Right Opinions

Written on February 9, 2011, when everybody had an opinion about Angelo Reyes’s suicide

It disgusts me— the way we always have something to say to explain other people’s actions or inactions; the way we encapsulate a lifetime into a sentence; the way we reduce a person into a Right Opinion.

Today, I do not care about Right Opinions.

I am saddened by Angelo Reyes’s suicide. I do not care if he was guilty or not. I do not care about the politics that backdrops his death. All I care about is that he belonged to someone. All I care to imagine is the pain that his death is causing the people to whom he belonged. Damn everything else.

I remember a similar feeling I had almost six months ago with Rolando Mendoza, the hostage-taker in the infamous bus hostage crisis. I still remember how the media cornered his poor father and how they feasted on his reactions. Damn those insensitive bastards.

I cried for Mendoza’s father that night. His reaction to his son’s terrible death was unforgivingly captured by the media that brought the news. That moment was in the midst of so many things to be said, of so many facts that would happily back up opinions, of so many justifiable opportunities to reduce, to trivialize, to mock.

However, that moment should not have been like all the rest. It should have been a moment for pause, for feeling. And because it was so delicate a moment, it needed to be seized—to be felt—right then. At that fleeting moment, all we should have cared about was the poor old man in his flimsy shirt, wailing like a heart-broken child, for the son who belonged to him. Damn everything else.

In the next morning, that moment will have drowned in a sea of Right Opinions. In the next morning, it will not have been a Right Opinion to feel sad for Mendoza or for his father.

Sometimes I fear that we couldn't stop long enough to second-guess ourselves. We are all so proud—and so right—all the time. Couldn't we just sit down and feel? For a while? Couldn't we allow ourselves to just be sad, for a moment, because something is sad?

I do not care so much about Right Opinions today. I only care that my heart is in the Right Place. Damn everything else.

The Murakami Experience

I remember how I struggled with Murakami the first time I picked up "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman". I complained about the unresolved conflicts, the denouements that never came and the non-concluding conclusions. He has a way of building up his plot until he reaches a certain height and then he stops. All of a sudden, I was reading the conclusion. Before I realized I was there, I had missed the ending.

There has always been something I felt I was missing when I read him—something that kept me from making sense of the stories he told. It was easy to feel like an outsider from Murakami’s world. I felt unwelcome and as a result, I was always lost.

Strangely, though, the stories manage to make me feel comfortable with my confusion. At some point after I put the book down, the frustration and the confusion will have left, and what lingers, surprisingly, is the impression of an experience. What remains are memories of the loneliness of spaghetti, of chocolates melting in the sun, of a moving kidney-shaped stone, of a sole firefly against the vastness of a black sky. I remember them, and the emotions they carry, as if they were my own memories.

As for Murakami, I could only attempt to make sense of him in the single way that I know how. I became aware that I was—and still am—constrained by a Way of Seeing that requires me to label, to consult, to anticipate. Because of this, I necessarily live in a world that refuses to perceive what it does not recognize.

And still, in a peculiar Murakami-esque way, it is only when I give up trying to comprehend the Strange Things, that I begin to appreciate what I could not understand. Just as in magic, there are things we see only when we don't.



This un-seeing, I have come to realize, is a Way of Seeing.