Shine on, crazy diamond

You know that summer’s finally arrived when April, just like a poet had written, really seems like the cruelest month, with taxes as inevitable as death and vice versa. I had received an invitation to the first Maningning Miclat poetry awards held April 11 at the UP Executive House, four days before she was to have turned 31. The contest was open to poets not more than 28 years old – age of Maningning’s death – and in three language categories – English, Filipino, and Chinese, of which the late poet was equally facile.

There was not much one could do, what with Holy Week also around, but to reflect on death and the poet, and how she fell like a leaf off a ledge of a building in the Far Eastern University campus, two and a half years ago. It almost seems inevitable too that the thud of that fall can still be heard in the Morayta area, in the hearts of writers who knew her, whenever they happened to pass by that part of town riding on a jeep with sound system blaring.

Of the poet certainly many things have been written and said – poems, essays, tributes, a number of them compiled in the Anvil book Beauty into Ashes, same publisher of her trilingual Voice from the Underworld.

Reviews were generally mixed. While many were in agreement that here definitely was a major voice beginning to stake a corner of its own in the ever shifting Philippine literary landscape, some pointed out that there was still an indefinable rawness in Maningning’s work, which needed a bit more honing. Even genius, they said, can suffer through a sophomore jinx.

Another tragedy was that the poet very likely took these reviews seriously, must have been stung to the quick by them, although that may be giving too much credit to the critics. Either way, she persisted doggedly in her art, never letting go of the muse until she herself let herself go. What can a writer write before reaching the age of 29? To paraphrase another craftsman, precious much as well as precious little.

It was said that Rimbaud wrote all his work before he reached 20, after which he retired and concentrated on being a trader in the high seas. Diana Gamalinda drowned at age 19 in the sea off Vigan in 1978, leaving her contemporaries bereft and wondering more than 30 years later about what-might-have-beens, maybe she could have been an excellent jazz singer. Nikos de Ungria, bass player, opted out also in April some years ago, must have been in his early or mid 20s.

But what of the late bloomers and similar Johnny-come-latelys, who may be a bit slow but no less gifted? Many writers don’t find their voice, at least the literally mature voice, until they are well into middle age. But nobody ever thinks of putting up a contest for writers at least 40 years of age, because that would not only be redundant but also self-serving. The money would also come from that generation, whose members, save for a few bohemian holdouts, would by then have become establishment.

Besides, who was it that said that you have to reach a certain age to qualify for the National Artist award, so that the betting would be how much longer the awardee would live to receive the accruing benefits? Other times it is given posthumously but no less an afterthought, the mechanics of which we will leave to higher authorities.

There have been suggestions that Maningning was more at ease with brush and canvas, though a number of her works are dark, especially the murals full of wild forebodings. If you look at her large paintings long enough, it is as if you are being drawn into a vortex of a parallel, abstract, surrealist world. In her drawings and sketches she was most playful, child-like, such that it was her poetry that struck the delicate balance between pencil outline and oil impasto, and where she very likely found her center. Her chakra woke up in her a spell of verse. And the dictum that all poets can paint but not all painters can write poetry became merely a matter of ideological comprehension.

There are a few random memories I have of the poet, whom I can now only wish to have known better in her all too brief lifetime, and probably, had I not been too shy and preoccupied while running into her on the covered walk between Faculty Center and the Liberal Arts building at UP, might have asked her for a painting or a sketch of some sort, just a light drawing, none of that brooding stuff.

At a waterfront in Dumaguete, by the tocino stands drinking beer with some of the workshop fellows; at a beach on the outskirts of the same southern city, watching a toddler watch some chickens amble by; at the National Press Club during a writers club gathering, when you were with another writer’s daughter and contemporary pointing to the water lilies on the murky Pasig river beneath Jones bridge, the nearby staircase winding down to the void of what could be your voice during a reading, fragile as a paper crane.