At-Tariq & Nick

My old friend the poet Jose Lansang Jr. is dead. Long live." So went the simple text message from Erwin E. Castillo, poet and novelist.

A couple of days later, on April 13, some of us of the UP Sixties received the following e-mail from Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez in Chicago:

"Dear Everyone, It’s chilling news. Erwin, please extend my sympathy to the Lansang family. All the best, Willie."

Willy, also known as Willybog, but who has inexplicably gone from willy-nilly to the willies, also sent the following poem as tribute:

"Lines for Jun Lansang" – (born Sept. 2, 1939): "He is no Ezra Pound of Sorrento/ No Torquato Tasso;/ He is at-Tariq.// He is no Quijano de Manila/ No Jose Garcia Villa;/ He is at-Tariq.// Because he sought the deep end/ He is Willybog’s friend;/ Au revoir, at-Tariq!"

Cesar Ruiz Aquino a.k.a. Sawi in Dumaguete City followed suit with a hats-off homage, titled "Chapeau, Maitre": "Remember/ Jun/ Lansang/ So keen a lyric/ Sense it was sixth. At-Tariq,/ When you sang/ It was June/ Even in December."

Apropos the title, Sawi explains it comes from a blurb written by Luis Bunuel – meaning "Hats off, Master!"– for Jose Donoso’s novel, Obscene Bird of Night, which Sawi’s own unwritten one of the early ’60s, "Perfumed Birds of Night," had antedated but not preempted.

So lyrical must have been the times, those ’60s, especially in Diliman, QC, that the fine poems issuing from the young campus poets were quintessentially lyric, that is, "expressing the writer’s emotions, usually briefly…," (per Oxford American Dictionaries, a software in my iBook). And no one was at his finest as a lyric (also referring to a poet who wrote in such manner) than Jun Lansang.

His poem "Song" was deemed a classic, if by that it meant a faux-canonical work that enjoyed the most instances of recitation from memory whenever poet-manqués drunk gin at Hong Ning’s in Cubao. Or decades later, whisky at South Sea in Dumaguete.

"Yet sing now of beauty/ Which lasts not forever/ Through all metamorphoses –/ I am terribly lonely.// In the dining hall/ Skin shining like Eve –/ Or dark with layers of night/ I creep into my pall.// I, being free as air,/ Bless all who stand – / As winds ravage leaves of trees/ Who’d only nuzzle in her hair.// Yet sing now of beauty/ Which lasts not forever/ Through all metamorphoses –/ I am terribly holy."

Jun Lansang, characteristically fevered, once said that The Beatles wrote Hey Jude for him. We believed him. Tense and intense, he lusted and panted after girls, went in and out of institutions, and somehow, while never losing that lyric gift, petered off on the poetry in favor of riding a bicycle up and down EDSA. But that was in the late ’70s and all throughout the ’80s already. I wonder: Was Jun a catalyst for change, the one that heightened to a climax in February of 1986? That, too, is possible.

Decidedly, in the ’60s he was the idolized campus poet in UP; all bowed before him, especially after the publication of his first collection, 55 Poems, which we all knew Jose Garcia Villa to have subtly hommaged by subsequently putting out his own Poems 55. Why neither didn’t slacken by a verse to come up with only 54, as in the old highway before it paid tribute to Epifanio de los Santos, must be a historical quibble to be decided by the future of lyric poetry.

Jun Lansang followed up that volume with Black or Otherwise, with foreword by Leonard Casper – before he was silenced by daemons and damsels (in distress). And then we’d hear nothing of and from him. And then he’d re-materialize, as when he wrote a letter-to-the-editor for Ermita magazine, addressed to MMDA Governor Imelda R. Marcos, suggesting that Metro Manila be called "City of Woman."

Forthwith, for the June 1976 Ermita issue he contributed a full page of poetry, collectively titled "The Philippine Saunas in Four Parts." One omnibus poem had brief parts dedicated to Francisco S. Tatad ("Fervent Wishes") and Guillermo de Vega ("Apotheosis"), both Malacañang ministers at the time. Two other parts we reproduce here:

"II. Motives (for Francisco Arcellana, Sr.)": "You live on enviable sentiments/ (noble, necessary, practical)/ Your honor was that somehow// violence and rape would not/ overtake you/ But we did not know how it would feel/ when the fire was stoked/ the fuse lit/ the engine raced/ I heard your cries in the night/ Rachel, Margie, Viviane!"

"III. Erotica (for Nick Joaquin)": "An old crone would intone:/ Catharsis for men/ Catharsis for women/ Bitch in heat/ Bull in stall/ Sweet on the skin/ Fever on the face/ Children bewildered/ as if stunned./ The world really hushed/ like in awe./ Combat d’amour/ Combat d’honneur/ Combats des invalides/ Combates perpetueles."

Another, longer poem celebrated his fiefdom of the mid-’70s: "Stanzas for Gigi, or the Saunas Revisited":

"All my life I labored/ to lust –/ why must my love be/ sometimes in absentia?/ behold I am here in persona!// when I set aflame my passion/ unwisely, I was confined/ for months, seasons, and years/ in hospitals, prisons and institutions// and were set up, built/ the lovely saunas of Manila/ the Philippine saunas of Greater Manila:/ die Shulen den Philippinen, GrossManille.// I saw the young women living in/ at the Mandarin/ the fair damsels of the Rose Tattoo/ precursors of the best love of Gimo// the large women of the New Greek Sauna/ magnificent liebchen/ who were harbingers sort of/ of Vitarich dressed chicken.// I came down with Margie/ her body, the totem of her body/ displayed in the lobby of the PNB/ sculpted in wood by Solomon Saprid.// And I became her friend/ who was simply devious/ apparently deceptive, for self-survival maybe/ I set her awhirl, and she pulled me to her.// Sometimes I remember my lithe one/ Zeny who stayed in at Okura/ fair and fleshy, honest and natural/ who hinted for a pair of white leather shoes.// and when I met Jo-Ann/ I felt cool sensuality/ so magnificent was she/ great body, unbelievable, small wet cunt.// why call them whores, Gi?/ were they not women also/ and working students really/ in this or that university?"

Ah, Jose M. Lansang Jr. Erwin, Willy and Sawi all have anecdotes about him. A pity I saw not one of them at his wake in Loyola Park Marikina on Good Friday, when he was due to be interred an hour after Christ’s and Lorca’s "A las tres de la tarde." Oh, Erwin had been there at dawn that day, reported poet Marra PL Lanot. True enough, he left a large, loving wreath, too.

Jun Lansang’s mother Flora was there. So were sisters Risa and Nina (from California, together with Flora), and brother Tos who used to play guitar and sing folk songs at Café Hurri-manna on the wrong side of Taft Ave. and Ermita in 1970. Another brother was there, sorry I forget his name, and Ed Abad, brother to Jimmy, and part of the Diliman Area 1 commune.

Who else had come to say goodbye to Jun? Per Marra, her husband Pete Lacaba, Bobbie Malay, Terra (Jun, too, I assume), Daffon (Tess?), Jenny & Frankie Llaguno, Rol Peña & Cynthia, and Dick Malay. Nene Zaballero Reyes and family had also left a wreath.

There was talk of brother Bunny Lansang, and yet another, much younger one who had perished in the mountains as a rebel, just like Eman Lacaba.

I couldn’t recognize Jun in the two photographs atop the casket; he seemed to have put on a lot of weight. Inside that coffin, he looked very sedate, dignified, with a little lyric smile playing on his lips. Risa and Nina said he ate a lot in recent years. He had peptic ulcer; he died of a stroke, in his sleep.

Farewell, At-Tariq. That was the name he gave himself as poet, which for years I surmised was a reverse pun on being slightly "kirat." But Sawi says it could be an allusion to the Persian Sufi poet Attar, author of The Parliament of Birds.

My last strong memory of Jun, although I’m sure he had come to the Ermita office to get his fee for the sauna poems, was him standing outside Hurri-manna in 1970, seeing a lady get into a cab. As she did, Jun made sure to give her butt a quick pass of the hand, much to her defenseless shock.

But Sawi recalls that Jun once argued with Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo in Dumaguete, when "Doc" criticized Carmen Guerrero Nakpil’s "Woman Enough" essay. Jun defended it. And how at Alumni Hall in Silliman, one whole afternoon when Sawi and Willy visited him in his room, Jun just kept staring at Willy, until he finally pronounced to the younger poet: "Your poems are poems of darkness; mine are poems of light."

Here’s a longer recollection of Jun Lansang, from Cesar Ruiz Aquino:

"For some reason, Jun Lansang in recall strikes me as the first poet I ever met, after having read a lot of English poetry in high school including Villa. That was not true on the face of it – I had met Willy Sanchez – and, yes, Edith Tiempo the day before. This was all in the 1962 Silliman Summer Writers Workshop, the first ever held in the country. But Willy Sanchez was too much the fellow youngster, fellow teenage kid in the workshop for me to anything like adulate. Familiarity breeds demythology. And Edith too much the instantly recognizable teacher (normalcy breeds invisibility).

"Jun had the gift of madness. Yeah his madness was a gift, albeit a terrible one. Everything he did was invested with an uncanny glamour in my eyes. I guess he was decisive in the formation of my personal idea of what a poet essentially is.

"He stayed in the workshop for only two or three days, attended only one session, the first, and packed up for home for no understandable reason, perhaps from some original rhyme going on inside his head. I vividly remember him suddenly walking out on the session and Nick Joaquin in the panel sort of smiling and winking with a poker face.

"In 1964 I went to UP Diliman to study Comparative Literature under Prof. Leopoldo Yabes and I met Jun again. I had meantime read his first book 55 Poems, which bore as foreword an excerpt from a letter written to him by Villa. Villa wrote, ‘You are writing now not only with depth but from the depths.’ For good measure Villa gave his own next book of poems the title Poems 55.

"Over coffee, I ambushed him with a recitation from memory of his poem ‘Song.’ The first two lines of the poem go: Yet sing now of beauty/ Which lasts not forever. When I was done, Jun remarked that he had been considering revising the second line to ‘Which does last forever.’

"The next day there was a rather early morning knocking on my room at Narra Dormitory. It was Jun – inviting me to coffee at Camia Hall, a girl’s dormitory where the UP Diliman girls were prettiest. Here coffee was only five centavos a cup! Where – he asked with relish as he sipped his coffee – in the country could you find coffee at five centavos a cup?

"Then he took a yellow pad paper and pen to scribble a poem. He wrote: Resurrected from the flames of human love. It’s for you, At-Tariq said. I took it.

"And sort of return the line now."

As for Nick Joaquin, the great man’s second death anniversary falls soon, on April 29. On May 4, his birthday, friends led by his literary manager Billy Lacaba intend to get together, on a KKB basis, at Exchange Bar of Richmonde Hotel in Ortigas Center, there to party for and with Nick, while listening to his favorite lady singer, Girl Valencia, do all the old Cole Porter numbers he loved.

The last three months before he passed away, Billy learned that Nick had kept re-reading The Portable Chekhov – his copy falling apart that he asked his attendants in the house in San Juan to Scotch-tape the pages all back into place.

Nick had left a calling card (not his; he never had one) as a bookmark, between pages 70 and 71, within the story "A Calamity" – where a line read: "And reflecting a little, he added: ‘Of course, it is dull for you here. Go ahead if you like.’"