transcribed from a half-lengthwise paper, unedited
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Slaughterhouse
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Memories have a way like wind or water; like a breeze it surges against you as you walk forward. Memories go against the walk, precisely that is what memories do. Like water, memories turn into clouds, as clouds make us remember how we have travelled. And as clouds memories taint the drying world with color and a deeper shade, as would leaves and shadows bearing the weight of rain.
Sometimes on a bus stop I find someone reading, and in making conversation, I ask for the author. In the heart of noon, I don’t think it matters anymore. Those are her words and mine, we are in the world, and everyone worries to go forward as much as they can, but what we are doing is memory work, all the books and poems and conversation, given after being written and somehow disowned, the work saying “This was my life and I am bare. I am going to die; I am already dead. Find me a home.” And in that instance, we, too, are bare. In that instance, it is we who need a home. But we are naked, alone, with this alien recollection, and we fold into each other make each other our home. That makes the author’s work our own, and memory our being. We are the home of the author’s work, the engine, its air being thinking, and life.
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“The Midnight Meat Train,” how the city is a person, not a mechanism, a specific persona that we all have a part in shaping, that we shit on. How the city creates its own sorrows, violence, how it lets lovers meet and fall apart out of each other just so it would not die out [migration being horror, not the bloody murders, not the crime, not the cries like rain if all the sorrow were gathered and then thrown at a single space.], just so it would have its own history. Interesting how the city is placed over abandoned things e.g. railroad stations and former towns that we resound.
In the movie, I could see how the city slowly transformed, transforms into, the man, especially in the scene with him photographing his wife and her taking off her clothes. That scene was one of transformation (for one, of how the city goes beyond the flesh, how it is more than a place where people can be people and fuck. The city is not for man.), how blood needs to be shed in the city, flesh [though beyond it, the city is of the flesh], so that things may continue. Someone needs to die at times.
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And it is not the city interests me but the formation of it, the formation of disease and pestilence, violence (though contestable), and crime. How the city means a neurosis, just as poetry.
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How the city creates its own sadness and how we keep it alive, yet loving it more, thinking sadness is beauty.
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Ang latak ng lungsod. Kung saan/kanino nahuhulog ang lungsod. Clive Barker’s “The Midnight Meat Train” is an attempt at history, the establishment of myth, and thus of a personal, rooted, experience of a culture. With the establishment of myth (stories you hear) is history, in its slivers, leaping forward the same manner of the “kuwentong-bayan.” With history is the history of creation, something which is primordial, but is never changing. Something which pervades, like the essence which is carried over into the vessel of form. That is also one root of the horror: that something which is there still lingers and is present, which defies life and logic. This is the beauty of horror, the defiance of death, and yet this scares so many people! Why? Horror is the salvation of literature because its effect in the irrefutable mortality and limitation of man: how man transmogrifies himself, how the city transmogrifies man, how garbage is sacred because it is the residue of the whole mechanism of change, garbage shows the whole history of man, “waste” shows the whole history of man.
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And the city is man, the buildings and everything. And man is a city. There is a vision of the city in each one of us, the face of everyone there of the same beggar one the street. From the richest to the dead. The city falls into the way a man speaks, a paragraph, the way two people stare at each other before ending their relationship. The city withholds everyone within it some way or another. The city has its own ecology, which makes the people feel as though they dwell in it. Which is why the city contrasts with the province and nature. That is why there is a certain freedom one feels when one sees the sea and how sand accepts the waves that rush and recede under it. How the trees nearest the shore accept freely the wind from other worlds. There is no archive fever in the province, for there is no proliferation of signs, that which Baudrillard describes, a jungle of empty signs. [In nature, signs are not dead ends but are too difficult to make out, the obscurity of nature only matched by its beauty.] The memory of a kind of rootedness represents itself here. You are led to remember in the province, to write or tell a story. Deep into the heart of land, another body takes over the bodies of the people there, and, unlike the loneliness of the city weighing down on man, it is a loneliness which does not have any signs, only silence, under everything.
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