⌈Rosselle-ism Is Good Stuff⌋

How does one write about the familiar?

The trap of triteness goes exactly like this: one begins with a neat, predictable accounting of the present and clinchers with a sanguine projection into the future. Time is necessarily rendered docile to the power of plans and strategies, with unforeseen circumstances as the only respite to the ruthless process of fabrication. The task soon proves to be banal as to induce abandonment of the project itself, which then results into the discrediting of the significance of the story altogether. Such is the temptation (and danger) of the fast-paced and mechanistic ethos of our milieu—we virtually reduce the act of story-telling to that of calculating odds and risks, and we no longer anticipate in the face of unpredictability.

Home life—one of the very emblems of the familiar—is not spared by the contemporary disillusionment with anything evocative. For the most part, we only view the fact of habitation as simply that of mere occupancy and constancy. The thought of home no longer excites us, for it has also been relegated to a permanent fact of existence that is shunned more than it is celebrated. Even the act of coming home becomes only a tiresome ritual that, for the most part, seems to run counter to our culture that glorifies expediency and pragmatism.

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Despite all the hell days I've encountered and ranted about for the past few years, I could easily conclude that I have been immensely blessed beyond what I could have possibly imagined before entering college. Sure, I was fortunate enough to have passed and been sent to arguably the best educational institution in the country, but I never expected that a lot more would be in store for me once I began my journey in Ateneo. I could go on and list everything here but for brevity's (and well, modesty's--though not a signature trait of mine) sake, I wouldn't take advantage of the liberty to do so.

Yet beyond everything I have gone through so far, several things still seem to be in transit. I could not--nay do I dare--lay claim that after four years of higher education, I am wiser nor more ready for life as I was several years ago. More so, there are certain components in my life that I would not even imagine repudiating from the fact sheet of my being--first of which is my fidelity and progressively expanding love and nostalgia for Ilagan, the only place which I truly equate to the concept of home.

I haven't had the chance to go back for the last 9 months since I left the country and returned again to handle the final leg of undergraduate life. That has been the longest time I've spent without coming home to Ilagan, and is also probably the reason why I suddenly decided to randomly post an entry amidst my hectic schedule. But I digress. The barest fact underneath all of this is that I miss home and everything else that reminds me of it.

I miss Ilagan and all the trivialities about it which, in retrospect, are the very things that endeared me to it. They're the sort of mundane trimmings one finds in a campy film or TV show he or she secretly loved in childhood or the stuff of conversation with good friends that always ends up with a feeling of emptiness, of deep nostalgia, of unexpected lamentation. But then I might just be speaking for myself--a person faced once again with the Heideggerian (pardon my German) angst of being, still uncertain about the unstructured world I will rub elbows with a few months from now. I wouldn't really know, but it all boils down to the sincerity behind the attempt. And now for the cheesy part.

I miss Ilagan for it reminded me of my childhood: its innocence, the tragedy of its loss, and the hopeless pang of longing for it again. I miss my immediate family and the days when my present life and achievements in college was just a figment of a dream for my parents. I equally miss my extended family, whose distinctive quirk never failed to elicit a good laugh, a juicy piece of gossip, and sheer awe at how some of the older ones were already legends in their own right whose stories were carved in the malleable minds of the children that me and my cousins were back then. Ilagan doesn't just mean home to me in the formalist sense; Ilagan is, first and foremost, the heart of what "family" is.

I miss Ilagan and the humility demanded by the sheer fact of having to live there. The prospect of living the fast life in the city pales in comparison to the rich, textured yet quaint charm of provincial life. The plain simplicity of it all holds out an unexpected elegance and a genuine sense of treasure for all the little details it had under its sleeve. There were no shortcuts, no short-time solutions, nor come-as-you-go fixes, whichever way or context one has to put it. Yet the laidbackness and generally slow passage and pace of time one experiences when living there has its own conveniences: one can appreciate more the comfort of home and community, the goodness local food, the perpetually familiar establishments, the simple yet commanding open roads and highways, the literally straight road to the hustle and bustle of the centrifuge of everyday life, and the actual joy that could possibly exist in going places, that is, commuting back and forth to the same spots. A curious tidbit: the concept of "joyride" seemed to have been endemic to the provincial experience, and seemingly non-existent in the city. Definitely says a lot about the enormous difference of the demands upon the lifestyle in both places.

Central to this soliloquy is probably that of missing Ilagan and its strangely endearing community: being part of it, the culture wrapped around it, and the constitutive parts which truly make it as such. Among the sources of the exigency of having to live a distinct sort of lifestyle in Ilagan is that of knowing and having to exist, laugh, cry, celebrate, and grieve with people from all walks of life. On a personal note, there is some tinge of nostalgic amusement upon seeing familiar people in the street and more so, having the opportunity to strike a conversation with them beyond the fleeting character of those which take place in the city. Back home, it was even convenient and possible to classify people according to which school they went to, the barangay they resided in, and even the extended families they were part of. Such was the uniqueness of having to belong in the community espoused by Ilagan: there was an unexplainable sense of instinctual familiarity with one another.

I could practically go on and type an epic of sorts as an ode to nostalgia, but it will never be enough to frame the feeling of haunting in me at this very moment. Life goes on, as the casual bystander would say, but does it really progressively do so? Or are we all in the same boat sailing in circles, pining for anachrony in hopes of redeeming that which time has declared past? Missing home terribly at least gives me a sense of grounding, a sense of direction, and a sense of love--though unrequited at times--enough to keep me going for a long time.

In my exposition of homesickness, I tried my best not to romanticize or idealize what Ilagan is for those who do not know it. That wasn't the aim at all. In the face of increasing uncertainty and expansion of horizons, this activity was at the very least comforting and humbling. I only wrote of the Ilagan I knew, and hopefully, still the Ilagan I could return to and dream about.

I honestly do not know how to blog anymore, in the most basic sense of the word. My blog now looks like a repository of course work papers instead of the journal-y and emo ones I used to write a couple of years back. And in retrospect, I think I really don't know how to write like a real blogger. Being candid, spontaneous, not self-conscious, and having self-control against coughing out compound sentences are all alien writing habits to me.

Let's say I have enough reason to blame it all on this girl who told me once to stop writing about her in the purplest of prose. And so I gave in, but then I did more than what she asked for: I stopped writing about her and about how I honestly felt about things in general.

I digress.

I guess my passive-aggressiveness comes in at moments like that when I see an opportunity for vengeance through the most silent yet deadly manner possible. After that episode, I found it really hard to write like I used to and knowing myself all too well, my tendency to be comfortable in convenient habits which will make me stay away from further trouble will likely prevent me from spewing out emo entries anytime soon or ever. More disturbingly, even the manner by which I verbally narrate stories is now running behind the logic of basta--be it the mindless or profound kind.

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Last July 20, billions of cyberspace denizens woke up to finding a lunar insignia plastered on the Google homepage where the logo was supposed to be located. The world's largest search engine has a knack for selectively altering its homepage as a nod to events of great significance occurring on a particular day. And in this case, it was that of one of the most symbolic scientific and even political events in recent historical memory--the 40th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon.

For those who were born (or at least conscious enough) after 1969 could only imagine how the collective ego of humanity was given a major boost by this affirmation of the supremacy of our rationality and our sciences through the emblematic colonization of space and the realization of a millennia-old fantasy. The sky was no longer the limit for the scientific community and the most ambitious of states; it was now the infinite mysteries of the cosmos and the sheer will to domination.

The lunar landing transformed human consciousness forever, bursting into the different scaffolds of culture and action as either a perpetual statement of celebration or caution. The 'giant leap for mankind' made by Neil Armstrong forty decades ago somehow clinchered the schizophrenia of our time; on the one hand, we have completely wagered our fate as a species into the side of the Dogma of Reason while simultaneously increasing our uneasiness and distrust with the now highly unintelligible miracles and precision of sophisticated discourses and bureaucracies.

With determined purpose and without anticipated provision, we have leapt closer to the apex of finality, to the ethos of decisive solutions.

Human imagination--one of the last bastions of pervasive criticism--was effectively seized by formulaic strategies towards reaching the Divine, the Absolute Spirit. This development in human discourse is not a novel scheme at all. A genealogical investigation unto the history of thought and the thought of history would reveal instances of the conquest of what we cannot understand and calculate, that is, an assimilation of the Other. The image conjured by the videos of the lunar escapade provokes a dramatic and violent response towards the fully alien, airless, and battered surface of the moon, a celestial body which we have only previously viewed from a vantage point whose gap was eternally fixed. The moon, whose gloom inspired countless mythologies, tragedies, and triumphs was now rendered indistinguishable from the carcasses of biological specimens carefully dissected in highly-controlled laboratories. And the aim was precisely that: to exalt man into the position of Great Scientist whose testing ground was the Universe.

Behind this epistemic orgasm (or suspicion) lies a more troubling telos: the capture of space was to be heralded not as the victory of mankind, but of a political hegemon within the context of ideological imperialism over the domain of the Earth. This particular experience provides an optimal insight into the past of commonly accepted and embraced forms of knowledge and the methods towards attaining them. Our being unchained from the domain of faith and communal passion made us quick to jump into totalitarian celebratory events posing as triumphs for the whole of humanity, regardless of fundamental and deeply-rooted affiliations which are potentially agonistic vis-a-vis the normalized and highly codified order of things.

Amidst the euphoric hangover of the world over the Eagle's lunar touchdown, a proposal for a reminder of tragedy should be injected in stark contestation towards such totalizing proclamations and signifiers for the human race. Mastering the cosmos, after all, does not acquit us from the responsibility of constantly remembering the various forms of enslavement harrowing our inner consciences back in the Earth.

These yellowing sheets
are metaphors to
the re-writing of history:

the folds of their margins
bleed of passions thought as
necessary to erode
the monument to a utopia
canonized by time.

The strokes in them slowly turn uneven,
some curves heavier than
others

yet all still consummate into
an optimist effort of
writing

and writing
until the words become fact

until an absurd attempt at poetry
cannot deny the honesty
of the act.

With outlandish words now shunned
and tragedy kept at a minimum,

what remains is the bareness
of the struggle in its
purest form--

a wick of hope burning against
the harsh darkness
of inevitable teleological movement
sketching the visuals of compromise,

painting the landscape brown,
filing it under the convenient label

of an accident in history.

too busy these days. will work around this after (ateneo) finals and probably write an exposition of sorts:

"There is credence then in the claim that the workings of the universe and the way by which humanity operates is structured (not in the functional sense) in a macrocosmic-microcosmic relationship. [I have] a renewed hope then, that human emotion is not a mere cognitive disturbance and that I am not just a collection of thoughts which assumed the visceral form of humanity. These emotions are a manifestation of forces greater than us. Like how even the tiniest star in the sky (however trivial it may seem to the ordinary gaze) is actually a huge ball of fire somewhere else which, despite of its immensity, still manages to lend the Earth--an otherwise tiny cosmic body--the beauty of its light, even in small doses." -Rosselle :))

(it's more of an ambitious project that will attempt to link two fields of knowledge that i love--theoretical cosmology and philosophy. should i fail, i can always say that it's a lame try to transcend everyday-level emoness. haha.)

Whitewashed dreams burst forth,
painting the sound of your name
in the wind's canvass.