More terrifying are the nightmares when you’re awake

Ang Kapangyarihang Higit sa Ating Lahat (The Power Greater Than All of Us) by Ronaldo Soledad Vivo Jr. (Ungazpress, 2015)



Note: I wrote the following in 2015 as an intro to the novel. There is no translation.



[Mga] Paunang Salita

1. ang mabisang paraan ng pagsasaayos ng problema

MAHALAGANG PAALALA:
Kung ikaw ay nagdesisyon na magpakain ng stray cats o mga pusang gala, importanteng ipakapon mo sila. Kung hindi sila kapon, magbe-breed sila at dadami.Maling pagmamalasakit ang pagpapakain sa galang pusa ng walang kaakibat na pagpapakapon

Kadalasan sa mga nagpapakain ng ligaw/gala o stray na pusa ay nape-persecute o nakakaaway at pinagtutulong-tulungan ng mga kapitbahay at komunidad, lalo na’t hindi pinapakita ng taga-pakain o “feeder” na sya ay “responsible feeder” o nagpapakapon at nagsisimula ng TNR effort sa kanilang komunidad.

Ang TNR o “Trap-Neuter-Return” ang pinakamabisang paraan ng pag-control ng populasyon ng mga pusa sa isang lugar. Dahil ang kapong pusa ay hindi na manganganak o makakabuntis, hindi na madadagdagan pa ang kasalukuyang bilang ng pusa sa isang lugar. Maging ang mga pusa sa kalapit-lugar ay hindi na rin papasok sa isang lugar na may mga kapon ng pusa.

Ang mga kapong pusa ay pangangalagaan ang kanilang “source of food” at hindi nila papayagang may kaagaw sila dito. Kapag ang pusa ay hindi kapon at nanganak, i-si-ni-share o ibinabahagi nya ang pagkain sa mga anak nya kaya’t dumarami ang pusa sa isang lugar kapag hindi sila kapon.

Kapag kapon lahat ng mga pusa sa isang lugar, hindi na rin mapapalitan ang mga pusang namatay na (maliban na lamang kung namatay na lahat ang pusa at merong mga papasok na bagong pusa na makikinabang sa “holding capacity” resources /tira-tirang pagkain ng isang lugar.)

– The Philippine Animal Welfare Society. http://www.paws.org.ph

2. dreamlandangst

Sa mga nakabasa na ng dalawang kalipunan ng kuwento ng ungazpress, hindi na nangangailangan ng babala ang handog nilang unang nobela. Dapat alam mo na rin ang bitag na pinasok mo. Ang [mga] babala ay hindi na uubra kaya 'di na kailangang pamain. Lalo na kung ito naman ay walang kabigin sa [mga] bangungot na umaakbay sa bawat himaymay at kalbaryo ng buhay maralita. Sa dreamland na iniikutan ng nobela, ang buhay ay isang panaginip na umuupos sa (halang na) kaluluwa ng sambayanang hindi na magigising. Hindi dreamland ng operang Miss Saigon o soap operang pampalipas-oras. Ang [mga] digmaang itinatampok dito ay kainan ng laman, puso, at bayag. "Higit na nakagigimbal ang mga bangungot habang gising" – ang sabi dito. Evil na puwersa laban sa mabuti. Mahirap laban sa filthy rich. Hayop laban sa karapatang pantao.Tao laban sa animal na tao.

Habang naghihintay ng order, nagmasid-masid muna s'ya sa paligid. Desperadong humahanap ng dilihensya. Sa kapal ng tao, hindi n'ya mawari kung pa'no didiskarte. Hindi naman kasi s'ya mandurukot. May malaking pinagkaiba ang mandurukot sa holdaper. Para sa kan'ya, ang mga mandurukot ay mga tirador na walang bayag - na kung kumana ay palihim, patalikod, galaw hunyango. Mas panglalake raw ang panghoholdap at di hamak na mas makatao ang proseso, dahil bilang holdaper ay ipinaaalam mo sa mga biktima na kailangan na nilang magpaalam sa mga minamahal nilang gamit at salapi, di tulad ng mga mandurukot na iniiwanang praning ang kanilang mga biktima.

"Isang aleng nagmumurang kamias ang nadale namin kahapon, matrona. Kontak ng tropa ni Buldan. Sabik sa burat, pinatikim ko ng burat saka ko dinigma. Tumataginting na pitong libong piso ang laman ng wallet ng gaga. Pares ng hikaw na ginto, tatlong singsing na ginto rin, at kwintas na silver na may pendant na puso. Inarbor ko yung kwintas sa hatian namin ni Buldan. Di naman na ito nag-arimuhunan at pumayag agad.

3. sellout cops

Nambasag na naman ng trip si Ronaldo S Vivo Jr. Hinantad ang [mga] kaepalang umiiral sa (alta-)sosyedad. Kaipala'y hatid ang [mga] kabalintunaan sa paligid-ligid na puro linga. Sa dreamland ay tuluyan nang nakapinid ang pinto ng palasyo at gobyerno. Kaya naman ang nasasakupang sambayanan ay patuloy sa pagganap sa kanilang dakilang propesyon: pagpupuslit, pandurukot, pagbebenta ng katawan, pangongotong, pangingikil, pang-aagrabyado.

Ang [mga] naturingang alagad ng batas, ang [mga] kampon ng dilim – patuloy sa pagpapatupad ng batas at lagim. Hindi sila maaring lumihis sa layunin: ang Sariling Alamat ng kapulisan.

Ang sabi, para mo masukat kung ga'no kabobo ang isang pulis ay huwag mong bilangin kung ga'no na karaming katarantaduhan ang nagawa nito o kung ga'no na kabigat ang atraso nito sa sinumpaan n'yang tungkulin. Sa halip, tukuyin mo kung ga'no ito kadalas nagtanggol sa masa. Ibig sabihin, bobo kang pulis kung lumilihis ka sa dakilang layunin ng kapulisan na susuhin ang higanteng burat ng gobyernong pahirap at maging instrumento sa pananarantado nito sa bayan.

4. wasakpad

Ano ang [mga] sumunod na nangyari? Ito lang naman ang tanong na nagpapaikot sa mambabasa. Hindi ito yung babasahing prenteng-prente ka na sa pagkakaupo habang kinikilig sa maaring mangyari dahil alam mo na na mangyayari. May kakaibang estilo ng pagkukuwento si Vivo na bumabalik sa kanyang mga unang kuwento sa PseudoAbsurdoKapritso Ulo. Ito ang wasak (non-linear) na pagtatahi ng kuwento at damdamin. Hindi mo namamalayan tastas na ang diwa mo dahil sa pagragasa ng agam-agam at pighati. Nakapaloob sa di-kompromisong pagpapahayag ng pinandidirihang katotohanan, halaw sa hilaw na buhay lansangan, hinding-hindi mahihiwatigan ng mga fan ng pamaypay na kwento (fan fiction) sa wattpad.

5. kinapon ang (kapangy)ari(han)

Sa paglukob ng transgresibo sa tradisyon ng sosyal realismo, ang nobela ay maaring pampurga sa [mga] hindot na luho at ulayaw ng burgismo't burgesya. Dude, ito ay negosasyon hindi lang ng puri at dangal. Kaluluwa at buhay na ang nakataya dito. May eksenang pantapat sa kalunus-lunos na mga tagpo sa Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag, Insiang, Scorpio Nights, Mga Agos sa Disyerto, at iba pang produkto ng malubhang haraya. Huwag nang ikumpara sa metaporikal na inidoro ni Bob Ong sa MACARTHUR. Ibang shit-level ng hardcore ang nakapaloob sa unang nobela ni Vivo dahil lubos na isinuka ang metapora at ilusyon. Higit anupaman, ang nobelang ito ay pagdalumat sa [mga] emaskulasyon ng kabataan sa lipunang makatae. Ang [mga] di-makatarungang paraan ng pagkapon sa pag-asang umahon sa buhay, mabuhay nang tahimik at di sumala sa pagkain sa buong araw. Dinggin ang bating(ting). Tinigpas na ang kaka(n)yahang lumalang ng sining.

6. Kastrationsangst

Gahd, ang bigat lang ng tema nito. Manhid lang ang walang pandama. Paano ba haharapin ang kapangyarihang higit kaninuman kung bumira at gumupo? Isugal ang oras sa bitag ng salita. Magbasa at panawan ng ulirat. Kung paanong namayagpag sa nobela ang pagkabalisa sa kastrasyon-kolektib. Kung paanong namayani ang terorismo-sibil sa walang patumanggang pandarambong at pagnakaw ng kaayusan sa lipunan. Ang pagkadurog ng pagkalalake at pagkababae ng mga aso at pusang galang nagtangkang magpumiglas at manlaban. Ang pagkainutil ng diwa't pagkalumpo ng kaluluwang hindi maiibsan ang sakit. Kahit anong usal at dasal. Sumpain ang pagpapakatao sa panahon ng kanibalismo at pagkahibang habang nilalaro ang nakaliliyong kalaydoskopyo ng krimen at parusa.

7. sirit na

Isugal ang oras sa bitag ng salita. Magbasa at panawan ng ulirat.

Kafka's labyrinths

Amerika: The Missing Person by Franz Kafka, translated by Mark Harman (Schocken Books, 2008)


Kafka's comic novels could hardly be called social realist ones, but I could detect a sympathetic attitude for subaltern-like characters. (And here I used the term "subaltern" loosely; Kafka's posthumous novels were hardly postcolonial). The novels operated within a psychological space of helplessness and entropy, hence they seemed to unravel in a nightmare landscape. Gregor Samsa awoke from a listless dream to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. Here, Karl Rossmann arrived in America greeted by a transformed landmark, a signal that we were about to enter a weird reality.

As he entered New York Harbor on the now slow-moving ship, Karl Rossmann, a seventeen-year-old youth who had been sent to America by his poor parents because a servant girl had seduced him and borne a child by him, saw the Statue of Liberty, which he had been observing for some time, as if in a sudden burst of sunlight. The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds.

IMAGE: VANISHED EMPIRES

The scenes that followed were classic comedy from the master of indirection and misdirection. Karl was fetched by his uncle in the ship after running into misadventures with "the stoker" and another passenger to whom he foolishly entrusted his trunk. He was practically adopted by his uncle, a very wealthy businessman and politician. However, for flimsy reasons, his uncle disowned him and left him to his own devices. With this great misfortune and the succeeding hysterical scenes that followed, it was not farfetched to say that he was prejudged and found guilty of an unspecified crime, just like Josef K in The Trial, even before he set foot in America.

Now it was simply a matter of finding one's way back to the dining room, where in the initial confusion he had probably misplaced his hat. Of course, he intended to take along the candle, but even with a little light it was not easy to find one's way about. For instance, he could not tell whether this room was on the same floor as the dining room. On the way over Klara had dragged him, so that he hadn't been able to look around; Mr. Green and the servants carrying the candelabras had also kept him busy, and indeed he wasn't even able to say how many staircases they had passed, one, two, or perhaps even none. If the view from here was any indication, the room was fairly high up, and so he tried to imagine them taking the stairs, but even at the entrance they had had to go up several stairs, so why couldn't this side of the house be elevated also? If only there had been a glimmer of light from a door somewhere along the corridor or one could have heard a voice from afar, however faintly!

Confusion and disorientation reigned. Deadlines were missed. Unfortunate delays ensued. A chain of improbable digressions brought one to the brink of laughter. We were in Kafka territory alright. The claustrophobic and pathetic situations Karl found himself in was simultaneously funny and tragic. One had to consider it very funny. Otherwise the anxious reader, in all seriousness, would be frightfully affected by darkness and horror.

Karl, like K. in The Castle, was surrounded by characters who constantly demand for his attention or who sought him for some use. He was thrown in one absurd situation after another, one set piece of back luck after another, the kind of absurdity and lucklessness that induced one to side-splitting laughter, the only redemptive and bearable reaction, because, certainly, not to laugh and to take the writer seriously was more than tragic. Kazuo Ishiguro, in The Unconsoled, borrowed this almost unbearable absurdity and comedy to great effect.

While Kafka's three unfinished comic novels and fantastical stories like "The Metamorphosis" could be read literally, they most certainly opened up fertile grounds of inquiry for the reader. Translator Mark Harman, in addition to rewriting the German in an agile prose ("agile" being my token adjective for the quality of a translation from a language I do not speak), supplied a preface which provided an overview of Amerika's critical reception, some new background researches on Kafka, and some pathways with which to approach the ideas raised by the novelist. Harman noted how Max Brod's "once widely accepted portrayal of Kafka's works as religious allegories has not aged well". In fact, Jorge Luis Borges, who translated Kafka, considered Kafka's fiction as "a parable or a series of parables whose theme is the moral relation of the individual with God and with his incomprehensible universe". This might be true, but I think that a secular reading of the novelist offered a more robust reading.

Harman also underscored how, among Kafka's novels, Amerika constituted the most overt social criticism. That was obvious given how the major characters in the novel were all immigrants to America, with their countries of origin emphasized for good measure. It was also obvious how social hierarchies and inequalities (between the rich businessmen and the poor working class) were incorporated into the novel and how it eventually focused on Karl's adventures in soliciting menial work. It could even be argued that the novel's central topic was "work" in the same manner K. (a surveyor), Josef K (a banker), and Gregor Samsa (salesman) were partly prosecuted or haunted because of or on account of their work.

In her introduction to Walter Benjamin's Illuminations, Hannah Arendt—the German intellectual philosopher and previous editor of Schocken Books which championed the publication of Kafka's body of work—considered the Czech writer in light of the Jewish question.

No doubt, the Jewish question was of great importance for this generation of Jewish writers and explains much of the personal despair so prominent in nearly everything they wrote. But the most clear-sighted among them were led by their personal conflicts to a much more general and more radical problem, namely, to questioning the relevance of the Western tradition as a whole.

Certainly the Jewish question gave a rich context or background to any reading of Kafka. If one was to believe Arendt, the constricting atmosphere that pervaded European societies at the time, including Kafka's, was hard to ignore. When she wrote about the "most clear-sighted" Jewish writers, Arendt was referring to Kafka and Benjamin, among others. (It would be interesting to look into how Benjamin himself viewed Kafka in the two essays included in Illuminations.) (Extending to later non-Jewish European writers, I suppose this critique of the Western tradition was extended by Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald, and László Krasznahorkai, each in his own revolutionary way)

When she wrote about "questioning the relevance of the Western tradition as a whole", one could recognize how this applies to Kafka's fiction which was a maze of digressions and collapse of meanings. The Western philosophical tradition I would say applied to the liberal capitalist machinery of society: power plays and power structures, labor inequities, economic inequalities, problematic family relations, societal arrangements, slavery and overwork, the deterioration of one's health and well-being. Like Gregor Samsa confined and wasting away in his small room, the sick Robinson (Karl's acquaintance) was visited by a grim self-realization.

Now I've ruined my health for the rest of my life, and what did I have other than my health? If I exert myself ever so slightly, I get a pain there and here. If I were healthy, do you think those boys in the hotel, those grass toads—what else would one call them?—could possibly have defeated me. But no matter what's wrong with me, I won't breathe a word to Delamarche and Brunelda; I'll work as long as possible, and until it's not possible anymore, then I'll lie down and die, and only then, when it's too late, will they see that, though I was sick, I was still working, always working, and that I actually worked myself to death in their service.

Of course the way with which this critique was explored in Kafka was almost invisible mainly because they were covered by comedy and a deceptively artless prose. One could only admit the critique if one interpreted the broad outline of the novels as tracing the plight of the disadvantaged, persecution of the vulnerable and marginalized, racism, the last gasps of a decent person in an inhospitable environment.

He knew that whatever he could say would end up seeming very different from the way it had been intended and that the way they assessed the matter was critical, since it alone would determine the final judgement of good or evil.

The impossibility of comprehension, the inability to fully understand one's state of nature, this was embedded in the work itself. There would always be a gulf between the word ("whatever he could say") and its supposed meaning ("the way it had been intended") which would make the novels seem impervious to criticism and evaluation. And the gatekeepers of power, with "the way they assessed the matter" would always find fault and would render harsh judgement.

Borges called Kafka a "nihilist" whose subject is "the unbearable, tragic solitude of the individual who lacks even the lowliest place in the order of the universe" and whose greatest strength as a writer is "the invention of intolerable situations".

"Well," said Karl, "it won't be that bad"; however, after everything he had heard, he no longer believed in a favorable outcome.

Unfavorable, yes. And we were still laughing.



Quotes from Borges were taken from pieces in Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger.

The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader

“The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader” (1931) by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, in Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger (Penguin Books, 1999)


I am not sure which is the most erudite writer: Borges the storyteller, Borges the poet, or Borges the critic. Perhaps the question is moot when it comes to the literary tradition which Borges helped build: the intellectual tradition, a poetic and metaphysical-philosophical bent, the striving for excellence at every imaginative turn of the pen. With Selected Non-Fictions, with its doors and windows opened wide to inquiring minds, Borges is a critical tradition unto himself. The fount of his critical production derives from all the resources available to a librarian. Borges the reader is the most erudite writer.

The superstition in the essay “The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader” referred to the “superstition about style”. This was a general tendency of readers to look for or characterize a writer’s style (mannerisms) in order to appreciate a literary text. Borges rejected this form of readerly “affectation.” This led him to state that "strictly speaking, there are no more readers left". There are only potential literary critics. He meant this in a most ironical sense.

For our librarian, greatness in a work could exist beyond stylistic flourishes. There could even be an “absence of style” if it comes to that. Don Quixote was sloppy in parts, but it was still great, owing perhaps to its idiosyncratic absence of style. Borges did not consider Cervantes to be a stylist (“in the current acoustical or decorative sense of the word”). Don Q was great not because of its style but because of its other novelistic attributes. A perfect page, our librarian critic suggested, was an “everlasting fallacy” (For this phrase, our critic gave a nudge to Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, but I did not get the reference.). A perfect page to Borges was not immutable:

On the contrary, the page that becomes immortal can traverse the fire of typographical errors, approximate translations, and inattentive or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the process. One cannot with impunity alter any line fabricated by Góngora (according to those who restore his texts), but Don Quixote wins posthumous battles against his translators and survives each and every careless version. Heine, who never heard it read in Spanish, acclaimed it for eternity. The German, Scandinavian, or Hindu ghost of the Quixote is more alive than the stylist’s anxious verbal artifices.

This passage I quote in full because I just realized Roberto Bolaño plagiarized (borrowed/paraphrased) the idea in an interview where he said: A work like Don Quixote can resist even the worst translator. As a matter of fact, it can resist mutilation, the loss of numerous pages and even a shit storm. Thus, with everything against it – bad translation, incomplete and ruined – any version of Quixote would still have very much to stay to a Chinese or an African reader. And that is literature.

Are they (our librarian and his fanboy) saying that one test of a masterpiece is its resistance to translation? Are Helen Lowe-Porter’s supposedly unfaithful translations of Thomas Mann tomes not a hindrance to the perception of the latter as a great novelist?

* * *

The taste of Borges is not always beyond reproach. He does have his personal preferences, but his magisterial coverage of traditions and his wide reading (the reading of a reader’s reader) makes one pay attention.

He is allergic to all-knowing readers. Readers who get ecstatic about style. The superstitious etiquette of readers is to be drawn to the absolute and superlative. This is one of the most interesting books I’ve ever encountered. This is such a weird novel, such a very strange novel. Such a unique reading experience. The best book of the summer.

Ah, to needlessly elevate a book:

Overstating something is as inept as not saying it at all … [R]eaders sense the impoverishment caused by careless generalizations and amplifications.

I admit I am sometimes guilty of this superstition, this affectation for style, this appeal to a definitive assessment and judgement, this Blurbing Syndrome. One has to recognize the beauty of straightforward and imperfect narratives.

The exhortation of our librarian is simple. Book bloggers have to be, first and foremost, readers. Otherwise they become literary critics.


Posted for Stu and Richard's Spanish and Portuguese Lit Months 2018.

Jaime Gil de Biedma's ambiguous poetry

"The Persons of the Verb", complete poems translated by Alice M. Sun-Cua and José Mª Fons Guardiola, in Jaime Gil de Biedma in the Philippines: Prose and Poetry / Jaime Gil de Biedma en Filipinas: prosa y poesía (in Spanish and English text) (Vibal Foundation, Inc., 2016)

Presumably an important but neglected Spanish poet of the second half of the past century, Jaime Gil de Biedma (1929-1990) remained largely inaccessible to English. That was until the publication of this collection in the Philippines. The only other book of his that appeared in translation was a selection of his well-known poems in Longing: Selected Poems (City Lights Books, 2001), translated by James Nolan.

I must say at the outset that this volume, a hefty bilingual edition, was a tome at 644 pages, plus 25 prefatory pages, plus 16 pages of photographs in the midsection. It was obvious that the publisher was a big fan. The end product was groaning with supplementary and scholarly materials, including two forewords, a page dedicated to the memory of Carmen Balcells, beautifully printed endpapers/separators for every major section of the book, a 47-page introduction by publisher Gaspar Vibal, an Autobiographical Note to the poems (1982), author’s note to the first (1975) and second (1981) editions of the poems, notes to the poems by Gaspar Vibal again. And these were only up to the end of the poesía part, which consists of three complete poetry collections: Las Personas del Verbo, Moralidades, and Poemas Póstumos.

The prosa part is Retrato del Artista en 1956, translated and annotated by Wystan de la Peña, which was also divided into three sections: Las islas de Circe, Informe sobre la administración general en Filipinas, and De regreso en Ítaca, each section terminating with translator's notes, for a total of 581 endnotes. I just managed to read up to the first section of the artist's "Portrait". The first and third parts were diary entries sandwiching a management report on Tabacalera, a well-known tobacco industry in the Philippines, for which JGB travelled all the way from Spain to oversee in the mid-1950s.

Rounding up the texts was a particularly informative annotated bibliography grouped by genre and theme, a chronology, an index, an about the translators page, and a final page with two longish blurbs. In the paperback edition that I bought from last year’s Manila International Book Fair, there was a front flyleaf containing JGB’s capsule biography, and end flyleaf with more blurbs. For a beautifully bound book, it was disappointing that the texts and the accompanying scholarly materials were not perfectly proofread. Nonetheless, the materials were well researched and certainly offered a welcome surfeit of information on the life and times of a unique, marginalized (non-mainstream) writer.

A reader interested only with a superficial introduction to JGB would surely complain about the extra pages. But one was afforded the option to immerse oneself into the depths and heights of a poet. JGB was apparently a slow writer and this was obvious from the slow cadence of his lines. Sometimes the poems were impervious. They occupied literal space yet seemingly told nothing particularly earth-shaking at first. But in the simplicity of openly declared feelings they sometimes revealed something close to an epiphany. Perhaps the inwardness of the poems was a subterfuge to JGB’s sexual identity and repressed expressions. Yet the political and sexual were interleaved in subtle wording, emanating from “el gran boquete abriéndose hacia dentro del alma”, as signaled in the poem “Ars Poetica”.

The nostalgia for the sun on the roof terraces,
against the dove-colored concrete wall
—nevertheless so vivid—and the sudden cold
that almost startles.

The sweetness, the warmth of the lips by oneself
amid the familiar street
as in a grand salon, where distant multitudes
would have arrived like beloved family.

Above all, the vertigo of time,
the enormous nothingness that opens towards the depths of the soul
while promises that fall in a faint
as if they were froth, float above.

Its is surely the moment to ponder
that simply being alive demands something,
perhaps heroic deeds—or just
some humble common thing

whose earthly skin
is to be handled between the fingers, with a little faith?
Words, for example.
Familiar words, halfheartedly worn-out.

JGB could sound tender and forthright and conversational. But his frustrations were concealed between the lines. He wanted to rebel at being part of the bourgeoisie, and his poems were his attempts (futile, perhaps, but heroic attempts) to inclusivity. With the background of civil war and poverty in Spain and his reckoning with his homosexuality, JGB’s poetry was shaped by a conflation of private and public concerns. The idyllic Pagsanjan Falls—a tourist spot in Luzon Island which unfortunately became infamous for being a sex tourism haven for foreign child molesters and pedophiles in the 80s—as a backdrop of "Days in Pagsanjan" could sometimes evoke a Cavafy-like sensuality.

Like dreams, beyond
the idea of time,
dreams made of dreams I carry you,
days in Pagsanjan.

In the heat, after the denseness,
the river throbs again,
speckled like a reptile.
And in the dark atmosphere

under the flowering trees
—gleaming, humid,
when at night, we bathed—
each other’s bodies.

JGB, who died of AIDS complications in 1990, was an intermittent celebrant of love and romance. His impermeable poems sometimes gave way to open declarations, as in these lines from “Pandemic and Celeste”, which contained an epigraph from Catullus:

To know about love, to learn it,
it is necessary to have been alone,
And it is necessary to have made love
on four hundred nights
with four hundred different bodies. For its mysteries,
as the poet said, are of the soul,
but a body is the book in which these are read.

JGB's “Posthumous Poems”, published when the poet was still very much alive, was a distillation of his idea of moralities closely haunting mortalities. In this final anti-poetic sequence, somewhat in the tradition of Nicanor Parra, self-questioning, anti-self rants embodied the unself-conscious, fullest expression of one’s own devil’s advocate. One poem was called “Against Jaime Gil de Biedma”, another, “After the Death of Jaime Gil de Biedma”. The persona called "Jaime Gil de Biedma" in the poems could safely indulge in self-pity. It was a perfect way to put distance between the self and the Self.

Against Jaime Gil de Biedma

What's the point, I'd like to know, in moving house,
leaving behind a basement darker
than my reputation—and that says a lot—
hanging small white lacy curtains
and taking a maidservant,
renouncing my bohemian days,
if you come later, you bore,
embarrassing boarder, an idiot wearing my suits,
loafer, good for nothing, shithead,
with your clean hands,
eating from my plate and dirtying the house?

The late night bars, the pimps,
the florists, the dead streets at dawn,
and the dimly lit elevators follow you
when you arrive drunk,
as you pause to look
at your ruined face in the mirror,
with eyes still raging
which you don't want to close.
And if I scold you,
you laugh at me, and remind me of the past
and say that I am getting old.

I could remind you that you are no longer charming.
Your casual style and your disdain
become ridiculous
when you are more than thirty years old,
and your enchanting smile
of a day-dreaming boy
—who feels sure to please—is a sad remnant,
a pathetic attempt,
While you look at me with pleading eyes
and cry and promise me
not to do it anymore.

If only you weren't such a whore!
And if I didn't know, so long ago,
that you're strong when I'm weak,
and that you're weak when I rage ...
Of your homecomings I keep a confused impression
of panic, of sadness, of unease,
and of hopelessness
and impatience and resentment
of suffering again once more,
the unforgivable humiliation
of excessive intimacy.

With a heavy heart I'll put you to bed,
like one who goes to hell
to sleep with you.
With each step dying of impotence,
stumbling over furniture
in the dark, we'll stagger our way through the flat,
clumsily embracing, wobbling
from alcohol and repressed sobs.
Oh, vile servitude of loving human beings,
and the vilest
is to be in love with oneself.

"A Body Is a Man's Best Friend" was almost reminiscent of Auden's "Lullaby". While Auden's rhythmic poem was essentially a tribute to a night of tryst, sleeping heads, faithless arms, and human love, one would reinterpret Gil de Biedma's (posthumous) intent considering its inclusion in a cycle of posthumous poems.

A Body is a Man's Best Friend

Time is not yet over,
and tomorrow is as far as a reef
that I can scarcely make out.

                                   You don't feel
how time drips slowly in this room
with the light on, how the cold outside
laves the window panes... How fast
you fell asleep in my bed tonight, little animal,
with the simple nobility of necessity,
little creature, while I watched you.

Well, then, good night.
                                        That quiet country
whose borders are those of your body
makes me feel like dying
while remembering life, or staying up
—tired and excited—waiting for dawn.

Alone with age, while you sleep
like someone who has never read a book,
little tiny creature: to be a human being
—more honest than in my arms—
therefore, a stranger.

If JGB was tucking his own "little" self to sleep, wasn't it a shocker that the self is none other than "The Other"? After all, he wrote in another antipoem, that "I saved myself writing / after the death of Jaime Gil de Biedma".


For Stu and Richard's Spanish and Portuguese Lit Months 2018.

Čapek's non-human kind

R.U.R. (Robot Unibersal ni Rossum): Isang Dramang Kolektibang may Komikong Prologo at Tatlong Yugto mula sa Tsekong Manunulat na si Karel Čapek [R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots): A Collective Drama With a Comic Prologue and in Three Acts from the Czech Writer Karel Čapek], translated to Filipino by Guelan Varela-Luarca (Central Book Supply Inc., 2016), from the English version by Claudia Novack
 

The term robot supposedly first appeared in the 1920 Czech drama collective R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek. They were humanoid machines created in a factory by scientists using a formula. The template for robots was humans. In this present age where the rights of "non-human persons", or at least those of animals, were increasingly being recognized, we had to give it to the Czech dramatist for his prescience. The robot inventory of Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R.) company warehouse currently held 347,000 units. Harry Domin, the CEO of R.U.R. acknowledged the capacity of these robots to be taught.

DOMIN.   Bueno. Puwede ni'yong sabihin sa kanila'ng kahit na anong ibigin ni'yo. Puwede ni'yo silang basahan ng Bibliya, ng mga logaritmo, kahit ano. Puwede ni'yo pa ngang turuan hinggil sa mga karapatang pantao.

DOMIN.   Well. You could share with them whatever you want. You could read them the Bible, logarithms, anything. You could even teach them about human rights. [1]

Coming from somebody called Domin, that was quite a superior statement. According to Dr. Gall, the R.U.R.'s chief of research and physiological department, robots had to be taught "pain" in order for them to protect themselves from destroying themselves. This was for "industrial reasons" (read: pure capitalist motives). Robots could destroy themselves if they don't know how to feel pain. They could put their hands inside a machine, where their fingers are chopped off, their heads could be broken, even if they don't feel anything. "Kailangan nating ipakilala sa kanila ang kirot; natural na proteksiyon iyon laban sa pagkasira." (We had to teach them the concept of pain; it will be their natural protection against destruction.)

Čapek offered a scenario of the future, a Gedankenexperiment. Humans will rely on robots to do all forms of labor for them. As Domin explained, the human kind would now have the time to do anything they wanted. Poverty would then disappear. True, he said, humans would become unemployed as a consequence, but that was because no job would even need to be performed by any human being at all! The machines would do all the things at their bidding. And as a bonus, human slavery would finally be a thing of the past. Mankind would just be left to pursue its perfection.

Helena Glory, the woman who visited the factory, would have none of it. She believed it was a terrible situation for the robots, and it was a violation of natural law, for even if male and female robots were created, they did not feel anythings for each other. They will never love, will never bear children, will never hold a newborn baby in their likeness in their arms.

But since this was first-rate science fiction, it was only a matter of time before the robots were provoked and awakened, before a labor union of robots was organized. It was only a matter of time for the human spark to flare inside the robots and for them to finally revolt against their masters and creators.

Our Czech writer carried the logic of this dystopia to the end. (And it would not be farfetched to imagine that this play might itself be a product of a robot's thinking ...) The situation and characters, humans and non-humans alike, were vivid. It was a Marxist comedy, a satire on human intellect and ingenuity, a perfect product of neo-liberal capitalist society, a slogan for non-human persons' rights. It was written in 1920, a pioneer of visceral robotic imagination, a defining work, way ahead of any ghosts in the shell, the terminators, pacific rims, blade runners, and ex machinas [2].



Notes:

1. The play was translated into Filipino from Claudia Novack's English version. Since I don't have a copy of Novack, I back-translated the passages, as well as the paraphrases, above.

2. Spoiler: Here we were introduced to the "Čapek test" (contra Turing test) of determining whether a non-human robot finally exhibits the characteristics of a biological human being. It was a simple biological test, and it involves a robot mimicking the characteristics of living things, reproduction being the clincher criterion. The other human aspects (empathy, tolerance) might be easier to test for robots. I mean, even for humans these aspects were hard to come by. The likelihood of failure was high.