Tatak IDS Ako

Almost five years ago, my friend Ron and I put together a video ID for the Integrated Developmental School, where we both were members of the faculty. We decided to use the battlecry (for lack of a better term), "Tatak IDS ako".  

So many things have happened since then--some of them sad, some of them scary, some of them insane, but all of them necessary, and therefore, wonderful. 

Friends, students, teachers, people we work with--I have never ceased to be amazed by all the lives we form memories about, or form a memory in. 

I am inclined to believe that we are all each other's most beautiful coincidences. 

And then again, perhaps we are more.

Mid-day Epiphanies

I do not know whether every other death is similar, or whether each death is different.

What I know is that since the death of my parents, I have become aware of a ruthless panic that is unlike any I’ve ever felt before. It feels very much like the panic of a fall: it is as if the ground is suddenly snatched away and my heart catches in my throat, except that this time, the panic is not momentary—it is continuous and unrelenting.

What I know is that it is worse in the evenings, when my mind checks for familiar sounds, as if it is unknown to it that the sounds will not come anymore. In the evenings, I am suddenly aware that I knew those sounds so well.

And I knew the silences, too.

But the world is different in the mornings. In the mornings, there are strengths that are doled out to wanting hearts, even though these strengths are retrieved at sundown. Oh, no, the strengths are not given for keeping; they are only lent. And while it is true that there is beggary in anything that is borrowed,  we beggars hold open our palms eagerly, because there is also salvation.

Mid-day epiphanies arrive arrogantly, knocking down walls and threatening the doled-out strength you picked up on the way to work. They are the kind that would drive you out of the office at lunchtime and make you walk in the rain so you could entertain the thoughts, fearfully, in the privacy of an unshared umbrella.

Mid-day epiphanies about loss are the worst. They arrive while you book a flight, and the form asks for emergency contact persons. They raise an eyebrow when you get comfortable in a conversation, and they scoff, “What if your friends indulge you only because they think you’re their responsibility and they’d really rather get on with their lives?” They march with you as you get awarded for Outstanding Teacher, and they whisper, in cadence to your steps, “There is no one to make proud anymore.”  The epiphanies help you arrange your brother's academic gown on his graduation day, and they chide, in many different versions, all throughout the day, "They had to be robbed of this experience, as well."


Epiphanies that come in the middle of the day are powerful epiphanies. 

They are those that make you stop at the turn of a familiar aisle in the grocery when you suddenly realize that you will not need to get anything from that aisle anymore. Right there, at the aisle crossing, in the middle of little kids playing tag around pushcarts, and above the din of half-meant threats thrown by parents at their unruly children, you suddenly realize you have actually ceased being a daughter.  

How is it that one actually stops being anybody’s child? 

How is it that one is brought into the world and then abandoned? How is the weighing being done at the moment when it is decided how much is too much for one heart? Where does one appeal about it? How does one keep his heart from looking for those who will never come back?

What I know is that while you deal with the loss of people you love, you begin to truly comprehend what never means. The comprehension does not come suddenly, of course. You will have been contending with it since Day 1, but one day, perhaps on a rainy Wednesday, without warning and without your consent, the thought suddenly crosses your mind. Never. Never is a very, very long time. The thought drives you out into the rain, because there, in the middle of the day, you are gripped by the panic. You are suddenly falling, not belonging to anybody. 

How does one un-comprehend that?

  

*My parents died two weeks of each other in October. We buried them two weeks apart, in the same place, after a similar ceremony, around the same people who knew them or who know us. We dug the earth again, while it was still soft— when it hasn’t even begun to heal at all.

In Medias Res

People lie when they talk about death.

Nobody ever dies “done”. Nobody ever “finishes the race”. Nobody ever “fights the good fight”. There is no ‘[raging] against the dying light’. No bargaining; no volition. There is no “leaving” even, as if some consent is given. Everybody leaves is taken in medias res.

People lie about the dying knowing their time is near. The truth is that there is no intimation. No foreshadowing. People only flatter themselves with meanings they forcibly assign to otherwise random events prior to the death. People romanticize coincidences too eagerly, too desperately. The events in our lives do not give way to death. Death happens, quite insensitively, in the midst of things--in medias res.

Nobody else participates in its performance either. Not even the dying. Friends are poor performers; the bereaved are worse. We take refuge in clichés, because three languages-worth of vocabulary will not have the words to encapsulate what we want to say.

Is that it? Or is that a lie, too?

And what about “[resting] in peace”? Who knows for sure that it is a resting? When people lie about everything else, why should we trust them on this, too?

Suffice it to say that some part of the rational mind recognizes the whole hullabaloo during a death, as a performance: everyone is a performer, and everything is performed in medias res.

How necessary this conspiracy is. In lieu of a rational explanation, we take to metaphors, to ceremonies. The grander, the vaguer, the better. We take to lies, to make us forget how strange it is to bury someone in the ground, and to leave him there, under all of us, never to return to his things, to his half-finished coffee, to us.

So there is no philosophizing this. There is no other perspective to be convinced about. There is no seeking for metaphors that would provide comfort. There is only death.

There is only an end. And with everything else, a loathsome, loathsome continuation.

For the Sake of One Individual

“You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle or integrity, nor endeavour to persuade yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger security for happiness.” 

            –Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Jane Austen says DON’T.

For the sake of one individual, she says, we should not waver in what we believe in: that what we hold true for one person, we should hold true for everyone.

I’ve been trying to figure out why the absoluteness of her saying no doesn't sit well with me.

Why is she absolute about advising against making an exception? 

Why do I feel that it is a rational expectation that we should have the ability to make an exception, if necessary, for people we love?

It is true that principles, essentially, should be unshakable. They should be applied to everybody, in all circumstances. What good, of course, are whimsical “moral rules”? I even agree that a few of those we are especially passionate about need not be explained or apologized for.

These said, I still believe that rigid principles are anti-human. It scares me to think about an inability to compromise, even for the sake of one individual. As people, we assign more value on unbending principles and less value on those that allow room for negotiation, for compromise, for exception. This is great, for all the right reasons. But when we equate compromise with weakness and with unreliability, I disagree. I think the ability to compromise reveals a strength rather than a weakness in one's character.

This said, I can imagine the vast uncertain gray area. When do we bend our own moral rules? For whom should we allow ourselves to do it? And for what reasons?

Who knows, really?

What I know is that I believe in the simple logic of making an exception for people who matter in our lives. Whether this means staying up later than our usual bedtime, or letting pass errant punctuation marks, or allowing this person to see us in our most vulnerable states--if our person so requires, our making an exception for him communicates a valuing that words will fail to encapsulate.
   

Sure, it is laudable that someone should die for a principle, but I find it more impressive when, in this same state of passion for what he believes in, he could make an exception.

I think our ability to do this is precious. I would always choose to be someone who will make an exception, than be someone who would not.

For the sake of one individual, why not? yes. 

The Broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah is not a praising song, although it might as well be. 

It is a sigh, really—one that grays the space between surrender and defeat. 

It is the cry which one utters when he is exhausted from a fight he has been very passionate about, but then he discovers a truth he has not seen, and this changes how he feels about the fight, except now, he is spent, and he could not be anything more. The fight in him has left, and so has everything else.  

I saw your flag on the marble arch

But love is not a victory march

It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah

The songwriter Leonard Cohen clearly alludes to the Bible, but he flits from one allusion to another, until the “you” he addresses in the song becomes unclear. At one point it refers to David, at another to Samson, and then to God, and finally, to some absent lover. A vagueness like this may start out to be appealing, but after a while, the lack of clarity becomes frustrating.

In the end, though, what I fail to understand does not matter as much as those that I do understand. A hallelujah is usually an exclamation of faith, a declaration of love--a single word for all of the words we cannot say. Praise You, God, for every thing.

I first heard the song's refrain in an episode of The West Wing. The refrain seemed to jump out of the scene, haunting and stubborn, demanding to be experienced on its own. And as I did, I was gripped by a surreal recognition: this is not the hallelujah that people know. 

This is my hallelujah.

It seems to me that this is how exhaustion would sound, if it had to be personified. And I know that there are those of us who wish that we didn't recognize it. In a song. Like an anthem of our soul.

The song alludes to how David's faith had been challenged by the bathing Bathsheba under the moonlight. David was a dutiful king during a very difficult time, but although his faith was strong, [God] needed proof. It baffled David, this test of his faith despite all the good that he did and all the struggle for it. It is understandable how, when he failed--in the song at least--he utters a cold and a broken hallelujah.

Perhaps I, too, like the "baffled king", think this "test" is cruel.

Too many of us are already doing the best that we can about what we are thrown in life, and when we have to struggle further because we are being "tested", in order to prove our worth for love, or in order to prove our faith...why, hallelujah.

None of it would make sense, to David, and to me, and I could imagine that no argument could ever come close to explaining the abandonment and betrayal that are afforded even to especially to the best of us.

Perhaps, like Cohen’s David, I, too, understand too well the privacy of this hallelujah. It is the resentment of a good man, undeserving of the Test of Faith he was bound to fail in. A resentment that is quieted now. I recognize the rebellion in the refrain, and the loathsome yearning to be rescued, and the resignation. And ultimately, the exhaustion for what never arrived. 

I heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But You don't really care for music, do you?

In the end, who's to say that a cold and a broken hallelujah is valued less than its holier counterpart? Who's to say that confusion, or anger, or brokenness, cannot be a place for an exclamation of faith? Or who's to say that we risk heavenly favor if we question, quietly, what the suffering is for?

And about those of us who have been spent in the fight, who’s to say that we are not fighting still, here, with our very surrender?

Daunt/Less

I am putting to rest one persistent thought tonight.

Paton wonders in his book, Cry, the Beloved Country, “What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another? What broke when he could bring himself to thrust down the knife into the warm flesh, to bring down the axe on the living head, to cleave down between the seeing eyes, to shoot the gun that would drive death into the beating heart?”

And what about when he decides to take his own life? Does something break in him, as well?

Is the breaking unhurried, and unrelenting, and agonizing? Or is it a shattering--sudden and ravaging?

Or perhaps it is a birthing, rather than a breaking? A creation rather than a destruction? A filling up of the void which had been the very reason for the giving up; except that in the final moments, what fills the void is a dauntlessness that is unusable but for a singular purpose--ending one's life.   

Dauntlessness. It is neither courage nor a lack of it. It is only the absence of fear. In fact, it is only an absence--an absence of reasons to continue, rather than having reasons to stop.

And I believe if one pauses long enough, he will find in himself a fearsome capacity to empathize— the tabooed recognition of the human tendency to give up and stop.

Instead of hope.

Limpid Dewdrops

Mono no aware. The pathos of things. The poignancy of the awareness of the impermanence of every thing in the world.

The mono no aware is the Japanese aesthetic perspective that the sadness of transience is beautiful.

Scholars exemplify this with iconic examples: the last sliver of the waning moon; the last burst of summer; a flower in its fullest bloom. Zen examples make more sense: a dewdrop on a leaf, a rose and a horse by the roadside, a snowflake on an open palm, the stillness of an old pond. These images evoke a sensitivity towards a criterion of beauty—what makes something beautiful is not what already is; what makes something beautiful is the awareness that it doesn’t last.

Thus, in this perspective, the snowflake, the dewdrop and the still pond are beautiful because of their fleeting existence. A rose in full bloom is beautiful only because it wilts after that period of beauty. A dewdrop is a marvelous thing to behold only because it could roll to the ground without warning and disappear in an instant. The beauty of the stillness of the pond lies in the apprehension of it being disturbed, perhaps, by Basho’s wayward frog.

Transience. Sadness. Beauty.

I see it in the excited chatter of students, sudden and wonder-ful, when an idea—irrelevant until then—suddenly becomes the most important discovery of the day.

It is there, and everywhere else—

In the awareness of a pride that cannot be contained by the world for a class one mentors;

In the smile that steals into the eyes of a parent who has been tired for too long;

In the ridiculous affairs of a younger brother, or in the fierce passion of a younger sister’s dreaming;

In the lighting up of a child’s eyes at the arrival of an adult friend, making the latter wonder if it isn’t undeserved;

In the carefree laughter shared only among true friends, the rolling kind that renders one breathless;

It is there, especially in the silence that sits between two memories—the previous memory for which the laughter was, and the next one, still being sifted through for, in the minds of old friends who sit together, just for reminiscing. It is there in the quiet that lingers when they say goodbye, before they send each other off with silly jokes that speak what they do not say.

It never gets old. Each time I am confronted by the aware, I am struck by the same sense of discovery that washed over me nine years ago, as I sat in my AsianLit class, and a haiku suddenly made sense, opening to me a worldview that was as powerful as it is honest and beautiful.

Oh white, limpid dew

With what poor judgment you choose

The place where you lie.

Limpid dewdrops, we might all be. And are we not all placed in the midst of great uncertainty, at times rolling to the ground before we are ready, and at times, lingering long enough to catch a ray of light, and lending a tiny burst of colors to the world around us?

Mono no aware. It is the uncertainty—the gray—that makes that tiny burst of colors, and everything else, precious.