BANANACUE
REPUBLIC
Vol I, No. 13
Dec 01, 2004
social criticisms by
Vicente-Ignacio de Veyra III
The
Complaints of Gossips
HERE
IN the city subdivision, I just had the bamboo in my yard killed because
it’s become quite a monster already and it’s near the fence. Which
means that my neighbor and myself do the sweeping of the fallen bamboo
leaves on the ground and on the roof gutters of our houses, and we laboriously do
that once each week. It’s quite unfair to my neighbor, even as the
bamboo monster has actually served my neighbor’s family a wealth of cool
shadow and fanned-in green breeze, the family’s appreciation of that
notwithstanding. Despite the benefits of a monstrous bamboo plant, no
requests for me to halt the cutting was announced, so I presumed the
cutting was long awaited by my neighbor’s possibly shy though possibly
uneasy attitude towards the plant. The plant was also intermittently
feared as a possible harbor for snakes and as potential haven for homeless
and harmful enchanted beings, this as per the rumors that flew from the
dime-store in front of my house that echoed on my backyard fence and
reached me in my bedroom.
Admittedly,
it took me a long time to cut that bamboo, and by all appearances I
wouldn’t blame another neighbor’s thought which might conjecture the
cutting to have been triggered by the bamboo’s reaching my door – the
cutting read as a non-empathetic act towards my neighbor via my conscience
but merely conceived by a self-serving reason. Anyway, that’s done, and
I did it knowing that the gesture (which would actually lose a certain
part of my yard) would not exactly rally my neighbors to keep their dogs
in their yards so these would stop shitting on my house’s dogless front
as the dogs’ territorial Berlin fence made of dogshit bricks. No. I had
the bamboo cut because I know how irksome bamboo can be when it’s coming
from behind your fence. It’s usually appreciated well when inside your
yard, perhaps because you can manage its growth – the bamboo as an
interactive plant as plants go. So, to repeat, I didn’t cut the bamboo
so my neighbors would turn back the favor and chain their dogs. I don’t
expect that to happen, not by a long rifle shot.
The
kid I hired to cut the fence is the son of a local folk sculptor in my
hometown. The sculptor’s house was next to ours. I remember the sculptor
once as the man who climbed his santol tree after my father complained of
the tree’s leaves claiming some years off our GI sheet roof. That was
back when I was a kid. Now I’m the man who hired a kid to cut a
most-likely irritating plant about which my neighbor couldn’t complain
(unless she really didn’t have that wish to have the plant go missing).
While
resting with a cigarette, the kid and I had a conversation about the folks
at our street, how they were and so on and so forth, and he got to mention
one that has ended up being the primary male gossip of our street named
after a hero, Marcelo del Pilar. I couldn’t resist the contrast with the
hero, because gossips are hardly ever a heroic lot, finding more time in
talking about others than in keeping their yards free of insect-harboring
grasses. I also couldn’t resist playing the intellectual towards my
hired bamboo-cutter. I said to him that it’s quite easier, and far more
exciting, for a human being to talk about others than to gossip about
himself, for two reasons: 1) if he gossips about himself, the lies are
harder to carry and quite impossible to sustain; and 2) gossiping about
others makes one a judge while gossiping about oneself merely makes one a
witness, if not a confessing convict pleading for forgiveness. My hired
bamboo-cutter laughed and agreed with me, especially when I added the
unfair stereotype of the gossip laundrywoman in suggesting our male gossip
friend could use his new gossiping enterprise by accepting laundry. This
was my version of unfairness to my hired kid’s sexism that likened our
male gossip neighbor to a woman. Quite unfair, his sexism, considering
that in our town – come to think of it – the men aren’t exactly less
gossipy than the women, especially as the men usually are culturally
blessed with more luxury hours to congregate with other men during those
times when the wives are with the family laundry and the dishes and the
kids.
Gossip,
however, is understandable. It can be understood primarily as a
manifestation not merely of a level of education but likewise of a kind or
class or quality of education.
Or,
to be fair to my uneducated non-gossiping fishermen friends, gossip is a
manifestation of a kind of intelligence. This is, of course, if we can
agree that one’s education is not coeval to one’s intelligence. An
educated man, after all, may show stupidity in his bookishness’ handling
of life, in his conservatism that hates those who question the textbooks,
and in his penchant for social-scientistic judgmental or labeling comedy.
An intelligent man, on the other hand, may merely have had the misfortune
of being born to parents who couldn’t send him to school, so that he
ends up being the fisherboy who – anyway – spits at our other
friends’ simple-headedness and being easy to feed just about any
information. There’s an intelligent uneducated being in my fisherman
friend. He’s no more dangerous than an articulate, well-educated stupid
being who disguises his gossipy behavior in literary analyses of various
characters in books. Or in political analyses of various classes or ethnic
groups in a polity.
Then
again, I must be mistaken. For even intelligent men may at times, a lot of
times, fall into this trap of luxurious gossip. Therefore, to say that
gossip as an activity is a status symbol for the stupid is to do the
stupid an undeserved disservice.
THE
MYOPIA of gossip that wears glasses that can’t see mirrors is usually
the same myopia worn by those who complain about the bamboo plants of
other people. This is not of course saying something about my present neighbor,
since to assume that she didn’t like the bamboo and couldn’t complain
to me about it is to carry the same gossipy jurisprudence that I’ve
announced my hatred towards here. No, it’s possible that my neighbor
neither wanted the bamboo removed nor wanted it not removed. Maybe
trimmed, I don’t know. This is trying to say something about neighbors
in general -- here, there, and everywhere.
For
I’ve been to other neighborhoods and I’ve heard a lot of passed-on (as
against directly-delivered-to-the-person-involved) complaints that
displayed this myopia that I wish to talk about here.
This
myopia, understandably, being extroverted and not given to introverted
introspection and checking the bedroom mirror, will always see the
mistakes and flaws of others, or others’ management (or lack of
management) of their yards. They will not see the dogshit of their lives
that may perhaps be far more insulting to their immediate neighbor than
the perceived disrespect of that neighbor’s neglected garden.
In
essence, therefore, the complaining person in all of us (educated or not,
intelligent or not) could also be that gossip that easily judges and fails
to conjecture other possibilities. By the gossip’s laziness to enumerate
other possibilities regarding the subject involved, a consequent hurried
judgment is passed. The judgment is his literary reading of a text that is
of the world outside him. The complainer, meanwhile, finds it quite
easier, and far more exciting, to talk about others than to complain about
himself, for two reasons: 1) if he complains about himself, the truths are
harder to carry and quite impossible to explain or even resolve; and 2)
complaining about others makes one a respected journalist or a senator
deserving of a TV show while complaining about oneself merely makes one a
poet, and therefore a fool.
When my hired bamboo-cutter comes in tomorrow I’ll tell him this too, and I hope he’ll laugh and agree with me, especially if I can add the unfair stereotype of merely-complaining radio announcers in suggesting complaining neighbors could use their cowardly complaining enterprise by putting up non-proactive euphemized radio towers. This should be my version of unfairness (which is towards radio announcers) against my hired kid’s sexism that likens complainers to cowardly gays. After all, more articulate and proactive complaining has derived from such gay personas as Lino Brocka, etc.
No,
gossip and cowardly complaints are not the turf of either women or gays.
BY THE way, where the bamboo used to stand is now a mere molehill of cylindrical bamboo stumps sticking to the ground. Above the fence and the neighbor's roof, a nice view of a nearby mountain.
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Posted at the Bananacue
Republic website 11/23/04. Send comments to:
[email protected]
". . . complaining
about others makes one a respected journalist or a senator deserving of a TV
show while complaining about oneself merely makes one a poet, and therefore
a fool."