SABBATICAL NOTES. 26 JAN 2014 N2.

SABBATICAL NOTES. 26 JAN 2014 N2.
[For the Philosophical Association of Northern Luzon (paging Dr Danilo Alterado, Prof Rex Alejandro, and Prof Mark Gil Ramolete) for joining us in this cause of fighting for what is right.] 

IN THE FRENZY OF 'languaging' the language of our struggle, we are lost in the forest of ideas, words, concepts, phrases, and sometimes, sometimes, we mistake the trees for the forest.

Which should not be the case, however.

We think of our struggle, and we think of the road we need to pave in order to get to the end, and the hiatus between thinking through and acting out what we have in the head could be a space without a space, beyond words, ineffable too.

Sometimes fear and trembling, like Abraham's at the moment of his sacrifice of Isaac, gets the better of us, and we can only heave a sigh for these layers and layers of problems we have to face for our people.

It is never of personal benefit, this.

Ayn Rand is all wrong about going rogue and doing it your own way, and announcing, 'I am Nikita, I am Michael, I am Alex, I am Seymour, I am Sonya, I am Ryan and we the new Division!'

Even if we think about selfishness as a virtue in this self-righteous way of doing things, we cannot buy that Rand crap.

That is not the way it was, that is not the way it is, that is not the way it will be.

The predicate-initial character of our way of languaging our world which presumptuous scholars of the Ilokano language miss all along reveal a beautiful world out there in the Ilokano mind, a world of relationship, a collective world dreaming of the polis, the ili, the pagilian.

In the beautiful abyss of the Ilokano utob-nakem, there is that kinalinteg, and we are going to look for that one, pursue it, make it the agendum of our collective life.

And so in between the sanctities of our struggle and the sacredness of our doubts, we can only thank our co-warriors for a better life.

We know one thing: they will never leave us behind in the cold while warming our quivering hands with just barely a 'paginudo-fire' in the freezing night.

WPH, HI/
26 Jan 2014