nameabledays Archive One

Perhaps an unlikely trio but everything’s possible on the Net. Or in the creative imagination. In the Pictura Poisesis reading of a month ago at Mag:Net, it was more than possible. Here then are the rest of the poems from Pictura Poiesis, and the paintings from great artists that inspired them. Enjoy both.


Sid Gomez Hildawa

On Juan Luna’s Tampuhan (1895)

It is a yellow afternoon that slides open
the capiz-shell windows,
that makes the mahogany floor
like a pond shimmer with silhouettes
of the ventanilla’s squinting fingers.
“My dear, you’re missing the procession
below.” He leans out, as if wanting
to join the shuffle of dusty feet.
She looks in, anchored to wooden things.
the yellow light passes without a sound
between them.

Sick Leave

(On Luna’s Parisian Life)

Like a patch of skin spared
from sunburn by a shield
of cloth or sun block lotion,
there’s a rectangle on the wall
lighter than the wall itself,
where a painting used to hang.
Now that the artwork is gone,
visitors ask, “What used to be there?,”
and “What was it about?,”
as if they hadn’t seen the piece before,
or maybe not carefully enough.

‘Wasn’t there a woman seated
in a café?, Didn’t she have a glass
of wine, or some company?,”
The damp ground, eavesdropping,
almost shifts, holding up the house
whose wall holds up a rusty nail
in its perpetual upturned pose,
holding up no answer.

On my fourth day in hospital
with dextrose feeding me twenty
drips a minute, I picture in my mind
a space I may have left behind,
not entirely empty, but of air
made thinner by my absence,
or of lighter tissue,
so that people pause, inquire,
and imagine what used to be there.

“So where’s the painting now?


Sid with National Artist Rio Alma at Mag:Net.

Sid Gomez Hildawa is poet, visual artist and professional architect. As artist, he was among the recipients of the CCP Thirteen Artists Award and the British Council Fellowship for art and architecture in 1990. As writer, his poems have appeared in national publications and anthologies. He was a poetry fellow to the UP National Writers Workshop in 1995 and the Iligan National Writers Workshop in 1997. He won twice in the Philippines Free Press Literary Awards for poetry. His collection, “Building a House and Other Poems” won in the 2006 Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. Sid is currently pursuing a Ph.D. Literature degree from De La Salle University, after obtaining his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing there in 2004. He is a member of the Art Association of the Philippines, the United Architects of the Philippines, and the ALON literary collective, while working full time as director for the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Visual, Literary and Media Arts Department.




Marjorie Evasco

La Condition Humaine

There is a room where a man lies next
To a woman whose shoulders are lit
By morning. He wakes her to drift
Of clouds, wash of skies, drizzle
Of leaves in the air. “Magritte,”
He says into her ear, tracing
With a long slender finger,
A frame beyond the windowpane.

Another room in another time
Suddenly opens inside her.
She is standing by a window
Before the painting’s expanse of grass,
The cut of dirt road, and on the horizon
A stand of mountains measuring the reach
Of a single aspen. “La Condition Humaine,”
She turns to the man beside her,

As if to say she understood how inside
And outside the rooms of love
The landscape was not always seamless;
How, every time she turned her heart
Into words to invent the true form
Of being, dustmotes were already trapped
In the light of images, like this morning
Vanished fast into another day.

In no time they shall each be elsewhere.





Joel Toledo

Crows

Even the streak and blaze of color cannot undo
the onset of evening, sudden dip of the sunset
tainting the impressions. At least, spilling hues always

awaken to dewdrops, birdsong, and strokes of morning,
when gradually the eye again trains itself to vision,
curves and festivities. So then the endless parade

goes on in increments, smudges of blue and definitions.
The painter sought to extend his hearing, as if
sound is an impediment, as if the charge of seeing

is the pursuit of pure silence. This way, the stakes
may be higher, the senses sharper. The sonorous swirls,
the remembered spires—they are nothing more

than the pushing of night onto empty canvas. A good
right ear should suffice, found browns, long walks
down the valleys, shadows blending and dissolving

and gone again. See now the watermills revolving,
digging into the water. See now the frenzied cycles
and the calm, calm women under the bridge,

bathing and washing, colorful and well-dressed,
waiting for noon and cleaner clothes, the call
of cathedral bells. They are pious this way

and attentive. The man is moving in and out
of the landscape, damaged and all, still willing
to stand still and wide-eyed, awaiting the flutter

of wings, flapping of clothes, capture. If only
the crows had remained feeding and hidden,
their flight none too startling, none too dark,

madly bursting into sunflowers and wheat fields
and it is evening once again, gases and cypress
and celestial ornaments covering the sleepy town,

that half-heard cawing and black debris of wings
spinning and spiraling, gathering up there
and over here: tower of night, curls of wild light.

After Van Gogh, After Kurosawa

My thoughts… Absences & Treacheries

The Lunas by Sid. It is coincidental that Sid Hildawa chose for his ekphrastic exercise the same two Luna paintings I have poems on, Tampuhan and Parisian Life. Well, these two would probably make the other most popular works of one of our greatest painters, after the magnificent Spoliarium. In fact, the subject of Sid’s second poem gained some notoriety recently as some sectors protested over its purchase by GSIS from—was it Sotheby’s or Christie’s?—using “people’s money.” Meaning, that while retirees or beneficiaries of the government worker’s insurance fund still go through the bureaucratic wringer to claim their benefits, here was GSIS spending millions on a crummy painting. And to that the agency responded that they were just recovering a “national treasure”…

Whichever side of the debate you are or were on (GSIS eventually had its way) is perhaps not germane to Pictura Poiesis. Or is it? Would a retiree who has not collected his GSIS benefits but who loves art, and who is perhaps a poet (a literature professor from UP?), not consider writing an ekphrasis on this crummy national treasure? Why not? He could in fact give poetic voice to his resentment of GSIS. That’s the whole point of ekphrasis.

But Sid is not an unrecompensed retiree and it is a different set of circumstances he uses to express his thoughts on the painting (or he uses the painting to muse on a different set of circumstances). Absence is a complicated thing. He draws parallels between such a prosaic thing as getting sick and being absent from work and the absence of something vague, unnoticed, or maybe something as mysteriously unimportant as a painting. The “patch of skin spared/ from sunburn,” is actually a correlative (under the circumstances) of the “rectangle on the wall / lighter than the wall itself, / where a painting used to hang.”

“Sick Leave” ultimately becomes a comment on the persona’s intimations of mortality, who perhaps owned Parisian Life or its reproduction and lost it or sold or gave it away (the poem doesn’t say) as he hears his visitors ask, “‘Wasn’t there a woman seated in a café?...” And that the (vacant) space it left behind was like own his prospective absence, “not entirely empty, but of air /made thinner…” Was the thing/painting lost or gone, important? Why was it not noticed except in its absence? Does this say something too about the author’s regard of the controversial painting itself, and does he not ask us in turn what we think of it? The poem's last line, a rhetorical question, bespeaks with disguised half-concern our ultimate horror vacui.

The Tampuhan (lovers’ quarrel) poem is a real vignette in the literary and artistic senses, being a brief evocation and an illustration or picture with faded or no borders. Allow me to interpose my own Tampuhan poem here (perhaps written earlier than Sid’s), not to compare merits but just to contrast treatment and possibilities. (The poem is reproduced below, after these notes). Sid’s vignette of a “yellow afternoon” is as fleeting as the “yellow light” that passes without a sound between the two lovers, a moment in time as brief as the poem itself. My version of the yellow afternoon is a “varnished” one, evocative of my own memories of old provincial house, the bahay na bato. Both poems mention the ventanilla as a fixing detail, but mine mentions more of them, unable to avoid their local and Spanish names. It is a longer rumination that aspires to recreate not just the moment but the historical time of the painting, resorting to inventions and elaborate speculation on the subject/s.

Marj’s Magritte. It is always fascinating to dwell on the enigmatic and witty images of René Magritte and how they have actually inhabited the modern popular imagination. (Paul Simon has “René and Georgette Magritte with Dog After the War,” Paul McCartney is a collector of Magritte.) Floating men in black overcoats and the ubiquitous (and intriguing) bowler hat, the apple in front of the head, the deceptive horizons and the painting superimposed on nature while imitating it, the overall transgression and treachery of our visual reality. Everything is not as it is, a pipe is not a pipe, a portrait is not a portrait: the representation is not, can never be, the thing. But we see ourselves in those paintings (despite their distinctly European character): the drab anonymity of cities, the faceless everyman duplicated and multiplied. They are us, we murmur in recognition. We are witnesses, participants, residents of the Human Condition.

Even love is not spared from La Condition Humaine. It is perhaps only a comforting illusion despite its grand nobilities, its self-denial and futile defiance of death. So the lovers could as well be living inside the painting in Marj’s poem. And they are aware of it, they recognize Magritte and the human condition—all too painfully but also esthetically. He wakes her to behold the morning with its “drift of clouds / wash of skies,” and traces “A frame beyond the windowpane.” Inside her “Another room in another time / Suddenly opens…” The lovers, in their anonymity and self-awareness, represent, or enact, Magritte’s version or reality (in Magritte there can only be versions of the thing in iself—as in all art and literature):

She turns to the man beside her,

As if to say she understood how inside
And outside the rooms of love
The landscape was not always seamless…

And the lovers are apparently just another version of themselves:

How, every time she turned her heart
Into words to invent the true form
Of being, dustmotes were already trapped
In the light of images…

Like the floating men in bowler hats, the face covered with an apple, the pipe that is not a pipe (and themselves living inside a painting), perhaps they are not even man and wife:

In no time they shall each be elsewhere.

They apart not only from each other but from their "true" selves, whatever those are: but that "truth," wherever it resides (does it float above or around us, is it inside or outside us?), is ultimately unknowable.

Joel’s Van Gogh. (Aha, this is my opportunity to direct you to my new blog-ezine, poets’picturebook. My comment on Joel’s “Crows” is posted there as part of the third Test Issue. His and Marj's pictures and biographical notes, if you don't know them yet, are also there. In the post previous I sent out my invitations for contributions to the ezine. Come on, take a peek. Or a tour.)

My Luna

Tampuhan

by Marne L. Kilates



Was it a time of grace, of smooth
And even things? How long ago
Was it, how far away that seldom
We make a visit, even in our dreams?

Sun on floor of a varnished afternoon
Before Christmas, lace on the pasamano,
Curve of elbow under gossamer sleeve,
Hand as delicate, missing its abanico,

Vines around the branches of talisay
Beyond the wooden balustrade
Of the ventanilla, brocade saya
On the polished planks of narra,

Velvet on slipper carved with flowers
Under the step of tender maiden heel
Hid behind the folds of skirt, now perhaps
Cold in the tropic heat like a heart.

Curled back of batibot chair, burnt
Rattan cane more like eyebrows
Than mustache, unable to comprehend
The afternoon’s sudden gloom,

Window of capiz-shell at the shoulder
Of camisa de chino, and two faces averted
After the posuelos of hot chocolate,
Rice cake and suman have been taken away.

How long ago was it? How long before
Or after the Parisienne, when men
In coats and stove-pipe hats sat whispering
In a café, on the eve of another Dream?

April 25, 2007

Last Notes on Pictura Poiesis & how it led to poets’picturebook…

One thing I like about poetry in blogging is that the blogger (whom I assume to be a poet when he insists on putting poems in a blog) is compelled to search for images or pictures to accompany his poems. Compelled because that is the nature of the medium or venue (which one is it?)—it is a visual one. Even a poem in a blog must be treated visually. The web log or online journal is not a simple diary (written and hidden in a drawer), it is a letter to oneself that other people read instantaneously. The computer and/or Internet are/is firstly visual, thus meant to be seen. It is the illegitimate son of television but who is so talented that he is taking over the family business. Most of us Net users are even still a bit confused about what it is. Is it a medium or a venue? Is it a framed canvas, a cathode ray tube, a plasma LCD panel… or is it the keyboard and all those “peripherals” too, that we use to manipulate it? It is a TV screen and yet we can control what we want to see or put in it. It is a writing pad as well as a typewriter and yet it “publishes” and distributes what we write immediately. It is both a “thing” and a “place.” One creates a blog and another visits it. Author is also publisher, but also printing press and bookstore. Movie studio is movie house also. And so we are forever creating and entering the worlds we create—poems, novels, movies. The Imagined Reader has become, is also, the Imaginative Writer. The medium is no longer just McLuhan’s message, it is also the venue. Visit my book. Read my house. They’re all in my site. Sight. Kitakits!

That’s why Pictura Poiesis is a good thing for this blog. It gave me a lot of visuals, and materials for it. I had most of the texts and the digital files of the paintings from Marj’s student-poets in her literature graduate class (excepting Joel, who teaches in Miriam, and me who’s mainly puttering around the Net). But, as George Harrison said, all things must pass. Meaning, this is my last posting on Pictura Poiesis. I”ve run out of materials. From time to time, when I find pictures or shoot my own that can accompany the poems here, that should provide interesting blogs. But more interesting would be your poems & pictures. No, not of your face (but send that too for the bionote), but of an interesting photographic, or even Photoshopped, image that can go with your poem. Now that is an interesting idea…

The idea has become poets’picturebook, my new blog and ezine which I introduced in the previous post, and which as I said, does not replace All Our Nameable Days. But I actually suspended my writing for the Pictura series, clicked the Create Blog button, and spent the better part of the pre-Christmas week testing posts. Part of these notes has become my introduction to the first Test Post of the ezine. So we have two blogs: take your pick as reader for one or as contributor to the other. Take both. The better for our art.