Mazemapping

2006-12-31T11:03:00.000-08:00

Table of Contents

Prelude/Interlude/Postlude: Lost Mapmaker

Turn 1: In Search of
Sentimental Education
Wandering Rocks: My Life as an Archipelago
The Swelling Laboratory

Turn 2: Who's Driving?
Queer Catechism (Version X)
Interview with a Cracked Mirror
The Internal Return

Turn 3: Higher Unconsciousness
Tape
Hyperbolic Heteronyms
The _____ing Thickness

Turn 4: Mind's Body
An Autobiography of My Mother
Word Crossing
The Case of the Missing Clocks

Turn 5: The Six Senses
Food Chain
Versatile Perversions
Tortuous Tropisms

Turn 6: The Touch of Language
Word of Mouth
Transmigrant Translations
Singing in Tongues

Turn 7: The Feeling of Living
Sounding the Silence
Wave-rings
Polyphonic Clay

Turn 8: Anomalous Loves
The Anatomy of Love
Love's Leap
Contiguous Passions

Turn 9: The Monkey's Fist
Wishes Circle
The Geometry of Joy
The Tantalized Tantalist

Turn 10: Becoming Is Becoming
A History of Nomadism
Polymorphous Travesties
Orchid Machinations

Turn 11: Metempsychosis Variations
This Astonished Heart (The Stories of My Lives)
The Promiscuous Garden
The Falling Sickness: Eccentric Epistemology

Turn 12: The Aesthetics of (De)Composition
Death Journal
Ascending Asyla
Petal Fugue

Excerpts from Mazemapping featured in In Pieces, published by Impassio Press

Also by the author:
A Life in Habits
Perversations

About Mazemapping

2006-05-21T06:12:00.000-07:00

Petal Fugue

2006-05-13T07:02:00.000-07:00

<< Ascending Asyla
>> Prelude/Interlude/Postlude: Lost Mapmaker

Ascending Asyla

2006-05-13T06:40:00.000-07:00

For Antonin Artaud

I am a . . . perforated tongue . . . a dead little girl . . . asleep in me . . . yesterday . . . only specters . . . neither the unconscious nor the subconscious . . . the monkey hand . . . it falls . . . the earth which I will eat . . . and what is chance? . . . limbs fighting among themselves . . . thought from below . . . in the middle of the void . . . a window . . . vampirizes . . . compenetration . . . to break one upon the other . . . a city besieged . . . nothingness . . . at the bottom of nothingness . . . etc. . . . I do not want to know . . . I don’t want . . . I don’t want to sleep anymore . . . the heart liberates its own thirst . . .

Which indeed is not in philosophy, but in the pan of fried potatoes, square perhaps and with the handle of the cantilever which bears like the spoon in the perforated tongue of the sex organ forever denied by the heart.

What is philosophy? The pan of fried potatoes, the spoon, the sex; and in the heart – the which, the in, the but, the of, the perhaps, the and, the with, the by, the the, . . .

Bone by bone, tongue by tongue, cock by cock, I’m exhuming the dead within me – to free them, to free me.

He would free his body from suffering by making it understand – even if he had to put it on the rack.

Specter-haunted mirrors, rats dreaming of Freud.

His perversion was not yet invented. (In his body’s darkness, they multiplied.)

Everything I need to know, every book I want to write, everyone I love fit neatly in my mouth. (Yes, you too.)

I never listen to myself, except when I need a good laugh.

Ideas don’t come without limbs, and so these are no longer ideas but limbs, limbs fighting among themselves.

Eyeless ideas groping in the dark. (They scratched each other’s eyes out.)

The only sensible way to judge an idea is by its smell.

Th body is the body, but the mind is not the mind. (Yes it is.)

Patiently polishing his glassy essence, he turned his body into a translucent asylum.

All thinking is pornographic.

Language is always fucking me up the ass – and I like it.

Inside and out, hordes of undead assailed him.

A black nothingness mirrored by a bright emptiness . . .

Everybody’s waiting for something to happen.

The philosophy of etc.

I don’t remember what I did yesterday – I don’t want to remember.

I want to wake the others that are sleeping in me – I don’t want to dream anymore.

Free yourself from yourself – unnot your heart’s knots.

The bewildered lair of the knot through which the heart liberates its own thirst from being before what we call nothingness.

<< Death Journal
>> Petal Fugue

Death Journal

2006-05-11T06:04:00.000-07:00

Media vita in morte sumus.

March 2, 2002

3:17 AM
I trust the world with my life – why don’t I trust it with my death?

5:11 AM
Old age, disease, suicide, accident, murder, . . . How do I want to die? (There are as many ways to die as there are to live.)

7:47 AM
An unworldly afterlife bears no attraction for me. I wish, however, that I could believe in metempsychosis.

Noon
How many people die without discovering the limits of their suffering or joy?

4:29 PM
If it comes to that, how will I kill myself? (My sense of decorum demands that I die “cleanly” – no blood on the floor, no brains on the wall.)

6:29 PM
If deathdays were celebrated as well as birthdays . . .

8:33 PM
Here in this living-dying moment, death and life are not enemies.

10:19 PM
When they say you have six months to live, they’re also saying you have six months to die.

Midnight
I am a cosmic accident – my life, a gratuitous dicethrow.

April 1, 2012

She died today. No tears.

March 3, 2034

Sixty-four years old. If I had died thirty-two years ago, what difference would it have made? If I live thirty-two more years, what difference? Today, what difference?

_______, 20?? (Last entry)

Give everything away.

March 3, 2070

What is remembered? Who remembers?

March 3, 2470

Nothing. No-one.

March 3, 1970

8:12 AM
It’s a boy! (Bloody beginning of my lives and deaths.)

Feb 6, 1990

We could have all died. (How many times have I nearly died without even knowing it?) The van was totaled. Death’s fingers brushed my face, clutched my hands gripping the steering wheel. Something should have happened.

July 4, 2002

The San Francisco Chronicle announced nine deaths today. What will my obituary say? (What will it not say?)

July 5, 2002

I’ve never contemplated suicide. What does this say about me?

July 6, 2002

I don’t want to write my life away.

July 7, 2002

Dying of AIDS is the worst death I can imagine. Nobody blames anyone for getting cancer.

July 8, 2002

I’d rather kill myself than suffer too much. But how much is too much?

July 9, 2002

I will be childless for life.

July 10, 2002

A voice recorder on my deathbed.

July 11, 2002

What will I leave behind? (I know the faint ripples my living made will rapidly fade away till the small circle of time’s water my life disturbed is still again.)

July 13, 2002

How many more lives can this body live?

July 14, 2002

Writing is my transmigration-machine.

July 15, 2002

Life is the only thing worth dying for.

July 16, 2002

Sunrise
If I were told I only had a year, six months, three months left to live, the only thing I’d do differently is pay more attention. (This would change everything.)

July 17, 2002

Sunset
You only die once.

July 18, 2002

It doesn’t disturb me to picture my dead decomposing body. What discomposes me is trying to imagine the labor of dying.

July 19, 2002

Death is not the enemy – it’s forgetting. But who can survive a life without forgetfulness?

July 20, 2002

Life is a breathless parenthesis. (Why do we run toward death?)

July 21, 2002

I want to write a joyful Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man.

July 22, 2002

I feel more and more as I grow older. This terrifies me.

July 23, 2002

There’s no such thing as an uneventful life – life itself is the event.

July 24, 2002

Death defies explanation. Why do we expect life to be different?

September 4, 2002

Every night for nine hours, I am dead. (Every night for nine hours, I’m neither behind nor ahead of myself – unconscious, I’m going at the speed of life.) Is sleep the closest thing to death or the furthest from it?

September 7, 2002

If desiring ceases, how will I know if I’m alive or dead? If my body isn’t stretching toward you, how will I feel it?

October 31, 2002

Whenever I hear of something another person has said about me, I’m always taken by surprise: partly because I’m amazed anyone is thinking of me (not because I’m modest but because I’m self-centered – I take it for granted that everyone thinks about themselves as singlemindedly as I do), and partly because the sudden awareness of another’s gaze (all eyes exterior to me are evil eyes) throws me outside myself, placing me in the uncanny position of being beside a self I don’t recognize. Thus, few things are more chilling to me than imagining people speaking of my dumb, purely external existence after I’m dead – like a mute photograph, my life would be shrouded by an irrevocable silence.

November 28, 2002

My life is not mine. (I cannot count the stars.)

December 31, 2002

Outside my little world of life-and-death, the universe keeps on expanding.

In the midst of death we are in life.

<< The Falling Sickness: Eccentric Epistemology
>> Ascending Asyla

Turn 12: The Aesthetics of (De)Composition

2006-05-10T06:02:00.000-07:00

Death Journal
Ascending Asyla
Petal Fugue

The Falling Sickness: Eccentric Epistemology

2006-05-09T05:53:00.000-07:00

Epistemology

Every scrap of wisdom I’ve scavenged deserts me when I need it most, leaving me with folly’s tears that drip, drip, drip from my leaking eye sockets, bony waterclocks. If I didn’t weep, how would I keep time?

Time

I love to make up explanations for things – this is because of that . . . It’s a harmless pleasure . . . until I start believing my inventions.

Inventions

Maybe there’s no exit from this expanding labyrinth, but I’m determined to map the convolutions of my maze – a map of the lost, by the lost, for the lost.

Lost

I’m bending my body into a bow and sharpening my passions into arrows that I’ll shoot into the unknown.

Unknown

We assume that everything that happens behind our backs is reasonably continuous with what we see before us, but again and again we discover that we’ve grossly misrecognized what’s right in front of our eyes. Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to believe that the world is tripping funny dances behind our backs?

Behind Our Backs

There’s no reason to believe in love, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the incredible.

Incredible

I only want to write the impossible, especially when I’m writing on myself.

Writing on Myself

I’m cutting myself open to unleash my fabulous genealogy – the singing beasts in my balls and eyeballs, the delirious machines ticking and whirring in my buzzing skull, the ferocious flowers blooming in my belly, promiscuous garden.

<< The Promiscuous Garden
>> Turn 12: The Aesthetics of (De)Composition

The Promiscuous Garden

2006-05-08T05:44:00.000-07:00

For James Joyce

Always beside myself, I am never myself – I am parallax, paralysis’s mobile adversary. Neither the fixed authority of the one nor the fickle orthodoxy of the many, I am a fugitive transition between singular ways of seeing. Neither a subjective I nor an objective eye, I reject the fictive contradictions of inside and outside. (I’m not even a wandering I or a roving eye – I’m just a wandering, a roving.) Amazed mazemaker, I am constructing labyrinths you’ll want to get lost in. Lose yourself – just say the magic word: Metempsychosis! Cross the threshold. Leave Ariadne’s thread behind.

What is in the doorway?

I am a haunter of thresholds.

What were these words, these sonorous pools teasingly lapping his ears, these liquid tongues writing fluent seductions on his quivering skin, rousing his limbs to an amorous nomadism?

Here are we come together, wayfarers; here are we housed, amid intricate streets, by night and silence closely covered. In amity we rest together, well content, no more remembering the deviousness of the ways that we have come.

Our deviance is our innocence; our silence, our community.

Centrifugal living, centripetal writing: His centrifugal ambition was to turn his whirling thoughts into a sensational torsion that disturbed the flesh of anybody it touched.

He mastered the art of departing early, but arriving was still beyond him.

Manila – Dublin’s double – is also a city of invisibles.

Though afraid of heights, he was fascinated by the feeling of falling. Falling out of himself, he was transported by the sight of the world shooting starward.

The falling sickness: the eyes vanish under their lids: the cry.

<< This Astonished Heart (The Stories of My Lives)
>> The Falling Sickness: Eccentric Epistemology

This Astonished Heart (The Stories of My Lives)

2006-05-07T09:50:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, a certain King was hunting in a great forest, and he chased a wild beast so eagerly that none of his attendants could follow him. When evening drew near he stopped and looked around him, and then he saw that he had lost his way. He sought a way out, but could find none.

What will I do with my life? (What will life do with me?)
I write because I’m royally lost. (Life is my great forest as well as my wild beast.)

There was once a girl who trod on a loaf to avoid soiling her shoes, and the misfortunes that happened to her in consequence are well known.

There was once a boy who masturbated morning and night – in bed, in the shower, on the roof; lying down, sitting, standing, and kneeling; alone and with others, real and imaginary. The enormity of his guilt crushed his adolescent Catholicism into a single terrible tenet – masturbators go to hell!

The little old kitchen had quieted down from the bustle and confusion of midday; and now, with its afternoon manners on, presented a holiday aspect that, as the principal room in the brown house, it was eminently proper it should have.

As a child, I was strangely drawn to the dim cramped damp servants’ quarters which smelled vaguely obscene to me. Simultaneously excited and repelled by the room's pungent shadows, my thrilled nostrils longed to cross its dark threshold to explore the netherworlds whose mysteries aroused obscure desires in me.

On a bright December morning long ago, two thinly clad children were kneeling upon the bank of a frozen canal in Holland.

It was never cold in Manila. In America my hands and feet are always freezing – so I write, I wander to keep them moving. (In the heat of writing, my tropic past returns.)

From the old and pleasantly situated village of Mayenfeld, a footpath winds through green and shady meadows to the foot of the mountains, which on this side looked down from their stern and lofty heights upon the valley below.

Which mountain should he climb? (Should he climb?)

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

–What are you writing? the child asked.
–I’m writing letters.
–To whom?
–To strangers and the dead.
–Do they write back?
–They wrote me first.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

I can’t go back to Manila – my youth’s vanished city – so verb by verb (reverberation by reverberation) I’m building a memorial metropolis of words, reconstructing not its streets and buildings but the feeling of being someone else (It’s me; it isn’t me.) with an unknown future in another world.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

I don’t know how many times I reread Pride and Prejudice before I finally realized (admitted?) – it was Mr. Darcy I was in love with.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo . . . .

My mother loved fables, so she read me stories of cocky foxes and sassy asses, translating their catty ratty batty dialogues into Tagalog for me. (Though it feels like I’ve always already known English, this memory proves it was once as foreign to me as Tagalog is now.) Ant the squirrel of the storkie is . . .

I begin my story with an experience from the time I was ten years old and attending the grammar school in our small town. Many memories are wafted to me, touching me inwardly with melancholy and pleasurable thrills: narrow, dark streets and bright houses and steeples, the chiming of clocks and people’s faces, rooms filled with hominess and warm comfort, rooms filled with mystery and profound fear of ghosts. There is a smell of cozy confinement, of rabbits and servant girls, of home remedies and dried fruit. Two worlds coincided there, day and night issued from two poles.

Where to begin? Where to end? I don’t remember the beginning. I can’t foretell the end. Shall I make up stories?

I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America.

I jumped on – no, I was thrown on – this hurtling logomotive thirty years ago, and I still don’t know where this careening train of words-words-words is taking me. (Where did it come from? Where is it going?)

As Karl Rossman, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself a child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbour of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven.

747. Manila-Narita-L.A. Freeways of Liberty glittering in the sun. Dazzled thirdworld eyes.

“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay.

–Don’t become your father, my mother was always saying (not in so many words).
–Don’t become your mother, said my father’s silent contempt.
–Don’t become yourself!

When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.

I saw E.T. seven times when I was in the seventh grade.

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.

Beneath all my external semblances of order, what feared-desired disaster lurks?

For a long time I would go to bed early.

For a long time I would go to bed whirly. (My head it simply swurls!)

This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

My favorite book in all the world is this very world which I can scarcely read, this voluminous book of dreams, this cyclopedic librarinth of my myriad waking lives.

While Pearl Tull was dying, a funny thought occurred to her.

Old enough to feel that each remembrance was a little death (memory’s a cave littered with impetuous Lazaruses dying to be resurrected), but still young enough to wish that he didn’t have a past, he dreamed of writing a memoryless book .

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.

You are about to begin reading Felipe Kalbo’s new schizography If through my splintered life a traveler.

It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened to me when I got there.

1995 was the year I turned queer. I was a virgin back then, but I was returning to San Francisco to become a pervert.

Where now? Who now? When now?

And if questions abandoned me too?

All of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania – that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him.

Whenever I bump into another exile marked by Sodom, our blazing city rises up between our querying eyes, and our gay smiles of recognition say – welcome home.

From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that – a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dost motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.

What will my death pass on?

The longing for a destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.

His disbelief in love was more romantic than others’ belief in it.

Geryon was a monster everything about him was red

C. was a seamonster everything about him was wet his mind was water always wavering his eyes were water his tongue was water his thirst unfathomable

Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing.

I want to say everything – I can’t say anything.
I have nothing to say – why can’t I stop talking?

<< Orchid Machinations
>> The Promiscuous Garden

Turn 11: Metempsychosis Variations

2006-05-06T09:36:00.000-07:00

This Astonished Heart (The Stories of My Lives)
The Promiscuous Garden
The Falling Sickness: Eccentric Epistemology

Orchid Machinations

2006-05-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

If I were a plant I’d be sporiferous – a fern, a moss, a liverwort – bearing airy offspring – nomad windtreaders.

If I were a plant I’d be the orchid Angraecum sesquipedale of Madagascar that has a foot-long spur at the back of its flower – a nectary harboring sweetness in its secret depths. Happening on the Star Orchid in 1862, Darwin predicted the existence of a moth with a proboscis long enough to reach the nectar. Forty years later, Rothschild and Jordan discovered the nocturnal sphinx-moth, with its coiled foot-long tongue.

If I were a machine I’d sound the weird throat-songs of fabulous creatures – minotaurs, mermaids, manticores, humans . . .

If I were a plant I’d be a flamboyant magnolia, choreographing ostentatious dances of seduction with lusty beetles for the last 100 million years.

If I were a machine I’d be a telephone that lets the dead call the living (collect, of course).

If I were a machine I’d play impossible music. Name your impossibility – I’ll compose its music.

If I were a machine I’d be a camera photographing the dark, picturing the darknesses we can see as well as the darknesses we can’t.

If I were a machine I’d be an elevator that stops between floors, at the shadowy interstitial stories squeezed out of our fluorescent realities.

If I were a machine I’d be an optical instrument – a microscope, a telescope, an X-ray; a hydroscope, a periscope, a stroboscope – magnifying the minuscule and the distant, penetrating opacities and aquacities, looking around corners, capturing motions too swift for the eye.

If I were a plant I’d be a bulb – a tulip or an onion, a lily or a garlic, an agapanthus or a narcissus – a multi-layered flowering, a stratified unfolding.

If I were a plant I’d be tangled seaweed on the Sargasso Sea – the Bermuda Triangle’s unblinking eye turning clockwise languorously.

If I were a machine I’d simulate other machines – blooming machines, twittering machines, new-wave machines, spanking machines, kissing machines, whirling-dervish machines, midnight machines, perversing machines, dirtying machines, greening machines, mimicking machines, . . .

If I were a machine I’d follow the alchemical transmutations of grass, transforming sun, wind, and thunder, breath, shit, and death into a spreading greenness.

If I were a plant I’d be a mistletoe, a parasitic shrub which (most lovers don't know this) is a fatal poison.

If I were a plant I’d be a fiery hot pepper – a piquant capsicum burning the tongue.

If I were a plant I’d be rootless arctic moss on windblown tundra rock drawing rare water from the gelid air.

If I were a plant I’d be a 3,000-year-old gingko. (The forgetful eat gingko leaves to help them remember. What do gingkos remember? 200 million years ago, Fabrosauruses and Vulcanodons cooled off in their great shadows. In 1815, Goethe wrote a love poem titled “Ginkgo Biloba.” In Hiroshima, a gingko survived the atomic bomb, which destroyed the temple the hardy tree was shading.)

If I were a machine I’d be an epiphany-camera freeze-framing those arresting instants that suddenly change everything. My silvered film would catch those catastrophic kisses of the real that stop time for an instant – before turning one’s world upside down.

If I were a machine I’d be a quirky clock registering the fluctuating feeling of time – sometimes flying, sometimes crawling, sometimes stopping altogether like an astonished heart.

<< Polymorphous Travesties
>> Turn 11: Metempsychosis Variations

Polymorphous Travesties

2006-05-04T17:12:00.000-07:00

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a needle to prick the same I twice.

If I invent ten thousand different personalities, maybe you’ll find one you like.

My I’s come and go without bothering to consult me.

In love, I morph wildly from moment to moment, until one day I’m surprised to discover I no longer recognize myself in the mirror – I’m not the same person that fell in love with you – I’m not in love anymore.

Maybe if I assume Japanese names – Yasujiro, Kenji, Akira, Shohei, Takeshi, Toru, Jun’ichiro, Matsuo, Murasaki, Sei – I’ll turn Japanese.

A diary of my other lives – realizing the imaginary, imaginizing the real.

Like someone possessed, his body didn’t belong to him alone – he gave it (he couldn't help himself) to whomever he fell for.

When I grow up, I want to become an archipelago. Spread out over a flickering sea, I would collect lost and drifting things and pile them into ziggurats on my shifting shores.

Other boys wanted to become firemen when they grew up; I wanted to become a siren.

I’m a salamander, a water lily, a sandpiper, a tide pool. If you want to know me, meet me at the water’s edge. If you want to love me – plunge in.

Last night I dreamt I only spoke Spanish, and everyone else spoke only Russian. We were having a picnic on a breezy hill. Everybody was laughing as the samovar boiled away on the grass.

Is it possible to outgrow the blindnesses of youth without replacing them with grown-up habits of unseeing? Is changing our blinkers from time to time (glimpsing reality’s brilliance during the fleeting transition from one darkness to another) the best we can hope for?

To write . . . Today I’ll be a sunflower stalking the sun. Tomorrow I’ll be a telephone sending electric messages across the sea. Next I’ll be a hill passing the time as hills do. And then I’ll be an antswarm in a rainspangled forest. And then . . .

If I were God I’d die laughing.

If I turned into a girl, the first thing I’d do is masturbate.

What would the world look like if I were fat?

Voices, always voices – an unsleeping multitude’s incessant babble. Who said that?

I don’t need an Orpheus to fetch me back from the underworld – I’ll sing my own way out of hell.

I’m getting curiouser and curiouser as I go on – I can’t resist following each wandering smile to the next wonderland.

<< A History of Nomadism
>> Orchid Machinations

A History of Nomadism

2006-05-03T08:21:00.000-07:00

bridge Chinese Muslim arrive colonize writing assimilate state teachers invade independence March 3, 1970 assassinate arrest return revolution $ volcano act

Pre-history. Settlers cross land bridge from Asian mainland to Philippine islands 20-30,000 years ago.

May 8, 1985. Crossing a bridge of air and time, we arrived in Los Angeles, 11,796 kilometers from a self I did not yet realize I had already lost.

–Welcome to America, the Black immigration officer said

Our first meal in America was Chinese take-out – chow mein, egg rolls, and orange soda. (I learned that they called soft drinks soda in California – and that my English was a foreign language here.)

243 South Lone Hill. My older brother and I shared a small room whose only furniture was two new beds with mattresses still wrapped in plastic and a beat-up radio my brother found next to a dumpster. Because the radio’s dials were missing, we used a screwdriver to change the station. I was overjoyed when I discovered 102.7 KIIS FM – it played the exact same music as my favorite station in Manila.

10th-12th century. Chinese trading posts established along the coast of the Philippines.

A thousand years ago China added its yellow melody to my blood’s red fugue. (When I go to a Chinese restaurant, the waiters will sometimes address me in Chinese, though I don’t speak a word of it.)

15th century. Muslim missionaries reach the Philippines from Indonesia and Malaya.

My ancestors were Muslim before they were Christian, but they were motley heathens for thousands of years before they were either. Now I’m a pagan again. And tomorrow?

March 16, 1521. Magellan arrives in the Philippines, claims region for Spain.
April 27, 1521. Magellan killed by Lapu-Lapu on Mactan Island.

Because Magellan stumbled into Samar (he christened the island Archipelago San Lazaro after the man Jesus raised from the dead) on March 16, 1521, I arrived in LA (El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula) on May 8, 1985. Because Magellan’s ships (sans Magellan) circumnavigated the globe, I am writing these words in English instead of Tagalog.

1565. King Philip II commissions Miguel Lopez de Legazpi to colonize the Philippines. Augustinian missionaries arrive with him, later followed by Franciscans, Dominicans and Recollects.

How can I forgive Catholicism for colonizing my penis?

Obsessed with inquisition, recollection, and confession, will my writing ever stop being religious?

1884. José Rizal starts writing Noli Me Tangere at the age of 23. His nationalist novel, smuggled into Manila in 1887, creates sensation.

I have loved to read ever since I discovered the library when I was seven years old, but I didn’t become a reader till I came to America, where my life suddenly stopped being a story. Was it the unnarratable shock of dislocation that inflamed my hunger for novels with their comforting beginnings, middles, and ends?

Thrown outside myself by my transcontinental displacement, I was abruptly shifted from first to third person, from speaking subject to silent object. He still hasn’t recovered from the trauma of this translation. (His masks multiplied.)

Splitting me, doubling me, exile made me a many-headed monster – a Cerberus, a Scylla, a Hydra; a Typhon hissing riddles with a hundred paradoxical tongues.

–To talk like an American, speak loudly, my father taught us.

Giving up Tagalog for English irrevocably forked my tongue. Now I only speak in ambiguities. (I will never speak English without a foreign accent.)

A writer is an impersonator who falsifies his memories to make them more real.

What wounds shall I reopen with my pencil this time?

May 1, 1898. Dewey’s fleet sinks antiquated Spanish Armada in Manila Bay.
December 10, 1898. The United States and Spain sign treaty of Paris, granting the United States sovereignty over the islands. McKinley calls U.S. policy in the Philippines “benevolent assimilation.”

They say they want you to assimilate, but they wish you wouldn’t.

December 1900. Conservative Filipinos establish Federalista party, advocating statehood for the Philippines.

I was born in the illegal fifty-first state. Every Filipino is born illegal – some more than others.

August 23, 1901. American teachers arrive aboard the U.S. transport Thomas.

The first thing America taught me – I’m not white. I didn’t really become Filipino until I left the Philippines. (Because I’m not white, everyone feels entitled to ask me – Where are you from?)

January 2, 1942. Japanese forces invade Manila.

America invaded me. I didn’t know how to defend myself.

July 4, 1946. The United States grants the Philippines independence.

Nostalgia is the wanderer’s shadow.

When my past was outlawed, I built a hideout in the future. (Who will grant my outlawed memories amnesty?)

The nomad’s declaration of independence – this passing moment is my only home.

March 3, 1970. Riot police in Manila stop thousands from marching on U.S. Embassy following “people’s protest march.”

There are 7,107 islands in the Philippines. There are ten million Filipinos in exile.

March 3, 1970. Born from the sea, another wandering rock drifts into the diasporic archipelago.

November 27, 1970. Assassination attempt on Pope John Paul VI upon his arrival in Manila for three-day visit.

I used to pretend I was sick on sweltering Sunday afternoons when the heat made it torture to wear hot itchy church clothes. Lying in my parents’ big bed with the electric fan on full blast, I listened for the sound of the car driving away before I turned the TV on to watch Star Trek. While the others broiled in church, I was Spock, flying through cool starry space, boldly going where no man had gone before.

I became an atheist in the summer of 1992. (With Spinoza, I flew through cool starry space.) I didn’t assassinate God – I just walked away. I didn’t look back.

September 22, 1972. Marcos declares martial law, imposes curfew, bans public demonstrations, closes newspapers and radio and television stations and arrests opposition politicians.

Marcos was elected president five years before I was born. He was still president twenty years later when we escaped from the Philippines – a sinking ship. I was only two when Marcos declared martial law. Unbeknownst to me, my still unborn political consciousness was arrested that day. I didn’t become aware of this abortion till thirty years later.

August 21, 1983. Aquino, cautioned by Imelda and Enrile against assassination plots, discounts warnings, returns to Manila and is shot to death at Manila airport. Alleged assassin immediately shot dead.

Until I return to Manila, how will I know how many deaths I’ve died since I came to America?

I used to eat rice three times a day. Now weeks can go by without a single grain of rice passing between my lips. Who knows how this has changed my soul?

I’m not the only one who suspects that American tap water is drawn from Lethe.

The first thing I’ll do when I become American is leave America.

February 22-25, 1986. People Power revolution overthrows the Marcos regime.

Exiled in an oblivious Southern California suburb, I miss the revolution in Manila. Years later I am stricken by a furious regret – history had been stolen from me.

February 26, 1986. Marcos and his family are flown to Hawaii aboard U.S. aircraft. Aquino government resolves to recover over $6 billion in assets Marcos gained illegally.

My family fled to California in 1985. $uddenly we were poor. I was utterly unprepared for the humiliations of poverty. (We were so poor my brothers and I qualified for free lunches at school. I was too ashamed to use my vouchers, so I bought a powdered donut for lunch everyday. I ate my donut quickly, the powdery sugar frosting my lips, dusting my fingers, snowing on my shirt.)

June 12, 1991. After being dormant for five hundred years, Mount Pinatubo erupts on Independence Day, spewing tons of magma, ash, gas, and pumice. The volcano’s eruption forces the evacuation and closing of the U.S. military base at Subic bay.

And the Philippines erupted, spewing ten million Filipinos all over the earth. I found myself an ocean away – 7,000 miles from my tropic memories, lifetimes from the sounds and smells of my exploded childhood. Now I’m writing my way back to the volcano’s mouth so I can shout my unanswerable red questions into its blazing belly.

January 20, 2001. President Joseph Estrada, who has acted in over one hundred films, resigns after impeachment trial.

Is America a dream or a movie? Sometimes I’m seized by the strange feeling that I’m just acting – but I’ve forgotten my lines! Do I have any lines?

Is history a nightmare (it haunts those who struggle to escape it) or a lost dream home? How can I resist the twin seductions of utopia and nostalgia? Wake up! Rise to your homeless life. History is in the making. Act.

Quotations (italicized sections) are from the In Our Image by Stanley Karnow.

<< The Tantalized Tantalist
>> Polymorphous Travesties

Turn 10: Becoming Is Becoming

2006-05-02T08:19:00.000-07:00

A History of Nomadism
Polymorphous Travesties
Orchid Machinations

The Tantalized Tantalist

2006-05-01T07:46:00.000-07:00

Always ravenous, hounded by a craving for the ethereal and imperceptible, I should have been a plant, sustained by light and air.

I’m so hungry I could eat Sodom and Gomorrah.

Every artist worth his pepper is a hunger artist. (It may look like I’m starving myself to death – but I’m really starving myself to life.)

Inside my bellying hunger for emptiness churns a thirst – oceanic – for infinity.

<< The Geometry of Joy
>> Turn 10: Becoming Is Becoming

The Geometry of Joy

2006-04-30T07:13:00.000-07:00

For Baruch Spinoza

I am the triangular ecstasy of construction and destruction, the spiraling making and unmaking, masking and unmasking of worlds within worlds within worlds. I am the masterless convergence of discordant fractions into accidental harmonies, the cosmic composition of random atoms into unaccountable flashes of consciousness. (What have mere good and evil ever made?) I am the decaying – gradual or sudden – of empires of seeing and meaning, of feeble and magnificent stories of reality taken for reality. Making and unmaking, I’m a child again, dissecting dolls, clocks, books, erecting ambitious towers out of sand, cards, words. Now and again I stop playing so I can just listen to the polyphonic hum of fuguing universes constantly forming and unforming, singing within me, without me.

For strife will never arise on account of what is not loved, nor will there be sadness if it perishes, nor envy if it is possessed by another, nor fear, nor hatred – in a word, no disturbances of the mind. Indeed, all these happen only in the love of those things that can perish . . .

I’m striving to love the permanent impermanence of things; the hardest part is letting myself go.

I’ll never understand the convoluted motions of my mind – but trying to, I’m happy.

And stones speak too of stoniness; and flowers, of flowerness (that is, of bees moths butterflies beetles wind rain earth sun and of countless other things only flowers know of – and jasmine and irises know different things). And I, what do I speak of? Emptiness.

Life is fatal – each passing moment a matter of life and death.

All the truths I try to sit on are always being pulled out from under me, and my butt comes crashing down. But my ass has wised up – now it just sits right here on the ground.

Mind spreads. Can you smell it?

To discover a few small patterns scattered in reality like twinkling islands in a dusky sea. O blazing archipelagos of time!

The commonest deathwish (because it doesn’t seem like one) is the wish for a life with no suffering.

I also have an appetite for evil.

Whenever, then, anything in nature seems to us ridiculous, absurd, or evil, it is because we have but a partial knowledge of things . . . and because we want everything to be arranged according to the dictate of our own reason.

Save me from those who know too much (especially when they have God on their side). Save me from myself when I think I know what’s what.

At the crossroads, both free man and slave agree – I don’t have a choice.

Knowing the savagery of my own passions, how can I not fear you?

The greatest labor of consciousness is to give birth to unconsciousness, to push plodding thought out of its cave so it can emerge as light-footed intuition.

In life, the reward comes first – life itself. To live up to this incalculable gift, one must be as prodigal as life itself – and as unpredictable.

The storms of the mind are also beautiful to those who dance in the rain.

I have labored carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions; and to this end I have looked upon passions, such as love, hatred, anger, envy, ambition, pity, and the other perturbations of the mind, not in the light of vices of human nature, but as properties, just as pertinent to it, as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like to the nature of the atmosphere, which phenomena, though inconvenient, are yet necessary . . . , and the mind has just as much pleasure in viewing them aright, as in knowing such things as flatter the senses.

<< Wishes Circle
>> The Tantalized Tantalist

Wishes Circle

2006-04-29T15:54:00.000-07:00

March 3, 2002

Birthday. More years more
Selves more yearnings – Make a wish
You are what you want

Spring

Hair, come back to me
Why did you leave me forlorn?
Pity my cold head

Sixpack, bubblebutt,
Bulging biceps, major pecs
No-sweat hot bod – woof!

Spellblinding beauty
To see me is to love me
Dumbstruck strangers swoon

Mandarin, Spanish,
Arabic, . . . Cunning linguist
Long Don Juan tongue (Lick!)

Lightning lovemagic
Blinding eyebeams unwinding
Binding you to me

Big thick cocky dick
Swaggering swellhead cyclops
Everrready fuck

No AIDS, hep, herpes
No shame, no useless guilt. Just
Fierce fearless fucking

Spainsounds, Ceylon scents
Senses roaming, unhoming
Transmigrating eye

Summer

Manly men Fridays
Handsome hand-and-foot houseboys
Service with a smile

Babel’s library
Private Alexandria
Bibliomaniac’s dream

Money enough to
Forget about it. How much?
Millions? None at all?

Samuraisword mind
Quick slick olympic body
Well-oiled Übermensch

Iron will power
Shield from snake-toothed temptations
Sword for Gordian knots

Just do it! (Do I
dare disturb the universe?)
No fear! (I grow old . . . )

A room of my own (A womb of my own)
Skylight, bay windows, French doors
Brilliant sunborn books

Stroll in a bookstore
See my book shelved with the Rs
Romance? Fantasy?

That queer thing genius
(Not too queer, unrecognized)
Seminal strangeness

Readers gushing thanks
You’ve changed my life, sign here please
Tearstained fan mail, gifts

Fall

Unknowing teachers
Wise innocence rewarded
Free learning for life

Brown rice and roses
Creative revolution
Free work free love free

Winter

To become no-one
To shed myself. Naked life
Stark glad affections

Metempsychosis
Thrilling lives fly through me – Whoosh!
I’m open. Come in.

Open sesame!
Wanderer’s magic passport
Bold border crosser

Chanceforked paths – which way?
Accidental knight errant
Random Quixote

Moment to moment
Breath by breath: here-ing, k/now-ing
Life inspiring life

Stop. Seehear what’s here
Miracle reality
Add, subtract nothing

Life, overwhelm me,
Overthrow me, strike me dumb
Inspire my stunned tongue

To make and break and
Make anew, always folding
Unfolding all ways

I want out – to fly,
Escape my wishes’ circle
Fearhope's sad passion

Yes is becoming
Embrace yes impermanence
Becoming is yes

March 3, 2002

Thirty-two candles
Wishes blown away by life
Light! Life is here now.

<< Contiguous Passions
>> The Geometry of Joy

Turn 9: The Monkey's Fist

2006-04-28T15:52:00.000-07:00

Wishes Circle
The Geometry of Joy
The Tantalized Tantalist

Contiguous Passions

2006-04-27T15:43:00.000-07:00

Though the sharp edges and protrusions of other bodies cut and jab me, and their odorous exhalations disturb my dreams, I love to be in the middle of excited bodies excitedly bumping into each other. Now and then something hits me, and suddenly I’m in love. I believe I’m in love with x or y, but I’m mistaken – what I’m enamored with is this passionate confusion of colliding bodies, this seething Brownian romance.

To transmit my body’s pulses, rippling outward then returning, reflected by other eccentric bodies adding their vibrations to mine – this is all I ask from art – a little communication, a few queer intersections.

It’s hard to resist the temptation to just watch, to just listen, to become pure contemplation of the coming and going of things, of the musical engagement and disengagement of bodies in restless motion. The vegetable part of me wants only to observe the enchanting syndromes of pollination – the dance of bees and flowers, the tragicomic theater of desire – but a flickering image of a winged fugitive darts through my mind, and my fascinated eye grows feet to run after a dream.

<< Love's Leap
>> Turn 9: The Monkey's Fist

Love's Leap

2006-04-26T15:04:00.000-07:00

For Sappho

sweet mother I cannot work the loom
I am broken with longing for a boy by slender Aphrodite

I am a lesbian, undone by love and – unreformable addict of passion – continually re-formed by it. It is love that ages me, and hurls me back to my youth; that turns me into a spider, a bat, a hollow tortoise shell, a two-headed monster, a crushed hyacinth, a grove of oaks quivering in a storm; it is love that scatters me like dandelion seeds, and gathers me like a whirlpool sucking in flotsam and jetsam on the sea; love that strikes me dumb and makes me babble in strange tongues; that gives me life and kills me, only to resurrect me with a lightning memory; it is love that twists paradoxes true and jigsaws truths into crazy puzzles. If you love me beyond understanding, it’s because I’m broken. (Like you, the only way I know to love is to love you to pieces.)

Black prince, you’ve turned me into a nocturnal animal feeding greedily on dark love.

An ardent atomist, he wanted to analyze his mind till he arrived at an indivisible thought – one that wasn’t ambiguous or paradoxical or a crazy mixture of jumbled animals. But his impassioned mind just kept on splitting, splitting, disturbing Democritus in his grave.

Stretching toward the horizon you’ve disappeared beyond, my thirsty tongue can almost taste love's salt blue line, loss's infinity fringing sky and sea.

As for me, love has shaken my wits as a downrushing whirlwind falling upon the oaks.

Like a gust breaking Narcissus’s image on a placid lake, my love’s untoward violence has shattered my reflection in your once receiving eyes.

O shell – moveable home – sonorous relic of a lover whose departed heart’s echoes still resound, how can I replay the layered melodies of your spiraling affections – you who have harbored who knows how many lives?

Before you run away from me, I’ll run away from you. (Even my shadow has deserted me.)

A disconsolate spider, I spin filaments that lead nowhere or end suddenly in mid-air; I wind a strand (my mind unravels) round and round an empty space, weaving an echoing chrysalis. Struck dumb by longing, I spell out desolate words with a gossamer thread – invisible messages to the void.

May you forget your suffering, yourself for a night. Go – ride a stranger’s dream.

He buried himself at the golden intersection of water, earth, light, and air. Perhaps a thousands years later another lover, hearing a plangent throbbing, will dig up what’s left of him – a fatal rhythm deranging the heart.

What are these arrows flying into my eyes?

Far out of my reach they ripen, elusive words.

Without warning, his love’s skull exploded into flower – carnations spilling out of eye sockets, nose hole, and ear canals; forget-me-nots blooming from an astonished mouth.

Every time he closed his eyes, vampire memories clamored to get in. Tired of fighting them off, he opened his mouth and invited their dark flutterings in.

O dream with black wings, may you come when sleep brings forgetfulness . . . Sweet is the god. Terribly you do afflict me.

<< The Anatomy of Love
>> Contiguous Passions

The Anatomy of Love

2006-04-25T10:56:00.000-07:00

The Integumentary System

The integumentary system is composed of the integument (the skin) and its derivatives, including the hairs, sweat glands, and oil glands. As the largest body organ, the skin provides protection to the body and performs other functions, . . . [including] excretion, sensation, and immunity to disease.

Heading toward each other on strangers’ discrete trajectories, we collide without touching, the gleams of our gazes singling us out for each other in the anonymous crowd. Our paths diverge – our ephemeral conjunction is already fading into oblivion. But three steps later, we both turn our heads to look – our searching gazes click, desire hooking into desire almost audibly. I stop, turn around, start following you. You look back from time to time as we go deeper into the maze (suddenly the crowded plaza has become a labyrinth for two). Every time you look back, your eyes unwind more of their magic thread. Mesmerized, a charmed snake, I follow this luminous filament. Our spontaneous dance – the choreography of enthrallment – unfolds like an immemorial ritual. Slowing down, you walk off the pavement, sit on a grassy plot and take an apple from your pocket, all the while withholding your saving gaze from me standing just an apple’s throw away – I’m adrift; I’ve lost my thread. But with a flash of your reviving glance, I’m back on track again.

The first word shatters the Gorgonspell – our silent weaving of look and counterlook into a shimmering, mirroring fantasy is broken. Our eyes’ invisible tendrils, twining gaze to gaze, snap – the untimely exchange of words (in the beginning the first words are always an outrage) has turned us back into wary strangers.

The Circulatory System

The circulatory system of the human body is actually two systems: a pulmonary circulation extending from the heart to the lungs and back to the heart; and a systemic circulation, extending from the heart to all other parts of the body then back to the heart.

It was all over before it could even start. An unexpected email reignites my dormant desire. To have two beginnings – sublime gratuitousness! If asked to choose a moment in love’s rise and fall that I would relive eternally in some amorous heaven, I would pick the beginning with its promise of indefinite satisfactions; the beginning when everything is liquid, polymorphous – before desire has settled into too-familiar pleasures and sufferings, before the delights of anticipation have turned into the tortures of perpetual deferment; the beginning when the other’s strangeness draws one thrillingly to the brink of an unknown life. Your improbably overture has made me feel desirable again; in other words, I exist again. For in those intervals when you don’t want me, I all but vanish, impotent to do anything but wait facelessly for you to desire me back into being.

The Digestive System

The function of the digestive system is to break down large food particles into smaller ones that can pass across the membranes of cells during absorption. Two main groups of organs make up the digestive system. The first group are the organs of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract . . . This is a tube extending from mouth to anus and opened to the exterior at each end. The second group are accessory structures such as the teeth, tongue, and glands lining the GI tract. They aid the mechanical and chemical breakdown of foods.

Whenever my twittering tongue touches your ear, you become a growling unheard-of creature. (Astonished biologists will have to revise their taxonomies, bestiaries will require appendices.) I want to hear your unearthly cries again, those calls from a strange country whose eerie resonances transport me. Carrying you along in my mouth, I voyage to invisible cities where streets change their places every time your uncanny throat’s bell rings.

The Respiratory System

The respiratory system consists of passageways that filter incoming air and carry it into the lungs. Here in the microscopic air sacs, exchanges take place between the external atmospheric air and the internal body environment.

You only fall in love with phantoms. Should I become a ghost for you?

The Excretory System

Excretion involves the elimination of the waste products of cellular metabolism. It also encompasses the removal of surplus materials from the body tissues, and it includes regulation of the water and salt content of the body.

You haven’t asked me why I’m leaving, but I have to tell myself the reasons why:

You want too much from me.
You want too little from me.
You kiss like a corpse.
I’m tired of making love to my own echo.
It doesn’t make me suffer anymore to imagine the time when you won’t make me suffer anymore.
Talking to you is like eating broken glass.
Mired in the miasma of my frustrated desire, I stink – people can smell my noxious anguish from miles away. Nobody wants to come within sniffing distance of me – least of all you.
Neither of us draws pleasure from my suffering anymore.
Since you never do anything, I’ve been forced to play both parts in this farce of love. Why did it take me so long to realize you’re totally dispensable? I can play this game without you.

Quotations (italicized sections) are from the Anatomy Coloring Workbook by I. Edward Alcamo, Random House, 1997.

<< Polyphonic Clay
>> Love's Leap

Turn 8: Anomalous Loves

2006-04-24T10:55:00.000-07:00

The Anatomy of Love
Love's Leap
Contiguous Passions

Polyphonic Clay

2006-04-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

Not at the door but at the window. Sitting not going, hovering over an airy threshold, an I-less eye looks out . . . looks in.

Ladders to a solar eye, staves to a scimitar moon slicing the nightsky open, spilling stars.

Sunflower soliloquies, dancing daisies, a cactus chorus in a vegetable comedy . . . Lost in succulent dreams, I wake up a riotous garden, my fluttering eyes bursting into flower.

Rocking at the edge, winding winding to spring out of myself into the faceless space beyond.

To stumble upon an undiscovered planet, one must still know which way is up.

Crossing a threshold, the current diverges – tomorrow explodes in a prismatic spray. Crossing back, the future eddies into a kaleidoscoping past. Cascading from threshold to threshold, he flowed on, flowered on – a chromatic river in full bloom.

<< Wave-rings
>> Turn 8: Anomalous Loves

Wave-rings

2006-04-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

For Virginia Woolf

When a body dies the ghost it is said sometimes haunts us. But when a book is read, and shut up and put away, what happens to that ghost? Some haunt us almost whole; poems for the most part; but the greater number fade, and not merely fade, but as they are blown about the corridors of the brain change, and mingle with other shapes, so that after some years they are scarcely recognizable.

I am a pulsing between. I am a wave between the sea and the moon. I am a ghost between the quick and the dead. I am a memory between the past and the future. I am a blank page between a writer and life’s unstoppable stream. I am a question between the unknown and the unknowable. I am a silence between lovers. I am a lighthouse between the lost and the found. I am an interlude between the acts. I am an eye between the darkness within and the darkness without. I am a metaphor between a rose and a rose. I am a tensile web between fatetwined strangers. I am a suspense between an ascent and a plunge. I am a vibration between a word and a thing. I am an androgyne, a quivering transition, a luminous passage, a flicker passing through the night.

I used to think words were rungs on a ladder – sometimes ascending to airy summits, sometimes descending underground, but always promising to show me something that will change everything. Now I know words don’t rise or fall – they spread like wild grass on a plain. Lying on this sprawling greenness, I contemplate the silent sky above and feel the earth beneath me spinning through spiraling time.

He only wrote letters to strangers and the dead. He forgot about his missives – queer love letters – as soon as he consigned them to the waves. But now and then, out of the blue, mysterious replies would appear in his mailbox.

A blank piece of paper – whiteness in motion, mirror of emotions.
After darkening the page with words, he was always seized by an impulse to wipe out everything he’d just written – to return to the moving radiance of the empty page.

Everything that dies comes to life again – but not right away. The dead lay low before they return, giving the survivors time to forget. Time passes . . . Springing back to life, the dead take the living by surprise.

His ghosts were mixed affairs – fusions of the ordinary and the miraculous spouting sphinxy riddles; waves of mixed-up pasts and futures disturbing his unsteady present; composites of the living and the dead wandering in his clear-obscure dreams; compounds of the remembered and the forgotten mysteriously moving his muscles, his mesmerized brain. A plaything of time, a confused admixture of repetition and difference, he was haunted by his own mind’s monstrous progeny.

Time too is a ghost. (Time two is a ghost.)

To atomize every solid thing – not like a conquistador aroused by senseless destruction, or like a solemn scientist in search of cold indestructible truths, but like a penetrating pulse of light momentarily scattering the darkness.

He was a meteorologist of mystery, an alchemist of ethereal paradoxes. In his underground laboratory, he experimented with atmospheric enigmas – capturing whispered intimations in the air, concocting haunted mists in flasks and tubes, blending the breaths of rare plants and animals, mingling the dreams of extreme personalities – all to make an atmosphere of mystery to surprise strangers into fleeting moments of sublime cohesion.

Something had happened. Something so trifling in single instances that no mathematical instrument could register the vibration; yet in its fulness rather formidable and, in its common appeal, emotional, for in all the tea rooms and restaurants men and women who were strangers looked at each other as though they were not strangers.

A sympathetic logophile, he felt a characteristic vibration for each word - and for each space or silence between words - like strings of different lengths, tautnesses, and compositions.

Versatile filaments, wordstrings can be coiled like snakes or springs; knotted or unraveled; woven into airy webs to catch prismatic dew, into subtle nets for capturing dreamfish, dreambirds, into a Penelopean brocade made and unmade in anticipation of a perpetually deferred homecoming.

He only wrote with mechanical pencils because they were always sharp – the better to make holes and openings, tears and apertures with. Every time he picked up a pencil he was seized by visions of its black point pricking an eyeball. What savage image was trying to penetrate his startled eyes? What wild phantasm struggling to escape the dark confines of his skull?

Ecstasy has its dangers, bliss its risks.

But unless something restrained his heart it would burst, fly asunder into pieces.

<< Sounding the Silence
>> Polyphonic Clay

Sounding the Silence

2006-04-16T10:39:00.000-07:00

Silenzio

Pli selon Pli, Pierre Boulez

Sliding down the slope of night, your music’s chromatic delirium uncrumples the crumpled day
crinkling in my bone-tired skull. Skull, tired bone, uncrumples in crinkling chromatic music,
nightslope downsliding. The rippled shimmerings of lacewinged waves wash over me,
revirginized by violins. Violins revirginized by waves, lacewinged ripples shimmering.
Enfolded in polyphonic pleats – sonorous origami – I fold into a black swan in love with water.
Waterlove into polyphony. Dive in! My nocturnal wings unfurl into a submarine gamelan –
seagarden of echoing gongs, aquatic carnival of furious xylophones. Furious carnival,
xylophones unfurl aquatic gongs – submarine nocturnal, seagarden gamelan. Rising
from sonic depths, windy trumpets hurl me into the night’s purple mouth where I explode
into a burning tongue luminous with questions. Rising questions explode
into luminous tongueburning trumpets.
Where?

Rumore

Silenzio

Keyboard Sonatas, Domenico Scarlatti

A virtuoso improviser, Scarlatti composed hundreds of keyboard sonatas on the fly, none of which he committed to paper until he was 53. Over the next twenty years, he transcribed 555 sonatas.

555 ways of looking at a harpsichord
555 digital diversions, nimble finger dances
555 kaleidoscopic variations on a theme
555 indefatigable beginnings
555 yes yes yeses
555 sonorous folds in a shimmering fan
555 time machines thrilling through time
555 love letters to a world that will go on without me
555 stained-glass windows of a baroque cathedral
555 unanswered questions
555 gifts to future strangers
555 twittering machines
555 duets of life and death
555 gems of crystallized time
555 maps of a mobile mind
555 odes to joy
555 moving sculptures in sound
555 essays on the unsayable
555 ethereal epitaphs on tombstones of air
555 virtual rendezvous for separated lovers
555 masks for a dancing Proteus
555 mirrors of emotions in motion
555 stars in a singing constellation
555 involuntary memories from an Italian childhood
555 miniature worlds revolving round each other in infinite time
555 major and minor utopias
555 avatars of a transmigrating bliss
555 rungs in a ladder to silence
555 lucid dreams of an open-eyed dreamer
555 invisible cities of the mind
555 children to take care of me in my old age
555 fluent homages to water
555 radiant hymns to the sun
555 just-because’s
555 voyages through oceans of sound in search of undiscovered archipelagos
555 portraits of possible and impossible selves
555 signatures accepting life’s inscrutable terms
555 imaginary arrows shot into a future beyond imagining

Rumore

<< Singing in Tongues
>> Wave-rings

Turn 7: The Feeling of Living

2006-04-16T09:38:00.000-07:00

Sounding the Silence
Wave-rings
Polyphonic Clay

Singing in Tongues

2006-04-15T09:22:00.000-07:00

Hinipo ng aking dila ang daigdig.

I dream of a language made of sand, a shifting poetry with verses sculpted by the wind and stanzas burnished by the sun.

I touch the world with my tongue.

I dream of a language that speaks to the dead, resurrecting dialogues of buried tongues.

Toco el mundo con la lengua.

I dream of a language composed of silences rather than sounds – if you want to hear me, come closer, closer . . .

Ich berühre die Welt mit meiner Zunge.

I dream of a fierce fiery language spitting fire from tongue to burning tongue.

Je touch le monde avec la langue.

I dream of a tactile language passing sensuous impressions and expressions from body pressed to body, skin kissing skin.

Watashi no shita de sekai o sawaru.

I dream of a nameless language where there is no verb to be, where wild becoming touches wild becoming in an untameable universe.

<< Transmigrant Translations
>> Turn 7: The Feeling of Living

Transmigrant Translations

2006-04-14T08:59:00.000-07:00

For Friedrich Hölderlin

I am a blue surge in a sea of twists and turns, a tricky green divergence trying to outrun desire’s disasters. I know I won’t escape life’s fatal lawlessness, but maybe I can build a little boat to float on my mind’s capricious waves. Come with me – let’s roam this mazy sea in search of singing islands, enchanted archipelagos where we can lose ourselves and time.

a burning wound drives them about . . .

Unwind your wound,
Unbind your destiny.

Here at the lonely crossroads where ghosts and witches dance,
I stretch the blind tendrils of my pain into singing windstrummed strings.

I love the kiss of contrary tongues, the swoon of ardent paradox.

I’d rather stammer my funny nonsense
Than mouth your dumb transcendence.

The world is a maze in the mind,
The mind a maze in the world,
The body – amazed – a blazing passage between evershifting labyrinths.

Blinded by life, we withdraw into dim caves – futile retreats from the sun’s piercing radiance.

Your fiery touch unlooses seas of memories – Sodom burning rises from the waters. Do you remember when the angels came . . . ?

I open
my mouth to say
nothing –
I’m just an echo
chamber amplifying the earth
’s whispers.

What is the price of joy?
Suffering does not pay
for past pleasure nor for future bliss.
Life is no accountant,
Death is not a bank.

An artist of destruction, he broke and broke and broke, till utterly broken, his rubble spoke.

The cunning wanderer stops and rests in rushing time’s white interludes where straight ways disclose their deviousness and unforked paths bifurcate.

A stranger came to me in my sleep and killed me – somewhere someone woke up.

I’m searching for a great white wave to wash over the motherless moments of this meandering life.

And the bats – black wings questioning the dark – told him what they heard.

all around the summits of Time are heaped,
around clearness,
and the most loved live near, growing faint on
most separate mountains,
give us innocent water, then,
O give us pinions, most faithful in mind
to cross over and to return.

Yearning on sundered summits, how can we touch unless we fall? (How can we fall unless we touch?)

O lambent archipelago! Your wave-ringed radiance beckons my dark explorers. Will my black ship reach your fleeting islands before they sink back in the inky waters?

Ravish me,
Unravel me,
Warp my woofs,
Unwind my knowing into innocence.

Swallow the light – it blinks, blacks out.
Swallow the dark – your guts glow eyes.

The event of writing is nothing but the passionate impossibility of capturing the event.

–You must finish what you’ve started, masters and slaves agree.
–Once you’ve said A, you must say B, teachers pronounce. (You must say A!)
One by one, I by I, his certainties fell away. Utterly, inutterably naked, his body suddenly understood the meaning of with. For the first time in his singular life (the empty overflowing world whirled round him) he did not feel alone.

Let me never cease
Diverging from myself.

The lines of life are various; they diverge and cease
Like footpaths and the mountains’ utmost ends

<< Word of Mouth
>> Singing in Tongues

Word of Mouth

2006-04-13T10:43:00.000-07:00

How can words – flimsy phantasms – traverse the tortuous emptiness between our estranged solitudes?

Why speak? (Silence tempts me.)

Do I use words or do they use me?

Twenty-One Things to Do with Words

1. Greet and take leave

Greetings and Leavings

I cannot list everything I’ve left, everything that’s left me. When each moment is a short hello shading into a long goodbye, every utterance is a leavetaking.

2. Identify objects

Things I Touch Everyday

A bed.
Glasses.
Shoes.
Underwear, a t-shirt, pants.
Water.
Vitamins.
A refrigerator.
Food.
Spoons, forks, cups, plates.
A toothbrush, toothpaste.
Tea, a tea kettle, a stove.
A calendar.
A penis.
Pencil and paper.
A chair, a table.
A timer.
Books, a dictionary, a thesaurus.
CDs, a stereo.
A computer.
A phone.
A microwave.
Keys and doors.
Toilet paper, a toilet, a tabo.
Soap, shampoo, towels, cotton swabs, tissue.
Lip balm.
Floss.
A pillow, a blanket.

Our habits are speechless. They command our bodies without words.

3. Identify persons

People I’ve Been Told I Resemble

My father, my mother, my brothers (except my brother with the Chinese eyes), a frog, Boy George, Andrew McCarthy, the Dalai Lama, my lover, . . . Who else will I look like in coming years? And after death, what faces?

4. Ask about a newcomer

The Pleasures of a Newcomer

You crackle with a stranger’s electric aura, magnetizing – positively or negatively – the desire of others.
Your senses are magnificently, magnifyingly receptive.
You become an amateur anthropologist, fascinated by the queer customs of the natives; even your own habits start to seem peculiar.
Your past melts . . . Who will you be this time?

5. Count

Ten Most Common Words in Mazemapping (excluding articles)

I - 809 occurrences
to - 792
of - 791
and - 687
my - 547
in - 520
is - 317
was - 269
it - 258
me - 246

Ten Most Common Nouns

time
life
love
father
mother
tongue
words
things
writing
years

Ten Most Common Verbs (excluding auxiliary verbs)

know
remember
want
love
go
write
make
say
desire
long

Numerology

3, 1/1000, √2, C, Π, dx, ≠ , ∅, . . .

I am not one.
I am a fraction.
I am irrational.
I am imaginary.
I am a circle.
I am imperceptible, incommensurable, empty . . . I ≠ I

6. Describe objects

Delightful Things

Purple, blue, green, black, red Clairefontaine Mosai notebooks.
Hand-knit cotton scarves.
Wide-open windows on summer days.
Long rambling letters full of little intimacies.
Things that look like one thing from afar but turn out to be something entirely different when you get up close.
Red things.
Velvet.
Clean bare feet.
Flowers whose names I don’t know. (Perhaps I’ll learn them someday, though I’m not sure I want to.)
Teapots.
Pencils that feel just so in my hand.
Scratch-n-sniff stickers (even the pig ones!).
Comfortable chairs where one can read for hours.
Promiscuous lists.

(What Sei Shonagon said to Lady Murasaki
Lady Murasaki: Life is not a list.
Sei Shonagon: Even less is it a story.)

7. Describe food

Sweet Things

Fuyu persimmons in November and December (and then waiting for ten months to taste them again).
Crème brûlée with a burnt sugar glaze that cracks with little taps of my spoon.
Vietnamese coffee sweetened with condensed milk.
Atis, lansones, mangosteen, manga, rambutan, bayabas, kalamansi, langka, alatiris, santol, chico, guyabano, . . . the fruits of my tropical childhood.
Jiffy corn pancakes (made with lard!).
Egg custard tarts and sesame seed balls at dim sum.
Kozy Shack rice pudding while watching television.
Super dark chocolate (at least 70% cacao).
Tapioca pearls – smooth and slippery on the tongue – in warm coconut milk.
Halo-halo, barquillos, pastillas de leche, turrones de casuy, ube halaya, yema, . . . memory’s irretrievable sweets.

8. Give commands and instructions

How to Obey

What I learned in school: How to obey.

I’m ashamed to admit, even now I sometimes wish I had a master – a benevolent one of course, but a master nonetheless, one who’ll relieve me of the anxiety of desiring by telling me exactly what I want. (Better yet, he knows what I want before I do.)

9. Talk about yourself

Unspeakable Things

Being TNT.
Herpes.
Viagra.
Baldness.
Becoming gay (only with my family, above all my mother, though she clearly knows that of which we do not speak).
Anything I fear might disturb the ideal image I wish you had of me.

10. Recount memories

Forgotten Things, Unforgettable Things

Every memoir is a pale shadow of its silent double, comprising the forgotten that cannot speak and the traumatically unforgettable that won’t.

11. Introduce members of the family

Things My Family Taught Me

From my father I learned how to buy a car, how to tip a stripper, how to escape.
From my mother I learned how to write my name, how to love music, how to suffer in silence.
From my sharp sister I learned how to eat heartily, how to defend myself from germs, how to use intelligence as a weapon.
From my angry brother I learned how to ride a bike, how to hide porn, how not to be angry.
From my ultra-religious sister I learned how to be undogmatic about my atheism.
From my quiet brother I learned how to keep on asking why.
From my confident brother I learned how to catch a wave.

Though in many ways they taught me to be me, I cannot identify most things I learned from my family – I know them without knowing them. (I don’t know myself. I don’t want to know.)

12. Claim ownership

Things I Own

Books.
Music.
Clothes.
Scribblings.

Things I Don’t Own

My thoughts, feelings, and perceptions – transient souls.
My face.
My fears and desires, shrinking and swelling my mind.
My vagrant penis.
My impossible imaginary self.
My fickle fortuitous beliefs and unbeliefs twisting and turning me this way and that.
My father’s lusts, my mother’s wishes, staking their conflicting claims on me.
My genes, voluminous book of the dead.
My books, music, clothes, scribblings.
My shit.
My epiphanies, involuntary memories, and moments of being – fortuitous flashes of sublime impersonality.
My stupidity, obliviousness, and zomnambulism.
My spontaneous lies, ramifying out of control.
Words, impetuous demons, imperiously possessing my defenseless tongue.
The living and the dead making themselves at home in me.
Time, loopy time, fatally spiraling me in and out of myself.
.
.
.

13. Express likes and dislikes

Pleasing Activities

Reading “women’s” and “young adult” novels when I’m feeling sentimental.
Swimming and watching half-naked men swimming, and then afterwards seeing them naked in the showers.
Making up names for the anonymous flowers I come across (roses and sunflowers are about the only ones I know by name).
Going to gay bars thick with men in shadows.
Tongue-kissing a handsome man.
Gossiping about people I really like or dislike.
Chewing chewy pig’s ears marinated in garlic, vinegar, and soy sauce.
Writing in a new Clairefontaine notebook. (O brave new world!)
Dreaming of Zanzibar – the breezy beaches, the spicy food.
As a child, overhearing guffawing grownups telling what Filipinos call “green jokes” (they believed I was still too young to understand).
Receiving a long slow blowjob that brings one to the edge again and again.
Pronouncing the soothing final m in “mantram.”
Smelling peeled persimmons, reminiscent of semen and swimming pools.
Stroking mine or – even better – someone else’s stubbly just-shaved head.
Stoking the suspenseful feeling – what agony, what ecstatic disaster is coming? – of being in love.
Learning funky new hip-hop steps.
Happening on an open-sesame question that lets me into you.
Getting so turned on that my hardon is pointing up to my chin.
Doing front handsprings on a trampoline.
Overhearing foreigners speaking their language in a café or some other public place (they think nobody knows what they’re saying) and understanding some of the words.
Searching for something important and stumbling into some delightful thing that makes one forget what one was looking for in the first place.
Watching weepy movies.
Going to the farmers’ market every Saturday morning and watching the kumquats turn to persimmons, cherries, nectarines, blueberries, plums, . . . as the seasons turn.
Making a list of pleasing activities – one feels one could go on forever.
Being blown hither and thither by desire’s vagrant whims.

Annoying Activities (and Passivities)

Sharing a restaurant table with fussy eaters.
Trying to write when one is horny to distraction.
Dancing to tedious music at a club when one is dead tired but one’s companions are still bouncing with energy (what drugs are they taking?).
Grading papers.
Having to wait when one can’t wait.
Getting a crick in the neck (one has to turn one’s whole torso just to look left or right) from sleeping badly.
Discovering strange bumps on one's body (especially on one's penis).
Going to an STD clinic just because one is feeling paranoid.
Cruising men who pretend not to notice you.
Attending a party where one doesn’t know anyone, but everyone else seems to know each other.
Playing a game one has no chance of winning.
In a gay.com chat room – fishing for hours without hooking a trick.
Eating leftovers from a delicious meal – they always look worse than leftovers from an ordinary meal.
Seeing pee stains on white briefs.
Looking for a job.
Watching experimental films that torture time, making a few minutes feel like forever.
Listening to music one likes over and over again, and then not liking it anymore.
Being assailed by Catholic guilt and Filipino shame when one is just trying to have a good mindless fuck.
Pretending that ugly babies are adorable because their mothers are showing them off.
Waiting for a lover who knows he can make you wait.
Finding oneself performing habits that have long outlived their usefulness.
Seeing the better but doing the worse.
Wallowing in the disappointment of a frustrated expectation.
Wallowing in the disappointment of a fulfilled expectation.
Making a list of annoying activities – one feels one could go on forever.
Being blown hither and thither by desire’s vagrant whims.

14. Tell time

Ways to Feel Time

When you feel like peeing – don’t.
Smell yourself from time to time on a hot sweaty day (don’t wear deodorant).
Fast.
Go slow. Slower. Slower . . .
Interrupt one of your habits.
Memorize a sonnet.
Arrange to meet a lover who’s always late because he desires you far less than you desire him; show up early.
Sit with your boredom; resist trying to distract yourself.
Listen to Stravinsky with your eyes closed.
Just breathe.
Take a walk to nowhere in particular.
Get up in the middle of the night and read Proust when everyone is sleeping.
Plant herbs; use them in your cooking.
Cut yourself and watch your wound heal in its own time (you don’t have to cut yourself – an old wound will do).
Stay up past your bedtime till you get your “second wind.”
Wash dishes to wash dishes.
Give it away (you know what).
Translate haiku; if you don’t know Japanese, learn it.
Write a letter in long hand, then use snail mail.
Plot the seduction of someone “out of your league.”
Spread rumors and wait for them to boomerang.
Eat blueberries one by one till your tongue turns blue.
Go out; leave yourself at home.
Stop.

Clocks kill time. Kill your clocks!

15. Talk about past events

Reasons Not to Have a Past

I don’t want to drag a long heavy tale around.
I want to begin again, again, again . . . (In the beginning was a maze . . .)
I still don’t have enough tragic cunning to transform every It was into an I wanted it thus.
Every past is haunted, shrieking with ghosts.
The inconstant past makes a liar out of me.
My ancestor’s fatal obsessions keep fighting over me.
Each habit I’ve contracted adds another link to my chains.
Memories are nostalgic tyrants.
Besieging the present, the past cuts me off from myself.
The past is the tomb of the present – I don’t want to be buried alive.
Time goes faster and faster as it passes; before long it will run ahead without me.

16. Talk about the future

Pleasing Fantasies about the Future

I win the Nobel Prize twice – in literature and in peace – but decline both times for some noble reason.
An anonymous patron endows me with a generous annual stipend for life.
I inherit a beach house in Spain (never mind that I have no Spanish relatives).
All my students love me, especially the handsome ones.
When I’m 64 I’ll be living lustily with two (three, four, . . . !) lovers in a polyamorous household.
My looks become “distinguished” as I get older. (Idealistic young men are always falling in love with me. What a nuisance!)
Advances in genetics give me back a full head of hair.
Hindus turn out to be right. I am reincarnated into an astonishing series of unimaginable beings.

The future is a figment of the imagination. (Someday I’ll stop wishing, but not yet – let me dream a little longer.)

17. Talk about habitual activities

Habitual Things

Masturbating in the morning before I start writing, then using Kleenex to wipe the ejaculate off my belly and sniffing the semen-soaked tissue before I throw it in the trash.
Snacking on sweet or salty things while I’m writing.
Sleeping on the left side of the bed.
Writing with a pencil and an eraser. (I wonder if my eraser is my pencil – sometimes it feels as if my writing is composed entirely of canceled words, my work a worn-out palimpsest of scratches and erasures navigating perilously between silence and nonsense.)
Making a semblance of order outside me when I’m feeling chaotic within.
Ordering scrambled-egg-barbecue-pork over rice at the Chinese restaurant down the street to reward myself for some accomplishment.
Soaping myself twice in the shower (I also still shampoo my head twice even though I’ve been bald for seven years).
Craving Filipino food whenever I visit my family.
Reading the fat content off nutritional labels.
Whenever I’m feeling oppressed by my obligations – going online to hook up with strangers.
Hankering for sweets after a meal, no matter how full I am.
Using a kitchen timer to time my writing.
Finding out when a writer I admire wrote his or her first novel to reassure myself I still have time. (Virginia Woolf began writing The Voyage Out when she was 24 – she took nine years to finish it; Joyce was 32 when The Egoist started serializing Portrait; Proust began the Recherche when he was 38; Beckett was 32 when Murphy was published; Jean Rhys’s first novel came out when she was 38; Faulkner started writing Soldier’s Pay when he was 28; Henry Miller was 39 when he began working on Tropic of Cancer; Willa Cather was 36 when Alexander’s Bridge appeared; Edith Wharton published The Valley of Decision when she was 40; Paul Auster was 36 when Squeeze Play [out of print] came out; Sebald published The Emigrants in German when he was 49.) The funny thing is, I don’t even want to write novels.
Smelling my pinky after picking my ear.
Trying to pop my pimples when they’re not even “ripe.”
Shaving my head before I go out and want to look good.
Creating lists of things to do and crossing off each completed task with immense satisfaction.

Too much habit blinds the senses, deadens desire. A body without habits, however, is like quivering flesh without a skeleton or skin – it can’t stand up or hold itself together. Everybody needs habits to hold them up, to shield them from the ferocity of life. The most important question of ethics is – Which habits?

18. Describe something going on

What’s Happening

This . . .
           . . . and . . .
               . . . this this . . .
                     . . . and this too . . .

19. State existence

Strange Books (If they didn’t exist, somebody would have to invent them.)

The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.
Spinoza’s Ethics.
The 120 Days of Sodom.
Tender Buttons.
Une Semaine de Bonté.
Finnegans Wake.
Exercises in Style.
Life A User’s Manual.
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.
The next book I’m going to write.

20. Express ability

What Can a Body Do?

It can touch.
It can love.
It can break.
It can kiss.
It can taste.
It can blow.
It can fuck.
It can burn
It can freeze.
It can die.
It can sleep.
It can leap.
It can dream.
It can try.
It can wake up.
It can sing.
It can dance.
It can play.
It can imitate.
It can repeat.
It can excrete.
It can steal.
It can feel.
It can laugh.
It can cry.
It can laugh and cry.
It can see.
It can remember.
It can forget.
It can imagine.
It can doubt.
It can think.
It can say.
It can lie.
It can write.
It can do.
It can wait.
It can sneeze.
It can throw.
It can smell.
It can eat.
It can want.
It can point.
It can search.
It can come.
It can go.
It can run.
It can stop.
It can change.
It can give.
It can make.

Touching and changing, loving and giving, breaking and making, my body is becoming becoming.

21. Express obligations or responsibilities

Things to Do Today

Live, just live.

I touch the world with words, phantom fingers of my mind. (With my tongue I taste you, tender stranger.) Crossing the chasm between us, words weave our divergent solitudes. For a moment, an intimate web vibrates in the vastnesses of silence . . . before melting back in time. Life strikes me dumb – and forces me to speak.

<< Tortuous Tropisms
>> Transmigrant Translations

Turn 6: The Touch of Language

2006-04-11T10:37:00.000-07:00

Word of Mouth
Transmigrant Translations
Singing in Tongues

Tortuous Tropisms

2006-04-08T11:25:00.000-07:00

trope. The figurative use of a word or expression.
tropism. The responsive growth or movement of an organism toward or away from an external stimulus.

In grade-school science, I was fascinated to learn about plant tropisms – hydrotropism, geotropism, phototropism, . . . Unlike plants that turn to water, earth, or sun with a green directness, my tropisms are full of twists and turns – the errant detours and diversions of desire. Just when I think I know where my devious tropisms are taking me - they swerve.

traumatropism. A peculiar growth or curvature of an organism resulting from a wound.
entropy. A measure of the randomness, disorder, or chaos in a system.

Life is the wound my chaotic writing curves to.

contrive. To invent or fabricate, especially by improvisation.
tropical. Hot and humid; sultry; torrid.

I am the fish between the crab and the goat, improvising a kaleidoscopic future from my tropical past.

<< Versatile Perversions
>> Turn 6: The Touch of Language

Versatile Perversions

2006-04-07T11:10:00.000-07:00

For Marcel Proust

I am Sodom and Gomorrah, a horny horde perversely plotting the glorious defilement of angels. (I am habit’s eyeless vampires and memory’s myriad-eyed ghosts – guardian demons of slumbering ecstasies.) I am chance’s goblins gaily gambling on life and death with capricious dicethrows. (I am the compulsive duplicity of blind love disastrously pursuing ungraspable phantoms.) No, we don’t want your insipid angels – let them fly off and leave us to our devious search for reversals and inversions to syncopate our fateful falls into the tongueless mouths of time.

This change in the value of what we possess, like those old bundles which turn out to be priceless treasures, is one of the things that introduce most wonder, animation, variety and consequently poetry into one’s adolescence (that adolescence which, while gradually dwindling until it becomes no more than a thin trickle that often runs dry, is sometimes prolonged throughout the course of one’s life), . . . mak[ing] one’s youth as fabulous as the metamorphoses of Ovid or even the metempsychoses of the Hindus.

Whenever a self seemed within his grasp, a lover’s lie, a stranger’s casual glance, an ambushing memory would suddenly shatter his crystallizing identity.

On viscous days when his languid mind oozed from jaded hour to jaded hour, he missed the exhilarating, exasperating drama of adolescence – the vertiginous oscillation between selfing and unselfing – when a hiccough in time, an unexpected divergence in habit’s tight succession could sweep him out of himself into a groundless no-man’s land.

How could he be certain that he was who he thought he was and not a dying man’s hallucination or a twitching animal’s dream?

His proper name chafed him like an itchy ill-fitting shirt. (He’d always preferred shifty pronouns.)

Between the ignorance of the know-it-all and the ignorance of the always-astonished – a sea of difference.

There’s something truer about the truths of childhood.

Give me a writer and I’ll show you his cage.

Narcotics or euphorics, anaesthetics or hallucinogens, tranquilizers or amphetamines, habits are addictions, sometimes complementary, often contradictory, but always striving to persevere even at the addict’s expense, like those lethal viruses that kill their hosts too quickly and end up annihilating themselves. Is death the only antidote to habit?

How many lovers and writers have wished they could hear others’ thoughts? They could not have considered the horror of what they were asking for.

Just as . . .admirable and beautiful wives are always being abandoned by their husbands, it often happens that people who are ugly in the eyes of almost everyone excite inexplicable passions; for what Leonardo said of painting can equally well be said of love, that it is cosa mentale, something in the mind.

The lover, like love, is in the mind. (Who is this naked stranger lying next to me?)

Truth has always hurt me more than lies.

Happily, jealousy is alien to me, but sometimes I can’t help envying the emerald anguish of abandoned lovers.

What is the escape velocity of time? ∞

How many deaths does it take to see beyond the terrible emptiness of the self to the terrific spaciousness of life?

Since one’s ego lives by thinking incessantly of all sorts of things, since it is no more than the thought of those things, if by chance, instead of being preoccupied with those things, it suddenly thinks of itself, it finds only an empty apparatus, something which it does not recognize and to which, in order to give it some reality, it adds the memory of a face seen in a mirror.

<< Food Chain
>> Tortuous Tropisms

Food Chain

2006-04-06T10:17:00.000-07:00

It may be true that you are what you eat, but I scarcely know what I’ve eaten (nor what has eaten me). What am I?

Filipino cuisine is a blend of the exotic and familiar. Just as the Filipino people are part Malay, Chinese and Spanish, so is the cooking of the Philippines.

Exotic, from the Greek exotikos – from outside.

Everything I am is from outside – I’m cutting myself open to expose my exotic genealogy.

Lengua Estofada (Braised Beef Tongue)

1 whole beef tongue (about 2 pounds)
1½ tablespoons salt
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 medium onion, quartered
3 cloves garlic, minced
8 ounces canned tomatoes
½ teaspoon peppercorns, crushed
2 bay leaves
½ cup sukang paombong (palm vinegar)
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 cup water
3 teaspoons sugar

Ox tongue sliced into tender tonguelets, what are you trying to tell me? Taking a bite of you is less like kissing a cow (an image my brother likes to evoke to make us laugh and to freak out the white guests) than like kissing the pursed lips of vanished days, prying them open with my tongue to taste the morsels trapped between time’s teeth. I’m not much of a rememberer, but lengua remembers for me. I just have to take a bite of the tender nippled flesh to be sucked in by a dozen swirling memories. Whenever I go home I ask my mother to cook lengua for me. I like to watch her peel off the tough mottled skin after she’s boiled the enormous tongue in vinegar for hours. This is arduous work –it’s the years that she’s peeling.

Dinuguan (Pork Blood Stew)

1 pound pork, diced
2 tablespoons oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 small onion, diced
1/4 pound pork liver, diced
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup vinegar
12 ounces pork blood (The blood makes this dish look black.)
2 teaspoons sugar
3 jalapeño peppers

Mixing the blood of pigs, cows, chickens, fish, squid, shrimp, clams, turkeys, lambs, ducks, crabs, goats, rabbits, geese, quails, pheasants, squabs, frogs, turtles, sharks, alligators, and other animals that I don’t remember eating or don’t know I’ve eaten, my veins also mingle the blood of

a thrice-married Doña descended from Andalucian shepherds
her sons – a piano teacher and a train inspector in Manila
silk and porcelain traders from Fukien
Tagalog revolutionaries and traitors
Catholic heretics and fanatics . . .

What crime has not been committed by those whose blood circulates in my heart and brain? What virtue have they not carried to a terrible extreme? A red flood of memory, I am a river of immemorial blood rushing to a black sea.

Paella

2 pounds chicken
12 large shrimp
2 crabs
12 large clams
1 pound pork butt
1/4 pound ham
1 chorizo de Bilbao
1/4 pound salt pork
½ teaspoon oregano
2 cloves garlic, minced
4 teaspoons salt
6 peppercorns
4 tablespoons oil
6 cups water
2 large onions, sliced
2 cups white rice, washed and drained
8 ounces tomato sauce
½ teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon saffron
1 large green pepper, cut into strips
1 large red bell pepper
½ cup peas

Mamá Grande

Doña Romana Arguelles Villaseñor
Madrid
shepherds in Cadiz
claimed to be related to Reina Ysabel la Católica
on a secret government mission?
“muy alta y de personalidad”
a pair of bracelets, multi-colored strings of beads
two or three husbands?
died 1895 (age 79)
my great-great-great grandmother

Maybe she was thrown out by her family for being a slut or a mystic, for eloping with a gambler or a goatherd, for seducing or being seduced by a priest, for being a lesbian. Maybe she was sent to a distant colony with a pension because she knew too much. Maybe she fled to the Philippines to escape a sadistic father with big hands, the unbearable virginity of a nun, an absinthe-maddened husband, a claustrophobic love, a bloody secret, a crime (sedition? murder? possession of a clitoris?). Maybe she was an impulsive adventurer who liked the way “Las Islas Filipinas” rolled off her tongue. Maybe she was hysterical, consumptive, syphilitic, and a doctor (perhaps a disgruntled paramour, perhaps bribed by her weary, secretive, or callous family) dispatched her to a tropical climate. Maybe she was spiteful, flouting her family’s pretensions by consorting with mercenaries and criminals in a colonial backwater. Maybe she was a feminist who knew she’d have more power as a Spaniard in the Philippines than as a woman in Spain. Maybe altruistic or romantic notions impelled her to convert, enlighten, or even emulate savages. Maybe she was a spy sent by the crown to infiltrate revolutionary conspiracies. Maybe she was a colonist’s widow, forced to live in Manila because of her measly pension, which couldn’t even feed a rat’s ass in Madrid. Maybe she pursued a dream or was chased by a vengeful ghost halfway round the world. Maybe she was a retired whore, an almost-saint, a stupid racist, an audacious but stifled artist. How did she make her paella? Did she ever try dinuguan? Was she a good lover? Who gave her those colored bracelets? What memories comforted or assailed her on her deathbed? We don’t even know if she was married to two or three men, though the family genealogist opted for two, because “multiple marriages have a dirty or malicious connotation, and I would not like that to be imputed to our revered Mamá Grande who did not deserve to be so maligned.” Who was she – my tall great-great-great grandmother, Doña Romana Arguelles Villaseñor? Who shall I become one hundred years after I die? What shattered relics will inspire the wild conjectures of future imaginists?

The most significant influence of the Americans came after World War II, with the widespread distribution of canned foods.

I love Spam. Seeing the dark blue rectangular can still makes me drool. I love the sound of the key snapping off the bottom. I love threading the little metal tongue through the eye and watching the silver spiral swell around the key as I twist it round the can. I love how snugly the pink marbled flesh fits in its container so that you have to pry it out with a knife. I love the sucking sound the dappled meat makes when it slides out, glistening with a gelatinous coating and landing onto the plate with a PLOP! I love Spam right out of the can, but it’s heavenly when sliced super thin and fried to a red salty crisp. Too Americanized now, I almost never eat Spam anymore. I only indulge myself when I’m vacationing in Hawaii, where, served as sushi, Spam and rice embrace each other promiscuously, married by a green ring of seaweed.

The most popular meat for most Filipinos is pork.

Lechon Sauce

2 pounds pork liver
2 tablespoons salt
1½ cups water
12 cloves garlic, peeled
1 small onion, chopped
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
½ cup distilled white vinegar
½ cup sugar
1 teaspoon black pepper
½ cup fine bread crumbs

Everyone fights over the scrumptious crunchy skin of lechon. Grownups elbow children and children sneak mouthfuls when their parents aren’t looking. Everybody looks jubilant when the gleaming pig makes its appearance. The lechon’s aromatic effusions put everybody in the mood for jokes. But underneath the jocularity, they’re ruthlessly competitive, sizing each other up, gearing for the ferocious moment when everyone pounces on the golden pig, savagely tearing off strips of skin with fatslick fingers. In seconds, the pig is naked, white like a ghost. Skinless, it has lost its magical sheen. Maybe I’m imagining it, but does everybody seem a little sad? Even so, this melancholy suspension only lasts an instant – they dive into the pig again. But the fever has passed.

Filipino food to gross white people out

Dinuguan (Pork blood stew)
Lengua estofada (Braised beef tongue)
Kare-kare (Oxtail stew in peanut sauce)
Adobong pusit (Squid cooked in its own ink)
Sinigang na itlog ng isda (Fish eggs in sour broth)
Callos (Stewed tripe with garbanzo beans)
Chicharon bulaklak (Deep-fried pork intestine)
Tokwa’t baboy (Pickled pig’s ear with tofu)
Bagoong (Fermented shrimp paste)
Balut (Hard-boiled duck egg with embryo)
Sugpo sa aligue (Prawns in crab-fat sauce)
Utak (Beef bone marrow)
Bopis (Minced pork lungs)
Azucena (Dog stew)

The Tagalogs and Pampangueños eat frogs as a delicacy, but the rest of the people of the Philippines rarely touch them.

Our cook used to make me laugh by dancing with the frogs before she fried them. She took a foreleg in each hand and made the skinned princes prance before she dropped them in the sizzling oil.

In the West, dinner is sequential . . . Planning a Filipino menu is based on contrasts of taste and texture rather than different courses . . . sweet, sour, bitter, and salty . . . smooth, silky, crispy, crunchy, chewy. Rather than serving the individual components separately, they are all brought to the table at one time, and it is up to the guest to decide what combination they want to create.

After returning from her weekly expedition to the market, before preparing the lavish Sunday lunch, my mother would lay out her spoils – moist, salty white cheese wrapped in glistening green banana leaves; raw carabao’s milk, forming a thick floating skin upon being boiled on the stove; puto and cutsinta sprinkled with grated coconut; suman with a coconut-caramel dip; fried tofu soaked in a sauce of palm vinegar, soy sauce, and crushed garlic; chopped salted duck eggs (their shells dyed red) with diced tomatoes; the season’s fruits, oozing sweetness – jackfruit, rambutan, lansones, mango, atis, papaya, soursop, three or four different kinds of banana, pineapple, cantaloupe, watermelon, mangosteen, avocado . . . (on those incandescent Sunday afternoons, eating our mother’s plump fruit was like kissing cool refreshing cheeks). We pounced greedily on my mother’s bounty, but I don’t remember ever seeing her eat anything.

I dream of cooking up unstories that are synchronous rather than sequential – shifting compositions of juxtaposed tastes and textures instead of the fixed succession of conflict, crisis, and resolution. Not conflict, but contrast – variable constellations of sweet, sour, bitter, and salty surprising the mind’s tongue. Not crisis and resolution but passionate returnings to those magnetizing moments that gather life’s divergent fluxes into fascinating patterns . . . I’m searching for exotic dishes for a moveable feast. Try this dinuguan. Taste this lengua. These are my body – eat.

Note: Italicized text quoted from Filipino Cuisine by Gerry G. Gelle.

<< The Case of the Missing Clocks
>> Versatile Perversions

Turn 5: The Six Senses

2006-04-05T16:28:00.000-07:00

Food Chain
Versatile Perversions
Tortuous Tropisms

The Case of the Missing Clocks

2005-10-20T06:20:00.000-07:00

The happy person has no future.

Averse to the present, consciousness is the mind’s time machine.

I’m afraid that if I stop counting the years days hours minutes, life will overwhelm me. (Overwhelm me!)

Freedom is the power to release the potential of this moment to diverge from what has come before.

Behind the clockface – time’s false mask – order and chaos clinched in an eternal embrace.

When it comes to the future, we have as little imagination as clucking chickens – and far less than silent eggs.

A beloved face ages just like that – there are no words to describe it.

Some write to forget the unforgettable. I write to remember the unrememberable.

Life is not chronological - coming at one from all sides, it refuses to be ordered into a straight line.

Now is the event horizon of time’s black hole.

Exploding out of time, the event is what keeps on happening.

Time is not money.

Time is an omnivorous flowering.
Ever ripening, time is a fruit that never ripens.
Time is a chambered nautilus, a pearly spiraling in a spiraling sea.
Time is a two-faced amphibian, compounded of water and air.
Time is a karma kaleidoscope.
Time is an ouroboros ceaselessly shedding its skins.
Time is a queer contagion spreading an irresistible strangeness.
Time is a sleeping bat dreaming upside-down dreams.
Time is a swarm of bees making love to a field of clover.
Time is our insatiable mother.
Time is a falling Alice.
Time is a vanishing magician, disappearing with his bag of tricks.
Time is the universe’s blackhole lost-and-found.
Time is a furious shuttle weaving its fateful threads between our lives and deaths.
Time is a perilous bridge joining the possible to the impossible.
Time is a perverse pendulum steadily marrying contraries.
Time is what happens when nothing is happening.
Time is an atlas of all possible worlds - with a stupendous appendix of all the impossible ones.
Time is the chaosmicomic chronochrographic folding and unfolding of space.
Time is the atheist’s joyful amen.

One-question-one, one-question-two, one-question-three . . . My internal clock (my heart’s inner hourglass) is filled with questions instead of sand. When the questions run out – time’s up.

<< Word Crossing
>> Turn 5: The Six Senses

Word Crossing

2005-10-18T06:59:00.000-07:00

For Yury Olesha

I am a bustling intersection, a dangerous crossing bristling with risk and possibility. I am a tricky traveler tripping on an always-forking road. I am a monster, a phantom, a dream, riddling wayfarers at fateful crossroads. I am a strange attractor making divergent paths meet. I am this slippery moment, continually splitting into past and future; a fluctuating present, made of changing yesterdays and tomorrows, constellations of past and future worlds where I exist and don’t. I am a palimpsest, so multifariously overwritten it makes addicts of deciphering swoon. I am a motley novel, a crazy quilt of quotations – stolen fragments from the mouths of the living and the dead. I am a golden shelf of favorite books; there’s still plenty of room – I’m waiting for you to write.

Contemporary things in prose can have value to the contemporary psyche only if they’re written in one sitting. Reflections or recollections of twenty or thirty lines . . . that’s the contemporary novel.

Every moment is a novel – not just the moments that are happenings but also those that are not-happenings. Traditional novels leave out uneventful moments, which are exactly what I’m trying to capture in my writing – the momentousness of the ordinary, the passion of each unrepeatable moment.

Let me write fragments without starting them. Everything I write is a piece broken off the middle of something that has no beginning, something that was already going on before I knew my name, before I could say “I,” before I was even conceived as a quickening question in my mother’s womb.

What is life, if not the fugitive interludes that flare between our countless deaths?

I’ve been disintegrating for as long as I can remember, for as long as I’ve been forgetting. How can I say “I” when there’s so little of me left?

Every loss leaves a question. All that’s left of me are questions – nothing else.

I was born in 1970, so I missed Stonewall, Apollo 11, and Woodstock in 1969, l’année erotique. My time began the year floppy disks and bar codes appeared.

I want to tell my story without telling stories. (I don’t have a story – just a body in pieces and some broken words, so I’m playing with these scattered fragments, forming transitory patterns that I contemplate for a moment before I scramble everything up again.)

Though I loved being read to by my mother, I had little curiosity about reading till I was forced to do it in the first grade. (Because of this my first contact with reading is inextricably linked to coercion.) Before then, the black marks in books whispered no siren promises to me. After suffering my mother to teach me to write my name, I showed no further interest in the secret life of letters. It’s true I’ve always loved the picturesque or funny sounds of certain words, but I never felt any desire to decipher the dark scratches in books. I had a cousin, however, who was already a ravenous reader when we were four or five years old (even then he was already wearing thick glasses). The grownups were very impressed, but I couldn’t see why. I’m still not impressed by the inky procession of words across a page. As a reader, I’m more susceptible to the sensuous seductions of a book – its distinctive color, smell, heaviness, . . . As a writer, I prefer the blank page – the whiteness of possibility – to the overwritten one, dirtied by words. Yes, words are dirty, irredeemably impure – that’s why I love them.

It’s very hard for me to write a sentence . . . The sentence suddenly breaks in two, and I’m left hanging, holding onto some piece . . .

Like a miragelike pointillist seascape, my writing is all dots and dashes, ellipses and interruptions, for I have set myself the impossible task of writing the forgotten, the lost, and the unspeakable; my scribblings a broken record of failed attempts to remember and to speak. Every reconstructed memory, each stuttering utterance misses the mark, but the amnesia and silence of these essays sometimes have their accidental ecstasies blossoming unexpectedly in the suspense between words.

I don’t remember a time when English was alien to me, yet it must have once tasted strange in my mouth. The first TV shows I watched were American cartoons – Scooby Doo, Josie and the Pussycats, The Wacky Races, My Favorite Martian – so English’s strangeness must be beyond remembering, for there was always already a television blaring American laughter in the house. After I started school, where everything (except Tagalog) was taught in English, Tagalog began to feel more and more exotic as my tongue increasingly conformed to English’s Teutonic contortions. By the time we reached high school, we were studying Tagalog as if it were a dead or foreign language (a nineteenth-century epic read like Beowulf to us). Yet English is not my mother tongue – every word I speak reminds me I’m an alien.

I have no straight thoughts, only stray ones.

Word by word, I’m building a private Babel, reaching for an unknown summit where I can make sense of a world not made of words, not made of sense. Everything tumbles down, words scatter, but gathering them in again, I erect another precarious tower from my passions’ rubble.

When will I have enough strength to resist the seductions of metaphor?

From time to time I'm tempted to give up writing. Perhaps I should only be a writer every other day. And on the alternate days, what reticent Hydes should I become so my erratic Jekylls can speak?

Who will buy my frangible metaphors?

My writing desk is an optics laboratory. Everyday I grind and polish glassy sentences into all manner of lenses. Try this one. And this one. Now try these two together, these three. Here's a microscope, here's a telescope. What do you see?

I want to write a book about everything I don’t remember.

Supposing (it’s presumptuous to suppose) I’ll live to 64 (three of my paternal uncles died well before they reached that age), at 2, I would have lived 1/32nd of my life; at 4, 1/16th; at 8, 1/8th; at 16, 1/4th. Now 32, I would have already lived half of my life, the shrinking ratios rushing toward my imminent disappearance, as unaccountable as my gratuitous appearance.

Overwhelmed by time’s rising waters, most of us exchange our airy hopes for sinking memories. But time also flies - why don’t we fly with it?

Words are masks; the writer, an extravagant masquerade.

I travel farthest, fastest when I’m still. Running away, I just find myself going in circles.

The sun - my heart’s fiery clock – blazing timekeeper of my ephemeral combustion.

What is the sun? There is nothing in my human life that could have been managed without the participation of the sun, be that participation overt or hidden, actual or metaphoric. Whatever I have done, awake, or in darkness, whether as a young man or an old one, I have always been on the tip of a sunbeam.

<< An Autobiography of My Mother
>> The Case of the Missing Clocks

An Autobiography of My Mother

2005-09-27T05:50:00.000-07:00

I recollected my manifold past lives, that is, one birth, two births, three births, four births, five births, ten births, twenty births, thirty births, forty births, fifty births, a hundred births, a thousand births, a hundred thousand births, many aeons of world-contraction, many aeons of world-expansion, many aeons of world-contraction and expansion: ‘There I was so named, of such a clan, with such an appearance, such was my nutriment, such my experience of pleasure and pain, such my life term; and passing away from there, I reappeared elsewhere . . . ; and passing away from there, I reappeared here.’

–Gautama Siddhartha, 563?-483? B.C.E.

Every singular thing, or any thing which is finite and has a determinate existence, can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it is determined to exist and produce an effect by another cause, which is also finite and has a determinate existence; and again, this cause also can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it is determined to exist and produce an effect by another, which is also finite and has a determinate existence, and so on, to infinity.

–Baruch Spinoza (later, Benedict de Spinoza), 1632-1677

God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead.

–James Joyce, 1882-1941

Part 1: Cat-o’-nine-tales

My mother used to be a dog; now she’s a cat. She’s already shed nine skins, but she’s still hiding more lives in her mouth. A cubist cat, she’s been mailing me splinters of herself that she’s been holding in her belly for who knows how long – tattered maps, broken phrases in three languages, shards of lost time with jagged edges sharp enough to cut forgetful flesh. I can’t assemble these fragments into a recognizable mother. Who is this riddled sphinx purring enigmas into my ear? After sixty-one years of feline silence, where did my mother get a new tongue?

Umbilicals

I never celebrated my birthday (being greeted happy birthday by relatives and friends) until I was in grade three because I did not know when I was born. Tia Lita said it was Nov. 28 but she was not sure. I have to submit birth and baptismal certificate for my first communion and that’s when I was sure it was Nov. 28, 1937.

A Filipino superstition says that a mother should save her children’s umbilical stubs after they drop off their navels – by keeping the puckers of black skin together she’ll keep her children close. Somewhere between Manila and LA, she lost her little plastic bag of dried umbilicals and her children scattered all over.

Beatings

My mother was known for her beauty that men from as far as Pampanga came to court her (when I was growing up in Barihan, Bulacan, everyone who knew my mother was saying how pretty I was but not as pretty as my mother). Tio Valentin (Tita Cleofe’s father) I guess introduced my father to my mom (she is a relative of Tio Valentin). My father and mother eloped and when they went to ask the blessing (in the Pilipino custom it’s called namamanhikan) of my grandparents, my grandpa caned my mom and hit her several times on her back (at that time they thought that triggered her TB disease) It was customary in the Philippines (at least with the Tagalogs) to show anger or great disapproval (even though you like your future son-in-law) if your daughter eloped. The proper way is to ask formally with an entourage to ask for the hand of the daughter in marriage, then a public wedding with relatives and friends as witnesses and followed with a modest feast.

When she beat us with our father’s coat hangers, she seemed to look right through us as though she were trying to get at someone behind us, or as if she were struggling to drive out some alien evil hiding beneath our skin, said the first child. Her anger was terrifying and pitiful at the same time, like the black frenzy of an unwidow mad with uncrying because of an undead husband, said the second child. Or like the rage of a disappointed Cinderella whose prince turned out to be a beast, said the third. Then the beatings stopped. To the fourth child, his siblings’ stories of their mother’s fury had the archaic aura of fairytale stepmothers.

Playing

My nana Eva married Francisco (Paquito) a cochero (calesa driver – a calesa is a four seater horse drawn carriage) I remember we moved to a room in a house of Tata Paquito’s grandmother. I remember going with a neighbor’s daughter. We play either in their home or in a meadow near by. We gather violet (that was the only color then, no hybrids yet of orange, red, pink and others) bouganvillea and squeeze them in water and pretend that we are selling juice (of course we never drank them) Sometimes we chase butterflies and dragonflies (tutubing kalabaw or tutubing karayom) catch them and put them in bottles. I was helping nana Eva with her first child Bartolome (Tommy) by rocking the cradle (duyan – made of woven slit bamboo) while she washed. She used to wash me after I been to the bathroom (usually outside the house) and several times she has to rush with a sipit (kind of tong used to turn coals or firewood while cooking) to pull out an ascaris (intestinal worm) still clinging from my anus

Mothers don’t have childhoods. Mothers are only children playing mother. In my mother’s bedroom, I played mother. When my mother went away, I used to put on her shiny green nightgown and stumble around in her high heels. Somehow, with a child’s unerring intuition, I managed to ensure that only my mother discovered me, never my father. When she returned, my mother made me step out of her shoes and slip off her gown as she changed out of her yellow-and-orange work dress. Then I clambered onto her bed and she read me fables featuring loquacious frogs and chatty asses till the maid called us for dinner.

Bitter

My mother was my Lolo Dencio’s favorite in-law and he would cook his specialty for her to make her eat (she would not even eat when my father was away).

Pinakbet

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon ginger, minced
1 small onion, diced
½ pound pork, diced
1 medium tomato, chopped
3 tablespoons shrimp paste
½ cup water
½ pound Japanese eggplant, sliced
in 1-inch rounds
½ pound okra, whole
½ pound bittermelon (ampalaya), seeds and
pulp removed, and sliced thinly crosswise

Pregnant with her fourth child, she craved a bitter vegetable. She ate pinakbet till her tongue felt numb, turning dark purple like eggplant skin. Every morning after throwing up, she cooked the pinakbet for the day – crushing, mincing, dicing, chopping, slicing. She always bought the greenest bitterest ampalaya, which her vegetable woman at the market saved especially for her.

Hydra

My mother never learned how to read or write, my father never go beyond grade five. He was always “naglalakwatsa” My mother lived with my lolo Dencio and his children while my father joined the construction crew of my lolo Paeng (Rafael Custodio – Tito Wahoo’s grandpa) They were building bridges and others in Naga, Camarines Norte. He stayed in a boarding house owned by my stepmother’s mom. He would stay away for months and months and letters dictated to Tia Eling and read to mom was the only connection. My father was coming home fewer and fewer times. When my sister Elizabeth (she died in infancy) was born even my mom’s letters were not answered. My mom’s pregnancy and childbirth aggravated her TB. The seeming alienation of my father’s affection weakened her will to live, specially after the death of my sister. She refused to see the doctor and stopped eating. Her dictated letters were never answered and on her death bed, the pleading telegram was not acknowledged.

On hot summer nights, the bathroom walls pearled with monsoon tears. Before going to bed, the children bathed together, the girls laughing at the boys’ ridiculous pendulums. Afterwards she shivered alone in the humid bathroom, while the children’s shut eyelids fluttered in the blue bedroom. Through the bathroom window, she could smell the papayas ripening, their orangeing skin swelling in the darkness. In a bathroom across town, his mistress was sucking his cock, its purple skin swelling in her dark mouth. The heady scent of the bulging papayas made her retch into the toilet. In the blue room, her youngest son was wetting the bed.

Blood and Money

The early recollection I have is a house with a lot of people and a band with somebody messing with the drums. People crying and somebody fainting. I don’t recall that there was a coffin in the sala (living room) or going to the cemetery. The next I remember is that my nana Eva and I were living in a sort of compound. At the time relatives tend to live very close to each other so a block will be occupied by sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles. You are living with relatives but how you are related have never been explained by anybody. You call Tia, tita, or tio, Tito only those related by blood. Older people who are not blood related are addressed Aling or Mang, I was the buntot of my nana Eva. When I wake up from my siesta and my nana Eva was out of the house, (maybe washing clothes near the well or doing some errands) I would cry and the neighbors my relatives would tease me and say that my nana Eva eloped. I would cry louder and will only stop when my nana Eva comes home. I don’t remember going out to play with other children here.

After she married, she rarely saw her family, and then only when her husband condescended to let her pay a visit. Hearing her voice change uncannily when she regressed to her youth, her gregarious children become shy as soon as they set foot on the ground of their mother’s past, where everything smelled strange and strong. I’m glad the poor girl got lucky, her aunts and uncles said, eyeing her well-dressed children. Poor Baby!, his brothers and sisters and their money murmured. On the first Sunday of every month, her in-laws met in a great glass house to play mahjong and poker and to eat, eat, eat. Everything they looked at said to them, eat me! Except her. Her inedible silence provoked them.

Names

From my mother’s side, I know very little. I knew that my mother’s maiden name was Crisostomo when I was grade four or five. I never knew the name of my maternal grandmother and grandfather, I think Louisa is my grandmother. My mother is Brigida (Idang and she is the middle child). My fraternal grandfather is Gaudencio Protacio Custodio (lolo Dencio) my grandmother was Dominga Victorino (lola Inga) My father’s siblings: Juan (tio Juan), Araceli (tia Eling), Anacleto (tio Etong), Arsenia (tia Eniang), Moises (tio Esing), Lolita (tia Lita), Cristino (tio Tinoy) Presentacion (tia Lelet). Serafin (Afin) is the second to the oldest.

An only child (though she had eleven half-siblings), she wanted to have twelve children. She got half her wish. In the Russian folk tales and German fairy stories she loved, the heroes (Sergei, Fyodor, Vladimir, and all the Hanses – clever Hans, stupid Hans, lucky Hans, lazy Hans) got whole wishes. Is that what reality is – an in-between place where only half of each wish comes true? Half a husband, half a life, half-truths?

Before each child was born, she picked out a boy’s name and a girl’s name. With six children, she had six names left over – our countersexed counterparts, disembodied Doppelgängers. Is this why I’ve always felt double? Secretly androgynous?

We’re all named after saints and martyrs – fanatics mauled by lions, crucified, stoned, eviscerated, stretched on racks, drowned, burned, buried alive, hanged from hooks. They terrify and fascinate me – my tortured counter-family, consumed by prodigal passions.

I Have Heard Stories

My father came to bring me to live with his family (my stepmother—Remedios, Tia Medying, and half sister Arielita, tita Ariel) I never knew him I did not know since then that I have a father. My world was my nana Eva with occasional visit to my nana Cosang’s family. My nana Eva did not want to give me up but my father said that I have to go so I can start school in Manila—Baclaran really. I did not have any say on that, and I just heard that my nana Eva fainted when I finally left.
My father brought me home in lolo Dencio’s house but I was so unhappy to live with my stepmother maybe because of the picture of a cruel “madrasta” that I have heard. Later I have heard stories about how it was with my father, mother and stepmother.

Our family told no stories. I’ve always been hungry for them, but I have no desire to tell any. Or maybe I just don’t know how?

Part 2: Scatterstories

Random Variable

My story will be at random and it is up to the reader to piece them in chronological order.

Her story strayed here and there, and she was beginning to suspect that her life lurched forward – and backward and sideways – randomly too. She wanted her readers to connect the fragments, but she didn’t know herself how they fit together – her memories jigsaw puzzle pieces that wouldn’t add up to a bigger picture. Maybe there was no bigger picture? Maybe the real story was the one (un)told by the multiplying lacunae, by the proliferating silences of her (de)generational drama of remembering and forgetting?

Gifts

This gift of mine to you will be a lifelong project and a battle in discipline. I would have to get binder notebook that I can refill with lined paper. This notebook should be by my bedside with a non leaking ballpen. Usually things come to me at night sometimes in the middle of my sleep when I am awaken and can’t go back to sleep (sometimes 2:00 or 3:00 A.M.) I force myself back to sleep because I have to go to work in the morning.

To whom is my writing a gift? (My body is a leaky pen . . . )

The Captive

I have this recurring dreams of being a prisoner.

Her moveable prisons followed her wherever she went. Even in her dreams she felt the chill of metal around her ankles, wrists, neck, tongue. After her most suffocating nightmares, she would wake up clutching her neck, her mouth feeling gritty with rust.

Burning Tongues

Throughout history if a conqueror wants to eliminate a nation, they first burn their books they destroy their culture so the subdued country will not have an identity anymore.

Though she only spoke Tagalog to me (and I only responded in English), she couldn’t write her story in her mother tongue. I once asked her what the Tagalog word for sky was, but she couldn’t remember. She could only recall the word for heaven.

Marriage Plot

Even though the motive may not be the right one on the start, we were in it already and we were going on not badly. Your father could have tried to work on it instead of looking elsewhere (after all he never got a better woman or a better family). From the start I have resolved to work and make a go of my marriage and give something I always longed for to my children – a home, a father and mother and emotional stability so that they can grow up confident, compassionated, cheerful and grateful for life itself.

What is the right motive for marriage?

She wanted to give her children what she had always longed for. How many tragedies have been set in motion by a mother’s selflessness?

Re-membering

I don’t remember how we went back to Baclaran from Barihan – by train, caritela or what? I was living with my father and stepmother and tita Ariel in my grandfather’s house. It was a two bedroom house, big sala, dining and kitchen. The floor was of slat bamboo, the walls were wood and the roof galvanized iron. The windows were capiz squares in wood that slided in grooves. Underneath the windows were sliding solid wood that when opened revealed spaced carved wooden pegs. So during the hot summer days air will circulate through the bamboo slat floors, the opened capiz windows and the spaced pegs. We have siesta on a spread anahaw leaves mat not in the bedroom but in the sala. We did not have beds. We only have mats, pillows, blankets and mosquito nets. We have clay (kalan) stoves and pots (palayok) cooked by firewood and ate with our hands. I don’t remember how my father earned a living.

I remember . . . I don’t remember . . .

She didn’t remember the faces, just the stories. Mysteriously the stories carried on, though the faces had decomposed long ago into blood, skin, and bone scattered in the hazy nebulae of time.

Every time she forgot a name, misplaced her keys, or worried about whether or not she had locked the front door after going out, her untold stories sank a little deeper into her brain's convoluted graveyard.

Death didn’t discompose her. What disturbed her was forgetting. (A swelling forgetfulness was engulfing her receding memory, her past lives transmigrating furiously to an immemorial limbo beyond the good and evil of remembering and forgetting. Everything reminded her of something she couldn’t quite remember, every fugitive sensation tantalizing her with some elusive memory.)

Since she had a solitary childhood, no once could dispute her early memories. (How many times had she revised her past, remade herself in her own image?)

Even though she only knew it from a fading photograph, her mother’s tragic face (love killed her) was imprinted on her mind.

She was six hundred mothers. Because we all remembered her differently, we couldn’t piece her into one mother, not even a cubist one with forty-two eyes, seventeen mouths, thirty-six motherly and unmotherly hands, . . .

The early recollection I have is a house with a lot of people and a band with somebody messing with the drums. People crying and somebody fainting. I don’t recall that there was a coffin in the sala (living room) or going to the cemetery. The next I remember is that my nana Eva and I were living in a sort of compound.

I was the buntot of my nana Eva. When I wake up from my siesta and my nana Eva was out of the house, (maybe washing clothes near the well or doing some errands) I would cry and the neighbors my relatives would tease me and say that my nana Eva eloped. I would cry louder and will only stop when my nana Eva comes home. I don’t remember going out to play with other children here.

I don’t remember how we went back to Baclaran from Barihan – by train, caritela or what?

I don’t remember how my father earned a living.

I lived with my father whom I do not remember meeting until that time he picked me up. I remember nana Eva and I riding the train (with me standing up most of the time because I had boils on my buttocks) to live with tia Eling (Cleofe’s ma).

I don’t remember their faces I just heard the stories.

I never remember going to church.

She sees me everyday with red swollen eyes but I don’t remember her asking me why.

My father tries to take me at least weekends but even that was not acceptable to me. I don’t remember how many weekends I went home to Baclaran with him.

Anyway I don’t remember attending a single day of class during the Japanese occupation.

I remember our relatives in Parañaque staying in an air raid shelter made of “banatan.” I still smile every time I remember lola Juana with a thick pillow on her head walking to and fro with so many “Sus Mariosep”.

The war is over. We came home to Baclaran and I remember the aroma of baking pandesal and pan americano.

Part 3: A Mouthful of Mysteries

Black and White

In school I enjoyed learning history, geography, math, sociology and literature. I practically liked all my subjects except I had a difficult time finishing my sewing/craft projects and being present in complete uniform for my afternoon P.E. classes. I did not do well in my religion classes (a requirement for graduation) because many Sundays I did not join the class mass (in the Parañaque church early morning – in white gala – white shoes, white long veil and white starched skirt and long sleeves blouse)

History, Geography

Out of time, out of place, love – like heaven – must be white.

Math

She stumbled into love with all the probabilities against her. Why don’t they teach the algebra of desire, the geometry of passion?

Literature

After the nuns expurgated the objectionable passages, none of the stories made any sense – desires she couldn’t name rushed into the gaps.

Sewing

If you want to be a good wife, sew your mouth shut.
Black roses sprouted from her cross-stitched tongue, dark thorns cut her praying lips. Her bloody silence spread, reddening our childhoods.

Religion

Mary Mary quite contrary save us from the shiny tongues of pretty men.

Mother Mysteries

The Sorrowful Mysteries

THE ANNUNCIATION

And the angel said to the virgin – you’re fucked.

THE VISITATION

He came. They did it on a chair in her aunt’s kitchen. He came.

THE NATIVITY

She was on her way to Shitlehem to bear her bastard child with the carabaos, goats, and chickens when they dragged her back to church, slapped a white dress on her unvirgin ass, stuffed a rosary in her mouth, and made her say I do.

THE PRESENTATION

She named her firstborn after the patron saint of music who died a stubborn virgin, condemned by Romans to be suffocated in the baths. Her baby was two months premature, if one counted from the wedding night. (Everyone counted, of course.) She offered her to him, but he shook his head. –I don’t know how to hold a baby, he said.

THE LOSING IN THE LABYRINTH

Nobody warned her that marriage was a cruel maze.

The Gory Mysteries

THE RESURRECTION

She was almost dead, but not quite. There is no resurrection for the half-dead. Who could blame her for clinging to her shrinking life?

THE ASCENSION

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s – SWISH! – a wishful uterus!

THE DESCENT OF THE HOLY GHOST

Her tortured spirit descended on his head, his disgruntled spirit on hers. They haunted each other for twenty-five years, their silent tongues dueling, fire fighting fire. Years after the divorce you could still smell the singed hair, the scorched scalps still smoking.

THE ASSUMPTION

(Where was Mary when the lights went out?) In the dark he penetrated her. She floated above her stunned body, watched herself fake an orgasm, was yanked back when his dead weight collapsed on her. (Pray for us feigners now and at the hour of our death amen.)

THE CORONATION

Why is it so angry? Would she ever tame this violetveined oneeyed monster? She imagined love as a crown of stars, a luminous ring circling fused bodies - instead she got this purple cyclops threatening to poke her eyes out.

The Teufel Mysteries

THE AGONY IN THE GARDEN

The snake tricked her. As usual, they blamed the woman.

THE SCOURGING

His pleasures were her pain.

THE CROWNING WITH HORNS

He was her worst demon, so she married him.

THE CARRYING OF THE CROSS

She was born carrying a cross passed from her mother, and from her mother’s mother, and from her mother’s mother’s mother, and so on to Eve who, though born of no one, carried a cross too – Adam’s accursed rib.

THE CRUCIFIXION

He thirsted, she thirsted. They only had each other’s blood to drink. Iron Nails Ran In. Each was the other’s bleeding cross. Red offspring sprang from their wounds.

Mud Masks

I think I was with nana Eva during the first phase of the Japanese occupation. One time all the women had to smear mud all over their faces and hide in a dug out air raid shelter. As usual I was “buntot” and stayed in the damp dark shelter. It was dug out in the middle of the rice field and so disguised that you can’t see the entrance. It was rumored that the soldiers would go to the “bahay kubos” in the field confiscate hens, grains and vegetables rape the women. They sometimes amuse themselves by throwing up babies in the air and catching them with their bayonets.

The women taught her how to hide her pretty face, how to disguise her entrances. She learned early that masks and disguises were a matter of life and death. Huddling in a hole in the middle of a rice field, one aunt protested – I am not a hen; another complained – I am not a cabbage; a third – I am not a woman.

Our Father

I don’t know if my father would have gotten me if my nana Eva remained single. My father said that since nana Eva was married and had a son to take care of she might not have time for me, besides I am better off going to school in Manila
I lived with my father whom I do not remember meeting until that time he picked me up. I remember nana Eva and I riding the train (with me standing up most of the time because I had boils on my buttocks) to live with tia Eling (Cleofe’s ma) Even that time I have not seen my father.

Where are my father’s stories? (Did I inherit my nonnarrative tongue from him?) Who is my father?

My father is a used-car salesman.
My father is a mobile home.
My father is a wig.
My father is a butter-and-asparagus sandwich.
My father is a story without words.
My father is not a story.
My father is a migrant fantasy.
My father is a dildo.
My father is a get-rich-quick scheme. (My father swallowed America, but America spit him out.)

I don’t remember when I first met my father. (Everyone has a first meeting with one’s father, but not with one’s mother, for one has always already met one’s mother.)

For a long time my favorite sound used to be the sound of my father’s white car turning into the driveway. Coming in from the dark (we had finished dinner hours ago), my father smelled like the outside. After kissing his cheek, I would plunge my hands into his pockets, always jingling with coins, to feel for colored jellies (green, yellow, purple, red, and orange stuck to each other in a cellophane package), crunchy malteds in a clear glass bottle, chocolate pretzels in a red box with a picture of an Indian boy and girl, . . . My father’s pockets were Ali Baba’s caves to me.

Mixed Marriage

Everybody were hoping my father would marry my nana Eva for my sake but I guess my stepmother was fast. There were many suitors for nana Eva. There was this particular guy who was rich (I don’t remember their faces I just heard the stories) who my fathers siblings were pushing so my nana Eva will have a better life in Manila (she would not have to go back to Barihan and live with relatives). My mothers relatives discouraged her from marrying a rich man (“aapihin ka lang ng familia niyan”) My mother’s side relatives have beautiful women (although my father’s side has more mestisa good looks too) nana Eva was never exposed to a complex way of life she didn’t have the confidence maybe that she can hold her own. Even if she did not finish school at least she could read and write unlike my mother who couldn’t.

The old wives said – Don’t marry rich men, their families will despise you. But did she listen?

Female Mysteries

When we went back to Barihan, my nana Eva’s life was helping in the cleaning, cooking and washing in the house of our relatives. All the women did that (it seemed that all the people in that house were women)

Their life was cleaning, cooking, and washing. But what did their minds do while their hands were busy?

Male Mysteries

(I guess the men leave for the fields early while I was still sleeping and came back late when I have retired for the night.) I never remember going to church and of course I don’t know the days of the week we were at. Sometimes I see men congregating in the front yard caressing their roosters and blowing cigaret smoke on the roosters’ ears and letting the roosters peck at each other while holding on their tails (it sort of practising them for the Sunday cockfight)

She had no memory of going to church when she was a little girl. But the fascinating communion of men and their fighting cocks made an unforgettable impression on her.

Overheard

I have not met my stepmother and half sister but I already made up my mind not to live with them without knowing where I could stay then. I never thought my father not giving any choice except that he tried to make it work that I stay with him. Maybe my fathers coming was preceded by stories of cruel stepmothers. I did not hear of tia Medying’s keeping my mothers letters from my father, even the several telegrams saying my mother was dieying, until later in my early teens. I just overheard it from my aunts. Most of the things I know of were just from conversations (when they thought we’re out of earshot).

An orphan from infancy, she learned the uses of invisibility early on – she was always listening. Bit by bit she assembled a motley mother from scraps of gossip overheard.

Silently, of Course

I never experienced tia Medying’s cruelty during that short time I lived with them. I was always out of her way. I was hanging out alone, up in the guava tree crying my heart out (silently of course) while looking for fruits ripe enough to munch. I go down from the tree when it was almost merienda time and I walk to my tio Etong’s house where his wife will feed me with pancit or suman or kalamay or bibingka or goto. She sees me everyday with red swollen eyes but I don’t remember her asking me why. I guess they talk among themselves what to do with me.

I’ve only seen my mother cry once – during a fight with my father. (I did also hear her cry on another occasion, not long after the divorce. I don’t know why, but hearing her sobs over the phone infuriated me.)

The Floating Garden

My granfather’s lot is about 1,000 square meters more or less. It was planted with mangoes, papayas, bananas, guavas, kamatchili, rimas (breadfruit) flowering adelfas and kalachuchi. It rained everyday almost all day during the rainy season (end of May to November). We love to bath in the rain (usually with only panties on) but afterwards it was dreary staying indoors without any toys. It seemed I was the only child in that house because Ariel was not big enough to interact with me besides I don’t mind her at all too.

Rain rain rain . . . the waters swelled and lifted her, a lush floating garden – glorious ark – carrying all manner of beasts, clean and unclean, including birds and everything that crawls on the ground.

Evolution

Finally my father relented and let me live with my lolo Dencio in Parañaque. We stayed in a rented house near my lolo’s brothers and sisters. My lolo were taking care of the unmarried girls – tia Lita and tia Lelet.
My lolo worked for his sister Lola Milia or one brother lolo Ando. They were the rich relatives who owned several fish pens way out in Manila Bay. They also owned rice fields and salt beds in Sukat, but lolo Dencio work for the “baklad” (fish pens). He is a diver when needed (when they plant the bamboo poles on the seabeds) most every day they sail early in the morning (2:00 AM) to gather the catch of the night and as soon as they dock many sellers (mostly aunts) rush them to the market.

Her grandfather was a fisherman; her father an electrician; her first and last jobs were at banks; now her son is a teacher with a taste for strange books. Fish becomes electricity becomes money becomes words becomes fish . . .

Tongue-tied

My father tries to take me at least weekends but even that was not acceptable to me. I don’t remember how many weekends I went home to Baclaran with him. My tia Lelet was trying to teach me to write my name at least so I can be enrolled at the school run by the Japanese (they were teaching Nipongo of course) I guess one of the advantages of being occupied is learning a new language – Spanish and English (Japan was in power less than five years). To subdue a race the conquerors have to substitute the native tongue, traditions and culture and one’s country’s soul dies or is lost forever. Anyway I don’t remember attending a single day of class.

The Philippines has over seventy dialects. During their 333-year reign, the Spanish withheld their language from the natives. During their 48-year rule, the Americans wanted to teach every Filipino English. Jose Rizal wrote his subversive novels in Spanish, which Filipino high school students are now required to read in an archaic Tagalog translation. Most of them, however, “cheat” by reading an English version. (My mother has never read Noli Me Tangere; Rizal’s book, published in 1887, was still banned by the Church when she was going to a Catholic girls school in the fifties.)

The Sounds of War

I remember our relatives in Parañaque staying in an air raid shelter made of “banatan” (thin long bamboo sticks woven with small rattan vine used as fence in the sea (sa laot) fish pens.) These matlike banatan are spread on the ground to repair the broken rattan vine that hold the bamboo sticks together. These banatans were rolled (exactly as rolled sleeping mats) and stacked two deeps on top of each other to make the high wall of the air raid shelter. I still smile every time I remember lola Juana with a thick pillow on her head walking to and fro with so many “Sus Mariosep.” At night we could see the sparks of bombs and canons on Corregidor across the bay, you could hear the sound of war day and night.

They heard the sounds of war day and night; in other words, they stopped hearing them.

Stretch Marks

We have to get out of Manila and the immediate suburb (there was the airbase in Baclaran and that too was bombed). We evacuated to Barihan and we all stayed on tio Valentin’s house. His house is very similar to lolo Dencio’s house in Baclaran. At night it is very difficult to get out of all the sleeping mats and mosquito nets because we’re packed closer than sardines. Tio Valentin’s family, my father’s, tia Eniangs, tio Esings and lolo Dencios (tia Lita, tia Lelet and me) were squeezed in that house. The farmers were able to plant and harvest rice so we had some rice to stretch with fillers like diced camote, corn grits or diced kang kong stalks, or just make lugaw. We heard that people who stayed in Manila were starving.

This consciousness I call mine (it isn’t mine) stretches back to the war my eyes never saw.

Our bellies stretched by hunger, my mother and I ate rice mixed with yams, grits, and swamp spinach.
–Can we have some more?

The Invisibles

About 10 km. From where we live was an air strip where the Japanese made mock airplanes with “sawali” (thin bamboo strips woven as mats usually used as walls in “bahay kubos”) The American planes would bomb these decoys and we could hear the frightening sounds, We then again retreated to the “bukid” away from the streets.
I cherish that retreat place because it was surrounded by trees – mangos, mabolo santol and others. Nearby was a pond with flowering blue water lilies. Sometimes “nililimas ang sapa” (drain the water out) to catch the fish (dalags and hitos) easier and faster. They also dig “kuhol” (snails) from the “pilapil.” We also have frogs when the rice paddies were calf high in water.

Fish in muddy ponds, snails in the pilapil, frogs in rice paddies, Filipinos in the boondocks – only the invisible survive.

Soap

My father and tio Esing made trips to Manila by bike to buy some supplies specially ingredients for making laundry soap. They made soap and sell to our neighbors and the money we use to buy rice and fish, shrimps and other food items. One time they came home very late. My father was hit by shrapnel in the thigh and tio Esing had to help him because he could not pedal his bike anymore.

Ingredients for laundry soap:

lye (caustic potash or soda)
coconut oil or lard
water

Not even considering stray shrapnel, making soap is dangerous. Lye burns skin and blinds; when ingested, it burns the throat like liquid fire. Caustic soda is also used in the manufacture of drain cleaners, and caustic potash is a powerful bleach. Despite the risks, her father made soap so they could eat. People were starving in Manila, but their neighbors in the country willingly traded rice for soap. Even during a war, one has to keep clean.

War Is the Father

We came out of the bukid, back to tio Valentin’s house and saw the American and Filipino soldier’s marching on the streets. The war is over. We came home to Baclaran and I remember the aroma of baking pandesal and pan americano. Corned beef, sausage and other canned rations of soldiers were sold in mushrooming sari-sari stores.

The war is over. American and Filipino soldiers were marching in the streets, but a few fanatical Japanese soldiers, unaware of the fates of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were still hiding in the jungle. The war is over. She smelled bread baking as she walked through the devastated streets. The war is over. People were buying and selling soldiers’ rations hand over fist – everybody was hungry for meat.

Digging

All the families who stayed in tio Valentins house in Barihan are now staying in lolo Dencio’s house in Baclaran. All the streets seemed still to be in chaos. You have to be careful even in your own backyard because there strayed unexploded shrapnel that you can step on. All the trees on lolo Dencio’s yard were still alive and we gathered mangoes and bananas and even dug some camote. There was a very huge camote almost as big as a dinner plate that I dug and made me so proud to have such a find.

The trees were still alive. They tiptoed through the garden, watching the ground for glints of steel while they gathered mangoes and bananas that were plumper and bigger than before the war; she even dug a yam as big as a plate. (We’re both good diggers.)

Naked

Now that the war is over and I am of school age, they are thinking of sending me to school. A grade one class was opened in one of the big houses by the beach. My first teacher was Miss Mayuga. I went to school in wooden shoes (not my own, I did not have my own and my dresses are all hand-me-downs too big for me). One day everyone had a commotion outside the classrooms. We were out on the beach and it was high tide. The waves brought in several bloated bodies (from sunken warships) there were very big negroes and americans and some of them were stark naked. Miss Mayuga hauled us quickly to the classrooms.

The naked Americans were gigantic. There were no clothes big enough to cover their nakedness. She couldn’t look; she couldn’t stop looking.

Click!

One day we had class picture taking and everybody has to come in white attire. I only had “gris” (blue denim dress usually used when women go to the well to wash clothes) I did not go to class but peeped to see how it was going with the picture taking. Miss Mayuga saw me and insisted that I join the picture taking. After one class was finished she borrowed one of the girls white ribbon. She combed my hair and pinned the ribbon on my hair put me behind where my gris will not show but my beribboned head and smiling face can be recognized. The picture was shot and I went home without telling anybody what happened. I of course did not have a copy of that class picture.

Miss Mayuga saw her.

Born Again

To be continued.

I was born on March 3, 1970 at 8:12 A.M.

<< The _____ing Thickness
>> Word Crossing

Turn 4: Mind's Body

2005-09-27T05:44:00.000-07:00

An Autobiography of My Mother
Word Crossing
The Case of the Missing Clocks

The _____ing Thickness

2005-09-23T06:27:00.000-07:00

Writing, I’m always trying to fight _____. A quixotic dreamer, how can I defeat _____’s spellbinding mindwheels?

How can I write when narcolepsy seizes me as soon as my fingers touch my pen? Perhaps I can become a _____writer?

For me, writing is, by far, a stronger soporific than orgasms.

When I write I don’t know if I’m a_____ or awake – I must be a_____ because writing feels like falling, and one doesn’t fall awake.

I’ve never lost _____ over problems or misfortunes. That’s why I’ll never write the book of _____ I’ve always dreamed of. Nevertheless, every book I write is a book of dreams.

When I open my eyes in the morning, before I even remember my name, my memories – ten thousand clutching demons – rush back to repossess me.

In love, in dream, I wander half-a_____. (Which half of me is awake, which a_____?)

<< Hyperbolic Heteronyms
>> Turn 4: Mind's Body

Hyperbolic Heteronyms

2005-09-22T05:33:00.000-07:00

For Fernando Pessoa

I am many. I was born a litter, multiplying so quickly that my mother ran out of names. (I’ve resorted to addressing myselves by shifty pronouns – You! I say to one of my nameless selves – what kind of mischief are you up to now?) Since my first breath, I haven’t stopped proliferating, my lungs a factory of souls. The mere touch of another impregnates me; strange hybrids are constantly springing out of my orifices. I used to exhaust my energy naming myselves, but I’ve given up. Now I call each new arrival Anonymous n, like the forgotten authors of medieval treatises. Bestiary after bestiary is being overrun by my chimerical incarnations and mutations. There are so many of me I’ve gotten lost in the multitude – there’s no one to say I anymore.

Damon Disparu

Man is an animal that almost exists.

Life, a breathtaking disappearing act.

Salvador Searcher

He owed all his accidental discoveries to his obsessive pursuit of what wasn’t there.

Jäger Freud

He believed he was pursuing happiness, but in actuality he was employing all his human cunning to evade it.

Socrate d’Espinosa

I am not conscience-stricken but consciousness-stricken.

The more I know myself, the less I know myself.

Addie Murphey

Unable to control my selves’ promiscuous propagation, I give in – Go forth and multiply I tell them, and they do.

Vaughn Verso

What is singular about the body is its irreducible plurality. Like the universe, it is always turning into something else.

Debbie Doherty

The only time I forget my paralyzing fear of dirt is when I’m dirtying myself.

Frank Feigner

Fancying himself a poet, he pretended to be in a perpetual state of astonishment. (Sometimes he really did astonish himself.)

Jon Undonne

An artist of incompletion, I send out my unfinished self to seek what’s unfinished in you.

Madeleine Middleton

My favorite beginnings and endings are those that throw me into the middle of things,

Carl Cutter

I’ve always felt my ideas deeply, like sharp objects cutting me up inside.

Cyrus and Cynthia Cezanne

Suffering too is made of cones, spheres, and cylinders - they can be reassembled into a shapely joy.

Martin X

In a crisis it’s hard to tell if things are falling together or falling apart, but it doesn’t matter, because the ecstasy is in the falling.

Medusa Gorgonzola

Too much self-knowledge is petrifying.

Tricky Triphop

The only way I’ve ever learned anything about myself is by pretending to be someone else.

Simon Inocencio

What is knowledge without innocence?

Living is a secret and fluid state of being ignorant of things and of oneself – and the only style of life appropriate and comforting to a wise person.

<< Tape
>> The _____ing Thickness

Tape

2005-09-20T05:28:00.000-07:00

You are what you think.
Haphazardly taping your motley pieces together, your consciousness – looped recording of your thoughts – makes your world.
Past and future squeeze the present out.
Thinking past, thinking future, you become a ghost of repetition.

I.

I Confess

They were in an “open relationship,” so he didn’t have to lie when his lover asked him – more pruriently than inquisitorially – did you do anything interesting today?

–No, he would say, though the taste of a secret visitor still tingled on his tongue. He wished he could say – Yes, a tall stranger came to me on this afternoon of a faun. I can still feel his liquid tongue licking my ear. His lips were shiny like wet shells and his belly burned against my cheeks. He kissed my feet. When he exploded on my stomach, his semen pooled in my thirsty navel. I can still smell his neck, his hands, his knees. He wished he could say yes, but he couldn’t. If he stopped lying, how could he ever believe himself again?

Spanking the Monkey

–Even monkeys don’t do that, the invisible priest hissed through the confessional grill.

At the time, he was too naive to question the priest’s knowledge of primates.

–Bless me father for I have sinned . . . Nobody told him that masturbating was a sin. The little pamphlets – a bad confession was a passport to hell – which scrupulously listed venial and mortal sins didn’t mention it either. But as soon as he learned how to masturbate, he knew without a doubt – this exquisite pleasure must be a sin.

Nailing a calendar to the door of his room, he marked black X’s on the days when he defied temptation. By some subtle reasoning – Catholicism’s impossibilities made him ingenious – he included the days when he touched himself but was able to stop short of coming. Sometimes he managed to marshal as many as three successive X’s – a stupendous achievement for a horny teenage boy – but still not good enough to receive the bland white Body of Christ on his tongue two Sundays in a row. (It was too mortifying to confess the same sin – did he have any others? – week after week.)

–These are my sins . . .

Childhood Adulterated

Night and day the house creaked and groaned with his mother’s unasked questions. His father’s silence was a glassy wall that reflected and amplified her inarticulate anguish back to her. Her unvoiced questions consumed her till nothing was left but a mouth without a face. Still this howling mouth strove to bind him to her with its tortured questions’ coils. His father escaped (his mistresses asked him no questions), but he didn’t.

II.

Battle Royale

–You always . . .
–I never . . .

They needed something new to quarrel about – all their fights were repeats.

After another wrangle in which they seemed to be reciting hackneyed lines, he decided that they should just record representative fights and play the appropriate tape whenever they felt an altercation coming on. Meanwhile they could do something useful or fun, like clean the basement, see a movie, or fuck. (Some of their best fucks happened after ferocious fights – why wait till after a fight when they could fuck during it?)

Some titles in their library of squabbles:

The you’re-asking-for-something-I-can’t-(don’t-want-to)-give fight
The you’ve-never-understood-me fight
The you-remind-me-of-my-mother fight
The I’m-too-anxious-to-have-sex-so-I’ll-deflect-your-advances-by-starting-a-fight fight
The I’m-hiding-something-and-it’s-making-me-irritable fight
The I-want-to-be-alone-but-I-can’t-ask-you-for-space fight
The I’m-hungry-why-do-you-insist-on-talking-about-this-before-I’ve-had-something-to-eat fight
The why-can’t-you-guess-what-I-want-I’m-giving-you-all-these-signs-do-I-have-to-spell-everything-out-for-you fight
The I’m-horny-but-I’m-waiting-for-you-to-start-something-why-do-I-always-have-to-be-the-initiator fight
The why-are-we-having-this-fight-again fight
The you-don’t-appreciate-what-I-do-for-you fight
The money fight
The I-feel-like-I’m-losing-my-independence fight
The I’m-jealous-but-I-don’t-want-you-to-know-it fight

Ironically, in our zeal to hide our vulnerabilities from each other, we only succeeded in becoming more and more adept at poking each other’s sore spots.

III.

–I don’t believe in love; love is a story I don’t believe in, he told all his lovers early on, when they were just falling in love. Curiously his disavowals never seemed to faze his lovers. Did they know something he didn’t?

He’d been with the same lover for seven years. What was their secret? They had none, unless it was that they never fixed their future. (Happily ever after is for tidy fairy tales not for capricious fairies.)


The present is what escapes the story we are always telling ourselves. Eject the story! Break yourself. Let every moment remake the world anew – not in your image.

See here. See this. The past and future wind and unwind in this moment, this unrepeatable crossing.
See now. Give yourself to the deviant instant, to the swerving ecstasy of the other – another world – unfolding in you.

<< The Internal Return
>> Hyperbolic Heteronyms

Turn 3: Higher Unconsciousness

2005-09-20T05:25:00.000-07:00

Tape
Hyperbolic Heteronyms
The _____ing Thickness

The Internal Return/The Infernal Return

2005-09-19T07:45:00.000-07:00

Whenever reality threatened to drown him, the composer Giacinto Scelsi would sound a single note on his piano for hours. What fantastic island was calling him to its stranging shores?


      (Repeat: to do or say again.)
      (Return: to go or come back.)

Some repeat to remember, others repeat to forget, I repeat to keep (to lose) myself at the uncertain edge between remembering and
forgetting – now-here’s wavering shore.


      (French repeter, to go back to.)
      (French retorner, to turn back.)

Never again . . . ever again . . . virgin . . . again . . . With the metallic patience of a stubborn alchemist I’m transmuting every leaden never again into gold.


      (Latin re + petere, to seek.)
      (Greek tornos, tool for drawing a circle, also lathe.)

Every artist is an escape artist binding himself again and against to reenact the primal thrill of breaking out.


      (Indo-European pet-, to rush, to fly; hence feather, appetite, pen, symptom.)
      (Indo-European ter-, to rub, to turn; hence threshold, detour, throw, thread, trauma.)

Shrouded by habit’s suffocating embrace, what stifled worm’s crushed wings are struggling to unfold?

<< Interview with a Cracked Mirror
>> Turn 3: Higher Unconsciousness

Interview with a Cracked Mirror

2005-09-18T07:05:00.000-07:00

For F. Scott Fitzgerald

I am a crack-up, an impractical joke that breaks the joker, splintering him into quizzical fragments. I am the laughter that bursts into tears, a contagious hysteria subliming the body’s derangements into riddled ecstasies. I am the cracks of a broken mirror glued together by delirium – whoever looks into this fractured glass will be unspeakably unselfed, shattered beyond any mother’s recognition. I am a falling-down life, barely held together by sticky addictions. I am a shivering emptiness briefly echoing life’s fugitive loves and hates before time’s amnesic wind blows away all memories and forgettings. I am the ragged polyp-phoney of a dissonant improvisation, the unfinal unresting place of an interminable dialogue – the living and the dead’s futile striving for some illusory destiny. But there’s still time before the pain-ultimate shuddering to snatch some shiny shards, some moving detritus from the irreversible shattering that is time.

Egyptian Proverb: The worst things:
To be in bed and sleep not.
To want for one who comes not.
To try to please and please not.

Writers’ Proverb: The best worst things:
To be in bed and sleep not.
To want for one who comes not.
To try to please and please not.

Every morning before wrestling with words, he had to grapple with his penis first.

The genealogy of writing: In the beginning, boredom bore thinking – which makes writing boredom’s bastard grandchild.

When I desire someone, I strive to insinuate myself into him – I want to be a sly worm in his blood, a secret virus in his imagination. Because I write to seduce you, I lace my words with infectious dis-ease.

I am an imaginary precipice. I look and look and look over the edge in horror – I can’t tear myself away from my darkness’ susurrus.

Though he was constantly sawing and hammering with pencil and paper to make mobile homes for his transient selves, he could never build them fast enough.

If you slow a moment down enough, you can pack several lifetimes into it.

I talk with the authority of failure . . .

Failure made him taciturn just when he finally had something interesting to say.

Drifting lazily toward oblivion, the bored crave catastrophe – at least disaster relieves ennui.

The dreams he remembered were always black-and-white – he was ashamed that most movies he’d seen were more vivid. But, without admitting it to himself, he was also proud of his monochrome fantasy life – it proved (he liked to believe) that his “real life” was in living technicolor.

Writing is like speaking into a dead telephone and trying to talk somebody into existence on the other side.

The writer’s eighth commandment: Never lie to protect yourself. (Of all the passions, fear is the most poisonous to art.)

Flayed by desire, exquisitely tender, he stitched himself a snaky skin, a scaly covering of words.

How will I find my way out of this roaring maze?
A clue: Tragedy will take you in, but comedy will bring you out. (Act!)

He fell in love like a drowning man - no lover could stay afloat in his thirst’s unpacific ocean.

Because his own desire terrified him, his wanting always swerved into wanting to know.

To use one’s mother tongue as if it were a foreign language.

A mind without barbarians cannot conquer new frontiers.

The man who knows too little has more thrilling – and funnier – adventures than the man who knows too much.

Love’s hook: it makes even misery interesting.

Inertia is life’s most intractable problem.

A cunning escape artist, he used his picklock pencil to break out of all kinds of tricky cages. But outside his keywords rusted, crumbled; the only way he could break the silence was to keep on writing himself – perverse Houdini – in and out of devious cages of his own devising.

The good create, the bad imitate.

He observed his own disintegration with the passionate dispassion of a cosmic atomist.

The quiet ones especially succumb readily to the caresses of words.

His motherless tongue burned with an ambitious orphan’s fury.

The poverty of common sense:
     It tranquilizes the mind.
     Fools unthinkingly agree.
     Guaranteed conversation-stopper.
     It goes without saying. (Everybody’s always saying it.)
     Your dead mother would approve.

His mind was a swirling polyphony of strange voices. Whenever he opened his mouth, he never knew what would whirl out.

Most people are desperate to be saved from their own confusion – they’ll grab anything that floats above the chaos of their minds. For someone drowning in doubt, any belief – as long as it’s inflated enough – will do.

A leaky sentimentalist, his emotions oozed obscenely from his cracks and orifices.

I’m searching for a singular passion – eccentric vector – to snatch me from my circular obsessions.

I remember best when I forget myself.

I still haven’t discovered a compelling alternative to silence – perhaps that’s why I can’t stop babbling.

He was born running. Lately, he’s even been inventing pursuers to keep himself on the move.

He wondered if writing was also a way of avoiding himself, because as soon as he picked up a pencil, he became a rowdy crowd.

TITLES

Journal of a Pointless Life.
Wore Out His Welcome.
“Your Cake.”
Jack a Dull Boy.
Dark Circles.
Talks to a Drunk.
Birds in the Bush.
Travels of a Nation.
Don’t You Love It?
All Five Senses.
Dated.
Thumbs Up.
Book of burlesque entitled These My Betters.
Title for a bad novel: God’s Convict.
Skin of His Teeth.
Result – Happiness.
Police at the Funeral.
The District Eternity.

TITILLATIONS AND INTIMATIONS

Diary of a Dead Man
My Mother’s Dresses
Eating Is Believing
Jack’s Corner
Parabolic Passions
Tongue-Dyed
On the Other Hand
Gypsy Hearts
Saint Pervert
5½ Senses
Anti-Ultimate
Slow Motion Commotion
Forgettings: A Memoir
The Odysseus Complex
The Seven Skins of Memory
Joy’s Decoys
The Dildo Factory
Manila Envelops

From a little distance one can perceive confusion in what at the time seemed order.

<< Queer Catechism (Version X)
>> The Internal Return

Queer Catechism (Version X)

2005-09-16T06:04:00.000-07:00

¿REVERSION?

How did you learn to masturbate?

One day in the shower, a stream of water hit my penis just so.

How do you masturbate?

Sitting, standing, or lying down; fantasizing, reading stories on the Internet, or watching porn videos; I grip my dick with my right hand and work my fist up and down. Sometimes I use my other hand to play with my nipples – usually the right one, the more sensitive one.

What did you fantasize about when you masturbated as an adolescent?

Even in my fantasies I was timid. Often I just watched faceless people do vague things, perhaps because participating in more explicit scenarios would have forced me to confront my latent homosexuality.

Did anyone know about your secret sex life?

Once my older brother walked in on me when I was lying on the bathroom floor with my eyes closed, my mouth open, and my penis bouncing up and down under the shower’s powerful stream. (For some reason our shower didn’t have a showerhead, so the water gushed from the shower arm in a single vigorous jet.) Thankfully, he walked out without saying a word.

Who else?

Every night I pulled my white briefs down to my thighs, masturbated, came on my stomach, pulled my underwear back up, and promptly fell asleep. (Now I can’t imagine how I could have stood the stickiness.) Every morning, still half-asleep, I jacked off and came into my briefs again. Every day our laundress washed our dirty clothes by hand.

¿DIVERSION?

When did you first encounter pornography?

I had always been permitted to look at my father’s Playboys whenever I wanted.

What do you remember about them?

They were all coverless.

Why?

It’s still a mystery (especially since the centerfolds were all intact).

Did the naked women excite you?

No. But I remember being fascinated by a pictorial featuring the Marquis de Sade portrayed as a laughing half-naked man brandishing a whip.

¿INVERSION?

Who was the first man you were attracted to?

When I was still young enough to do this, I used to crawl into my parents’ bed early in the morning while they were still sleeping. Insinuating myself between them, I turned toward my father so I could drink in his delicious smell – I could never get enough of it.

List the boys and men you’ve desired.

In the ever-shifting order of memory with its fluctuating, gap-riddled chronology: my father, Paul, Christopher Reeve, Bernard, Maxwell Caulfield, Gabby Concepcion, Henry Thomas, Michael V, the blonde musicologist with a foreign accent sitting across me in the library as I’m writing this, haiku Ben, Andrew, Michael Y, Rüdiger, Darin, Dan, Thomas, law-school Mike, Peter, Hector, Jiri Lubov, Eugenio, Craigslist Noah, Ethan, Jeffrey, Chris O’Donnell, Brendan Fraser, school-bus Aaron, Texas Nigel, Roman, the Australian tourist, sundry wet and dripping men in the swimming classes I’ve taken, Xiao Xeng, the popcorn vendor at California Cinemas, Steve, José, my older brother, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fabrice, Club-Universe Claude, underage Casey, Dean, Jean-Nicolas, and countless others who’ve been swallowed up – for now or forever – by forgetfulness’s inconstant waters.

How old were you when you first masturbated?

10 or 11.

When you first kissed?

24.

When you first masturbated another person?

24.

When you were first fellated?

24.

When you first performed fellatio?

25.

Cunnilingus?

Never.

Anal intercourse?

26.

Vaginal intercourse?

Not yet.

How many men have you kissed?

About 30?

How many have you masturbated?

30.

How many men have sucked your dick?

25.

How many dicks have you sucked?

10.

How many men have you fucked?

1. (In fact, I don’t really know how many men I’ve had sex with. I can only guess, and I’m probably underestimating.)

Are you a top or a bottom?

I want to be blithely, uninhibitedly versatile. But fear not only of the other’s desire but also of my own makes me both a nervous top and a half-assed bottom. When I’m topping I’m too anxious about disappointing or displeasing my lover to take my pleasure; bottoming, on the other hand, unmans me so that I’m too ashamed to surrender to pleasure.

Why does your own desire terrify you?

Have you ever had sex with a woman?

No. But I can imagine kissing a woman, fondling her breasts, or getting a blowjob. Fucking’s harder to picture. Maybe I’ll never have sex with a woman. If I did, it would probably be impelled by curiosity more than desire.

¿PERVERSION?

Have you ever wanted to have sex with an animal?

Once when I was petting my cousin’s dog Joyce, I noticed that he had a bit of a boner – the tip of his reddish penis was peeking out of his furry foreskin. I found myself aroused by this. I don’t know what I’d do with a dog though – it’d be disgusting to suck a dog’s dick, and I’d be scared to put my cock in a mouth with all those teeth. I don’t think a dog would put up with being fucked (nor would I want to force one), and the image of being fucked by a dog is just too ridiculous.

What sexual act have you performed most?

I’ve been masturbating almost everyday since I was ten.

How many times have you masturbated in your life?

Balancing out the days I masturbated more than once with the days I didn’t masturbate: (33-10) x 365 = 8,395 times – and still going.

How often do you have sex with a partner?

Once or twice a week.

Do you enjoy masturbating more than sex?

I’ve suspected it.

Why have sex at all?

I enjoy the hunt.

What are your favorite sex acts?

Masturbating to new porn, exchanging the first kisses with a stranger, getting blown by an eager cocksucker, tickling a lover’s engorged prostate with a finger or two or three while I pump his dick with my other hand, sucking a beautiful penis, watching the euphoric contortions – fierce masks – of my lover’s face as I fuck him, having my right nipple licked and sucked while I’m being fucked, finding a lover’s hotspots and teasing them relentlessly till his ecstasy escapes from his lips as moans, sighs, growls, hums, and purrs – a strange animal’s aphrodisiac cries, . . . (I’m looking forward to the unfamiliar pleasures my body’ll stumble into when it stumbles into you.)

What are the pleasures of kissing?

I love the inexorable movement toward the abandonment of speech, when the tangle of words gives way to the speechless twining of tongues. I love the irresistible convergence of faces magnetized by desire; the mutual penetration of lovers (there are no tops or bottoms in kissing); the proximity of nose to skin allowing each to breathe the other in. I love the distinct flavor of different lovers’ mouths; the ragged rhythms – accelerating with excitement – of mingled breaths; the feverish caresses of wandering hands, the tongue's curious tendrils. I love the dancelike engagement and disengagement of lips, the counterpoint of tongues trilling songs from different countries of memory and desire. I love this prelude to undressing, this postlude to seduction, this indefinite interlude when, neither coming nor going,we dwell contentedly in each other's open mouths.

What are the pleasures of fingerfucking?

I love the feeling of a resistant rectum slowly yielding to my pressing fingertip – and then the hot snug grip of my lover’s ass as my finger plunges in. (My desire turns to disgust, however, if I feel any shit.)

Do you avoid any sex acts?

I have no taste for rimming – I don’t like putting my nose so close to an asshole.

Do you enjoy group sex?

The idea of a delirious confusion of tangled writhing bodies is exciting, but it’s usually awkward in practice. (It’s hard enough coordinating just two bodies.)

How many threesomes have you had?

Two.

What was your biggest group-sex experience?

Five men in the same bed. (Strictly speaking it was a threesome and a couple sharing a mattress on the floor.)

How do you meet casual sex partners?

Usually by chatting or placing ads on the Internet. Once a year or so (after I’ve once again forgotten how boring it is) I go to a sex club.

How many sex clubs have you been to?

Seven.

Which ones?

The Black House (now defunct) and Eros in San Francisco, the Steamworks in Berkeley, the Water Gardens in San Jose, a bath house whose name I forget in San Diego, the West End Club in New York, and 515 Toulouse in New Orleans.

What is your taste in penises?

Big dicks make a big first impression, but shapeliness is more important than size. (An ugly big dick is still ugly.) I admit, however, that I’m crestfallen when, after undressing a new partner, I discover that his cock is too small.

What is too small?

Considerably smaller than mine.

What are the attractions of a big cock?

Its size promises extreme (if indefinite) pleasures. Dazzling the eyes, its length and girth inflame the imagination.

What makes a penis shapely?

It has a head – not too big and not too small – that is proportional to its shaft, a thickness that invites manipulation, an imperious hardness (I love those proud hardons that bump into their owners’ bellies), a smooth texture and even coloring with no suspicious bumps or splotches, a big plus for a head with a nice shine that makes you want to lick it.

Cut or uncut?

It doesn’t matter to me, as long as it’s clean and smells good.

What kind of porn do you like?

I like porn that shows real enjoyment, or at least a convincing simulacrum of it. In porn videos I always look for those scenes of fucking where the bottom is hard and his face, overcome by ecstasy, shows that he has surrendered himself to pleasure. Most porn, however, is an insult to desire, since desire (and hence enjoyment) is usually so conspicuously lacking.

How do you feel about cum?

It’s always thrilling to see it spurting out (I adore shooters), and I love the smell of it, but though the idea of swallowing semen is a turn-on, I don’t really care for its taste.

Where have you come?

In Asia, in America (including Hawaii, but not Alaska), in international airspace; I’ve come into toilets, in showers, on the red-orange soil of Bryce Canyon, on hardwood, tile, and linoleum floors, in library carrels, in the backseat of a moving car (unbeknownst to the other passengers), in sundry chairs and beds, into condoms, into the palm of my left hand, in a public park, on a bridge, on the grass shoulder of an interstate highway in Oregon, in my underwear, on Lexington Avenue in midtown Manhattan, in my lover’s boss’s office, in a confessional, in an airplane lavatory (smoking prohibited), . . . (If I knew I were going to give an account of my erotic vicissitudes one day, I would have kept a masturbation journal.)

What have you done with cum?

I’ve spread it lasciviously all over my belly. I’ve rubbed my midriff – slick with commingled cum – against a lover’s stomach. I’ve tasted my own semen after masturbating, or by kissing a lover after coming in his mouth. I’ve passed cum and spit back and forth between a partner's mouth and mine. When I was thirteen, I collected some cum in a film canister and stored it in a cool dry place – a little science experiment. After three days, I was amazed to discover that my semen had turned rust-orange!

¿SUBVERSION?

Do you have any kinks?

I bought silicon anal beads years ago, but I still haven't used them. I like reading erotica featuring incestuous brothers (though I’m not at all attracted to any of my brothers, unless getting a little excited while roughhousing with my older brother when I was going through puberty twenty years ago counts). I once pissed all over a guy’s hair, face, and chest (he was kneeling in a bathtub). I have a sporadic fetish for foot-fetishists – now and then I get a kick out of watching someone caressing, massaging, licking, and sucking my feet. I’m both drawn to and repelled by dom-sub scenarios.

What is the attraction of being dominant?

If I were a dom, my sub would automatically want what I wanted – this congruence would allay much of my anxiety about sex.

Have you ever wanted to rape someone?

A mock rape – where I’m ravishing someone who wants to be ravished – would be titillating, but I can’t imagine deriving any pleasure from actually raping someone. Since I’m hypersensitive to the other’s no (this would explain why my biggest turn-on is seeing my partner’s turn-on), my victim’s hate would destroy all possibility of enjoyment

Do you think you’d enjoy being a sub?

I’m afraid I might.

Why do you want to be a pervert?

Ever since I became gay I’ve dreamed of becoming a hero of desire.

<< The Swelling Laboratory
>> Interview with a Cracked Mirror

Turn 2: Who's Driving?

2005-09-16T05:58:00.000-07:00

Queer Catechism (Version X)
Interview with a Cracked Mirror
The Internal Return

The Swelling Laboratory

2005-09-15T07:46:00.000-07:00

I’m experimenting with . . .

Invisibility
I’m writing myselves out of existence.

Catatonia
I’m playing dead to trick my haunted body’s ghosts into coming out.

Pornography
I’m studying carnal conjugations that disturb the flesh beyond reason.

Desire
At the heart of each craving there beats a pulsing pain.

Mixtures
I’m mixing a bit of me with a bit of you to make a strange brew.

You
I’m trying out your hands, your eyes, your sex; I’m borrowing your mouth to see how it tastes.

Telephones
Electric silences knotting distant tongues.

Masks
Different faces letting different voices sound through.

Fire
I’m burning away my second skin to bare the raging flesh beneath.

Emetics
I’m throwing up my mother and my father.

Hunger
I envy the ascetic’s beautiful hallucinations.

Poisons
I know many of my selves are poisonous to me, but which ones?

Catastrophes
For the love of accident.

Reversals
I’m shuttling faster and faster between opposites, till they become contiguous in me.

Doubling
With two of me, I’ll be able to see my habits as if they were the customs of another country. (Why stop with two?)

Autobiographies
A Portrait of the Artist as His Mother, Autobiography of a Virus, A Day in the Lives of an Illegal Alien, . . .

Perhaps, Maybe
Perhaps the only thing that’s real is maybe.

Parturition
To give birth to other worlds.

Clouds
I’m dispersing myself into a polymorphous mist.

I’m experimenting . . .

<< Wandering Rocks: My Life as an Archipelago
>> Turn 2: Who's Driving?

Wandering Rocks: My Life as an Archipelago

2005-09-14T07:25:00.000-07:00

I am an archipelago – a spray of islands, wandering rocks in a swirling sea. I am a sailor sailing from isle to I’ll, picking up new eyes at every port so I can fall in love with the shimmering wavering skykissed sea all over again. Surfing on sirensongs, I lose myself as life finds me. It’s time for another voyage – can you feel it? A new island is rising from the restless foam.

Many of the early philosophers were itinerant.
The first Greek philosophers came from Miletus (now in Turkey), at the mouth of the Meander.

Everything is made of water.
–Thales, Miletus, 625-545 B.C.E.

My eyes are made of water. My mouth too, and the words dripping off my melting tongue – globed droplets of my dissolving self.

Humans originally resembled another type of animal, namely fish.
–Anaximander, Miletus, 610-540 B.C.E.

My mother is a fish. I was born to swim upstream, but the river has been wearing away my doggedness with its sweet-tongued murmurs – relax into the current.

The soul is immortal. It changes into other kinds of animals.
–Pythagoras, Samos-Croton-Metapontum, 570-510 B.C.E.

For a long time I used to be protozoa. I would go to bed an amoeba and wake up a vorticella. After lunch I turned into a radiolarian. At night I continued to mutate in my dreams.

Men die because they cannot attach the beginning to the end.
–Alcmaeon, Croton, fifth century B.C.E.

I have neither a beginning nor an end to attach to each other. All middle, I’m in perpetual suspense, always about to –

The thunderbolt steers all things.
–Heraclitus, Ephesus, flourished 500 B.C.E.

The lightning flash illumines other ways, the thunderbolt forks the unforked path, my tongue

splits again at every crossroads, doubling my voice once more, multiplying my already rampant paradoxes.

it is indifferent to me
whence I begin, for there again shall I return.
–Parmenides, Elea, 515 B.C.E.-

It is indifferent to me whence I begin, because I know nothing will be the same when I return. Begin!

What is moving is moving neither in the place in which it is nor in the place in which it is not.
–Zeno, Elea, 490 B.C.E.-

A flickering haunting the elusive spaces in-between, I’m impossible to place, but I’m not lost. (I’m not trying to find myself.)

It is fine to speak twice of what one should.
–Empedocles, Acragas (Sicily), 495-435 B.C.E.

I never know what to say, so I either say nothing or repeat some strange saying I’ve stumbled into till it feels like home. Then I repeat it some more till it feels strange again.

Do not speak in the dark.
–Fifth-century Pythagoreans

Listen. Darkness speaks.

The world is one. It began to come into being from the middle . . .
–Philolaus, Croton, 470 B.C.E.-

They say every story has a beginning, middle, and end. I might be a story, but my life definitely isn’t.

We in reality know nothing firmly but only as it changes in accordance with the condition of the body and of the things which enter it and of the things which resist it.
–Democritus, Abdera-Egypt-Persia-the Red Sea, 470 B.C.E.-

A porous interface between rival enigmas, my skin too is an unfathomable mystery.

And mind controlled the whole revolution, so that it revolved in the first place. And first it began to revolve in a small area, and it is revolving more widely, and it will revolve yet more widely.
–Anaxagoras, Clazomenae, 500-428 B.C.E.

Centrifugal autobiography:
I was born spinning. I turned around you and I turned around me and I turned into this and I turned into that. Awake or asleep, I’m always spinning both stories I can’t tell and unstories I’m always telling, and someday I’ll spiral into silence – a quiet that’s still turning.

<< Sentimental Education
>> The Swelling Laboratory

Sentimental Education

2005-09-13T17:25:00.000-07:00

Red Science

Miss V stretched the rubbery red lips of the balloon over the round mouth of an empty milk bottle. The balloon’s empty belly sagged redly against the glass. Slowly she lowered the bottle into a pot of boiling water. Your eyes grew bigger as the balloon swelled, its deep red turning translucent. Then she moved the sweaty bottle into a blue basin of ice water – CRACK! – and the balloon slumped redly. CRACK! – and your red hunger for astonishment broke out of its slumbering egg.

Obedience School

Every morning on his way to work, your father dropped you off at your scary aunt’s, where you had lunch before Poleng walked you to school. Presiding over lunch, your aunt made sure you were served plenty of tomatoes, string beans, okra, or whatever the vegetable horror of the day was. At home, you never had to eat anything you didn’t want to, but here, there were rules, there were punishments – the rules were punishments. You avoided the hairy slimy okra for as long as you could, so you had to force everything into your mouth at the last minute. After excusing yourself, it was hard not to run to the bathroom where you vomited your green misery into the toilet. Afterwards, you wiped your mouth with the back of your hand – time to go to school.

How to Be a Boy

You were Sabrina, the smart angel. Teves – who unerringly picked the two shyest boys in the class to play Charlie’s Angels with him – was Farrah of course, and Ricarte, dark and quiet, was Kelly. Aiming your cocked index fingers around corners and from behind pillars, you chased each other in the haunted hallways of the Catholic boys’ school. (They said the Japanese had shot some Brothers in the school during the war.) Every recess and lunch you pursued bad guys while Teves sang the wordless theme song. In the third grade you were transferred to the “smart” section, where you discovered that Teves was a bad guy because he wanted to be a girl.

The Kiss

Every morning before she entered the classroom Mrs. Encarnado gave her husband a goodbye kiss on the lips in front of the whole class. Every morning the class cheered and Mrs. Encarnado gave us a big smile. Every morning you looked forward to this happy ritual.

Lead to Gold

–Look! Charlie said, pointing excitedly at something on the wall. What made him smile so strangely?

     Five years ago you flunked the entrance exam to your father’s (and his
     father’s) alma mater. The grownups whispered.
     Four years ago you were dumbfounded when the first-grade teacher      askedyou to read aloud.
     Three years ago the school that rejected you finally let you in, but you
      were put in the dumb section.
     Two years ago you were promoted to the smart section.

Now you’re blinking at your typewritten name next to the words Gold Medal. What was this writing on the wall?

Real Life

You were Silver the Sorcerer, a good elven magician with superhuman strength, intelligence, dexterity, wisdom, constitution, and charisma. (In real life you were skinny, bookish, clumsy, naive, asthmatic, and timid.). You had more platinum pieces than you could count (1 platinum piece = 5 gold pieces = 10 electrum pieces = 100 silver pieces = 1000 copper pieces). Your fantastic spells rewrote reality.

Silver’s Spellbook

Charm Person
Enlarge
Erase
Forget
Invisibility

Magic Mouth
Tongues
Polymorph Self
Animate Dead
Disintegrate

Reincarnation
Simulacrum
Maze
Shape Change
Wish

Silent Treatment

Father Chito didn’t say a word to the class for months. He wrote the English lessons on the board and you copied them quietly till the bell rang. After class you often saw him puffing on cigarettes and laughing with Miss Lagra on the green benches just outside the school. It always seemed unpriestly to you that he should be smoking and sniggering with a woman in public. His punishing silence, however, didn’t seem unpriestly at all.

Imitation of Affects

You were an unlikely boy scout – the kind who got merit badges for reading and stamp collecting. On a seaside camping trip, you ended up in the same tent as a boy who had been bullying you for years. But he wasn’t mean that night. Perhaps emboldened by the darkness, by the privacy in the tent, he proposed a curious bet – touching any part of his body but his penis, you wouldn’t be able to give him an erection. So you caressed his inner thighs, tracing its taut bluish veins with the soft padding of your fingertips. Struggling to keep himself from getting hard, he grunted and grimaced, which made you hard. This confounded you, because he was one of the ugliest people you’d ever known.

Don’t Move

Mr. Rochester was explaining something about the Holy Spirit. Once again, you were pressing your knees gently into the ass of the boy (M) who sat in front of you during Religion class. You imagined his buttocks’ heat spreading from your knees through your thighs to your burning groin. He could have slid forward just half an inch, and you would have left his butt alone from then on – but he never moved. (The next year, M moved to California.)

Church of the Poison Mind

After “Karma Chameleon” became a hit, people at school started saying that you looked like Boy George.

     Karma karma karma karma karma chameleon

Some fags even expressed their envy.
–I want your face, one of them said.

     I’m afraid of me
     I’m afraid of me

You feared there was some incriminating mark on your face that everybody but you could see.

     Give me time
     To realize my crime

It would take you the next ten years to overcome your fear of being queer.

Transmigration

Less than a month ago, you were somebody else on a tropical island 7,000 miles away. Now you were no one, and you didn’t know how to become someone again.

After twenty-three years in school you realize that the only thing you’ve learned is how to obey. You know nothing. Begin!

<< Prelude/Interlude/Postlude: Lost Mapmaker
>> Wandering Rocks: My Life as an Archipelago

Turn 1: In Search of

2005-09-13T08:02:00.000-07:00

>> Sentimental Education
>> Wandering Rocks: My Life as an Archipelago
>> The Swelling Laboratory

Prelude/Interlude/Postlude: Lost Mapmaker

2005-09-12T08:54:00.000-07:00

I’m drawing maps to master the art of losing myself.

I’m drawing maps of subways, so I can follow the movements of the underground people, my fellow subterraneans.

I’m drawing maps, cutting them up, and piecing together a world I want to live in.

I’m drawing maps of landscapes I’ve visited in dreams – cities with shifting streets and forests with wandering hills, dreamscapes where the earth is as fluid as the sea, where one has to navigate as circumspectly as on uncharted waters.

I’m drawing maps to commemorate my fugitive loves: This is where I first saw him . . . This is where I fell . . . This is where we walked, this is where we flew . . . This is where I died, again and again . . . This is where . . .

I’m searching for a map of the gaping chasm between lovers, an echoing abyss that only gets vaster as their bodies draw closer–when their skins touch, they’re sucked into an insatiable hole.

I’m searching for a map of the strata of grief underlying all my loves: the progression of love is a regression of griefs – the greater the love, the deeper the grief.

I’m searching for a map of life’s passing, enfolding everything I’ve lost to time – elusive fragments of my irretrievable autobiography, dismembered memoir of the countless lives I’ve lived and haven’t lived.

I’m searching for a map of the shadow world where the darknesses within communicate with the darknesses without in an obscure language. I’m trying to learn its black vocabulary, so I can move more sleekly in the gloom.

I’m searching for a map of the secret passages connecting my separate labyrinths, my crazy mazy selves.

I’m searching for a map of what comes and goes without a trace – elusive vectors too fast or too slow for the unvigilant eye.

I’m searching for a map of a moveable country, a portable roaming I can call home.

I lost my maps. I’m running away as fast as I can before they find me and give me new ones.

I lost my maps. I’m going to throw my watch in the river.

I lost my maps. I’ll hide behind this tree till another traveler comes along, then I’ll steal his maps, his name, his face. Every time I want a new life, I just lose my maps.

I lost my maps. All my life, I’ve been struggling to find my way back to you. Suddenly, I’m overwhelmed by other possibilities.

Since I lost my maps, instead of skimming the surface, I’ve been digging underground. Some people think I’m trying to get to China, but I’m not – I’m just digging.

I thought I was trapped in a labyrinth, but when I lost my maps, I realized I am the labyrinth.

I lost their maps. Now I’m drawing my own maps with my feet.

I lost my maps. I’ve forgotten the names of my mother and father.

Since I lost my maps, I’ve taken to traveling slowly enough to learn the names of flowers and trees – every flower, every tree. When I meet a cluster of daisies, it’s not unusual for us to spend the greater part of the day making introductions.

I lost my maps, so I ask everybody I run into questions. I’m not trying to find my way – I just like asking questions.

I lost my maps. I’m scarcely making any progress toward my almost-forgotten destination. On most days, I don’t even cover any ground – lying on the grass or on a big flat rock warmed by the sun, I just watch the clouds drift through the sky’s unmappable blue.

After I lost my maps, I followed the river to the sea, where I watched the seekers come and go.

Since I lost my maps, things have been changing places whenever I’m not looking. When I go to sleep at night, I know I won’t recognize where – or who – I am in the morning. These involuntary displacements used to vex me, but now I look forward to seeing where I’ll be transported. Lately, I’ve even been learning how to change places with my eyes open.

I lost my maps. Maybe I’ll finally stop going around in circles.

When I realized that the shortest path between two points is never a straight line, I lost my maps.

I lost my maps. Now I travel like a gambler, following the dice I throw before me.

>> Turn 1: In Search of