nameabledays Archive One

Digital Composite by friend Dan Pinto

Above is how "War Correspondent" looked in Dan Pinto's digital art. You don't have to read it as laid out (Penman Butch Dalisay would be bristling over this), the text is reproduced below. The poem hung in its corner near one of the most intriguing setups in the exhbit—another of the huge acrylic plate constructions by Jean Marie Syjuco, with its physical reconstruction of the Nabokov line from his verse novel, Pale Fire. What, or where, indeed, is reality as the verse in its melange of illusions asks declares:

I was the shadow of a waxwing slain
By the false azure of the window pane.

Construction by Jean Marie Syjuco, photo by Howie Severino, from his blog "Sidetrip"

My own "War Correspondent" is asking the same question, where one part of reality is perhaps more lethal than the ones we can see on our television sets as the wars of the world "intrude into our living rooms," from both our memory and the digital video memory of the war being reported on TV. At the last hour before the exhibit, I comandeered digital artist Dan Pinto (who is an able writer and editor who's still refusing to get published) who montaged (Photoshopped) the images, including a photo of himself posing as our village idiot, Tinoy, who provides the bridge between video and memory.

WAR CORRESPONDENT

It was a time when hometowns
Were sleepy, the world was far and its wars
Didn’t intrude into our living rooms.

(The last war we knew was our parents’,
Of which they now seldom spoke,
Having, it seemed, given up on their losses.)

But you roamed our streets in your tattered
Olive-drab. Relic, it was said, of Vietnam or Clark,
Its pockets stuffed with the debris of other lives.

One hand cupped to your mouth, the other
At your ear, you were always speaking
Into some kind of telephone. Or was it a field radio?

Your voice crackled and cracked, mimicking
Static. Your eyes darted. Were you calling
Perhaps from some raging battle?

Was it rescue or assault? From what swamp
Or desert? The children mocked or watched you
Wide-eyed. Spreading their arms, they glided

And swooped, aimed their gun-fingers
And pop-popped their mouths, as they
Strafed your position or emerged from ambush.

Until you turned and threatened them
With one lucid stare, and they broke up
And, squealing, scampered away.

Left once more in peace,
You went back to your war. One hand
Cupped to your mouth, the other at your ear,

You resumed radio contact with the past.
Or was it the future—ours?—when the world
Had shrunk, when children either starve

Or are sent to war: Wars that keep breaking
With the entertainment news. Wars that bring you
Back babbling out-of-sync on the videophone,

As you shudder with each blast,
And behind you a city burns. Wars that keep
Intruding into our living rooms.

September 12, 2006

Chromatext: Reloaded is the third poetry and art exhibit (either collaborations by poet & artist or with art by the poet himself) mounted the Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC) & Friends. Curated by Sid Hildawa (architect-poet and CCP head of visual arts), Jean Marie Syjuco and Krip Yuson, Chromatext: Reloaded is on show at the CCP Main Gallery from Jan. 25 to Feb 28, 2007.