today, i almost had the most legit of excuses not to post. my internet service, well, for some sublime reason, it failed to connect to wherever it should. and for a while, it felt truly emancipating.
but then, just as i whiled away my downtime scrubbing my mildewed (just slightly, you neat freaks!) tub, i felt really rotten. not the tub scrubbing part but the gnawing feeling that i was not writing.
here's a tall tale. there's an ogre that rages within me. actually, two, duking it out for my undivided affection. one, although inarticulate, needs to be fed without ceasing with whatever writing i can muster-a rush email, about nothing really, to a friend, a doggerel scribbled on a magazine white space while straphanging on a local train, a tedious journal entry, this before i discovered blogging.
and then, there's the other grendel, the slacker that abhors the regimentation, the discipline that all these writing impose: the strenuous physicality of sitting down, the monumental task of stilling my otherwise fretful mind. and this one growls "what's the point" everytime i'm about to sit down and endeavor to come up with anything not akin to gibberish.
my first boyfriend in college, a science major, gifted me with ranier maria rilke's letters to a young poet in just our first week of going out. well, not really out, for we were two incorrigible closet cases going for our degrees earnestly in quite a conservative protestant university in southern philippines. he gave me this after i, a business major that time, intimated that had i been a trust fund baby, i would have read literature in school.
in rilke's first letter, my boyfriend highlighted the following: "ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must i write?...if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple 'i must,'then build your life in accordance with this necessity."
au courant with my so called necessities - my poor relations back home, my paycheck to paycheck existence here - i've long since made peace with my answer to herr rilke's stringent question. to answer that i must is an exorbitant luxury i simply couldn't afford.
and yet, deep inside i know that writing is my bliss. and deep inside, i know as well, that i'm just craven and unheroic enough not to follow it.
the great physicist albert einstein had this fascinating dichotomy of living. he said "there are only two ways to live your life. one is as though nothing is a miracle. the other is as though everything is a miracle."
i live a life of a stunned blind man miraculously afforded vision. i open my eyes to all the throbbing, trembling shafts of light bursting out from every objects around me. and i stagger. and i feel faint. from all these illumination, from all these beauty.
but i decide, pussilanimously, perhaps, that i must close my eyes again and get back to groping my way around. this i do knowing that all the wonder, all the beauty is all for my taking if i just open my eyes again. but god, does it ever hurt.