Poetry and Brokenness (wooh boy, another serious one)

Note: I wrote this piece August 28, 2002.


This picture, taken July 5, 2006, is not meant as an aid to better understand the essay. In fact, it has absolutely nothing to do with my piece.

I haven’t written for the longest time. I see that it’s not easy to turn one’s back after all to things one really likes. In my case, these things happen to be (hold your breath) math, followed by writing driven by erratic bursts of inspiration. Nowadays, it seems that I only write whenever I want to shout but I can’t since it wouldn’t be right. I only write whenever I want to cry but then I can’t since that would make me seem weak.

I often imagine myself to be above some people when it comes to dealing with problems. I thought I had some things figured out all along. But sooner or later, you find out that there are still some loose ends to tie which you missed the first time around.

I taught college math for a couple of years in the school which I love dearly for what it taught me. I learned to swear, drink and smoke. Along the way I hurt some dear friends too. Here I cried for the first time because I believe I loved despite the odds. In short, I became less of the hypocrite and the cretin that I was in high school. My new world expanded my horizons and pushed my tolerance level of other people. It also pushed my alcohol tolerance and the limits of being able to keep myself awake.

But damn did I work hard! I knew when and how to have fun, but I also knew how to get lost and immersed in abstract mathematical concepts. For some reason, which probably more than half the world’s population would violently disagree with, math was the easiest subject in the world for me. Yeah, you’ve probably seen me as one of those wholesome A students who kept getting sent to math contests. Just add a slightly growing beer belly, replace the eyeglasses with lenses, and shave to a skinhead, and I won’t need to give you my picture anymore.

When you’re 18 to 20 (especially if you were a special child nurtured with brain enhancing milk supplements) your idealism (a.k.a. angst and repressed hormones) can push you to denouncing the workaday world of functionality and practicality. Your mantra then: I want to free myself of the absurd. At that time, I wanted to contribute to humanity by further excelling in what I’m good at. I wanted to assert my individuality by putting myself over the world’s mundane concerns, and pursuing, like Christian in “Moulin Rouge” the bohemian ideals of beauty, truth, and love. While this is going on all in your head, you hear that line too from Nine Days: “For though I cannot fly, I’m not content to crawl.”

Instead of poetry, it was math for me. Ironically, I loved it for the very reason people hated the subject – its seeming lack of significance (at the superficial level) in attaining such practical goals as earning big bucks and getting laid. Once understood, math is a means by which people can create abstract concepts, see relationships which serendipitously fall neatly into place, thereby manifesting the seemingly limitless possibilities of human thought. In this scenario, how can then one cease to be in wonder?

I graduated with honors and started teaching less than two weeks after graduation. Who could reject an invitation to teach from one's school? But actually, I was already set anyway on teaching as a possible lifetime career.

When you’re 20, hence immortal, you believe that like the mountains, the oceans, and the moon, things will stay as they are, much like clearly stated mathematical definitions. You believe that forever is as long as you want it to last.

Then you realize that a mountain is immobile, the ocean could dry up, the moon is a dead planet (so to speak) - but you’re just in your 20’s and very much alive. Woe to you then for not seeing that things are not perfect like squares or circles, that circumstances change, and what you thought would last forever is gone before you can even say “kookaburra.”

I’m not teaching anymore. I just stopped. I’ve had enough for now. I myself didn’t see it coming. It was an act that defied rationality. I decided to stop teaching, and also my graduate studies.

Admittedly, something bad happened that broke the camel’s back and pushed me to find a job elsewhere. Pride also got in the way. And just as easily as I got into my university and first job, I suddenly gave up teaching and studying something I had immersed myself in so much.

Where did that faith in the ideals I set, all go? It’s scary because it leaves one groping for what is certain in one’s life. One can't just continue to hold on, believing that what we’re doing is right, even though it’s not that easy to ascertain anymore what is right – making one wonder how even the certainty of goodness can elude us.

I was led to believe before that all questions have only one correct answer, that all we had to do was look hard enough to make sense of things. Eventually, the world itself will disprove such a linear mode of thinking. Then you’ll realize (or someone will point out) that it’s not only looking for our own answers that drives us, but asking our personal questions too. Thereby do we define ourselves further, since by posing our own questions we confront our internal conflicts and validate what’s important in our lives.

But still this is not enough. I believe that one also has to ask questions at the right time. Questions are more effective when experienced in time, for only then will the answers make perfect sense. Thus, we might be asking the same questions all along, but more than the personal flavor afforded in the answers, the replies are different because each answer belongs to a unique personal circumstance.

In times of brooding like this one, I am afforded the opportunity of looking back at the lessons picked along the way. Sometimes, our human rationality can’t satisfy us. There will be moments of confusion, when what we think is right doesn’t jive with what we feel to be right. Either it is the mind which is clouded and it is the heart which is in the right place, or vice versa. But one has to go on and choose, and be judged. One must refuse to be immobilized for a long time by a period of indecision.

One can count the many times of helplessness and curse why the things that we don’t want, do happen. Sometimes it’s alright to curse this lack of power over events, and be angry about it – so that we can eventually accept it. We will be hurt and we can only be beautiful as beings because we are broken. Our brokenness makes us precious, because more than the fact that we can be broken, we change.

And because I change, I know I am alive.