Edel garcellano biography of michael

O How did they cope with dictators of the land. O to affirm their ballyhooed significance! When shadow is consumed by light, do we bother to ask: Why, why, why? O capitalism forever calls the shots? But they have nothing to lose? They have only their destitute life to risk in claiming their share of the pie from Europe which has plundered their wealth since time immemorial.

Edel garcellano biography of michael: Garcellano's materialist decolonial critique of

After the bestial heat, we long for a storm to wash us out into the open sea… But air is all we can pray for — a mode of dying in a season of mourning. O Do we accept the heavenly verdict? Is God worth our servile worship? O There must be respite for mankind… This poetry is just a tapestry of words that we launch like an inflatable raft in the rising flood!

This women of summer will be gone with the first rain of May… Towed toward the sea in the monsoon interlude that is bound to happen as the moon edges the sun from the blue, blue sky. A blur of the Real once upon a time? O ever are we in the prison house of imaginary delight? Who recalls truth perfectly? But a certain sadness overwhelms remembrances of what is forever gone….

Did he think the mourners will spare him for his involvement in a James Bond incursion? Is he worth being the Leader of the pack? O so much expectation, so little patience for his truths O is he virtuous to a fault? His circle hears the beat of a different drummer! Does he read the blazing signs on the wall? Trapped in the silence of his sanctum sactorum he is oblivious of the crowd massing at the gates… O pretenders to the throne he bewails through the fog of his witchcraft.

April Is the cruelest month of the year? Then the oceanic deluge! The Guy on the hill laments His fatal fate, but it is not for Him to make — O the Father whose divine decree He must consummate! Where is the piece of earth that has not been touched by human blood? O where must we lay our hearts to gently rest from the mordant turmoil Tunisia is the green, green leaf of the Arab Spring now reeling under the shadow of marauding Islamists!

O do we hear the howl of wolves on the perimeter while black birds circle around in the vulturine air! O who reads this strange omen? Every place is rained down with blood-soaked tears! Huntsmen are quick to raise their swords for the slaughter of the innocent! Who cares about the nameless dying, like the kitten rotting in the gutter?

O where is the alcove to hide against man-made disaster? O will they only repeat the errors of their elder? O who shall they betray with their pestiferous loves? O who shall fall prey to Koranic warriors?

Edel garcellano biography of michael: Edel Garcellano - Fiction of

O who of the brats shall come of age? The coconut fronds. Is he asking for a miracle? Can he will the universe to suspend its natural Law? That he should accept the unforgivable loss is good for the soul, devotees counsel. Acceptance is the cure, they dutifully chorus. They are fresh converts to Islam — but under duress? They have to survive the terrors of the camp?

O how barbarous are the barbarians? His mother at 61 passed onto the light victim of the scourge that afflicts womankind. To play safe, he quotes a neuro-expert from UC, Irvine. O how old memories cannot be trusted by anyone, after all! O she was not the phantom of delight? There was no witness to affirm. O like the light of a dead star that has long vanished in the black, black night.

It lies buried in the crevices of his mind embedded behind the heavy layer of illusions he mistook for the real that image behind the imagined smile… Did she really exist? Illusions can be symptomatic of a edel garcellano biography of michael but no one would dare confirm it— like a child is he that holds its invisible gun claiming it to be some material glock!

Everyone says it is the truth, he can prove it because his heart says so? What after all, is there to forget, asks a stupid lover, when memory itself flies out of the heart. All the pain and sorrow is not worth remembering weighed like air, the ghost of gold? Whose voice would tell the truth? Is there a truer truth? One voice hovers over the noise, in a domineering fashion, another will be muted, as if silenced by its angelic light.

She has long vanished, without a trace, the rest could only be echoes of derisive laughter. She was never there fixed like a bat in the cavern of his mind. Who would claim the spectral presence? There will never be witnesses to the sorcery of his heart…. Can you place a timeline on the pulsations of the dream culled from memory that is always threatened by the breakwaters of erosion.

Who therefore can verify the fantasy? They can only infer a certain truth which will never be admitted by observer and patient alike? Remembering is a perilous voyage, into the mind, he friendly warns. As he swipes back the tumbler on the bar for edel garcellano biography of michael. The violet hour is done he must close for the night…. Memory is heavy with images Bible-readers mistake for dreams.

If memory is distorted how can we trust writers to draw from the mind if nothing is itself sure, something is amiss in the theory of the subjective truth? Is recollection a scoundrel art? Only the rich are spared — they could flee the country to be out of reach of the murderous plague. A great equalizer, it is said. Only the poor moreover are generally decimated, as if God were behind all this balancing erasure….

O was she the captain of her soul? O death shall have no dominion? O this is the tragedy of daring to cross the line among puritans! O How the mighty have fallen? Yet justice is far from being done. But this is all so damned futile. The dead shall forever be dead — no one has returned from the dark, undiscovered country? Who would benefit from your choice?

Garcellano asked in one of his last poems posted on his blog. But as a thinker of dialectical logic, this pessimism comes with it as a positive suggestion. If one can never kill a God, can the many do it? One thing that Garcellano never mentioned directly in his writings is his equation of conscious and committed resistance as the only act of freedom and reason.

That anyone who thinks they are doing their work of art or literature as individual freedom, bearing universalizing content, oftentimes does not act within their very freedom and reason, in fact, they even deny artmaking as a logical work. In the field of struggle, those who are within the state power, like Almario, do not act within realms of freedom and reason but rather through privilege and class impunity.

In fact, they will never, ever, give in to reason. He put it again on rewind to look out for a serial number, to pin it like an elusive butterfly, place it in a box, and probe its meaning. Bettelheim, 86, the Austrian born psychologist whose deep empathy for children led him to a lifelong effort to heal the emotional wounds of early life, died of 'suicidal asphyxiation' in Silver Spring, Maryland, Dr.

John E. Smialek, the state medical examiner, said. Bettelheim studied in Vienna under Freud. He spent nearly two years in the Nazi concentration camps Dachau and Buchenwald before his release in He then immigrated to the United States and gained early fame for his study of death camp prisoners. His attention to these personalities was born out of his obsessive desire to understand—actually, he has already been compelled, as though through the first gulp of beer—the true history of his grandfather, supposedly killed by an unknown man [from the Right or the Left?

And on this matter, he has already made several private interviews: the old professor from the university, some workers from the compound, his colleagues from the journal [many of whom were already retired and demented], and in this way, by a careless process, the biofile would take shape, have substance. In it, Edel already makes a case for writing as an ethical practice, a form of responsibility and solidarity that comes out of bearing witness to, as Petronilo Bn.

Ang blangkong papel ay magkakaroon ng katarungang sosyal at indibidwal, mabubuhay sa gunamgunam ng lahat. Ang pagsulat ay ang pagbabalikat, hindi lamang ng sakit ng tao, kundi ang sakit at lunas ng sansinukob Ngunit bakit ayaw intindihin ito? Soli sporadically flits in and out of the narrative. Her job in the novel is to serve as a character foil to her tokayo, Sol Soliman.

In such an elite-dominated system, resistance is futile; beneficiaries of that system should just literally forget about trying to change it. Ang paper lang dito yung panglinis ng puwet. Even among people who think and declare themselves progressive, Edel remains critically vigilant. Somehow, one imagines oneself traveling on the road, meeting people who would go their separate ways.

Nothing has changed. I leave you with poem no. Here is Edel, speaking to those of us who lived through, or in the shadow of, the EDSA Drama and its ambiguous, ambivalent legacy. Here is Edel exhorting us to commit a different kind of apostasy, the opposite of reactionary apostates who purvey false histories and fake news. Here is Edel exhorting us to exercise critical vigilance and, just as important, take action against the barbarians who are well past our gates, who have always dwelled within our walls.

O America, who gave shelter to both warring families, what crimes have you committed? To stop the intramural among the mafia gadflies? The traitors are back in church, given the sacrament as if they were repentant, innocent. Do the people deserve their fate?

Edel garcellano biography of michael: He wasn't charismatic but his

Amnesia is the scourge of history? O shit! This is the country that never learns its lessons! Alas, behind the curtain peeks another apostate! May there be more apostates and apostasy among us. Mabuhay ka, Edel! Mabuhay ang Pilipinas!

Edel garcellano biography of michael: Along this line Michael Ryan,

New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt. Apostol, Gina. Manila: Anvil Publishing, Inc. Appadurai, Arjun. London: Verso. Beckert, Jens. Benjamin, Walter. New York: Shocken Books. Garcellano, Edel E. Sons of Naujan: Poems in the Labyrinth of Time. Manila: Polytechnic University of the Philippines Press. Vanishing History and Other Poems. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.

Reprinted from Philippine Daily Inquirer. Interventions: Essays. Philippines: Tamaraw Publishing Company, Inc. Garcellano, Rosario A. Mean Streets: Essays on the Knife Edge. Quezon City: Kalikasan Press.