A requiem for a dream

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines - Catherine Tan, 18, of Filipino-Chinese descent, juggles a few nouns during moments of productivity: (foremost a) writer, part-time student, full-time biblio-/cinemaphile, fledgling scientist, sophomore student in UP Manila, 2010 Palanca awardee, and hater of all that is pretentious. She also believes that “the love of reading begins with the love of words.” 

The artist is the child that survived. — Ursula LeGuin

...I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it.              — Miranda July

Over the years, I’ve developed an affinity for mathematics. This, I reckon, has all to do with its relative position to reality. On one hand, to animate its world of misplaced Xs and limitless protrusions is to rotoscope the movement of its characters — numbers, variables, parabolas — into a motion picture that clasps in its bosom a bulwark of quirk and color, quite a far cry from our reality. I can see them all right: lines seeking out meaning by journeying to the farthest limits of the Cartesian planes; numbers, switching niches, as per the properties of addition. After all, when your protagonists are mathematical elements, you can expect the plot to abide by their realm’s ironclad logic. One and one make two, for eternity. And yet, in spite of such structure, math is freedom (for how else is there infinity without freedom?). Numbers prevail, heedless of the sneers and jeers of their greatest critics — students, my age and any other.

Quite contrarily, too, I came to love math because of its close proximity to real life. Once in class, bouts of my fragmented attention span stockpiled and fused into fanfare over the day’s lesson about graphs. Waking life, I concluded, could be likened to a linear one; its number of points finite, depicting days.

And if anyone asked me to graph my waking life? Currently, I would be poised right at the middle, in between childhood and adulthood; the crucial time between departure and arrival.

From what and to what?

At 18, the roof of dreams caves in and succumbs to gravity. Glassy-eyed innocence, through the accumulation of exposure and experience, hardens to become beady-eyed cautiousness. And since new form indicates new function, vision too is altered.

I see that adulthood in its welcoming of waking day is an effort to always triumph. To be victors in a game of wealth, beauty, power and, ultimately, survival, a game that is designed by “real life” supposedly to test one’s guts. But really, just tests how willing one is to yield. In the process, hearts harden, and childhood sense and sensation are inhumed under cairns. A measure of strength is to do whatever it takes to win, is that it? The soft-filling inside the hard candy eventually becomes forgotten: the ability to dream. Of promising careers, affluence, or ambitions of grandeur — no, I don’t speak of those dreams, but of dreams that are conjured out of nothingness, tinged with what real life calls the impossible, and whose existence is meant to supplant life itself. The dream of flight, say. The dream of infiltrating the kingdom of an anthill. Or the dream of free-falling in an Amazonian waterfall at the sight of gushing tapwater.

I have not forgotten how to dream.

“How” is by grabbing all that I could from the flotsam of sight, sound, word and wisdom that came by. Just to stunt the possibility of drowning.

The Phantom Tollbooth

Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth is the only children’s book that sits on my bookshelf, amid the John Updikes and the Aldous Huxleys. “Children’s book” may be a form of betrayal to what it really is, however. Until now, I don’t see how I managed to comprehend its content, which is a solid mass of allegory, penetrable only by an experienced enough mind. Yet, in spite of this, I credit it as the book that defined my childhood imaginings.

The lead character Milo, launching into one of his despondent, somewhat existentialist monologues, intones: “It seems to me that almost everything is a waste of time…I can’t see the point in learning to solve useless problems, or subtracting turnips from turnips, or knowing where Ethiopia is or how to spell February...” Which was, as the narrator put it, punctuated “with such a deep sigh that a house sparrow singing nearby stopped and rushed home to be with his family.” And then, in a rather deus ex machina fashion, the Phantom Tollbooth appeared in his bedroom, as if to assuage all his fears and sorrows... that is, by transporting him to the Kingdom of Wisdom.

My grade school library was steeped in its encounters of me. Being a recluse, and bearer of the notion that my make and model were peculiar to other kids, I drowned the darkest lit, least frequented area with thoughts of the mysterious. In my diaries during that era were scripted “accounts” of how there must be a hidden chamber behind these ancient bookshelves. For why else would there be a gaping hole to which no light enters? And didn’t a librarian die here once? Couldn’t you hear her blood-curdling scream of murder through the wooden walls?

Among these “accounts” were short fiction pieces that were asinine in plot, and even more asinine in writing style. One of them revolved around an event that I deemed then the most frightening ever imaginable: A young writer (most likely a characteristic replica of me) accidentally left her literary magnus opus (in bond paper!) intercalated between pages, only for another young writer, equally starved for literary stardom, to find and be credited for its supposed brilliance.

I notice now, though I didn’t at the time, that all my works then were about the search for connection. Not with someone, really. But with something. With the world. Those stories were my way of compensating for my own inadequacy, my own smallness relative to an enormous world I didn’t understand but was willing — bloodthirsty — to.

It wasn’t the only compensatory mechanism, though. I would admit to the paranoid greed that came upon me later on in that same library: In my quest to be Catherine the Brilliant and also as a by-product of my own paranoid short story ideas, I gathered all of my favorite books and hid them in the gaps between the bookshelves containing books called “Mills and Boon” (which I would later find out weren’t titles at all, but instead, authors of erotica), an act that was my way of saying I didn’t want anybody touching my “knowledge.”

This stashing and hiding of books went on for a long time. The paranoia and greed, unfamiliar notions then and unmentioned by any adult, made me feel like I was committing a crime. So when the librarians never found out, somewhat of an evil grin sought out my face. Guess now who has a phantom tollbooth of her own? This was my world after all.

Although it wasn’t evident to me then — the way even the simplest things weren’t evident to kids — I identified with Milo. But I suppose I subconsciously rejected this, since what I know felt for him was envy. Couldn’t I be the one to find a phantom tollbooth in my home? Why did the cosmos choose him over me? And moreover: why did the cosmos choose guys over girls all the time? (It never occurred to me that what the book was trying to say was that such a bewildering imagining can happen to virtually anyone.) The last thought angered me. It fueled my still-existent (but now mostly subconscious) desire to defend the female gender, as if women were oppressed all the time. One of the things that the book left me with was feminism, a knee-jerk reaction to brandish my sword every time a Milo came along.

Yet in spite of the identification that’s enough for me to deem it one of my favourite books, what I really loved about it was — gasp! — the words. It amazed me how a distinct object (e.g. words) can cradle something else, something completely different (e.g. images), inside it. Which is why when I was a kid, I sighed audible, melancholy sighs, and then searched the nearby trees for a sparrow heading home to its nest, the way the narrator said it in the book.

Vanilla Bright Like Eminem

A torrential morning in June, the heavens are morose, gallivanting teens are glum. Everyone’s day plans seem to be ruined. The 8 o’clock morning sky, treacherous in feigning it’s 8 in the evening, stalls possibilities of walks in parks. Who wants to wade in floodwaters, after all? And where’s the geedee sun when you need it?

I mutter remarks opposite the grayness of theirs. Not because I’m wont to sing and dance in the tropical shower – umbrella in hand, wielded as prop. But because the sun’s hiding, to my eyes, is a relief. My new pair of transition eyeglasses – those meant to change into darker tints upon contact with various degrees of sunlight – was the result of a fairly recent need to combat sunlight. Sun hiding, they need not be summoned. Woebegone Weather also keeps my wanderlust at bay, which in turn elevates productivity a hundredfold. It’ll just be me, my desk, and my newly-purchased “warm bright” (orange!) light bulb, which was spawned out of my inability to handle bright fluorescent light.

It wasn’t long before the familiarity of the situation, my solar animosity, became known to me.

In “Beyond Pain,” one of the short stories in Michel Faber’s anthology Vanilla Bright Like Eminem, we follow a Rock drummer’s uncanny (and quite allegorical) dislike for sunlight. The transfiguration of his deep-seated attachment to the pitch-black into the bright, buffered by the hovering presence of her girlfriend, in Michel Faber’s hands went smoothly. It was one of those works one read because the words on the page looked good together, and the sounds they produced, subtle yet breathtaking, were redolent of the pitter-patter of the rain as heard by the ears of a child in boredom. Additionally, turmoil resided internally, something for its host to wrestle with. Faber, able to fuse those things into a glut ball of images one can carry anywhere and bring out when the need arises, made it become more like a memory, etched in the subconscious.

His is fiction at its most relatable, and consequently, most life-changing. To be able to relate is to enable yourself to face a mirror, to look inward – just to see how far characters like the drummer resemble yourself. I surmise that’s how Faber’s prose galvanizes our mental faculties. To wit, in “Smallness of an Action,” which begins: “One Wednesday morning, in a moment of carelessness, Christine dropped her baby on the floor and broke him,” he frightens us by peeling off exteriors that reveal flesh, blood, and vein – the ravenous monsters we could become by mere deletion of a single inhibition. One gets the impression that anyone can suddenly turn frigid, cold, gaunt. Hands can be bloodied, eyes can be reddened; pupils can dilate. But, alas, that we too shouldn’t be afraid, because the bright iridescence of epiphany returns – always – and with its touch, the black and white becomes varicolored again.

I wonder now if fiction that renders such photographic effects should undulate freely – too freely, so in fact, it seeps into reality, manifesting itself in small phenomena, like a reader’s subconscious mimicking of a character’s animosity for the sun.

She’s Come Undone

Come college, I discovered I held a considerable amount of disdain for humanity. This I gathered through subtle nuances from everyday life: The slightest brush of contact with a random stranger ends up sending a thousand nerve cells irate and flaring. Eventually, even being spoken to – a rudimentary and supposedly harmless act – I came to regard as the greatest transgression of the week. And although I’ve long since accepted the dwindling civility with each passing train unable to accommodate the would-be passengers, I still judgmentally brand each shoving, pushing, guffawing, and whining person stupid and inferior, rationalizing that if everyone on the train were intelligent enough, it wouldn’t be that chaotic in the first place. Stupid. Inferior. Words are the greatest bombs I detonate.

That is me, at the crux of my misanthropy, judgmental and dismissive. Judgmental in that I place people into categorical boxes, Simple and Complex. And dismissive in that if you’re plopped down in Simple, I would deem you unfit to love me and incapable of understanding me. And as if that weren’t cruel and selfish enough, I would catapult whatever leavenings there is left of our relationship...into the pitch-black void that is in place of my heart.

It took me a while (and a literary character) to realize, though, that it is entirely possible that the joke is on me.

A characteristic of Wally Lamb’s books is his propensity to turn an everyman into an un-everyman – a character from an epic whose life is anastomosed by his relationships with other characters...and whose redemption lies in the uncovering of himself in that intricate web of appendages. By zooming into the life of a character, spanning from birth to middle age, Lamb hands us the license to his characters’ thoughts. Once we are in the light of understanding, actions become justified. We understand. And because we’ve seen them grow, it’s as if we’ve survived with them. Eventually, their enemies become ours. We are bound by tragedy.

In She’s Come Undone, Dolores Price is an individual who has been placed under too many corrosive labels that melt away her trust for humanity. Cruel society calls her a “fatty”; those who intend to be euphemistic call her “plus-sized.” After her premature release from a psychiatric facility for depression (among other things), she travels to meet a man, Dante Davis, whom she hasn’t met personally, but gawked at from afar. She believes she has fallen in love with him although in reality she is blinded by the need to have someone, and responds by subconsciously lowering her standards and succumbing to obnoxious, narrow-minded (though claiming to be otherwise) Dante. In one of their verbal spats, Dolores begins affectionately: “I feel so ugly in this uniform. Do I look okay?” Dante replies: “You’re a vision in blue nylon. A frigging goddess in wedgies,” with his trademark unfunny sardonicism. In bouts of his claimed ingenuity, he resorts to immature things, such as throwing crumpled paper at Dolores’ face, and finding it amusing. He also inflates himself by saying that he envies Dolores’ “lack of complexity”, dismissing her along with other people who know nought about philosophy, poetry, et cetera, as ordinary.

Although I’m not one to throw crumpled paper and find it funny, nor am I expressive of infallible greatness, I realized that no matter our degree of gradation, Dante and I were alike. Alike in that our deploring of other people’s shortcomings, and putting them in “complex” and “simple” boxes, was a form of assailment. Bullying.

But couldn’t our actions be justified, though? What I can fault in Dante is his inability to desensitize himself to the world outside his mind. The rest of his character (and the core of his misanthropy) is founded upon having great standards, and being disappointed – going bonkers, even – when these standards aren’t fulfilled.

In retrospect, this is the effect of a life lived with (lived through?) dreams. The limits for extraordinary and ordinary become placed extremely far apart; their delineation clear and beckoning. Once you see an anthill as a world of hidden passages and secret messages, of its queen’s corruption and potential war with another anthill, you cease to regard it as a mound on the ground you ought to kick.

And yet, what seems to be a selfish justification for Dante and my behavior isn’t so selfish after all: What these books have taught me is that anyone’s life can be transfigured into literature. That, like young Milo, we all grope for life through filling the gaps where nothing exists. That the reason why we can get up after a discomfiting stumble is because within us is the isolation that comes from living in our own respective worlds, rendering us cut off from corporeal reality. That some dreams are hollow and made entirely of darkness; that there will always be a portion of which untouched by the light of day, but that eventually even darkness fosters growth. That there is no such thing as “simple” and “complex” and if there is, it doesn’t matter. That even though I learn every day how easy it is for others to reject one’s childlike precocity, it is possible to soldier on. That as long as I can rotoscope a world supposedly as technical, stiff, and grownup as mathematics, my chances of survival increase. And, ultimately, that if we simply attempt to, we can see the extraordinary in what seems to be ordinary. That is what it means to dream.