Idealized Forms for Secret Thoughts

My relationship with Tina spurred me to work with words. The elevated feelings of love give way to noble thoughts. They seek outlet in words of tenderness and acts of giving and sharing. The first words I tooled together for other than required academic work sprouted from these feelings and thoughts. Like people similarly affected through centuries immemorial I wrote lyrics, lines meant for singing.

In a cramped room on an empty ward at Clark Air Base Hospital that I shared with Arturo, I began to write verses in a blue-and-red lined Corona Stenographic notebook. While my roommate was on duty at the Emergency Room, busy with Med Evacs from the war then raging in Vietnam, I jockeyed words together to express what I was too scared to say aloud even to myself. Poems couched secret thoughts into idealized forms.

Emptiness

18 September 1973

I tear myself away

From deep within the caverns of my room,

Scene of my cantonment rich in gloom.

Outside the leaden skies hang low.

The air is rank with not-yet-fallen rain.

No-sound proclaims the habitude of pain.

Upon a cankered yellow rose I watch

Ants build mud cradles for the flood,

Oblivious to my emptiness inside.

Ay, Rosing!

Just like little children today, I spent more time with my mother than with any other member of the family. But like many children in middle-class Filipino families of the time, there was another woman. For me this was my yaya, Rosing (probably short for Rosita or Little Rose).

The family teased me endlessly for supposedly being in love with Rosing. This was a little boy of two or three years. I remember Rosing’s face and the flowered dress she wore so my memory is probably false. That’s how she looked in a photograph in the family album. My mother indulged, maybe even initiated the teasing. She would take out her maroon-bound volume of sheet music from inside the piano seat and play the Ilonggo song, Ay, Rosing! Hapless I would be persuaded to sing the love song in my reedy, childish voice.

Thus are we trained about love the puny understanding of which we carry the rest of our lives. Some of us, already feeble with age, divorced or with a string of relationships like school trophies on the shelf, are still searching for that elusive fairytale we were introduced to as children. It was an almost embryonic closeness we try again and again to find in sexual, physical or emotional intimacy.

Many of us find it, but late at night, sleepless and queerly restless, we ask ourselves if we’ve simply given it up as a dream. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things….” Maybe growing up is a matter of putting away what we treasured as a child. To each season are its own treasures. We have to throw out the old to make room for the new. Others do, not I. For me the past beckons even more today, promising treasures I have yet to unearth.

Salvador, My Father

One of the few details I know about my father was that he was a graduate of Silliman University in Dumaguete. Silliman was the first American-founded university in the country, and it's oldest Protestant school. Graduating from Silliman, I gathered, was a singular achievement during his time. It set the bar for us kids in terms of academic achievement.

Today I wonder about the relationship between my father and Silliman. How did he choose to get his college degree there? How did his stay there affect his fundamental values? I remember him to be anti-religious. In a country that was predominantly Roman Catholic, did his education there in any way help push him into atheism? He never attended church with my mother and us kids. We would come home from church on Sunday to his grumbling about the wasted time. He had already done this and that. Church was not important to my father as it was to me during those early years.

While I don't remember him talking about literature or the arts, he must have at one time loved literature. Or did he study English at Silliman only as a means to an end, as his passport to steady income? How did he become associated with the Lopez family that owned Iloilo City Colleges where he taught? Was he interested in politics or was the connection purely financial? What were his fundamental beliefs in life?

For years now I would joke about my father's name, Salvador. In Spanish, Salvador mean savior. Despite his tough exterior my father was tenderhearted, some family and friends would say gullible. A frequent image from childhood is people waiting in the living room to speak to him. He didn't always publicize his generosity. He was largely an unknown quantity although increasingly I sense his influence on many facets of my own character and choices in life that I’ve made.

Imagination and Memory

I remember a sense of unreality when we came back to Iloilo after a visit to Manila. I was maybe four or five years old. I sniffed the inside of our suitcases as my mother or the maid took the clothes out that we brought back from the trip. I imagined I could smell the aromas of that other place that now resided only in memories. Smelling them I tried to convince myself that other place was real.

Back then I already distrusted memory. Memory was someplace else and some other time. The child begins to differentiate here from there, then from now. In his developing sense of dichotomies he senses the idea of worlds rather than just one world. Each world comprises its own reality.

It was simpler then. The child didn’t have to choose between worlds. He could live in memories instead of the evidence his physical senses were constructing for him in the moment. And he discovers an even more powerful faculty of mind: imagination.

Between imagination and memory there is often not a great deal of difference. Equipped with these, a person awakens to the possibilities of fiction, thence to literature and art, philosophy and theology. The child grows into a man.

The Captain Connection

Of the two books from my mother’s bookshelf, Captain cast the more lasting influence. It prefigured my fascination with cultures and the origin of cultures. It prefigured my obsession with identity, not just who I am but why others are who they think they are. Reading that book was the first step towards an almost intrinsic bent to deconstruct reality itself.

Back then the book was just a story that somehow held my interest until I finished reading it. Who knows how our interests take shape? From the moment we become conscious we make choices. As children the adults regiment much of our time but they can’t regiment what we think. Our interests first find expression in what we think.

I read the book and didn’t recognize it as fiction. It described people and places different from what I saw in my life outside the book but I was ignorant of the difference between real and fictional. Back then I didn’t jump to conclusion as quickly as I do now. There is something to be said for innocence.

The Vast Inner World

My parents owned books that they kept prominently displayed in a man-sized bookcase in the living room of the house on Burgos Street. My mother’s were novels and children’s (and, as the kids grew older, juvenile) books that occupied four of the shelves. On the bottom shelf were my dad’s odds and ends. He taught high school English but didn’t own any book worth listing nor did I see him ever read one. His life was completely taken up with administrative work at ICC and, when he came home, his horses and calesa business.

I read my mom’s books. Off the top of my head I remember two: Captain from Castille (published 1945) by American author Samuel Shellabarger and Rebecca (published 1938) by British author Daphne du Maurier. The 1938 edition of Rebecca sells for $187 on Amazon. Captain was republished in 2002. Two copies of the out-of-print hardcover edition are available for sale for $57 each. The effect of these books on my young mind is priceless.

From that 13-year-old boy’s world to my world today is immeasurable space yet no more difficult today to visit than the snow-covered garden outside the door. In fact the inner tundra begs to be revisited. To visit it again is to pay my dues in appreciation and gratitude. It’s like paying a debt, word for word.

Making a Life

Others wiser than I declare: we make our path by walking. Life is what we make it. No one has a ready-made path that ensures he gets what he wants every time and in the end. We each stumble about in the shadows (since the future is always dark from where we are in the present), take one step after another, steps that on looking back appear a coherent whole. Why, I know the plot, I know who I am, I understand why I did that!

In Manila while struggling through medical school I met Tina who became my first girl friend. Girls had tried to get close to me before but I was too immature to see what they were trying to do. Tina represented an ideal and suddenly I understood the concept of a girl friend. I learned many things about myself those first years in Manila but this discovery ranks among the most far-reaching.

Tina inspired me to write poetry. In my cramped room at Clark Air Base Hospital I wrote verses in a Steno notebook that today make me blush to read but they were the real start of my love affair with words. I took a break from medical school one summer and took classes on English and American writers and the philosophy of literature back at San Agustín. I little knew then how important that time was going to be. Those two classes were the only classes I took in literature that informed my writing through the years. English Lit and Comp classes in high school and college were useless. I memorized what I needed to pass the tests and that was all.

On those dark nights in that cramped hospital room, writing by the light of wall sconces not meant for reading, somehow I elaborated my wild scheme of escape. Books had opened windows into a world that felt to me wondrously open, bright where my world was in shadow, and wide enough to contain fledgling hope that somewhere in a larger world I might find myself.

Elements of Style

I came across Strunk and White's The Elements of Style with irrelevant, playful illustrations by Maira Kalman. Years ago, Strunk and White's book was the first book on grammar and style that made sense to me. Rereading it reawakened a sensitivity to words and phrases that decades dictating psychiatric reports have eroded to jargon and carp. There's hope for me again. Unlearning a thoughtless way with words, like unlearning the wrong ways I learned to play the piano, feels a daunting, hopeless task. Kalman's irrelevant pictures reminded me of the value of insanity. When we don’t take it so seriously, a daunting task lifts and becomes, if not doable, at least a joy.

Duende Notes

Why write? For the mind to be so fiercely occupied. In Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner wrote (he died in 1982) that a writer's goal was to create a "vivid and continuous dream." To write is to leave home and occupy for the time the dream persists some fearsomely foreign place as someone else—maybe dreaming the life we are living. To be able to write such a world into being beats even reading a good book. There is more life inventing it so well that it becomes a dream to wake up to.