Largabista

To Africa's graven pagan face was the holy book remade and it was sacrilegiously, spectacularly successful. The book is as primevally (prime evilly in Rachel's broken-down vocabulary) lyrical and robust as most people's instinctive idea of the dark continent.

Yet it holds within it the strong moral temper of an Hawthornian novel, as one reviewer puts it, especially spoken through the character of Leah, the author's mouthpiece for certain political sympathies that would have sunk this novel like a rock if she was allowed any more space than the fourth or a fifth of a book that she was given.

Her twin sister Adah, the former idiot savant and droll philosopher of the brood, was closer to the real spirit of the novel and perhaps, to the author's own deepest inclinations. She has by far, the most memorable opening salvo in the novel, to my mind, to wit: "Sunrise tantalize, evil eyes hypnotize: that is the morning, Congo pink. Any morning, every morning."

That is one of the most concise and imaginative verbal sketching of character I have ever encountered in recent readings. To quote one of the book's most memorable imageries, it's like the eyes inside the tree describing the inside of the tree.

The author was a lot more self-conscious with Rachel, the "dumb blonde" of the brood. Maybe because she herself isn't. The fact that I can pin down this character with the withered strength of a cliche says a lot about how much of a shell she is compared with her red-blooded sisters and even mother who by the way got to be on that stage to act out their heroic issues with the dark continent because of an interesting little trivia which catapulted the story.

Their father, the half-crazed Baptist preacher, was in everlasting atonement for having been spared from the Death March in Bataan during WWII by an act of self-preservation variously interpreted as cowardice. So he is trying to cleanse this instance of moral filth from the muddy banks of Africa's Congo river by proxy, vowing to baptize as many of the dark children as he could, an act interpreted by the locals as a sacrificial offering to the crocodiles and which subsequently cost him his life after that stain of sin in these isles (the Philippine isles) proved uncommonly resistant to the soap of forgiveness, even one self-directed.

There are many such instances of humor, dark as the continent itself, in this book. One of my favorites were the episodes with Methuselah, the African parrot and inherited house pet too eloquent for his own good. He is at once a piece of intransigent Africa and his hapless demise in the jaws of a wild animal a foreshadowing of a greater tragedy that would serve as fulcrum for the last third part of the novel.

This last one went without closure. It is the continent again slipping from the grasp of a bunch of women with the same complexion as its Belgian, French, Portuguese conquerors in the distant past and the Cold War partisans who maintained their local puppet petty despots. Sounds familiar.

Antonia comes off not so much a woman as a force of nature. At least that's how I can finally comprehend how a mere human being --- no matter how forceful of presence --- can have a story built around her life with only a series of trivial even sordid situations to show for it.

The running subtext here is that we are looking at a life that is, well, larger than life. Her biographer, Jim, who go a long way back with her, vacillated between infatuation and reverence.

His bias shaped those of the readers and kept us turning pages in our attempt to find a peg for what made Antonia click. The closest I ever came was a sense of her as both earthy and sublime. If only this translated to a character that we can all understand with our guts instead of a goddess whose motivations is clear only to herself and maybe not even.

That is if she can be thought to have any premeditation at all, instead of being such a creature of the moment. There's something of an animal about Antonia which the author later played up and off her through the almost-feral personality of one of her sons.

It's a good thing that when character development falters there's still the lovely language to fall back on. I covet such gems as being "brushed by the wings of a great feeling." Some of the trifling running commentaries can also be spot on, like the observation about the "curious depression surrounding small towns."

Like Antonia herself, a particularly fine flourish in the human canvas, these created their own little fireworks in what is otherwise a rather plodding narrative.

Finally, after much huffing and puffing.

http://www.medobserver.com/janfeb2008/onthecover.html

Crossing our fingers that unlike the 1998 Milk Code, a landmark legislation turned lemon, this law will have enough institutional spine not to have people calling for its repeal soon after. Worth watching is how the BFAD (Bureau of Food and Drugs) will bone up.

Fear and shame disproportionate to the pain. Grace Roxas tells the stories of five Filipinos battling hepatitis from A to C.

Conversation with 2004 Nobel Prize winner Aaron Ciechanover, a scientist born and raised in a small country (Israel) and proud of it.

Grace: How was your experience as a scientist working in a small country, in terms of the infrastructure available? I'm asking this in the context of our situation(Philippines) where our brains have to go abroad to be able to do important work. 

Prof. Ciechanover: I can tell you my story -- why I decided to go back (from the US) -- but it won't help you because I was backed up by a system that was receptive to me. I wouldn't have gone back if my institute didn't have start-up funds for me, laboratory and infrastructure, exactly the same word you used. I got a package deal that made it attractive for me to go back.

The love for my country was not sufficient. You cannot live on love,(laughter) especially love of country which is very vague. You need to have conditions to work...and it is the government who has to set up the infrastructure. We work closely with the government and we put money aside, raise funds to bring young people in.

When people ask me about the future, I tell them my future is behind me already. We build a lot on the young,talented people to come back and we generate talent for our own needs. 

I notice that in the Philippines, that is not the case.  I notice that numerically, you are probably the number one manpower exporting country in the world, and you are losing the best. You are not exporting farmers (not that farmers are not important), but doctors, high-tech people and nurses in which you invested a lot of money.   

Grace: You mentioned that Israel never had a single day without war or threat of annihilation? To what extent do you think this affected your country's drive to do well? 

Prof. Ciechanover: It's hard to say because we never had it any other way. But it had always been a tradition for Jews in Europe to study, before they even had a country, and they brought it with them when they established Israel.

You may look at it like with the development of computers. It all came from the space industry, of which the big pusher was the US. And you know where the space industry came from? From the tension between East and West. The war industry pushed the civilian industry, and then all of a sudden, Russia exploded. Nothing was left of the ideology, and this shows you that ideology in general worked for nothing.

You may argue that the need in Israel for maintaining the security (we have a very sophisticated defense industry) pushed a lot of education in engineering, electronics and computer science. I don't know if it would have been better or worse if we had peace instead. But if all your life you had to walk at the tips of your fingers (sic) rather than walking relaxed on the ground, it pushes you.

Not that I would prefer war to peace. I would prefer peace to war. But learning from the American experience and our own, it's an incentive for our country. Still, if there was peace around and the Arabs had collaborated, I believe it still would have been better.

Grace: In your personal case, it really didn't matter right?

Prof. Ciechanover: I was lucky. I was not wounded or hurt and lived a smooth life. I never was a refugee thrown out of my home. No real disaster in my life.

Grace: You mentioned that a new therapy for at least two types of cancer (multiple myeloma & non-Hodgkin's lymphoma)  are now out in the market based on your discovery? (Ciechanover co-discovered why and through what system proteins are degraded in the body) What other innovations lie in store for the future? 

The future is very promising but it will be slow because we are understanding more of the system and identifying more enzymes that can be drug targets in the future. There are thousands of these enzymes that act like policemen and identify which proteins are somehow not functional or not needed and so needs to be degraded.

We are just at the very beginning of drug targeting. And it will be for different diseases: known degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, additional cancers, inflammatory diseases, even infectious and viral diseases.   

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Prof. Ciechanover was in the country recently to talk about why "Our Proteins Have To Die So We Can Live." Along with two other scientists, he won the 2004 Nobel Prize for Chemistry by going against the mainstream line of inquiry in cell biology, investigating the death of protein instead of the more commercially mined topic of how they are synthesized and transferred across generations.   

All children should be spared from suffering, but when they aren't, what you see could break your heart. Five stories by Grace Roxas

Rudy Fernandez's battle with periampullary cancer may be his biggest action role yet, reports Grace Roxas.

Start:	Apr 11, '08 06:00a
End:	Apr 13, '08
Location:	Mt. Banahaw - Dolores, Quezon

Nature awakening in Mt. Banahaw...
Contemplate and learn to quiet your mind. Have fun relating to kindred spirits. Strengthen your core values and self-worth. Tap your potential for natural leadership. Learn how to manifest your life purpose. Challenge yourself to overcome fears. Or just take time off to commune with nature.

Contact: Riza Regis - 809 2892 / 0917 8254333

The accident itself was a minor misadventure within a bigger tragedy.

It was the black Nissan Patrol skirting the ravines on an ambulance run that prompted me to comment about a  brewing problem: inadequate parking spaces in a mountain idyll that used to draw only a frontier-spirited few.        

Not two minutes later, it was made clear that this particular specie of the gas guzzler genus won't be making it to any parking space at all, in Sagada or elsewhere, for at least the next three months. 

A beast among Philippine roads --- its many hairpin twists and turns snaking atop the breathtaking chasms of the southern Cordilleras --- the notorious Halsema Highway won't be tamed just yet --- certainly not by any presumptuous driver believing a vehicle priced over a million comes equipped with automatic override for recklessness and stupidity.

The brawny Cordillerans who drive along this highway on ragtag public buses have a point with those cowboy tunes they play during the long hours of travel. They've earned their spurs reining in this bucking bronco of a road --- not by riding roughshod over it but by observing a healthy respect for its rules.

So ironclad are these rules and one breaks them only at the risk of one's neck (or a broken fender if one is very, very lucky) that there are probably more road courtesies practiced by these drivers on any given day than in the whole history of EDSA bus driving.           

Ironically, it is the same muck tainting things government from the ground up which seems to be preserving Halsema and the mountain enclaves it unlocks like Sagada from being overrun by the country club and theme park crowd, at least for the time being. 

The present Malacanang tenant, herself far from pristine pure, is said to be furious over the sub-standard quality of the highway portions that has so far been paved. The meantime clutter in the road portions under snail pace construction may actually have slowed down travel time from before, keeping the crass mob at bay.            

But for how long? Walk around Baguio nowadays and weep.

A leisurely Sunday drive it was not to be for many entering Metro Manila the day before the 21st year after People Power Day. 

Turning 21 is the normative turning point to maturity, unless one counts calendars backward.

And that's exactly how the calendar flips for whoever give marching orders to the police and soldiers flagging down city-bound vehicles with a crowd large enough for possible mischief the next day.

In their natty uniforms, what are these personnel but stylized versions of ragged bands manning feudal fortresses in the European Dark Ages.

If you need any show of force at all to make a point, where does that put you and the institution you stand for in the rungs of civilized behavior?

Not much above the law of the jungle. Whoever thought up that hoax about the "code of Kalantiao" as proof that Filipinos have ever lived under any objective rule of law at all must be on to a private historical joke indeed.    

People who try to shake the tree like Lozada et al just don't seem to get the point so patently obvious to people like Mang Domeng, the oldest mag-uuling in a charcoal yard in Tondo. Or maybe they pretend not to for their own agenda.

Who determines the fate of the likes of Mang Domeng is not some obscure seat of power on the banks of the Pasig River --- the biggest fiefdom of it all. It is the minor government factotum and neighborhood pulis --- lords of the ulingan realm --- who extract their weekly share of the mag-uulings' earnings on pain of personal reprisal cloaked with legal authority.        

Only the amount of money changing hands seem to vary. But it is the same black grease of lord-among-vassals entitlement that oils the big and small cogs of venality from Malacanang to the ulingan.

One's perspective can get so skewed by the sheer scale of it all that sometimes you wonder if making a blanket judgement of corruption is not somehow being anti-historical.          

Selected outputs from last year's story mill. Click the titles to read the full articles.   

The Gentle Maverick  Three interviews with those who chose to stay --- he who shook the tree of life, the Jonas who didn't run away, and a woman who lent her name to a gumamela.

The Cancer Mystique There's one belief that still shackles many Filipinas -- confounding modern technology and good intentions -- and it's getting deadlier by the day.

Twinning of Novelty and Tragedy A rare medical case got tangled up in controversy arising from its unfortunate sequelae.

The Business of Science For their ideas to see the light of day, Filipino scientists are urged to learn to speak the language of business.

Sleepless in the O.R. Are you ready to have your skull opened even while you're awake? Awake craniotomy is here.

Pinoys at the Table When it comes to matters of the stomach, most Filipino adults can do more to eat healthy.

Mother of All Perils The health outlook of mothers --- whether they've given birth to two or 12 --- and their offspring ultimately depends on the soundness of the society's health and economic support system.

Hype Price For hypertensives, there is one other thing in life that's as inescapable as taxes and the tomb --- the daily cost of managing their condition. 

(A note on the photo: Over-developed tumor or under-evolved human? I shied away from eating citrus fruits for a while after doing a story about this bizaare medical occurrence at the Baguio General Hospital.)    

Grace Roxas reports that in the issue of infectious diseases, what the Philippines faces is the threat of age-old diseases and aggressive new bugs.

Is the cheaper-medicines bill really just about lowering drug prices in the country? Grace Roxas finds that it is a much more complex issue than it seems.

He looked leaner and hungrier then, though the hairline already hinted of things at ebb. The prosperous businessman's paunch wouldn't come until much later, more than ten years hence when he faced national television like one still not quite believing that all of it is not just a bad dream after all. 

His name, so common, didn't register at first. A dupe of EDSA II, I've tuned out of Gloria gate long ago. Following its twists and turns is akin to to reading that greatest of  newspaper spacefillers, the society page, Philippine politics being the biggest masquerade party in town where about 80 percent of Filipinos are just mirons looking in on the cavorting.

The so-called whistleblowers who surface from time to time are the occasional gatecrashers whose integrity are therefore not unimpeachable.Jun might be the exception, although I must admit to a certain personal bias.   

It wasn't until a friend reminded me of Net Curricula, one of the meantime projects in my salad days, that Jun's face popped out from the haze that is my memory of people and places older than five years. What jogged my memory was the same goodhumored set about what is otherwise a nondescript, lab rat's face.

Perhaps I associate the good humor with what is by far the most vivid, if not the only clear personal memory I have of Jun. He's the type who would notice what the girls crossing the path of his car is wearing and then pay an oblique compliment by rhapsodizing on the beauty of the Philippine scenery.  

I also have a aftertaste of a certain quixotic flavor in Net Curricula, which I think he undertook on an entrepreneurial dare after making his mark in the corporate IT world. It was not an unpleasant lingering in the tongue. 

I wouldn't know what the years have done to Jun or whether I am such a very rotten judge of character after all. But if I'm not that off the mark, Gloria might not be able to stall anymore until 2010 because finally, someone might have decided to break up the party for good instead of just gatecrashing to get some of the spoils. (Photo courtesy of GMA News) 

 

 

They mete out life to him, though barely, in little tubes that blow and feed and suck and cajole him back every which way to the world of the quick. It's all a boy can do to keep body and soul together. The flesh is too weary to keep up with a soul born to curiosity.

And so we find him, all of 10 years old and not a day wiser to the ways of the world than when he was two. Lying in a bed that is not just any bed, in a room that is not just any room. A delicate bloom cultivated in a green house, not to sit in a vase in some rich woman's parlor some day but just to slog it through another day.   

He usually does. He's a scrappy one they say. Physical pain doesn't touch him much. But how he feels. Must be that for every calcified someone who has somehow managed to trade his soul's birthright for tinsel, we find a Rico with a face as fleet with expressions as a sky prone to rainbows. 

He is holding his mother's hand while she cries out of sight. He wells up too, his mother's miniature. As he will doubtless do when someone else's unknown mother quietly weeps at the far end of the hall. 

Any emotional turbulence within his radius at all, this exquisitely sentient being will take it in. But with his mother perhaps, it goes back to the primeval link between baby's tears and mother's milk.  

Some will call it a piece of cute maladjustment in one that's otherwise impaired. I don't know. What it suspiciously looks like is something that so many souls have passed this way without much of.... an abundant gift of human empathy.             

There's something to be said about shooting first and asking questions later.

But be prepared to have the gears and pinions of your heart -- well-oiled or rusty and corroded these may be --- put out in plain sight.

Photographs, esp. those that race ahead of our ability to understand them, hold up a mirror to what's inside minus the distort of our equivocations and procrastinations with words.

Sometimes the autobiographical view can be as disconcerting as seeing one's intestines digest dinner. And the universe tends to add an extra punctuation or two just to underscore the message.

Like what happened with the photo on the right, one of the few personal ones I took amongst a few dozen formal documentaries of churches during a recent trip to Pangasinan.

I have to admit to a certain subversive urge when I saw the minuscule saint amongst a forest of dark twisted metals bathed by the less-than-angelic mood lighting. That its head was visually negated by a metal bar was less conscious heresy  than technical shoddiness on my part. And --- with another guilty dig at my pagan forehead ---, I gotta confess it didn't at all hurt the effect I was after. The whole setup also stood out from the deep gloom of a church's underside even in late morning.          

When I chopped some of the forest, post-exposure, to focus on just couple of trees, my little heresy was thrown back at me twice amplified when I saw the true punctum/puncta of this image. Did I hear someone say that subliminal messaging is no longer the exclusive turf of liquor and automobile commercials? Or is my imagination just working overtime from days of looking for anthropomorphic images in the clouds?  

The dry pleasures of the book shelves and the red-blooded pursuit of photography have always been worlds apart in my solar system.

But sometimes they show themselves as reflecting the same light from a common sun. Or coupled in darkness within the same airless void. The difference between sun and void being one's cosmic weather at the moment.  

I caught a sunbeam recently when I encountered the words of an admired dead, white European again while browsing through a monograph of the legendary Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is." - T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets (Burnt Norton).

These lines have been with me for the longest time, not connecting with any gut experience,  like the rest of Mr. Eliot's wonderful stew of the temporal and metaphysical so deceptively flavorless in its title. I've stored it up like a pretty but pointless trinket, more enthralled by the language and imagery rather than any worldview it might represent.

Then someone attempted to explain Bravo's work and I saw how deep the hook of this poem, those lines, have truly snared my photographic vitals, the parts that come alive the most when the world renders up its overt and hidden codes in images. Conversely, I'm usually inclined to pay back Eliot and other secret sharers like him by impregnating each frame I record with the seed of a revelation.    

While words are never adequate, it's always nice to find the closest English to one's experience. When you click that shutter, how to describe that silent shout amidst the vastness of it all? Eliot's rhapsody about stillness and dance coming together isn't such a bad start.