Pussy Willow (An Apology)

By Susan Mitchell

Why delay? Today I stopped
to rub the fur, like the tender
ear of a cat, stopped

to stroke the lush gray
plush (and oh, the pink!) as if
the cat had rasped

itself to frenzy, to an
ecstasy of itch
all raw

this steak tartar, this
chafe of meat, and
because of this

I was late (the willows in
their bins outside
the florist almost as tall as I)

and once again, have traded
friendship for
dillydally.

I had to take off
my gloves, and I would have
taken off my skin

(for why should I put
a barrier between
myself and anything?)

to pluck, to blow back
each separate tuft
of foam (in down, sink down)

because I cannot keep my hands
off the world and the world
out of my breath. What

does the world want (anyway)
of me with its pussy willows, with
its tears and angers

its greeds and splendors, its
petitions of
skyscrapers and waterfalls?

And what do I want with
its famous and forgotten? And is
this the purpose of my life,

to figure this out? Or is it
to touch and be touched? And if
I love the world more than

any one person, or if I love
one person more
than the world, what

does this say of me?
And what do I say to friends
when they keep me waiting,

Oh dally, friend, delight
so that I may rub
it from your body

its furs and gewgaws, its
horrors and sweetnesses, so you may
deliver it to me, you

the messenger, the unwinged
the prosaic in all
its scratch and bliss?

* * * * *

A poem for friends who patiently wait, as well as those who keep me waiting. I told Egay once that I wanted to write a good poem about friendship. Tama na muna yang love, yang heartbreak. True friendship, that lets two people breathe, is more difficult for me to write about. Next project!

* * * * *

Despite the rains and suspension of classes yesterday, I decided to go out. Passed the bridge and saw the Marikina river in all its muddy, overflowing glory. And saw the riverpark and urinals and benches (where Mitzie, Mikael, EJ and I had greeted 2004 like vodka-saturated sponges) were all underwater.

"And you find this exciting?" Mitzie texted back. Haha. Yep, almost as exciting as the two words that greeted me when I got to SM: Underwear Sale! Instead of giving in to temptation, though, I accompanied EJ on his shoe-shopping spree (he ended up buying good shirts instead), watched The Stepford Wives (which failed to be truly entertaining, or sinister), and devoured half of a Yellow Cab pepperoni and mushroom pizza. With extra pepperoni. Mmmm.

* * * * *

This past week has been a good flurry of moments with friends. I remember the forever-late and now-free Pastrana animatedly narrating the ending of Frankie and Johnny, complete with Michelle Pfeiffer's pout and shrug. Egay, with whom I shared 3 rounds of Mongolian food and 5 hours of reading/checking at Sweet Inspi. Mikael and Lij, who somehow shuttled us to Paranaque despite our wayward sense of direction. Gelo and Cholo telling hilarious Boy Bastos stories, which disguised the smell of White Flower and the retching in the other room. Jeline, who made code-switching sound poetic over cheesecake and yema. Vince, Elmo, and Allan, who are fast becoming my best Cantina salsa buddies. Mykel, who made Sunday night much more bearable. The one who still has the power to hurt, but only because of his tough honesty and faith. And even the one who will not answer text messages, because "one for the road" means "we're better off as inactive spectral presences in each other's lives."

Misreading an Urban Sign

For the past few days I'd been spotting these small white posters on the wall beside the road from Barangka to Katipunan. In big bold capitals: MISSING! Underneath: MARILYN. And under those, in a smaller font size: Hawak ng sindikato. My initial reaction: befuddlement. Why all the posters? What are we supposed to do now, without even knowing this Marilyn's last name, or what she looks like, or whom to contact, or what syndicate has her in its grip?

Today I squinted from the FX's window and read the fine print under the three boldfaced lines: Ni Alan S...

Sigh of understanding. Probably another student play or film. False alarm.

Urban Mythmaker, Urban Lover

This past week I've been reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, now my ultimate multiple orgasmic read. I love its premise and structure: Marco Polo tells the old Kublai Khan of the cities, real or imagined, he has seen and been to. The italicized sections depict their ongoing dialogue and banter in the emperor's garden; the bulk of the book contains the explorer's richly embroidered descriptions of the cities, threaded together by meditations on memory, desire, naming, death, trading, and others. Hence, an idea touched on in one city (each of which is devoted 1-3 pages) gets repeated in another, like variations on a rhapsody, like ripples of recurring, breathtaking pleasure.

I love that the sections are part parables/fables, part prose poems. It's impossible or flat-out wrong to read it in one sitting (though being only 165 pages, one could certainly try); it's the kind of book that has to be savored every few pages, giving one an excuse to postpone fulfillment and stand up to get a glass of iced tea or something from the kitchen.

Man, I really should have read this a long time ago, before I got a hold of Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, before Neil Gaiman's Fables and Reflections, before Colette Brooks' In the City. This is the original urban lover's literary treat. Here's one of my favorites, one of the shorter sections:

Trading Cities 4

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia's refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

* * * * *

Was it good for you too? =)

Family Portraits 1

When Mama picked me up from the department at 7 pm the other day, Papa was in the car as well. They were listening to a tape of Strauss waltzes, and in between pieces, Papa increased the volume and said, with almost as much enthusiasm as he expresses when watching the Santa Ana horseraces, "This is it, Wiener Blut, the 'national anthem' (yes, I heard the quotation marks in his voice) of Vienna." Then he leaned towards me and said, "You used to bounce to this waltz when you were a baby." Great, I used to bounce to a piece called "Vienna Blood." But it was beautiful, and familiar, and...sensuous, so much so that Henry Mencken once described it as:

"...magnificently improper---the art of tone turned lubricious. I venture to say that the compositions of Johann Strauss have lured more fair young creatures to compliance than all the movie actors and white slave scouts since the fall of the Western Empire. There is something about a waltz that is irresistible. Try it on the fattest and sedatest or even upon the thinnest and most acidulous of women, and she will be ready, in ten minutes, for a stealthy smack behind the door ..."

My best moments with Papa have often involved movement---either physical (riding a bike several blocks down to where MJM School of Dance used to be; going around a quaint church in the Quezon highlands; walking as far as we could into the ocean with him carrying me until the water reached his neck) or musical (both of us calling the energetic summer movement of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" as our favorite; him playing Chopin nocturnes on the piano after a tiff).

Without music and movement, we become snarling mirror images of each other: impatient, moody, and somewhat spoiled, with elitist tastes.

* * * * *

Yesterday, my sister spent one of her precious "days off" from GMA (the station, not the president) to help me in the (admittedly frivolous) hunt for the perfect September 1 dress. And it was a hunt my former fashion mag co-workers would have been proud of, taking us from Glorietta to Galleria, from orange Mexican curtain-like shifts to slinky vermilion ("red" does not do justice) cocktail dresses, from mid-high-end boutiques to department stores, from the so-so to the ill-fitting (insert your own jelly belly/inadequate cleavage/bulging butt example here).

What did I end up purchasing? Taupe sandals, mint lip balm, and spicy seedless sampaloc. My problem? I have a budget and I don't know what exactly I'm looking for. Bitchy philo teacher translation: stop making your mundane chores illustrations of your existential angst. My sister's take: "Sumusungit ka when you don't get what you want."

My reply: "This is payback time for when you used to drag me around from Cubao to SM City in the 80s for the perfect running shoes and I, not knowing any better, would be happy with my reward of a cup of buttered Mais ni Ann corn."

Her witty comeback when we stopped for Chinese food and a waiter shoved a gigantic plate of mapo tofu to my side of the table: "Ah, the kind that farm animals feed from."

"(Grunt, snort)." Man, I miss sisterly banter.

* * * * *

Some Kind of Ordinary, Some Kind of Sabog

I'm posting this 30 minutes before my MA class, with Larry a few computers away. What's on my mind: it's amazing how, even after an extraordinary, momentarily earth-shaking event, your life goes back to normal the next day. It's comforting, yes, and expected---so why the wish that the rest of your life be permeated by that fleeting moment? Unless you want to keep that memory separate, because it's one of those un-integratable spur-of-the-moment things that shouldn't have happened---making it all the more delicious. This morning I got up at 10:30, after 6 hours of sleep, with wobbly knees. While waiting at the corner for a taxi, a child in a pink sando, turquoise cotton shorts and lilac slippers (hanep na color combination) was blowing bubbles from one of those cheap bubble mixtures sold by sidewalk or tiangge vendors. Bubbles over J.P. Rizal. Like those bubbles over Session Road last April. She snickered when bubbles burst against my shirt.

* * * * *

I had good intentions of seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind again last night, but we never even got there. Ok lang, baka maiyak na naman ako e, as I did when I watched it last Monday. It's my favorite Kauffman-written film to date, being not only funny and intelligent, but poignant. I love how a/typical and fucked-up the characters are, especially Clementine. I love the tender, quirky quality that shines through even in the hilarious but twisted scenes where Joel escapes to a memory of himself as a 4-year-old and Clem flashes him her crotch. The scenes that got me most weepy, though, were set on the beach where the two first meet. "This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon." "I know." "What do we do?" "Enjoy it." Boo hoo. In the darkness of the cinema, with all my phantoms, I was grateful for the now-platonic arm that extended itself to me in comfort. An arm with elbows that are now simply pointed.

* * * * *

Thanks to Tarie and Elmo, I found the Alexander Pope poem that contains the line Kauffman turns into the movie's title.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
"Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;"

The above excerpt's from a poem entitled "Eloisa to Abelard," published in 1717, inspired by real-life 12th century lovers Peter Abelard and Heloise/Eloisa. He was a 40-year-old philosopher aiming for clergyhood; she was his 18-year-old student, the niece of a friend. As these things go, they had an affair, she got pregnant, they had a son (whom they named Astrolabe!), and secretly got married. Her uncle reacted by having him castrated. In shame, he became a monk, and she a nun. Their renewed correspondence twelve years later show how passionately she still felt about him, though his mind had long turned towards theological matters. Diane Ackerman has a wonderful section about their story in A Natural History of Love. Though it doesn't say whatever happened to poor Astrolabe.

* * * * *

Chilled white wine smuggled into a mall in plastic Jollibee cups. Where do I tuck this memory away?

Another Lembas Equivalent for the Day

Celebration of the Marriage of Heart and Mind
Eduardo Galeano

Why does one write, if not to put one's pieces together? From the moment we enter school or church, education chops us into pieces: it teaches us to divorce soul from body and mind from heart. The fishermen of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, feeling-thinking, to define language that speaks the truth.

Another Word for Kidnapper

I was reading and grading the last of my students' review magazines, intending to return them the following day, but I couldn't shake off the feeling that something was wrong. The phrase "raindrops are projectiles" kept surfacing in my mind, like some piece of crap that refused to get flushed. I looked for the student's article, a movie review of A Bug's Life that I had given a B+, and found it: "a movie where raindrops are dangerous projectiles, single berries provide full meals, and the most feared enemy is a bird." This is too good, I thought, and felt bad for thinking it.

But I went to Google anyway and typed the phrase. And discovered the student had lifted whole paragraphs from an online movie review. I Googled some other phrases from his article, which turned out to be from other reviews. He had cut and pasted and rearranged other people's words to form a mishmash of an article. How could I have overlooked this? I looked at his (checked) draft and found all the plagiarized phrases there. Was I in a hurry when I checked it or was I just too trusting?

Insulted at having been fooled, I went on a Google frenzy, hunting for unusual phrases and well articulated ideas in their reviews and typing them up. I found two other articles where entire phrases and paragraphs had been lifted from Internet sources. Both of them were movie reviews---one of Shrek 2 and another of Lord of the Rings. The annoying thing was that the students had copied even the plot summaries and character descriptions (ex. "a Zorro-style swordsman turning into an overbearingly cute, saucer-eyed puss"). I mean, how difficult can it be to summarize a freaking plot and describe characters of a movie of your choice in your own words?

And one group's introduction/ editors' letter turned out to be a Time magazine article by Richard Corliss on movie sequels. The last two sentences gave it away: "Some Greek, upon hearing that Homer had just composed the Iliad, probably groused, 'That old war story?' And when the Odyssey came around: 'What? Not a sequel!'" I should have known. Judging from their grades in the vocabulary items I include in quizzes, I bet less than one-third of the class knows what to grouse means.

So I prepared a short speech, which I gave after yesterday's official lesson. Starting with, "There's a reason why I haven't returned your review magazines yet." I wrote the word PLAGIARISM in humongous capitals occupying half of the blackboard. That got their attention. They gave their definitions: "taking someone's words and passing them off as your own," "using ideas and phrases without acknowledging your sources," "stealing other people's ideas."

I added, "It comes from the Latin word plagiarius. Can anyone guess what it means?" A brave soul answered, "Cheat?" I said, "No. Worse. It means kidnapper." Nervous laughter. "In a sense, plagiarism is like kidnapping someone else's child and pretending he or she was your own. Or like kidnapping then hacking off the child's arm or head to graft onto your own deformed, premature Frankenstein baby." I get dramatic and grotesque when mad.

I said students who plagiarize are either: 1) ignorant, which is inexcusable---as sophomores, they should know when they're plagiarizing or not; or 2) outright deceptive---regardless of whether the motivation is laziness, insecurity, dislike of the subject, or simply because they can, because Internet sources are so accessible.

I told them about an intelligent, articulate student I knew in high school who would write term papers for people as long as she got paid. Know where she is now? She works for an advertising company. I had college batchmates whose modus operandi was to cut and paste, cut and paste, breeze through Great Books courses without having read a single book. One of them is now in law school, and eventually wants to be a politician like her relatives. How disturbing is that? Advertising, law, politics---three fields where integrity and honesty have time and again been proven to be sorely lacking.

I said that if they still had an ounce of integrity, the offenders should approach me by Friday and admit they had plagiarized. Or face worse consequences. Then I dismissed the class a few minutes before the bell, noting how certain people couldn't look me in the eye.

The speech must have scared them. A (paranoid) couple approached me and asked if copying ingredients and items from a restaurant menu was plagiarizing. Two others whom I hadn't even suspected admitted they had copied passages from other reviews (I pretended I already knew, and said I'd still give them an F for the task).

Later, in the department, the first (raindrop-projectile) offender approached me, looking very apologetic and penitent. "What do you have to say?" He answered, "Ma'am, I'm very sorry. I plagiarized." In halting English he said he had watched the movie and started writing, but, unsure of his opinions, read online reviews which were better than his own. He said he's really terrible at writing and just wanted a good grade so he could keep his scholarship, etc. I felt bad for him, knowing he was one of the nicer, more active students in a class I had walked out on two weeks ago.

Instinct told me he was essentially a good kid who needed to be taught a lesson. So I rejected his offer to rewrite the review, said he would get an F for that task but still be able to make up for it by doing the next tasks well. In my most mataray voice I said I was insulted and disappointed, but that I wouldn't report him to the ADSA this time. But that I would be watching and expecting more from him. He thanked me and apologized again, on the verge of tears. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he won't, in 25 years, be just another con artist, cheating husband, or overweight congressman.

The whole thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I don't like knowing I was deceived. I don't like playing police either, playing the moralistic disciplinarian (esp. knowing I've broken some rules myself and am hardly a parragon of virtue). And I don't want to be forever suspicious of the next good phrase from a student's paper. But, I guess, as a teacher, vigilance should be my new watchword.

A Spy in the House of Love

I finished the Anaïs Nin novel I borrowed from Vince in one sitting. Not that it was a long read, just 166 short pages of delightful, sensual, though sometimes forcedly metaphoric, language. And I know why I was so riveted by it---not as a novel (the actual story leaves much to be desired), but as a character study, an exploration of the psyche of a woman with an inner fluctuating compass and an addiction to multiplicity.

She understood why it angered her when people spoke of life as One life. She became certain of myriad lives within herself. Her sense of time altered. She felt acutely and with grief, the shortness of life’s physical span. Death was terrifyingly near, and the journey towards it, vertiginous; but only when she considered the lives around her, accepting their time tables, clocks, measurements. Everything they did constricted time. They spoke of one birth, one childhood, one adolescence, one romance, one marriage, one maturity, one aging, one death, and then transmitted the monotonous cycle to their children. But Sabina, activated by the moonrays, felt germinating in her the power to extend time in the ramifications of a myriad of lives and loves, to expand the journey to infinity, taking immense and luxurious detours . . . When she did finally fall asleep it was the restless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.

And yes, Sabina's character fascinates me. Whereas others would call her frivolous and unfaithful, I'd say she's simply restless and earnest in a quest for (not love, not artistic power) something she can't single out. She wants too much. And her voice strangely resonates with some of my poetic personae. Especially when she talks about the sadness of folding paper parasols in the rain, the need to reveal as well as conceal with her words even when conversing with friends, and her obsession with the idea of happiness, which she defines as the absence of fever. And this:

In the multiple peregrinations of love, Sabina was quick to recognize the echoes of larger loves and desires. The large ones, particularly if they had not died a natural death, never died completely and left reverberations. Once interrupted, broken artificially, suffocated accidentally, they continued to exist in separate fragments and endless smaller echoes. . . . The echoes struck at first through the mysterious instrumentation of the senses which retained sensations as instruments retain a sound after being touched. The body remained vulnerable to certain repetitions long after the mind believed it had made a clear, a final severance.

After a string of loves and blurred identities, Sabina ends up feeling dispersed, fractured, like a split atom, or, as she witnesses, a postmodern painting where it's still possible to reconstruct a human figure out of the constellated, distorted fragments. How to piece herself together again? Beethoven's Quartets provide the clue at the end: continuity, repetition of a single pattern, harmony. The book ends before we find out if she does find a way to be faithful and single. But isn't there any other way?