A VALEDICTORY

not a bang but a whimper,
the lady’s hair fluttering on air
making “not a brush stroke
but a quiet whisper”

I come to the end of my “opinionating” as I cruise Pinoylandia. With most readers of this column reportedly from here, and with the breadth of coverage I gave my columns, it was hard to miss anyone on the “stepped-on-your-toes” department. Readers comment that they sensed contrariness in my demeanor but are lucid that my writings were simply to express a selfhood, a confident “selfie”, to the end.

Here’s my picture of the fullness of being: we intuitively “sense,” “feel,” “know,” and “do,” a set of tools in our arsenal of capabilities. “Being” is the intensification of the “sense-feel-know-do” continuum. Metaphysically, “being” intensifies knowing and doing. To know what I know and do what I do is to be, to become. This is beyond Descartes cogito ergo sum declaration that favors the head-trip. Ours goes with the gut-trip: “I am, therefore, I think, one of the four basic functions that makes me and other humans who we are!”

If you are lost, keep reading. Others use the word “spirit” to designate this “being me” category and we concur if done without the extra luggage of magical hocus-pocus, the escape into the hairy-fairy realm of enigmatic mystery, deus ex machina on matters that account for the boundaries of human limits. Since we know phenomenologically that what anyone says redounds to being a “self-statement” regardless of whether the pronouncement’s logic is circuitous and non-linear, we rely on the power of metaphor when direct discourse is too blunt to accomplish our aim; however, we paraphrase the testy Winston Churchill when he posited that all accounts of life are autobiographical.

It is not important what our “gurus” say; it is what you and I say about our own journey that counts. Though academic learning rests on the ability to quote someone, accounts of self-consciousness, the consciousness of consciousness, and the thin air beyond, is the domain we usually describe with the all-encompassing term “god,” though they are demonstrably autobiographical confessions. That is why theology, once the queen of medieval science, is bunk in our time, of necessity, a theologian’s wild imaginings find its way into telling the narrative. Were theology to remain a valid discourse in the same way as alchemy is still practiced, I relegate it to the field of symbolic gestures and poetry that require metaphorical translations!

After a decade of literary opinionating, what valedictory statements do I make? The hair flutters ‘n whispers four statements.

Life is good. It just is. To imagine “is not” is a waste of intellect. Admittedly, we grow up in a culture where “life as is” is dejado (at a disadvantage at the gate of existential pintakasi, [cockfight]); we are handicapped at the start. In the Semitic traditions of the Levant, the beginning is caricatured as allured by a snake. To imagine what is not is to engage in illusion, and mirage is ultimate deception in the desert. I say, life just is, not always just but is irrevocably IS. In fact, its Is-ness is its comparative advantage. Of a minimum of 200 million sperms that careened to be me, only one made it, chosen by the ovum from the 200-some sperm stragglers that made it to its walls! The wonder of birth is not being an onset of living as it is an arrival, of having made it. One opts the manner of its flowering, thereby, llamado en la puerta, however it is sliced.

The past is done. It is finis, kaput, terminus, over. Time travel is H.G. Wells’ utopian dreaming. We do not relive the past and undo what was already done, nor does the past determine the present, unless we decide to make it so. To be incarnate is to choose that our carne is our karma, and our karma is our carne. We picked up our path; there is no error to make, only a decision made.

The present is a gift. That’s why it is called “present,” silly. Folks take a moment as the present, measured in minutes, hours, days, months, or years, which turns the “before” into a past often bewailed, anticipating a fearful future that scares the bejesus out of us. My present is a whole tapestry of 86 years grounded in specific times and places, with roles I play among specific persons, and a story I spin to keep the human narrative gyrating and swirling ’til the end. My “one moment in time,” a “first time in forever,” where I dance through the bright day and dark night of the soul is 86 years of duration. I chose to be conscious, and tell the “selfie” story of my treasured singular existence of “one, unique, unrepeatable gift of life into human history, unlike anything or anyone before, and not having another one ever again,” to which I add, “just like you and all the bipeds that walk this planet, along other flakes in Dong Bei snow.” Diversity and uniqueness make life’s texture!

The future is open. Oh, the door is so wide open. One only needs to decide. Watch this. Goodbye!