Analog

THE PLANNER I chose for next year disconcerts. It marches the months in a row before inserting the weekly pages. The journal plots 2020 but begins in December 2019.

Then I remember why I liked this journal, its simple lay-out, almost bare except for fine lines and grey print. I am seduced by all that expanse of unmarked paper inviting contact with a pen’s nib or the gossamer brush of daydreams.

Yet, choosing a planner these days has become a chore. Do you need one for goals, exploration or inspiration? Will it be a-page-a-day, a weekly spread, monthly, five years, or a lifetime?

The word “planner” itself is a giveaway. Do I “plan” each day, let alone 365 days? While I live with some intentionality, productivity is a grid that I chafe at rather than welcome.

Perhaps this mindset has something to do with my start in keeping a journal. In grade school, my father passed on to me the diary given away by pharmaceutical companies. I could doodle in it and buy with my savings a book instead of a sketch pad, he suggested.

Later, my maternal grandmother gave me the journal a bank gave at yearend to clients.

How would I fill all those pages? Nothing much happens to a seven-year-old.

I did not know then the effect paper has on imagination. I tore out and cut up the medical ads inserted in the journals. Purple intestines, blue hearts, and rainbow organs became paper mosaics. I drew cartoons in the readymade panels of the corporate diary.

And I experimented with my handwriting, trying and discarding attempts to copy my classmates’ admirable cursives before settling down with the scrawl that is no one else’s but mine.

Even though I compose now with a keyboard, I think there is no better way than holding a pen and letting it flow on paper to hear myself better.

Keeping a journal is like taking a walk. Why one does, where one goes are minutiae; what matters is keeping the conversation running.

The bead of ink from the ballpoint becomes a trickle, a gush, then a slipstream widening into a channel where the unknown tempts and daunts.

Ever the good listener, paper receives everything unspooled by the pen, absorbs confidences, makes omissions palpable, nudging the voice to move on to the next recall, coax the lurking insight, claim the orphaned memory at the fringes of self-conceit.

In these digital times, when each is hell-bent on talking to all, writing to oneself, an attentive, thoughtful audience of one is not just another analog anachronism, not a trend in communicating in bullet form, not a selfie in long form. If we cannot hear ourselves, who can?



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 24, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Perfect

AN IDEAL of a house is the true villain in Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” and the 2018 Netflix series inspired by the novel.

Both novel and series are set in a fictional haunted house owned by the Hills, whose long history is marred by insanity, cruelty, murder, suicide, and other tragedies. These morbid associations grew in time to contaminate the mansion with a reputation veering into the morbid and supernatural.

Jackson wrote about an investigator of the paranormal tapping two women and the young heir of the mansion to live in the house and record the phenomena for a research to be published in a scholarly journal.

In the Mike Flanagan-directed Netflix series, the “ghost hunters” are replaced by the Crain couple and their five children, who are renovating the Hill mansion to sell for a profit so that the Crains can build their “dream house”.

Seemingly Hill House of the murky shadows and murkier malice is responsible for the chain of calamities.

Yet, the mansion is not half as “diseased” as the golden ideal of the perfect house that sinks its roots and ensnares the Crains into not just staying on in the mansion that summer but also never escaping the phantoms even after the survivors have aged and transferred.

In a ham-handed way, the Netflix series puts across the ideal of perfection as the most dangerous delusion. It is Jackson, though, who has the voice that rivets.

The most vulnerable in the team studying Hill House is Eleanor Vance. At 32, she is looking for a place of her own. She took care of a demanding mother until the latter died. She hates her only sister and her family. She has no friends, no job, no prospects.

Accepting the invitation to be a research assistant, Eleanor sets off on a journey to Hill House, full of anticipation: “… I am going, I am going, I have finally taken a step.”

This is a poignant line, specially if one suspects the Eleanor/Nellie of the book and the series as mirroring the insecurities Jackson faced in real life. Daughter of a mother who never saw her as measuring up to standards and wife of a lesser writer who controlled her earnings and forced her to listen to his accounts of his infidelities, Jackson had a nervous breakdown but recovered. She was writing a novel when she had a heart attack in her sleep. She was 48.

The line that opens and closes “The Haunting of Hill House” endures as the most chilling ever written about a haunted house: “… whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Written long before an age almost painfully aware that kindness to oneself is the key to wellness and mental health, that line is the most haunting written by Jackson.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 17, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

The taming

WHEN I remember the eunuch cats of Bonifacio High Street, I realize we can still be drawn to the very things that upset us.

The first cat was lolling on a makeshift platform used by men working on the landscaping. It was a tom, as big as a dollhouse.

Yet, it allowed me to scratch its exposed stomach, an inverted yolk, white in the middle and yellowish at the outer ring.

On our way to a bookstore to pick up my books, my son and I had started from the Burgos Circle where there seemed to be more dogs than humans taking in the sun that Monday morning.

The dogs of Burgos Park are cosseted and urbane. They have no fear of humans.

These pets are as close to the otherworldly and the exotic in my world.

Where I grew up, the barbed wires enclosing the house we rented was ineffectual for keeping our menagerie of nine or so dogs safe in a neighborhood where any dog was free meat fueling several rounds of drink and feral singing.

After our guard dogs went the way of the ten little Indians in the nursery rhyme (“… and then there were none”), my father finally decided to keep small dogs who slept with us, locked away from the world with teeth, to borrow an image from Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House”.

The cats that suddenly showed up in our home were thin, fierce survivors who waited and waited, moving in to finish the meals only when the dogs napped or were shut in for the night. They melted away in a blink but it wasn’t long before I convinced my father to bring home a kitten from a cousin’s cat’s litter.

There is no lack for cats that no one wants. When I was younger, I brought home abandoned kittens: in my knapsack from school, in a shopping bag someone left on the side of a busy road, where I plunked into my shirt the mewling blind creatures that poured out like tomatoes about to be squashed into red paste.

The world jokes about steaming cats into buns. Feral survivors nurse on this mean teat. Most of the strays we feed at home never lose their wariness. In this country, a housebroken cat is often a dead one.

The Bonifacio High Street tom, complacent and suave, was odd as ferals go. We entered another promenade that hosted, years back, a community of cats. After a five-star hotel opened nearby, the cats were relocated, like absurd Third World artifacts.

I found just two strays napping on the benches that day. Neutered, enormous, and slack from human benevolence. Ignoring the signs that warned people about feeding and petting the cats, I scratched between two pointy pairs of ears, two furbellies.

A cat rolls on the ground and exposes its belly to a human it trusts. My prayer is that those cats will live not to regret this.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 10, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Dog’s life

THE DOGGY lives I observed at the Burgos Park are enviable. I am a human on a park bench, wondering what great acts of compassion I must do to be reincarnated as a Yorkshire Terrier, a Samoyed or a Bichon Frise living a condo-park-pet spa existence.

Four hours after midnight, I woke up on a working Monday and was on the road in an attempt to cut down a two- or three-hour commute from the outskirts of Metro Manila. Bleary-eyed, I waited for the Bonifacio High Street shops to open at 11 a.m. so I could pick up the books I reserved.

I felt far from frisky, worlds apart from the rarefied plane bearing these beautiful creatures.

Yet, what struck me most that I am in an enclave that hardly resembles the Philippines was not this green oasis circled by the signposts of Western prosperity but the insouciant sociability of the dogs.

They are unlike the dogs I have been used to, commuting around urban centers and even living in gated communities for decades. There are two kinds of dogs in the country: the dogs that are part of families and those that are on their own.

I know the barely human specimens that have an instrumental regard for the family AsPin (asong Pinoy), chaining a dog and leaving it behind for weeks as if it were a burglar alarm with fur.

Most Pinoys, though, love their dogs. They may not afford vet services to spay, neuter or regularly check their pets. But the Pinoys I respect give their AsPins these minimum needs: sustenance, shelter, and family.

The dogs of Burgos Park gave me pause, though. Like humans, dogs enjoy meeting other dogs. A walk means opportunities to explore with their noses, roll in the grass, and carry out no. 1 (pee) and no. 2 (poo) as nature demands. The dogs’ caregivers and walkers picked and bagged their waste, keeping that park habitable for the humans and other dogs sharing the space.

These dogs’ existence had other trimmings, too. The perks—the humane leashes of extendable length that allowed a dog to wander to their doggy heart’s desire without being separated from their humans, the knit sweaters, bright socks, and treats randomly given for acts of obedience or state of cuteness—made a dog’s life definitely better.

It showed in the animals’ coat and the spring of their walk, the alacrity with which they accepted and did not shirk from strange hands petting them. While watching the uniformed guard of a snow-white Akita obligingly snap dogfies with the smart phones of enamored ladies and gents, I spotted a little cat cross the street. A motorist slowed down to let the stray cross without accident.

In Burgos Park, fractal humanity—which deals out cruelty as often as kindness—is at bay.


[Photo source: YouTube]


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 3, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”