nameabledays Archive One

A LL OUR FRIENDS CAME, and gallery owner Rock Drilon commented, as I fiddled at the mixing console back of Mag:Net Bar above the first floor art gallery, that it looked like a real production. The longish hall was full. All silhouettes faced the screen onstage (where the band played or people read their poems). Among these shadows were National Artist Rio Alma and wife Lyn, Kaibigan Dr. Jimmy Abad (without our friend, Krip Yuson, who had to be at Ka Pete Lacaba’s second Salinawit concert at Capisce over at Metrowalk in Ortigas), Anvil Publisher Karina Bolasco, two beautiful Susans—angel-voiced Susan Fernandez and fictionist Susan Lara, poet and book designer Donat Alvarez, and a host of Marj Evasco’s artist and academic friends and students whose names I missed. And, the bigger-than-usual literary crowd from the UP-Ateneo-Miriam academic triangle. By coincidence, award-winning film director Mark Meilly was there behind me as I tested the projector. He was a working acquaintance from my advertising days when he directed one of my forgettable TV commercials. He had come in late and missed the showing of his indie film before our “show,” and stayed to watch ours perhaps a mite curiously. Picture Poiesis was an attempt at something different and mildly thematic—a slightly structured and sequenced reading, of poems accompanied by pictures projected onscreen. This was a necessity, for they were the source art of the readers’ the ekphrastic poems, poems taken from, reacting to, or inspired by art and that night it was paintings. One could also be ekphrastic from other forms of art, mainly the non-verbal ones, like sculpture, music, dance, or even scenes from a play or movie.


And ekphrastic was quite ecstatic, as the readers commanded the audience’s attention, captive now by the images onscreen. (And thanks, too, to some of the smooth transition effects and themes of the Keynote presentation—the electronic presentation program to be preferred over the other brand’s popular one.) Marj Evasco of La Salle, the inspiration of the show (and who gave it its intriguing title), had, the week before, handed over to me CDs prepared by the poets from her graduate class, with the text and digital files of the paintings. They were the main readers of the show. I had no choice. My co-organizer Joel Toledo, initiator of Happy Mondays, is a techie who doesn’t do presentations. Now I had been “forced” to do it myself. In retrospect, while I was still in advertising, doing digital presentations was a job we “creatives” usually left to the AEs (account executives). Out of the comfort zone, when I left my ad agency job, I had to do presentations myself to chase after projects, and I had gotten adept at the Mac Keynote. It was a chance to show off how something as mundane and prosaic as Keynote might become a tool for poets, on my old Powerbook, or simply, as a fine, and rather refined, alternative to the PowerPoint which everybody does.

As it turns out, by audience reaction and text messages after the show, Keynote might yet come in handy for the literary mind unaffected by technophobia. But what you will see here are the paintings and the poems (for surely we cannot blog a presentation). They are, in themselves, the actual objects of beauty that provided the reason for the show, and made the Mag:Netic night sparkling. There were twelve paintings, two photographs, and eight poets, some of them having written poems on one painting. My poems based on the photographs may be accessed in a recent posting ("Continuing My Adventures...", link under Previous Posts in the right column of this blog), so I will not include them in this series of postings. One poet read, as opener of the show, and perhaps more as a recent example or tribute to ekphrastic poetry—Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Short Story on a Painting of Gustav Klimt.” I will feature in this series only the original poems read in Pictura Poeisis.

Here, first, is Marj Evasco’s poem on a Picasso. Marj, of course, is Dr. Evasco of La Salle’s Literature Department, right now among the leading in her generation of Filipino poets in English (without referring to gender), who chose to stay and build her work here. Neither Picasso’s colors nor Evasco’s lines need elaboration.

Solsequiem

(after Pablo Picasso’s Maternidad, 1905)

by Marjorie Evasco

She had known ever since she felt
the miracle of his heart quickening in her;
it would end the way it began, her arms
gathering his hurt body again and again
into her indigo mantle, the shield of her love
bringing the world to complete silence.

Today, when the boy limped into the room
of her mending, she laid the ball of thread,
needle and pair of scissors on the footstool
near her ebony chair, and held him close,
right hand tilting his face for her blessing,
her left covering his, cupping a ball,

red and small as his heart upon
his lightsome shoulder. As she bent
to soothe him, death quietly slipped out
and into the world’s double horizon
of sienna and cyan, cyan and cerulean,
primary hues of earth meeting sea,

and sea meeting sky. Anchoring his vision
on the woman at the center of a room
mending a child’s heart, Picasso tends
to the world before it completely shatters,
has hands shaping a small blue universe
illuminating the script, enfleshing the Word.

❦

Post-Posting: The Anchor of “Solsequiem”

I will take back my words. The colors and lines of two masters need no elaboration, but they can stand appreciation. I had to say something about this poem, how you and I might not just “like” it but find reason to, among and between its lines. I hadn’t the time to look up solsequiem (which I misspelled and corrected above), to be able to say something competent about the poem—the title, of course, is the first clue—so I went to the primary source. And across the microwave traffic of Globe and Smart, I asked Marj—

TEXT MESSAGES (italics provided):

Me: Maayong buntag, Marj… So, what’s ‘solsequiem’?

Marj: Maayong buntag, Marne. From the “Blue” chapter of “The Primary Colors” by Alexander Theroux: Solsequiem is the blue tinta used by the medieval monks in illuminated manuscripsts. Lovely, no?

Me: Lovely, lovely! I will do my own research.

Marj: “A blue called turnsole (sometimes called solsequiem) was commonly used by monks for putting gorgeous pen flourishes around letters (usually red) in illumination books.” (A. Theroux, 1994:9)

I looked it up. “Turnsole,” according to the Oxford Dictionary bundled in my Mac, is “a Mediterranean plant of the spurge family, whose flowers are said to turn with the sun. Chrozophora tinctoria (family Euphorbiaceae), from which a blue or purple dye was formerly obtained. ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French tournesole, based on Latin tornare (see turn) + sol ‘sun.’" I love this. I can see the sol in the Spanish (or Latin?) name, but I don’t have a Latin dictionary and my Spanish-English one is a tiny Pocketbook edition. So let’s leave it at that for the meantime.

The texting continues.

Me [half of the research done]: I can imagine Eco’s monk [Adso, I remember now] in ‘Rose’. I could have been an illuminator in another life.

Marj: Ah, The Name of the Rose! Me, too, I KNOW I was a monk, but in Tibet.

A word can transport us not just through the cell sites of Metro Manila but through time and space, to the medieval Italy of Benedictine monks illuminating manuscripts (thanks in part to Umberto Eco), and the ancient Himalayas, among the ancestors of Swami Vivekananda in their Lotus positions. Marj’s soul prefers to be Oriental.

Now, let me just attempt go to the heart (or anchor) of “Solsequiem.” I know Marj won’t mind my partially formalist reading (one of many, of course), but notice how the poem creates a narrative—illuminating Picasso’s visual and manifest subject—around Motherhood. The mother in the first stanza is the mother we all know (or forget?), who finds the fulfillment of her womanhood when “She had known ever since she felt / the miracle of his heart quickening in her…” The part about motherhood that we are familiar with comes from the child’s inherently selfish appreciation: “…her arms / gathering his hurt body again and again.”

But the narrative is already extracted as text from the painter’s visual subject. Do we or I know, whether we have researched the circumstances of Picasso’s painting and subject or not, that the child’s was a “hurt body”? Here starts, I think, the extractive process of ekphrasis. The poem now is reading the painting. The “shield of her love” (our “typical” mother’s infinite virtue) is not just any comfortable embrace but an “indigo mantle”—a Picasso mantle painted in his early “blue” period.

The second stanza, up to the first two lines of the third, ending in “his lightsome shoulder” extends the narrative based solely on the images and details of the painting, despite the fact that the poem has introduced a new element about the boy that we don’t know or cannot immediately see in the painting. So we are told that he “limps,” his body was “hurt” perhaps not just in play but permanently. Between the painting and the words of the poem all we see are the white body of the delicate child, his face “tilted” for her blessing (such diction!), almost enclosed in the indigo mantle of her love. If he limps or was permanently hurt, is she too the permanently Grieving Mother, perhaps a post-Christian Mater Dolorosa anticipating the global disturbances after 1905 (the date of the painting)—the War of 1914-18, the Spanish Civil War (that killed another poet, Federico Garcia Lorca), and even Picasso’s Guernica—the source and signified of the archetypal blue of suffering?

We are, of course, reading all these into (or around) the painting and the poem. Or are we? We must ask Marj (the only advantage of having a living author; when the author is no longer there—some people don't want her or him to be there at all—the poem becomes a true artifact, and there will be as many readings as there are readers), or you can send your comments. Our excursions into its external contexts make a complete revolution as the poem takes us back to the painting itself, which I think is the whole point of ekphrasis:

…As she bent
to soothe him, death quietly slipped out
and into the world’s double horizon…

and we find that the “double horizon” is composed of Picasso’s pigments: “…sienna and cyan, cyan and cerulean,” (lovely colors, lovely names!) the primary colors of our perceiving the shimmering borders and non-borders of our physical world, “earth meeting sea, // and sea meeting sky.” And “anchoring” all these (Picasso’s and our vision) is the Mother, the “woman at the center of a room / mending a child’s heart.” But the poem insists it is the vision, or the process of seeing through art or from the eyes of the artist, that enables us or Picasso to “tend… to the world before it completely shatters…” Such optimism.

Perhaps art or the perception (the search and the finding) of beauty is our only salvation?—as Picasso “[shapes] a small blue universe / illuminating the script, enfleshing the Word”? Can we “un-shatter” the world? Can we “tend” to it before it annihilates itself, through art? Or is this “simply” the creation (and reading) of art, the voice in the wilderness of the world’s prosaic pain, representing (again) the idea that if the world had listened to the (illuminated) Word—in red and gold and solsequiem—Picasso might not have had to paint Guernica?

We all know what war, pain, and death look like (or a child's limp). They have been with us since the beginning. Artists have painted them, poets have told about them, made us experience them, in words. We forget. Ekphrasis is an amazing reminder.

Marne L. Kilates
November 28, 2007

❦

PHOTOS: From top, the backdrop and first slide, in Keynote "Leather Book" theme, with detail from Klimt; the Mag:Net sign from the smoking deck, where one might see the Poet's Alcove, that week with a Maningning Miclat poem on display; gallery owner and painter Rock Drilon; and Picasso's Maternidad.

A Pictura Poiesis Second Edition is in the works, featuring known poets writing on other art forms—sculpture & music, from classical to jazz.