The world and its woundedness

"The morning air is all awash with angels."
~ Richard Purdy Wilbur

While my doctor brother Dennis was dressing my knee wound this morning, I had a brief time to ponder on the world's woundedness wrought by Covid19.

(BTW, my stitches have dried and no longer require waterproof bandaging. Dennis sprayed a medical disinfectant, applied some ointment and instructed me to tape Band-aids on the top and bottom parts of the vertical line of stitches. I'm a cooperative patient and after doing as told, I walked within the house a bit, trying on my newly liberated knee. It felt grand!)

I also thought of the opening lines from W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts": "About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: How well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along..."

We spent hours pouring over and discussing that ekphrastic poem in the comparative literature class of Dr. Gemino H Abad in the mid-'70s at UP Diliman. I remember thinking then how a Master like Auden could pull off a stunt like that--open a poem with a prosaic, almost forgettable observation. It led me to think that one doesn't have to always have a lyrical first line.

When super-typhoon Yolanda walloped Southern Philippines, particularly Leyte, in November 2013, poets were also called upon to do their own brand of "relief work" with the composition and immediate publication (uploading online) of poetry that soothed or raised a protest against what was perceived as a slow response from the powers that be.

That calamity enabled me to concentrate on renewed versifying, something the Bard of Pasig Pablo Tariman is doing in the time of today's plague. I wrote "Plane Manifest," partly inspired by Auden and taking off from a photo of a surviving father rescued and evacuated from Tacloban. His farmer's demeanor belied the dark color of years spent under the sun, his eyes a-brim with tears as they grieved for loved ones who didn't make it. The estimate then was 10,000 people dead.

I posted my relief response in FB and when the call for an instant visual and literary anthology called "Surges" was made by Rossana Golez and Joel Garduce, I was prepared with my submissions. Here is that poem in its entirety.

Plane Manifest

in the quieter network
where i get my news feed
for the day
where members
aren't so overwrought
and telling others
what to do
what to think
in a calamitous country

this image
and description
of a man
spoke for all
who had lost
someone
(never mind the some things
that are always replaceable
in some ways)

but to lose someone?
or maybe three four
six seven eight?
and see them
on some broken pavement
laid out straight?

the horror the horror

the awareness
that here he was
left with this one life
and some clothes on his back

haunted perhaps
by the thought
that he would've
given it all up
for a wife
a child not yet fully weaned
a mother who raised him up
to be as hardworking as she

he trembles
while seated
in this freight plane
of human cargo
flying him where?
to what sort of new life
in some strange place
will he rebuild
without those he knew
and touched as

love
made
manifest?

Truly, we are called whether it's in a time of crisis or a time of increasingly elusive peace and wellness in the world. To paraphrase the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, the darkness is vast so we are all called upon to supply our own unique light.

Creative juices and how to make them flow

For writers, whether they are in journalism or in the literary arts, one source of creativity is the company of other writers.

Tim Tomlinson, co-founder of the New York Writers Workshop, shared this observation at "Read Lit District," the Third Philippine International Literary Festival, at the Ayala Museum in Makati City.
Speaking at the panel discussion on "Juices: Get Creativity Flowing," he said being with writers always "makes me want to write." He quoted Dr. Gemino Abad, poet- professor emeritus at the University of the Philippines Diliman, who earlier said, "The knowing is in the writing."

Tim Tomlinson

He shared how he got into the social media network Facebook to connect with his yoga group, but later found that it could also link him up "to people I haven't thought of in years." So for his workshops, using FB as some kind of model, he would ask participants to hurriedly write down 25 random things about themselves.

Tomlinson, a fictionist and editor of the webzine Ducts, said this exercise opened up the experimental end of literature, "the anti-narrative, the anti-story." Even with an exercise like that, he advised those who do it not to throw anything away. "Never give up. Mining the self--it's a great source of material. We're constantly drawing from our childhood. One way is to draw a map of the street where you grew up on."

He told beginning and mid-career writers that it's important "to guard your time for creativity." He said this time should be "inviolable," citing novelist and Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison who once said she got more things written when she began turning down dinner invitations.

Ken Spillman, author of several acclaimed novels for young readers, said he enjoyed following poets on another social network, Twitter, because "it helps me to be in a creative space." He also tried to practice mindfulness, "to be totally present in my work. Several things may be going on at the same time, but (a writer) should shut out everything. Trust yourself. My creative view is you do have the chance to become who you are."

Ken Spillman

He said, "The hardest part of writing is the sitting. Ideas are easy to come by, but books are not. You have to sit a long time before you have a book."

The oft-cited writer's block, he said, meant "having too much to say, too many ideas that it is hard to move forward." He recommended that when faced with a block, a writer does a seemingly random exercise like what Tomlinson earlier cited, then "get an entry point into a story. The human brain is in wild spaces. It gets easily distracted. You must learn to be wired, to be more aware of your surroundings." From that can emerge what he called "the wonder of you."

Spillman said the signs of creativity are when a person is able to bring a new process into something or associate one thing. He added, "Memory takes you to places that were significant to you in past times. It brings you back to yourself. There are  countless numbers of pathways that take us to the unexpected, the unwanted, even the unpleasant places. Making links is an essential part to being human. It takes a lot of practice to still the mind, to be ourselves, to be original."

He cited composer-musician Amadeus Mozart who wrote his father while he was a young man touring Europe that he was not really an original, that his ideas for his music came from everywhere and he hoped that he was creating something that sounded "Mozart-like."

Spillman also said, "If we know ideas have value, it is okay to express ourselves. But the hardest part is to sit, to hold on to the child or artist in each of us. Writing is like being a child again. You must use the gifts you have that you yourself alone have."

He quoted the great poet Maya Angelou who said one cannot use up creativity because the more you use it, the more one becomes creative.

In his introduction to the popular The Portable MFA in Creative Writing (Writer's Digest Books), Tomlinson quoted American literary agent Noah Lukeman about his opinion on the pursuit of a masters of fine arts degree in creative writing.

Lukeman said, "Take the $35,000-50,000 you're going to spend on the degree, buy yourself a good laptop and printer and a bundle of paper, and go off to a cabin and write. At the end of two years, the worst that can happen is you have nothing. Less than nothing is what you'll almost certainly have at the end of your MFA program, because, besides nothing, you'll have a mountain of debts."--Text and photos by Elizabeth Lolarga

First published by Vera Files / Yahoo Philippines, Nov. 22, 2012