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Yes, that was quite a hype.  I just saw Avatar for the second time in the cinema.  Of course this time, I had the liberty to go to the bathroom anytime I wished, hah.  And could do it when there’s little or no action to be anticipated in a scene.  But the fact that one thinks it is worth paying good money to watch again is symptomatic of a curious film piece.  I suppose that the reason is because there are so many elements in the creation of this film that requires repeated review in order to elucidate its whole.  I also think that it helps to watch it several times, the first for me was a complete state of arrest while the second was critical and distant.  Overall, it is a multi-million–I mean–multi-layered piece.

I come home from the movie having a mix of elation and disappointment.  Elated because I was so receptive to the visual and sensational penetration of the technical effects, that all my senses were relaxed to the point of being absorbed in to the world that was constructed before me.  Disappointed that just as how the film manages to convince perceptual “reality” so craftily translated through synthetic visuals, it just as well thwarts the excitement of this profound imitation the moment you walk out of the cinema, forced to sober up.

And so what I like to reflect on is how this new frontier in blockbuster, apart from it being the next cash cow, will dismantle our predisposition of cinema’s command of spatial-perceptual image relation.  Furthermore, it would be interesting to discuss the implications of a more “realistic” CGI and 3 or 4 dimensional digital constructions.  How privileged is an audience’s concept of “reality” in face of effects that nearly blur the lines of what constitutes realistic visuals?  What are the factors which propel our differentiation of synthetic or natural reality?  Or are we simply caught in the trap of an optical illusion, a mind trick if you will, rather than our imaginations being unleashed and coalescing with new visual perspectives that upon engagement is strikingly familiar?  The questions will not be answered for now, but what compels us to ask them is of greater curiosity.

I admit that I turned off the cynic in me when I watched the film, but retrospectively, I feel that the film has underutilized the sophistication of its medium by failing to articulate the complexity and intrinsic nature of “dreamwalking”, (which theoretically would have been an unnerving parallelism to the moviegoer, yet I forget this is not European cinema). I also forget that this is not a George Lucas film where world creation also entailed political, philosophical, scientifically theoretical, and massive ideological construction.  There’s a line to cross to be able to create a colossal world in our imagination.  Avatar was just not that eloquent, literature-wise or how the characters were defined based on their world view.  For the sake of argument let’s disregard for a moment that the film was such a bleeding-heart narrative.  Given that the narrative took on this character-centered approach, the character of Jake Sully struck me as someone who was so unnervingly apathetic to his own developments.  He merely reacts, predictably at that, to the situation he finds himself in.  The trouble with casting an unremarkable actor for a supposedly internally conflicted character, is that so much of the story was narrated by the larger-than-life design of the digital representations and the set rather than the subject, or that which occupies the foreground of the spatial limits of the frame.  I kept asking myself, how did Jake Sully manage to disconnect himself, whether willfully or consciously, from “human” life to migrate in to a new one with the Omatikaya? This is just one of the many character intricacies of Jake Sully which was oversimplified and thrown out to obscurity.  The film was a lush landscape, I’ll give it that.  But in effect, the different stories of the diverse characters that lived in this landscape was so poorly articulated. Take for instance the Na’vi people presented in the film was hardly a sustained theme, when it would have helped a lot to illustrate the dichotomy between the sky people and the Na’vi.  Why did it prove difficult for the sky people to assimilate with the Omatikaya, and vice-versa?  What is the history of misunderstanding between them despite attempts from both ends to bridge the gap? There are so many unfilled blanks throughout the story.

The problem with a filmic narrative is that the story is only ripe when it comes full circle.  I admire Cameron’s effort to weave some mysticism to “dreamwalking” and “waking”.  For me, the last scene was the most powerful.  The attempts to strike a dialog about rebirth, ever-flowing energy and waking from dreams were such powerful references to life itself.  There was also an attempt to portray repetition of history, of life.  But all of these seemed like one foot in the door to a cinematic masterpiece, while the other foot stays in unabashed mediocrity.

The fight goes on.

It is hurtful to hurt, and the fight goes on.  I walk with a guilt that I caught with my teeth. I am clenched.  I swallow the gruel of conscience, but the fight goes on.

The fight goes on.

Generosity is as foolish as a room of white elephants.  A golden inconvenience.  The fight goes on.

They call us freaks!  The radicals! The rebels!  The…ooh, what’s the word…the polemics!  Who’s being ridiculous now you goddamn wimps!

I turn to the sky with my arms outstretched.  I cry dissatisfaction!   I cry anxiety!  When I am losing, I want to fight some more.  Give it to me!  Throw me your best shot!

The fight goes on.

Sometimes, I want to give up.  I don’t want to wake up in the morning.  And if I do wake up, I don’t want to get out of bed.  My eyes are so restless during the day.  I get eyestrain.  Maybe, I get tired of looking except at Kaye. For everything else, I am forced to look on.

(My dear Kaye, you are the most pleasant thing I see and I wish you were in front of me in every single blink.  Mornings are hard for me, you know this.  And so you must understand why I never want to leave.  I still don’t know how you manage to believe in me so much when I am so good at failing.  You egg me to fight.)

On and on.

She was at the most confused state of her existentialist grappling: reaching the point of having won her desires and then being faced with the absurdity of perpetual dissatisfaction.  Though it remains true that being controlled had caused great misery to our heroine – who constantly sought for a semblance of freedom from expectation – she was overwhelmed by the implications of receiving no expectations at all now that it was granted.  It was beginning to appear that there is some endlessness to being imbibed into yet another culture, another system, another pitfall of modern banality.  And now there is nothing expected of her, and then she waits – but must she wait?  What becomes of a person with no undertaking, no miserable struggle?  Does one wait for the next task at hand that makes the next demand?  That you must eat?  That you must work?  That you must find bliss? Can there never be a moment throughout life that remains motionless?  Tell why is there a voice in one’s head that says: something must be done.

The absurdity ensues.

She has spent a great deal of time thinking about what she had done wrong.  And that maybe, Freud was a considerate enough man to have thought that one is destined to do what they do, for one is not their own shaper.  For if that was the case, and then whatever that was done whether of sound judgment or not, has been pinned down by a most powerful unconscious.  There is nothing gorgeous about isolation and desertion – but how is it humanly possible to cause others to leave?  Everyday there are people who are called fuck-ups for that reason.  (Makes you wonder what their childhood was like).  Try to open your mind to the possibility that they are not their own fault.  Ask: why are there persons who are condemned?  Why punished?  Why are they carted away to incarceration, as far away as possible from the “normal”?  Truth be told, normal people are as mad and as vicious and as poor as their own complacency.  There is no such thing as impalpable madness, only personal history.

Please read this woman right.

This woman I am writing about; this woman who has done so much of nothing to deserve so much of nothing.  She is the heroine but she is the heroine of a tragedy.  Her personality and resolve is triumphant but not her deeds or the result of them.  Do we really want a hero that has done so many things so easily and have taken the certain steps that were recommended to get to that point?  What’s the point of this? To finally get there. Wherever that might be.  The woman asks herself that if her world view has been distorted and has been cruelly reduced to a vague and impractical lifestyle, why does she speak as though she gripped her words, nursed them in her mind for so long and uttered them with so much affection and certainty.  Is that not the sign of clarity?  For the person who is mad, everything appears to be clear and full of eccentric meanings that they fully assert.  The half-wits, the safeties, the squares, the planned futures, and the comfortable – they don’t sound at all like they’ve understood.  Because why else do they categorically call the impractical, the clochards, the sloths, the gays, the drop outs, the criminals, and the marginalized as misunderstood?   Yes, misunderstanding exists.  But the problem is on how to respond to it.  Do you confront misunderstanding by showing no interest or no compassion? The assumption that a person can be a cut above the other permits ignorance. On their part, they have failed to inspect close enough.  They don’t really care.

So look.

Who do you think that woman is?  Do you really know who she is or is there an assumption that you know her better than she thinks she knows?  Have you spent more time thinking about her life than she has?  Shall we count in hours?  Shall we count in years?  Shall we count at all?

So much of the space we occupy is an assertion of our self-worth and that we are indispensable.  We struggle to fill the world with actions, words and photographic memories in order to put forth a symbolic Self.   Simply put that one’s body as a physical limitation is the foremost enemy of the ambitious mind.  We are everything in our mind that we have yet to embody.

Heroism therefore, is resistance.

Rest in Peace, Alexis Tioseco.  You’ve fought the good fight and I truly admire your work.

A Boeing 747 was flying across the East China Sea, from Tokyo’s Narita International Airport to Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila when one of the plane’s passengers begun to have a heart attack. Despite efforts to resuscitate her by a dermatologist who happened to be riding on the plane, Valerie Fukazawa gasped her last breathe just 45 miles shy of landing on the closest airport located at Hualien, a province at the eastern coast of Taiwan. Normally, when an onboard situation was over the plane would postpone its emergency stopover and fly back toward its original route so as not to further delay arrival at the intended destination, however, the fact that there was now a dead body on board made that option all too cumbersome and more complicated. Tower officers from Hualien advised the plane to pursue landing in order to covey the dead passenger to Taiwanese paramedics waiting at the airport. A request was made to the military hospital right across the street from the airport to temporarily store Valerie’s body at their morgue until further notice and the request was approved. Meanwhile, that evening the hospital head contacted the Filipino embassy to turn over the responsibility of determining where Valerie’s body ought to go. While investigating the circumstances of Valerie’s death, it came to the attention of the Philippine Embassy that she was a Japanese citizen holding a Filipino passport. Valerie is the widow of a well-known Japanese painter who had died in a car accident just two days after her naturalization was approved. Just a week more, she was supposed to have surrendered her Filipino passport and was supposed to have received signed documents declaring that she had given up her Filipino citizenship and was taking a Japanese citizenship exclusively. Her husband’s untimely death made her anxious to flee the country and the final procedure was never done despite the fact that she had already taken her oath. After Yusuke Fukuzawa’s burial, she hastily booked a flight to Manila, made reservations in a hotel, packed a few of her clothes into a suitcase and left the following morning. The day she left, she locked up her apartment in Shibuya and surrendered the key to the caretaker. It was beginning to look as though no one was fully informed of her departure. Her phone indicated that her last few calls were for the travel agency, a few hotels in Manila and an orphanage in Tokyo where she had been making anonymous donations to. With that, the investigation came to a halt when the officer handling the case felt that he needed to confer with his superiors before making the necessary arrangements, whether Valerie’s body ought to be sent back to Japan or to the Philippines. When word got to the Japanese embassy, the head of the consulate expressed his deep sympathy but was apprehensive to receive the dead body of a dead artists’ spouse who had no family waiting for her in Tokyo. The Japanese press got a hold of a tip of this peculiar incident and the story was run on the evening news.

Even if you don’t know that your mother is hiding something, one day you’ll find it inside a packet stored in some neglected drawer.  Almost every woman I know collect things for sentimental purposes, and shelf them according to era.  For many women in my mother’s generation, mementos are preferred over a photo album (really, you only save image relics to brag about those once shapely hips) and are actually more purposeful.  Women like my mother get a kick out of remembering something that they felt in order to be cheered up or tortured one day.  (Boggles me why bother keeping so many memories of past feelings when you can manufacture your own at present).  It could be an unassuming tissue from a restaurant in another city that she’s been to only once, and kept it because maybe she wiped her tears with it over a postponed tryst.  It could be the great lola’s brooch heirloom that was pinned on her uniform every day until the matriarch died.  It could be a photo of a man once loved back in college who disappeared toward the “middle age” since everyone went on a frenzy, jumping on the domestic bandwagon.  My mother for instance was fond of keeping letters, random scribbles, and holiday greeting cards from lovers and friends. She also made it a habit of enclosing them in bubble wrap – a crude method of preservation which managed to keep a hint of scented flora but failed to ward off that peculiar mature smell so distinct of oxidized paper.  How both person and memento turned out with the passing of time, sounds to me as some kind of remarkable coincidence.

Yes, I’ve been snooping around in fact, as I was shuffling through that aged pile of someone else’s treasure, I found this poem written on my second birthday.  It goes, “…Lo and behold! / I raised you above my head / with my own hands / pray, hope, that you / should so much as look upon / the grass that grows upon my grave” dated July 12, 1990.  I mean, this is so tellingly morbid!  How could she keep something like this!  When you think about it, there are only two possibilities.  One, that mortality was such a pervasive theme at that time of my mother’s life and that maybe, just maybe, she secretly wants to outlive me, or; two – mind you, this is the most problematic – she actually wants me to read it.  Believe me, I would be a lot more consoled if it was the former.  I know she may have brooded about life when she had troubling issues with her family back in the late eighties that lasted until 1992.  Those were really trying times…  If I may digress, I remember the day when we were leaving our apartment in the city for a much more secluded subdivision.  I was four and it was pouring hard, and people were running back and forth trying to secure boxes of our lives into this big truck parked outside Burgos street, which in my opinion at that time, was the narrowest street in the world – the wonders of childhood depth perception. We left the place so that we would become a legitimate nuclear family but I realised much later it was because mom was exhausted to her wits of being the workhorse or martyr eldest daughter archetype for the B(o/u)ndalo family – whichever spelling you prefer.   I remember she looked so determined that day, wearing a salakot on her head and I joked that she looked like a farmer and I laughed like it was the funniest thing.  I mean, children have no concept of dignified occupation and in my case I had no concept of provincial life either.  When it was time to leave, she lifted me by putting an arm under my armpits and she ran toward the truck’s front seat like her life depended on it! It probably did.  And as we sat inside the warm front seat of the truck, the storm seemed like a minor setback.  Looking back, it must have been an important day for her to leave that place.  And I somehow wish that I kept that salakot.

Like a flash, memory can take you to a landscape of emotions.  Therefore, a space occupied without a single memory is for amnesiacs and psychotics – people who live there by their choice or not have no care of the forgotten.

My mother asked me finally, “Now, tell me: what do you think about that poem? How do you understand it?”

I said to her, “I don’t know how to understand it, it just makes me cry.”

I said to myself, life is so frail.  As frail as I was when you carried me as a baby in your hands.

***

Often there are old folks and relatives who ask me, “How’s your mother”?  To me, old folks ask too many rhetorical questions.  I wonder what my mother would say to,  “How’s your daughter?”

Don’t listen to people.  Don’t go to workshops.  Don’t go to school.  The last thing you want is to unlearn everything that is original.  Forget fundamentals.  Forget mores. Forget what you were taught you ought not to forget.

So much of our surrounding is a repetition of another.  Little do we know that in the process of creation, we confiscate or borrow without consent or knowledge.  When do we know that a material is not borrowed when there are many occurrences around the world that spark spontaneously?  It may not have been published anywhere, but as long as you were first to do so, we tend to ask ourselves how wrong could it be?  The thought of it would make Ayn Rand shake her homophobic head.

As I write, I do so with so much trepidation.  What’s so new to write about anyway?