Part of the letter I made for my favorite professor

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass,” this quote from Anton Chekhov stated perfectly the lessons I learned from Ma’am Roldan. She was a proponent of choosing words wisely, keeping in mind the value of nouns and verbs over adverbs and adjectives, and of defamiliarization, which is seeing things anew, like a child, like it is the first time the sunlight has ever kissed your skin! (As many have expressed it before and after me, including Arthur Rimbaud who said, “Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.” Picasso also said something along those lines.)

My professor redefined the way I saw art and writing, transformed my standards of aesthetics and hard work, and above all, inspired and believed in me and my abilities.

Sandra Nicole Roldan was my creative writing teacher and I hope that many more will find Great Souls like her in their journeys. She is a professor in UP Diliman and also a talented writer and teacher.

She also introduced me to Brain Pickings, which houses Maria Popova’s genius and labor of love.

The Whole vs. Its Parts

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” (Aristotle)

A still from the 2010 film adaptation of Flipped

I first read this quote in Wendelin Van Draanen‘s Young Adult fiction, “Flipped” when I was in elementary school. Flipped has garnered the honor of being one of my favorite books because of the complete innocence, purity and magic it possessed. It’s about childhood friends who go through the pits and hurdles of growing up but end up all the better for it. Covered in the glitter of good storytelling, based on the solid foundation of almost naive love and sprinkled with the spice of family, school, little chicks and hors d’oeuvres, it has remained a book I continue to recommend to friends.

One of the deciding factors in my declaration of love for this book had been the wisdom it contained along with its quirky and inspiring set of characters. My favorite part had been the conversation Juli had with her father (if I remember correctly. I confess I do not have the book, but I’ve been promised to be given a copy of it by a dear friend. We just both forgot about it, I guess.) about the “whole being greater than the sum of its parts”, which, I learned from Goodreads, was originally said by Aristotle.

In the book it went like this:

“A painting is more than the sum of its parts,’ he would tell me, and then go on to explain how the cow by itself is just a cow, and the meadow by itself is just grass and flowers, and the sun peeking through the trees is just a beam of light, but put them all together and you’ve got magic.”  ― Wendelin Van Draanen, Flipped

This little lesson has stayed with me ever since and I never really fully understood what it meant when I first read it but I felt that unmistakable chill on my skin that told me it would change my life. I’m still in the process of absorbing its full meaning! But I must say, the fragments I understand of it are intensely beautiful.

And that meaning was also shared wonderfully in this video of the filmmaker Ken Burns about how stories should be told.

“You know the common story is one plus one equals two, we get it. But all stories are really, the real genuine stories, are about one and one equaling three. That’s what I’m interested in.

We live in a rational world where absolutely we’re certain that one and one equals two, and it does. But the things that matter most to us, some people call it love, some people call it God, some people call it reason, is that other thing where the whole is greater than the some of its parts, and that’s the three.” – Ken Burns

Ken Burns: On Story from Redglass Pictures on Vimeo.

You can read Brainpicker Maria Popova’s take on this video here.

Flipped has been adapted into a beautiful film by Rob Reiner on the year 2010. I recommend it as well.

Credits go to three of my cyberspace haunts

YouTube, Brain Pickings and Goodreads

Is life meaningful?

from National Geographic, Photograph by Marko Savic
“In a hidden street I found this cafe. It looked like a scenography for some movie. I loved the atmosphere and the pictures on the wall. The lighting was really dramatic, and the man with the cigar was in just the right place.”

Here I am, sharing my exam answers in the blogosphere! I’m going to leave for Pagudpud, Ilocos Norte tonight, where there will be no access to internet, until the end of holy week. I didn’t want to end March without me posting at least one thing of relevance! Here is what I have come up with for the past busy month full of exams, papers and preparation for an awesome dance concert.

For our final exam in my Philosophy class, we were asked:

1. Is life meaningful? Defend.

            Before I answer this question, I must first do my best to define meaning and life.

Does this paper have meaning? To a three-year-old child who finds this in the quest for something to draw on, it is a canvas for his or her imagination. To a pet lover walking his or her dog around a village and finds this paper while the dog is performing acts of cleansing, this paper will serve as something to keep the streets free from dog litter. But hopefully, to Sir Caslib and others who will read the letters and words that have been printed on this paper, this paper holds a good argument to prove that life is meaningful.

The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus says meaning is synonymous with significance, sense, value, usefulness, and worth. Meaning is made and created. Meaning is not an intrinsic quality of any object, or even any person. Meaning is fluid and arbitrary, it is something people decide to give or act on. Meaning-making is a human activity. As such, individuals have the power to give or withdraw meaning to or from anything, which is why the meaning of this paper changes for each person who finds it.

Since life is trickier to capture, let me share this anecdote from David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement Address called “This Is Water”.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”[1]

This is water; this is life. In academic institutions, we often say schooling is preparation for real life. Is this not real enough for you? We get so caught up in the whirl of school and business we forget we are already living! We are in the midst of life. Life might just pass us by too quickly if we don’t take notice of it.

Like everything else in the entire universe, life, intrinsically, has no meaning.  But, since, as human beings, we have the unique ability and natural tendency to give things reasons to exist, to seek answers for all our whys, we are what make life meaningful. So is life meaningful? It is, if you decide to make it so. Joseph Campbell said, “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.” Stephen Jay Gould, a science writer, agrees with John Campbell. He ruminates on life’s meaning through elaborating on the chances of having human life in the universe.

“The human species has inhabited this planet for only 250,000 years or so-roughly.0015 percent of the history of life, the last inch of the cosmic mile. The world fared perfectly well without us for all but the last moment of earthly time–and this fact makes our appearance look more like an accidental afterthought than the culmination of a prefigured plan.*

Moreover, the pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable. Human evolution is not random; it makes sense and can be explained after the fact. But wind back life’s tape to the dawn of time and let it play again–and you will never get humans a second time.

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher’ answer — but none exists. This explanation, though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating. We cannot read the meaning of life passively in the facts of nature. We must construct these answers ourselves — from our own wisdom and ethical sense. There is no other way.*“[2]

            This begs the question, so, what is the meaning of life? The three Greek Philosophers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, agree that virtue is something all humans should aim to have. They define virtue as excellence of function, this means fulfilling one’s purpose to one’s fullest capacity. Therefore, the meaning of life is living to one’s whole capacity. Being alive means being totally aware. Notice life, see the water, taste it, savor it, make love to it! Life is meant to be lived and to live fully means to have a full taste of all the facets of life. Aristotle also speaks about telos. the ultimate why or reason for being of an individual. He describes entelechy, which is the innate, natural drive in each individual to achieve telos. For humanity, that telos is eudaimonia. It is a full awareness of life by a fully functioning individual.

Henry Miller said much of the same thing in this beautiful and poetic quote.

“Strange as it may seem today to say, the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.* In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem. No why or wherefore, no direction, no goal, no striving, no evolving. Like the enigmatic Chinaman one is rapt by the everchanging spectacle of passing phenomena. This is the sublime, the a-moral state of the artist, he who lives only in the moment, the visionary moment of utter, far-seeing lucidity. Such clear icy sanity that it seems like madness. By the force and power of the artist’s vision the static, synthetic whole which is called the world is destroyed. The artist gives back to us a vital, singing universe, alive in all is parts.*“[3]

Living life gets hard to do. Sunday Morning Lyrics. Art by Janelle P.

2. What makes love figure in the existential question of the meaning of life?

            I have just talked about eudaimonia and the meaning of life. If eudaimonia is a full awareness of life by a fully functioning individual, where does love figure in it? Let me clarify now that when I speak of love, I speak not only of eros, but of love for family and friends and love for a passion, dream or advocacy as well, because while some manifestations of these different kinds of love may be different, they are all united in their main purpose. Love seeks to unite two individuals, may they be things, ideas or people.

Here is a poem that perfectly encapsulates this quality of love.

“Wondrous the Merge”

by James Broughton

Wondrous Wondrous the merge
Wondrous the merge of soulmates
the surprises of recognition
Wondrous the flowerings of renewal
Wondrous the wings of the air
clapping their happy approval

* * *

I severed my respectabilities
and bought a yellow mobile home
in an unlikely neighborhood
He moved in his toaster his camera
and his eagerness to become
my courier seed-carrier and consort

Above all he brought the flying carpet
that upholsters his boundless embrace
Year after year he takes me soaring
out to the ecstasies of the cosmos
that await all beings in love

One day we shall not bother to return

Based on Sir Caslib’s lectures, I have gathered that, according to Plato, people love because we desire to possess what’s beautiful and we desire it to last forever. In other words, people want to become better. And in an act of loving, we do become better. We expand our consciousness; we think outside of ourselves. So initially, what started out as a selfish reason to possess something that is good and beautiful becomes selfless because we start doing things for somebody or something that we love; in effect, we broaden our perspective of the world and of life. Love is a selfish choice that enables selfless giving.

When we love a friend, we do favors for them, we share stories with them, and we connect with them. When we love a special person, we do the same and even more because the sense of oneness is actualized in an act of making love. When we love an idea or are passionate about something, we focus our attention on it and see things in light of that love and naturally want to protect that love, so we are moved towards action to make sure it is preserved. Honestly, you can interchange the things I just said. All three are really interconnected and so fluid in their characteristics.

This expansion of the self when loving was described beautifully in Carljoe Javier’s essay, “The Grammar of Love”, in Wagas.

“In an act of love time dilates and we are, through loving, able to expand the universe, making it seem as if this one moment were a moment that could be held and stretched across time.…*

Performing acts of love allows us to expand our hearts, our selves, and the entire universe.* The act of loving allows us to connect, to transcend physical barriers and emotional turmoil. And in this we create a space in the universe, wholly our own, and shared only with the person we share this creation with….”[4]

No matter what kind of love you have in your life, the most beautiful thing about love is how it is simply uniting two individual things or people. It is a unity, a merging, something almost Buddhist and Daoist about how everything is one and the same. And perhaps, that is the natural human state–connection, unity, belongingness, acceptance, embrace, universality–which is why, I believe, loving is the paradigmatic manifestation of being human.

Being fully alive and aware is actualized in the act of loving because when we love, we risk our entire self, our time, our effort, our minds, our well being in our act of expansion for the receiver of our love. One of my favorite professors in the university, Ma’am Liway Ruizo, writes in Wagas,

“This is where I shall dare venture into the dangerous waters of theorizing:

That true love is for the brave. *

It is not for the tentative, the sacred. It is for the bold, the heroic, and yes, the reckless. It is not for those who are constantly afraid of heartbreak, who by reflex, are protective of themselves. It is not for those who have the habit of folding when confronted with the risk of losing it all. Not for those who are more fearful of rejection, than the regret that comes with not trying….

We embrace despite the fear of wounding ourselves with the thorns that they put up. We take them and let them in, these people we love, fully aware of the danger that they might not choose to stay.* We welcome them into our homes, our lives, when they just might rob us of what little we have, and leave a gaping space where they once were. We dare to make them feel what we really want them to feel, even when it might not be reciprocated. We partly, or wholly, relinquish our conditions and checklists, for the sake of making them feel that we love them for who they are, and not for who we wish they’d be.”[5]

Loving is living life with arms outstretched like our legendary Oblation. Love strips you of all your facades and leaves you naked and vulnerable. Loving is the only way to live life fully! When we love, that is when we fully open ourselves up to life and experience all its sorrows, joys, disappointments, mundanities and silliness in their purest essence. And yes, it is terrifying, it can be boring, it can be exciting, and it will hurt, but as Ma’am Ruizo ends her essay, “…the only other thing more terrifying than truly loving, is the going without.”⁵

from Brandon, creator of Humans Of New York blog
“I do yoga to get energy from the air.”

---

[1] Wallace, David Foster. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. New York City: Little, Brown and Company, 2005.

[2] Popova, Maria. “Charles Bukowski, Arthur C. Clarke, Annie Dillard, John Cage, and Others on the Meaning of Life by Maria Popova.” Brain Pickings. 09 17, 2012. http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/17/the-meaning-of-life/ (accessed 2012).

[3] Popova, Maria. “Henry Miller on Creative Death.” Brain Pickings. 12 07, 2012. http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/12/07/henry-miller-on-creative-death/ (accessed 12 2012).

[4] Javier, Carljoe. “The Grammar Of Love.” In Wagas and other tales, talks and takes on love, by Bernardo N. Caslib and Liway Czarina S. Ruizo, 90-91. Quezon City: Central Book Supply Inc., 2012.

[5] Ruizo, Liway Czarina S. “Terrified.” In Wagas and other tales, talks, and takes on love, by Bernardo N. Caslib and Liway Czarina S. Ruizo, 113-114. Quezon City: Central Book Supply Inc., 2012.

*bold and italics are all mine.

February Bites My Bum

Now, something a little more personal compared to my last post. 

I also apologize for the long gap between my two posts. Things just kind of got in the way–in a good way, if you catch my drift. Might share more about my life in the coming posts but now, I am simply going to share some thoughts about love, my non-existent love life and this photo of my parents during my half-brother’s wedding in Tagaytay Highlands.

It is February and love is in the air. When I was my high school paper’s Features Editor, I read an audition paper talking about Valentines’ Day as S.A.D., i.e., Single Awareness Day for the lonely ones (like me). That was the first time I ever heard Valentine’s day called as such!

When you’ve been single for as long as I have (since birth), you begin having thoughts along the lines of “What the heck is wrong with me?”, “Am I that ugly? Or unapproachable? Or intimidating?”. Or maybe that’s just me. I was stuck in this gooey state of longing for someone I can just always hug and adore the wits out of and bitterness at having no permanent companion slash hug buddy, but one good thing that came up during this month was my realization about what this blog should be best filled with! It’s not really so far from what I originally thought of but this helped make a jumping board for my ideas. Behold:

Behold the almost hackneyed, mushy, but still beautiful VERB called love.

Let me try to make this idea fresh to you again by inserting here two different ideas from my Professor in Philosophy, Bernardo Caslib and from one of the most charming writers in contemporary Philippine literature, Mr. Carljoe Javier.

My professor is working on his thesis about the Philosophy of Love and Sex. From his bonus lectures, I gathered how he is contemplating the WHY of love rather than what it is. From different fields of the social and hard sciences, there is enough evidence that love does exist and it is generally viewed as something beneficial. So now we can contemplate the reason it exists! Why do humans love?

According to Plato, we “love because of beauty.” The cause of love is to immortalize beauty, “the good”. When we love, we desire to possess beauty for ourselves for eternity. Loving is giving birth in beauty, giving birth in terms of the body and the soul. Physically, this is the cause of our reproduction and desire for beautiful bodies. Eventually we move up this “scale of love” and discover the beauty of souls, beauty of customs and ideas. On the other hand, being pregnant in the soul means exercising wisdom, moderation and justice. For the big three of ancient philosophy, namely, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, virtue is the excellence of function. It basically means fulfilling your purpose.

In not so philosophy-heavy words, we love because we desire beauty, in body and in soul. We want to be beautiful, whatever that means. And to be honest, I still do not perfectly understand all of this, but what I get from it is that we love because we want to be better! It all seems so selfish, but I think it is still true.

Delving into the deeper realm of metaphysics, there is something really interesting about the way humans are wired, which we also talked about in my Geography course. It seems that human beings are never satisfied. We always want more, which is why consumerism and the economy survives. We have all these “wants” we’ve turned into “needs”. And perhaps, when we love, we seek to fill in that void of emptiness that seems impossible to fill. No matter if that love is love for food, or love for someone else, or love of God, or love of dancing, we love because we seek to be complete, or to be better.

After talking about all the “WHY’S” of love, let’s move on to the HOW of love which is the second great idea I wanted to talk about. I read about this in Carljoe Javier‘s little essay called “The Grammar of Love”, which can be found in “Wagas”, a book edited by my Philosophy professor and my previous English professor, Ms. Liway Ruizo.

“‘What is love?’ ths slam book asks, and thus is framed, in our formative years, our approach to and perception of it. In asking what it is we find ourselves describing it, quantifying it….

The problem is we treat love like a noun. Notice that when asked, we find ourselves describing love. We use adjectives like kind, forgiving, everlasting, magical, and unconditional….

We treat it like a possession….We begin to apply ever-increasing pressures, when in certain relationships; because we believe that we are securing love building love, preparing that love to be thrust into the future….

We ask the ones we love, ‘How much do you love me?’ as if it were something that could be measured, as if we could employ a system that we could subject love to….

But it’s not the what or the how much of it that matters, but rather the how. This is an insight offered up by Daniel Handler in his novel Adverbs….

Love is a verb….And loving is an act that must be committed, repeated, and sustained. Love, as do all actions, exists not in the past but in the present. This means that when you love someone, you are loving them in the precise moment that you say it and in the specific acts that you do in the present to express said love.

…In an act of love time dilates and we are, through loving, able to expand the universe, making it seem as if this one moment were a moment that could be held and stretched across time.…

Performing acts of love allows us to expand our hearts, our selves, and the entire universe. The act of loving allows us to connect, to transcend physical barriers and emotional turmoil. And in this we create a space in the universe, wholly our own, and shared only with the person we share this creation with. And so it’s never a matter of finding, capturing and containing love. But rather it’s a matter of making love. It’s not something that we have, it’s something that we do. When we love, we should love not because of our pasts, or what we think is our future, but because we love that person in the present, and this present, through love, stretches out for as far as we can keep loving.”

I would like to add a sort of Platonic dualism to this concept though. Love is both a noun and a verb. As a noun, I believe it is patient passion, love is relentless. However, the actualization of love is not in it’s description, but rather in it’s practice. In order to be understood, love must be done.

That is why, in this blog, I want to explore love mainly in two ways: LOVE IN THEORY (as a noun) and LOVE IN PRACTICE (as a verb).

“Love in Theory” will include speculations and findings about love in the realm of the social sciences, literature and religion. Kind of like this post! This section will talk about love as a noun, it will deal with describing love, exploring what love is.

On the other hand, “Love in Practice” will contain things more like in the previous post about that interview with the amazing gay couple who’ve been together for almost 60 years. This section will contain love as practiced in friendship, in family, towards my main interests and hobbies like dancing, films, books and music. That means, I can post stuff that I am actively loving at the present, sharing with you good music, good books, good films or good lessons from strangers!

However, I do understand that these two parts of love overlap and seem to be kind of like the inseparable yin and yang of Daoism. One cannot exist without the other. But then again this distinction (I hope) will help organize all my posts in the blog and make it easier to understand the different categories inside it.

How else can we live but to love?

Let me leave you with a book spine poem from one of my favorite blogs in the cyberspace!

A working theory of love by Maria Popova from brainpickings.org

Lessons we can learn from 60 years of love and commitment between a gay couple

Eric Marcoux, left, and Eugene Woodworth, photographed in Chicago in 1955 by photographer Jo Banks, have been a couple for almost 60 years.

“You know, we all have closets to come out of. They’re all different, but you have to find out what your closet is and come out. Before that, you’re not a whole person.”

Eric Marcoux and Eugene Woodworth were interviewed by The Oregon and shared some deep, good, and true insights about the beauty of love and commitment that transcends romantic love for another. Woodworth shares something that touched this writer personally as well. Maybe we all deserve a little more love for ourselves by stripping off each protective layer we have put up to look invincible to the rest of the world. I believe we all flounder on being vulnerable to ourselves, because we each are our own greatest critics. Then we get stuck in the gutter of our own fantasy of misery and never have the chance to share who we really are to other people.

 

Q: What’s the biggest lesson about love and partnership you’ve learned along the way?

Woodworth: It never lets up.

Marcoux: To be more gentle toward my own vulnerabilities and to his inadequacies, because they disappoint him as well as me. Oh, that didn’t make any sense at all.

Woodworth: You never were worried about disappointing me.

Marcoux: Oh, God, I’m going to leave him right now. May I get a ride?

Woodworth: Yeah, teasing is part of it.

Eric Marcoux, right, and Eugene Woodworth still together in 2013

Marcoux: It’s worth the effort. In the form of Buddhism we practice there’s a real emphasis on what we call Buddha nature. It refers to our innate goodness. There’s wisdom and compassion there, and we can be utterly cruel because we haven’t learned to recognize it. When you really get that you have Buddha nature in yourself and so do others, when we begin to get a kind of radical respect for the other person’s strengths and weaknesses, and our own, we can afford to be loving and friendly toward them.

Woodworth: Tied to that is a continual coming out to each other. Whatever it is that we suddenly discover in ourselves, we share. And just coming out basically as a gay person. It is something that builds respect and friendship with other people outside our circle. Even people who aren’t allies at the moment become allies because of our honesty. You know, we all have closets to come out of. They’re all different, but you have to find out what your closet is and come out. Before that, you’re not a whole person. You really aren’t.

Marcoux: Sharing our vulnerabilities and being willing to be vulnerable, when it’s not going to get you shot or beat up right on the spot. Once you get to doing that, it can become a demanding habit but a really good habit. It’s incredible and liberating.

Woodworth: When we come out of our own closest, other people do too.

This is an excerpt from The Oregonian Article

Other posts that feature this interview:

• A Love Story: For 60 years ‘There Wasn’t Anything Else’ (dgsmith.org)
• Gay Portland Couple Celebrates 60 Years Together, Gets Awesome Interview in ‘The Oregonian’ (towleroad.com)