"... justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts..."
(Luke 16: 15)
Thursday, December 16, 2021
Tuesday, December 14, 2021
Walter Stefano: Catus humanidades
(Wandered in 2015 - 13 December 2021)
Walter at the University of the Philippines (U.P.) Cebu Jose T. Joya Gallery.
Photo taken by Yvette Malahay-Kim
Classroom
Udo (scratches aluminum screened door)
Us : Gawas ka, Doy? (opens door) Ayaw pangihi sa tanom, ayaw sa deck, ayaw...
Udo (takes his time to sniff around after urine-hosing down a verdant pot)
Us : Udo, Udo. Sulod na, Udo.
Udo (watches the street, snout resting on the grills until we, exasperated by the waiting, close the door then he goes up the steps, sits before the door, and barks once)
Us : Hasta ka, senyorito. Sulod na, sulod na (grumbles but opens the door)
Udo (enters and ambles to the kitchen, the day's lesson on obedience finished; the student, average as usual)
Monday, December 13, 2021
Sunday, December 12, 2021
Saturday, December 11, 2021
Thursday, December 9, 2021
Tuesday, December 7, 2021
Monday, December 6, 2021
Sunday, December 5, 2021
Tapok
i.
THE HUSBAND and I have more differences than commonalities. One of those that has endured the years is our split over space.
The persnickety housekeeper in the family will clear space. I, on the other hand, fill space.
Our dining table is a favorite arena of contentions. The husband can spot a rumor of mold blighting the mahogany through the clear sheet of glass placed on top of the table. He will move aside the glass and obliterate every dingy spot before this blooms and levels up into Household 101 disaster.
Soap, water, baking soda, and vinegar. Any or a combination of these home staples can dissolve fungi without harming wood or the person cleaning. Besides, the husband contends that it is not molds that he is up against; it is me.
To move aside a heavy and fragile sheet of glass, we first remove everything on the counter. I am sure the husband exaggerates when he points out that after he has cleared clutter, he only has to turn his back for me to leave on the cleared surface one or two items, which, given enough time, multiply exponentially.
“Exponentially” is a hyperbole (and not just because it is a mathematical term I need to look up and refresh for its exact meaning). Some folks love to look at sleeping babies, fresh bedsheets, grooming cats, and empty space. I like the last two.
Space is a blank sheet for doodling. A clearing on the dining table invites an interesting rock found in the garden, a water bottle, a book. Then I differentiate: an insulated water bottle to hold hot liquids, another in glass for the pretty water beading iced drinks make, a plastic one I can bring upstairs and not break.
Books are even more exponential. I dig out and dust off a book that has a section I need to cite. Then I see another book while rummaging. This fellow joins the first one on the table. Soon enough, on the space the husband cleared on the table, I have gathered a “tapok,” a pajama party, a fiesta.
Space cries out to be filled. Fill my cup.
ii.
In the 1980s, when the husband and I were development workers hoping to find fish to cook for dinner at the Badian Poblacion wet market, we often were too late or too plebian to compete with the tourists for the bigger, meatier fish. We ended up drifting towards the section where shellfish and small fish were sold by the “tapok,” meaning “heap” or “group” in Cebuano.
At the end of the day, dinner was a meal that gathered all of us, field workers and the farmer and his family that adopted us. So while we inhaled in our imaginations the charbroiled perfection of fillets of “tangigue” (which never reached the Poblacion market as premium fish catch was diverted often to island resorts in Badian and neighboring Moalboal, diving capital in the south of Cebu), we brought home for sharing a few “tapok” of small fish or shellfish, which Mama Lomer fried, stewed or sauteed with kangkong grown on their land and shared with the pigs raised for the market.
The “tapok” that looked so scanty on the wet tiled stalls of the market was more than enough to warm our stomachs as we ate and talked, washed up and talked, and talked some more as the men rolled and puffed dried “lomboy (duhat)” leaves wrapped around a small strip of tobacco leaf for the “likin (handrolled native cigarettes)” that suffused the hours until the murmurs fell quiet at midnight or early dawn.
Turn over and over the moment until it makes a small roll. Slot into the intimate spaces of memory and take out when hungry.
iii.
On the first Sunday of Advent this year, I cleared our supper from the table for the lighting of the Advent wreath. The one table fixture the husband and I don’t disagree over is a small resin figurine of the Batang Balaan (Holy Child) in the crib, which stays on the table the whole year.
Since the counter was last cleared for mold extrication, a jumble of household objects has risen around the infant lying on the crib lined with half of a mahogany seed pod picked up one morning while sweeping the street. We intended to put the Child in the Manger at the center of our lives but inadvertently hemmed Him in with our clutter, distractions, routines.
In a household where cats nonchalantly crisscross or slumber on the table, it’s a wonder no canister has toppled and broken the Batang Balaan’s beatific smile and arms opened wide.
For the second year, my sister, niece, and I read every night during Advent one chapter from The Gospel According to Luke. Luke’s account covers the trajectory of the birth foretold of “a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger” (2:12) to the last meal when He gathered His disciples and quieted their fears and doubts by showing them “his hands and his feet” (24:40).
Luke organized his account into 24 chapters. By starting to read one chapter a night on Dec. 1, we reach the last chapter on the evening of the 24th of December, the eve of the birth in the manger.
According to Luke, shepherds were watching over their flocks sleeping under the night sky when an angel came into their midst. The shepherds later banded together to seek in Bethlehem what the angel augured: “a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger” (Luke 2: 12).
With every candle lit in the wreath, with every story read in the Bible, the distance dissipates between my sister and niece, and I. We turn separate pages but retrace in unison the steps taken by the shepherds: believe, gather, seek.
Tapok, in Cebuano, also means to flock and gather around One who will never sleep on His watch over us.
Thursday, December 2, 2021
Wednesday, December 1, 2021
"The shepherds and the angels"
IN THE FIELDS, as shepherds kept watch over their flock at night, an angel appeared and said:
"This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger."
(Luke 2: 12)
The Gospel According to Luke
"For nothing will be impossible with God."
-- Luke 1: 37
The Gospel According to Luke has 24 chapters.
If, beginning on December 1, one starts reading a chapter a day, one will finish reading Luke on Christmas eve.
Twenty-four days for the Greatest Story Ever Told.
Sunday, November 28, 2021
First week of Advent
"The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep
darkness--
on them light has shined."
Isaiah 9: 2
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
“Bukamata” means “open eyes”
I WROTE my last column, “Matamata,” which SunStar Cebu published last Nov. 21. For more than 21 years, I met a deadline, missing this only once.
A habit of writing is one of the perks of writing for the legacy media, a term used in academia to refer to the trimedia—newspapers, radio, and television—in the age of digital media.
While I was writing to submit earliest by Saturday noon a column that was published in the paper edition on Sunday (and much earlier on the website), I hardly thought of “deadline writing” as a perk.
As disruptions go, the break in my weekend routine opened my eyes. I took stock of more than half a century’s involvement with writing. In grade school at the St. Theresa’s College, my teachers sent my compositions for class—poems of stodgy moralism—to the school publication.
Reading my name printed on a page was not just pleasant; my parents gave me books as presents and overlooked my tendency to disappear behind a novel more often than bury myself in class references.
As a college undergraduate at the University of the Philippines (U.P.) Cebu, writing fell into two categories: for love and for lucre. I wrote about subjects close to my heart for campus publications, official and underground, and earned a few pesos from occasionally writing for a local magazine that mixed travel and lifestyle with progressive causes. I never read this magazine, which seemed dazed and confused in its orientation, but liked having pocket money for more books.
I was a young mother and a college instructor torn between academia and journalism when my former U.P. Cebu Journalism teacher, Eileen Mangubat, invited me to write a Sunday column for Cebu Daily News, which had invaded the Cebu turf ruled by The Freeman and SunStar Daily, along with another upstart, the Independent Post.
Ei said I should write about issues I feel strongly about. For the first time, a mainstream newspaper was interested in my views, my personal take on subjects of interest to its readers. As a newspaper intern and occasional contributor of features to local dailies, I was often encouraged by editors to write for the body politic or the market.
In 1998, when I started writing “Fisheye” for the Cebu Daily News, newspaper column-writing was predominantly male, political, and critical. It was the print version of the popular “bombastic” style popularized by AM radio commentators or komentarista, who did not pull their punches in lashing out against personalities and issues in the political arena.
Eileen’s encouragement to write about my experiences and insights was eye-opening to me as a reader and a writer. For the first time, newspaper columnists were writing about topics that had often been relegated to other pages outside of the influential main opinion-editorial pages. In Cebu Daily News, politics jostled with ecology, women, literature, spirituality, humor, and marginalia in the op-ed section.
I carried this mentality when I edited for SunStar Daily in 2000 and was later invited by my editor-in-chief, Atty Pachico Seares, to write a Sunday column and later, the unsigned Monday editorial on social issues.
I titled the Sunday column, “Matamata,” which means an “estimate” or a “guess” in Cebuano. I like the duality of the images and meanings of using the “eye” in my column titles.
Writing begins with seeing. The eye is not a perfect instrument; it is limited by vantage point and the superficiality of appearances. The eyes cannot be totally relied on as these can be blind from disease or bias.
Yet, for the writer, the eyes are the jump-off points. A journalist will use other references, like interviews and documents, to validate her observations. For an essayist or a columnist, the eye is the portal, the ways of seeing connecting the ways of feeling and thinking to the ways of expressing.
“Fisheye” refers to the special camera lens that takes a distorted image that the human eye rarely registers. Because of the extremely wide angle it uses, resulting in a hemispherical image, the fisheye lens induces the photographer and the viewer to see the world differently.
When I wrote “Fisheye” essays for Cebu Daily News, I wanted to show different ways of seeing what was personal and familiar. For women, the personal is as dramatic and insurgent as the political.
It is the timeless call echoing from the second wave of feminism: the personal IS political. This was the realization in the late 1960s that the personal issues experienced by women, from housework to child-bearing and career guilt, are connected to the social and political structures men dominate and control.
As a passionate carnivore, I believe that few parts of its anatomy, except perhaps for the portions near the fins and tail, which are always mobile, can rival the sweetly succulent eyes of a fish.
Eyes became the motif again when I chose the Cebuano word for approximation in my SunStar column. When a word is repeated in Cebuano, it is a diminution, not a consolidation. So “matamata” means a dilution of certainty because the views of a columnist or an essayist is just that, one person’s perspective or subjectivity.
Contrary to some readers’ matamata take, the column title of “Matamata” is not a contraction of my nickname, “Ma(yette) Ta(bada) Ma(yette) Ta(bada)”. I am not that fond of my name.
After putting to bed finally after 21 years the “Matamata” column last Nov. 21, I wondered what I would do. I thought I detested deadlines until the rug was pulled out from under.
I decided to make a blog and, in keeping with my affection for eyes, created a blog title that continues to play with the image and meaning associated with my favorite part.
From my Indonesian classmate Reny Triwardani, who teaches me phrases of Bahasa, I learned that “membuka mata” has the same meaning in Cebuano, “buka mata”. In both languages, the phrase means “open eyes”.
The digital is a platform I am exploring. A habit of writing for print means a lifetime of quirks and reflexes that I am still detecting and tweaking for online reading and, I hope, engagement.
However, whatever the portal, our writing reveals our ways of seeing. A cat figurine I bought for P25 from a store selling Japanese surplus is my talisman in exploring the digital.
Curled up and exposing its vulnerable belly, the ceramic cat mimics what, in a living cat, reveals utmost trust and vulnerability. That is what writing means to me, the moment of expressing and revealing, crossing over from sleep to wideawakeness. Buka mata.
Monday, November 22, 2021
Banagbanag (let the light in)
In Cebuano, the word means "daybreak".
This view, from the window, comes after I find good news in my inbox.
My first post, too, for this young blog.
A break or a cut lets the light in, said Rumi.
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