Rest in Peace, dear sir.

What the news said yesterday.

I was one of those kids who actually got into the wild rumpus late- as in, really late. My first encounter with Sendak’s work was in (get this-) third year college when my philosophy professor at that time, read out Where The Wild Things Are to our class. Yep.

Well, dear sir, I’m sure you’re in a wonderful, wild place now.

I saw this .gif set just now from the Tumblr-folk and it made me smile. Hehe.

—

Other stuff, or, my reading list right now:

• 1Q84 – Haruki Murakami (I’m 2/3 done with the book )
• Grimm’s Grimmest (started with the first few stories; a delightful read)
• Also, something Eliza V. linked: Roman Emperors, Up To AD 476 And Not Including Usurpers, In Order Of How Hardcore Their Deaths Were by Josh Fruhlinger (really amusing)

100!

A painting* of mine made it to 100: The Hundreds Project. Really nifty poster we got going on thar.

You can get a copy for P220.

More info here.

 

*(yes, apparently my artistic shiz also merits publication)

Smoke signals

She lets the words sneak away, leaving
nothing save for that scent of smoke
and the long drive home.

-
This week: 2 exams.
Next week: 7
Next, next: finals
After that: comprehensive exams.
 
I hope to live through this.

I will let someone else explain-

An excerpt from Letter 8 by Rainer Maria Rilke

Borgeby gard, Fladie, Sweden
August 12, 1904

We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. That is how all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.

This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called ”apparitions,” the whole so-called “spirit world,” death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don’t think we can deal with. but only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. for if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity that drives those prisoners in Poe’s stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust inthe difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

—

You don’t have to read this part, since it embarrasses me but I wrote it down anyway so I have something to refer to.

Just sharing (& an open question)-

My 18-year old sister, commenting on a 3-page poem I wrote, 5 minutes after reading it:

“It’s cheesy, nostalgic, and adventurous.”

[then she proceeds to underline the said portions, labeling them as "cheesy", "nostalgic", and "adventurous"]

…and tell me, what am I to make of this?

My attempt to involve my immediate family into reading the stuff I write has failed. I am sad. Back to revising.

Edit:

I figured I should ask this because I still don’t have a decent answer.

What’s the difference between something poetic, prosaic, and prose?

I don’t like getting stuck with definitions, but apparently, some people do (*eyeroll*) so entertain me if you have an answer, I would love to know.

Fragments

1687, Spain. You are a ship carrying a hundred and fifty men, all sailing out into the new world, eyes brimming with promise despite the graying clouds and I am the mermaid hiding behind a pile of jagged rocks, praying for a storm, hungry for my first meal.

Highschool, I was the girl who aced all my subjects and cut class to hide in the bathrooms, the windows the only witness as I took in whiffs of happiness. You were the smoke I exhaled thirty seconds before my first overdose.

2207, a single lightyear northwest Alpha Centauri, I live in a tower on Hyperion IX. Inside it is a garden where I spend my days tending to the young plants, remnants of a world we never saw. My 21^st clone rushes into the room, her face raining beads of sweat and she stammers as she speaks. Today she brings me the news I spent a century waiting for: they have found you.

In the year of The Plague I am a slave cleaning the sacred books of Alexandria and you are the bastard son of a monarch, staggering into the halls of the library, breathing pestilence into the books, creasing their pages, death quietly trailing from a distance.

20 years from now we are wearing a few more lines on our faces and you are sending me a message saying you are sorry, how much you wanted to make up for everything but you had no idea how, and I reply with the four words that will render us strangers: I’ve heard this before.

Ragnarök, I am the last valkyrie standing at the edge of the world and your are my sword, drunk and thirsty for the golden blood of gods. I am wounded, bleeding through my once-lustrous armor. The god of war approaches me, a fervent look painted on his face and I tighten my grip, stiffen my right arm. I ready myself for battle.

It is 1943 and you are running away from the bombs they said would grace the city in a few hours. Your shoes are worn out, having run too much, too often, and so the laces come undone midway through your escape from the city. You stumble over my body, splayed over other bodies. You scamper away in fear, knees wounded by the wreckage, mind wounded by the look on my face like I were feigning sleep, reminding you why it was necessary to live.

1724, you are a missionary sent into terra incognita, hoping to chastise the foreign soil with the holy waters of your god. I am the virgin sacrificed to the most vicious of the native gods, moonbeams in his glass eyes and strings of thorns budding from his head. The moment you laid your pale feet on the ground, I am offered up in the first of temples, my eyes closed, my mouth breathing fire.

Book Design: They make my heart flutter

I recently stumbled on an interesting Tumblr all about books and I particularly got impressed by these two things –

Book art by Alexander Korzer-Robinson

“The cut book art has been made by working through the books, page by page, cutting around some of the illustrations while removing others. The images seen in the finished work, are left standing in the place where they would appear in the complete book. As a final step the book is sealed around the cut, and can no longer be opened.” from the artist’s statement

This is just… wow. I’d be happy to lie snug and asleep in my grave if I accomplish something like this.

The Antibook by Francisca Prieto

This is a non-conventional book of Nicanor Parra’s ‘AntiPoems’. It is a visual expression of his ‘Anti’ idea – opposing conventions. The essence of the book was analysed and its components abstracted in order to re-define the conventional form of a typical book. Dimensions: Icosahedron: 15 x 17 x 19 cm / Book: 20,5 x 10,5 cmThe Antibook is part of the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Library artists’ book collection.

You can’t read the poems unless you destroy the book and create the paper sculptures.

I love it when form follows function.

BRB gathering the tiny scattered bits of my heart back.

How I wish when I’m all grown up I get to create such lovely things like those [with the help of my design-savvy friends, ‘cause no way can I do this alone, heh].

Also, I’m working on another WAR post on one of my favorite books [Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways]

Missive

Suppose the past is a place
dangling from a slew of stars. Imagine
all the faces we used to wear, safely shed
from the present, left to drift

into a constellation curious of the worlds
swirling below it – how would they feel
seeing us, smiling or perhaps sadder,
our faces mere specks to our former selves:

strangers unable to understand, immobile
from doing anything that could tip the fulcrum
of our bodies – trapped in those stars, repeatedly playing out
actions paving way for this moment. I imagine their ghostlike mouths

opened wide, breathing in stardust; nostrils attempting
to comprehend through scent the distant visions before them
as though each tiny piece of space inhaled is a letter
we send to those we used to be.

Conch

Today you asked in your blog if you would be missed
tomorrow, if anyone would care. I remember hearing

that same question from your lips six years ago, spending
a waking morning dangling our bare feet from a balcony

overlooking the sea. I answered you with a sigh, leaning
my head on your shoulders, keeping my hand close to yours

yet making sure our fingers would not touch
because even then I already understood

how we were no different from the shore beneath us,
eventually giving our bodies over to water

and its fickle whims, rending our bones farther away
than measured distances would allow – I would have answered you

now that I’ve had enough time to gather my words,
collected at the roof of my mouth every useful memory left

to float in those waters. I would have told you
how much I missed you, bridging the gap brought by these years

of living with other people’s decisions, I would have held your hand
but the closest I can get is to send you a message

in pixels muting the sound of my voice, grains of sand
from a virtual shore. The husk of an abandoned shell.

—

For J, and you as well.

Post-grad who committed suicide last week: reason for death still unknown

Lyza told no one of her plans to kill herself.

Born Alyza May T. Taguilaso, she was 21 when she passed on.