Siftings
Thoughts of Gray Novembers in My Soul (Part II)
This is belatedly the second installment of this column entry. Alas, due to my ineptness with the computer, my first attempt at this second installment went the way of all flesh – gone in a touch of a key into the blue beyond of cyber space! After 45 minutes of sweating my brows getting my thoughts into shape at that. So now it has taken me all of 10 days to get my gumption up, enough to make another stab at getting this thing finished, at last.
At last, this was the result of all those ruminations about my gray Novembers. As the Persian poet extraordinaire Omar Khayyam expressed it in his Rubaiyat:
And this is all the harvest that I reaped:
I came like Water and like Wind I go.
Pretty morbid. The way of the world, of nature, etc. But it makes me call to mind some of the Great and Near Greats of Philippine Arts and Letters whom I have been privileged to hobnob and rub elbows with or have been beso-beso with, simply because I was a member of the UPVisayas, UP Diliman and UP Los Baños at one time or another.
It’s not the mere encounters that count. It’s what I’ve learned from them that has made me what I am, today, at this time of my life. These encounters or experiences have taught me a lot about writing, thinking, loving, losing and, most of all —- living.
Before I go into any reminiscence about these encounters, let me put down here a veritable Who’s Who of Philippine Letters of the last decades of the last century and the first decade of this one, starting from the very beat of the best writers:
Franz Arcellana, National Artist
NVM Gonzalez, National Artist
F. Sionil Jose, National Artist and Columnist
Bienvenido Lumbesa, National Artist/ Ramon Magsaysay Awardee
Ricaredo Demetillo, Republic Cultural Heritage Awardee
Alejandrino Hufana, Palanca Poetry Awardee
Leoncio Deriada, Palanca Hall of Fame Awardee
Cirilo Bautista, Palanca Hall of Fame Awardee
Alfred “Knip” Yuson, Palanca Hall of Fame Awardee
Butch Dalisay, Palanca Multi-Awardee, and more.
The list is so long my fingers are aching from writing down the names: The Tiempos, Edilberto and Edith; Leonard and Linda Casper; the Eds (Maranan, Alegre, Reyes); Amelia Lapena-Bonifacio, Roger Sicat, Efren Abueg, Jimmy Abad, husband and wife Juaniyo Arcellana and Grace Monte de Ramos; Jimmy An-Lim, Cristina “Jing” Hidalgo, Isagani Cruz, Christine Ortega; my friends of Visayan extraction Merlie Alunan, Marge Evasco, Alex de los Santos, John Iremil Teodoro, Glen Mas, the late Wynton Ynion, Alice Tan Gonzales of Hiligaynon Fiction.
And the younger ones like: Joel Toledo and his strange haunting poetry, voice of his generation of intense writers in the NCR; and here, in our very own city and region, our younger poets and literati who express themselves in the languages of the Region and worship faithfully at the altar of the Lyric Muse: Eman Lerona, Marcel Milliam, Bryan Mari Argos, and the most visible of them all until his US migration, Peter Solis Nery. There are more who tirelessly conduct poetry readings and literary discussions in local cafes a la Montmartre in Paris, over coffee and cigarettes. Ah, to be back in the era of the beatniks and the Beat Generation! Do some of you still remember the cause of the Great Angst that impelled poets and novelists to write in that era? But never mind, my breath runs out from trying to remember the name of that cause. If my memory serves me right, it was called Existentialism.
But naming is a step in the process of my attempt to celebrate the individual and distinct contribution of every writer worthy of the craft to the creation and growth of Philippine Letters, locally and nationally. As the year 2009 draws to its close, I would like to reiterate here the value and urgency of the Imaginative Mind: it colors our lives and existence with the shifting, ever-unfolding refractions of the rainbow.
How could I ever have thought that Gray Novembers would take hold of my soul at this time of my life? The gray mist is now being blown away by these splendid remembrances of things past – le temps perdu, as in A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu/ Remembrance of Things Past! Time lost, time of the past, is gone forever. But then, there is always the sun rising at every dawn of God’s morning. And with it, new splendor in the grass arising! (More)
