Rape is Rape, Whichever Way We Look at It

In Answer to the Article, “Fr. Reuter presents the ‘other side’ of the Accused”

To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, nowadays, crime does not happen in dark, seedy alleys by suspicious-looking gangsters. It happens in well-lighted offices by neat-looking men in crisp shirts with clean fingernails. This is what makes evil all the more alluring, and harder to detect. In real life, an obvious distinction of what good and bad really looks like doesn’t exist. This is the lesson we get, looking at the clean shaven and even –let’s say it—good-looking soldiers in the Subic rape case. Of course they would have clean cuts –they are soldiers. Of course they would look good to us, for all the brainwashing that tells us white is beautiful and all the Hollywood movies that makes us judge beauty based on Caucasian superstars, why wouldn’t they?

This argument is dangerous however, because it recalls the horrifying logic that some people had regarding the Visconde massacre. Since Hubert Webb is rich and good looking—with a lot of girls even crushing on him during the rape case, he could not possibly be guilty.
This is also reminiscent of the case of Bishop Bacani’s secretary, who accused him of sexual harassment. She was being discredited because she was ‘homely.’ “She’s not even beautiful, she’s not even sexy, why would a distinguished priest take interest in her?” people asked.
Rape, however, does not chose appearances –the victim’s or the rapist’s. The victim will not always look like an alluring princess caught in a high tower, and the devil will not always have dirty hair, sinister eyes, and horns to match. Rape is not a crime of lust or passion, we have to understand. It is first and foremost a crime of aggression and it chooses no one –whether beautiful, desirable or not. Rape is about domination. The thrill one gets out of it is the kick of establishing power.
Just because the rapist has a “tame appearance,” is “gentle and soft-spoken,” celebrates birthdays, and/or has a family, as the article “Fr. Reuter presents the ‘other side’ of the accused” shows, does not mean they are incapable of misdeeds or heinous crimes. Fr. James Reuter, a conservative, albeit well-respected Jesuit, says that “media should ‘balance the picture’ by interviewing and getting to know the suspects even for a brief moment.” He after all, exclaiming his bias as the men’s adviser, “likes them personally.” Thus marks the beginning of the personality wars campaign.
But as one lawyer of the case said: “The public should know that even though they look like tame puppies, they raped and abused a Filipina, treated her like a pig, and threw her on the road. That is what they did. Let’s not be fooled by looks.” We are called to re-evaluate and break our stereotypes, realizing that injustice comes in many guises.

We should remember that it’s the victim that is on the losing end. That is why she is called the victim. It is not at all imbalanced to focus on the woman simply because she is the one wronged. In fact, in these cases, we should believe the woman precisely because it has taken helluva lot of guts for her to even come out to a skeptical world and proclaim what these men did against her.


Therefore, the fact that these soldiers are portrayed as “depressed,” emotionally troubled, religious men in the article should not easily win us over. Rape is a serious accusation. An 80 year old American priest of high stature ‘liking’ these soldiers should not divert public focus against what these men really did, or are accused of doing.

What happens in this country, as in all patriarchal societies, however, is that it is the woman that is made to prove her ‘innocence’ and ‘purity.’ It is as if she is the one tried and at fault. Her character, her habits and her work is scrutinized: “she is a prostitute,” “she wanted it,” “why did she even drink with them?” Her accusers, on the other hand, are presented as clean and meek lambs. Now that is the imbalance. Now that is utilizing media for propaganda.

In fact, during the American occupation, history books are careful to print pictures of American soldiers together with Filipino babies or children, so as to present an air of superiority. “Here we are, your big brothers, out to take care of you poor helpless Filipinos who wouldn’t know how to govern without us.” This is the power of pictures and media to capture imagination. These American soldiers are once again using propaganda against us, to deny the truth of the violence of their invasion. They are using Fr. Reuter’s seal of approval together with his reputation as a dignified Christian leader so that we can turn a blind eye to what they have been accused of doing. Sure, have a catechism for the accused. They deserve to repent their ways. Sure, give therapy to the rapists, they need all the spiritual guidance they can get. In the end, we all have to face our maker and for the things we have committed, anyway. But meanwhile, here on earth, let’s remember to strive for a balanced justice by opting to side with the disadvantaged, not forgetting who that really is.

Men are not the victims of women out to seduce them. It does not matter how clean shaven or ‘family oriented’ they are. We must go beyond our conception of the woman as ‘Eve.’ The woman is not an evil temptress. No means no and everyone has a responsibility to uphold that.
Indeed, let us realize the “imbalance” of the distribution of power here. Our first responsibility is to give justice to this Filipina woman, who, too, has a human face, a loving family, a birthday and a name, but who also stands for every woman who has been violated and dared to fight it. Nicole, our deepest sympathies to you.

I can’t begin to say how infinite I feel, as though I were one of many a weightless absence touches, and out of this strange transformation: the soul ringed with changes, as old as a tree, as old as light.
I am always learning the same thing: there is no other way to live than this: still, grateful, and full of longing.

--Eric Gamalinda
Untitled by Peter Meinke,

this is a poem to my son Peter
whom I have hurt a thousand times
whose large and vulnerable eyes
have glazed in pain at my ragings
thin wrists and fingers hung
boneless in despair, pale freckled back
bent in defeat, pillow soaked
by my failure to understand.
I have scarred through weakness
and impatience your frail confidence forever
because when I needed to strike
you were there to hurt and because
I thought you knew
you were beautiful and fair
your bright eyes and hair
but now I see that no one knows that
about himself, but must be told
and retold until it takes hold
because I think anything can be killed
after a while, especially beauty
so I write this for life, for love, for
you, my oldest son Peter, age 10 going on 11.

The House of Glances: La Casa de La Mirada


The heart is an eye.
You are in the house of glances.
Two mirrors have hidden
All their ghosts.

Your eye is a hand,
Your hand has five eyes,
Your glance has two hands.

We must repopulate the house of the eyes.

You come and go between the
infinity outside, and your own infinity.

There are animals, planets, beings in your neurons.

To love:
To open the forbidden door, the passageway
That takes us to the other side of time.

The moment:

The opposite of death
Our fragile eternity.

To love is to lose oneself in time.
To be a mirror among mirrors.


To say what you want to say, you must create another language and nourish it for years and years, with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again

George Sefaris



The meaning of existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or conversely, I am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer for otherwise, I am dependent upon the world’s answer.

Carl Jung


Everything here is a spinning in the circle. The question is how and in what way we can face this circle, instead of continually closing our eyes in the face of it.

Nietzsche


A prophet is a historian looking forward, a historian, a prophet looking backwards.

Nietzsche

Even a thought, a possibility can shatter and transform us

Nietzsche

Live in such a way that you wish to live again, you will do so in any case!

Nietzsche

You must learn to look at the world twice. From each droplet of rain on the grass so you can see smoke rising from an anthill in a sunshine. Nothing should escape your notice. But you must also learn to look again at the very edge of what is visible. Now you must see dimly if you which to see things which are dim visions, mist and cloud people, and animals which hurry past you in the dark. You must learn to at the world twice if you wish to see all there is to see...


Native American Saying
Jamake Highwater

If you’ve found your voice it will resonate in your body, it will resonate in your dreams.

Unknown


We don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.

Satchel Paige

We are lies that always tell the truth.




The experience of surprise is a sign of one’s readiness to grow. Amazement and wonder signify that one’s concepts of self and of the world and of other people are ready to be re-formed. When we can be dumdfounded at what comes out of us or what others are capable of disclosing, we are growing persons.

Sidney Jourard


The best anti-depressants are expression and action. That way our depression is not an end but a meaningful beginning.

Marilyn Ferguson



Perhaps the only choice we have is what to do with our dead: To die when they die. To live crippled. Or to forge, out of pain and memory, new adaptations. Through mourning we acknowledge that pain –live past it. Through mourning we let the dead go and take them in. Through mourning we come to accept the difficult changes that loss must bring –and then we begin to come to the end of mourning.

Judith Voirst

If you are a true artist, if you are a true warrior, face your biggest shadow. Behind that lies your greatest creativity!

Unknown


Whenever we block pain, we also block pleasure. Repression keeps us from knowing how warped our perceptions are, how much more alive we could be to joy and excitement.
Arthur Janov

The world is the way you see it because if it were different –you would not be here otherwise.

Metaphysics

Whatever we deny, denigrate or despise serves to defeat us in the end.



If we seek ultimate order or ultimate chaos, we create a monster.

Fred Alan Wolf



Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans.

John Lennon

Those who fear death are those who enjoy life least.

Edward Abbey


We live in the body of our conscious and unconscious stories. The stories are hypnotic narratives about attachment to others; identity, personality, and the experience of the world… We story our lives to give them meaning, understand the past, and predict the future. Sometimes, the story offers a wasteland of pain and suffering, a narrative without hope that points toward future alienation. Sometimes, the story offers medicine for what was lost or never found when we were young.

Carol Kershaw


The universe is a story. It’s not a place, it’s an event.

Brian Swimme

We remember sadness so that we can ignite and enhance life. What we eventually discover in our passionate remembering of the galactic, terrestrial, biological and human stories is that a study of the universe is a study of the self.

Brian Swimme

If you are a true artist, if you are a true warrior, face your biggest shadow. Behind that lies your greatest creativity!

Human writing reflects that of the universe. It is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing.

Octavio Paz

I am, therefore I continue.

Theodore Roethke

Newspaper/magazine Articles

SAMPLE WRITING
On EDSA 2

Memory and Forgetting: A Look at the People Power Revolution

“In this world, everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything is cynically permitted.”

--Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera’s novel tackles Nietzche’s idea of eternal return: ‘Everything recurs as we once experienced, and that a life, which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful or sublime, its horror, beauty and sublimity mean nothing, altering nothing in the destiny of the world.’ The idea of eternal return, he says, implies a perspective from which things appear other that we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. ‘This mitigating circumstance is what prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia.’

In the much previously celebrated but now almost always neglected People Power revolution, we find proof of these sayings. This monumental event, precisely because of its historical value, was so implanted in our consciousness that remembering it meant rekindling a lost patriotism found in those days. Not focusing on the horror of Martial Law, it was viewed upon by so many others, myself included, as a fond reminder of a passage in time that would never return.

I never knew about Marcos. I was too young to comprehend what was happening when it was happening. My understanding came later. So I perceived the many injustices committed by him against the Filipinos not as tremendous monstrosity, but as something that was meant, if only for the revolution to be possible.

Many critics say we Filipinos forget too easily. Just a couple of years later the Marcoses are in power again. If true, it is perhaps because we have forgiven. If time is a circle, then cynically, the future pardons everything that has ever happened in the past because its existence owes itself to it, however dark it may be. If we have not had a tyrannical dictator, we would not have had People Power. Where then would this peaceful revolution, the only one of its kind in the world, and the epitome of our patriotism and source of our national pride, have come?

Since history will always be recorded, however neglected it may be, it will always be relived. Under the process, it will gain a multitude of meanings and interpretations. It will become heavy with associations and scrutiny. Ages will come to wonder: “how could my life have changed if this never happened?” and despite how much they may theorize or complain, they will owe their existence to it, because, having only one life to lead, there is no reality save that very one which has created them. “We see things the way they are because if they were different, we would not be here to see it otherwise,” the science of quantum physics says.

This quantum science also tells us that it is the person’s ‘belief or disbelief that either confirms or precludes the existence of the issue in the observer’s reality, although this ability to control our reality through our perception and actions towards it, is in fact a communal undertaking.’ History is constantly and ultimately reinvented by each action of every human being. This tells us that if we have a government we despise, it is only because we have fostered it, just as if we exist in a world we hate, it is only because we have succumbed to it.

To forget history means to have no history at all. Without history, life has no pattern and context, and it is removed from being part of any ‘greater scheme.’ It is a life that cannot recur, dead in advance, meaning nothing and altering nothing.

Is this, then, why we constantly end up in the same tragedies? Years after the massive struggle of People Power I, The Marcoses and his cronies are in power again. Years after the passion that inflamed People Power II, Loi Ejercito is senator and Erap is threatening to be released. The Ozone tragedy, the Ultra tragedy, and all the other tragedies we could have avoided with a little foresight –all stem from a lack of hindsight, a lack of insight into what needs to be done as counseled by the wisdom of the past.

Take, for example, the recent Leyte landslide—how many times within just this decade, has trash or the earth swallowed our countrymen alive? What an appropriate metaphor for our collective memory. We remember for a while, and then cover up the trauma –eventually leading to an avalanche. That is why life in this country isn’t one tragedy after another. It is one tragedy over and over. Corrupt jailed leaders coming back to power after a long hard struggle of ousting them, the treatment of women and the poor as animals –all these are nothing new.

Some say our forgetfulness is the source of our happiness. We are one of the top 10 happiest countries in the world despite the poverty, a survey says. Some say our forgetfulness can be the source of our forgiveness. It’s gotten so that we allow the guilty, who we shouldn’t even be allowing to roam freely, off the hook. More than that, however, our forgetfulness can be the source of our martyr-like tolerance for living the same bad thing over and over again when what we desperately need is change.

Our forgetfulness is obviously not serving us anymore. True forgiveness and retribution comes from remembering, from reliving. True happiness comes from knowing the past is in its rightful place. The past isn’t something we overcome, but something we build on, something we, at the very least, learn from—the ashes of our failure, rising up to the phoenix of whatever remaining hope we can muster. And memory –memory is a recourse that promises pessimism of the intellect but an optimism of the will. We mustn’t allow ourselves the luxury of forgetting.

These recent events, engraved in our consciousness, will, pray God, grow heavy in collective memory into what Nietzsche calls “the heaviest of burdens,” the weight and the responsibility we have to give the past meaning, to give it ka-hulugan.

Our nostalgia is often either our saving or dooming aspect. We base our judgment not considering the future, but always in light of the rivers of the past. Always seeking familiarity instead of the unknown is perhaps what keeps us from progress, but it also simultaneously allows us to correct the same mistake twice.

The future will either recall this era as the catalyst that helped us pick ourselves up from the overwhelming mountain of decay and catastrophe constantly threatening to bury us alive, or the start of the unending erosion of memory that will constantly steal our life and our rights away from us. It all depends on the now. The now for which the past flows into, and the future springs from, in an eternally static river we can never step in twice.

History is a paradox. We are its slaves as much as its masters. In eluding it, we find ourselves jerked by its chains. In forgetting it, we find ourselves reliving it. But in acknowledging it, we find ourselves released it, as taking part in the past is the only way to really dwell in the present. In respecting it, we cease to be haunted by it, finally learning to face the future bravely, as a harvest that is meant to arrive from the seeds of what we planted.

Character Profiles

These two profiles were printed in 2bu! June 1, 2005. F4, F2 respectively

Fashionable Advocacy

Luck is when opportunity meets the prepared. Some may say that Chiara Castaneda, or Kissa, has simply been ‘born’ lucky…but that’s not it at all. Readiness for opportunity is something this 22 year old has been honing her entire life with her philosophy of openness and receptivity. “I am a very open person. I look at people as people, not as a white person or black person…” Not believing in ethnocentricism, she says her mantra is to always “suppress my stereotypes and first impressions. I try to make sure to give everybody a chance.” She tolerates, nay, encourages diversity and uniqueness in people and things around her. A world class traveler and globe trotter – she says she “still cannot get rid of that travel bug” even though she has been to over 15 countries. Her itch to go far and wide also extends to an unquenchable intellectual curiosity and an immense desire to leave nothing unattempted…

Openness, Receptivity and Synchronicity

So when her classmate in UP came up to her asking if she wanted to try entering Ritsumeikan University in Japan, she was naturally game for it. And after having been accepted with 100% tuition scholarship, this adventurous soul jumped at the chance to be able to be on her own. It was not that she had set out with dreams of grandeur in being a big achiever in Japan. “I just followed what I wanted,” she modestly explains, –but what she had actually accomplished was greater than expected.

Since then, she has been awarded the UMAP Scholarship, the Oita Government Scholarship, the ANDO Momofuku Scholarship as well as the Tokushukai Scholarship.

Ritsumeikan University, fostering international relations and emphasizing links between countries widened her already comprehensive view of the world and reinforced her belief in the appreciation of diversity as well as the power of interaction to enhance self-growth. Any trouble adjusting to such a new environment was minimized by the fact that “the school didn’t make you feel like an outsider. It felt like we were a community people who just happened to be learning together… It was a family.” The University’s hospitality coupled by Kissa’s candidness and energy soon became a free-flowing, mutually beneficial exchange that led her to eventually be presented the President’s Award come graduation time, March 2005. The award is a recognition of the highest honor created to acknowledge not just academic excellence but also relevant extracurricular activities that left a mark in the school. People like Kissa pumped life and fun into what would otherwise just be the plain concrete walls and classrooms of the University.





Work Hard, Play Even Harder

Kissa believes that there is more to learn outside the four corners of the classroom and beyond the pages of required readings. So while making sure to study and work hard, she also made sure to have fun with the same vigor –something she believes life is worthless without. “What would the world be without fun? Most of the things I did were fun, light but also relevant,” she says, proving that it’s not what you do but the way you do it.

In her four year stay in Japan, she managed to juggle her very busy social life while being Lifestyle editor of their online paper, publicizing and participating in the DJ workshop club, sometimes simultaneously working part-time as a teaching assistant. She also helped direct Kumon camps for children, and was one of the founders of the Bayanihan Filipino dance troupe, all the while learning to read and speak Japanese fluently and managing to be competent in Spanish enough to win first place in the University wide Spanish Speech contest held in 2002. Aside from having accomplished all of this in such a limited time frame, what is an even greater feat is that she still managed to maintain a grade average of 3.2 and above (4 being the highest). Her numerous sleepless nights paid off as in as the fall semester of 2003, her GPA reached a whopping 3.8, leading to the Dean’s Prize, an honor for the top achievers of each semester. An ultimate multi-tasker and constant overachiever, she is a staunch advocate of living a balanced life. “Life is too short not to fulfill one’s dream,” she says.

Writing Since 8

Looking back, she believes that these achievements weren’t abnormal feats but merely the effect of her extending and applying herself.

With writing and cultural studies being her long time fascination, she along with several others formed their school’s first ever on line newspaper –APU Boundless. She served as its Lifestyle Editor—writing and designating topics about fashion, food, music, events and basically life in APU. The culture and travel articles, as well as the expression of APU’s distinct culture is highly relevant for APU, being a one of a kind school that serves as a melting pot of diverse nationalities “We’ve had student summits discussing global issues, we’ve had business venture competitions, and we even had our very own APU Olympics. But something related to the arts, fashion, media or lifestyle? Nada, zilch, zero. Not until now… I am very happy to be founding team of this circle for I was able to contribute and leave a legacy just doing what I love, writing.”

APU-Boundless revolutionized life in APU and served as a stable and reliable resource material as well an outlet that builds a sense of community while allowing its contributors to hone their writing skills


Women and Fashion

Kissa enjoyed her 2 year stint as lifestyle editor immensely. It’s what made her decide that she really wanted to go into writing as a career. She is particularly interested in fashion because it was a portable art, reflecting the larger culture out there. “I wanted to write about something light but relevant…”

She also believes that fashion is a pertinent avenue for women to express themselves. “I think it’s amazing for women to be mothers, bosses and workers, aunts and companions, all at the same and yet even with these multiple roles, still manage to look good and give attention to detail,” Kissa relates in regards to her own fashionista mother, whom she describes as her best friend and idol.

She also learned to be interested in humanitarian and women’s causes through her mom, who has infused her with the self same liberal and assertive character. As a descendant of Gabriela Silang’s matriarchal line, this very family oriented girl relates that she first learned to be attuned to women’s issues at home. “I grew up in an environment where women were very independent and take charge, so when I discovered that this was not the case elsewhere –I became interested in the roots of this inequality and starting looking into women’s rights.”

Kissa’s interest in women’s studies led her to represent her school as a UN delegate for the UN Study Program, as well as to do her thesis on the lie of the impossibly “perfect woman’ as foisted by a certain women’s magazine.

She recently took a fashion journalism course in London’s Central St. Martin’s School of design. Instead of opting to stay in Japan where she stands to earn a lot of money in big corporations, she chose to come back to the Philippines to be with her family and work as a fashion writer in Preview—one of her favorite magazines. She is now having a blast writing about fashion and attending parties and events connected to it. Kissa also plans to publish a book by 25.

And More

Even though she openly states that media and writing are her first love, she also romances business on the side –reading as much books as she could find on marketing and branding, fields she also has extensive knowledge of. Kissa wants to be a full-fledged entrepreneur in the near future, and dreams of becoming a TV host. Highly Proficient in Japanese and competent in Spanish, she’s now trying to learn a new language –this time, French. Indeed, if ‘to be young is to always keep beginning’ this free spirit definitely won’t age with a life full of multiplicity and diversity like her many achievements and talents. Proof that success comes with following what you love and that meaning and substance can come with fun and vitality.



A Passion for the Stage, for Life



Milan Kundera once said that: “We come to our chosen professions not by calculation or coincidence but by a deep inner desire. In so far as it possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity.”
On that note, we can say that Missy Maramara’s title as an ‘actress’ is she something she deserves down to the last letter. By ‘acting’ here, I don’t mean to say deceiving people or putting on false appearances. On the contrary, Missy has always
emphasized that acting “should always be honest. It should be. Otherwise, the audience would not understand, cause if you don’t understand or you don’t feel it, then how are they gonna feel it? How are they gonna get the message? It’s your emotions carrying it to the reader. It has to be clear to you what the message is and your own personal character. [It] has to begin with you. Otherwise they wont be able to emphatize, they wont be able to feel.”
Missy explains her understanding of the art of drama from its Latin root word which means “to do” –and in so doing, become. Acting isn’t just a profession but a way of life for this 24 year old thespian, teacher and artist. It’s an avenue for connecting to people as well as experiencing and comprehending the world. “I wouldn’t be able to understand the world if I don’t understand it the way I do, through theatre –you can study it in books you can read articles, but when you live it on stage, not just do pure technique but you live it… then andami mo talagang nabibigay. And I guess nabibigay ko naman sa kanila yung nagagawa ko sa teatro. Sana.” ( “Then you really have a lot to offer. And I guess I do give to people what I accomplish in theatre. Hopefully.”)

Missy Maramara has put on enthralling performances in numerous and wide ranging roles. She has portrayed Lysistrata in the play of the same title, Tisbea in “Don Juan,” Katherine in “Taming of the Shrew,” Sara in “Stop! Kiss,” Woman 1 and Babae 3 in The Vagina Monologues, (the English and Filipino version), and The Princess of France in “Love’s Labors Lost,” to name only a few. All her hard work in these plays as well as her work as director in Rene Villanueva's Awit ng Adarna with street children and Usaping Puki -- College Campaign in Blue with Ateneans, garnered her the Loyola School's 9th Dean's Awards for the Arts in Theater.
One of the first graduates of the Theater Arts Program in 2002, she served as a pioneer of the Fine Arts Festival in the Loyola Schools and has been its director for the past two years.
Aside from acting for ABSCBN soaps and being an active alumna of Tanghalang Ateneo, she has also acted for professional theater companies such as Tanghalang Pilipino (CCP), Dulaang Unibersidad ng Pilipinas and Monique Wilson’s New Voice Company.
Sensitive to gender issues and determined to make her mark in the University, Missy Maramara was part of a group of students who pushed for the controversial showing of the acclaimed feminist play, “The Vagina Monologues” in the Ateneo.
Its no wonder that this innovative artist fit right in under Monique Wilson’s progressive New Voice Company, known for having brought hit shows discussing relevant gender and social issues such as Angels In America, Chess the musical, Top Girls, Rent, Falsettos, The Vagina Monologues, Stones in His pockets and Cabaret.

Stop!Kiss

One of Maramara’s most memorable performances was when she starred as Sara in NVC’s restaging of “Stop! Kiss” in Republic of Malate. Diana Son’s “Stop!Kiss” is a play about two women who meet and, feeling a growing attraction towards one another, kiss. This kiss leads to a fierce gay bashing that causes Sara to fall into a coma, in wonderfully woven script that speaks about the tenderness of homosexual affection and the violence of homophobia. It’s a play that the Philippine lesbian community is grateful for, for helping combat the oppressive stereotypes and closed mindedness of hetero-patriarchy.

“Stop Kiss calls on us to be aware of what’s happening. It shows us how it really is. It’s about people falling in love and accepting who they are. Kasi when people don’t understand and don’t want to understand they become violent and kawawa naman the people who just want peace and quiet,” Missy explains. “You have to be very open-minded because plays nowadays tackle issues that are very real, very important but we chose to ignore. Ignorance is our worst enemy in the Philippines –kaya tayo mahirap ay dahil wala tayong edukasyon na matino –kung di naman kulang.”
Missy fervently believes in the curative power of theatre to educate people and enhance critical thinking, while at the same time instilling idealism and opening minds.
She quotes her Dulaang Sibol mentor, Onofre Pagsanghan in saying “‘If you’re not going to teach them idealism now, when else will they learn?’ “So we have to teach them what social justice means, what gender equality means now,” Maramara concludes.

Spunky Characters

This Miriam College High School alumnae relates that it was during her stint in Dulaang Sibol as ‘Lady Macbeth’ that her mind opened up to the possibilities of theatre. “That when I confirmed that that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So I went into Ateneo with theatre arts as my first choice.”
But even though Macbeth was the first classic Maramara has done, she recalls that she had been into theatre as early as five years old. “In Kinder, we had a school play… we had auditions for Cinderella and I thought I was gonna be Cinderella and I was so happy because the teacher said ‘very good’ but apparently, [she cast me] as the step sister. But I enjoyed the role so much more than if I were Cinderella, ” Maramara remembers with a chuckle. “Ever since then, those were the characters I liked playing—the ones with spunk.”

Even though our talented theatre actors are not as patronized as much as one would hope and monetary compensation in the field does not amount to very much, Missy finds that she simply cannot do without the high she gets from acting.
“It’s my life force. I can’t imagine not doing theatre. I explode when I don’t do theatre. I get so depressed. I get jealous of everyone else whose performing. I do it because it’s me. It’s a large part of me. People have to keep reminding me, you’re in play, and I’m like, who said I’m in a play? I’m not performing it’s just me.” Of course, Missy believes that a large part of technique and method is also involved in acting. She stresses the importance of textual analysis and research –skills that are of great use to her as a teacher as well.


Passionate Communicator

As a lecturer in the Ateneo De Manila English Department Missy believes that her talent for performing greatly enhances her skill for teaching. With extensive experience in captivating her audience, she makes sure to always keep her students interested in the lessons.
“I don’t like students to be bored with my performance –so same goes with teaching. Since I want them to learn, they shouldn’t be bored, otherwise they won’t learn…I use theatre skills to keep them awake and surprise the all the time ,to make them laugh, to make them cry –to bring their emotions to the extreme –and then you process [the experience].”
Missy also recounts that being in the field of theatre and the academe mutually benefits one another. She relates that teaching has helped her better process her acting experiences by giving a logical flow to her understanding of it. It has helped her to be better organized in regards to her performances.

As part of her role as educator in Miriam College, facilitating drama workshops and directing the annual plays also provides her with new challenges. “Directing is a whole different experience from acting—when you’re acting, you’re just thinking of yourself, but when you’re directing you’re thinking of other people.”
The deep empathy and sensitivity she derives from being an actress is also a much needed trait in directing. “Acting helps you understand people so sa directing natutulungan ko din sila to understand people.”
Missy Maramara is set to direct another socially relevant, feminist play in the near future.

Important Message

Maramara is great advocate of the brilliant and unique heritage of Philippine drama. “The Filipinos are an artsy crowd, they love performance, they love dances, plays. Sayang lang kasi hindi nasusuportahan yung art –music, painting ---ang galing galing ng Pinoy. But the talents are forced to go abroad because no one supports them here.”

Despite the undervalued state of theatre in the country, Missy Maramara is a living testament that going into acting and following your passion is absolutely worth it. The road is tough, but the adversity you have to overcome builds character and fuels drive.
Her advice to would be thespians: “You really have to want it. If you don’t want it, its not gonna go anywhere. Be in for the art, for yourself, not for vanity, not for pride, not for money—cause its not gonna get you any of it. If it does, lucky you. Thank God for it. God is good. But otherwise, hindi yun eh. Maraming roles na pangit ka, maraming roles na maganda ka. kung gusto mo lang na maganda ka wala kang magagawa. You really have to be honest and love it for what is.”

So how does this eternally energetic soul juggle her time between acting, teaching, directing, taking her Masters in Literary and Cultural Studies, and having an active social life? She says you just have to “take it one day at a time. Know where you wanna go and take the first step.”

And sure enough, the countless steps this tireless surveyor has taken, has already taken her very far, enough for prominent writer and columnist Danton Remoto to call her “one of the most talented theatre artist in the country today.” Still, it looks like this young, up and coming actress has her eyes set on going the distance.

On Comic Books

The incredible shrinking superheroes

First posted 04:04am (Mla time) Oct 13, 2004
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page E3 of the October 13, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
FANTASY is a commentary on life. In giving us the precious distance of make-believe, it provides a clearer picture of where we are and where we are headed.
Superhero comics, like the "Kingdom Come" series by Mark Waid and Alex Ross, are direct spawns of that need for fantasy in our lives.
"Kingdom Come" is a unique comic book in that it shows us the evolution of the classic DC heroes-Superman, Wonderwoman, Batman, among others-in a postmodern, cynical world. It's a comic book that looks at the medium itself and shows us how these superheroes become aware of the attention bestowed on them by the human race, sometimes with disheartening results.
A scene shows how degraded the symbolic significance of these heroes have become, with workaday waiters and waitresses dressed as Wonderwoman, Green Lantern, the Flash, etc. In this version of the world, the old glory of the legendary superheroes has lost its shine, with Superman and many others retiring and fading away into myth.

Others like Flash and the Hawkman continue to do their good deeds secretly. And while these superheroes of old are dying, they are being replaced with more hip, modern and flashy metahumans and anti-heroes-a sign, perhaps, of the changing social norms
Other






Mythic significance
In his prime, Superman had always wielded immense political, psychological and mythic significance. The story of how Superman's parents sent him to earth to save him from the destruction of Krypton has always spoken to the American consciousness because it speaks of the main themes that characterize the American experience-immigration and integration.
It speaks as well to the Filipino mindset for perhaps the same reason, and also because of the large impact of American colonialization and globalization on us.
Superman's appeal eventually became universal because of its religious undertones, with Superman standing in for Moses, Christ, or other deliverers. As Moses was sent down the river on a basket, so too was Superman sent hurtling on a basket-like spaceship to Earth.
As Christ was raised by Mary and Joseph, two simple folks, so too was Superman discovered by humble farming parents and raised as their own. Sacrifice, selflessness, strength and rebirth are key themes of hero mythologies, but in Superman they find specificity as this superhero "fights for truth, justice and the American way."
But these days, people no longer seem to want 'gentle and old-fashioned' superheroes like Superman to face the challenges of the 21st century. They want their heroes meaner and more complex, with good and evil sketched in various shades of gray rather than in the previously comforting black and white.
Subtle similarities
As Samuel Jackson's character in "Unbreakable" observes, comic heroes often share many similarities with their arch villains. In fact, they are usually friends, the better to highlight their subtle similarities amid the dramatic contrasts.
However, as these characters become more knotted and multidimensional, the good and bad impulses that drive the story forward play more and more in the psyche of the protagonist, leading to strikingly tormented, conflicted characters-superheroes for a grittier, more brutish era.
In "Kingdom Come," for instance, we learn that Superman has been forced into an early retirement in his Kansas ranch because people no longer shared his goody-goody ideals. As some metahumans put it, "he was no longer the man of tomorrow but more the man of the 1950s."
But "Kingdom Come" also shows us the enduring appeal of the classic superhero. We see the romantic tension between Wonder Woman and Superman as she tries to convince him to snap out of retirement and return to being Superman because of the worsening conditions in the world. Without him, metahumans have proliferated and ran rampant without any sense of responsibility for their superpower gifts.
What is wonderful about this comic book is the absence of any super-villain. The enemy is within. It shows us that the greatest source of conflict is our own intolerance of diversity and fear of the unknown.

The Tao of Calvin and Hobbes

First posted 09:34am (Mla time) Oct 13, 2004

Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page D6 of the October 13, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
Paul Gauguin asked, "Whence do we come? What are we? Where are we going?"
Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I came from my room, I'm a kid with big plans, and I'm going outside. See ya later!... Say, who the heck is Paul Gauguin anyway?
-Calvin, The Tenth Anniversary Book by Bill Waterson
COMIC books have always dealt with the representation of alter egos. If the cartoonist is really good, the alter egos which are part of his or her personality become the voice in our heads as well.
This is very much the case with the obnoxiously endearing Calvin and his wise-cracking tiger Hobbes. After reading the strip for a while, we get to imagine what Calvin would do or say. Calvin is a meaner, weirder and also a more philosophical Dennis the Menace. He builds snowmen which he pretends will get ran over by his dad's car, he dresses up as a superhero ("Stupendous Man") to cheat on exams, he constantly annoys his schoolmate Sussie by telling her his ham sandwich is actually made of disgusting innards.
Calvin is the first comic character to use the word "boogers." Yes, it's that radical. In the beginning, readers wrote to Waterson and his newspaper to complain about the strip's contents. One particularly provocative strip showed Calvin fantasizing about flying a military aircraft and blowing up his school.
Readers also complained about Calvin's parents, who are constantly portrayed as regretting not choosing a dog over Calvin. (With a kid like that, who could blame them?)
Sophisticated and profound
Nonetheless, majority have rewarded Calvin and Hobbes for telling it as it is, and for trying to portray the point of view of a 6-year-old through a more sophisticated and profound adult lens.
Calvin and Hobbes also present the troubles of having a kid-especially one like Calvin who is basically like any other 6-year-old, focused only on his own needs and desires and clueless about such a thing as delayed gratification.
This kid just happens to have constant delusions of living off in another planet as well as transmogrifying into a tyrannosaurus. And readers are constantly made to guess whether Calvin's tiger, Hobbes, is real or merely a stuffed toy. Thus, it delves deep into the nature of subjective experience.
Hobbes, like many characters in comic books, represent the dual versions of reality that converge in comic books-the objective and the subjective world. As Waterson himself explains, "I don't think of Hobbes as a doll that miraculously comes to life when Calvin is around. Neither do I think of Hobbes as a product of Calvin's imagination... I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it. I think that's how life works. None of us sees the world in exactly the same way, and I just draw that literally in the strip."
Flexible medium
Comics are an incredibly flexible medium. On one hand, the series of fragmented boxes offer an infinite range of interpretations while at the same time having a simplicity and directness that makes the medium powerful and mythic.
It also uses both narrative and visual techniques. The challenge in comic books is how to simulate movement through figures. Like film editing and how film stock is put together, meaning is created through how the audience "stitches together" a series of seemingly unrelated pictures which try to point toward a story.
In that sense, the meaning can both be obvious and subtle, symbolic as well as literal. Pictures can be quite explicit and outright with what it wants to say, but it can also stand with or without words. Either way, however, it will always lend itself to many readings, with readers interpreting the strip according to their own individual experiences.
Calvin and Hobbes often play their favorite game called "Calvinball." The only rule of Calvinball is to keep inventing rules. That kind of radical creativity captures the wit, vitality and the imagination of the strip.
Alternate life
Contrary to what most people believe, Calvin is not based on Waterson's son or details from his own childhood. He is more a reflection of its creator's adulthood than his childhood, having been quite an obedient kid himself.
Calvin is an example of how an alternate life can be explored through fiction and, by doing so, help us sort out our mess in real life. Calvin is Waterson's outlet for his immaturity, his way to ridicule his own obsessions and maintain his curiosity about the natural world. He is a reminder of that little bratty kid inside us who wants things his or her own way.
Comics characters also show us how we might act, how we might explore the world through imagination. Like the duality of the hero and the villain most often found in comic strips, Calvin and Hobbes present the dialogue between the many sides of a story and a personality. It critiques the institution of schools, parenthood, superheroes and even comics itself.
This is because Waterson believes that "the best comics expose human nature and help us laugh at our own stupidity and hypocrisy... Surprise is the essence of humor and nothing is more surprising than the truth. When cartoons dig beyond glib punch lines, cheap sentimentality and tidy stories to deeper, truthful experiences, they can really touch people and connect us all.”


Back to (graduate) school
By Danicar Mariano
Inquirer News Service
SEVERAL weeks after I graduated from college, I began yearning for the familiar comforts of our university library. I developed withdrawal symptoms and desired to attend class -- any class -- again so I could pretend to listen to the teacher.
What I really wanted to do was be in a classroom. I wanted to be an eternal student -- and that's when I decided I better become a teacher -- which meant taking up graduate studies. It was the only way I could continue to be on campus without being considered a bum.
I took the test for graduate studies and found the Math doubly hard than in the ACET, even though the course I was applying for was Literary and Cultural Studies.
Still, I managed to pass and even got a graduate assistant scholarship. I was on my way.
Nope, it's not true that you need to gain work experience first before taking masteral studies -- not for my course, anyway. It's a chicken-and-egg situation, actually. On one hand, work helps you gain perspective away from what you are studying, thereby allowing you to handle it more
effectively. But a job can also distract you and make you a "rusty" student.
I have classmates who are only coming back to school after several years of working and they are now unused to taking down notes and terrified of writing papers and answering tests because of the pressure to do better since they are older.
I also have one classmate who has been teaching in high school for 20 years and who finds it difficult to be in a graduate school setting. In grad school, the tendency is to make the discussions more in-depth and complicated, in complete contrast to what she has been trying to do for two decades, which was to simplify and make points easily digestible for younger students.
But of course, it has been a cause of such growth in her part, learning new theories on how to read "literature" and "culture" as well as being around people who are older and wiser, so to speak.
Apart from the regular approach to literature, we learn the cultural and interdisciplinary approaches to a text, and even to jokes and mall structures, flyovers and other phenomena of modern society.
The contemporary cultural theories we take up make reviewing a text more relevant and holistic. It's designed for teachers and scholars who want to grow in their appreciation and criticism of literature. That's why there's a 50-percent discount given to full-time teachers who take the course.
The scholarship I got, however, covers the tuition 100 percent and even provides an allowance for part-time work. Given the vast pool of underemployed, overeducated individuals in this country, I know that being in the academe is a very privileged existence.
In the academe, you can write creatively and critically and earn your keep. It may not make you rich, but in today's society, having the opportunity to continue learning and sharing that learning to fellow energetic and curious minds is blessing enough.


TV Series Review : Printed in L Magazine

Review of the Lesbian Series: The L Word

Lips. Licking. Lesbians. Loving. Life. Letting Loose. Labyrinth Loss. Lust. Looking. Liberal. Like this ‘L’ Magazine, these are just some of the words the “L word” stands for. The “L Word” Series stands at the forefront of lesbian entertainment.. It’s certainly a series where not only lesbians, but a whole gamut of people can relate to. More than being a ‘Sex in the City’ imitation—one wherein the girls not only sleep around but sleep with each other—or even a lesbian counterpart of ‘Queer as Folk,’ the L Word has a distinct characteristic of its own. Sure, the girls also have their routine luncheons while they talk about sex and life, looking fabulous in fashion-launching outfits as in ‘Sex in the City,’ and yes they also handle homosexuality in an unapologetic way as in ‘Queer as Folk,’ but this TV spectacle isn’t your regular, run-of-the-mill series. Rather than just being a string of episodes, it seems like one erotic independent art film after another –mixing popular appeal with depth.
Advocacy and Art also meet head on in the show. Bette Porter, played by Jennifer Beals, is an Art curator at a California museum who ditched the traditional gallery show for a wildly controversial one called ‘Provocations’ which she describes as ‘a leap off the edge towards the unknown.’ The phrase also describes the show. It manifests how society and art is unraveling new ways of thinking and being, consequently widening the horizons for a more diverse and colorful future.
The producer of the ‘L word’ admits that such a breakthrough in entertainment wouldn’t have been possible without the pioneering work of ‘Will and Grace’ and ‘Queer eye for the Straight Guy’ who has opened the eyes of networks about how successful shows presenting the positive side of gay life could be.
In the show, Bette and Tina is a cozy couple who has been living together for 7 years. Bette tries hard to juggle the demands of her relationship and work as a curator, being the sole ‘breadwinner,’ as Tina has quit her job because they are trying to have a child. The first few episodes tackle the challenges of insemination and pregnancy. When Tina suffers a miscarriage and Bette’s controversial managing of the gallery causes extra strain on their relationship, things between them become rocky. Bette starts to have an affair with a Latina woman from work named Candice. When a protest breaks out in her gallery, causing Bette and her friends to be arrested –Bette and Candice are put in the same prison cell where one of the hottest sex scenes to ever make television history occurs. The memorable scene shows Bette leaning against the wall, touching herself, while Candice lies on the prison bed, doing the same thing, in a steamy illustration of how to accomplish ‘telepathic sex’ or what lesbians have come to claim as EESP –Erotic Extra Sensory Perception. Eros is tackled through the creative and mature handling of sex and sexuality in the show. Jennifer Beals even reveals that the Director made a cassette for the cast showing a series of both lesbian and heterosexual love scenes—wanting them to grasp which of the scenes worked and which didn’t. She relates as having come to the realization that the best love scenes were those wherein the actors weren’t fearful—as fear takes one away from the story. This ‘fearlessness’ shows in how the actresses convey the sex scenes with so much passion and surrender.
The lesbian sex scenes aren’t about objectification or servicing straight men’s fantasies. It’s about showing how much two people who know each other’s bodies can give pleasure to one another. As a line in the series goes: ‘…Here are two people who know how to use the same ‘equipment’ to their utmost satisfaction. How can you beat that?’

Different issues are also discussed together with the complexity and conflict of each character. Confusion of identity and the search for the self is most tackled through the character of Jenny. Jenny is a writer engaged to marry Tim, who believed she was straight until she meets Marina, a gorgeous and steaming Restaurant owner. Marina, an irresistible seductress who shares Jenny’s love for literature, says the memorable line “all desire is a desire for that which we have lost.” Jenny, Marina and Bette’s characters illustrate the ups and downs of infidelity—as well as the loneliness and guilt and loss that come with it.
Alice, a bisexual magazine writer, shows the distinction and fluidity of genders. Her friends tease her ‘are you part of the lesbian team? Don’t the bisexuals have their own?’ She is also the one who memorializes the sexual counterpart of six degrees of separation: ‘Six years marriages, casual encounters, one night stands--name any group of gay people, and you’re sure to have someone else who has slept with someone else and so on. Name any lesbian you know and I can link her to me in six moves, easy. In our solitude we are all connected…’
Shane, who looks like the Meg Ryan’s lesbian brunet sister, is the androgynous heartthrob of the group. She even gets offers from gays. At first her character is this cool heartbreaker whose into casual sex and promiscuous encounters until she falls in love with a married woman.
Dana, a tennis player, portrays the dilemma of coming out as well as its benefits and consequences. By coming out, she risks losing endorsements. By staying in the closet, she risks losing her girlfriend. Her character also plays a cautious and awkward lesbian who has no idea about ‘multiple orgasms’ or ‘bush/nipple confidence.’ She also doesn’t have ‘gaydar,’ and the scene wherein their clique assesses whether the chef she has the ‘hots’ for is lesbian or straight by checking her fingernails, her walk, her wielding of the chopping knife, her shoes, ala matrix/detective style is one of the funniest and most memorable moments in the season.
Each character brings her own charm into the show. Aside from the relevant issues each of them raise, they also have great group chemistry, which you will see increasing episode after episode as the cast becomes more comfortable with one another. Chemistry is definitely the river that this show is floating on, on what looks like a very long and ground breaking run.


Essays On the Craft of Writing
A Powerful Magic


So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of consciousness continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly, the words come as though from the air: the situations that seem blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.
-Graham Greene, The End of The Affair


Art is a lifestyle. For true artists, one is creating art when shopping, computing, doing menial chores, standing at street corners and even when sleeping. The only way to be creative, as Ricky Lee recommends, is to practice creative living. “You should do it all the way from creative viewing to creative researching to creative writing.” It is to be as fearless one can and experience as much as possible. Writing, as in all art, involves a sense of wholeness that we simply cannot fake. Our suppressions, limitations and biases will inevitably show on paper if we do not apprehend them. The work will suffer distortions or seem disloyal if we try to fake this wholeness. “A poet is a one who puts heaven and earth in the cages of ink and paper,” and art not only requires us to be in tune with ourselves but also in tune with everything around us. It is like capturing the ungraspable and putting order in chaos and seeing beauty in it. At the same time, writing is also an act of splitting us up. Indeed, it is capable of massacre if used properly. It can separate us from certain parts of our being, silencing one, while allowing the others to speak.
As Freud had said of the psychology of creation: the lack of creative power is nothing more than the constraint of the intellect on the imagination. Hence, to allow the creative process to flow is to silence the inner critique within and let the inner artist take over. It’s about outwitting yourself.
At the same writing also like a journey, with a lot of false starts, stumbles, premature halts and wrong turns. It’s not about getting to the destination in one straight line, the boring way, but about the mud holes and thorny paths we encounter by journeying to it. What’s the point of writing if we know exactly what we’re going to say at the end of it? That would make it just another lethargic task. What makes writing so exciting is the fresh epiphanies that emerge from it. It’s about uncovering or rediscovering things that we’ve forgotten or never knew we knew. It’s a going out of oneself where we should not expect to return. Each time we write and journey outwards, we return to a different person, changed by the act of writing with a new perspective to the world that the writing had brought about. Writing is a point of no return. No wonder so many writers refer to it as dying and being resurrected. It’s like letting a part of you lay to rest, and then like a phoenix, be raised stronger and more whole, with a new existence in the world.
“Travel,” afterall, as Proust had said, “is not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes.”
Writing, like walking, is a moving meditation. “Walking is pure grace.” writer Sam Keen says. “[It is] an effortless art that produces surprising moments of spontaneous self-transcendence. Walking reminds me that my Being is becoming. I am always going. Never arriving. […] I have no identity that will not be lost and found and lost again.”
For Ricky Lee, as well, walking is a great prelude to writing and creativity. “Perhaps because, as the Chinese say, all the parts of the feet are intricately connected to all the parts of the body, when we are walking, activating our feet puts our whole being in motion too.”
Other than this indirect way of probing for our muse, the book “Writing as Craft and Magic” asserts that any other activity that we work on “where the brain’s conscious sectors are occupied” allow an eruption from subliminal region that has been dilligently at work to come forth and bring about what we call “inspiration.”
This inspiration is all about letting our unconscious inner resources to surface. It is there for us all the time, waiting to be conjured. “Inspiration comes not from above but from within. The real muse is internal. We do not wait for it, it waits for us. It will tantalize us with stirrings and glimpses, vivid but fleeting reminders of its presence and latent power like the fading images of a dream or the internalized melody of a love song. ”
The only way to conjure it’s real presence however,as the book says, is to act. “you wire your work habits to connect to those internal currents that will summon inspiration. Inspiration may be mystical, it may be mysterious, but it is not accidental. It may seem magical but it is ultimately explainable.”
I first formally learned about the creative process as magic from Tony Perez who blended creativity with occult and altered states rituals. He taught us that the only way we could ever be good artists is if we free ourselves from everyday thought and work with the deeper mind. He blended creating magazine advertisements with meditation and hypnosis to make it more subliminally effective. We learned from him that each color had a certain symbolism and “power” that one could actually “feel” even when blindfolded. We learned from him that in writing, one needs the aids of spirits and angels for ideas and inspiration as well as the ritual of offering a in return. “When you take something from the realm of the spirit you have to give something back.” We learned from him that songs can be turned into stories and that painting can inspire poetry and that all art can intersperse. We learned from him that songs and artworks, have the capacity to connect the mind of listeners and spectators who have beheld it, and will behold it through their union in the collective unconscious accessible from the profound recesses of our psyche through art. I learned from him how to view making art as a kind of portal into different dimensions, and how to experience art forms as opening doorways to these portals as well.
Fr. Bulatao, also his teacher before, revealed to me the strings and secrets to this magic trick. I learned from him that the mind has two kinds of awareness, the conscious and the unconscious and tuning in to this unconscious awareness gives us powers beyond what our normal states of awareness can conceive. I learned to hypnotize others and myself to get the outcome that I most want to achieve. I learned to find that quiet place inside each and every one of us that has access to the collective unconscious and resources of humanity. He taught us that by tuning in to this state we can even achieve something close to what psychology is beginning to acknowledge and catch up on today—extra sensory perception. He also taught our class how to make beautiful poems come out of ourselves, even if some of us have never written any poetry before, just by listening to a peaceful flowing music and allowing it to play and reverberate like it was coming from inside our own bodies. He also taught us a breathing meditation practiced by the Buddhist for many centuries that immediately and easily puts one into this creative and illuminated trance-state.
It is in this state that we are most as peace with ourselves and no intrusive thoughts cloud our judgement. No wonder then, that the yogi’s referred to this “luminous emptiness” as the most sacred part of ourselves. It is not surprising that it is in this state of grace and tranquility “in the silent and untroubled point within the chaos of our personality” that we produce our best ideas and works of art.
Breathing, like the unconscious activity that it is, similar to walking and writing, is very much like a work of art too. At first when we pay conscious attention to it, it seems very strained and very forced but afterwards when we are used to it, it becomes natural and effortless—“after a while you feel yourself being breathed. Who you are changes. Whereas once you are acting, now you seem moved by a power beyond yourself. Your breath tells you you are the same substance as the spirit that moves everything.”
Breathing is very much underrated and ignored, but in almost all arts, it is important that we breathe naturally in order to be creative and brilliant in it.
“As breathing becomes a liturgy we are reminded that moment by moment, the essence of our being is the practice of gratitude (in inhaling) and compassion (in exhaling) … we are alive only in the degree that we are moved by the tidal wave of giving and receiving.”
Breathing, like art, is about taking in life with gratitude and bringing it out while giving something of ourselves with it. It is often a mystery how we do it, but it nonetheless remains a necessity for life.
I learned from Sir Francis Aguas that writing can be a spiritual and life changing experience. It is the process of healing yourself and opening yourself up to greater powers. It’s the act of arresting your own shortcomings, through recognizing the flaws and biases of your own characters in yourself, in the hope of changing it for the better. It’s when you put yourself to the extremes of emotions and allow yourself to be taken in by the storm, discovering your own faith through the ruins of what you have survived.
When he writes, he says, he’s unstoppable. He seems to be possessed by the characters that he creates, forcing him to write about them without any distortions, sometimes to the point of hearing them arguing and fighting at restless nights of unsuccessful sleep compelling him to get up and write to be appeased. It seems like the characters just grabs you by the neck and demand that you write of them, to the point that it can really drive one insane. He recalls that he would write his play, “When The Purple Settles” from days on end feverishly without stopping and then suddenly be woken up by his characters shouting and then discover that he has unthinkingly fallen asleep. He remembers times when he was compelled to puke as well, together with the characters in the play. Sometimes he would also try and intervene with his character’s story to no avail realizing that the work is beyond him. He just found himself unraveling and releasing it rather than actually writing it.
Ricky lee identifies with this manic and compulsive form of writing as well. He believes that that surge of adrenaline where everything is on its toes is good for the writer. “Writing should make you come face to face with mortality… It’s about pushing yourself to the edge so that you’d be forced to develop wings.”








If a painter is an alchemist, a creative writer is a wizard who casts spells.

-Tony Perez, A Filipino Werewolf in Quezon City

I had always believed that art is magic. Even when I was a kid and I didn’t know what art and magic was really about I understood that it has to be conjured with concentration and a silent mind. With that came the reverence and wonder that I had always approached the creative process with. The act of creating something from nothing was something I had always marveled about. It seemed like a god-like quality gifted to us from above. Nonetheless, like the art of magic, I do not believe that it is something just given to you. I had learned it and honed it through ages of practice and perseverance.
I had always believed that, in learning the art, the only necessary prerequisite is that, at least for the moment that you are doing it, it is all that matters to you. If you have the ability to focus that way, so that everything else gets sucked out in a vacuum but you and what you are doing, I can’t see how there could be a barrier in doing anything that your passion and craft can conceive. That’s perhaps why artists are often obsessive or single-minded. The important thing is to find pockets of silence to shut the world and all it’s nagging distractions out and live intensely in that realm of death. And indeed, art is always a kind of dying. In the sense that it’s kinda like that yoga meditation where you just lie flat on your back and relax all your muscles. After a while you get a sense of peace and blissful nonchalance. Afterwards, you can even feel yourself leaving your body and wandering around. Art, like magic, is always a going out of yourself.

Art, like magic, also involves many recipes for it spells. First, you have to really picture what you have in mind. Next you have to gather all your necessary resources or “ingredients” together and just allow them to cook. Sleep is a wonderful way to marinade all these creative juices together.
Art, like magic also requires meaningful rituals that herald it. Sometimes, if you really need it and if you’re not watching, this magic can come spontaneously and almost anywhere. My inspiration to write poems comes in scenic views, in dreams, in movies, in painting or playing the guitar; but it also comes in the middle of traffic jams, walking in malls, waiting in lines or in the middle of cramming for projects and exams.
An image of a geyser comes into mind when thinking of a metaphor for inspiration. It moves in the underground rivers of our mind, silently collecting, absorbing and coagulating tiny drops of information and experiences that passes through, and with some pressure—whoosh!--it rushes above our stream of consciousness, too magnificent and compelling to let pass. If we let it fade the moment it comes, with its unique and urgent voice, we begin to lose it to the realm of the shadows again. Art, like magic, involves a kind of discipline to hone the craft.

When beginning to write or draw or play the guitar, I usually start with quieting my mind. But after a while, these things become unnecessary, for I find that the act of writing, drawing, or playing itself is what puts me into trance just like for fortunetellers, shuffling their cards is enough to put them in that mysterious alpha state. Writing, Drawing or playing the guitar becomes its own meditation for me and even amidst turmoil and chaos, it can always silence the distractions. I guess it’s the same principle as when we go to a certain place to pray, wherein afterwards it becomes easy to quiet our minds in that sanctum because we have already identified it as a holy place. The same goes with art form me. It is my Mecca, my sanctuary, my holy space.
Art, like magic, has historicity. It comes deep from the archives of our akashic records, our collective unconscious, so much so that to speak in art is to speak with the power of all of humanity before you. We suddenly become the reason our ancestors existed and they become the secret inspiration for the art that we make, their spirit and traditions mingling with it. After all, for what other reason and justification do humans live and exist, if not to create?
Art, like magic, is mythological. “He who speaks in myths has the power to speak with a thousand voices, he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional & transitory into the realm of the ever enduring. He transmutes our destiny into the destiny of mankind & evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon has enabled humanity to find a refuge from peril & to outlive the longest night.
That is the secret of great art & it’s effect upon us… By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present & so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life. Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly at work at educating the spirit of the age; conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking.”
Artists, as Campbell says, are the mythmakers of today. They are the “new shamans.” The babaylans of our pre-colonial origins who held the highest position in Filipino culture then, for example, mixed shamanism with religion and art. The purpose of artist today, even though denigrated and looked down upon by a materialistic society, is fairly the same--to help people “mythologize” the world, to help them constantly find meaning and spirit in it, to rediscover metaphors and traces of the face of God in all things.
After all, “the only way life can cease to be oppressive,” as Marx said, “is if it is viewed as an art. Art is inextricable from a life well lived. It becomes as unnoticed as the air we breathe, but with that, all the more encompassing and necessary. Art, like magic, is inescapable. It is everywhere and it haunts you in all things.

Art, like magic is an obsession. I have long been an incurable addict of art. In one form or another, whether in philosophizing, eating, talking, or hypnotizing, I have learned to see all the things I do as an art. Life’s more fun that way. To have a ritual for these things is to give them added grace and meaning. “Sometimes all it takes to transform a mundane afternoon into a holi-day –a Holy-day—is a small ritual, a sacramental taste of bread and wine, a moment of thanksgiving for a ray of light, falling through a lace curtain.”
I have learned to see things like spiderwebs, lightnings and butterflies as symbols synchronized with my life, heralding certain stages.
The art fairies also visit me in sleep. I dream that I am creating poems and stories, with lovely imagery to match. I am an addict to that blissful high and that orgasmic rush that you get when you suddenly conceive of an epiphany or are in the middle of creating something you love.
I enjoy the experience of synesthesia that art gives. The capacity to harmonize all the senses, to feel what you see, to smell what you hear, to taste what you touch. I do not believe in the saying that the jack of all trades is a master of none. In fact, the experience of one art enhances the other. Being able to draw enhances my skill as a writer and as a musician and being able to play guitar increases my skill to perceive and to articulate and being able to hypnotize and pranic heal increases my understanding of the invisible but powerful forces that govern these activities.
I am a firm believer of the invisible. I trust in the hidden spirit of things. I trust that all great art has a life of it’s own and I just let it unfold before me without anxiety since I am only the channel of a creation made in its own right anyway. Art, like magic, is beyond us. It grows less in power with too much conscious effort and is most effective when it is believed in.
Art is not heretic. It is not ‘playing God’ but rather following in his footsteps of creation. It is not superseding nature but rather putting yourself in line with it. In a state of magic, the reason why you have the power to influence anything is because everything influences you as well. You have that understanding that you are one and interconnected with everything else so that you are open to the universe and in turn, the universe is opened up to you.
Art, like magic, is way of communing and linking yourself to God. It is discovering that while we humans dream and fumble for things to good to be true, God gives us things too good to be false.








“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translating through you into action; and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. You must keep that channel open. It is not for you to determine how
good it is, nor how valuable. Nor how it compares with other expressions. It is for you to keep it yours, clearly and directly."
Martha Graham

Mission Solidarity

And Ladlad might run for congress this 2007 for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, TransgenderPartylist. The first in the Philippines. Danton Remoto is the representative. =)

Support us! You can help in anyway you can.

For this revolution, there will be dancing. ;-p

Mission Solidarity

How the 2^nd ILGA International Lesbian and Gay Association Asia Conference promoted LGBTQI pride and unity as a bonding against oppression

For LGBTQI’s solidarity is not a matter of luxury, but survival. In a very heterosexist and patriarchal society such as ours, there is immense value in standing together and fighting for our rights. This is the conclusion that came from the 2^nd ILGA Asia Regional Conference held in Cebu in a quaint but charming beachfront hotel. The conference raised a question that has long been needing redress: beyond the alphabet soup of LGBTQI, letters which stand for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex –can we truly find a common ground and come together? How do navigate with these different letters and diverse identities and work harmoniously to fight the common enemy of totalitarianism, oppression and plain narrow-mindedness?

Since the conference is also particularly focused to the needs of Asia, it, of course, discussed issues which are unique to LGBTS in the Asia region. Delegates from Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, Burma, Indonesia, Hong Kong as well as the Philippines spoke about the different situations of the LGBTQI movement in their countries. We talked about how in deeply spiritual Asia, religion plays an important factor in the acceptance of LGBTQIs. In certain countries that believe in Buddhism where karma and reincarnation figure predominantly, for example, homosexuality is believed to be in-born resulting from the “karma” of the individual involved. It is seen as a kind of punishment and therefore, people ‘pity’ homosexuals rather than persecuting them harshly. This is not the case, however for many other Asian countries who criminalize same sex relations like in India, Sri Lanka and in Singapore. In Burma, where the harsh military rule is extra cruel to homosexual “deviants,” homosexuality has just been decriminalized. So too in Hong Kong. A Hong Kong delegate who is active in the gay movement and in the prevention HIV Aids reported that in many ways, the LGBTQI condition in the country is getting worse. “The loud, extremely conservative minority is a well funded group with the chief goal of bringing us down” he said. They even publish smear campaigns in the papers against gays and lesbians. In the Philippines, LGBTQI discrimination as well as triumphs were also reported. We have to combat visible and invisible homophobia, from the blatant to the subtle, despite us not having a sodomy law. The incident where a mayor in the Quezon province was banning gays and lesbians in his city and having them beaten up and abused was talked about, as well as discrimination of LGBTQI’s at work and school. On the other hand, some success stories were reported as well. The Gender and Development Code mandate is now operative in Quezon City wherein schools are obliged by law to have gender sensitivity workshops. Competitions are also held for the most gender sensitive film award as well as the most gender sensitive community. One very interesting testimony was by a male to female transgender who was working for the Philippine National Police, breaking the stereotype barrier. She was working, for one, not as a secretary, but as a forensics officer. She had the full respect of the people around her, and was even called “mam.” She was relating the tragicomic story of this biased judge who deemed her ‘mentally unsound’ just because she was transgender.

All throughout the discussion, knowledge and awareness of oppression as a way of fighting that oppression was highlighted. Building a politics of solidarity while acknowledging a politics of difference is crucial. We admitted that LGBTQIs may have different positionings and concerns from one another, we may be from different countries, different genders, different classes and different cultural practices but what is important is that we recognize that we are all struggling for the same equality heterosexuals are given and that we are all trying to make the world a freer place to love.

The lesbian caucus concluded that even though in this patriarchal society, gays still have more privilege over lesbians as virtue of their still being men, these differences could be worked around. The same call is also issued to our straight feminist sisters, for them to recognize that we are battling the same fight against gender labeling that puts us in boxes and does not allow us to explore our true being.

What is refreshing and inspiring about the conference for me, is meeting so many passionate, intelligent and idiosyncratic lesbians, gays, transsexuals and queers who are at the forefront of the gender revolution in their country, each with a unique story to tell. The coming together of different nationalities teaches you a humbling respect for diversity. It also resonates that the personal is indeed political as each person’s struggle is a microcosm of the struggle of the larger society. We had a rich sharing about our intimate experiences as various workshops tackled “The Ethics of Breaking up (and is there any?)” “Same Sex violence and How to Get over them” “Guerrila Warfare: Organizing LGBT pride in the Philippines” and “Ain’t I a woman? The question of lesbianism to the Women’s Movement.”

During the solidarity night, when we were all in one big circle by the beach, bonfire alit in the center, dancing to the tune of “I’m coming Out,” one can’t help but feel the energy of the message that love itself is the revolution. Against hate, against discrimination, against violence, love and camaraderie are the radical pronouncements. With the forces of heterosexism and patriarchy closing in on us, threatening violence and oppression, the lesson is clear: stand, and if possible, dance and celebrate together with flair.

The Symbolic Meaning of EDSA

The Symbolic Meaning of EDSA:

A Right of Passage

As Texts can Oppress, So too can Texts can Set Free

There’s an old Chinese curse that goes: “May you live in interesting times.” And certainly, we are living in scintillating and literally explosive times where, more than ever, we are coming to understand the necessity of “reading as if our lives depended on it.” (Rich) Until now, we may have thought of this dictum as “OA”[1] –what GMA and her detractors accuse one another in what can be seen as a childish game of mirroring insults.

[To paraphrase:

FVR/Opposition forces: Declaring State of Emergency, How OA!”

GMA forces: Why are you reacting so violently about declaration 1017? You’re the one that’s OA! ]

Needless to say, we have been taught that reading is not for us. “At most we have been taught to read as if our grade depended on it, the next scholarship, the next job, fame…No questions asked about further meanings.” (Rich) But now, as the State of Emergency proclamation 1017, has us whipping out The 1987 Constitution, and reading between and beyond the lines of newspapers for hidden insights to our countries uncertain and fluid future, we know that reading is not the theoretical, academic game we’ve often thought of it to be. Especially since “the democracy we’ve signed up for may be altered through interpretation, by those who hold power.”(Hilbay) Indeed, what does reading and writing mean in these times of chaos and turmoil?

The one word answer: Everything. We’re coming to understand, more than ever that “reading and writing is a matter of survival, and not to reinvent the word and world is to disappear.” (Rich). This notion isn’t just being OA. Many authorities want us to believe its OA so we wouldn’t engage in it, so we wouldn’t access its revolutionary potential. Especially in times of censorship, we come to understand that researching, rewriting and re-visioning history, knowledge and our lives—more than being a matter of survival, is also an act of being radical.

Language is the battleground. Language is the propaganda. Language has been used to keep truths and rebellious thoughts as bay. Language has been used to lie to us, over and over again so that we finally believe them to be truths.

But the call is not to reject language. That’s as much possible as it is for a fish to reject water. The call is to be disturbed, to “learn how to read…allowing what you’re reading to pierce the safe and impermeable routines.”(Rich) There is much more at stake than just multiple question quizzes and grades. What is at stake is where we put our stakes. What is at stake is whether we go on believing in a language that manipulates and oppresses or go on a quest for a language that will set us free.

As Conrado de Quiros’ article goes:

These are times of murder and mayhem, of the strangling of sovereign will of the voters, of the stifling of angry voices, of the voiding of all that is decent and fair. These are times of cynicism and despair, of growing indifference to injustice, of a rising capacity to tolerate abuse, of an expanding ability to factor in the worst in us. What do you do in the face of this, believing that language can be employed either as a weapon of self-defense or as a scintillating stratagem to keep thoughts at bay? (qtd from de Quiros)

The value of reading, the value of revision: we could succumb to others people’s readings, allowing ourselves to drown in the sea of collective opinion, or we can learn to swim, reading these symbols and re-experiencing them as our own. But we must also be warned, there’s a price to pay for freedom of the mind. In a country where democracy is an illusion, freedom of the mind is often paid for with incarceration of the body, like in the arrest of Argee Gueverra, Randy David, Liza Masa (and many other less prominent people who participated in the rally commemorating EDSA.) But we are in between a rock, and a hard place. If we refuse to write our lives, we will have no life, just as if we don’t know what we want, we will never get it. “If we don’t know what we want, we end up with a lot of things we don’t want” (Palahniuk).

Use It or Lose It

Our unconscious has the power to expedite our greatest dreams but we refuse to engage it because we within it also lies our greatest fears. When we detach from the great wave of the unconscious however, which at its depths, connect to the national unconscious—our long buried patriotism—we strip ourselves of the capacity to feel and to imagine fully. It is to deny the source of our creativity and our sense of history. It is to refuse to acknowledge the side of us that knows how to read dreams and symbols, the side of us that knows everything is cybernetic: constantly influencing everything else; the side of us that grasps synchronicity and the responsibility of meaning. (Ka-hulug-an –The Heaviest of Burdens.)

The synchronicity, for example, of GMA declaring emergency rule the day of the anniversary of Edsa –the alignment that “the very day dedicated to the fall of martial should be dedicated to its resurrection 20 years later” (de Quiros). The synchronicity, for example, of 938 people buried alive in Guisaugon,

Southern Leyte

with geologists cautioning that the topography is still very “unstable and dangerous,” and with rescue workers admitting that “we don’t have much hope, but we are not giving up yet.” –With all the muck we are in, they might as well have been talking about the whole country. Whole memories can be erased. Even villages can be “wiped off the map.”

The Weight of Symbols, The Power of Myth

The symbol of EDSA—often highly contested, sometimes idealized in nostalgia, sometimes manipulated in propaganda—is always an open invitation: connecting us to our national collective consciousness and transporting us into a portal of time where we can re-experience it. Symbols, as we’ve learned, allow us to be both character and interpreter, director and actor at the same time. We get to experience and feel what the symbol of EDSA really means even if we weren’t there. This experience of a symbol is “intensely personal, and surprisingly political.” (Hampl)

Symbols are dangerous, dynamic and powerful things. They are touchstones, yardsticks. They judge what we have become and who we will dare to be. Every symbol connects those who have experienced it, to those who are experiencing it, to those who have yet to experience it in the dimensions of past, present, future, whose distinctions, the unconscious and quantum realms know does not exist.

You never force a symbol to serve you: lest it rebels against you. We’ve seen this with GMA trying to use “EDSA” for her vested interests, but having it escalate to a massive unrest instead. We are not the masters of symbols; but if we are lucky, being faithful servants to symbols gives our lives meaning and weight. “It’s not what you want, but rather what it wants” that is followed (Hampl).

Rather than ask a symbol, “Symbol, what do you mean?” we are urged to ask instead: “Symbol, what do you want of me?” (Mitchell) That is the proper reverence with which to approach a symbol –moving beyond us arrogantly scrutinizing its meaning, to us being humbly moved and propelled by it. Re-experiencing a symbol allows us to live twice. This second living is both “spiritual and historical” allowing us to reach “deep within the personality as its grasps the life-of-the-times as no political treatise can.”(Hampl)

Indeed, a symbol is even capable of inciting passion and rebellion. Fortunately for us, you cannot incarcerate a symbol. Fortunately for us, you cannot close down a symbol when it does not agree with you. Fortunately for us, no one owns a symbol, just as “no one owns the past.” (Hampl)

Truly, a person’s education is incomplete, until (s)he learns to read her dreams. Until we know how to read symbols, until we know how to surrender to our deeper consciousness, all knowledge is worthless.

At best, all we can do is allow a symbol to work through us. “You do not choose your topics,” Conrado de Quiros and Patricia Hampl both agree: “your topics choose you.” Who wants to write about pain and suffering when you can write about daffodils and sunsets? Yet you write about it because the voices in your head will not let you rest until you have; because your life will, all the more, revolve around them until you do, and because, as de Quiros tell us “you bear witness to the blood in the streets.”

Rina David and Chuck Palahniuk tells us that “we are living in a state of perpetual deja vu, all over again.” For sure “everything here is a spinning in the circle; to that there is no doubt. The question is how and in what way we can face this circle, instead of continually closing our eyes in the face of it.” (Nietzsche) Filipinos, in our trauma, often refuse to remember. The weight of the past is too much. It is easier to not talk about it. It is easier not to ask any questions. It is easier to just become what we hate rather than fight it.

But this administration’s hatred for terrorism is making it one of the biggest terrorists of all. Total order (military rule) or total chaos (anarchy), can only lead to a monster. Totalitarianism, the suppression of sexual, religious, political and ideological difference and the logic of Holocaust and Martial Law, is at work whenever we do not allow our own biases and authority to be questioned. That’s when you really have to wonder what kind of basis that knowledge and authority is grounded on: as solid as the mountains of

Southern Leyte

, we can say. The denial of difference does not lead to harmony or unity. It leads to derangement. It leads to Multiple Personality Disorder.

A rite of passage is a right of passage, and no one has the authority to quash that call towards growth. Those in the past who did were overthrown. Crisis, in its Chinese ideogram, connotes danger, but it also connotes opportunity. (The Yin-Yang) A rite of passage is all about finding that rebirth in a simulated death. Every symbol has its opposite—and that’s why speaking in symbols is the only way to give justice to the chaos, beauty, and complexity of life. “It is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing.” (Octavio Paz)

The call is simple, but not without challenge. In light of “interesting times” that show us so many are out there, ever-willing to erase memory, and ever-capable to suppress imagination, “we must do the work of creating this personal version of the past,” lest we run the risk of having “someone else do it for us” (Hampl). More than ever, there is a need for us to remember, to “touch the radiance of the past.”

In the act of remembering and writing we yearn for a world that is “gone or lost, effaced by time or a more sudden brutality…into the endless and tragic recollection that is history” (Hampl). That is the earnest but urgent call: to read and write as if our lives depended on it; to communicate our answer, or otherwise be dependent on the world’s answer.

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[1] Overacting