Guesswork

Last weekend, while I lounged around the house reading Eco’s How to Travel with a Salmon, I thought of a new plot for a novel: why not write about my hellacious situation in the company I previously worked for as a happy little writer-elf, that peculiar situation that had inhabited most of my waking hours for some three years? Why think of something else, weave it out of a daydream, when there was all the grit of a smashing story, sparing me the mental effort of conjuring false ones?

I also realized, still while reading Eco, that because of my preoccupation with death, self-annihilation, and the nonexistence of God, I have altogether forgotten how to observe everyday life—the ways of everyday people, the subtle expressions of the daily culture in which I exist. Back in the days of my juvenile poetry, I used to make them up in my head even as I walk the road to my university, or while on the LRT. I wrote love poems, hate poems, angsty poems, poems that purported to have some social or political purpose, verses that mimicked the beginnings of a romantic epic, only to end abruptly like what the French do. So I decided to observe, again, the people, the daily grind, the little colorless details, in the hope that somehow, I’d be able to take something from it: a new way of seeing things, for example.

Now, this is what I’m going to write, while outside a slight rain mists the glass panes. I just received my assignment for a five-day thing. It’s a profile of a company I barely know about. This is what my work is about: guesswork. Adapt to someone else’s style. Lick the wounds of others. Take full ownership of the issues of the original writer, feel for him, fight for him, kill his enemies for him, dominate this planet and ride on his high horse. Terrific, isn’t it? That’s the intangible “joys” of working at home.

I was editing some manuscript today when something suddenly hit me. It was a small Eureka moment, the kind that descends on you when you’re alone and staring at the sinking sun. It’s about living and dying (a girl named Ciaramarie Abalos died of E. coli just Friday last week, by the way). Even if I’d be able to live for 75 years, it’s still a fleeting existence, a brief spark, a short interlude before the final curtain call. As the late artist Levi Celerio said it so aptly: even if you’d live a hundred years, it passes like one cloudy afternoon, it feels like you’ve lived for only one whole day. It’s that compelling sense of brevity that sometimes drives me mad. And when I look around, no one else seems to notice those very things that confront me every single day. Ah, the entire universe is maya, an illusion. Tyler Durden is right: We are part of the all-singing, all-dancing dungheap that lives each day to forget about and deny the fast-approaching The End.

And what do I do for the meantime? One writer said: “Sit on the banks of the river and wait for the corpse of your enemy to come by. Obviously, in the meantime you have to think of something else—that’s what I mean by polychronic personality. Wait on the banks of the river, but in the meantime you read Plato, you write books."

Well, I will, man. I will. And for the meantime, too, I will hold a sword and slice through the thick, stinking flesh of this all-singing, all-dancing dungheap. And continue guessing, guessing, guessing who will knock on my door when it’s all over.

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