hanging

I woke up early everyday of my summer. I am not used to doing so but I have to. Circumstances are compelling me more than ever to shift my habits and practice things i don't necessarily have a heart for or a least bit of interest in. But then compelling means no excuses so I follow through. I still stay up late during the nights, still do a lot of thinking and reading and sometimes purely existing, but when my brother leaves for his early morning jobs, it signals my waking up after an hour. it went on for four weeks. Four-should-have-been-fun-because-it's-summer-weeks. But I spent it going to school, everyday. Taking exams every once and a while and answering exercises like forever.

But now it has ended and so I do not have to wake up as early as I did during the last four weeks. I don not have to take late afternoon naps to compensate for my sleep deprivation. I don't have to consume all the coffee in the sari-sari store every morning just to keep me awake and attentive during the excruciating, dragging and seemingly forever sessions in the subject I least take interest in.

But what remains of me are question marks, pasted on my wall like glow-in-the-darks. Haunting thoughts of what will be, of plans that are based on the immediate occurrences and should-bes. I hate waiting and anticipation. I hate the thought of not being able to take full control of everything I am involved in. I hate being left in the corner waiting for someone to open the door and ell me that its my time. I hate how things don't just go my way and how things crumble when everything I wanted depends on them, on the satisfaction of the immediate, of the steps before reaching another.

And so I take on the role of someone who waits even if it kills me everyday of my life. Even if I think that I'm aging more rapidly because of the lost moments spent in idleness and purgatory. And i don't have much choice either. It's all up to anybody's power to either draw like from me or fill me with it. What i only know I can do is to take courage, and be hopeful and be faithful for the passing over of the uncertainty and the hanging moments. It's hasn't been easy. It's still killing me, the waiting and all, but because of hope, every death is coupled with salvation. Light or darkness may not have the contrast expected normally, but the situation draws the blueprint of self i couldn't have discovered without situations such as these. I am able to realize how control, domination and even power are things I can't always count on, that i have someone bigger to count on and trust with my situation. When everything is falling apart and ripping my soul to pieces, i have a companion who carries and lifts me up no matter what.

I'm still waiting...and hoping...and i hope this too will pass. So help me God.

after the torture

I am bloodless. the battle has robbed me of every pigment of life. My scars won't heal anymore. I've suffered from the worst physical torture ever invented by man. The saddest part of it was, i consented the torture. It can actually be synonymous to self-inflicted pain. But what makes the difference was that the decision to undergo the pains and sufferings of the torture was, that my decision did not at all encompass and considered the extent of the process itself. There was fear, but more than the fear, there was a desire and the desire clouded everything else that might get in the way of fully submitting to the experience. It was a choice I did not choose. it was a personal decision made without my consent. Decisions and consent differs in the factors that were looked upon when they are made. I'm totally confused what was it that I did, but I am certain I did not consented it. 

So  I began to emerge in the process, like a detainee in a death camp, I began to observe the routine. At some point I would record the events, write down everything I saw in full colors, description. I also talked to a lot of the people there. Like a journalist passionate about a beat and wanting to write immediately, i interviewed people. Most of the time I did not get anything substantial, like people's reflections and opinions. What I received were uneasy smiles, teardrops, sobbing, aimless looks on space. Those meaningless and meaningful expressions, of grief, of pain, of insult, of inhumanity, of humiliation. 

During the nights in the quarters, where a candle is placed in the middle of the room, i would sob. I can hear both of my selves weep at the tortures I am yet to experience. Of the tortures I can see in the eyes of the individuals whom I was able to talk to. Those nights were the nights I often thought of escaping. The picture was clear to me. I cannot bear the weight that a lot of people around me then were experiencing. I cannot imagine how my skins will be taken of my body and my eyes pierced with surgery implements. I cannot bear the thought of undergoing the state of being I once thought a sort of fulfillment.

And escape I did. at least on the level of thoughts. I began to escape from the fortress of doom. I climbed the walls that clams me up inside the chamber. It was harder than i thought. it was torture in itself. My feet are numb, both at the thought of being caught and escaping. But I went on, further, out, nowhere. I'm not even sure if I'm still inside or outside of something i thought to be guarded. it was bright, the sun aimed its hot knives on me as i walked past people, and places and things. But I was nowhere... I was walking somewhere, i know i was, the dust and the sand touches my bare feet but my soul was still kept somewhere deep down. it was buried, with all the life in it.

Another step further and I was at the same spot in the chamber i was when I escaped. everything feels the same. The warmth and coldness of the room. the painful and agonizing moans of people from everywhere, the restlessness of the eyes gazing at the candle in the middle of the room. everything was back to where ti all should not end. And i have no control of it. The next morning, I found myself in the face of the inescapable. It was my time and also not yet mine. For I chose to not exist in the reality of it. I am in another dimension now. I can feel on pain at all, yet I still am tortured. Escape was not the word, for every time I try to, another form of torture will come, maybe it was more of a choice. To feel or not to, to see or to be blind, to let go or to hold on, to feel or to be numb. And i chose to experience both ends of it, both sides of the coin, without the certainty of doing so. At the moment I am lost and found as well. Either way, it does not make much difference. 

lightheadedness

Sleep has not been my friend lately. Every manifestation of sleep is within my reach. Within the length of my limbs. Yet it aches to see my desperation to do so. it aches to realize how the possibility of dreaming would mean being lost and eventually dying in the midst of the happiest of dreams. 

So it is better to become lightheaded yet sober. To let worthless thoughts enter and come out of my mind than to stagnate at the thought of sleepfulness. The experience of going beyond the realm of the tangible. It is better to hold on to material thing because permanence and physical forms are always quantifiable and its loss would mean nothing but a physical deterioration. 

Loneliness is lonelier when the intangible, the presence that's made up, the thought that's imagined are the things lost. In sleeping, what happens is the deletion of the aches and pains of the day, the recovery of the energy lost, but also, the moving of the physical to the memory-al, the intangible musing that past has gotten hold onto. I admire the insomniac, for even if the same process of material-to-memory transfer of experience happens to them, their experience goes beyond the mere process. Their experience is fuller for they are able to balance the pain that is physical with the pain that is imagined or pretty much though of in the process of making things permanent still. Insomniacs need to make sure that amidst their lightheadedness and restlessness, their experience are made up of a dialectics between the physical manifestation of emotion and the concept of it engraved in their minds.

I like sleeping, dreaming even. I like rest and comfort, but i also like lightheadedness, because it makes me realize how much of the physical can I tolerate, how much of the emotional can I contain and how much of both can I balance. Lightheadedness makes me experience a different form of humanity, a transcendental form. A form that allows me to live in a dreamy state of consciousness yet experience the blurry face of reality at the very same moment they are occurring. 

the fearful thought of leaving and starting over

Adaptation. It's the revolutionary thought of Charles Darwin that changed a lot of established perspectives on human progression. It went against the dogmas of the church and the creationist ideology. It created the great divide amongst the people as to what is the truth behind their existence. It questioned the infallible and almost imposed pronouncements of the church that God created everything that belongs to nature. But it also made way for people to create compromises. That maybe both phenomenon (creation and evolution) were part of a two-pronged process of human progression. That in the beginning there was creation and in the process was the evolution, the process by which organism tried to adapt to the changing and almost always harsh to harsher environment that these organism are in. These were the occurrences that change bring us. Questioning, doubting, uncertainty and eventually reconstructing. Others choose to reestablish previous constructs, other choose to go beyond the limits and prove for themselves the rightness of the new proposition until finally, up until a detain extent they begin to doubt the revolutionary idea they thought of to be their very core principle. 

In change, two pronged-process of adaptation also happen. One is the meat of the evolution process, the adaptation process that organisms engaged in and two the adaptation process in the audience of the ideas, the adaptation that happens when people start to be irritated at how possibly worldviews destroy each other and eventually confuses more and more generation. Even up to now, the disjunct is still the very subject f man's doubts, and long years from now, I doubt if they can ever find a consensus, not just settle to futile attempts of compromise which not only destroy the essence of both, it also destroys that value of absolutes, the universals that a lot of institutions base their existence.

What's with all these that even in the simplest forms of change, the complex process of adaptation has to appear? even more imposing than expected, than attempted?

What's with leaving things behind and moving forward that feet are left weak and unable to pursue?

What's with change that make everything else appear to have been just old things, unworthy of attention?

Or do memory even serves its purpose of making us believe that we experienced a time we call past?

Its annoying at times. No, its pathetic most of the time when people have to leave because of a belief that they have to grow. Trees need not the concept of distance, the horizontal distance to grow. They only need a spot to stay in and every season they experience in the same spot contribute to the process of its growth, either retrogressive or progressive growth. 

Human mobility sometimes cause people to think that unless we practice the bipedality of life, we do not fully experience progress. the left and right swings of the feet of possibilities lets us believe that to be stuck in a spot is to be stagnant. But I cannot see the green in every people that trees have. I cannot see the vitality of its limbs in every person who travelled the world and experienced the fulness of life. Sometimes I think that to be stuck is to let the world pass me by but I also think that being stuck is to experience a stable growth, not a terminal type of growth, not the unsustained growth. 

I think that for most cases, the idea of mobility skew the people's idea of possibility. That possibility can only be experienced fully when distance and time are dually-experienced. The absence of one will make things all to dull, dragging, boring. But at the need of the day, stability is experienced when the spot that people search in their journeys is finally found and no amount of oversaturation and boringness will make you leave that spot. The spot that people call grave. 

The Return Home

The Return Home
Originally uploaded by aknacer

nice pic..

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

jellyfish

Just a thought. What if memories and everything else that's crafted in the consciousness, what philosophers call the vital can float into air and be carried off by the wind away from the physical self (the mechanical)...

____________

My memory has been floating ever since I became aware of my existence. The thoughts pass me by every time. Oftentimes, my thoughts does not fit my necessity. There was this one time when what the thought that I needed was the time I spent in the river when i was a child, but what came was my memory of the distant future. it broke my cousins heart because she thought I did not cherish that memory at all and put it in the recycle bin, or worse, deleted it permanently. But it wasn't really the case. The truth is, I cannot find that specific thought of mine because it is literally floating in mid-air, occupying nothing of a solid state like a bottle perhaps so that i can just select the thought to think about.
i write my memory in the air. The sheets of the wind has been the fabric of paper I scribe my thoughts on. In windy days, I cry, I sob and write my saddest thoughts. I thought then that when the wind is strong, the memories will easily be taken away from me restoring my inner peace and tranquility. It also seems logical to think that the heaviest of the thoughts (the saddest ones) should be taken off the mind and put out in the air when it is strongest. Only then can I make sure that the wind has the capacity to carry the heaviness of the thoughts. But then the continuous surge of the winds makes the heaviest of thoughts wander around me even more. The hills at the back of our house witnessed my sobbing, the earth shook at every tremble as the thoughts enter my mind, as I gain consciousness of its emotions, as I start to manifest the emotions physically, and as I mechanically try to cope with its weight. it has been a process I cannot perfect amidst its predictability. it little thought creates a surge of blood different in intensity and pressure inside of my system.

During summer days, the thoughts are lighter. they float in midair changing in colors and dimensions. They look pleasing and the warmth of them gives me chill, a summer kind of chill you feel when you recognize the coldness of the apparent warmth. during lazy afternoons, i stroll down the boulevard downtown searching for new thoughts, images to fill my changing mind. I'd go inside a bookstore, scan some books and when a book captures my attention, search my wallet for enough money and pay for the thoughts to fill up my mind. I know they will soon depart from me like all the other thoughts, but pretty soon, in the least unexpected moment they will come back. They will enter other people's mind, remain there for a while until finally, as if destiny dictates, they will temporarily be stored inside my head. Selection is possible, so long as access is ensured. Conflicts arise when two persons at a time want to get hold of a thought. It's a disaster when this happens. but because of the enormous thoughts that are floating in the air, conflicts is not so much experienced.

The capacity of the winds to carry thoughts has diminished geometrically. In the past, the winds used to carry all the thoughts that the people can unload. In the present however, people started to create memory containers in order to lessen the weight of the thoughts in the space and to be able to maintain the speed of access of the people to this memories. In the near future, it is predicted that visions and other memories of the future will not be able to gain access to the wind. The solution that people have thought of doing is to excavate the land and and bury the past thoughts and memories so as to prevent the present and future thoughts from being taken away. At least people can still work out their beings in the past. I mean in terms of the degree of importance, past thoughts seem to occupy the thinnest level of importance of mankind. However, there seems to have problems implementing it because experts in memory and thought science says that the burying act will disrupt the continuity of the flow of thoughts. others even argue that the burying of the past thoughts will make it impossible for visions (the future thought) and consciousness (the present thought) to exist without the past thought (memory). To solve the problem, experts are working on the creation of underground tunnels, an archive of some sort to store permanently these thoughts and access to these will still be granted to the present and future thinkers. This I think is more workable and probable. They argue that civilization requires that there be a screening or filtering process of thought generation and thought accessing, which means that categories need to be installed. It's not just anymore a thought, it is categorized according to the time frame it existed. In the process of identifying however, experts find it hard to say whether one existed in the past, future or present. There are of course easy thoughts to categorize, those that present clues in terms of fashion, clothing, color, dimension, texture and the like. Hopefully, the project of the government to develop a technology to identify thoughts will be successful. the initial problem really is that these thoughts (most of them are not dated). You see the recording of history is very problematic since the personal has been altogether mixed with the social. another problem is the overproduction of thoughts, an unstoppable phenomenon. People cannot seem to stop experiencing things no matter how imposing the consequences are to them. Legal acts have been done actually in trying to minimize the production. There has been limits in the production. a person can only produce 100 thoughts a day, compared in the past when it is limitless. The prison cells have been pretty much over-occupied in the recent years because of the increasing number of violators. In this cells, a machine is put in all the prisoners head which qualifies which thought matters and which does not. The machine also controls repetition. Most of the time, when a person thinks to much, the machine reduces the number and permanently delete them for better mind efficiency. Lonely as it may seem, I guess, there is no choice for the civilization to continue existing but to control these thoughts.

By the way, my thinking of these thoughts made me one of the many prisoners inside an underground facility where millions of people are in right now. I just hope our number will not increase ANY LONGER.

so what's my life plan? :short term

Let me establish my present situation in order to further build up the life I want ahead. I'm currently a graduating student of the BA Communication Arts program, major in Speech Communication, in UPLB. My graduation (I'm claiming it) will be sometime in April. I don't like the idea of doing routinely job as in office-based ones. I want to be always in the field discovering and experiencing for myself things I have not seen or done before.

With these facts about me, I figured i should just study more. Maybe earn an MA degree in political science, or international relations/studies, cultural studies, speech communication and the like. Maybe while having an MA, I can teach in college. I can teach in UPLB or maybe outside. It has always been my dream. To become an information-sharer an "imparter" of pieces of knowledge to people who're hungry for it.

Or maybe I can apply for a job in media. Media jobs have always been very exciting, unpredictable even. It would go with my hope not to stagnate and do things habitually and predictably.

I can also apply for law school already. It's one thing I always wanted. Law and politics have always been a twin tower that overshadows all my other interest. Hopefully, I'll be able to pass the exam and have sufficient funds for me to enroll in the law school. The tuition fee nowadays seems to have increased dramatically even in public universities and colleges.

But, if I think of short term, what I really want to achieve this year is to have a teaching job. A vocation I've always treated to be noble and fulfilling. Hopefully, the universe will conspire for me to graduate on time, have my diploma earned and have all the courage to face panels of interviews and demos to be able to teach.

These are the things running in my mind at the moment. These may change depending on the situation but I'm hoping they won't. So help me God.

photo from: http://scoop08.com/files/images/obama%20teaching.jpg

An attempt at an inquiry into the nature of life plan

Life plan, as they call it seems to have a special recall during the start of the year. This may be because of the feeling that a new set of calendar would also mean a new timeline to start over, get back to the line, get up from a fall, get over someone, move on from the past and the like (as if the past is only made up of bad things, miseries, sorrows, sad things). positively though, it brings a little optimism into the down-trodden hearts and minds of people across the globe. its a perspective by which nature in the oh-so-cliche natural process of light and dark (in a day0 extended into months, years, decades, and lifetimes. Life plans creates a failure-success pattern of waves that seemed become normal in the mindset of the people.

Well, enough of criticism of life plan. I'll try to think of it the positive way. Rebutting the above mentioned statement: no matter how negative the past seem to have been because of the "proposed changes' i ones being and becoming, it still gives a leeway for someone to engage in an introspective moment. An almost only once in a year phenomenon people engage in in order to assure their self of control over his/her being. Introspection: almost the same with reflection (the only difference is that introspection connotes more of the internal while reflection connotes more of the social self) is a healthy way by which people recognize their existence in a vacuum they call world and being. Other say vacuum is impossible, I say (in the most postmodern sense) that everything is a vacuum(a vacuum we think exist and is tangible.) What I'm trying to say is that introspection is a process of looking at oneself being as empty, as nothing. It seems so complex but it is actually very simple. You reconsider truth and its meaning 9if it really has one) you look at yourself and look at the truth inside of it, and you find that truth can only exist in emptiness, in the vacuum self you thought to be full.

Now, what does life plan do to the empty self? it serves as a coping mechanism of the self to assure the existence of a being. Plans, the intangible thoughts of the future are then translated to someones destiny, someones physical and almost distinguishable phase in one's life which is illuminatingly real, even if at the moment, it only exist in the middle of nothingness and emptiness of the self. This atom of a plan radiates a massive light of hope gradually filling up the nothingness; thus self is filled with expectations, with bright dreams and wants and the like. It's a process by which a bulb (a tiny object run by electricity) which, when connected to a powersource fills every reachable corner of the room it is in the center of. The being does not care whether the outside of himself is dark or uncertain, for as long as his inside is filled with light, the path of the uncertain will always be an easy path. So long as he/she sustains connection to the powersource, his direction is clear.

Well powersource could be anything at all. Anything that makes a person follow a plan. Cult members find their powersource in the "truth of the words of their leaders and savior," a student's powersource is anything that makes him/her certain that knowledge and truth emanates,(it could be books, teachers and other sources) pagan and nature believers' powersource is the pattern of being that exists in natural world, scientists powersource is the belief in an objective knowledge that can be observed and can be manipulated according to their needs and wants and a believers powersource is God, the unseen being that guides each and every action that the man does. Without such powersource, the purpose of his/her existence goes down the drain, steals him/her of his life, brings him/her to his original empty, useless self. Without the powersource, he/she lose the reason behind his existence.

Life plan then is a tool by which a person directs and maintains the being that he believed he is purposed to have. Consistency plays a major role in it. A zigzag path would only mean an uncertain self, almost good as nothing. A clear path would mean a life planned and destined for something (almost always expected to be bright and good.) Life plan is one way of ensuring life amidst the death that surrounds it.