Last Saturday, Joi, who has played the role of a mentor-tactician (for my academic and romantic pursuits) comrade, and shrink to my so-called life, came home all the way from Boston to celebrate her birthday. Ever gracious host, Roland once again opened his industrialesque mansion (that is by my i-live-in-a-rat-hole standards) to Joi's guests and well-wishers. It was, as most CONTEND parties go, a night of radical chit-chat, moderate mudslinging, cultural performances, quick check-ups on org matters, and most of all, eating with all our national democratic might.

I got particularly busy playing with the children. Gabby, the prettiest one year old I've ever made friends with, chuckled when I told her “I'm your yaya tonight.” Her lovely mom, who is currently the executive director of the Amado V. Hernandez Resource Center, once intimated that breastfeeding Gabby makes her feel like a machine. One morning, as retold by Poti herself, when she and husband Paul (of EILER) were leaving for their respective offices, Gabby joyfully bade her parents goodbye: “Babay Papa, Babay Dede.” She loves her daughter, nonetheless, and delights in the consensus that her first-born has surpassed her in the facial symmetry department.

My goddaughter Una Bighani came with CONTEND parents Jasmin and Mags and their new-born superstar Julian. As in our usual play whenever we get the chance to see each other, Una would act out her role gracefully in pretend games. She likes to be a train, a butterfly, a bat, yet refuses to be Gretel, the little girl lost in the forest with brother Hansel. She is her own little girl who loves to wear ballet shoes, stockings and intricately designed girlie dresses, only to play the role of an inanimate object. This is something I can expect from a daughter of an English professor, who might have been subconsciously teaching her child some of her discipline's more interesting lessons: parody and irony.

And there was, of course, Andoy the plebeian boy, son of League of Filipino Students National Chairperson Vencer Crisostomo and his equally radical partner Silay Lumbera (they are so good looking I've been thinking about forming a fan club for this love team). Andoy's Lolo Bien came up with binary categories to distinguish between two of his grandchildren who were born in the same year, Migoy being the other boy. With Migoy's fair skin and calm disposition as a baby in contrast to Andoy's kayumangging kutis, restlessness, and perhaps his own parents' engagement in activism since their highschool years in UP-IS, the former was labeled “ilustrado” and the latter “plebeian.”

Andoy and Migoy would come as a “package deal” when one is a visitor of the Lumberas. They outsmart each other in their drawings of what they claim as representations of trees, houses, human faces, cars, etc. They engage in what their impassioned eyes suggest as the fiercest competition in human history: who has the better toy. But they could only persist in this manner for not more than 15 minutes. After which the boys begin to search for some guidance and direction. I would then intervene and convince them that we are a rock band,
or the Bell Star Dancers or the UP Cheering Squad. And I would be swept away by their talent, cooperation and their capacity to laugh as loud as I can.

Migoy was not in the party. And as a self-proclaimed princess of intrigue (Inday Badiday being the queen), I asked Andoy, “Hindi mo kasama si Migoy?” “Hinde” but with the tone of “obvious ba?” was his response. “Friends ba kayo ni Migoy?” “Hinde” was his I'm-not-about- to-act-like-an-adult-and-lie-to-you- about-my-true-feelings-on-the-matter” reply.

Andoy is very articulate for a two year old. He has an arsenal of “adult” filipino words for complex concepts and situations. Not surprising for a kid who lives with an accomplished academic like Lola Shane and National Artist Lolo Bien. He also has a theatrical flair as when he would suddenly break into “Palayain ninyo ko, ako si Lyka!” while we were just hanging out at Roland's pergola (bahay na may pergola? astig..lupet...). So I said something like, how can you be Lyka, I'm Lyka because my surname is Raymundo (Lyka Raymundo ang huling bantay sa soap operang Lobo). The kid did not buy it. It was too lame an argument for a much coveted name and role. Instead, he kept holding on to the grills of the gate that leads to Roland's ecological garden (altogether now, “astig..lupet...”). It took a while before I realized that he did not choose to be Lyka. Instead, it was the setting that chose him to be Lyka at that precise moment. And as a budding thespian, he can't but perform the role. Since I kind of liked the idea of playing prisoner (aren't we all in real life? charot), I asked him to be Noel instead so I can be Lyka. But he just kept on shouting for freedom and distracted his Lyka self by addressing me: “Hinde pwede, ako si Lyka.”

Andoy was also amused to have learned to use the expression “astig...lupet...” in its proper context, and would say this aloud after Rosel and Jasmin perfomed a few song numbers. After playing all kinds of games, from hide and seek to train-trainan, from lost in the forest acting contest to ako ang kapitbahay mo (“knock knock, sino yan”, pwede po bang makituloy? sige..and so on, but Andoy turns the plot upside down when he plays the role of the may-bahay by replying “hindi pwede” to “pwede bang makituloy?” at which point we would all get stuck with badgering).

As we all know, parties come to an end. In another context, I would have added, “despite the continued existence of the class sruggle.” Anyway, Andoy came up to me and whispered “Aalis na kame.” And so I told him, Ma-mimiss kita, (“Miss you” he interjected) magkita tayo sa UP, diba dun din ang school mo, anong oras natatapos ang class mo? “Thirty” was his sure calculaton. “O sige, puntahan mo ko sa FC walk sa Wednesday ng thirty ha?” I requested. “Sige, puntahan kita” was his gentlemanly response.

He was about to walk away but he suddenly turned as if to pick up something he would have, otherwise, forgotten. But he just wanted to embrace me and to tell me, with a wide smile on his face, “Babay Lyka.”

I'm not sure why remembering his “Babay Lyka” line made me teary-eyed when I was telling Arnold about it over lunch. There is something about Andoy's gesture that reminded me of how it feels to be a child grateful for something she felt previously deprived of. And for an adult like me, it is not without tears that I recall all those instances when my demands for certain things were not consummated at once. In this familiar story, the parents become the object of anger for the child's unsatisfied wants. At that point, everything is still manageable.The unbearable lightness of parents, which from my experience, hits the child when they, in all their selfless and loving ways give in to that demand which previously measured them and have had been found wanting.

It's that “it” that makes me and Arnold laugh and cry whenever we talk about our parents: their crazy ways, their foolish choices, their shortcomings and on the other hand, all the ways that tell us, in hindsight, that they were in fact mature, sensible and most of all, more than enough.

It's always with a deep sense of gratitude and neurotic guilt that I think of Imee and Itos. Not that I think they raised me in the wrong way, I don't even think they did otherwise. I just don't think of them in those terms. I think of how they've always ran that extra 5 miles when on the first mile I was already thinking they can't even run. It is this “extra” that passionately attaches me to them. The same “extra” that allows me to make sense of Andoy's afterthought: “Babay Lyka”

“You can only give to the other what the other already has” is one of those enigmatic Lacanian themes. Andoy's gift is something I already have through my parents. That doesn't make his gift any less precious. Rather, I recognize it as a precious gift precisely because I already have it.

Today is Wednesday. Andoy and I promised to see each other at the FC walk at his preferred time which is “thirty.” It did not happen. There is no such time. This is, perhaps, the second best way to be with him on a Wednesday at “thirty.”

There are a number of ways to traverse agony with aplomb. Nanay Connie, Karen Empeno's mother, told her sympathetic audience three days ago that she has been taking care of herself more than she ever did before her daughter became one of the many desaperacidos.

Her countless engagements with the press, the courts,the military; with lawyers, human rights volunteers, friends and supporters of Karen, however, prove that her mode of self-care is far from self-absorption. She sounded almost as though she was painfully amused that she understood Karen's wager the hard way.

“Ginagawa ko ito dahil mahal ko kayo” was Karen's line of defense, one that sought to reconcile her radical politics with a tragic feminine tradition that is suppose to glue young women to the normative stakes of their families. “Paano nangyare yun, mahal mo kami pero iiwanan mo naman kami?” was Nanay Connie's nagging retort.

On June 26, 2006, Karen Empeno and Sherlyn Cadapan, UP students who volunteered to work for a peasant organization in Bulacan were abducted by unidentified men. A year and a half later, the most horrible story of torture that involved Karen and Sherlyn, and their military captors was reported by the Manalo brothers who were themselves victims of enforced disappearance but who were successful enough to escape.

Two years after a mother lost her smartest daughter to her violators, the former still in search for her precious one confesses a bittersweet lesson: “Mula nang mawala ang anak ko, mas lalo ko siyang nakilala sa pamamagitan ng mga kasama niyang aktibista, mas lalo ko siyang hinangaan. Ngayon na ipinaglalaban ko na rin ang ipinaglalaban niya, naiintindihan ko na ang sinabi niya. Totoo pala yun. Mahal pala niya talaga kami kaya niya ginawa ang ginawa niya... Kaya iniingatan ko ang sarili ko habang hindi pa siya nakakabalik, para pagbalik niya, nandito pa rin ako at magkikita kami.”

Utterly humbled by that powerful message, I tell myself, “I can believe that.” Yes, Nanay Connie, and thanks for showing me that true love emerges only by struggle.

This morning, I got a text message from our friend Jo congratulating Arnold. We were puzzled. "Text her back, I might have won the lotto!" "Baket you have tickets?" "Wala." Of course, winning the lotto would have really made our nagging consumerist dreams come true. But this one sort of closes that season theme of the Arnold&Sarah show entitled "Finish that thesis already, fucker!"

                                           The Arnold&Sarah Show season ID
                            
                            
                            


Love in the time of migration
By Randy David

MANILA, Philippines—One of my students, Arnold P. Alamon, has written a graduate thesis titled, “Lives on Hold: Sons of Migrant Parents.” It is based on the retrospective accounts of the six young men he interviewed on what it was like to create their own lives while their parents worked abroad. Poignant and rich in detail, their stories are evocative snap shots of the Filipino family in transition in the era of overseas migration. They show the scars beneath the imported clothes. They articulate the gap that could not be bridged by international calls and text messages.

These are stories that no longer shock us. The improbable has become typical. They are the stuff of recent Filipino films, and they are often romanticized in songs. My particular interest in this study is the shift in the semantics of love in the family that it documents.

The substance of the parental role in the traditional family is equated with being a “good provider.” Apart from the basic necessities of food, shelter, and clothing, the assurance of a solid education up to college is generally treated as a Filipino parent’s primary obligation to his/her children. In turn, children are expected to obey their parents’ wishes, to look after their younger siblings, to do well in school, and to take care of their parents in old age. Husband and wife are supposed to be supportive of one another in the performance of their culturally-prescribed roles as provider and home maker, respectively.

Modernity has long disturbed this traditional order, but none perhaps has turned it more upside down than the phenomenon of overseas work. It is now common for fathers to leave their children for extended and indefinite periods in order to provide for their needs. Where the man in the family cannot find a job that provides adequate income, the wife must step into the role of provider and look for work. Today, in the typical Filipino family, the old roles have melted, and both husband and wife have to earn a living to support the growing needs of their children. But the impact of these changes on the family as a world of meanings is not as jarring as when both parents have to leave their young children behind in order to try their luck abroad.

That is when the tacit understandings that bound the Filipino family together come into question. Children, confronting the paradox of the absentee-provider, begin to miss the living presence of the parent who dutifully remits the money and the “balikbayan” boxes containing goods. Entire studies can be conducted on the countless ways in which parents, spouses, and children desperately attempt to compensate for the physical distance that overseas work has put between them. Telecom companies have tapped into this human need in order to expand their sales of pre-paid calls and other real-time communication schemes aimed at bridging the distance. But it takes much more to sustain the spirit of family life under these circumstances.

The young men in this study appear to have survived their parents’ absence quite well, a fact that is often celebrated as Filipino resilience. Almost all of them managed to finish college, and they all believe that living on their own somehow forced them to be strong. But an unmistakable sense of loss, often surfacing as resentment, is palpable in their accounts. One of them says, almost as if he were grieving: “My parents did not see me grow up.” They grope for words to describe the passing of an era in which part of their lives have been sacrificed.

It would however be wrong to think that only the children have suffered. I will surmise that the loss is probably at least double on the parents’ side. I say that as a parent. From the moment they were born, I have looked at my children with a wish that I could see them grow into fine human beings every step of the way. I have perhaps exulted in their triumphs, and bled in their pain, more profusely than in my own. I think of them when I visit a nice place, or eat an unusually fine meal. I worry for their safety, and I cannot imagine not being able to recognize them in their mature years. This is what love commands us to do.

The traditional Filipino family, like the one in which I grew up, was not always good at verbalizing familial love. But it was there. I saw it in my mother’s eyes when anyone of us was unwell and in my father’s eager face whenever he would ask his children to recount their achievements in school or at work. A word of praise said in my presence came as rarely as an open profession of love. I rejoiced when my parents gave me money or bought me a gift on my birthday, because I did not expect it. Yet I never doubted that in my parents’ scheme of things, I was someone special.

In the age of absentee parenting, the communication of love has taken the form of a steady stream of gift-giving. This however cannot compensate for the erosion of intimacy. As the sociologist Luhmann nicely put it: “Roughly speaking, one loves not because one wants gifts, but because one wants their meaning.”

We expect those we love to show us, by their actions, the depth and complexity of their inner world, not the broad practicalities of their material situation. This is true not only for lovers and spouses in long distance relationships; it applies as well to children and parents torn apart by migration.

It has been very easy to measure the economic benefits from overseas work. But I doubt if one can ever quantify what the Filipino family has given up in terms of love, or what it is doing to recover it.

To laud or praise a person in the context of his/her passing away is what constitutes a tribute in its general and more contemporary usage.

It was in 2005 when I decided to refer to two tributes given to two exceptional intellectuals as the best I have ever heard of. These are tributes to French novelist Emile Zola (1840-1902) and French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002).

Emile Zola is the author of the Les Rougon-Macquart series of novels which                intended to trace scientifically the effects of heredity and environment in one family[1]." The narrative of this family saga acquires its most radical, if not revolutionary, twist in its 13^th instalment entitled Germinal, THE story of a miner's strike. The book's introduction contains the following account of a tribute that was given to Zola:

“...[O]n 5 October some 50,000 people followed his [Zola's] funeral procession through the streets of Paris, including a delegation of miners from the Denain Coa field. And from the single word they chanted during the procession it is evident that they at least believed in the authenticity of their champion – and in the power of that one word to symbolize protest against injustice wherever and whenever throughout the history of human affairs that injustice may be found: 'Germinal!, Germinal! Germinal!” [2]

Meanwhile, below is a description of a rare tribute given to Pierre Bourdieu:

“In may 2003, when public-sector strikes again gripped France, mass demonstrations converged on the Bastille, that symbolic centre of the French Revolutionary spirit. Among the many demonstrators holding placards, one perched on the corner of the Bastille monument declared 'Remember Pierre Bourdieu.'[3]

Coming across these humbling acts of recognition to two great men who championed the cause of the people they sought to depict and analyze in their works, I have since then longed for a moment when I could finally be a part of a great tribute to be given to a great person, somebody who is not as geographically, historically and socially remote as Zola and Bourdieu.

I occasionally play this sick yet definitely entertaining pretend-game with my closest comrades. We would take turns in delivering what is supposed to be a eulogy for a dead comrade. That dead person may either be present or absent during the game (the latter scenario makes that pretend-game really naughty!). But none of these pseudo-eulogies were ever seriously constructed. They are, after all, intended to make a mockery out of another comrade who, during the game, is being warned of his darkest secrets, foolish ways, wayward tendencies, stupid acts done while alive and the one great yet super secret love of his/her life being revealed once he/she is lying helplessly dead in a necrological service.

That, of course, never fulfilled my more honorable desire, described earlier as my intention to be part of a great tribute to a great person.

But, eventually, came yesterday (May 28,2008). I woke up earlier than usual as I was, since the night before, raring to attend Ka Bel's necrogical service. I had previously been in two of these series of programs held in honor of Ka Bel. But I felt it was my duty to be in the ultimate parangal for the grand old man of the working class' struggle.

Parangal is how we call a program that gives honor to a beloved comrade who has died. The event is always a special occasion. Kasamas always pour their efforts in order to come up with a wonderful program that would remind all of us of our departed kasama's life that was lived in pursuit of our historical and collective mission. It is a venue for crying, laughing, crying while laughing, thinking, remembering, singing, flag dancing, poetry-reading, secretly criticizing (the not so well performed performances), agitating, historicizing, thanking the departed's family for sharing their beloved with us, and, sometimes, even eating (the latter highly depends on a very limited budget and/or on intelligent donations such as butong pakwan, cornik, tasteless biscuits that, nonetheless, get us through the lamay, coffee, water dispenser, tetra-packed or bottled juice or the more luxurious rice meals and chunky chicken sandwiches).

The House of Representatives prepared a necrological service for Ka Bel. Songs were sang beautifully by the performers. The eulogies were heart-warming, some made me sob like a child lost in the now defunct Fiesta Carnival. But the one that I like best is the speech of Maria Rosa, one of Ka Bel's valiant daughters. Towards the end of her headstrong speech, she intimated how the younger Ka Bel would tell his children again and again that “tandaan ninyo, mahirap tayo pero tayo ay proletaryado. There is a sea of difference in between.

After the necrological service for Ka Bel, thousands of us gathered outside the House of Representatives to prepare for the funeral march. Soon after we have had started marching, two of my companions were already pining for water. We asked every single sari-sari store, situated next to each other thus ,forming a chain of stores which serve as facade for a long and winding trail of urban poor households, if they sold mineral water. It took a few more stores before class analysis came into the rescue and made me realize that we were in a place where there is zero demand for our dream commodity at the moment; and that it was even imprudent to inquire about its availability to begin with.

And so I marched on, overtaking numerous organizations peopled by familiar faces to whom I had exchanged controlled smiles and appropriate hand waves. I had to overtake because I wanted to take pictures of the funeral attendees and their numeorus placards and tarpaulins. I failed to photographically document these because my attention was diverted to the people watching the funeral march by the sidewalk (and by sidewalk I mean that space which is only a few steps out of their living rooms or bedrooms). They were people of all ages: old and young women, old and young men, and most remarkable of all, the children. They who gave me the strongest goose bumps of my life when they repeatedly chanted “TULOY ANG LABAN” at the top of their lungs, releasing tiny yet sharp shrieks that sounded off the greatest message of Ka Bel's passing away.

I was tempted to capture their astounding image as they shouted. But there was just no way I could frame, in a moment of unjust containment, their spontaneous freedom that probably urged them to start mouthing our line. And it suddenly dawned upon me that I must have heard of the name Crispin Beltran since I was about their age. Yet at that moment, there I was marching as a national democrat who relishes some quiet pride from the fact that I don't have enough money to pay the rent and other bills this month, same situation as last month and the months before. But then again I had to warn myself against thinking that I am going through what Ka Bel might have had gone through in his lifetime. Because that would be a travesty, or better yet, a delusional thought. And so I dwelled upon a more sensible question: Am I “the teacher that the child that I was would like to have learned from?” [4] The answer to this question is, as Bliss Lim would have put it, “The child that I was wouldn't even recognize me if she sat in my class.” [5] But what about those children, do they even go to school? In any case, “tuloy ang laban” might as well be the best lesson that they could ever learn.

Marching on, I noticed that my comrades' chanting was louder and more emphatic than usual. This was, after all, our first and last march with Ka Bel's remains. The thunderous chanting must have made one of the spectators curious enough to ask the actvist who was diligently distributing the polyetos from Anakpawis, “Sinong namatay?” After handing him a statement, the activist replied “Si Ka Bel, Crispin Beltran, congressman ng Anakpawis partylist.” The middle-aged looking man whose shirt was wrapped around his neck like a shawl replied, “Ha? Patay na si Ka Crispin?” He sounded alarmed. It was as if something so unforseen was already happening to him, something he coudn't stop. I quicky looked sideways to catch another glimpse of him. At that point I caught him shaking his head as he got passed by the marching crowd. The sad look in his eyes was infectious. His eyes were not focused on something or someone. But somehow, I felt like I shared that sense of loss that his eyes betrayed.

While in Bulacan, residents were also outside of their houses or vulcanizing shops clenching their fists or waving their hands to the long queue of vehicles that boarded approximately 20,000 activists who joined the send-off to Ka Bel's “resting place.” They were too many. But there was a dark, muscular old man standing in front of what looked like an abandoned rice mill. He was situated a few meters away from the series of commerical outlets and repair shops. He looked like he was 60 years old, or maybe just about to be in a few years. He wore a fatigue fishing cap, a white undershirt that peaked through his unbottoned, tattered long-sleeves grey collared polo shirt. He was all by himself. But being alone did not stop him from standing still with his left fist clenched as if to stake a claim to Ka Bel's legacy. I made an effort to stick out my right clenched fist from the jeepney's window. I hope he saw it. I may never see him again while a part of me thinks I have to. But in that brief encounter, I hope those hand signals were enough to make us both remember Ka Bel; and for the rest of our lives, be hopeful and defiant.

Postscript:

"Crispin Beltran" is a name I grew up with. Yet all the while, I was confusing him with  Beltran the journalist. And so while was growing up , I was under the wrong impression, that Crispin Beltran, like Ka Lando who was a lawyer before he became a labor leader, was anything but a worker or a farmer. When I joined CONTEND in 2000, it became clear to me that Crispin Beltran, whom I started to refer to as "Ka Bel" is of the working class. Judy used to tell me how Ka Bel, being the responsible ninong that he was would wash Inday June's diapers while all three of them were in prison along with many other political prisoners during the Marcos regime. And if I remember correcltly, this rectangular wood carving hanging on Judy's wall that depicts a baby in her diapers was Ka Bel's gift to his inaanak.

Ka Bel  has done wonderful things with his hands. I shook hands with him twice. I only had two personal encounters with him. The very first was in 2004 at the UP fair. Yes, he was there. Who on earth brought him there? Judy Taguiwalo. It was perhaps bonding time for old friends and Judy must have thought that compelling Ka Bel to watch We Know No Roydor's performance was a good idea. I was that weird band's awkward yet gutsy "lead singer". Judy was so proud of me and Omeng that she was even texting me whether or not "tuloy ang concert." We performed around 7pm when the fair grounds was just really nothing but the sunken garden. But who needs hundreds of fans when Anakpawis Representative Ka Bel was there? The act of acknowledging Ka Bel on stage thrilled me.

The second encounter took place in his room at the Philippine Heart Center during his hospital-arrest. Roland and I could not wait any longer for our comrades to arrive. After eating while waiting, walking around while waiting, retelling favorite stories while waiting, we decided we were tired of waiting. And so we played the game 'Dare.'
"Dare, akyat na tayo kay Ka Bel, bahala na." "Oo ba." We just got out of the elevator. Ka Bel's room was in sight. "Andito na tayo, ano?" I was tempted to back out. But feigning confidence in the face of an opponent (we were after all playing the DARE game) was more tempting. And so there we were walking towards ka Bel's room. It was only a sliding door that separated us from him who was in a siting position on his hospital bed while looking at our direction with a puzzled look on his face. His three companions were giving us a suspecting "sino po sila, ano pong kailangan nila" look. But we were brave. Never mind if they ever drove us away, that could only mean that they are observing  tight security as the case should be. This was the time when GMA filed trumped up charges against Ka Bel and other prgressive party list representatives.  It was our fault, we never  bothered to give him or his family prior notice, such was the SOP. We just literally barged in. But did they send us away? No. At first, Ka Bel was staring at us blankly.  So as not to be suspected as intelligence agents, we  hurriedly  introduced ourselves. Roland Tolentino ng CONTEND, kamusta kayo? Sarah Raymundo po ng CONTEND. At that point, Ka Bel flashed his pearly-whites. But we were still insecure aboout our identities. We felt we had to prove them further by pulling out whatever we can find in our bags. Luckily, I found a write-up on Karen Empeno and Sherlyn Cadapan's case, Roland found a few poems. To my delight, I also found a CONTEND statement which gave me my peace of mind (thougt balloon:O yan ha, dami ng proofs). I think searching our own bags in front of Ka Bel was a way telling him that we've got no guns and no bombs. In hindsight, we were way more paranoid than the then beleagured Ka Bel.

In no time he was already exchanging stories with us and laughing along our gay lingo. I remember Roland asking him, Natatakot ba kayo? I do not remember Ka Bel's reply. But what I do recall is Roland's "Ashushu" (another way of saying, 'Ows talaga?'). I remember this because I was almost half-green in envy that Roland could actually carry a very casual conversation, and in fact just be himself with someone like Ka Bel.

At shempre pa, TULOY ANG LABAN!

Notes:

[1] Preface to Germinal by Roger Pearson. PLondon:Penguin Books. 2004.

[2] ibid., xl

[3]Michael Grenfel. Pierre Bourdieu:Agent Provocateur. London: Continuum. 2004.p.92

[4] from the poem Chalk Dust on My Finger by Bliss Cua Lim. Poems frm Two Places (1995).Philippines: Anvil Publishing. p.13.

[5] ibid.

This morning, a blasé soul quipped that our age marks the end of ideology and the end of work. Slightly irritated, I stirred away from what could have been a sarcastic Eagletonian attack and settled for a Kantian argument of ethical progress: “...ethical progress has nothing to do with the form of progress promoted by modern industry, or the “service of good,” but it is rather matter of personal conversion, of the subjective necessity of going beyond oneself (Copjec,2002:44).”

It was indeed an oblique critique of what was evidently an unforgivable opinion. “Ayan kasi, nilalamon ka na naman ng mga binabasa mo, nilalamon ka na ng kakatakbo mo, kaya hindi na ikaw yan,” said my dear friend who was disappointed with my sober little story. While I admit being “nilalamon ng buong-buo” by my current fascinations, I would like to think that my response was spot on. Precisely, the poor fellow's reactionary politics has its reasons which his reason did not know. What better way to drive home that point than to respectfully urge the freak to go beyond himself?

And speaking of reason and that “nilalamon” phenomenon (thanks to Vener for giving me a new word in and through which I can now articulate the different states of my own unfreedom), I notice that some people have placed their reason in the service of egoism (read: nilalamon ng sariling ego). I am so dismayed and it breaks my heart to see people self-destruct as they blog away about themselves telling the world one or more of these things:

1. that they are sad (wenongayon?)

2. that they are happy (you are not convincing anyone)

3. that they are amused (baliw ka lang)

4. that they have finally come closer to the world of glitter and glamour (hi there, climber, please speak english at all times ;P)

5. that they are so cool (ulool)

6. that they are rich and could afford whatever it is that they are displaying at the moment (and that is just because you have sought to reconcile yourself with the system's savage intertia)

7. that they want to kill themselves (go ahead, do it now)

8. that they are better than their “replacements”(that is not true. your ex's current lover is definitely better...by leaps and bounds. chew that.)
   

There is always something very disconcerting about finding people who are determined to compel the world to grant them some recognition on account of their fantasies. And I am not even talking about felonious fantasies such as those of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. I'm talking about fantasies that are spawned by a demand for love masking itself as recognition. Egoism is only a symptom of a world that is cold and cruel. And to traverse it, one would have to turn to the imperative of ethical progress:”the subjective necessity of going beyond oneself.” Many people combine this with another wager: the necessity of going beyond capital.

And in the TV screen in my head, Marx turns his head to take a second good look at Kant. But he would neither bend backwards nor hint at a happy ever after.

(I am sorry for posting an unfinished entry earlier. I thought I clicked save as draft. This one is the finished version.  Natsy, here are some photos.)

I'm a sucker for UP graduation ceremonies. That's what I have become as a faculty member. I missed my own graduation rites exactly a decade ago. I thought back then that such rituals are for whimps. Against the tragic feminine tradition of my school and family, I remember myself swearing, as a teenage sociology major, never to succumb to the seduction of matrimonial rites since walking down the aisle dressed in white while holding a bouquet of flowers was for me the perfect image of fetishism. And fetishism was the lowest of all crimes any young self-proclaimed marxist could ever be found guilty of, at least for my peer group back then. I also resolved never to give in to baptismal rites and impose upon my children a religion that my parents imposed on me. I even remember someone making a very convincing proposal about educating our children: Let's not send them to formal schooling, that way they would be spared from the "kacheapan" of bourgeois education. We just teach them ourselves, anyway we are smart and then they just have to take the qualifying exam from DECS so that they will be eligible to take the UPCAT. 


Armed with our avant-gardeish claims, we thought we are ready to damn all institutions that get in our way of fostering our self-styled idea of freedom, justice and what not. I realize that it was the stubborness of the punk movement, the audacity of the Beat poets and the maverick thinking of  Flaubert, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Milan Kundera which shaped our young sensibilities; and not Marx's Manifesto or Mao's Five Golden Rays.

But it was all good.

But then again, I must say, with all  humility and sincerity, that the young activists of this day are better. I observe that  they are not given to useless snobbery and can very well mix with their generation. Some students hate them on account of their strong positions on an issue. I had never heard of anybody hating me in college but I must have earned the ire of some when I opined in class that my classmate's presentation was more like a faux pas than a report or when I  attached a course syllabus with a complete reading list and a logical sequence of topics in my final exam because I thought that the course was crappy.

The young activists are present in all ceremonies that the studentry generally go to. They would unfurl protest banners during the freshman orientation day. They would hold a lightning rally in fora to protest a guest speaker. They would be present in every room in AS, if permitted by the instructor, to convince the students to take a stand on a particular issue. Some students have branded them as self-righteous, dogmatic and emotional. But those who do so are believers in the doxa of the free market without their knowing. I refuse to elaborate on this point because I have nothing more to say to social climbers and their corresponding neoliberal agenda for their so-called lives.  


But you see, a few ideas and events deserve some lashing.

On UP's centennial commencement exercise, the valedictorian whose name I cannot recall at the moment, claimed that indifference is not a mark of the current crop of UP students (I am paraphrasing her since I only feign ineloquence when dealing with superiors and armed men, charoz). She proposes that we reinvent our definition of patriotism since cutting classes just so that students could commit themselves to giving solutions to persistent social issues is wasting the taxes of the marginalized in society whom the activists claim to defend. Focusing on one’s studies is itself a  form of patriotism

For example, she opines, students from the College of Human Kinetics who run and train barefoot is an expression of patriotism. And she was serious. Such is, of course a romanticized view of runners. Whoever runs barefoot from that  College anyway? Besides, I don’t think  that our mighty and fast runners run without having to tell themselves that they do it in the name of patriotism. Does one actually think about patriotism while reviewing for an exam or writing a paper? I think the young lady was imputing her own rationality to the hardworking students she was talking about.  Precisely, this is what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu refers to as theoreticism--the academic’s tendency to skip to understand the practical logic involved in a practice  and instead comes up with an explanation which is a mere assertion of his/her hypothesis. In her aim to prove that militant activism is passe, she then cited running, reading, going to class as new expressions of patriotism. Can we also include coffee drinking at Chocolate Kiss, tambay hours in our respective orgs, photocopying readings, taking pictures of trees in the lagoon, smooching at the sunken garden as other examples of this new sensibility? Why not? I mean, she is, in fact, saying that patriotism’s signifiers are forever sliding therefore it can be everything and and nothing (as logic would have it) at the same time. Maging Summa ka man daw at magaling, sumasablay din.

 

Indifference as per C. Wright Mills (The Sociological Imagination) is a condition when people are not consciously aware of their cherished values and, in effect, do not feel that these values are being threatened. Indifference is not a disposition that is consciously chosen. In short, one does not will indifference. And so when some people label others as indifferent, it is not necessarily a put down or a derogatory statement. Rather, it is a description of a condition that shapes a person’s location in his/her social millieu. I hope people would start to appreciate the term as a conceptual tool (i.e. imbis na magtampo o mairita tayo, bakit hindi na lang natin basahin  si C. Wright Mills, chapter 1, The Promise?)

 

But indifference was not the theme of UP’s Centennial Graduation Rites. Below is a statement that Arnold wrote to describe the protest action on UP's centennial graduation.

GMA MUST GO: SYMBOLIC ACTION AT THE UP CENTENNIAL

GRADUATION CEREMONIES

 

Progressive faculty members, graduating militant

students and non-academic personnel of the University

made a series of symbolic actions at the UP Centennial

Graduation ceremonies last April 27, 2008.  Amidst the

tight security of the University authorities, various

groups creatively made bold statements on the

country’s deteriorating political and economic

situation reiterating the position of the Diliman

University Council that GMA must go! 

 

Around past four in th
e afternoon, breaking the somber

mood of the keynote speech that was being delivered,

activist teachers breached the back section of the

amphitheater and hoisted a streamer on red balloons

that read “Oust GMA!”. As the streamer made its way

up, it became visible to the faculty members and

guests on the stage as well as the parents on the side

of the amphitheater until

 it got entangled on a tree at

the back of the amphitheater.  The streamer was to

remain there visible for all to see throughout the

whole graduation ceremonies as a symbolic reminder of

the University community’s stance in the wake of the

series of scandals that has plagued the Arroyo

administration.  It was only the first of a series of

actions that would take place in the ceremony.

 

After the conferment of degrees and the valedictory


speech, University police and the Rayadillo cadets

from the UPROTC moved to block the access points to

the stage in anticipation of more symbolic actions. 

But this did not deter activist graduating students to

break from their ranks on the grounds of the

amphitheater. With a red banner that read “Serve the

People!”, they marched to the front of the stage and

raised their firsts while singing “UP Naming Mahal.”

On the stage, progressive faculty members, with

clenched fists, went down

 from their bleachers to


unfurl two banners that read “GMA MUST GO!” . This is

the call made by the UP Diliman University Council in

its special meeting on February 27, 2008. As the

graduates sang the UP Hymn, the amphitheater

transformed into a sea of clenched fists as faculty,

students, and even alumni from the gallery

symbolically joined the protest. 

 

Not a few faculty members, parents, fellow students

and guests were impressed about the militance that the


actions represented. The afternoon’s symbolic actions

were a reminder to everyone that on the occasion of

UP’s centennial graduation ceremonies, the cherished

University traditions of activism and nationalism

cannot be forgotten. For as long as courageous souls

emboldened by their UP education continue to speak

truth against tyranny, these traditions will remain

integral to the University’s soul.   

It is precisely for these moments of precipitating the Real, as it were that I attend graduation ceremonies.

   

 

From Hamlet to your nerves: "The time is out of joint."And the shortest explanation to this obscure warning is that there is no natural check on speed. And so as you labor, you reproduce everything, including your own subsumption to that which is constant and dead.

On Labor Day, perphaps, you will be remembered by well-meaning university students who are aware of your kin's misfortune but could vaguely understand what time and speed have got to do with it. Do they know that they will eventually expend their precious energy to reproduce that which is constant and dead? I wonder.

Demands like 125 across the board wage increase will echo like the sound of Pagsanjan Falls amidst the summer heat. But isn't your real wager more than that? Mine is.Yet I wouldn't know how to face you if you stood in front of me right now. And for Christ's sake, I am not about to stand the way you embody our civilization's barbarism!

But come Labor Day, I shall march with you. Come to think of it, the May First March has become an annual ritual for me and this poet-professor beside me who is now sipping a plastic cup of iced coffee. A while ago he showed me his new toy—a digital point and shoot camera. In the tradition of social realism, I'm sure it can work to capture sharp images of you as you march on your big day.

For a few minutes now I have been toying with this image: You and me. Holding a point and shoot apparatus. Emanating from its barrel is power. Do you think we can seize something together?

In any case, and despite the cool, heterosxual, scholarly couple Ernesto and Chantal, better known as  Laclau and Mouffe, and the politically vogueish tandem of Hardt and Negri, you remain to be my last universal. Oh come on, wouldn't you know it?
 


 

This post was written early last year when the world was a bit younger. I recovered it from a blog account which I have stopped managing. KC Concepcion keeps one official blog, and she keeps it HERE in MULTIPLY. I did not think we have something else in common besides our love for  Gabby Concepcion, despite everything (charot). I'm so glad Gaby's back. What? Oh, that pix with Goma during the centennial kick-off? It's nothing. Gabo is my guy.

I'm posting this one because I bumped into K last Friday. She was so thrilled to tell me about her new job--a teaching position in one of the largest State Us. I'm happy that she's eventually pursuing a career in teaching. Finding out  that former students have joined the academe is always good news for me (after all, misery loves company).

"Dialectical thought starts with the experience that the world is unfree; that is to say, man and nature exist in conditions of alienation, exist as 'other than they are.' Any mode of thought which excludes this contradiction from its logic is a faulty logic" (Herbert Marcuse, Reason and evolution). This morning a pretty young lady claimed that she can no longer be assured by common sense. She was very much agitated in describing how "unfreedom is so much at the core of things," as Marcuse would have stated it. But the task was doubly hard because she had to expose the unfreedom in the things that most kids consider as practices of freedom. She was rather impatient in responding to some of the questions. I don't think it was a case of bad temper. Perhaps, so much was at stake at that particular instance. Against the vogueish claims of post-politics (postmodernism, identitarian politics, multiculturalism), she had to convince everyone about the necessity of Leninismm in our age. I could never guess what the others thought. Though I heard Gerry talking to himself (as usual) "magaling, magaling ito." I thought so too. But not only because she was able to articulate Zizek's theorizing of "repetition." It wasn't only a case of one smart kid qouting the right ideas and expounding on sticky issues. She must have, like the others in our reading list: Zizek, Gramsci, Marx, Luxemberg, walked the talk. And in doing so , she must have tripped several times. She might have even sprained her ankle or leg. In other words, she must have experienced that complex pain that the struggle brings. I wonder what drew her to the struggle. I wonder what kind of habitus, capitals and field produce a fiesty young woman arguing against all the conditions that make her early morning report possible. She ended her presentation by playing the Internationale-- a hymn that had never lost its affective purchase on Jacques Derrida. For he always cried whenever it was played. It is a painful song despite its optimism. I hope this young woman, who played the Internationale for everybody in class to hear, knows that the pain (i.e. conditions of unfreedom) that draws her to the struggle, is also my own.

The way out is to the left. Even Beyonce knows that. After almost twenty years, nobody can believe Fukuyama's wager: that capitalism is the end of history. But still, we can respond by singing to capitalism a few lines from Beyonce's Irreplaceable:

You must not know 'bout me (2x)

I could have another you in a minute

Matter of fact he'll be here in a minute, baby

You must not know 'bout me (2x)

I can have another you by tomorrow

So don't you ever for a second get to thinking

Your'e irreplaceable

A better-known Lacanian joke tells about a man who thinks that he is a grain. On account of his delusion, he submits himself to the asylum. A few years later, his doctor informs him of the success of his treatment as evidenced by his current perception of himself as a  human being. He then leaves the asylum to lead a normal life. A few days later, however, the man goes back to his doctor. The doctor tells him, “You already know that you are a human being and not a grain, you have no bussiness coming back here. ” The man replies: “Of course I know that , but does the chicken know it?”

 

I have cracked this joke twice this semester. The first instance was to a bunch of student radicals from different colleges and state universities and the second time was to three sections of UP students who managed to fit themselves in a single classroom for a make-up class in Sociology 10 (Being Filipino: A Sociological Perspective). I imagine these kids constitute their generation’s best minds. And I know it is not easy to make intelligent young people laugh. But I did. Some years ago, I  remember telling the same joke to two adults more or less my age. Their reply was “ang corny.” I’ve also known these two to be, you know, slow.

 

What about this joke that would make a poltically and theoretically astute person enjoy? I venture it’s the joke’s oblique yet crucial reference to a repressed feature of social life: the Big Other of the Symbolic Other embodied in the joke by the chicken.

 

The Big Other is the objective structure. It is that feature of social life which has been there long before we became a part of it and will remain to be there long after we are gone. Karl Marx tells it better in a passage from his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

 

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their mental forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite social forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness (20-21:1970).”   

 

In his attempt to break with subjectivism and objectivism, Pierre Bourdieu resurrects the concept habitus* in order to locate a person’s dispostions, tastes, habits, mannerisms and position-takings within the history of the objective structure. He explains that "when habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a “fish in water”: it does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted (An Invitation to a Reflexive Sociology, 1992:127).”

 

The fact that we do not really think of our society’s mode of production and its corresponding forms of social consciousness and institutions in everyday life does not mean that Marx is wrong. We neither think of them, nor do they weigh heavily upon our heads because we already embody them. In fact, it’s almost always that we see through them. And when we look through a lense, it is the site or the object that captures our attention and not the lense.

 

Oblivious of her lenses, the subject who sees says “I see” when it should have been “I see through” or in Lacanese,  “I see through the Other,”.

 

We see through the Other, the Symbolic Order, not so much because we are pawns of the objective structure. It is rather that our assimilation into the language of the Symbolic Order, our precipitious identification with it makes for the genesis of the “I.” Do we remember who we were prior to language? Do we remember ever believing in something before we began to speak? Our entrance into the symbolic order therefore marks the birth and the death of the “I.” Birth because from that point on, we can participate in the practices of the symbolic order. Death because this participation is not solely determined by us. We participate in so far as we have assimilated the ways of hegemony which in turn constitutes the symbolic order.

 

What if  the psychiatric patient was only cured at the moment when the Clinic would  have concluded a relapse of paranoiac delusions?   

 

The patient in the joke is not having a relapse. His current affliction is not the same as what he had the first time. He now knows that he is a human being. That he does not know the first time. This time he is also aware that he used to think he was a grain.

He was discharged from the asylum to be part of society again. But what about society? Has it changed since he got cured?The mad man is in fact throwing at Psychiatry its most difficult problem: how do you cure people from mental illness when the world that makes them ill has not been cured?

What are the guarantees that this world structured by capital will not eat him up like a grain for its own survival?   

 
This reminds me of another joke from Zizek which is a derivative of the joke at hand:

A student who learns about commodity fetishism from a course in Marxism  comes back to his teacher one day and tells her: How come commodities still appear magical to me? The teacher answers, "But you know how it is.  Commodities are not magical obejcts but are ordinary objects produced by the exploited labor power of the working class!" The student replies: “Of course I know that, but the commodities I am dealing with seem not to know it!” 

 

Zizek tells his readers that this encounter between the  student and his teacher is instructive of the proper materialist procedure in exposing the true nature of commodities.

 

When a Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist reproach to him is not: ‘The commodity may seem to you to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but really is just a reified expression of relations between people,’ but rather:’You may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations..., but this is not really how things seem to you. In your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity really appears to you as a magical object endowed with special powers’(2007:94, How to Read Lacan).

 

What is common between the mad man and the student is that both recognize the crucial role of the (Big) Other’s knowledge of who they are. It is crucial to recognize the Big Other’s role because through it, we can understand the gap between our grasp of revolutionary theory and our immersion in a system that is structured by capital.

 

Now it’s easy to see why someone who is not brainwashed by the ideology of individual freedom would enjoy the joke. The same person knows that despite what s/he knows, there is still a system to be smashed and state power to be seized just so that we can create the conditions of possibility for our humanity.

 

 

_________________ 

       *Habitus is a concept used by Aristotle in his writings. The concept is supposed to shed light on the way philosophy effaced the metic logic to highlight rationality. Metic is a term derived from Metis, one of the goddeses in Homer’s mythology. Zeus impregnated Metis and once the former finds out about this, he swallows her perhaps out of fear of castration. Metis stays in Zeus gut and gives birth while being stuck in it. This explains why Athena (their daughter) is delivered through Zeus’ forehead.

       Thus, metic logic refers to a logic that comes from “gut feel.” This is why Bourdieu’s habitus is also referred to as one’s “feel for the game.” 

I meet a girl. She claims to be a “multiperspectivist.” Metaphorically, she, therefore, uses more than one pair of lenses in order to see. But I only see a pair of eyes in her comely face. Another day at the Shopping Center, I bump into her and ask her about her stand on the Arroyo government. She tells me that there are several positions and that she has yet to decide. She is frantic about something else. She needs to decide which pair of eye glasses to order from the optical shop in front of us. And so I tell her, “You know why you cannot choose? Because you are already wearing one.” “I’m not, can’t you see? I lost my pair of eyeglasses last week”, she replies. “No, I see you are already wearing one,” I say  before turning away.

 

The objective structure colonizes our bodies through ideology. Ideology as opposed to science is never a set of ideas that we consciously adhere to. This is why it is best detected and exposed in the most mundane of conversations rather than in theoretical or political debates. Thus the proper sequence to the story above is the following:

 

1. I meet a “multiperspectivist” girl ( I put the word multiperspectivist in quotes because its adherents have not come up with a theoretically plausible definition of multiperspectivism save for some vague assertions like "there are several sides to an issue." Of course but that idea is not the sole monopoly of multiperspectivism as an “ism.” Besides, that is more like one of the steps in decision-making rather than an “ism, ” and there is a difference between method and theory, at least that should be made when in the academe.) Therefore, I’m limited to regarding it as the “new opacity” (Habermas).
2. I ask her about her stand on the Arroyo regime.
3. She says  there are several positions and that she has yet to decide.
4. I tell her “You know why you cannot choose? Because you are already wearing one.”

     

That “truer” yet “impossible” sequence would have ended the conversation abruptly because one was responding out of context. And so the real proper sequence is this:

 

 1. I meet a “multiperspectivist” girl and I ask her about her stand on the Arroyo regime.

 2.She says  there are several positions and that she has yet to decide.

 3.I find this answer fishy but  sufficient for the moment.

 4.Until she shares the eyeglasses dilemma

 5. Suddenly, her stand on the Arroyo regime was insufficiently argued for on account of another moment of indecision.

 6. I tell her “You know why you cannot choose? Because you are already wearing one.”

 7. I lost my pair of eyeglasses last week”, she answers back

 8. I reply "No, I see you are already wearing one."

    

The misunderstanding in that conversation stems from my own condensation of what seems to be two separate topics, which for both cases,  constitute a moment of indecision.

I intended to misunderstand the girl’s confusion in the second instance because it was the only time that I could properly reply to the first on account of my own position. Thus, the real encounter between us happens only when we seem to misunderstand each other. In the former where an ideological wager was being summoned, all we could do was to avoid touching each other’s politics by playing the liberal coy game(“I know that you know that I’m pretending but let us pretend we are not so that this conversation may continue and end in a friendly manner.”). Yet the insertion of the mundane provoked the the Real in that encounter: that it is an ideological clash and not some petit bourgeois exchange of symbols, language and what not.  

 

is a term coined by T.S. Eliot to describe Shakespeare's inability to articulate something in Hamlet that is supposed to be more than Hamlet himself. To maneuvre this excess into art, one has to find an array of objects, a sequence of events, or a situation which will convey this 'excess' or what is in emotion which makes it always something more than itself.  These external facts are supposed to evoke a specific emotion which was, otherwise, inexpressible in its pure state.     

But this is really a homage to Suzanne Vega. I must have been in grade 4 the very first time I listened to her album sent by my father. I was so delighted because the cassette tape came with a lyric sheet. I had probably spent a good deal of my time as a child memorizing the songs of Vega, Lea Salonga, John Denver, Sheena Easton and,  well, truth be told, the Air Supply!

Back then some of my classmates whom I got accustomed to calling before going to sleep were preoccupied with winning quiz bees, topping exams and perfecting art projects. I don't remember winning a single quiz bee or topping an exam.My mom finished all my art projects because I did not think that basket weaving and stuff like painting were more important than recording my favorite songs from the radio to the cassette tape in order to decipher  their
lyrics.  After  having my lola check whether the lyrics made sense, I would quickly run to the telephone and call some of my classmates who were too eager to learn the accurate lyrics of a Madonna song. I remember being so in demand for Madonna's Borderline, a song  I recorded from a dance number rendered by  Snooky  Serna and Albert Martinez in some  primetime  variety show (Snooky sucked in dancing big time!  Well, she did in everything back in the 80s didn't she? But I thought she was really pretty). My classmates exchanged at least 5 sheets of their precious and scented stationery for a complete lyrics of Borderline.

One classmate who did not have a "decent" collection of stationery or Sanrio stickers
offered to have merienda in their house instead. The place was just a few minutes away from school. And since my school service  wouldn't leave until the six graders were dismissed from their classes two hours after our dismissal, I thought it was nice to see Rachel's house.

Back then I thougt it was an old house made of wooden floors, wide wooden ceiling, wide and winding wooden stairs and other stuff that looked brown and dull. The language that Rachel spoke when she adressed an old woman sitting by the dining table was incomprehensible. I remember telling her, "You look like her." I do not remember her saying anything. In hindsight, Rachel must have spoken Spanish, she must been half-Spanish. I don't remember us talking about hybridity.But I do recall us dancing to the tune of Spanish Eddie by Laura Brannigan in an effort to immitate Sheryl Cruz ("The night Spanish Eddie cashed it in They were playin "Desolation Row" On the radio//The night Spanish Eddie made front page His revolution came of age...").

Before I could even give her the lyrics of Madonna's Borderline, Rachel found my Vega casette tape. That same day Melissa copied the lyrics of Tom's Diner during Reading and Comprehension hour when we had to work on our PLPs (Phoenix Learning Package). And so I had to do her work for her which I thought was ok since I only had to copy from my own workbook as I worked on hers. Meanwhile, Suzanne was the soundtrack of the merienda that  Rachel swapped for  Madonna's Borderline.

Suzanne's In Liverpool is a song I learned about much later. I was probably already in college.
The song's refrain, to my mind, best exemplifies T.S. Eliot's objective correlative.

In Liverpool, on Sunday
No traffic on the avenue
The lights are pale and thin like you
No sound now on this part of town
Except for

Refrain:
The boy in the belfry he' crazy
He's trhowin' himself down from the top the tower
Like a hunchback in heaven
He's ringing the bells of the church
For the last half an hour
It seems like he's missing something or someone
That he knows he can't have now
And if he isn't, I certainly am.



In Liverpool remains to be my vote for the saddest song ever made. Many years ago, I would listen to it whenever I thought about losing a loved one in the romantic sense. The image of the boy in the belfry (that was, of course, a projected me) made me almost always decide against parting.

I remember listening to this song over and over when RC told me that Karen and Sherlyn were abducted in June 2006. Tonight, I imagine the boy in the belfry and it pains me to think of Nanay Connie and Nanay Linda (Karen and She's mothers) feeling themselves to be that boy: in suspension, holding on and missing the missing.

found a piece i wrote a long time ago. since the article does not contain my acknowledgements to the people who helped me come up with it, let me retroactively thank the following:

1. Roselle Pineda for referring me to ISIS
2. ISIS for giving me the opportunity to write about Ka Nere
3. Judy  Taguiwalo for  giving me SAMAKANA's contact number
4. SAMAKANA for being so hospitable
5. Mayo Uno Martin for his company, his PC and his editorial powers
6. Johanatan Pimentel for being my ever-dependable translation consultant as I wrote that piece
7.most especially to Ka Nere whom I still see during mass demonstrations. in fact, i saw her two weeks ago in BAYAN's all-leaders meeting. I came up to her and asked her "Ka Nere, kamusta na? Naalala niyo pa ako?" "(Smiling) Saan na nga ba tayo nagkita"? "Ininterview ko kayo five years ago, pinadala ko nga sa inyo yung magazine, di niyo natandaan?" "Ay di ko alam yun ah, kanino mo binigay?" "Naku di ko na rin matandaan." "Bigyan mo ko ulit?" "Shempre."

click the link below and find out more about Ka Nere, my heroine.
http://www.isiswomen.org/wia/wia103/athome.htm

( Judy Taguiwalo's 58th birthday cake)










THE CRAFT OF PEOPLE POWER

MASS DEMONSTRATIONS, in John Berger's realist assessment, are rehearsals for the 'event' wherein people would unleash concrete acts of political maturity rarely imagined in classrooms and in mass media. These acts, combined with the ripeness of a given condition and the push of favorable circumstances, are the kind that would alter the existing coordinates of the system.

The statement below was crafted and unanimously approved by the University Council (UC) of UP Diliman on 27 February 2007. The  UC is composed of  UP faculty with positions as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and Full Professor. The day before the UC meeting, a smaller group of professors worked on the draft statements written by Atty. and Prof. Te and Dr. Bomen Guillermo. In her best element, Dr. Judy Taguiwalo facilitated the said meeting while Dr. Guy Estrada-Claudio, director of UP-Center for Women's Studies provided the venue and volunteered to be the witty and agitated documentor. It was my first time to sit in a meeting with Dr. Tet Maceda and I realize she is larger than life! Dean Paz, the icon of dissent was also there to guide us with her wisdom. What you see are photos from the small-group meeting.        But nothing really beats the actual UC meeting on Wednesday. It was one of UC's shining moments. Professors from different colleges "sat" (of course in reality, one has to stand like a Senator to either make or belabor a point) on the draft as if  it were the most urgent task to be accomplished. Of course, it was.  Dr. Pepe Miranda and Atty.and Prof. Carlota elaborated on fundamental law which makes for a republican and democratic constitution and the system of oligarchy in the Philippines. Professors like Dr. Preachy Legasto, Dr. Serena Diokno and Dr, Popoy (who was most active in analyzing the logical sequence of the sentences in the draft statement and I'm so sorry I did not catch his surname), Dr. Tet Maceda, Dr, Judy Taguiwalo, Dr. Adel Lucero, Dr. Rose Torres-Yu, Dr. Gani Tapang,Dr. Abraham Sakili, Dr. Bognot (who was proposing civilian arrest of GMA, as in tayo mismo ang huhuli at magpapakulong sa kanya, how punk diba?) and a few more whose names I don't remember but whose faces I shall recognize from now on as comrades in the struggle to oust GMA, were so enthusiastic and agitated that at some point I was asking myself "ano kayang tinira ng mga ito?" Of course, I  realized that it's the  spirit of the Iskolar ng Bayan. Dean Manalili had the final say when he had to explain the significance of the penultimate sentence. He emphatically said: "Kaya nanduon ang paragraph na iyon ay para ipaalala sa ating lahat na mga Iskolar ng Bayan at mga guro ng mga Iskolar ng Bayan na hindi magtatapos ang ating pakikibaka sa pagpapatalsik kay GMA. Kailangan nating linawin na mas higit pa doon ang ating pangarap at adhikain. Nais natin ng isang lipunang may hustisya at pagkakapantay-pantay. Lipunang walang naaapi at nagugutom." He got the most resounding applause from the body. That moment to me was a miracle. Mabuhay ang University Council! GMA MUST GO! A Statement of the University Council of the University of the Philippines Diliman   Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has no basis to continue in office. On 13 July 2005, at the height of the Garci Scandal, the University Council (UC) of the University of the Philippines Diliman—called on President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to resign immediately.  She did not resign. The UC observed that all her acts are “a direct assault on nearly all the values we hold sacred in the academe.” Since then, there has been an unprecedented number of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances – which includes two U.P. students, Karen Empeno and Sherlyn Cadapan.  Corruption in the highest places continues unabated and remains unaddressed. Institutions which were created by the Constitution or the law to safeguard accountability have either been ineffective or rendered ineffective. Official government response to requests for information on matters of public concern has been to thwart the truth either by the invocation of Executive Privilege or by threats issued to t