You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September 2008.
1.
An Urgent Matter
When Gelacio Guillermo gave me a print-out of the blog of a certain Eugene Gloria, whom he said was a much awarded Fil-Am poet in Chicago (a “virtuoso,” an admirer wrote), I was puzzled & amused by the left-handed spiel of the guy who would “not apologize for the poem [“To Gelacio Guillermo in Iowa City”], but only for misspelling your name.” He reasons out “poetry,” after all, “is not journalism nor is it meant to be taken as memoir or biography,” being “clearly a work of fiction.”
In the fashion of a formalist aesthete that reminds one of a smug Villa reclining on the couch on a Free Press cover in the ’60s, he offers mockingly peace: “As a poet (and I hope you can empathize since you are a poet yourself) my allegiance is only to the poem.”
(If Gelacio does not play along, it’s his own look-out.)
Gloria however admits Gelacio is the persona in the poem he playfully “fictionalized” as having renounced the revolution, even pursuing his fantasy (historization as his own creative permutation, much like God would invent the cosmos according to his whim) that the guy “joined the CPP-NPA forces in the guerilla fronts,” when in fact, according to Guillermo, the “idea did not yet exist, there was enough movement work to keep me in Manila, at the same time trying to help my family survive the most difficult years of martial law.”
But Gloria wouldn’t hear of that, preferring his historical invention culled from “snippets of stories I pried together from friends at UP – not about you exactly but based on the other poets who traveled to Iowa or at the prestigious Bellagio Residency in Italy.”
(In brief, his allegiance is to himself, not to factualized history.)
Gelacio had become both his idol & bete noir, an iconic index of all writers who have had cosmopolitan exposure/connection but who eventually tired of singing commitment blues, betrayed the revolution, which Guillermo protested “as nothing more preposterous, although for some former revolutionaries who did/do renounce, their betrayal can be rewarding.”
Gloria must be running around with a writerly hood given to pursuit of radical chic & grants that would spark their prodigious explosion in the American market.
Gloria had probably in mind his fellow workshoppers who would spike their texts with ethnic Filipino exoticism & filiation that would allow minority discourse researchers to put them under their radar, so to speak.
Is this the imperative of Fil-Am writing? Making use of tribal ethos & valorizing the drift toward the counterrevolutionary? Identification & skin color are not enough for one to speak on behalf of a country that simply serves as reference point.
Gelacio a virtual apostate?
Gloria wouldn’t apologize for his infantile gaffe. He thinks he’s self-sufficient, in the name of art, with a capital A.
He doesn’t get it.
2.
October in Manila
“October in Manila” is a most celebratory line by Nick Joaquin, which also underwrites his essay on “La Naval” that gained him acclamation from religious, middleclass readers of literature. The lauding of the miracle, done in a hispanically ornate flourish of Joaquin in English, would also be symptomatic of his approach to history, for he implied that the Dutch defeat had saved the archipelago from another colonizer – somewhat suppressing the thematics that Spanish colonization was a blessed one. Some cynics would however quip that it would have been a fate better than the slave’s anxiety: Manila would have been spared the monsoon flood, given the Dutch expertise in dike engineering. (Ha-ha.)
It is not bizarre nor surprising that Joaquin as historian would find Bonifacio a hot-headed rascal who failed miserably to unite the Katipunan factions (he was arrogant, couldn’t hack the ilustrado lieutenants of Aguinaldo who stacked the odds in his Cavitismo favor, anyway).
His ideological blind spot would surely affect his reading – despite his colorful narration of what he deemed as having expired in the meeting, his ideologemes nevertheless got it in the way.
Simply, he was an ilustrado peeping through the hole on the wall of history.
(October, alas, is a repetition, like a song that triggers old sentiments & old philosophies.
The second-time around, after all, is always the nth time, like this text which repeats itself, as if for the first time.)
3.
Aka Houdini
Strangely
his father
was too damn slow,
as if taken willy-nilly
by family blood,
to teach him
the tricks of the trade –
the magical secrets
that make roses
bloom in his hands,
eggs appear
behind his ears,
pigeons fly out
of his big hands
& colorful scarves
knot up
an infinite rope
to haul down the sky.
When he finally
without word or warning
executed his famous
Houdini act,
he was most enthralled
yet terribly lost
for whenever he floundered
like fish on the rocks
he’d reel him in,
a lion with his cub.
Yet when she
sauntered beyond the hills
limned by orange sunlight,
abracadabra & voila!
would turn
glass splinters
in his mouth.
4.
Tempus
A.
(For her, who never existed)
Pete Daroy,
scholar & historian
was wont to miss
informal appointments
with coterie of friends –
he’s a day earlier
or several hours late
but nobody
would dare complain,
even talk
about the weather…
He was, they argue,
like that
& would always be
forgiving.
Now he understands
the ways of older men:
they must be preoccupied
not with today
but tomorrow,
watching their bodies
like somebody else’s,
truly marveling
like a lover before
a stone Aphrodite
how it could stand
the season’s brutal weather.
When he looked
into her eyes
he’d be gazing at
all of her recent summers
& the distance of years…
They would eventually
disremember
the encounter at the woods,
then diverging
like sullen strangers.
All the raging & passion
die in October
when leaves fall
& tears break out
like sudden rain in May.
B.
Fugit
He was frowning
when he sneaked
a glance at the mentor
gazing at his blind side:
was it strange pain
sizzling down his spine
like nerve pinched
by laser eyes?
The prof had remarked
something about something
he never quite grasped,
something in reference to him
who was slow to wave
because awkwardly
or by design
anonymous in the crowd.
Now, it finally dawned
how confident he was then
when disease had not yet
ravaged his blood –
O it took an old man
seeing him
what he once was,
brooding over his youth
going down the drain,
so vulnerably helpless
against time & the elements.
At their time,
passion is an accidental
concern
for nowhere is she
in sight,
remember?
1.
Amnesia
They virtually buried the news about activists in their teens who perished unknown on & after September 21, except for the Inquirer who had it front-paged.
The exhibit, mounted by Felisa Supapo, who was inspired by the Holocaust Museum in the US, featured the available faces of the martyr. Photos, collated from families, were hard to come by because the pictures would be burned lest these serve as IDs & end up in “soldier’s hands.” “Sketches took the place of some non-existent pictures, as in the case of Macli-ing Dulag, a Kalinga leader.”
If not for the ideological will to remember, the dead would have passed into oblivion among the present generation: only their immediate families seek to perpetuate their memory. But what if their kinfolks didn’t wish to be reminded of the heartaches of the past?
We can always deny the past & postulate, as in David Hume’s paradox that “the problem of the past is not a problem for the simple reason that the past does not exist” [in the sense] that “the content of the past – its nature, its priorities and problems – is determined by the character of a particular ideological form.”
It comes to us as text, devoid of flesh & blood, the fear & the trembling that would rouse us to immediate action, even weeping.
The writing of history [itself] reduces “artifacts, washing list, court rolls, kitchen middens, memoirs” [& in the Philippine context, “Father Nilo Valerio, Jr.’s favorite striped T-shirt, the one he was wearing when he and community organizers Resteta Fernandez and Soledad Salvador were beheaded by soldiers in Bakun, Benguet on August 24, 1985… the compilation of propaganda songs by student activist Ishmael Quimpo”] but “are converted into texts,” which “constituted as text by its reading, is at the mercy of this reading. Far from working on the past, the ostensible object of history, historical knowledge works on a body of text.”
Thus so saying, remembering is a matter of interpreting texts produced by the writing of history.
Taken on various ideological modes, the death of martyrs is either celebrated or dismissed.
Should all the witnesses come to pass, who will eventually remember their deeds for posterity?
Every generation concerns itself with its own existential moment & recuperation – to look at the martyrs with the same reading of their context is an exercise in futility.
It is on this premise that history repeats itself because lessons of the past are never known, much less heeded.
When it happens, the recurrence of an event that is a shadow of itself, an autonomous one despite alleged similitude, it is too late for forewarning.
2.
Balance
When Queenie Sicangco Padilla, eldest daughter of Robin Padilla, a Muslim convert, “joined a relief operation in war-afflicted areas in Mindanao, on behalf of her father, to distribute relief goods of the Liwanag ng Kapayapaan Foundation, Inc.,” she observed “evacuees were milling around as if trying to pick up whatever bit of food that they might set eyes on. But there was no food that we could see.”
However, she understood the “near pandemonium when some of the evacuees started climbing into the truck, grabbing some of the food packs and throwing these to their kin in haste. But they could not be blamed for that. They were too hungry to wait.”
It is this brutish desperation of the poor that would lead her to remark: “Why despite the war there is such glitter at Rockwell, Eastwood, and many other places for the rich, who spend large amounts of money for expensive food, clothes, cars, cell phones and many more luxurious things?”
The Calvinistic ethic by a young Muslim would surely never be the concern of those who fanatically pull the carriage of the Black Nazarene at Quiapo, even the zombie-celebrators of the Virgin of Peñafrancia. The Christian faith has, by & large, stayed insulated from the plight of Southeners whose image has been reduced to the plundering banditry of fanatics & self-styled Koran raiders.
How would we judge these events that transpire like atavism that is never exorcised?
Only if, in the injunction of Fredric Jameson, we “convey the sense of a hermeneutic relationship to the past which is able to grasp its own present as history only on condition it manages to keep the idea of the future, and of radical and utopian transformation, alive.”
What we practice now is partial response to the sedimented mode of production that rules/defines the past – equally a harbinger of how we have preempted the verdict of the future that hovers like a black angel upon our acts.
How shall the children of the future view us?
With fascination?
With respect?
Or with smoldering loathing that nullifies our claim to civilized history?
Between living well & dying badly, what is the balancing act?
3.
Mediations
Gelacio Guillermo’s “Party Policy in Revolutionary Literature” is clear in its conception of what literature “essentially” is:
“Policies on the basic line – forces, program, tactics, and strategy, socialist perspective – of the people’s democratic revolution, methods of work, organizational principles and the ideological leadership of the proletariat are the lifeblood of the Communist Party of the Philippines and all other organizations under its leadership. Only through the implementation of those policies can the party achieve its historic mission under the present circumstance of US imperialist domination of the country’s political, economic and cultural life through its surrogates among the big comprador bourgeois and landlord classes, and form these proceed to its socialist project.”
The ideological praxiology is traced to Lenin’s answer to “Economists… who are muddled by questions of the relations between the ‘material’ (spontaneous) elements of the movement and the ‘ideologist’ (conscious, operating according to plan).”
Explains he: “An ideologist is worthy of the name only when he precedes the spontaneous movement, points out the road and organizational questions which the ‘material elements’ of the movement spontaneously encounter… One must view (the material elements) critically, one must be able to point out the dangers and defects of spontaneity and to elevate it to the level of consciousness.”
But this is not a signal for the party to dictate the minute trajectory of ecriture.
Guillermo admits (being conscious of historical precedents) “policies, even those emanating from the highest levels of leadership, are not always right, and it takes practice (lasting for months or even years) and internal party struggles to prove them wrong… (which in concurrent literature are depicted).”
Yet in this wise, Maoism is vilified in the West. But for an obvious reason. “In an attempt,” says Jameson, “to Stalinize and discredit [it] and the experience of the Chinese cultural revolution – now rewritten as another Gulag to the East – all of this, make no mistake about it, is part and parcel of the larges attempt to trash the ’60s generally.”
For the decade saw also Sartre theorizing on engagement, “a political aesthetics” that is premised on “interpersonal relations… the dimension of alienation in my ‘being-for-other-people’,” but his Critique failed to complete “the projected highway that was to have led from the individual subject of existential experience all the way to fully constituted social classes.”
Many a bohemian radical subscribed to this existential project, but the literary production harped on the anarchistic, so much so that the ‘60s would see Nick Joaquin’s “Candido’s Apocalypse” stylize rupture as adolescent guilt, even metaphysizing the class discourse in “The Portrait of the Artist.” The existential bog trapped so many aspiring writers, & their thematics have survived to this day in their concentric & formalist poetics.
The narrative has symbolically been running in circles, like a snake devouring its tail.
Neferti Tadiar, in her unpublished response to Guillermo’s lecture on revolutionary literature in 1999 however warns against the problematique engendered by “the relations between aesthetics and politics.”
Says she: “While the function of culture is most evident in the use of literature as a tool of consciousness-raising and education… which means understanding the analyses of the historical situation as articulated in the principles of and strategies of warfare… political struggle is, of course, based on an analysis of the mode of production… the problem of base-and-superstructure comes in.”
“Generally… the theory sees literature as having largely an illustrative role (underscoring mine), the way in which the revolutionary forces and the masses are organized.”
“Revolutionary culture,” Tadiar suggests, “consists of practices of culture which are reappropriated (in effect, ‘freed’) from the social relations of production… and these are completely autonomous systems of domination.”
Tadiar reminds that the internal contradiction in the spheres of domination is a practice in itself, which must be interrogated, as it were, lest the generalizing construct opens to “unforeseen” error. The strategic & tactical plan must naturally anticipate potential/theoretical fall-out.
She resonates Jameson’s political space that resulted from revolutionary praxis of the ’60s, & which the movement seemed to have a blind spot of: “a rhetorical shift, a whole new political space, a space which will come to be articulated by the slogan ‘the personal is political,’ and into which – in once if most stunning & unforeseeable of historical turns – the women’s movement will triumphantly move at the end of the decade, building a Yenan of a new unpredictable kind of which is still impregnable at the present moment.”
For her part, Tadiar posits “the constitution of labor through dynamics of gender and sexuality… It is for this reason [the most commodifiable forms of labor today bear gendered, sexualized and racialized characteristic] that Marxists and particularly the cultural theorists of the movement must engage in dialogue with feminists and theorists of sexuality and race…”
Did Guillermo miss out specifically on this? It could be assumed this is part of the package, but his text is enveloped in tactics & stratagems on what could be mistaken as “masculinist” textual strain.
Yes, there was the brief on Lorena Barros, but her exemplum pivoted on “defending an artificial mass base in the mountains,” regretfully pursuing an error (individual or party?).
Tadiar, of course, implies stressing on equal terms a feminist perspective in the movement inasmuch as “it is living labor, an activity of mediation, as the creative practices of people which are continuously expropriated from them in through the processes of objectification, but which they continuously invent as part of their struggle against their exploitation and objectification.”
Here, instrumental reason is an issue, which implicates pragmatism & historicism. Both must however ultimately confront “the nightmare of history, whose form is rather the fact of labor itself, and the intolerable spectacle of the backbreaking millennial toil of millions of people from the earlier moments of history (Jameson).”
The notion of party literature consequently is the relations of labor & capital, where work is the writing itself, & for what benefit labor must exert itself is the revolutionary distillation that attends Guillermo’s tract on the praxis of the text.
Nadine Gordimer settles the notion of literature & politics with an ironic twist: “For when have writers not lived in time of political conflict?”
Definitely, the polarities interpenetrate each other, just as form & content do not exist separately. Each has an ideological dimension & complement each oppositional “nature” to create a polyphonic meaning.
Of course, there are different modes of engagement/partisanship, & this is best exemplified by the debate in South Africa at the time of apartheid, where censorship by the white state had cost lives & fortunes: “between those who, perceiving that the cost was the constraint of the writers’ imaginative powers within what was seen narrowly as relevant to the political struggle, think that the time has come for writers to release themselves if they are to be imaginatively equal to the fullness of human life predicated for the future, and others who believe literature must be perceived as a weapon in the hands and other the direction of the liberation movement come to future in a future democracy.”
Gordimer is certain about her function: “As a citizen, a South African actively opposed to racism all my life and a supporter and now member of the African National Congress [underscoring mine], in my conduct and my actions, I have submitted voluntarily and with self-respect to the liberation movement.”
[There seems to be no quarrel here with Guillermo’s mode of ecriture.]
Relatedly, Tel Quel, the French philosophico-literary journal “in the late ’60s… sought a political interlocutor – in the form of a collective movement or party – for its program of cultural renewal, defined, on the one hand, by the latest theoretical advances in semiotics, philosophy and psychoanalysis, and, on the other, by the ‘poetic revolutions’ of the 19th and 20th century avant-gardes.”
The magazine consequently allied with the French Communist Party (PCF). In May 1968, the year of the infamous student uprising in Paris, “it would seek to articulate its theory of practice in terms of class struggle… adopting a Marxist theory not only to formulate a materialist conception of the literary text and its subject, but also to associate its scriptural theory and cultural practice with class struggle.”
But the alliance would prove rocky. It criticized, in accordance with the PCF Stalinist position, the revolt “as the petit bourgeois contestation of the students that had been substituted for the class struggle.” The PCF, after all, is heir to the revisionist notion especially in literature as “a reflection of the real, art subordinate to politics, and intellectual activity as a function of militantism.”
The separation of culture from politics – given Tel Quel’s fetish for theorizing – would be temporarily sutured by Althusser, who “showed that Marxism would be comfortably synthesized with the structuralist recasting and with such disciplines as semiotics and psychoanalysis.”
The honeymoon with Leninism was short-lived, as per Tel Quel’s direction. For Sartre, the May movement was an index that intellectuals had been denied the role – so cherished by Tel Quel bureaucrats – of “leading the masses.”
Sartre himself would be a figure of the guru descending the streets, microphone in hand, distributing manifesto – plagued as his postwar generation was with “guilty conscience.”
But for Tel Quel, “there was no need for it: the writers’ raison d’etre was in his or her writing.” Though it “warded off the perils of May,… it continued to defend the revolutionary specificity of its own work, which did not take to the streets.”
It presumed, on Althusser’s axiomatic, that “it could separate its avant-garde work from party politics and still claim, in good faith, to resonate its work with class struggle.”
Theory & practice diverging on the road to utopia did not however dampen Tel Quel’s enthusiasm for the Chinese Cultural Revolution, only later to be convinced, in the words of Kristeva, that “Mao, poet and writer, was the most faithfully modern version of essential Taoism… It was classical China, dressed in the worker’s blue suit of socialism that we had gone to find.”
To wit, for Danielle Marx-Scouras, “it was the distinction between theory and politics that permitted Tel Quel to abandon the PCF for the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and, finally, Marxism and politics altogether.”
Of course, the aforemention is the historical legacy of polemics in the West, but it undeniably would have a ripple effect on Philippine literary exchanges. But the fact that the culturati face a blank wall, as it were, on party literature, the virtual other of the canon hereabouts, only affirms the hegemonic diktat of cliques that willfully marginalize the Marxist hermeneutics, which however makes for its secret allure.
O let a hundred flowers bloom.
4.
Adjustment
Way back in Naujan, a poor peasant would bundle himself up into the size of a small table in the corner of hut to be able to sleep listlessly into the night.
Today, housewives pride themselves with “their sawdust stoves in Sikatville, Muntinlupa City,” to save on fuel because “LPG and kerosene have soared beyond their reach.”
“Savings derived from the improvised stove are used for basic necessities, especially food.”
Transport drivers would put the squeeze on commuters who are hard put themselves to put up with domestic expenses; the pecking order of small guys bearing down on smaller punks has become the order of the day.
Adjusting to the price-hike, blind to resistance to the logic of multinational capitalism, results in the small fry breaking into a smile over, for instance, the brisk sale of charcoal & wood which would ultimately lead to deforestation. Community organizers, thralled to the principle of making do with what is given, have succumbed to this mode of survival, as if poverty is a metaphysical curse, even man-made & visited on the unwary by monopolists & investment bankers.
Capitalism is premised on laissez-faire or euphemistically the play of market forces that even out, but when the US got whacked by subprime losses & default, President Bush had to change his tune.
He had finally admitted that “the federal government should interfere in ‘the marketplace only when necessary,’ but given the precarious state of today’s financial markets, and their vital importance to the American people, government intervention is not only warranted; it is essential.”
This is a socialist mechanism within capitalism that is finally employed in the name of balancing the market.
Here, GMA stubbornly holds on to the deregulation bill for the simple expedience that the VAT adds a windfall to the national coffer, which prevents the regime from cutting the people some slack.
The bits & pieces of advice on how to cope with the crises are virtually agit-props for multinational untouchability which is enabled by a strong military frontline that augurs badly for any transition to egalitarian politics.
There is calculated madness in governance.
But only a few see through the charade.
Do we deserve our masses?
Is pacifism devoutly to be wished?
5.
Editorial
Trust an editorial writer for a broadsheet to defend capitalism the while bushwhacking “the routed forces of communism, and even fascist thinking, who were the only ones celebrating: toasting and boasting what they proclaimed to be a vindication of Marx, glorying in the bloodbath of Wall Street and other great bourses of the world.”
He was talking about the Depression of the ’30s, & in effect the crisis of Wall Street that was triggered by the monumental failure of Lehman Brothers.
Marxists are fascists? Gloating over the poor driven out of their mortgaged houses? The hungry & the jobless?
The masses screwed by a system they had placed their faith in?
A Marxist and a revolutionary, to boot, is compelled to act not by force of anger but by love & compassion. Would they laugh at the misfortune of others, as in Shaudenfreude?
His ideological boorishness shows. The Freudian slip is most telling.
At any rate, in the context of Ernest Mandel’s “account,” for instance, of the recent “worldwide crisis of 1974,” (a virtual recession technically) “he draws on a far more controversial conception of vaster cycles of some thirty- to fifty-year periods each – cycles are then much more difficult to perceive experientially or ‘phenomenologically’ insofar as they transcend the rhythms and limits of the biological life of the individual.”
[Mandel is simply theorizing about the boom-bust cycle that attend the capitalist system, inhering in the very philosophy of overproduction.]
“These ‘Kondratiev waves’ (named after the Soviet economist who hypothesized them) have… been renewed four times since the 18th century, and are characterized by quantum leaps in the technology of production, which enable decisive increases in the rate of profit generally, until at length the advantages of the new production processes have been exposed and exhausted and the cycle therewith comes to an end (From a reading by Jameson of Mandel’s Late Capitalism).”
Or when the bubble bursts, as business jargon goes, & Reaganomics finally comes to a stop: “the boom [having] started from 1940 in North America and the post-war period in the other imperialist countries,” the economic decline in 1973-1974 sent the signal “that the dynamics of this latest ‘long wave’ are spent.”
2008, & it took years for the downtrend to make itself dramatically visible: the rapacity of investment bankers to risk people’s money in their schemes to rake in profits that would take a worker several lifetimes, if at all, to amass.
Yes, the crunch took indeed a long time coming.
It is not the “fear that paralyzes the market” that in turn crushes it: it is greed of Wall Street to hype returns on investment via the very mechanism of capitalism that they zealously secure.
It is Hegelian where the will to succeed & bail out companies will turn things right; it is materialist economics that showed money flowing out without necessary collateral from homeowners that started the meltdown.
Marx saw the inequity of the systemic forces, not the fantasy of Horatio Algers which brokers cultivate, in populist imagination, as if capitalism were mystically ordained.
Why flog communists when the blame lies with those overpaid CEOs, lobbyists & politicians in the interstices of Washington?
6.
News Report
“She forgot
her piggy bank
of loose coins
& went back
to retrieve it
when an ‘artillery round
slammed home.’
She & her unborn child
were killed
in an eternity of a second.
But the soldiers averred
they were collateral
damage
in an operation
against the MILF rogues,
washing their hands
clean
of the episode.
& the six children
strafed by a fighter plane
as they fled the
battle site?
Their mother
was offered P10,000
by a “military officer”
but she had disappeared
allegedly ‘showing
disturbing behavior’.”
He read the news –
including the President
in New York –
while sipping coffee
in a morning
of overcast skies
& dry secret tears.
1.
Misprision
The room
is an archivist’s
nightmare:
books & papers
piled up
everywhichway –
on the bed
& under,
stacked against
the wall
& spilling over
to the door,
as if to brag
to the curious
& the jaded
he’s a virtual nerd
who has scrounged
around the corners
of the mind
the truth & untruth
in every Kabbala
of the word.
But when she flew
for nowhere
never to return –
she left no number –
it dawned
on him
he’s nearly blind
to anything
read
up close.
2.
Somewhere
He is a somewhere man,
always
never at the X site
but only at X1,
slightly off
the target center,
sideways
of here & there
like when he presumes
he knows
what she’s saying,
but his facts
betray the confidence:
she remonstrates
it’s not what
she’s grievously telling,
never the heart
of anything at all.
So when she leaves
the table,
he sits nailed
to his chair,
alleged victim
of the affair.
He holds on
to his beer
like Socrates
to his poisonous grail.
No one will
of course
weep
over this sordid play.
3.
Shot
He keeps
his nose close
to the grindstone,
hoping his craft
of words
is in exact
mathematical precision
to relay
his interpellations.
He’s wary
of reckless explosions
that make for
collateral implications:
words are bullets
that should hit the mark.
Always he strives
for a perfect clean shot
that however
doesn’t draw blood
but the target
falls down
not knowing why.
He is a pro.
He prides himself
with the expertise
other guys
shoddily claim.
But the gun
has its own agendum:
it backfires
now & then.
It could be fatal
if it happens.
Words
are exploding grenades
& offer
no apologies
to the executioner
& the victim.
4.
Stranger
He’s off to work
in a distant country.
He’s told of his immense
possibility –
that’s the scuttlebutt
of his neighborhood gang
who showed up
with gold necklaces
like amulets.
But it’s a one-shot deal:
they pick out stories
to tell over whiskey
& chaser.
He’s gonna take the plunge,
just the same.
Time is wasted
shooting the breeze
where the ocean is so far away.
When he flies back
there will the glint
in his eyes
& observers will be slow
to note the reason why.
He’s packing his bags again
this time with nary a smile
if he’ll ever return.
5.
Resolve
The jukebox
crazily insults
his ears
when it croons
“When will
I see you again?”
She’s gone, gone, gone
like water
flushed down
the toilet bowl.
It’s the final dot
but the vinyl
keeps on humming
like a knife
in his heart
corkscrewing.
But the drunkards
around him
grouse,
O he’ll get used
to the pain.
Eventually
it won’t hurt,
he’ll get back
to his old game.
6.
Respite
He’s been stuck
in his room for days,
as if hiding
from the gremlins
of the world
who are everywhere.
Is he writing
his brief memoirs?
Is he relishing
the moments
of being totally alone,
a straggler
marooned on an island,
& there’s no human voice
to interrupt
his secret meditation?
But when he comes out
like a refugee
from nightmare,
he stares blankly
at the wall:
it’s just as if
he had never left,
he’s nowhere to go,
he’s got no choice
but to damn
the torpedoes:
he cannot allow
to simply coast along,
be carried like
a useless stone
by the current
of the ruling buffoons.
That must have been
the mantra
of a revelation;
like Jesus
before the execution.
7.
Forever
She’s still praying
for her beloved husband
who died ahead of her.
“Sulking in his tent,”
a younger sibling teases.
She won’t go abroad,
preferring the reliquaries
of him
who was her everything –
He who is her
pure, solitary memory,
& she but his empty shell.
“She’s digging her own grave,”
a sister confides,
exasperated & impatient
with her overextended
grief.
To mourn is true, expected,
proper
but her whole lifetime?
“She should live for others,
too.
Her soul companion
is not the whole of mankind,”
she mutters.
8.
Posterity
He cannot understand –
although Michelet does –
why “the nameless
generations of human lives
must vanish without
a trace”
& be forever from history
erased,
not even a mention
if their names
from familial roster
to pivot in the telling
in barrios & the cities
time has dustily forgotten:
It dawns on him
as he scans
newspaper & internet
where figures
in multiply & friendster
appear & disappear
like insects.
& what about his stuff?
It won’t matter,
poetry will stand
like memorial tablet
crumbling in the wind.
& she,
who had ravaged his heart
like an infernal omen,
would just as well
stay in faceless silence.
What are tears for then?
The secret longing?
The constant waiting
of loss & gain?
O We are all heir
to eternal wasting,
the constant extinguishing.
9.
a.
Prole
At the crack of dawn
she’s already at it:
sweeping the leaves & debris
off the street,
raking them into her plastic bag,
then moving on
to the other side of the strip,
almost in rhythmic monotone.
She takes a break
for a minute or two
& resumes the repetitive toil
when leaves drift down again
& she looks back
at the cyclic ruination
of her place –
her place which isn’t hers
at all,
but an allocated space
decreed by her function.
Every hour of every day
of every year of every century
she is there
until she “melts into air”
or turns into dust
that her kind will in turn
bury away.
& she thinks
she lives in dignity
of a real life
of what the Bible decrees.
O She’s no more than
the ghost of brutal memory
that time records
for no eternity.
b.
Imagined epitaph at the paupers’ cemetery:
Here lies a street sweeper from MMDA
who thought she lived with dignity,
never dreaming that for centuries
she had lived the nightmare of history.
She never did really exist at all:
she was only felt like the air,
but authorities solemnly swore by her
to actualize their hypervalued power.
10.
Winner
They finally get it
straight from the horse’s mouth:
Yes, she’s no big deal anymore.
He swears she was the plague
he got over with.
But, somehow, they see through
the stratagem:
a psychic offensive,
a defensive maneuver
of some fool
who survived near-death experiences,
explaining a cure.
Wasn’t it not too long ago
that his knees buckled under?
He was putty, as the cliché goes.
Yet he claims
he’s his own man now
& wary of the consequence
of falling for someone
who doesn’t give a damn.
(He does not connect,
it’s all that really counts.)
This is shit, they conclude.
He’s just jiving.
When he vomits
like a drunken bozo,
they smile
he’s the first casualty
of the internal setto.
11.
Magic
Failing to comprehend
the world in all its studied complexity,
the idiot turns to necromancy
along the line of psychic energy
that opens doors
to the fourth dimension:
Is it possible
for a heart to resurrect?
Is healing a semiotic balance
between yang & yin?
Is it dignified
for the occult message
to reach the hunted
in strategic retreat?
Are centuries
of truth & fantasy
behind the surreal dream?
But the gypsy admits
she faces the blank wall
that foretells
none
of the answers
he wishes for…
Does her cryptic smile
veil a truth that may devastate
or clear a message
to inner reprieve?
The idiot blinks:
even the third eye
is blind
to the fata morgana in the air.
12.
Old Song
People
won’t even
talk about it
in his presence:
it’s all money stuff
& he’s just a furniture
at the sala
to be familiarly ignored.
Money, money, money
makes puny men
emperors of shoebox realms
but he’s got only
a few pennies
not even worth
a cone of ice cream.
In feudal lore,
a peon in cheap clothes
conscripted to serve
the King
whose pedigreed women
are allotted to ministers
with holified schemes.
Vice & virtue
have each a price
in gold or silver
but he’s small change, alas,
to humanly matter.
His soul is peddled
by stock traders.
But who’s buying?
13.
Weatherman
The weather’s
trapped
between partly cloudy
& isolated rainshower.
Intermittently
the idiot manages
to amble down the road
with his folding umbrella
& denim jacket
to keep out the cold.
It’s always been
that way
since childhood –
the glass is ever half-empty.
When they flash a smile
he is slow
to be consolate.
It must be the genes,
he rues,
he can’t be light,
a sun in winter,
like any other guy.
He avers
with false expertise & air
he’s in the cusp of history:
the working class
is in disarray
to even line up.
O There’s no waking
the cats
lazing at the veranda:
it’s been
the best times of their lives.
14.
Warning
Wall Street
is falling down,
falling down
& capital
is going the way
of toilet bowls.
& you & I
are gripped
by evening
“etherized like a patient
upon the table.”
Proles are out in the streets –
catatonic,
psycho wrecks
flashing knives
& yellow teeth…
But didn’t Lenin
warn a century ago:
no one listened
but for little prophets
in marble crypts…
What’s there to do?
You & I
must wake up
never putting faith
in a helpless God
who has changed residence
in a somewhere universe.
The old world,
is spinning fast –
we’re too damn hypnotized
by the turning gyre
to see
clean bombs
falling.
15.
Proposition
Amphetamine
is the patron saint
with sampaguita
he garlands
at the rearview mirror:
he can’t do
without its blessings
to keep him wide-eyed
24 hours without pissing.
But the gas price
rises like a geyser,
his tank level
drops like his jaw
& he,
sitting stonily
behind the wheel,
broods,
ears split by radio,
how things should add up
to a comfort zone
that has long proved
elusive.
There is the grey
of the horizon:
& he has been driving
like crazy
since truant days.
But nothing
has changed.
If he had only a gun…
Kids had whispered
it’s no brainer,
never even a wild whim.
16.
The People’s Poet
They were aghast
at the way the bunch
was detained
as subversives,
who were farmers
out on a ride
to their legal headquarters.
That was the alpha
of the malevolent ordeal.
Handcuffed, beaten
to confess
what the captors
in fatigue
had wanted to hear
so mission
could be, sir, accomplished.
Their loved ones would spend
days & nights
menacled to the same grief
as if they themselves were
in the dark, fearful cells
that might mark
an unknown death.
It took a long long time
to edge in their counterclaim.
& When the court
cut them a slack,
admitting
they had no blood on their
hands,
the poet of the group
had already written a volume
about his violated
solitude.
His kinsmen bannered his texts
like some omega of truth
but really,
they had presumed
those were chords
of their own, muted voices
in a humongous
prisonhouse
that is the world.
A.
Back to the Womb
Christopher K. Travis, an architectural designer, has for his staff “a neuropsychologist and a chemical psychologist advising him” to promote his “method” in utilizing “an exhaustive psychological and aesthetic compatibility exercises for would-be homebuilders” that make for a dwelling that is not so much “bricks and sticks” but a “suite of emotional experiences.”
An expansive mansion is not necessarily an edifice that defines the perfect house; it is something that fits the psychological needs of the owner for a livable space.
Travis’s so-called psychological profiling of clientele allows early childhood memories to interplay with the project – the “layout and décor” of the space merely signifies “the story of a house [which] is the story of a life.”
“But interpreting that story is not just a science but an art.”
Buying a house is never shopping around for a simple roof over one’s head: the looking for the holy grail, as it were, starts from the womb – the design, the materials, the space of the habitat must complement the desire that is virtually DNA-embedded in the psyche. City dwellers, of course, who have had rural origins, would be unexplainably ill at ease in high-rise condominium in a crowded site, no matter how the initial comforts are – there’s something that the “soul” seems to subliminally dictate, or as Carlos Castañeda, mescal shaman of the hip ’60s, would put it, one must find his/her seat of “power” in any site (a room, a street, or whatever) for that sense of assurance, invincibility.
One views the quaint arrangement of the chairs, the opening of the windows, the temper of light that filters in, the foliage outside the room, the sound of trees & human voices, the quality of silence with visual & emotional conduct of a surveyor – all the living elements that rule the atavism of déjà vu.
This is not being bourgeoisly fastidious, but obeying the suggestions of the unconscious that stress the painful & the pleasurable.
(The townhouse he lives in is comparatively pleasant, but he always feels something is amiss… while the economic vise contains choices, he can only sigh for that distant time when a house was sun, ocean & the noises of children wildly playing in the streets.
& Grandma’s banana fritters in a light, breezy afternoon.)
B.
Four-footed Emperor
When Kayenne curls up on the sala chair as if it were his imperial throne – his & his alone, he feels the ambience of peace & well-being in the domicile.
His languorous pacing of the ground floor & his mellow intransigence when strangers butt in (in his meatloaf stance, he would silently eye the visitors like a gunslinger), are indices of his guardmanship in a house he virtually claims for himself & we his housemates are merely friendly interlopers. We let him rule, in honor of animals in the world.
Once perturbed by human voices, he would briefly stretch his legs from his sleeping position, turn his bark toward the recalcitrant murmur, as if to purr, “Jesus, let me be.” Where he wakes up, he looks straight into your eyes as he sits at your feet, waiting for a caress on his nape, & for the pellets to drop down his empty bowl. He’s a sanguine observer of table protocol, & you wish all the humans outside the garage were all civilized.
What is there in animals that cushions the brutality of everyday life as overwhelmingly absolute?
Their eyes tell all: gentle, somnolent, you wonder how through the centuries they have survived the insensitivity & barbarity of cannibalistic humanity.
Loyal they are when humans turn deceitful & grossly traitorous.
Faithful to a fault & most forgiving, when lovers only have their heavy hands & averted scowl to effect inhuman affection.
“In Norway,” according to Dr. Raffy R. Castillo, “there is a farm clinic where horses and other farm animals are used to assist in the treatment of mental disorders such as depression, excessive anxiety and even frank psychosis.”
Moreover, “children who were abused or neglected or had undergone traumatic experiences find release of their fears and mental anguish as they communicate these emotions to their pet animals, which ‘never tire’ of listening to their human friends.”
In Spain, a vagrant’s dog would wait for his master, staying outside the ward every evening, never knowing that the old guy had passed away. Hospital personnel, moved by his dogged attachment, would take turns feeding him.
Times, indeed, when lowly animals tug at your heart & make you dew-eyed – never humans who come, who go like the wind.
C.
Gold Rush, Russian Style
“There is a land rush in rural Russia,” & “huge fund managers, Russian oligarchs, and even a descendant of White Russian émigré nobility” are leading buyers of collective farms, reputedly “among the most fertile on earth.”
Russia, moreover, “has millions of acres of untouched, pristine land that would be used for agriculture” – & the “new companies dedicated to breaking up and reforming collective farms hope to bring huge tracts of land into production – tracts that can take advantage of the economics of scale.”
Michael Orloff, a “former director of the Carlyle Group’s Moscow office and the scion of a White Russian noble family “has a factory farm from outside Podlesmy – formerly the Sunrise of Communism collective farm… His model rested on the idea that the collective farms should not be broken up into smaller plots” [note that during Yeltsin’s time, collective farms “devolved into small holdings, which failed”] “but consolidated into larger factory farms, able to achieve economics of scale” which “he calls new corporate farm ‘clusters’.”
[This is similar to San Miguel’s project for Sumilao farmers, where land would subsequently be integrated into the corporate plan, as initially proposed. Individual farming would entail capital outlays & inputs which the farmers only as pure labor cannot provide.]
“Though many investors are piling up their investments” at the moment “remain small relative to the size of the huge agricultural sector.” But the idea of opening up Russia to foreign capitalism marks an uptrend in “socialist” thinking, when once collectivism under the umbrella of the state, locally generated capital itself, was the raison d’etre in Lenin’s time to disenfranchise the kulaks who subsequently rose in revolt. Remember the Hollywood film “Taras Bulba” & Sholokhov’s “And Quietly Flows the Don”?
But how did this happen in the land the international plenum envisioned as the possibility of the future?
Does it still shock the orthodox left & the progressive militants that the unexpected, like the Guinness world of shocking developments, would happen like Putin, a KGB agent in the mould of the discredited Beria, becoming President?
Zizek, in his “Georg Lukacs as the Philosopher of Leninism,” traces it to that time “when Soviet philosophy assumed the form of ‘dialectical materialism’ as the legitimizing ideology of ‘Really Existing Socialism’ – one of the signs of the gradual rise of Thermidorean Soviet orthodoxy… that elaborated general laws which can then be applied to either natural or to social phenomena” [Remember the fallacies in poetry that would compare human societies to the simplified hierarchy of ants? Villa would even celebrate this natural, instinctual phenomenon as complementary to social organizations]… thus depriv[ing] [diamat] of its directly engaged, practical revolutionary attitude and the turn[ing] it into a general epistemological theory dealing with the universal laws of scientific knowledge.”
Consequently, the ramifications in theorizing on the “triple syllogistic mediation of History, the proletariat and the party” resulted [during Stalin’s time] in “the third element of the triumvirate (the Party)” as the “reference to History… in order to legitimate its actual domination over and exploitation of the working class, that is to provide opportunistic pragmatic Party decisions with a kind of ‘ontological cover’.”
In this wise, the likes of Zinoviev, “in his famous intervention at the Congress… afforded himself a rabble-rousing and anti-intellectualist attack on the ‘ultra-leftist deviations’ of Lukacs, Korsch, and other ‘professors’ [whom he] rejected as ‘revisioni[sts]’.”
Zizek would satirize the fact that “Soviet workers were awakened early in the morning by music from loudspeakers” [note that in Japan, zaibatsus would organize a singing of the national anthem before work] “playing the first chords of the International” [we sing Bayang Magiliw at ceremonies, even when regimes fall short of mass expectations & themselves ideologically & pragmatically divisive] whose words are, “Arise, you prisoners of work!” is granted a deeper meaning: the ultimate truth of the pathetic original meaning of these words (‘Resist, break the chain that constrain you and reach for freedom’) turns out to its literal meaning, the call to tired workers, ‘Get up, slaves, and start working for us, the Party nomenklatura’.”
The task, in this regard, according to Alain Badiou, as quoted by Zizek, is to “think the necessity of the passage from Leninism to Stalinism without denying the tremendous potential of the Event of October” i.e., without falling into “the old liberal babble of the ‘totalitarian’ potential of radical emancipatory politics.”
[Note the French revolution analogy, where reactionaries decry revolutions to supposedly devour their own children, thus batting for a discursive impasse – & the marginalization of any revolutionary act. The Edsa event is even peddled as the failure of change, which can never be achieved because, as pacifists in Menshevik clothing say, violence breeds violence: & always the new reverts to the old.]
Zizek supplements that “the challenges to be faced here is… while conceding that the rise of Stalinism was the inherent result of the Leninist revolutionary logic, not the result of some particular corruptive influence, like the ‘Russian backwardness’ or the ‘Asiatic ideological stand of the masses,’ one should nonetheless stick to a concrete analysis of the logic of political processes and, at any price, avoid recourse to some immediate quasi-anthropological or philosophical general notion like ‘instrumental reason’.”
The Minister of Agriculture, Aleksey Gordeyev, boasts that Russia “before the Russian Revolution and the subsequent forced collectivization of farming under Stalin, it was the largest grain-exporting nation in the world.”
In its drive for global diplomacy & subliminal yearning for the empire, Marx & Lenin are turned on their heads.
The Revolution unleashed the power of the Russian masses: to deny the history of emancipation is to affirm the orthodox Party line that has gone the way of capitalist West & governance in the mould of the Czar.
D.
September 11
So it is said, September 11 “is no longer yesterday but not yet history… There is an unmistakable distance now. No one speaks of the ‘new normal’ anymore. All these things are just normal.”
If the observers at the gates of Auschwitz had a longer time watching the trains pull up at the camps, they would in due time be catatonically inured to the ghastly spectacle that, in ordinary times, would have been hair-raising: behind their backyards scores of Jews are being gassed, their skin converted into lampshades, their false teeth & spectacles melted for whatever they were worth.
It would have been just any day at the office.
Human suffering, even in extreme form, can be devastatingly banal & we tend to look the other way: For instance, at the airport where it has become surveillance standard “to slip off your shoes, buy zip-top bags for liquids and gels” & turn worrywart if a beard grows on your face. Shaving creams – & there is no consumption statistics – must have made a killing these days.
(Filipinos, like any race, get accustomed to fascism, which they wouldn’t know if living inside it, anyway. The daily microrealities set up our daily acceptance even of the most arguably perverse practice.)
Big Brother is watching no longer passes for bizarre comedy; it is the farce of the epoch especially in cities where the poor live in hovels because America has extended its paranoia over potential enemies to the outpost of empire. When Washington sneezes, Manila gets flu.
(The “ripple effect” of the bombing would see a student working on his dissertation be held in England for downloading from the State Department website the manual on terrorism by Al-Qaeda. He was released days later without any charges filed against him.)
But should we ride the bandwagon?
Political pundits essay that warnings had been flashed as early as decades ago when Pentagon launched their little secret wars in the globe – & when they got it right at their doorsteps, Washington went on a road-rage, as it were.
In Manila, the inevitable is asked: What are those Yankees doing in Mindanao, anyway?
They are not without their first-line defenders: “They are not involved in combat,” shares Filipino & American officials, but Prof. Octavio Dinampo of Mindanao State University would “cite a case this year where… a US spy plane provided directions to Filipino ground troops conducting operations against Moro rebels.”
The public is bound to believe the apologists: after all, the MILF tends to shoots its foot, after the MOA imbroglio: photos of field commanders like Bravo & Kato looking like FPJ movie villains hardly endear them to the misinformed media viewers.
However, the question – real & relevant – remains: Will American troopers stay forever, making the South their base of operations against the “Asiatic hordes?”
With a compliant autocrat like GMA futilely running after McCain & Obama, we know the telltale answer.
E.
Old Bard
He doesn’t know
how the festschrift
of his
for a mass of faces
will turn out,
he muses,
but for sure
it’s a farewell to all that,
his voice
edging toward a crack
of laughter.
There will be
the batch original
of lament & exultation
plus the community
of comradely translations.
He doesn’t intend, though,
to add a line
to what he had said
before:
the truth of peasants
& workers
who do battle
& complete
his cycle of lives:
will it be
on the eve of martial rule
or in December
when the Party celebrates?
He has marked
the final dot
to a hypothetical return
to words
that must rise like a Phoenix
to incarnate
what has long been foretold.
F.
Prospect
He grouses
about the future
as if it were
history’s grand design
when the working class
finally wises up
to the usual bum steer:
whatever it has become
to mean
for young bucks
& oldtimers.
Isn’t it bad poetry, sir?
The kid on the block
ripostes,
grinning from ear to ear,
as if to cushion
a deadly attack.
But he gamely
brushes it aside,
having done
with generational put-downs.
Hobbling back to his room
suffused with evening lights,
he gropes blindly
through his cataract.
O For a voice, a hand
to guide his arthritic steps
to where he can see
tomorrow,
like her elemental beauty,
up close.
He ain’t ready yet
to give up the holy ghost
of the original cause.
G.
Caveat
Duke Bagulaya, in his forthcoming second book, Philippine Literature and its Critics: A Critical Introduction to Literary Criticism, writes that the “most involvement that [Salvador P.] Lopez had [with the left] was a few outings to Mount Arayat with the Lava brothers, Don Pedro Abad Santos and Luis Taruc, all belong[ing] to the Socialist Party.”
Lopez, then a well-known figure in Philippine letters, had “call[ed] for the creation of a ‘Proletarian Literature’ and cite[d] definitions of literature not from Soviet writers, but from US writers whose views had nothing to do with proletarian literature,” especially Ludwig Levinson, whose general mantra is “the interpretation of the experience of the working class in a world that has been rendered doubly dynamic by its struggles.”
But for Philip Rahv, in his Essays on Literature & Politics, 1932-1971, the controversy regarding the matter is “not the connection between art and politics and between art and society… but primarily its specific political history which explained proletarian literature.”
He adds: “It is impossible, in my opinion, to understand the development of literature, its rise and fall” [particularly in the West after Stalin] “without understanding its relation to the Communist Party.”
It was during the Depression “when suffering imposed on the bulk of the population [in America] by the economic crisis elevated the ‘common man’ to a martyrdom that almost overnight integrated him into the sympathies of the literary artist.”
So overwhelming was the juggernaut of their doctrine that in the words of Tom Wolfe, “The Marxist fable of the ‘capitalists’ and the ‘bourgeoisie oppressing the masses’ – the ‘proletariat’ took hold even among intellectuals who were anti-Marxists.”
It was in this context, the Philippines being a satellite of US imperialism & consequently suffering like fate, that Lopez saw his opening. He “grew up in the countryside,” according to Bagulaya, & “must have known the wretched condition of the peasantry.” He was “writing when sporadic peasant revolts were exploding in Central Luzon.”
His quarrel with Villa is a classic case of class differentiation. His partisan position was however premised on the liberal tradition of art being a “living force” that “cannot be separated from the life of the society.”
He definitely wasn’t into the contradiction that attends the class struggle, eliding the potential for violence in his call for the aesthetic shift in direction.
It was not his métier to view the context in terms of capitalist accumulation of surplus value that perpetuates the divide; he merely worked/articulated within the parameters of colonial discourse that playfully allowed local literary theorists to argue over form & content. But the Communist Party, which set up such imperative, had by this time a ready-made, although Stalinist, blueprint for the literary offensive. (Of course, the totalitarian party bureaucracy eventually collapsed in the West, but the debate on literature & politics still resonates until now in the Tel Quel of the ’60s as well as the “post-marxist” ramifications. Locally, the resurrection of party lit thesis by Gelacio Guillermo patterned after the Leninist mode is a case in point & although this is largely ignored in academes, it is the guiding light in underground production. It has rectified what the early proletarian literature committed with the top-down policies: writers as mechanical footmen of Comintern directives.
During the ’30s, Lopez’s formulation of “emphasis on social content” that “all the ends to which [a writer] may dedicate his talents, none is more worthy than the improvement of the condition of man and the defense of his freedom” is a revisionist position of what Rahv would allude to as the standard Marxist imperative that “the writer should ally himself with the working class and recognize the class struggle as the central fact of modern life.”
In a sense, the trajectory of Lopez’s life in the bureaucracy is tactically conceived project for accumulating, says Bagulaya, “his symbolic capital [to gain] real political capital.”
That literature, however, should be split into the warring camps between Villa & Lopez is the fallacy that is still very much alive. They are both sides of the same coin of negotiating with capitalism. (Same error attends Garcia’s dissertation on Abad & Almario where no ideological schism is affirmed, only a variation on a style, thematics, language.) Both were leery of the Communist Party, not for Trotskyite or Leninist reason, but for playing around with the hegemonic ideology of the US colonial politics.
The Depression implicated theoretically the Communist Party of the United States of America, which caused a lot of Hollywood writers to be blacklisted & thrown out of jobs. Lopez must have known it too well as a writing on the wall if he pushed his advocacy to a higher, logical level.
To wit, the Commonwealth polemics is virtually an intertext of the US crisis, which is remarkably Lopez’s blindside, or that which is equivalent of Barthesian “lost origin.” The irony of ironies of course, is that, for Tom Wolfe, the American intellectual is simply “the sweaty little colonial [who] still trots along the heels of… [European] sahib: Herbert Marcuse, Walter Lippman, Charles Reich, Philip Green, Dotson Ruder, even one named Susan Sontag.
In Harold Bloom’s version of intertextuality, as quoted by Jonathan Culler, it has “compressed [intertextuality] to a relationship between the text and a particular precursor text.”
This means, of course, that Lopez had repressed, arguably & probably so, the likes of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin in what seemed to be his radicalizing import during his time.
Never has there been so much misreading of his importance during the Commonwealth years.
H.
Theorem
1.
When the guy sighed
in a maudlin tone,
I miss her terribly,
he suppressed his smile
& set up the logic
of discursive presupposition:
Did she really leave?
For where?
She could be just
on the other side of the street.
Does she exist?
If she doesn’t,
why miss her?
What for?
Is there a relation
between the two souls?
Are they lovers?
Who are they?
He supposed
he was babbling
like any fool.
But of what?
Is he hallucinating?
Is it a symptom
of the heart’s perpetual lack?
We always point
to ghosts in the attic, anyway.
His tears then,
real or imagined,
could only be for show,
Haha!
self-inflicted.
Something painfully throbs
but where is the wound?
2.
Like a penitent
on his knees
before St. Christopher
to whom he had vouchsafed
his fate
in his everyday journey
he fervently prayed
that no harm
would come his way.
But the Vatican
had issued an edict
the saint had never existed.
O He could never
weep
nor laugh
thereafter
when she failed to text
because
he’d never know
if she’s for real.
A.
He was gazing at her
with stupidly sad eyes,
but she wasn’t stirring
from stirring her coffee,
& he was sitting
like a fool on the hill,
watching the sun expire;
she, in measured moves
sipping the cup slowly,
& he blankly looking
at his dried-up palms
crisscrossed with gypsy lines…
The silence was deafening –
but never did he tell her
his story,
& she hers.
They struggled under the lights…
with deep sense
of civility
each to each
they humanly smiled –
one of those things
you couldn’t repair
like an old furniture
when an imagined love affair
follows the order of the day.
There was no need for words –
only protocol.
B.
If she knew
what he had known…
But wouldn’t that
be unfairly presumptuous
she, at the end,
was at fault?
The nymph was she
he met at the shoreline
but he it was
who persisted to pry
her name
off her tongue.
Now, she’s looking way past
him
as if he were a gnome.
It’s in the stars –
but he never could divine
their luminal ways
that semaphore
her
as chilling wind
& he
touched in the head
by the sudden squall.
No, it wasn’t worth
knowing anyway
what everyone had known:
stones on the beach
console themselves
with being stones.
C.
The morning after
is the silence of stones:
ditch-diggers out in the streets
are full of stolid merriment
but no consequence are they
in the hierarchy of things;
children in the classroom
bustle about their childhood
but lost are they in the game
like wild dogs in a tenement;
People moving about fetid corridors
won’t give a hoot
about his theatrical solitude:
never was he worth
an ounce of gold;
she won’t even raise an eyebrow
even if the Event occurs:
earth has never missed a step or two.
The morning after
is sure of hot, brewed coffee,
a spoonful of hope,
but conversation at the breakfast table
is certain of cold comfort:
who cares if he babbles
about the story
older, but not wiser, than the world?
Patriarchs had long ago foretold
wounded heart has no magical cure.
D.
Firstly,
find out
if your humor
is unfrayed
at the bloody edges.
Then,
step back
like any budding philosopher
or engineer
to assess the faultlines:
heart,
spleen,
even your smile
flashed in the mirror
on days you’re all raring to go
but she never showed up:
Secondly,
don’t let on
you’re stupidly hurt:
whiners suck
for legion
is out there
licking its chops.
Finally,
sit down,
compose your ragtag self,
then grope for the word
on all focus
like an animal
in the soul’s dark corridors
to sum up
the mathematics of gain
& loss
that bolts like lightning
in a blue sky.
Roll it down your tongue
like some marble lollipop:
their mantra
& survival kit
to carry on.
E.
After the act –
the rupture & shadow –
he was nothing about him
like a woolen blanket
of dear ol’ snoopy
to drive the shivering away
on an oven-hot day
but words, words, words
to exorcise
old stories of passion
that open to another maze;
words, words, words
to keep the pleasure
of his solitary company;
& hopefully
words, words, words
to ring
his sad, violet eyes.
F.
“O She loves to play
with boys
who’re putty in her hands,”
the old man chuckles.
“She wants to be on top,
Haha! of everything.
She’s worth dying for?
How stupid you’ll look
if you stay around
for a Christlike miracle
to leave you a spot
in her serpentine charm.
Your passion isn’t worth
a dime –
she’s too busy
with her own wiles
to take note
how you grossly agonize.
She’s focused on something else
& none could stop her
from climbing to that place.
C’mon, you cut a sorry figure
if you tipple in a corner:
it’s too damn pathetic,
she’ll shrug her shoulder
& to her dude repair:
walk away,
your tail between your legs:
she’ll spread her thighs
for some clown, anyway.”
“But actually,” he cracks,
“to cut the crap,
if you ain’t got money,
you ain’t got honey,
comrade of class morality.”
G.
He keeps swearing
it will be the last,
mumbling to himself
while speeding through
the sunrise highway…
But he keeps failing himself,
unable to desist
from falling for someone,
disaster after disaster.
How are they doing now
who keep skewering his heart?
They who vanish like the years
in his timeblown mind…
But always the wind
picks up & ripples
the sail to flutter
like heartbeat in a ward.
How will the masquerade end?
Like a convalescent
at the hospital
who wheels around
to size himself up,
scooting down the pathway
as though able & unhurt
to meet shadows
who dare catch his eyes.
There will never be
a closure,
this terrible gamble
of seizing the fragments
of that face
in various shapes & fire.
O he keeps swearing
it will be the last…
H.
“You bum,”
the barfly mockly sneers.
“You give floozies
a bit too much –
they stink like shit
at the crack of dawn.
O sweeter is our beer
we share with boozers
who barely complain
if rowdily the glass spills:
they’re happy like heifers
& go their merry ways.”
He adds with pontifical air:
“They can’t lose their cool
at our bark or banter.
A joke will set
fireworks & comradely toast.
But women are insatiable,
like to play the game
of Guantanamo waterboard
like twirling us on their pinkie
if you so much declare
her cat, her vassal, her lover.
Ha-ha! They lust
after heavy hands,
& masculine flair,
thinking you’re Othello’s heir.
But he’s puzzled,
tongue-tied like a cuckold;
after all,
he’s an academicus
who won’t raise a hackle
if she so much as struggle…
Indeed, this epochal moment
when women hold up half the sky;
he can only mark his time
safely from a distance.
He’s not barbarous
like the ancient Mongols
who raided & destroyed empires.
He’s foolishly civilized.
I.
“It still works,
this formula for ages –
all fascist pigs
women secretly adore
when kept shut luxuriously
indoor.
There’s no division
inside the room:
a singular authority,
an emperor of sun & moon
to bark modes of behavior,
nothing less,
nothing more,
as long as there’s feast
in the cupboard
& limousines to ferry her out
the door
& into metromalls.
He chuckles,
“You’ve got her by the balls,
if, now & then,
you croon into her ears
the sound of falling coins.
What’s there to conclude –
the blind masses
move like symphony
to the baton of dictators
who ululate
as the smart-ass in town
despair & mumble.
They dare not play
outside the rules.
Mailed fist defines the game:
they’ve got no place
but the kitchen.”
J.
“But is that passion?”
a dude asks,
fresh from boarding school,
naïf of loverly discourse.
“You call it
as you see it,”
the humbug shrugs.
“But at the end of the dream
there could only be
accounting of pleasure & pain.
What works for centuries
should work for all maidenhood –
she cannot languish
in half-lit rooms,
surfeit of blocked ambitions.
She’ll fly the coop,
if poverty knocks on the door.
Passion is only worth
a few electric moans…
A Roman gargoyle
is the future
piping out the waters
of cavalier tradition.
At the final hour
of the viaticum,
the winner weighs
his hoard & options.
Yes, the young
are given to cleaning out the table;
the old settle for loose change
to jeeringly applaud.”
K.
“If you let a foot in,
she’ll get the whole tent,”
counsels the Bedouin
to his wild-eyed son
starting to warm up
to the women in the camp.
They must be treated
like royal concubines
but never to intrude
in the circle of men.
Put them in proper place:
their point of embarkation
is their point of departure
they speak never to dishonor.
No one should feast on her
with his adulterous eyes –
she’s your property
for delicate use & disposal.”
He takes the words
to heart,
only to rue it all
when a harridan of subversive
wiles
would slip,
in another time & season,
a poniard into his ribs
for keeping her like a cage beast
howling in the night.
L.
The horsecart
is a slow drive to infinity,
turning him metaphysical
every inch of the charted route.
He draws his inward map.
But the 21st century
is all lightning speed –
electron at the fingertips –
that cusps his throat
in suffocating grip.
& no one speaks
to be familiarly recognized.
At the end of the road,
he is all by his lonesome –
friends/family
in diasporic flight –
& combing back his hair,
picking up the leather bags
to lead him
in multiple directions.
Where is she now?
Where have they gone?
Does anyone remember
when bleary-eyed travelers
bump into his smile & nod
at the way station?
He glances at her sidewise
& she, like a revolving light,
is quickly gone.
O Faces fall & change
like coins at the turnstile.
She’s lost in the headlights
of a cruising car.
Memory is just a blur.
(O Lovers, pledged to love & loyalty,
in a twist of infamy,
rage against each other as in war.)
M.
She’s a “teen-ager
with an explosive vest
strapped tightly to her body”
primed for dying.
The way to go
for women of her kind
& class
to secure Allah’s liberation?
But kinfolks
had madly driven her
to a mission of carnage,
never on her grim volition.
O Suicide bomber was she,
pushed to the edge
of the glassine dunes
in the name
of mujahedeen sacrifice –
Never her own conversation
with her soul
to break from the vise
of copper minarets
& desert songs.
O How she wished
her body would explode
in the sullen faces
of patriarchs
& bestial Gringos!
N.
He needs a drink
to clean his mind
& slips
into an air-conditioned pub:
a hand waves at him
like he were
the second coming of Merlin.
But she it is
who warmly signals
an impromptu homecoming.
Was it not too long ago
he was full of venom,
denouncing Eve’s encounter,
the existential dead-end?
He shuffles out of the shop
strangely light headed.
Another déjà vu,
another cycle of remembering.
O.
There is no end to it.
Impossible, he swears,
what he has gone through
to imagine
it could ever happen
again.
Yet he will do it,
just the same,
over & over again,
follow the road
always taken
& return to the beginning,
the inconsolable weeping.
Is there respite
in the turning of the wheel?
Things, as in Nietzsche,
repeat,
like birthing & dying,
rising & falling,
loving & loathing,
& the planet
inexorably turns on
removed from heaven’s pleasure,
hell’s pain.
O There is no end
to passion’s lament.
P.
Draconian
is the rule of living:
Always
the hard & fast rule –
live, live, & let live
& damn the torpedoes
of consequence.
Scramble up the stairs,
or slide down the floor,
knock over something old
on the well-traveled route.
The rest is attrition,
to bear & grim it
& suffer thy blessings…
The world doesn’t care
you’re a man for all seasons,
or clown on the staggering moon.
Nothing in love
eventually matters:
look in the mirror
& behold time
disregard
all poetic keening.
Q.
“Back go square one,”
signs an old man
who has visited
verity’s archeologic ruins.
Puffs he on his pipe,
“There’s always time
for every mean season –
you just don’t know
where it ends or begins.
Time to bury old emotions
& burn still
shadows of salvation.
Wisdom of ages
cannot be fixed
in the labyrinth of passion:
liberation that bears
on the notion
epitaph that hovers
over relations.
Have a life,
the heart’s solitary axiom;
move on,
the mind’s sole direction.
Always, the ball of fire
between breaks in the cloud.
R.
He wouldn’t leave
despite the warning:
Katrina ravaged him
three years ago,
when she drowned
in the bubble of air
in her heart,
right in the attic
floodwaters tried to reach –
& he could only
watch himself
watch her being claimed
by the howling rain & the dark.
No, the Afro-Am photographer
who snapped shots
of New Orleans & the living
clearly remembered
the angle of his seeing –
but she wouldn’t be there
to share his Bresson moment.
No, he wouldn’t abandon
the nest
he had rebuilt
even if Gustave
would batter his body,
never his spirit
that would dare
rushing wind & water:
O She would watch him
enter furiously
the eye of the hurricane.
Recent Comments