It’s 1:38 in the morning and I can’t get myself to sleep. There are a lot of things going on in my head; chief of them is how to get a chapter on what to me is a rather unexciting period of recent Philippine presidential history over and done with.
Yesterday, I was supposed to resume academic work after a brief vacation in my hometown in Albay. But it was gloomy the whole day in this side of the world, and so was the progress of my writing.
There were a few bright spots though.
First, I was able to successfully send via facsimile to my home department at NUS a completed form of the renewal of my research scholarship for another year—my last year—an ‘endowment’ without which I would have difficulty surviving in a very expensive city-state.
Second, I was able to procure back issues of the journal called Public Policy, some of whose articles I need to have some sort of an academic handle of the Philippine socio-political context of the last twenty years.
Not to be forgotten was my meeting with Jas—a former student, an aspiring pedagogue, and most likely, a future colleague—who gave me a glimpse into another interesting version of life after getting a UP diploma and who, I’m very glad to know, has shown great interest in education work and how its complexities can be viewed using a disciplined lens. She is now doing her MA in Language Education in the Diliman campus.
Another interesting moment was getting myself (and Jas) suddenly interested in what the ‘museum’ in the Museum Café, located in the (literal) margins of Diliman’s Vargas Museum and the Filipiniana Research Center, has to offer.
Incidentally that afternoon, after sipping hot lemon tea and taking several measured bites of some fancy slice of cake with Jas at the somewhat funky Museum Café, there was the opening of an exhibit of art works featuring youtube star Juana Change in various modes of undress. Her curvaceous, voluptuous body on canvas and in photos tells me that I was right when I foisted sometime ago that “flab is fabulous.”
Body beautiful doesn’t always mean Slimmer’s World or Vicky Belo. (If you are in Quezon City, do visit the exhibit at the Vargas Museum in the UP campus. It is a testament to what art can do in tweaking, if not recreating, reality to the advantage of those deliberately disadvantaged by big business and consumerism. Art thumps advertising this time.)
The icing on the cake offered by that visual feast of an opening exhibit was getting to hobnob with the delight of the (contemporary) Philippine art world. There, Jas and I came face to face, side by side, with a section of the Who’s Who of Philippine Art (thirty six artists were there according to Juana) – a crowd with whom Mr. Carlo J. Caparas, Malacanang’s or Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s National Artist for Visual Arts and Film, would probably detest hobnobbing.
But perhaps, the highlight of my Thursday was reading Conrado de Quiros’s rather optimistic take on the world economic slump—which has incidentally taken its toll even on scholarship grant packages offered to so-called foreign talents by “posh” global universities. How he capped his article captures the kind of optimism he projects in his usually captivating prose imbued with his characteristic criticality: “Maybe in this hour of want, we may discover abundance.”
Such point is made resonant by an earlier passage in the piece: “On a still broader plane, I am glad the slump has happened because it forces us to wonder about the things that matter in life. It’s not just a question of settling for less, or even doing more with less, it’s also a question of doing better with other things. If the slump makes us a little less material girls and boys, if it makes us a little more spiritual travelers or seekers, then it’s worth its weight in, well, gold” (“There’s the Rub,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, 5 November 2009).
For some of us whose life stations are too remote from enjoying the guilty pleasures of the rich, the slump is nothing new. It’s same same. In one of our conversations some time ago, when the world was just starting to come to terms with the reality of an economic slowdown, a friend said that the “crisis” shouldn’t be a problem for the majority of the Filipinos who have known poverty all their lives. She adds, “The Philippines has been in an economic crisis for centuries; what else is new?”
Arguably, the slowdown only poses to be a major problem to those who aspire for or are used to the media-constructed “good life.” And I will have to agree with Mr. de Quiros that the crisis should give the affluent—and even those of us who do not belong to the affluent category but more often than not get deluded by media constructions—time to reflect on “what matters in life.”
But it’s not actually the critical optimism in Mr. de Quiros’s article that struck me the most. It is the portion on developing a sense of wonder and on being a spiritual seeker or traveler that did. And these are apparently recurring themes in his essays with or without an economic crisis at hand.
My 12-hour day trip by bus from Legaspi to Cubao on Wednesday actually rekindled that sense of wonder and I would like to thank Mr. de Quiros for helping me articulate what I had felt throughout the journey.
On my way to the Philippine’s capital region last Wednesday, I realized things haven’t really changed significantly in the regions south of Metro Manila since I left the country to study in a foreign land. No, things haven’t really changed significantly since I started traveling fifteen years ago from Legaspi to the Southern Tagalog region to study communication arts in UP Los Banos.
In the countryside—which easily dwarfs in proportion the business districts of any major city in the Philippines, you still see public school children in worn out uniforms and tired slippers earnestly braving long distances of stony, dusty sidewalks just to be able to get to school, and then you wonder how many of them would enter universities and read the kind of books you are excited to devour at your own pace and during your precious “study time.”
In the countryside, you still see public school buildings ingloriously painted with the names of some self-indulgent local politicians or of a national leader, who, in asserting her legitimacy, makes sure no stone is left unturned, and you wonder whether the many books and articles providing incisive critiques of the personalistic and patronage oriented character of Philippine politics ever get to seep through the Filipino public mind.
In the countryside, you constantly see parents of these school children carrying heavy loads of produce from the farms they till, and you wonder whether topnotch research from the best schools in the country has ever made the lives of these farmers better or lighter.
Still astonished by what one discovers when looking through the glass windows of an air-conditioned provincial bus, I have begun to wonder on the relevance of my research agenda. It is an unwelcome thought especially at this time when I could actually visualize a homestretch in a year’s time. But it is a thought worth pondering nonetheless.
(At this point, I couldn’t get off my mind a question purportedly posed by a student to Dr. Ruanni Tupas when he was still teaching in UP Diliman, “Will Critical Discourse Analysis feed the poor?” Hell, I don’t even know how to deal with that question squarely at this point!)
I don’t know if deluding myself into thinking that I am “ahead of my time” would work this time. (With candor, I am inclined to think that a “sophisticated” reading of Philippine presidential discourse—in English—is something that would be better appreciated in a more developed Philippine context.)
I am inclined, though, to accommodate the unwelcome thought, that source of disturbance, for a while, if only to keep reminding myself that it will take more than my modest scholarship to create even a minor dent in the Philippine countryside.
