This Is How You Mourn--Part I
1.
You wait at a 12 hour stop over at Manila airport, after a 17 hour flight waiting for the connecting flight to Laoag. Same layover as the last time I was here for my mother. And now the same things I saw and experienced before don't carry the same poetic weight, whether out of the demistifying effects of repetition, the novelty of first blush. the 8 gate terminal of the domestic wing of MNL the polished white surfaces flooded with diffuse light, the entire space like a long hall or sarcophagus for the serpent king. Like that neurologist that wrote a book consisting of several different conceits about the afterlife, I too had imagined airport terminals being some kind of purgatory, all the souls awaiting reunion/release/departure--(Maybe that's what allowed me to attach an undeserved gravitas to the TV show LOST with it's opening plane motif)but this time around I just saw the leacherous old white men with impossibly young girls or boys in tow and the statement printed on the Immigration Declaration forms about how the PI punishes all forms of child trafficking. You marvel at all the scuba diving, adventure seeking, sexcapading tourists, white, Korean, Chinese, Japanese that weren't scared off by the recent hostage incident where a tour bus was hijacked and 6 Hongkongese killed. Maybe if the overhead lights had worked on the transpacific flight (Sorry sir, we'll try rebooting the system that controls the overhead reading lights, when we stop for refueling in Honolulu), I would have been too weary to read for another half a day.
2. Last time the tome I brought along was Pynchon, a hefty volume, the book jacket with it's august typography and simulated patina of generations of sebum and sweat rubbed into the spine and folds, fooling people into thinking I was reading the Jerusalem bible not some mostly obtuse multi-genre puzzle being at heart a mostly obtuse and arcane treatise on the nature of light. This time around I've brought Roberto Bolano. The cover being some possibly Blakian Nightmare of angels in the abyss, against the black inscrutable forms the red laquered title printed off center and clpped at the spine, rife for misreading. What are you reading Kuya? 666? Yes I am reading the satanic bible. During the wake sometimes I hold the book at a shallow angle if I'm embarrased and feeling filialy submissive, other times held aloft in plain sight, covering my face as if to say this may be paradise, lush and verdant but I feel otherwise, all you other people. An island of horror in an ocean of boredom.
3. With both reads, there were passages at the time-- although I can't recall the gist--that were as consoling to me as Psalms is anodyne to any Christian soldier. In that bifurcating way that you can not tell which is casting the light, the life lived on the page or in the world. Would this still make we want to cry if I had read this in other circumstances. Is it only so beautiful because I need a refuge from all the ugliness. And are even the nightmarish passages something that can buouy the spirits?
You wait at a 12 hour stop over at Manila airport, after a 17 hour flight waiting for the connecting flight to Laoag. Same layover as the last time I was here for my mother. And now the same things I saw and experienced before don't carry the same poetic weight, whether out of the demistifying effects of repetition, the novelty of first blush. the 8 gate terminal of the domestic wing of MNL the polished white surfaces flooded with diffuse light, the entire space like a long hall or sarcophagus for the serpent king. Like that neurologist that wrote a book consisting of several different conceits about the afterlife, I too had imagined airport terminals being some kind of purgatory, all the souls awaiting reunion/release/departure--(Maybe that's what allowed me to attach an undeserved gravitas to the TV show LOST with it's opening plane motif)but this time around I just saw the leacherous old white men with impossibly young girls or boys in tow and the statement printed on the Immigration Declaration forms about how the PI punishes all forms of child trafficking. You marvel at all the scuba diving, adventure seeking, sexcapading tourists, white, Korean, Chinese, Japanese that weren't scared off by the recent hostage incident where a tour bus was hijacked and 6 Hongkongese killed. Maybe if the overhead lights had worked on the transpacific flight (Sorry sir, we'll try rebooting the system that controls the overhead reading lights, when we stop for refueling in Honolulu), I would have been too weary to read for another half a day.
2. Last time the tome I brought along was Pynchon, a hefty volume, the book jacket with it's august typography and simulated patina of generations of sebum and sweat rubbed into the spine and folds, fooling people into thinking I was reading the Jerusalem bible not some mostly obtuse multi-genre puzzle being at heart a mostly obtuse and arcane treatise on the nature of light. This time around I've brought Roberto Bolano. The cover being some possibly Blakian Nightmare of angels in the abyss, against the black inscrutable forms the red laquered title printed off center and clpped at the spine, rife for misreading. What are you reading Kuya? 666? Yes I am reading the satanic bible. During the wake sometimes I hold the book at a shallow angle if I'm embarrased and feeling filialy submissive, other times held aloft in plain sight, covering my face as if to say this may be paradise, lush and verdant but I feel otherwise, all you other people. An island of horror in an ocean of boredom.
3. With both reads, there were passages at the time-- although I can't recall the gist--that were as consoling to me as Psalms is anodyne to any Christian soldier. In that bifurcating way that you can not tell which is casting the light, the life lived on the page or in the world. Would this still make we want to cry if I had read this in other circumstances. Is it only so beautiful because I need a refuge from all the ugliness. And are even the nightmarish passages something that can buouy the spirits?
posted by JGLuzifer at 7:59 PM
1 Comments:
it's like when you start seeing signs in everything, everywhere, birds in the sky, cloud formation, colors of clothing of the people around me, sidewalk cracks, wall blotches -it happens to me all the time. write more if you can.
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