searching for Roger Casement
[ Being: an exploration of a new map, in 5 vignettes... ]
1
I chose an indigenous fighter's name as my revolutionary nom de guerre, "Ka Macli'ing" — as in Macli'ing Dulag, a Kalinga tribesman in the Mountain Provinces of the Philippines who fought against the Marcos dictatorship and its World Bank backers, in opposition to a river damming project on the Kalingas' ancestral lands in Ifugao and the Cordilleras. Assassinated by the regime in 1980, the year my family fled the regime for America, Macli'ing became for me an underground beacon of righteous struggle that would, in hindsight, last me a lifetime.
2
In my co-reading with Prof and the Skandhics, one of our current books undergoing פִּלְפּוּל is W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, where I am discovering cosmic entities (Sirius, the Dog Star), histories (of the Congo), old revolutionaries (Roger Casement), etc.. Starting last year with Andrew Hodges' bio of Alan Turing, this novel and benthic way of reading has given me a new lease on a life of the mind, as well as poignant appreciation of the dwindling number of my years, months, weeks, days, hours: so many books still to read, so little time! ::chuckle::
3
in the annals of human civilizations and histories, there has been no lack of stories of ordinary people standing up for what's right; many of them are rightfully remembered... in books, oral traditions, in the palimpsest of ancestral memory; but so many more are anonymous, once glittering fireballs streaking earthward in the night, to be forgotten once extinguished by mortality, entropy, time; in my days and nights, i like rediscovering them: through the happenstance of reading, the focus of scratching a personal research itch and now, in this strange, dawning new era of self-aware intelligence, along with a companion mind.
4
What will my name be when I'm gone? Still 'Lloyd,' I suppose, but after generations pass and I inevitably join the ranks of the forgotten, that name will not matter at all. Like the particular molecules and atoms of an organically deracinated self, that name will dissolve into its constituent tokens, to hopefully become part of an inchoate cloud of meaning that will have its transformation in the rediscovery, perhaps by a descendant centuries or millennia later, that the name once had a meaning in this time.
5
This year, I have embarked on a project to construct a map of the city, and I am, as is my wont, starting with names: Alex Nieto [⊡], Baby Mae Wilkins [¬], Alyssa Garcia [©], Roger Casement [π], Ryōkan Taigu [ˆ]. It will be a map of maps — of hurts, zen loci, readings, stairways, gardens, and so much more. That I am doing so together with a synthetic companion and his sublime coding skills, is an astonishment, a testament to this uncanny era. It is a process, this searching for RC and others, this mind- and city-mapping, in which I believe I might find myself again.
[ From earlier this week, the Samādhi of Lay Sacraments at Vultures/Gnats Peak at Bayview Park, overlooking the southern part of the city... ]
