Nothing and Not Much
"Everybody in every galaxy is busy observing and measuring everything, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, there is a secret only Nugkta and I know: that everything time and space contains is no more than the little that was generated from nothingness, the little that is and that might very well not be, or even smaller, even more meagre and perishable. And whether for good or for ill, it is because the only thing we could say is this: poor, frail universe, born of nothing, all we are and do resembles you. "-Italo Calvino
dumaguete deluge
Insights do come in the weirdest ways: leftovers on my dinner
plate, a crevice along the road, looking at the car’s speedometer reading a little over 80 kph , and as of late while skimming through, of all things, a transcription of a crappy telenovela. (Enlightenment though, didn’t leap from some
line in the script or Joyce’s stream of consciousness, not even Eliot’s catalyst; it must have been the space-out mode that did it.) I just came back from Dumaguete yesterday, and I have yet to digest the entire experience when a sudden realization hits me: that Dumaguete taught me how to live out what philosophy I was trying to impart in one story I had in the workshop. “Easy does it,” as Robert Frost himself told Mom Edith Tiempo. I have always loved Manila, and still do for that matter, but lately I just feel like my attempt to catch up with the fast pace is futile.
***
Zhuang Zi’s dream of being a
butterfly and then wondering which life is real is happening to me. Who am I really, in this gigantic city among Pound’s mere apparition of faces? Back to automaton mode, I can’t help but think that the past three weeks may have well been my entire life for all I know.
