Still points, then some movement

Although you had turned off the bedside lamp, faint light kept streaming through the slats of the louvre windows. You got up and, on bare feet, padded towards the sliding doors  and slowly opened them wider, careful again not to wake anyone. You had kept those doors half open the night before so the breeze from the bay could cool the night further. Plus, of course, you wanted the repetitive sound of waves as they crested and fell to cradle and lullabye you. So there you were in the dark balcony, at almost 5 a.m., and on your left was a tree all lit up with capiz lanterns. Yes, you remembered, the third Sunday of Advent was approaching. You returned to the room to fetch the camera.

It was the kind of darkness that you had, many times in your life, wanted to walk straight into. Nay, march into without turning back! But always someone, something, some interfering noise (not even music) pulled you back. But this darkness had a speck of light in the distance. Lighthouse? Fishing boat? Briefly, you remembered the misty lighthouse from where you still dispatched cards and short notes that now and then got a reply. Most of the time, there was silence at the other end. Meanwhile, you went back to the room and put on your wristwatch to time the taking of shots while your elbows remained solidly braced on the balcony railing.

The light became lighter, the clouds were coming out to play. So what must you call this kind of blue then? In The Little Book of Colour Healing, Catherine Cumming and Deborah Italiano cited electric blue for its "jewel-like intensity." With that still light in the distance to stand for a diamond, an electric but unmoving body of blue water was a good spot to put it on top of.

Was that the sun? It could not be because it was too early for this time of the year, the month when darkness was long. What was that orb on the left then? It distracted you from the original still point. Whatever it was, it changed the light. The outlines of the rocks and boulders became more pronounced. Beyond them was the airy blue of the waters. You were tempted to describe them a Nordic blue, but this was the tropics that always kept the promise of pale pale summer skies, yes, so even in December some hearts could remember.

The clouds were coming out to add their cotton-like texture to the brightening sky. Hark hark the lark. You were tired from stooping and peering through a lens. But that state of anticipation enabled you to wait it out. Hmmm…Carly Simon on your mind again.

Framing the still point, framing it--this was the point of your own utterly still posture. It was windless, thus, there was no blurring of the image.

The context, where you stooped to watch

The still lighted point disappeared. After all, it was morning already, and the artificial light must've been extinguished. Beyond you was Filipino blue, not Mediterranean, certainly not Moroccan, blue but your type of blue that spoke of moons in June, jazz in time, the feelings trapped in an indescribable abyss.

And then it was full morning. You stretched on your back on the bed and waited for stirrings of life below, the host calling you down for the promised walk. There was air, pure air, rare air but not enough of it for a wind. The call came.

The meals were spartan, the swim refreshing. It was the perfect mix before the Baudelairean feasting and drinking to follow in the weeks ahead.

Before it was time to clear the room and pack your stuff in your backpack, you leafed once again through your journal, a random turning of pages, until you eyes fell on a verse by the Sufi poet Rumi, the one you had forwarded by SMS to a recuperating friend somewhere in Cavite after his return from a hometown visit to Antique. 

Not only was it apt but it captured the turmoil, the anger you had gone through. Yes, all that was done and gone. You were heady and ready for the future.

It may be that the satisfaction
I need depends on my going
away, so that when I've gone
and come back, I'll find it
at home.

Before sundown on a Friday, you were back in the boat, near the prow, bidding goodbye to all that. You shut your eyes as you neared the shore and hastily threw an imaginary  pebble into the water packed with great intention to return.

Photos by Babeth Lolarga

Not even a month ago and you can still hear the waves

It was a Thursday the 13th, how often does that happen in a year or more? Except that this time, it was December. Inside, you were nursing a low-grade fever brought about by a combined anger at the world for what it had become and a more dangerous anger at the self for never having learned to adjust to that world and a weariness unsuited for the season. Seeing the pain that couldn't be disguised by dark glasses, the friend impulsively invited you to tag along to the beach. "Nothing like a night's rest and a walk and a swim to restore your spirit," the host said. So you went, but the waves were rough. You had to take a boat far from the pier where the waters were calmer.

At first you thought that the motorized banca was too frail for the waves, but the host assured you that the beach house was just five minutes away beyond a rock that hid a cove and the house. The shore was covered everywhere with pebbles. There was hardly any fine sand. Your city slicker's feet found the massage on the undersoles a pleasure beyond words. Now who was that hedonistic person who said, "Paradise awaits where the sea meets the land"?

Except for the bed, the lamp, a study table where you had parked your backpack, the room was almost a nun's cell, except that there were no bars on the windows and the doors hardly locked. You let yourself be rocked to sleep by the unceasing music of the waves a few hundred meters below the balcony. As usual, when in a new place you automatically woke up at 4 a.m. and looked for something to lull you back to sleep. You found some books, and before you knew it, you were involved with them.

Inside the book Inner Simplicity was a bookmark with this quotation (a found poem at four in the effing morning!) from Stephanie Dowrick:

Restraint holds you
back from saying
anything that may give
you momentary relief
or even pleasure, but that
causes hurt, confusion
or retaliatory anger. It 
expresses love at best,
or at least an awareness of choice
and some insight that
others' lives have a 
value equal to your
own.

And then you heard it, a faint noise. You put down the books, set aside the ballpoint pen and the notebook and followed your first green visitor. It was too early for a visit, you told the insect quietly, careful not to waken anyone asleep below the floor where you were assigned to. Lit by the lamp, the grasshopper became the subject of your camera.

It might not even have been a grasshopper. It didn't hop. It wasn't fearful, and it allowed you to move around it. It was a welcome distraction, a true apparition in the tired metro(nometer beat) of your life.

Closeup of the creature showed it was as droopy-eyed as you were at that hour of the day. You tried to will it to leave so you and it (he?) both could rest.

Instead, the visitor chose to creep up the wall beside the bed. It was then that you heard another buzz...

...and a bee called out your name. A bee, not a moth, was attracted to the lightbulb. You decided to let it be (okay, okay, too many Beatles and insects at that hour) and return to your reading.

 At an hour considered ungodly by others, you prayed that sleep would return, but it was no good. Soon you found yourself copying some more lines from Ms. Dorwrick into a notebook. 

Promise at all times to take
the time to know yourself,
to be true to your deepest
values and, in so doing, to
be open to all other human
beings... and to the
infinite manifestations of 
beauty and wonder
within nature itself."

At that point you turned off the lamp, decided to wait another hour before singing to yourself a welcome song for a Friday morning.

Photos by Babeth Lolarga   

Seriously, now

Image from Google+

In love with the hunks of Mirador Hill

If I'm walking with a silly grin plastered on my face today, it's because Del Tolentino, kagalaang-galang na propesor ng Unibersidad ng Pilipinas, just sent me his New Year greetings with a photo of the kind of activities that happen in his tiny kitchen, drinking to everyone's health being the least harmless and most wholesome of them all.

Trust him to send me a message like:

"Happy New Year, Baboobska! Taking this opportunity to thank you for the links to your blog which I always enjoy reading. They say bloggers don't get laid, but I suppose that is no longer of any consequence. Cheers!"

Del Tole (left), he of the impishly smiling eyes, and his perfect foil, the always sober economist and wonderful piano accompanist Ben Tapang

Points of view

Joey Albert used to sing a song about points of view. Found this image below at a Google+ site. Another apt reminder on the fourth day of the New Year. Reminds me, too, of the acrobatics my toddler-age apo is capable of.

The company I kept, briefly, in December

A rare smile coaxed out of Luis Teodoro

"But we all know who, or what, the writer is. He or she is a poet, an essayist and/or a novelist, as the initials and acronym of this organization suggest. But he or she is also the writer of the editorials and columns, the investigative and explanatory reports that are among the many forms journalism has developed in discharging its public task of describing and interpreting the human environments. In the digital age, the writer is also the blogger who makes it his concern to gather and provide information on issues of citizen concern and to comment on them online."
--Excerpt from Luis V. Teodoro's "Interpreting the World: The Writer as Public Intellectual," keynote address as the PEN Philippines Conference at the Cultural Center of the Philippines Silangan Hall, Dec. 6, 2012 

This being a belated account of what transpired at the last Philippine PEN conference, the blogger finds it fitting to begin with what Prof. Teodoro had said less than a month ago.

He pointed out that "the intellectual, like the writer, is necessarily public."  Apart from this, he enlarged the definition of what a writer is to include not just poets, playwrights, essayists and novelists (the traditional membership of PEN which has chapters all over the world) but especially journalists. 

He spoke in the latter's defense, saying, "Those writers who are neither poets nor novelists and 'only journalists,' are too often denied the distinction of being included in the august company called writers, the products of their craft being thought to be too ephemeral, too bound by time, and in some if not most cases, constricted as well by the interests, whether political or corporate, of the media organizations they write for.

"Journalism is truly writing by the numbers, that virtue, if virtue it indeed be, being driven primarily by the need for information gathering skills. But journalism can be more than information gathering, as many journalists, among them Nick Joaquin, have demonstrated. The journalist who guards and fights for his independence and who is more than a gatherer of information can also be a great writer, if, as Joaquin warned, he approached every article as if it involved the parting of the Red Sea or the splitting of the atom."

Manong Ed

Teodoro, himself a fiction writer, newspaper columnist, journalism teacher, former political detainee during the Marcos dictatorship and introduced by Manong Ed Maranan as "70-ish, a natty dresser and a national democrat," acknowledged journalism for its long tradition of lending "itself to the need of the intellectual for public engagement. But the Philippine experience has demonstrated again and again that public engagement can be extremely perilous for both writer and intellectual. The perils are not limited to dying in poverty under alien skies like Graciano Lopez Jaena, or execution through musketry like Rizal. During the martial law period, hundreds of writers were arrested and detained, and others killed in demonstration of how driven by violence is the authoritarian fear that information and insight are values too dangerous to tolerate in those who hold them.

"Emman Lacaba was slain without the benefit of charge or trial for joining the army of the poor, departing thus from the conventional path of  middle class ease and the Bohemian excess usually—and mistakenly—associated with writers. The poet Lorena Barros was similarly executed—the exquisitely ironic term devised by the military is 'salvaged'—while hundreds of intellectuals in academia and outside were arrested, others were made to disappear never to be seen or heard of again, or thrown into prison, as some of those present today were.

Teodoro: "..[T]he intellectual speaks the truth and exposes lies—to the end... of interpreting the world towards changing it."

"The country is no longer under martial rule. But today the journalist and poet Ericson Acosta is still in prison, sharing the fate of others in other countries where dictators rule."

Teodoro pointed out that not all journalists are blemish-free, saying,"Among journalists some have been more successful than others, and many have succumbed to the blandishments of wealth and power, serving as the spokespersons of local tyrants, business interests, criminal syndicates, the military and/or the police. But public intellectuals have nevertheless emerged among journalists despite the chaos in the communities, where warlordism and corruption, environmental degradation and human rights violations are most pronounced and occurring in the larger context of  the poverty and injustice that for centuries have afflicted that portion of humanity we know as Filipinos. These public intellectuals and writers have armed themselves, out of  sheer necessity, with a coherent theoretical framework with which they examine and report events in behalf of the fundamental need to understand the roots of human misery.


"Many are in military Orders of Battle and almost regularly receive death threats as the reward for their work. They write with the constant possibility of being ambushed and slain, in courageous affirmation of that commitment to 'speaking the truth and exposing lies' Noam Chomsky declares is the intellectual’s responsibility, interpreting the Philippine world to their readers as  part of their contribution to the historic necessity to change it. In what is known as the alternative press, the same focus is as evident in the work of those who labor unrecognized but who have found among those Filipinos fighting for the change that for at least a century has eluded this land, the growing and appreciative audience that can do something about it."

After Teodoro, what could one say or dare add? 

Nery called Rizal "a man of projects...a scholar of history."

John Nery, a newspaper columnist, author of Revolutionary Spirit: Rizal in Southeast Asia and one of the panelists, quoted the fervid letter-writer that was Rizal in his paper "Condensados en un libro: Fr. Vicente Garcia, the Noli, and Rizal's Theory of 'Intellectual Tradition'". These words from the 1800s still have currency among young and mid-career writers:

"I who belong to the young generation, anxious to do something for their country and uneasy about the mysterious future, I need to come to men who have seen much and studied more so that with their experience they may supplement our youth and limited knowledge. We need besides the applause and the blessing of the old to encourage us in the colossal struggle and the gigantic campaign that we have thrown over our dwarfish shoulders. However great is our enthusiasm, however confident is our youth, however promising our illusions, we hesitate nevertheless in certain moments, especially when we find ourselves alone and abandoned."

The rest of Dec. 6 went by like a blur, forgive the cliche. For this blogger, it was enough that the most solitary, almost anti-social beings that writers and journalists could be sometimes, weren't clawing the eyes out of each other's faces. 

Angela Stuart Santiago

It was also delightful to put a face on certain writers one admired from a distance, the mother-daughter Angela Stuart Santiago and Katrina Stuart Santiago, both master essayists and critics. The former called Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile a liar out to revise history to protect his political and business interests. This is exemplified by his pushing son Jackie to run for, and succeed him as, senator.

She accused Enrile, who came out smelling like roses after the Corona trial, of rewriting history in his so-called autobiography, an exercise that she called a throwback to the Dark Ages when politicians reinvented themselves as icons.

On Enrile's attempt to rewrite history, moderator Rony V. Diaz said, "If that is not sad, I don't know what sad is."

Quite moving was Jaime An Lim's reading of his poem "I Am Finally All I Have" about a "short-time" encounter between two men. 

He spoke of how hard it was for homosexual men of his generation to blend in, to "banish the limp wrist, cultivate a manly baritone" so they could not give themselves away. He considered himself one of those "not visible" gays even if he and the others had been around for the longest time.

Lim: "Liberation starts with self-affirmation."

 That was why he considered the anthology Ladlad, edited by Danton Remoto and Neil Garcia, as "the first Cry of Balintawak of the gay community." In a bigoted world, Lim said, Ladlad helped unite the gay writing community in the belief in the power of numbers "to be heard" and "to change the world...Listen, because we are many."

Jun Cruz Reyes spoke in Filipino about the need for writers to shake the power structures of society given the speed with which today's generation moves: "May nakakarating, may naiiwan." 

He noted how topics discussed among writers have veered towards safe ones instead of their seeking out a national discourse that could capture the public's imagination. Such a discourse would be characterized by "pukpukan ng bayag."

He lamented how Rizal has been reduced to "a myth," apart from his figure appearing on the cover of matchboxes and in cement monuments. Cruz Reyes cited the not so recent history of Filipino writers during the dictatorship wherein they were jailed, tortured or executed while confronting issues of oppression. He said this situation goes on in countries like China, Burma and Turkey.

Jun Cruz Reyes

He closed by saying writing should go beyond celebrating the self or setting up one's own literary clique.

In most conferences of this kind, sometimes the most exciting discussions, in whispered tones, happen at the back of the room. 

It was great to hang out by the secretariat table staffed by Shirley Lua who looked as young as her college literature students. Sometimes, she'd scold us, with a smile, for doubling over in laughter as we found ourselves engaging in pleasurable gossip. 

I felt the temperature in that air-conditioned hall go up a bit when Ed Cabagnot marched in partly to listen to the discussions, partly to play. 

When I asked why he doesn't co-emcee Writers' Night at UP Diliman with Gou de Jesus anymore, he explained why he was banned from the event. I don't know if this physical reaction of mine is possible. But my non-virgin ears blushed!

Backroom crowd: Lito Zulueta, Shirley Lua, nice decent lady, Nic Tiongson, someone whose jaw must be locked sometimes and Ed Cabagnot

When the Miclat couple, Mario and Alma, arrived late, it was another occasion for a group hug and shot. Front row from left: Dr. Luis Gatmaitan, children's book author, Domingo and Edna May Landicho, Mario, Alma and Shirley. Rubbernecking are Wendell Capili and a woman whose jaw came unlocked.

The adjective "patrician" becomes the old guard: National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera, Rony Diaz and Elmer Ordoñez

At the Philippine PEN, Writers' Solidarity Night has been a long tradition. I remember one  author in the '80s who slumped in a drunken stupor in the men's room of the then US territory on Roxas Blvd., Seabreeze, and woke to find some US military police glaring at him.

Gemma aging young-ly

Guerrero cousins Amadis and Gemma

On the last month of 2012, the old guard, the avant garde, even the guarded and shy convened at Dencio's by Manila Bay for prose and poetry readings in English, Filipino, Chavacano and other languages, drinking, more gossiping and photo ops with the country's first Miss International, Gemma Cruz Araneta, herself an essayist and fictionist.

That's anthologist Erlinda Panlilio caught in the middle.

The boys couldn't contain their thrill at the visual feast in their presence. Soon, Domeng Landicho was declaiming extemporaneously his admiration for Ms. Araneta and ended his on-the-spot poem with a courtly kiss of her hand. 

I should've butted in by crooning, "Ikaw ang Miss Universe ng buhay ko."

Boys at heart at the back: Francis Macansantos and Arnold Molina Azurin. Seated are a Chinay writer who prefers to use a pen name, Gemma and Mrs. Panlilio.

 Photos taken by Babeth, except the ones with her in them

Boys don't make passes...you know the rest