Edel Garcellano

trans. by Bernard Capinpin

A Brief INvestigation To A Long Melancholia

How can you make broken eyeglasses speak?

How many writers have attempted to unravel this mystery: the Aleph from which, at any angle/location/aperture, all the past, the present, the future could be seen; a grain of sand that unfolds the entire sea; the bread/wine that are the flesh/blood of all the living; the thread that ties together all the trees and the leaves. The tiger blazing at night. The dragon spewing smoke up in the air. The Sacred Letter that acts as a key to the gates of the Kingdom of God. Each is part of the whole, the whole in each part; this is the theology of the One and the Crowd, Idea and Reality—and this perspective [dialectic on one end, metaphysical on the other] will restore the broken glasses of the eyes, its own history. But how to unveil the secret history, to make a thing that has never spoken speak? If to create a twin, a clone [of Hitler? Einstein? Rizal? Bonifacio?] is a duplication, in genetic engineering, of a structure of DNA from a living cell, does that mean a mirror could reveal its face from its back? It’s impossible but there is a possibility [all things are said to be possible] of writing history [if that is so, then the face is at the back of a mirror, by that logic] if the circumstance of the glass’s shattering be known: when? where? why? The process—from the medieval fantasy of transforming iron into gold until the scientific solution of concocting an artificial diamond [compressing the centuries into a mere instant]—is a challenge to man’s intelligence, but science is an endless interrogation on Minerva’s secret, on nature, and gradually all knowledge will be transformed by nature which will, in turn, be transformed by knowledge. Could a grain of sand, a petal of jasmine, a string from a guitar, the bones of a man speak? No, at the outset. But don’t artifacts, skeletons from the past, also shape the sea, flowers, song, and organisms? The biofile was delivered to him—a thesis to which his theories of mathematics and artificial intelligence would be applied—chained his reputation, and his broken eyeglasses, one among the evidences he needed to comb through, should give structure—clean, ordered, lucid—to everything. [“Could be a funny story, you know,” consoled the captain. “Remember that small guy, Charlie Chaplin?”]

. . .

His eyes were not as clear as before, and he could understand it, his white hair and the bouts of migraine were a few steps toward the grave; between breaks in his reading, the lines of words seemed like rows of cars knotted in traffic, he couldn’t have missed it, like faces about to startle him, saying his name—the eyes that were, at times, like vagrants lying prostate on the streets one cold December in San Francisco, under the LRT on a scorching April, begging, sweltering, or eyes like vigilantes and uniformed men around the corner and at the checkpoints, keeping watch, jeering, or the eyes from the narrow world of the university, curious, caring. He needed to see Dr. Espiritu to recover clarity to the stairs, the garden, the canteen, the room: were they friends or enemies? He needed to read, the clock’s ticking was maddening, he seemed to be dragged to who knows where, and the book was a sword [the students concerned themselves on their laptops, the library was growing molds, and most of all, the journalists, businessmen, basketball players and artists were the new intellectuals of the council; those who actually read were ignored! And as for the reader, how would he be read? Would he be tapped on the shoulder or rejected? And as for those who have eyes that see, whose eyes are looking at him?]

. . .

When the screen lit up again [months had gone since it was abandoned after the entire tape was found—unedited, as is, let the machine present all the evidences of a flux, our selectivity is ideologically bound, prejudiced] and after playing with the buttons according to the new calculations [a technique akin to psychoanalysis, when on the first meeting the analyst/reader and the patient/text would first see each other; on the second meeting, the analyst/reader would focus on the analyst/reader of the patient/text himself or like a camera aimed at another camera] he would be met by a furrowed forehead: the speaker/narrator was not a single entity, there seemed to be numerous voices coiled around a single voice [the pronoun for him was for many characters, talking one after another]. He put it again on rewind to look out for a serial number, to pin it like an elusive butterfly, place it in a box, and probe its meaning. Never mind that he had to report it to the Panopticon; he’d have to decide on the last scene. 

. . .

He’d have to start from the very beginning. While rummaging through discs in the National Computer Depot, collecting biofiles, he paused at a single entry: “Bruno Bettelheim’s death Tuesday at a retirement home in Maryland was a suicide, medical and police officials said Wednesday. Mr. Bettelheim, 86, the Austrian born psychologist whose deep empathy for children led him to a lifelong effort to heal the emotional wounds of early life, died of ‘suicidal asphyxiation’ in Silver Spring, Maryland, Dr. John E. Smialek, the state medical examiner, said. . . . Mr. Bettelheim studied in Vienna under Freud. He spent nearly two years in the Nazi concentration camps Dachau and Buchenwald before his release in 1939. He then immigrated to the United States and gained early fame for his study of death camp prisoners. . . .” Before this, Z-666 remembered a photo of Ernest Hemingway pointing a shotgun into his mouth; in addition, one Ernesto Manalo slashing his wrists, letting his blood stream into a basin, taking sleeping pills for his eternal slumber. His attention to these personalities was born out of his obsessive desire to understand—actually, he has already been compelled, as though through the first gulp of beer—the true history of his grandfather, supposedly killed by an unknown man [from the Right or the Left?] who intruded into the apartment as he was resting and listening to a Kristi Becker record, a pianist who became famous in Bellagio. And on this matter, he has already made several private interviews: the old professor from the university, some workers from the compound, his colleagues from the journal [many of whom were already retired and demented], and in this way, by a careless process, the biofile would take shape, have substance. First of all, the mad grandfather had been a writer, a profession often disregarded, but the journalists/artists/homosexuals/matrons/generals, postmodernist expositors of McLuhan interpreted the political, social and economic programs of the state, filling up auditoriums in the lecture circuit. Literature was a minor course overshadowed by automatons, science and technology—therefore, to devote time and money for one man, although associated with some historical event, was a useless endeavor, some meaningless research [“the statistical valence is negligible”], as the grandfather was merely one out of the thousands of numbers registered and wiped out from the megacomputer’s microchip—headed to the campus, meandered around winding routes, lingered in restaurants, slept in a room until the awaited moment of being erased from the machine’s memory came. [“He was a number, all right,” began Professor M, who was also his thesis advisor, “but like anybody else, he could have been a zero, and nothing would have mattered.”] Did the zero have no actual value? If it had, what was it? If it hadn’t, why did such a number exist? Because the truth of television—people moving, talking—was the truth of society, the truth of the grandfather was not the actual truth. But regardless, what was the truth of what came of him? His experiment aimed to answer this question: he was developing a five-dimensional mode of perceiving the mathematical matrix of the sign-system [visual, acoustic, linguistic, psychoneural, historico-dialectical, kinetic] of an advanced model/type of an IBM-compatible holograph: from a text, it could materialize the representations the text contained—man, beast, mineral, plant, etc.—together with the author who would appear to have come back to life, out of the grave of the white paper, uttering words [those written on the text] spoken during the text’s era; indeed, it was a reconstruction that had only been previously actualized by connecting the letters of the alphabet with a flowering imagination, and now, his Vortex I [an invention, for instance, that could reanimate a work by one Reuel Aguila, an enfant terrible of the twentieth century, that instead of reading the play, its coded matrix will be encoded into the machine in order to, after a few minutes, incarnate the fictional character, who would move around the crystal compartment, while the “reader” peered in front of the module]. This was the coding system: based on the researched texts [interviewee reports, receipts, car registrations, travel reports, types of clothing, shoes, perfumes, shampoos, personal notes, remaining notebooks, diary and other details of the subject], a list of keywords would be indexed, each word with a corresponding number, frequency, duration, and context so that it may be utilized, in order to generate the maximized possibility concurrent with the extrapolated meaning [the generational mathematics of semantics] and the process of elimination [the differential calculus of the text]. This methodology took some time but if he could spend twenty-four hours of attention every Saturday each week—he had to leave off visiting his partner—calculating how long he could complete it or at least have it see the light of day, the project would take around a year or so. And perhaps one of the problems to be solved was the mysterious death of his grandfather ; he had been, her grandmother from New York suspected, salvaged although the Panopticon [previously known as Centrix] had disproved it because according to the data bank, the “object of research” had personally requested a peaceful death [actual euthanasia, or physician-assisted death, a state service given to the ill who wished to be at peace, a practice no longer controversial, already popular among the old and the young], aside from the affidavit they retrieved from the megasystem’s archives; and moreover, the professor was manic-depressive, antisocial [antiheroic], a negative introvert, traits that now could be cured with group activation, controlled psychic medication and restructuring. The Panopticon had declared it. The eye inside their consciousness that guided their actions and principles in life. Because what he was doing was experimental [the potential of psycholinguistics was at stake here, a reason why he was cleared by headquarters], entering the skull of the dead was a provision not handled by investigative limits. 

Edel Garcellano (1947-2020) was a poet, essayist, literary critic, and lecturer at the University of the Philippines Diliman (UP) and the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP). He was the author of two novels, Ficcion and A Brief Investigation to a Long Melancholia. 

Bernard Capinpin is a poet and translator. He is currently working on a translation of Ramon Guillermo’s Ang Makina ni Mang Turing. He resides in Quezon City.