Reading ACH's Anx, an Appreciation

 "ANX is a collection of fifty poems that explores the tensions between stillness and motion, solicitude and disquiet, harmony and discord arising from and/or in response to anxiety vis-a -vis the poetic space." The collection is divided into five parts of "poetic exploration of anxiety as image, where the page becomes an intersection and intermingling of sense, sound, and shape to generate order and meaning." (from the Introduction)

1: In Tales of Trauma and Tears, the lyrical expressions of anxiety and longing are most poignant, leaving us with images of nuanced sadness. The first poem in this chapter “State of Being” seems to declare the magnitude of anxiety that pulsates in each poem. There is a lyrical progression of this state of self that is conscious of its distortion and dreams the impossible. One seeks for a “Reprieve”, longs for peaceful silence, a calmness after the storm, peace following mundane daily battles, but no, there isn’t a chance this will ever happen, since this is what is constant in life, this palpable disquiet, and thus: ‘we keep holding our breaths…’

The last stanza from “One Day I Come Home and Where is Silence” resonates because it’s not a feeling when one is young and untouchable. But at a certain age, such pounding ache is like the fatal threat of a stroke:  

So they ask what to do with the silences

that numb when unaccompanied by voices?

Music for killing time? Does solipsism sting?

Does gossiping with one’s conscience prove

 

too much of a guilty pleasure? How does one

enter this reformed house? Does one cover

one’s ears? Does one sing along? Where’s

 

that guide for adapting? Or the manual for

singing? How to deal with a case like this—

this life insisting on pushing out the longing?

How true. While just about every minute of longing can’t be denied, a time is set for a declaration that one has perhaps arrived. Passion, mission, profession, the desired business of living converged in a center, and nothing follows. But how this merely pushes a fresh anxiety, professing it to be a negative attitude that can be made subservient to our numbered days.

Then the poet asks in “The Encoder,”

What if time ceased to be? No six o’clock,

Just news. No hands ticking, just your fingers

Typing away. Encoding data feels eternal

When your day finds no pleasure. Time

Or, will there still be time? Other things follow. Regrets. Memories which aren’t simply nostalgic beleaguer and blight what remains in both mind and spirit. Our hope is “Another Life That Afford Us Do-Overs” since nobody can go back. Maybe, this is the eternity promised in the Holy Scriptures, this other life which needs us to cross over. Our anxiety for deliverance place us in cognizance of the fact of our lostness.  

And in the last three poems of this chapter “Cake,” “Pater Noster,” and “The Romance of the Dogs” the poet laments the magnitude of such depravities.

2: In The Architecture of Muffled Woe the first poem delays grief through a ritual of acceptable deception: Light them candles…Set them flowers//Let them candles and flowers be,/Let us put on a show to their show./Let us stop the pretense only upon their withering.//

But in “Mourning Song” grief persists in a dream blasting denial into acceptance. “I’m hovering—out of my dreams I’m lingering, /calling out your name at dawn, unable to let go, /your face etched in my recall. But my eyes/now are shutting, waking me up at long last. //

In “All Pains are Asymmetrical” death is something to grapple with, an abnormality that can’t be helped. Same normal for everyone at some point in time, but not everyone will at once be open to receive it. Having lost someone, one will always ask why, or opine the meaning of it all, or pry a legacy out of a permanent departure:

The world appeared to me tilted

like a misplaced apparition

the day my sister passed on.

I had slept absent-mindedly

with my glasses on and I awoke

to things all bent. The shadows,

the stance of lilies, the charisma

of rain. It was a slant so slight, yet

it bragged of permanence, proclaiming

things would never be the same.

So, what is the color of grief? What is its architecture? How does one expunge the pain of loss of a loved one?  How does it happen at once? There must be an answer, and in fact, every possible unsatisfactory answer is laid down in verse. Lyrics philosophize, offer antidotes, and theorizes on ”How to Administer Relief” to muffled “Woe”.

3: In Resist the Quiet’s Creeping the poet begins by facing an “Affliction,” the curse of the muse insisting indulgence. Art is never one to simply wait and see. Art needs the cuddle and caress of memories, even the most passing ones:

Take for instance, this memory: during the Feast Day

of San Dionisio many years back, this marching band

ignited the festivities in my hometown with only a lone

trumpeter among a sea of drummers. His quacks

 

took center stage as he blustered with all his power

the grit in his gut, trumping all percussions poised

to drown out all other sounds. What he had on

was white. What music he had in him was whiter

Art doesn’t offer a mere lovely view, but rather invites one to gaze. In “The Art of Framing” pre-judgment is admittedly careless and based on what one has not fully seen.

In “Language Game,” the poet writes to meet the demands of his own art as he grapples with “power is precisely this: it sings/the language only strangers speak.//

Finally, in “Smoke Fragments” the dynamic structure of the poem encapsulates the rigor of his poetry, his art.

4: In The Mum Knocking on Your Door, woman, mother, mum, wife – the unnerving questions of and about this human beleaguer the poet.  Is she a construct? Is she the passive recipient of history’s conditioning? Is she always the martyr and victim? Does she always offer the ultimate sacrifice?

In “Momsense” and “Hand on Hand,” she is the wisest in this poet’s estimate, the ultimate philosopher of life, the perennial questioner of meanings.

5: In Let’s Make Parables of Trees the desire to live life to the fullest is often dulled and frustrated by life itself being difficult to live. In “Daylight” this desire is like grasping a “blazing fire”:

The pursuit gives us nothing to feast on but                                          the tease,

Never the full illumination of day. We labor,                                         stretching

Our fortitude for the flash of awe                                                        and beholding.

Our pursuit never wavers however, even as we presume we have acquiesced to monotony or as the poet imagines it in “Settling” when 

‘our hands turn restless,

fraught 

in their need to wipe the dust

off its claimed residence, ever aiming

 for movement, for resolve, always

untamable, never hushed.’

Almost always, we are left with “Antipathy” as we begrudge what must have been or as we belabor pointless, empty wasting of moments. But the poet invites us to gaze and to take note of what we see – ‘notice the clouds…notice resplendence…notice gratitude…notice loss.’

Our ears kept attuned to the “Sounds of Wonder,” we hear the poet sing an affirmation of our state of being, that we are capable of long, stable, duration albeit a lifelong struggle for life itself. In "Let’s Make Parable of Trees," the poet coaxes us:

we ought to make parables that exudes light.

                         Or vessels through which spirits pass. Breeze,

                rainwater, the brown translucency of honey.

Adrian Crisostomo Ho received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada and completed his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at De La Salle University. His essays, poems, fiction and plays have appeared in Rappler, Tomas, Sustaining the Archipelago: An Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry, Philippine Graphic, Montage Literary Journal and Sunday Times Magazine. ANX is his first book. 

Reading "Coders"

Two hours of reading Coders, this account of the culture and ethos of the engineers of logarithms, suss out the nerdy types I rarely meet (but am very much aware of). My reaction is part envy and part amusement: I'm envious that my artistic temperament (you are free to judge if I'm really an artist) isn't more of the pedantic coder's, thus, being a generalist, I have not had many euphoric 'aha' moments similar to a coder's high when she busts a bug, technology works again, and the user is happy.

To be a coder is to plod through a myriad of frustrations when hacking through smelly code until it is cracked and the glitch is fixed. To be an artist is to care passionately about life, even for only a portion of it. The 'poet' as artist must care by engaging every day's puzzle like a coder, mulling over it and trying out solutions however tendentious, until insight leads to a fresh direction. But while  a coder's fix guarantees that a system previously not doing what it should do will now do what it is told to do, a poet's fix is hardly ever a tinker.

The author's metaphors in describing the coder -- as writer, as editor, as poet -- bring me to ground zero of creation itself. You sit down, you labor, you never let up until you've got it right. For the coder to come to the end of the puzzle is to truly find euphoric rest, but for the poet, this only means the end of poetry itself.

N A R I T O -- byTAFTIQUE

How To End an Essay, and then Probably Publish

What I have been doing all along, beginnings.

          I’ve always hoped to become part of the ‘writer milieu’ whatever that means, in this country, mostly because I’m living here and have not been anywhere else. But the thing with writing is that it requires a place to sit down and ruminate. However, all the ruminations I have been doing have always been on the road, as I commute, or as I wait for a cab, or as I line up at MRT then LRT and back. And when I sit, down, mostly to eat – at any fastfood  -- the rumination stops because of blaring music and the mind-numbing cacophony of chatter  in those places. And this is not a choice, but a circumstance, the layout of my life. Cooking just adds up to a stressful time management – so, Jolibee, Chowking, Mcdonald – and any of their kind – since they’re immediately there – are my catharsis – like, I’m now hungry so I eat – in the most routine, most pedestrian sense of hungry.

When I wake up, it’s not the sleeping in but the hurrying up because I’d like to maximize the time – you know – my class begins, and I’ve requested this, at 11 AM, but I leave the house at 7 AM, so I can read, relax, ruminate, roam – imagining – another life. I’m old, so this is my indulgence.

But that In a sense, I am at a perennial search for a space where I can truly just stop, sit, and write. Maybe, I’m always writing, that is, on the go, where my ruminations begin to assume solutions, or in my dreams, answers, to simple struggles of living, such as when I am at one point sitting beside a child with skin cancer on her way to PGH.  I am in the cart for seniors, pwds, and mothers with little children – and I am none of the above – and sometimes, all these vulnerables become more real in their vulnerabilities which are just a breath away. And what can do? I think about reaching out, but all I do is stare or avert my stare. And at one time a lump in my throat rose and I suppressed my tears – the child was so small and yet bore so much suffering. I got something from my bag and gave it to the mother who smiled at me and said “Thank you po pagpalain po kayo ng Diyos.”

Or when I am standing on commute and then some really abrasive creature crushes me and in such pressing brusko-muscular pressure I shriek as a trapped mouse. And then the invectives, with all the Ps, and ‘putchas’, and  ‘if you don’t like to be crushed, go take a taxi…. etc.’  exhale all those bad, infectious breaths, and you can’t even cover your mouth because your arms are no more. And nothing of those Freudian mumbo-jumbo can tell me why this is, why this man, why this …this… soul is acting the villain. Our commutes are the same,anyway,  all harried creatures, we all are. So why burden the burdened even more? But all I do is grit my teeth and bear it, as so many more oppressed  others do, until,  an ellipsis of  this country’s ills are pointed by seniors as reasons for our common suffering.

Or when at home, I try to think of where to go on a Saturday afternoon to escape the toddler-versus-mother wars that begin at the time of my sister’s feeding her son at breakfast and doesn’t let up until the child is exhausted at play. Outside, I seek the cafes, and once inside, I request the servers to keep the sounds low. Most of the essays I have written for my occasional blogs, and this one, were finalized and edited at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf (Well, coffee is expensive but train to Lasalle library and back will cost me half so this is the compromise) or on one of those white tables of the fastfood restaurant in Landmark in Trinoma (this one, the price of the coffee in Mr Donut is cheap , plus, it’s just ten steps away from my ‘white-table’). Therefore, I am like a refugee without a chance of crossing over any boarder. At the end of the day, I will have to go back home and sleep – and only sleep – and then the day ends.

I cry sometimes, because of this, because I am always on the move. I’m fifty six and commuting by train – should I stop? I should find another job which will afford me a daily grab taxi. But on the other hand, I’m on the move, alone. I would rather be on the move alone, than static in a place, alone. Maybe, with the ordinariness of my ordinary life, moving is the character which has made it extraordinary.

Which means that I should probably take note of the simple places I’ve been. Which means they probably matter anyhow. Which means I can ruminate about meaning in those spaces. And so I made a pact of peace with this itinerant lifestyle.  I still crave for a personal, private, space to write, but it has become less an obsession. I’ve already bought two small houses for this reason, but still, I don’t have this space. So now, I simply tell myself, just write or you will regret it.

In joining this collection of Taftique, I seem to have found another beginning toward  this writing track, and this probably, is the best way, at this point, somehow, to move on. 

BEGIN AGAIN

Why is this blog called confidante

Confidante (fem confidante) according to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary means “a person that one trusts enough to speak to about one’s private affairs or secrets.” In a way, this blog is a revealing of my soul. Yet even with the revelations in poetry, in meditations, in diary entries and in notes gathered here and there so many secrets remain not within reach of any person, even the most “intimate” confidante. My professor in poetry once said that we couldn’t be attached to ourselves in our poems since our words must echo other people’s experiences too. This is why we ought to grasp the most concrete image of our life’s instances in the hope that others may feel in those images a kind of reverberation. A most peculiar thing happens in the search for an image – I often lose the immediate experience and realize that another secret reveals itself and the image formulates its own theme. In the end, I may take up that new theme to echo something already said and in a different way. But there you go; a new secret is revealed, and only to me. So now, I become my own confidante.

Editing is another confidante-thing. An author trusts you with the product of his creative juices and allows you to see through backward and forward, read between the lines, comment, or merely draw a red-line through his thoughts. Once entrusted with a manuscript, I become a confidante.

7 lessons from books made into movie adaptations

7 lessons from books made into movie adaptations

CINEMALAYA

While I really wanted to see all the films during the Cinemalaya festival, I was able to buy the only remaining available tickets for "Dagsin", "Kusina," "Hiblang Abo", "Shorts A", "Shorts B", two Asian Films, plus Lav Diaz's "Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis." Quite expensive if you ask me, but this was the only time I could really watch a lot of Cinemalaya films so I endured the pocket drain. However, I wasn't so satisfied, that is, as a simple movie goer.

Dagsin is supposed to be heavy and yet, I felt something was lacking in the gravitas. If not for the ever brilliant Tommy Abuel Dagsin would have suffered more. Judy Ann was exemplary in Kusina, but Kusina itself failed to give me that moviegoer high. I didn't like the Kusina template of stage and film fusion. There is too much going on that deserved great cinematography. I guess, I simply was looking for the Film-ic quality. Kusina's textuality bored me. The kitchen/cooking/food motif occupied too much space in the narrative that its symbolic quality just got lost in the monotony and the repetitions. (I was told that Mercury is Mine handled the same motif more cleverly, so I regret that I didn't see it). And of course, because of the fusion thing, the mis-en-scene is obviously so staged and although I can understand the studio effect, I have long favored exterior and interior spaces interspersing and giving a much needed exposition of characterizations of interior and exterior selves. But maybe that's the point of the film, that there is agonizing interiority that the character in Kusina is unable to exteriorize, and thus, her space doesn't expand and she dies without ever going beyond the boundaries of her safely defined space.

The other characters in Kusina could have been better cast. All of them are stereotypes, with strained albeit contrived dialogue, formula types of formula friends, with their wardrobe amplifying them as formulaic constructs.

In the past, I didn't see Rene Villanueva's Hiblang Abo as play, so I treated the film as play, and did not go look for anything other than the nuance of the text as would be delivered in a play. This is a mistake of course, because film is a visual medium and the nuances that are supposed to be read in the subtexts of a play, the supposed mystery of each personal struggle, ceased as nuanced puzzles and became apparent in the visual montage. I also wondered about the film's casting of one and the same actor for the younger versions of the three old men in the story. I offer myself the answer that there is no symbolic meaning in that casting after all, it was just Indie budgeting constraints which led to that decision. But I hope I'm wrong and just plain stupid in not seeing the reason/meaning behind this choice.

I found the shorts entertaining, but predictable too in the Filipino-indie-shorts tradition (The good ones had a twist of course, like in an O' Henry story). However, I saw great promise in Direk Quesada's film Pektus. For me, Pektus was excellent for a low budget Indie. The pace, the editing, the mis-en-scene and the acting are all well deliberated. But mostly, I like the idea of found chances as opposed to missed opportunities. For me, that was a very ethical point that isn't submerged but also isn't preached. I had an aha! moment in this film, like an epiphany of sorts.

The Asian film from Kazakstan, The Stranger is superb. The cinematography is awesome and the visual footage succeeded immensely in projecting the isolation, the strangeness, the utter difference of one man from the rest of the population. Then as usual, the film from Afghanistan is terribly depressing, but the acting is superb. This film will ever remind me that there is much more that needs to be done for women. A film can only expose. How long will this situation of female subjugation last in other parts of the world such as Afghanistan? What can people do? How can a film make people responsible? The face of that woman in Afghanistan, who is with skill, but whose skill doesn't count; who's only value is in the dowry she gets from marriage; who's recourse against such arranged marriage is begging on the streets for survival -- that face needs a response.

Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis (Lullaby in Sorrowful Mystery) turned out to be easier to watch (eight hours)  than Norte Sa Dulo ng Kasaysayan (four hours). The film has a linear narrative that focused on the days of Gregoria De Jesus's search for the body of Andres Bonifacio. The almost mythical telling involving three creatures of the forest, all Tikbalangs, problematizes the still unsolved mystery of Bonifacio's un-recovered body. Considering Gregoria De Jesus's youth at the time of that event in Philippine history, and the circumstances around her capture and her husband's arrest by the Filipino soldiers, the film succeeds in projecting an ancient, almost forgotten, quite anachronistic, and not even a footnote of a question in our national memory. The issue resonates however given that we still have "the disappeared" in our midst, and most of them are rumored heroes as well.

Lav Diaz shoots the entire film in black and white, but the story is not black and white at all. References to the Japanese film classics in the visual narration style is Diaz homage to filmmaking at its core, an exposition of soul and conscience using scarcely edited and prolonged real time photography. (The only downside in watching this film is when somebody, lulled by the scarcely edited footage and getting impatient, started to munch that crispy chips or popcorn and this moviegoer was distracted from certain deep ruminations.)

El Filibusterismo's Isagani and Basilio interpellate Diaz's interior monologue about history. In the end, Basilio, the hero of the novel, lives with all his unanswered questions and lost idealism, while Bonifacio, the hero of the revolution dies in the hands of the men he supposedly led. And the Gregoria De Jesus's of our nation's story? They will simply have to live through the mysteries, endure the superstitions, cast off the demons and tikbalangs of their desperate expectations and lull themselves to dreamless sleep.

Jennylyn's RomComs

So to relieve my stress, I went to the movies and saw them all - English Only, Walang Forever, and Just the Three of Us. Jennylyn rules the romcom genre at the moment! In the first movie, she is so lovely that I contemplated dressing myself up in a certain translator's stylish country flare for an un-intimidating dating. But not necessarily to meet a Derek (although that won't be a minus), but to get and finalize high paying translation/editing/writing job contracts!

In the second film, Jen was impossibly successful as a romance novelist, getting all her "hugot" premises from real love-life. The romantic course of her life precludes a self-destructive streak but, thank you very much, the self-destruction is worth it because the cause of the ultimately desired self-devastation is Jericho Rosales! I was thinking that precisely the reason for my lack of romantic story arches was my passion for placid wholeness. No wonder, I can't really write anything happy or tragic in a passionate sense. My life has been sooooo nice.

And finally, in Just the Three of Us, Jen's problematic and losyang demeanor, her already devastated self seeking escape, sexes the unromantic, prim and proper John Lloyd Cruz - and bam! They beget a child! Catastrophe in the beginning, but everybody is happy in the end. There's no way this cliched love story will end tragically. But well, Jen's character is one for feminists to grind their teeth into.

I have my own Hollywood RomCom favorites; On top of them all , Nottinghill. The best scene there is the last scene with "When You Say Nothing At All" playing in its loveliness in the background while a pregnant Julia Roberts reclines on Hugh Grant's lap (she's a superstar), as the latter reads a book (he's a book-lover), and both are quiet and comfortable in each other's company.

In Jennylyn's movies however, I can't recall a single scene that leaves an impact. All three movies showcase Jen's comedic flare, but she is the same Jennylyn Mercado, the GMA actress, in all three movies: the same delivery of the dialogues, the same quirky movements, the same laugh when happy, the same cry when sad, the same facial mannerisms. Even her hair style is the same in all three movies, since in all, she looks like she has forgotten to comb her hair, but she looks pretty nonetheless.

Meanwhile, the male characters are mere romantic interests, and to add dimension, they all came from problematic family backgrounds, and they eventually meet Jen's big and happy family (always). There are always those loyal friends of course for both woman and man and the usual complications of friends giving wisdom but philos never wins in an eros charged story.

But I was entertained nevertheless. Would I recommend them? Yes, but just remember that they aren't for the morally upright.

I am still waiting for Jen's definitive romcom. I hope she won't stay on in this stereo-casting.