“Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity / we once were?”
Before I even reach the end of Marie Howe’s poem, I am already aware of the tiny dot in my throat, like there is the space that was not. I watched the rebroadcast of Universe In Verse before the start of 2021, so I know how the poem ends, but the effect is more agonizingly palpable. My favorite poems speak to me in irregular punches depending on what phase in my life they find me. Back then, I was simply in awe of the convergence between science and poetry. If there is a so-called scientific way of thinking, I never considered my mind to be wired in that way though sometimes I wish it was. I am watching Singularity’s animated short film again and it is so entrancing, the thought that I am the ocean and the land and the space at the same time. I am you and you are me precisely because there is no I, no you, no us, no them. Singularity makes me feel like I am not here.
Not tomorrow, not today, not yesterday. A mere space that was not.
I feel a resistance to be seen. When I entered a cafe, I thought, they could see a customer—a woman in her navy blue shirt and white pants, sweating from the sweltering afternoon, placing her umbrella and her bag on the table, and herself on the chair like it’s her most awaited arrival—but not me. As I approached the counter they would hear a greeting, an order, a thank you, and nothing else. I feel I am nothing, and it’s a comfort, not a pain.
Sometimes the burden of being is too much.
The days are not without breadcrumbs. I still consume things and am consumed by them. I’ve been working. I’ve been watching, I’ve been reading, I’ve been writing. I’ve been continuing on with my routine despite falling again into an irregular sleep schedule. I’ve been with friends and family, talking and laughing with them. But often the desire to disappear is formidable. It’s like reality is somewhere and I am a ghost in the usual life trying to take a physical form. The silence is an unravaged space and any laughter or small talk I engage with is a rabid dog that feasts on it. I lie in bed at night, hidden in the dark, and under my blanket I imagine the bed is empty.
Is this a blessing or a curse?
I remember upon wishing an Armenian colleague a safe return after his manager announced that he would be on indefinite leave last year for being called to the military, his manager said with a laugh, which I took to be tinged with sadness, “Oh, things like these happen here all the time.” It’s probably the saddest thing I heard from all our meetings, for someone to get so used to a violent environment.
Is the Earth too small for us? Or is it our love that is?
We call the oppressed, civilians. We call the oppressors, oppressors because they have forgotten civility. Krista Tippett, when she got asked what her definition of civility is, said in an On Being podcast episode,
“I really think what civility means to me, what civility needs to become for us to walk together — because we do share a life, whether we like each other or not — I think civility, what it’s opening up as a calling, is about being willing to be present, one human being to another. All those issues and differences can be in the room, but they don’t define what is possible between us.”
They don’t define what is possible between us.
Further, she said, “Any single encounter is not going to solve anything. It’s just, can an encounter of civility be an opening? Can it open something? Can it soften something that wasn’t soft before?”
Walking together, sharing a life—it all starts with openness and accountability and continues with acceptance and forgiveness, doesn’t it? Acceptance not only of our differences but the common ground of how we are all wounded. Forgiveness for taking so long and at the expense of so many lives to learn this. It’s not easy—acceptance and forgiveness, especially in the heaps and heaps of casualties unatoned for. I know that from experience, like most of us do, and it’s a whole new level altogether when we’re speaking of it collectively. There’s a hunger to retaliate. There’s a thirst for vengeance. But what else do we know? That a wound doesn’t heal by inflicting another wound. That’s just not the way life should be. It’s not even the way science is. Our body heals from tissue repair, and the growth of new and healthy tissue. I always thought civility meant being tame, disagreeing in quiet for the sake of politeness, but Krista is saying something else. She’s saying let’s lay these differences on the table and handle this like the mature individuals that we are. What is possible between us? These differences, instead of being a gigantic monolith between each other or ammunitions to guns that should have never been invented in the first place, should rather be a bridge to a common ground, and we take it from there, one step of civility at a time.
These differences don't have to be a cause of antagonism, but it’s frustrating to be aware that it’s more complicated than that. In the first part of A Rap on Race, James Baldwin and Margaret Mead talk about being black and being white and sharing a common ancestry:
Mead: So we’ve got a brother in common.
Baldwin: So we’ve got a brother in common. But isn’t the tragedy partly related to the fact that most white people deny their brother?
Mead: Well, there are two kinds of tragedy, and I think that’s one of the things we have to get clear. There is a tragedy of denying brotherhood when there is an ancestral tie that is at least ten thousand years away or maybe one hundred thousand years away. I mean, my relationship to someone in New Guinea and your relationship to someone in New Guinea is thousands of years away, although we’re all human beings and we all belong to one species. That’s one kind of brotherhood. The other kind of brotherhood is where people have been so close that they are really related in the sense that one talks about blood relationships.
At some point, they were talking about the possible solutions for integration, in which Mead says, “I was speaking in those days about three things we had to do: appreciate cultural differences, respect political and religious differences and ignore race. Absolutely ignore race.”
Not so far in that part of the conversation, Baldwin and Mead agreed that race cannot be ignored. Mead comments later on about a “consciousness that there are different kinds of people and you’ve got to remember it.”
I was reading this side by side with Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and translated by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché. In some of his poems he says, brother. He says, my brother. He says, brother-enemies. There is anger, but there is more pleading. There is more anguish:
“My longing weeps for everything. My longing shoots back at me, to kill or
be killed.”
Sometimes reading is grieving.
When I read these seemingly unrelated books, I understood just how deep and nuanced everything is and how I may not be able to completely comprehend it. But with my limited understanding, I know that Mead and Baldwin talk about an apprehension that goes far back in the history of black and white ancestry, and Darwish, in his poetry, seems to call for the recognition of the Jewish in Arab and the Arab in Jewish. And I looked at how, despite the complexity of these matters, they all speak in the same language, which is the language of humanity, that we are singularized by the fact that we are all humans.
Like many of us, I am at a loss of how those in positions of power—the power to change something and do something good for the sake of humanity by stopping the bloodshed instead of keeping at it and encouraging it—those who I believe are not without wounds and need to heed this more and tackle these complications with levelheadedness, are so blinded that they forget.
To what end?
Where is the middle, the heaven on earth where we can meet, where you are not more powerful and we are not less fortunate? Where there are no guns, only roses?
I hugged my mother, and with my head against her back, I was crying inside for those who long to hug someone but all they have are ashes, or body parts.
In the last days of September, I was thinking of my own justice. Imagining someone’s retribution like a most desired dream. To put him behind bars, his long overdue punishment. Now, I think of these Palestinian people with hardly any access to food and water, whose homes are now reduced to a hoard of dust and blocks, who have not gotten a private, solemn time to mourn their losses, who are not allowed to grieve. Justice just might be the last thing on their minds, if they are even able to think or process anything. Their dead are not given a proper burial—all those I will never know, all those I will only ever hear of collectively as the death toll reaches 4,651 and more. Yesterday and today, and the awful truth of tomorrow, the names that may never be written on gravestones.
Suddenly, privilege is a pain. Suddenly, laughter feels like a luxury of breath, and I am suffocated by the awareness of how many of us can no longer afford it.
I’m ashamed to admit that sometimes I read more than I watch the news for the reason that I can barely have the stomach to look at the terror on their faces nor to hear their cries, to see the injured children, the doctors who are dedicating their lives to their purpose. I keep remembering the photos I saw in Tumblr years back, where a kid said they were just playing and he saw how his friend got killed. It really stuck with me, the photos and what he said, because back then I was just his age. And I realize how privileged and cowardly it all seemed, to even have the option to look or not to look, to even choose to divert my eyes just because it’s painful to see. And then I knew I had to look harder, at the very least, to remember their faces as much as I could.
I can simply not write about this. I can simply think, maybe it is not my fight. But like many of us, I am pained. I cannot think of this letter without thinking of how Mahmoud Darwish had been “imprisoned several times and frequently harassed, always for the crimes of reciting his poetry and traveling without a permit from village to village.” I cannot think of that and not think of how after all these years, it’s all the same, both there and here.
I cannot think of this letter without hearing his poetry echoing its way to me:
When you go to sleep tonight, be a song for those who have no songs.
All October I cannot think nor feel anything major other than what is not me, not happening to me, but is affecting me and therefore is actually happening to me in a way. Until now I still remember certain events in certain fiction and nonfiction books I’ve read growing up—the gas chambers, the eating of snow for survival, the basements and bombings, the silence, the silencing—just as I still remember Luis Manuel’s mutilated body being dropped in an open field, just as I still remember the Ukrainian child with both blood and a coloring book in his hands, just as I’d remember the anguished cries of traumatized Palestinian and Israeli individuals. It is impossible for all this not to be interconnected by the threads of trauma and injustice. It is all a vicious cycle of hurt people hurting people, and the cycle has to end.
And so I know it is also my fight, our fight, regardless of who and where we are.
The desire to disappear intensifies for every atrocity heard. It brings me to the atrocity I myself had suffered as a child. It brings me to yet many other atrocities less heard and less spoken of. I thought, what good are these emotions? What good is this sorrow? What’s the point in reading books and staying attuned with the news and carefully navigating the media swarming with propaganda and disinformation if the oppressive forces are out of our control? Even this is a cycle. I wanted the world to stop then, for the seeming hopelessness of it all. Yet how much harder is it for them? Most of us probably share this, the grief paralysis. The reactions—the shock, the silence, the anger, the disbelief, the disappointment—are all understandable. And after that, more than anything, what humanity needs is our response.
I fear that the violence has become so rampant and normal and out of our hands that we stop being sensitive about it. I fear that we believe so much that our voice is not so important and powerful that we remain silent. I fear that we believe our actions can only do so little that we stop trying.
As Susan Sontag eloquently put it:
“The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.”
I care so much about freedom growing up. I care so much about expression. I care so much about the sensitivities of living, which is what this space is all about. And I so much about the people around me. It only feels right in my heart to write this, to be in solidarity with those who have been injusticed by the violence committed by both Hamas and the Israeli forces and their Western allies, and to call for a ceasefire to end this brutality, which I believe is for the best interests of all communities.
The war against ourselves is hard enough.
I keep thinking about guilt and how it lingers the more we go about our lives. But as it should, life will continue, perhaps more today than yesterday and even more tomorrow, even if we feel guilty about it, even if we are still grieving, even if in the dreadful tomorrow we might find ourselves with more rage in the face of yet another horrible news, which we don’t wish. Life should continue, even in all its joys and simplest pleasures and triumphs, and I don’t think there should be any shame in that. Maybe I am just trying to make the end of this letter sound a little more hopeful, which is difficult, but that’s what I believe in. Like what I said before, “To keep participating. To grieve and still laugh and celebrate love. To keep the love in motion in all ways always, not in spite but most especially.”
But we will keep reading. We will keep being vigilant of the disinformation and the spinning of narratives. We will keep aiding in the ways that we can in what big or so little that we have. We will keep speaking up. We will keep sharing. We will keep learning. We will keep resisting. We will keep saying: enough.
This is keeping the love in motion.
We will keep being a song for those who have no songs, and those who cannot sing.
Thank u for sharing this. Everytime i think about what's happening in palestine, i can't help but burst into tears! It helps that a lot in this community has been constantly educating and sharing what's truly happening. It's depressing to think about it, but it doesn't cost us anything to care, to try to shed some light esp for the Palestinians who has been in the dark for far too long. Love to see more Filipino's are standing for Palestinians. Hugs for all our weary hearts, but also prayers and peace for palestine. 🙏
wow wow wow angel! i was nodding my head throughout the whole thing because the sentiments and your entire outlook totally resonate with me (i’m not surprised) i love the idea of civility being walking together and being present for one another, because i think that is precisely what’s been missing - we’ve turned our backs on one another and therefore on ourselves. sending you so much love 🤍