Again, in the opening line alone, the tangle of conflicting acts of arrival and departure seems to have been knotted. The statement is almost an oxymoron. If someone who came left quickly, did they come at all? And if they did, they only came to leave. Such is the great paradox of the moment that Ortega recognises and introduces to us again and again. And he continues:

You didn't say A moment!

But in the construction of this line, in writing ‘[y]ou didn’t say A moment!’ he simultaneously contradicts his statement – A moment has already been said! – especially since this phrase – A moment! – was italicised apart from starting with a capital letter and punctuated by an exclamation mark, thereby calling attention to itself. Thus, the succeeding lines ‘though as always, you / and the words are one’ not only seem to be a counter assertion of ‘what has been said’ (of what’s been on the page) but also seem to be an affirmation/amplification of the ‘unsaid’ (of what’s not on the page) in the previous statement.

It may still be added that if ‘you [we] / and the words are one’ – (if we are ‘like starlight’) – then we, as stated earlier in this essay, are markers of time, and to a certain extent, we are ‘moments’. On the one hand, there may no longer need to say A moment! On the other hand, however, we still need to use words – to speak or to write – despite their inadequacy. According to Karmen MacKendrick, in her book Immemorial Silence, ‘to speak or to write is always to speak or write at a time and of a time, to imply some relation between the time of speaking or writing and the time of that of which one speaks or writes’ (6). In this premise, it can be said that speaking or writing always fills the inadequacy of language even though MacKendrick added: ‘Our words will always be wanting. Language is always desiring what language cannot have’ (97). Or in Ortega’s words in the 19th poem in Notes on the Memory of Beauty:

Tungkol sa gunita:
Tungkol sa huling eksena ng pelikula:
Tungkol sa nawawalang pilas ng papel:
Tungkol sa madaling-sabi:

(About the memory:
About the final scene of the film:
About the missing piece of paper:
About what was briefly said:)

Iyan ay kung mapupunan 
ang bawat pagkukulang.

(That is if it can fill
every lack.)

Ortega deliberately omits something after every colon in every line in the first stanza – something that cannot be known about a memory, a last scene of a film, a missing piece of paper, and whatever was briefly uttered – and it would always be arbitrary if the so-called ‘about-ness’ of these things could be given at all – if these ‘can fill / every lack.’ And ‘[if] it is lacking,’ he adds in the penultimate poem in the book, ‘… it does not / last. / It won’t last long.’ Aware of the undeniable inadequacy and impermanence of everything – even memory – Ortega hands us A Few Moments, Merely and Notes on the Memory of Beauty as a testament to his impassioned desire to mark time, i.e., to somehow extend what can be extended, using the language that we can still hold on to even if we can’t rely on it against what relentlessly grows and eventually overcomes us – transience and oblivion.

Marking the Moment: ‘In the Mind’

Ortega continues his trilogy project in Desire. Marking time is also marking the moment. And here, because of his deep interest in the concept and phenomenon of time, he underscores Marx’s ideas in two books about time. He explains his process:

With a PDF copy of the three volumes of Das Kapital and Grundrisse, I derived all instances of the word ‘moment,’ carefully translated into Filipino, based on my understanding of the sentence. (Ortega)

Such derivation can also be considered erasure – erasing what he does not need – and also not (ostensibly) erasure. Says Ortega: ‘Sometimes I think that I didn’t really erase Marx’s words. Like surplus value, I just took the necessary words.’ With this plan, his project can immediately be seen as full of paradoxes and ironies, and conflicting ideas that give it complexity and gravity. In Marxist economics, surplus value is the profit created by workers and which capitalists appropriate for their interests. In this light, Ortega seems to say that in his appropriation of Marx’s texts, he appears to be a capitalist in claiming the work of others. Embedded then in Ortega’s work is a critique of his method, and by extension, of appropriation at large, and an awareness of its danger in the creation of his work. However, he cannot really be considered a capitalist, especially since the result of his appropriation is not entirely for his benefit. What he is promoting in creating this project is quite clear: to be able to express the possibility of the new, both in the art of poetry and in the way in which one lives. He declares:

I have a deep interest in this type of poetry which opens up many possibilities of what can be – the spirit of utopia not as subject or content to reveal the writer’s predictions, knowledge, criticism or political project, but as a force that gives expression to the desires of the community, of oneself as a part of one or many communities – the writing of poetry as an act of creation (building words on the
page; building a world, consciousness, or meaning in the reader’s mind); it is also a way of liberating our fantasies – poetry as a bridge to cross and arrive at the unexpected, the possibility of change. (Ortega)