And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

My memories of last week remain bittersweet. My family and I celebrated my son Manuel's 3rd birthday while I, along with so many others, mourned the passing of a dear friend, Alexis Tioseco. I recall, with some wistfulness, how I used to dismiss the juxtaposition of the beautiful with the ugly as both being opportunities to encounter grace. Of course, this was before I encountered the heartbreak, and the frightening numbness that accompanies a sudden, tragic loss. Now, I long for the days when I could explain loss away so easily.

Fortunately, many people, braver and wiser than I, of varying persuasions and with varying degrees of success, have tried to make sense of the senseless.

Paul Dumol wrote:

What is clear right now is that his death has reinforced something we also experienced only recently, with the death of that other person who lived in his neighborhood: The power of ideas, the power of example. Alexis was not a political person, although he graciously agreed to organize a lunch in which I made a PowerPoint presentation to Lav and Khavn and Sherad about my analysis of what our society is going through. Nika was in that lunch, sick, but she was listening, more intently I thought than Alexis. With time she might have made him political. The idea that movies, good movies, reveal to us what it means to be human—and Alexis was, if anything, a humanist; he was no ideologue—this is something Alexis believed in, as you might see in four movies he introduced me to and are now among my favorites: In the Mood for Love, Amores perros, Yi Yi, and Bresson’s Au hasard, Balthazar. He loved these movies for the same thing he loved in Lav’s movies and the same thing he looked for in Southeast Asian independent films. Thank you for that, Alexis, because art revitalizes, and every time I watch these films and experience the grace which art brings, I will be thankful for your persuasive enthusiasm. Thank you, above all, for demonstrating with your own life what you loved most in film: the difficult art of being human, how to be kind and generous and respectful and cheerful and honest and hardworking and friendly to all without, it seems to me, exception.

And Philip Peckson shared:

From Kit Kwe:

This is from a chat with Alexis on yahoo. This is one of Alexis's favorite passages from his beloved John Berger. It could've been talking about his beloved Nika.

alexistioseco 11/30/08 2:55 AM
can i share with you the opening and closing of "and our faces, my heart, brief as photos"?

alexistioseco
11/30/08 2:58 AM
"What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your left ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough."

alexistioseco 11/30/08 2:59 AM
These are the first and last words of the book. The rest speaks of all that lies between these two.

But it remains for ordinary people like myself, betrayed by the inability of either the spoken or written word to provide consolation that can mute or redact grief, to move on the only way we know how.

Requiescat in pace, dear friend. I will be at mass later. If anyone else wishes to remember Alexis, kindly drop by Santuario de San Antonio, Forbes Park, Makati City, later at 6 pm.