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2003-05-12 - 8:49 p.m. A Tribute to the Reader (for Rizal) To the Reader, all men are open books. Women, understandably, are only half open, but for the most part, depending on light penetrability and the angle in which they are held, still legible. The Reader begins by examining hairstyle—this tells him whether the text of what he is reading is written in cursive or script. Bald people are written in shorthand. This graphological information, however, is sometimes useful, and most often not. Foreheads are read like the spines of books—for the title, but more importantly, for the tell-tale signs of wear. Logically, the greater the number of wrinkles, the thicker the book. On some people this stigmata is not indicative of the girth of the book, but how many hands it has passed through; in other words, how much they have suffered. The Reader does not have the gift of prophecy; he merely reads people—their endings and the future plot of their lives are beyond the scope of his powers. But there are those people who happen to be read with great predictability. Much like monthly magazines which rotate unvarying articles, only by different writers and in different arrangements of words: the cyclical worlds of fashion and politics, the generic deja vus of horoscopes and advice columns, the carousels of gossip and stock markets. Over time, the Reader finds himself engaging in the habits of a librarian. He classifies. Executives look like self-help books. Students appear as textbooks, but most as vandalised textbooks whose pencilled graffiti reveal more than the printed text. Housewives are cookbooks, letters from overseas children, and religious books, or rather, underlined passages from religious pamphlets. Factory workers—the Communist Manifesto, but the censored version, since the Reader after all lives in Singapore. Secretaries are romance novels, whose contents are more florid and more preposterous in inverse proportion to the monotony of their dictated notes. The pervert has dog ears, and the criminal those of a wolf’s. There is no refuge to be taken in grooming—stockings, ties, bangles and hairclips are unable to throw shadows onto the exposed words of open books, or rather, distract the Reader’s eyes with their glittering. The Reader penetrates through such deceptions. He reads such people as copy-written text for advertising, which traffic in the stereotypes of Success, and Wealth, and Youth. There are times when the Reader encounters difficulty reading people. This is the equivalent of one stumbling onto foreign words in a book. How do you read someone with a scar at the back of her ear, with eleven raffia strips tied around his wrist, as if they once held the keys to eleven birdcages, who sings lines from a Cantonese opera (memorised from a transistor radio) in a crowded train, who reads an upside-down newspaper in a bus (even if it turns out he was only reading the solutions to a crossword puzzle)? At times like these, the Reader mutters to himself, ‘There are many things in this world that are untranslatable…’, but not with despair, but humility. The question that has often been asked is, ‘Is it possible then for us to read the Reader?’ Those who have met the Reader can testify that there is a striking way in which he dresses, with his corduroy pants, and red shoes, and T-shirts with arcane slogans and images. He keeps his hair long, sometimes let free in the imitation of some animist living on one of the unnamed islands of the archipelago, sometimes tied at the back like one of those masterless and unemployed samurai known as the ronin. He also keeps a moustache, and wears a pair of sunglasses once belonging to his friend’s mother--even at night. His gait is sly; a mirage on two legs. Of the various names that the Reader has collected, we shall mention only two extremes, ‘pseudo-intellectual’ and ‘urban shaman’. And perhaps another one, which cannot decide on which extreme it wants to be on: 'the Reader'. The answer: yes, it is possible to read the Reader. As a matter of fact, he seduces responses from even the most indifferent around him. He receives curious glances and disapproving stares; distances widen, faces are averted. And this is the Reader’s secret to reading other people. In those moments, the books around him find their spines suddenly bent, their pages offered for more intense scrutiny. For the Reader knows that delivering judgement does not mean that one gains invulnerability—on the contrary, we betray ourselves at that very moment, and reveal the deepest seams of our insecurities.
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