Still, Life
New essay on Guernica, the value of rest, and the many names of mystery
Last July, I was invited by photographer Veejay Villafranca to collaborate on a piece with him for Guernica. Though we had only briefly met many years ago through a close friend of my father, this isn’t the first time our work has appeared together. I had the honor of writing a poem for his first photobook SIGNOS (Mapa Books, 2017), a stunning documentation of the displacement of thousands of Filipinos after Typhoon Yolanda, one of the most powerful storms on record, hit the Visayas region. The poem felt like a creative extension of my research interest, as I was writing my thesis on the same subject matter that year.
This time, our project zooms into a specific impact of this displacement: human trafficking, especially of women and children, in the wake of climate-related disaster. The essay is now live.
On the night of the August blue supermoon, I began to feel the first signs of a rising fever: the shivers, the ache in the limbs, the ebbing glow of a not-quite-there headache. It was the kind of unwell that I figured I could simply sleep off. True enough, I felt well enough to go to work the next day, though there continued to be a heaviness I couldn’t shake off, and a warmth I blamed on the relentless Texas heat.
On Friday morning, I woke up at 5 o’clock, shivering, unsure if I should still head to the gym. I entertained the possibility that it was just a particularly cold morning, but when I couldn’t get warm despite putting on more clothes, I finally determined I had a fever. My temperature seemed to rise with the sun, and by nine I could barely stand up from a dizzying migraine. After going back-and-forth with myself an embarrassing number of times, I called in sick to work.
I was cocooned under two blankets all day. Next to me were my medicines and a jug of water I struggled to constantly refill. I could do nothing but drift in and out of a sweaty, uncomfortable sleep as I waited for the fever to break. I could barely even eat. Because of all the sleep I got that day, I was so worried I would be up all night—insomnia terrifies me—but that evening I had the most restful sleep. Completely dreamless. My body seemed to need the rest.
I was well enough to work from home the day after—I normally work Saturdays—but it took a few days for me to fully recover. The migraine lingered for a while, and slowly other symptoms started showing up: colds, dry cough, fatigue.
It was fatigue I struggled with the most. I was frustrated with still feeling weak and unable to do much work despite already being “well”. The better part of me that knew I was rushing recovery, that I was being unfairly demanding to my body, had to constantly resist the “you need to be productive now!” programming I’ve internalized. I would force myself to a blank page and try to write, or register for the next morning’s gym class despite still feeling exhausted. In the end, I had to surrender to my need for more rest. I’d close my laptop, cancel my reservation, and try to quiet my mind as lie I down.
Exercising kindness towards myself is an ongoing practice, and I am relieved, despite the dissonance, that I was able to extend myself some grace. Now, I feel recovered. I am grateful to have been sick, a necessary process to strengthen one’s immunity, and to have had the strength and time to recover from it. I try not to think in terms of being “back to normal”, so instead I say, I feel strong again today. Tomorrow may be different. For now, gratitude for a clear head and even breath.
In writing the essay for Guernica, I surprised myself with a revelation about my own values as a reader and writer. The issue of human trafficking exacerbated by climate-related disaster is a subject that requires sensitive handling, and I was very careful about writing with clarity without reducing the issue’s complexity. How could I, when the roots of the issue go deep, beyond climate?
In the process, I realized that I am averse to reading about certainty. More often than not, certainty bores me, though well-landed statements can be thrilling, even if they leave a sharp taste of suspicion in my mouth. Such strong, blunt statements can feel authoritarian to me, especially when it comes to matters of incredible complexity. Any creative work that ends so clearly with x causes y—especially if it comes with warnings of imminent doom or a prelude of “they don’t want you to know this”—immediately raises red flags.
Instead, I am drawn to mystery. To that which we do not know, know little about, and may never know. The idea of the unknown excites me far more than the idea of knowing it. (Whether we can live on another planet is an interesting thought exercise, but I cannot relate to the desire to spend resources actually trying it out.) In retrospect, I have always been drawn to mystery, though I’ve called it different names over the years: dark matter (my favorite topic in my high school physics class), the immaterial (“The immaterial has become immaterial,” says Lord Beckett in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End), the sublime (Edmund Burke’s “the terrible uncertainty of the thing described”), the liminal (scattered all over literary theory, this was one of the concepts behind The Mangrove project Kirsten and I made in 2020), crossroads (from a keen interest in the Greek goddess Hekate). Now, simply, mystery. It explains, too, my fixation on water, an element symbolic of the sublime.
Carl Phillips writes: “To acknowledge limits to what we can know about a thing—to acknowledge mystery—is not, to my mind, an admission of defeat by mystery but instead a show of respect for it, and to this extent—I mean this as secularly as possible—it’s a form of faith.” Faith is a word I had avoided for many years that I now seem to find in every decision I make these days.
An intermission: I’m giddy about my name being on the same Recent Winners announcement page as Carl Phillips, whose Then the War: And Selected Poems won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. I read the book in one sitting at the Austin Central Library last year when I first arrived in Texas.
I recognize that the line between this penchant for mystery and ideological agnosticism is thin—but it is there. My values are clear to me, but I like to think that I continue to make space for surprise: there are so many things I do not know, and I want to remain open to the possibility of being wrong, to find the humility to accept even that which feels threatening. Easier said than done, like many things, but absolutely necessary.
Mystery is how I sustain conviction in what I believe in. How I test its foundations and trace its outlines, its limits. Belief that has become stagnant—religion without self-reflection, ideology that fails to change with its context—is dangerous. Emily Dickinson puts it beautifully: “On subjects of which we know nothing...we both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble.” Surrounded by mystery, may we both practice this lightness of feet.
"They say we are sinking, that the waters are rising to swallow our homes whole, but the sea has spat out the bones of our villages a thousand and one times and the frog has, all the while, been in the pot over the fire." Re-read your piece today. And wept inside. Please keep reflecting and writing.