Deconstruct now!

for if we dwell
on greek dictionaries
and dark tunnels,
aren't we... 
forlorn
victims, and
slaves
of past and
modern inequities
still perpetuating
the negative
image that
we abhor?
why
confirm
what others have fought
against?
i'd say
transcend and
train the light toward
heaven...

"Find each other.

Attach yourself to what you feel to be true. Begin there.

An encounter, a discovery, a vast wave of strikes, an earthquake: every event produces truth by changing our way of being in the world. Conversely, any observation that leaves us indifferent, doesn’t affect us, doesn’t commit us to anything, no longer deserves the name truth. There’s a truth beneath every gesture, every practice, every relationship, and every situation. We usually just avoid it, manage it, which produces the madness of so many in our era. In reality, everything involves everything else. The feeling that one is living a lie is still a truth. It is a matter of not letting it go, of starting from there. A truth isn’t a view on the world but what binds us to it in an irreducible way. A truth isn’t something we hold but something that carries us. It makes and unmakes me, constitutes and undoes me as an individual; it distances me from many and brings me closer to those who also experience it."

The lines above are  just a part of the torrent in the newest treatise called "The Coming Insurrection," that has graced the news lately.  Anarchic and communistic in its bent, the truth they are talking about is best  pondered after a drink of ones favorite libation, French or otherwise.  For, not only is it totally serious and somewhat disturbing, it can also strike the most vulnerable part of one's soul if one can only find the time to take stock of the world in this busy lives of ours.

Not since Derrida had brightened the darkened cicatrices of human's faltering brains that a freshly minted book ignited such controversy if not adoration from many philosophes of today.  It talks directly about the cloying grip of unfettered capitalism and "war-on-terror anti-immigration" mentality pervasive in contemporary western media. Although this blogger personally does not condone anarchy, the beauty of reading books written with the intent of searching for truth (albeit a rehash of some famous manifestoes) and trying to uncover the follies of humanity as we know it, is that one can ponder at leisure the many desires, foibles and vagaries of man, and the state of affairs in general.  As one waits for a pot of rice to cook, for example, or as one waits for another round of latte in ones favorite cafe, this book,defintely, is great company. 

Catch a butterfly of idea flitting by. 
Cherish its color and beauty. 
Capture the tints and shadows...

Or let it go.

Nanay, as we fondly called my late grandmother, was a housewife and a widow at the age of twenty six.  Armed only with the most basic knowledge of child-rearing and housekeeping as all young wives were in those days, she raised six children on her own--a super human feat compared to the single mothers of today.  This was during the era of "Liberation" when the Americans came to free the islands from the grip of Imperial Japan.  (The period before was called Occupation but there was also a phase named Insurrection depending on whose side one is on.)  Raised in the hot, arid tracts of sugar cane and coffee plantations where people were purported to have originated from across the Celebes, she moved her family to a nearby province where my grandfather built her a house with his own bare hands.  He was an eccentric yet educated man, much older than Nanay.  And he died of unknown reasons.  (The Catholic priests, at first, did not let his remains be buried inside the confines of the town cemetery for fear that he had commited suicide.)

So, the town they settled in was located in a coastal town at the foot of a huge mountain, Mt. Banahaw, where history has noted the many brave heroes who spilled gallons of blood against conquerors of Iberian origins--an earlier era of more horrendous consequences.  In Nanay's days, however, even when the Americans were already in sight celebrating their victory in the Pacific, the locals were still plagued by the ravages of the war; there were rampant poverty and malnutrition.  The biggest city--Manila--was bombed beyond recognition, second only to Berlin in devastation.  Nanay learned how to cook a very Spartan, yet nutritious and adaptable fish stew that could last for a week without refrigeration.  Everyone got tired of it for she kept cooking the same dish long after the war was over as if it were some kind of offering to the gods--I can just imagine her saying, "Thank you god of the ocean, for all fish big and small..."

There were many, many stories that ensued long after the horrors of the past were buried.  Nanay told tales of entire villages evacuating for fear of being decimated by the approaching armies.  She recounted about how once, a large field planted with corn and vegetables completely disappeared--roots and all--in a matter of minutes after the hungry villagers had passed.  Of relatives being buried alive and surviving to tell the tale.  Yet, Nanay, despite the tragic consequences of history and later of her own life, took to the difficult task of raising her children and ensuring their education (Catholic parochial yet private) and making sure that the generations that came along must not forget the stories passed down from one generation to the next.  Nanay's stories, her idiosyncracies, her stunning non-traditional mathematical abilities (she can add large numbers without the use of a pencil) and her legendary thriftiness will forever be remembered by her descendants (who have studied the past from the pages of history...).

to learn more click on any of these:
http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/ump/majors/english/bookshelf/bain/sitttingindarkness.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Crete/9782/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine-American_War
http://www.eserbisyo.gov.ph/Default.aspx?ssid=84&aid=1880

The Rhodora

On being asked, whence is the flower.

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.

                                            Ralph Waldo Emerson