In a week’s time, the incoming correspondence is likely to rise to over half a handstretch high. Bills, receipts, promo materials, memos, newsletters from the village association, thank-you letters, invites to premiere screenings and book launchings, brochures on furniture exhibit-sales… Plus an occasional, suddenly revived correspondence, from a poet in Finland or a critic in Wollongong, Australia.
That’s not counting the books that come in – mailed from Iloilo, New York City, Greenhills in San Juan, or dropped off by messenger from Giraffe Books or Anvil Publishing, Inc. These are the samples over the past week.
Certain e-mail correspondence I make sure to print out, and those too soon rise as a pile. Every couple of months or so, I retrieve a long manila envelope that’s still good for re-use, and recycle that by marking with a Pentel pen: "E-mail (Nov-Dec 2003)." Then I lug the fat, brimming envelope to the stairs leading to the attic-library, and deposit it on a rung, on top of other such envelopes or thick folders with all sorts of literary contest entries I’ve browsed over and graded, and made notes on among those I intend to keep.
There will be time, I repeat to myself, to separate chaff from grain, consign the former to the carport from where once a week they could make the quick portage to a pushcart brought to our gate by the recycling guys.
Incoming, outgoing. The symbiotic, contextual rate for these categories hardly makes for an ideal, proportionate cycle of gain-some-lose-some. For the most part, I’m losing the battle. To accretion. Darn this keepsake mindset, heartset, soulset. One must throw away more ruthlessly, with total abandon on occasion.
But then the holiday springcleaning binges come few and far between. There is no time to cast away the hardcopy floss of a life -— one that invariably begins to look like a bulletin board for an entire community under peril of onslaught from faster and faster-paced globalization.
I recall having written a short story in the early ’70s, titled "The Letters." It had pa-Kafkaesque strains, with a pa-Borgesian lament thrown in toward the end. The central character, the "I" persona, indulges in much correspondence, and is so successful that he gets inundated with replies that threaten to engulf him in his small room. He drowns in the piles of letters he receives in response to his infinite queries.
That story was published in Asia-Philippines Leader magazine before its demise at the onset of Martial Law. So it must have been around 1971 when our father Nick Joaquin, the magazine’s literary editor and founding uncle, chose it for the week’s literary offering.
I have since failed to rediscover my copy, as I’m sure I kept one – so that anyone out there who outdoes me in this collection game, and happens to have a complete file of that briefly glorious publication, hey, please, send me a photocopy. I’d appreciate adding it to my ever growing arsenal in the Sisyphian battle for space. And memory.
Will we ever win it? Petitions for our signatures gather dust and scant attention in various corners of the household. The family room is awash with reams of paper in sundry forms, including crazy circulars saying we cannot now walk our dogs outside without a muzzle, just because someone got bitten recently by a large mutt that had escaped a yaya’s leash hold. And worse, even with a muzzle, never on weekends until eight o’clock in the evening! And we know we have to give a piece of our aggrieved mind to whoever formulated that fascistic decision, and we will keep a copy for our own files.
Like Aragorn & Co., we can only win the battle with a stroke of luck and valorous determination, rely on a space-time warp to make it across the Black Gates of Mordor and finally plant our flag atop Pork Chop Hill. How mythological, how medieval, how circa Korean War in the early 1950s is this constant travail over lebensraum in the guise of millennial continuum.
On Temple Drive in Quezon City, so scenic when it opened in the early ’80s with its vista of Marikina Valley bathed by full moons, and resplendent over recent yuletide seasons when the Church of Latter-Day Saints turns on the power at dusk to light up hundreds of thousands of bulbs gilding the temple’s already magnificent grounds rife with elegantly arranged flora —- there, in that wide stretch now fronting the freshly developing Corinthian Hills —- you as a motorist will now be accosted by banners on every lamp post announcing something about Smart Infinity.
I should remember to tattle on by e-mail to Messrs. John Silva and Toti Villalon, copy-furnish dear Maribel Ongpin, join the cause against the infinity of clutter. Our landscapes are finite; soon the MMDA will run out of center islands to gouge for its often impractical, unworkable U-turn schemes, such as the latest one implemented on Katipunan Avenue at Loyola Heights.
Whereas Jimmy Abad or Jim Paredes used to take ten minutes to reach the UP campus from B. Gonzales St. fronting Miriam College, by way of two left turns and even after seemingly interminable stoplight changes, now they will have to turn right on Katipunan, fight for space on the U-turn slot, go past the erstwhile left turn toward Carlos Garcia Rd. to UP, and struggle even more aggressively along three lanes making another grand, chaotic U where the avenue has already narrowed down before UPIS at Balara. They will not stop before any light, yes, but now the travel time is doubled. So might their respective BPs.
Such antic geniuses Messrs. Bayani Fernando, Vergel de Dios and other MMDA honchos are. Where we Katipuneros used to grin and bear it before the stoplights, now all this rushing of traffic flow guarantees our reaching the chokepoints faster. Thus, more clutter. Down the road and up our bodily arteries.
Perhaps I should give up teaching at the Ateneo next sem, stay home and avoid these vexations championed by MMDA geniuses who just want to build more pedestrian overpasses and perhaps make a construction killing. Stay home and avoid receiving voluminous papers from large classes in Fiction, that I have to pore over and evaluate without ever throwing any away; who knows, that errant story might yet serve as a good example for a future class, on what to avoid in the service of craft.
Who knows? Perhaps we should just consign our ever growing detritus to the National Archives, and hope that someday some item we have donated might just come in handy for the next snoop to come by who will be smarter than the others.
But hey, I’m holding on to that GMA 2004 calendar with the bright smile of achievement, and of course the "Dear Basketball" letter by Michael Jordan published in the Los Angeles Times, among others, on Sunday, April 30, 2003, and which I begged a friend in Glendale, CA to send over for framing and safekeeping.
Quote: "I know I’m not the only one who loves you. I know you have loved many before me and will love many after me. But I also know that what we had was unique. It was special. So as our relationship changes yet again, as all relationships do, one thing is for sure.
"I love you, Basketball. I love everything about you and I always will. My playing days in the NBA are definitely over, but our relationship will never end."
I wish I could address my obsession in like manner – this commitment to keep printouts and souvenirs, manuscripts for proofreading, clippings on LeBron James’ entry into the league of men, downloaded parts of friends’ blogs in the Internet, photocopied essays by Jorge Luis Borges on poetry and on Buddhism, recipes from Sunday papers and magazines, agri tips from Zac Sarian…
The relationship with these Personal Archives has changed much over the years. Indeed, now all the footnotes have stretched into a long, coiled tail that wags this dog burying yet another bone. Make that wishbone, for future reference.
How I wish, how I wish I could address this archival clutter the way MJ did his passion, say goodbye and yet hold out a hand with "Much Love and Respect."
How I wish I could be invited to a Senate investigation in aid of legislation, and say earnestly after taking the oath: "Go, my children, I turn you over now on this day of the orcs. But remember that you will remain my passion, which is to accumulate and amass paper, paper, paper. Perhaps it is time to move to a new place, empty and thus full of space, so I may start all over again."