Excuses for a Story # 3

Pain: As Function of Stealth (Or, Notes for Utopia)*

They were all uneasy in their seats, in anticipation of a show that would proceed with genteel development. There were countless lives at stake–a definite number, yes, but since such a number would matter to only the pristine faces behind white-topped desks, the number was without name and therefore countless.

Those who waited were not allowed inside the room. Inside, those who feared every breath as the last were probed, questioned, and soothed momentarily. Those who waited were not allowed inside the room where posters assured their onlookers of impending safety and cautioned them against harm, as though color and words could lengthen their lives and paint boat-shapes on the mouths of those who waited outside.

On the rows of hard-backed seats painted green, the space between chairs was pathetic–a mere inching away of one discomfort from the next, in the row of metal that held all seats in place. Society deemed the uncomfortable solution, despite the pain: the horrific aftertaste, the limited options to the claim that more caution should have been in action and there was no point in wasting time. Hope, too, was to be allocated and defined by logic so that it could be applied to something more practical.

Only muted conversation could be heard from inside the room. The screams and the howls and the sobs were only in the mind, like pain. In the past, no one would have been allowed to stay alone in the room while a professional uttered the words and completed the tests, which, like physical questions, assaulted each guest inside the room. In the past, there would be the least semblance of happiness.

But that was the past. And this was the hospital of the future.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxeIivNDtFU]

—

*Don’t you just wish that the pictures/videos/music for every excuse had a direct relationship to every excuse?

Oh, I don’t know.

Matres*

In the bedroom where her mother left her, the tears of a strong-willed
child dried and cracked like paint best forgotten on the autumn skies of youth:
a mad orange glare, painted with the artistic manner in which the juvenile
goes down fighting into settled hormones. But this rage of immaturity bears
sweetness in its futility, as a mother lays hand on the shoulder of the daughter
facing away from her: a white marble tableau of non-questions. The movement
is in the struggle; because all daughters to their mothers become stubborn,
the way hands fisted in the womb, in the painful hours of movement in birth
reach for the imperfection of the world beyond—and this despite every particle
in the body that recoils in defense and doubt. The goal is only that, fully alive,
never to be still (for to be still is to die), in the hasty fever called womanhood
where the heart grows weary, never in a solitary existence that was once, so
easily achieved. It tells the story of a mother whose arms are in surrender
when they wrap around her babe. There!—her mouth croons like a white flag
for all the days and nights spent sleepless and moving to defy a lullaby sung
to the child who leaves her behind. The wings for a setting are a bedroom
where unshed tears have all but been painted a shade of unshed, in memories
where, in time and patience passing apathy, all tears crack and dry.

The denouement unfolds in almost passing, but ignorant bliss: there is nothing
can be done because the hours have also passed, from conflict to a daughter’s
one turning point, until she leaps. In time, there will be blood and consistency,
there will exist only this birthing again, a leave-taking page for the books.
The parting becomes unique only in its even folds, the distance between here
and there, the space for a coward silence of two women, unknown to both.

—

An exercise in line cuts; more or less what I expected (more than what I could have produced this time last year, less than the last piece I wrote, the one that cannot be as of yet found on this blog).

I remain unsatisfied with the second stanza, and am only confident in what I feel I know, equal parts feeling, equal parts an amateur confidence that this is actual knowing.

*The title is the Filipino term matres, which is the native word for uterus. Incidentally, of course, one usually finds a mattress in a bedroom. Make what connections you will.

Excuses for a Story #2

The Other Side of Fruition*

Filling in the blanks, his teachers said he must make his handwriting legible. There being no space for murder on the paper, his mother advised him: a steady hand, easy on the pressure, take the time with every letter. Later, his father, squinting at his adult hand: Son, why do you write like a woman?

Shooting blanks!, he tells himself, ashamed. He cannot get her with child. Here, the daughter she had in wedlock, sweet and clinging, thoroughly not his, stubby fingers holding crayon sticks. Not so hard, he tells her, as sun-bright yellow pierces Barbie’s head, spilling blonde into the next page. His wife comes home and they make love and oh!, how lonely the palms cupped around his face; she is glad he feels. He is sad that in her palms, there only being his tears.

Her blank, empty stare. His not-daughter and the Daddy-names she had for him, growing up. A blank stare for his disapproval: no, you cannot marry that young man (he is smart; he has made inquiries, knows the same young man supplies her with drugs). And then later, when the girl has written off her life on her wrists, his wife weeps but oh! How they both loved this girl-child, having vowed to give her siblings once. At the funeral, he wonders, if this is dead and I am alive, where do all the lovely feelings that are left, where do they ought to go?

—

*It would probably help to add that “White Blank Page” did not exactly inspire this piece, the way The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle only tangentially touches the post before this.

Excuses for a Story # 1

The search for something to write, I find, brings about questions that must be asked; so before I launch into the first piece in a series of shorts that I cannot [yet] transform into a full-fledged story, there are things to ask.

The first questions then, are thus:

How do you fill in the gaps, without actually dispelling the gaps? Remember, the goal here is to tell a story stripped to its muscles. You would say bones, but you are not a subtle enough for that.

Are they portraits? “Painting-snapshots of characters yet to be developed” launches us into something synonymous with sloth. If they are starting points, what are the chances that they will be continued?

Which launches us to a discussion of “prolific.” Perhaps everyone is prolific because they keep writing because they never stop because they are waist-deep in drafts. Now, we are to ask ourselves at what point is a piece no longer a draft? When even publication is neither final punctuation or a book slammed shut, what differentiates anything from the status of a draft? 

These are not questions for the past, or for the present, or the patterns you see now, rising like bubbles still unidentified.

The question then becomes, what are you what do you create now it exists what comes after what is now?

—

Nutmeg’s Shadow*

Always? She asked herself. Was she always asking too much of the world? Better aperitif, better service, higher grades, grander parties, more intense sex. Always? Colleagues, staff, children, husband. Always? The thought was paralyzing, but intensely fascinating. What hunger could be more passionate than this: bigger smiles, higher standards, later hours, always, always; not because she believed she wasn’t enough but because there must have been a dire mistake: this world was not at par with her. It was hell.

Ever punctual, she turned on his lateness. Always patient, always never understanding (what traffic jam, what  stomach ache?) She berated her countless lovers and three children in the consistency of punctuality the “I,” the “never,” the “late.” The impossibility of there ever being the right amount of time, neatly trimmed at the edges, centerpiece-perfect, and always for her needs.

It is late in the day when she realizes the house is dim but no one has bothered with the lights. Facing dusk and sunset streaming through the window, the room is scarred with the people she has trapped in the timeline of existence. There are picture frames, there are smiles that long ago were wiped out like greasy-fruity lipstick; the shine of wonder years. She is late for a nap; there is never enough sleep. Now she is alone; now she has arrived.

—

*I owe this name, in part, to Haruki Murakami, although I do not imagine it may be the final title, or that it is a kind of basis, or that this would flatter anyone, really.

Project Timeline: Last Half of 4 Parts

I.

Her son will remember her roses; and as he protests poetry is lost on him, he forgets their thorns.

II.

She is only a story now, the old woman who made crema and wrote on them the names of the dead. They were sweetest for the youngest grandchildren who knew nothing of the gentle ruin of egg shells like the streets after being treated by the fingers of an earthquake, cracked to produce the softest of creams.

III.

At first her grandchildren will think her story is short—a precise if unknown beginning, a chaotic middle, a definite end. Later, when they themselves are stretched by time they will know the length of the wrinkle that ran from the skin of her forehead, down her neck, and deeper, right through her heart.

IV.

They will begrudge the growing up she gifted to her son, their father, in all the stretches of the barely there love. In the faded sepia photos they will not care to preserve, she has carefully folded her soul: then, in the 20’s and 30’s when no smiles graced photographs she is stern, and her blood the generations later, will wonder why it is so difficult, even in the Technicolor of mixed media, to smile for the camera.

V.

Now, a garden with no roses (and thereby not a thorn): instead the wild bush of grass or brown mud when the season’s dry. Her daughter-in-law (now simply just a mother) grew orchids that became tiresome, that became imprints on childhood photographs. Never before a garden wishing to be fertile, but all the blossoms in the past, they all smell so fragrant, and so are gone.

_

I.

But it is only one heartbeat, now. There is a singularity in the many words. A person is made up of all of other people’s stories, and then just her own. In the wonder of alone is the power of one. Past fragmentation, to be whole, but not whole without the fragments, there is really only just her.

Intermission

In the tunnel, briefly–

Before they approach the light

Everything is a dead star

Ridges along the walls and rumbles,

The sound from the bridge where the engines

That come to life imitate the beating

Of human hearts without a pause

She says I love you

But his comfort is the light ahead

His hands are steady on the wheel

(Hers are trembling on her lap)

The light comforts as it sears.

__

Have I told you I love the lightness of certain books? The kind of lightness that comes with terrible meanings so that you feel you also have to write something; like a little thank you gift to the author although she’ll never see.

Which is all just a roundabout way of saying that I would very much love to write about Isabela Banzon’s Lola Coqueta soon.

Project Timeline: 2 of 4 Parts

I.

At seven, this was the exhaustion: her father’s strict face with the fault lines—the illusion that all fathers are such, and her mother, too, by his side in the early years, while the household waited in what her first memories thought was a kind of freedom. Toil and labor were, after all, only just places her parents went off too.

II.

It was also, exhilaration: the breeze around her in a game of tag, breathlessness that was the fruit of limbs and steps on the concrete of the school floor. The sudden thought and later, realization, that the bell that tolls at the end of recess is more difficult to hear and take to heart, when school has finished and all hopscotch and Marco Polo games are done.

III.

The belief that the breath let out after the empty glasses and heavy music has lapsed—the startling discovery that a set of notes can excite fever, excitement: the discovery of thrill, too, ends in her wariness. Of tired bodies, and a mind still so naïve, fed with the belief that nights must be stayed up late for. It is exhaustion the drum beats inspire her to work for.

IV.

Later, just new ways to breathe that leave her tired out: all the words expected to be spoken by the young people who, knowing everything, love themselves broken. Later: just to breathe, and think, and say: I am not tired, I would just like something else.

V.

The exhaustion of explaining yourself. And then later on, of simply not.

—

V.

The handles and cracks on his wife’s kitchenware, the old kettle that hardly whistles as the water boils and the Teflon frying pan that now looks like a soup bowl, are the things he must tinker with. Tools and toys of trade surround him, old mechanic of fatherhood days. To his left the tools for the car, the scattered screws and the memory of grease-stained fingers. To his right the last few things of an eternal house, pots and pans that needs be replaced, fixed over and over beyond repair.

IV.

His son’s life bore the same complexity of the future that would not be dismantled. It is one where he cannot control nor comprehend the mechanics of the Internet, and online choices made over a non-virtual experience lie heavy on his steadily drooping brows. His straight back more a symbol of stubbornness meeting difficulty of his own son, his flesh too and his bones, then of healthy happiness that sustains age, the way roads upon roads of circles choose, are chosen, by his child.

III.

Like the endless strain of togetherness, the santol falls bang-bang-bang! On the rooftop. Tomes of disturbance, eerie remembrances that in pregnant pauses is always the danger of the next few words that will be said: on lazy afternoons, that lull shatters as another fruit comes hurtling down from the tree he and his wife planted so hopefully, without the sun.

The fruits fall and awaken his tired children at night, the uneaten becoming clutter in a backyard so sweet it smells of rot. He picks as many as he can, climbing on the rooftop, hand outstretched to pluck them. By afternoon, he is burned by the sun and the tree looks bare, until he comes down and the next santol falls heavy on the ground.

A torrent of heaviness too ripe to still hold on, so fruitful in fact, there is no such thing as peace at last until the tree is cut down.

II.

The truck is still and calm in the night, while the rice simmers on the side of the street. They are hungry, and the grains will be warm and soft with the cold viand on their fingers. The sacks of uncooked rice await the ride on his shoulders when the sun rises. Then they will learn what downturn luck struck their engine. He will pass by countrysides on his unpredictable Pegasus, the beast-of-unperturbable-sleep-tonight. His companions will talk idly, men whose faces he will never see again, donned later in slacks and a a collared shirt.

Later, the truck will slow down, nuts and bolts under three pairs of hands and years after, he will point out to his daughter stalled trucks and drivers asleep inside, waiting for the night to pass.

I.

But he must run along now, he is late for school. At home, yesterday the Sunday, he and his family feasted on chicken, sucking the last meat and skin from the bones, six children and parents and one pot of soup. Extended with liver, with what vegetables his mother could find, it is the recipes he tells his wife of while eating her meals, of the taste so lost he is still desiring the piquancy of long gone days. Running, he marks the long dusty road lined with mabolo trees, the fruits his snacks to school. The days are hot, and so is the long road, and when he returns home he will fix and make the shoebox, and the pieces of wood, and love his toys, break them, too, but that is forgiven. Tomorrow, he will fix them again.

—

There must be a better way to entitle these fragments. But various reasons for an almost-lull: because I am late in updating (fear, antibiotics–understanding, if only briefly and tangentially, the inability to control body), I’ve posted 2 out of 4 and now thinking if the 4th is worth an extension.

The Road to Peripeteia

1.

At first you thought there was a road

The soft-trodden bricks of which you had to follow

Given: the trees wearing glimpses of sunlight

And faces wearing a history taught to you

2.

Nothing holds each piece of a Roman arch

But the sheer fittedness of shape;

The way our words in empty classrooms still ring

Because there are walls to remember what the evacuated victims,

Haunted by memory, are too sick to entertain

The ghostly faces of fast-paced youth

That shelves memory in carved niches of hands and fingers,

Roughening palms, and hungry mouths.

3.

I know a story that failed to reach its pinnacle,

Having all its pages ripped out for the sake of beauty:

A seamstress tried to bind it together,

A magician attempted to heal the spine,

A critic tried to reassess the damage and deconstruct

The pain in the heart where the book’s pages

Lay lonely; were it only that they didn’t deny

The perfect symmetry between the flat of the page

And the coldness of the ground on which it lay.

4.

What I know for sure is that they made promises

And we listened because we thirsted for music.

5.

Case in point: the best, the highest part of the arch is the hardest to achieve, and the most chaotic of all its parts. I am heartbroken to tell you this, but when I thought I would survive it, I was called into a room to bear witness to more suffering which they felt would Improve My Character. The sign was stamped red for approval and official purposes, and I was loved for all that I could be. Potentiality, of course, is said to have reached its ripest point. I was ripe for the plucking and the feasting of roughened palms and hungry mouths.

And so, the same may be done to you, but you must not be afraid, things will accelerate and go swiftly downhill after this.

6.

Before movement is a pause.

You must soak in this silence and absorb its painful hollows,

Else never again enjoy the creak of muscle, the bend of bones.

Before the firestorm, if you listen carefully,

You will hear the long scraping of a match head against the box.

7.

It falls apart, chaos.

Your fall will also be softened by another blow

Which you alone can deal

Like a house of cards held by nothing but sides

And corners and the snug way they all know that to go home

They must simply be fitted and stacked

Back into a little plastic box—

You turn and break your fall.

8.

Now, this is what you have come to know, says my mother, who was there when the first words were written, and when the last pages were torn from the binding of the story that could have been her life.

Now is what my mother has become, in the softness of her skin and the weariness of the voice that puts one child next to the other (it all makes sense in the womb).

(But elsewhere and in someone else, significantly less so).

9.

Things have been accelerated after you turn, unscrewed from scruples

To make new ones where you must build one brick aside, not on top

Of the one brick waiting before; there are no arches there are no bridges

There are no metaphors or mathematical measurements

There is only a turning point.

10.

The arch that is a road that is a book that you have destroyed is unfinished

And rolling on the floor, collecting dust, fitting itself into a memory which has not concluded for the benefit of Your Improving Character. The rules still apply: unlit matches, unwalked paths, crumbling bridges, a hallway of voices but no distinct memories.

Through it all, you tell yourself you see the end, over the crest of a gently sloping hill where you will go down faster than you believe, and in that split-second pause where you wonder if this is right, it is too late, it is your mother, it is the poem, it is the sunlight on the trees of the road you thought was familiar; it is now.

To Paint, a Taste

There are, undoubtedly, better ways to start this entry, but physical discomfort aside (ah, you see, corporate life leaves tangible marks, too), I feel that the best way to begin would be–

So, for the sake of unifying my jumbled thoughts and no longer confusing the small (but chocolate-lovable, book-smelling) community that follows me–

I’ve decided to collate my Livejournal with this, my WordPress blog. If you go through this blog now (assuming you’ve been here before), there are now actually more entries, as I’ve transferred old LJ pieces here according to their original “publishing dates.”

One of the goals now, aside from producing new pieces, will now be to keep transferring these here.

But more than that, I think it’s just time to start asking myself again what role writing has in my life. I’ve already figured out that I can’t do without it, largely on a psychological/emotional scale. As to how, as they say, I’m supposed to pursue anything to do with it, there is no clear answer (yet–and have you ever seen a more uncertain parenthetical?).

The best choice for me right now? Simply put–to write; whether that may mean casual reviews, ever-sharper criticism, or something a little more (non)fictive–ah, but I guess the whole point is to live.

–

And now: In June 2011, I started pieces of well, sort of dinner reviews. Simply put: prose pieces where I pretend that the way I eat (and what I eat, and how I do, with my family, at the end of the day) is Quintessential Subject of Literature (that’s right, capital “L!” Haha. I kid, I kid).

And now, onwards:

It strikes you then, without pretty words to describe the scene in front of you or any other prompting, that a mother is an artist who can paint a canvass without uttering a word. Effortlessly, at least to you, mere freeloader of meals and indispensable daughter both, the surprise that things on the table can still make you wonder.

Case in point, for no reason at all (other than that word, other than that white elephant), there is the night you find on the dining table, Singaporean chicken (is it a variation of the Hainanese variety? You aren’t sure, and neither is your mother). Oh, no, no, your mother says, she didn’t cook it for your father, she didn’t cook it for your brother, she cooked it only for you.

Your father later: pretend complains (“Sabi ni Mama mo, ‘Oo, niluto ko yan para kay Iya, para matikman niya mamaya.’ “Sabi ko, ‘Ha? Si Iya lang?’”), but all in good jest, and he takes a taste and proclaims wonder, too, when you eat alone because they have all eaten ahead, your job has kept you.

You, you’re just flattered she’d do it so out-of-the-blue, and with yellow rice, too! What a rhyme, what a feast of colors. There, too, are the three dips, three colors, aren’t they just amusing, to think your mother thought of the whole, to borrow another culture’s term (but then again, what else is all this?), enchilada.

There’s the whitish-green that only has a mild hint of whatever spice it is, with little flavour, there’s the red you like the most, the subtle sweetness, the spice. Then there’s the black, the thicker-than-soy-sauce, and sweeter, too.

All are pastes of paint on bowls set on the glass dining table.

It strikes you then, that the discipline you thought to instil on yourself by way of shorts about each dinner has been stopped. Now you must put your pen where your mouth is, done salivating at your mother’s cooking. This too, is her craft, which is more exhausting, who can tell? For it is an unfair comparison of crafts, a disservice to you both.

There is just this: the end of a meal that was colourful to the mind’s eye and to the pen both, imagination as flavourful as you would like, but in the meantime the reality is that you can’t cook and have no time to learn, although your bloodlines tell you, the stories your father tells of your paternal grandmother and the paintings made by your mother tell you that this is so: you are already that wonderful cook, now if only you could just get started, it would be true. What are you but this: still mere ingredient to be thrown in (what is this, how clueless is a cookbook that you can cook up, how frustrated its pages, how dry its words, in both taste and sound and meaning, to those who profess you as foe?)

Imagine, this is your blank page, your empty plate. You are still imagining the banquet, not even ready, perhaps just ticking off the items on the list of things you need, planning market day, imagining yourself sold. Will you ever stop being the empty plate? How is it that day after day of sweat and dreams, it is an empty plate still?

If to be better beats the stasis of the best why does it feel like a perennial lack? Is that what movement is all about–an eternal emptiness for the continual process, because urgency must be movement because to stop is to die?

Notes on the Margins

It’s always harder when my eldest brother is absent at the table. But the news is ever-present, wafting over the food.

When I was in grade school, my teachers kept telling us that only pleasant things should be discussed over meals. I was constantly puzzled by this, because at home there seemed no limit to the negative things my parents and my brothers discussed.

Perhaps it can’t be helped. After all, mealtimes are the only real chance we get to talk. My family spends a lot of time together, but the lengthiest conversations are always over food. These days, because my family listens to the news as we eat, I have to bring spoon to mouth while listening to everyone else’s political opinions–all of which, I am saddened to say, are nothing more than an elementary understanding of social situations and frankly, the most misinformed conjectures on race and culture.

I know it sounds like some superiority complex bullshit coming from someone in her newly-formed twenties adulthood–but you weren’t there to hear the opinions I heard, the ones which you probably never will.

I blame Noli De Castro in part, for all of this.

It’s because of the news and the way the reporters deliver the news, that dinner tonight is once again a fame of prevention:

Preventing my dad from imitating the exaggerated, elongated vowels when Noli announces the show will be back after a commercial break (“TVehhhhyyy…Patrol!”);

Preventing my mom from talking about the latest scandal on yet another noontime show;

Preventing my dad from insulting someone’s intelligence and suggesting some sort of cruel action to punish said intellectually-deprived person in a way which I’m fairly certain is inhuman;

Preventing some news about a malicious act by a criminal or about the corruption of a government official from being paralleled to someone from the neighborhood (not that, mind you, we live in a village of shady figures, but the imaginative spectrum of my father when it comes to the Evil That People are Capable Of is as deep as the eye of a storm);

These dangers aren’t always imminent, but they’re always more likely when I don’t have either of my siblings to steer the conversation any other way. Granted, my brothers can be narrow-minded, too, but they don’t have the incomparable yawning age gap with my parents that I do.

And then there are other preventive measures that center around the politics of the table. These did not prove relevant during the particular dinner tonight, but as we are on the topic, I might as well write about them:

Preventing soup bowls, plates, and glasses from being turned over. My father has this thing where everything must be in order. There is no such thing as organized chaos for him, and everything must be within his reach. Add to this my mother’s impulsive need to give my siblings and I anything we could want before we even ask for it (the bowl of rice or of ulam) and I find that sometimes things are shoved onto my face even though I’ve just finished my meal. It’s either that, or the constant pulling and pushing of the main dishes across the table cause sauces spilled over and glasses almost broken;

Preventing my father from being annoyed that he wasn’t handed something right away, when he wants it. How true it is that when people grow old they become children again. This impulse only agitates my mother’s need to give people around the table (read: especially my father) what they may possibly want to eat more of, before they even ask for it;

Preventing my father from complaining that the soup is too salty. He is so adamant that too much salt is bad for us that sometimes, my mother cooks nilaga, sopas, or puchero that tastes of bland heaven. These days my brothers and I have taken to suggesting that we water down my father’s soup bowl but keep the main serving bowl tasty enough for the rest of us.

There are many more, really, but I’ll stop here.

I suppose the dinner was so full of prevention tonight only because we couldn’t find a stable enough topic or string of topics to last. As it was, I found myself talking about my cat and other silly such things and letting the chink-chink of our silverware against our plates fill in the silence.

It wasn’t that bad, really. My parents were in a fair mood and as always, my mother’s cooking was superb. But when you know you could have so much more, it always feels like you got leftovers instead of the main course.