Call it this: the conspiracy of communion.
Or communion in conspiracy.
Or conspiracy in communion.
All these are possible when minds meet in space and time, when minds of various energies meet to look and see at issues that need so much appraising.
It is like reading a book on your long journey and you never cared whether you get to finish reading it on time or not.
In this instance, the reading and journeying are one and the same, inseparable, one aspect of the other in that equation we have drawn up: the silencing of the soul is equal to the soul of silencing.
You can even sleep while reading your book for as long as you keep others at bay, especially those who get to buy books only from a garage sale in these parts.
Some can be so snooping-like they want to know the words that catches your heart.
The garage sales, oh, you go to them as if these were rites and rituals of a religion, the skimming and fast-reading some kind of a rubric of a ceremony for the elect, for the priesthood of readers and book-people.
You go to these events hoping that the better books bought by those trying to impress others but only to dump them unread in these garage sales held by churches and other civic-minded groups are there for the selling to the highest bidder, the bidding not in money terms but on the ability of the mind to go figure which book matters and which one does not.
As a student of human relations, you keep your tools on the ready by looking for clues and cues as the conversation begins in every event of what I call the "conspiracy of communion".
Who says this word?
Who reacts this way to which word?
In what context some word was said?
But more so: when would words begin to wound the heart, wound the soul, wound the spirit, cut the sinews and fibers and cells and muscles of the mind and let the mind bleed with blood, thick and sticky, red in the color of a revolution or a war or a murder whether in the warfront or in peacetimes?
You realize: there is more to sound in words being uttered.
In immigrant-land, words are blades.
Words are bolos, bullets, bayonets.
They harm when not used properly, slashing the flesh, leaving it with raw wounds, open, and invitatory of infections of other words, other sounds, other hurts, other verbal pus and phlegm, other wounded memories.
They kill when not used properly, ripping off the person's soul, spirit, self-respect, self-esteem--all those that make up the man.
Or the woman.
Or the child.
Or the immigrant in this immigrant-land.
For in this immigrant-land, the words are clues to the binaries: clues to inclusion, to exclusion, to a combo of both, to a negotiation, to an engagement, to a commitment.
I wonder why newly-arrived immigrants tend to be more sensitive to these cues and clues than those who have been here for quite a time.
Perhaps, Americanization is the reason?
Or is this just plain crap?
A. S. Agcaoili
Torrance, CA
July 7, 2006
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