40 blue shadows

On Akat, Akat Revisited, Re:Visions, and Another Place


Irma Lacorte’s current solo exhibit is presented by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts . It will run until July 31 at the NCCA Gallery, Intramuros, Manila.

For now, let us believe that the act of an epic is to preserve, to carry farm produce, trinkets, magical pets, vats of dye, and rolls of fabric aboard the same story. Our elders wanted to keep it together, we are told, to each its proper place, every detail as if charged with command:

                    Let there be light

                    As on heaven so on earth

                    Eat the world

                    Still life

So we take and keep, and what we can’t preserve we transform into something not fully tangible, something that might yet outlive us. How do we keep such non-things in? How do we leave an inkling of something to the next carriers, to those destined to find some other yet unforeseen use for it? And what if the notion is to multiply, “scatter”?

Irma Lacorte comes to us now with four of her exhibits, cut portions of her creative prime, her decades of making, gifts from walking about among under shades of violet and yellow ochre, swimming in blue, breathing out variants of white. Her Akat and Akat Revisited play on the T’boli word for scatter, and while one celebrates land and wind, the other invites water.

And water pervades my way of looking at it: Irma doesn’t take the word “akat,” she takes to it—as Rilke once took to the phrase “nature morte”. Heroines and heroes of creation myths would behold the leaf and name it “leaf,” and when millennia after we invented bound pages, it was as if we could not think of any other word. Perhaps even back then, while envisioning contracts and narratives, we also saw how these leaves torn from their contexts would take flight.

In Re:Visions, a partial gloss was placed over previous compositions to extend and renew the tale, maybe even change it, push the thought off the weathered groove. But there is no abandoning the old meter: though limned, the original make might yet be traced through the new membrane. Life is cut and layered in a variety of modes—dried petals and a flower print cut-out drift toward a silhouette abloom, and alongside them dart fragments of anthologies (“anthology,” from the Greek for “bouquet”)—across the sprawl of a sheet that was perhaps not done saying something else.

We have followed the chant from lake to sea, the artist from hilltop to her far shore. But Another Place takes us to the root of it, the wild vision all of a sudden grounded, as if children unraveling from crawl to walk, or fingers held high, but steady, to gather wind, and at the base of it, the hidden decay, decomposition informing composition, this old, irremediable striving, the pain beholding itself, hoping to exhume some pattern, the expectation itself painful: and maybe—receiving nothing, hearing no whisper, finding no opportunity—we are brought to latch, finally, onto beauty.

Notes on Lima’s “Bright Blue Self-Portrait”

I thank the spiders’ webs and the circus dancers who stain our eyes with
Rapid movements and authorize our handcuffs to make no distinction
Between night and day or love and hate.
No one will know the sum of our arduous daily separations from bed to

Work. These pillars actually belong to you since I have not counted them
Or know any more than you do where they are or in what country they
Still exist. We can put all our concerns into a loaf of bread and French
Kisses, go to movies and watch the splashing milk on the screen imitate

The forest in the moonlight. Why all the fuss about the patrons becoming
Feathers, discharging their ideas of nobility on the evening news? There
Are no lights in the theater just soft snow from the balcony that is the
Little red schoolhouse where all this began.

Actually it was because of you I did not attend as often as I should have.
I was too embarrassed to face you across the clay modeling tables since I
Always felt like the clay in your hands was a cartoon version of my teen
Years, dear slippery-fish ladies of the sleepy west.

Don’t forget, my early life will be yours, too,
With its self-descriptions of poetic justice,
The tiny creatures we write about can describe themselves in the moss
We leave behind.

*

[ Poetry Foundation ]

*

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D— Curious that the pillars are marked “these” and thus would have been close at hand, within view and maybe touch, but then the tail of the sentence denies knowledge of location. Maybe “these” because it’s in the mind, or on the table in a conversation. Or is it because they are still there somehow, his supports or foundations, but he also has no access or continued awareness of them?

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D— Inability to cope would indeed explain the discontinuities. Maybe some of these pieces belong together though. Could the theater (or schoolhouse) be housing the pillars? But if so, why would “these” be uncountable? The darkness? And since it’s the theater, might that (slightly) account for the shifting country/ies?

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D— And your word “faded”... could it be a set of photographs? That would multiply a single set of pillars. In which case, what is he handing over? The pillars, the pictures, or the memories (which could also be unreliable)?

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D— Another take on the pillars. One of the theories about the origin of the $ sign is that it was derived from the Pillars of Hercules. That might account for “counted” and for the insane mobility of these pillars.

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D— Also, the possibility that Lima might be addressing his child-self. But these lines—

Don’t forget, my early life will be yours, too,
With its self-descriptions of poetic justice,

These may point us to him in the act addressing his future self. Another thread-inspired possibility: he might be addressing his ideal self.

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D— I thought this self-portrait had some parallels with Rilke’s (I pasted Lowell’s translation below). Blue is here too, inside the eyes, as if a portrait within a portrait. Perhaps Lima is figuring himself as that scared blue child? The “opening animal” here is a beast of burden, but in Lima we have the spider, and tiny creatures toward the end. In both there is a sense of being controlled by external (but internalized) forces (in Rilke, the figure of the mule, the idea of servitude, of speech kept in; in Lima the handcuffs and “No one will know the sum of our arduous daily separations from bed to / Work.”)

Self-Portrait 

The bone-build of the eyebrows has a mule’s
or Pole’s noble and narrow steadfastness.
A scared blue child is peering through the eyes.
and there’s a kind of weakness, not a fool’s,
yet womanish––the gaze of one who serves.
The mouth is just a mouth . . . untidy curves,
quite unpersuasive, yet it says its yes,
when forced to act.  The forehead cannot frown
and likes the shade of dumbly looking down. 

A still life, nature morte––hardly a whole!
It has done nothing worked through or alive,
in spite of pain, in spite of comforting . . .
Out of this distant and disordered thing
something in earnest labors to unroll.

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D— There’s a theater, so maybe the “I thank” is like an acceptance speech (gone awry, berserk, or... interesting). Now if the “I thank” came from the schoolhouse, then maybe this a valedictory.

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D—  I thank the spiders’ webs and the circus dancers who stain our eyes with

And “stain” here would have been an easy substitute for “strain” and it did cause quite a strain whenever I come to read it, wondering if it’s a typo. Could there be others? If so, I’m thinking of “fathers” here:

Feathers, discharging their ideas of nobility on the evening news? There

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D— Maybe there’s a hint of clay tablets in “clay modeling tables”? And if we’re entertaining Moses, other ancient expressions of law and order, then, those really are for modelling.

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D— The West usually locate their exotica in the East. Edward Said built his discourse on Orientalism on that ground. The East is also known to have been characterized as “sleepy” say, “Sleeping Giant” as opposed to what might be a Western self-image of we have less resources, bitter weather, but we are untiring and industrious. There seems to be a reversal of these things here. The sirens, Odysseus, are at home, not far off in some uncharted land that have yet to taste your brand of clever.

Or, overreading in the morning. Have a nice day everyone.

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D— Food is Lima’s specialty, so that’s perfect context for his majors and minors in the fourth stanza of “Felonies and Arias of the Heart”. Remembering Corman now, and marking this movement toward “you” that begins at the third stanza.

I very much like the last stanza, would like to hug it, make a pillow out of his pieces of paper, the candor of a poet saying yes, you know, I’m doing this to make an impression on you, I’m throwing in some flashy history too, dear reader, forever desirous of your love and attention, signed.

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Sipi mula sa Briefe an einen jungen Dichter

ni Rainer Maria Rilke
aking salin

Ngayon (sapagkat sinabi mong gusto mo ng payo) nagsusumamo ako sa iyo na tigil-tigilan mo ang ganyang uri ng kilos. Tumitingin ka sa labas, at iyan ang pinakamahalagang iwasan sa lahat. Walang sinumang makapagbibigay sa iyo ng payo o tulong—wala. Isa lamang ang maaari mong gawin. Pumaloob ka sa iyong sarili...

Sipi mula sa Briefe an einen jungen Dichter

ni Rainer Maria Rilke
aking salin

...mahalin mo ang iyong pag-iisa at subukang awitin ang idinudulot nitong kirot. Sapagkat silang malalapit sa iyo ay napakalayo... at ipinapakita nitong nagsisimula nang lumawak ang espasyo sa iyong paligid... ikagalak ang iyong pag-unlad, kung saan syempre wala kang maaaring isama, at maging mapagtimpi sa mga hindi nakasasabay sa iyo; panatilihin ang iyong katiwasayan at kapanatagan ng loob sa harap nila at huwag mo silang pahirapan ng iyong mga alinlangan at huwag mo silang takutin ng iyong pananampalataya o kaligayahan...