SABBATICAL NOTES. 17 JAN 2014.
IN LIFE AS IN DEATH, the vagaries of our being and becoming are like those of the weather, the wind, and the street.
Or like our plans to write narratives of our struggle in the form of a novel, but the novel remains in the mind. Redemption, where are you?
The street, of course, is a synecdoche for the everyday and for that struggle to find something relevant in our life. The existentialists, whoever they were, and whoever they are right now, are and were not wrong on so many substantive points of their argument about what gives on this earth of mankind.
The reason is simple enough: like Haiyan, we cannot control the vagaries of life in much the same way that we cannot the control coming and going pf the storm surge despite claims to the contrary--or it is true?--that somebody has used this storm surge ('russuak-danum' or 'russuak-bagio' or 'russuak-baybay' is our term here in the dictionaries to account that there is something more sinister that our 'aluyo') to experiment it as something like a weapon of mass destruction.
Today, the Honolulu headline screams at us: homicides in the Paradise Isles, and those dying are those who have fallen in the cracks, homeless people who did not have the means to get back on their feet again, and thus, had to run to streets for refuge and safety, the streets presumably being open, public, and spacious one can easily run to where freedom awaits.
But that is not so.
Six homicides in six months in an Edenic place like Hawaii is enough reason to make us worried about the present.
The report talks about case management dollars in the form of a grant from the feds, and here we go again, in this circle of acts of violence.
It is not random, this. Is going vicious, and at the very least, it is societal, structural, institutional.
To live in Hawaii is like looking for that proverbial needle in a haystack.
The romance is over--unless we did something about the tragic thing we call street life.
Novel, novel, where are you?!
HNL, HI/
17 Jan 2014
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