my sentiments exactly... flowing from the mouth of brandon boyd and from the musical stylings of incubus...
If I hadn’t made me, I would’ve been made somehow
If I hadn’t assembled myself, I’d have fallen apart by now
If I hadn’t made me, I’d be more inclined to bow
Powers that be, would have swallowed me up
But that’s more than I can allow
Bow, aww yeah
If you let them make you, they’ll make you paper mache
At a distance you’re strong, until the wind comes
Then you crumble and blow away
If you let them fuck you, there will be no fore-play
Rest assured, they’ll screw you complete
Til your ass is blue and gray
You should make amends with you
If only for better health, better health
But if you really want to live
Why not try, and make yourself
Make yourself
Make yourself
If I hadn’t made me, I’d have fallen apart by now
I won’t let them make me, it’s more than I can allow
So when I make me, I won’t be paper mache
And if I fuck me, I’ll fuck me my own way
Pow, fuck me in my own way
Pow, fuck me in my own way
Pow, fuck me in my own way
Fuck me in my own way
You should make amends with you
If only for better health, better health
But if you really want to live
Why not try, and make yourself
Make yourself
thanks to http://www.lyricsfreak.com for the lyrics.
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Friday, July 09, 2004
walking on broken glass
Memory is a selection of images, some clear, others illusive, some engraved deeply within the abysmal recesses of our minds. Each image is a strand and each strand is an essential part of the tapestry of life. What makes this bitter reality of existence worth its while is the fact that we all hold a piece of the truth. It may come as a surprise to some but even the ignorant, the dumb and the broken have their stories to tell. Bitter reality never was exclusively selective and truth resides both in silence and in speech.
I have come to know in the span of nineteen years that the concept of a single and definite truth is nothing but a three-fold Utopian dream. Being that, it would be beyond the pale of my descriptive capacity for impossible to even try to hint its likelihood as my truth and my reality may not be the same for everyone else. A simple but glaring illustration is the subject of religion and its immortal controversies. A spin-off of Catholicism, the Church of Christ (Iglesia ni Cristo) denies the deity of Christ while Roman Catholics believe in the mystery that Christ is both human and divine. Each facet have their own beliefs and they both hold them to be their truths. If you were a member of the Church of Christ, it is your truth that Christ is not divine and your truth would be the opposite if you were a Roman Catholic. Whose truth therefore, is the real truth? Is it the former or the latter's? Dare I even say both? There is absolutely no sense in accepting both arguments to be the Truth obviously because the ideas are in opposition. Is it safe therefore to assume that Truth is relative?
Even science with all its observations, identifications, descriptions, experimental investigations, and theoretical explanantions of phenomena, is not immune from the multifaceted spectrum of truth. About seven thousand years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was the center of the universe. Now, we all know that it's not true. It was true then, when man's model of the universe was geocentric in nature as proposed by Aristotle an Ptolemy but the case isn't presently so. When Copernicus came up with his heliocentric hypothesis, the masses rejected its veracity because if first of all did not fit into the Aristotelian way of thinking and it also challenged the long-standing belief that the earth was the heavenly center of the universe placed by god himself.
So my contention is, anyone can change the truth, with doubt, with blood, with death, with an intense struggle or by whatever means anyone sees fit to galvanize its evolution because the reality of truth is that it is not only relative, it is also flexible (now we know why there are so many spindoctors in the world) and usually redefined to suit one's necessity. There must be honesty therefore, in the statement that the only thing constant in this world is change... and that statement includes Truth within its scope.
What therefore really matters you might ask... well, at this point, there is no justice in saying that the Truth matters. What matters is your own truth, or more accurately put, your own version of the truth as you see and experience it to be. What matters is the veracity of your truth. What is important is the strenght of your conviction in your truth that it helps other people find their truth as well.
I have come to know in the span of nineteen years that the concept of a single and definite truth is nothing but a three-fold Utopian dream. Being that, it would be beyond the pale of my descriptive capacity for impossible to even try to hint its likelihood as my truth and my reality may not be the same for everyone else. A simple but glaring illustration is the subject of religion and its immortal controversies. A spin-off of Catholicism, the Church of Christ (Iglesia ni Cristo) denies the deity of Christ while Roman Catholics believe in the mystery that Christ is both human and divine. Each facet have their own beliefs and they both hold them to be their truths. If you were a member of the Church of Christ, it is your truth that Christ is not divine and your truth would be the opposite if you were a Roman Catholic. Whose truth therefore, is the real truth? Is it the former or the latter's? Dare I even say both? There is absolutely no sense in accepting both arguments to be the Truth obviously because the ideas are in opposition. Is it safe therefore to assume that Truth is relative?
Even science with all its observations, identifications, descriptions, experimental investigations, and theoretical explanantions of phenomena, is not immune from the multifaceted spectrum of truth. About seven thousand years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was the center of the universe. Now, we all know that it's not true. It was true then, when man's model of the universe was geocentric in nature as proposed by Aristotle an Ptolemy but the case isn't presently so. When Copernicus came up with his heliocentric hypothesis, the masses rejected its veracity because if first of all did not fit into the Aristotelian way of thinking and it also challenged the long-standing belief that the earth was the heavenly center of the universe placed by god himself.
So my contention is, anyone can change the truth, with doubt, with blood, with death, with an intense struggle or by whatever means anyone sees fit to galvanize its evolution because the reality of truth is that it is not only relative, it is also flexible (now we know why there are so many spindoctors in the world) and usually redefined to suit one's necessity. There must be honesty therefore, in the statement that the only thing constant in this world is change... and that statement includes Truth within its scope.
What therefore really matters you might ask... well, at this point, there is no justice in saying that the Truth matters. What matters is your own truth, or more accurately put, your own version of the truth as you see and experience it to be. What matters is the veracity of your truth. What is important is the strenght of your conviction in your truth that it helps other people find their truth as well.
Politics and Governance
This was originally a paper I wrote on politics as required by Mr. Louie Montemar:
I want to start my paper with a clich̩, as most articles, papers and novels are not started off. I have never been one to really engage in or even think about politics or politicking for that matter. Allow me to clarify that Mr. Montemar has, if I recall correctly, made the argument that politics is something that we could never totally eradicate from our lives, and has suggested the term politicking to articulate the sentiments of many misinformed people Рmy ignorant and misinformed self included of course. Well Sir, if you think that I have been beating around the bush with my quaint but totally irrelevant opening, you are correct. To tell you the truth, I had to ask a number of people for suggestions as to what a good topic might be. Most proposed topics given to me can be generally classified as current events and I, being one who never got into the habit of reading periodicals even through constant insistence on my part (somehow I never got past the comics section whenever I tried), believed that I could never write a sensible-enough paper about politics - sensible-enough, to merit a grade to suit my purpose that is. The fact of the matter is, I have never had a concrete idea of politics before my POLIGOV subject although I suspect that I already had many first hand experiences of it in my life. The agonizing part is that, thinking that I have almost finished the subject, I would have already recalled these particular moments of my life and identified them with politics. But I do not - and that obviously, is my troublesome ball-and-chain as of the moment.
Moving on from a clumsy start, I would like to give a somewhat informal discussion of politics the way I have haphazardly experienced it in my life. Modest as these haphazard encounters with politics might be compared to most people, I believe that it would serve my purpose in this particular paper. If not, I would always have the consolation that what I have written here is better (forgive me for my arrogance) than the lousy paper a certain Ms. Marquez has submitted to the same professor I am writing this paper for. A word of petition on my part though, please do not share my sentiments with other people in any case as it would only embarrass me nor inform Ms. Marquez of my opinion about her paper.
This card tells the story of a real person who lived during the Holocaust…
Anyway, in the summer of two thousand and three, I found myself walking towards a museum whose name caught my fancy – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. After minutes of lining up for admission, I was dutifully inspecting a makeshift identification card a museum personnel gave me (she said it was part of the program). I was supposed to be Ilona Karfunkel Kalman, born on May 12, 1906 in Erdobenye, Hungary and that I was gassed upon arrival in Auschwitz. That information I thought to myself, sounded somewhat grim. Wouldn’t you agree with me dear Sir?
Of course, important aspects of a discussion are always given definition and to provide just that, let me quote its description from the museum pamphlet. The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. During that time, I later on learned, six million Jews were murdered as well as Poles, Roma or gypsies, people with disabilities. They were all targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic and national reasons as they were believed to be a race weaker than that of Hitler’s Aryan race. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny. And I was offered a glimpse of this horror as I saw videos, pictures and materials that spoke of the said oppression. One section of the exhibit that engraved itself in my mind was a section where a room (to give a descriptive estimate, half the size of Gokongwei rooms) was full of mounds and mounds of shoes. They were all grey with ash and looked beaten. On a wall wrote (or something like it anyway) we are the witnesses of a great injustice as our owners were thrown into the flame. We could survive the fire, their flesh however, could not.
I remember that I could not even begin to describe what it was that I felt upon reading those words as I stood there fully alive with my trusty Kickers on. Suffice to say that the emotions I felt during that moment are beyond the pale of my descriptive capacity for melancholy. Call it a reaction. An affective orientation if you wish to be politically correct.
For the dead and the living we must bear witness…(Ellie Weisel)
The deaths, the massacre and the injustice, all these stemmed from one political ideology – fascism. And fascism as we know it has a face, that of Adolf Hitler’s. The Holocaust as I see it was an inhumane exercise of power and authority in the name of one political ideology – the unity and harmony of government and society defined by opposition to forces that might weaken that collective unity (Danziger). Fascism is a philosophy that would give rapid development to a country. Fascism as displayed by Hitler however, was an idea poisoned and corrupted by personal loathing which he crafted and spilled amongst the German people.
Put it this way, Fascism had great ideological promise I’d give it that but perhaps the way the ideology was interpreted and the means of execution for reaching fascism’s political goals were just too costly and in the strictest argument, bible-sense wrong. No such aggregate of people should suffer in account of any ideology be it political, economic or social in nature. We do not need any form of education to know that. Politics I believe should only be a mechanism for enhancing the people but the reality is, it is a double-edged sword like many other things.
I want to start my paper with a clich̩, as most articles, papers and novels are not started off. I have never been one to really engage in or even think about politics or politicking for that matter. Allow me to clarify that Mr. Montemar has, if I recall correctly, made the argument that politics is something that we could never totally eradicate from our lives, and has suggested the term politicking to articulate the sentiments of many misinformed people Рmy ignorant and misinformed self included of course. Well Sir, if you think that I have been beating around the bush with my quaint but totally irrelevant opening, you are correct. To tell you the truth, I had to ask a number of people for suggestions as to what a good topic might be. Most proposed topics given to me can be generally classified as current events and I, being one who never got into the habit of reading periodicals even through constant insistence on my part (somehow I never got past the comics section whenever I tried), believed that I could never write a sensible-enough paper about politics - sensible-enough, to merit a grade to suit my purpose that is. The fact of the matter is, I have never had a concrete idea of politics before my POLIGOV subject although I suspect that I already had many first hand experiences of it in my life. The agonizing part is that, thinking that I have almost finished the subject, I would have already recalled these particular moments of my life and identified them with politics. But I do not - and that obviously, is my troublesome ball-and-chain as of the moment.
Moving on from a clumsy start, I would like to give a somewhat informal discussion of politics the way I have haphazardly experienced it in my life. Modest as these haphazard encounters with politics might be compared to most people, I believe that it would serve my purpose in this particular paper. If not, I would always have the consolation that what I have written here is better (forgive me for my arrogance) than the lousy paper a certain Ms. Marquez has submitted to the same professor I am writing this paper for. A word of petition on my part though, please do not share my sentiments with other people in any case as it would only embarrass me nor inform Ms. Marquez of my opinion about her paper.
This card tells the story of a real person who lived during the Holocaust…
Anyway, in the summer of two thousand and three, I found myself walking towards a museum whose name caught my fancy – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. After minutes of lining up for admission, I was dutifully inspecting a makeshift identification card a museum personnel gave me (she said it was part of the program). I was supposed to be Ilona Karfunkel Kalman, born on May 12, 1906 in Erdobenye, Hungary and that I was gassed upon arrival in Auschwitz. That information I thought to myself, sounded somewhat grim. Wouldn’t you agree with me dear Sir?
Of course, important aspects of a discussion are always given definition and to provide just that, let me quote its description from the museum pamphlet. The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. During that time, I later on learned, six million Jews were murdered as well as Poles, Roma or gypsies, people with disabilities. They were all targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic and national reasons as they were believed to be a race weaker than that of Hitler’s Aryan race. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny. And I was offered a glimpse of this horror as I saw videos, pictures and materials that spoke of the said oppression. One section of the exhibit that engraved itself in my mind was a section where a room (to give a descriptive estimate, half the size of Gokongwei rooms) was full of mounds and mounds of shoes. They were all grey with ash and looked beaten. On a wall wrote (or something like it anyway) we are the witnesses of a great injustice as our owners were thrown into the flame. We could survive the fire, their flesh however, could not.
I remember that I could not even begin to describe what it was that I felt upon reading those words as I stood there fully alive with my trusty Kickers on. Suffice to say that the emotions I felt during that moment are beyond the pale of my descriptive capacity for melancholy. Call it a reaction. An affective orientation if you wish to be politically correct.
For the dead and the living we must bear witness…(Ellie Weisel)
The deaths, the massacre and the injustice, all these stemmed from one political ideology – fascism. And fascism as we know it has a face, that of Adolf Hitler’s. The Holocaust as I see it was an inhumane exercise of power and authority in the name of one political ideology – the unity and harmony of government and society defined by opposition to forces that might weaken that collective unity (Danziger). Fascism is a philosophy that would give rapid development to a country. Fascism as displayed by Hitler however, was an idea poisoned and corrupted by personal loathing which he crafted and spilled amongst the German people.
Put it this way, Fascism had great ideological promise I’d give it that but perhaps the way the ideology was interpreted and the means of execution for reaching fascism’s political goals were just too costly and in the strictest argument, bible-sense wrong. No such aggregate of people should suffer in account of any ideology be it political, economic or social in nature. We do not need any form of education to know that. Politics I believe should only be a mechanism for enhancing the people but the reality is, it is a double-edged sword like many other things.
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
outside looking in
Man is probably the only creature who has precariously deviated from his instinct and perhaps the only creature who sought to redefine himself in his unfounded arrogance - which is probably equally why he is considered the most interesting. It’s peculiar to admit that man is such a good study taking into consideration that we ourselves are human. Perhaps it is even our very flare for drama that fuels this narcissistic idiosyncracy of sorts, this fascination of the self.
We do not know of the strength and the purpose that lies behind the existence of man (this is of course, open to refute). Procreation? Stewardship perhaps? But we know this much is true: that man has constructed worlds upon worlds of ideas to suit his every necessity. For the purposive he has invented meaning, for the devout he has fashioned a host of deities, even the cynical he indulges with pessimism. To go on and on about each and every school of thought that caters to a particular makeshift requirement would be tediously unnecessary. What I am driving at as of the moment is that perhaps these seemingly innocuous concepts are an unconscious expression of man’s vexation at the sight of reality- an argument that is to my frame of mind, rather justified. Consider this premise if you do not completely see my case: who else has a greater reason to lie his way out of reality if not man? If we do not lie to ourselves and strip reality bare, then I personally think that we would be left without any drive to live. If man is truly the crown of all creation as argued by many philosophers, then it goes without saying that in man’s semi-perfection, he is capable of creating a scapegoat of the mind. Virtual as it may be, it is still nonetheless- the makeshift backdoor that man has created to protect both his sanity and his vanity. As to whether I am right side up or upside down, I leave the decision to your objective intellect. Before you define anything that is close to a decision however, whether it is for or against my veracity, keep in mind that I have perhaps come in the guise of a pill – whatever you reckon fitting to help you swallow truth all the more easily.
At scrutiny’s fingertips, doesn’t it seem as if all the fragments of man’s delusions have warped itself to a kind of entity, a thing we have fondly called reality that is in truth, beyond even the pale of man’s descriptive capacity for rhyme and reason. Should it be man’s consolation therefore, that the answers reality gives to those who search for purpose and meaning are never really what they expect them to be? Should man therefore dare to raise his fist and in his frustration, shake it towards a conceived heaven and against a conceived holy host of deities and heavenly beings? Should he dare to make up his own truths and another kind of reality that is none too far from the reality he knows as he stumbles along the way? For what is it really that shapes man’s reality if not pieces of himself that he broke, mended back and shattered again? Man is a being whose existence is under perpetual redefinition. Was it not he who was whole who allowed himself to be broken by the careless, the indifferent, the enraged? This is perhaps a glorious moment for our subject, a moment of seemingly utter selflessness which is not always the case in ordinary instances. Are these the moments that man feels that truly alive? Is this then, the reality of all realities?
It is rather unfortunate that man’s nature and conceit never did allow him to be broken for long. It is ill-fated that his intelligence, the very thing that makes him exceed among the creatures of this world, never did bid him to sleep beside an empty rage. For all that man knows, it might have been worth his while… His nature and conceit spurred him to pick himself up piece by piece; it galvanized him to pick up his dignity, his lopsided beauty, his humanity (even if it is a humanity that he discards willingly to give room to reason) and all the things that he allowed to be mutilated by the careless, the jealous, and the envious. It was all the things he allowed himself to maim. In man’s rejuvination, he is subject to a thousand pair of eyes that smolder their jealousy, because man is a phoenix in his own right. He dares to rise up from his ashes, and this perhaps, is the irony of it all. In his rebirth, he goes back to a reality that veils what is real. Should I dare and say that reality as we know it is a surreal reality woven by somnambulist society? That all this is nothing but a Technicolor dream thought of by black and white people?
We do not know of the strength and the purpose that lies behind the existence of man (this is of course, open to refute). Procreation? Stewardship perhaps? But we know this much is true: that man has constructed worlds upon worlds of ideas to suit his every necessity. For the purposive he has invented meaning, for the devout he has fashioned a host of deities, even the cynical he indulges with pessimism. To go on and on about each and every school of thought that caters to a particular makeshift requirement would be tediously unnecessary. What I am driving at as of the moment is that perhaps these seemingly innocuous concepts are an unconscious expression of man’s vexation at the sight of reality- an argument that is to my frame of mind, rather justified. Consider this premise if you do not completely see my case: who else has a greater reason to lie his way out of reality if not man? If we do not lie to ourselves and strip reality bare, then I personally think that we would be left without any drive to live. If man is truly the crown of all creation as argued by many philosophers, then it goes without saying that in man’s semi-perfection, he is capable of creating a scapegoat of the mind. Virtual as it may be, it is still nonetheless- the makeshift backdoor that man has created to protect both his sanity and his vanity. As to whether I am right side up or upside down, I leave the decision to your objective intellect. Before you define anything that is close to a decision however, whether it is for or against my veracity, keep in mind that I have perhaps come in the guise of a pill – whatever you reckon fitting to help you swallow truth all the more easily.
At scrutiny’s fingertips, doesn’t it seem as if all the fragments of man’s delusions have warped itself to a kind of entity, a thing we have fondly called reality that is in truth, beyond even the pale of man’s descriptive capacity for rhyme and reason. Should it be man’s consolation therefore, that the answers reality gives to those who search for purpose and meaning are never really what they expect them to be? Should man therefore dare to raise his fist and in his frustration, shake it towards a conceived heaven and against a conceived holy host of deities and heavenly beings? Should he dare to make up his own truths and another kind of reality that is none too far from the reality he knows as he stumbles along the way? For what is it really that shapes man’s reality if not pieces of himself that he broke, mended back and shattered again? Man is a being whose existence is under perpetual redefinition. Was it not he who was whole who allowed himself to be broken by the careless, the indifferent, the enraged? This is perhaps a glorious moment for our subject, a moment of seemingly utter selflessness which is not always the case in ordinary instances. Are these the moments that man feels that truly alive? Is this then, the reality of all realities?
It is rather unfortunate that man’s nature and conceit never did allow him to be broken for long. It is ill-fated that his intelligence, the very thing that makes him exceed among the creatures of this world, never did bid him to sleep beside an empty rage. For all that man knows, it might have been worth his while… His nature and conceit spurred him to pick himself up piece by piece; it galvanized him to pick up his dignity, his lopsided beauty, his humanity (even if it is a humanity that he discards willingly to give room to reason) and all the things that he allowed to be mutilated by the careless, the jealous, and the envious. It was all the things he allowed himself to maim. In man’s rejuvination, he is subject to a thousand pair of eyes that smolder their jealousy, because man is a phoenix in his own right. He dares to rise up from his ashes, and this perhaps, is the irony of it all. In his rebirth, he goes back to a reality that veils what is real. Should I dare and say that reality as we know it is a surreal reality woven by somnambulist society? That all this is nothing but a Technicolor dream thought of by black and white people?
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