In our time of workshop

We forgot to pay tribute to the late mad poet Jun Lansang, a dark and frightening figure from our childhood that may as well have been "the black thing," or that anonymous roving specter that could be the wing of madness it(him?)self.

When text messages began circulating that he died, anyone who had a passing acquaintance of him tried to remember at least one Jun Lansang story: how he had washed his privates using the water falling from the dilapidated gutter of the Eagle’s Nest dormitory along Katipunan Avenue; how he coolly munched on sampaguita buds and bagoong sandwich at the back of some book launch or literary event at the Faculty Center; or picture this – his sunburned face suddenly appearing above the green gate of home to drop by and give regards to a mentor, during his tour of Luzon/tours of the black clock days.

We came across an old book of his, in the basement library of the ancestral homestead, and saw how the madness filtered into lyric poetry, basing many of his blues on an unrequited lust, and turning into music the time he spent at the National Mental Hospital along Nueve de Febrero Street in Mandaluyong. His poems with references to NMH should be photocopied and distributed to inmates and outpatients of the ward, so that the seemingly hopeless may be reminded that there is a glimmer of life and even poetry beyond the deep end of despair.

Afavorite question asked among literary pundits has always been: who is or was madder, Lansang or the trilingual poet Licsi Espino, Licsi or the suicide Manalo, Manalo or the wrist-slasher Cuala, and so forth as if madness can be compared by degrees. To paraphrase what someone said about genius – itself a kind of madness: either one is mad or one isn’t. But listen to this: a souvenir T-shirt of the Silliman workshop long ago, which we only recently learn Lansang had walked out of, had the following text printed along with a picture of an earless Van Gogh: "There is a touch of madness in all great minds."

A photo of Einstein or Jun L. could have accompanied the phrase and the effect wouldn’t have differed. Or would it? Maybe madness is comparative after all, because as AZ Jolicco said, the man who wrote Black or otherwise really may have taken the craziness too far. Lansang’s madness was not fine, unlike the late Pepito Bosch’s; nor benign, like Cesar Ruiz’s, or any poet worth his or her salt who has managed to steer clear of the NMH and its ballads of joggers and out-of-stock brown cigarettes.

Of course what was madness then can be merely considered performance art now, because if for example a guy like Vim Nadera performed his stunts in the more sedate haunts of the ’60s, the conservatives might have brought in a straitjacket.

Our encounters with madness, or with fine lyric poetry for that matter, have not been limited to the ridiculous, often frightening figure of the late mad poet who walked out of workshops and who, perchance, might have seen how such annual exercises reeked of their own share of poetry – more abstract now than lyric – and fellow crazies.

We’ve heard it said before but there’s no harm in saying it again: there but for the grace of God go I, and we can only thank Lansang, Licsi and the others who distracted many of our own demons to their side so that we could somehow function with a semblance of normalcy.

In this our time of crazies, er, workshops, everyone’s fair game to be critiqued. We get pointers of all sorts and in various shapes and sizes on how to write or how not to write a story, watch the panelists argue among themselves short of pulling each other’s hair or getting under each other’s skin literally, only to kiss and make up and make eyes and passes again in the many watering holes and sweaty, swimming turo-turos of the city that happens to be hosting the workshop of the moment.

It has gotten to be something of a cottage industry, and we don’t mean just the writing workshops, but similar exercises like actors workshops, dance theater workshops, cooking demonstrations, the whole hog that is the marriage of art and commerce altogether designed to keep us preoccupied and away from drugs and boredom, because everyone knows that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, oops, there’s that word again.

But what I would give to attend a Silliman workshop in the late ’60s or early ’70s, with Edilberto Tiempo still very much alive and in the conjugal panel with wife the National Artist Edith, and maybe a couple of guest panelists from Manila including Kerima Polotan, who edited the magazine Focus during the martial law years and whose book of personal essays, The True and the Plain, was released last year by the UP Press. Reading Kerima again after all these years has us marveling how good she writes, yes we had plain forgotten how good she is. We seldom come across writing as clear and concise and by its very artlessness exposés (unintentionally and with not an ounce of malice) the many pretentious reams of newsprint we have to suffer through day in and day out in the regular press.

We can almost see them now, Ed, Edith, Kerima and maybe Rolando Tinio, all together now, the living and the dead, discussing the merits and demerits of a poem, story or play, or if we may do a bit of time space acrobatics even some creative non-fiction, and the afternoon will come and find the driver of the red Tiempo sedan waiting, and Cesar Ruiz is raising his hand wanting to excuse himself because he has a chess combination lingering in his head and wants to try it out online against the anonymous hustlers on the Internet from Dumaguete to Finland, and isn’t that Jun L. walking out yet again to ride his bicycle for the last time, sailing away along the boulevard like a seagull.