Prologue
Just before I left for my trip, R. and I had a last lunch at The Old Spaghetti House, my quiet little nook around the De La Salle campus. (I took some friends there once, and the place inspired the idea of a philosopher’s restaurant with a similar ambience. “We’d call the bathroom ‘Plato’s Cave,’” M. joked.) Anyway, I learned a new word from R. that day: bardo. He said I was in it. It’s an essential term in Tibetan Buddhism, and I was chagrined I didn’t know what it meant. He told me it refers to a transitional state, usually triggered by a crisis. Literally, it's the interval between death and rebirth.
“A lot of people don’t like it,” he said. “It’s difficult to live with a sense of deep uncertainty, of not being at home. You want to move on as quickly as possible. But those who linger and appreciate this state often pick up a lot of insights. There’s an increase in creativity, due to the death of the old self and the lack of anything solid to replace it yet.”
Perhaps I did leave her behind, the old me. Certainly I absconded from that kid professor’s world, where you couldn’t mourn properly for the velocity of the days. But the shriveled heart will do it for you. I’m just glad that now, I can write again, read, you know—do things, instead of thinking thinking thinking, or sleeping to escape the sad thoughts. That was how I learned that unconsciousness makes no difference, because you always wake up to the pain.
I’m suddenly reminded of the essential message of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. The bardo state is similar to Dream’s crisis in the culmination of this comics series. (Spoilers ahead.)
Dream’s old sins, from his millennia of existence as Endless, have caught up to him. He once condemned an old lover to hell simply because she refused to be his queen. He has also ceased talking to his only son, the lyre-playing Orpheus of myth, because the latter disobeyed him. Dream realizes now that he is not happy with the distant and forbidding self he has become.
So he decides to die.
Below: Dream meets his sister Death (a scene from Vol. 9, The Kindly Ones).
In a sinister series of events—in which the Norse trickster god Loki plays a part, as well as Desire, who is Dream’s arch-nemesis, and the Furies—Dream secretly orchestrates his demise. Fittingly, his older sister Death grants it to him. A new Dream emerges, white-robed this time, claiming a continuous identity… and yet, he is not the same. He is warmer, more innocent somehow, more human.
Below: The new Dream pets one of his gatekeepers (from Vol. 10, The Wake).
The Sandman is a highly personal, existential myth because of this message: To be human is to undergo these unbearable transformations. In the course of a lifetime, we have to die many times over. What’s heroic is the final decision to close our eyes and leap. The self that survives the fall, the bardo state, shall fly. “Sometimes when you fall, you fly,” to quote Mr. Gaiman. (For a fuller discussion of this reading of The Sandman, see Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern Myth by Stephen Rauch.)
Any change or transition is scary for me. Unlike Dream, I’m never ready to die, even metaphorically. Just consider my attitude about plane rides, which I’ve been experiencing too many of lately.
Flight
Another airport, another takeoff. I trudged through security, where they x-ray your things and confiscate your toiletries and make you strip your feet. I handed over my boarding pass and headed for my seat. It was a domestic flight this time, so the plane was smaller. There were only two columns of seats separated by a thin aisle. “It felt like flying in a soup can!”, I told Les and her husband upon my arrival in Kansas.
I’ve never liked flying. Les on the other hand loves it. We examined our disparate opinions a week later, when they had driven me back to the airport. My original flight back to New Jersey was cancelled, so I had an hour to kill at the terminal with her.
“I love plane rides—short ones and long ones,” she gushed. “The takeoff, the landing, all of it. The idea of going somewhere new. What a rush!”
“Agh, I hate flying. I’m always scared something would go wrong. And flights across the Pacific? God! An entire day confined in an airplane.” I shuddered. “Plus, the very idea of being transplanted… You know, carrying around all your stuff, hopping from one place to another just when you started getting used to the last one. Not my idea of fun.”
Sometimes I wonder how she and I ended up being friends. I love the things she doesn’t care for, like fresh orange juice and chocolates. Meanwhile, I can’t stand the things that thrill her to death, like roller coasters and horror films. To my credit, I gave the latter two a chance, very reluctantly, during my visit. I still don’t see the point of either, but at least now I know it’s not for lack of trying.
Below is the roller coaster I rode at the Worlds of Fun theme park, with the loop and all. It was supposed to be my warm-up for the more exciting rides. But Les knows what happened after that, in a bathroom stall, to the breakfast of bacon and eggs that had been in my stomach.
Meanwhile, here are some rides I didn’t dare try anymore, because… well… you know.
Maybe I’ll never be truly adventurous. Certainly I’m not there yet, where she is. Getting married and having your own family—for me, that's like riding the tallest roller coaster attached on top of an airplane flying thirty thousand feet above the ground! But hanging out with Les again, observing her new life, and getting caught up in the tiny tornado of her wedding preparations, I realized… this is something I’m not unwilling to try, at some vague point in the future. (Unless I go the way of the French existentialists, like Beauvoir who lived in hotel rooms all her adult life, ate out, never married any of her lovers, and never had kids. Not that I consider her lifestyle, or any other, as “ideal.” It’s just that it’s nice to have an alternative role model, if only in literature. Oh, pathetic!)
For the first time since Les left the Philippines more than a year ago, we saw each other again. She didn’t change much. But her lifestyle did, and I was amazed at the things she can do now. She’d work at the office all day, then come home and cook. We’re not talking TV dinners either, but full-fledged Filipino meals like afritada, kaldereta, and sinigang. She also maintains this complicated Excel file of their weekly household expenses. In other words, she keeps track of their finances and saves, especially now that a new addition to her family is coming in November. During the wedding reception, the couple announced that they’re three months’ pregnant! :)
Here are some pictures from Leslie's and Tony's wedding....
Below: Les and her bridesmaids (L-R: me, Les, Madz and her baby Alexis).
Below: Les and her family, followed by a picture of her with Tony and her in-laws.
Below: At the reception hall. By the way, we decorated the place ourselves and put together the centerpieces. ;)
Below: Check out the way Alexis is smiling in these pictures!
Now, I’m used to best friends getting married and having a baby. But until now, I hadn’t really witnessed the daily details of conjugal life—unless you count living under one roof with my parents. ;) When Les’s friend Madz, who brought along her three-month-old baby, also came to visit, I was immersed in domesticity. Surrounded by grown-ups, I suddenly realized how insulated I’ve been. For awhile there, I identified with Gregor Samsa in that short story by Kafka—I felt like such a useless being who doesn’t have a place anywhere and should just scuttle off and die! But I got over that after awhile. It’s actually part of what I had hoped to accomplish during this stolen vacation, which is to gain a detached perspective on my life. Previously, I focused myopically on philosophy and literature. The frankly stupid romantic land mines I always stepped on took so much of my energy. Now I realize that there’s more to life than that much-vaunted interiority of the poet-philosophers. It’s time I looked—really looked—outward rather than too much inward.
Here are some more pictures of baby love, taken at Les's sister Grace's trailer home. Grace has three kids and another one is on the way.
Below, L-R: Grace, Tony with Grace's son A.G., TJ, Tony's mom Faye, and Grace's husband Charles.
Below, L-R: Les with A.G., Madz and Alexis.
Finally, here are some pictures taken at Great Wolf Lodge in Kansas City. The day after the wedding, most of Les's family—plus two bridesmaids and a baby—went to this indoor water park.
Below: Is the bulge noticeable yet? ;)
* * * *
All this is not to say that I’m no longer such a baby. Perhaps, on some level, I always will be. Sometimes I wonder if that’s the reason why I seem to be so difficult to love, most of all by myself. I think about Dream who, overcome with regret, decided to change. He got tired of taking himself too seriously, so he let that old self die. Personally I think that the dark Dream is more of a romantic figure than the white one, and people will always think of him—Morpheus—as the real Sandman. But the white Dream, whose name is Daniel, is infinitely wiser, if only because he has died once.
Below: Daniel's first appearance as the new Dream (from Volume 10, The Wake).
Below: A two-page spread tracking the fall of Morpheus' funeral barge into the abyss (also from The Wake).
I like to think that my trip has been a kind of farewell ceremony to the old self... even though I know something of her will always be in me.
I’ll end this with words of advice from Rilke, addressed to a young admirer (from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell). This is a very long paragraph from the eighth letter, but I felt compelled to quote it in its entirety, highlighting some significant lines. Often when I found myself in a new nadir in this bardo state, wondering resignedly where the bottom really was, I’d turn to Rilke. Then I’d realize I can learn to love the ride.
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary. It is necessary—and toward this point our development will move, little by little —that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them. Just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.
