I've been finding out more about the Yellow Vest movement in Paris.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0GHWSi_cXY
And this one on William Blake:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_gNG-hgT3U
I identify with William Blake for lots of reasons. When I watch his docus I feel more okay with my life. I am considered weird and crazy by my own kids and my handful of friends (all women, a few fellow interpreters and translators). I feel very close to the spirits, to the dead, who I know are more alive than we are here. I myself feel dead here. This life is not a propitious place for feeling truly, intensely alive. We have all seen or read or experienced this, over and over. It isn't subject to argument anymore.
I have never felt comfortable in human society except when I am with simple people, which means in 99.9% cases, people who are not rich, who are not complicated, though I do have one or two friends I love who are well off because they worked very hard all their lives and who are white but perhaps of Italian American, or Italian Chilean origin.
Native Song, 1999 Santiago Bose
Because I have been single since I was 39 when I ended an unhappy marriage, and would have liked to have found a companion who could have understood how my consciousness works, who could have had a rich inner life that he would share with me, but never have found anyone, it has been a hard life and I hope to die by the time I am 72. I am bored by most people though I am not an unkind person and I treat people well unless they do not deserve it, which is rare, and when I meet someone of this kind I just move away. Sometimes it takes a long time before I realize that I should put an association to an end. Most of the time it is just a case of, I can relate to 25% of the person, and they can relate to 10% of myself, and we just make the most of it insofar as our association can be one of mutual cordiality and respect, and reciprocal assistance on the basis of equality and freedom.
The thing that makes me happiest of all, is when I lose myself in research on Hispanofilipinas, and when I make an effort to write, to explain the important points I discover in my research, and to try and write fiction recreating Hispanofilipinas. It is very difficult for me to write because I need to be unemployed and quiet. This means I have to have money to live on. This means my production of texts has been very irregular and continues to be so. It can't be helped. Besides, I don't produce texts that are the product of my imagination alone. I write to bring back a lost world, one that I did not know in this present incarnation. I know I was alive in Hispanofilipinas, and the history books wake up my sleeping and lost memories.
THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT FOR THOSE WHO HAVE ACCUSED ME OF BEING A KASTILALOY -- someone who is trying to make a big deal that she is of Spanish origin. This is a lie. I am not an elitist. This is what I find utterly ridiculous about the claims that Rizal was Chinese because he had a great-grandfather who was Chinese. Rizal felt himself to be a pure Filipino, full stop. I had a great-grandfather who was from Andalucia. But I have never felt anything else but a pure Filipina. I never considered myself mestiza de español. I never learned to speak Spanish at home or from my father. It is not a racist point with me. It is a spiritual point. I have no connection to the land-owning oligarchy and I have never been slavishly religious. Yes, as a child I prayed a lot and asked to see the Virgin. When I lost something I prayed hard to St. Anthony. I spoke to Jesus. I loved the stories of the saints and still do. But I am not a Catholic by self-definition. I am like William Blake, though I do not see visions of angels. I know they are there.
I know that the period between 1872 and 1913 was cataclysmic for Filipinas, that the entire Spanish colonization was very difficult, and that the period from 1900 to the present was a reaction, and a pact with the Devil. A trade that was forced on Filipinas because she had no choice, but basically her children decided to trade their souls for a false material development without sound foundations and with the continuation of tyranny, this time under the rule of the former slave owners, the principales, now speaking English and acting like Little Brown Brothers.
Unlike many colonized nations, in both cases of Spanish and American colonization, except for some violent resistance, the yoke was accepted. It wasn't like the Aztecs and their vassals, or the Incas and their vassals, where the native peoples traded one oppressor for another who was more powerful, more violent, but the new oppressor was of the same color and race. We accepted or succumbed or parlayed with a different race both times. And so
at the very base of both colonizations was racism. It had to be so. This also happened in Hispanic America. But no numerically significant new race was born in Filipinas, not with the primary colonizer race (neither with the Spanish nor with the Americans), yes with the Chinese race, which had been carrying out a tacit colonization through trade and blood mixture, and it is the one that has had the most perduring characteristics, though very much of a silent, unobtrusive but nonetheless influential kind. Filipinos already have many inner characteristics that make us similar to the Chinese people. BUT WE ARE NOT CHINESE.
Faith and Science in the Time of AIDS, Apologies to Dr Jose Rizal, 1999 Santiago Bose
Filipinos are a very complex people, very resilient, very adaptative. But Filipinos do not love other Filipinos, and this is the worst aspect of our people. Filipinos do not want other Filipinos to develop their great potential. Filipinos want to use other Filipinos, just as they have been used by other races. Filipinos do business with their own fellow Filipinos, I mean buy and sell, as if their fellow Filipinos were commodities, or else they treat them worse than dogs without owners.
It is a great shame. The Spanish already taught Filipinos hipocrisy and false pride, and sadly, after Spanish and American colonization Filipinos have lost virtues: kindliness, hospitality, generosity, self-sacrifice, respect, courtesy, loyalty, faithfulness, simplicity, non-materialism.
Of course, this has happened to all the nations of the world. But it is not an excuse, it is a diagnostic of a spiritual disease. A spiritual and a cultural disease.
And it is not the end of the world either. It is part of our passage from childhood to adulthood. We are like teenagers who did not receive an education in values. Yes, in repression and getting ahead, going through life the easy way, skipping important stages of individuation, of learning to be an integrated, whole, responsible, reliable, trustworthy individual.
Let It Bleed, 1994 Santiago Bose
After you have gotten through life being dishonest, being a sheep, a spoiled brat, taking advantage of others to do all the hard and dirty work for you (and then resenting and insulting them for it, saying they are ungrateful, dishonest blablabla, which is what YOU are), ass-kissing and currying favor to get ahead, breaking the law as long as you don't get caught, making promises you know you will never keep, lying with a smile, acting like butter doesn't melt in your mouth, brazenly covering up the others' crimes and taking the money, etc. etc. etc. --- still life will ask you to keep making decisions farther down the road of life and choosing the left or the right hand. And if you don't come clean, it will be up to your children to do it for you.
The Americans taught us terrible things. That you can get away with everything if you are a fast talker or a smooth liar. But even before the Spanish, it was already there. Our concupiscence. The masters and the slaves. The lazy and the obedient. The ones who wanted more and more, and the ones who gave and gave and suffered in silence.
Well...the Chinese are also a very old and very corrupt people. Theirs is an ancient civilization and no such ancient civilization is alien to corruption. Yet, it was the British who introduced opium in China. And when China resisted, Britain crushed her imperial house. So the Chinese called the Westerners white devils. The Japanese had imperial dynasties made strong by the ethos of honor and courage. But the mass rapists and murderers of Nanking dishonored the nation and it is very strange that Japan has refused to teach those historical facts to its postwar generations. Japan considers itself to be a superior race, this is why. The whites of Asia. Second only to the Germans. The rest of us Asians were therefore not deserving of human rights. The war crimes were equivalent to quashing ants. Rather large ants. With memories.
PINAY'S CURTAIN CALL, 2000 Santiago Bose
After all, the Filipinos compared to those two nations are amateurs.
I still say: it is enough. I want it to end.
Now that we have danced with and slept with Hollywood, are we still going to continue as locusts, maddened addicts to pleasure and mindless materialism, birds of prey for our own kind, or isolated communities steeped in mutual dislike, envy, meaningless competitiveness and zero solidarity, no vision of ethical society, bankrupt of enlightened spirituality. Why do we not see the ugliness of the poverty and misery around us and realize it is also ours? Our poverty, our miserableness? Oh, it's okay. As long as we can go home to the gated village, the mansion in Disneyworld Forbes or Dasma and Alabang.
How is it that a people so prone to shame, feels no shame in front of the rest of the world, at how their own best people are reduced to slavery and sexual chattel? How can a people be so STUPID.
Even in Chile this is happening and I find it no less abhorrent and sad. Rich people make me sad. I don't like to associate with them because they frighten me. There is something terrifying about emptiness.
Here is the art of Santiago Bose. He to me is the Filipino artist who has masterfully represented the Filipino unconscious. To transform ugliness, terror, despair, dead religion into truth, light, revelation, is to me, art.
#artsitter #santiagobose #freetrade #smileyface #colonizer #colonized #unaware #crossfit #civicreflex
