Monthly Archives: September 2019

Penman No. 371: Love Letters from Rody (1)

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Penman for Monday, September 30, 2019

 

IT’S NOTHING short of embarrassing to stumble upon other people’s intimacies—you know you shouldn’t be looking and you try to turn your eyes away, but you also know you’ll be taking at least a peek, as the curious and fallible humans we all are.

More than fifteen years ago, moving into a new home on campus previously occupied by an eminent professor who had retired and moved elsewhere, I went out to investigate a blockage in the culvert just outside our house. I was surprised to find a mass of papers, bundled up in plastic, that had apparently been tossed there by whoever had cleaned up the place in preparation for my taking it over. When I took the bundle apart, I realized—to my simultaneous horror and fascination—that these were Professor X’s private papers: her diaries, letters, and notes accumulated and saved over more than half a century of exemplary teaching.

Looking a bit deeper into the penciled entries (I told you I couldn’t resist), I spotted references to a nameless man with whom the writer was clearly enamored—but it was also and just as clearly a stillborn affair, as the writer professed, with fervid anguish, her commitment to a higher, spiritual calling. They would not become another Heloise and Abelard. My hands felt that they had been scorched by the papers, and I decided to turn them over to a friend, a poet who was among her most devoted disciples, for safekeeping.

Two weeks ago, I bought a trove of books from a junk shop in Caloocan, books from the 1930s to the 1950s covering mainly political and historical subjects. I was really just after a good copy of Lope K. Santos’ Banaag at Sikat and Zoilo Galang’s For Dreams Must Die (a 1950 novel based on another star-crossed romance, between Jose Rizal and Leonor Rivera. When I began sorting out the lot, I noticed an unusual thickness in a book from 1953 about the struggle for Indochina, and fished out, from between pages 172 and 173, a folded letter; several chapters later I found yet another letter.

They were typewritten letters, probably drafts, with scribbled corrections between the lines—undated, unaddressed, unsigned, and unsent—written by someone who identifies himself in the second letter only as “Rody” (no, not that Rody). I was struck by the quality and quaintness of the prose; these were letters obviously crafted by an educated man, meant for a distant an unnamed beloved. All we can firmly gather from them is that she was a nurse in a hospital, while he—well, let’s read the first letter first, and take it from there. The second letter—and my speculations—will follow in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned.

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Maybe you will be surprised on receiving this letter—a letter unexpected at the most inopportune time. I was overwhelmed by a magic urge which I cannot understand or cope with. It induced my pen to scribble the words coming out of my heart.

The end of the world and the complete annihilation of mankind is at hand, they say. My love for you will never end through eternity. It will be enduring as the tides of time, as lasting as the sacred flames kindled by my burning heart.

Love works so many wonders, lovers say. It can deviate the earth from its course, it can make the giddy heaven fall. It can teach the torches to burn bright like rich jewels in an Ethiop’s ear. My love for you is as deathless as Gabriel’s love for Evangeline, as infinite as Romeo’s love for Juliet.

Three years elapsed like a click. For three years, I waited in patience for a ray of light on my love affair. During this period, I found the right meaning of love and can define it even in my sleep.

Through the years I found neither laughter nor peace. I cannot associate the past, the present nor the future. Will my future be bright? Or will it be gloomy as the present and the past? You are the key to the answer. My life will be meaningless and valueless without you. No one but you can bring light to my world of darkness. Nothing but love can best cure my aching heart.

 Each night I go to the hospital, just to have a glimpse of you. Wanting to talk to you for a moment which I know is an impossibility. My eyes just speak for me in the passing glance.

Each night I sink in a sea of speculation. In the maintaining silence, I think of you. I cannot help but ask myself, what are my chances? Will the answer be ‘yes’ or ‘no’? I think of the fatal ‘no’ as the answer. I think of yes. Each of them is a sentence complete in itself. Each of them is a word which can mean everything in my life—words which when heard can shatter heaven and earth.

Maybe during these three long years, you have known me from head to toe better than any living soul on earth. And it is not far from impossible that you have reached a decision.

I love you more than anything else. Do you love me too? Your silence on the matter can only signify four simple words—“I love you too.”

I am the captive of yoru charm, the prisoner of your heart. I am standing before the judgment chair—before the beauteous goddess of love.

Hoping that your sound discretion guide you in your decision, I pause

 

Penman No. 370: A Collection and a Collaboration

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Penman for Monday, September 16, 2019

 

YOU KNOW that you’ve reached the hilltop, just in time to view the sunset, when they start compiling your works into hefty one-volume collections that could take a very long vacation on a very lonely island to plow through. Apparently I’m at that point, because Anvil Publishing has just released Voyager and Other Fictions: The Collected Stories of Jose Dalisay, a 500-page compendium of 43 stories written and published over four decades from the 1970s onwards.

I had been quietly at work on this collection these past few months with Anvil general manager Andrea Pasion-Flores and her team, and I was elated to see it being sold at the recent Philippine Readers and Writers Festival, and later at National Book Store, Anvil’s parent company. Let me just share what I said about the project in my brief preface to the stories:

“These stories span forty years, from 1975 to 2015, during which I turned from a lanky 21-year-old to a potbellied senior, and everything in between. I’ve chosen to present them in the chronological order of their writing, as best as my challenged memory could manage, hoping that this sequencing will reveal some patterns of growth and change in the way a writer selects and treats material as he himself is shaped by life and time.

“The inclusion of some juvenilia may be indulgent, but my excuse is that it may be instructive and inspiring (albeit by negative example) to the young writer who must be made to believe that better things come with age.

“I came to fiction in English from a background in drama and screenwriting in Filipino. This helps explain my interest in scene-setting and dialogue, in the unseen currents of thought and feeling that cross synapses and much larger spaces between people.

“While creative nonfiction occupies most of my time in retirement, largely for a living, nothing exhilarates me more than writing fiction—not the novel, for which I never mustered anything resembling affection, but the short story, which I find both exacting and exciting in its compactness.

“I’ve lately often argued that the best antidote to fake news is true fiction, because only fiction—not even journalism—has the power to draw us out of ourselves, out of the present, into that chill place where Honesty resides. Fiction redeems and saves the writer as much as it exalts the reader. That realization has been the personal reward of my work for these past forty years.”

After writing so many books for other people—I always say that rather than live to write, I write to live—it’s a balm for the spirit to see and review all my stories in one place, and to be reminded of fiction as my true love, the thing I most enjoy doing although the least materially rewarding. Indeed I’ve often said that my stories—invariably of lower and middle-class Filipinos like me—are the biographies of those people who can’t afford to hire me to write about them, whose lives are often dismissed as “ordinary” but which are in fact eventful and dramatic in their own fashion.

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I had a second reason to rejoice with the launch of my newest book, Why Words Matter, last Saturday at the Vargas Museum in UP Diliman. With lovely and haunting illustrations by Marcel Antonio, the book is based on a TEDTalk I gave last year in UP about why we read and why we write, and how words can kill but can also heal. It’s being published by Gigo Alampay’s CANVAS (The Center for Art, New Ventures and Sustainable Development). Two other books were also launched alongside mine—a children’s counting book by artist Ioannis Sicuya, and one about horror stories from the martial law era that distills affidavits by claimants of martial law abuses into three sentence tales, illustrated by Renz Baluyot.

While this book was produced as a special, limited art-book edition (only 500 copies, all hardbound), CANVAS will allow the free, non-commercial distribution of material from the book, with proper attribution, in any medium, as part of its program for cultural literacy.

I must say that I’m awed by and deeply grateful for Marcel’s exquisite artwork (just as I appreciated Jordan Santos’ delightful cover design for Voyager). Not since I collaborated with Jaime Zobel on an art book titled The Island almost 25 years ago have I had such a visually engaging publication. While I firmly believe that every author—never mind how sharp he or she may imagine himself or herself to be—needs an editor, and even as I’ve welcomed most of my editors’ suggestions, I’ve also sometimes given my publishers and designers a hard time, having stubborn and stodgy ideas about how my books should look. I’m relieved to have had a very pleasant experience with the publication of these two new books, for which again I thank Andrea and Gigo for putting together. It’s a bracing reminder to this old man that, to a happy few, his words still do matter.

(Voyager is available at National Book Store; to order Why Words Matter, please email info@canvas.ph.)

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Penman No. 369: Meaning in the Many

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Penman for September 2, 2019

 

IN MY fiction writing classes, until I recently retired, I often began the semester with what I thought was a generous offer, or actually a challenge: I would give flat 1.0 to anyone who could submit a well-written story with a happy ending—not some contrived finale with God scooping the hero out of harm’s way on the last page, but something the reader could believe in, something that would give reason for hope in the human condition, or at least the human future.

How many students, do you imagine, found their way to that happy ending and to that glittering 1.0 all these years? None, not a single one. It wasn’t for lack of talent—I did hand out a few 1.0’s for other reasons—but it seems that a believably happy story has become the hardest thing to write in these times in which the political has compounded the personal. As my students’ stories keep repeating, people feel trapped in situations and relationships that diminish their self-worth. In the age of the Internet, which is supposed to connect strangers instantaneously across the planet, many feel lonelier than ever, unable to keep up or blend in with the crowd, which always seems made up of happier, smarter, and richer people.

Everyone says they want the truth, which others—including governments and peddlers of this and that—are laboring to obscure, but when they do find it, they can’t deal with the consequences. The only ones smiling are those in power, who feel they can get away with murder, because no one else is strong and whole enough to stand up to them. As someone else sagely noted, despots feed on people’s despair.

In recent conversations over coffee with friends—chats overcast by a spate of deaths in the literary family and by a growing despondency over our political situation—the question was inevitably asked: so what can we do? How can we recover and offer hope, and find some happiness amidst hardship and despair?

To cut a long and complicated discussion short, I’ve resolved that, at the minimum, my aim will simply be to survive all the bad people and the bad stuff. I shall keep myself healthy and sane, and do things that not only give me personal pleasure—an admittedly selfish but vital element of happiness and well-being—but also help others, which can yield even greater satisfaction, as you find meaning in the many.

I know that that’s easier for me to say and to execute, as a 65-year-old retiree who’s been through enough, has hit most of his life goals, and could croak tomorrow without too much commotion. Easier, that is, than a 22-year-old with a troubled home life, a shaky job that barely pays for gas and fares, and the crushing pressure to conform and be another nobody.

But it’s certainly true that for my generation, we were ever aware that the world was larger than ourselves, and that it didn’t owe us a living, so we had work and fight for everything, and while we bitched like hell about the general crappiness of life, we were thankful for every scrap that fell our way, and prepared to fight and bitch some more the next day. We sought out kindred spirits and sang songs together, finding solace in community and in the sobering realization that many others had it worse. We found relief from our personal troubles by relieving the greater needs of others.

That may all sound peachy and preachy, platitudes that roll smoothly off the tongue forty or thirty years after one’s last rolled papaya-leaf cigarette or shot of watery gin. But it’s true: we tried to be as strong and as tough as we could, individually, but didn’t mind admitting to a soft spot here and there, maybe even turning that into an affectation (dare we say an art) like poetry, or music, or, for others, activism and public service. Whatever we had, we shared with an audience. And if sometimes we didn’t even get so much as a thank-you or a polite couple of claps, well, we could always say we belonged to a cool and tight fraternity of the underappreciated, like Poe and Baudelaire. Misery loves company, but we didn’t just stay miserable—we made something out of it, something even approaching bliss.

So in line with my new mantra of starting local and starting small, Beng and I will devote ourselves to family and community, beginning with our apu-apuhan Buboy, who’ll turn three this month, working with his parents to ensure that he’ll get a good and sensible education while we can help it—not just in school, but around the house and at the dinner table. I’ll be telling him things like “Respect food, and finish what’s on your plate. Eat fish and vegetables. Love cars—toys or real ones—but respect pedestrians. Respect working people, your parents most of all. Do things yourself. Do the right thing even when no one’s looking, and even when everyone else is doing wrong.”

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There’s reason for hope if we each do the right thing in our own lives, and not yield too easily and too soon to the clamors of submission and self-annihilation.(There’s always somebody else who deserves to go before we do.) We are not alone.