The last good book you've read
This being a mirror broken in the streets of Binondo at the height of the last Chinese New Year revelry, and the shards that they might reflect.
You can close your eyes, after JT. Am at my in-laws’ place, an acoustic guitar is brought out. I try to remember the chords of the old James Taylor song, “You can close your eyes,” and start strumming and singing, the wife beside me, her uncle attempting to sing along. But the chords of some parts are not quite right, so I bluff it, and sing on. “Well the sun is sure sinking down, and the moon is slowly rising…” even if occasionally out of tune. Upon waking I look for the dusty acoustic guitar, sitting in a room of a son now in Dumas Goethe, “ but no one is going to take that time away, because this old world will still be spinning round, and we can take as long as we like…”
The Fil-El Salvadorean artist Julie Tolentino was in town the last week of January, for a one-night only talk at the Green Papaya along Kamuning corner T. Gener. Though I don’t know her from Eve the media advisory sent by curator Lian Ladia seemed intriguing enough. Tolentino was founder of the Clit Club in New York sometime in the 1990s; she appeared in Madonna’s Sex book. She’s in the country also to meet with “queer Filipino artists.” If, say, I wanted to interview her, does this mean I’m queer, or at the least qualify for queerness? To paraphrase what a poet once said, of all the queer things I ever did see, your eyes are the queerest by far to me. She was at Green Papaya with Yason Banal, whose name somehow sounds familiar.
The mysterious disappearance of masseur Golem’s bike. It happened one night when masseur Golem had just performed his task of tending to our bruised bodies to make the pain and ourselves disappear, rendering the visible invisible, the seen unseen, vision indivisible, until his very hands sink into the dark folds of night, a black cat trailing yet I would not call it omen or unluck how Golem’s bicycle disappeared in Port Area, the moment his uneven face regained its shape, and he applauded like an orphan watching his first porn film, the pews too vanishing with his silent laughter.
This from Sawi Cinvates in Dumas Goethe: “The Song of Xerxes Reversus”: “I crashed through castles and fortresses/ I cracked riddles, codes, paradoxes. / A girl lay naked at the world’s edge./ I penetrated her from all sides.” Cz, recently let loose in the fields of iniquity, says it’s a poem about invasion. She says she’ll be applying at the Dumaguete workshop next year because it’s the ultimate writing workshop. I don’t know about ultimate, more like penultimate.
Been rereading The Izu Dancer by the Japanese Nobel prizewinner Yasunari Kawabata that’s been sitting at bedside, and this unforgettable passage: “One small figure ran out into the sunlight and stood for a moment at the edge of the platform calling something to us, arms raised as though for a plunge into the river. It was the little dancer. I looked at her, at the young legs, at the sculptured white body, and suddenly a draught of fresh water seemed to wash over my heart.” The bio note at the back of the book reads: “Three years after being awarded the Nobel Prize, he was found in a gas-filled apartment near his Kamakura house. No suicide note was found, however.” Kawabata’s dancer is different from Elton John’s Tiny Dancer, the ballerina whom you must have seen dancing in the wind.
Poem written on 52nd birthday. It is not a simple truth to say that one has remained the same person since one has started to write, that nothing has changed yet what we refer to as the third person has undergone a sea change… How I wish these little notes I scribble were true, or that they might reveal something new and unusual about this strange old world. Then again it might be better to keep silent, as they say hold your peace, let the shape-shifting landscape do the talking, the walking. Ramble on.
Ongpin Street of course was a riot of colors when the water dragon came tumbling in. Small garlands of good luck fruit and sheaths of unhusked grain (are they hung inside or outside the house?), cute red ribbons tied around giant pieces of ginger and gabi. Favorite hopia brand all sold out save for an unknown one of yellow mongo with a small piece of green plastic hidden deep in the delicious pastry like a treasure or fortune. It is with some trepidation and the usual caution that people meet and begin another year in the trenches, no matter what the surveys and fuel companies say.
