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