Black Beans

The black beans toasted and grind 

Filling every wasteful hot water in this mind

Stirring the Aplonian and Dionysian soul

In me that fights in a fierceful battle

Grief,angered, cool air surrounds

Every moving thoughts of a slanderer

Knocking down every sting of intellectual reasons

Nevertheless, it is just a mere imagination

Lavished, abused memory of some summer romance

Breaking into the entire course of this hallucination

Like a drug addict rehabilitated

Brought about by a deadly and incurrable obsession

What kind of man would I be?

If in some acrobatics of love I can't flee?

Though a monster of intellectual capacity

Man is just a dust in the truest sense of chastity.

Short Auto :)

“Life is absurd.”

            This line from my favourite philosopher Albert Camus is something that I always put in my mind and always bother me every time I find myself idle, which is often the case. Why on earth have he concluded that life is absurd? Or is it out of self- pity and frustration have he concluded this? Looking deeply upon this abyss of confusion, looking for reasons and discovering for myself what this line mean to me, I found myself looking at my own story, of my own life.

            I was born one rainy day, on the 23rd of October in the year of our Lord 1991. My mother said she almost died because of bleeding for I was a big baby. When my father knew that the baby is a boy, his compulsion from cigarette died right away. That was the day that he quit smoking, as a fulfilment of his promise to my mother.

            My childhood memories were filled with adventures and misdemeanours. I had the knack of finding short routes and narrow passages towards different places and spots in our neighbourhood. I even imagined myself as Prince of Persia escaping those people who chase me, or perhaps I even think that I am. I used these routes and passages in going to school and in going to my classmates’ house to meet them and play with them during my afternoon school breaks.

We usually went to the coastline and caught small fishes and collected them in our small jars. We used to call this activity as “Pananakop ni Magellan”, as an imagination of our conquest for this tiny fishes, which we imagined as our slaves. After we caught them, we allowed them to die by not giving them food and oxygen as we tightly closed their jars. Well, that’s how cruel we were. Even though I was very adventurous and wanderer, I still get good grades during my elementary years and high school years. Though in high school, my knack for finding short routes was replaced by basketball games.

         During high school, I and Michael James, my cousin, used to go from one barrio to another just to play basketball. We used to play for fun and “pustahanay” or betting, which ranged from twenty pesos to a hundred. We enjoy these games and made it as a source of money for buying our snacks in the afternoon. That was when our house was near to my cousin’s house. But we moved location after I graduated high school and never had the chance again to play with Michael.

       After high school, I went to the seminary and applied for the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer ( Congregatio Sanctissimi Redemtoris), the Redemptorists in Cebu. After three years of discernment, I went outside the seminary and decided to continue my studies. I wanted to be independent and wanted to be away so after a lot of thinking over, I decided to go to Davao to continue my Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy.

              I am now studying in the University of the Immaculate of Conception. Thinking over and over again, I still did not answer why life is absurd. Maybe life is absurd because we keep on repeating things and doing things at the same manner. That is when we become familiar of the things that is usually happening and will happen to us every day. The schedules, the lifeless daily routines, those dry and long study days, loads of work, all these things becomes so familiar that I feel meaninglessness, absurdity, as Camus calls it. Even in the seminary before, all things are scheduled and done routinely. Life then, maybe, is absurd. But dwelling in this absurdity is useless for I still dream and look towards the future.

                 I always see the future as a very bright horizon and verizon. I see myself as a family man, a successful career-oriented man, an independent person, and a person who find meaning among meaninglessness. I want to explore the world, write a lot of books, own properties, and of course, I want to marry the woman that I love the most.

               Maybe life is absurd. Not when you put love in life. That is the time when meaningless becomes “meaningfull”, if there is such a word. As I look my life now, I can say I found meaning in between the two polars of absurdity of life. Between the absurdity of life and death, there is love that provides meaning. This is, maybe, the off beam of Camus.

This is my autobiography, as I call it, and thank you for reading my randomness but not meaninglessness.

-Orlyz Apolistar Presbitero