A Letter From Stranger

Note: The following article is an old e-mail from someone I have known only through cyberspace and text messages. I met this country girl (about to study in one of the prestigious university here in Manila) six years ago in the net. My relationship with her started with sensible conversation via text messages that even Pablo Neruda might envy for their poetical gestures and melody. We were strangers playing with intimate words that we called each other faceless stranger (pardon the redundancy) and non-existent.

From this I leave it here and be the judge to our child’s play. This is the exact letter she sent; nothing is changed.

***

Well, I wrote a letter ages ago that i never did send.. i was trying to sum up my courage and before I knew it.. You left.. But i found it and thought it was such a nice letter.. Everyone I guess already read it.. except of course .. you.. so im sending it now...

Non-existent,

I can't answer your questions, nor can I even try to deem of them for they are as incomprehensible as the silence you so try to grasp. Nor can i even begin to imagine the depth of your soul, nor the feelings that dwell in between the words exchanged between two unknown beings.. the enigmatic us.

You know little of me and I can say i know just as much of you, yet, we speak with so much passion that it scares me so. Do you feel the same passion? Or is this just a created lie between a faceless stranger and a non-existent guy? I want to reach our and look into your soul but you're soul's ocean deep, I'm afraid I may drown in it.
I'm scared of this, but why can't i stop. Why am so afraid to lose this, to lose you? Is this real or just a game? For if so, spare me. Spare me please from thy lies and spare me from thy created words for i can't bear it. Spare it and me'll spare us both. I'm drowning in the mystifying depths of you and i can't get out. I'm not even sure if i want to. But i don't want to drown alone. I don't want to keep reaching out in the empty dark and grasp the incomprehensible silence you so seldom say.
I know im the only one who could answer these silly questions but i wonder if you ask yourself of this too.

I don't believe in dreams. For as I've said, dreams don't come true but you are just but a dream. Does that mean that you are just as non-existent as my dreams? I don't believe in stars for they are a useless flaunt of the hopes and wishes of mere humans unable to touch them, nor feel the sparkling glow of light come out of them. And I don't believe in love, for if love existed, everything would have a reason, everything would make sense. But not everything has meaning; more, not everything has reasons the same that we both have a reason in doing this. Or do we?

You speak much of passion and the nothingness of love, but yet, can't you consider passion-love or love as passion? Where do we draw the line between passion and love? If love does not exist, the, could passion be just as unreal as love? For do you not love with passion and give passion with love? Are they two separate imaginings or are they one and the same? Does not our logic blind us into believing of its non-existence or do you just choose not to believe in it as i do?

Questions... questions... You are more than a question yet you're nothing more than a cloud of unreal dreams. You say beauty lies with uncertainty, then, I can't find the beauty in it, for though it sparks the imaginative minds of us mere humans, it ignites the greatest fear an the most consuming doubts. The way it’s consuming the whole of me.

Is what we are doing the answer to the questions we most dearly seek or is it just another questions itself?
faceless stranger

----

there........ finally i did it.. well, i'm really sorry if i inconvenienced you in anyway.. thanks...
enveloping darkness, i tried to escape from it..
think not of thoughts that slowly suffocate one's
being.. doubts that consumes through the mind like
fire... drowning in a pool of lies.. drunk with the
wine of oblivion..a pagan to love while a slave to
passion.. i tried to reach out for something that was
non-existent ... found him gone.. found myself
empty..
i wrote.. though knowing all was lost.. hoping that
somehow he's there though believing he's not.. yet he
writes and i know not why.. but still... still.. i
hope..



Technorati Tags: love stories pablo neruda

Obituary— so it goes

The news of his death halted me to continue Lolita. Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007), the man who gave life Kilgore Trout, died from suffering brain injuries after a fall at his home in Manhattan.

I have been working this article since his death, started writing as requiem for the man who wrote novels just for indulgence to Planet Tralmafador. No, requiem isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s an elegy for the comic writer who farted in his writings. Or maybe to pay my last respect to the black humorist who thought me the beauty of war and human frailty. I don’t know. I am no death vulture. Besides, dude, I am just a groupie with a cute ass trying to call himself a lover of his crappy novels. I never cry for the death of someone unless my relative. But Vonnegut is different.

One, Vonnegut is a writer. Two, he is one of my God Poet. And so on.

I used to snatch his books from the musty corners in Recto along with the other authors I care to read. I am his kid, dude. I can feel his fusty books, as Jedi feeling the force, rotting like hell in dingy corners in Recto or book stalls. I remember I bought Slaughterhouse Five for only 30 pesos (Oh, the book reminds me of a luscious dream). I chose Breakfast of Champion instead of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I finished Slapstick in just a night contemplating every word of it in our bathroom enough to suffocate me from the smoke of Lucky Strike, the night I lingered the scent of my Ice Princess (Ha-ha, I can still remember what song I played while reading the book). Some of his novels I read are HTML files downloaded directly from IRC chat-room.

I thought the only thing that could stop the motor of the world is writer’s death. I am wrong. It saddened me that the world is still changing; the camera of life is still rolling, spinning its beauty in dismal vogue. The world seems doesn’t change at all. His death is just an ordinary day in a pixilated world obsessed with info-porn. No the same funeral fashion like what happened to Jean Paul Sartre funeral march. I am not kid who feel sad over the death of his kitty, but frankly speaking, dude, I haven’t got laid since his death.

Perhaps I’m just vain. Looking for something to write, something he can call himself a grand thing. And Vonnegut is the perfect character, a god in cage whom I can play with. A writer’s death is someone’s vanity. So why am I writing this piece? To borrow from Breakfast of Champion: “Because I felt like it, you stupid machine,” The Man said to the bear.

Kilgore Trout summed up our masquerade and what we really are in The Man’s tombstone: Not even the creator of the universe knew what the man was going to say next. Perhaps the man was a better universe in its infancy. Don’t ask me its meaning, dude, I don’t understand either.

I sure will read all his books again, as if reading like a kid for the first time, skimming with awes on its theme and style of episodic non-sequitur stories. Playing with The Postal Service’s Iron and Wine, I wonder how much yosi I can consume reading Sirens of the Titan.

I’m not sad. My only regret is that I never had the chance to thank him.

So it goes.

Maria Isabella

She is my goddess. I dream of her every night like an electric blue in my darkest night. I love her; I love her dark images lying within me. I desire her. I suffer for her. She is my rose that defines my intimate lust to black petals. Am I dreaming? Her beauty is my joy against the inexplicable landscape of existence. Have you seen her eyes? Her eyes like a dot in the sky. Her naked eyes, her dead eyes I desire in her silence.

I make love to her cadaver. I make love to my nymph. Her last word still exists in my fantasy. I’m dying, I’m flying, I’m begging. I am crying as I dream of her naked, so vivid in the fog of my confused being. Here is a draw between her pulchritude and Death.

Her pulchritude is sadness never wither in my bed. I am suffering from isolation and beautiful memories. Is living a kind of poetic struggle? I am bleeding with lost words and promises, bleeding in her absence, making love with her body parched with lethargic words. What is existence if I can’t create you with imagery and allusion, Maria Isabelle?

Her love is my vanity. My vanity is my nocturnal malady. I suffer for this beautiful enigma. I hide her pulchritude deep in the darkness of my heart. The tears of the black emerald are reverie in my sleepless night. It is a dream of simple joy where words are nomads and heresy of wisdom. She died and I created her image with fantasy, anguish, hatred, and total silence. Her death becomes my divinity. Life with her kiss is indefinable. It is music with tempo of madness and tenderness. It is poetry hiding with her virginity. Ah, my Maria Isabelle, my nymph. Life is a tragedy to fulfill, I reckon. Do you still remember the past before Death kissed you? Love you said “Must be with sadness. It has neither beginning nor end. It is beauty inside the tragedy of life. Love must possess the solitude of the self and never a possession of the other self”. How true, how true! Is love an expression of the self only to become a possession of the past?

I wait her holding her hand in my dream. I wait for her while I wander in the beauty of thing that sleeps in the middle of the night.

She left and died. In the spring of July was the first time I made love to her cadaver. In the dark space of my heart I conquered the love that will never be mine again. I mourn in her silence. Her lips are mute I love to kiss, her breast is a soft pillow I caress, her naked body is a dead petal of rose with intimacy and lust. I am with sadness. I am fleeting. I am with her death.

Death.

Death is.

Before July sadness is vague. Walking with her in the garden of life is a passionate moment for me, an exquisite joy. I paint the sky with purple hue. It was life full of surprises, imagination, sensuality and love. My love is dying as it breathe the passion and desire of my beloved. Ah, Maria Isabelle, I am now here with your memory and without your lips to warmth me. I disobey time. Why do you have to kiss me with all these flowers lying here without you seeing how beautiful they are? Time is something I can’t unravel. My consciousness is always there in my past. Where are you, Maria Isabelle? I want to kiss you, to feel you, to make love with you.

I can’t imagine her last words for me. I hate her last word exists in my mind: The last word of love is saying goodbye.

Tags: tragic love, rilke, neruda

Philosophy of Sigh

Why sigh? Why I write?

My answer is this: Because I am guilty. In what manner I am guilty? What kind of crime?

Let me put it this way: In Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Trial, a question is left to the reader. Is Josef K. guilty? (He was accused of an unknown crime and died in the end of the story without ever knowing what kind of crime he had committed.) Max Brod, Kafka’s biographer and best friend offered an answer: Josef K was guilty of being incapable to love.

Like Josef K. I am guilty of being incapable to love. But on the contrary I know my crime: I am guilty for loving literature above all. I know, John Galt, contradiction doesn’t exist. How can I love Literature if I am incapable to love? Let me explain this by experience. By experience I mean stories of my life with women.

Wisdom is like a cell phone snatcher. It always comes suddenly, rubbing you out for the abrupt elucidation. Last Sunday, after Manny Pacquiao was abducted by Tralmafadorians for the 2007 calendar porn star pictorial, it dawned on me that I am incapable to love outside literature.

I’m incapable to love outside literature? The truth is I never love any woman in my life. Being in love is being with literature. I can only manifest my deep affection with my beloved with loving the puddles of literature. I can only be with my beloved as I am deeply in love with literature. It is to write with them but not about them as it manifests my imagination. To write and to love is two things inseparable to me. To love only bathed with the lyrical scent of literature and tenderness of their breast, like two planets I have to conquer in my cup of double espresso universe. (That is why I never doubted why writers and artists are promiscuous in nature.)

Writing is to imagine the brazilin model Gisele Bundchen lying in my bed as I write verses in her most beautiful legs, as if her body is particle accelerator that triggers a wormhole and open a door where I can travel into the unknown side of poetry. It is only by my wildest imagination can I possess such beauty, not to mention the beautiful tragedy.

It is like loving a woman who will never arrive in your date, a letter by a virgin boy to his beloved upon his first discovery of eroticism, a cry of a woman who ditched by her boyfriend for another young lad, an unanswered prayer of a child to God, a doodle art while Elliot Smith or Aimee Mann hum in your room. It is an answer, it is sighing. It is love giving a beautiful sigh.

Writing is a sad, sad, sad, sad affair. It is being with Rilke whose beloved will never arrive. It is being with Neruda who wrote the most beautiful and saddest line in the ocean of Love. It is being with Yeats who wrote mysticism as his lyrical gift to his Helen who left him. It is being with Molly Millions as our lips are parched with Lucky Strike in our coffin bed. It is being with Einstein who discovered the Zen of Sexual Position hidden in the mathematical precision of energy, mass, and the constant speed of light.

Above all, it is being with Kafka dating with Ingrid Bergman in the small town of poetry and imagination, a coffee date rendered in the palette of philosophical and erotic bedscape. Writing is sighing; it is called Philosophy of Sigh.

It is an answer to ambiguous love affair with Life and its lack of meaning. Writing is being faithful with life amidst the shitty experiences. It is to feel the humanity inside me.

Never mind if I drown again, I think of the distant sea, to qoute Kundera, as love conceived and yet to be born. I am guilty, I sigh; therefore I write.

Tags: philosophy, kafka, neruda, rilke, random musings