Thursday, November 24, 2005
Yap: Chalk
By Januar Yap
Meanwhile
SO, I figured, like rubber bands and crayons, the lowly chalk had gone into mitosis of brand names. Just like religion and politics, they pluralize.
To chalk, however, you never really pay much attention. They come in raw carton packages, like bullet cartridges the bespectacled terrorist brings into our classroom.
Now I find myself barefoot on the planet called chalk. “For the first time, I’m buying chalk,” I said. “Congratulations, sir,” a voice from third row says.
In the store, they come in an array of cartridges labeled “yellow,” “white,” “assorted.” Writing the word “postmodernism” in blue perhaps looks good. “One morning, lacking black, one of us used blue. Impressionism was born,” said the French painter Pierre Auguste Renoir.
I chose the white cartridge anyway. “Dada means nothing,” the poet Tristan Tzara declared. Sorry, in maters of chalk and blackboard, I’m sort of Victorian.
“Still, a great deal of light falls on everything,” said Vincent Van Gogh. In the room where I said it was the incendiary “Little Boy” on Hiroshima that bore a hole in which postmodernism was born, the sun is ruthless.
“How can that be, sir?” The A-bomb, along with Holocaust, altered the modern man’s consciousness, I said. This university encourages liberal thinking, thanks to a dean that had Jacques Derrida for a postgrad mentor. Suddenly, I remembered the Coen Brothers’ film “Barton Fink” where the furious salesman burns the building as he screams “The life of the mind! The life of the mind!”
It’s a whole new milieu, coming from the press where I worked for almost a decade. It’s as rowdy as the newsroom. And though still in the business of conveying news, the academe however dishes them out rather differently. Fine dining, somewhat. Journalism is eat-all-you-can.
I have a view of the city from my classroom window.
(November 24, 2005 issue)
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