Matters of Indelicate Substance

Today I found it necessary to repeat every medical test that had been run on me in order to qualify for a legal document. Quite surprisingly, in the clinic in which I resorted to had an added bonus of some more tests. It is not that I mind them so much, but they do tire one so. Earlier this month, it required the leeching--ehem--bloodletting from both arms to get the sufficient amount of rabbit-essence from me to swill and watch and compare and stare at to get results. At least one arm was spared this time, but it took the Grandfather of Syringes to prod out enough of me from me.

Ah, and these ponderous people wonder why I lack blood.

Oh well, now I officially am lacking blood for a little less in a month running. It had the ponderous people's certification. Ah me, ah my, which explains why I've been more on the yellower and purpler side of things--that is, on the outside. I would have told myself that a long time ago, but it was not official, and I was no more official than... than... than a pig is about matters concerning cows. Old McDonald would be. But I admit I fantasized about being sick, it gave an excuse for why I was tired most of the time and have the tendency to be floppy and inadequately dexterous. Then it turns out that it was because I was really sick.

Yay, for me. Fantasies do come true. But the Knight would frown upon this thinking, and would force me to get well, for a good reason. But I do have a reason why I like getting sick. People care about you more during those times. If they don't, then one has the excuse to indulge in self-pity, that emotional chocolate and cream truffle. But then again, I don't really know why I like being slightly sick. Note that I said slightly sick. It means sickness without a tremendous amount of pain. Or even half of tremendous amount of pain. Not even a quarter of it, I think. But I like me sick, nevertheless, that fuzzy, disconcerted, silly state. Every time I have a fever, I think that I am a furry ball, emitting a tangible fuzz of heat.

Malady, thy name is Anaemia.

Come to think of it, I've always found Anaemia a lovely, lovely, lovely name. If I were to name myself, I'd probably call myself that. It's so nice, it has this yellowish tinge in its sound, and as childish as Gretel or Spiegel. And its dipthong, especially when it is writ with the second A and E in miniscule are joined together, is wonderfully antiquarian. No one makes such nice names about sicknesses anymore. It's either named after a physician, or an odd jumble of inconsequential letters. They write it like they write mathematical equations, letters and numbers with parentheses and brackets. You could say that the physicians from long ago simply loved their illnesses.

There was this one ponderous person from that said group earlier who gave me a psychological test. An official psychological test. A first for me. One that will go down my national records. It was long-ish, but I savoured every question mark and blank. It seems that I am more being offered questions and looking for answers. I don't know how he did interpret my drawing of a boy and a girl. He asked me to do one, and I thought of churning out Hansel and Gretel, in the moment of unbeknownst brink of desperation, because right behind them, a crow is eating their crumbs. I don't know how he'll find it. Them people always make fabulous conjectures, almost downright silly. Maybe he'd find that I am stuck in my childhood, terribly moody, and depressive.

Oh wait. I think I am that.

At the stars

(For the Knight)

There are times when the Knight and I would patter around the school after our classes, then decide to lie down in the middle of a grassy somewhere implicitly not so allowed, where the sky was unobscured and seem just within your reach. We would look at it and think about it, our thoughts spanning the length of truth and the fantastic.

The last time we did so, one ventured to ask what I would be, in his opinion, if I belonged to that sky. His answer was very curious, if not altogether endearing. However, it reminded me of a story that I had in mind a long time ago, when one was still in the habit of fashioning complete universes--so complete it had even its own cosmogony and literature. He was, and still is, doing that sort of things, something that makes me tremendously happy in knowing, and partly selfish, whenever I hear his tales, as I never do get enough of them and insist that he keeps on weaving them. Methinks we both are the reverse Arabian Nights, he is the Scheherazade, word-spinner, and I am Schariar, spouse-killer, or rather, one who has yet to outgrow the other world of words, weary I am of this world.

It is for his sake, that he reminds me of it, that I will retell the story.

---

It so came that the Golden Maid had grown so fond of her own toy that she decided to abandon the further dwelling to reside in the newer land.

Left by her sister, the Silver Maiden lingered alone in those parts. Unable to bear the brightness of the sun and careful not to vex her sister by keeping to the other's side, she kept herself as far away from all as much as she could, silent in solitude and madness of what she knew would be. All else were too far away, even her companions in the dark, remnants of the tears shed for the lost child of the First Mother. These fires, these stars, watched her from afar, awed and fearful of her melancholy gleam. It was not like theirs for it was far too cold, and she uttered nothing in reply even if they sang to her and each other. Among them were Herders, brighter than the rest, caretakers of the fainter ones, cautious to gather those around with their mantles of wisp and dust.

One of them had, by chance, took his course far too near the Silver Maiden. To his surprise, he heard the Maiden singing. It wasn't that she was silent, but she was only too far away to be heard. Closer and closer, he edged to the Maiden to hear her words, and he saw her for herself, beneath the forbidding frozen light. And if it was curiousity and pity that brought him near, now it was something else that made him overstep the final distance between them.

In the fear of finding another so near, the Silver Maiden ran, with the Herder only a few steps behind. When she grew weary of running, she stopped and awaited for whatever harm she perceived from him. But the Herder threw his mantle about her and drew her to him, asking why she was alone.

The Herder's words broke her madness, and the Silver Maiden forgot the darkness and her visions, and finally returned the Herder's embrace. Within her, her sadness remained, indelibly marring her, but then, only the Herder and his fire mattered.

From then, the Silver Maiden awaited the Herder's coming, waning as he sojourned with his flock across the expanse of the sky, shining fullest when he was there again.

---

There are other parts of the story, which would be too long to retell, and one is running on limited time. It's nowhere near Tolkien (God bless his good pen), but then again never did I endeavor for it to be even levelled with him. Good heavens, what an ambition! It was made out of fun and for the sake of knowing really if I could make a universe as a writer. However, here I am, thinking that this was made many years past, how foolishly it was made, and that only now did I find meaning in this simple tale.

A man said it would storm...

Funny, but a man said it would storm. And as I idle in this keeping place, my eyes would linger on the outside, expecting an hourless darkness and desperate, despairing winds, to disturb these still rivers of streets, moan like a widow who echoes her laments in the music of the things she absently fingers in passing.

Storm, where are you? No sunshine for me, the shadows it makes fools me into believeing that time passes, when it does not. No, it does not seem to pass in this limbo of waiting. The paradox of wanting is that everything else would conspire against the one who wants, time being the most prominent of these conspirators.

Wanting for a storm, am I simply waiting for the weather to console me, accompany me in this solitary state I am in? They had called this literary technique as "pathetic sympathy," the author fits the hero with a suitable weather to emphasize all that makes him the hero, as one would don a cape for dignity, or a teacup for civility.

Be that as it is. What makes me wonder is if asking for sympathy really just pathetic.

Wasting in ennui, what have we...

This afternoon happens to have an aforementioned ill condition, plagued and brooding, suffering the very melancholy of Robert Burton's forgotten treatise.

It's hard to believe in anything it shows you. These rent skies, does it give you anything to believe in? Just when you had gotten used to the sunshine, it turns its back on you and its milk-face goes sour, sourer than yogurt, curdled by some bile who knows where it had procured, or how it came to be produced. It scowls before it cries. And how it cries...

You can believe it's the past century, and I pretend that it is. Preoccupied with tea and afternoon things, there is nothing to occupy the eyes and the mind but cakes and mince pies, and space, more space.

Amuse myself with stories, that's what I'd do. But odd how it is that even if one does this, the picture in your head is not within the words, but of the words, black and serifed, puncturing the skin of virgin paper.

Ah, I ramble.

Constellations

Stars are falling down tonight

but i told you i can't see

which one is you, which one is me.

-

Pointing, wishing, trying

to figure out the outline of things,

you're looking for lights in the night

but i'm lost in the lifetimes between.

-

There's a girl who lost her mother

and a bear who got no further

than the ends of both earth and sea;

sitting on a black hole, i never can see.

-

Tomorrow there will be

another sky above me

orion's just another hunter

just too far from his lover.

-

Going to where everyday's morning,

until then, love, i want it to be night,

where you had burnt through heaven

when you said you'll be that fire for me.

-

Stars are falling down tonight

but i told you all i can say

a few had gone into my eyes.

And sheep can run with horses

Faster than most supposes

Running away from they who say

No sheep can run with horses.

Photograph by Eugene Atget.

Relics of Afternoons Past

As it goes, there was a time when I was terribly afraid of rain at 2:30 in the afternoon during the summers of my childhood. I would wake up at that very moment from the noontime nap requisite to growing children, as my mother (via the then nanny) would have me do, and find the world absolutely changed from what it was in the glaring morning. The sala wherein I slept would be emptied of my companions of the earlier hours, replaced by watching shadows whose eyes seemed to be the window and the door left open, as if one missed the goodbyes of a leaving guest, only to realize the minute after they do that they really are gone. It was supposedly summer, but then I would wonder where summer had gone in the absence of its sunshine. Outside was a sky pregnant with lead and rain, brooding and muttering bass complaints above deserted streets, whipped-silent houses, and desolate children. It cried as it gave birth, and one would cry with her, hoping that the noise one made would drown out the former--drown it first before it drowns you, and oh, how it drowns you, that thunder of rain falling on echoing pavements and cheap tin rooftops and the hollows of your chest when you know you've been abandoned.

I remember crying in a way that seemed more like screaming, because the sadness wasn't much like itself but more like fear. I would be screaming for an hour or so before my nanny would come and snap at my pointless crying. Whoever cries during the rain, anyhow? Rain was simply water falling, she said.

If only rain was just that.

She was the kinder one, her. The crying-screaming took too much air, and I hiccoughed when it was too much, so she gave me water to stop the hiccoughs, and would console me with some afternoon snack, like chocolate rice pudding or fried plantains. And I would forget that I had been afraid, until the next afternoon.

Strange that I should recall it now. There is nothing about this noon that ought to have reminded me of it. No shadows, no rain.

It would take several summers more to outgrow the rain, and years more to outgrow abandonment. To be precise, twenty years and one knight to outgrow abandonment.

The Death of Art

It is with a measure of a feeling of futility in which one views what path I had chosen for myself some years ago. It is rather too late for regret, and I know little else about other livelihoods, if not that I have less passion for anything else, despite these following thoughts that call to my attention from the trenches of my brain, coursing through as echoes of echoes; whispered, but nonetheless irritating. I have something like two years ahead of me (one year supposedly, but something came up just recently and it got extended) in this field. No turning back. And I don't think I would if I could, come to think about it.

By profession, we would call ourselves artists. A respected professor of mine said that we no longer had the privilege of calling ourselves that, or rather the opposite of it: we do not have to. We were creators, and it would the highest title we can think of for ourselves. Artists is what your followers will call you, and it would be not to your credit. The very name has been bastardized by having been applied too thinly over too many, unfortunately. You can call anyone artist, anyone can call themselves artists. A true artist is an oxymoron in a time where art is within anyone, if most would have you believe it. This is because art is no longer caused and a cause for beauty, but an expression.

Art is everything, and if everything is everything, it is worthless, and is nothing. My Logic professor would kill me if he can just hear what I have said. I forget his term for this error. But even if the reason is wrong, I hope I did make sense. Most paradoxes and irrationalities appeal in such a manner.

Formally, postmodernism killed art. I heard from a man who was an apologist for Christendom--and an excellent apologist he was, or is, if he still is alive (Raavi Zachariah, I think, is his name)--that postmodernism was like making an edifice with a foundation whose purpose was to crumble, if not to get destroyed by its creator. What it did was to strip art of its being, and see what is left of it. Of course, what would remain is simply the structure of the entirety, sometimes even less. The movie Art School Confidential (albeit quite, hem, forgettable) tried to get this point across in the scene where the protagonist and his class was to do self-portraits. The former made a good representation of his physical self, but he was derided for very odd reasons, in my opinion: that he was too much of a machine for "copying" from reality too much. Enter a classmate, who had but a furious scribble on his papaer, and it was this that garnered lauds from his colleagues, because it exposed the process of the drawing. Yet what is a process if the end could not be seen? Say that you made a man by taking a man and turning him into a kid. Informally, though, it would be freedom that undid art. The freedom that anyone could call a creation art is something one has mixed feelings about. Precisely what one had appreciated in the first place it is it being limited to the few that one found beauty in. But with such a subjective criterion, I guess it was already on the road to its end the moment it was begun.

Another argument takes place starting with the opinion that art was a construction of the elite: their criteria was aesthetics, its credibility found in which was framed and hung in lofty galleries and museums. And as much as I hate the free-for-all of expression, so do I hate this disdainful exclusivity, ESPECIALLY the latter. Despite the desire of some that art ought to remain as pure as it was from the moment it was completed in the hands of its maker, it meant that your being an artist depended on whom you know. The bureaucracy and politics of galleries was made apparent to me when I had ventured to wonder loudly the possibility of applying for a reservation in our college's gallery. The same professor who had pointed out to me the difference of creator and artist was also the one who answered my wondering. Don't, he said. Even if you were good, it seems that you have to appeal to the tastes of the committee first before being allowed. And, knowing where their tastes were inclined, it followed that it was a hopeless venture. Expressing my dismay that I could not, I spoke of how it would be better for me professionally if I had a few exhibitions to my name, and then it occured to me how far I had fallen.

Two arguments. Both going nowhere, as many things in this world does.Fools are we who would call ourselves artists. At some point of writing this entry, I would agree that it is a construct, and that it is too subjective, and thus moribund.

Hereon, one's dreams of being acknowledged by my peers and the disciples of this field in the morrow is safely stored, sealed with a sigh and a shrug. It doesn't matter anymore. I will continue what I have started, wherever it would lead me, with my knight errant in shabby armour beside me. He is in this field too. He believes in beauty still, as the old masters did. I would not call him artist. He is far worth more than that jaded title. He is an illustrator. It is what he does, illustrate. And that is praise enough, to have skill to enliven stories told by the paper and the tongue. We dream of making pictures and tales for little children that would not really follow what has been said of their capacity to understand beauty (if anything, they are an underrated audience). If the children perceive it to be wonderful, then I would believe them, more than what the older ones could say of beauty, for they have not been tainted by this selfish world, and would be rightfully content of thinking ourselves in the company of masters.

An old child has a long memory

There is nothing else as futile as the act of redeeming the negligible. For, in any case, there is a good cause why such things are negligible in the very first place. Of course, a full-fledged dictionary of the obscure is beyond my current capacity ( although I once had hoped I could, or was, at least, capable of such a thing ), but I will pursue this endeavor with what I could.

To be honest, one has an unhealthy obsession with memory. Faulty memory. It seems natural, even essential, for men to forget things. It is, in a way, a coping mechanism for having too many things that trudge and wallow about in the mush within our skulls. Forgetting is essential to survival, opiates for living.

This goes especially true for pain. The memory of pain is either two things: forgettable and unforgettable. We try to forget as much pain as we can so that we could go on about our lives. People who linger in the company of their personal demons are often masochists of the highest kind--nee, depressed; people with long memories are often in pain. They remember too much, forget so little. Imagine, a person with perfect memory, so vivid that yesterday lives simultaneously with today. Every little thing that happened to you is still there. But such is the nature of pain that it is magnified in retrospect. Pitiful existence.

In any case, most of the things forgotten have yet worth in them, made obscure for some equally obscure reason, nevertheless, most worthy of remembrance.

Memento mori? Almost.