In Defense of Incoherence

Prayers, as I know them, are usually composed of moments of non-speaking. The things we express in prayers: repentance, gratitude, aspirations—these are the least expressed by human language. I have learned that the most heartfelt of aspirations, those we make known only to God, are expressed without any appreciable coherence. Our most honest expressions of remorse, of gratitude and of desire are revealed not in any orderly construction of phrases, but rather in Incoherence, consistent only in the underlying faith that they will be Understood.

Perhaps, the language of prayers is silence. Perhaps, its syllables are flashes of images and warmth. Perhaps, they take wing from the depths of the soul and fly through the limits of our minds, through the clouds and the stars, to a place where they are welcomed and understood. Perhaps, their disorganization is their very organization, and they defy human comprehensibility precisely because they were never ours to make sense of in the first place.

Perhaps this Incoherence is the expression of a language we have forgotten, but which refuses to be lost. It lingers in defiance like a devoted soldier, and presents itself only in prayers, as a lifeline, a conduit, to everything Divine.

Five Pieces

Today, in the midst of packing in the IIT evacuation center, an old man slowly walked up to the stage where volunteer groups were getting ready to distribute bread. I saw the tentative steps he took towards the organizer who had just given reminders about the system of distribution to the hundreds of people who would have been in their own houses, had it not been for the flashflood. The old man took out his Family Card, a creased index card which had been wet and soiled in places. He straightened it out with both hands and presented it to the organizer.

“Sir,” he said. “Mangayo unta ko ug pagkaon. Mulakaw naman gud ko.”

The organizer explained that there is a system in place, that if he were given ahead of everyone else, questions will arise. Another volunteer head said that if he waited, he would receive his share in a while. I wanted so badly to give him his share but I know I will be breaching a system that has been in operation long before I started volunteering, so I piped in and said we were almost ready to distribute, but the organizer cut me off and said we weren’t. We had been waiting for another queue to finish before we could start the distribution.

The old man folded his card and placed it back in his shirt pocket, nodding away his disappointment.

“Aw, mulakaw nalang ko,” he said slowly as he turned to go. He wasn’t angry. The humility in his eyes is one that would shame any of us on the gymnasium stage.

I watched the old man leave and then I looked at the bread packs we were going to distribute. Five thin slices per pack. Per family of five. We have just denied a hungry old man five pieces of bread, for which he had stripped off all of his pride and for which he had worn all of his humility.

I followed him with my eyes, as he wove through the crowd, to a corner of the gym, where he bent down to get two red plastic bags of clothes and other things, to the main gate where he slowly made his way out. He was alone.

We had been afraid that he was lying, that like so many before him who used his reason, he just wanted to get ahead. We had insisted on a system that would ensure fairness. We had wanted to protect the five pieces of bread.



I did not run after him. I realize that when God accounts for each tear in our hearts on Judgment Day, I will have to answer, too, for that old man's.

There

“I had wanted to tell you a story today,” my professor said at the very end of the class period. I was in my Philippine Linguistics class for a very special reason that semester. I was classmates with my students, as I sit in each class to learn how the subject is taught. Come next semester, I was to handle the major course.

My students/classmates, caught up in the business of putting away their notes and gathering up their things, eagerly settled back down and urged her to continue. My professor set her books down on the table again, and then told us about a day, twenty-five years ago, when--in her words--it was a particularly good time to be a Filipino. It was the day the Philippines made a difference in the world. In EDSA. She was one of those thousands of people who stood up in the bloodless revolution that became our legacy to the world.

One student, caught up in the narrative, asked what the people did in EDSA.

My teacher considered the question momentarily, in that half-expression people usually make when they are half-incredulous, half-impressed, half-sympathetic. She nodded once before she answered, as if to confirm a truth that presented itself only at that precise moment.

I was at the back row, contemplating an answer that floated up from the literature schema I had been academically brought up to create. This answer tasted like Pretense in my own tongue: it was a powerful irony I had been trained to anticipate, but one which was also the very exemplification of something “full of sound and fury, [but] signifying nothing”. It was something I’d expect to enjoy from literature and I had never really believed that I would hear it so sincerely said in real life.

That morning, I did.

“What did you do there, ma’am?” was the question.

A pause. A half-expression. A nod. And then a smile.

“We were there,” came the reply.

Shelves and Hills and Boulders

12:41 AM. This is my summit. This is when, if I were Sisyphus, I stand at the peak of the hill, wrapped in the quiet of whatever semblance of a finished task there is, before my boulder rolls down again. This is the moment when realizations and reflections start with the phrase “at the end of the day…”

At the end of the day, more often than not, after partying for beaten deadlines, we stop and take stock of what has been postponed: people and relationships we excuse ourselves away from.

At the end of the day, we think of birthdays unremembered and belated plans and of presents yet to be wrapped.

Of ecclesiastical duties de-prioritized

Of letters unwritten

Of goodbyes unsaid

Of welcomes not uttered sincerely enough

Of gratitude not expressed quite adequately

Of griefs postponed

And wishes unspoken


At the end of the day, we realize how laughable the things we spend our hours with. They seem trivial in the face of what we have to put on hold. We put relationships on a shelf, so that we can roll our boulders. And then at the summit, we take the relationships down from the shelf where we had shoved them before we dove into the rush of deadlines. We take them down, dust them off, and expect them to pick up from where we left off.

At the end of the day, we realize that we live in a scary maze of shelves and hills and boulders, where we could be shoved in a shelf and postponed, where, as it happens sometimes, we are never taken down nor dusted off.

At the end of the day, we know that we do what we can. We do our best to make amends. We will always have hills assigned to us, and boulders to roll, and handy shelves. This shelf is for plans; this one for Church; this one for friends who never complain; this one for those who do.

At the end of the day, we look forward to the summit, to the pause, to the quiet. To remember whom we put on the shelf this time, and dust them off.



Perhaps. At the end the day.

Nine Pages

I have always wanted to read Night by Elie Wiesel. When a friend finally lent me a copy, however, I discovered I was not brave enough to do so yet. I have had three attempts to read it, but I only got as far as the ninth page, this last time. Reading those first nine pages was unlike any reading experience I have had. I knew this because the whole time that I read it, the hairs on my face, my arms and those at the back of my neck kept standing, and this has never happened too early in anything that I have read, nor for that long. I had always dubbed that sensation "The Longinus Effect", credits to Longinus, a literary scholar/critic who theorized about an aesthetic criterion--a feeling that you get when you read and you know that whatever you are reading is good because you had been "touched by the sublime".

As I said, the Effect came too soon and persisted for too long that it felt oddly misplaced, as if it broke some universal law on writing that postpones the best until the end or the damning until later. Night is a slim volume of the biographical account of a Holocaust survivor, written in such potent prose. It is a record of the worst that human beings could be, and I worry that when I read it, I might see things I cannot un-see.

I’ve seen such things in Schindler’s List and in Life is Beautiful. I have read it in Alice Walker, in Toni Morrison, in Alan Paton, in Edilberto Tiempo, in Joseph Conrad, in Anna Akhmatova, and I remember the things that that seeing had caused me: grief then questions. Questions, then an inconsolable sense of abandonment. That and then a struggle for redemption.

I never got past those nine pages. Not yet. I had to put the book down, eventually. It was too powerful, and I am terrified of its power. I still look forward to reading it, one day, when I am wiser, when I have found answers to those questions. One day, when I am no longer afraid of the consequences of seeing.

As for now, Night will stay on my bedside table, closed. Silent. And benign.

Redemption

Tonight, I’m thinking about the Hindu tailors Ishvar and Om, the scholar Maneck and the beautiful Mrs. Dina Dalal—the characters that people Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. Ever since I put the book down several weeks ago, I knew why I thought the book was 713-pages worth of wasted time. What I did not understand was the wonderful reviews about it. I agree that the story is told in fine prose, but the plot it unravels is a terrible progression towards conflicts that are never untangled nor resolved.

“A Fine Balance” tells the story of these four characters. Theirs is a wonderful connection of unparallel lives, each of which has been riddled with tragedies that mold their persons. The book was a wonderful read until the last few pages, when I realized there weren’t enough pages left for the denouement I believed the characters deserved. In the end, all the tragedies in each of their lives amounted to nothing. The free-spirited Maneck jumped in front of a train; the indomitable Dina Dalal surrendered to the humdrum of domestic life she so detested; and the Untouchables-turned-tailors Ishvar and Om became a tandem of beggars—Ishvar, legless on a wheeled platform steered by an overweight eunuch that had been the zesty Om.

The conclusions of their struggles are a mockery to the fights they fought. By not rewarding them even a semblance of redemption in the end, the storyteller has invalidated his own tale. What is the sense of detailing tragedy after tragedy, if not for the redemption that is saved in the end? What is the sense of a struggle if not for the respite when one can say “This tiny moment is worth everything”?

I rebel against Rohinton Mistry’s conclusion. Yes, there is reason to believe that life does not owe us a happy ending. But redemption? Life owes us that at least. Otherwise, I fear that like Ishvar and Om’s tragedies, Maneck’s suffering and Dina Dalal’s struggles, our own stories would be nothing but long meaningless tales spun with silvery time-threads, that were never ours in the first place.