Plumbing the erotic

It’s been a week since the holy one, so I suppose we’re safely out of politically or piously incorrect territory for this discussion.

One more caveat I’d have to admit is the fear of severe misim-pression: that the speaker has valid claims for assuming the dubious position of an expert in matters erotic.

Let’s just say that I’ve been placed in this awkward role through sheer happenstance. It just so happens that I have recently edited or helped edit two forthcoming publications that thematically group erotic Philippine literature in English.

The first would-be volume (unfortunately still in question as to its eventual publication) comprises 17 short stories, 13 of these by Filipina writers. The other book, more imminent, features poems from 50 Filipino and Fil-Am poets together with erotic art from just as many contemporary Filipino artists. This second manuscript is in more advanced form toward publication. Titled Eros Pinoy, the book is currently being designed by RayVi Sunico, and will soon be published and released by Anvil Publishing, Inc.

As editor, it was I who posted the call for erotic poetry, and mainly conducted the selection from over 200 poems that were sent in, mostly through e-mail.

Our outstanding artists Bencab, or Ben Cabrera, and Virgilio "Pandy" Aviado in turn collected the visual erotica that came in various titillating forms and genres, such as oil paintings, prints, illustrations and photographs. We all hope to have a wonderful book that can provide much delectation and titillation.

Aye, there’s the word that of late has induced paroxysms of protest and counter-protest over its acceptance in an immature society.

Now, I happen to still be a member of the MTRCB, or Movie and Television Review and Classification Board. Last week, in our first official meeting presided over by the new Chairman, the esteemed Dr. Alejandro R. Roces, we were enlightened upon hearing from him a couple of literary quotations which he used repeatedly in setting the framework for the board’s discussion on what parameters ought to apply on movies and other entertainment fare that are scheduled for public showing in movie theaters and television.

This discussion, by what is still often erroneously referred to as a censors‚ board, came in the wake of the controversy over the Palace ban applied on Live Show, which some moral do-gooders, including the President of our republic, deemed unfit for public consumption on account of its allegedly pornographic features.

The first quotation which Dr. Roces treated us to is from Leo Tolstoy: "How in art are we to decide what is good and what is bad in subject matter?"

The second quote came from Gilbert Keith Chesterton: "Art and morality consist in drawing the line somewhere."

I am grateful for Anding Roces‚ retrieval and dissemination of these quotations from notable writers, as both will now play a part in our attempt to discuss what is and what is not pornography.

I now read the full text of a poem submitted and accepted for inclusion in Eros Pinoy. It is titled "The Pornographer Labors on His Lead." Here is the first stanza, which I must stress is placed entirely within quotation marks.

"‘I placed my feverish hand on the velvet rock/ of her crotch, now hot with lust and excitement,/ pressed my hand on her wet clit and,/ with my other hand, took out my raging cock/ and entered her. It felt great and glorious.’"

Here are the second and third stanzas, without quotation marks.

"He did not like the passage. He would work/ on it some more, though it was late. He rose/ and went to the fridge, reached for a Bud.// Outside, a wondrous dawn./ Someone’s small dog, barking."

This short poem is by Luis Cabalquinto, who is due back in June, from New York City where he is based, mayhaps in time to savor a 26-0 triumph of People Power forces in Bicolandia of supposedly fertile soil and reportedly fevered couplings.

Is his poem pornographic? It has explosive four-letter words one doesn’t bandy about in polite society or in polite literature. It contains a graphic description of an aggressive sexual advance, indeed of penetration. But does that make it pornographic? I suggest it doesn’t, for the simple reason that the poet, knowledgeable craftsman that he is, relied on simple literary devices. Call it tricks.

You know what doesn’t make the first stanza of five dynamic lines porn? It’s the quotation marks. The words are uttered by an imagined, created persona. Those words are by the persona, the pornographer in the title of the poem, and not directly expressed by the poet. What we have here isn’t a live show, but a puppet show, or the poet as ventriloquist.

After this seemingly shocking first stanza, the reader is brought back to reality in the mainframe or mainstream narrative that casually describes the subsequent actuations of the pornographer/persona. Why, any halfway intelligent reader then says to himself, this is satire. The poet is making fun of the pornographer. First he endows the persona with such lurid lines that are as cliche as kingdom come. Then he shows us the discontented writer of porn walking away from his creative frustration to get a beer.

The third stanza, a cute couplet, if insidious in its elliptical throwaway, is finally what makes it a good, strong, enjoyable poem.

Of course it may be argued – what if the quotation marks were not there? What if that opening stanza stood alone, in all its naked ... glory? No, not quite. Even I would blanch and deem it unacceptable as authentic literature. Not unreadable, nor censorable. But unacceptably lewd and cliche-ic by itself. It may be considered porn literature, the stuff of Xaviera Hollander columns that used to be mimicked, in Filipino, by anonymous tabloid columnists appealing purely, or is it impurely, to prurient interest and nothing but.

The bottomline is that it’s all a matter of taste. I’ll defend, though not to the death, the right of any man or woman or gay to pronounce those lines. Will they titillate? Do they shock? Well, the latter perhaps. But they will shock only the virginal or the prude. I believe the rest of us will turn away offended, if at all, by their crudeness and lack of freshness. They’re terrible lines because we’ve seen them before; they’ve been regurgitated in countless offerings that try to pass themselves off as literature, when in fact all they demonstrate is the line, not so fine, that separates the low-grade, declassé pornographer from the wizened, satiric, laconic poet who is making fun of such a persona.

Mr. Cabalquinto gets away with sex and violence, gets away with textual murder, so to speak, by applying those quotation marks that layer him away from that crude mouth or mind.

Let’s go on to part of a new poem by another fine master of Philippine English poetry, Ricardo M. de Ungria. By chance of lore, Ricky tells it like it is, and then some. From his poem titled "The Light Smiling Outside Shut Windows" come the following lines:

"Ass it felt like/ the first time,/ no puckered port of call/ I skidded in/ on the slick./ Inside it cupped like/ soaped rubber glove/ not one to slip out of, the fit/ tried out sideways, roundedly/ and long, heavewards and deep/ into waiting, mushy corners/ whose stoked heat/ licked back/ my own wild steam./ She was salt in the neck, brine behind the ears, and jiggling breasts,/ and she thighed me into/ boneful strokes/ on surfaces that did not break./ A cop’s crop throbbed/ inside her deep –/ weeks old, she said with a smile..."

Now, isn’t that delicious more than salacious? The thought of a luscious reading by Ricky himself, replete with body English parsing the lines in public – aye, there’s another titillating thought to be enjoyed by certain ladies.

The lines describe, thoroughly subjectively, once again the love act. Some of us may be aroused, but I suggest that the more consensual reaction would be one of appreciation for the agility with which the poet tenders those words, that imagery, that ejaculatory line-breaking – or what the late great post-Modernist fictionist Donald Barthelme writes about when he essays the following: "The combinatorial agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered."

Wonderful.

This brings us back to the Tolstoy quote from Dr. Roces: "How in art are we to decide what is good and what is bad in subject matter?" As well as to Mr. Chesterton’s proffer: "Art and morality consist in drawing the line somewhere."

Yes, but where do we draw the line? And how indeed may we, can we, decide on what is a no-no in subject matter? Is it all just a matter of personal taste? Essentially, I believe so. The learned reader will delight in Mr. De Ungria’s erotic poetry not solely or mainly because it is erotic and thus titillating, certainly not because his manly words and lines induce a rise in our prurient interest, but because they are uttered fresh and freshly, and conspire to surprise us with their appreciably high literary worth.

And that is why I feel confident in saying that there can be no pornography in fine literature. Once the writer elevates his work through craftsmanship, he is shorn free of the weight of opprobium that may otherwise cast his produce down to the dregs, or what my 12-year-old son and his peers call "japex." For fake. For the TH (trying hard) imitations that fail to evoke that resonance, that ringing bell tone of a good product, of good literature, or of any good and valid art for that matter.

It is the same line, not so fine, that separates a Bencab nude from an A. Mabini painting in velvet of sunset in Manila Bay. Which is lurid? Why, the velvet painting of the sunset, of course. Which is obscene? Not Bencab’s naked woman, because he is a true and fine artist, but the "japex" art found on the sidewalks of A. Mabini St. in Ermita.

We may recall the sound and fury that attended the publication of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover decades ago. Or the same that hyped up Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Now, I must admit that as a 13-year-old, I got hold of the first title, and dared cross the threshold of Roman Catholic sanction by allowing myself to be titillated by its "purple passages." It was only because I had not read anything of the kind before that the scenes between the fortunate gardener and Lady Chatterly did get a rise out of my imagination, as well as somewhere lower in my adolescent frame (of mind).

But there was also more than nine-tenths of the novel that one had to plow through to get to the choice spots in the English countryside where one coud draw universal satisfaction, in terms of physical gratification. All helped along by the Filipino adolescent imagination, of course.

It was the same case with Tropic of Cancer, or James Joyce’s Ulysses, or Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Later on we democratized our colonized taste in literature by subscribing to Playboy magazine, where erotic fiction lay side by side with voluptuous, naked women, as well as advisories on matters sexual, and of course Hugh Hefner’s attempts at a philosophy since deemed puerile.

As careful readers we knew when what we were perusing was literature, or if it was just gratuitously directed at Nabokov’s "fire in my loins."

Artists like Bencab and Pandy Aviado can draw penises and vulvas with apparently reckless abandon, and still produce, like the countless Reclining Nudes we have seen and appreciated, great good art. Why? Because they are not done, figuratively, in velvet. The Saturday Group of artists may do nude painting sessions with Rosanna Roces or Ara Mina as subjects, and their produce is to die for. Because these artists have, like their voluptuous subjects, paid their dues, and have been acknowledged as rightful artists. And they do not work, figuratively, in velvet.

Poets like Luis Cabalquinto and Ricardo de Ungria, as are the other poets selected for the anthology titled Eros Pinoy – whose passages I shall also treat you to in this afternoon of righteous excitement – such poets as Marra Pl. Lanot, Alice M. Sun-Cua, Nadine Sarreal, Eileen Tabios and Lilledeshan Bose among our erotically fecund contributors – have paid their dues, are first-rate poets, and may play around with any subject, because they know how to elevate both treatment and subject to fine literature, that is not on velvet, that is not "japex."

Their work manifests good plumbing, as against the unreliable plumbing found in sheer pornography, which will not last numerous flushings. Good erotic literature can be read without blushing or flushing at all, because it appeals to more senses than one.

I can also argue of course that even porn, soft or hard, has its merits, however it appeals mainly to prurient interest.

What is it in purient interest anyway that should condemn the ersatz monster as a pariah from alleged moral bounds? The term "prurient interest" gets the same rise out of me as the term "moral fiber." And it is the kind of rise that, if left unattended, would lead to barfing.

But then that’s another story, so let’s leave my internal plumbing out of this, and exult simply in the truism that "Life is Beautiful" (with or without French plumbing). Oh, yes, that Italian feel-good film. A world away from our very own "Live Show," it may be said. But then "live" is also beautiful, and the erotic, as with any object of beauty, lies "in the eyes of the beholder." That’s John Keats, of course, and not Tolstoy or Chesterton.

Now it’s time to share more of our erotic poetry at hand – from Lanot, Sun-Cua, Sarreal, Tabios and Bose – a fine first five in any hardcourt – as well as early verses from the old masters Ricaredo Demetillo, Francisco Arcellana and Nick Joaquin, the last two our living National Artists for Literature – if only so I can bolster my argument that literature can be erotic without being offensive, without appealing impurely to prurient interest, without endangering any moral fiber.

I know we will get a rise out of this poetry in more ways than one.

(The above text served as the basis for a lecture titled "Eros Pinoy: Plumbing the Erotic in Philippine Poetry and Fiction" delivered last Saturday, April 21, at the Filipinas Heritage Library in Makati City. One might say it is an expunged version.)