East Timor Notebook: You know how people always say that having children will change you?

26th June
Dili

You know how people always say that having children will change you?

Until Gabby, I’d always been dismissive of children. Not that I disliked them. Not at all. There have been plenty of occasions where I prefered the company of children to grown ups. I still remember what it was like, holing out in my bedroom, hoping not to have to entertain my parents’ guests. Seeing affluent foreigners in a country like Burma or Cambodia going all Angelina Jolie with the children had always made me cringe inwardly.

But things are remarkably, remarkably different now.

I see children suffering, little children who should have every chance as anyone to a decently life, suffering, my heart contracts painfully into a little fist, and I see Gabby’s sweet face on theirs, thinking of the impossible.

Oh Timor-Leste.
Maubere, maubere,
stand up, and let me stand with you.
Your wounds are the wounds of all humanity,
your hopes are too.

Maubere, maubere,
you sing without sorrow,
you dance without tears.

Remind us what it’s like
to love a people,
to dream a tomorrow.

East Timor Notebook: What is a full life?

25 June 2007
Dili

What is a full life? Pessoa argues that one should abdicate from life, otherwise abdicate from one’s self. To belong to something is banal. Creed, ideal, wife, profession: prison cells, shackles.

I gallop in the opposite direction. I feel mortality closing in on me and race to fill my life with ideals, with living out my dreams, with pursuits of grandeur, with turning my hobbies into passions. Because it is an effort, there is a skein of falsehood in this attempt. And yet, how can it not be an effort? How can I not push myself to achieve more, to travel farther, and to fill, fill, fill the pages of my notebooks and screens with the words and evidence of the density of my life.

I can’t pause. I can’t stand still. I’m a motor that is constantly running.

Last week, EC tender.
These two weeks, election observer mission in East Timor.
After that, Chiaroscuro.

And now, I am alone with Pessoa’s coffee cup and cigarette, following the blinking cursor to the next thought.

Traveling to Dili was like travelling to any destination I’d gone to before. Sitting here and typing on my iBook, alone in the living room, is no different from staying up until the wee hours of the morning, doing the same thing with Gabby and Junior sound asleep upstairs at home.

Thirty years and I still can’t tell you the meaning of my life.

I’ve tried so hard to be independent, need no one, touch nothing; but without the love and friendship of the people around me, I’d be bereft and forlorn.

I need to be liked, I need to be loved. Respect and admiration are food for the craven soul.

From needing to be the good girl, as a child, I’ve grown to needing to be a great person.

I wish I could write, right now, about all my mundane observations in coming to Dili for the first time. Is this the Dili of my dreams? In that, Pessoa was right: nothing in reality could ever be as good as their versions in our imagination, in the ether where there exists only two: you and your thoughts.

Dili was familiar territory because I’m always carrying around the same baggage of who I am. There is nothing alien about the wide, empty highways and the small, uneven streets, littered with the rubble of 25 years of Indonesia’s brutal military occupation.

You don’t see it in the wide, smiling eyes of the women and children. Children play in the street, scattered by the occasional big vans with “UN” emblazoned on them. They play soccer and own the road. They laugh and practice English on me and on any foreigner they see, probably. They grab at the US dollars of my guilt for being a thousand times more affluent than them. They sing and dance and link hands with you and step forward, step back. Maubere, they sing, man, woman, stand up for Timor Loro’sae.

Chiaroscuro: From the Book of Disquiet (A Script)

Nothing, nothing.
Just the night—
The silence of emptiness—
the space that exists between me and me—
a thing mislaid by some god.

We are death.
This thing we think of as life is only the sleep of real life, the death of what we truly are.
The dead are born, they do not die...
When we think we are alive, we are dead, we live even while we lie dying.

Oh, that I should die--feelings first!

We must learn to sublimate the pure from the contagion of the vulgar.

We must know, immediately and instinctively, how to abstract from every object and event only what is suitable dream material and to leave for dead in the External World any reality it contains...

Harboring no ambitions, passions, desires, hopes, impulses or feelings of restlessness.

The very fact of completing or achieving anything, be it an empire or a sentence, contains what is worst about all real things: our knowledge that they will perish.

To belong to something—that’s banal. Creed, ideal, lover or profession: nothing but prison cells and shackles.

To be, is to be free.

Touch nothing!

Abdicate from life, so as not to abdicate from one’s self.

Do not think with your feelings, feel with your thoughts!

Find for every feeling the most serene mode of expression; reduce love to a mere shadow of a dream of love...

Make of desire something vain and inoffensive, the delicate private smile of a soul to itself...

Lull hatred to sleep like a captive snake and order fear to preserve agony only in its eyes and in the eyes of our soul.

Let pain instruct you. The pain of not understanding the mystery of life, the pain of being unloved, the pain of others' injustice to us, the pain of life crushing us, suffocating and imprisoning us, the pain of toothache, of pinching shoes--who can say which pain (is) worse?... Everything is nothing, and our pain is no exception.

If my heart could think, I think it would stop beating.

A cup of coffee, a cigarette, the penetrating aroma of its smoke, myself sitting in a shadowy room with eyes half-closed...

I want no more from life than my dreams and this... It doesn't seem much? I don't know. What do I know about what is a little and what is a lot?

Summer evening out there. How I would love to be someone else.

I open the window... Everything outside is so gentle, yet it pierces me with an indefinable pain, a vague feeling of discontent.

And one last thing pierces me, tears at me, leaves my soul in tatters. It's that I, at this moment, at this window, looking out at these sad, gentle things, ought to present a beautiful figure, like someone in a picture--

and I don't, I don't even do that.

I'm nobody, nobody.

I am the outskirts of some non-existent town.

I don't know how to feel or think or love.

My life is a tragedy, booed off the stage by the gods after the first act.

I am the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book, a character in a novel as yet unfinished, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.

I am... the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself... I've become a character in a book, a life already read.

With all this rewriting, I have destroyed myself.

Everything in me is a tendency to be about something else; an impatience of the soul within itself as if with an importunate child, a disquiet that is always growing, always the same.

... For light fleeting moments, I manage to forget the taste of life, to leave life and noise behind and die, feelings first, into an empire of anguished ruins, a grand entrance amidst flags and victorious drums, into a vast final city where I weep for nothing, want for nothing and not even ask not to be myself.

My imaginary world has always been the true world for me. I never knew loves so real, so full of passion and life as I did with the characters I myself created.

I am the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself... I am a character in my book, a life read.


words adapted from Fernando Pessoa's "The Book of Disquiet"

Only Pinoys will Unnerstand why this is so Funny

not the, but a, scream

bittersweet, fruit i eat,
up the spiral down again,

nicotine, and caffeine,
cursor leads me where i go,

clock strikes thirty; sound, no fury;
lots to show for; not enough,

stare at myself staring at myself--
am i just worth my weight in gold?

tick
tock
drip
drop

how many Sols does it take
to screw things up?


it's three a.m. and i'm stressed out

open house!

the return of prodigal books, dvds, et cetera is welcome. i want my stuff back.

Do Gooder's Anonymous: What Does a Hero Make?

Move over, Peter Petrelli and your wanker hairdo!








And Chocolatini goes on to say: Well, he has a magic lamp!

Do-Gooders Anonymous: Scene from a Cubicle

Dilbert wouldn't last five minutes at this fictitious organisation (that I fictionally doodle about). Say hello to the lovable kooks at Do-Gooders Anonymous, saving the world one email at a time!

Today's cartoon: Random Thoughts from Kapten Umbad on George Dubya

Chiaroscuro: Mislaid by Some God

Here's the "Previously, on Buffy the Vampire Slayer" rundown: Pessoa was a poet "who wrote poets" and not just poetry: he created what he called "heteronyms"--personalities whose philosophies and writing styles were distinct, and ostensibly distinct from his. The book is Pessoa's only major work in prose: the novel is written as the journal of Bernardo Soares, a clerk in a small company. The text was written over a quarter of a century--published post-humously possibly never meant to become public. Pessoa scholars apparently think that Soares as a character is very close to being Pessoa himself. How do I bring this to the stage? This is the question that has haunted me over the past weeks, a hum of worry like a crease on the skin at the back of my mind. Come mid-July, I've committed to performing a monologue, along with five other performers, at The Substation. Each of us has our own book to dramatize, in whatever way works.

"Nothing, nothing, just part of the night and the silence of whatever emptiness... the space that exists between me and me, a thing mislaid by some god." That is how 'The Book of Disquiet' by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa ends.

Throughout the book, my mind's eye saw Pessoa/Soares quite clearly. Demystified. Or I thought I did. Pessoa (I think of him as Pessoa more than the character Soares) was socially maladjusted, intelligent but intellectually arrogant, sexually repressed and alone. Lonely and loveless. Sometimes his angst was palpable to me--even close to my own inner Munch-ish scream. Other times, I felt appalled by his misanthropic tendencies.

Although the book was never properly edited by Pessoa into a novel before he died, several threads ran through the work: isolation, love, hate, nothingness, tedium, the meaning of his life and of life in general, his writing and the meaning of writing, and--most importantly--sublimation. Sublimation is the process of separating two or more mixed substances; what Pessoa tries to do is sublimation in the literary and ideational sense of distilling the pure from the unpure. With words, he tries to render the base, transitory and meaningless material world into the purity of its substance in ideas, dreams and writing. Sleep is to life, as life is to death. "This thing we think of as life is only the sleep of real life, the death of what we truly are. The dead are born, they do not die... When we think we are alive, we are dead, we live even while we lie dying."

Pessoa reveled in the objectification of emotion (writing that he should die, "feelings first"), in his self-imposed distance from humanity and in his belief that this distance made one superior to others. He extolled indifference as an aim: "(t)o know, immediately and instinctively, how to abstract from every object and event only what is suitable dream material and to leave for dead in the External World any reality it contains... harboring no ambitions, passions, desires, hopes, impulses or feelings of restlessness.

"We must find for every feeling the most serene mode of expression; reduce love to a mere shadow of a dream of love..."

The consequence is best exemplified in a passage about pain: "The pain of not understanding the mystery of life, the pain of being unloved, the pain of others' injustice to us, the pain of life crushing us, suffocating and imprisoning us, the pain of toothache, of pinching shoes--who can say which pain (is) worse?... Everything is nothing, and our pain is no exception."

But was he just hypocritically trying to assuage his own loneliness? Was this intellectual and psychological onanism simply a defense? He admits on page 159 that he was once truly loved, once. Pessoa scholars speculate that Pessoa died a virgin. Apart from passages about being (or striving to be) above sensuality and the sappy sentiment of love ("If the heart could think it would stop beating"), here was one entry that I think betrays his struggle for equanimity with all his futile passions roiling in him:

"A cup of coffee, a cigarette, the penetrating aroma of its smoke, myself sitting in a shadowy room with eyes half-closed...

I want no more from life than my dreams and this... It doesn't seem much? I don't know. What do I know about what is a little and what is a lot?

... I open the window... And one last thing pierces me, tears at me, leaves my soul in tatters. It's that I, at this moment, at this window, looking out at these sad, gentle things, ought to present an aesthetic figure, like someone in a picture--

and I don't,

I don't even do that."

What I also found interesting was Pessoa's many references to himself as the book itself (or as the product of his art)--Pessoa the "written voice" and "intellectual image", indistinguished from Pessoa the person, mind and existence. Writing four years before he died, he despairs: "I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me." Also: "I am... the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself... I've become a character in a book, a life already read." And, with irony and uncharacteristic humor: "With all this rewriting, I have destroyed myself."

More likely, it is Soares (the character) speaking in direct address to the audience acknowledging that he is only the product of Pessoa's pen.



"Everything in me is a tendency to be about something else; an impatience of the soul within itself as if with an importunate child, a disquiet that is always growing, always the same."

Dirge for the Departed

Vending machine.
Your cold glass slabs,
warm only in our memories
of the saccharine drinks you purveyed
to slake our thirst
and fetishes for
aspartame and carbonated fluid.

You are no more.
It took four men
to carry you out
while a funeral dirge
wailed
in our hearts.

i really want an ice cold can of green tea right now.