So it’s been a while since my last post. Our phone line was disconnected for more than a week (yes, we're still dial-up), and when it was finally fixed I was surprised to find myself swamped by a host of unofficial responsibilities. So much for my peaceful pastimes. Of course, more lessons keep coming my way whether I ask for them or not. I feel like I’ve had to relearn my entire life these past few months; I've learned more this year than all my college years combined. It really feels like the future keeps changing and defining the past, and not the other way around. A rare word that I've slowly fallen in love with is the word “eschatological.” And it doesn’t have to relate to a complex theological notion, but to a very simple truth in life, that life will be weighed not by random disconnected moments, not by spurts and episodes of happiness here and there, but by its closing end. And though it relies much on the prospect of an everafterlife, I think one can already catch a glimpse of this truth in some lonely grandfathers, those whom the years have made bitter and resentful. That as you look at their sad eyes, look at their graying head and prominent veins, you know that whatever pleasures they may have tasted while they were young, however many years of joy, all those experiences count for very little now. Somehow it is the man in the deathbed, the man who closes his eyes to sleep, who will be the measure of the man's life. On the other hand, this is the same reason why it is so powerful to see an old man able to laugh and smile like a child, who negates all his past sufferings through good cheer, because he shares with us a divine secret: that dying can also mean rebirth.

Another lesson that I think I am learning, though only the very introductions since this lesson requires seven lifetimes, is that Love is Happiness inasmuch as it is Suffering. But you’ll say, why, everyone is supposed to know that! Yes, but if you place it in the heart of divine love, in the heart of Christianity, then you know how tricky it can sometimes get. Because sometimes I too fall under the impression that with Christ all your sufferings must disappear, that you'll live your life in uninterrupted peace and goodness. That you do yourself a favor, humanly speaking, in entering safety. But I find that it is not so. Because though they promise a "peace that transcends all understanding", meanwhile here in the sphere of understanding you are asked to weep with those who weep, rejoice with those who rejoice. And rather than becoming the Stoic, unaffected man, you find that your range suddenly stretches far beyond what is permissibly human. That you are able to rise and soar beyond the clouds in breathtaking joy, but just as much as you are able to swim the ghastly depths of grief and sorrow. You are able to experience everything that it means to be alive, pulsating heart, trembling lips, tears streaming. And what is this all for, you wonder? Well, isn't this supposed to be what Love really is? Not the trivial, novel-ish romance, or the happily ever after, but the truly magnificent? The Lover who is willing to be crucified and stricken, before seeking to rejoice and ascend with his beloved. And I feel we do not just mean polar opposites, but way past these poles, yes, eternally past these poles, from the most hellish weeping, to that joy and fulfillment that can never be spoken. Can you swim in this sea for the One you have yet to love? But He loved you, in this exact same way, first.

I think the apex of aesthetic poetry can already be experienced in one of our own Philippine National Artists, Jose Garcia Villa. I’m not even a poet myself, just a student of philosophy, so all my opinions are from an amateur perspective. But I find that inasmuch as Villa is the father of Philippine poetry, he is also the first original Filipino philosopher. His philosophy is akin to that of Nietzsche, except instead of explicit Power it is directed to the pure aesthetic, to the beautiful, to the self-aggrandizing: or the most accurate term yet, the Luciferic. There is only a very subtle difference between the two. His philosophy presents the logical conclusion to that explosive little phrase: “art for art’s sake.” I think he involuntarily shows there is no such thing. That the art is inseparable from the artist who lives and breathes and leads poetry workshops: and that art for art’s sake is art for the aspiring artist’s sake, to help him rise on his worded wings like Icarus. To see one’s self more than a man, as the crowd cheers: “Behold the voice of a God and not of a man!”

My first encounter with Villa was unfortunately not with any of his poems but with those ‘caprices’ like the Emperor’s New Sonnet and the Bashful One. Those two examples, which I may have once encountered in High School, and next in a college Humanities class, really left me annoyed and scratching my head. For those blessed never to have read them, the first was just a title with an empty page, the next was a poem made of a single comma. Instead, my teachers should have quoted his real poems like this one:

First, a poem must be magical,
Then musical as a sea-gull.
It must be a brightness moving
And hold secret a bird’s flowering.
It must be slender as a bell,
And it must hold fire as well.
It must have the wisdom of bows
And it must kneel like a rose.
It must be able to hear
The luminance of dove and deer.
It must be able to hide
What is seeks, like a bride.
And over all I would like to hover
God, smiling from the poem’s cover.

I do not really know how much of Villa still affects the local poetry scene, but from what I read he was a kind of ‘literary tyrant’ from the early 1930’s to the 1980’s. His word and his judgments were law. Not only in poetry but also in the realm of the short story. You were not a good writer until he gave you a star (in his literary reviews); you were firmly established if he gave you three. His three main works, composed early in his life, were only one collection of short stories, Footnote to Youth (1933), and two poetry collections, Have Come, Am Here (1942), and Volume Two (1949). But with only these couple of masterpieces he dominated Philippine literature like a god, even until his death in 1997. You will be surprised to learn that this was a man who rubbed shoulders with e.e. cummings and had Allen Ginsberg (of ‘Howl’ fame) kiss his feet. Of him e.e. cummings writes: “and i am alive to see a man against the sky— ” And why not?, with words such as these:

O Lovely. O lovely as panther. O
Creation’s supremest dissenter.
Enter. Teach me thy luminous ire.
O jewelled, pacing, night-displacing
Fire. O night’s nimble-dancing, No-
Saying lyre. Embrace me. Defy me.
Reave me. None shall defend me.
Not God. Not I. Purify me. Consume
Me. Disintegrate me to thy ecstasy.
O lovely and without mercy. O dark-
Footed divinity. O Lovely and Terrible.
O Death-irreducible. O Unimpeachable.

He spent most of his life in New York, and amongst his other acquaintances were Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, etc. If not for many cultural and discriminatory factors that entered the picture after we strove for our independence, his name would probably still be among the greatest names of English poetry. But for some reason he seems to be fated for obscurity. In the UP Main Library for example, there are only a handful of books that really talk about the former legend. If he was a glorious celebrity while he lived, now I had to dutifully ‘unbury’ him. In fact if not for a personal whim I would never really hear of him, except maybe as one of our list of underappreciated National Artists. Here is the gist of his aesthetic philosophy, the philosophy of Genius:

Sir, I commend to you the spirit
Of Lucifer, who was most beautiful
And wore in that proud skull
Rebellion like a jewel exquisite;
I adjure you to meekly admit
That seething genius pre-punctual,
Foreword to all the historical:
I beg you to give him his meet.

Brightest of archangels and brightest
Of demons—proud, incomparable Lucifer!
I alone of all men remember
And praise that magnificent zest
That sent God frantic to abuse
And doom this First, pioneering Genius.

And also, in the anti-positive and rendered more clearly:

In the chamber of my philosophy
God is instructed.
God is all naked
For reception of my energy.

God is all naked.
I am incandescent.
God must begin His ascent
To me the Created.

God is instructed
In the ways of humanity.
God must humanize divinity
To be perfected.

God is my elected.
Him have I chosen
To be berosen.
Him have I elected.

God is my miracle.
God is my Work.
Music from the stark
Original, marble Syllable!

Much of his poetry does achieve its aesthetic purpose. Many of them, given my humble, personal opinion, are indeed beautiful in of themselves. You can, if you want to, choose to ignore the rationale. There is no message. There is only image. There is only landscape, scenery, a visual experience. In one of his aphorisms he writes: “Precipices,and,peaks! / My,proud,geography.” Villa began his artistic career as a painter. This is partly the reason for his controversial ‘comma poems’, which employ a comma between every word, “enabling each word to attain a fuller tonal and sonal value… The method may be compared to Seurat’s architectonic and measured pointillism…” The most amazing example of this powerful, dizzying aesthetic is in the beginnings of his last, greatest poem, The Anchored Angel, which I find surpasses Sylvia Plath's Ariel by far:

        And,lay,he,down,the,golden,father,
        (Genesis’,fist,all,gentle,now)
Between,the,Wall,of,China,and,
        The,tiger,tree (his,centuries,his,
        Aerials,of,light)…
                Anchored,entire,angel!
He,in,his,estate,miracle,and,living,dew,
        His,fuses,gold,his,cobalts,love,
                And,in,his,eyepits,
        O,under,the,liontelling,sun—
The,zeta,truth—the,swift,red,Christ.        

        The,red-thighed,distancer,swift,saint,
        Who,made,the,flower,principle,
The,sun,the,hermit’s,seizures,
        And,all,the,saults,zigzags,and,
        Sanskrit,of,love.
                Verb-verb,noun-noun:
Light’s,latticer,the,angel,in,the,spiderweb:
        By,whose,espials,from,the,silk,sky,
                From,his,spiritual,ropes,
        With,fartherest,fingers,lets,down,
Manfathers,the,gold,declension,of,the,soul.

Beauty, and beauty, yes, but what about the man? Based on honest existential philosophy the man is more important than the philosophy—they are never separate. Each validates or negates the other. The philosophy which the philosopher cannot even live is a useless and defeated philosophy. The same is true for poetry. Whatever any one says, poems do not achieve a life of their own. It is always communication; it is always sharing of mind; it has a motive. You can choose to remain ignorant of the life behind the poem, but it will remain only exactly that: ignorance. To the truly conscientious, he must give equal value to the biography, to the human story behind the art. The best collection of essays on Villa I’ve found in The Anchored Angel by Eileen Tabios. It includes wonderful personal accounts of his life from people who really knew him and even studied under him, people like Nick Joaquin and Alfred Yuson. Because this is just a sketch, I direct the interested reader there. It is only through a familiarity with the minute details of his personality that one will learn what I mean when I say he did seek to live out his philosophy, and ultimately failed. From a vibrant young and rebellious man, with celebrity status both here and in America, deified by his students and peers, to a withering old man in a lonely apartment who died alone. From his devastating critiques, his offhand insults, his hatred of his father, to an old man who could only feed pigeons and seek friends in isolation. It is the irony of life that, it seems to me, his poems will wither and die with him, though beautiful and intoxicating as they are. It is only ironic because of his chosen philosophy; the truth is old age overtakes all men. But the god-poet deludes himself that his flesh is not grass, that his dynasty will last forever. Here are words from the man himself:

“I want the absolute words, only the absolute words, used in the poem. You will notice that in any of my poems, every word has been carefully chosen. In fact, every word is a poem in itself, so pure it is. That is an emanation from my angelic divinity. Don’t laugh at me Cirilo, I mean it. You are no poet if you are not divine.”

In a work entitled ,,A Composition,,:

Biography I have none and shall have none. All my Pure shall beggar and defy biography.
Myself I busy creating my perfect temporal flower. That is my direct flower, my direct concern. Let the temporal flower, if it can, flower a permanent flower: if it is great enough it will blaze its italic image whether I will it or not. Ambition cannot create the italic flower.
If I attain out of my life two perfect flowers, two eternities—
The main thing always is that I lived
The First Eternity.
My name is Jose, my name is Villa.
My true name is Doveglion.
Doveglion is the author of Jose Garcia Villa.

But the man is never separate from the poetry. And Doveglion (Dove, Eagle, Lion) is a figment of the imagination. There is a larger point here: that philosophers and professors and poets are still and always will be men, and the man, though with the genius of a god, also dies. It is ironic that truly, when he speaks of God in his poems, he really does speak of himself as he reverse-intended:

In,my,undream,of,death,
I,unspoke,the,Word.
Since,nobody,had,dared,
With,my,own,breath,
I,broke,the,cord!

Dead,was,the,Word. Hurled,
To,its,tomb.Dead,
With,the,dead!
Alas,around,it,curled,
Behold: God,with,a,broken,head.

There is something waiting to be spectacular, something ready to burst wide open through the surface of the earth. It’s the gentle kicks of the child in the womb, and it’s the cold, piercing hours before morning. It is the day when the lover finally comes home, or when my bride finally gives her tender-passionating kiss. It is every echo that disturbs the silence from since the beginnings of time, sprung from the voice of this holy noble creating. Everything that I will come to live for is expectation: of future warmth, of the Paradisic. Selah.

In the thick foliage, the leaves turn, and I, I behold Eve, and she says to me: ‘Where goest thou dearest son?’ And I says to her, ‘Mother, the world journeys through the Red Sea continuously, and I must hurry! lest I be among the drowned!’ And in a whiff I catch ahold of Elijah’s fiery chariot as we soar through Noah’s Rainbow, and the Pillar of Cloud, and Lord Almighty! Passing through the Two Mountains, rend, and bent, and torn asunder. And dear Christ the Melchizedek KING, would You graciously give me a bottle of myrrh, so that I can in turn lay it at Your feet? And we the pilgrims three sing hymns on the way to the Holy Mountain, Zion, but I have not even taken a step and I am already quaking, kneeling, short of breath.

(My little sisters, still unbelievers, chasing after half-loves and topsy-turvy boys.)

They tell me, matronly: young man, you are bordering on religious fanaticism, and your cheeks are kind-of caked with saliva. But they say this with the drone of a low, oboe, robotic-tock-ness, like twice unfed marionettes. And querulous, querulous, they hasten to add I have perhaps slept too little or slept too much, but between the both of us, who is the more uncertain?

Because you and I both know that this illusory cage of technology and high-flung postmodernity and liberal, casual, sexua-spiritualitizing is all just a ruse, as the billboards pile up ever higher on the highways, replacing your sense of sky with sense of flesh. And the awe and grandeur of wide berth is reduced to encroachment of televised hypnostazing minds, and superpolished glittering luxuries, and the Zen-material void. And little girls with still tender hearts whimper: love? love? Where now to find the one I love? How can I possibly wade through all this clutter to find my love?

And you know as well as I do the linear yellow light of the morning strikes at your heart like a Cross, through the thick fog of your I-don’t-need-You’s. And like the remnants of a ghost blown hither and thither in the wind, so with your soul that says: I will pursue this happiness on my own.

But there is something waiting to be spectacular, something ready to burst wide open through the surface of your heart. It’s the forgiving embrace of a rejected Lover, whom you, dear sister, have spurned and spurned since the very first day of your life, just as I did—

“but I never! I never even knew He was there!”

But now that you do who can tell what you will do? Not as though you’d so easily trade your ghostly-self for your morning-self in His nail-pierced hands? Mmmm, still holding fast to your boy-toy-boys when you can have the Man? Making the most of this irony: that the most beautiful-splendid-sileantic YHWH courts you like a desperate madly-in-lover, yet perpetually frustrated by your abrupt hand and disinterested glances?

Which is why everything I will come to pray for you dear sister: that these are the proud hesitations that precede the prodigal lover's return, and that there is still a future warmth for you in compassionating embrace. In the space between paradise and Paradise, you can still replace your undeciding adams with Christ. Selah.

 

One day, under the hot afternoon sun, MingMing the Adventurous Meerkat stood up on his hind legs, scanned the horizons, and made a decision. He had decided to leave the confines of his narrow burrow and embark on a journey through the World’s Sacred Fields. More and more it came to his attention, as he watched the other meerkats dig under the same logs or forage under the same soil, that he was depriving himself of a wider, more overwhelming view of God’s His-Story by just sitting where he was, and that the old line could really ring true: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Despite the sense of haste and urgency that was quickly laid upon him, he knew, from little experience, that such a task required careful planning. He knew for example how a few lines of sacred text can do much to consume an entire life of devotion, and that unfortunately a meerkat does not live very long. So he decided to borrow a journeyman’s principle form Luther, who managed to hack through centuries of excess Roman Catholic foliage by shouting (among other things): Sola Scriptura! Simply stated, so that one does not get lost in the many forests, the many mountain crevices, one must go directly to the River’s source. One must go, past the superstitions, the later additions, the apocrypha, to the original text.

While MingMing was still in his burrow, he grew ever more confident of his plans. As I squeezed myself into his abode, he did show me the early sketch of his map, and I could see that sparkle of excitement in his eyes. I must say, though it sounded easy enough on paper, I could trace out the dangerous roads, the treacherous terrain, which he desired to cross. He did tell me though that a meerkat must be flexible, always attune to danger from both above and below, so this was to serve merely as a guide. I thought to myself his choices were rather commendable... for a meerkat:

1. The first destination was the Rigveda, Sacred Hymns, the oldest of all Hindu Texts, and the premiere of the four Vedas. Here he would wade through the pantheon of pagan deities of all the known elements.
2. The second destination was the later Gita, the Bhagavad-Gita, where Hinduism is sharpened in the person of Krishna. A masterwork of Sanskrit poetry and religious unification.
3. From Hindu Territory he would skip through the realm of the Buddha. Here he told me he would have to be more careful and selective, since the Three Baskets, the Tripitaka, was a continent too wide. So he initially chose the Sutta Pitaka, which contained the historical sayings of the Buddha, and among these many volumes perhaps concentrate on a few manageable-length Sutras.
4. But Buddhism is split into the Theravada and the Mahayana, and the Mahayana or ‘Greater Vehicle’ (Literally ‘Greater Ox-Cart’), which developed 500 years after Theravada, has managed to conquer most of Northern Asia. Though the Sutta Pitaka is recognized by both groups, it seemed indispensable to include a strictly Mahayana text, and of these he chose the famous Lotus Sutra.
5. After India he’d have to go to China. And the first place to go was the Daodejing of Laozi. Remember: “The Dao that is named is not the real Dao!”
6. Right after that it’d have to be the Analects of Confucius (Kongfuzi).
7. And then cap it off to a journey to Mecca, to read the Holy Islamic Koran.

He told me of course that, given his very short meerkat life, he would have to give up journeying through the Zohar of the Jewish Kabbala, which after all, was written only around the 12th or 13th Centuries AD. Also of secondary importance were the Japanese Zen Buddhist traditions. Of the two, the Rinzai (the Koan tradition) and Soto (the Zazen tradition), he would only have practical access to the first, and Rinzai Zen was developed only around the 11th Century. He said it is better to start with the oldest, mostly BC texts, and God-willing, progress from there. He did make a snide remark about the Theosophical, New Age, and Rosicrucian traditions, calling them half-baked European playtoys.

Now as I waved goodbye to him from the door of his burrow, I asked myself if I would ever see more of MingMing the Adventurous Meerkat. Such journeys, even to a single of these destinations, have taken some pilgrims entire lifetimes (and according to some, even multiple lifetimes). But I remembered that a meerkat is a very nimble-footed animal, able to skip and scurry without getting bogged down in a single spot. I prayed that every now and then he would return and tell me about his journeys, even if it took years. This, unless of course he was unduly consumed by Shiva, or achieved premature Buddhahood. Before he finally left I told him to remember the Light of the world, and like Galadriel giving the Light of Earendil to Frodo, I wished him a safe journey as he walked towards the morning sun.

"In this phial," she said, "is caught the light of Earendil's star, set amid the waters of my fountain. It will shine still brighter when night is about you. May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.