April 2000

There is something with the sunrise of summer, something that I loved which never lost its spectacle. I watched its sky from the blinds of the window, the transformation of pitch black to purple to pale white to a glorious yellow. The golden beams bring a blistering heat that brushes a familiarity with my skin, announcing the arrival of summer and all it holds. What does it hold? A bottomless well of booze to quench an undying thirst, endless parties, trifling and sensible thoughts to ponder, newspapers and books to read, the idiot box, boredom that can never be effaced, scorching heat and lazy afternoons and a summer to spend eternally in bed. This bores me. I wrote the same material two summers ago. There nothing new to romanticize about.

“We scurry like ants looking for sweetness.” The author I studied from poetry class places in tasteful imagery. Why are people so eager and so inclined to love and romance? Whole lives are spent in pursuit of it. The stupidest things are done in its name: jumping out of windows, stabbing skulls of other people or whatnot. Beautiful poetry had risen from it, and it have given birth to beautiful children. But so did love provide tasteless poetry in the cards of Hallmark, they bear wayward children.

Love has always been stupid. “Love is never intelligent, for if it was, it should’ve been conquered by the strong.” That was one of the P. lines that I hailed so much. It’s almost Nietzschean.
But people love anyway, the strong and the weak alike. Love is just something that happens, or persists, like suffering… Love is just like taking a shower, brushing your teeth or eating. Love is something strange like a drizzle in a blistering hot noon. Love is suffering, brushing your teeth, love is a strange drizzle in the blistering hot noon. It’s just something that happens.

I am going to regret one day, why I never dropped Stat101 and why I didn’t pursue my thesis this term. I believe that I made the grade for honorable mention, but I already flunked and blew my chances. Got close, but no cigar. What the fuck anyway. I never wanted gold stars patched on my forehead, nor laurel leafs on my ear. At least I got a 4.0 in Nietzsche.

One of the things a 4.0 in Nietzsche (that I flaunt blatantly) had taught me is the so-called preservation-enhancement values of life, strength, the excess of it, the expending the energy of the will to power. But I think I’m pruning, I am subsiding. Life is a hundred times too short to be bored, but I’m mostly bored despite having gone partying for the past two weeks. I am so obese from a shovel full of food into my mouth, and I didn’t even have enough physical energy to dance until four in the morning with D.P. and friends at the Common Ground on a Saturday night. Well I never really dance a lot, but its always been such an apple in the eye to watch them dance in their tube outfits. But even more I have not appropriated my mental energy to reading, writing, and thinking. Another regret.

After reading Lolita for a month or two, I read another F. Sionil Jose book, “Sins.” Like most of the books his written, it impels one to a to valiant sense of nationalism, and jogs your memory of the roots of the ills of a society which are the same ills which this country of poverty is sick of because we never fond out what our history was, we trivialized it in textbooks, and if we ever knew what happened we would eventually suffer from a national amnesia. We never knew how elite the Malolos congress was and how unequal the treaties of Americas were, for instance.
It’s amazing how the bloodline that’s been ruling and exploiting back then still has the same gene pool. “The higher you go, the whiter it gets.”

It also seems that it is our terrible lot to forever hold the elite in power, sell ourselves to imperialism camouflaged in globalization. Just now cronyism is rampant in the government and the president is supposed to be the champion of the masses. Sure. The educational system has taught not a lesson to our despicable people and the 2:30 p.m. soap operas on the tube and you’ve-seen-one-you’ve-seen-all action films had surely suffused something into our minds.
It bends my intestines, and twists my guts when I yak about capitalism, elitism, revolution, Marxism, land reform and the like. The things we could not eschew, and could only do little on.
I’m whining. There is so much to say, of course. I have read a number of books that have moved me, summoned me somehow into doing something… I’ve written poetry about it sure, but I feel that I never had done anything that will cast golden deeds before the words I have uttered.
I’m digressing. F. Sionil Jose’s story wasn’t so powerful, I didn’t enjoy the plot so much because the events were predictable and you knew what was about to happen. Despite that though, you can’t put the book down as if you were held by the neck and you had to read it.

I admire the way F. developed the character it its fluctuations and vicissitudes in the struggle for power. It was a magnificent character. It wasn’t so bad to be the haring-may-lupa that exploited us exponentially, he was merely being strong, being Nietzschean --- the weak shall perish. They live life and they nurture power. I believe after all, that we are not equal and thus speaks justice. We will never be equal but I’d like to see the poor’s side of the seesaw rise up a bit.

However, F.’s ironies were too obvious. The character’s I-have-everything-but-can’t-please my-son thing, that I’m-a-philanderer-now-I’m-impotent ironies were far too overused already. But it wasn’t so bad as too make me vomit. It’s holy week at this time and one of the funny stunts F. pulled is that attempt at magic realism with that pendant from Siquijor thing. It seemed desperate.

The sex scenes were excellent as usual.

The facility of language was so effective that it is as if I the scenery was tangible. I read “Sins” in a late afternoon of this summer and the crisp yellow pages of the hardcover book set in a galliard font looked glorious against a sun about to set in the world’s rims. I was listening to classical and the feeling is familiar. I could smell the sea again.


Holy Thursday. I’ve indulged my ears and soul with classical music from Bach to Beethoven to Schopann to Schubert in 98.7 day in and day out. This was coupled with honeyed tea while reading the first part of Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground.” The streets are silent and sea emits its smell so fragrant. I was even able to give a little hand on house chores.

Dostoevsky is largely similar to Nietzsche whom he influenced. They both have an amusing, eccentric, creative literary style and rather uncommon notions on matters such as free will, history, math and numbers, consciousness. I must admit that I misread a little of Nietzsche when I read him on my own, but who didn’t? I am also afraid of misreading Dostoevsky. But aren’t those literary critical theories such as new historicism, American criticism or even deconstruction, misreadings themselves? What we take as a form of understanding is only a misunderstanding.

Should I completely digress again?

One way of reading Dostoevsky, or at least the first part of Notes… is its reaction to reason, natural laws, logic and logocentricism. In an effective metaphor he says that “life is not a series of square roots."

In another strong figurative representation he says that “man is not a piano key.” We have wishes and desires, which couldn’t be graphed and atomized out by science because it comes from “devil knows what.”

The book is pool of insights with things to say on toothaches, cursing, smashing things, and how insensible history is. e.g., “whether good or bad, it is pleasant to smash something on occasion.”

He agrees and disagrees at the same time, saying that one thing is excellent and its opposite equally excellent. Dostoevsky tells you to stop laughing when you begin to laugh at his book, and I’ve never seen a writer so overly self-conscious. So far, the book is profusely amusing and it has good imagery.

Last night, on the eve of this Holy Thursday, “New York Stories” was on at Star Movies. It had three short films directed by Martin Scorsese (Life Lessons) and Francis Coppola (Life Without Zoe) and Woody Allen (Oedipus Wrecks).

The Scorsese film had the trademark camera movements which speaks for itself amazingly. I believe it explored the condition of the character (an artist in New York who falls in love with young, attractive female artist-wannabe, but as it shows the ladies have whims and the impulsiveness of a lose canon which couldn’t be handled.) It had some sort of parallelism with the music and paintings and probably some deep literary meaning entrenched in it but I wasn’t able to catch. Coppola also told a nice story about this affluent New York child named Zoe (Greek for ‘life’) who had this fantastic flute player for a Dad which I don’t want to put into paper anymore because it’s an exhausting occupation to do so and I’m bored out of my wits writing and I’m not into mental gymnastics for the night. It was wonderful to watch though, like reading short stories. At 2:45 a.m. I’ll be watching “As Good as it Gets” over beer and that will bring in good laughs and some superficial, inauthentic feel-good air to my lungs. After that I will read Dostoevsky again until the sky turns blue and I’ll be gobbling a big fucking breakfast.

What a Holy Thursday.