A Brief Reply to a Long Comment On Žižek

This is a reply to comment by Mr. Alex Reynolds in a previous blog entry explaining my position as a fan of the Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. The introduction to the said blog entry was, of course, something of a joke, a play on the postmodernist commonplace of how no narrative can be privileged to explain the complexity of life and history anymore. Thus the juxtaposition of Žižek’s cultural theory and Maria Ozawa’s pornographic videography. Consequently, an excess meaning can be traced in the demonstration of how in this era of late capitalism what has been described as the condition of postmodernity inaugurates a multiplicity of (and often contradictory) identities.

Coming from a university with a culture of student activism, I join immersions in impoverished communities, protest actions on various issues, and espouse a “nationalist, scientific and mass-oriented culture” in the Maoist mold. But then as a student of Literature in the Humanities Department, I study The Illiad, Oedipus Rex and other artifacts of Western “high culture” in the classroom. But then I also keep myself updated on the latest Korean pop songs from my classmates and friends and listen to these songs while reading on Said or the latest by Žižek in the dormitory. And in facebook, I got hit for watching the latest Harry Potter without reading the book version first.

Seriously though, I don’t think it would be fruitful to dismiss Derrida, Lacan, Žižek, and much of Post-Saussurean theory on the premise that the language these theorists use in expounding their texts lack clarity. The aim of their theoretical projects is precisely to demonstrate that what we perceive as “natural,” “obvious,” and “commonsensical” are ideologically constructed. Common sense, as Catherine Belsey notes in her book Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), is “rooted in a specific historical situation and operating in conjunction with a particular social formation”[1] and is thus “produced in a specific society by ways in which that society talks and thinks about itself and its experience.”[2] And since “Common sense appears obvious because it is inscribed in the language we speak,”[3] a critique of ideology necessitates a reappraisal of the concept of language as “merely the medium in which autonomous individuals transmit messages to each other about an independently constituted world of things… transparency of language is an illusion.”[4] Belsey explains:

Partly as a consequence of this theory, the language used by its practitioners is usually far from transparent. The effect of this is to alert the reader to the opacity of language, and to avoid the “tyranny of lucidity,” the impression that what is being said must be true because it is obvious, clear and familiar… New concepts, new theories, necessitate new, unfamiliar and therefore intially difficult discourses. [5]

As Adorno and Horkheimer already pointed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947): “False clarity is only another name for myth; and myth has always been obscure and enlightening at one and the same time: always using the devices of familiarity and straightforward dismissal to avoid the labor of conceptualization.” [6] Of course, there is a proper place for everything. I don’t use Lacanese when writing for the student paper or speak in Derridean aporias to my classmates. Anyhow, my position vis-a-vis Žižek is perhaps better captured by Filipino literary critic and poet Edel E. Garcellano:

It is not surprising that Žižek would find resonance in the heart of young scholars: The Elvis Presley of philo is a veritable compendium of film, music, philo & lit giants that are intertwined in a new light: this bestiary that would dazzle the Socratic flaneurs in MTV mix. At this point of historical flux when Marxism is a god that failed & the future isn’t even privy to Benjamin’s angel, anyone who emerges from the ruins of despair would find Žižek a comforting figure that survived the first wave of socialism but wouldn’t denounce it, assaying also as unacceptable the triumphalistic chest beating of capitalism. Which exactly fills the bill for a generation of Filipino activists who devours Žižek as a feast of texts: he represents a positive despair in view of the promise yet unfulfilled by the revolutionists of the ’70s, its deflection in the ’80s, & the subsequent rectification in the past decades to keep their hopes alive.[7]

As I’ve pointed out before, I do have reservations about Žižek. But it has nothing to do with his lack of clarity or his compulsion to be original, which as Mr. Alex Reynolds points out, leads him to cling to the most unoriginal and orthodox Leninist positions (which for me is one of the good things about Žižek!). My primary reservation would be, apart from those I already pointed out in my previous blog entry, Filipino Marxist scholar E. San Juan Jr.’s observation that Žižek does not go beyond questioning the coordinates of the present order:

Armed with Žižek’s apercus disseminated in numerous books and articles circulated all over the world, are we any wiser or more fully informed of the total picture of the world today after his brilliant disclosure? Are we more adequately mobilized to confront Obama’s imperial mission in Afghanistan and all over the world, including the Philippines, via the subservient neocolonial Arroyo regime? Can the Lacanian-Freudian theoretical framework clarify the root and solution to the unprecedented global economic crisis started by the financial collapse of 2008? Is US hegemony still standing after the powerful Žižek diagnosis of self-deception, seduction, and traumatic cathexes?[8] ■

Tears in the Darkness

Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman’s Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath is described by the Publishers Weekly as “a gripping narrative of the 1942 battle for the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines,” by Kirkus Reviews as an “[a]ssiduous account of the Japanese conquest of the Philippines in World War II and the fate of the American garrison there,” and finally by Richard Pyle of the Associated Press as

A new account of the Bataan Death March, in which more than 70,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war were victims of appalling barbarism, a particularly grim episode of World War II following Japan’s invasion of the Philippines.

Tears in the Darkness is marketed as “an altogether new look at World War II that exposes the myths of war and shows the extent of suffering and loss on both sides.” Bryce Christensen writes in an advanced review:

Unlike historians who have spotlighted the titans—MacArthur and Wainwright, Yamashita and Homma—who matched strategies in the Philippines in 1942, the Normans focus on the ordinary soldiers who bore the brunt of the wartime savagery.

Tears in the Darkness, a The New York Times book review enthuses:

is authoritative history. Ten years in the making, it is based on hundreds of interviews with American, Filipino and Japanese combatants. But it is also a narrative achievement. The book seamlessly blends a wide-angle view with the stories of many individual participants.

But while there is no question to the integrity, “extremely detailed and thoroughly chilling treatment” of the historical facts presented in the rigorously researched book, there is also no reason for us to promptly accept the efforts to privilege the book as “popular history’s final say on the subject.”

In the new book, the Normans’ gaze is basically focused on the ordeals faced by the Americans involved in the Death March, particularly on the figure of Ben Steele. The Christian Science Monitor comments:

The book seamlessly blends the history of the war with the stories of people like Steele who lived through it. It could just as easily and appropriately have been titled “Ben Steele’s Story.”

Striving to give the other side of the conflict, the couple also presents previously untold accounts of some Japanese soldiers “who struggle to maintain their humanity while carrying out their superiors’ inhuman commands.”

But where are the Filipinos, the “collateral damages” of conflicting American and Japanese imperialist interests?

Victorious American colonizers stand over the bodies of fallen Filipinos. More than 1.4 million Filipinos died during the Philippine-American War.

The Great Depression that struck the advanced capitalist nations in the 1930s directly led to the Second World War of the next decade as these very same nations scrambled to redivide the world among them to escape the economic crisis. The fascist powers Germany, Italy, and Japan fought against the Allied imperialist nations (US, France, UK, etc.) for the acquisition of colonies and semi-colonies that will serve as new sources of cheap labor and natural resources and new dumping grounds for their surplus products.

The Philippines was thus dragged into the war by virtue of its being a US colony.

This deafening absence is no reason to dismiss the book outright, however. While it may not be “popular history’s final say on the subject,” the book still presents one more vantage point from which insights can be taken.

A Japanese force of 43,000 seasoned troops began the invasion of the Philippine islands eight hours after the Japanese fleet attacked the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The US preparations against the looming Japanese invasion of the Philippines, however, were at best haphazard. Falling back skirmish after skirmish, the American command finally gathered the remaining US troops and Filipino volunteers in Bataan and Corregidor in January 1942. Ninety nine days later, the Normans write, “more than 76,000 Americans and Filipinos under American command laid down their arms.”

The sick, starving, and bedraggled prisoners of war were rounded up by their Japanese captors and made to walk sixty-six miles to a railhead for the trip to prison camp, a baneful walk under a broiling sun that turned into one of most notorious treks in the annals of war, the Bataan Death March. […]

As the events of 1941‒1942 passed into the hands of historians, both the battle for Bataan and the death march became symbols, the former as a modern Thermopylae, a stirring last stand, and the latter as a crucible of courage, the courage to continue on a walk to the grave.

…but when the dross of propaganda and myth is skimmed from the surface of history, what’s left, in this case, is an example of the miscarried morality and Punic politics that underlie every appeal to arms—the bad leadership, the empty promises, the kind of cruelty that crushes men’s souls. (4-5)

"KILL EVERYONE OVER TEN," American Gen. Jacob Smith ordered his troops during the Philippine-American War.

And indeed, American and Filipino troops battling side by side (but with the latter as the leading man’s sidekick of course) and sharing the experience of brutality under the Fascist Japanese military occupiers sealed the image of America as the colonized people’s benevolent big brother.

The vicious violence of subjugation (half a million Filipinos killed during the Philippine-American War and so on) was erased from the Filipino people’s collective memory primarily by way of the US colonial administration’s introduction of a public educational apparatus that molded the Filipino people into docile and passive colonial subjects.

The bond formed between the American and Filipino troops during the Second World War only furthered this erasure. This amnesia and attendant “colonial mentality” survives up to the contemporary period of neocolonialism (the indirect control of foreign imperial powers over the Filipino people’s political, economic, and cultural life). ■

Kant with Sade

Is Marquis de Sade, as the reputation that precedes him intimate, the sexually transgressive aristocrat par excellence? This element seems to be missing in the two short stories published by Hesperus Press in the thin volume Betrayal: “The Magistrate Mocked” and “Emilie de Tourville.”

As John Burnside observed in his foreword to the book, the popular notion that Sade “was all about sex, and that ‘sadism’ – the ritualization of an exquisite sexual cruelty – was something that the ‘Divine Marquis’ had invented” somehow misses the point.[1] Sade’s obsession is with power and humiliation, two themes that overshadow the stories.

Sa kabila ng (walang habas na) pandarahas ng estado, tuloy pa rin ang laban!

Patuloy pa rin sa paghahanap ang mga magulang nina Karen Empeño at Sherlyn Cadapan. / PW files

And no, I am not writing the body of this text in Filipino. I confess that I cannot write a decent sentence in the national language (patawarin niyo po ako, sa totoo ay sinasanay ko pa ang sarili ko na magsulat sa Filipino – bigo ata ang paghulma sakin ng sistemang pangedukasyon sa larangang ito). And though I’ve been compelling myself to read Filipino texts these past months, I still find reading them difficult.

So why the title? For one, it captures the message of what I thought I would briefly mention here before all of this unnecessary rationalizations came up. Secondly, I actually take a fetishistic pleasure (sa kabila ng aking paghihirap) in the articulation of militant tracts in Filipino (ang mga islogan at agit sa partikular – mangahas, mangahas, mangahas na makibaka) in the same way that I enjoy apparently pointless K-Pop choruses – gee, gee, gee, gee, baby, baby, baby (not to mention the Korean lyrics of which I understand not a word).

Now that explains the linguistic discontinuity between the title and the body of this blog entry. But that is not important.

Pandarahas

These days, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that not a day passes without one’s hearing a report of a human right violation – be it extrajudicial killings, abductions, illegal detentions, massacres, harassment, etc.

And this is not just a matter of statistics (the human rights alliance KARAPATAN has documented over a thousand extrajudicial killings and two hundred enforced disappearances since the present regime’s assumption of power).

Just this semestral break and this is the news that greeted my brief homecoming, Karlo Cabahug and Cai Alvarico (both of whom I got the honor of working with in a few student advocacies when I was still studying in Cebu) were illegally detained by elements of the Philippine Army while they were researching on the conditions of peasants in Zamboanguita, Negros Oriental.

Karlo and Cai are now free. The charge of rebellion filed against them was dismissed by the Prosecutor’s Office in Dumaguete City for lack of probable cause. They only spent more than two weeks in jail.

But not everyone is as lucky (swerte dahil hindi pinalabas ng militar na missing, atbp. – isa pang indikasyon sa perverted na kaayusan ng lipunan na umiiral sa kasalukuyan).

Last year, Rachelle Mae Palang, who I also got the honor of working with for a while when she was editor-in-chief of her college’s student paper and officer of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines, became a martyr for the cause of social transformation.

It is often said that every Filipino has a relative or a friend or at least someone close who is working abroad. With the way things are going, I’m sure the day is not far when the same can be said of victims of the State terrorism.

Dukot

It is therefore good to hear that the recent film Dukot is tackling the pervasive issue of human rights violations in the country. I was told that Dukot will be shown sometime this November or December.

Written by Bonifacio Ilagan and directed by Joel Lamangan, Dukot follows in the tradition of the great Filipino classic films, such as Orapronobis by Lino Brocka and Sister Stella L. by Mike de Leon, that portrays the country’s ugly realities.

I hope Dukot becomes a truly material force not only for raising awareness (and mapping the contours of the present crisis) but also moving people to emancipatory collective action. Will be waiting to see the film. For now, we can check out the trailer and the soundtrack music video:

A Void: Now How About That?

Looking for a book missing from an expensive bookstore’s shelves, I stumbled upon another title which immediately finds itself in my hands. The front cover, a violet expanse with a lower corner inhabited by an army of minuscule letter E’s in different pink shades, caught my attention. I turned to the blurbs in the back cover and read The New Yorker praise it as “A true tour de force: a full-length novel containing not a single ‘E.’ An entertaining post-modern detective story.”

Now how about that? Straight away, I returned Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Rolando Tolentino’s National/Transnational: Subject Formation in and on the Philippines (thinking it’s in the university library anyway), Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and Edward Said’s Orientalism, among others, back on the shelf – I not having the financial capability to acquire all of them – and bought Georges Perec’s A Void at the counter.

Thus having relegated Said for Christmas (or perhaps my next birthday), I began leafing through A Void and learned that the book was originally in French and that the author, perhaps to compensate for the lack of E’s in A Void, also wrote a shorter text using only E as a vowel. Meanwhile, the award-winning translator and novelist Gilbert Adair also made sure that the English translation made use of not a single E!

For the Love of Žižek: a Fan’s Confession

We believe that feelings are immutable, but every sentiment, particularly the noblest and most disinterested, has a history.

Michel Foucault,
‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’

I was not always a keen reader of theory, that anamorphic genre that blends literary, sociological, philosophical, political, and other conceptual apparatuses under one appellation. Adorno, Bahktin, Barthes, Judith Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Kristeva, Lacan, and Lyotard, were never my thing. I’ve read some Marx, some Lenin, and some Mao before. But that’s just it. It was only recently, particularly the beginning of this year that I began to develop a taste for what most readers would readily dismiss as dry and obscure texts. I have Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian guy, to thank for that.

Yes, I am a fan of Žižek in the same sense that my classmates are fans of the Korean pop boy band Super Junior, or in the way that my other friends are avid followers of J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter, or in the sense that my baby sister follows Spongebob Squarepants on television every weekend, or in the way that some of my acquaintances are obsessed with the Japanese porn star Maria Ozawa. I am a fan in the fullest sense of the word, like the Noranians of the past or the Pinoy Big Brother devotees of today.

To Whom It May Concern

Hello.

Bad habits die hard. I’ve been trying to stop myself from writing you. But then, it seems even in the middle of performing what I’m supposed to be “officially” doing, I’m still trying to write you! I guess there’s not much we can do about it, no?

But language never communicates in a straightforward manner (a friend said language doesn’t communicate at all while my other self is questioning this whole enterprise of communication).

To put things simply, let’s just say that we often say things we don’t mean and mean things that we don’t say, which goes to say that some things (like this one) are better left unsaid.

All this reminds me of a poem I recently read from the cover of a book I came across somewhere in the library:

            My love
            Is like the grasses
            Hidden in the deep mountain:
            Through its abundance increases,
            There is none that knows.

That would have been the best for all of us. Then again, I was watching the new on TV the other day and realized something: Typhoons, as we all know, have been battering the country these past weeks. They pour too much water on rivers that overflow and flood the towns and cities. Such an abundance does not fail to make its presence felt. ■

An Instrument of War

“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he’s a painter, or ears if he’s a musician, or a lyre at every level of his art if he’s a poet, or even, if he’s a boxer, just his muscles? On the contrary, he’s at the same time a political being, constantly alive to heartrending, fiery or happy events to which he responds in every way. How would it be possible to feel no interest in other people and by virtue of an ivory indifference to detach yourself from the life which they so copiously bring you? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.”

Pablo Picasso

Babae / Woman

I remember the second time I visited SM City Iloilo this year quite vividly for the simple reason that I heard a familiar tune playing over the mall’s intercom. I was with my two titas and their baby boy when we noticed Inang Laya’s song “Babae” reverberating across the mall interior.

I was way younger when I first listened to the song. I cannot recall the circumstances of those childhood moments anymore but I can recollect the song’s melody just fine anytime. I was older when I came across the song again and that was also the time when I learned the lyrics:

“Babae”

By Inang Laya

Kayo ba ang mga Maria Clara
Mga Hule at mga Sisa
Na di maruning na lumaban?
Kaapiha’y bakit iniluluha?
Mga babae, kayo ba’y sadyang mahina?

Kayo ba ang mga Cinderella
Na lalake, ang tanging pag-asa?
Kayo nga ba ang mga Nena
Na katawan ay ibinebenta?
Mga babae, kayo ba’y sadyang pang-kama?

Ang ating isip ay buksan
At lipuna’y pag-aralan,
Ang nahubog ninyong isipan
At tanggaping kayo’y mga libangan
Mga babae, ito nga ba’y kapalaran?

Bakit ba mayroong mga Gabriela
Mga Teresa at Tandang Sora
Na di umasa sa luha’t awa?
Sila’y nagsipaghawak ng sandata
Nakilaban, ang mithiin ay lumaya.

Bakit ba mayrong mga Lisa
Mga Liliosa at mga Lorena
Na di natakot makibaka
At ngayo’y marami nang kasama?
Mga babae, ang mithiin ay lumaya!

“Women hold half the sky,” Mao once said. But in a society like the Philippines, women are subjected to the double oppression, among others, of class and sex. “Babae,” a favorite during women’s month commemoration affairs during March and protest actions involving women’s issues, is a song that problematizes the gender role assigned by the social order to women since their childhood.

On This Reproductive System Where I’m Blissfully Stuck Now

Not only do we find in the uneasy transitions of organisms engaged in reproduction the same basic violence which in physical eroticism leaves us gasping, but we also catch the inner meaning of that violence.

Georges Bataille,
Death and Sensuality

The news of students and faculty in 10 University of California campuses coming out in huge protests cheered me up, coming as I am from a university that is victim to the same neoliberal policies of budget cuts and fee increases. These cuts, Judith Butler writes,

eliminated 2,000 positions, gutted programmes that train high school teachers in science education, closed courses in East Asian languages and advanced Arabic, overburdened classrooms, shut students out of their majors, let scores of lecturers go and closed the university library on Saturday. In addition, the administration demanded of students tuition and fee increases of nearly 40%, imperilling the very notion of an affordable public university and forcing many students to leave the university or scramble for full-time jobs.

Meanwhile: “Annually the state pays $49,000 per prison inmate and less than $14,000 per UC student. If the state can lock us up, it can invest in our education for one-third of the cost,” The Guardian quoted one of the protesting student’s leaflet.

University of California Berkeley students and faculty protest against fee increases and budget cuts. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty

Sounds familiar? In the Philippines, the government has been annually decreasing the budget for education services in favor of foreign debt servicing. Of course, why should the state provide quality and accessible education if what’s in demand by the global market is cheap and docile labor?

Perhaps this is one face of what Bourdieu describes as the “contribution that the educational system makes to the reproduction of the social structure”? Think of how certain competencies are restricted to the dominant groups in the social order. [1]

The University of the Philippines will be allotted only P5.3 billion pesos by the government next year. Not only is this figure way lower than the current year’s P7.06 billion budget, it is P13 billion less than the P18 billion originally proposed by the university.

This will certainly mean another round of increases in tuition and other fees as the university struggles to cope with the budgetary lack for its continued existence: a travesty that, in the Philippine context, runs in accordance with International Monetary Fund prescriptions that is restructuring the educational system to cater to the needs of the global market (the following of which is a precondition for further World Bank loans by the government).

Education for all!

It is precisely because of this adherence that the government implemented the Long-Term Higher Education Development Plan for 2001-2010, a plan which particularly reduces the number of state universities and colleges and transforms the remaining ones into semi-corporations that generate their own income.

Although I am skeptical of Althusser’s theory that the educational institution is still the principal apparatus for conveying the dominant ideology among the masses (so pervasive is the effect of popular culture and the media these days; and yes, my professors are my pets in facebook), it cannot be denied that education is still a powerful instrument for molding minds.

As the neocolonial and semi-feudal social formation in the country persists, the educational system will remain to be colonial (because it is geared to serving what Negri and Hardt call Empire), commercialized (because it is profit-oriented), and repressive (because it denies the youth access to education). The struggle for a nationalist, scientific, and mass-oriented education and culture, likewise, continues. ■

[1] Or how not all sperms are allowed to fertilize the egg in human reproduction? Whatever!

The Real Catastrophe behind Ondoy

The administration presidential candidate Gilbert Teodoro has been airing costly TV infomercials bragging about the Arroyo regime’s disaster preparations. The typhoon Ondoy proved his claims to be a big farce. The scale of human suffering that enveloped Metro Manila and other parts of the country in the aftermath of typhoon Ondoy’s onslaught is staggering. The landslides and flooding, said to be the worst in forty years, brought untold destruction on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

As we continue to extend aid to the victims of typhoon Ondoy, we should never overlook examining the convergence of various underlying factors that resulted in the disaster. The people were not merely victims of a natural catastrophe. The threat of strong tropical typhoons, considering the country’s geographic location of proximity to the Pacific Ocean, is always present. The more revealing detail is the Arroyo regime’s lack of adequate provisions for such emergencies.

Typhoon Ondoy did not only reveal problems of insufficient preparation for effective relief and rescue operations. More importantly, it exposed the government’s misaligned priorities that resulted in deficient preventive measures.

Lest we forget, even as the Arroyo regime continues to neglect urban planning, infrastructure, drainage, and flood control, the president was able to rechannel emergency funds amounting to P800 million for her foreign travels.

In a sense, typhoon Ondoy substantiates the people’s fears of an ecological breakdown that would destroy human civilization as we know it. It props up a form of thinking that can be summed up in the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s remark on how today “it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.”

But what is truly apocalyptic is not the specter of more environmental catastrophes but the reality of human actions that fail to prepare for such calamities. In the long run, we can only ready ourselves adequately for future Ondoys precisely by changing how our society is organized and the way our government is run.

Until Philippine society remains to be divided between an exploited majority of workers, peasants, and slum dwellers and an oppressive minority of big compradors and landlords who use the State for the protection of their interests, government funds intended for disaster prevention will continue to be squandered in corruption and skewed priorities.

“Cast away all illusions and prepare struggle,” Mao once said: let us turn the grief and suffering of the present into a thirst for justice. The moment this longing crystallizes will be the Day of Judgment for the callous ruling classes who have made the people suffer for the longest time. ■

DONATE RELIEF GOODS NOW for 20,000 families who badly need help after Ondoy fury

Help Tulong Kabataan reach 20,000 families ASAP. Donate relief goods now.

30 barangays in Metro Manila and nearby provinces badly hit by Ondoy cry for help.

You can help them NOW. Gather and bring relief goods to any Tulong Kabataan donation center:

• Rice
• Potable water
• Canned goods
• Cooking oil
• Cooking utensils
• Medicines
• Blankets, banigs
• School supplies

You can also help by donating money:

• Smart Money: 5299670778290
• GCash: +639266677163
• Bank Deposit
  Bank Account: Student Christian Movement of the Philippines
  Bank: BPI
  Branch: Kamias-Anonas, Quezon City Philippines
  US Dollar Account No: 3324-0048-06
  Peso Checking Account No: 3321-0176-64
• Paypal: donate or http://3.ly/tulong
• For Western Union: Carl Marc L. Ramota, B12 L27 San Pedro Subd Vill Nova QC

Tulong Kabataan donation drop-off points

TULONG KABATAAN CENTER

• 118-B Scout Rallos, Brgy. Sacred Heart, Quezon City (look for/contact Frances 09072536529, contact hotline number 394-4285 or email tulongkabataan@gmail.com)

QUEZON CITY

• Vinzons Hall Lobby/USC office, UP Diliman Quezon City (look for/contact Brandy 09062778145)

MANILA

• United Methodist Church Headquarters
  900 United Nations Avenue, Ermita, Manila (infront of Manila Police District, look for Ate Merly)

OTHER DROP-OFF POINTS
QC Area:

• Trinity University of Asia (Marga 09274313843)
• Southeast Asian College, Welcome Rtda (Val 09158156860)

U-Belt Area:

• College of Holy Spirit (Alpha 091642456955),
• San Beda College (Jacob 09156441311)

Intramuros:

• San Agustin Church

Taft Avenue:

• St. Scholastica’s College-Manila (Chikee 09277855372)
• St. Paul University-Manila (Kaycee 09272845150)
• UP Manila- CAS SC (Ces 09158185686)
• Emilio Aguinaldo College (Kath 09062537432)
• Adamson University (Dora 09069227804)

Sta. Mesa:

• Eulogio Amang Rodriguez Institute for Science and Technology (EARIST) (John Rey 09094389199)
• Polytechnic University of the Philippines

CAMANAVA:

• De La Salle Araneta University (Vincent 09228068473)

Metro South:

• PUP- Taguig (Jov 09107172398)

List of Community Beneficiaries

For more information contact the Tulong Kabataan hotline: (632)394-4285

The Lake by Yasunari Kawabata

Gimpei barely suppressed the urge to put his arm round the girl’s legs. But before he could do anything rash, the sudden realization that, every evening, she would walk here with her dog beneath the shade of the gingko tree and that he could watch her from a hiding place on top of the bank came to him like a ray of hope. It was like lying naked in the new grass, so cool and fresh was his sense of relief. Yes, he would watch her from the top of the bank, and she would come up the slope toward him forever… His happiness knew no bounds. (p. 86)

The Lake by Yasunari Kawabata begins with a fugitive entering a bath. He is Gimpei, a self-conscious old man with ugly feet who was suspended from teaching for seducing his teenage student. Gimpei recently took a bag dropped by a woman containing two hundred thousand yen and ran away from home, fearing the police will be after him.

Fragmented scenes and memories flashed in his head while he was bathed by the establishment’s pretty attendant. The voice and the body of the young girl stirred up his memory, haunted as he was by several ghosts from his past. So we begin to learn of the death of his father in the lake near his childhood home, the child he had with a prostitute who he abandons in the streets, and the faces of the young women in his life.

Throughout the novel, it is interesting to note that Gimpei’s voyeuristic episodes, sexual interactions, and perverse fantasies are narrated beautifully and with nostalgia as if they were the most natural thing in the world.

Meanwhile, a parallel narrative focuses on the life of Miyako, the young woman who lost her money. She gave her body to a decrepit old man in exchange for financial security. On one hand, the money she worked hard for and lost makes “the very thought of saving a bitter memory.” On the other hand, “she had felt a momentary thrill when she lost the money – a thrill of pleasure”:

It was as if some vague sensation, smoldering within her while she was being followed by the man had suddenly caught fire – almost as though her youth, lost in old Arita’s shadow, had suddenly been restored to life and had taken its revenge. If this were true, Miyako, at that precise moment, received compensation for all the shame she had endured through the long days and months it had taken to accumulate the two hundred thousand yen. And so the money was probably lost not in vain. (p. 50)

The Lake is essentially a disturbing yet poetically rendered short novel about the fantasies of a dirty old man and the twisted lives of those around him, all symbolized by the stagnant lake that fails to move forward. ■

I Love the System!

I love systems; corporations exploit systems and deform them to channel capital. I love habits; capital destroys habits so that implements must be replaced, which requires further raw materials to be drawn and further labor added, and fetishization and idealization to be the main quality of cathexis. I love cathexes; people murder and hurt one another because their drives have been pushed into distorted images or ideas, either by genetic predisposition or by a variety of family pathologies, psychological or physical abuses, that often stem from economic factors, but cross class lines and can express themselves in large-scale non-egalitarian modes of power, as well as in their more familiar manifestations within the living space, a determiner of roles among those sharing it.

Michael Scharf,
“I Love Systems”

Going Against the Current?

We all too often create our own conception of a thing that is removed from the reality of that object and dismiss the whole thing based on the wrong views that we have constructed.

An essay published online by John Ryan Recabar in the blog, Going Against the Current, last year questioned the continued validity of radical student activism as a means of effecting change.[1]

The disparity in the number of students participating in protest actions during the First Quarter Storm of the early 70s, and the height of the anti-dictatorship struggle in the mid 80s and the students mobilized in recent years seems to back up this view. A closer look at the topic, however, would reveal cracks in the arguments employed in the said essay to oppose what it labeled as “radical activism.”