Under The Cut-Off Line

"But if we send you to Iowa, how can we be sure you won’t go haywire again?" 

Fancy quoting someone worlds ago. 1968 and Edith L. Tiempo said that. 2005 and the young addressee, now sinner city son, never made it. Could be he was, like Gravity’s Rainbow’s Roger Mexico, "brilliant but unstable" and the instability was stronger than the brilliance. Anyway brilliant but unstable was a dime a dozen in those days, so not much megalo there. Many have dropped out of not only sight but memory as well. Who knows Jose Lansang, Jr. for instance? Not the young poets who attend the yearly workshops from Baguio to Iligan.

One never made it to Iowa, to anywhere that was the U.S. of A. Younger writers who grew younger and younger every year went and came back (some stayed for good) with, to the loser, amazing, inexplicable ease. Perhaps it was unluck.  Jinx. We was robbed, baby–as Warren Beatty put it after the 1968 Oscar. 

Dream-stripped across the decades, for it’s the Philippine dream isn’t it to go to America and dream the American dream, especially if you feel the force with you, or think you do, perhaps in New York, Greenwich, to bum and bump into someone the same way, legend says, David Cortez Medalla bumped into James Dean, one’s once and future fellow mutant king. 

Or Edward Estlin redivivus knocking on your door in the morning to make friends.  What would it have been like indeed if one had gone in the 70s or even the 80s? Would one have turned out less a writer manque? That is, had more works to one’s name? Or less a father manque–that is, had at least one child to one’s family name? One’s private INRI: I Never Reached Iowa.

Then, lo! the mountain city of Iowa came to the poet! The 2005 writers’ workshop in Dumaguete was different from its previous forty-four versions. For the first time it, er, subsumed an American workshop in, or rather from, Iowa City–where the workshop had its provenance half a century ago! Almost a dozen American writers interzoning and interhoning with the usual 12 local fellows and almost as numerous local panelists.

Among the latter were Edith Tiempo, Gemino Abad, Krip Yuson, Susan Lara, Bobby Villasis, Dave Genotiva, Charlson Ong, Anthony Tan and Jaime Lim–writers of different persuasions at times coercions.

How place Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas? Was, is, she from Iowa or from Dumaguete? Correct to say both. She re-joined the Dumaguete workshop after 22 years in Iowa. And in fact she had been in Iowa much earlier. She was Fil-Am already when she went to grade school in Dumaguete in the late 50s.

Three weeks after the workshop she emails: "I’m back in Iowa City, still a bit dazed at the marvel that transported me to Dumaguete bringing a small chunk of Iowa with me last month. Trekking across the world is taking its toll. The last time I did this jet-lag thing was in 1998.

"The amazing good fortune–of being able to consider our ‘home’ two vastly separated locales–is offset by our being doomed to a lifelong sense of ‘elsewhereness’; my family and I will be homesick wherever we happen to be. This was an awareness that was especially acute for me, this latest trip to Dumaguete. 

The duality of spirit has not been helped by the fact that it’s been equally humid on both sides of the earth, this time. The Iowa that greeted me when I arrived was sweltering hot, and it was almost as though I’d never left Montemar, even though my body told me I’d crossed 13 time zones. Cloning does indeed exist: Iowa has a genetic double in Dumaguete."

The Iowan fellows submitted works, all nonfiction, as well as read their papers, all on nonfiction. Leading the group was Robin Hemley who directs the Nonfiction Program at the University of Iowa. The transported Iowa workshop in Dumaguete was a nonfiction workshop.

Which, to this writer, seems to be an insistence that it all really happened. The Iowans did come to workshop in Dumaguete. All of it was real. My own assurance of this is the title of this article.

Angela M. Balcita wrote in her paper, Re-Considering the Feuilleton: During his rule, Napoleon declared that any political writing printed in French newspapers must solely be issued by his government.

Writers and journalists could still write, but their work was not to contain any arguments about government or politics. Furthermore, on the newspaper page, Napoleon drew a line underneath his government’s articles and told writers and journalists that their commentary could only be printed below this "cut-off" line. 

Matthew Davis asked me which countries I had been to. I said only one, Thailand, and only last year. Matthew Davis was incredulous–that is, that it was that long in coming, whereas I am, now, incredulous that I had gone at all. Then he asked me that if I could travel again where would I like to go? I said maybe New Orleans. Off-hand, random, or idiosyncratically, for the sheer unreality of it. I should have added Shanghai. Ever since I discovered J.G. Ballard I’ve really been looking at this Paris of the East. Weeks after the workshop, I discover that Vladivostok is not far away from RP, an imaginary swim away from Japan, if one were a reincarnation, and beautiful in all four seasons.

Matthew Davis is a travel writer on his way to fulfillment. In the paper he read, Being There & Getting There, he said, "I have read numerous travel books and travelogues by various western authors in Asia, authors that have written in the 13th century and the 21st–missionaries, traders, explorers and writers. Few would dispute that Asia will play the most vital role in the direction humanity takes in this nascent century, and how westerners perceive the countries of this vast and diverse continent will come partly from travel writing."

He took his listeners to far away and long ago Beijing in the time of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. His paper somehow provoked this chain-association among the audience: Marco Polo was European and so Asian readers who would therefore be identifying with Kublai Khan would be strangers to the former’s Travels. Likewise Matthew Davis who stayed in and is writing a book about Mongolia would better be aware of this, that he is writing about an Eastern country from a Western, therefore a stranger’s, eyes.

I remarked to Krip Yuson later on that in the case of future Filipino readers of Matthew Davis’ book, when it’s written, these will be more sympathetic since, if one accepts Nick Joaquin’s thesis, we are a child of the West, e.g. when we read The Travels of Marco Polo we will for sure be identifying with Catholic Marco Polo rather than with heathen Kublai, or Genghis, Khan.

 "You could have brought that up."

"Yeah, this temerity is no good."

"Timidity, you mean."

"Yeah, timidity. Damn homonyms."

"Actually antonyms."

Timid or timorous, I listened to Bernadette Espocito read her paper, which again raised the fascinating point that both a work of nonfiction and a work of fiction can occasionally blur the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. Elizabeth Cowan’s nonfiction, Drowning Not Waving, earlier gave me the impression of a novel-in-progress. And Bonnie J. Rough’s Notes On The Space We Take, that of what could be metanonfiction. When I took the floor and cited a part from my own piece on the late Pepito Bosch where I interviewed the subject and then let him say words of my pure imagining, someone from the Silliman School of MassCom walked out of the hall muttering "I can’t take this."

Gerry N. Peralta, one of the poets in the workshop, later agreed with me that Bernadette’s smile at my temerimidity blurred all boundaries. This was at Ta Mary’s, a beer garden with imaginary Frank Sinatras and Elvis Presleys in it, where Gerry and I took new arrivals Charlson Ong and Anthony Tan.

If the second week of the workshop saw the coming of the Iowans, the third week saw the entrance to the Dragon Room of Charlson Ong, Anthony Tan and Jaime Ann-Lim, a gangster touch of Shanghai and Vladivostok, the Three Khans of the Pen to Marco Polo’s Matthew Davis, the Far East combining with the American Midwest to refute Rudyard Kipling.

With a little help from Ringo. More exactly a fellow Liverpoolian of the Beatles. For even the first week were not all locals. The fellows from Manila, mostly from Ateneo, UP, and UST, found themselves in the company of Dumaguete writers Whitney Fleming, American, and Boo, English, a neighbor of the pre-Beatle Paul MaCartney. Boo what? Just Boo. Boo, the friendly bloke.

Will these Americans believe us, seeing we can’t even speak their language that well? Anthony asked. This was the unkindest cut of all, I thought, quoting his Shakespearian namesake.

I said, "You should have heard Jimmy Abad and Alfred Yuson when they penetrated and perorated and perforated at the sessions, all Chicago and Rolling Stone below the belt."

But what do you know, that Anthony Tan had me fooled, trading panel blows with Tausug authority when he recalled, vis a vis a nonfiction story by Dr. Virginia Mercado-Villanueva which had Jolo as setting, how the Americans had to invent the .45 to stop the fearsome Tausug. When they get going like that, I thought, someone ought to invent a similar weapon to stop workshop panelists.

When Edith Tiempo had kindly thought of sending proteges to Iowa back in the late 60s, it was surely part affection for a memory: Silliman had sent the Tiempos to Iowa in the 50s to study under Engle et al, Brooks and Warren, and when they returned it was clear they understood, or at least critiqued, fiction and poetry better than anyone in the country.

Of course Nick and Franz were matchless in their own nonwrite. A Franz Arcellana lecture was like a brilliantly woven Philippine mat. But those who never heard him must be warned against looking for correspondence in Juaniyo, for there is none except in terms occult. The father was a magician of a lecturer; the son, a hypnotic mumbler of auto-suggestions.

It would be interesting to have Juaniyo as panelist at the Silliman workshop. Franz paneled in the very first back in 1962. And recycling should apply even to relatively recent years and recent fashions. For some time now, the workshop has been missing the postmodem, love me gender sophistication of Danny Reyes, Danton Remoto and Neil Garcia.

But really, call it grace, call it the aleatic, almost inevitably the fair weather’s fire is stolen by the budding one, not the mentors. My own candidate this time is, on the strength of one poem and against real competition, Peachy Paderna.

Presence  By Charisse-Fuschia A. Paderna

During a rather petty squabble, 

you had asked me if,  

when the time came, I would ever  

choose a cat over you. 

I had to laugh then - 

you were so silly, hush now, I’d said. 

Your head sank to my thigh. 

It is 6 in the morning, 

and I’m looking out from my window 

and at the houses fanned out below, 

stolid, held to the earth. A golden tabby 

stretches out on one of the rooftops 

then settles, sphinx-like, on its belly. 

A quick flick of its tail, and you come 

padding again into memory, 

quite simply as that. There’s your back, 

sunlit, and your footsteps, 

purposeful in departure. 

I fake-mew to the cat, wonder 

if it hears me at all. The daybreak chill 

fastens me to this creature, makes me 

feel foolish - when there it is: 

ears pricking up, the furred body in tension. 

The tabby head turns, turns, then stops 

before those cat eyes meet mine. 

And don’t you know, that cat sure heard me, 

that stupid cat knows I am here.

"This is a poem after my heart," I said. And luckily the rest of the panelists followed suit.

Dr. Aquino is a professor of literature at the Silliman University and the author of three books of fiction and poetry.