"Huling Lagapak ng Kandado" (Axel Pinpin)

The Lock's Last Thud
BY AXEL PINPIN


The calendar is weathered and withered
The chain is clanging and slamming
Time is slowing and speeding
The bars are bruised and skinned
The cold is here and gone
The heat rose and receded
Boredom mocked and endured
Anger, sneering and jeering

Eight hundred and fifty-nine days
Over and over, a spiralling dance

Two years and four months
Back and forth, spinning with no end in sight

This freedom expected to battle the deepest
darkness of the tomb of the living,
was snatched stolen buried
by the dump of flawed laws
which were even the first to rot and agonize
over the demise of the acrobat, a witness inexpert
in the lessons of walking and balancing.
Ay! He slipped from the rope of lies
knotted by the corrupt fiscal, all reason
mumbled and stumbled,
turned into black magic
each time a false witness sprang
a surprise from the box of evidence, not
the white rabbit which was trained to be swift
and clean, fooling the stunned
masses, guardians of justice
in the Judge’s carnival court.

Eight hundred and fifty-nine days
Over and over, a spiralling dance

Two years and four months
Back and forth, spinning with no end in sight

In an instant, before eyes blink,
The fracas is ended!





     TRANSLATED FROM FILIPINO
     ("HULING LAGAPAK NG KANDADO")

Crossing the Heart of Africa (Julian Smith)

I draw the basic outline of my trip in the air: six and a half thousand miles through seven more countries, a crooked line heading north and west up the scar of the western branch of the Great Rift Valley (technically the East African Rift System), a massive fracture in the earth's crust where the continent is tearing itself in two. My goal, like Grogan's 109 years ago, is to go as far as I can down the Nile into southern Sudan ... [34-35]

Julian Smith's Crossing the Heart of Africa is part travel writing, part memoir. Smith journeyed into the continent following closely the itinerary of legendary explorer Ewart Grogan who undertook more than a century before what was then considered an impossible feat. The parallelism in the two men's travels rests not only on the similar roads they took but on their motive for their respective crossings: they both, in their own ways, did it for love. Grogan was challenged by his beloved's stepfather to the task as precondition for his marrying her. Smith, on the other hand, did his own travel on the eve of his scheduled wedding. Each of their separate travels was recounted in the book in alternating sections, with some flashbacks of the developing relationship between Smith and Laura.

The book's subtitle, "An Odyssey of Love and Adventure," promises the reader two things. The romantic notion of braving all odds to get the girl was enacted here. Grogan accomplished it and he and Gertrude lived happily ever after. (There's a long denouement recounting Grogan's further "adventures" even after his famous journey.) Smith's attitudes on his own relationship with Laura were a bit more complicated.

Thankfully, the book escaped the self-centered kind of confession from Smith. He candidly shared his personal thoughts on the matter of love. This "inner" journey into the self, the parsing of feelings before a major life-changing commitment, the need to "know oneself" through solitary travel: these are all equally perilous territories for a writer to dwell on, one that could easily fall prey into the trappings of chick lit books. I was actually resisting the book from the beginning, not sure whether I will still find two journeys whose ends were already predetermined still engaging. Yet the book was filled with enough anecdotes and concrete stories to make it a singular reading experience.

"To travel" originally meant to "suffer." A thousand years ago, life was dangerous, but leaving home was worse. The word itself comes from the Old French travailler, meaning to toil, as in "travail." It's rooted in the Latin tripalium, a torture device made of three poles tied together, to which victims would be attached and lit on fire. [101]

I was a bit put off at first with the forced alternation of chapters, feeling lost as I navigated the brief transitions between the two men's parallel travels. This device felt a bit overused and artificial for me at first, but eventually the book grew on me. I much appreciated the cultural and political contexts that Smith integrated into the text. The realization that Africa is a place fraught with danger and threats precisely because men tried to tame it. That the heart of darkness in the continent stems from personal and historical interests staked on it.

In the end though, while I found interesting the mixture of romance and adventure in the book, I actually enjoyed more the larger silent story that Smith was telling in the background. One was shown revealing aspects of human nature as Smith recalled ordinary incidents with people he interacted with. The historical precedence of violence in Africa was evident in Grogan's time as it is in the present. The all too real incidents of genocide, cannibalism, colonialism, and slavery; the challenges of wildlife and national parks management in Africa; the unstable history of newly founded African nations - all of these provide a very forceful backdrop to the shared passions of Grogan and Smith, two lovers trapped by frontier dreams. Crossing the Heart of Africa is a sometimes stirring, sometimes humorous, often barefaced and plain account of overcoming personal and emotional challenges amid the forces of nature, the clash of cultures, and the humanitarian crises enveloping the dark corners of a continent.

From here on, every step I take will be toward home. [202]

I received a copy of the book from the publisher.

Kafka and the end of the world

31. I dreamt that Earth was finished. And the only human being to contemplate the end was Franz Kafka. In heaven, the Titans were fighting to the death. From a wrought-iron seat in Central Park, Kafka was watching the world burn.
- Tres, Roberto Bolaño

Tres, translated by Laura Healy, is coming in September from New Directions.

For a limited period, excerpts from Bolaño's "A Stroll Through Literature," the final section of Tres, can be accessed online at BOMB Magazine, Issue 115/Spring 2011.

More here. Via: Work in Progress.



Cross-posted from The 2011 Roberto Bolaño Reading Challenge.

Don Q, via Syjuco

Authorship and the self-determination of characters


At the start of Miguel Syjuco's puzzle novel Ilustrado, a character named Miguel Syjuco began investigating the mysterious death of his mentor, the writer Crispin Salvador. There's no shortage of possible motives to his death. Salvador blazed through the Philippine literary scene with a series of books that divided the critics and earned him a lot of enemies. The character Syjuco reflected on Salvador's career as he searched for papers left behind by the deceased in his apartment:

To end his own life, Salvador was neither courageous nor cowardly enough. The only explanation is that the Panther of Philippine Letters was murdered in midpounce. But no bloody candelabrum has been found. Only ambiguous hints in what remains of his manuscript. Among the two pages of notes, these names: the industrialist Dingdong Changco, Jr.; the literary critic Marcel Avellaneda; the first Muslim leader of the opposition, Nuredin Bansamoro; the charismatic preacher Reverend Martin; and a certain Dulcinea.

Dingdong Changco Jr, Nuredin Bansamoro, and Reverend Martin are not-so-veiled references to actual personalities in Philippine politics and church affairs. If they were not Danding Cojuangco, Nur Misuari, and Bro. Mike Velarde, then they were at least possible stand-ins or stereotypes of these recognizable personalities who continue to persist in Philippine society: the oligarch and Marcos crony, the Muslim separatist leader, and the fanatical preacher.

Two names are not readily identifiable: Dulcinea and Avellaneda. Who are they in Salvador's life? Avellanada is mentioned earlier on as Salvador's fiercest critic. And we learned later that Dulcinea's relation to Salvador is quite significant after all.

Syjuco's "quixotic" quest to find out the truth about Salvador's death brought him to unexpected places and enabled him to confront some of these characters. "Quixotic," along with "messianic," is a word that appears in page 21 of Ilustrado (via), mentioned in Salvador's Paris Review interview while he is discussing his current engagement in polemical writing.

Dulcinea is of course the name of Don Quixote's object of affection. Don Quixote, the messianic knight errant, is so enchanted with Lady Dulcinea of Toboso that she almost becomes his battle cry, the sole reason for his existence. She is a lady of incomparable beauty, peerless, the one and only muse that drives him to chastity, spurning the designs of other women. The only catch is that Sancho Panza also knew Dulcinea, the three of them being inhabitants of La Mancha, and if we are to believe Squire Sancho, then she is in reality a crude peasant woman, not a lady of noble birth, certainly a far cry from Don Quixote's idealization. (In some ways, what Dulcinea is for Don Quixote, is probably what "the Intended" is for Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.) Cervantes's sharp irony is always in full effect as Don Quixote is to finally "meet" Lady Dulcinea later, but this time only in enchanted form.

To discuss the circumstances of the character Syjuco finally meeting the Dulcinea character in Ilustrado is to spoil a lot of things. Let me just say that it is one of the best parts of the book and completely overturns the whole puzzle, such that what one is looking at all along is not a completed jigsaw but the jigsaw turned upside down to reveal another puzzle.

At the start of the second part of the history of the ingenious knight Don Quixote, in its prologue, we are told that a "false" second part of the Quixote was published in 1614, a year before the actual second part by Cervantes came out. In one of the rare moments in the errant knight's history, the "real" author of the Quixote directly speaks to the reader of the book ("illustrious or perhaps plebeian reader") in a furious, or at least ambivalent, tone about certain licenses taken by another writer, a native of Tordesillas, to continue his history and to do so in very poor imitation. Cervantes's resentment is evident as he starts to refute and discuss the disagreeable personal attacks to his character in the spurious second part. The full title of this second part is Segundo tomo del ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha ... compuesto por el licenciado Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, natural de la villa de Tordesillas. Avellaneda is a pseudonym. The identity of the author was never known.

Yet another notable scene in Ilustrado is the character Syjuco's "confrontation" with the critic Avellaneda. This direct reference to the author of the false Quixote, in the guise of a literary critic, is a brilliant play on a book that is, like the true Quixote itself, concerned with truthful transcription of history and ultimately with the question of authorship.

The last chapters of the Quixote are almost devoted in fact to the question of authorship and of Avellaneda's poor depiction and appropriation of the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. What better way to demonstrate the falsity of Avellaneda's version than to point out that Don Quixote is "no longer in love with Dulcinea del Toboso" and that Sancho Panza's wife is not given the same name she had in the first part (Part II, Chapter LIX). It is understandable that Don Quixote flared up whenever mention of this second part reaches him.

It is almost as if the whole conception of the "real and truthful" second part of the Quixote is but a kind of direct response or reaction to Avellaneda's book. In any case, Cervantes has given Cide Hamete Benengeli enough leeway to write and publish the continuation and to faithfully incorporate what happened outside in his history. As the events in real life directly impinge on the fictional, the extra-literary is given a life of its own.

The Avellaneda affair has so consumed Don Quixote that, on his own initiative (yes, possibly without any intervention from any author, real or imagined), he intentionally changed his itinerary just to prove that he is the authentic character, to assert his own palpable existence. Here he and Sancho are speaking to a certain Don Álvaro Tarfe, a character from the false Quixote(!), who they "accidentally" met at a village inn. They were able to persuade Don Álvaro Tarfe that they were the real characters (Part II, Chapter LXXII, tr. John Rutherford):

   'I do not know,' said Don Quixote, 'whether I am good, but I do know that I am not the bad Quixote, as proof of which I should like you to know, Don Álvaro Tarfe sir, that I have never in my life set foot in Saragossa; on the contrary, having been told that the fantasy Don Quixote had taken part in the jousts in that city, I refused to go there, to prove to all the world that he is a fraud; and so I went straight on to Barcelona ... And although what happened to me there was not very pleasant, indeed was most disagreeable, I can bear it all without heaviness of heart, just for the sake of having seen Barcelona. In short, Don Álvaro Tarfe sir, I am the Don Quixote de la Mancha of whom fame speaks - not that wretch who sought to usurp my name and exalt himself with my thoughts. I entreat you, sir, as you are a gentleman, to be so kind as to make a formal declaration before the mayor of this village to the effect that you have never in all the days of your life seen me until now, and that I am not the Don Quixote who appears in the second part [by Avellaneda], nor is this squire of mine Sancho Panza the man whom you knew.

Don Álvaro Tarfe was convinced and subsequently executed an affidavit in front of the village mayor and the notary (both of whom, as it happened, conveniently entered the very same village inn they were eating in) to the effect that "Don Quixote was not the man who appeared in print in a history entitled The Second Part of Don Quixote de la Mancha written by one Avellaneda, from Tordesillas." De facto and de jure then, Don Quixote's authenticity was validated beyond reasonable doubt.

Don Quixote's reactions to the spurious sequel and the actions he took to uphold the truth demonstrate the freedom granted by the storyteller to his own characters, such that the character is given complete power to set the record straight in the story he found himself in. The storyteller has transferred to the character his right to self-determination, to speak for himself, to chart his own plot in his own story. Right up to his own death, Don Quixote was so affected by the false character impersonating him that the author of the false history, Avellaneda, even featured in his last will and testament, albeit in a tone of reconciliation.

The author Syjuco, in the spirit of granting his characters the same freedom and right to self-determination, has produced Ilustrado. It is a novel that is a fitting tribute to what is authentic and original in books.



Related post:

Don Q, via M. Menard

GIVEAWAY: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Black Dossier)

• The prize is the graphic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Black Dossier) by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. Hardcover in very good condition.

• The giveaway is open to all readers with address in the Philippines. One address per reader, one reader per address.

• Entries are accepted through email. Email subject: Extraordinary Giveaway. Please include your full name, complete address, and blog/site (if you have any).

• Deadline is midnight of 15th March, local time. The winner will be chosen using a random number generator.  I'll update this post and announce the winner here.

• UPDATE: Congrats to Gian Faye of Loading-Info | An InfoTechBlog.