January

Janus is the nominal divinity for the parts of the world that follow the Roman calendar and start their years with "January." With delinquencies in my Bulfinch and Hamilton noted, I say Janus was one Roman god who was not copied from some Greek precedent. If the scholars are right, he was formed before much of the Greek influence came. He evolved from the native Latin spirit of doorways, ianua.

As you may have read in the volumes or heard in homilies of the more classical-thinking priests, Janus was remarkable for his head. It had two faces, one looking forward, another looking back. He was a god of new beginnings, new years. He also presides over ends. As the deity of the doorway, he is the god of both entry and departure. His immortal eyes stare down both things to come and things past.

Down on the mortal, local, and more culturally significant plane, we have our very own saying about people who do not acknowledge their origins:

"Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan,
di makararating sa paroroonan."

Despite the resonance of this theme in our contemporary literature and even in popular culture products such as films, somehow the still mechanistic world-view tells us that we don't have to look back. Where to and where from are two distinct points in any map. Alpha is irrelevant and Omega is entirely up to you. No need to confuse the two.

Well, that is one way of looking at it. Nevertheless, someone can always stand up and dare say, despite all the points and lines, it's still just one map. It's just one door.

Whatever. Happy new year.

Mapagpapasensyahan kaya ako sa pagiging matanong? Kumusta ang panahon ng Kapaskuhan ninyo? Ano ang pinagkakaabalahan ninyo ngayon? Marami bang lakad o pipirmi lamang sa bahay? Magiging masaya kaya? E manigo?

Mawalang-galang na ha? Nangungumusta lang.

Tomorrow

I will not make sense today. I really won't. I will just take a few minutes off this night and hope I can wake up early enough for Simbang Gabi. Early enough or not, I will definitely not keep the kids waiting for their prelims.

I used to do this a lot. I just list down everything I'm thinking of at the moment, related or not. Here it goes then.

No further ado.

Carol. Prof. Dadufalza. Birthdays. Beginnings. Ends. Jol and his mysterious problem. Nathan. Arlyn and Thursday. Angas. Monica will join us on Thursday. Asian Center. Jurgen Habermas. Kantianism. Dr. Serafin Talisayon. Christmas Monitos: Ronnie at the NGO, Norberto at the PTC. Kids. Parents. Blue and his awareness of his own pettiness. Alish and the question of happiness. Pauline and her secret problem. Omar Khayyam and his two classmates: Mulk and Hasan. Mulk became vizier to the sultan while Hasan is the man after whom "assassin" was named after. I wonder how Monica will fare? How is everybody doing right at this moment, 11:20 pm? Will the kids be the better for my classes? Critique of Knowledge. Mystic solution to the problem of evil.

Fitzgerald. Translators. Hasan, Mulk, and Omar made this youthful pact: whoever made his fortune will share it equally with the other two. I wonder if Jol and Nathan would agree to such a vow? Mulk got the fortune. Hasan asked for his share and an office under the sultan. He got both. Later, he would strike back at his benefactors. Mulk would suffer assassination from the progenitor of the word. Omar didn't take his half, only a small pension so that he could concentrate on learning. He would achieve eminence in the sciences. He would also create a unique Persian voice in world poetry.

In the Rubaiyat, we have his conclusion: there is nothing on this world to stand on, only here and now, in this moment we know as today. Tomorrow is unborn and Yesterday is dead, he says. I wonder. Tomorrow is the birthday of two people I know. And earlier today...

I wonder what my own conclusion will be?

Lantern parades. Naked oblations. Must go drinking with an Aussie for funds. Else, no clinic. Must check the kids' journals. And hear their English one more time before I retire for the holidays. Holidays.

Ends. Beginnings. Sense? I promised I won't make any. Will I make it early tomorrow? It's just a few minutes before tomorrow. Happy birthday, to whom it may concern! I wonder how everyone is doing. I look up at everything I wrote. I feel distant. Yet I am no different. Here, for example, I edited some things from this line of thought. So I have my own secret and mysterious things. I look up at my list, so much like the frayed ends of some hideous tapestry made from so many different pieces of cloth. Some pieces have more color, more significance. Others are hidden beneath stitches. Others aren't hidden although they aren't important either.

Nevertheless, they are there. They just are. I look up at the list, from a distance now so that I can see the whole. Maybe I'm hoping to put some unifying sense where there is none.

Oh I see. I am distant but no different. I am now also aware of my own pettiness.

(It will not matter much to you my dear celebrant - yes it's almost your birthday - but my tomorrow's Mass is for you and her. For whatever it's worth. Despite or because of everything, please have the best of the holidays.)

Morning Jog

"It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul."

From Invictus
William Ernest Henley

I now meet Jol, Monica and Nathan on a more or less weekly basis. I must insert a note before anything else. Notwithstanding seemingly contrary indices in the following entry, I am happy with this situation.

We begin the day with the ritual jog around the UP acad oval. We go round and round, numeric rhythm interspersed with a sweaty exchange of ideology. We had no trumpets, only the vocal instruments we shaped in the heat of this academic forge. One would think we were in Jerico's business of breaking down some wall. There being no such barrier enclosing the acad oval, it may be more logically speculated that we were trying to summon one.

Here we stretch and walk and run, the viridian blades of grass always within the mobile purview. Trees attend us, sentries marking our passage with hidden eyes and deacades-old silence. Their artificial relievers, the lamp posts, seem superfluous. Anyway, the sun is high and they're supposed to be redundant in the morning. Meanwhile, the buildings never seem to change, either in appearance or significance.

The people, with their respective businesses (classes, meetings, trysts, and the like), also seem essentially the same. It's as if nobody left the university though there's not a single familiar face. I see them, still with my mobile line-of-sight, as different bodies inhabiting the same spirits.

The morning birds chirp, almost entirely ignored. I wonder what makes these halting, bursting songs more beautiful than our panting, counting, and verbal abstracting. None of our ideologies ever seem to approximate such expressive abandon and grace. Maybe it's because they are in flight and they know no walls. Maybe because they are taken cared of or they have that feeling.

Here we run, around all greens until we are sure the grass is never really greener anywhere. What I'd give for those birds' point of view! Again and always, the birds. Maybe their song is lovelier because it's not ours.

Here we run. Here at the acad oval, the hollow center of our vanities. I feel renewed everytime I pound my feet on these sidewalks. I don't know why exactly. I wonder if the other students or alumni walking and running in the campus feel as I do. Are we all thus recharged as some Antaeus upon his alma mater Terra?

I must ask too if they run here with some hidden misery. Something - some pain or general exhaustion - from which renewal and recovery is necessary. What makes us go around in circles like this? Maybe we're trying to gain something, some strength, some state. I may never know. It would be telling, really, if we're somehow looking for something. Is this something we lost along the way? It is different when you're trying to get something and when you're trying to get something back. Maybe some of us here are in that search for the left-behind.

What is it? What was left behind? Some strength? Some idea or ideal? Some spirit maybe?

Before we went our separate ways, Jol and Nathan discussed metaphysics. They threw around the "problem of evil" like some ball. Or hardfruit from some Tree. They went on to ethics, fate, free will, responsibility, and such; angels and beasts; man and eternity. At one point, the idea of the five or six-dimensional God arose.

Meanwhile, by either chance or fate, a woolly caterpillar, what we know as the nasty higad, went a-wandering on the back of my neck. Not knowing what was crawling there, I instinctively crushed it. The minute corpse, now enveloped with its yellowish blood, stuck to my hand. Too late. I now freely sport an ugly, livid, four-inch long rash, half-bracing my neck.

All told, I hope we'll all meet again next weekend.

"This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders."

Captain Ahab unto Starbuck, the First Mate
From Moby-Dick
Herman Melville

The First Place

"Call me Dennis."

How does that sound? Let's say I got my November 2001 back and I could begin my journal in some other way. Would I be well-advised to start with a pretentious take at Melville's immortal opening line? I think not. Let Moby-Dick wreak havoc where he may and Ishmael drift to his elsewheres in his life-saving coffin; I have other fish to fry.

If I had an inkling of the trouble I'd get myself into, I may have just simply commenced with "Let's get ready to rumble!" Or the more forthright "Let's get it on!" However, the charging bull opening brings no rush of blood to my veins. It just alerts me to watch out for the point when the whole thing loses steam. I'd rather go straight to grabbing the wild thing by horns or balls, depending on which end of the beast I must wrestle. I'll go ahead and gut it and cook its parts. Then I'll begin with a little feast!

In the absence of some sacrificial bovine, I could begin with one of my all-time favorite ending lines, "Omnia mutantur, nihil interit". Everything changes but nothing is truly lost. That's a nice way to begin. It reminds me of the grecian postulate that we never really cross the same river twice. It also intimates some form of immortality beyond all the projected posterity of man. It is a subtle expression of faith. It is human hope in the face of all the thermodynamic evidence of entropy.

I cross November again, my fateful river. The current is a bit more swift, and the water, more fleeting. I bring a different leg into this river. I bring a different man. I have more scars now, all the more reason for washing. It also means I have gone through more healing than in any previous point of my life.

Call me Dennis.

I can never more begin except in the way that I did. That holds true for all sorts of beginnings, I guess. From where I stand, chest-deep in a watery contemplation, I look up to possibilities diverging in thought like the branches of the trees on the bank. In the world of deeds, despite the richer world of speculation, there is only one end as there is one beginning. There is an advantage to a singular beginning. I can come back to one home and easily remember what I set out for in the first place.

In the first place, I struck out to serve some dishes. I'm in this river for a reason and so I must quit my idle, aquatic ruminations. I came here for fish.

Remembering

I've been reading Kantogirl's e-mail, one of those life-questionnaires where Jol and Jess always have the best answers for the silliest questions. I don't recall ever filling up one of those but I always have a great time reading them. Well, while reading this particular one, I was reminded that I've been blogging for a full year now. So I checked out one year ago.

I am currently (and maybe arrogantly) under the belief that things are better now than they were a year ago. It could also be that nothing has really changed, and I just haven't gotten rid of the autosuggestive mantra I've drilled into my head during my self-helped youth: "Every day, in every way, it's getting better and better." Well, then, I'm ruined for life; I am self-cursed into believing every year was better than the last. So I will live until I run out of those things that make me stronger and finally comes tete-a-tete with the Nietzschean prophecy of that which will kill me. Maybe, despite everything, all subsequent years are inferior to those unrecollectable days of childhood amnesia?

Anyway, I have lots of people to thank for the fact that I'm still here, recollecting online. One year huh? Well, all you guys are accomplices. Right now, I'm getting less mileage here compared to the blackboard, the notebooks, and the offline-good-ol-fashioned-pen-on-paper journals. Maybe that's a good thing.

Or maybe I'm a full year older than my first entry and I'm not one drop of arrogant less.

Table-Turning

Wait

These are
the good
old days.

Just wait
and see.

Steve Turner

I hope the guys remember this one. Our freshman block was given this poem by Prof. Nudas, SJ around six years ago. It served as the bottle broken on our collective hull to kick us off into our maiden voyage on the waters of tertiary level writing. The old guy didn't serve as any sort of inspiration to most of us. However, none of us will deny that we learned most of our basics from him. He was also definitely entertaining. I think we all have a special place for him as the priest who gaily violated our freshman virginities.

I'm sitting on the other end of his table, reading this poem from his selection. I'm smiling now, trying to fathom the extent of the dear professor's humor.