Where I Boldly Went: Explorations into Star Trek

I recently saw Star Trek into Darkness, the second film in J.J. Abrams’ reboot of the Star Trek franchise. The first movie, which came out four years ago, hadn’t made much of an impact on me, probably because (1) I’m not really a Trekkie, and (2) the whole time-travel scenario was somewhat confusing. To my pleasant surprise, Into Darkness turned out to be my favorite kind of film: action-packed mind candy. Relieved of the burden of having to explain Abrams’ alternate universe, it highlighted the humanist philosophy that the original series was known for.

William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as Captain James Kirk and Mr. Spock

Star Trek, the syndicated 1960s TV show, used science fiction to offer a covert critique of the issues that defined America at the time. These include the Cold War, the Vietnam war, the feminist and anti-racist movements, etc. In the same vein, Abrams’ film is easy to read as a sociopolitical allegory about the post-9/11 era. It features a stateless adversary who resorts to stealthy attacks against a hegemonic order. The story itself resonates with archetypal ideas about good and evil, the struggle between them, and their often murky borders.

I was intrigued enough to do my research. Apparently, Star Trek’s 47-year history has seen five television spin-offs, including an animated one; twelve movies counting Abrams’ contribution; and voluminous literature in the form of novels, comic books, and fan fiction. In the most recent big-screen adaptations, a time-travel plot device creates an alternate “Abrams-verse.”

In Star Trek (2009), the Romulan Nero, whose planet has been destroyed when a nearby star goes supernova, accidentally goes back in time when his ship is swallowed by a black hole. He is bent on vengeance against Ambassador Spock, who has failed to prevent the catastrophe that befell Romulus. Nero’s appearance in the past leads to the death of Tiberius Kirk, father of the future Captain James Kirk, thus creating new destinies for the crew of the starship Enterprise. (The operational metaphysical theory here assumes that if a person travels to the past, the prime timeline doesn’t change while a parallel one comes into existence.)

This lets the reboot tell fresh stories about familiar characters. In Abrams-verse, they are depicted to be much younger, as the famous odyssey of the Enterprise has yet to begin. We see their early interactions as a team, especially the budding friendship between the swashbuckling Kirk and the coldly logical half-human, half-Vulcan Mr. Spock. There are also the fussy Dr. “Bones” McCoy, the kick-ass communications officer Lieutenant Uhura (who, in this iteration, is in a relationship with Spock), the stalwart Officer Hikaru Sulu, Russian navigator Pavel Chekov, and not least, the comic engineer Montgomery Scott and his silent alien sidekick. Significantly, actor Leonard Nimoy, who originally played Spock, appears as old Spock, lending a strong sense of continuity between the original series and Abrams’ films. As the movie concludes, we hear the familiar voiceover by Captain Kirk: “Space… the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

In Star Trek into Darkness (2013), a mysterious rebel named John Harrison instigates the bombing of a key Starfleet research center and later fires on top commanding officers. Kirk and his crew are sent on an undercover mission to eliminate him, using powerful, newly developed torpedoes. However, Kirk hesitates because the fugitive is hiding in Klingon territory, and any attack could precipitate a war between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire. After he apprehends Harrison, he also discovers that there’s more to his story and the 72 torpedoes now stocked on the Enterprise. Kirk’s decision to ignore his original directive makes him a target of the formidable Admiral Alexander Marcus. In order to save the lives of the people on his ship, Kirk is forced into an uneasy alliance with his strange prisoner.

The preservation of life as an absolute end recurs as a theme in the movie. But the choices of the characters reveal this to be inherently paradoxical. In the name of saving certain others—one’s child, one’s friend, a crew, a family, an entire world—the taking of lives is perceived as inevitable or justified. This of course points to the tragic relativism of values, which Kirk and his friends heroically struggle against. As Kirk helplessly tells Spock, “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. I only know what I can do.” In this sense, the torpedoes—each of which harbors a surprising secret—represent both danger and safety, destruction and preservation. The ending suggests that, against all odds, there is hope for the latter.

In a way, the principles of warfare have not really changed since at least The Iliad. The differences between then and now are a matter of method and name (weapons of mass destruction, terrorism), but the stakes are the same. Even in an imagined universe where poverty has been eliminated and humans have achieved interstellar travel, the old specters lurk elsewhere in the galaxy, in the form of alien empires or renegade villains who have somehow acquired WMDs. The United Federation of Planets is only the modern (Western and liberal) nation-state on a grander scale. Admiral Marcus represents the consequentialist militarism that cannot think beyond black and white. On the other hand, the tandem of Kirk and Spock represents the union of intuition and reason, without which we can’t even begin to comprehend reality: That we live in a world where resources are tragically limited, duties and goods conflict, and death is inevitable.

All in all, the narrative of Star Trek into Darkness is as rousing as its over-the-top musical score, as awesome as the trail left behind when a starship goes on warp speed. It makes my foray into its overwhelming universe worth it, for after all, exploration is an end in itself.

We Know Who He Is: A Non-Spoilerish Review of Iron Man 3

Tony Stark is hands down my favorite Avenger. He makes the best quips and has the most interesting love story, to say nothing of how Robert Downey Jr. owns him completely. Iron Man 3, which I saw a couple of days ago, does not disappoint in any respect. I love how it takes Stark’s story in a new direction and also (it seems) neatly closes the saga of the armored superhero. The saga-closing isn’t quite as grand or poignant as that of the third film in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, which is on a different level. But all the same, Iron Man 3—co-written by Shane Black and Drew Pearce—feels just right. Its narrative logic arises naturally from the evolution of Stark’s character.

The third film is set in a post-Avengers world, a game-changer in terms of Stark’s global appeal. There are only so many places where a character’s story can take you before the journey starts to feel pointless. After the first two Iron Man films and The Avengers, what challenge is left for Stark to face? He’s already dealt with the moral conundrums that come with being heir to a weapons manufacturing business (Iron Man). He’s done the requisite tango with the ego that every superhero seems to be saddled with (Iron Man 2). To top it all off, he has already teamed up with heroes both human and god who could’ve easily outclassed him, but not quite (The Avengers). In Downey’s three previous movie appearances as Tony Stark, a couple of important aspects of his life continue to change, keeping pace with his personal growth. It’s these sweet notes in the story that keep the melody listenable, like a radio station you don’t want to change. More ever remains to be told in terms of his two most important relationships: with Pepper Potts, and with his suit.

His suit first comes into existence when Stark has had to invent it to escape from a band of terrorists holding him hostage. Later, the expected kinks are dealt with and we see his metal exoskeleton burnished with its iconic colors of red and gold. This marks the beginning of Iron Man’s hero’s journey, the departure stage as Joseph Campbell calls it. During his transition from weapons manufacturer to world protector—apparently two mutually exclusive roles—Stark’s flirtation with long-time friend and personal assistant Pepper Potts begins to simmer. As early as the first movie, the seemingly incorrigible playboy tells her, “You’re all I’ve got.”

Widely known now as Iron Man, Stark improves his suit so that it becomes more portable, coming to him in the form of a briefcase during his memorable showdown with Whiplash on a Monaco racetrack. He also replaces the suit’s palladium core with a more powerful new element that he creates synthetically. (Incidentally, it is this same element that keeps him alive by repulsing shrapnel from his heart. The fatal fragments are first embedded in his chest during an explosion in the first movie.) In keeping with the initiation stage, Iron Man faces dragon after dragon, from Whiplash to a senate committee to his own hubris. His best friend Colonel James Rhodes is established as his sidekick, getting a suit of his own as War Machine. And Pepper becomes the perennial damsel in distress, with whom he embarks on a romantic relationship at the end of Iron Man 2.

When the couple reappear in The Avengers, they are practically spouses, and you get the feeling that, in terms of the love story, the film presents their epilogue. Stark proves that he has conquered his narcissism when he learns to be a team-player, performing the ultimate hero’s sacrifice at the end of the movie. Even his suit seems to have reached its pinnacle of improvement when it gains the ability to deploy from a certain distance. Iron Man 3 thus faces the challenge of picking up the threads of a story that has already seen the return stage. With things seemingly perfectly sewn into place, must some things now unravel?

As a matter of fact, they do not need to. One of the conceits of the film is that the conflict doesn’t inhere in equipment malfunction or trouble in lovers’ paradise or even in the predictable hero’s faceoff with his own Shadow. There is a new adversary in the person of the mysterious Mandarin, who wreaks havoc with random explosions and killings that he would take credit for on live TV. There is also a new agenda for Stark: how to protect the world and Pepper at the same time, since she has become the most important person in his life. The reappearance of a former lover, Maya Hansen, only underscores the soul-mate level of the Stark-Pepper bond, revealing where Stark’s priorities are. Just when the audience is ready to write Pepper off as the stereotypical damsel-in-distress, a twist near the end gives her character some applause-inducing glory moments. As for the suit, let’s just say that it achieves an unexpected mobility and iterative ability that a philosophy professor can use to explain the whole-to-parts and parts-to-whole fallacies. This popcorn movie dares to take on the grand literary theme of self and identity—in keeping with its tagline, “You know who I am”—something that is cleverly mirrored in the real story behind the character of the Mandarin.

All in all, Iron Man 3 is a thoroughly satisfying addition to a couple of interconnected series, one that cements Tony Stark’s status as a character whose ever-new movies we will want to keep watching. After all, we think we know who he is: someone to be unmasked again and again, only to keep surprising us about who and what he truly is.

Paris, for want of a souvenir

It’s almost been three months since I got back from my trip to Europe. For some reason, I still can’t look at the bulk of the pictures. Memories are so vivid and real, perhaps more so than the journey itself. I knew, going in, that the “in retrospect” moments were going to be priceless. These days, certain things would set off small vibrations in some chamber in my heart, spreading throughout my body: The rose window of a church. A train ride. A brief mention of the Botticelli Venus in my feminist philosophy class. Perhaps pieces of my soul are still lodged in the cracks in some cobblestoned street in Rome. Looking at the pictures would be the final admission of my real location. I’m in my home in Pasay City, typing this in my laptop as the insidious heat rises with noon. If I’m in the midst of a Philippine summer, I must no longer be at the foot of the Parthenon on the Acropolis, or among the shop stalls on an arch bridge across the Arno river, or swept away by the eddy of bodies crowding the Louvre in any given day. I am here at last, fashioning words from the simulacra of reverie.

Look, I’m not prone to missing stuff. This sounds strange given my attachment to certain people and things, sticky like filaments of mozzarella on fingertips. They say the writer is one on whom nothing is lost, as though the surface of your brain were constantly absorbing the particles of experience, down to the last dust mote. So you’re not supposed to miss things; you must carry them. Ét voilà, the secret to being able to say goodbye.

My five days in Paris made me realize that this city has got to be the soul mate of my 30s. In truth, it was all too much, even for an entire lifetime. The mystique I thought would dissipate once I finally saw the place only absorbed me in its own legend. Now I see why the Impressionists painted so many pretty pictures. Or why Sartre and Beauvoir and Camus had to temper all the beauty with talk of death and absurdity, lounging in a café blowing smoke rings. I’d have wanted to do the same, except I didn’t smoke; and even if Les Deux Magots weren’t too crowded, the prices weren’t too tourist-friendly either. So I just posed for a picture in front of the once temple of existentialism.

View of the foot of the Eiffel Tower. All photos courtesy of Mike Lim

The existentialist cafe

The Louvre pyramid, top view

The Louvre pyramid, bottom view

At the Mona Lisa salon

Meh.

The big wall clock at the Musee d’Orsay, a museum built from a converted train station

Musee d’Orsay, ground floor

A metro station

View of the Seine from the clock tower, Musee d’Orsay

Versailles, outside Paris

A garden at Versailles

At the gardens at Versailles

Marie Antoinette’s bed

Hall of Mirrors, Versailles

Of all the mementos I hauled home, I may have unconsciously decided not to include one: A mini Eiffel Tower. Perhaps this was because nothing so small could represent the heights I experienced, milling around the park one cloudy morning as my companion bemoaned the lack of proper lighting. It wasn’t the best day for taking photographs of probably the most famous structure in the world, but it was our final day in the city and our last chance to do this. The steadily darkening clouds finally let loose their angst, fat teardrops of sky falling on my umbrella-less self, on my cursing friend, on the wedding party that absconded in their limousines. (All these wedding photo shoots in Paris! There was another one along the Seine, near the Notre Dame church. The bride posed with her bare shoulders and back in the afternoon sunlight, her breath steaming in the late December air.)

Not a good day for taking pictures

Closeup of the tower

Up its skirt, so to speak

Wedding party

Notre Dame de Paris along the Seine

Notre Dame, with bird

Art stall at the Left Bank

The Eiffel Tower wasn’t as good as any of its billion miniatures, unlike the Mona Lisa (in my opinion). I get it, why some who thought they knew holiness forbade religious icons. Or perhaps I didn’t buy a souvenir because I wanted a reason to return.

Return to the night before that rainy morning, which was New Year’s Eve. For the occasion, train fares were waived. Everybody had the same brilliant idea of holding the vigil for midnight in the same vicinity, i.e. the Champs de Mars. We could hardly squeeze into the train. When it was disgorged, the throng moved two millimeters per minute in the underground tunnel. The possibility of a stampede occurred to me and I thought, I didn’t come here to die like this. Later when we emerged into the drizzly night, it was cold and wet and there were three champagne vendors for every tourist and we had no clue how to walk from the Champs-Élysées to the Eiffel Tower. We could see it in the distance, shooting off a rotating beam, a monstrous skeletal lighthouse marooned in a city. We decided to follow the crowd, at one point walking down an avenue of couture shops festooned with Christmas lights. When midnight was about to strike, the steel colossus loomed before us. Cars were at a standstill on the streets, performing a symphony of honks, in annoyance or in celebration. Disposable cups were already filled with champagne. The countdown started.

New Year’s Eve crowd at the train station

Parisian boulevard, New Year’s Eve

D&G main store in Paris

When 2013 finally came, there was an expectant pause. Then unexpectedly, the tower began to glitter for a full five minutes, to deafening cheers. It was cabaret-level garish. It was a cliché that belonged to everyone and no one. And I thought of how it was my 33rd year on earth, my loved ones were scattered all over the globe, and I no longer had enough money for champagne. But baby, I was in Paris and I got it made.

Cheers!

Friendship as soulmate-ship

With Maricar at Chops Steakhouse, Greenbelt 5, 11 February 2013

Lately I’ve been appreciating good friendships. I don’t have very many friends, just enough. This is something I’ve come to appreciate in the landscape of my 30s, when hanging out with a posse of high school or college friends is no longer as doable or as appealing. For one thing, people have jobs or families. A good number of them are in committed relationships, which obviates the impulse to keep in touch with others. And the bigger the group, the harder it is to find a common time to hang out. Increasingly, as I settle into what seems to be an unusually long spell of singlehood, I realize how essential genuine connections are. Not to wax lugubrious, but I do love my handful of best friends.

And only a handful they can be. Excluding my immediate family, I can only maintain up to three intense relationships—four at the most, and one friend will have to be demoted from “best” to “very good.” (These are generous numbers, since I’m not in a romantic relationship. Whenever I am, my buddies would complain that they hardly saw me. I find it easy to lose myself in only one thing, a kind of single-mindedness that I actually wouldn’t want to change about me.)

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar came up with a number to describe our optimal amount of social relations with respect to the processing abilities of our brains. Dunbar’s number, often simplified to 150, refers to the limit of stable or meaningful relationships we can have at any one time.

Now, I used to have more than 1,500 friends in Facebook—ten times Dunbar’s number! It didn’t mean I was ten times more social than the average person, only that my career as a college professor happened to land me a lot of friend requests from students. Then there are the obligatory connections to former schoolmates one hasn’t even talked to or seen in decades. However, some weeks ago, just for the hell of it, I decided to reduce my number of Facebook friends to 300. It’s still way over Dunbar’s figure, but I liked the rounded clarity of 300. Like the 300 Spartans said to have stopped the entire Persian army in Thermopylae. The hardy, digital 300.

In any case, this talk of numbers is ultimately useless in trying to describe the unquantifiable. For example, the length of time you’re willing to wait before speaking while I pause to collect my thoughts. The occasions in a busy week we bother to ask each other how things are going, with the new job, the marital spat, or the financial dilemma. The years together we can look back on, evidenced by pre-digital photographs, high school hairstyles, birthday blowouts, travels out of town or out of the country that we’ve saved up for or swept clean our schedules just to make possible. The years do matter; I’ve had deep relationships that died deaths both natural and unnatural. Longevity is a litmus test for one’s capacity to love. There is something noble and ennobling about a friendship that has lasted through personal difficulties, estrangements, betrayals, distance.

Now they say that the most important relationship you could ever have is with yourself. (Let’s assume this is true, even though my most important relationship is really with my mom.) I’m afraid I hadn’t been the best of friends with me for the most part of my life. During my teenage years, I hated this person. There were also some very dark years in my 20s when I could hardly stand being in my own head. Because of this general unmoored-ness, my relationships had also felt storm-tossed; some became outright shipwrecks, the remains lost in the bottom of the sea. Thankfully, things are different now. I’ve met my soul mate, and this is probably the best terms we’ve been on since forever.

Valentine’s Day is coming in a couple of days. On this note, I’d end with a quote from my other soul mate, Henry David Thoreau. Now he was a man who rocked with the single life. In chapter five of Walden, where he contemplates solitude, he speaks of a paradox, how our true aloneness is really a quality of bondedness with nature. How this primordial relationship has always been there in the background, and all it takes to appreciate it is a shift in attention. This is me paraphrasing him, of course. My own words can never quite capture the sense of the infinite which glimmers in his sky:

This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? …. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another…. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.

Collecting souvenirs from Walden Pond, Massachusetts, during my Thoreau pilgrimage circa 2010. Photo courtesy of Terri-Ann dela Cruz, sister and best bud

The Other David

He carved me from marble that had already
vanquished two sculptors, a slab that refused
the shape of all intentions, cracks blooming

at the slightest tap of the chisel. He liked persisting
where mere men had given up, and from the start
I felt the full force of his vision

in the hollow triangle above my clavicle, the lean
the ladder of my ribs, the supple knobs of my knees
the swirls of hair at the base of my penis.

He whittled at the perimeter of perfect
till I emerged naked, slingshot draped over
my shoulder and a rock held loosely in my hand.

I had just toppled Goliath. Proof of the impossible?
They put me in the square, all seventeen feet
of me looming at the doors of the Palazzo.

Here I donned the patina of centuries:
bird droppings, grime, tearstains of a broken
gutter. One day they stopped seeing me

as just a statue. I was wheeled to a museum
where someone took a hammer to my left foot,
shattering a toe. Since then I had been

cordoned off, untouchable doll
in the display cabinet, larger than your life.
You can’t even take pictures of me, although

you could buy a hundred million replicas
or download my official photographs.
Lately I have been feeling very exposed.

The stones we carry

View of the Bay of Naples from the Sorrento coast. All photos courtesy of Mike Lim.

A week into my travels in Europe, and I finally have some downtime to write. After a brief excursion this morning to the cliff-side town of Sorrento—which is an hour away by metro from our hotel in Naples—my friend Mike and I have decided to stay in for the rest of the day. After all, it’s December 25, and most establishments are closed. I am in our room at the modestly named Hotel Ideal in Piazza Garibaldi, chosen for its proximity to the train station and its cheap breakfast-inclusive rates. I’ve a bunch of lovely images to share and the memory of spectacular ruins to write about. I’m a happy camper.

This trip came about by whimsy. While I had always dreamed of seeing certain places in Europe, I didn’t know that I would actually get to do it this year. Mike dragged me into it. I couldn’t think to say no since we were on the same boat in terms of our flexible schedule, our finances, and the fact that we make a rather harmonious, platonic match. The last is somewhat surprising because we are opposites. He sticks to his budget; I’m quite prodigal in my spending. He is very spartan in packing; I bring my whole house. He has a keen sense of entitlement; I’m often hesitant to ask for what I want. He walks at the speed that I run. If I’ve learned anything from this friendship, it’s the valuable skill of not expecting the other to give you what you need. Et voilà, the secret to getting along.

On the train to Sorrento

Our three-week do-it-yourself itinerary includes five main stops: Rome, Naples, Florence, Paris, and finally, Athens. (These were my chosen cities as I was given carte blanche in planning the trip.) The first two we’ve already completed; tomorrow, we check out of our hotel and take a three-hour train ride to Florence.

So far, the ruins: Of Rome, once the center of the western world. Of Pompeii, a thriving city obliterated by Vesuvius in 79 A.D. All this evidence of greatness is so old, it has a history in history. We are obviously not the first visitors to Italy. Before trains made mass tourism possible, the privileged young men of England would go on their Grand Tour, soaking up the culture of bygone civilizations from France all the way to Spain. Places like Rome, with its ancient sites, and Florence, the home of Renaissance art, were mandatory stops. This sojourn we are making, they’ve been making since the 1600s. No less than José Rizal, national hero of the Philippines, ventured to Europe for his education.

Rome is indeed a grand old lady. I particularly enjoyed the Colosseum, where the gladiatorial games had been held during the heyday of the Roman empire. Even if I hadn’t seen that Ridley Scott movie or studied world history, the place would still have made an impact for its sheer scale and vast number of archways. The structure gouged such a hole in my heart, I had to buy a miniature of it. It’s like a many-tiered cake whose outer circle had been half-sliced away. (When it was no longer serving its original function, the Colosseum had been quarried for other building purposes.) I’m reminded of Rilke’s words in the Ninth Elegy:

Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished….

The Colosseum’s facade

Inside the Colosseum

View from the bleachers

It is fitting that we should speak of elegies, for these ancient stones—from the Colosseum to the Arch of Titus to the Roman Forum—are love songs of loss, stair steps leading to air, colonnades supporting nothing, walls bordered by space. They are what we were. The ancient Romans engaged in gambling during games, the same as we do; they also wrote graffiti. We share a (bloody) heritage. What would we leave behind? What would survive of our present-day civilization?

Ruins of the Roman Forum

The Forum, in silhouette

The Arch of Constantine

Digital imprints perhaps, of our images and words, terabytes of information, disembodied consciousnesses. Mike takes hundreds of pictures during every trip and posts them on Facebook at the end of the day. It is as though our friends on the other side of the world were with us on the journey, so updated are they with our progress. A picture taken is itself a kind of ruin, an artifact frozen for the delights of reflection: “Pictures, or it didn’t happen.” My friend, who has a master’s in communication arts and who previously taught photography classes, is an expert at framing this whole experience. Since he sees things I don’t, I’m only too happy to let him direct the shots. For posterity perhaps, and why not? Don’t we marvel at the faded paintings on the walls of the ruins in Pompeii, or the intricate images on their mosaic floors?

Pompeii is another place frozen in time. It took us a whole day to explore it, and some regions of it haven’t even been excavated. We walked around an entire city. Come to think of it; I haven’t done this much walking in my entire life. My leg muscles are rusty, as are my writing muscles. But one must explore every house and temple; one must write of the contours of this extraordinary adventure.

Entering Pompeii

Lonesome column on a hill in Pompeii

Part of a cemetery area in Pompeii

The remains of a temple

An ampitheater

Sculptures and fragments found at the Necropolis

Imagine a ghost town. The cisterns are still in place; the flat rocks that served as crossing stones are still in their original locations. The amphitheaters stand placidly under the sun. Here, people gathered; there, they slept or ate or walked their animals or sold their wares. Then one day the volcano erupted, spewing such quantities of ash as to bury people beneath their collapsing roofs. Imagine too, some hours afterward, waves of lava engulfing the town, moving at the speed of a car on a highway. Against this onslaught, no one could survive. The casts of victims—both human and animal—we see today had been made by filling with plaster the empty spaces left in the deposits by their decomposed remains. It is said that the casts captured their dying expressions.

If ruins are what we were, Pompeii is especially poignant for its evidence of normal life interrupted by disaster. It can happen to anyone; that’s the absurd (in)justice of it. On December 15, my birthday, I heard the tragic news that 27 people—20 of them children—had died senselessly during a school shooting in Connecticut. Simply to be human is to endure so much heartbreak. The trace of it is everywhere, in the telltale pottery shard, in the graffiti on the wall.

Graffiti on the train

Michelangelo’s Pieta, photographed at the Vatican Museum

Bird, Sorrento

Instead of an Email

I miss you, Mom. The thought came
between my awareness of a new leak
in the toilet plumbing and the matter
of where to sleep. The couch tonight,
I decided. My bed will wait in vain.

The apartment groaned its emptiness.
In the library, the spaces between books
seemed to echo, as though saying
there is always room for one more,
and we can never crowd each other.

At least, not too much. The new maid
had washed the covers of the couch,
disturbing the cushions. A corner
is slightly off, like a last puzzle piece
not fully pressed into place. Your face

is raised like a relief in my mind’s eye.
I thought of writing you an email
and discarded it the next moment
thinking I have nothing to report
except the leak, the laundered covers.

Nothing of interest. I am still me. Are you
still you? My nights are a collection
of sounds: wall clock ticks, droplets
on bathroom tiles. Such minutiae
fill my heart. There’s no more space.

On reading and writing

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lately, a kind of contentment, a quiet joy that obviates the need to write. Or perhaps I feel that blogging has become redundant in our age of information overload. Sure, the Internet’s been around for more than a decade, so our reading and writing habits must have been changing since its inception. But with the arrival of Internet 2.0, the social media networks, online and e-book (self-)publishing, &etc., it’s become harder and harder to catch up with what you have to/want to read. As I’m a firm believer in Emerson’s dictum that first we read, then we write, not being able to catch up with my reading means rarely ever feeling that I was ready to write again.

But it’s not just that the writing has to catch up with the reading. I remember poignantly what my poetry professor once said, offhandedly: The writing has to catch up with the living! Experiencing life is precious, but the recorder in my consciousness is itching to try to make sense of it all. I haven’t been balancing well the two existential desiderata, i.e. understanding life and living it. As Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” I think the Melancholy Dane can speak for himself. He had the luxury of scribbling reams of fiction, memoirs, philosophical treatises. Maybe he was subconsciously exhorting himself  to put down his pen for once and live. As for me, I’d like to be able to freeze-frame my life long enough write a blog entry.

* * * *

There’s been a spate of plagiarism scandals lately. Last month, a correspondent for Time magazine was suspended for not citing his sources in an article about America’s lax gun control laws. A couple of weeks ago, a Philippine senator was accused of plagiarizing a blogger in one of his speeches against reproductive health and rights. (Later he was also accused of copying–in translated form–a speech by Robert F. Kennedy.) Earlier this year, the President of Hungary was forced to resign after it was found that his dissertation contained passages that were lifted from the works of others.

These cases are not the first or the last that we shall hear of. Even in the university where I teach, where there are stringent rules about academic dishonesty, I catch an average of three or four cases of plagiarism every term. I think the biggest factor that’s led to this is the digital revolution. Previously, it took some legwork to commit plagiarism. Presumably, one had to go to the library or bookstore, and actually lift the books one would be lifting passages from. Now, all it takes to steal others’ words is an online search and the copy-and-paste commands.

But I don’t want to blame technology. The Internet has profoundly increased our access to information, which is indispensable for reading and writing; in fact, for thinking itself. At the same time though, we’ve become lazier and more impatient.

None of what I’m pontificating about is new. These are the very points that Thoreau evinces in Walden (1854). Now more than ever, his ideas are so relevant. But who has read him? Who can be bothered to?

Consequences of Procrastinating about the Batteries

Having lapsed into lateness long ago,
the wall clock in my bedroom
is now a few hours ahead, as though

left to its own devices, it has decided
to tell no one the right time
pointing to the numbers with a logic

known only to itself, as stars were
before the telescope. Its clicks punctuate
the morning’s silences, and I imagine

fate’s disembodied hand in this,
how she routinely measures lengths
before her other sister snips the thread.

The second hand, thin as an eyelash
and slower than a true second
makes day feel longer than it really is

as when Dali, waiting for his wife
observed the melting camembert
and took to painting clocks

draped like limp pizzas on the desert
of existence. Time waits for no one,
It can stand still but always passes

like the scenery outside the car window
its speed a function of the traffic. But now
is inside, not outside. Why is it the best time?

Singapore, “stuck-ness,” and Sartre

It’s a rainy Monday morning and I’m at a hotel room in Singapore. The desk where I write this is right beside a floor-to-ceiling glass window that overlooks the swimming pool, and further beyond, Clarke Quay. My sister, who brought me along on her trip, has left for work. I have the whole day—in fact, the whole week—to spend in a city that has been compared to Plato’s utopia.

Last night after we arrived at the Park Hotel, Terri immediately took me out to see the bars, restaurants, and cafés in the area. Clarke Quay is in the central part of the city, situated alongside the river which flows toward Marina Bay in the east. From my hotel window, one can see the famous Marina Bay Sands hotel, a trio of towers with a ship-like structure on top. When our cab passed by the place last night, Terri promised we’d spend an evening on the Sands’ top floor, which features a spectacular view of the city.

To my mind, Singapore is a Manila-sized Greenbelt Park. Buildings everywhere, greenery in all the right spots, and not a beggar or stray animal in sight. Already I am dreading the moment I’d return to the Philippines, stepping out of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport and into the heat and squalor of Pasay City. But for all its cleanliness and orderliness, Singapore doesn’t seem to be anything I haven’t seen before. Then again, it’s only my first day here.

With sis pre-departure

At the Changi Airport in Singapore

Terri in our room at the Park Hotel

I envy my sister for her almost constant traveling. Her work as an IT specialist (which is all I know about what she actually does) has already brought her to at least five different countries. Naturally gregarious, she meets all kinds of people, and is now in a long-distance relationship with a likable Dutchman who works for the same company. Last night when they were video-conferencing, I felt a little embarrassed to be inadvertently intruding in an intimate moment, if only because Terri and I shared a hotel room. I marveled at the fact that my sister, six years younger than I—and by all appearances, six years emotionally more mature as well—was in a grown-up relationship. Whereas I… well, let’s just say I feel kind of stuck where I am.

Of course, “stuck-ness” is a state of mind. Career-wise, my circumstances are hardly dire. Passion-wise, my bliss might as well be in another planet. Not that I am not doing anything to marry the two (the career and the passion), or to ensure that they at least intersect on some tangent. Still, there is that insistent sense that I could be doing something more, or that I could be more alive somehow, elsewhere. It’s just scary, following this intuition: like (1) leaving a marriage or (2) leaving a country. The former only figuratively (for am I not, in a sense, married by tenure to La Salle?), the latter possibly literally, for it may come to that.

Some nights ago, I got together with some friends from college, the occasion being the impending nuptials of a longtime buddy of mine and the necessity of his handing us our wedding invitations. Six of us came, all 30-somethings, two a married pair. I happened to mention, in response to a generic but sincere How are you query, that I was thinking about immigrating to Canada. Upon hearing this, one of our friends, the male half of the married couple, shared his experience of having applied to, and having gotten approved for, immigration to another country, back when he was still single, an option he had since let go of on account of his current status, which option was still open for him and his wife, though it appeared the entire process had to be redone, which didn’t seem to be among their priorities right now, though I was given to understand that it remained in their horizon of possibilities. I can say the same of my own plan to leave: though abstract still, it is firmly in my horizon of possibilities, and as long as I have sight of it, I can say I am living paradoxically in the meantime, a spatio-temporal non-locale, the nothingness which is our freedom (as Jean-Paul Sartre would put it). But it is amazing how many years can disappear into this nothingness, an entire decade even, gone. Sitting in a circle at a café, my friends and I segued into the topic of how our 20s compared with our 30s, apparently a pressing issue, and the general consensus seemed to point to a kind of relief that the last driven, occasionally wild, and perennially experimenting decade was over and done with, owing maybe to a hard-won stability (which generally means, for Lasallites our age, a career or a start-up business, and/or marriage), and a sobering new sense of how one is not so young anymore. I confessed that I myself preferred my 30s, if only because now I had fewer issues.

The thorniest issue being: a number of people in my life appear to be moving toward a possibly final level of Stability, and I’m scared. Funny word, “stable”; its meaning is close to “secure,” “settled,” and sometimes “stuck.” “Security” implies fear and maybe even paranoia. “Settled” is good but “to settle for” is bad. “Stuck” is always bad and one must find a way toward a state of unstuck-ness. Is Stability the happiness at the end of the freedom rainbow, something that can be arrived at? Is there any truth to the existentialist claim that there is no ultimate arrival, that anything that feels as if it were such is bad faith, a denial of our nothingness? Or can nothing become something after all?

Something to think about. In the meantime, Singapore awaits.

Me and college friends, in Manila