inklingfair This isn’t going to be a rant. What I’ve learned after five months of quarantine is that no amount of bitching (a.k.a. preaching to the choir) is going to magically endow the corrupt powers-that-be with the compassion or competence that we all badly need. Sure, Leni Robredo and Vico Sotto were roundly mocked by trolls for not taking it lying down. Zara Alvarez and Randall Echanis were killed. Now people have woken up and are raring for a fight. Good.
On the other hand, I’m exhausted with longing for a return to a normalcy that may never arrive; with bitterness for the time we are being robbed of daily; with disappointment with my present helplessness. No, this isn’t a rant. But neither is this resignation.
Right now I’m too tired to generate new thoughts, but thankfully, there are those I can borrow. I can’t have it all, “but there is this”, writes Barbara Ras –
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August, you can have it August and abundantly so. ... You can have the life of the mind, glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness, never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you all roads narrow at the border.
Many times, during this lockdown, I have marveled at how my four-year-old can be much better than me at having each day, each month “abundantly so”, forgiving my daily irascibility, unwavering in her declarations of going to the beach, seeing her friends at the park, and visiting her Lolo and Lola again “when the coronavirus is over.” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?:
We may never dissuade leaders of our nation or any other nation from responding vengefully, violently, to every insult or injury. In this, the Age of Television, they will continue to find irresistible the temptation to become entertainers, to compete with movies by blowing up bridges and police stations and factories and so on…
But in our personal lives, our inner lives, at least, we can learn to live without the sick excitement, without the kick of having scores to settle with this particular person, or that bunch of people, or that particular institution or race or nation. And we can then reasonably ask forgiveness for our trespasses, since we forgive those who trespass against us. And we can teach our children and then our grandchildren to do the same — so that they, too, can never be a threat to anyone.
I’m afraid I don’t have the childlike magnanimity of forgive and forget clasping hands. But at least I can see the poison in my cup and refuse to drink it. And I can pick up another. Vonnegut also wrote:
One of the things [Uncle Alex] found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when they were happy. He himself did his best to acknowledge it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
Before the quarantine I found Google Photos’ “Rediscover this day” and Facebook’s “On this day” mildly annoying at best. These days, though, they have become part of my lifeline, welcome interruptions to the fresh hell of daily disappointments.
So, Augusts:
And finally, 2020: Having samgyupsal and carrot cake on Josh’s birthday, and pizza and wings on Yaya Jing’s. The surprise of liking the Coffee Prince universe and characters, despite several k-drama false starts. Rainy afternoons curled up with Madeleine L’Engle’s Two-Part Invention: a peek into a marriage lovingly woven into creative life, and a journey into a good death:
Music I heard with you was more than music, And bread I broke with you was more than bread... - Conrad Aiken
If this isn’t nice, what is?
