The God Who Loves You
Carl Dennis

It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures,
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week--
Three fine houses sold to deserving families--
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college.
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a life-long passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withold from your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You'd have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you're used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You're spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.


******

The morning bore terrible tidings of the impending unsolicited cheer in the form of a jeep adorned with caricatures of prancing reindeer. Words ran alongside garish red ribbons - Sison of cheer. (shudder)


******

Mary: How much do you love me?

Mrs. Tilford: As much as all the words in all the books in all the world. -Hellman, the children’s hour

******

I am that I am, your late and lonely master,
Who knows now what magic is:- the power to enchant that comes from disillusion.- WH Auden

Because the above quote has always served as one of my long-standing ideologies, I have always been a sucker for illusionists. magicians, underworld/ otherworldly capers.

I'll definitely watch The Illusionist. The movie seems promising.

I, admittedly, am not very good with movie critiques. This is because I firmly believe that critiques should have a certain sense of objectivity or a set of guidelines that give a coherent format to an analysis. I detest people who say that certain movies do not do justice to its subjects. I guess that's why it's a movie, for christ's sake. From time immemorial, the main goal of movies is to entice, to hide truths, to exaggerate realities. If everyone else made movies that were true to the form they represented, then who the hell would watch them?

******

Words are green eggs and ham:

As You Say (Not Without Sadness,) Poets Don't See, They Feel
Karl Shapiro

As you say, not without sadness, poets don't see, they feel. And that's why people who have turned to feelers seem like poets. Why children seem poetic. Why when the sap rises in the adolescent heart the young write poetry. Why great catastrophes are stated in verse. Why lunatics are named for the moon. Yet poetry isn't feeling with the hands. A poem is not a kiss. Poems are what ideas feel like. Ideas on Sunday, thoughts on vacation.

Poets don't see, they feel. They are conductors of the senses of men, as teachers and preachers are the insulators. The poets go up and feel the insulators. Now and again they feel the wrong thing and are thrown through a wall by a million-volt shock. All insulation makes the poet anxious: clothes, strait jackets, iambic five. He pulls at the seams like a boy whose trousers are cutting him in half. Poets think along the electric currents. The words are constantly not making sense when he reads. He flunks economics, logic, history. Then he describes what it feels like to flunk economics, logic, history. After that he feels better.

People say: it is sad to see a grown man feeling his way, sad to see a man so naked, desireless of any defenses. The people walk back into their boxes and triple-lock the doors. When their children begin to read poetry the parents watch them from the corner of their eye. It's only a phase, they aver. Parents like the word "aver" though they don't use it.

******

Proverbs according to Dennis Miller by Johnny Carson:

1. A rolling stone. . . if not acted upon by any force will keep rolling in a straight line at the same speed.

2. Every cloud has. . . water vapor that has the potential of producing ice crystals or raindrops, depending on the Bergeron or coalescence process.

3. The grass is always greener. . . if it receives an adequate supply of C55H70MgN4O6.

4. A penny saved. . . if doubled every day for two months would be worth more than the combined GNP of the industrialized nations of the world.

5. A bird in the hand. . . is dead or alive, depending on one’s will.

6. What goes up. . .will stay up if it has an escape velocity of 11.3 kilometers per second.

7. When the cat’s away. . . the mice will play cautiously if it’s Schrodinger’s cat.

8. People who live in glass houses. . . are surrounded by a strange hybrid of solid liquids or liquid solids.

9. Nothing is certain but death and. . . Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

10. There’s a time and place. . .but not before the Big Bang.

******

And now, a joke:

What do you call a woman who knows where her husband is every night?

A widow.

******

Urban Legends 2

You will be shocked to find that there are people who:

"have been working on restaurants for 7 years now"

"have a desktop on our house since we were in elementary level."


Lewd-icrous!

"I came in UPLB. A year after, I got pregnant."

"I did everyone there."

"I did the liaison officer there."

"I do room attendants well. I worked in the wines. I like going around the bushes."


Does this remind you of annoying poets who exhibit confusing syntax?


"doesn't speak my mouth"


It's nice to have a strong sense of self-awareness:

"i'm very nice. very gullible."

"i’m very oblivious and cool."

"I am quite peculiar in some different ways."



Sige nga, are you this rich?

"I have a train at that Call Center"


Words for the week:

infective representative

Definition: STD victim who works in a call center.


emphathetic

Definition: Someone who, when told about a problem, wrings his hands and wears a sack cloth for days while whipping himself into a frenzy with a thorn-laden lasher.


turd (could be third. who could really tell, though?)


Used in sentence- "I am the turd siblings in the family"


Definition: Someone who has low self-esteem. Either that or s/he has a ridiculously strong sense of reality.


******

All I Want for Christmas:


In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster

Turtle Voices in Uncertain Weather by Alfrredo Navarro Salanga

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

The Mooring of Staring Out by John Ashbery

(it's either one of these or a pair of socks. teehee)


******

I and the Griffin went to Powerbooks last Saturday before watching The Prestige. Even though I always do get a bit insecure at the onset everytime I step into Powerbooks, that sense of inadequacy wanes when I actually look around. There are really a few books there that I can consider a good read. Most of them are your run-of-the-mill, oh-i'm-so-literary-and-boringly-rich editions. There are shelves and shelves of pure balderdash and surface-glitter. It gives me the chills. The classics are expurgated versions (weak tea). The Filipino section is pitifully comprised of two shelves of uninformative loquaciousness.

It's funny what supposedly adroit people consider important these days.


*******

It is still best to end things with a song:


Some Journey
Suzanne Vega

If I had met you on some journey
Where would we be now
If we had met some eastbound train
Through some black sleeping town

Would you have worn your silken robes
All made of royal blue?
Would I have dressed in smoke and fire
For you to see through?

If we had met in a darkened room
Where people do not stay
But shadows touch and pass right through
And never see the day

Would you have taken me upstairs
And turned the lamplight low?
Would I have shown my secret self
And disappeared like the snow?

Oh, I could have played your little girl
Or I could have played your wife
I could have played your mistress
Running danger down through you life

I could have played your lady fair
All dressed in lace like the foam from the sea
I could have been your woman of the road
As long as you did not come back home to me

But as it is, we live in the city
And everything stays in place
Instead we meet on the open sidewalk
And it's well I know your face

We talk and talk, we tell the truth
There are no shadows here
But when I look into your eyes
I wonder what might have been here

Because if I had met you on some journey
Where would we be now?

today and yesterday

One of the perks of being an orphan is that you can do almost everything you ever dreamed of doing when your parents were alive. You can drink as many Slurpees as you want, even if you have been coughing and sniffing for three whole days. You can dance in the rain and see your brother watching you surreptitiously from an open window before he joins you minutes after. You can stay up late, watching Somewhere in Time over and over again and no one will come up to you, serving sermons on gilded platters about health and the dangers of romanticism. You can sit and stare at absolutely nothing for hours and no one will come to envelope you in a furious hug, saying that for them, you exist. You are loved.

******

One of the moments when I wished I had a digicam or any camera of any sort was yesterday, when, upon leaving the apartment, I saw a large orange tabby glaring at me from a neighbor’s doorstep. It was so beautiful and sleek that I was really tempted to steal it and hole it up in my room for a day.

******

The new owner of my father’s ancestral house was kind enough to let us take some furniture from the house. He said that it would help us remember. I wonder if he thought that he was doing us a favor.

Here are some treasures that I found:


1. I unearthed a writing table from my uncle's old room. It probably was an antique mahogany sewing machine (sewing table?) that belonged to my grandmother, which was later fashioned into a kind of writing desk, now unpolished and a bit dusty. I fell in love with its intricate foothold patterns that scrolled and unfurled, like so many wild vines.

Time to take out my writing cap. I will not be blamed for future Dickensonian entries.


2. I also found my mother's other painting- a still life composed of apples and peaches and round patterns swirling on large jars.

Her name on this one is C. Usebio. My mother rarely signs her name on her paintings. She said she used other names on most of them. This will make the ones she sold in Japan and the other paintings of hers hard to track down, even if I do get to become a billionaire. She has had too many lives, too many secrets lost in the wailing wind.

********

Two books that I've read over the weekend:

1. Lady Oracle : Margaret Atwood

The reason I enjoy Atwood books is because I believe that I am a narcissist. No matter what people say, everyone likes seeing themselves in black and white, in another person's clothes, hidden in a heart. Atwood's characters successfully elucidate parts of me that, to use a cliché, I have never chanced upon before. When I read her, I feel that I am on a treasure hunt. In her characters I see my plots, my hands, my tired, black heart.

2. The Wayward Wife and Other Stories: Alberto Moravia


Two movies that I've watched (they're really good. but don't take my word for it.):

1. My life without me - Isabel Coixet

"I am classically in love!"

2. Garden State - Zach Braff

"What's the word that's burning in your heart?"

***********


You won't feel pain immediately after a fall. You first think about what you would've done better if you haven't stepped on that particular railing. You were forewarned but you decided to be a regular troglodyte and risk it. A few minutes after the fall, you feel your knees go slightly numb. You lift your skirt an inch and you see pinpricks of blood adorning flesh. You press a finger to the scar, lightly trace its irregular pattern. You laugh at your instability - at your penchant for accidents happening even before the journey. You try to divert your attention from the discomfort so you watch the wipers on the windshield mechanically move from side to side, as if the movement will heal you, will make things disappear like rabbits in top hats. After a while, you notice that the pain has stopped. You imagine yourself victorious. You are a riot of dry autumn leaves spinning around, finally happy. But you lift up your skirt an inch and see how red the prinpricks still are.

only a phase, these dark cafe days

after i've bawled my eyes out for roughly an hour, i groggily went out of my room, my mouth sulky with so much sugar due to the meringue pieces i've been consuming while listening to the ramons and being clinically pathetic.sweets never really do compensate for desolation, no matter what the hersheys ads say. if anything, they make you feel weaker, more pliable to assaults.

so i forced myself to sit in front of the TV and just flipped channels. there was nothing good on, as usual. as i sat there, feeling so out of sorts i started crying again, i realized that this was definitely the saddest year of my entire life.

i am more lost than ever.

******

last wednesday, i watched the prestige with a couple of my officemates. funny how i finally identified with a lead character and she ended up hanging from a ceiling in a room full of birds.

******

this afternoon,i looked in the mirror and did not know who i was.

******

i finally realized that i have no right to be so smug about where i am right now. every action that i'm against may very, very well happen to me so i should just keep my meddling mouth shut.in this day and age, when everyone else seems to find solace in strangeness, it's very risky to throw stones.

******

Two poems by Yehuda Amichai that are fitted for the nearing occasions:

Memorial Day For The War Dead

Memorial day for the war dead. Add now

the grief of all your losses to their grief,

even of a woman that has left you. Mix

sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,

which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning

on one day for easy, convenient memory.

Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,

in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.

"Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding."

No use to weep inside and to scream outside.

Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.

Memorial day. Bitter salt is dressed up

as a little girl with flowers.The streets are cordoned off with ropes,

for the marching together of the living and the dead.

Children with a grief not their own march slowly,

like stepping over broken glass.

The flautist's mouth will stay like that for many days.

A dead soldier swims above little heads

with the swimming movements of the dead,

with the ancient error the dead have

about the place of the living water.

A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.

A shopwindow is decorated with

dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.

And everything in three languages:Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.

A great and royal animal is dying

all through the night under the jasmine

tree with a constant stare at the world.

A man whose son died in the war walks in the street

like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.

"Behind all this some great happiness is hiding."

A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.

******

because forgetting, even for a moment, is a wave of vindication:

Drinking Song

Silvia Curbelo

In every half-filled glass a river

begging to be named, rain on a leaf,

a snowdrift. What we long for

precedes us. What we've lost

trails behind, casting

a long shadow. Tonight

the music's sad, one man's

outrageous loneliness detonated

into arpeggios of relief. The way

someone once cupped someone's

face in their hands, and the world

that comes after. Everything

can be pared down to gravity

or need. If the soul soars with longing

the heart plunges headfirst

into what's left, believing

there's a pure want

to fall through. What we drink to

in the end is loss,

the space around it, the opposite

of thirst, its shadow.

******

All I know of you is in my memory; All I ask is for you to remember me. -Suzanne Vega, Rosemary

******

it's best to end things with joni mitchell lyrics:

THE LAST TIME I SAW RICHARD

Joni Mitchell

The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in '68,
And he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday
Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe
You laugh, he said you think you're immune, go look at your eyes
They're full of moon.

You like roses and kisses and pretty men to tell you
All those pretty lies, pretty lies
When you gonna realise they're only pretty lies
Only pretty lies, just pretty lies

He put a quarter in the Wurlitzer, and he pushed
Three buttons and the thing began to whirr
And a bar maid came by in fishnet stockings and a bow tie
And she said "Drink up now it's gettin' on time to close."
"Richard, you haven't really changed," I said

It's just that now you're romanticizing some pain that's in your head
You got tombs in your eyes, but the songs
You punched are dreaming
Listen, they sing of love so sweet, love so sweet
When you gonna get yourself back on your feet?
Oh and love can be so sweet, love so sweet

Richard got married to a figure skater
And he bought her a dishwasher and a Coffee percolator
And he drinks at home now most nights with the TV on
And all the house lights left up bright

I'm gonna blow this damn candle out
I don't want nobody comin' over to my table
I got nothing to talk to anybody about
All good dreamers pass this way some day
Hidin' behind bottles in dark cafes
Only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings
And fly away
Only a phase, these dark cafe days.

today, you are golden

Great Art
Lawrence Raab


There's so much I don't want to look at,
big religious scenes especially,
big historical battles,
almost anything, in fact, containing
large numbers of people.

Three or four people—that's the right number
for a painting. Then you can think
about what they might mean to each other,
why they're standing around that beach
at sunset, walking toward that mountain.

Or they're at home: a woman sewing, a child
playing, a dog, a man at the door,
much more ominous, I'm sure, than the artist
intended. And I like that, imagining
this isn't what I was supposed to feel,

the way I'm pleased with small imperfections,
stains and wrinkles, erasures particularly,
where you sense the artist changing his mind.
And sometimes a shape's been painted over,
although the ghost of it remains.

In Vermeer's Girl Asleep at a Table
she leans on one hand, dreaming
perhaps of love. Behind her there's a mirror
in which nothing is reflected. Once,
x-rays have shown, this was a portrait of a man.

And we would have understood, given
the conventions of the time, he was the subject
of her thoughts. Why take him away?
It's better, I want Vermeer
to have decided, not to show that much.

Let her keep her dream to herself.
Let the light be our secret.

I'll come running


Even if Ms Paltrow's acting skills in this movie left a lot of things to be desired (come on, how hard is it to LOOK blank and devoid of any real ideas? you'd know what i'm talking about IF you read the book), Great Expectations really was a good movie.

Argh. Blogger is making me soooo insane. My links are all so screwy.:(

I'm really moving on to BETTER pastures. Prolly Wordpress will do. I was practically salivating when I saw how easy it was to maintain a blog there.

Soon, anyways. When I have time and have decided to make the effort.

By the way, check out PLUMA, our group blog. As of today, it has no posts yet (just registered 5 minutes ago) but try checking it out after a coupla days.