"IN THE DEW of little things, the heart finds its morning." And I, born once upon a high noon in August under a lion's sign, roar amen. We'll meet again--all of you in whom I have taken root--in yet another sunrise soon... * * * IT'S BEEN A MONTH since I left the country and settled (temporarily, I hope) with my family in the heartland of America. Ah, the sweet sorrow of departure and the thrill of a new adventure! And, yes, the geyser of goodwill and the grace of friendship that I've been blessed with all along! It had been a whirl of beer binges and videoke, reunions with friends long missed, and poetry dedicated to me like a talisman for tracing my way back home soon (Thank you, dear ole' Temistokles Adlawan). Plus a toast from two kindred spirits whose beautiful minds and hearts will always be cherished. Read on, here's a reprint of two opinion columns from Mayette Q. Tabada and Ana Escalante-Neri:
Xman Redux
by MAYETTE Q. TABADA, Sun.Star Cebu, 13 May 2007
CHEAPSKATE that I am, the first thing I bought when I had something left over from my salary was this mobile phone. Inexpensive and simple, the new phone fit me, down to the longish time it took to unlock and the limited memory of my ancient SIM card.
As far as coexistence anxieties went, this new phone and I settled down in no time, except for a few days ago, when this infernal gadget went crazy.
Fumbling with the keypad, I panicked every time the phone tone indicated an incoming message. Each time, I feared the worst: my younger son finally swallowed his older brother and was regurgitating him out, with the pieces in odd order.
Every time, it was this and that writer asking if Myke was gone, had gone, was really, really gone.
Texting is really ideal only for thumbs that fly over the keypad and eviscerate nimbly the rules of English writing. It is not for technophobes that feel they have to use the shift key every time to begin a sentence with a capital letter; or leave a space after punctuations (two if a period).
Also, texting is just too bloody for explaining to the young, the heartbroken, the dreamers that the mentor they wrote for, imitated, drank with—heck, loved—had, as of 3 PM last Friday, taken off for an 18-hour flight with his two young sons and a pocket full of finger puppets to go home to his beloved Arlaine.
Thanks to Myke, my editor-on-leave, I discovered a facet of the phone I thought I knew: push the buttons too quickly and this unremarkable piece of plastic will rear its spirit and refuse to execute a command.
Toxic, my editor would have said, nodding his bangs sagely while smiling roguishly.
Yeah, everything’s toxic alright, Xman. Some just use the poison to make poetry.
I first worked with Myke U. Obenieta in 2000. Our group of writers and photographers were prowling in the firecracker-making countryside of Babag, Lapu-Lapu to catch children and minors assembling in the illegal trade.
It was my first special report but my heart was not in it. Why punish the victims? For Myke, his interest was not to expose and investigate; he wanted to listen to the stories woven by those small, nimble fingers before an accidental spark sent them flying all over the countryside.
 In the exacting world of journalism, Myke and I felt, more often than not, like mutants. In the backyards of Babag, we took to calling each other Xman, or “X-Man,” if according to Myke, as he was more straitlaced about grammar than I.
Over the years, in the newsroom or during coverage, we bumped into each other desultorily. I knew him better though as one of the most graceful editors to light up a classroom or a young writer’s dreams.
Some students stumble into writing because, caught between the devil and professors who believe in “publish or perish,” they have nowhere to go but into the roiling waters of the publishing world.
But the ones that grow into their craft have, hovering over their pens, not just Muses but angst-ministering angels and nurturing mutants. Until he finally made good on his travel plans last Friday, the Xman did not assign writers as go off with them on rambling, irreverent, offbeat, funny explorations of language, the movies, drinking, poetry, parenting, loving and other digressions that inexplicably fed the Craft.
For those unable to believe he has left, let me comfort you with Epictetus.
It’s not only because quoting some long-dead Greek confers the proper gravitas on leave-takings. The fellow is in one of the books left behind in the normal clutter of my editor’s desk.
This, as well as an oil-and-pastel painting of a ballet dancer, the communities of writers woven around his four scrupulously updated blogs, and the unfinished series of despedidas requiring at least half-a-year to complete, are portents that Myke has just stepped out and will, one afternoon, pop up to declare to us, day-shift stiffs: “Hi, beautiful people!”
* * *
Leavetaking by ANA ESCALANTE-NERI, Sun.Star Weekend Magazine, 25 April 2007
 IT IS HARD to write about someone who has left, but even harder to write for someone just about to leave when you imagine you could still venture the hope that they would stay. Offer a final argument against their departure. The ache is keener when you see what spaces remain occupied—his mess on his desk, blunt-tipped pencils in a mug, he on that chair where he’s sat in the lifetime of eight years—while knowing that a mere few, few days would empty all that.
There are only five days left, to be exact, before my Weekend editor Mr. Myke Obenieta leaves with his two boys for Kansas to join his wife Arlaine.
I am tempted to send him, in lieu of this column, something incoherent (uh, not that my columns aren’t) with twice the usual character requirement.
Or maybe I could be dramatic and turn in a blank page, tell him that would be enough to explain the great void we would all feel in his absence. Sniff, sniff. Choke, sob.
Or I could do the corny but heartfelt thing and write about his being more than an editor, but an occasional beer buddy, too, for whom I’ve offered to foot the bill only to find out when it was time to pay that I had not enough cash in my wallet—the only time we managed to laugh about not getting paid enough writing.
 A mentor, he was, as well, paneling in the two regional writing workshops I attended where he was the easiest of the bunch to forgive despite all his insulting comments on my poems….naw. He did no such thing. If anything, he’s been best at giving encouragement and good advice, literary or otherwise.
Perhaps what I can do is give some of that back, casual good advice, from one traveler to another?
Myke. Stuff your suitcase with the usual chicharon, otap, rosquillos, dried mangoes, pastillas, danggit. Our kababayans in the States are heartsick for those. They won’t mind your charging them quadruple their original price. Use profit from sales to tide you over until you find rich relatives to mooch money from during the first few months of your stay.
On the plane, when your two little men start to become a handful, think tranquilizer. Not for them, silly. For you. There should be at least three hundred other passengers on board anyway to keep an eye on them.
When you get there, don’t stop yourself from constantly calculating exchange rates. That way, you won’t have the heart to spend on anything, especially the little luxuries you never needed anyway when you were here. So when you come back home to Cebu, to us, to me, your favorite columnist, you could feel free to bore us with your stateside tales in an unnatural American accent if only because you’ve saved so much dolyares and could afford to buy us beer. If you spring for more than a couple, we might even pretend to be interested.
The important thing is coming home, at some point. Hopefully before the new Weekend editor recommends to fire me due to an attitude problem. A catty treatment from me. Uh, wait. Sorry to have to break it to you here, but I believe that position has been offered to me. Great news, right? You’re guaranteed a job when you return, and I get the chance to pay you back for all your kindness by offering you a tiny 300-worder space-filler under my editorship.
Meantime, ayo-ayo, Bai. Do enjoy your new adventure and give our regards to our fellow-poet Arlaine.
Wait, wait, a final thing. Don’t bring large bottles of toiletry in your hand-carry.
And your desk. Maybe don’t clear it.
Or clear it.
Or don’t.
Apr
26
2006
Letters in All Writing Systems Traced Back to Nature, according to Yahoo News dated today (26th of April, 2006) THE SHAPES OF LETTERS in all languages are derived from common forms in nature, according to a new hypothesis.
The idea, in some ways seemingly obvious and innately human, arose however from a study of how robots see the world.
Robots employ object recognition technology to navigate a room by recognizing contours. A corner is seen as a "Y," for example, and a wall is recognized by the L-shape it makes where it meets the floor.
"It struck me that these junctions are typically named with letters, such as 'L,' 'T,' 'Y,' 'K,' and 'X,' and that it may not be a coincidence that the shapes of these letters look like the things they really are in nature," said Mark Changizi, a theoretical neurobiologist at the California Institute of Technology.
 Changizi and his colleagues think letters and symbols in Chinese, Latin, Persian, and all 97 of the other writing systems that have been used through the ages have shapes that humans are good at seeing.
"Evolution has shaped our visual system to be good at seeing the structures we commonly encounter in nature, and culture has apparently selected our writing systems and visual signs to have these same shapes," Changizi said.
The idea is put forth in The American Naturalist magazine.
Changizi notes that a basic shape such as "L" can be easily bent to form a "V." He found 36 shapes that require just two or three contours, and he then correlated these shapes to common scenes in nature and in ancient architecture.
"So the figures we use in symbolic systems and writing systems seem to be selected because they are easy to see rather than easy to write," he concludes. "They're for the eye."
Even graphic art that is not necessarily alphabet-based conforms to the idea. 
"Company logos, for example, are meant to be recognized, and we found that logos have a high correlation," Changizi said. "Shorthand systems, which are meant to give a note-taker speed at the expense of a commonly recognizable system of symbols, do not."
Apr
23
2006
 (A lecture-testimony to the fellows of the 2nd Lamiraw Creative Writing Workshop in Calbayog City, Samar, 22-24 September 2005)
ON THE WAY to this workshop, there was no turning back to the facts revealed in the headlines of Cebu's newspapers: A policewoman stationed at the Women's Desk (where the complaints of abused women are heard) was murdered by her own husband. A 12-year-old girl was also killed after her own father and her uncle allegedly took turns raping her. Masked men, in vigilante fashion, remained on the loose after leaving corpses of suspected criminals. Meanwhile, the governor of Cebu had joined the Cardinal's call for an end to the bloodshed between two warring fraternities. On the political front, the city mayor and a congressman from an adjacent city were locked in a squabble on jurisdiction over a reclaimed strip of real property. Elsewhere, of course, the primetime news had been cranking up cliches ad nauseam about the doggone state of our nation: leadership crisis, the circus in Congress, a ping-pong of allegations about corruption, protests galore, and restlessness about an impending oil price increase. 
These news, come to think of it, are a rehash of a reality reported in newspapers, say, twenty years ago. The personalities may have changed, but the circumstances remain. Talk about bad news, and there's really nothing new about this notion of badness under the sun: rotten politics, reckless policies, regrettable interpretation on the concept of public service.
Obviously, some lessons we were supposed to know in kindergarten have been outgrown or, worse, forgotten. From these horrible happenings, certainly, we have not yet learned. Or how come we seem cursed to repeat all these things too bad and too boring as they remain true in our times. Strange, indeed, in the face of this so-called enlightened times in the summit of human achievement, in this era of information technology. So strange that the recurrence of this phenomenon patent in our headlines and primetime scoops might as well be the contents of the X-Files any Martian gone astray on earth would contemplate as an interesting subject for an essay on the human condition.
That we are apparently trapped in this vicious cycle worthy of any struggling writer's indignation, that we are running in circles, indicates a failure of imagination. That we appear stuck and trapped in a labyrinth means we have not yet found the way out of the dark. That, indeed, the idea of transcendence and breaking through barriers remain fancy notions devoutly to be wished despite our inventions, our books, our songs.
Failure of imagination is also apparent in the way our leaders and society at large remain in the dark on matters of social renewal and progress that are always the favorite topic of editorials and opinion columns in newspapers and campus publications as well as in socially committed literature. Bad roads, worsening economy, institutional apathy and a sense of drift and despair: these are also metaphors of one simple fact: our limited vision.
How to look at the world in a new light? This continues to be the challenge of every writer, and this is no less of a wrestle than tilting at windmills.
Though World War II, the Holocaust, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem like rumors from the past, if not a figment of a nihilistic imagination, this generation can't be deaf to the demonic roar of its own times: the 9/11 tragedy and the horror of a planet plagued by its its inhabitants carelessness and recklessness that flung our world into the pit of imminent extinction.
Against this backdrop oceanic for an existentialist to drown in, our writings might as well be paper boats, a desperate contraption and artificial imitation of Noah's Ark through the deluge of our worries and our nightmares about doomsday scenarios straight from the movie “The Day After Tomorrow.” These cataclysms are really redundant when we reckon that these natural calamities are just variations on a trite theme of “man's fall from grace,” or how this flood of human misery is symptomatic and symbolic of a world damned by a tide of intolerance, enmity, and inequity. Where hatred and hunger, poverty and politicians are facts of life that also hint of the state of our cultural state of being. Where estrangement from our moral moorings and a dislocation of our sensibility are a commonplace.
Failure of imagination is a matter we may ascribe to our politicians and policy-makers. But this is something we delude ourselves or hope to believe we are exempt from as we dare to play God with the purging and transformative power of the written word, out of that cloud in our head we call creative writing.
This is one power worth struggling for even as we try to tame this wild and larger-than-life creature called literature, as we stubbornly attempt to discover meaning in life as well as find life in meaning. That meaning might be found as we conscript ourselves to a crusade for our culture, or when steadfastly and stubbornly assert our identity even if such identity is shadowed by forces more formidable than us and threatens to wipe out our singular voice with which we hope to amplify our authentic experience to which we are umbilically linked.
Failure of imagination happens when the terrible things in the world, conspiring to cast a black eye on humanity, defeats us into seeing it with cold jaded eyes and blinking away the spark of wonder out of our gaze that ought to glint with the “pure wisdom of someone who knows nothing,” as Pablo Neruda would put it. To find something out of nothingness or the void as when another poet, Carolyn Forche, stubbornly exclaims: “Only if the dark conceives it must I think of beauty.”
This knowledge I owe from Neruda and Forche matters most to me about writing beyond theories and shifting schools of thought, beyond history and politics, plot and structure, the literal and the symbolic.
Despite the black wind wafting about, everybody needs metaphors to live by, and everyone has the responsibility (especially writers) to create order or a sense of cosmos out of the chaos of human experience, as much as we strive for a construction of harmony in a poem, or an orderly narrative in a reportage, a novel, a story.
 But I agree there is a something much more simple and primitive and elusive that lies at the core of writing that has to do with the mystery of the created world: the need to approach this mystery with fear and loathing, at first, and finally with hope.“Eventually one must put aside the paradoxes and the explanations and simply write,” averred a novelist.
Failure of imagination, that's something we can not blame on Cseslaw Milosz who referred to his poems as "bearing witness both to the natural wonders of the earth and the demoniac doings of history in the 20th century." That's something we can not accuse Octavio Paz of, as he devotes himself to the idea that poetic activity is revolutionary in nature, convinced that creative writing is an operation capable of changing the world. Writing, he swears, is both "a means of internal liberation and also a spiritual exercise."
Creative writing, after all, can only be an act of faith, of hoping against hope. That, indeed, something can still be saved. That something left for dead, like our marginalized culture and literature, can still be resurrected.
Though our voices may spawn a howling wilderness of disquiet and questions, it's comforting that there's a coda in the Eucharist that ought to be echoed as the bottomline of our bylines: “We remember. We celebrate. We believe.”
Mar
03
2006
From E. ANNIE PROULX's The Shipping News: "One of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.":::"And what we fear we often rage against." :::"... he was wondering if love came in other colors than the basic black of none and the read heat of obsession.." :::"Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some invoke night perfume. Some had centers as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swallowed. And among the common bull's-eyes and peppermints a few rare ones; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought calm and gentle pleasure. Were his fingers closing on that one?":::
"... we are only passing by. We only walk over these stones a few times, our boats float a little while and then they have to sink. The water is a dark flower and a fisherman is a bee in the heart of her." From UMBERTO ECO's How To Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays "The mass media first convinced us that the imaginary was real, and now they are convincing us that the real is imaginary; and the more reality the TV screen shows us, the more cinematic our everyday world becomes. Until, as certain philosophers have insisted, we will think that we are alone in the world, and that everything else is the film that God or some evil spirit is projecting before our eyes." (How To React To Familiar Faces)
:::"A writer is someone determined to extend language beyond its boundaries, and he therefore assumes full responsibility for a metaphor, even a daring one." (How To Use Suspension Points):::
"It is enough to tell the truth. Naturally, truth comes in all sizes." (How To Write An Introduction To an Art Catalogue) :::"Human beings have always been merciless with animals, but when humans become aware of their own cruelty, they began, if if not to love animals (because, with only sporadic hesitation, they continue eating them), at least to speak well of them. As the media, the schools, public institutions in general, have to explain away so many acts performed against humans by humans, it seems finally a good idea, psychologically and ethically, to insist on the goodness of animals. We allow children of the Third World to die, but we urge children of the First to respect not only butterflies and bunny rabbits but also whales, crocodiles, snakes. Mind you, this educational approach is per se correct. What is excessive is the persuasive technique chosen: to render animals worthy of rescue they are humanized, toyified. No one says they are entitled to survive even if, as a rule, they are savage and carnivorous. No they are made respectable by becoming cuddly, comic, good-natured, benevolent, wise, and prudent... Simply put, we must love-- or, if that is downright impossible, at least respect-- these and other animals for what they are. The tales of earlier times overdid the wicked wolf, the tales of today exaggerate the good wolves. We must save the whales not because they are good, but because they are part of nature's inventory and they contribute to the ecological equilibrium. Instead, our children are raised with whales that talk, wolves that join the Third Order of St. Francis, and, above all, and endless array of teddy bears." (How To Speak of Animals)
Feb
18
2006
 DON'T WORRY, WRITE POETRY. And be happy. That, in a nutshell, is the eyebrow-raiser out of the Independent Online Edition written by Christina Patterson. Read on:
Poetry is good for your health. That, at least, is the premise of studies currently under way for the Arts Council and the Department of Health. One study, published a couple of years ago in the journal Psychological Reports, suggested that writing poetry boosted levels of secretory immunoglobin A. Another, undertaken by a consultant at Bristol Royal Infirmary, concluded that poetry enabled seven per cent of mental health patients to be weaned off their anti-depressants. Poetry, it seems, is not the new rock'n'roll, but the new Prozac.
This was not instantly evident at the ceremony for the TS Eliot poetry prize last week. Perhaps it was the strip-lighting, but the assembled throng of pasty faces and panda-shadowed eyes did little to foster a sense of radiant health. As feel-good events go, it ranked just above a tussle with your online tax return, but probably below a Thai takeaway in front of Celebrity Big Brother. It was, of course, not fair of Cyril Connolly to describe poets as "jackals fighting over an empty well", but it is true that £10,000 prizes do not, on the whole, boost the health and happiness of those who don't win.  The prize, in any case, went to a paean to psychosis. Carol Ann Duffy's collection of love poems, Rapture, is a moving and, at times, skin-crawlingly accurate portrayal of a process that psychologists have recently identified as a form of madness. We have all been there: tending the mobile "like an injured bird", repeating the name "like a charm, like a spell". For most of us, falling in love is a season in what Duffy calls "glamorous hell", and not a sojourn. We might suffer a few sleepless nights, or even eat a bit less than usual, but we can't sustain life at this pitch. And, luckily for us, our minds comply.
Many poets - a higher proportion, apparently, than of the average population - are not so lucky. John Clare, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and, most famously, Sylvia Plath, all knew the torments of a mind that would, on occasion, burst out of the crucible of what Freud called "normal human misery" into the nameless horrors of mania. The mad poet may be a cliché, but it is not a myth. Poets continue to write of their experiences of mental illness. If poetry is some kind of wonder-drug, it sure ain't working for them.So who is making these headline-hitting assertions, and why? The answer, of course, is arts administrators, and they're doing it for money. And kindness, and the philanthropic impulse, and passion and a desire to help the lost and the lonely and the miserable and the mad. But, to do all this, you need money, and to get money you need to go to funders, and to go to funders you need studies, evidence, and results.
A current project is a good example. Poems in the Waiting Room was set up by an enthusiastic  social worker eight years ago. Run, like most of these things, on a shoestring, it has had little pots of funds from trusts and foundations as well as the Arts Council, the Poetry Society and the Foreign Office. It aims are, you'd have thought, worthy and modest: to cheer up miserable places (hospital waiting rooms) at an anxious time with a little injection of art.Their online "evaluation," however, tells a different story. Amongst a dizzying range of aims and objectives listed in its executive summary are "to gauge the external consequences of displaying poems in waiting rooms", to see "what new behaviour follows" and "what new activities". An extensive discussion of the "methodology" follows, with tables of facts and figures. The one thing, in fact, that the project doesn't allow for is for someone to read a poem and keep quiet about it. This is poetry as life-coaching. You must read and act and reach your goal. And you must do this in an act of self-improvement in which most poets, critics and readers have failed.
 In a brave moment of honesty and bathos, the project's organisers assert that "the precise impact of the poems displayed... was always going to be hard to measure". The final report consists, as these things always do, of pages of anecdote masquerading as science, and ends with the hope that further funding be found. My heart went out to the organisers. Like most of us, they're simply doing their best in a league-table culture where everything is judged by results.
There is, in the right hands, a fine role for poetry as social work, but let's not pretend that it's the same as poetry as art. Poetry, like all art, is not a panacea. Perhaps it's more like homeopathy. A great placebo - some people swear by it - but the studies are inconclusive.
Jan
24
2006
 EVERY WRITER worth the ground under his feet knows losing one's head in the ether of imagination is a risk too real for comfort. It's a tightrope act no less of a daze than keeping one's toehold on truth between the devil and the deep blue sea: escapism from and engagement with the world. Indeed, to find a room of one's own is also to run the peril of shutting one's self off till the walls crumble on creativity's reason for being-- awareness, empathy, discovery.
"A retreat from the world can be a perilous journey. " So asserts the title of Jonathan Rosen's essay printed in The New York Times:
THE JEWISH MYSTICS believed that God, in order to create the world, had to make himself smaller. I consoled myself with this notion when my daughter was born and I had to move my office out of the large spare bedroom and into the maid's room.
Long before my move, I'd been keenly aware of the weird expansions and contractions necessitated by creative life, particularly the painful paradox that to write about the world, you have to retreat from it. Not completely, of course. I like the way Walt Whitman described himself: "Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it."
Even with that credo in mind, writing is lonely work. For Virginia Woolf it wasn't glorious travels or vast experience but a room of one's own that the writer needs most. She knew you can only advance by retreating. Of course her maid's room probably had a maid in it, which no doubt took the edge off the solitude.
But all writers wind up metaphorically in the servants' quarters. When you write, you're taking orders from somewhere — a higher (or at least a lower) power — and the work isn't always pretty. I was appalled to discover that my first novel, "Eve's Apple," was about a woman starving herself and a man madly in love with her and morbidly fascinated by her illness. It is not the novel I thought I would write, not how I wished to enter the world. But I was forced to say, like Prospero pointing at Caliban, "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine."
The inner journey is often a perilous one. Even the divine contraction was fraught with danger. The mystics concluded that because God had to shrink in order to make room for the world, he was no longer all-powerful. The vessels intended to receive his glory broke, scattering divine sparks all over the place and introducing imperfection into the world, presumably explaining why the world is full of flawed characters and horrific plot twists. All I had to do was install a second phone line. 
But even if I do not have to worry about my superabundant energy overflowing inadequate containers (if only I did!), stepping out of life can be disorienting. It can even seem a little humiliating, especially in New York City, with the busy world streaming past my windows. I became keenly aware of this when, along with our daughter, my household acquired a nanny. She only works three days a week, but her presence has made me awkwardly aware of just what my writing day looks like.
Our nanny's husband is a welder and works outdoors in all kinds of weather. What does she think when she sees me, a grown man who goes to work in his bedroom slippers? Or when I wander out of my little room at midday, while my daughter is taking a nap, to lie on the couch with a book? Or if I sit by the window staring out for a while? Or if the need to figure out a certain scene or a certain sentence — or the need to escape from a certain scene or a certain sentence — drives me from my desk over to, say, a box of cereal for a late-morning snack.
Keats referred to the poet's “diligent Indolence,” a state of suspended activity necessary for creativity. On days when I'm really diligent, I might even take a nap, not unlike my daughter who, after 12 hours at night, still needs a little supplementary sleep to feel refreshed. Play, after all, is hard work; Anna Freud called play the work of children. And perhaps of writers, too.
Play is work; inside is outside; indolence is activity. One might add that the imaginary is real, and introspection is actually a form of social research. No wonder I have to take a nap from time to time. Eventually one must put aside the paradoxes and the explanations and simply write.
But even then I find that the paradoxes make their way into the writing. "The Talmud and the Internet," my most recent book, despite its title and subject, wound up having at its core a description of my two grandmothers. In a book about harmonizing unlikely elements, nothing challenged me more than my own contradictory inheritance: one of my grandmothers lived a long and prosperous American life; my other grandmother was murdered by Nazis.
Each life and death pointed to radically different conclusions about the nature of the world, of human conduct. The best I could do was put them side by side and, in the manner of the Talmud, let them each stand as point and counterpoint, neither dissolving into the other. I let my grandmothers take their place alongside all the famous figures in my book, Talmud sages and great writers and historical figures, because without that personal element my public speculations seemed weirdly abstract. There's always a piece of writing that for me must be close to home, the string that binds the balloon to the earth. 
I was at some level as embarrassed to find myself writing about my grandmothers as I was to find myself writing about a self-starving woman. Where was the grand picaresque American adventure I had always imagined I would create? What were my grandmothers doing in the middle of everything, calling me home? The wonderful thing about writing is that it forces you to confront yourself in a way you don't usually have to. That is, needless to say, also the terrible thing.
I used to waste my energy envying an earlier generation of Jewish writers, children of immigrants who seemed umbilically linked to authentic experience I was born too late for. They were fueled by a world-conquering hunger that made their protagonists born-again Don Quixotes. Well, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote, "The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges." This is a universal problem, not a literary one. Everybody has to find his own voice, whether or not he is a writer.
This is why all the arcane things a writer discovers about his craft aren't really arcane. Everybody has to make the inner descent into himself, everybody needs metaphors to live by, and everybody has to order the chaos of experience into some kind of narrative, if only in the depths of dream-fashioning sleep. In that regard, the writer who stays home is really a kind of everyman. There should be more novels about him.
He is also something of an immigrant himself, exploring the world and groping for the words that will help him master it. And staying at home has taught me something else: my daughter is a kind of immigrant, too. I hear her as I write this; she is in her highchair in the kitchen, just outside my door, being fed her lunch. She is learning to say brief truncated words: "nana" for banana; "mih" for milk. Soon enough she will know my language so well that the physical world she is on such intimate terms with may seem abstract, reaching her through a muffling amnion of mediating words.
Inevitably my home is becoming a sort of melting pot for my daughter. She cannot go through life yanking the phone off the hook, pointing at things and screaming if she doesn't get them. She cannot (very important) push open the door of my maid's room whenever she wants.
And though this process of assimilation is necessary, it has a small element of sadness in it for me. Because I so love her untutored, marveling attitude to the world. I love her deep attach-ment to sunlight, the way she pokes the water in her bathtub to test its properties, the way she gapes at the mystery of a face, laughing in amazement.
 "Not in entire forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness but trailing clouds of glory do we come," Wordsworth wrote. For him God himself was "our home," the Old Country where we all once lived and for which we all secretly pine. On earth we learn a new language. But if we manage to keep the trace of an accent from the mysterious place we once inhabited, so much the better for us.
Certainly all my favorite writers have retained their attitude of wonder. And I think this matters to me most about writing, beyond history and politics, plot and structure, the literal and symbolic. Of course one wants all those things, too. But there is something much more primitive and simple and elusive that lies at the core of writing that has to do with the sheer mystery of the created world. For me it is what links a cave painting to a page of "Ulysses.”
Perhaps it is the need to approach this mystery that explains why I am a grown man who stays home with the nanny when other people are going to work. And why, as I sit in the maid's room proudly overhearing my daughter speak her first words in my language, I find myself hoping I will capture a few forgotten elements of hers.
Jan
20
2006
 SOME SQUIRM at the sight of spiders. Creepy, they say. Never mind if those crawlies are nowhere near the tarantula's level.
Then again, I'd stick my neck out to vouch for one of the world's most overlooked natural wonders, a perfect model for order and harmony, wrought out of such silken concentration worthy of a Zen master, with such craftmanship packed at once with lethal potency and fagility enough to give monks a run for their meditation, an ode to solitude: the spider's web.
No wonder, a character in Bergman's film Through a Glass Darkly had visions of God as a giant spider.
Caught in his own fantasy, my eldest son Golli (short for Gabriel Ollivan) thinks he is Spider-Man. God bless the power of imagination. Stuck myself in the web of my own flights of fancy, I hope he'd grow up to understand and empathize in due time his father's own thread of longing for fortitude and grace. Here's my first published poem (which I have recently revised since it was printed in the Philippines Free Press, 4 June 1994 issue) shortly after my creative writing fellowship at the 1994 National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete:
SPIDER SENSE
He thinks of how a spider makes its web, how the web is torn/ by people with brooms, insects, rapacious birds; how the spider/ rebuilds and rebuilds, until the wind takes the web and breaks it and flicks it into heaven's blue and innocent immensity.. - Stephen Dobyns
Windowing
the whiteness
of the wind,
the blind's incandescence
straight from the storm's eye as I
see a web, unspidered. 
Fled from the dead, I hear
the mourners in the living room chanting my name.
My shadow looms in a corner,
reaching for cobwebs while
a whorl of gossamer
whirls in my head, darkly,
lest they'd see me, skull-shaven
or with hairs graying in
the wee hours
of awareness.
Jan
17
2006
 VERY BASIC. Or so Dr. Resil Mojares echoes, at the 2005 Cornelio Faigao Memorial Writers Workshop in Cebu, the smart-alecky point of a fellow writer who simplifies the complex world of a difference between prose and poetry. "Prose is planned parenthood," he grins, "while poetry is accidental pregnancy."
About that distinctive fissure or face-off in literature, Mark Halliday explains more in this reprint from The Georgia Review:"SOMETIMES Sometimes fatigue or a journal stuffed with bad poems throws us into poetry-dismay, even poetry-disgust, but poetry soon wins us back. A good poem comes along that is damned appealing; it has charisma, it has a peculiar panache, it cuts a new path through experience, it expresses - or it is - a new truth, or new edge of truth. Life is suddenly undreary. And this poem is so strangely sure of itself! Where did it get such nerve? It has a quality I will call arrogance.
A poem, just by being a poem, says ‘I am more significant than all your chatter, all your information, all your reports and articles, more significant even than all your stories, more important than any page of Crime and Punishment or Women in Love or Middlemarch - even, in a mysterious way, more important than each of these novels as a whole. You must gaze down into the well of me. You may never see to the bottom.’
The essential sign of poetry's arrogance is white space. Poetry takes unto itself the luxurious, ostentatiously high-class option of not reaching the right hand margin. Prose must pack itself into the common area, the second-class accommodations, filling the page all the way to the margin regardless of whether it's referring to the principles of Baroque architecture or the Meaning of Meaning or what some Hollywood star wore to a premiere. The unfilled part of a poem's page is the ornamental garden surrounding the castle of superior meaning. A poem says, ‘I can drape myself in white space like a mink coat. I stand apart from the mundane tide of utilitarian utterance. I create and require a respectful silence around me.’
The arrogance of poetry is titanically oppressive in the silence immediately after a poem’s last line. That silence stares at you. It says, ‘Do you or do you not get it.’ It says, ‘Do you love me? You should. If you don't, you've missed something. The problem is yours - some blindness, some crudeness, some insensitivity to nuance.’
If a person said that to you, or if a person’s way of falling silent implied that, you would respond energetically - you would walk out of the room, or laugh in the person's arrogant face, or ask intense questions, or express remorse. Like such a person, a poem refuses to be taken casually. If you do take a poem casually, you feel slothful, shallow, flippant - a feeling that is very different from thinking hard about a poem and deciding it is itself slothful, shallow, flippant. Fortunately, persons don’t often have the gall to say, ‘If you don't love me, the problem is yours.’ Poems say this every time.
 Poems keep stroking their own hair. A poem is like the person at the table who won’t speak unless everyone else hushes to listen. A poem is like the person whose tone announces: Enough of your jabber. Now I shall speak words worth remembering. You should want to chisel these words in marble.
Poetry’s demand for special attention is one aspect of its essential arrogance. Another is its pride in implication. A poem always knows - or carries - something it doesn't spell out. A poem is like someone who conveys crucial meanings with subtle changes of gaze and gesture, with eyebrows rather than words; a poem suddenly stares at you to see if you can meet its challenge. This gaze is charismatic - when it is not absurdly portentous. We are beguiled and enthralled by the poem’s sublime implicitness - when we are not irritated and repulsed.
Confronting a poem, we often have to work hard to decide whether its oddity or difficulty comes from a wonderfully forgivable, or from a repulsive arrogance. The arrogance of all poetry is tiring - like both good sex and bad sex.
Poems are mostly read by people already hooked on poetry. How does a novelist feel, reading a book of poems? The novelist may feel a puzzled respect for someone who doggedly writes a kind of literature unlikely to bring wealth or fame. At the same time, the novelist may feel annoyed when the poet offers such small things - coy, anemic perceptions and teasing metaphorical connections - as if each one were terrifically unusual - a day' s work! - enshrined by costly whiteness on all sides, commanding a hushed and riveted attention. The novelist has produced countless equally sharp images and insightful connections and richly evoked moments - hundreds in each novel! And the novelist has given these gifts to the reader without poetry's preening insistence that each morsel is a sublime Godiva truffle. The novelist may think the poetry is ‘good’ but that her own work by comparison is admirably unpompous and generous.
 But Thomas Hardy, one of the few writers great as both poet and novelist, felt that greatness in poetry mattered more than greatness in prose. Isn't this an unreasonable bias?
To be calmly sensitive and thoughtful each time a poem is in front of your eyes, but to turn away for rest and refreshment before either exhaustion or cynicism sets in. This nearly angelic response is humanly possible, but it is amazingly hard to sustain.
Poems crowd toward you like the shades of the underworld when Odysseus visits; they crave the hot blood of attention.
Or they crowd toward you like refugees mobbing a United Nations worker who dispenses far too few bags of grain from the back of a truck.
Notice the inconsistency of that simile with the analogy of a poem's being like a proud high-chinned person requiring a respectful hush around his or her augustness. On the level of self-presentation, each poem is that dignitary; meanwhile, on the practical level, seen from outside, each poem is more like a famine victim in danger of being trampled beneath the feet of its fellow poems, all famished for the reader's ration of attention.
The poem seems not to have noticed its actual social situation. Picture a crowded, deafening cocktail party; in the middle of the room stands the poem, addressing itself to anyone and everyone, not even shouting, regardless of whether anyone listens. In real life this is a kind of madness. In art, it is the arrogance of art...
Jan
17
2006
JACKPOTS happen like this: Just when boredom starts to kick in while you're idling through the mall, you spot a book sale. See what I got, scoured from the shelves in one of the stores at Robinson's Cebu. A handful of second-hand gems priced at 10 pesos each---whoa!---here are my first four book acquisitions in 2006:  Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Upon its publication in 1968, this book of essays confirmed Joan Didion as one of the most prominent writers on the literary scene. Her unblinking vision and deadpan tone have influenced subsequent generations of reporters and essayists, changing our expectations of style, voice, and the artistic possibilities of nonfiction. "In her portraits of people," The New York Times Book Review wrote, "Didion is not out to expose but to understand, and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed brides and naïve acid-trippers, left-wing ideologues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful....A rare display of some of the best prose written today in this country." Herzog. Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow's "Herzog" received the International Literary Prize in 1965; the story of Moses E. Herzog, a confused intellectual suffering from the breakup of his second marriage, the failure of his life and the specter of growing up Jewish in the middle part of the 20th century. All God's Dangers. This triumphant National Book Award recipient assembled from the 84-year-old sharecropper's oral reminiscences is the plain-spoken story of an "over-average" man who witnessed wrenching changes in the lives of Southern black people – and whose unassuming courage helped bring those changes about. "There are only a few American autobiographies of surpassing greatness....Now there is another one, Nate Shaw's," raves The New York Times. "When, finally, this big book is put down, one feels exhilarated," agrees Studs Terkel. "This is an anthem to human endurance."
 The Soul of a New Machine. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and selected by the Modern Library as one of the100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century. Computers have changed since 1981, when Tracy Kidder indelibly recorded the drama, comedy, and excitement of one company's efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market. What has changed little, however, is computer culture: the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the mystique of programmers, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological innovations. By tracing computer culture to its roots, by exploring the "soul" of the "machine" that has revolutionized the world, Kidder succeeds as no other writer has done in capturing the essential spirit of the computer age.
|
