I woke up this morning a tired and unhappy man. Just like the person in the Soundgarden song
The Day I Tried To Live who gets up one day and muses: "I woke the same as any other day you know/I should have stayed in bed/The day I tried to win/I wallowed in the blood and mud with/All the other pigs." One more time around the existential
tsubibo? No way. Or the person in Radiohead’s
No Surprises whose favorites things include fits, bellyaches and carbon monoxide. Or how about the doomed, repressed but remarkably dressed Morrissey character? I walked out of my cramped condo unit to the tune of sad saxophones and much wailing.
My e-mail is a dead letter office. Aside from the ads promising me a bigger, harder you-know-what in six weeks, I get a lot of e-mail from people telling me I should hold back the cynicism and sarcasm in my articles. I could do that if I refrain from looking out the window, watching the news or taking the public transportation.
Ah, the sights and sounds of our so-called lives. Dirt. Grime. Crime. Corruption in government. Billboards selling products we can’t afford. Ads for TV shows that systematically dumb us down. The dispossessed. Mansions beside railroad tracks, under bridges, and visible through our blinding shades. Children swimming in rivers teeming with mutant organisms. A sky heavy with black smoke. Nope, I don’t see trees of green or red roses or a wonderful world. Just people trudging to work like sheep heading for the slaughterhouses. Like a scene straight from T.S. Eliot’s "The Wasteland," except there is no poetry here. No fragments to shore against our ruin. No "voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells." Just a lot of despair. Despair without florid prose or poetry. A wordless gloom.
I decided to do a William S. Burroughs this week and cut-up my past articles to see if I could find some sort of ray of sunshine in them. Just to answer those who think I should be writing more about "cream-colored ponies" and "schnitzel with noodles" (whatever those mean), or paint happy subjects (a triptych of maidens dopily harvesting grain in the dead heat of summer).
Anyway, I believe it was French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (or was it our neighborhood
jueteng-collector?) who said that saying no is an affirmative act. A no can also be a yes, in some obscure existential way. Yeah, no, but, yeah.
You can’t
be all that you can
be in this sad republic of ours. We can dream all we want about becoming rock stars, poets or presidents of the freakin’ RP, yet we’ll wind up as beer garden DJs, bureaucratic toadies or salesmen who harass mallrats with pamphlets, brochures and sweet sales talk. "Man is born free," according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "but everywhere he is in chains" – the chains of economics, the political superstructure, circumstance, reality, fate, destiny and other slimy factors that define our identity.
Stuck in heavy traffic, you are appalled at how 10,000 vehicles try to inch their way into slim roads. Leave the Laws of Physics out of this, the damn trucks seem to say before inching into a piece of road as wide as Nicole Hernandez’s waistline. You spend approximately 10,000 hours stuck in traffic each year (give or take a few thousands). Well, with those figures you could practically meet someone, get married, have kids, maybe take up a hobby, grow old with your partner and live happily ever after. I am exaggerating, of course. No one lives happily ever after in this country.
Philosophers like Marx and Engels (even if you read them via Barron’s or Cliff Notes) make perfect sense. Your job has alienated you from your true self (unlike tadpoles who grow up to be politicians). You like Nabokov and Dostoevsky, yet ended up as a ghostwriter for a society columnist. You like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, yet ended up in a record label peddling Cueshé. You like Kubrick and Scorsese, yet ended up making ads for the MMDA and the Department of Health ("Iodized salt, iodized salt,
mag-iodized salt
tayo…")
Why does watching Congressional hearings make me think of words such as "eternity" or "entropy" or "state of putrefaction"? Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?
Plato once told the myth of how humans were originally hermaphrodites. People became too ambitious, which angered the gods who then cut the creatures in half (one, male; the other, female) with handy, easy-to-use lightning bolts, and condemned humans to a life in constant search of each other’s half. How sad. Survivor has a song about it. Not
Eye of the Tiger, dum-dum. Must be why one time I suddenly got the urge to talk to a girl I saw at the Gil Puyat station of the LRT. I went up to her, gazed into her eyes, swooned and almost lost consciousness – not because of love sweet love, but because of BO nasty BO. ACME-strength BO. Obviously, she was not in love with deodorants.
Life is more or less a freaky game show. We file languidly into a brightly lit stage and try our luck at the Karmic wheel, never knowing what’s in store for us. At end of it all, we receive lovely parting gifts: a fancy title, a biography, a paragraph or two in an obituary, a car, a house, a microwave oven, a swanky mausoleum as expensive as a low-cost housing project, a street named after us, a 15-second cameo on newsflashes with hyperactive anchormen, an ashes-to-ashes speech from a preacher, an album, a book, a memorial statue to get pissed on by drunkards, a memorial park for hookers and muggers, a dose of chemical healing, dose of lethal injection, a dose of STD, an epiphany or two. But most of us leave the planet empty-handed, having won zilch. Better luck next lifetime.
What is "the edge"? The edge is waiting for someone in a café and the other customers are talking about grand pyramid schemes. The edge is getting so drunk and getting lost in the London tube – and confusing the
Circle Line with the
Central Line and reaching a cold and clammy void, instead of a cold and clammy hotel. The edge is listening to a drunken cowherd talk about his crazy sorrows, realizing he does make sense and that you blew time and money listening to academics talk shit. The edge is for a moment believing he
is your savior.
Books and music made me feel alive, for a time. I was an eye swallowing codes and signposts to different realities. I was an ear digesting ecstatic noises. Carlos Castaneda saw beautiful blobs of consciousness in his mind-expanding trips with Don Juan. Miles Davis played squawks and silences like a dark angel with his glorious trumpet. Bill Evans played tones with the consistency of water. Hendrix kissed the sky with a flaming electric guitar. But sometimes not even Beethoven or Bukowski can get one out of the direst of existential anguishes.
Everyone knows love is wanderer: It flits like a fly from shit to shit; it disappears suddenly from hearts like Batman; it leaves skid marks like unbearably gray November on one’s soul. Just when you thought you found "the one," the one puts one over you. Lots of songwriters wrote whole albums about the depressing tangents of relationships and breakups. Bob Dylan for all his sermons on the folk-rock mount will be remembered (fondly) for "Blood on the Tracks," an album which documents love, loss and everything in between. The same with Elton John, The Smiths, Beck, The Cure and Jeff Buckley, who all have charted the rise, the fall and the burning down of emotional empires in song, who each has stood over the decaying "corpses of murdered relationships." Love is like selling life insurance on the avenues of the dead.
Time is an illusion, according to writer Douglas Adams, albeit a very persistent one. There is neither past nor future. There is only an elongated present, a protracted "now" that is always fluid, flexible and ever expanding. Man has the penchant of inventing things to configure order and control into a world that is inherently chaotic, irrational and completely screwed up. Why, you ask. That’s because we’re all innately obsessive-compulsive bastards who are afraid of the unknown. Time, some metaphysicians say, is a human invention, just like Santa Claus, ballroom dancing or thong underwear. A timely thought.
I remember the first time I decided to become a writer. I was standing on the corner of Recto and Avenida Rizal at 3 a.m., waiting for a jeepney to MCU. I felt like a gatecrasher in an orgy at a house straight out of Sodom & Gomorrah. There were fifty-peso prostitutes, junkies, grease-laden lunatics, and decaying on the gutter were one-day-old chicks, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, urine, spoiled food, dreams and discarded love. The world is such an ugly place that a writer needs to write something beautiful – ideally. Call it egotistic, but I felt like a Chilean poet summoned from the "branches of night" to decipher fires and watch "shadows riddled with arrows, fire, flowers" – or something to that effect.
So, there.
Hey, I feel better already.
The hills are alive …
For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja_ys@yahoo.com.
