WordWell

Today, I meet the debaters for an afternoon of practice, all raring to say their piece. Debate is a lousy thing, people claim, because it may talk about what’s wrong with society and how things be done the right way, the speakers are left to have not moved society any bit after the wordplay. All it is about is dogged resoluteness to pursue the impossible, the ideal, that is always beyond the human reach.  All it is about is words that bloom with other words and create imagined reality palpable enough to throb as long as the debate lasts.

At the end of the day though, and every droplet of spit employed into the useful occupation of bringing out the longing of humankind to make the world a better place, the world remains the same, equipped with existing mores that are questionable and biases that put asunder what everyone hitherto has been pretty much wanting to stick together. The reality debaters spun, as systematic and causative as it is, crumbles as the claw of naked truth reveals people are inept and skeptical and none the wiser.

All that is left are spits that land whichever way, on desk arms or on someone’s open pores, globs that are lightly viscous and vomit-inducing.

In my university, well the time I spent there for five years, two of which I dedicated pursuing the art of refutation and bitching, there exists an animosity between philosophy organization and the debaters. We did not openly engage each other, knowing that we wield similar instrument of reasoning, and that keeps us at bay. It’s enough that we exchange scathing remarks through the word of mouth, them having no qualms to accuse us of not doing the homework on fallacies and our haphazard regard on classical syllogisms. We accuse them of pining for the absolutes, the romantic pursuit of underlying causality of things, forever chasing a cosmos where discordant truths meet their agreement, conflicting discourse will find respite and union.

Heck, even engineers join in the fray, and a student-leader had the audacity to express his barefaced repulsion about the practice of formal disagreeing and humiliating and alienating people in public. He has not heard about the Roman maxim: when you want peace prepare for war.

            An officemate once asked why I debate. It was an inappropriate time, she rather inquisitive in a loud way amongst eavesdropping passengers in the jeepney. Their heads were trained in our direction. I was caught off-guarded and my knee-jerk reaction was to search for a way to evade an answer. Finding none, I answered the de facto debater’s official, noncommittal reply. It makes one to believe the possession of facility of the language. It makes it easy to pull brilliant excuses from the air. Together with these two, it’s a handy tool to sweet talk one’s way to the future.

            I did not tell her debaters worth their cents use these to, shall we say, kick asses.

***

            I open my phone and find a message from a friend. It says, Ikalibang ra na imong sakit. (You’d better shit that sickness out.)

             I have received sundry messages that express unfading support and heartfelt sincerity to stand by my side. None has been much shockingly acerbic, much pregnant with love and rawness, than this. Rather than be pissed off for that friend’s remark, I have the strangest idea that an inspiration has just come in, the answer to many of man’s questions that are indubitably self-proving has break in, the balm that appeases the vainglorious to kick asses is at hand at last. Walk it away. Just shit it out. Indeed, what wisdom and relief crap holds.

            When I drink my medicine at midnight, I feel better. So much better.

~ by emelito-torres on February 13, 2008.