Against Involution

There was
what we call "words,"
a lot of language,
syllables,
each syllable made of air.

Then there was
s i l e n c e,
no talk at all,
no more syllables
shaped by living tongues
out of wandering air.

Thus all tongues
slowly talk themsleves
into s i l e n c e.

"Speech"
Carl Sandburg


Last night, Akdang_Bayan (A_B) held its first sA_Bat, that is, the first in a series of discussions that aim to equip its members with the basics. These fundamentals cover an introduction to issues and opportunities in literature and language; the critical triad: class, gender, and race; globalization; the tri-media: film, radio, and print; the new media: digital arts and internet; the marketing of literary products; and other cultural venues.

It began at quarter to four in the Tree House of UP Diliman. Our resource person was Arnold Azurin, a political anthropologist. He wrote Reinventing The Filipino's Sense of Being and Becoming. We discussed the matter of language and its role in nation-building. Several roadblocks were identified. Primary of these was the Tagalog self-conceit that held the national language through the policies that perpetuate and mobilize. The scholarship and literature of the Tagalog writers of Azurin's generation did not have the breadth to encompass the nation. Instead of envisioning the nation through its interregional linkages, the nation was seen only in the wake of the Tagalog's struggle with the colonizers. Now, even freed of the foreign proponents of the Hispanizing drive that built UST and the Americanizng drive that built UP, the educational system still weaves a nation based on an assumption of inferiority of the Filipino vis-a-vis white scholarship and the rest of other Filipino thought-systems and literature to the Tagalog scholarship that studied and expressed only itself as the basis of the nation.

What is the challenge to the writer engaged in nation-building? Write what you know. But move beyond the Tagalog-based linguistic horizon. Know beyond the comfort zones!

There were many points raised. With these, many names were bashed (guess who's on top of the list). We have not yet collated the feedback, but I personally consider it a success. The assumptions A_B members regarding language and its dynamic with literature were provoked sufficiently to raise a number of questions and challenges.

We have long identified this inward spiral that now sucks in the national resources to a coterie promoting their Tagalog. I believe a new attitude and action is rising, the old elements of freethought, yes, but mixed and moving in a different course. The openness is promising. My fear? That this same involution shall infect us. The fact that these machinations have been recognized and vilified at the outset assuages me.

Bienvenido Lumbera is set for a survey of Philippine Literature on the first week of December. My dear hope is that I can get some of my Los Banos students to attend this one.

After the Stars

'Says I to myself' should be the motto of my journal.
It is fatal to the writer to be too much possessed by his thought. Things must lie a little remote to be described.

Henry David Thoreau
November 11, 1851
Diary entry


The student is the teacher after all, having broken the back of his elder. Or, showing it was not a whole spine in the first place, only a high voice and a mastery of radical rhetoric that kept towering appearances. All were grew the double-height and insubstantial, like shadows.

Yesterday, they talked of stars and navigation. Tomorrow, one takes the land route, the other takes the sea. Who will walk the stars? Who has breath and sorrow enough for all the darkness in between? Who has thicker ribs to cage the secrets?

Certainly, the one who left behind his children will regain them. A father will be restored to decide anew if the hunger of his young can nurture him, drive his
spirit on. Or will he need to leave again? These will be his questions, this one who must heal. His surplus of tears will not serve to cleanse him.

The one to who kept his promise shall have the will and wherewithal to lay down a new table. He shall break bread with the few among his adopted, those few he found to have the greater breadth and a longer road within them than their father ever had. Then he shall entrust the table to them, to their father.

He shall not be keeper of the children any longer. He shall not be student of a broken man.

One will retain soil and roots, let this be known. The other shall stretch his legs out to sea.

An Empty Lot Before the Curve

The swath of light climbs up the skyscraper
Around the corners of white prisms and spikes.
The inside torso stands up in a plug of gun-metal.
The shadow struggles to get loose from the light.
Shall I say I'm through and it's no use?
Or have I got another good fight in me?

"Evening Questions"
Carl Sandburg


November eight or nine. A row of resorts will pass, some road, then a funeral parlor, buko pie stands here and there, then come the boiled egg yellow facade of Olivarez. The bus will stop in front of this mall, a gas station where wait the jeeps that will take the curve: UP GATE.

But before this mall, some small buildings before the station, the bus will pass by a vacant lot the size of a classroom. The viridian grass marks a time that I did not even experience, nevertheless it is known to me: the greener days of Los Banos. This lot is the green shadow of rising cement. Off-center, I'll find a tree, short like one of those sidewalk trees, but lush, well-fed by a steady stream of gray carbon. A sign on the tree, and I will read it.

Sometimes it says glass-cutters. Other times, crude advertisements for vulcanizing shops. Once or twice, it spoke of keys and duplications. When I pass, this next time, this first time after five semesters of first times, will I bother to read it? Or will I sleep thirty seconds more and believe that it reads NO VACANCY?

There will be miles in that step from the bus. Too few of them will belong to the coming gate.

No Line

It's not all pretty
Launching a first book
With ten short stories.
I was not hitting

On you after you
Asked how it felt, then
I went, "like running
Around with no clothes

On my ten bodies."
Dripping with dead hair,
Fat, scars, littleness.
No hope of cover,

Just appeal left: please
Please please love at least
One of me? Next day
Forget. I'm a copy

On a shelf. Nothing
Actually stirred there.
"Naked," I answered
You, making no move.

I saw it for the first time to-day! Gadzooks!! This is the only fit ejaculation to explain my amazement! It's a pagan temple with the Gods in the middle and all around various obscure dark figures prostrating themselves in worship.

W. N. P. Barbellion
October 22, 1913
(The British Museum Reading Room)


The Break

(1) Happy Birthday, dear sister. Happy birthday celebrants! Congratulations, dear newlyweds!

(2) Action is the conceit of man, yes, but hide it so that it's okay, like a camouflaged fast. On the other hand, indolence - much more, exalted indolence - leave it to people who feel themselves slouch-worthy like the universe.

(3) Yesterday morning, much to my brother's relief (for we can turn the lights off and he can sleep the sleep of the must), I finished Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes. Goodbye eight hundred pages and many thanks.

(4) I am not fit to teach.

(5) Another baroque offering, so far from the last Fuentes I've read, Diana, which already mentions the creation of the "terrible beauty" by the author cum narrator. A whole 'nother animal than his The Death of Artemio Cruz. The Death and the Land share the same gnostic stripes though. Or the same fertile mother. I imagine Diana as Fuentes's rest before, after, or within the exertion of Terra Nostra.

(5) Pity I only found this out after two and a half years.

(6) Terra Nostra surprises with the reimagination of Don Juan umbilically coiled to Don Quixote, Cervantes to Kafka's Metamorphosis, and the New World's Quetzalcoatl to other such Christs. Much of literature rewritten here. Watch out for Pierre Menard, Jean and Javert, Colonel Buendia, Ariadne, and boys born of she-wolves.

(7) The wasted time of children in classrooms. The wasted children of classrooms, of time.

(8) How's the US of A this time of the year?

(9) Now I know what a black kiss means, thanks to the invention of a Tiberius Caesar that promoted the symbolic cross alongside the sexual slavery of the dwarfed and deformed.

(10) April or May. The last novel I read was the book sent by CBS, Mario Vargas Llosas's Feast of the Goat, the bloody juices shimmered despite the dark glass of the translation. I hope I get to read a novel every vacation. The rest of the time I devote to anthologies of poems, short stories, and plays. CBS, I hope, would be happy to know that the book suffered the leafing of three other pairs of hands: my father's, a co-teacher's, and student's. One of them a lover of Minerva, La Mariposa. One other reading it over her sembreak as a requirement. The last or first just had time on his hands and sat the book on his palm to kick time out like a whipped mongrel.

(11) If you force a vacation on someone, is it still a vacation? If you force a vacation on yourself, is it still a vacation?

(12) Sincere thanks to friends who severed ties. This is the best of all possible worlds when the shoe speaks and proposes to the man how it is unfit. In this case, the women tell me: you are a shoe, you are an overbearing heel, you are unfit. And when they tell me it is a good world, I believe them with all my heart.

(13) Congratulations, dear newlyweds! My sister, happy birthday. My brother, sleep tight.

(14) Gadzooks plus twin exclamation points? The only diarist more pathetic than the author of this abomination is one who would quote that author verbatim.

(15) Never waste a compliment on the vain.

(16) If you force your friendship on someone, is it still a friendship? If man ought to walk around like Plato's Socrates creating quarrels to define friendship: what is love?

(17) How's Singapore this time of the year?

(18) Fuentes discourages me to type one more letter, drop another drop of ink on a sea that will drown itself. The way Fuentes writes a long sentence reminds me of Joaquin. Joaquin reminds me that I ought to write that long sentence writhing, pullulating in my stomach. Cervantes would say the same thing if I listened to him any closer than I could bear him.

(19) Both my chalk and pen belongs to a hand with more fingers and lines.

(20) Congratulations, dear newlyweds! Sixty-what days till Christmas?

(21) My friends, it's a good thing there's more to me than me, there's more to you than you, and there's more to us than a cosmos. Get down and lazy on me! We have all the time in the world! Eat, drink, envy, marry! I'll say goodbye so that tomorrow's a day with one less exclamation point.

Good for Tinig to focus favor Yorac's late smile over Arroyo's living scowl. I have not enough grace for such lessons.

Your Dark Neck

You have a dark neck so still and the rays of the sun are nimble upon it like thieves with golden, futile fingers on heavy opal. You have a neck of black cream and moonlight is white upon it, nibbling like royal rats'teeth on adamantine chocolate. You have a dark neck curved as the cosmos is curved, black as the universe is black, and yielding always and only to the shadow god that once danced for a million years, torso bearing down on toes, toes beneath the beat of celestial music, toes above the heat of coal suns. The knowledge of the curve was thus pounded into the sleep of the earth to be born ages later into the petals of flower, intricacies of pine cone, convolutions of cloud, and into the light-scorning curve of your neck.