Essays and Writings about literature, Essays (high school) of Law

Download Essays and Writings about literature and more Essays (high school) Law in PDF only on Docsity! I Got Flowers Today By Soki Ballesteros I got flowers today It wasn’t my birthday or any other special day, We had our first argument last night And he said a lot of cruel things that really hurt me I know he is sorry and didn’t mean the things he said Because he sent me flowers today. I got flowers today It wasn’t our anniversary or any other special day Last night he threw me into the wall and started to choke me It seemed like a nightmare; I couldn’t believe it was real I woke up this morning sore and bruised all over I know he must be sorry Because he sent me flowers today. I got flowers today It wasn’t Mother’s Day or any other special day Last night he beat me up again And it was so much worse than all other times If I leave him, what will I do? How will I take care of my kids? What about money? I’m afraid of him and scared to leave But I know he must be sorry Because he sent me flowers today I got flowers today Today was a very special day! It was the day of my FUNERAL! Last night, he finally killed me, he beat me to death If I only have gathered enough courage and strength to leave him I would not have gotten flowers today.... First, A Poem Must Be Magical by Jose Garcia Villa First, a poem must be magical, Then musical as a sea-gull. It must be a brightness moving And hold secret a bird’s flowering. It must be slender as a bell, And it must hold fire as well. It must have the wisdom of bows And it must kneel like a rose. It must be able to hear The luminance of dove and deer. It must be able to hide What it seeks, like a bride. And overall I would like to hover God, smiling from the poem’s cover. Dust of Snow BY ROBERT FROST The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued. To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time BY ROBERT HERRICK Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; Stanza 5 of the poem says, “So eagle-like you may invent your act;/Then think you walk in a world of thrall,/Where Beauty walks too but does not look back,” and the one-liner last stanza, “Crossing the foggy fjords of the skull.” Wrestling with words may be difficult and in so many ways not so fruitful endeavors, but creative writers should not give up if only to take a glimpse of that Beauty crossing the foggy fjords of our minds. And perhaps, it will be the beginning of freeing the mind. And when the collective minds of the society is free, an authentic and inclusive social transformation in the Philippine society have the possibility to occur. Creative writing will only matter when it is transformative. It is only then that the sacrifices made by writers will be worth it. When a literature cannot transform its society, why bother to write at all? Can literature, at this age and time, really change or transform society? With what is happening in the world today — climate change, unjust wars, migration crisis, political unrests, poverty in all its forms due to cold-blooded capitalism where the rich become richer and the poor become poorer — as a writer turning 50 years old this year, I have my doubts. But whenever I would give introductory lectures to my literature classes, I would share with my students the classical notion of the function of literature outlined by Quintus Horatius Flaccus or Horace a few centuries ago—dulce et utile, to delight and to instruct. That reading and/or writing literature is pleasurable because it is not only a means to our personal happiness but also for the common good. As a writer I have no choice but to have faith in the power of creative writing to shape society, because to believe otherwise is to question the validity of my own existence. So believe me when I say that I am most happy whenever I am wrestling with words to free my mind because I am hoping and praying that maybe, yes maybe, when a reader read my poem or essay or story or play, it will also free her or his mind and will become a citizen of a free society. Or at least will be able to imagine a free society. With Honor Excluded Middles By AVERILL PIZARRO MANILA, Philippines — Let me just come out and say it, so we can get it out of the way already — graduating with honors is overrated. I graduated from UP Diliman a year ago with a degree in Philosophy, magna cum laude, and this is a lot less impressive than it sounds. For one, my class, the Class of 2011, produced 21 summa cum laude, 215 magna cum laude, and 794 cum laude. The feat isn’t exactly extraordinary if 1,000 other people in the same room can do it too. At the University graduation, only the summa cum laude get to sit on the stage with their parents, along with the members of the Board of Regents, former presidents and faculty. Magna cum laude get to sit in the front rows, but it is not a big enough achievement — our parents have to sit at the back under the hot sun like everyone else. Of course I wanted to graduate with honors, and it felt good when I did. Sometimes, it still does. My parents like telling their friends about it, and so do my aunts and uncles. Fortunately, as far as I know, none of them had a tarpaulin printed out and hung at the municipal hall.I have to admit — magna cum laude looks very good on paper. Most people are immediately impressed when they hear about it — and one of them, my current boss, was impressed enough to offer me a job. But that’s about as far as graduating with honors has taken me. It got me into a job, but staying in the job, and performing well in it, is a different matter entirely. That’s a fact that people often miss: it doesn’t make you better or smarter than anyone else. It means you got better grades, but it says little about your intelligence, ability, or lack thereof, because most people who graduate with honors intend to graduate with honors but don’t intend to learn. It’s easy to go through college taking all the easy professors and getting all the free unos, and graduating with a summa or magna or cum laude following your name. But this doesn’t mean you learned well, nor that you made the most of your opportunities, and this does not prepare you in any way to meet real challenges. Most of the time it’s an investment in image rather than in substance, and it is a dishonor to the University that took time and money to teach you. It is easier to graduate with honors than to graduate with honor. This is a lesson I first learned in UP. On the first day of class, a Literature professor had asked us to introduce ourselves to her by submitting a list of all the real books we had ever read in our 16-year lives. “Don’t tell me you were valedictorian, or an awardee this or awardee that,” she said rather crossly. “Don’t tell me you were editor-in-chief of your high school paper. Guess what--we all were. Now tell me the books you’ve read when nobody asked you to and I will judge how well-prepared you are for this class.” We were all frightened. Today, though, she is still one of my best teachers, and that was still one of the best classes I ever took in my life.I find that working is much the same. In our office especially, my boss has a habit of hiring honor graduates. Everyone is summa, magna or cum laude. Or a lawyer. Or has a master’s degree in something from prestigious universities here or abroad. It doesn’t make you special. It doesn’t determine the quality of your output. I came in as a fresh graduate, armed with honors, and I had to start from the bottom of the food chain, learn everything as I went along, and learn fast. Sometimes, the philosophy has helped me. The books I read in my spare time have helped me. But I find that what has helped me the most in my job is not the cerbral knowledge I gained in my fours years in college, not the stuff that got me through exams and gave me good grades — it’s all the things and disciplines surrounding that, outside that, beyond that. It’s the coolness under pressure, the habituation to deadlines, the initiative and foresight picked up from doing volunteer work that you get through experience, and by watching older people do something well. It’s the clarity of mind and the determination to work well and hard even when a professor is discouraging or angry or aloof, and you don’t hope to get a good mark anyway, but you want to be able to say you gave it the best you have. It’s the willingness to get your hands dirty and to give more than the minimum because you believe in the innate value of honor and excellence. It’s all of these and more — the elements of a good education, about how well you learned, including, especially, from your failures — and such things just cannot be measured by numbers. *** The true-er measurement of one's achievements lies on his ability to rise above adversity--whether he graduated with honors or not. Being honorable is different from graduating with honor. LIHAM NI PINAY MULA SA BRUNEI Elynia Ruth S. Mabanglo Ako’y guro, asawa at ina. Isang babae—pupol ng pabango, pulbos at seda, Kaulayaw ng batya, kaldero at kama. Napagod yata ako’t nanghinawa, Nagsikap mangibang-lupa. Iyo’t iyon din ang lalaking umuupo sa kabisera, Nagbabasa ng diyaryo uma-umaga. Naghihintay siya ng kape The metropolis bore down on me like a sack of hard and heavy firewood. My Tagalog is loud and thickly-accented Batangueño, and I felt inferior. Footbridges are unknown in my rural upbringing, and at one point, I was forced to pay a fine of P200 to an officer for jaywalking. The claustrophobia I’ve never known to exist within me was brought to the surface by MRT rides. My cheap pair of leather shoes did not withstand a leg-deep flood. One time, I woke to find that my favorite pair of slippers, which I had left just outside the door, was gone. Stolen. Even so, I could not bear to go home with nothing to show for my “adventure.” I needed to stay, to earn and save money. I miss the idle life in Batangas—days spent with easy labor, easy talk with people you’ve known all your life, nights spent with friends under skies full of stars, the sound of cricket wings and bamboo creaks lulling you to serenity. Simplicity… It was still raining when my supervisor and I arrived at his favorite eatery. I waited expectantly as he ordered two bowls of goto. I was excited, and nostalgic. Why, come to think of it, I had lived a week without a staple in my gustatory life. But when the waitress served us our order, along with a platter of tofu and little pieces of cold calamansi, I felt insulted. “But sir, this is not goto!” I told my supervisor. “What? Why? What do you mean?” he said, surprised at my outburst. “This—a bowl of rice porridge with a few slivers of ox tripe on top? This is lugaw!” It was far from the goto I know – a rich stew of beef fat, heart, blood, liver, intestines and tripe, kept on a slow simmer over a low fire, flavored with chili, ginger, onions, fish sauce and roasted garlic. “No. This is goto,” my supervisor insisted. “Taste it. If you don’t like it, I’ll order a different dish for you.” I forced myself to swallow a spoonful. Well, it tasted like lugaw. But then, the warmth of it, the plainness of it, was so suited to the rainy weather that it was more than enough to warm my insides and indulge my wanting tongue. “Bonn,” my supervisor said as he squeezed calamansi over his bowl, “this is the goto I’ve known. This is the goto here in Manila. I know this is different from the gotong Batangas you know, but you’re in Manila now. You should expect a different bowl of goto.” He smiled at me and closed his eyes to say grace. I suddenly understood the point of this invitation, this goto discovery, and the life lesson my supervisor wanted me to learn. We have to eat the bowl of goto that we are served, even if it is not the one we are accustomed to. The same can be said of life. Live the life you have, not the one you had. Embrace today. Embrace change. I said my prayers and thanked God for the bowl of goto in front of me. TO KILL A CHICKEN George Deoso One Sunday, after a brief visit to my godfather’s farm in Pampanga, we went home with a hen straight out of his chicken coop, one of the many he maintained. We transported her in a box along with another hen, which was to be for our neighbors who had also been invited to the farm and whose car was used for the trip. The box was crammed in the car’s rear compartment along with some plastic bags full of other farm goods. Muffled scraping noises were heard from the box during the three-hour trip back to Manila, as if the hens inside were trying to peck their way out. When we got home, the first thing my mother and father did was to find a place where the hen could stay before being butchered. Our sad little veranda filled the bill. Not that it was unkempt or abandoned, but that it was hardly the most appealing part of our house. Objects waiting to be used — a water hose, a plastic chair, plastic basins, a thinning detergent bar — were kept there. The hen was nestled among these objects, and she seemed not to mind. She just stood there after my father set her down, and looked up at the four of us — my father, my mother, my sister, and myself — as if to say: This is it? Fine. Leave me alone now. Of course, the hen wasn’t arrogant. She didn’t have a right to be, for a number of reasons. First: She was dirty and stank to high heavens. She had left a chicken coop but the smell stuck to her grimy white feathers and anyone could smell chicken droppings within several feet of her. Second: She’s a bird, and having a bird brain never guaranteed anyone or anything intelligence. And third: She’s a mere ingredient for tinola. Any pomposity she might have had would end up anyway in our bellies, never to be noticed again. Actually, despite the unpleasant smell and appearance, the hen had her redeeming qualities. During the days she lived in our veranda, not once did she bother us with noise we had come to expect from chickens. We were not dragged out of our sleep by some crowing, some tiktilaok! that she might have been suppressing since she arrived in our house. One would’ve forgotten the hen’s existence had she not been put in our veranda, where it was impossible not to see her as one entered or left our house. Also, she didn’t try to escape. She only stood, or sat, where she was placed, laying her silent clucks where we wouldn’t hear, like deftly concealed eggs. I named the hen Knorr, as a sort of joke. And so Knorr lived. For several days. My mother would feed her moist cooked rice and, later, when my mother noticed Knorr wasn’t fat enough for our pending tinola, some pellets that were supposed to put a bit more meat in her. Whether or not Knorr gained weight wasn’t a concern for me. I wasn’t even concerned with the hen herself. Naming was just about the best display of affection I could ever show her. And the few times I got a glimpse of her whenever I left the house, there was always that calm, that silence. It almost felt like the passing of a cloud, a small mute patch of storm cloud, in our veranda. Came the next Sunday. Knorr had been living for seven days under our roof, and on the seventh day she was to rest, as God did. She would be laid to rest finally, in our tinola. But first, we had to kill her. For that, my father initially sought my sister’s help because I was just having my breakfast then, having gotten out of bed late, as usual. But my sister made it clear that she would only put her hands on the chicken once it was cooked. And so it had to be my hands. “Hawakan mo diyan, kuya,” my father said, indicating one of Knorr’s wings and her feet. I held her. Though my father had washed her with tap water, still the smell of chicken dung wafted from her feathers as she struggled under our grip. I turned my face away, to avoid the little rain of water she unleashed as she made those sudden jerking movements, which I assumed were her brave yet vain attempts at escape. My father held her head with one hand and a small sharp knife with the other. With steady hands he slit her neck. I didn’t see how the blade was buried in her, but from where I stood I saw a small stream of blood pour from her and onto a cup set in our kitchen sink. How did it feel to take part in the killing of a chicken? To feel that small, defenseless living thing struggle under your iron grip? At first, there was an element of excitement in the knowledge that you could snuff out life, or help to do so, in a matter of minutes, or seconds. To snuff it out, like the flame of a candle with a rumor of wind from your lips. I looked around and decided on one near the door, its clawed wings clutching the doorknob. To avoid breaking anything in the room, we first brushed the bats away or flung and tossed them. We hit them till they were thrown crawling on the floor where we crushed their slender bones and bludgeoned them. Soon the bats were darting, swooping, swirling and looping in the air, wing to wing. The bats heated the air with their body temperature turning that cold night into hours of humid killing. We didn’t know where they were coming from. We found them behind curtains, on ashtrays. Finally, my father saw a bat’s head protruding from a crack below the air conditioner, the mammal squeezing itself, forcing its way in. He bashed it and finally corked the tiny opening with the bat and what remained of its crushed head dangling. After several more hours, it was over. Pale with exhaustion and disbelief, we stared at the dead bats that littered the bedroom. We scooped them into sacks and garbage cans and threw them outside. Many years later, I read about bats and remembered that night. I wondered how the tiny creatures made sense of their ultrasonic cries, bouncing hard and fast, providing a picture of our bedroom, their cries too loud and high beyond human hearing. Did they follow one another, parent and child? But I thought if their hearing could tell the difference between the solid echoes bouncing off electric posts and the light fluid echo of a falling leaf, surely they could echolocate pain, fear, and death. I remember one of them opened its mouth again and again and I knew it wasn’t snarling. It was making sounds, yelling, shouting, and listening to echoes because it knew no other way to find its place in this world. I will always remember that night when we killed the bats because that is how I later came to realize why some stories would never be silenced. Humans don’t hear well enough. But that’s not the point. Each waking moment a voice screams, sometimes whispers, and a story bounces back against a landscape, a political event, and the whole of humanity and what it fails and aspires to be, all of these echo back to the source, year after year—amidst typhoons, migrations, fiestas, death, revolution, and romance—and it is all that matters. 2. What’s your most memorable meal? The question was posed one rainy night in 2012 in Colombo while my friends and I were enjoying Sri Lankan dishes in a hotel. When my turn came to share my story, waiters in orange cotton shirts were serving us wafer-thin, bowl-shaped pancakes made of rice flour, coconut milk, and palm wine. It will never happen again, I began, this lunch I had in Nueva Ecija, Philippines. I was working at the university-based freshwater aquaculture center surrounded by man-made ponds, tanks, and rice paddies. My job was to help edit the proceedings of a Southeast Asian conference on rice- fish farming. This was in the late 1980s. Around that time a British scientist from Swansea was conducting initial genetic experiments on tilapias. He was feeding them estrogen and androgen in the ponds, reversing their sexes in a matter of weeks. Male tilapias are bigger and grow faster. The idea was to make them all male to address the problem of hunger in the developing world. One day a typhoon hit the central plains. I was at work, but nobody thought of going home. We were used to it. As students, we would brave the deadly wind and run along the university’s main avenue lined with mango trees, the whirling leaves and twigs whipping our faces. Branches snapped, flew, and hit the pavement and buildings with loud cracks. We picked up green mangoes from the ground and filled our bags, occasionally pausing to grab a bite of the fruit, its sour, tart taste giving an extra kick to our howling harvest. We had no thought of the sobering headlines the following day—the destruction, the flooding, the drowned. I was looking out the window when a group of excited students from the College of Fisheries barged into the office. They were very wet and carrying bunches of green mangoes. Something was happening in the ponds, they said. We rushed outside, no umbrellas or raincoats, straight into curtains of downpour. In the field we saw the laborers running back and forth. The wind whipped the flooded ponds and the sex-reversed tilapias had escaped. They were jumping all over. I thought of catching them but had no idea what to do after that. Throw them back to the pond, I suppose. But we already looked like we were walking on water. Most of the staff ran back to the main building for shelter. I didn’t. I followed the others, the students and laborers who ran to a tiny wooden shelter, its rusty corrugated iron roof rattling violently. There were probably half a dozen of us inside. It was warm and smoky. On the dirt floor, somebody was cooking steamed rice, fanning flames under the blackened pot. Another was busy peeling green mangoes and cutting slices into a plastic bowl. Another opened a can of mackerel. Over low fire, they grilled fish rubbed with rock salt. I stood there, shivering, wide-eyed like the others. We huddled in that tiny square of earth, staring at the biggest tilapias we had ever seen. There weren’t enough tin plates for everybody, so I had to use the cover of the pot. JB, one of the students, grabbed the only spoon we had and scooped out rice from the pot and served it on my “plate.” He had taken off his wet shirt. He had smooth, dark skin. His chest glistened, his biceps looked like the solid muscle of a fish struggling against my grip. He popped a crunchy slice of green mango into his mouth and chewed its sourness with relish. I felt it in my mouth, sharp and tart. I gulped. Meanwhile, the wind howled and the walls shook. We poured the mackerel mixed with vinegar and chopped onion over our rice. We ate with our fingers, our bodies and faces covered with mud. JB turned to me and offered the transgendered tilapia. Our eyes met. I did not even look at the fish as I tore a piece of its steaming flesh and tasted it. It was delicate, soft and moist, flecked with rock salt and burnt scales. It melted in my mouth. Meanwhile the waters rose. JB and I were still eyeing each other. Nabokov once said that only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic. This is it, I thought. I am going to die; desire and disaster in one bite, my transition marked by the reversal of the laws of nature, the waters obliterating all borders, turning females into males and men into ghosts of their former fish selves. 3. In 1994, a group of British and Japanese entomologists invited me to see their work in one of Thailand’s national parks. We entered the forest at night, climbed a gentle slope and emerged into an impressive clearing, an immense plateau. In the middle of this field was the project area, a grid that consisted of what looked like rows of small tables covered with white cloth. Some of the tables were lit underneath. I never understood what the study was about. But I remember the site’s lambent glow and the hushed voices as the scientists identified and counted the insects drawn to these squares of white light, rows and rows of them. I examined the bugs, though I had no clue what I was looking at; they all looked the same. After a while I got bored and decided to explore the rest of the clearing. I walked slowly towards the horizon, marveling at how this plateau on a hilltop could stretch so far. I may have walked a hundred meters away from the project area when I saw something that made my heart stop. What I thought was land extending far into the horizon turned out to be a thick forest canopy. I was, in fact, already standing on the edge of a ravine. I must have stared at the lights so long that it took a while for my eyes to adjust and see things as they were. I easily could have fallen over the edge. I looked back and saw that my companions had followed me. With the illuminated field behind us, we stood on the edge of the ravine surveying the forest canopy, as if we were standing on a shore looking out at a vast phosphorescent ocean. I can’t remember who turned to whom first, but at some point we all looked at each other nervously. “Don’t move,” somebody whispered. We all felt it. A mild tremor. Don’t move? Shouldn’t we be moving away from the cliff? But we stayed there, motionless. We heard rustlings in the forest canopy. Branches cracked. Treetops shook. Down there, something huge and noble moved and left us breathless. The earth didn’t tremble. What we felt turned out to be the vibration made by a herd of elephants communicating with one another, a rumbling, low-frequency sound an octave lower than the human male’s voice. We felt it drumming our chest. 4. When I was in college, my father opened a beer garden in a vacant lot right next to our house. He called it the Plaza Azucena Grande—its specialty: dog meat. Every afternoon the cook hung dead dogs on hooks and blowtorched them. After scraping the burnt fur, he grilled and chopped the meat into bite-sized pieces. He added vinegar, onion, and calamansi to make kappukan; or potatoes, tomatoes, and carrots dangerous to climb down to the beach,” the guide said. I was disappointed: we would not see the sea turtles. But I did not argue. It was too risky. My guide’s wife tagged along to pick ground orchids in the forest and she was pregnant. Meanwhile, the sea turtles were returning to their places of origin to lay eggs. Recent advances in satellite transmitters and genetic analysis have allowed scientists to learn more about the turtles’ astonishing memory. I wondered what it would be like to be born with an inner compass, to always feel the earth’s magnetic core. Sea turtles have been around for two hundred million years. In evolutionary terms, they are far older than birds and dinosaurs. They are notoriously myopic and are guided by light and darkness. Scientists are beginning to wonder how sea turtles are able to detect magnetic fields, since oceans and coastlines have unique magnetic characteristics. Some scientists have speculated that the magnetic location of home is imprinted on sea turtles’ minds. It’s possible that they are also guided by scent, waves, taste, and visual cues to the beach of their birth. How do you store a multitude of knowledge and never lose it across continents and a lifetime? What does it take and what does it mean to be tuned in constantly to home, to always retain the elemental signatures of open waters, to hear coastlines inside you? My own memory fails in comparison. It retains selectively, vanishes in parts, mutates. And yet I know of astounding instances in my life’s shifting geographies and my own mercurial identities when a familiar breeze or a particular freshness bursts on my tongue, or when a pounding rhythm jolts me—moments when I would tell myself: I know this! 6. Amid the glare of the afternoon sun in San Francisco I walked towards the plaza at the corner of 16th Street and Mission. I was about to cross an intersection when the traffic lights switched. I’m not sure if it was the pedestrians’ urgent rush to cross the street, but at that point something launched a flock of pigeons into the air. The flapping of their wings startled me. I couldn’t tell which direction they were coming from but it felt close enough that I thought they were going to fly straight at me. I closed my eyes and felt the air ripple in front of my face. As soon as I opened my eyes I saw what to me appeared like a dream. All at once, the street turned into a canvas of streaming shadows, giant flight patterns gliding over concrete, cars, and people. The birds swooped to the ground and it transfixed me, how their rushing shadows grew bigger on asphalt, then smaller, a dark path that constantly changed in size and shape. My eyes followed it until everything else faded and all I could see was a breathtaking ribbon of spectral navigation. It soared and then disappeared. I can’t remember how long it lasted but after a while it came back and swept me again, this looping reel of projected flight. In the 1970s scientists attached magnets to pigeons’ backs to study their homing ability. In another experiment, they glued a battery-operated wire coil on their heads. It’s still a mystery. Presumably the cells or something in the cells swivels like iron filings do in response to a magnet. Some scientists claim that they have found magnet receptors in the upper bills of pigeons, while others suspect the magnetic information is located in the ears. The biologist Bernd Heinrich wrote all of this in his book, The Homing Instinct. He said that animals “seeing” a map of the magnetic landscape could be literally true. He noted an experiment done on Australian silvereyes: under bright blue light, the birds oriented along the east-west compass direction, under green light they reoriented toward west- northwest. Studies indicate too that pigeons have 53 neurons in their brain that respond to magnetic fields. 7. One night, my co-worker and I went hiking on a hill overlooking Tomales Bay, a historic spot in the Bay Area where a wireless telegraph station was built in 1913 to receive transmissions from across the Pacific. On a moonlit pine tree meadow, we encountered a mule deer standing a few yards away from us, perfectly motionless. We remained still, hearts racing, seeing wildlife so close. Why didn’t it move? Surely, it must have detected our movement, heard our approach. My co-worker said it didn’t see us; it saw the light coming from our headlamps. I wondered how the deer saw the world. I thought of the rushing headlights on the road. In 1920, the naturalist Joseph Grinnell observed a new source of fatalities in industrialized nations with their new automobiles: hundreds, perhaps thousands, of roadkill in California alone. Grinnell wanted to understand the unpredictable behaviors and adaptations that occur when geographic barriers and ecological niches open up. I’m also drawn to such strange encounters, where they take place—shores, port cities, and highways— what goes on inside us, and what we turn into at the moment of contact. At the San Francisco Zoo, I found myself in a dark room with the aye-aye, a lemur known as the world’s largest nocturnal primate and considered a bad omen in its native Madagascar. Some villagers kill the aye-aye on sight and display its carcass to ward off evil spirits. At the Doelger Primate Center, a few aye-ayes are cared for on a reversed light cycle. I visited the primates during the day, which was “night” for them. I couldn’t see anything inside the viewing room. It was pitch-black. I groped for walls and lost my balance. Part of me wanted to leave but the guide encouraged me to be patient, to let my eyes adjust. I felt the metal railing and held on to it. Gradually my vision adapted and I became vaguely aware of a new way of seeing. At first I noticed shadowy greens and blues floating like a hologram. Later, I noticed the same color, but with lighter, almost phosphorescent hues. Finally, I could almost make out a glass wall and the branches behind it. I stared long enough at the canopies until something moved and began to take form. For a long time, naturalists debated what to make of this creature that looked like a cat but had teeth similar to a rodent’s and a tail like a squirrel’s. It uses its bony, elongated middle finger to hunt, tapping wood up to eight times per second, searching for grubs through echoes. But unlike my incandescent moment with the mule deer, I couldn’t tell exactly what I was looking at behind the glass, or if anything at all stared back at me. I waited and waited, and it became clear to me—I wanted the aye-aye to see me too. We all carry a personal wilderness inside us. And then there are these corners in time, the edges of place where contact with unfamiliar realms is inevitable. We render the rest of the world mostly with eyes closed, drawn to what blinds us in stories, and sometimes we do survive each other’s way of seeing, even thrive in the aftermath. After much time passes, we wake up to the remains of these extraordinary encounters—a cryptic litter of bright bones: obsolete technologies, abandoned buildings, misplaced ektachromes, encrypted files, strands of DNA … The immense loneliness of ruins, arcane fragments, and loose threads keep me awake at night. What had been broken becomes eternal; it latches itself to other things. The wayward universe of the past is my new wilderness and it tugs relentlessly, this epic finding of a rightful place. It won’t let go. 8. Bernd Heinrich wrote that the earth’s magnetic fields flip on average once every half million years. This magnetic flip can occur in the span of a century and mess up everything. Just like that. All rules could change. It was dark on the Philippine mountain trail. The guide and his pregnant wife walked fifty meters ahead of me. They each carried a burning torch to light their way. I was exhausted, not just from the hike but from lack of sleep. I couldn’t keep up with the couple. To make matters worse, the trail was strewn with the catastrophic aftermath of a recent typhoon: collapsed mountain walls, loose soil, giant boulders perched in the wrong places, trees uprooted. Some parts of the trail had gotten erased. My legs were weak and my eyes were getting heavy. I could barely make out the trail. Ahead, the couple lit another torch and left it burning on the trail. After some distance they would light another and again leave it there. I realized that they were creating a trail of burning torches to light my way. This got me worried. We could start a wildfire on the mountain. But they couldn’t wait for me anymore. I needed to rest, so I lay down on the rocky trail. I must have fallen asleep. When I opened my eyes, I saw the couple kneeling in front of me. The guide raised the burning torch, the light falling on his face and on his pregnant wife holding a giant bouquet of yellow orchids in her arms. You have to keep going, the guide said softly. Five minutes, I muttered, and closed my eyes. In the old days in my hometown, virile men and wise women, young and old, would go to the river on weekends to catch fish. I was very young then, maybe four or five. I have a crisp memory of them grilling fish over fire pits made of river rocks. “Call your father,” somebody said. “It’s time to eat.” I found my father along the riverbanks, foraging in his underwear. “Look,” he said, lifting a big wet rock. He showed me something underneath it—a gelatinous mass. He scraped it using his hand and asked me to look closer at the frog’s eggs. “Open your mouth,” he said, and I ate it, fresh and wild, straight from his glistening fingers to my hungry bird throat. your hand in the fire twice) and likewise our present actions influence our memories (sticking my hand in the fire was not in vain: it taught me something). Each recollection of a memory — a process called reconstruction or sometimes reconsolidation — changes that memory. In her book Reconsolidation, Janice Lee writes about the risks of remembering her deceased mother: “The emotional or psychological state you are in when you recall [a] memory will inevitably influence the reconsolidated memory. Recalling a memory during these stages of inadequacy, repentance, sought-after impossibilities . . . may be dangerous.” When your beloved dies, your memory is at risk. Your past no longer fits your story of who you are. In order to change your story, you must change either time or memory. At first, when my wife died, I couldn’t stop thinking about all of the ways I had failed her. Failure was a logical story that led from my married past straight to my widowed present. How did I get here? I asked my wife to move to America, where we don’t screen for stomach cancer. I taught her that hospital visits are expensive and to go only in clear emergencies. I mistook her cancer symptoms for morning sickness. I caused stress that exacerbated her illness. Freud’s idea of healthy grief (mourning, as opposed to melancholy) is the process of removing your desire from a lost object and reinvesting that desire in something/someone else. This definition suggests that to grieve your beloved healthily is to change your love for her. Grief often causes survivors to forget the face of the dead. That face belongs to a shared time that is lost when the beloved is lost. To remember is not to time-travel; it is to alter how time feels. 5. The feeling that your life is not your life is the premise of many stories — Total Recall, Atmospheric Disturbances, ME, The Doppelgänger. Why does this feeling occur? In Atmospheric Disturbances, the narrator is convinced that the woman who claims to be his wife is not really his wife, that his real wife has gone missing. The belief that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter is called Capgras delusion. It was first identified in 1923, when a psychiatric patient claimed her husband and children were “the object of substitutions.” In Atmospheric Disturbances, the narrator’s search for his wife results in his entanglement (or his belief in his entanglement) in a secret society that fights wars in parallel universes. In our quantum world, the multiverse is a natural leap from Capgras delusion. To think you have entered a parallel universe is a tidy solution to the problem of your missing reality. One of the most interesting aspects of Capgras delusion is the element of love. Usually it is not a stranger who has been replaced, but a beloved. In the 1990s, psychologist Haydn Ellis and others theorized that Capgras delusion is the result of your mind recognizing a face without feeling the love that you normally associate with that face. Love is how we know we are in the right time. 6. Capgras delusion is like an extreme mirror to imposter syndrome, which is the feeling that everyone else sees you as an imposter. (They don’t believe you’re a physical replacement, only that you do not belong where they are.) In imposter syndrome, the subject himself is the one in question. The subject himself does not feel loved. This kind of perceived inadequacy often comes up in my Asian American Studies course, especially when my students of color talk about their mostly white school. I understand imposter syndrome as a professor of color — and as an adoptee. The more you feel that you are an imposter, the more that feeling affects your behavior. As a child I became good at math because I was told that real Asians were supposed to be good at math. In Asian American Studies, my students talk about imposter syndrome as dangerous to their sense of self. If an Asian American kid is supposed to get perfect grades, for example, it becomes a failure of self to get a B. You build your story of who you are around the story of who you are supposed to be. As a kid, the boy I saw each day in the mirror was white, not Korean — I couldn’t have described my actual facial features. I wasn’t looking in the mirror for something I recognized. I was looking for something that belonged in my life. I knew that I was supposed to look like my parents and friends. An image, like a memory, is not about accuracy; it is about value. We fill up an image with what we believe is important about it. If that image appears without its value, as in Capgras delusion, we can’t recognize it. It doesn’t fit our story: it is out of time. An adoptee like me can look in the mirror and see not the image he sees, but the image he wants other people to see when they look at him. Viewing himself as an imposter, he can fill up his image with imposter values. He might be able to love himself only by replacing his image of himself with the image of other people’s love. But, as my Asian American Studies students say, it is dangerous to think of yourself as someone you are not. When the cops show up, you have to remember what you look like. 7. The stress of multiple stories is the stress of living in two times at once. A psychologist friend does her research in a “time lab,” studying how bilingual people experience time differently from monolinguals. Bilinguals, she says, are often late. It takes a bilingual person more time to process information. “You can’t turn off language,” she tells me, and the language(s) you speak impacts your internal “clock.” In order to understand any symbol you have to recall its associated value. In order to understand a word you have to recall what the word means. The example my friend gives me is the word “peacock.” When you read “peacock,” it takes longer to process than when you read “man,” since you have fewer episodic experiences with the word “peacock.” For a bilingual person, those episodic experiences are split between two languages. Each and every word, each and every symbol and image, has to be processed through memory and so has a small effect on your sense of time. Why are bilinguals often late? Their time ticks away little by little. When they live and work among monolinguals, bilingual people also have to keep track of other people’s time, which means more processing. It sounds exhausting. Our memories are supposed to fade. We are supposed to forget. There are some people whose memories never seem to weaken — like Jill Price, who describes the condition as “maddening.” In 2017 Price told The Guardian it was “like living with a split screen: on the left side is the present, on the right is a constantly rolling reel of memories.” For sufferers of perfect memory, the past is not recalled — it seems to play out alongside the present. The cost, for Price, is that painful events from the past continue to torment her. In some interviews she says she wishes to be normal and in others she says she wouldn’t trade her memory for anything. 8. Once in a novel I wrote that my 22-year-old protagonist wanted more than anything to be old, to look back at his life and know everything had worked out. When you are young the future stretches endlessly before you, full of possibilities. Now I am 37, with two kids, and the thought of the future exhausts me. Every day I want to quit the time I am in and join my wife. Every day I want to rest. Maybe if I were older, or younger, my body could accept the situation more easily. At night, thinking about everything I should have done, I can barely sleep. In the morning my body aches as if it held someone all night. The first thing I bought after my wife’s funeral was a massage chair. When I was 23, I went back to Korea for the first time since my adoption. I took a job teaching English. I flew in before a major holiday (I didn’t know this at the time) and everything was closed for days. The school housed me in a love motel, where the TV got two channels, both soft-core porn. I wanted to give up, I wanted to go back to knowing what to eat and how to