Slip of the Pen

[No, this isn't a Halloween post. Or Grim Fandango, for that matter.]

Writing is not at all dissimilar to courting a girl. You groom yourself with gusto, you bring out the flowers and sweets, and you arm yourself with the best words you can muster. But of course you can also end up downtrodden, you can curse the sun and earth, you can spew out the vilest of invectives. You try to make the right choices, but here and there you commit a few missteps — sometimes many — and end up back at square one.

Such is the intertwined fate of writer and suitor. They both learn to dance with life, to flow with its twists and turns, to value its nuances. They both learn to tap into the deepest alcoves of the soul, and dance with whatever they may harness from within. They can tango with anger, cha-cha with love, waltz with hope, swing with despair, jig with frustration, glide with joy.

If the physical dance — the one we see actualized everyday through sweating bodies and gyrating motions — is the dance of the body, then it’s not at all ridiculous to call writing the dance of the soul. Poetry and prose are how the inner spirit tries to express itself, be it through flamboyant weaving of words or no-frills use of language. The same holds true for music and the visual arts, and to a certain extent, the courting of a girl (especially if one claims to have a beloved girl as his very soul).

But of course, before one can easily flow into the motions of the dance, he or she must first learn its steps. Like the corporeal boogie, there are an infinite number of steps which one can take to master the groove. And so with writing. Every person to his own approach; after all, no two souls are alike. Maybe akin, but not identical. As long as it works for you, and after pursuing the steps your soul gets all fired up and restless to burn the midnight candle, then you’d have already mastered the dance of your soul.

One of Hemingway’s steps was to sharpen twelve pencils (I think). In all probability there exists a poet who needs to make torrid love with his wife before being able to rhyme, and maybe a fictionist who eats a whole large-sized bar of white Toblerone before penning a short story. For my part, because I’m just a simple writer with no acclaim to my name, my steps are terse and quick to perform. And because the same style holds true for my exploits in love — which are unfortunately unfortunate — I shan’t be able to resist the temptation to compare the two.

First and foremost before writing any piece, I turn on the PC, plop down onto my monobloc chair, and reflect for a moment, just as I would plop down on the bed and flick on the switch within my brain which reads “Courting 101”. Second, I’d read other works, be it a chapter from a Tolkien book, or a poem by Jose Garcia Villa, or even one of my previous attempts at literature. It’s not at all dissimilar to my getting inspired by my friends’ dazzling feats in love, or xeroxing my own patented ‘da moves’ which always fail to, well, succeed.

Having done that, I’d open a word processor, preferably MS Word, OpenOffice, or Notepad (my illegible handwriting is hardly conducive to my attitude of perpetual revising and self-doubt) and start fiddling with the margins, font style and size, and other minutiae, me being some sort of an obsessive-compulsive git. This resembles my fidgeting with my clothes, hairdo and perfume before making a grand salvo on a damsel.

Last, and of course ‘but not the least’, I write — rather, type — the first of my thoughts, which would hopefully be the birth of a good piece. This is the courting process itself, replete with the stammerings and sweatings, the furrowing of the brows, the puckerings of the mouth, the horrible speechless seconds, and of course the occasional heartbreaks. Alas for me, there is no ‘Undo’ option (ah yes, the omnipotent ‘Ctrl-Z’) in love.

You see, that’s a mere four steps in learning how to dance with your soul. Not guaranteed to produce the best results, or even have results at all, but hey, it works for me — these little shuffles I do before I get into the groove.

I must apologize to those who’ve patiently dropped by this space from time to time. I admit, the past months have not been the glory days for my relatively young journal — I wrote ZERO posts for September and a measly FOUR pieces (including this one, which shouldn’t be even included!) for October. Me bad.

While Slip of the Pen has been chugging along with scant fuel, Crimson Crux — yep, that other tech-oriented weblog — has been doing fine. In fact, I’ve actually managed to make a DOZEN posts for it this month.

Fear not, this imbalance will be soon rectified by the Corsarius, and blogging equilibrium shall be attained. For now, allow ol’ thick-faced me to shamelessly promote my other blog, Crimson Crux. (Little boy voice: Do drop by, please? Haha. And if you do have the time to visit, just let me know so I can repay the favor.)

is different,
a stark contrast to poetry
written for one’s self
(poetry at its rawest harshest kindest
truest form).

the farther the person is from the heart,
the fainter the beat will be. faint
fainter faintest, until there is
nothing more
to hear
.

but when
the person is
close closer closest,
the beat gets strong stronger
strongest, and convictions ululations
salutations damnations gush out from pen
to paper, finally reaching a crescendo where
the moment is invincible and the spirit is unstoppable.

poetry written for another person
is different,
a stark contrast to poetry
written for one’s self, as different as
gems in a pirate’s chest for the foreigner,
stars on a clear night for those we hold dear.

3:53 AM
The Day When the Person-Whom-the-Corsarius-Holds-Dear Celebrates Her Birth
Quezon City

The Journalist

Stop the press!

Make room for this breaking news — Corsarius Updates Blog, Readers Blast Delinquency. I want it in 72-point Palatino Bold and screaming all caps. Heck, make it the paper’s banner!

If anyone thought The UP Parser was late in releasing its first issue of the academic year, then hang me twice. Even though problems outside of our control were the delay’s reasons, I believe the weight still lies upon its Editor-in-Chief. Yes, yours truly. And though problems outside of my control were the reasons for this blog’s nil output, I believe the weight still lies upon its author. Guess who.

This world should be sued.


The Student

Thesis year. Video streaming, the Rijndael algorithm, eigenvectors, laplace transforms, shift-reduce parsing, syntax-directed definitions, ubiquitous computing, wireless fidelity, binary exponential backoff, carrier sense multiple access, probability mass function, unbiased estimator.

I’m at a loss for words.


The Marketer

Good day, sirs and ma’ams! I am a reluctant technopreneur from the land of the tongue-twisted, fidgeting geeks (otherwise known as Computer Science), and I am here to promote our product, “S^infinity” — S raised to infinity, Service raised to infinity. That sounds good, doesn’t it?

Three “S” words are of chief concern to you, dear sirs and ma’ams. The first word for today is “Shoot”. Shoot your videos using your cameraphones, while I’m shooting down my writing career. What the hell am I doing entering this and that marketing contest? And actually surviving them?

The second word for the day is “Say-what?” Third word is “Sanavagan!”. Fourth word is “Sally-sells-seashells-by-the-seashore.” Wonderful, no?

Sinfinity. S raised to infinity, Superficial Supereminence raised to infinity.


The Histrionicist

This still applies:

The Corsarius is stressed.

My threshold for pain and hardship is going way off the charts. Now I know — I’m a certified masochist.

Right now, if Corsarius was a nation, it’d be ravaged by a plague, battered by typhoons, splintered by a civil war, and besieged by an ally state turned bitter rival.

I’ve been called many things in my life — liar, defensive, good-for-nothing, belligerent, selfish, bad-boy. A few of these words have been thrown at me with more ferocity and frequency lately than ever before. I don’t know if I’m all of these, some of these, or none of these. I can’t tell, and I don’t friggin’ care.

The world can flaunt its eloquence by expressing its disdain of me in a thousand words. I can summarize all those words in one — painful. But who am I to convince the inconvincible, to talk to the un-listening?

The mantra here is to accept. Pain is a wonderful sensation (as long as you’re feeling it because of your own misery, not the ill luck of your close ones). Accept pain, accept it with exceeding openness.

Because deep down, I know I only wished for good things.


The Person With the Pen

Get these four blog-hogging fools out of the way, and let the pen speak for the Corsarius.