Xn3cTs

reposting… november, 2003.

best regards,

ian

—

Nietzsche, Hume and the Buddha

When I first heard of Nietzsche, it was in association with Hitler and the Nazis. I simply dismissed him as a rabid, power-hungry maniac who probably had an unhappy childhood. A classmate in college wrote a paper on this Nietzsche guy and I was silently chuckling on the thought that a comic book idea (”superman”) can be the subject of a scholarly paper.

But when I did get to read him (years later), I was simply won over by this crazy guy! He says provocative things that, when thought about, actually make sense. He’s probably among the few philosophers who doesn’t come across as an insipid intellectual. He’s got style, lots of it. He doesn’t say things just for effect (although sometimes it feels like that). He’s an artist, an artist-philosopher. He’s very passionate and his sincerity comes across. He also has a weird sense of humor. Indeed, he writes with his blood. Indeed, he’s a dynamite.

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For Sharon (And All the Many Brave People in the World)

I stood
Like a statue
Unmoving, unseeing
Not speaking, not wanting
To break
The fragile silence that
Engulfed us like
A wall oppressing,
Suffocating, separating
Me… from you.

But I was dying to live!
And breathe, and see
The many things I haven’t seen
And move, and do
The many things I haven’t done.
How I longed to look at you
(Take a long and good look at you.)
To speak, and be, with you.
Oh how I yearned to touch,
Feel, and love you.

But then again, as always,
I was afraid
Of you, and me,
And the many things
I haven’t seen and done
(And of I-don’t-but-God-knows-what-else).
And then again, as always,
I had to hide
And be content
To peek from inside.

Suddenly, brave as an angel
Come down from heaven, you
Freed me from the chains
I myself forged
And wound around me.
You looked at, talked with, me
And with a smile, shattered
The walls of timidity and fear
That imprisoned and prevented
Me from loving you.

And then, I could breathe, though gasping
And so, I could see, though squinting
And more, I could move, though trembling
And yes, I could speak, though stammering
And now, I could feel, though numbing
At last, I could love, though wanting.

Err… This is to say
“Thank you”
For “I love you“?

From “The Book of Lights” by Chaim Potok:

“From the age of fifteen until the age of twenty-one he lived in the apartment world of his aunt’s whispery talking and his uncle’s coughs and brooding silence, and he did not know which was more frightening. For a while after his cousin’s death he thought his family had somehow been singled out for a special curse. But he talked to friends and found that throughout the neighborhood ran a twisting river of random events: parents died in slow or sudden ways, children were killed, relatives slipped young from life. The world seemed a strangely terrifying place when you really thought about it. He tried not to think about it too often.

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“… Listen to Me in the truth of your soul. Listen to Me in the feelings of your heart. Listen to Me in the quiet of your mind.

“Hear Me, everywhere. Whenever you have a question, simply know that I have answered it already. Then open your eyes to your world. My response could be in an article already published. In the sermon already written and about to be delivered. In the movie now being made. In the song just yesterday composed. In the words about to be said by a loved one. In the heart of a new friend about to be made.

“My Truth is in the whisper of the wind, the babble of the brook, the crack of the thunder, the tap of the rain.

“It is the feel of the earth, the fragrance of the lily, the warmth of the sun, the pull of the moon.

“My Truth - and your surest help in time of need - is as awesome as the night sky, and as simply, incontrovertibly, trustful as a baby’s gurgle.

“It is as loud as a pounding heartbeat - and as quiet as a breath taken in unity with Me.

“I will not leave you, I cannot leave you, for you are My creation and My product, My daughter and My son, My purpose and My… ‘Self.’”

—

The above quotation is from the last portion of Neale Donald Walsch’s “Conversations with God, Book 1.” I’m quoting it at length because I think it gives a general idea of what pantheism is all about.

Pantheism is, simply put, the belief that God is everything, or conversely, that everything is God. Of course, some philosophers have pointed out that pantheism is virtually an atheism. To believe that everything is God is to make the idea of “God” profane. If God is immanent (to the universe) and not transcendent, then why use the word “God” at all? The very notion of “God,” they argue, presupposes the idea of “transcendence.” Pantheism, insofar as it denies the transcendence of God, is virtually an atheism.

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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)

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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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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a post in autograffiti, may 9, 2003

I once gave a remark:

“Read and read, until you understand.”

Rather harsh?

But it wasn’t meant to be a slight on anyone’s intelligence. Understanding (a text) is not necessarily premised on one’s intelligence. Tama ba ‘yon?

My point is that you need more than intelligence to be able to read and understand. You need a sympathetic ear, a willingness to “hear” what the other has to “say.” More than intelligence, you have to have the right attitude for a better understanding.

Hermeneuts like Schleiermacher (a hermeneut is one who specializes in the philosophy of understanding/interpretation) began with the presumption that there is always the possibility of MIS-understanding. That is why there is a need for hermeneutics (the art of interpretation).

Gadamer, following Heidegger, turned this around and said that we always already understand. All of us come from a fore-knowledge/fore-understanding of things which become the very basis of any future understanding. In other words, we all have biases and prejudices which determine the way we look at and understand anything in the world.

But lest we say, “Ah, we don’t need to make the effort to understand, anyway we always already understand,” Gadamer didn’t stop there, one’s “prejudices” (literally “pre-judgments”) is corrected by hearkening/listening to the otherness of the text.

That’s why the injunction “to read and read until one understands” is meant for all of us, especially when difficulty in understanding comes.

Reading and understanding is always meant to be a dialogue, a dialectic, a to-and-fro motion between the familiarity of our own assumptions and the strangeness of the otherness of the text.

It is definitely not masturbation.

best regards,

ian

next: the primacy of the text

This was my first post in autograffiti@yahoogroups.com. May 6, 2003.

—-

Hi to everyone!

Thank you for joining Autograffiti.

As mentioned in the invitations you received and the description of the homepage of this new e-group, this is meant for artists and philosophers of all stripes, colors, and kinds.

Why Autograffiti?

Err… For want of a better name? =P

As I was thinking of possible names for the group, the following came up: essais, essaying_the_self, askesis, agon (greek for contest/battle), enkrateia (self-mastery), the_crucible, autography, and others which I now forget.

Where am I coming from?

From the belief that life, philosophy, and the arts are intricately connected. Our struggles to become the good/better/best artists that we can be cannot be divorced from the effort to philosophize. Being an artist necessarily involves creation, and perhaps the greatest artwork in progress that we all have is our very lives.

Thus, you will notice that the names aforementioned are all, in one way or another, connected with the idea of creation/trial/formation of oneself.

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Will keep posting old articles until they are all archived here. Will post something new every now and then.

best regards,

ian

Writing in Tongues

By Michael Ian Lomongo, April 29, 2001

(Thoughts on Actors’ Actors Inc.’s production of Paul Stephen Lim’s “Mother Tongue” — with Bart Guingona, Nieves Campa, Miren Alvarez, Ed Feist, Richard Cunanan, Bobbie Greenwood, Kate Fernandez; directed by Chris Millado)

The day I watched AAI’s production of Stephen Paul Lim’s “Mother Tongue,” I had just finished reading Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club.” I’ve long wanted to read the novel after seeing the movie years ago. Some of the people I’ve talked with, who have both read the novel and seen the movie, preferred the novel. As they say, much is lost in any translation (whether it be from one medium to another or from one language to another). For me though, much of the narrative’s visceral impact in the watching wasn’t there in the reading (probably because I was no longer encountering it for the first time).

Anyway, I mentioned “The Joy Luck Club,” because like it, “Mother Tongue” is about finding and defining one’s identity and home in the Land of Promise. The former is about immigrant Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters, and how they try to bridge the breach in understanding caused by two disparate cultures; the latter, about a Chinese mother who’s an immigrant to the Philippines and her writer-son who migrates to America, and how this son seeks her mother’s understanding in his freely causing (and embracing) the breach.

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