WHY write at all?

To write is to live. Or is it the other way around? Whether writing is a subject and living, a predicate, or the sentence is structured in some other way, it does not really matter. Writing and living, these two are sides of one reality.

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All men can write, and therefore, can live a life. Living takes so many forms, one entirely distinct from one another. Writing too, except if one is a plagiarist - and that is not writing at all - is unique to every individual.

Just as with living, the passion for writing differs. The zest for life too is unique. God did not create a unique individual by physical appearance. Identical twins can dispute that hypothesis. What makes each man truly different from one another is passion for life.

We can never be the same at the way we look at life. Yes, we too can never be the same in the manner we regard writing.

We all write. Some write letters to their love ones. Others, the juvenile ones, write on the wall. Texting is a form of writing. Even if text messages bastardize not only the English language but even the dialect, still that is writing, a form of communication in the digital world.

Writing is not all about the mastery of the English language, or any language for that matter. Grammarians are not necessarily good writers. The perception of reality, and the intensity and lucidity in the written form in which one communicates to the world makes a writer.

A writer is a keen observer of reality, of people, and of events. For a poet, the falling of a leaf evokes a gamut of expression that only he can describe in a passionate form. The news reporter sees not only the events, but also the interrelation of events. A columnist reads events, not only as a web, but as manifestations of a paradigm.

Writers are usually intense and keen observer of the world around them. That is their gift and at the same time, their curse. Truth comes to them in a blinding and searing light that even if they close their eyes, they see it all around them. They cannot pretend to live without writing about their perception. They suffer a silent agony unless their own eureka finds expression in the written from.

For a writer, living is synonymous with writing. A written piece is a writer’s liberation, and if by consequence society embraces the writer’s version of reality, society is liberated. Jose Rizal could not contain the truth about the oppression of the Indios. His Noli Me Tangere was not only the liberation of the Indios but his too.

Don’t ask a writer why he writes. That would be asking why he lives and breathes at all.

Don’t dare ask my fellow columnist here Manny Valdehuesa why he writes assiduously about the need to go back to the barangay. That is his eureka. And if he writes with stinging words about our absentee vice-mayor that is one truth that he cannot keep to himself, or else, he would puke without end.

Don’t ask me too why I write.

I remember writing and editing The Crusader, the official student publication of Xavier University. Every time I read the old issues of the paper, the passion to oust the dictator is always relived all-over again. There was no way one could not write about martial law then.

When Jun Bustamante invited me to do column writing in Southern Tribune, the heart leaped. The opportunity to harp on the evils of dictatorship multiplied.

Much later, after the political quite that followed the martial law storm, writing for the Peryodiko Mindanao which was published by Sonny Guillena, was more of a routine. It was a time when Cory Aquino was granted a honeymoon with the media. Without my notice, the political pen was without ink, and I could not even recall how I ended my stint with that newspaper.

When the grim picture of society beckons a writer, writing is as natural as continuing to live.

How can one be silent amid the global climate change, of a morally- bankrupt government, of the immediate threat to the city due to the massive mining along the riverbanks and the watershed areas, and of arrogant display of power by the absentee vice-mayor?

To not write about all these is to die, to cease living. (email comments to tiburciopalasan@palasanlaw.com)