My kind of people, there is always something wrong with them. Yet, it is definitely NOT with their sensible dispositions and creativity.
If they are long-haired (genderless), they are not content on just being black. The hair should be wiry, mutilated with chemicals, berserkly outward, ashed with wisdom (lots of them too), pulled out, snobbed, hooted on, fattened, strengthened, grown and can even block stage performances (no complaint though--it is a fine, fine thing).
Thank you to the people who continue to carve in their select and noble (dignity does not necessarily attach to power) works--the importance of their humanity, their willingness to help without being shamelessly poll-conscious.
I have a piece titled Beatles In Times of A Convoluted Dance. I could not seem to transfer it to this space for the dumbest reason (I am impatient to try other ways. I wrote that dreamers, like most of my favorite people are, think NOT of cruel, despotic, repressive ways first in facing dissensions. One does not gather assent via ignorance. John and Paul, after the split, critiqued each other through music. A musician, when already leaning to suppressive tendencies, is a gem to handle. Just tell him/her "I shall wreck this Fender of yours with the Hendrix signature if you do not shape up" and one can be sure, he will no longer implore Divine Providence to do the right thing.
Why am I writing this way again. I just watched performances that absolutely are reasons enough why I got stuck on maintaining bravery and courage even if at times, I wanted to take out a huge dagger and punch holes to the World so it can slowly breathe. The musicians...and the people who stage them...they are my alternative psychologists to living with purposefulness without the morose, horrible things usually inflicted to it by people who refuse to listen.
Musicians, they can be angry but always with a certain classiness. They make their instruments the extensions of their laments and they speak more soulfully.
To all of you, thank you so much for refusing to mar our space with vindictiveness and vile---rest assured, these people, they can face anyone even if they hate their faces because their craft, their musicality, made them free. Show me someone with a passion either in music or letters who is NOT a freedom giver.
I love the blank and the tree and everyone. Especially the person I hope everyone should understand as my only sense of direction because he located somewhere in my ribs that the greatest pacifier of trouble is there, beating. My path is cleared, for him and to the rest of the friendly habitat in his circle.
As I was immersed in that vibe of openess---I envy all of you for your 24 hour laughter that still sees hard work as a way to live. Not through stealing or cheating a public silly. You do not shortchange people; you all seem very happy already hearing the riffs of your friends. That is not greed. That is celebration. They do not do that in huge castles I think.
Yeebah. A gazillion buckets of thanks.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
The Wonderful World of Innocence
“There are men who love to gaze with the mind at things that can never be seen, feel at least the throb of a beauty that will never be known, and hear over immense bleak reaches the echo of that which is no celestial music, but only their own hearts’ vain cries…”
From “Dusky Ruth” by A.E. Coppard
How I would love to scoff at my pretentious title. Yet, WWI could stand not for war but for something consequential like that.
It has no bearing whatsoever to the contents of this entry but only to suitably introduce that more than perfect passage, especially the mind gazing part. How does one appropriate this colloquially? Focusing your 20/20 vision blindly to the invisible? If someone asks me the concept of innocence, I will readily quote him or her those lines.
And now, for the goldsmith kind of hard speak.
Pretend that I am playing with a plastic ball (striped, in blue and white) in a field with dragonflies. Kites are flown by unseen hands. Color them yellow. Yes, the hands. Paint the kites in b&w stripes. Put some starchy white clouds over me and if you may, jumping centipedes nearby. I know centipedes do not jump but imagine them jumping anyway.
Chances are, I will never lose that ball even if those centipedes are undermining my solemn self. If I lose it, clearly, my claws shall remain intact. I choose where to hurl my slings where they make a difference. And, yes, I may be forgiven for that. I am far and so out of the loop.
On that note, I would like to appeal on behalf of my mother and her fellow retirees who are now directed to claim their pension benefits from the provincial office of the GSIS. I do not see the logic of dragging people of age, some even in wheelchairs, to travel far and wide when they had the luxury of waiting for them via post before. I told my mother, this may be for your own protection to prevent fraud. When I blurted this out, I nevertheless figured: what better way to guard the delivery of those checks than to bring them directly to the homes of these retirees? That is ensuring that recipients truly get their benefits and not just some people pretending to be them.
My mother--I guess, she is one breed of individual who will always follow guidelines and rules (except in lining up and market concerns sometimes). She received a letter from GSIS that beginning February, she is to claim her pension benefits from the provincial office (she needs to take two rides to reach it).
It smacks of any reasoning why people like my mother, some of them thoroughly sickly, must go through the winding road of claiming their benefits requiring long periods of travel when there is an aligned government agency (the post office) to secure those deliveries safely. It was working finely before. On a more material note, she also told me that my departed father’s survivor’s benefits no longer carried the 13th month pay privilege unlike the previous years.
These old people just sit down and discuss their predicament among themselves without a howl. They play scrabble and learn new words. Delightful aging I would say. I think they are too old to get angry and cut-out placards to seek redress. Mama’s companion asked : “Who are they to dictate on us?” They, meaning, whoever conceptualized the elderly-horrid idea that from now on, these old people shall pretend they do not have arthritis and can walk briskly like gym-pumped citizens to enjoy the fruits of their previous labors. Damn if they suffer from cardiac arrests.
Musicians, do you have mothers like me? Writers, how about you? It is quite puzzling. This is one of the gaps in basic social services I do not see working in prop wars. Where is the proper treatment to people who had served in public service after they have retired?
My mother and her colleagues ought to be given convenience they should get. She seldom whines publicly. She holds the household together at an advanced age of 72. Give her gang their just and dignified due. The elderly could not sow discord at this point in time. They worry more about their sugar levels.
“There are men who love to gaze with the mind at things that can never be seen, feel at least the throb of a beauty that will never be known, and hear over immense bleak reaches the echo of that which is no celestial music, but only their own hearts’ vain cries…”
From “Dusky Ruth” by A.E. Coppard
How I would love to scoff at my pretentious title. Yet, WWI could stand not for war but for something consequential like that.
It has no bearing whatsoever to the contents of this entry but only to suitably introduce that more than perfect passage, especially the mind gazing part. How does one appropriate this colloquially? Focusing your 20/20 vision blindly to the invisible? If someone asks me the concept of innocence, I will readily quote him or her those lines.
And now, for the goldsmith kind of hard speak.
Pretend that I am playing with a plastic ball (striped, in blue and white) in a field with dragonflies. Kites are flown by unseen hands. Color them yellow. Yes, the hands. Paint the kites in b&w stripes. Put some starchy white clouds over me and if you may, jumping centipedes nearby. I know centipedes do not jump but imagine them jumping anyway.
Chances are, I will never lose that ball even if those centipedes are undermining my solemn self. If I lose it, clearly, my claws shall remain intact. I choose where to hurl my slings where they make a difference. And, yes, I may be forgiven for that. I am far and so out of the loop.
On that note, I would like to appeal on behalf of my mother and her fellow retirees who are now directed to claim their pension benefits from the provincial office of the GSIS. I do not see the logic of dragging people of age, some even in wheelchairs, to travel far and wide when they had the luxury of waiting for them via post before. I told my mother, this may be for your own protection to prevent fraud. When I blurted this out, I nevertheless figured: what better way to guard the delivery of those checks than to bring them directly to the homes of these retirees? That is ensuring that recipients truly get their benefits and not just some people pretending to be them.
My mother--I guess, she is one breed of individual who will always follow guidelines and rules (except in lining up and market concerns sometimes). She received a letter from GSIS that beginning February, she is to claim her pension benefits from the provincial office (she needs to take two rides to reach it).
It smacks of any reasoning why people like my mother, some of them thoroughly sickly, must go through the winding road of claiming their benefits requiring long periods of travel when there is an aligned government agency (the post office) to secure those deliveries safely. It was working finely before. On a more material note, she also told me that my departed father’s survivor’s benefits no longer carried the 13th month pay privilege unlike the previous years.
These old people just sit down and discuss their predicament among themselves without a howl. They play scrabble and learn new words. Delightful aging I would say. I think they are too old to get angry and cut-out placards to seek redress. Mama’s companion asked : “Who are they to dictate on us?” They, meaning, whoever conceptualized the elderly-horrid idea that from now on, these old people shall pretend they do not have arthritis and can walk briskly like gym-pumped citizens to enjoy the fruits of their previous labors. Damn if they suffer from cardiac arrests.
Musicians, do you have mothers like me? Writers, how about you? It is quite puzzling. This is one of the gaps in basic social services I do not see working in prop wars. Where is the proper treatment to people who had served in public service after they have retired?
My mother and her colleagues ought to be given convenience they should get. She seldom whines publicly. She holds the household together at an advanced age of 72. Give her gang their just and dignified due. The elderly could not sow discord at this point in time. They worry more about their sugar levels.
The New Bang
In my own self-conscious effort to appear anywhere, I no longer do it to invite the people I want to link with but for other reasons. Say, to get tubular perhaps. They are already rightly herded for my own taking : melodies (for those who truly create music), paragraphs and all. So let me skip the opening pleasantries and write hey to all.
I have to correct myself. As always. The previous entries were stuffed with incorrect titles and chapters.
Someone told me it is Philharmonic. Or is it the Manila Symphonic Orchestra? Whatever the correct orchestra is, it does not tarnish the brilliancy of the music arranged for that purpose. I am sorry for the mix-up.
Secondly, the book of Jeffrey Sachs is “The End of Poverty : Economic Possibilities For Our Time”. My prepositions fainted under an environment of constant heaves. Anyway, the must read chapters re : guidelines are chapters 14 and up (and not 17 as written).
Bamboo’s song is “Noy-pi” and not “Pinoy Ako”. I have a mishmash of titles but you get the drift : the urgency of my mind flights sometimes kills me too. Nabokov had something to say on this verbal exigency. He said that when he converses, what comes out of his mouth is only the first draft. I do not have the luxury to double check. Yet, it is not an excuse to perpetuate erroneous statements. My apologies.
I do have a very erratic reading pattern due to the unavailability and/or inaccessibility of the writing pieces I need to read (when they are not fiddled gawkily as if I am the one who is copying). I have to dive out from my cocoon to know if I am actually connecting with the people I want to get connected with.
On the other hand, the writers have a long feedback gestation and it is purely because of my inadequate plugs to connect me to them that it takes a while to react. They did not fall on my dull moments of sloth. Mine is an intermediate world filled with kinetic-free gaps. Thus, whenever I read something that speaks straight from my mind (had I the intelligence like them and my pen did not run out of ink), it makes reading so meaningful. It enlivens the spirit. I feel the splendor of words not passing through my veins but becoming my veins. They give me positive jolts. These writers provide some vital statistics, weight, height and all, to that world already out of my sight and perception. In my present state, that counts a lot.
I have to say my thanks again. Why? I did not foresee the magnetism of interlinked passions and callings in that area where we can still trace our commonality from. Human nature. I do not approach it with whimsical but precise incisions (say, he likes lard that is why he often lies). Even with dizzying strides in science and technology, my greatest amazement still comes from surges of unexpected human responses. Foresight. Insight. Pluck&Nerve. Friendliness. Warmth. Honesty. Witticisms. DNA could not put those in vials and freeze them at below zero degree temperatures. No special sections of reading materials will feature them in bulk and sell them with the operative word “Breakthrough!”. Finally, I have a connection outside the grasp of money and I cherish it more since I could not press elsewhere what I need to articulate without wrinkling an already wrinkled face. When one has stumbled upon this realization, it is remarkably precious. It is made priceless because it is continuing.
Can I begin now? Yes I may, you say.
Let me specifically compose paragraphs on people whom I had omitted before.
The kindred spirits include writers of all kinds. One of my favorite pieces in an anthology of literature which I inherited from my father was an essay on boxing by William Hazlitt entitled “The Fight”. The slang term for boxing in the 18th century was Fancy. Fought with bare fists with no limit on the number of rounds. It is but natural that the medium can easily quote passages from poetry and plays. In describing the fighters that time, Hazlitt wrote :
“If there had been a minute or more allowed between each round, it would have been intelligible how they should by degrees recover strength and resolution; but to see these two men smashed to the ground, smeared with gore, stunned, senseless, the breath beaten out of their bodies; and then, before you recover from the shock, to see them rise up with new strength and courage, stand ready to inflict or receive mortal offense, and rush upon each other “like two clouds over the Caspian”-----this is the most astonishing thing of all: this is the high and heroic state of man! “
Appropriating that within the milieu of life, a pounced self is like a boxer’s jab straight to the right cheek. By standing up for what is right despite being ganged up by the most devious circumstances: that is the veritable shock. Nobody can curtail one’s mind from flowing. Nobody can plaster one’s mouth from piping melodies. Nobody can stop one’s pen from further inking. Heroic acts do not need especially sewn underwear and new coiffure to get noticed. Therefore, whenever I read defiance from that which assaults one’s sense of right and wrong, I automatically consider these people courageous fighters. Yes, even if they write about their pets or play golf and drink beer on Sundays.
I have seen one of these people in my movie incursions in the past. He and his wife scouted the arthouse films together and I considered it exceedingly captivating. One normally hears of couples doing opposite things as they advance into marriage. Watching an exception to this literally walk by, one gets a sense of an everyday myth that a billion people probably work very hard to execute. I recall that because now, he expressed regret over having clapped his hands and surged forth a voice of “this is what I stand for”. This can already be reeled off as an open sesame for upturned noses (from those who may be irked by the statement). I smiled at the way it was crafted. I can spot spunk when I read one. While I am at it, I once sent an impassioned comment about region-classed basketball league to this person’s equally prolific friend. It saw print and I never thanked him for it. Now is the time to express my gratitude.
To the other habitat of wordsmiths so enamored with entities screaming in shadows, the words are: Had I been disassembling the overlapping steel from my brain, I will still get the message of battered purses and stuff like that. Someone who wept over a seventh heaven gift (some mystics call this nirvana) must have been drizzled by question marks why the offered drink never came (it normally consists of water and some dye-colored beverage in my palate). I wish I can claim I have gone Tibetan but that is so novelic. Disappearing brew notwithstanding, the guffaw-magnetic lines still secrete chortles. If there is wonderment about the zilch-dimensional visions of a triangle---it is nothing but a piece of Toblerone without the nougat. You shuffle it with other shapes and the excitement of a promise---that a candy is shaped like hexagon-that is so scary-is lost. Ask your partner for verification purposes (insert a smiley with gap tooth here). Stay away from ferris wheels during concerts because you could miss those note transitions.
On another note, I couldn’t wait to hear some new eyeband’s compositions. Yes, a light always passes through to those who wear the same jacket, jeans and shades in both the supernatural and natural world. Chic Cor(n)ea. What an especially eyerating name. With engraved gems sparkling.
I am on to something semi-fulfilling that I have not finished yet. If by curves of pages, one can spot some inspired words coming out alive, let it be known, everyone who mattered contributed something to that state of mind. I will not trade it for anything else. The best people, at least in my list, are properly reined in. Brave souls, exciting minds, bloody hearts (as I said, they never flee).
In my own self-conscious effort to appear anywhere, I no longer do it to invite the people I want to link with but for other reasons. Say, to get tubular perhaps. They are already rightly herded for my own taking : melodies (for those who truly create music), paragraphs and all. So let me skip the opening pleasantries and write hey to all.
I have to correct myself. As always. The previous entries were stuffed with incorrect titles and chapters.
Someone told me it is Philharmonic. Or is it the Manila Symphonic Orchestra? Whatever the correct orchestra is, it does not tarnish the brilliancy of the music arranged for that purpose. I am sorry for the mix-up.
Secondly, the book of Jeffrey Sachs is “The End of Poverty : Economic Possibilities For Our Time”. My prepositions fainted under an environment of constant heaves. Anyway, the must read chapters re : guidelines are chapters 14 and up (and not 17 as written).
Bamboo’s song is “Noy-pi” and not “Pinoy Ako”. I have a mishmash of titles but you get the drift : the urgency of my mind flights sometimes kills me too. Nabokov had something to say on this verbal exigency. He said that when he converses, what comes out of his mouth is only the first draft. I do not have the luxury to double check. Yet, it is not an excuse to perpetuate erroneous statements. My apologies.
I do have a very erratic reading pattern due to the unavailability and/or inaccessibility of the writing pieces I need to read (when they are not fiddled gawkily as if I am the one who is copying). I have to dive out from my cocoon to know if I am actually connecting with the people I want to get connected with.
On the other hand, the writers have a long feedback gestation and it is purely because of my inadequate plugs to connect me to them that it takes a while to react. They did not fall on my dull moments of sloth. Mine is an intermediate world filled with kinetic-free gaps. Thus, whenever I read something that speaks straight from my mind (had I the intelligence like them and my pen did not run out of ink), it makes reading so meaningful. It enlivens the spirit. I feel the splendor of words not passing through my veins but becoming my veins. They give me positive jolts. These writers provide some vital statistics, weight, height and all, to that world already out of my sight and perception. In my present state, that counts a lot.
I have to say my thanks again. Why? I did not foresee the magnetism of interlinked passions and callings in that area where we can still trace our commonality from. Human nature. I do not approach it with whimsical but precise incisions (say, he likes lard that is why he often lies). Even with dizzying strides in science and technology, my greatest amazement still comes from surges of unexpected human responses. Foresight. Insight. Pluck&Nerve. Friendliness. Warmth. Honesty. Witticisms. DNA could not put those in vials and freeze them at below zero degree temperatures. No special sections of reading materials will feature them in bulk and sell them with the operative word “Breakthrough!”. Finally, I have a connection outside the grasp of money and I cherish it more since I could not press elsewhere what I need to articulate without wrinkling an already wrinkled face. When one has stumbled upon this realization, it is remarkably precious. It is made priceless because it is continuing.
Can I begin now? Yes I may, you say.
Let me specifically compose paragraphs on people whom I had omitted before.
The kindred spirits include writers of all kinds. One of my favorite pieces in an anthology of literature which I inherited from my father was an essay on boxing by William Hazlitt entitled “The Fight”. The slang term for boxing in the 18th century was Fancy. Fought with bare fists with no limit on the number of rounds. It is but natural that the medium can easily quote passages from poetry and plays. In describing the fighters that time, Hazlitt wrote :
“If there had been a minute or more allowed between each round, it would have been intelligible how they should by degrees recover strength and resolution; but to see these two men smashed to the ground, smeared with gore, stunned, senseless, the breath beaten out of their bodies; and then, before you recover from the shock, to see them rise up with new strength and courage, stand ready to inflict or receive mortal offense, and rush upon each other “like two clouds over the Caspian”-----this is the most astonishing thing of all: this is the high and heroic state of man! “
Appropriating that within the milieu of life, a pounced self is like a boxer’s jab straight to the right cheek. By standing up for what is right despite being ganged up by the most devious circumstances: that is the veritable shock. Nobody can curtail one’s mind from flowing. Nobody can plaster one’s mouth from piping melodies. Nobody can stop one’s pen from further inking. Heroic acts do not need especially sewn underwear and new coiffure to get noticed. Therefore, whenever I read defiance from that which assaults one’s sense of right and wrong, I automatically consider these people courageous fighters. Yes, even if they write about their pets or play golf and drink beer on Sundays.
I have seen one of these people in my movie incursions in the past. He and his wife scouted the arthouse films together and I considered it exceedingly captivating. One normally hears of couples doing opposite things as they advance into marriage. Watching an exception to this literally walk by, one gets a sense of an everyday myth that a billion people probably work very hard to execute. I recall that because now, he expressed regret over having clapped his hands and surged forth a voice of “this is what I stand for”. This can already be reeled off as an open sesame for upturned noses (from those who may be irked by the statement). I smiled at the way it was crafted. I can spot spunk when I read one. While I am at it, I once sent an impassioned comment about region-classed basketball league to this person’s equally prolific friend. It saw print and I never thanked him for it. Now is the time to express my gratitude.
To the other habitat of wordsmiths so enamored with entities screaming in shadows, the words are: Had I been disassembling the overlapping steel from my brain, I will still get the message of battered purses and stuff like that. Someone who wept over a seventh heaven gift (some mystics call this nirvana) must have been drizzled by question marks why the offered drink never came (it normally consists of water and some dye-colored beverage in my palate). I wish I can claim I have gone Tibetan but that is so novelic. Disappearing brew notwithstanding, the guffaw-magnetic lines still secrete chortles. If there is wonderment about the zilch-dimensional visions of a triangle---it is nothing but a piece of Toblerone without the nougat. You shuffle it with other shapes and the excitement of a promise---that a candy is shaped like hexagon-that is so scary-is lost. Ask your partner for verification purposes (insert a smiley with gap tooth here). Stay away from ferris wheels during concerts because you could miss those note transitions.
On another note, I couldn’t wait to hear some new eyeband’s compositions. Yes, a light always passes through to those who wear the same jacket, jeans and shades in both the supernatural and natural world. Chic Cor(n)ea. What an especially eyerating name. With engraved gems sparkling.
I am on to something semi-fulfilling that I have not finished yet. If by curves of pages, one can spot some inspired words coming out alive, let it be known, everyone who mattered contributed something to that state of mind. I will not trade it for anything else. The best people, at least in my list, are properly reined in. Brave souls, exciting minds, bloody hearts (as I said, they never flee).
In J.D. Salinger’s book “Franny and Zooey”, the acerbic actor Zooey admonished his younger sister Franny who was on the brink of a nervous breakdown :
“What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping---and it still does!”
Big words from a young man, especially when he followed it up with :
“I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while-just once in a while-there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time!”
When one feels cradling these words like one’s own, all the diversions present may seem meaningless. I quote these words to make clear where I am coming from when I switched on the television set one noontime. It has only two channels; one is government-owned.
The commercial channel glimmered first. This was around November of last year.
Immediately, I was presented with singing people. They were the faces I favorably wrote about in this blog not so long ago. Ordinary people, if you take that within the celebrity framework of the medium of television. They have not been salooned. They usually wore slippers and shorts. Some have lost their teeth; some their hair. Often, their bleakness was shielded from the spotlight.
I recognized the host. He bantered jokes with these common people. Tales and talks were exchanged. This reminded me of barbershop gossip of the folklore type. They spoke with hilarity. Their local fluency revealed the origins of their identities.
I found myself watching this show precisely because of that. How, as-a-matter-of-factly, the daily grinds of life became the sources of dialogue between the host and the game participants. The absence of glamour was striking since the show did not purport to be a magazine program but what may be slashly labeled as a variety-entertainment-game show.
You do not see big-named stars exposed lengthily. In their place were folks who must have passed by or had once lived in your houses : the laundrywoman, the plumber. There were also balikbayans who greet their families with contagious shrieks and grins. They were the ones who oftentimes provide instant financial assistance to the game participants. How a commercial presentation can package this as a truly authentic program without additional simulations for entertainment purposes, I leave that explanation to its creators. What I am interested about is that in such a short span of time that I had been watching this show, I never foresaw how it will stall one Saturday in utmost shock. It became a national headline because of a tragedy which left it open to issues of deeper probes. Poverty. Investigations. Culpabilities.
In the aftermath of this mishap, the ordinary people I saw on television who had willingly talked about their plight mostly with bravery, candor, hard-nosed wit and flair to entertain that I get astonished oftentimes, had unwittingly been incised to smaller proportions as either lazy or beggars. That they lack diligence. Some of them, by being there, were portrayed as greedy. That they trampled upon dead bodies still hoping to get the top prizes. Or are in constant crave for dole-outs.
I scanned the papers for other points of view. Obviously, most of the very insightful commentators focused on the larger deliberations of how shows like this promote mendicancy (a mendicant, according to the Thesaurus, is a vagrant, a vagabond, begging, indigent). That the answer to poverty should be hard work, true grit, self reliance and not through games of chance.
I do not claim knowledge of the show to provide wisdom as Zooey had laid out perfectly in my opening paragraphs. Nevertheless, the faces I saw were accurate representations of the poor segment of our society. Based on my viewings, they were not vagabonds. Some even manifested dignity in the face of privation.
It is for those few faces that I had glimpsed why I am writing this piece. How I wish they are articulate enough to engage in highbrow analyses as their plights are once again examined. People who rarely complete their 3x-a-day meal and merely subsist on water sometimes. They solely rest their faith to luck and the Creator.
For the benefit of the thinking force who have not watched this show, let me explain these characters as presented. They were so different from what is, by now, widely portrayed as people who were used to promote vagrancy.
What do these people do in this show? They sing, dance and even declaim/orate. Trademark countryside or urban-poor glib. Embracing life despite the harsh economic realities. These people, some of them have intermittent jobs. They collect garbage. They climb posts and fix electrical lines. They do the laundry. They are househelps. They tend small sari-sari stores.
The host often asked the participants how much they earn or if without a job, if the spouse is gainfully employed. They were also queried as to how they apportion their meager income to their families. It was from this show that I learned how much workers in an ice plant get. And that there is a difference in pricing for crushed ice and ice tubes. Some of these people receive P150/day. Their children sometimes help by doing labor themselves instead of going to school. How they breed largely might perhaps give one a starting point as to where the country’s population program is heading. They regaled common, often heard stories. Had I been not educated and gotten so blasé about my state of unemployment by covering it with the anti-climactic “But, I want to write”, I would easily be among these people who could use some game winning.
Greedy, they are not-if you put them in a habitable surrounding. One participant who looked like she was in need of help herself, forfeited her chance to receive her winning money because an opponent’s mother was sick. Some were separated from their husbands and/or wives. There were women who raised their children all by themselves. One time, the host asked one woman what, if there be any, her message was to the erring husband. With steel nerves, the woman unhaltingly said : “Wag ka ng bumalik sa akin!” How many wives have balls like that?
If everyone considered the prizes as dole-outs, one may be surprised again that instead of alternately choosing those shiny motorcycles and jeepneys, most of them chose money “to begin”. How? They wanted to return to their provinces and hope to be more productive in their places of origin. Money was used to send their children back to school. To help their sick parents. In short, these needs were immediate and urgently required. In one instance, the winner chose the money but divided it among those whom he beat in the game. His reason? So that more families will benefit from it.
In a macro picture, that is easily translatable. We know the congressional probes conducted on misappropriated public funds running to millions and millions of pesos. I said to my mother : “That show was giving away a mere P2 million on its anniversary. Paltry when you compare that with those funds under investigation. But look at its impact to a lot of people.” In short, the people profiled generally as pawns to vagrancy can offer better dynamics on how one fruit can benefit all by spreading it rightly, constructively as had been displayed by that one participant. I would pick him over someone with a degree who spends months diagramming how to cop out of a shady deal.
But as it is, the magnitude of that want had been misread. Throngs, they came. And some sacrificed their lives. If you want to present more ironic irony to that, I do not know what it will be.
My assumption is : these people can ably work; these people are not beggars; these people are not lazy if you provide them with jobs as Jeffrey Sachs had articulated in his book. Just give them a chance to reach the first rung out of poverty. If the common notion is to pin them more as to their dependence on luck and fate as encouraged by this show, we should have missed the larger and more significant values they had nakedly displayed. Stepping out of that show, some of these people would rather choose to become night scavengers than steal in order to eat. On deeper probing, they could teach one that wisdom sometimes comes from having experienced strife.
Sure there are structures to provide them with jobs but how accessible are these to the levels of competence as required by these jobs? Have they been given adequate learning mechanisms to compete in that labor market where even doctors choose to become nurses to earn better? This is no longer a talk of vagrancy promotion : there is a burning and crucial gap out there where structures had not responded as fast in providing rescue to hunger and joblessness. Laziness is no longer an option to lay the blame into. If there is an equivalent of this show in structured public forms to respond to those exigent needs----right on the spot----visible and transparent for the whole society to see, were the deliveries adequate, timely and responsive? How do you mount a job fair for people whose skills are confined to laundry? Yet, these are honorable jobs they had dutifully eked out. Who are willing to provide business talks to people who can ably fix faucet leaks but learn no other trade? If cooperatives and micro financing are in place, do these fit in the general capacities of the workers?
As a whole, these people never seem to give up on themselves either. They can still sing; they can still dance; they can still talk; you can humor them because their concept of dignity I think is receiving sincere smiles from people so “unlike” them and not solely to greedily dip their hands into the P2,000 they could get out of showing their false teeth. They can still express their thanks. The old and the sickly visit the program just to give the host a kiss. Perhaps, they saw in him a warmth secluded from the cold facade of their home surroundings if they have homes. One time, the host slightly scolded some of his staff when an unaided grandmother was left unattended as she was climbing up the stage. I also saw in this show balikbayans who willingly embrace people with no means.
I have a friend who recently went home from abroad and I kidded her why she did not pass by the show since she can be considered as a true “balikbayan” already. She said, she is ashamed that she can only give 50 pounds. You get the idea that had she much more money to spare, she would give all of that. Her brother then cited an episode where some retired teachers became the chosen contestants. He liked it. Instead of the prizes dangled, he had retentive anecdotes of those faces; how they corrected the sentences; how in spurts sometimes, the host would honestly say if there was one word to be spelled correctly: “Di ko rin alam yun ah.”
There is always an unwritten division in entertainment I guess. One goes to concerts and there will always be reserved seats for sponsors and VIPs. That is the privilege of the business so to speak. This show, refreshingly, broke that divisive line. The celebrities stand on the side; those ordinary people sit down. Did the producers even realize how important that was to a focused watcher?
What I am pointing out is : While others saw the show as a vehicle for mendicany, I saw its other, very bright side. The Filipinos in microcosm, in one surrounding, exchanging their stories of mischief and success. By providing examples to sharing, honesty (yes, it was a point repeatedly said by the host : “Wag mandaya” when they were asked to name song titles), preferential love for the elderly and the sick, friendliness, comedy of the street-talk type, love for Philippine dialects as participants talk in Ilongo, Ilocano, Cebuano, Bicolano or fractured English as they wish and yes, even industriousness as they openly discussed about their working hours with pride. In order to eat and educate themselves, they need to sweat in factories, households and baggage counters. Majority possess great singing voices. Not all of them were there for dole-outs. Perhaps, some of them really intend to showcase their talents long confined in bass-busted karaoke boxes. Those who truly need, only wanted to start.
Start what? Start being industrious by using their money to put up businesses. Start sending their children to school. Those are the jumpstarts that do not need long years to wait on. Exactly. Promises will not make them healthy overnight. That was how Jeffrey Sachs saw the indifference of the world to this poor segment globally.
Perhaps, taking a cue on this, we should have peeled one deeper layer as to how this show mirrors us as a society. How it provided a small skylight for us to peek into lives starkingly lived in want and poverty but who desire to courageously stay afloat. They do not cry themselves to death 24 hours a day (the greatest smiles come from the countryside folks: hardened faces, untouched by urban angst). They know their soul; they know their melodies; they know their wisecracks. They may be there for the big win but unlike the profiling done in the aftermath of the stampede---they, if one had closely watched it, have more angles to that singular, studied face as splashed everywhere.
There is a huge portion of social misery out there that urgently requires a response. The treatment of these stories as showcased in a daily entertainment medium certainly overrides, increasingly overrides, everything. In the end, the show chose to adopt an in-your-face, responsive slant: it decided to be blunt and applied straight-talk rather than wax hyperboles about these social plights (Host: “Ganun lang ang kita mo sa isang araw? Papano kayo nakakain tatlong beses sa ganyang kita at anim pa ang anak mo?” Answer : “Nakakaya naman po, awa ng Diyos.”). I do not think this was even envisioned by its creators when they started conceptualizing it. Those faces and their repartees echo as a bleak social commentary of what is truly happening outside that studio.
Rightly or wrongly, the gurgling social ills and the championing traits of Filipinos were appropriately captured by the show until that tragedy.
“What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping---and it still does!”
Big words from a young man, especially when he followed it up with :
“I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while-just once in a while-there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time!”
When one feels cradling these words like one’s own, all the diversions present may seem meaningless. I quote these words to make clear where I am coming from when I switched on the television set one noontime. It has only two channels; one is government-owned.
The commercial channel glimmered first. This was around November of last year.
Immediately, I was presented with singing people. They were the faces I favorably wrote about in this blog not so long ago. Ordinary people, if you take that within the celebrity framework of the medium of television. They have not been salooned. They usually wore slippers and shorts. Some have lost their teeth; some their hair. Often, their bleakness was shielded from the spotlight.
I recognized the host. He bantered jokes with these common people. Tales and talks were exchanged. This reminded me of barbershop gossip of the folklore type. They spoke with hilarity. Their local fluency revealed the origins of their identities.
I found myself watching this show precisely because of that. How, as-a-matter-of-factly, the daily grinds of life became the sources of dialogue between the host and the game participants. The absence of glamour was striking since the show did not purport to be a magazine program but what may be slashly labeled as a variety-entertainment-game show.
You do not see big-named stars exposed lengthily. In their place were folks who must have passed by or had once lived in your houses : the laundrywoman, the plumber. There were also balikbayans who greet their families with contagious shrieks and grins. They were the ones who oftentimes provide instant financial assistance to the game participants. How a commercial presentation can package this as a truly authentic program without additional simulations for entertainment purposes, I leave that explanation to its creators. What I am interested about is that in such a short span of time that I had been watching this show, I never foresaw how it will stall one Saturday in utmost shock. It became a national headline because of a tragedy which left it open to issues of deeper probes. Poverty. Investigations. Culpabilities.
In the aftermath of this mishap, the ordinary people I saw on television who had willingly talked about their plight mostly with bravery, candor, hard-nosed wit and flair to entertain that I get astonished oftentimes, had unwittingly been incised to smaller proportions as either lazy or beggars. That they lack diligence. Some of them, by being there, were portrayed as greedy. That they trampled upon dead bodies still hoping to get the top prizes. Or are in constant crave for dole-outs.
I scanned the papers for other points of view. Obviously, most of the very insightful commentators focused on the larger deliberations of how shows like this promote mendicancy (a mendicant, according to the Thesaurus, is a vagrant, a vagabond, begging, indigent). That the answer to poverty should be hard work, true grit, self reliance and not through games of chance.
I do not claim knowledge of the show to provide wisdom as Zooey had laid out perfectly in my opening paragraphs. Nevertheless, the faces I saw were accurate representations of the poor segment of our society. Based on my viewings, they were not vagabonds. Some even manifested dignity in the face of privation.
It is for those few faces that I had glimpsed why I am writing this piece. How I wish they are articulate enough to engage in highbrow analyses as their plights are once again examined. People who rarely complete their 3x-a-day meal and merely subsist on water sometimes. They solely rest their faith to luck and the Creator.
For the benefit of the thinking force who have not watched this show, let me explain these characters as presented. They were so different from what is, by now, widely portrayed as people who were used to promote vagrancy.
What do these people do in this show? They sing, dance and even declaim/orate. Trademark countryside or urban-poor glib. Embracing life despite the harsh economic realities. These people, some of them have intermittent jobs. They collect garbage. They climb posts and fix electrical lines. They do the laundry. They are househelps. They tend small sari-sari stores.
The host often asked the participants how much they earn or if without a job, if the spouse is gainfully employed. They were also queried as to how they apportion their meager income to their families. It was from this show that I learned how much workers in an ice plant get. And that there is a difference in pricing for crushed ice and ice tubes. Some of these people receive P150/day. Their children sometimes help by doing labor themselves instead of going to school. How they breed largely might perhaps give one a starting point as to where the country’s population program is heading. They regaled common, often heard stories. Had I been not educated and gotten so blasé about my state of unemployment by covering it with the anti-climactic “But, I want to write”, I would easily be among these people who could use some game winning.
Greedy, they are not-if you put them in a habitable surrounding. One participant who looked like she was in need of help herself, forfeited her chance to receive her winning money because an opponent’s mother was sick. Some were separated from their husbands and/or wives. There were women who raised their children all by themselves. One time, the host asked one woman what, if there be any, her message was to the erring husband. With steel nerves, the woman unhaltingly said : “Wag ka ng bumalik sa akin!” How many wives have balls like that?
If everyone considered the prizes as dole-outs, one may be surprised again that instead of alternately choosing those shiny motorcycles and jeepneys, most of them chose money “to begin”. How? They wanted to return to their provinces and hope to be more productive in their places of origin. Money was used to send their children back to school. To help their sick parents. In short, these needs were immediate and urgently required. In one instance, the winner chose the money but divided it among those whom he beat in the game. His reason? So that more families will benefit from it.
In a macro picture, that is easily translatable. We know the congressional probes conducted on misappropriated public funds running to millions and millions of pesos. I said to my mother : “That show was giving away a mere P2 million on its anniversary. Paltry when you compare that with those funds under investigation. But look at its impact to a lot of people.” In short, the people profiled generally as pawns to vagrancy can offer better dynamics on how one fruit can benefit all by spreading it rightly, constructively as had been displayed by that one participant. I would pick him over someone with a degree who spends months diagramming how to cop out of a shady deal.
But as it is, the magnitude of that want had been misread. Throngs, they came. And some sacrificed their lives. If you want to present more ironic irony to that, I do not know what it will be.
My assumption is : these people can ably work; these people are not beggars; these people are not lazy if you provide them with jobs as Jeffrey Sachs had articulated in his book. Just give them a chance to reach the first rung out of poverty. If the common notion is to pin them more as to their dependence on luck and fate as encouraged by this show, we should have missed the larger and more significant values they had nakedly displayed. Stepping out of that show, some of these people would rather choose to become night scavengers than steal in order to eat. On deeper probing, they could teach one that wisdom sometimes comes from having experienced strife.
Sure there are structures to provide them with jobs but how accessible are these to the levels of competence as required by these jobs? Have they been given adequate learning mechanisms to compete in that labor market where even doctors choose to become nurses to earn better? This is no longer a talk of vagrancy promotion : there is a burning and crucial gap out there where structures had not responded as fast in providing rescue to hunger and joblessness. Laziness is no longer an option to lay the blame into. If there is an equivalent of this show in structured public forms to respond to those exigent needs----right on the spot----visible and transparent for the whole society to see, were the deliveries adequate, timely and responsive? How do you mount a job fair for people whose skills are confined to laundry? Yet, these are honorable jobs they had dutifully eked out. Who are willing to provide business talks to people who can ably fix faucet leaks but learn no other trade? If cooperatives and micro financing are in place, do these fit in the general capacities of the workers?
As a whole, these people never seem to give up on themselves either. They can still sing; they can still dance; they can still talk; you can humor them because their concept of dignity I think is receiving sincere smiles from people so “unlike” them and not solely to greedily dip their hands into the P2,000 they could get out of showing their false teeth. They can still express their thanks. The old and the sickly visit the program just to give the host a kiss. Perhaps, they saw in him a warmth secluded from the cold facade of their home surroundings if they have homes. One time, the host slightly scolded some of his staff when an unaided grandmother was left unattended as she was climbing up the stage. I also saw in this show balikbayans who willingly embrace people with no means.
I have a friend who recently went home from abroad and I kidded her why she did not pass by the show since she can be considered as a true “balikbayan” already. She said, she is ashamed that she can only give 50 pounds. You get the idea that had she much more money to spare, she would give all of that. Her brother then cited an episode where some retired teachers became the chosen contestants. He liked it. Instead of the prizes dangled, he had retentive anecdotes of those faces; how they corrected the sentences; how in spurts sometimes, the host would honestly say if there was one word to be spelled correctly: “Di ko rin alam yun ah.”
There is always an unwritten division in entertainment I guess. One goes to concerts and there will always be reserved seats for sponsors and VIPs. That is the privilege of the business so to speak. This show, refreshingly, broke that divisive line. The celebrities stand on the side; those ordinary people sit down. Did the producers even realize how important that was to a focused watcher?
What I am pointing out is : While others saw the show as a vehicle for mendicany, I saw its other, very bright side. The Filipinos in microcosm, in one surrounding, exchanging their stories of mischief and success. By providing examples to sharing, honesty (yes, it was a point repeatedly said by the host : “Wag mandaya” when they were asked to name song titles), preferential love for the elderly and the sick, friendliness, comedy of the street-talk type, love for Philippine dialects as participants talk in Ilongo, Ilocano, Cebuano, Bicolano or fractured English as they wish and yes, even industriousness as they openly discussed about their working hours with pride. In order to eat and educate themselves, they need to sweat in factories, households and baggage counters. Majority possess great singing voices. Not all of them were there for dole-outs. Perhaps, some of them really intend to showcase their talents long confined in bass-busted karaoke boxes. Those who truly need, only wanted to start.
Start what? Start being industrious by using their money to put up businesses. Start sending their children to school. Those are the jumpstarts that do not need long years to wait on. Exactly. Promises will not make them healthy overnight. That was how Jeffrey Sachs saw the indifference of the world to this poor segment globally.
Perhaps, taking a cue on this, we should have peeled one deeper layer as to how this show mirrors us as a society. How it provided a small skylight for us to peek into lives starkingly lived in want and poverty but who desire to courageously stay afloat. They do not cry themselves to death 24 hours a day (the greatest smiles come from the countryside folks: hardened faces, untouched by urban angst). They know their soul; they know their melodies; they know their wisecracks. They may be there for the big win but unlike the profiling done in the aftermath of the stampede---they, if one had closely watched it, have more angles to that singular, studied face as splashed everywhere.
There is a huge portion of social misery out there that urgently requires a response. The treatment of these stories as showcased in a daily entertainment medium certainly overrides, increasingly overrides, everything. In the end, the show chose to adopt an in-your-face, responsive slant: it decided to be blunt and applied straight-talk rather than wax hyperboles about these social plights (Host: “Ganun lang ang kita mo sa isang araw? Papano kayo nakakain tatlong beses sa ganyang kita at anim pa ang anak mo?” Answer : “Nakakaya naman po, awa ng Diyos.”). I do not think this was even envisioned by its creators when they started conceptualizing it. Those faces and their repartees echo as a bleak social commentary of what is truly happening outside that studio.
Rightly or wrongly, the gurgling social ills and the championing traits of Filipinos were appropriately captured by the show until that tragedy.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
MANNY PACQUIAO THROUGH WILLIAM HAZLITT’S WORDS
Iris P. Concepcion
“The day was fine, the sky was blue, the mists were retiring from the marshy ground, the path was tolerably dry, the sitting up all night had not done us much harm---at least the cause was good; we talked of this and that with amicable difference, roving and sipping of many subjects, but still invariably we returned to the fight.”
This passage was taken from an essay “The Fight” written in 1821 by the eminent essayist Mr. William Hazlitt. He must have developed calloused hands writing literary discourses such as “On Shakespeare and Milton” and “My First Acquaintance With Poets” while he roved in his scribed themes with critical mastery. Yet, when he sharpened up his remembrance of a boxing bout between Tom “the Gas-man” Hickman and Bill Neate, it set “a standard of excellence for all sports writing since that time“ according to the anthology I lifted it from.
I always tenderly touch this collection of literature pieces (Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume II copyrighted in 1962, bound in the finest onion-skin pages I have ever flipped) ever since I can recall I wanted to fall in love with words and not with the magical frog which, by a loop of fable, hid a glistening crown in its green amphibiality. The book is now halved, particularly slicing Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover”. It gave up on its own brilliantly punishing weight. Before the verse split, a thread of some unfamiliar variety had hung there like a curtain cord as if expecting to be cut. When I was young, so young that I was unquestionably happy without adult sickness like gloominess, I could not understand the metric cadences of word groupings mastered in this obese book by names inhabiting (to me) the remotest, wintry world like John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I still could not fathom some of the verses now except for some pulsating lines, separately extracted personally by myself as flawlessly scrawled, brushed up in the neatest gloss so to speak.
Among the copious words leisurely scattered there, I read this essay on boxing by Mr. Hazlitt with kicking fascination. It awakened in me an importance rarely felt for bloodied sports, made peculiar if one considers the time frame I was in : television sets were still in black and white and carved like wooden cabinets. Rodents can build refugee settlements inside the box without getting detected. In rare occasions that I have seen my father genuinely awestruck with celebrities, he was waxing dialogues on Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard. RPN-9, when Mr. Harry Gasser, Ms. Ninez Cacho-Olivares and Mr. Phillip Tan were still its news anchors speaking in astonishing accents I just knew were not cultivated from my quaint and quiet town, telecast then a replay of a foreign network’s world of sports program where the “agony of defeat” was visualized by a ski athlete crashing into a banner and rolling horribly. It was through these replays of memorable sports moments that I first watched world-class boxing matches. I thought they were but a mere slugfest with boundaries.
Why am I finely peeling away these details with meticulous attention? To highlight the fact that what started me in developing a whetted observation of fighters who either raised their gloves up in triumph even with eyes shut or flayed down, totally lifeless, was intensified by my reading of Mr. Hazlitt’s essay. Although I winced at the punches thrown as beamed on that black and white t.v. set where gashes were not red but black, no picture can compete with the words of the essayist as he described the mood of the boxing match he watched during that eventful day of December 11, 1821.
Two hundred centuries later, Mr. Hazlitt’s words still boom loudly as I fervently viewed the rematch of Mr. Manny Pacquiao against Mexico’s Mr. Erik Morales. It is in the light of Mr. Hazlitt’s words that I approached the battle between the two from a different angle : How many excellently expressive verse and prose shall be written after this fight? I became Mr. Hazlitt’s feelings and his mood then could never have been more appropriate to my own situation. From “The Fight” :
“The day, as I have said, was fine for a December morning. The grass was wet, and the ground miry, and plowed up with multitudinous feet, except that, within the ring itself, there was a spot of virgin green closed in and unprofaned by vulgar tread, that shone with dazzling brightness in the midday sun. For it was now noon, and we had an hour to wait. This is the trying time. It is then the heart sickens, as you think what the two champions are about, and how short a time will determine their fate (italics mine). After the first blow is struck, there is no opportunity for nervous apprehensions; you are swallowed up in the immediate interest of the scene-----but
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream. “
(from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar)
The heart sickens. While Mr. Hazlitt was for Mr. Bill Neate ancient years ago, I am heartily diseased of dread for Mr. Pacquiao. No unfurling of evolution can change the bop of a heart when you lay all your screams for the victory of one person. The emotional torment is more than staggering. A day previous to the fight , my youngest niece unconsciously chattered during lunch that she and her classmates prayed for Mr. Pacquiao’s victory. Seven to eight year old kids begging for Jesus to calm, soothe and rouse the millions of Filipinos’ sickened hearts.
For me, the day of the fight started with a blessing. It was my father’s 74th birthday had he been alive. Most of the people whom I watched the fight with (pay per view) at a neighbor’s house had either came from Mass or had helped my Kuya in butchering a goat as a birthday remembrance for my father. Our kindly parish priest avoided mentioning the fight during the homily but could not help commenting at the end of the Mass that he was certainly aware of synchronized motions: churhgoers constantly checking their watches, eager to go home. He too, offered his prayers. Kuya and company, meanwhile, must have probably outclocked their previous record in slicing the goat’s meat for kilawen, kaldereta and papaitan to catch the fight unhampered. I made sure to stuff myself with each dish right after it was cooked. I was thinking in advance. If Mr. Pacquiao would lose (I know he will win but I came prepared for any eventuality ), I might as well consider my palate officially dead.
In the essay, Mr. Hazlitt asked : Reader, have you ever seen a fight? That query was important to him since, fancy, which was the slang term for boxing during his time, was not yet countenanced. The location of Mr. Hazlitt’s subject matter had to be kept secret from the authorities. YES, I shall answer him now with hands clamped as opposed to his
“…open carriages were coming up, with streamers flying and music playing, and the country people were pouring in over hedge and ditch in all directions, to see their hero beat or be beaten.”
In my setting, a certain nervous plague had somehow gripped each one, waiting for the first blow. On whom: that is the bodily tension that we all seem to panic into. We all came thirsty for Mr. Pacquiao to beat the pulp out of Mr. Morales. I have romanticized every possible way what that match can remarkably offer. Not for personal glory but as a lurch to anchor a sagging sense of national pride. I wouldn’t know what thoughts sprinted from my companions’ intense concentration but we all had the facial expressions to buoy up this very thrilling strain.
While Mr. Hazlitt talked about carriages, I was slumped in the sofa of good-natured neighbors. They converted their house balcon like a mini-movie house where one of the two television sets was placed. The other one was in the living room where I viewed the battle. I entered it with people already properly sat. Pleasantries were naturally warm but the sickened hearts, no matter how you hide them, will climb and crawl past the jumpy nerves and externally turn up under the busy tangling and untangling of fingers; of the frequent visits to the bathroom; of uneasiness and excuses if their flustered hearts can take a blood-spattered face of Mr. Pacquiao. There were several summons for medical glossaries as the females in the crowd, myself included, entertained the possibility of experiencing heart attacks and/or hypertension.
The build-up was extremely notable. Mr. Hazlitt’s disposition against unmagnanimous statements of a fighter ranked high among his displeasures. Like him, I was unconsciously appalled that Mr. Morales would have expressed the cocky statement that he never remembered any strong blow coming from Mr. Pacquiao. Mr. Morales might have said it to psyche-up the battle into a showdown of scare but here is the more redounding smack as psychologically sized up by Mr. Hazlitt :
“A boxer was bound to beat his man, but not to thrust his fist, either actually or by implication, in everyone’s face. Even a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains, but if he uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no gentleman. A boxer, I would infer, need not be a blackguard or a coxcomb, more than another.”
Mr. Morales might not have uttered invectives but he shoved his boxing amnesia as a rallying point which made him appear ungentlemanly as defined in 18th century boxing. In the reported press conferences when Mr. Pacquiao was made to say something, the latter never took the undermining statement against him, scripted or not, into a blaze of wordswaps. He did not turn into a coxcomb. Instead, he smiled, he waved, he spoke sentences using the native tongue of his opponent and plunged that unexpected trait you thought would never come from a fighter whose soulful purse is to draw blood from an adversary : an attacking humility.
I was therefore slumped in that sofa with more prejudice than ever against Mr. Morales. This added more to my nerviness since I know that a predisposed bias is often a cause of great devastation just like wars. Somewhere in Tijuana, Mexico, a Mexican would have readily debunked me and had felt sickness too, but for Mr. Morales.
I now leave out the sports jargons as I arrange my observation of the fight that I still view as a clash of brawn and brain. I am not an expert of the sport and I do not know if the fighters swayed rightly or wrongly or if they executed their counter punches correctly. Right there in Mr. Hazlitt’s essay, no punch or jab or uppercut or left hook were mentioned either, yet, he was a true aficionado. Proper descriptions to the boxers’ movements were not yet invented to add color to his account but he used characters from the “Iliad” and even “Paradise Lost” to stress out his points. His descriptions were like a playwright’s :
“If Neate was like Ajax, ‘with Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear the pugilistic reputation of all Bristol, Hickman might be compared to Diomed, light, vigorous, elastic, and his back glistened in the sun, as he moved about, like a panther’s hide. There was now a dead pause---attention was awestruck. Who at that moment, big with a great event, did not draw his breath short---did not feel his heart throb? All was ready. They tossed up for the sun and the Gas-man won. They were led up to the scratch---shook hands, and went at it.”
We went at it straight to the soap. When the national anthem of the Philippines was sung, someone unabashedly said, “I feel like crying.” I think not a few brave men would have showed this sentimentality in other publicly watched spectator sports. As I scanned the room, however, I realized that it was not shameful to accept that nationalism had struck in such an intimate way to all and whatever divine mercy that was, it purged us all off from the divide, from the tumults and away from desperation. The mixture of citizenship and self-identification gathered in those reddened, welled-up eyes.
Personally and with emotional rhythm, I have found the portrayal of Diomed through Mr. Pacquiao. He may not be a Greek warrior in physique but he lightly carried himself to the ring with an infectious smile. It nimbly emphasized his pair of arresting eyes that were focused as a jaguar’s. Elastic he was, in white garb, which reminded me of a galloping Ninja Turtle who can conquer any space with speed. He prayed in his corner, seeking heavens for guidance. Contrast this with Mr. Morales’ not so Ajax-like stance. His looks seemed to declare that the heavens had left him. He looked tired. Was it a flicker of my dramatist’s slant that I saw a heavy unhappiness weighing down his face like burdening bricks? His sadness somewhat blurred the television screen. Mr. Pacquiao, on the other hand, radiated. His true grit was burrowed in his heart and without doubt, his verve occupied the whole arena.
“In the first round, everyone thought it was all over. After making play a short time, the Gas-man flew at his adversary like a tiger, struck five blows in as many seconds, three first, and then following him as he staggered back, two more, right and left, and down he fell, a mighty ruin….Neate seemed like a lifeless lump of flesh and bone, round which the Gas-man’s blows played with the rapidity of electricity or lightning, and you imagined he would only be lifted up to be knocked down again. It was as if Hickman held a sword or a fire in that right hand of his, and directed it against an unarmed body. “
The first few rounds, my brain would blot out the longer arm reaches of Mr. Morales that landed on Mr. Pacquiao’s face. My hands by now have grown icy from fear. So, that was how sickened truly mean. The taller boxer, Mr. Morales’ melancholic appearance was by now translating into rapid knocks. During moments when Mr. Pacquiao’s face would seem to rotate halfway, everyone was hushed. I have never seen faces recoiled in pain like my seatmates’. My grimace would have stood out from that parade of pained expressions. One already covered her face with a tee-shirt. We did not sit there to watch Mr. Pacquio suffer and our body movements can attest to that. Yet, when Mr. Pacquiao hit back with forceful and rock solid punches, everyone screamed and thumped as if what was lacking in that communal feast was merely the accompaniment of drum beats.
“They met again, and Neate seemed, not cowed, but particularly cautious. I saw his teeth clenched together and his brows knit close against the sun. He held out both his arms at full length straight before him, like two sledge hammers, and raised his left an inch or two higher. The Gas-man could not get over this guard---they struck mutually and fell, but without advantage on either side. It was the same in the next round; but the balance of power was thus restored---the fate of the battle was suspended. No one could tell how it would end.”
This is where Mr. Hazlitt’s tale could not compare with what I saw. In between rounds, Mr. Morales’ face spoke large volumes of blows pummeled at him. Mr. Pacquiao had hit his body with multiple cannonball fists. When I saw the blood on Mr. Morales’ face (where a bud had rotated like a wheel inside a hole of his nose) and none in Mr. Pacquiao’s, I resolved that was foretelling whose hero shall be crushed in this battle of champions. Mr. Morales shall be gorged slowly like scattered crumbs which, when taken wholly, will satisfy Mr. Pacquiao’s innate hunger.
True enough, Mr. Morales was dazed as Mr. Pacquiao switched the landing pads of his jabs. Inunti-unting kinain si Morales (he slowly munched Morales) from body to head. Mr. Pacquiao received his opponent’s blows but doubled his counterblows. The unraveling of those moments shone best when Mr. Morales, who never remembered any strong punch from Mr. Pacquiao, tasted it from both hands of the latter. This time around, Mr. Pacquiao made sure that Mr. Morales’ memory bank will have those blows etched, engraved, neon-lit and best of all, unforgotten. Mr. Morales swayed, fell semi-fallingly in the ring when the bell rang. In that room and the balcon, something magical was happening too. We stood up, whooped up and yelled. Better still, we clapped as if we were in Las Vegas, Nevada when that particular round ended.
“…in the next, the Gas-man aiming a mortal blow at his adversary’s neck with his right hand, and failing from the length he had to reach, the other returned it with his left at full swing, planted a tremendous blow on his cheekbone and eyebrow, and made a red ruin of that side of his face. The Gas-man went down, and there was another shout---a roar of triumph as the waves of fortune rolled tumultuously from side to side. This was a settler. Hickman got up, and “grinned horrible a ghastly smile” yet he was evidently dashed in his opinion of himself; it was the first time he had ever been so punished; all one side of his face was perfect scarlet, and his right eye was closed in dingy blackness, as he advanced to the fight, less confident, but still determined. “
Can Mr. Pacquiao’s Round 9 display of courage drive itself back in a time capsule and fly back to that Bristol setting, stirring the words of Mr. Hazlitt anew? For Mr. Morales now knew, perfectly knew in fact, that he had been so punished. All of us were aiming that Mr. Pacquiao will go for the kill, pacify all the tremblors felt within us, speak our hopes through his blows, comfort us from that visage of suffering and then, give us the face of triumph, nothing else but triumph, in the face of our own private battles.
“From this time forward the event became more certain every round, and about the twelfth it seemed as if it must have been over. Hickman generally stood with his back to me; but in the scuffle, he had changed positions, and Neate just then made a tremendous lunge at him, and hit him full in the face. It was doubtful whether he would fall backwards or forwards; he hung suspended for a second or two, and then fell back, throwing his hands in the air, and his face lifted up to the sky. I never saw anything more terrific than his aspect just before he fell. All traces of life, of natural expression, were gone from him.”
Could there be anything more gratifying to me than the grasp of a thrill that I shall be spared from Mr. Hazlitt’s hesitancy two hundred centuries ago as to where his hero’s adversary would fall---forwards or backwards? My hero, Mr. Pacquiao lunged a left fist of a whirlpool to Mr. Morales’ face on the 10th round. In a swift second, there was never an uncertainty where his body and possibly his spirit will go. That tremendous impact, to a man already beat in blue from his torso up to where his neck rested, had already been struck in several ways that it must have felt like toothaches attached to gangrened gums were sprouting all over his body, his scientific destination can only be away, away from the one who inflicted upon him the unforgettable punches.
And so Mr. Morales flung like a deflated tossed ball inside that ring. In a highly filmable way of being freezily thrown. Leaning, sloping; it was reminiscent of how Neo of The Matrix would have executed it against his foe. It was dealt with finesse that Mr. Morales was precisely lobbed. The referee had to block Mr. Pacquiao least he would unleash more pain to an already conquered body. The countdown delivery must have sounded like death knell to Mr. Morales.
Mr. Morales beat the countdown and stood up, not lifeless as the Gas-man was described by Mr. Hazlitt, but with unkillable courage. He tried to defy the odds already against him in full circles but just as he mastered this comeback with bravery, only his will rose to the occasion. His body simply gave up. By then, he was pounded like he was wood to Mr. Pacquiao’s axe hands and there, where everyone of us were up on our feet screaming for all the skies to hear, Mr. Morales slumped to his knees the second time like “one of the figures in Dante’s Inferno,” to borrow Mr. Hazlitt’s words.
And what of Mr. Pacquiao’s courage? He showed everyone and I mean everyone that when one does something honorable, the crowd shall come and come they shall, with all their guts, with all their soul. How much more can you ask from a man who invested so much integrity to his profession that he unselfishly worked so hard at it and sacrificed a lot for it ? No shortcuts shall be needed for a man whose intention was never muddled by self-interest. When he said he did it for the Philippines, we believed him because he showed the good deed first, way before the pomp and pageantry. There is your credible fighter who does what he speaks and speaks what he truly does.
My account of the fight as seen from an 18th century essay resonated the universal appeal of being on the side of the triumphant but it is more than that to me. In one spectacular period of my life this year, I would have experienced how the disparate themes of nationalism, fandom and hope were impressively shaped in one man : Mr. Manny Pacquiao.
Iris P. Concepcion
“The day was fine, the sky was blue, the mists were retiring from the marshy ground, the path was tolerably dry, the sitting up all night had not done us much harm---at least the cause was good; we talked of this and that with amicable difference, roving and sipping of many subjects, but still invariably we returned to the fight.”
This passage was taken from an essay “The Fight” written in 1821 by the eminent essayist Mr. William Hazlitt. He must have developed calloused hands writing literary discourses such as “On Shakespeare and Milton” and “My First Acquaintance With Poets” while he roved in his scribed themes with critical mastery. Yet, when he sharpened up his remembrance of a boxing bout between Tom “the Gas-man” Hickman and Bill Neate, it set “a standard of excellence for all sports writing since that time“ according to the anthology I lifted it from.
I always tenderly touch this collection of literature pieces (Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume II copyrighted in 1962, bound in the finest onion-skin pages I have ever flipped) ever since I can recall I wanted to fall in love with words and not with the magical frog which, by a loop of fable, hid a glistening crown in its green amphibiality. The book is now halved, particularly slicing Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover”. It gave up on its own brilliantly punishing weight. Before the verse split, a thread of some unfamiliar variety had hung there like a curtain cord as if expecting to be cut. When I was young, so young that I was unquestionably happy without adult sickness like gloominess, I could not understand the metric cadences of word groupings mastered in this obese book by names inhabiting (to me) the remotest, wintry world like John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I still could not fathom some of the verses now except for some pulsating lines, separately extracted personally by myself as flawlessly scrawled, brushed up in the neatest gloss so to speak.
Among the copious words leisurely scattered there, I read this essay on boxing by Mr. Hazlitt with kicking fascination. It awakened in me an importance rarely felt for bloodied sports, made peculiar if one considers the time frame I was in : television sets were still in black and white and carved like wooden cabinets. Rodents can build refugee settlements inside the box without getting detected. In rare occasions that I have seen my father genuinely awestruck with celebrities, he was waxing dialogues on Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard. RPN-9, when Mr. Harry Gasser, Ms. Ninez Cacho-Olivares and Mr. Phillip Tan were still its news anchors speaking in astonishing accents I just knew were not cultivated from my quaint and quiet town, telecast then a replay of a foreign network’s world of sports program where the “agony of defeat” was visualized by a ski athlete crashing into a banner and rolling horribly. It was through these replays of memorable sports moments that I first watched world-class boxing matches. I thought they were but a mere slugfest with boundaries.
Why am I finely peeling away these details with meticulous attention? To highlight the fact that what started me in developing a whetted observation of fighters who either raised their gloves up in triumph even with eyes shut or flayed down, totally lifeless, was intensified by my reading of Mr. Hazlitt’s essay. Although I winced at the punches thrown as beamed on that black and white t.v. set where gashes were not red but black, no picture can compete with the words of the essayist as he described the mood of the boxing match he watched during that eventful day of December 11, 1821.
Two hundred centuries later, Mr. Hazlitt’s words still boom loudly as I fervently viewed the rematch of Mr. Manny Pacquiao against Mexico’s Mr. Erik Morales. It is in the light of Mr. Hazlitt’s words that I approached the battle between the two from a different angle : How many excellently expressive verse and prose shall be written after this fight? I became Mr. Hazlitt’s feelings and his mood then could never have been more appropriate to my own situation. From “The Fight” :
“The day, as I have said, was fine for a December morning. The grass was wet, and the ground miry, and plowed up with multitudinous feet, except that, within the ring itself, there was a spot of virgin green closed in and unprofaned by vulgar tread, that shone with dazzling brightness in the midday sun. For it was now noon, and we had an hour to wait. This is the trying time. It is then the heart sickens, as you think what the two champions are about, and how short a time will determine their fate (italics mine). After the first blow is struck, there is no opportunity for nervous apprehensions; you are swallowed up in the immediate interest of the scene-----but
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream. “
(from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar)
The heart sickens. While Mr. Hazlitt was for Mr. Bill Neate ancient years ago, I am heartily diseased of dread for Mr. Pacquiao. No unfurling of evolution can change the bop of a heart when you lay all your screams for the victory of one person. The emotional torment is more than staggering. A day previous to the fight , my youngest niece unconsciously chattered during lunch that she and her classmates prayed for Mr. Pacquiao’s victory. Seven to eight year old kids begging for Jesus to calm, soothe and rouse the millions of Filipinos’ sickened hearts.
For me, the day of the fight started with a blessing. It was my father’s 74th birthday had he been alive. Most of the people whom I watched the fight with (pay per view) at a neighbor’s house had either came from Mass or had helped my Kuya in butchering a goat as a birthday remembrance for my father. Our kindly parish priest avoided mentioning the fight during the homily but could not help commenting at the end of the Mass that he was certainly aware of synchronized motions: churhgoers constantly checking their watches, eager to go home. He too, offered his prayers. Kuya and company, meanwhile, must have probably outclocked their previous record in slicing the goat’s meat for kilawen, kaldereta and papaitan to catch the fight unhampered. I made sure to stuff myself with each dish right after it was cooked. I was thinking in advance. If Mr. Pacquiao would lose (I know he will win but I came prepared for any eventuality ), I might as well consider my palate officially dead.
In the essay, Mr. Hazlitt asked : Reader, have you ever seen a fight? That query was important to him since, fancy, which was the slang term for boxing during his time, was not yet countenanced. The location of Mr. Hazlitt’s subject matter had to be kept secret from the authorities. YES, I shall answer him now with hands clamped as opposed to his
“…open carriages were coming up, with streamers flying and music playing, and the country people were pouring in over hedge and ditch in all directions, to see their hero beat or be beaten.”
In my setting, a certain nervous plague had somehow gripped each one, waiting for the first blow. On whom: that is the bodily tension that we all seem to panic into. We all came thirsty for Mr. Pacquiao to beat the pulp out of Mr. Morales. I have romanticized every possible way what that match can remarkably offer. Not for personal glory but as a lurch to anchor a sagging sense of national pride. I wouldn’t know what thoughts sprinted from my companions’ intense concentration but we all had the facial expressions to buoy up this very thrilling strain.
While Mr. Hazlitt talked about carriages, I was slumped in the sofa of good-natured neighbors. They converted their house balcon like a mini-movie house where one of the two television sets was placed. The other one was in the living room where I viewed the battle. I entered it with people already properly sat. Pleasantries were naturally warm but the sickened hearts, no matter how you hide them, will climb and crawl past the jumpy nerves and externally turn up under the busy tangling and untangling of fingers; of the frequent visits to the bathroom; of uneasiness and excuses if their flustered hearts can take a blood-spattered face of Mr. Pacquiao. There were several summons for medical glossaries as the females in the crowd, myself included, entertained the possibility of experiencing heart attacks and/or hypertension.
The build-up was extremely notable. Mr. Hazlitt’s disposition against unmagnanimous statements of a fighter ranked high among his displeasures. Like him, I was unconsciously appalled that Mr. Morales would have expressed the cocky statement that he never remembered any strong blow coming from Mr. Pacquiao. Mr. Morales might have said it to psyche-up the battle into a showdown of scare but here is the more redounding smack as psychologically sized up by Mr. Hazlitt :
“A boxer was bound to beat his man, but not to thrust his fist, either actually or by implication, in everyone’s face. Even a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains, but if he uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no gentleman. A boxer, I would infer, need not be a blackguard or a coxcomb, more than another.”
Mr. Morales might not have uttered invectives but he shoved his boxing amnesia as a rallying point which made him appear ungentlemanly as defined in 18th century boxing. In the reported press conferences when Mr. Pacquiao was made to say something, the latter never took the undermining statement against him, scripted or not, into a blaze of wordswaps. He did not turn into a coxcomb. Instead, he smiled, he waved, he spoke sentences using the native tongue of his opponent and plunged that unexpected trait you thought would never come from a fighter whose soulful purse is to draw blood from an adversary : an attacking humility.
I was therefore slumped in that sofa with more prejudice than ever against Mr. Morales. This added more to my nerviness since I know that a predisposed bias is often a cause of great devastation just like wars. Somewhere in Tijuana, Mexico, a Mexican would have readily debunked me and had felt sickness too, but for Mr. Morales.
I now leave out the sports jargons as I arrange my observation of the fight that I still view as a clash of brawn and brain. I am not an expert of the sport and I do not know if the fighters swayed rightly or wrongly or if they executed their counter punches correctly. Right there in Mr. Hazlitt’s essay, no punch or jab or uppercut or left hook were mentioned either, yet, he was a true aficionado. Proper descriptions to the boxers’ movements were not yet invented to add color to his account but he used characters from the “Iliad” and even “Paradise Lost” to stress out his points. His descriptions were like a playwright’s :
“If Neate was like Ajax, ‘with Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear the pugilistic reputation of all Bristol, Hickman might be compared to Diomed, light, vigorous, elastic, and his back glistened in the sun, as he moved about, like a panther’s hide. There was now a dead pause---attention was awestruck. Who at that moment, big with a great event, did not draw his breath short---did not feel his heart throb? All was ready. They tossed up for the sun and the Gas-man won. They were led up to the scratch---shook hands, and went at it.”
We went at it straight to the soap. When the national anthem of the Philippines was sung, someone unabashedly said, “I feel like crying.” I think not a few brave men would have showed this sentimentality in other publicly watched spectator sports. As I scanned the room, however, I realized that it was not shameful to accept that nationalism had struck in such an intimate way to all and whatever divine mercy that was, it purged us all off from the divide, from the tumults and away from desperation. The mixture of citizenship and self-identification gathered in those reddened, welled-up eyes.
Personally and with emotional rhythm, I have found the portrayal of Diomed through Mr. Pacquiao. He may not be a Greek warrior in physique but he lightly carried himself to the ring with an infectious smile. It nimbly emphasized his pair of arresting eyes that were focused as a jaguar’s. Elastic he was, in white garb, which reminded me of a galloping Ninja Turtle who can conquer any space with speed. He prayed in his corner, seeking heavens for guidance. Contrast this with Mr. Morales’ not so Ajax-like stance. His looks seemed to declare that the heavens had left him. He looked tired. Was it a flicker of my dramatist’s slant that I saw a heavy unhappiness weighing down his face like burdening bricks? His sadness somewhat blurred the television screen. Mr. Pacquiao, on the other hand, radiated. His true grit was burrowed in his heart and without doubt, his verve occupied the whole arena.
“In the first round, everyone thought it was all over. After making play a short time, the Gas-man flew at his adversary like a tiger, struck five blows in as many seconds, three first, and then following him as he staggered back, two more, right and left, and down he fell, a mighty ruin….Neate seemed like a lifeless lump of flesh and bone, round which the Gas-man’s blows played with the rapidity of electricity or lightning, and you imagined he would only be lifted up to be knocked down again. It was as if Hickman held a sword or a fire in that right hand of his, and directed it against an unarmed body. “
The first few rounds, my brain would blot out the longer arm reaches of Mr. Morales that landed on Mr. Pacquiao’s face. My hands by now have grown icy from fear. So, that was how sickened truly mean. The taller boxer, Mr. Morales’ melancholic appearance was by now translating into rapid knocks. During moments when Mr. Pacquiao’s face would seem to rotate halfway, everyone was hushed. I have never seen faces recoiled in pain like my seatmates’. My grimace would have stood out from that parade of pained expressions. One already covered her face with a tee-shirt. We did not sit there to watch Mr. Pacquio suffer and our body movements can attest to that. Yet, when Mr. Pacquiao hit back with forceful and rock solid punches, everyone screamed and thumped as if what was lacking in that communal feast was merely the accompaniment of drum beats.
“They met again, and Neate seemed, not cowed, but particularly cautious. I saw his teeth clenched together and his brows knit close against the sun. He held out both his arms at full length straight before him, like two sledge hammers, and raised his left an inch or two higher. The Gas-man could not get over this guard---they struck mutually and fell, but without advantage on either side. It was the same in the next round; but the balance of power was thus restored---the fate of the battle was suspended. No one could tell how it would end.”
This is where Mr. Hazlitt’s tale could not compare with what I saw. In between rounds, Mr. Morales’ face spoke large volumes of blows pummeled at him. Mr. Pacquiao had hit his body with multiple cannonball fists. When I saw the blood on Mr. Morales’ face (where a bud had rotated like a wheel inside a hole of his nose) and none in Mr. Pacquiao’s, I resolved that was foretelling whose hero shall be crushed in this battle of champions. Mr. Morales shall be gorged slowly like scattered crumbs which, when taken wholly, will satisfy Mr. Pacquiao’s innate hunger.
True enough, Mr. Morales was dazed as Mr. Pacquiao switched the landing pads of his jabs. Inunti-unting kinain si Morales (he slowly munched Morales) from body to head. Mr. Pacquiao received his opponent’s blows but doubled his counterblows. The unraveling of those moments shone best when Mr. Morales, who never remembered any strong punch from Mr. Pacquiao, tasted it from both hands of the latter. This time around, Mr. Pacquiao made sure that Mr. Morales’ memory bank will have those blows etched, engraved, neon-lit and best of all, unforgotten. Mr. Morales swayed, fell semi-fallingly in the ring when the bell rang. In that room and the balcon, something magical was happening too. We stood up, whooped up and yelled. Better still, we clapped as if we were in Las Vegas, Nevada when that particular round ended.
“…in the next, the Gas-man aiming a mortal blow at his adversary’s neck with his right hand, and failing from the length he had to reach, the other returned it with his left at full swing, planted a tremendous blow on his cheekbone and eyebrow, and made a red ruin of that side of his face. The Gas-man went down, and there was another shout---a roar of triumph as the waves of fortune rolled tumultuously from side to side. This was a settler. Hickman got up, and “grinned horrible a ghastly smile” yet he was evidently dashed in his opinion of himself; it was the first time he had ever been so punished; all one side of his face was perfect scarlet, and his right eye was closed in dingy blackness, as he advanced to the fight, less confident, but still determined. “
Can Mr. Pacquiao’s Round 9 display of courage drive itself back in a time capsule and fly back to that Bristol setting, stirring the words of Mr. Hazlitt anew? For Mr. Morales now knew, perfectly knew in fact, that he had been so punished. All of us were aiming that Mr. Pacquiao will go for the kill, pacify all the tremblors felt within us, speak our hopes through his blows, comfort us from that visage of suffering and then, give us the face of triumph, nothing else but triumph, in the face of our own private battles.
“From this time forward the event became more certain every round, and about the twelfth it seemed as if it must have been over. Hickman generally stood with his back to me; but in the scuffle, he had changed positions, and Neate just then made a tremendous lunge at him, and hit him full in the face. It was doubtful whether he would fall backwards or forwards; he hung suspended for a second or two, and then fell back, throwing his hands in the air, and his face lifted up to the sky. I never saw anything more terrific than his aspect just before he fell. All traces of life, of natural expression, were gone from him.”
Could there be anything more gratifying to me than the grasp of a thrill that I shall be spared from Mr. Hazlitt’s hesitancy two hundred centuries ago as to where his hero’s adversary would fall---forwards or backwards? My hero, Mr. Pacquiao lunged a left fist of a whirlpool to Mr. Morales’ face on the 10th round. In a swift second, there was never an uncertainty where his body and possibly his spirit will go. That tremendous impact, to a man already beat in blue from his torso up to where his neck rested, had already been struck in several ways that it must have felt like toothaches attached to gangrened gums were sprouting all over his body, his scientific destination can only be away, away from the one who inflicted upon him the unforgettable punches.
And so Mr. Morales flung like a deflated tossed ball inside that ring. In a highly filmable way of being freezily thrown. Leaning, sloping; it was reminiscent of how Neo of The Matrix would have executed it against his foe. It was dealt with finesse that Mr. Morales was precisely lobbed. The referee had to block Mr. Pacquiao least he would unleash more pain to an already conquered body. The countdown delivery must have sounded like death knell to Mr. Morales.
Mr. Morales beat the countdown and stood up, not lifeless as the Gas-man was described by Mr. Hazlitt, but with unkillable courage. He tried to defy the odds already against him in full circles but just as he mastered this comeback with bravery, only his will rose to the occasion. His body simply gave up. By then, he was pounded like he was wood to Mr. Pacquiao’s axe hands and there, where everyone of us were up on our feet screaming for all the skies to hear, Mr. Morales slumped to his knees the second time like “one of the figures in Dante’s Inferno,” to borrow Mr. Hazlitt’s words.
And what of Mr. Pacquiao’s courage? He showed everyone and I mean everyone that when one does something honorable, the crowd shall come and come they shall, with all their guts, with all their soul. How much more can you ask from a man who invested so much integrity to his profession that he unselfishly worked so hard at it and sacrificed a lot for it ? No shortcuts shall be needed for a man whose intention was never muddled by self-interest. When he said he did it for the Philippines, we believed him because he showed the good deed first, way before the pomp and pageantry. There is your credible fighter who does what he speaks and speaks what he truly does.
My account of the fight as seen from an 18th century essay resonated the universal appeal of being on the side of the triumphant but it is more than that to me. In one spectacular period of my life this year, I would have experienced how the disparate themes of nationalism, fandom and hope were impressively shaped in one man : Mr. Manny Pacquiao.
Hi Jom,
Sorry if I wasn’t able to acknowledge your text about writing. Run out of load for outside-the-country SMS. Anyhow, it is great to know you are reading all those writers you mentioned like Gunter Grass and William Burroughs. Actually, the evolution of fiction has always caught my fancy; how forms have changed in so many ways. I haven’t read Tin Man nor Naked Lunch. Burroughs’ poetry and musings---some of those, I have laid my eyes on. I have his slim book on cats (he likes feline creatures and is creatively gay). I guess, I have to comb the book shelf because somewhere in one of the anthologies, Grass’ short story was featured.
I began writing a few pages of fiction which I think would take a year to tame. I read that a short story has only one action-hence, brief. An occurrence pasted so fast that you have to watch out for that lone smudge curling in paragraphs and give it a clued-up recognition---wipe it with a clean hankie of sort. No complications of too many cramped talks; of shifting settings. Yet, I also read that curious story about a brimstone house by Renata Adler. It happened in one abode with smidgens of actions and non-actions happening elsewhere. That house could uncover stories of a generation. Why not make a short story spanning an entire lifetime by using that technique? Minimal paragraphs not of an event but of several serialized episodes.
After all, what does life consist of really? Major impacts to human psyche do not happen in one snowball. They comprise scraps of the mundane- those snubbed domesticities frowned upon by “big” thinkers as inadequate for explorations. A source of conflict that an author utilizes to the hilt-to hold, to be in awe of, to suspend the crumbling pieces from dropping---is debatable. A story’s climax may come not from two wounded people so wretchedly torn but from a description of a table whose leg had been erroneously chopped off by an electrician. What am I saying? Peaks shoot off from everywhere, fiction included.
Don’t we do that mostly? We breathe, eat, go to school, work, earn, leave a place. We fart a lot of times. 9/10th of life unmiraculously constitute these things. A portion of humanity might have founded empires and re-creations about their glories might have influenced narrative genres from fantasy to folk tale. Yet, most of the pivotal physical actions take place in our minds and bowel movements unless we do carpentry or sent to battlefields to preserve civilization. In between we may have fallen in love, fled away from relationships, ruined our people relations, became hermits. We even threw the stale coffee from last night’s monstrous indolence of sitting down. Under a pen, these ordinary spurts could lead to some provocative actions, something out of the blue like slaying the dragons.
Short story, I think, is not a diminishing and narrowed form of just one action. Its true bent is on the economy of words as you present your tale. It is an expandable writing amulet in terms of setting. A writer should not brush off “action sidelines” just like that because they happened outside an event. Stories do stick there when compiled as a lifetime consequence.
Remember that little book I lent you-the O. Henry anthology? Nuzzled there are some of the words I want my characters to hug and spit on at the same time. In one swooshing lifetime. Not in thousand pages but twenty. I don’t know. One toys with the idea of breaking out from the mold even if one is ignorant of the molds and literary traditions and other terrifying walls like that. As a start, the thought alone is daunting.
Anyway, I have not realized how difficult it is to invent. Really. Play god to a situation of your imagination. You have to provide the plants and clouds and streets when you merely want one character to yell or else he is going to be marooned in a jungle somewhere in Guatemala. Somehow, you want to rebuff reality, allow your invented yet tormented people to chirrup like parakeets and say nothing. Wouldn’t that be too indulgent? What reader would want that? I am the kind of reader who would want that.
I also ponder : Isn’t that the purpose of fiction ----to provide an exciting suspension of a possibility? That something that could not happen, happens without constraint? That Hansel and Gretel will really be swallowed by that nasty machine especially constructed as a pastry processor? Inside a house made of candies and cookies no less! My subconscious is always aware of that whenever I observe the interiors of a bakery. Among those ensaymadas lined up in baking tins are the historically fictive ragamuffins : flattened Hansel and Gretel. Can you imagine them, these innocent children of pug noses and tattered clothes (see, I am embellishing but that’s how a fable gets to me--- unnecessarily victimized, they become rigidly adult under my rather sympathetic eyes) cut down to pieces courtesy of that finicky witch-cannibal who could not even eat the grubby kids wholly but had to, pray tell, bake them? They need to be filled with strawberry syrups and M&Ms. How cultured! There is your forerunner to Hannibal Lechter.
So, I do not care whether that witch is all about isolation or is in deep denial of her roof dripping with chocolates and thus says something about excessive capitalism ----but that is fiction. I am made alive not by the extracurricular and explorative meanings but by the weaving of that incredible, make-believe story. Since when was I aware that there should be limits to it? Not in my own existence. Hard work comes by making it so engaging, or the words must really be formed nicely to merit long periods of glances. If someone looks for universal truth to that, redirect him to the Bible instead. Let the readers apportion your creation to their own loves and biases. Including the smirks and questions.
In an average of say, 30 people who should have read your work, one may like a sentence, even just one sentence, that keeps running inside his head while getting himself dizzy in a swing at the town plaza. That would be a pay-off already.
So, there Jom. There will be self-doubts, criticisms directed at yourself by yourself but the hardest part---that knuckle you want to unfist-is really when you are already faced with that monitor and you begin interrogating yourself of that most dreaded statement so many writers might have faced in their own personal anxieties, exiles, deadlines, retributions and innumerable states of euphoria : “Now, begin to write!”
I have never encountered a more fearful situation than that (hahahaha). Anyway, keep on reading. I have a lot to learn and unlearn. People like you who keep on listening to me despite my incomprehensible talks contributed to the creation of stories growing fungus at the back of my mind that I am in constant ache of weeding out. I have not made one yet but I will make sure that I should have finished one before I expire. I will bring it to Jesus, if your friend is allowed in heaven. (insert guffaws). Who knows, He could be that guy who got himself dizzy in that swing with MY line humming in His head.
Thanks again…keep on living creatively.
Your friendly nonsense,
Iris
Sorry if I wasn’t able to acknowledge your text about writing. Run out of load for outside-the-country SMS. Anyhow, it is great to know you are reading all those writers you mentioned like Gunter Grass and William Burroughs. Actually, the evolution of fiction has always caught my fancy; how forms have changed in so many ways. I haven’t read Tin Man nor Naked Lunch. Burroughs’ poetry and musings---some of those, I have laid my eyes on. I have his slim book on cats (he likes feline creatures and is creatively gay). I guess, I have to comb the book shelf because somewhere in one of the anthologies, Grass’ short story was featured.
I began writing a few pages of fiction which I think would take a year to tame. I read that a short story has only one action-hence, brief. An occurrence pasted so fast that you have to watch out for that lone smudge curling in paragraphs and give it a clued-up recognition---wipe it with a clean hankie of sort. No complications of too many cramped talks; of shifting settings. Yet, I also read that curious story about a brimstone house by Renata Adler. It happened in one abode with smidgens of actions and non-actions happening elsewhere. That house could uncover stories of a generation. Why not make a short story spanning an entire lifetime by using that technique? Minimal paragraphs not of an event but of several serialized episodes.
After all, what does life consist of really? Major impacts to human psyche do not happen in one snowball. They comprise scraps of the mundane- those snubbed domesticities frowned upon by “big” thinkers as inadequate for explorations. A source of conflict that an author utilizes to the hilt-to hold, to be in awe of, to suspend the crumbling pieces from dropping---is debatable. A story’s climax may come not from two wounded people so wretchedly torn but from a description of a table whose leg had been erroneously chopped off by an electrician. What am I saying? Peaks shoot off from everywhere, fiction included.
Don’t we do that mostly? We breathe, eat, go to school, work, earn, leave a place. We fart a lot of times. 9/10th of life unmiraculously constitute these things. A portion of humanity might have founded empires and re-creations about their glories might have influenced narrative genres from fantasy to folk tale. Yet, most of the pivotal physical actions take place in our minds and bowel movements unless we do carpentry or sent to battlefields to preserve civilization. In between we may have fallen in love, fled away from relationships, ruined our people relations, became hermits. We even threw the stale coffee from last night’s monstrous indolence of sitting down. Under a pen, these ordinary spurts could lead to some provocative actions, something out of the blue like slaying the dragons.
Short story, I think, is not a diminishing and narrowed form of just one action. Its true bent is on the economy of words as you present your tale. It is an expandable writing amulet in terms of setting. A writer should not brush off “action sidelines” just like that because they happened outside an event. Stories do stick there when compiled as a lifetime consequence.
Remember that little book I lent you-the O. Henry anthology? Nuzzled there are some of the words I want my characters to hug and spit on at the same time. In one swooshing lifetime. Not in thousand pages but twenty. I don’t know. One toys with the idea of breaking out from the mold even if one is ignorant of the molds and literary traditions and other terrifying walls like that. As a start, the thought alone is daunting.
Anyway, I have not realized how difficult it is to invent. Really. Play god to a situation of your imagination. You have to provide the plants and clouds and streets when you merely want one character to yell or else he is going to be marooned in a jungle somewhere in Guatemala. Somehow, you want to rebuff reality, allow your invented yet tormented people to chirrup like parakeets and say nothing. Wouldn’t that be too indulgent? What reader would want that? I am the kind of reader who would want that.
I also ponder : Isn’t that the purpose of fiction ----to provide an exciting suspension of a possibility? That something that could not happen, happens without constraint? That Hansel and Gretel will really be swallowed by that nasty machine especially constructed as a pastry processor? Inside a house made of candies and cookies no less! My subconscious is always aware of that whenever I observe the interiors of a bakery. Among those ensaymadas lined up in baking tins are the historically fictive ragamuffins : flattened Hansel and Gretel. Can you imagine them, these innocent children of pug noses and tattered clothes (see, I am embellishing but that’s how a fable gets to me--- unnecessarily victimized, they become rigidly adult under my rather sympathetic eyes) cut down to pieces courtesy of that finicky witch-cannibal who could not even eat the grubby kids wholly but had to, pray tell, bake them? They need to be filled with strawberry syrups and M&Ms. How cultured! There is your forerunner to Hannibal Lechter.
So, I do not care whether that witch is all about isolation or is in deep denial of her roof dripping with chocolates and thus says something about excessive capitalism ----but that is fiction. I am made alive not by the extracurricular and explorative meanings but by the weaving of that incredible, make-believe story. Since when was I aware that there should be limits to it? Not in my own existence. Hard work comes by making it so engaging, or the words must really be formed nicely to merit long periods of glances. If someone looks for universal truth to that, redirect him to the Bible instead. Let the readers apportion your creation to their own loves and biases. Including the smirks and questions.
In an average of say, 30 people who should have read your work, one may like a sentence, even just one sentence, that keeps running inside his head while getting himself dizzy in a swing at the town plaza. That would be a pay-off already.
So, there Jom. There will be self-doubts, criticisms directed at yourself by yourself but the hardest part---that knuckle you want to unfist-is really when you are already faced with that monitor and you begin interrogating yourself of that most dreaded statement so many writers might have faced in their own personal anxieties, exiles, deadlines, retributions and innumerable states of euphoria : “Now, begin to write!”
I have never encountered a more fearful situation than that (hahahaha). Anyway, keep on reading. I have a lot to learn and unlearn. People like you who keep on listening to me despite my incomprehensible talks contributed to the creation of stories growing fungus at the back of my mind that I am in constant ache of weeding out. I have not made one yet but I will make sure that I should have finished one before I expire. I will bring it to Jesus, if your friend is allowed in heaven. (insert guffaws). Who knows, He could be that guy who got himself dizzy in that swing with MY line humming in His head.
Thanks again…keep on living creatively.
Your friendly nonsense,
Iris
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