Connect The Dots

This will be my last entry for this blog, which will almost be a year old. No lengthy goodbyes, no explanations, no forwarding address...yet. Just a song. All goodbyes need a song, if only to make the silences less deadening.

Here's Where the Story Ends
The Sundays

People I know, places I go, make me feel tongue-tied
I can see how people look down, they’re on the inside
Here’s where the story ends
People I see, weary of me showing my good side
I can see how people look down
I’m on the outside
Here’s where the story ends
Ooh here’s where the story ends

It’s that little souvenir of a terrible year
Which makes my eyes feel sore
Oh I never should have said, the books that you read
Were all I loved you for
It’s that little souvenir of a terrible year
Which makes me wonder why
And it’s the memories of your shed that make me turn red
Surprise, surprise, surprise

Crazy I know, places I go
Make me feel so tired
I can see how people look down
I’m on the outside
Oh here’s where the story ends
Ooh here’s where the story ends

It’s that little souvenir of a terrible year
Which makes my eyes feel sore
And who ever would’ve thought the books that you brought
Were all I loved you for
Oh the devil in me said, go down to the shed
I know where I belong
But the only thing I ever really wanted to say
Was wrong, was wrong, was wrong

It’s that little souvenir of a colourful year
Which makes me smile inside
So I cynically, cynically say, the world is that way
Surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise
Here’s where the story ends
Ooh here’s where the story ends

The Marikina river was muddy brown this morning, teasing the lip of the earth, calm, containing itself until the night's rains. It'll only be a matter of time until it rages again against the sky's pelting, until it pours itself out over the grass and the stone benches and the floats and the carabao statues and the paved road beside it, saying, My turn to go. I can only take so much.

* * * * *

Had a Desperate Housewives marathon this week while nursing a fever and this annoying cold. Hanep sa domestic issues. Though sometimes trite, the mystery aspect and slapstick comedy (c/o the still-sexy Teri Hatcher) were entertaining enough. What I liked most though was the slightly schizo character of Marcia Cross, who delivers surprisingly sharp lines. "After all, how much do we really want to know about our neighbors?"

* * * * *

What a lie it was, to live like you had no enemies. The truth is if you have solid opinions about some things, or have a checkered past where you mistakenly stepped on someone else's heart, you're bound to have a few enemies ignoring you in corridors or whispering things about you behind your back, twisting little details about your life (as if they know you!) to support their little thesis about your character. It doesn't matter anymore if their indignation was justified years ago. You didn't apologize. You were never friends. And now that hate's blown out of proportion, but what can you do? It's strangely gratifying, to finally acknowledge you're the object of so much hate. And to live with it.

* * * * *

Seeing the copy of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (that I've been slooowly digesting, after ignoring for so long) on my desk, Kokoy shows me his copy of Ashberry's new book, Where Shall I Wander. The first poem I read blew me away. I love repetition, I love accessibility.


The New Higher
John Ashberry

You meant more than life to me. I lived through
you not knowing, not knowing I was living.
I learned that you called for me. I came to where
you were living, up a stair. There was no one there.
No one to appreciate me. The legality of it
upset a chair. Many times to celebrate
we were called together and where
we had been there was nothing there,
nothing that is anywhere. We passed obliquely,
leaving no stare. When the sun was done muttering,
in an optimistic way, it was time to leave that there.

Blithely passing in and out of where, blushing shyly
at the tag on the overcoat near the window where
the outside crept away, I put aside the there and now.
Now it was time to stumble anew,
blacking out when time came in the window.
There was not much of it left.
I laughed and put my hands shyly
across your eyes. Can you see now?
Yes I can see I am only in the where
where the blossoming stream takes off, under your window.
Go presently you said. Go from my window.
I am half in love with your window I cannot undermine
it, I said.

by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

* * * * *

...because there are days I'd rather let the poems do the talking.

I'm a sucker for inspirational graduation speeches. Although Conan O' Brien's Harvard speech is still my favorite, this one by Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios), delivered at Stanford University last June 12, 2005 comes a close second (and not just because he connects the dots):

* * * * *

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

* * * * *

(The rest of the speech, where he talks about love, loss, and death can be accessed here.)

I remember Larry asking, while drinking Scotch at his apartment months ago, which 6 words we used most often in our poetry. The idea being that maybe we could use these to write a sestina---a form I'd always been intimidated by. (Or was the question simply: if you were to write a sestina right now, what 6 words would you use?) Anyway, we listed words off the top of our heads. I think my list included: city, love, rain, fire, someone, and you.

For accuracy's sake (and because I wanted to get my mind off something last night), I decided to actually look at 37 of my more recent poems and count which words (excluding articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and personal pronouns) I used the most.

At the top of the list, surprisingly, was HAND/S (with a total of 18 hits). Funny, I never thought that body part/verb was that important to me.

The next 6 words:
(17) WORD/S
(16) STREET/S, STORY, OTHER/S
(14) CITY
(12) LOVE

And the rest:
(11) day/s, know, say/said
(10) end, read, see/saw
(9) someone, night, hear, friend/s, year/s, lose/lost
(8) name, road, time, way, live, look, change
(7) first, page, morning, rain, memory, true/truth, mind, find/found
(6) car, heart, map, write, sleep, photograph, picture, new, sign, leave, question

I'd like to think these choices reveal more than a limited vocabulary. =) If, as Galeano said, "we are are the words that tell who we are," what do these words tell about who I am and what my concerns are?

For the past couple of weeks, in between listening to the stories of my friends unravel and spinning a few of my own, I've been reading two books by Stephen Dunn: the Pulitzer prize-winning Different Hours (2000) I finally bought at Aeon, and Arkaye's copy of Insistence of Beauty (2004). I've grown to love his compassionate, truthful voice---though I admit that a few times he tends to verge on the sentimental and trivial, coloring everything with a nostalgic eye. Dunn's strengths are the clarity of his voice, his accessibility (without the jocular glibness of Billy Collins), his earthy and uneasy wisdom. I like his concerns most of all. He said somewhere that "clarity in the service of what is easy to say isn't of interest to me. Clarity in the service of complexity is." The complexities that excite him often lie in the relationship arena: infidelities, the private-public split, the stories and versions of ourselves we tell our friends, lovers, and former selves. His poems' storyteller risks navigating the shadowy areas, untying and tying knots, delighting in (and sometimes romanticizing) ambiguities, always aware that "the reverse side also has a reverse side." So whether he narrates what happened to Jack and Jill after the crown-breaking and tumbling after, or offers a toast to "what goes on" after friends betray each other and get cancer, he remains ambivalent. And doesn't slip into easy confessionalism, believing in Robert Frost's precaution that "we shall be known by the delicacy of where we stop short." Above all, his borrow-able, revise-able stories implicate us readers. His hope, I think, is to lead us to that most human of emotions, empathy, which he defines as

more like a leaning, like being able

to imagine a life for a spider, a maker's
life, or just some aliveness
in its wide abdomen and delicate spinnerets
so you take it outside in two paper cups

instead of stepping on it.

And that empathy can lead us to action, and communion:

I looked for those who didn't laugh
at those of us who fell.
In the barracks, after drills,
the quiet fellowship of the fallen.

* * * * *

The Stories
Stephen Dunn

For M.A.W.
(1939-1994)


I was unfaithful to you last week.
Though I tried to be true
to the beautiful vagaries
of our unauthorized love,
I told a stranger our story,
arranging and rearranging us
until we were orderly, reduced.
I didn't want to sleep with this stranger.
I wanted, I think, to see her yield,
to sense her body's musculature,
her history of sane resistance
become pliable, as yours had
twenty-two years ago.
I told her we met in parks
and rest stops along highways.
Once, deep in the woods,
a blanket over stones and dirt.
I said that you were, finally,
my failure of nerve,
made to the contours of my body,
so wrongly good for me
I had to give you up.
Listening to myself, it seemed
as if I were still inconsolable,
and I knew the seductiveness in that,
knew when she'd try to console me
I'd allow her the tiniest of victories.
I told her about Laguna, the ruins
we made of each other.
To be undone---I said I learned
that's what I'd always wanted.
We were on a train from Boston
to New York, this stranger and I,
the compartment to ourselves.
I don't have to point out to you
the erotics of such a space.
We'd been speaking of our marriages,
the odd triumphs of their durations.
"Once...," I said, and my betrayal began,
and did not end.
She had a story, too.
Mine seemed to coax hers out.
There was this man she'd meet
every workday Thursday at noon.
For three years, every Thursday
except Thanksgiving. She couldn't
bear it anymore, she said,
the lies, the coming home.
Ended, she said.
Happiest years of her life, she said.
At that moment (you understand)
we had to hug, but that's all we did.
It hardly matters. We were in each other's
sanctums, among the keepsakes,
we'd gone where most sex cannot go.
I could say that telling her our story
was a way of bringing you back to life,
and for a while it was, a memorial
made of memory and its words.
But here's what I knew:
Watching her react, I was sure I'd tell
our story again, to others. I understood
how it could be taken to the bank,
and I feared I might not ever again
feel enough to know when to stop.

...and I still haven't been able to write the "last" poem of my collection, the one I theoretically want to end my book with. I've revised some old ones and even written one new draft, but I'm putting so much pressure on myself to end things with a bang that I can't seem to get it done yet. Maybe this has something to do with the end of summer (and the final episodes of Temptation Island, The Contender and American Idol---yes, I'm still a reality show junkie), and the closing down of my favorite Katipunan area restaurant Eyrie (goodbye hungarian sausage spaghetti and turon con caramel a la mode), and the beginning of June and the need to immerse myself in the rain amidst all things tinged with grayness ("Gray, then, was the only truth in the world." --Stephen Dunn) where shadows sometimes collide and find temporary shelter.

A paragraph from Auster's City of Glass:

Later perhaps I will do something else. After I am done being a poet. Sooner or later I will run out of words, you see. Everyone has just so many words inside him. And then where will I be? I think I would like to be a fireman after that. And after that a doctor. It makes no difference. The last thing I will be is a high-wire walker. When I am very old and have at last learned how to walk like other people. Then I will dance on the wire, and people will be amazed. Even little children. That is what I would like. To dance on the wire until I die.

Monet Refuses the Operation
Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Great Art
Lawrence Raab


There's so much I don't want to look at,
big religious scenes especially,
big historical battles,
almost anything, in fact, containing
large numbers of people.

Three or four people—that's the right number
for a painting. Then you can think
about what they might mean to each other,
why they're standing around that beach
at sunset, walking toward that mountain.

Or they're at home: a woman sewing, a child
playing, a dog, a man at the door,
much more ominous, I'm sure, than the artist
intended. And I like that, imagining
this isn't what I was supposed to feel,

the way I'm pleased with small imperfections,
stains and wrinkles, erasures particularly,
where you sense the artist changing his mind.
And sometimes a shape's been painted over,
although the ghost of it remains.

In Vermeer's Girl Asleep at a Table
she leans on one hand, dreaming
perhaps of love. Behind her there's a mirror
in which nothing is reflected. Once,
x-rays have shown, this was a portrait of a man.

And we would have understood, given
the conventions of the time, he was the subject
of her thoughts. Why take him away?
It's better, I want Vermeer
to have decided, not to show that much.

Let her keep her dream to herself.
Let the light be our secret.

And here's an excerpt from Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, because I've been thinking about summer and endings and last poems for several days now:

Douglas and Tom and Charlie came panting along the unshaded street.
“Tom, answer me true, now.”
“Answer what true?”
“Whatever happened to happy endings?”
“They got them on shows at Saturday matinees.”
“Sure, but what about life?”
“All I know is I feel good going to bed nights, Doug. That’s a happy ending once a day. Next morning I’m up and maybe things go bad. But all I got to do is remember that I’m going to bed that night and just lying there a while makes everything okay.”
“I’m talking about Mr. Forrester and old Miss Loomis.”
“Nothing we can do; she’s dead.”
“I know! But don’t you figure someone slipped up there?”
“You mean about him thinking she was the same age as her picture and her a trillion years old all the time? No sir, I think it’s swell!”
“Swell, for gosh sakes?”
“The last few days when Mr. Forrester told me a little here and a little there and I finally put it all together—boy, did I bawl my head off. I don’t even know why. I wouldn’t change one bit of it. If you changed it, what would we have to talk about? Nothing.”
“You just won’t admit you like crying, too. You cry just so long and everything’s fine. And there’s your happy ending. And you’re ready to go back out and walk around with folks again. And it’s the start of gosh-knows-what-all! Any time now, Mr. Forrester will think it over and see it’s just the only way and have a good cry and then look around and see it’s morning again, even though it’s five in the afternoon.”
“That don’t sound like no happy ending to me.”
“A good night’s sleep, or a ten-minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine, Doug. You listen to Tom Spaulding, M.D.”
“Shut up, you guys,” said Charlie. “We’re almost there!”
They turned a corner.
Deep in winter, they had looked for bits and pieces of summer and found it in furnace cellars or in bonfires on the edge of frozen skating ponds at night. Now, in summer, they went searching for some little bit, some piece of the forgotten winter.

The Penalty for Bigamy is Two Wives
William Matthews

I don't understand how Janis Joplin did it, how she made her voice break out like that in hives of feeling. I have a friend who writes poems who says he really wants to be a rock star---the high-heeled boots, the hand-held mike, the glare of underpants in the front row, the whole package. He says he likes the way music throws you back into your body, like organic food or heroin. But when he sings it is sleek and abstract except for the pain, like the silhouette of a dog baying at the moon, almost liver-shaped, a bell hung from a rope of its own pure yearning. Naturally his life is exciting, but I sometimes think he can't tell the difference between salvation and death. When I listen to my Janis Joplin records I think of him. Once I got drunk & sloppy and told him I feared artists always had more fun and more death, too, and how I had these strong feelings but nothing to do with them and he said Don't worry I'd trade my onion collection for a good cry, wouldn't you? I didn't really understand, but poetry is how you feel so I lie back and listen to Janis's dead voice run up and down my body like a fire that has learned to live on itself and I think Here it comes, Grief's beautiful blow job. I think about the painter who was said to paint with his penis and I imagine one of his portraits letting down a local rain of hair around his penis now too stiff to paint with, as if her diligent silence meant to say You loved me enough to make me, when will I see you next? Janis, I don't care what anybody thinks or writes, I don't care if my friend who writes poems is a beautiful fake, like a planetarium ceiling, I want to hold my life in my arms as easily as my body will hold forever the silence for which the mouth slowly opens.

Spent 2 days in Batangas with Joel and other speakers at a journalism/creative writing workshop for high school kids of the Oblates of Saint Joseph schools. I ended up sleeping for two nights ALONE in a room with FOURTEEN beds arranged headboard to headboard. Well, ok, I wasn't quite alone---3 cockroaches, a beetle, several mosquitoes and a few bedbugs kept me company. (At least there wasn't a dead maya ON the ceiling fan, as there was in Joel and Alvin's room.) Two free-roaming cows were sleeping outside the window. When I woke up, I could smell cow dung.

We ate breakfast and dinner with the nuns and Lolo---an old, senile, French priest who could speak Filipino. He would bang his spoon against his cup and mutter something under his breath. We thought it was murder, murder. Then we heard it as mother, mother. He'd look at Alvin and say Aba aba aba, ang yabang naman nito. He tried to hand me his red pill---Gusto mo?---offering it like a piece of candy.

I suppose when you're senile, it doesn't matter what country you're physically in, you feel like you will always be a foreigner, newborn.

* * * * *

I can't teach high school. Yesterday I raised my voice a few times and huffed impatiently at slow or inattentive students who seemed like they didn't want to be there. Tough luck. They got Miss Sungit and Mr. Comedy to critique their poems.

* * * * *

This is a haiku written by a young boy named Tonton:

Since my house burned down,
I now own a better view
of the rising moon.

Ang ganda, ano? The 2nd and 3rd lines are surprising, given the premise of the 1st. And the word "own"! Nakakatuwa. When we asked, out of curiosity, what led him to write the poem, he stood up and said, "Kasi po dati nasunog yung tindahan namin sa palengke, tapos..." His eyes welled up. "Na-realize ko po na kailangan maging optimistic pa rin, lagi pong may pag-asa..." He laughed while crying, which made us all laugh. First time I've "made" someone unintentionally cry during a workshop...

* * * * *

I have high hopes this year. Something grand is bound to happen. I'm willing luck into my life.

This site is a hoot. The writer, brimming with arrogance and an armful of caustic comments, seeks to "rehabilitate" well-known poems by pointing out what's wrong, and actually rewriting them. He's written over a 100 of these essays, showing that there's an endless supply of bad poems written by famous and established poets. His rewrites are rarely better than the originals, but sometimes his comments do hit the spot. Check out the essays on Sexton, Strand and Graham.

* * * * *

I've been postponing trying to make an outline for the best dressed feature I'm supposed to write. It was easier 2 years ago when all I had to do was write snappy profiles of each of the 25 best dressed women, without having to tackle the idea of the best dressed list itself. While fiddling around, I chanced upon the blog of someone who writes about contemporary consumerism and capitalism. His entry on "best dressed idiocy" makes an excellent (if obvious) point that's never discussed in fashion magazines:

What's so infuriating about all this is how in these lists the stylishness allegedly evinced is supposed to come from innate personal qualities and smart fashion decisions within anyone's grasp, rather than being the product of an enormous industry apparatus coupling itself to the long-accrued prestige of the privileged classes....[These lists] encourage you to feel bad that you lack this natural grace, and urge to buy more crap to try to get it, a move which will inevitably fail, make you feel worse, and more vulnerable to the same pitch to buy more crap the next time. The point: "style" is never personal. It is always socially produced, and never within one's individual control.

Admittedly, these are probably not the best ideas to be absorbing while writing FOR the magazine which will pay me GOOD MONEY so that I can SURVIVE THE REST OF THE SUMMER since THE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT in which I teach DOES NOT LET PART-TIMERS TEACH AND EARN DURING THE SUMMER (end of rant).

And I am back to square one: how do I write this feature well without resorting to frivolity and rehashing style cliches?

* * * * *

If you turn giddy in bookstores and love buying books at a bargain and live in the Quezon City area anyway, go to Bound. It's a small shop packed with jazz boooks, journalism books, children's books, and all sorts of literary fiction, mostly for bargain prices. Found the diary of Anais Nin 1944-1947 there for P100. Since people sell and donate their books all the time, there's no telling what you'll stumble upon when you do go. I'm really glad small bookstores like this exist. I hope it lasts.