Requiem for Lady Polyester

It had to be Leonard Cohen. It had to be Hallelujah.

The night I heard that my mentor, my muse and literary mother Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta had passed away, my friend and I were nursing our second bottle of Red Horse Stallion at Oarhouse on M.H. del Pilar. The angels of the bar watching over us. Krip Yuson, seated nearby with a laptop and shot of Scotch, showed me the depressing text message from Susan Lara about Ma’am Ophie (as we UST Arts & Letters students lovingly called her) succumbing to a heart attack.

That can’t be true.

Poets never die. I’ve always thought of Pablo Neruda still tending to his garden and forgotten wings, watching shadows perforated, riddled with arrows, fire and flowers. Still breathing, somewhere in Chile. Or T.S. Eliot, wearing his banker clothes and bowler hat, walking in the Unreal City under the brown fog of a London winter dawn. Still alive, still shoring fragments against his ruins. You see, poets mandate their immortality. We pedestrian writers (peddling goods you can’t afford but don’t really need anyway) live and die and are forgotten with our weekly articles and columns. Not so with poets. I’ve always pictured the dean still weaving her polyester poetry while she did her duties at the royal and pontifical university, still burning through and flowing on.

I called Carlomar Daoana, my batch-mate at the Silliman writers workshop. He, like so many others (from Eric Gamalinda to Lito Zulueta to Lourd De Veyra), was (is) Ma’am Ophie’s protégé. Many moons ago in Dumaguete, she treated us to halo-halo at Café Philomena in Bethel Hotel on the day she arrived for the workshop. It took me a long and strange trip (literary and figuratively) to get to sit beside Ma’am Ophie in a café near Dumaguete’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams with my manuscripts (more on that later in the article).

I heard Carlomar on the phone. He felt gutted as well.  

Lourd confirmed the news, calling the dean’s son, Al, and telling me where the wake will be held.

I called someone else and all I heard were sobs.

Never had mind-numbing beer been so essential. Never had Cohen’s words rang truer — with nothing on his tongue but “hallelujah” as he stands before the Lord of Song.

My tongue felt dry; my knees were shaking.  

I was at the dean’s office (ca. mid-’90s), having just submitted my application letter to take up Literature as a second major. I took up a course I frantically had no interest in. My classmates had all graduated, went to law school, took up corporate jobs, and had their souls crushed somewhere that was baffling and purgatorial. I wanted to study under Ma’am Ophie, and learn about the greats — from Jose Garcia Villa to James Joyce. I wanted a second chance. She said yes. And that changed the course of my events.

Ma’am Ophie’s classes (Continental Literature, Creative Non-Fiction, Poetry) were always an event, an encounter, and an appointment with poets, pipers and seers of visions. “In order to become a great writer, you have to be all there,” she famously said. Being “all there” means reporting straight from the frontlines of experience. One has to live through it in order to put it out. There is the famous story of William Burroughs accidentally shooting and killing his wife Joan in a game of William Tell. That was mental. Burroughs had only one recourse. He said, “I have no choice but to write my way out.” When you learn that in class or in the library (with Ma’am Ophie telling you to check out this or that writer), that surely beats sitting in class with other Literature professors who would drag tired old horses like Madame Bovary or “The Necklace” and give quizzes.

Ma’am Ophie loved everything from Shakespeare to the post-moderns. She dug the Symbolists. Those sons of anarchy who dabbled in sense-deranging substances, sexual depravities and the occult. Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and other writers who made literature hip. She would mention ideas by Robert Graves that would fly over our heads like white goddesses with wings. Or John Berryman with his dreamsongs. Or Wallace Stevens and his empire of ice cream. But the wellspring of wisdom, of course, was found in Dimalanta’s poetry.

When I first read “Kind of Burning,” it was like hearing the quiver of guitar strings for the first time. We have been all the hapless/ lovers in this wayward world/ in almost all kinds of ways/ except we never really meet/ but for this kind of burning.

Her poems are erotic, evocative, elegiac, elegant, swinging madly to invisible beats and rhythms; the voices flinging arrows our way at a fiery pace, bringing readers to each anointed zone; the words exposing their black, indestructible mouths like scriptures:

Away you end up wishing lovers are more/ like gaming children and children/ less like gnarled impatient lovers (“Children and Lovers”).

Mother chooses to rehearse her grief/ In a role she and only she can play (“Coming to Grief”).

The heart of waiting/ is one dead cold center (“The Heart of Waiting”).

For poetry never says; /it unsays. to say/ is to confine, contain,/ to unsay explore the/ vaguely all-hovering/ Presence of the unseen,/ deliberately left-out (“What Poetry Does Not Say”).

But when one feels real tragedy coming on,/ He has to be sure he is all there (“Poet In Search of a Tragic Theme”).

We read her poems with religious zeal, and she read our poems and prose with the same spiritual fire, pointing out the jarring phrases, the dangling participles, the bungled synesthesia, the occasional wonders. “The line ‘I love you’ has been used so many times that it doesn’t mean anything anymore,” she’d tell the entire class. The key was to sing the same thing in a different, stranger key. That’s poetry for her and for all time.

My tongue was still; my eyes, practically tearing up.

I was at the dean’s office and just got word that the powers-that-be rejected my application for a fellowship in the Silliman writers workshop despite Ma’am Ophie’s recommendation. That was depressing news. But the dean’s belief in my ability (well, disability) as a writer did not falter. She didn’t go to the workshop that year. She stood up for me. She made her point. How many professors would do such a thing for a tragically ordinary campus writer such as me? The following year, I reapplied, got accepted and earned my place in Silliman. 

Years before that, the dean appointed me as assistant literary editor in The Flame, the UST Arts & Letters magazine. Some staff-members raised hell. One reporter (a hulk of a fellow who wore muscle shirts and sported a fascistic crew-cut) said I didn’t go through the process (tests, interviews, etc.), thus I didn’t deserve a place in the magazine. Ma’am Ophie told me not to budge and to just quietly do my work. That, I did. The hulk now works for the ports authority, and I earn my living by putting words on paper.

If it weren’t for Ma’am Ophie I’d probably be in a different field right now. I’d probably be a seller of life insurance on the avenues of the dead. Or be in vulcanizing.

When I started working for The STAR, I got an opportunity to write about Ma’am Ophie. The paper had a mother’s day special and I was tasked to write about two literary moms. I went to Ma’am Ophie’s office in UST. She told me in so many ways how proud she was of me and for her other protégés who have done well in their careers: Lourd, Carlomar, Lito Zulueta, Angelo Suarez, Nerissa Guevara, and Ramil Gulle, among others. How she read my articles in the paper. How she wanted me to someday work for the UST Center for Creative Writing. How she wanted to publish my book (if I ever decide to go back to writing poetry). How she wanted one of my paintings to (what’s the antonym of “illuminate”) darken the wall of her office. How she wanted me to attend the events in the university and show how good a Thomasian I am.

When the article came out. Ma’am Ophie called me in the office through her secretary Anna. Thank you very much for the write-up, she said. She added, it was short and sweet and showed how much I appreciated her as a mentor, a literary mom. The other interviewee I never heard from again. That just shows you what a lovely human being Ma’am Ophie was. 

A future hangover was clambering into my head; my eyes, practically tearing up.

Leonard Cohen had given way to Tom Waits. The auburn bottles were empty. The cigarettes had run out. The clouds were beginning to blacken. A broken voice crackled from the speakers. The angles had departed.

Ma’am Ophie is gone, but will surely never be forgotten as long as her protégés impale on pages those words touched by her. Her poems, with their delicate architecture and plumes of emotions, are eternal. The griefs, the graces linger on. 

And, besides, poets mandate their own immortality. She would have told us this: Death is but symbolism.