Radio Boy

Breaking Signs
Panorama 10.11.09


AS A YOUTH growing up in the 40’s and 50’s, I was a son of the radio. It was just becoming popular then, one of those foreign items brought by American colonialism—together with apples, oranges, chewing gum, canned sardines, boogie-woogie, jazz, and cigarettes—that irreversibly changed Philippine cultural landscapes. It gained ascendancy over our everyday life from sunrise to sunset. In our humble house in Balic-Balic, Sampaloc, it was the centerpiece of communal living. It was installed in a specially made shelf out of reach of children and covered with a clean mantle when not in use. It was clock, newspaper, and entertainment all at the same time to millions of Filipinos then struggling for a better life after the Second World War. We told time by the soap opera in progress, got the latest political updates from the newscasters, and sat infront of it in rows of benches while listening with our neighbors to our favorite contestants in a singing competition. In our community, it was also an arbiter of sort. An argument was settled when one said, “I heard it over the radio.”

It was a clever contraption—inside a box of wood were bulbs and electrical connections that captured airwaves and processed them to sensible sounds! You turned a knob and you get the program you desired; you turned another knob to regulate the sound volume. As an object it was a work of art and a marvel at the same time. The highly varnished wood was of the best kind, manually shaped to bring out a geometric design. Its working intrigued my young mind no end, and I wanted to take it apart to see how it functioned, but I was afraid I would not be able to put it back together again. The well-to-do families had big models with elaborate facial carvings and sharper sound reproduction.

Unknown to me then, the radio was educating my young imagination. The programs to which I listened formed the seminal character of my perception, making me curious about things in the beginning and in the end, when I was already writing prose and poetry, sensitive to the nuances of words and their connection to human existence. Serial romances, on the one hand, taught me the existence of passion and charity. The plots of Gulong ng Palad and Siete Infantes de Lara, for instance, helped form the behavior code which I would follow in my later years, focusing on the need for moral uprightness and self-enterprise. While I cried over the travails of the poor characters in the story I was impressed by how the scriptwriters understood very well the human condition. I was involved in the story; I was this or that person grappling with tragedies to rise from the clutch of poverty and gain success. I was fascinated by the imagery of the wheel of fortune for it applied to my family’s real situation—we could not always be in the mire; someday, when the wheel turned in our favor, we would be on top, enjoying life.

Horror dramas, on the other hand, taught me the importance of suspense in creative writing. That feel of excitement on the part of the listeners or readers when they anticipate the inevitable outcome of a crisis-- that is something you have to work for, something nobody gives you, and you learn it by the strictest application of narrative rules. My best favorite, Ang Gabi ng Lagim with its howling dogs and mysterious strangers haunting cemeteries, gripped my heart like a vise with its terrifying tension and stress. Each episode left me quaking in my seat and gave me nightmares at bedtime. The more I got scared, the more I enjoyed the story. Is that not what critics desire from horror stories? There too was Ang Sepulturero sa Lumang Libingan which became the model for harmonizing story lines with appropriate sound effects for crickets, snarling animals, storm winds, horses’ hooves, and human anguish.

To our family then, radio and literature were one. We could not afford to buy magazines and newspapers—our little money went to rice and dried fish—and the few books I had were school primers. Consequently, I heard more than I read. Words were sounds I had to reconcile with speech morphology before they became written codes. This training was eventually to be beneficial to my writing verse, for it connected me subliminally to the tradition of oral literature, making me grasp the concepts of language rhythms, especially in reference to opposition and unity, caesura and closure. This knowledge, together with the lessons I learned from the Balagtasan which was then still a popular radio entertainment, shaped my poetic consciousness. Years later, with the publication of my first book of poems, I realized how greatly radio had influenced my literary voice.

Literature as Religion

Literature as Religion
Panorama, 08/02/09
By Cirilo F. Bautista

In Carlos Ruiz Zafon's bestselling novel, The Angel's Game(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves, 2009), the mysterious publisher Andreas Corelli proposes a commission to the protagonist, David Martin, "I want you to create a religion for me," he tells Martin. It seems a ludicrous mandate when seen from the labyrinth perspective of theology, but when Corelli explains the foundation of his thinking, Martin senses some glowing light.

"Religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends, myths or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values and rules with which to regulate a culture or a society," Corelli says. "Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated." Martin, a sickly, impoverished writer, succumbs to Corelli's offer of small fortune to work for a year "to create a story so powerful that it transcends fiction and becomes a revealed truth." Shorn of it's Gothic complicated subplots, how Martin pursues this commission is the central concern of "The Angel's Game," a most wonderful and exciting Gothic tale set in the early 1900s in Barcelona.

The idea of literature as religion had earlier been mentioned by Andrew M. Greeley in his autobiography, Furthermore! - Memories of a Parish Priest(New York: Forge, 1999). Like Corelli, he advances the theory of religion as embedded in literary narratives. Whether in story or poetry, religion, in this case Roman Catholicism, is a body of symbols which aims to explain the meaning of life and death. Since the Greek word "symbolon" was translated into Latin as "sacrament," meaning a revelation of God," religion was first of all a narrative symbol. "Our religion was story and nothing else. We learned about religion from our parents through stories (Especially Christmas and Easter) before we ever learn about it in school," Greeley writes.

These stories form what he calls "popular tradition" - the first component of religious tradition - made up of stories, metaphors, rituals, common devotion, and evidences of superstition and magic. They co-exist with "high tradition" - the second component - which is "organized systematically and logically and presented in prose propositions which are often supported by philosophical arguments. The proposition tell the devout member of the tradition what one must believe, how one must behave, what rituals one must follow, which leaders one must obey. It is assembled from the writings of the ancients, the teachings of the wise, and the decisions of the leaders. It is supported by a claim to sacred authority. While the propositions, may sometimes change and will almost always be added to, the assumption is that they are always the same truth in slightly different wording."

Did Zafon borrow Greely's idea, or was he really simply expressing a fascinating theory that is gaining wide adherence? It does not matter; what is important is that Zafon gives us a novel that is the literary manifestation of that idea.

For Corelli, religion is all about form - the other gestures, words, actions, and elements that are understandable and graspable in the content of the truths of narrative. "As in literature or in any other act of communication, what confers effectiveness on it is the form and not the content," he says. This is Greeley first component, the popular aspect which, in the end, determines the religion's survival. If there are no devotees there is no worship and the gods would be irrelevant. The second component supports with additional or emendatory narratives the first, though its real purpose is to control the society of worshippers. A system of organized government develops therefrom, always vigilant, always insuring that the form is maintained and attractive. The story of Jesus Christ, the story of Buddha, the story of the various saints and martyrs, for instance, have to be told again and again with increasing avidity and faithfulness according to accepted methods previously arranged. Both components are important, though. Without high tradition, folk practices would be directionless and might lead to idolatry. Without popular tradition, high tradition, "becomes abstract and has little appeal to the total human personality. It becomes an arena in which scholars and leaders play their own self-important games with little regard for the problems and possibilities of ordinary people," Greeley says.

It is not difficult to see how ordinary people's metaphors may affect the religious environment, though often they escape the attention of scholars and high leaders. Acts and experiences whose meanings reside outside official propositions but have crucial importance to the common people help build the popular tradition, strengthening their faith in God's graces.

Night Train to Paris

Night Train to Paris
Panorama, 08.30.09

SOME YEARS AGO in May, I took the night train to Paris. I was a guest of an Italian poet in his house in Rome, and that evening his assistant, Romy Sibug, was taking me on a tour of the nearby countries. I occupied a sleeping berth near the window, and waited for our time of departure. The bed was a bit cramp, but the pillow and mattress were clean and comforting. I had already brushed my teeth and changed my clothes in the small washroom in the next compartment.

As always in such a situation, I could not help engaging in the pastime of comparisons. Why could we not have such kind of trains in the Philippines? The last time I saw the Bicol Express stopping by the España station, it was a pitiful sight—rusted on the outside, uninhabitable inside. Time and hooligans had rendered it obsolete, but the government seemed to have no time for its rehabilitation. I gazed out in envy at the many trains lined up for various destinations in Europe, looking proud and sturdy in the twilight.

Romy seemed to have followed my thoughts. "I was in Manila last summer," he said, "and I could not believe how backward it has become. So many hungry people, so many without jobs. I visited Leyte and was just in time to prevent my two sisters from dying of starvation with the goods and money I brought them. I went to Bicol in the PNR train to see some friends and I must tell you it was a nightmarish ride! Dirt and garbage in the corridors, stinking toilet, mutilated couches— "

"I know. And cockroaches everywhere."

"Those too. And they say Martial Law is a blessing from heaven. I shouldn’t care, you know. I’m already a Roman resident, but I worry about my relatives there. My uncle was picked up on suspicion of being with the underground. He was just planting eggplants on the mountainside. From what I hear in the Filipino community here, the people in power overreact to criticism of their rule."

"That’s the trouble. They see things that are not there and impose sanctions for imagined violations. Soon the imagined assumes real form and becomes their enemy. They are sometimes paranoid in this regard but they hate being ignored, so they must act. Power is not power unless it is used."

"Even to the extent of imprisoning innocent men or confiscating their properties?"

"Often to that extent, I’m sorry to say. No one is safe from their scrutiny and suspicion."

"That’s why I felt an unusual silence in Manila even though the traffic mess has not changed," he said, shaking his head. "What, the silence before the storm? Or of helplessness? But can they not do good things in the meantime? They have all the power, so why not change some things for the better? Like the train system, for a start. You see in Europe that efficient train transport contributes to the overall prosperity, for it brings people and goods everywhere they are needed. You can go anywhere in Italy by train. But I suppose they will say that will involve a lot of money and the Philippines is just a third world country."

"Don’t fall for that trick of us being called poor. We have money, only it goes in the wrong directions, if you know what I mean," I said. "That is why no public project, like a road or a building, is ever done to specification, so the people ultimate gets the rotten end of the deal, with the road or the building deteriorating after one year."

"You know I want to go home and retire in the Leyte. I am not really at home here. My heart and soul long for my place of birth, but as things are going, I might be forced to be stay here till I die. When will things improve in our country?"

As I said, that was years ago, and as our train pulled out of the station for the overnight trip to Paris, I had no answer to Romy’s question. I have no answer to the same question now, for we seem to live in a perpetual cycle of promises and disappointments when it comes to our national life. Each government seems to be like the previous one. All we can do is hope that the storm will not demolish us this time.

Rain is Good for You

Breaking Signs ( Panorama 08/23/2009 )
THE HEAVIEST RAINFALL so far this year came to my part of Quezon City last July 26.
It poured in torrents from four to six in the afternoon. I sat in the garage and watch it shake the mango tree out in the road and the plants in my small backyard garden. The bougainvillas, yellow bells, and suntan submitted to its fury. Nature is most awesome when it is angry, and angry it was that week, burying people in landslides in Cotabato and Antipolo, flooding the main streets of MetroManila, and stranding, as usual, the unlucky commuters.

I had just brought out of the storeroom for re-reading H. Allen Smith’s autobiographical narrative, To Hell in a Handbasket (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1962), and was dusting it when the rain fell. It was accompanied by a gusty wind that swept everything that was not nailed down—plastic buckets, old newspapers, garden chairs. I watched in fascination as the silver drops arched and looped in some strange geometric patterns while the wind swished and swooshed in abandon. Smith provided a counterpoint to the noise with his well-known gray humor. "I have heard it said many times that a person cannot tell the whole truth about himself in a book. I honestly think that I can come closer to it than most authors of autobiographies. Gypsy Rose Lee and George Bernard Shaw have said that all men past forty are scoundrels. I am past forty and I have all the instincts of a scoundrel. Even in this time of pressures and compulsions, I tend to speak my mind."

And no one could speak their mind more than Smith who took delight in exposing the frailties and foibles of the great and the mighty. As a reporter, rewrite man, and sports commentator, he watched people and events with objective profundity and wrote about them with acidic keenness. "Scholarly investigators in the field of roughneck linguistics say that a person who is going to hell in a handbasket is going to hell because of amateur sinning, such as playing the horses, social drinking to excess, striking a lady real hard, gossiping, indulging in sex orgies, and other small misdemeanors. Such a person has not murdered anyone, he has not robbed any widows or widowers and he has not been a member of Congress. His sins have been the sins of pleasurable dissipation and I understand, from high authority, that when he arrives in hell they may even turn him away form the gate, telling him that his credentials show he belongs in the Other Place."

How close to home he was as I thought of the hundreds of congressmen we have with their endless inclination toward unpardonable transgressions. The rain pummeled the garage roof so hard that it leaked in two places, and I made a mental note to buy another can of plaster sealant. The rising water in the garden seeped into the floor of a downstair room. My wife cleared the clogged drainage outlet to ease the rise, and old newspapers came in handy in cleaning the room. When I was young, my mother would say, "Go out in the rain. It’s good for you," and so I would bring a piece of soap and take a bath in the street.

After watching the rain for a few minutes, I retreated to my room to go over Recipes for Life: Food for the Heart, edited by Jennifer Lee-Bonto and Christine Penaranda-Concio (Los Baños: Pages Publishing Artists, Co., 2009). This brainchild of St. Theresa’s College, Quezon City batch ’85 is a delightful collection of autobiographical narratives penned with sensitivity, humor, and energy. Like recipes, they are meant to guide, instruct, and direct persons engaged in the kitchen of life to feed body and soul.

As Charo Santos-Concio writes in her foreword, "Every chef has a secret ingredient: it may be the most unique spice you can find in Paris, or it may be just the right amount of soy sauce. We, women, are also chefs. We whip up the best of life. We want it spicy…sometimes sour…sweet…salty… hot… cold…or just right. What we are serving for appetizer, main course or dessert, matters. How we serve it is important. This is what made me crave reading this book. It’s the spices of life that women had to have a taste of and how women handled even the most sour and bitter of experiences. Every woman stands tall and strong…giving hope, courage, motivation and inspiration."

The 56 or so articles—three are poems— in this well-designed and unique book are arranged in the manner of daily eating structure—Prayer Before Meals; Breakfast; Lunch; Afternoon Tea & Biscuits; Dinner with its Starters, Main Course, Dessert; Cocktails, Mocktails & Bedtime Drinks; and Prayer After Meals. They concern human responses to critical situations and show us life’s beauty and meaning in the midst of battering storms that challenge our very faith in God and belief in humanity.

Believe and Betray

Cirilo F. Bautista Launches New Poetry Collection
by Tim Nubla
Source: http://www.panitikan.com.ph/news.htm#4

“Happy Birthday” said the cake on Cirilo F. Bautista’s book launch that was held last July 29, 2006 at the Gaerlan Conservatory of the De La Salle University, Manila. It is also the birthday of his latest collection of poems Believe and Betray.

Among the well-wishers who graced the event are DLSU-Manila’s EVP for Academics and Research Dr. Julius Maridable, Dr. Carmelita Quebangco, EVP of DLSU-Manila and Dr. Isagani Cruz and Dr. Marjorie Evasco, University Fellows.

Cirilo Bautista is a winner of the Palanca Hall of Fame award in 1995 and was previously hailed in 1993 as Makata ng Taon by the Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino for winning the poetry contest sponsored by the Philippine Government. The last part of his epic trilogy The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus, entitled “Sunlight on Broken Stones,” won the Centennial Prize for the Epic in 1998. “

Believe and Betray is a volume composed of four collections of Bautista’s Lyric poems from1960 to 2005, spanning more than fifty years of writing. The book is available at the DLSU Press bookstore.

New Book of Poems to be launched

Cirilo Bautista will launch his new book of poems at the Gaerlan Conservatory, De La Salle University, Taft on July 29, 10a.m.

Three Books and the Copyright Law

DEAN Francis Alfar’s novel, Salamanca (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2006), is now available in bookstores. It won last year’s Palanca Contest for the novel in which we were the chairman of the board of judges. We found it way above the other entries for its linguistic competence and artistic merits. Later, as a reader assessing its worthiness for book publication, we gave it a positive recommendation. For Alfar has created a love story that is memorable for its emotional restraint, sustained interest, exceptional characters, and well-conceived plot. The narrative moves at an appropriate pace to render unique interpretation of a slice of Philippine life. The title it all – there is some magic determining the relationship of the main characters Gaudencio Rivera and Jacinta Cordova, and Alfar does a sleight-of-pen that attempts to draw us into an enjoyable spell.

Alfar is one among those many Filipino fictionists influenced by the technique of magic realism. Popularized by South American writers, it fuses history with imaginings to configurate a situation that verges on the fantastic. The technique is almost made to order for the Filipinos who, like the South Americans, possess a consciousness which is a source spring of the unusual and the grotesque. Our geography and climate encourage extreme imagination. The influences of native religions, myths, legends, folktales, and epics have not been dimmed by the pressures of colonization and advent of modern technology. In fact, this consciousness gains energy by adjusting to western thoughts and gadgets. It accommodates imported realities without surrendering what it considers sacred and inviolable. It is not difficult, then, for our fictionists to write like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And, alas, that it the peril that they face. They may just end up being clones of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. They have to reinvent magic realism, as it were, to Filipinize it, so that it reflects the Philippines and not South America.

There is nothing magical in Edgar Calabia Samar’s poems in Pag-aabang sa Kundiman – Isang Talambuhay (Quezon City: Office of Research and Publications, Ateneo de Manila University, 2006). They are firmly anchored on the ground, being a collective pursuit of personal roots and identity. The familiar, not the fantastic, delineate the fervor and dangers one must face in trying to discover the land he has left and the land he has returned to. As the poet intimates in the title poem, Pag-aabang sa Kundiman, things change, feelings, ideas, places – the better thing to do is to leave the place again, to just keep it in the memory as it was first gleamed, or experienced. Samar’s Kundiman is both the street in Sampaloc and an imagined country of fulfillment which he can never attain.

The collection’s design is to show through the poems some pattern of the age old theme of journey and quest for the meaning of life. Here, the life of the poem becomes the life of the persona – a believable metonymy if properly accomplished. But that is largely unattained in Samar’s book because the theme has not been profoundly explored and there is the absence of the vital energy that should link the various poems to be thematic structure. Some of the poems even seem to be irrelevant to that purpose (Panaginip, Panganay, Palaging May Ligaw na Pusa). The linkage could be signaled by certain words or ideas that reverberate through the various poems. At the same time, Samar could have used a dominantly poetic rhythm. As it is, his rhythm is prose because he uses paragraphic rather than stanzaic patterns. Indeed, some compositions here are not poetic but prosaic (Liham Kay Elias, Kay Ligaya). How are they to be taken in the context of the book’s overall intention? They have to be justified one way or another.

The best way to approach these poems is to think of them as individual, separate compositions. Then we can read with delectation such competent performances as Mga Pagtakas sa Kamatayan, Pananalig sa Kamalig, and Huling Awit Kay Mariang Makiling.

There are many things that can be said of Poems for Leaders (Naga City: Ina Nin Bikol Foundation, 2005). It is a handsomely designed clothbound collection. It has a noble intention. In the words of Fr. Leonardo Legaspi, O.P., these poems "bring to life the themes: Hopes and Dreams, Faith and Prayer, Courage and Perseverance, Character and Influence, Love and Service, Success and Fulfillment. The poets have employed metaphors that allow them to instruct in a manner that pleases and edifies the spirit." Classical and modern poets are included in the volume – St. John of the Cross, Shakespeare, St. Ignatius of Loyola, Alexander Pope, John Donne, William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Pablo Neruda, Alexander Pushkin, etc.

The important thing that must be said about this book, however, is that the editors did not observe the copyright law regarding literary products. We know this for a fact because two of our works, "The Late and Hardly Lamented Canuplin and our translation of Amado V. Hernandez’s Isang Dipang Langit are included in the book without our permission. We would never have known about the existence of Poems For Leaders if Jason Chancoco, our friend in Bicol, had not mentioned it to us. Worse, we have not received any royalty for the poems used. The editors must remember that they are punishable under the law for this irresponsibility. Poems are properties of the poets and they must be compensated every time these poems are printed in books or magazines. The exception is when the poems have passed to the public domain because their copyrights have not been renewed by the authors or their heirs. We hope the people behind the Ina nin Bikol Foundation will rectify their great mistake.