Monthly Archives: December 2023

Qwertyman No. 73: Nurse and Patient Both

Posted on by
1

Qwertyman for Monday, December 25, 2023

(Today I’m offering, as I customarily do, a Christmas story, albeit one in rather unusual circumstances, to provoke us into reflecting on what Christmas should mean.)

NURSE NESTOR couldn’t recall how many times he had performed this procedure—thousands, for sure, in the ten years he had been with the hospital—and he had to acknowledge that it did get easier with practice to the point that he could lecture newbies on the proper way of doing things, such as changing diapers based not on their availability but on the patient’s needs, to avoid prolonged wetness leading to contact dermatitis.

He had become largely inured to the smell of urine and excrement, and all the other effusions sick bodies produced. Some other nurses and doctors dealt with that by employing exotic methods like putting coffee grounds or some other odor absorber in the room or applying lavender oil under their noses, but double-masking was enough for him, until he understood that some smells were simply too powerful to be suppressed, and that a philosophical kind of acceptance was the only real way of surviving along with one’s patients. Soon he reveled in being able to undertake the toughest assignments, such as the aging movie star who refused to let people know that he had had a colostomy, even when the hole in his belly began to leak. They had chatted about his biggest hits as Nestor irrigated the stoma, flushing out the detritus, until the man was in tears, but not over the pain of the process. 

It would have been easy to say that Nestor was now on duty in the ICU because of his proven expertise, and that he could be proud of having been selected for this shift on Christmas Eve, but he knew none of it was true. He was there because everyone else had a family to hurry home to, and he did not. He lived in a rented room in San Marcelino, a short jeepney ride away from the hospital, and took his meals in a nearby restaurant that toted up his bills at the end of the month; he did not even need to tell them what he wanted for breakfast. They would be closed on Christmas morning, so he would have to reach into his cupboard for some noodles or sardines.

It would have been different if Celeste hadn’t gone off with that anesthesiologist in his Miata, just because Nestor was on overtime when she needed a ride home. They used to wait for each other in the cafeteria, watching YouTube videos or making silly Facebook posts. Months afterward, when her blistering affair with the doctor was over and he saw her in her old chair fiddling with her phone, he would have swallowed his pride and swept her back into his arms, but she looked away and he had to pretend to be interested in the lunch menu.

Nestor knew the minute he saw the boy—because that was just what he was, a boy in a tall man’s frame—that he was trouble. Half his head was swathed in bandages and a leg was encased in plaster, like he had stepped out of a Mr. Bean comedy with something explosively hilarious about to happen, but the boy stared at him with a vehemence Nestor did not think possible out of one good eye. Nestor read his chart and saw that Patient Philip V. had been involved in a car crash the day before and had broken some bones, but nothing too seriously; he was going to live. He had not been drinking, which was unusual. Nestor could see that Philip had wetted himself, which was also unusual, as most patients had a hard time pissing after surgery, for a variety of reasons. He wondered why Philip had not been catheterized—possibly the Christmas rush? 

“I’m wet,” said the boy in an angry slur. 

“I know,” said Nestor, lifting up the patient’s gown to verify what he could sniff. It was nothing.

“I’ve been buzzing you—someone, anyone—for minutes. Where the hell is everybody?”

“It’s Christmas. People go home. People stay home. What happened to you?” Nestor began putting on his gloves.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m cleaning you up. If you don’t mind, I’m going to wipe you front to back to minimize infection, examine you for rashes. Then I’ll put a diaper on you, unless you want a catheter—you know, a tube I’ll stick into you—”

“I know what a catheter is. I have a master’s degree, in something no one cares about. I look too young, right? People always tell me I’m too young for this and that.”

Nestor looked at the boy and the hollows of his cheeks, the pale skin that bruised too easily, the slender bones that spoke of homes with swimming pools and SUVs in the garage and colognes in the bathroom. He remembered Celeste’s beau, a mestizo Chinese who wasn’t even handsome but who, Celeste said, could play the piano. He saw the boy’s limp privates and wondered what damage they had done, and felt a welling contempt. He wanted to pull the sheet out from under Philip as roughly as he could and shove him against the bed’s railing until he screamed.

“Hey, you look annoyed,” said Philip. “I know what you’re thinking. It’s Christmas and you’re stuck here with me and my—whatever. Go ahead, take it out on me. Hurt me. I never asked for this,” he said, gesturing at the straps and tubes he was attached to.

“Shut up and let me work.” Outside the ICU he could hear the patter of feet and the squeak of a gurney being rolled down the corridor, at the end of which a string of colored lights blinked around the swing doors, surrounded by foamy patches of fake snow.

“How much worse can it get? My parents are flying in tomorrow and will pull me out of this, like they always do—” He felt Nestor grab his leg. “You can’t hurt me even if you wanted to. I tried to kill myself, did they tell you that? I crashed my car into a post, but—the post was lousy and gave way. Whoever built that made some money.” He let out a dry chuckle.

Nestor stopped, holding an immaculate diaper between his hands. “No. Why would you do that?”

“Because they wanted to keep me away—from—from Timmy. They didn’t need to. Timmy’s gone. He left ahead of me, a week ago. He was better at it than I was.”

There were ways, Nurse Nestor had sometimes thought, that patients falling under “Code Gray”—unruly, irrational, and combative persons—could be brought to heel, or even privately punished. Caregivers needed that certain leeway—a pinch here, a pull there—to express and to expel their innermost emotions. He looked at Philip, suddenly smaller and meeker in his hospital gown. He resolved to show him how an adult diaper could be put on with the least discomfort, to nurse and patient both.

Qwertyman No. 72: Bullets to Ballads

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, December 18, 2023

MAYBE IT’S that time of year, when we get all wishful and start asking for things that will likely never come or never happen—like peace on earth and goodwill to men—but it’s the wishing that keeps us human.

Two weekends ago, I had the extraordinary privilege of spending Saturday night and then Sunday morning listening to two different concerts. The first, at Manila Pianos in Magallanes, featured tenor Arthur Espiritu and soprano Stefanie Quintin Avila in a program that brought the audience to its feet and singing along at the end of many encores.

After that wonderful performance, I messaged my deepest thanks to concert producers Pablo Tariman and Joseph Uy, noting that they made “magical interludes like this possible in these stress-filled times. If only all those bombs and bullets in Ukraine and Gaza were music. Fire symphonies, concertos, fugues, and cantatas across the border!”

The next morning, we drove out to Batangas City for another friend’s birthday celebration, which was heralded by a sparkling mini-concert with soprano Rachelle Gerodias and tenor Jonathan Abdon. At lunch that followed, I sat down at a table with a renowned journalist, a composer-performer, and a senator, and we were all breathless with joy at the music we had just experienced. It was the composer who put it best: “How can anyone argue with that?”

Indeed, in a world and at a time prone to argument and conflict, where even the most innocuous remark can ignite scorching disputation, the enjoyment of music seems to serve as a universal balm, a hushing power that creates a pause just long enough for us to remember our better selves—taming fangs, retracting claws, infusing tenderness into the coarsest of sensibilities. As William Congreve put it more than three hundred years ago, “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast” (not “beast” as it’s often misquoted, although it could apply just as well).

As I’ve noted elsewhere, whenever I think of music as a discipline, what comes to mind is Leonard Bernstein’s description of it as “the only art incapable of malice.” That may or may not be true—music in specific historical contexts such as Nazi Germany and our own martial law has certainly been made to serve the purposes of despotism. 

I recall that in 1980, in particularly disturbing example of music perverted for fascist pleasure, a film titled “Playing for Time” (written by Arthur Miller as an adaptation of the French Jewish singer-pianist Fiana Fenelon’s autobiography The Musicians of Auschwitz) showed how concentration-camp musicians were forced to play to entertain their jailers as well as to stay alive. It still chills me to the bone, as a prisoner under martial law, to hear the New Society anthem “May Bagong Silang” being played anew over the radio as though the past half century never happened.

Still, most people will surely agree that music has wielded a beneficent influence on human life and society, in ways that appeal directly to the heart and mind. 

In my own lectures, whenever I need to reach for metaphorical illustrations of the power of art to compel the human spirit, I turn to music. I advert to composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Symphony No. 6 in C Major, which came to be known as the “Leningrad Symphony,” was premiered during the siege of Leningrad by the Germans in July 1942, and became a kind of anthem of Soviet resistance, and to the story of the Berlin Philharmonic persisting in recording Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene and the finale from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung despite the Allied forces knocking on Berlin’s gates in April 1945 (supposedly you can hear artillery in the background of that recording). 

It may be too romantic to hope that music will waft over the bunkers in Ukraine and Gaza this Christmas season and still the gunfire, however briefly. We’ve all seen that movie and know how it ends, with a renewed barrage of rockets—ordered by stiff-backed men far away from the trenches—drowning out the carols.

But there are other battles being waged much closer to us this season where a little night music might help quell the temptation to savage one another—even across the dinner table. 

I can imagine how many Christmas parties will settle down to drinks and coffee and devolve into a discussion of the Israel-Hamas conflict, and explode quickly into partisan debate over proportionality, Biblical prophecy, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, Vietnam, Zionism, British colonialism, Arab nationalism, Munich, Entebbe, Eichmann, George Soros, anti-Semitism, Netanyahu, 9/11, and the Yom Kippur War (have I missed anything?). Half the world away from the frontlines, I haven’t seen an issue divide Filipinos—at least those who keep abreast of the news—so sharply as this one, which has become a kind of litmus test of one’s faith or humanity.

Much of that acrimony has, of course, been enabled by the Internet and the ease it provides for instant (often unthought) response—a habit we’ve ported over, perhaps unconsciously, into our daily lives.

Against this backdrop, music is a call to order, a shaping of emotions across a roomful of rampant urges, longings, and resentments. We can choose but not control it; the best response to music is one of sublime submission, from which experience we emerge refreshed and ready to be human again. 

A meaningful and peaceful Christmas to us all!

(Image from economist.com)

Qwertyman No. 71: A Breakthrough for Peace

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, December 11, 2023

I HONESTLY didn’t know what to feel when I first read the news that a breakthrough appears imminent in peace negotiations between the Philippine government and the National Democratic Front (and behind it, the Communist Party of the Philippines), whose soldiers and partisans have been at war with each other for over half a century, in one of the world’s longest-running insurgencies.

As a student activist who fought martial law and got imprisoned for it at age 18, I didn’t expect to live past 25 because so many of my friends and comrades were giving up their lives around me in the name of freedom and justice. Instead, in a Forrest-Gumpish turn of events, I survived and even prospered for another 50 years. As I wrote in my introduction to the book SERVE (Ateneo Press, 2023), co-written with 19 other fellow stragglers from what we called the First Quarter Storm, “We celebrated our seniorhood as the ultimate victory” even as “the experience of martial law coded itself into our DNA.” That victory, of course, is a shallow one, considering that the causes we fought for remain as valid and as urgent today, and that the social cancer we sought to excise “had never left, was always there, lying cruelly in wait for a chance to ravage us again—and not only us this time, but our children and grandchildren as well.”

My reaction to the peace talks—and I would guess that of many of my peers as well—was one of joy and relief, but inevitably compounded by some doubt and apprehension. All of these responses, however disparate, have their reasons.

The joy and relief must be paramount because, however we look at it and whatever arguments may be presented by either side, the armed conflict has gone on too long, without truly positive and strategic gains to show for five decades of warfare, at the cost of innumerable lives and massive drains on our resources. This is not to say that those lives were wasted nor that everyone’s goals have been met, but that surely there must be a better way—a more humane and effective way—to resolve our differences and move forward together without having to kill yet another cadre or yet another soldier, both of them probably just farm boys looking to improve their lives. 

Ultimately and simply, it didn’t work as planned—neither the “people’s war” nor the counter-insurgency. (Curiously, they manifest a kind of symbiosis or co-dependency, with one providing the basis for the other.) The Left is as far from seizing State power as we are from achieving a FIBA championship (no matter virtue, skill, or tenacity), and the Right remains essentially as it has always been, unreformed and unrepentant in its monopoly of economic and political power. But the Right seems to have been more clever at shapeshifting, riding on and pandering to the digital consumerism of a new generation and thereby dousing its revolutionary fervor, while the Left has basically stuck to the playbook and rhetoric of 1970s Maoism.

Meanwhile, in the great section between them, the masses of our people remain largely poor and vulnerable, in desperate need of food, housing, work, and education, a significant number of them kept afloat only by the grueling sacrifices of fathers, mothers, and siblings laboring overseas. Some decline has been noted in the incidence of mass poverty in recent decades, but it has been slow and uneven; even moderate economic growth did not necessarily lead to significant poverty reduction. 

We are said to have a rising middle class—estimated by the Philippine Institute of Development Studies at 40 percent of the population—but it is a very fragile one, strongly aspirational in its longing to be rich or be like the rich, but weak in the knees, and easily crushed or co-opted. Those of us in this category spend our lives saving up for the good things and cultivating our composure, only to lose all that in one catastrophic illness or declaration of redundancy.

Politically, as well, I place myself squarely in the middle, never having trusted the Right and its compulsive greed for wealth and power and long having fallen out of love with the Left, which has shown itself to be just as capable of cynical calculation. I declare myself a liberal (with the small “L”), with all of that word’s ambiguities and contradictions. I repose my faith in no party or church or army, but trust my reason (however faulty, and with God’s grace) to lead me to the truth and to the right decisions. I draw strength from knowing, as I saw in the crowds of May 2022, that a huge wellspring of goodness and positive purpose resides in many if not most Filipinos. We cannot and will not let bad politics and bad politicians stop us from doing good, in our families, communities, and eventually our nation.

However fractured our society remains, in the very least we deserve peace, and must agree on peace, so we can banish one of the darkest specters in our national history. No more war; no more political prisoners; no more tokhang. And please, no more Leila de Limas.

But a just and lasting peace will require not only a rejection of violence as conflict resolution. It should also mean strengthening the law and the independence of the judiciary, reducing corruption, and depoliticizing the military and police. It should mean dismantling the broad and expensive State apparatus devoted solely to counter-insurgency, a factor that the National Security Council itself has declared “a dying threat” even as military budgets remain high. Deploy our soldiers to our coastal waters and boundaries, where the real dangers to our national security loom.

The irony of another President Marcos securing the peace has not escaped me, as I’m sure it will perplex others, but I grant that peacemaking will require being able to look beyond the persons for now and focus on the larger goals and processes involved; other reckonings can follow. I’m under no illusion that the GRP and the NDF will sing “Kumbaya” around a campfire and that all will be well thereafter. Neither party comes to the table with clean hands and consciences. Both come with long histories of violence, betrayal, and guilt. There will be more hope than trust to share.

But a peace agreement is not a marriage, with a pledge to love and hold hands no matter what, merely a civil agreement to live under one roof without killing each other and maybe, just maybe, have an occasional cup of coffee or a meal together. 

For this I am willing to suspend my disbelief, and wish all the parties the best of luck, with a silent prayer for this most unlikely and difficult of enterprises. Other battles and debates can follow; let’s end this one first.

Qwertyman No. 70: Life (and Death) on Installment

Posted on by
1

Qwertyman for Monday, December 4, 2023

THE SUDDEN collapse of Loyola Plans—yet to be explained to longtime customers like me—reminded me of the fragility of our expectations. Like probably hundreds of thousands of other pre-need plan holders, I was just going about my daily business, secure in the thought that whatever happened, I could look forward (well, not exactly, but…) to a coffin, an air-conditioned room full of flowers, and a patch of grass or a marble urn at the end of the road.

That road apparently ended sooner for Loyola than for me and my wife, and we are now in the odd situation of having outlived our funeral plans and the company that was supposed to fulfill them. I understand that Loyola sold educational plans as well, which in a way is even sorrier for the supposed beneficiaries, whose lives are just beginning as opposed to ours. 

We bought those plans more than 30 years ago, when we were in the middle of our lives and careers and just beginning to think of a far future, of the sunset over the horizon and such other clichés meant to assure us that life follows a predictable if not comfortable trajectory. Beng and I were both student activists who, much to our surprise, had survived the First Quarter Storm and martial law, when our friends and comrades were being murdered right and left. We got married and became parents in the middle of all that, and became tentatively hopeful that we would live a little if not much longer.

In true middle-class fashion, we paid for that future on the installment plan. We bought a subdivision house and lot in the boonies of San Mateo on installment, faithfully amortized for P784.54 a month over fifteen years (you don’t forget a figure like that when you write a check that often). We bought a used Volkswagen Beetle on installment, spread out over 36 months. We bought a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica—the crowning glory of the middle-class library—on installment. We budgeted by the month, our wages largely committed to patient creditors whom I imagined sitting at their desks slitting hundreds of envelopes stuffed with checks and cash (back then, we still trusted the postal system enough to actually send money in the mail). 

Come to think of it, our parents also lived from month to month. Their big thing was appliances—TVs and refrigerators, especially—that they checked out on the display floor, ooh’ed and aah’ed over, and then deposited a down payment for, withdrawn from the bank that afternoon with a sigh at once hopeful and despondent. These appliances became virtual members of the family, occupying positions of prominence in our living rooms and kitchens—until, sometimes and shockingly, they were carted away by strangers to Mama’s tears and Papa’s embarrassed silence. We younger ones learned that installment plans bore obligations that also carried emotional costs.

A little Googling tells us that installment buying has been around since at least 1807, when a New York furniture store offered the option. In 1850, Singer began selling its sewing machines on installment. The practice took off in the 1920s, and became even more hugely popular in the 1950s with the growing use of credit cards.

At least, those kinds of plans began with you getting some product up front. Until the repo man knocked on your door or until the blacks of your eyes turned white from viewing, you used and enjoyed your 14” TV. That’s not the case with educational and funeral plans, which are a kind of a safe bet that tomorrow’s prices will be higher than today’s, so you might as well buy now what you’ll pay for tomorrow anyway. At the end of your long period of indenture, you even get a document in fancy script—like we did—as final proof of your faithfulness and as a guarantee, graven in legal stone, that you will get what you paid for.

Except that now, that’s not going to happen. As the thousands of Filipinos who bought into the College Assurance Plan (CAP) two decades ago discovered, sometimes the bottom falls through the piggybank, and suddenly your dreams go “Poof!” (The CAP case, I’m told, is a complicated one, compounded by the unexpected rise in tuition fees and a new government requirement to produce billions of pesos up front. Last year, after an 18-year battle through the system, a Supreme Court ruling finally allowed for CAP’s rehabilitation, theoretically enabling the payment of 50 centavos for every peso owed a plan holder.)

Not being an avid follower of the business news, I heard about Loyola’s troubles only after their liquidation and the procedure for claims (until April 18, 2024, for the equally ignorant) were announced. As these claims processes go, we could be strumming lyres in heaven (or dodging forks elsewhere) before we see the color of money—and even so, if they just give us back what we paid in, instead of the now-expensive service we paid for, then it’ll be laughably (make that cryingly) small. 

My 95-year-old mother’s response probably said it for most plan holders her age: “I can’t die now.” No, you can’t, Nanay, and not just because we need to find you—and us—a new plan, which hopefully will be worth more than the paper it’s printed on. 

Penman No. 457: The Actor as Painter

Posted on by
Reply

Penman for Sunday, December 3, 2023

A FEW months ago, I had the good fortune of coming into ownership of four watercolors by Juan Arellano (1888-1960), the famous architect of such landmarks as the Metropolitan Theater, the Post Office Building, and the Legislative Building (now the National Museum). Less known to many was that Arellano’s first love was painting, and it was a passion he pursued throughout his life. 

My inquiries into the background of my paintings led me to cross paths—initially online—with Juan’s grandson Raul Arellano, who turned out to be an accomplished painter in his own right. Born in Cagayan de Oro, Raul has been based for almost 30 years now in the United States, but he has recently been returning to the Philippines more often. When, one day, he messaged me to ask if we could meet up, I said yes, eager to learn what he could recall of his grandfather but also to get to know him and his art. 

I’m by no means an art critic, but my wife Beng (a professional art conservator and watercolorist) and I are museum rats and enjoy both traditional and modernist art, and peek into the local art scene when we can. There’s a lot of brilliance and energy out there to be sure, but also much safe and tiresome repetitiveness from artists who’ve settled on a commercial formula, such that their work no longer exudes emotional power. Many young painters—like their writing counterparts whom I meet at workshops and teach in school—also seem to think that the only worthy subject is death and despair, which invariably means dark canvases devoid of any suggestion of wonder and mystery, let alone delight.

When I saw Raul’s work online, even before we met, what leapt out at me was exactly what I found missing in many others—an element of metaphysical magic, fantastical but relatable, the kind of paintings you want to return to over and over again. I saw flashes of Henri Rousseau, Van Gogh, and William Blake, among others, but it was still all him—not his grandfather, for sure—trying to tell me something I hadn’t really thought much about before.

As it turned out, Raul never met his grandfather, who died five years before Raul was born in 1965 (Raul’s father was Juan’s third son Cesar). All he has of him is a self-portrait—and, of course, a passion for art that runs in the family; his cousin Carlos or “Chuckie,” the son of architect Otilio, was a formidable art patron and collector; Chuckie’s younger sister Agnes remains one of the country’s leading and most imaginative sculptors; Cesar’s brother Salvador or “Dodong” Arellano became a well-known painter of horses and game fowl in California.

Raul’s path to painting was neither straight nor easy. His first great obsession was acting, to the point of becoming a resident actor of Tanghalang Pilipino at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, playing a smoldering Tony Javier in a production of Nick Joaquin’s “Portrait of the Artist as Filipino.” “We were trained in method acting,” says Raul, “and it got to the point that I became so immersed in my character that other people on the set found it unnerving.” He would go on to act in the movies, in the crime drama Akin ang Puri(1996) directed by Toto Natividad, Batang West Side (2001) directed by Lav Diaz, and Himpapawid (2009) directed by Raymond Red. Of his performance in Himpapawid, reviewer Jude Bautista noted that “Raul Arellano as the main character is able to show the frustrations of the common man without going over the top. There is a quiet intensity in his performance.”

That intensity had been brewing in Raul the person for some time, leading to and compounded by domestic problems. In 1995, he took the opportunity to go on a film fellowship at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Midwest was too cold so he later moved to California, and quickly realized what all dreamseekers in LA wake up to: that he had to start all over again at the bottom rung of the ladder. “I swept floors. I learned how to operate a forklift. When the big steel container that you’re lifting comes crashing to the ground, you can feel the jolt running down your spine. I was in a lot of pain, but I kept on. When I left, my boss was very sorry to lose me.”

He set up a business restoring American muscle cars. “I had a Russian mechanic, but I took care of the interiors myself. I specialized in Mustangs—you could show me a Ford screw and I could tell you the year and model it came from. I had a fastback Mustang but my best sale was a Shelby Cobra.” But again another personal crisis blew up and he enrolled in a community college to study painting. He left school once he felt he had learned enough about the history, the theory, and the techniques of art to express himself. “Something in me was always wanting to come out, and I found that release in painting. I had no models or artists I looked up to. I just wanted to express myself, to work from my subconscious. I found that I could work best in a cemetery, because it was so peaceful. I still like working in the open, in plein air.”

The lure of painting proved irresistible. He worked in oils, and one of his favorite paints was lead white, popularly used in the past for its visual qualities and permanence. However, it was banned in the 1970s because of the danger of lead poisoning—a danger Raul was well aware of but embraced. “I found a stash of old paint and bought it all up. I was inhaling it every day and I could feel it doing strange things to my head.”

He returned to Manila every now and then and even resumed acting, but the death of a close friend shook him up badly. “I was all set to come out with an exhibit of traditional, representational paintings, but I was overcome with grief over the loss of my friend, and I just had to express that feeling in my work. So I put all my old work aside and began ‘Crucifixion.’” That work is one of his most impressive and a personal favorite, painted in 2004 at the outbreak of the war in Iraq.

(Image from artesdelasfilipinas.com)

Today Raul spends time in a small farm in Batangas, enjoying quick sketches in the sylvan scenery, and contemplating the possibility of exhibiting in his homeland. With him having gone from peace to pain, from calm to conflict and back again, one can only wonder what new work will emerge from this phase of his life. I find myself wishing for his playfulness to return, but that of course depends on what Raul Arellano is feeling inside.

(More here on Raul Arellano: https://artesdelasfilipinas.com/archives/85/the-art-and-thought-of-raul-arellano-original-)