From the DIRECTOR EMERITUS Dr. Edith L. Tiempo National Artist for Literature
BY MIRO FRANCES CAPILI We tried to write. We had positioned ourselves where our bodies would be able to cleave the wind, hoping perhaps to intercept what occult lore its salty tongues would carry; to entrap the utterances of the afternoon in free verse, realist fiction, villanelles, sci-fi, prose poetry. What precluded the wall, of course, was the pure verve of sea, that bladder of the warm earth, an unruly and irreducible reminder of timelessness. Everything else, among them the wispy periphery of sky, seemed simply to be what had happened to occur around at the time of creation. From time to time one of our poets would offer to read aloud what she had written, only to realize that the sibilance around us silenced both sound and subterrain of her imagery. The wideness of the sea, she began, and the sea was wider still. Waves making love, she tried, and it became impossible to ignore the sultry impassioning of water folding into water. We had tried, as fools do who trust in the glib promises of syntax and metaphors and line cuts, to discipline the dance; the lissomeness of the water, into written entry. But no theory instructs the mastery of seas. Memory cannot temper a rolling patch of sky. A rogue splinter of peach dusk explodes with too much ebullience to hold the grace of a poem. An afternoon offers its own syntactic patterns and resonances. And how do you dilute a sea, the near painful clarity of day, a summer of literature and noise, to ease into a story? I imagine it would take the same pains required to grow old and confuse home with memory, as the wise are able to do who’ve culled HOW TO WALK ON A SEAWALL their lives carefully. Keep in constant vigilance. Take long walks. Accept that falling spectator to the inaccessible rituals of waves, at times, comes at the expense of wordlessness. Grow a habit. Kick it after the second hour. Arrive at an awareness that a seawall in Dumaguete city has more in common than you think with the lamppost at the corner of the next street—it is a time, a place, an atmosphere, a parable, a tumor; a sweet kind of terror, something to despair over. Set store by William Stafford when he says, “For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream.” You are surprised. How difficult it is to still the imperative of bodily experience, of wanderlust, of energy and movement, as you develop with age a skill for ordinary life. How rare now those images of brute, fervid illumination. You quit trying to make small talk in line for your passport application. The laundry waits in the hamper by the door. You find a quicker way to remove the dribbles of pumpkin soup from last night’s dress.
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