Here is the Game, and Here is the Cycle

(Warning: long entry)

It's been three weeks since my last update. Yet no matter how long the intervals are between entries, the dilemma remains the same: what and how and how much to say, without being too revealing or cryptic or self-indulgent or trivial. And it only becomes a dilemma because I've chosen to write memoir-like fragments here instead of poems or critical commentaries or jokes, to make the connectable entries in Connect the Dots distillations of my life.

On some days, though, I'm still that schoolgirl with her mother's sapphire ring in her skirt pocket, choosing not to wear it on her finger not just out of fear (of it being confiscated by class officers tasked to implement the no-jewelry policy) but also out of the belief that the source of luck, the source of happiness must be protected from the prying, reductive eyes of the world.

* * *
I was so happy last night. Partly because the last Cynthia Alexander gig I'd watched was ten months ago pa, at 70s Bistro, after reading "Ped Xing" at Bersona. And it's been ten months of emotional tumult since. At Conspiracy last night, though, despite faint pangs of sadness when she sang "Ghost" and "Motorbykle" (and the funny thing is, I was unexpectedly seated beside one of my ghosts, and Allan had just told me something motorbykle-related that, whether true or not, cracked a still-fresh old layer of my heart), I felt like I was at graduation. My own. Or at least it felt like what graduation should truly be---a joyful ritual, shared with others, celebrating the achievement of having passed through something and having learned.

So when she belted out, "Don't lose yourself in anyone" (my favorite part of the drum-happy "Walk Down the Road"), it felt less like a scolding than a friendly reminder of a lesson already learned. And when she sang, "So we dance, oh dance . . . Hold on fast to living, for those days are long gone," it sounded like a blessing. On her third Joni Mitchell song of the night, I sang along at the top of my voice with other people around the table, which included Elmo, Allan, Larry, Maita, Anina, Miguel, Minelle, Kai, Missy, Mookie, Kokoy, BJ C., and Heidi. "I could drink a case of you, darling, and I would still be on my feet." Even at 5 a.m., after six bottles of beer and New York fudge ice cream and joining in a group conversation that meandered from solitude to siblings' sex lives, my heart was still doing steady pirouettes.

* * *
I've redecorated my cubicle, now with a Before Sunset theme: tacked on my corkboard is the Before Sunset postcard with the ethereal Julie Delpy on it; taped to the wooden desk and the wall behind me are pictures of landscapes (Stonehenge, Calgary), objects (the Dumaguete swing) and people (Virginia Woolf, Van Gogh's doctor, and an anonymous father and child) swathed in golden sunlight; between these are pieces of pink and yellow marbled cardboard with lines of poetry I calligraphed in blue ink, such as:

. . . a woman straightening
a desk turns her calendar to another day, signaling
that it is another day where the desk is concerned
and that there is in her days what doesn't belong to the desk
---Robert Hass, from "Natural Theology"

Egay's interpretation: even without looking at the content (of the lines) and aesthetics (of the layout), the very act of my redecorating screams out, "Something has changed and I want people to know!" And that what's most telling is not what's been added, but what's been kept (like the pink lampshade) and what's been removed (like photographs of certain people whose images no longer have power over me).

I suppose Mama's redecorating and cleaning bouts during my childhood did leave a few ideas ingrained. Those bouts weren't just about beauty and cleanliness. They were about letting internal shifts be reflected on the surface, about not allowing things to stagnate, and especially about making room for more good while holding on to the old and valuable.

* * *
The Tapatan reading with Egay last Thursday was a fun, if small, affair that affirmed not only our separate poetic journeys but our friendship as well. No other friend has been as constant and non-judgemental, quietly looking out for me. Conversations with him flow, even after a month of not having updated each other.

While it's comforting to talk to someone who knows almost all the narrative threads of my life, it's also thrilling to be able to tell these stories to new friends (and to retell them to myself as well), with all the necessary or unconscious revisions and reframings. There's a passage by Barthes (from A Lover's Discourse again) that talks about this narrative bliss:

Neither knows the other yet. Hence they must tell each other: "This is what I am." This is narrative bliss, the kind which both fulfills and delays knowledge, in a word, restarts it. In the amorous encounter, I keep rebounding---I am light.

* * *
Ron threw Adrienne Rich lines at me two weeks ago at Cantina. And he was right. These past two weeks have been about finally looking up after reading the poem, about not losing momentum like the underground train, and about running up the stairs towards a new kind of love my life---or my faulty judgement---has not allowed.

* * *
I had a dream the other week, which Vince called a good omen. The details are fuzzy now, but it involved people (from the department!) wanting to imprison me, other people helping me to escape, and my having the ability to fly. I was about to soar out of the window (of a room that looked strangely like the Summit editorial office) when I saw a worker with a name tag that said "MOG" (name has been changed to protect the dream character's identity, haha).

I said, "Hey, I knew a MOG once. Don't you have a friend or co-worker with the same name?"

He answered, "Yeah, actually. MOG ___. He works in the boiler room now."

"Can you call him, please? I haven't seen him in years and I've been wanting to talking to him!"

"What guarantee do I have that you won't fly off and disappear when I go to call him?"

I replied, "I promise to wait here until he arrives. I give my word that I'll stay here, that I won't fly off."

And the dream ended there, with the promise.

* * *
A bunch of us spent a quiet, companionable morning reading and writing at Picnic Grove, Tagaytay last Monday. Taking a break from Jorie Graham, I brought out my favorite summer book---Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, which I hadn't read in years---and was particularly struck by a passage, among others, in which the 95-year-old Helen Loomis says:

I've always known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for the night. It's essentially nocturnal. But what of the mind, which is born of the sun, William, and must spend thousands of hours of a lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful, selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect? I don't know. I only know there has been your mind here and my mind here, and the afternoons have been like none I can remember. There is still so much to talk about, but we must save it for another time.

The time was 10:15 a.m. and, while my mind was groping for a sentence that was merely declarative, I looked up and around, and saw: a kid near the railing with orange clips in her hair, blowing bubbles; the man selling bags of pink and turquoise-colored cotton candy, wearing a faded black Pantera t-shirt; mothers grilling pork barbecue, its smoke wafting towards us and other sheds and tables; Bible-wielding people, some of them wearing malongs, listening to a preacher trivialize Ecclesiastes by saying, "Lahat ng karanasan natin paulit-ulit lang, parang mga estilo ng damit"; and a charming red, blue and green kite flying high and strong---which, only minutes earlier, had gotten stuck in a nearby tree's branches but was lovingly disentangled by its flier (I refuse to say "owner"; nobody "owns" a kite).

Today, I feel like that kite: relieved at having survived near-catastrophe, grateful at being held steady and grounded, yet joyously buoyant, paradoxically free.

* * *
My answer to Anina's old question: I refuse the false dichotomy. I choose burning, with the intention of lasting.