Edited by Hilario Sevilla Francia
Anvil Publishing, Inc., 2002
Ravens in Love is a festal display of writings, from (essays, short stories, poetry, aphorisms, to apocrypha, graced with black-and-white reproductions of paintings, photographs, illustrations, and other forms of graphics. The authors and their works are arranged in alphabetical order, each authorial section gaily introduced by a pen-and-ink line portrait rendered by Hilario "Larry" Francia, editor of the anthology.
The Ravens refers to a group of writers who emerged in the 1950s and who have made indelible marks in Philippine literary history. Some of them have also thrown their creative energy in the pursuits of visual arts, architecture, film, theater and the performing arts while others have boldly ventured into journalism, business, law, politics, and diplomacy. The Ravens include Pacifico Aprieto, Armando Bonifacio, Romulo Chua, Adrian Cristobal, Andres Cristobal Cruz, Morli Dharam, Rony Diaz, Silvino V. Epistola, Hilario Francia, Alejandrino Hufana, Raul Ingles, Bernardo de Leon Jr., Virginia Moreno, Nick Nicolas, Elmer Ordoñez, Godofredo Roperos, Maro Santaromana, and Danny Villanueva. National Artist and non-Raven Nick Joaquin is bestowed an honorary place in the anthology.
Ravens in Love is their third legacy after two equally dignified and impressive collections the Ravens: A Selection of Philippine Wiring (1980) and The Ravens 2 (1996), proving that Ravens doth not quoth "Nevermore!"
In the Foreword to this anthology, Virginia Moreno presents an aide-memoire, inviting the readers to partake in the Ravens Ritual and pore over "an open dossier of who we were, once an X-file of what we’re doing now, and where we’re headed for."
Indeed this anthology, with its bold declaration of "Ravens in Love" ascertains Moreno’s claim of the Ravens as different, possessing "gritty, protean apartness from the generation before them." And shall we add, from the generation now and those yet to come.
Ravens in Love, to loosely quote Nick Joaquin, is a collection of "songs of love, wild and tragic." The deep and resonant calls of the Ravens evoke mingling feelings of delight, desolation, melancholy, wistfulness, aghast, and even bewilderment, like that of a lost child. It leaves one with a poignancy that teases, pricks, and lingers.
Pacifico Aprieto’s "A Valentine Story" beckons to us as if we were children once again, pointing out the kissing lizard, cautioning us of love’s destructive power in the twice-told tale of the "Persistent Youth, you have to prove, by deed your love is true." "A Little Boy’s First Love," with a twist of fortune, seems simple and commonplace. Yet, the tale of a boy’s affection for a puppy never fails to induce a drop of tear or two.
"Wild and tragic" indeed is Adrian Cristobal’s "Visitation in Venice." It is a story of a writer who returns to Venice to make peace with a dying enemy, his rival in intellectual debates on mortality and art. The narrative begins with gruesome images of pigeons pounced on and eaten in New York, fattened pigeons pecking at scattered corn grains, and dead bodies and small boxes in the Piazza San Marco. The story seemingly unfolds like a mystery, baiting us with a fleeting image of a bronze-legged woman in a seductive stride across the Piazza. Here the Hitchcockian similarity ends for the story unravels into a mystifying seduction of the septuagenarian character, whom the story fondly dubs "our voyager." It closes with a horrifying revelation for him – and likewise for the reader, as the image of dying pigeons continues to hover somewhere on the last page. This Raven tale has chosen to pick on pigeons.
Rony Diaz’s "A Hidden Life" begins ordinarily with a doctor’s diagnosis of his patient’s terminal days on earth. A series of cinematic-like juxtapositions slowly reveals the patient’s precious remembrance: his first love affair, which happened one summer. In spite of the story’s triteness, lyricism finds its expression in moments like this:
He walked through the dead leaves toward the lake. The harsh fragrance of the grass and shrubs filled his nostrils. He tried to tell the odor of lemongrass from the broom, the gorse from the wild ginger, the flowering spikes from the thyme.
Such sensual imagining elicits breathless response.
"In the Theater of Eros" is a dialogue among philosophers, thinkers, poets, artists, theologians, deities, and lovers – mythical or real. Originally written in Tagalog, Hilario Francia re-envisions a world of love and convictions on stage, situating his characters in a Manila book shop in the present time. These "merely players" include Rizal, Socrates, Sophocles, Machiavelli, Pushkin, Kant, Goya, Freud, Locke, Li Po, Lao Tzu, Gandhi, Marx, Saint Matthew, King David, Goethe, Shelley, Keats, Blake, Luther, Saint Teresa of Avila, Mabini, Luna, Cupid, Paris, Venus, Homer, Heloise, Abelard, Dionysus, Zeus, and many more. The utterances made by the players are a symphony of discourses, of love and about love. There is the universal paradox: "Tomorrow, all lovers will suffer for love, like Yesterday and Today" (Pushkin); the ironic tinge: "Love attains in a minute, what labor achieves in an age" (Gandhi); a tongue-in-cheek humor; "What is the straightest path to a woman’s heart? Pity. Pity. Pity. Pity…" (Goethe); a fervent cry: "O limbs of love entwined!" (Heloise); a matter-of-fact observation: "Goodness, at its fullest, is the divine nature of Love" (Rizal); or pure metaphor: "I can see and touch this everlasting love – like an eternal rose standing on my heart" (Saint Teresa). This charming exchange of words is enclosed within beautifully illustrated borders in the classical-romantic mode; a graphic interlacing of cupids, roses, maidens, vines, youth with lyre (or is it a god?), painter/artist, craftsman and other figures.
The poetry of Virginia Moreno never ceases to amaze with its magical and mystical interweaving of words, its gripping musicality. And such passion. Such pleasure. In "The Cubist Lover Guillaume Apollinaire," she visualizes the Symbolist poet making wild-abandoned love with Marcel Duchamp’s heroine:
And she descended and descended to the pit’s rim
Leaving fractures of her self on pegs,
Breasts in pink cubes and whitened spears for legs
That, in oblique shudder, collapsed on him.
In the last stanza, Moreno coyly observes, "A Forked fire they were in one embrace,/Which was she and which he?" Ah, this is a triumph of language and of imagination! And this act of "anonymity" elicits a sigh of "ecstasy" from the reader/listener.
Ravens in Love offers much more, with essays from Epistola, Villanueva, Joaquin, Moreno; short stories from Dharam, Francia, Ordoñez; play from Hufana; poems from Bonifacio, Cristobal Cruz, Francia, Hufana, Ingles, Joaquin; aphorisms from Chua, Francia, Nicolas and an apocrypha (text and illustration) from Santaromana. Also included in this treasury are English translations of the works of Andres Bonifacio, Emilio Jacinto and Jose Rizal by the Ravens, their tribute to the Filipino revolutionary writers/heroes of the past.
In the words of Edgar Allan Poe from "The Philosophy of Composition," Ravens in Love is a tour-de-force of "mournful and neverending remembrance" of love.