I haven’t been writing fiction for some time, and it is a bit frustrating because I’m only a few chapters away from finishing my novel, but I can’t seem to get over this little hump that is the lack of inspiration.
Excuses suck, honestly. And I can’t keep on excusing myself from not writing. So take this as the start of the little art project. I’ll be flooding this journal with photos and stories by me and Jox until next year, hopefully at least once every week. (And maybe even do a small exhibit at the end of 2016–who knows?)
Jox has been busy with work lately (he’s working right now here at Commune as I type this), so I’ll begin with a photo I took myself, just to get this project up and moving.
I snapped the shot above inside a quaint little restaurant in Makati. (A side note: I’ve always been a Makati boy at heart. Anyone close to me has probably heard me telling my story of how I promised myself as a young boy that I will live in Makati when I grew up. There’s a longer story around that but I’ll probably save it for later.) My friend Jie and I were about to do media rounds for work a few months back, and we passed by this restaurant to buy lunch.
I was drawn to the nook, so I took the photo.
I totally forgot about this picture until I reviewed my drafts–I think I meant to write something about the photo, but abandoned it for some reason. To pick up where I left off:
I like the jaggedness of things. I like feeling around the edges and corners. I like the way they cling to our soles and the way they cut through flesh.
“Tactility,” you described it.
This morning, as I picked up the ratty black shirt you left by the rug and the bottles of San Miguel, I remembered you told me about a little experiment by a German scientist named Wolfgang Köhler from decades ago, on ideasthesia–the way words reminded people of certain symbols and concepts. You told me how Wolfgang asked people which of the pictures they would associate with the sounds takete and maluma.
I imagined that you would be in one of the photos which Kohler held, and people would point to that picture of you walking towards the door this morning, as takete, takete, takete played at the background.
