dead stars, etc

After having been a Language and Literature student four years and a lifetime ago, it's hilarious how I am now taking my first official Lit class. Just goes to show how good I am at procastinating.

For our first lesson, the prof made our class read Paz Benitez' Dead Stars, a short story that is regarded to have started the trend of writing modern fiction in English here in the country. It's about this man realizing what he'd been keeping his heart vacant for for eight years was not really an emotion but a memory of an emotion, long gone.

The metaphor of memories being like light from things that either exploded or turned into black holes millions of years ago must had been exciting back then. It surely made me say "oh cool" to myself three quarters of a century later.

Things I learned:

1. Deus ex Machina means "God in the Machine", not "Machine of the God", as I'd always thought. It is meant to mean a critique on how the conflict in a story is so conveniently resolved, by an outside force.

2. Not to attend a class the first time drunk.


***

The short fiction triggered an exchange of messages of metaphors of stars with a friend that went as follows:

friend: Uh huh, lying down, wondering how the stars keep dangling over what appears to be a whole lot of nothing.

me: And how're the stars treating you?

friend: Some aren't where they're supposed to be, some have lost their way; the rest, the oldest have just been there all the while...and this all happened lightyears ago. =)

me: Each sparkling, fleeting destiny being played out before our eyes. The past reaching into the future. The night sky's but a history book with infinitely large pages.

friend: Stargazing as time travel. So horoscopes dictate futures with history. Then I'll say, "Oooh, stars! Pretty!!"

me: History determining the future in more ways than one. Too-late warnings. Old, cold light.

friend: Each glow a portent of dying, and the luminous lifecycle before it.

me: As we, warding off our own oncoming burnout.

We then moved on to topics of greater urgency, such as him going to Baguio over the weekend and me asking him to buy me chocoflakes and cool cheap accessories as pasalubong.


***

Saw a show on National Geographic on how Nostradamus' notorious quatrains are but clever retellings of past prophecies, perfectly explained by him having lived during the Renaissance when revivals were big.

Stars, says the show, were also Nostradamus' favored tool for divination.

"Stargazing as time travel. So horoscopes dictate futures with history."

"History determining the future in more ways than one."

A scientist interviewed in the show explained that eventhough stars' gravity and light do affect the earth it is with such minimal force, much less than everyday objects (like, say, light bulbs), to have any substantial effect on earthling future.

It is sad the older I get the less relevant stars become.


***



Now I look up, and nothing.

commas

When I was a child sadness took little test bites
of my soul.
Torturing nurturing
never swallowing whole.

***

squeezing into floating fleeting spaceless space faceless faces
, my created selves

***

Everything determined, by declaration.
This, is a great day.

According to Paolo

and all the men and women merely

Directed a school production of Ang Pinakamakisig sa mga Nalunod sa Buong Daigdig,Ms. Risa Jopson's adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, which was the final exam for theater class. Since I've no previous experience in theater whatsoever oh save for the time I played a drunk partee girl that gets raped in an interschool theater fest november last year, I found it surprisingly, seriously hard.

The closest thing to directing I see myself doing is maybe making films. I don't like playing god. Or rather, I don't like playing god so...for a lack of a better...directly. Like telling actors how to move around on stage. Makes me feel like they're objects. I'd rather make movies and control people from inside their heads. haha, of course i'm maybe kidding.

Or rather I'd rather watch. Watch people. Someone once said I live by looking and listening and staying still. Omniscience over omnipotence.

But yeah. Now come the cliches.

The play turned out great. I learned a lot from the process and even made good friends with many of the talented people i worked with. Am pretty proud of our class. A lot of 'em are potentials. A lot of times felt like being in actual theater school. Plus, the playwright came. We've met before through my sister, so I was shameless in asking her how she found the play. She said she liked it because she saw a lot of new things in it. I couldn't but smile.

I ended up on a rooftop with my brother and bestfriends, drinking beer, laughing, and watching the rain fall like curtains. "All the world's a stage..."

Sleep and Tristan Tzara

To stretch your brain
awake with shots of caffeine
and punch holes through the sleepy
blanket of rain falling stretching over
all our sleepy houses and not a wink
despite the pauses, blankness, is to keep
yourself connected to this wretched stretched waiting
waking...Waking. .......Waking : Extended Long-Playing
pain

- 09180600000000000000000000000000

Witch-Wife

She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun 'tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.

Edna St. Vincent Millay


To be sent this message through this floating, fleeting labyrinth. Awwww.

getting old:
being told
names of thoughts
you thought you thought

Nihilism Simulacrum Dada Postmodern Existential Absurd Mad

getting old is
getting is old


"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience."
– Johann Wolfgong von Goethe

Act One

Table-edge straight, I'm one who never found
girls pretty save for when envy
hits and always made them fast boys wait.
But now I want a lover and I want him gay,
and if you happen to be in a mid-life-identity
crisis, I want him you, specifically.
You could talk all day about Shakespeare
and dead white plays in our classroom
that is your stage, and I would only
quietly sit.
We could flit around cafes. I would try
and drink up all the art, which
solely wakes up all your hearts
and not feel sleepy.
We could lie around in bed
and trace the line uttered by
some god between where your body
ends and mine starts.
We willl forever be apart.
We could lie and laugh
about the men of our lives.

(for Tuxqs)

Deus ex Machina

Because of all the coming and the going and the staying in between.
Your leaving ............................ is the machine of the god is the end
..................
...................of our non-beginning

Something To Talk About
Badly Drawn Boy

I've been dreaming
Of the things I've learnt
About a boy who's bleeding
Celebrate to elevate
The joy is not the same without the pain

Ooooooh...

Ipso facto
Using up your oxygen
You know I'm shallow
Calling out for extra help
You've got to let me in
Or let me out

Oooh something to talk about
Oooh something to talk about
Oooh Oooh Oooh

I've been dreaming
Of the things I learnt

About a boy who's leaving

Nothing else to chance again
You've got to let me in
Or let me out

Oooh something to talk about
Yeah something to talk about
Oooh Oooh Oooh

In between the last time I was here which was around a month ago and now, I was wasting 6 hours of my life in line to watch The Da Vinci Code, drowning in beer what remained of the summer, cooking caramel rice krispie puffs i'm not sure what to call it, haha, with my brother, bowling in my sister's 20th birthday party in between swigs, screaming my soul out in gigs, watching Monk/Seinfeld/Simpson episodes on replay, bumping into familiar thoughts while watching a play, Godot Where Is U?, on a Friday, staying up late staring at blank pages, writing nothing, reading everything, liking unexpectedly Bob Ong and his Stainless Longganisa, and liking it a lot, forgetting to comb my hair until it was but a giant knot, and remembering or maybe even learning for the first time how to make a joke.

Just updating you with recent non-events in my life since i've been lazy. Oh, and promising to write here at least once within every 24 hours, in the hopes of some geek checking my blog out from some parallel universe and actually caring.

Till again. ;)

"Where Is My Mind?"

Nihil

.
"A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy."

"For Nietzsche, there is no objective order or structure in the world except what we give it."

See poem below.

Finally a structure of unstructure for my thoughts on non-structure.

Fun.

What Follows

Soon we became encumbered
by weight, but then it was never more
than another rule we wanted
to break. It was a windy day
when after struggling with balance
they launched their carefully-calculated
dream. They must have never felt so free.
The gate was ten feet tall why
ever did we evolve from monkeys then
again the body was a limit
that waited to be proven fake it was
the rigid schedule we could't take.
The exactness of beelines
to classes. The square ness of the rooms. Boxes
and boxes. We climbed over
the ten-foot line and launched
our lives, knowing only after,
the fall. Soon we became acquainted
with broken bones, this weight,

and how we obeyed,

we and the brothers Wright.
Even in flight.


...an old poem 'bout how we can't but live based on what we can't know. ambot.

Parallel (Creation Story no. ____ )

.

.

...and then our world goes pop!

.

.

The Haiku of Adam and Eve

And on the seventh
day he rested. and we start-
ed to play Create.

Inspired

In a vintage-inspired dress in a convenience-inspired store

"Nothing of us is original." -- Chuck Palahniuk, "Invisible Monsters"