An ephemeral high

Let’s take a break from the aggravations of politics and literature (some days I swear I feel like I’m in a graduate seminar) and talk about something truly fun for a change — albeit the kind of fun that can stop your heart or make you squirm in your seat like a corkscrew. I’m talking about the current craze (no, not for Sudoku, which attracts another kind of player) for poker — specifically, Texas Hold ‘Em poker.

This is my secret life: for many months now, I’ve been spending my Friday nights playing poker with a regular group of buddies somewhere in Quezon City. I’m no card shark (that’s an expert gambler, to the uninitiated) and certainly no card sharp (that’s a cheater), but I’ve always had a thing for cards and card games — too much of a thing, at one point in my younger life, when I was known as “The Prof” at the blackjack tables — and I can’t think of a better compromise between curling up in bed with your pillow at 7 p.m. and taunting a sumo wrestler about his questionable parentage.

I’ve met all kinds of people at the gaming tables — from semi-retired chanteuses and airline pilots to off-duty sailors and fishmongers. When they play something like blackjack or baccarat, you know they’re after a good time and maybe a little money (or better yet, a lot), not necessarily in that order. In casinos, you play against “the bank,” represented by the dealer, and whatever else may pass between you and your co-players by way of table chatter, that’s just so much talk to fill otherwise dead air. The real enemy is the bank.

(And blackjack yields great odds for the player, at something like 49.5 percent to the house’s 50.5 — meaning, the bank will win 50.5 percent of the time against all players, but if you play smartly you just might overcome that one percent advantage. Take note, though, that other experts have calculated this edge to be between less than one and over five percent depending on the house rules, so your mileage may vary; in craps, on the other hand — yup, that’s the game you saw in Ocean’s Thirteen — the house edge can be as high as 11 percent.) But enough of the silly math.

In poker, on the other hand, you basically play against each other, often in the most personal ways. Egos, personalities, predispositions, quirks, superstitions, constitutions — all of these factors come into play in poker, plus that most critical of skills, the ability to read not just your cards but your opponents (yes, their faces, and then their cards). Poker is as much psychological warfare as it is a game of chance; the cards you draw are just the beginning, and how you play them is often more crucial.

Ours is a truly friendly game, with no more than a few hundred pesos in play at any given time (let’s make that “play money,” just in case the vice squad comes barging in), and we all go home before anyone can say “Good morning” or “What’s for breakfast?” But for four or five blessed hours each Friday, we drop everything else to gather around a green poker table (yes, a real baize-topped one, provided by our gracious host Javie) and go off on our personal quests for “pocket rockets” (a pair of aces), a “big slick” (an ace and a king), “cowboys” (a pair of kings), and “ladies” (a pair of queens), away from more exotic combinations such as a “San Francisco busboy” (a queen and a three or a trey — I’ll leave you to figure that one out).

You don’t have to go too far to see how poker is played — these days, it’s on TV more often than most people care to watch. Basically, Texas Hold ‘Em — the most popular of hundreds of poker variations that have cropped up over the past 170 years since “the cheating game” became all the rage on Mississippi riverboats — involves combining the two cards you’re dealt with any three of the five “community cards” laid out on the table. Of course, you have to memorize poker’s hierarchy of values, from a humble pair of deuces (“ducks”) to the ultra-rare royal straight flush (10, J, Q, K, A in the same suit).

But the real fun is in the betting — like a popular song goes, “you gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.” With the right subliminal signals (a.k.a, the famous “poker face”), you can bluff your way to victory with little more than “sailboats” (a pair of fours); or you can lose your shirt to some mousy, nervous newbie secretly holding four of a kind. We guys (poets, fictionists, journalists, lawyers, doctors) regularly get cleaned out by Javie’s girlfriend Den, the only lady in the pack, who looks like a college freshman but who knows how to gut macho bluffers with an “all-in” (betting all your chips at once, do or die) and a sad smile. As the senior chump, the only break I get is an exemption from the shuffling and dealing chores.

There’s almost as much fun to be had in the “table talk” — ranging from inquisitory chatting to trashing your opponents with words rather than cards, which I will not recommend except when playing with very close friends, and certainly not with sumo wrestlers.

There are worse (and, come to think of it, also less nerve-wracking) ways of spending Friday nights; the pleasures of poker are unique, and the thrill of drawing and nursing a straight flush against a full house beats — in my book — winning a prize for a story I had to think about for three months. Maybe that’s because it’s also an ephemeral high — which is why we keep chasing it one Friday after another.

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From Nanding Josef, Cultural Center of the Philippines VP and Artistic Director, comes this important message for all Filipino artists: “The Artists Welfare Project, Inc., a private corporation of artists, is finally SEC-registered. We can now move faster to provide assistance to artists in need. Please attend our general assembly tomorrow, from 4 to 6 p.m. at MKP, fourth floor, CCP. The agenda will include a report on activities, membership, finances, donations, and an orientation for new enrollees.” All interested artists are invited to attend this meeting and to sign up with AWP, a welcome initiative that I wrote about in last week’s column.

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Now and then I get a truly well thought-out response to a piece I write, and I was happy to receive another one last week from reader Michael G. Aurelio, who used to teach philosophy (perhaps the farthest thing I could have segued to from seven-card stud).

With his permission and my warmest thanks, I’m sharing a bit of what he said:

“I personally know a few writers and poets who would fall under your description of ‘compromised artists,’ i.e., those who can no longer deny the reality of an empty stomach as they write way into the night or who can no longer hide the wish that their books catch up on its sales because money is still money if you are supporting a family. These are not judgments; this is reality. As you said, there is (practical) wisdom in transforming one’s talents in ‘producing’ something that others need, something they may actually understand, and frankly, something they will really pay for. And as you hinted, this may no longer be ‘pure art’ as it becomes sedimented with the dirty soil of reality. But we do what we can — ‘so long as it pays the rent.’

“In ancient Athens (I apologize for this lengthy detour) only free men were able to practice pure art, e.g., philosophy. The life of contemplation — serving no end other than itself — was only for the few who both had the mind and the time to gaze at the skies all day, seeking answers to their burning questions. These few were called ‘free men’ because they had slaves to do all the ‘work for the house’ (Gr. oikonomia and later ‘economy’); these were ‘men of leisure’ because for them the good life meant drinking and discoursing with each other all day and night. Thus, a life of pure contemplation was for Socrates the only life worth living; for Plato, a life deserved for the philosopher-king; and for Aristotle, the happiest possible life for mortal man.

Until today, we call some arts the ‘liberal’ arts — those arts for free men — which are distinguished from the ‘servile’ arts — you guessed it, the arts of economy. And until today the notion that learning is in essence leisurely has survived in the word ‘school,’ which originally comes from the Greek skhole both meaning ‘school, lecture, discussion,’ and also ‘leisure, spare time.’

“Yet what has changed — perhaps inevitably so — since the time of those boy-loving Athenians was quite a reversal: the free man of art has become the slave of his previous slaves. Now everything is standing on its head, or better, the life of high art has been buried to the ground — soiled, dirtied — as the strong man of economy has bought his freedom and has turned all art, e.g., poetry (creation) and politics (affairs of the state), psychology (knowledge of the soul) and cosmology (knowledge of the world), etc., into what can be determined with certainty, what can be computed like money, in other words, into a science.

“We see this today with business management classes full to the rafters while the theology class next to it lacks the quorum to begin the lessons. We see this in the bookstores where the humanities section occupies a measly corner in the back — without distinguishing what is philosophy from religion or poetry from non-fiction — while Stephen Covey, John Maxwell or Rich Dad, Poor Dad all greet you with warm dollar-smiles as you enter. (Footnote: ‘Will to Win’ silenced the arrival of Mother Teresa this past weekend.) We see this when the high school teacher leaves to become a domestic helper in Singapore, when the budding young painter is forced to take up law by his father, or when a writer dies and his death makes him more unknown than when he was alive.

“We see this and know this. But no longer do we live in the time of the Greeks nor would it be very intelligent to again become a people who bought and traded slaves in order to remain free. 

“If politicians are paid to steal a nation’s money, if soldiers are compensated to kill rebels who are really their brothers, should not artists get their fair share ‘for what they do to excite our imaginations, exercise our consciences, and remind us of the things truly worth living for’?... The philosopher will never really be a king. But give him and other artists the dignity of a peasant who toils all day on the soil to feed his family but is able to fly in the boundless realms of the imagination and contemplation with his oil lamp as a sun at night. Give him (back) that freedom at least. Give him that or (continue to) give him nothing at all.”

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.net.