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Books Liked/Loved:

The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexander Dumas)
El Filibusterismo (Jose Rizal)
The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
The Favourite Game (Leonard Cohen)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra / Genealogy of Morals (Friedrich Nietzsche)
The Trial / Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
Doktor Faustus (Thomas Mann)
Cubao Midnight Express (Tony Perez)
The Alphabet of Grace (Frederick Buechner)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)
Written on the Body (Jeanette Winterson)
The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevski)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
Personal (Rene Villanueva)
Foucault’s Pendulum (Umberto Eco)
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D.H. Lawrence)
Siddharta / Narcissus and Goldmund (Herman Hesse)
The Book of Lights (Chaim Potok)
Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
A Little Book on the Human Shadow / Iron John (Robert Bly)
It Is Here Now – Are You? (Bhagavan Das)
The Last Three Minutes (Paul Davies)
The Dancing Wu-Li Masters (Gary Zukav)
The Clowns of God (Morris West)
Zen Guitar (Philip Toshio Sudo)
Sophie’s Choice (William Styron)
The Artist’s Way (Julia Cameron)
The Day of the Jackal (Frederick Forsyth)
Inside the Music (interviews with contemporary musicians)
Writing Down the Bones (Natalie Goldberg)
Ordinary People (Judith Guest)
The Teachings of Don Juan (Carlos Castaneda)

Tags: Art, Books, Life, Literature, Love, Music, Nietzsche, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychology, spirituality, Writing
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In Defense of Matter
by Michael Ian Lomongo (1992/98)

“It is only with the heart that one sees rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

- The Fox, in “The Little Prince,” by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

We are all too familiar with this perennial problem in philosophy (and life): the contraposition between matter and spirit, body and soul. The materialist says that there is no need to postulate such a “thing” as spirit. There is nothing beyond matter: what you see is what you get. The idealist, on the other hand, in putting forth and emphasizing the importance and supremacy of the spirit, belittles matter. In this great war between matter and spirit, the dominance (at least, in literature) almost always goes in favor of the spirit, even if people’s lives seem to indicate the contrary. Since it is the spirit that gives life, good is associated with it. On the other hand, matter (crude matter, body, the “flesh”) is somehow seen as the source of evil, disgrace, bad luck, or imperfection.

Matter, then, has acquired (no thanks to philosophers) quite a bad reputation. And this is especially true in a lot of idealistic, intellectualist, metaphysical, and religious philosophies. The exaltation of the spirit in these philosophies is inevitably tied up with the denigration of matter. Such a derogatory outlook on matter has especially been influential when coupled with the belief in a Supreme Being who is regarded as a pure Spirit, and the belief in man’s way to perfection as that of an active emulation of this paragon of perfection — God. The more you distance yourself from matter, the more you become perfect and God-like, God being immaterial. This naturally translates, for the believer, into a fascination for “things” (pardon the expression) immaterial or spiritual and an attitude of condescension, if not a direct aversion, towards matter.

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Tags: Body, Matter, Mind, Philosophy, Spirit, spirituality
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“Keep me searchin’ for a heart of gold, and I’m gettin’ old.”

– Neil Young, “Heart of Gold”

—

A few months ago, I met Lizza, who’s in her early 30’s. When she realized I was older, she talked about “feeling it.” The coming of age. Old age… and all its concomitant side effects.

I feel the same. There’s a certain wistfulness in the realization that time’s passing. And that sooner or later, time, my time, will be up.

Most of my friends and acquaintances merely laugh it off.

I don’t. (Or, I try to, only that I imagine hearing a faint echo, as if the grim reaper itself were Old Sir Mick singing “Time is on My Side.”)

I feel old. Even when I feel young inside, my body feels old.

Even what I used to think was this raging fire inside my soul seems to be just dying embers.

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Tags: Aging, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Life, Love, Love in the Time of Cholera, Milan Kundera, Mortality, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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A Thousand Bitter-Sweet Poems for Women
By Michael Ian Lomongo, March 21, 2001

Last March 10, I watched PETA’s “Komedi Club,” a festival of 10 to 15-minute plays written by members of the PETA Writers’ Bloc. In celebration of the International Women’s Day, the plays featured during that weekend (March 8-10) were written by women playwrights (except for Nick Pichay’s “Kahit na Magtiis”). The line-up included “Flight,” an interpretative dance choreographed and performed by Martina Gonzales-Quesada, Regina Lasam, and Verni Severo, incorporated with a poem by Inge Saltarin; an adaptation of Liza Magtoto’s Palanca-winning “Despedida de Soltera“; Sheila Crisostomo’s “Emergency” (the grand prize winner of the second Charley dela Paz Awards of the PETA-PDP Writers’ Bloc); Nick Pichay’s “Kahit na Magtiis”; and Lallie Bucoy’s “Isang Libong Tula para sa Dibdib ni Dulce.”

I liked the last two plays best.

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Tags: Art, Duality, Femininity, Filipinos, Gender Issues, Layeta Bucoy, Life, Machismo, Maternity, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychology, spirituality, Theater, Tony Perez, Writing
Posted in Art, Filipinos, Gender Issues, Life, Love, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychology, Theater, spirituality | 1 Comment »

A reaction on

Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag

Posted in autografitti@yahoogroups.com, August 5, 2003.

—

I can understand the dislike that Sontag has for hermeneuts and their penchant for reducing a work of art into its purported meaning, especially when such meaning is made to appear as esoteric and accessible only to initiates. I’m inclined to think that this is the same dislike that we have for so-called experts, academicians, philosophers, and intellectuals. These personages are supposed to illumine life but most of the time they only succeed in clouding and cluttering it with hot air, pollution and garbage.It is interesting to note that Michel Foucault argued for an “ars erotica” vis-a-vis the “scientia sexualis” in Volume I of The History of Sexuality. Of course, he was not talking about an “erotics of art” but an “art of erotics.” But he, like Sontag, is wary too of hermeneutics and its promise of getting into the “depth of things.” (The truth/meaning of things.)

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Tags: Art, Education, Foucault, Hermeneutics, Interpretation, Life, Nietzsche, Philosopyhy, Sontag, Translation, Writing
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Tags: Filipinos, Photos
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Jokes for philosophers:

1. Philosophaster: Who’s the most punctual philosopher?

Philosopher: Immanuel Kant.

Philosophaster: And why?

Philosopher: It is said that Immanuel Kant used to take his daily walk in the afternoon in Konigsberg with such regularity and punctuality. It soon came to a point that his townmates knew what time it was when they saw Kant walking.

Philosophaster: Nope.

Philosopher: Who then?

Philosophaster: Martin Heidegger.

Philosopher: Really? And why?

Philosophaster: Because he wrote a book entitled “Being On Time.”

Note: “Sein und Zeit” (“Being and Time”), written by Martin Heidegger, cited by existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre as a seminal work. Heidegger, however, refused the tag “existentialist” as if it were “The Plague.” He was probably thinking: “Camu/s na lang. Wag n’yo na akong idamay.”

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Tags: Agnosticism, Existentialism, God, Heidegger, Hume, Jokes, Kant, Life, Movies, Nietzsche, Philosophy, Rorty, Schopenhauer, spirituality, Superman
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* Off the top of my head, here is a random list of films I’ve seen and liked/loved:

1 Leolo (probably my all-time favorite; a Canadian film in French)
2 Splash (with Tom Hanks and Daryll Hannah, with a beautiful song – One Fine Day or Love
Came for Me? – by Lee Holdridge and Marvin Hamlisch)
3 Insiang, Maynila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag, and Ora Pro Nobis (Lino Brocka)
4 Kakabakaba ka ba? (Mike de Leon?)
5 Alapaap (Tata Esteban)
6 Groundhog Day (with Bill Murray)
7 All About My Mother (Pedro Almodovar)
8 Carlito’s Way (with Al Pacino, and the beautiful Penelope Ann Miller)
9 Santa Sangre (Axwl Jodorowsky)
10 The Girl on the Bridge (a French film in black and white)
11 Immortal Beloved
… and many others…

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Tags: Literature, Movies, Pantheism, Philosophy, spirituality
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