Talking in Sign Language
I don’t know when this…Tim Burton phase will end. This state of noli me tangere and get-out-of-my-face-please-thank-you.
Or maybe this will be a more or less permanent thing. Only I will always be polite.
(At first I thought I’d get t-shirts printed with things like "Please get out of my way, thanks" or "Ask me if I care" or "Think before you say one word to me" on them. But then I thought people would most likely think I’m joking and ask me where I got the shirt and for how much.)
Actually, I find that I communicate better when people just write to me. Email me or text. Am not so trucculent or snipish then. I don’t have to look at people and…smile. I’m exhausted. My happy thoughts are still with me, but they express themselves through a frown. Well maybe not really a frown, but it’s not Smiley’s World with me these days. I wish I knew sign language. I’d talk to people in it. Volumes of words unspoken but their shapes cut and molded in the air one after the other in swift succession and the space between myself and others would be filled with invisible words, words unheard but seen and expressive of how freaking ANGRY and sad I am these days.
(I am remindedJD Salinger who’s still holed up in New Hampshire or Boston or someplace, never going out into society, ignoring his legions of fans. He and his family just send out for groceries or something. Am nowhere near being as good as Salinger and am so much younger but tragically, how most unfortunate it is I already understand why he wants to stay out of the world. )
(Or better — why Arthur "Boo" Radley keeps himself locked in. Even a little girl like Scout got it. The world is a scary place and people can be such…meanies. Jeez. First time I read to Kill a Mockingbird I thought, holy gee, it IS possible to stay away from people even if you live in their midst. Only I’d have to stick a pair of scissors into my dad’s leg to justify it. Harhar. I was a morbid child myself.)
But something great happened to me today! I heard that I could actually email Arundhati Roy and she WRITES BACK.
How do I begin to express how…happy that made me feel?
When I was younger and there was still no internet, I always wished I could write my favorite authors and poets. I even wrote a few letters (sheesh. fan mail to the likes of e.e. cummings and Edgar Allan Poe who was so sad!). It was very much like Holden Caulfield wanting to call up Eustacia Vye. Or Isak Dinesen.
I wanted to call up JD Salinger. Graciano Lopez-Jaena. Jose Rizal.
In my room I had a picture of John Irving and Isak Dinesen when she was younger. Kasi when she got old she looked like, well, a live skeleton: sunken cheeks and everything. I used to make up conversations in my head — putting together questions I wanted to ask. What a dink I was, wanting to ask Harper Lee about Scout and Jem (I was around their age when I first read To Kill a Mockingbird, and I guess i still didn’t know there writers didn’t really KNOW their characters so much as they, the writers, imagined them.)
But I digress.
Arundhati Roy!
Someone asked me this afternoon if I’ve read The God of Small Things.
I almost choked.
It was like asking me if I breathe.
I’ve read the book over 50 times if I’ve read it once.
****
So how’s the Philippines today?
Getting worser and worser.
The Supreme Court has laid down the decision lifting the TRO on the implementation of the EVAT. Yet another political activist was killed in cold blood (that’s almost every other day now). The anti-terrorism bill is still poised to be approved by the Senate. Miriam Defensor-Santiago is off ranting again and justifying the violent dispersal of protests by the police and slagging off the priests and church people who denounce the attack. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is still president.
I’m still trying to figure out what the heck is making me feel like a snail retreating into its shell. These political developments are driving me crazy. The phrase I’m thinking of right now to describe what I’m going through is "world -weary." And not in the sense that I’ve seen the world and gone tired of it; it’s just, well, I’ve seen so little, but so much of it is so downright painful.
(Maybe when I’m more cheerful I’ll write about, say, the train trip I once took from Belgium to the Netherlands and we passed through fields and fields of tulips. It was like being transported inside a painting. The sun was barely out, being hidden behind thick clouds, but the colors red green yellow were so alive and for a few moments the world was filled with flowers and the promise of unending, limitless happiness they seemed to convey to their beholder and whatever light there was golden butter).
I’ve been rereading The Chronicles of Narnia, and I feel such…longing to escape my daily reality, this current context.
No one has to explain to me that there are barely disguised religious undertones in the Chronicles. I’ve known that all along: that Aslan is Jesus, and Narnia is paradise and to have faith in Aslan’s goodness and love, to find comfort in his very name is something not so different from being, well, converted.
In whatever case, the book comforts me. The way Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story comforted me. People like me who are ill-equipped to deal with real people always seem to turn to literature and poetry for solace. They’re my medicine. I daydream I want to escape into peace and beauty. There is so much defeaning noise, and in the chaos the small, fragile things are crushed; the things that purify and elevate humanity neglected and destroyed. It really hurts that so many people will never know how it is to be never hungry, and how to feel security in a house of their own; or to read books like Narnia or taste sugar filligree or loose themselves in Beethoven.
Please don’t call the men with the straightjackets yet. This is just a phase.
At least I hope it is.
