Moments of sweetness
Dumaguete City — Congrats to Noelle Leslie dela Cruz for her first prize in this year’s Philippines Free Press Literary Awards, for her poem “Discourse.”
Only last May, we met Leslie here in Dumaguete, where she was a balik-fellow from the 2008 batch. She had a particular self-assignment, as well: to attempt a literary biography of our sister in more ways than one, Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas.
Rowena served as director of the 2010 Silliman University National Writers Workshop, and will do the same for 2011, when the longest-running creative writing workshop in our part of the world celebrates its golden anniversary.
Leslie has since been in regular touch with Rowena, but more on that later, as we still have to spread out the congratulations to this year’s other FP winners.
Our dear friend Marjorie Evasco won second prize for the poem “It Is Time To Come Home,” while no prize was given for third. The judges were Merlie Alunan, Myrna Pena-Reyes and Lourd de Veyra.
The winners for the Short Story were Eliza Victoria for “Reunion” for first prize; Mo Francisco for “Jimmie” for second prize; and Daryll Delgado for “In Remission” for third prize. For the Short Story, the judges were Nikki Alfar, Shirley Lua and Lito Zulueta.
Unexpected sweetness of irony it was that when we texted Leslie our kudos and elation, she was quick to point out that Marj, her teacher in DLSU, had helped her significantly in the crafting of her winning poem. For her part, Marj who was in Cebu City for the PEN Conference was also quick to share her elation over her former student’s first-place triumph. Indeed, it was a win-win situation for both mentor and mentee.
While we’re at it, we must also congratulate FP literary editor Sarge Lacuesta, prizewinning fiction writer, and his better half, prizewinning poet Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, for the birth of their first child on November 7.
Welcome to the writers’ world, Lucas, nicknamed Lucky. Sometime soon you’ll hear all about how your mom and dad were both writing fellows at the Dumaguete workshop.
We gave that piece of good news about Lucky Lacuesta’s birth to “Mom” Edith, the workshop’s co-progenitor, last Friday at her home in Sibulan. And of Marj’s and Leslie’s recent literary triumphs. And how we had already e-mailed that news to Rowena, who e-mailed her gladness right back.
A fortnight from today, Rowena flies back from Iowa City to Dumaguete with husband Lem, himself a Palanca prizewinner for poetry, their daughter Rima and her hubby Mike, and little Mikey, Mom Edith’s great-grandson — to spend the Christmas season with the nonagenarian lola.
So now in the midst of all this joyful sharing, we give the rest of our space this Monday to our younger sis Weena, whose recent essay may well encapsulate all of these comings and goings and various other milestones.
Cesar Ruiz Aquino of Dumaguete City and Silliman U. remarks on the following to writer Weena: “You write prose like gilded butterflies.” Bitaw. We’re sure you’ll all agree with this Aquino.
* * *
“Moments of Unexpected Sweetness”
by Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas:
We all have them: sudden interventions that break into one’s awareness, lifting the everyday toward the sublime, an intrinsic spiral in the DNA code of humanness.
The first time a child speaks your name. The taste of water right after you’ve vomited, replacing the bile of your bodily wretchedness with the restorative sip of the first and most basic element of biologic life.
Those moments are the favorite snapshots in one’s personal album of the fleeting and uncelebrated: the golden leaf of autumn that falls at your feet as you walk down a busy sidewalk; the first crocus of the spring, or the green fronds of the prized, uncultivate-able Oriental poppy that poke out of the flowerbox in late summer amid the dried stalks of the played-out previous blooming that lasts only five days each year.
Among the “Bucket Lists” one tabulates periodically — the places in the world you hope to visit before you kick the bucket — I believe we regularly update our private Top Ten Things That Make Life Worth Living. The universal and the personal intersect in those lists; ultimately, the matter of “sweetness” is futile to quantify.
Perhaps created work holds those moments in fixity; perhaps that’s the reason for art. They are sweet because they are embedded in, and spring forth from, bitterness or the crushing weight of banality: the artist’s inadvertent epiphany, en route to another theme.
So here’s my list of Moments of Unexpected Sweetness that I’ve experienced as a grateful viewer, reader, listener:
• Music: The trumpet soaring in the Beatles’ Penny Lane. An enumeration of the otherwise unregarded lives on a city street: “There is a barber showing photographs... the nurse pretending she is in a play/She is anyway.”
• Painting: Van Gogh’s La Berceuse (The Lullabye). There is no infant in this portrait: only the weather-worn face of the peasant woman of the Camargue, and her strong work-roughened hands folded over the wicker handle of a rustic cradle.
As with the chair left behind by his friend Paul Gauguin, the immediacy of absence-as-presence — that aching vacuum that Vincent sought to fill with pieces of his clumsy, yearning heart — the unseen, unheard lullaby is, to me, emblematic of the painter’s fierce, brief theme.
• Sculpture: The veins on the marble hand of Michelangelo’s “David.” The statue’s hand was broken off during a riot at the Signoria piazza, and later reattached; one can see the crack in the stone, testifying to the violence that had been wrought. But it is not the survival of this iconic work — the damage and its restoration, its transcendent beauty — I find inspiring.It is David’s other hand I’m looking at: the hand that’s poised above the slingshot, in that moment before he steps forward into the ages to assume his role as the heroic image of a nation about to be born, a young boy ready to walk over the threshold into manhood.
• Poetry: Too many to be named. For now, the poems of Rilke, perhaps: II, 4 of the “Sonnets to Orpheus” (“Oh this is the animal that never was...”) and the final sentence of “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” And Henry Vaughan’s vision of Christ’s hair filled with drops of dew as He walks through the night. And from the same era as Vaughan, Robert Herrick’s cri-de-coeur over his faithless mistress in “Cherry-Ripe.”
• Drama: Shakespeare, again too many to be isolated. What comes first to mind is when Lear tells Cordelia: “Come, let’s away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i’th’cage... And laugh / Like gilded butterflies...”
• Film: The moment at the end of the French film L’eche le blanche (Secret World, 1969), when the young boy lifts the vial of perfume and pours it over his head.
Tommy Lee Jones’s smile at the end of The Fugitive, when, as the relentless Lieutenant Gerard, he pursues Harrison Ford’s Richard Kimble, and, taking him in custody, gives Kimble a packet of ice for his bruised head, to which Kimble says: “I thought you said you didn’t care.” Tommy Lee Jones’s rugged features light up in a rueful laugh of surpassing gentleness when he says: “I don’t. But don’t tell anyone.”
Wandering the world, the benisons come unsought and breathtaking, so transient they catch one almost unaware. During our quest to set foot in all 50 states of the Union, my husband and I have had encounters with these eccentric serendipities: on my birthday, walking through a hillside meadow, across the Crazy Woman Mountain in Montana, wildflowers of yellow and purple outside our cabin and knee-deep everywhere my eyes reached, all that long, bright afternoon. That was sweetness, throughout: sharp and unadulterated, so that even as it was happening, one knew it was joy.
One of our trips brought us the confluence of sight, song, cultural iconography and person history that fulfills the definition of unexpected sweetness. We were driving through Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, trying to find the Motel Six where we’d made reservations, and as the sun was setting, we found ourselves back on the same stretch of highway, seemingly always returning to the same place. Finally one of the Bengali/Urdu gas-station owners who has set down their lines of convenience stores all down the East Coast told us in his gruff singsong that our best bet was to get to Lancaster. “The nearrrest Moootul Six whar you can find a room for sure is in Lanhcasturr,” he declared helpfully.
So to Lancaster we went, and tumbled into our Motel Six bed tired out from driving across Illinois and Indiana. The following morning we rose at dawn, refreshed and determined to reach Connecticut by afternoon.
A light rain was falling as we pulled onto the road. This was farm country, its contours faintly familiar, but somehow denser, more condensed in its bucolic consistency than the prairies where we live. I knew that the Amish lived in Lancaster; books and movies like Witness with Harrison Ford had made that awareness a part of my visual vocabulary. And in eastern Iowa we’d see the Amish and Mennonite farm folk all the time, driving their horse-drawn carriages in Kalona, and I’d nodded at the cheerful, bonneted ladies occasionally at the Aldi grocery store in Iowa City. There, at the northwest edge of town we’d sometimes drive past the bridge over a river that the sign designated as the “English River,” a stream running through the rolling hills of the territory that the German settlers a hundred fifty years ago, standing in a shaft of sunlight, declared was “Amana” (“Here we stay.”)
So I would not have been disappointed if, on that morning, we drove through Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and did not see any black-coated gentlemen in stovepipe hats and spade-shaped chin-beards. I had already seen them in movies, in real life, in paintings and the book of photographs by John Zalesky that stood among the folio-sized volumes in our study.
But on that Pennsylvania morning in May, coming out of the mist, in the light rain of early morning, there it was: the carriage with an erect, weather-scoured man holding the reins, the horse trotting under the leaves of tall old trees, while the raindrops fell in the gentlest and most matter-of-fact of benedictions.
Just as we were pulling onto the road, Lem had randomly popped some music into the car’s CD player. Twelve thousand miles from where we first heard it, and two thousand miles from our transplanted home, the song flowed through our black Ford Escort — an old favorite, first heard when we were across the sea, a world away: Michael Frank’s Dragonfly Summer.
The Amish carriage slipped quietly past us, out of the mist, through the fine rain, into the timeless space where, all unknown to oneself, memory takes shape:
A chorus of sparrows in summer/ Is how I remember you/ The fire of maples in autumn/ Is how I remember you/ The silence of snowfall in winter / Is how I remember you.
— Iowa City, November 12, 2010
