Afterwards

So, you see.
There are things that take time
To simmer and boil
The adrenaline rush
Of ripping the heart out has come
And gone
And here it lays,
Spoiled.
Retrospect clarifies they say
The view from afterwards is crystal
What was it that happened?
How was it?
Who was I?
It was, you know,
A rending apart
Of mine and yours.
And here I mourn the bits
I'll never take back from you.

Dark, Bright

I could see nothing but his perfectly shaped lips as they make motions to form words. By the light of the overbright table lamp we bought from Ikea, he looks up the ceiling as we talk, exhausted. Here we are again, struggling to piece us two together. I will remember him best as he sits dejected on the new couch, in my new apartment, in the new university accommodation. As he struggles to explain something from his heart rather than his head, I look out the windows listening to his voice. I care for this man. In a way I have never quite known before. Even though its maddeningly difficult. And I do not know how he is so sure of me when I am always doubtful of him. I do not know what will happen in the coming days, months, years. But at that moment, limned by the lights of the shiny new monuments to this university's will to greatness, I discovered what it means to be humbled by something so precious, so real, it hurts.

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Versus verses

Some things write better in verse
If only because
The economy of words
And what little is written
Somehow better express
Concreteness
Here, you see
In the absences
One can say
What cannot be articulated.
The disjointed staccato
Of the keyboard's clicks
Marries the scattered ego
And dreams with it.
In verse, the unconscious
Weaves and ducks
To avoid the mercilessness
Of the worldly
Here, you see
The id plays and dances
And cries and wails.

Wounds

Some wounds never heal, the ones underneath our skin. They linger and fester years after they were first inflicted. Eight years ago this month my father died in a car accident. But really the idea of my father died years before that. I carry with me still the pain of his betrayal. I was nineteen. Today it manifests in ways I could never have imagined back then. They continue to haunt me, to dog me, to colour my relationships. Perhaps it was because he died before any resolution between us was made. I didn't have a chance to make peace with my him or to forgive.

Eight years later, I am still angry and the feeling of betrayal is a wound that never gets a chance to heal. One little flick and there it bleeds again. I never did reconcile my superhero image of him with the reality of his being human. That process I was able to negotiate carefully with my mother as I grew older. In adulthood I came to know her and forgave her for being human. My two images of her, the one that has significantly influenced me in shaping who I am, that ideal of her, remains carefully preserved along with the 'real' her. These two have found harmony in my head, the sacred and the profane. And my father? He never got a chance for redemption. For us, his children, he had no explanations. He sinned just because he could. And so in my head men sin just because they can.

Sleep, Rest

Been back on the red dot for almost a week now, and I have found it difficult to revert back to 'work' mode. I am house-sitting the Super's house and it is lovely to have all this space to myself - free to cook, roam, smoke and enjoy the quiet. As usual there is the never-ending construction work on campus, but tomorrow I shall try and see if I can work in the office.

I can't wait for the semester to begin, this little bit of downtime is driving me nuts. I still owe the Super a ten-page summary of where I'm at with my proposal...but I can't quite muster the will-power to get the brain juices flowing again. The past school year has been pretty hardcore and all my faculties have been pushed to the limit. Z says I shouldn't be too hard on myself and to take advantage of the time for R&R. I dunno. I'm a bit of a puritan when it comes to these things. If I'm not having a difficult time with anything, with work, then I feel I am not really doing anything worthwhile.

Going home to Manila next month. It would be good to see old friends and family.

Friday Eve

For the first time in a while, it is quiet in my head. For the first time in a while, I have the quiet to write. So here it is. In a few days I shall celebrate another birthday. Broke. As always. And a few days after that I fly off to the city that gave give birth to Critical Theory. Not a bad way to celebrate a birthday broke.

It's been a year almost, since I landed my ass on this island. My first impressions stand. But there are things to like, even admire. Class here is not that big of an issue. Not in the way it does in the Philippines. Race is what divides people though. And religion.

There is a numbness-inducing continuity in things. Time here flows, in the way that yesterday flows seemelessly into today. Nothing disturbs the tick of the clock and everyone does as the should just so. Singapore has tamed time in the way the Philippines has not.

This business of higher higher higher education is difficult. I have learned to read a thousand pages per week on average. After a point it becomes addicting. You keep reading and you can't stop. The writing part is more difficult though. I thought it ridiculous when one of the professors said her aim was to write five hundred a day. I thought naively at the time, what a low output. But 500 words a day is a miracle on days when the muses don't come knocking.

I have fallen in love and we are broken up for the nth time. This loving business gets really ugly the older one gets. But I am enjoying my space tonight, free of thoughts other than these. I am downloading Hanna. It promises to be good.

Singapore's Best Muffin

Little flecks of chocolate decorate
Bits and pieces melt on the tongue
Dry it is, the muffin
As dry as the tearing eye
Wash it down with milk tea
Warm liquid flows land heavy
Mixing muddy in the gut

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Hello abandoned blog. It's good to see you again.

Egypt's Postmodern Revolution

This short interview of Egyptian Blogger Alaa Abd El-Fatah clearly shows how important the internet has become in mobilising for political change.



"What we need now is a transition government anyway, not one that is going to last forever. Whoever comes after that is going to rule in mortal fear of the people. They are going to remember these scenes forever. So I don't think anyone is worried about who will rule. If we don't like them we will change them, if not through elections then through another revolt." - Alaa Abd El-Fatah

The Heavy - How you like me now?

Always exciting to discover new music. If this sounds familiar, its because you heard it on the film 'The Fighter.' These guys are British!

Foucault on freedom

Interesting take by A.M. Rizvi:

Capitalism thrives on creating desires and multiplying them. Without the constant production and multiplication of new desires the capitalist system would dry up. It is important for the continuous production and reproduction of the system that each and every element of the system must keep ‘desiring’ more and more. The movements that turn into movements of safeguarding people’s rights and base their struggles on the charters of demands really enhance the functioning of the capitalist system (unless the demand is unconditional dissolution and overthrow of capitalism itself - the impossible demand). This is because they work on the false premises that capitalism suppresses desires. Foucault’s turn, in his later work, to the aesthetics of existence that would be based on voluntary asceticism and disciplining desires, was in part a response to this realisation (Foucault, 1988a).

Looking forward to swimming in Foucault this semester.

Eternal Recurrence

Randy David's column today is notable enough for a repost. A crucial point:

Far from defending inherited values, Nietzsche saw in modernity the chance to formulate new ones. The release from the old, he said, must not mean that everything is now permissible. On the contrary, it means learning how to live a self-chosen but relentlessly disciplined life. This will not come naturally. One needs to fashion it for oneself through a hit-and-miss process that requires the utmost boldness and sense of adventure. This process is not theoretical or cerebral, or doctrinal. It is eminently practical. Ideas are only starting points; it is the act of living itself that is crucial and ultimately instructive.

Ars Singapura

Singapore is hypermodernity in a few hundred square kilometres. Hyper-efficient, hyper-clean, hyper-sped. A friend said to wait ‘til I see what crawls underneath. I said I do not need to see to know. Money sloughs off every gleaming building, every zipping luxury vehicle, every tinker of laughter at the night spots. But the ostentatiousness is relatively restrained. It is matter-of-fact, tasteful, very Chinese. Professor O says they are renovating the faculty for the nth time because they need to keep workers employed to stimulate the real economy, versus the fictitious one, ‘money laundering.’ I said they must call it something else. I had a mental picture of the city-state sitting in a bathtub of its plastic notes, sudsy, with rainbow-coloured bubbles on top even as grimy particles accumulate below the surface of the South China Sea.

Diasporic Filipinos

Stumbled on this essay. Some interesting propositions. An excerpt:

Firstly, the problem with the diaspora as an imagined community is that, unlike the traditional nation-state, the diasporic population often fails to constitute a viable body politic; more than just difficulty in imagining itself as possessing real political power, the Filipino diaspora also has a historical susceptibility to marginalization, either in the home country or the adopted one. This sense of liminality often creates dangerous slippages. The Flor Contemplacion episode is one such instance. Here, the Philippines’s attempts to secure mercy on one of its citizens (a domestic helper), accused of murder and sentenced to death, in Singapore in the mid-1990’s offers the grossest example of the discrepancy between the home country’s ability to extend ancillary support to its migrant population(s) and the material reality of dislocation that puts the OFW subject beyond the tentacles of the State. Similarly, the reports of employer abuse, sexual harassment, and discrimination puts the OFW in a curious, and dangerous, position — one in which the State is both responsible and helpless.

Wikileaks - leaking power in the 21st century?

Power in the olden days was constituted by those who had the ability to muster means to make people comply to their wishes. The ability to hold life and death in one's hands, i.e. military might, was power. The acquisition of military power, in turn, meant being able to organise society in ways so as to extract economic surplus to fund war machines, which can then be deployed to engage in wars of expansion and the amassing of more wealth to fortify power-holders.

Naked displays of power are still apparent today. However, overt displays of violence and coercive force are now frowned upon, unless you are the preponderant hegemon (the United States). It is perhaps no accident that Julian Assange and the entire motive force animating Wikileaks have targetted the US in their 'exposes'. The 'US' is not so much a territorial entity here as an ideational construct representing who and how power is wielded in the world. Since entities such as Wikileaks cannot contest the 'US' in terms of the old definition of power, they find ways to diminish newer ways in which power is exercised today.