BEYOND THE SUNRISE

BEYOND THE SUNRISE
Sunday, February 29, 2004
at nakita ko na. hindi ako pah-tee girl.

went out with friends that i really really missed last night (especially duckyy and bea) and had a good time, sans the pretentious party culture. cori's right, we're nice-conversation people. i preferred the great grappa's beer and quiet moments in a small area in greenbelt than the loud see-and-be-seen strip of bars. i know i've been ranting about these things for more than two years, but it really just hit me now. ¶ 2/29/2004 11:32:08 AM
Sunday, February 22, 2004
(tired me) i'm tired of being critical. i'm tired of questions. i'm tired of having to watch myself speak, having to watch the words i write, checking that my claims are plausible, that i'm making sense.

so i'll be me tonight: silent and blank. i will retreat into a monologue.

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.

(Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali) ¶ 2/22/2004 08:23:35 PM
Friday, February 20, 2004
on blogs and activism Have had a slew of emotions this morning. Read the blogs of a lot those heights, literary(ily) great people, and am really humbled by their ability to combine wistfulness with simplicity. I'm still hiding behind my words. (If I would go to self-pity mode, I'd say I'm not good enough.)

Anyway, I stumbled upon a really good article in the guardian. It seems that a lot of those high-profile politicians have joined the blogging bandwagon. Howard Dean and John Kerry (US democrat hopefuls) have already been using the blog as a format for being accessible to voters. And now Tony Blair wants to make his own blog so that he can begin an 'engaging dialogue with the people'. Dean claims that 'virtual activism' can be translated to 'real activism'... sounds cool, eh?

I'm suddenly reminded of the time when both MIRC chatrooms and those email surveys were all the rage. One of the questions from those surveys was, "Who and how many are your online friends?" To which we ought to have replied, "None, because I have real life friends!"

When I tried to teach globalization I made my students read two contrasting articles: one post-modern reading, emphasizing 'flows' and 'disjunctures' and a Marxist reading, emphasizing wb-imf imperialism and proletarianization. Threshing these arguments will be done another time, but it was interesting that my students found the former po-mo reading very appealing. The whole notion of flows and fluid landscapes sounded good, implying that the world now consists of multiple flows such that time and space are compressed and information can be handled in real-time, in no time.

It sure is appealing to believe that we are living in a single 'global village', but we have to ask a really important question -- who is dictating the common-sense of the age? Our friends working for multinational corporations have become part of a transnational capitalist class, believing that they live the lifestyle of their first-world counterparts, just look at our apparent 'affinity' with shows like Sex and the City. They seem to forget that while they work (slave) for first-world capital, they are still situated in the third world. The vestiges companies put in their call-centers, like American flags or forcing American accents on Asian workers act as forms of insulation from the realities of economic inequality and social inequity (read: poverty and social injustice). Has the neoliberal onslaught been so strong that we have lost our own ideologies, or at the very least, our ideals? Whatever happened to third worldism? Can it only be a politics of negation, anti-imperialism, Eastern versus Western values? What does it mean to be an activist? To live the manifesto, or to go shopping in Greenbelt? Has the politics of protest been reduced to the politics of consumerism?

And while we're at it, how can I move away from my own insulation? ¶ 2/20/2004 07:56:06 AM
Monday, February 16, 2004
just another political post :P just read that yet again there will be delays in the elections in afghanistan. the major dailies claim that it's because of the low voter turnout (especially the female vote, tallying to only 2%) and the fact that so many parts of the country are still ridden with pockets of violence. these things are said to be substantive hindrances to democratizing the country.

turning to iraq, practically the same rhetoric is being launched against fast-tracking the elections. and yet, the issue is probably more complicated than the inability to mobilize voters. i wonder if it's because of the rise to prominence of the politically powerful shia parties, who will precisely try to win legitimate power through elections. thing is, they're sympathetic to iran (dubya's axis of evil), close friends with ayatollah, and will probably contest the us' influence in the country. so now dubya and paul bremer are not just afraid of bringing democracy to iraq. now their biggest obstacle is the fact that they are afraid of bringing the wrong democrats to power. ¶ 2/16/2004 10:22:15 AM
Saturday, February 14, 2004
GOOD NIGHT -- Czeslaw Milosz -------

No duties. I don't have to be profound.
I don't have to be artistically perfect.
Or sublime. Or edifying.
I just wander. I say: "You were running,
That's fine. It was the thing to do.
And now the music of the worlds transforms me.
My planet enters a different house.
Trees and lawns become more distinct.
Philosophies one after another go out.
Everything is lighter yet not less odd.
Sauces, wine vintages, dishes of meat.
We talk a little of district fairs.
Of travels in a covered wagon with a cloud of dust behind,
Of how rivers once were, what the scent of calamus is.
That's better than examining one's own private dreams.
And meanwhile it has arrived. It's here, invisible.
Who can guess how it got here, everywhere.
Let others take care of it. Time for me to play hooky.
Buena notte. Ciao. Farewell.

------ ¶ 2/14/2004 02:36:36 AM
Thursday, February 12, 2004
i can't seem to reconcile my being a student of politics with my lack of activism. i just had coffee with lawrence and aaron, and it hit me that i am probably one of the most a-political pseudo-marxists around. talk about bourgeois confinement--i am forever constrained by my background and social status. i am at best a student or even a sympathizer. but i can only approximate what i read, and hope that my theoretical rigour does justice to 'reality'. why then am i so afraid of 'selling out' when i have nothing concrete to sell?

yaack, angst issues. :P ¶ 2/12/2004 01:56:10 AM
Friday, February 06, 2004
ho-hum yes, i'm beginning to have a real aversion towards esoteric philosophers a la derrida. i'm trying to purge myself of jargon and complexity, believing that i can make some claims to truth and 'reality', especially claims to understanding social reality.

and in comes ning telling me that jacques precisely makes himself incomprehensible in order to make you aware of the complexity of language, in the same way that you can only become aware of the air you breathe when it's taken away from you. so we can be aware of language when we lose our capacity to speak, or our capacity to comprehend?

sounds nice, but i don't know if i buy it.

maybe we all should just say what we mean, and mean what we say?

language dies with woman

Yang Huanyi, China's last woman proficient in the mysterious Nushu language, died at her home last week. She was thought to be 98. Yang learned possibly the world's only female-specific language from seven sworn sisters as a girl. Nushu characters are structured by four kinds of strokes, including dots, horizontals, verticals and arcs. Linguists believe her death marks the end of a 400-year-old tradition in which women shared their innermost feelings through
codes incomprehensible to men.
... Beautiful story. But I wonder -- so women normally speak in codes comprehensible to men?

Another good reason

why they shouldn't vote for Bush...Here in an interesting article on a new controversial book, showing why we shouldn't mess with the Bushes --

But, as one of W's Yalie frat brothers tells Kelley, it's not the substance abuse in Bush's past that's disturbing, it's the "lack of substance ... Georgie, as we called him, had absolutely no intellectual curiosity about anything. He wasn't interested in ideas or in books or causes. He didn't travel; he didn't read the newspapers; he didn't watch the news; he didn't even go to the movies. How anyone got out of Yale without developing some interest in the world besides booze and sports stuns me." New Yorker writer Brendan Gill recalls roaming the Kennebunkport compound one night while staying there looking for a book to read - the only title he could find was The Fart Book.

So is that where the fundamentalist rhetoric of USes and THEMs comes from, as well as the even more interesting authoritative claim over what is evil? No wonder.

the limits of 'practical' research

The quality of research being made available to struggling hopeful scholars like me is severely limited. It's not just in terms of funding, but at the most basic level, mentorship is contingent on engaging in mainstream research. I could argue that political science in my country is locked-into mainstream research on 'good governance', 'new public management', civil-society empowerment and capacity-building, as well as in token critiques of environmental degradation and human rights. What this shows is that expertise and intellectual mobility is rooted in 'practical' research -- and while I have no qualms about being practical, it still precludes a lack of criticism, most especially the easy comfort of being complacent about one's assumptions and biases, no matter how limited.

I would probably be accused of hiding behind theory, or, as a navy officer said to me recently, I'm probably good at 'explaining what I cannot do." But it just saddens me that criticism seems to inhere only in the humanities, where it's still safe to be political because it is articulated into art, yet in the realm of politics itself, too much criticism is the ticket to academic alienation. If this is how my life is going to be like, I would rather withdraw into impractical isolation... or just read too much critical political theory into poetry. It's no wonder that I find so much comfort in Milosz and Heaney, with their poems grounded in history, war and modernity, and of course, in Adrienne Rich, with the mantra that writing is first and foremost the act of awakening a critical imagination.

I know that I must move beyond my own local, historical context. I know that practical constraints exist in order to be surpassed, but I'm just a little disgusted right now. It's no wonder that I've been so unproductive and escapist. Maybe I am being complacent -- or as Ellen Wood once said, I'm becoming comfortable within the 'interstices of capitalism'. Is a critical imagination necessarily a socialist one? I'm not sure, but I'd much rather be given the space to read about it and generate critical research on it, then to dismiss it altogether for its lack of practicality.

i think i scare them away

This weekend's highlights --

(1) Scuba diving for the international coastal clean-up. Yup, treasure hunting for trash. But we didn't find anything funky, unlike last year's refrigerator... and someone even found a whole chicken!

(2) When we went night diving I turned my divelight off and saw the natural lights emanating from the sea anemone, small fish, and from my own movements -- the sea has its own nightlights! It literally twinkles! (Scientific explanation: bioluminescence.)

(3) Saw a seasnake (one of the most poisonous in the world) and was dumb enough to hold it. I'm lucky it was full. I never knew I had unconscious suicidal tendencies. And that's not even funny.

(4) Reading this poem and sharing it with the world ---

Tonight, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independent shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.
~ Act of Union, Seamus Heaney

Beautiful. I find myself falling in love with Heaney. I denied his greatness for a while, but found him again.

... "I caress the heaving province where our past has grown."

Yup, I sent that line to about ten friends. Some of them new ones. They must have thought I was hitting on them. But it's just too beautiful to keep to myself.

Oh well, I'd like to hope that the good ones always stay.

Angst (yet again) about writing

I knew that for Marx himself, Communism never meant less than the means for freeing human creativity in all persons to the fullest: he believed that the release of that very creativity would ensure than no revolution turned in on itself, stagnated, and froze; that in "revolution in permanence," "new passions and new forces" would repeatedly arise as the creative currents of each and all found voice. You could say that the passion for human creativity forced Marx into the study of how Capital, by its own internal laws, had suppressed the flow of human activity and passions (Adrienne Rich, 2003).

I don't think I've given enough emphasis to the concept of alienation when I teach Marx. I guess it's because I falsely presume that it's an intuitive concept -- what else is capitalism but dehumanising? But it's hard to teach that to students who feel no need to problematise or even question things as they are. If any questioning is done, it's mostly introspective, lapsing into the self, deliberately detached from the 'dirty' themes of oppression, inequality, and social injustice.

Levels of freedom are arguably more absolute than ever before, and yet we are unaware of the levels constraint that underpin our daily lives. It's easy to understand and mark the enemy as the other during past historical periods, with martial law, nationalist struggles, and revolutionary ideologies. Much was at stake then, but what is at stake for me, and for my generation, now? Our regress into postmodernist language by problematising definitions, even our own identities, furthers my inability to speak about something for some purpose. In this day and age, when they say there is no truth, what is left to talk about?

I must remind this to myself, especially at my whiniest moments --

The history of the twentieth century prompted many poets to design images that conveyed their moral protest. Yet to remain aware of the weight of fact without yielding to the temptation to become only a reporter is one of the most difficult puzzles confronting a practitioner of poetry. It calls for a cunning in selecting one's means and a kind of distillation of material to achieve a distance to contemplate the things of this world as they are, without illusion (Czeslaw Milosz, 2001, emphasis mine).