Purer than poetry

I didn’t think that last week’s piece – "Fifteen questions," a Q&A on some ideas about writing – would generate so many other questions, but sure enough it did, and I’ll answer just one of them quickly. I’d listed down "guilt" as something every writer should have, among such less mysterious accoutrements as a good dictionary and a dependable pen or computer. So why guilt?

My answer is that – in the same way that pain, no matter how nasty, reminds us that we’re still alive – guilt indicates that we still have a sense of right and wrong, of good and bad, and that we’d like to do something about it if we could. I suspect that most of us carry some kind of baggage like this – a grievous wrong done unto someone or something, whether it be a matter of love or money or trust; I certainly do, and as baggage goes, I’d be charged extra if I tried to drag mine on the next flight to Dipolog. I can’t make it up to everyone concerned, so I write instead, as a form of restitution; I try to write well, to leave something better than I am. The writing may have nothing to do with the personal issues involved, but I imagine that, as with all art, somewhere a small tear in the fabric of the universe will have been mended by the needle and the thread of my fiction. (My goodness, I’m beginning to sound like some tofu-eating guru. Somebody pass the salami!)

And by "restitution" I don’t mean, either, that we should try to right the wrongs of life in our writing, the way some authors, burdened with one overarching advocacy or other, tack on fabricated solutions and endings to their stories just to stay on the right side of the political polemics. (Of course they’re all fabricated, overtly political or otherwise; the only question is how well.)

In my last class of the semester a few days ago, this subject came up, and I had to say that the best we can do is to help clarify the issues – sometimes, ironically, by showing just how complex they are. You’re not going to bring justice into the world by punishing all the wrongdoers in your stories with a terrible death; leave that to the judges and lawyers. (Well, maybe not in this country, although injustice is a global blight. If there were justice on earth, or even in the mall, women’s restrooms would be twice as large as men’s.)

If you’re feeling as feisty as the Man of La Mancha or the Maid of Orleans, don’t write fiction; write an essay, and let it all hang out. Fiction is driven by deeper and more plaintive urges than outrage or proselytization; it should make you hear cellos instead of trumpets.

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And speaking of cellos, I’m no music critic; I can’t even read notes, and I haven’t played a guitar since high school. But like most people, I love music, which Leonard Bernstein once described as the only art form incapable of malice (an opinion he might be forced to revise, if he listened to some of today’s most egregious examples).

Music is even purer than poetry in the pleasure it creates – with no words to get in the way of the imagination, music works through the sheer power of evocation, of turning sounds into sensations we associate with one experience or other. Music can make even sadness beautiful, by giving it a scene, a face, a breath; it lends sense to our joy, again by giving it some measure as songs rise to a familiar climax before letting us linger in the afterglow.

Life could be far worse than a moment like right now – I’m in a chair in the lobby of the Manila Hotel on a bright summer morning, typing out this piece on my PowerBook with a cold beer on the side (taking an extended break, if truth be told, from the world’s most brain-deadening academic conference a few pavilions away), with Borodin’s Notturno – better known to a few as And This Is My Beloved – playing on the iPod.

No, this isn’t going to be another praise piece for the iPod, which I’ve written enough about. But it is about music, and how getting an iPod forced me to confront my musical tastes and preferences. These gadgets – and there are many of them, the iPod just being the best (and, ugh, most expensive) one – all have the humble but complicated task of bringing music to your ears on demand: Your music, and not some radio DJ’s, in whichever combination and sequence (or playlist) you want.

There are many thousands of songs out there, and you can probably fit them into the largest, 40-gigabyte iPod, but my four-gig mini can take only about a thousand, which is still plenty enough. I have about 730 songs loaded now (ripped, as they say, from my CDs and other sources), but I’m going to have a hard time filling up the balance. I believe in selectivity rather than sheer acquisition – but then again I’m 50 and not 25, an old geezer who basically thinks that music as we know it ended around 1979. To make things easier, the iPod allows you to make playlists within playlists – your personal favorites, reachable in a few clicks, and I’m using this feature to prune down my choices to my top 100.

What I find interesting and enjoyable is that even within this hundred, I keep going back to the same old songs and the same old singers, preferring to get, say, four versions of Sabor A Mi or Desafinado than to give Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake (or, God forbid, Linkin Park) a chance. Put another way, half the singers and musicians on my playlists are dead – but not gone. The youngest artist on my iPod is Norah Jones, singing nothing newer than The Nearness of You.

But even these old boulevards can be full of serendipitous finds, such as Toots Thielemans transporting us to a Parisian café with Bluesette, Rosemary Clooney pitching You’ll Never Know with Harry James and his orchestra, and John Williams making any moment sound like a sun-kissed afternoon with his Cavatina.

I’ve enjoyed encountering old friends like Earl Klugh (Like a Lover) and Eumir Deodato (Baubles, Bangles and Beads), making the acquaintance of new ones like Laura Fygi, Patricia Kaas, and Ute Lemper (any one of whom could probably warble the paint off a wall), and hearing Etta James and then reading about her unhappy life and listening to her again oozing something like Body and Soul.

I never knew Jackie Gleason was also a bandleader and a first-rate musician (Moonlight Becomes You) before he became better known as a TV comedian. But my great discovery in these explorations has been a wonderful Legrand ballad titled Once Upon A Summertime, which, amazingly so for a sentimental fellow my age, I don’t think I’d ever heard before. What rock has this song been hiding under all along? This is the kind of tune that you have to listen to three or four times to begin to like, starting on a melancholy minor key (and don’t we Pinoys just love this?) before rising on a gust of remembered romance:

You were sweeter than the blossoms on the tree

I was as proud as any girl could be

As if the mayor had offered me the key, the key to Paris

Now another winter time has come and gone

The pigeons feeding in the square have flown

But I remember when the vespers chime

You loved me once upon a summertime.

Am I sappy or am I sappy? I’m not sure yet if I like the sultry Fygi version over the soaring Streisand, or Klugh’s guitar cover over Thielemans’ harmonica – but what the heck, I’ll make up my mind after playing them all a hundred times.

What I know is, all these old tunes afford us the easy comfort of constancy, which we crave desperately at a time when the peso’s going through the floor (and worse, when we don’t know whose face is going to be on it years from now). It’s like the young rock musician John Mayer talking about his PowerBook laptop, which he depends on for his life on tour, as being "the only thing that’s the same from the last place I was."

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And now a brief commercial on behalf of my fellow teachers of English: The Philippine Association for Language Teaching, Inc. (PALT) will be holding its Second International Convention on Language Teaching on April 21-23 at the Manila Hotel, featuring speakers from North America and Southeast Asia. For inquiries, call Dr. Helen Parcon at 0916-3731534 or Prof. Magelende Flores at 926-3496.

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This message came into our mailing list at the Philippine Macintosh Users Group (www.philmug.org/forums) from one of our members (and a former student of mine), Jason de Villa, who happens to be in Spain doing his PhD in Navarra. We had been talking about Macs when the bombs exploded in Madrid. I got Jason’s permission to share his impressions with you – what a waste of good reportage it would have been, I thought, if only a few people read his notes on-line – and here they are:

"The rain in Spain finally fell last Friday as the skies wept for the victims of the Madrid bombing last Thursday. I had wanted to start off this thread in a light-hearted and funny tone, but that’s nigh impossible, given the carnage that happened a few days ago.

"On the day of the explosions, Thursday, some 4,000 students here in the university where I am studying (we are about 400 kilometers north of Madrid) spontaneously gathered at the esplanade in front of the library building at 12 noon to express their solidarity with the victims of the attack. I didn’t know about it, as only those who’ve been here long enough know of this tradition. After many decades of bombings and killings, mainly by Basque separatists, the people have adopted some traditional, symbolic forms of expressing their protest at the killings, the most common of which are these ‘concentrations’ at noontime.

"It happens everywhere – in schools and universities, big factories and offices. It has no leader and it goes unannounced. Everyone knows what to do when the clock strikes 12: They drop everything and gather in a convenient place, and stand there in silence for a few minutes. Sometimes there is a speaker, often there is none. The tradition is strong in this particular university, where the Basque separatists have exploded bombs three times in the last 15 years.

"The next day, Friday, there was another concentración, this time in front of the Edificio Central (more or less the equivalent of UP’s Quezon Hall), also at noon. Although I could have stayed holed up in the library working on the assignments due that day, I didn’t miss it. It was raining slightly – ambon, as we would say, although for them it was close to something like raining cats and dogs – and we never got to hear the vice rector (vice president, essentially) because we stood at the edge of the crowd, but it felt good to do something in solidarity with the people who suffered the most in this attack….

"Later that evening, even as the rain continued to fall, I went with a friend to the demonstration – the manifestación, as they call it – called for by the government all over the country to express their protest at the killings. The turnout was huge – 120,000 people in a city of just under 200,000; some 11 million people attended these manifestaciones all over the country. The mood was intense. People were drenched, they hardly spoke, and just stood there, expressing their anger and their sorrow by their presence, silently but no less eloquently than if they had done so with words. There were all kinds of people – students, young workers, old people, entire families, some pushing baby carriages. I felt the same emotional rush I did at EDSA I and II, which seemed so long ago and which I thought I would never again experience in my lifetime. Only this time, there was a strong undercurrent of sorrow rippling through the crowd. We walked for an hour under the rain, silently, tracing a path that brought us past the offices of the regional government, and then to the plaza where such actions traditionally end."

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.