There will be days when he must wonder if anyone is reading this. Writing like all art is such an isolative and isolating enterprise. And it has been told, writers should really just concentrate on the writing instead of worrying too much about things like readership or whether or not the majority of people agree with what he writes.
But today the writing is caught inside the mad rush of life. And the writer worries if he is still writing as well as he should. All these naturally lead to some amount of insecurity. An angst even, which makes this piece seem like some message that figuratively he rolls into a bottle for casting out into the sea.
And so he imagines his bottle drift slowly with the tide finally landing on your shore, figuratively your breakfast table, with the morning coffee. It is Sunday he presumes. You will be relaxed. He will be working by this hour setting up the stands he designed for the show “Dinhi ug Didto”. This show opens at the garden square beside the building which houses the offices of Cebu Holdings, near Ayala Mall, 5 p.m. this Wednesday, January 16, 2013, near the start of the first year after the world as we knew it ended. You and he will have a good morning.
The stands he designed are like installation. But perhaps you might not even see it. It will hold large scale prints of photographs by Raul Arambulo. They are cityscape photos which sets Cebu against other cities of the world. These sit in a field of outdoor sculpture by Raymund L. Fernandez. Estela Ocampo-Fernandez curates this show. She designs as well the exhibit itself.
But the stands themselves are design objects and they work best by being visually unobstrusive. They would rather be judged by how effectively they do their function using the least material at the least cost. These form part of their beauty.
(In this sense they are like sculpture and the act of writing especially such things as messages in bottles. They too require the most utter simplicity and brevity. No material should be wasted to vanity. Not one word left on the page which does not serve function and purpose. No time wasted for mere embellishment.)
But they must if they work lead to the most fundamental questions: Why? How? And for what ultimate purpose?
And then this irony. The works must speak for themselves requiring no apology, no explanation. They must be cypher containing already the code for their own reading. The viewer and the reader must answer all these questions by themselves.
And so he imagines in his mind these words arriving on you wherever you are and whatever it is you are doing at this exact moment in time. You are reading this. That much is certain. And he would rather have you drinking coffee. Most likely so he can cast you in a way much like him when he wrote this and in a way that devalues his own sense of isolation. He makes you real for him if only in his mind. But even so, he cannot command what the words say to you. He can only romance your reading. Beyond that, nothing more. All are entirely up to you.
And you might open this particular bottle and with your thinnest littlest finger pull out the roll of paper inside. And you might already guess what the words say. All messages inside bottles are invitations. They say almost always the same things: This is me. This is where I will be on this particular time and place. If you would find it in your heart to find me, that will be good. And we both might enjoy each other inside a small moment of time and place.
“Dinhi ug Didto” is not hard to find. It is open always for you for this Wednesday afternoon and for a full month thereafter.