Miss Philippines-Universe Shamcey Supsup, weeks before her stint on the world stage, was asked by columnist Ricky Lo what kind of creature she would want to be, if she were to be reincarnated. Her reply was: “A bird, so I can fly high above the mountains and the seas.” How one wishes that this had been the question popped at her during the finals of the competition, instead of the bias-laden question on religion. Her answer would have been not only uncontroversial, but full of innocence, a sense of wonderment, with a universal resonance.
History and mythology are replete with examples of humans desiring to have what must be the most marvelous capability possessed by a living being flight, freedom from gravity and the ground and this exclusively belongs to the avian species. Human beings already possess what humanists would consider the crowning feature of creation, the human brain with all its attributes, but still, we have always yearned to be able to fly, and I suspect that not a few would be willing to trade places with a bird on wing, freed from the burdens being human and earthbound entails.
From the cautionary tale of wing-maker Daedalus and his ill-fated son Icarus, to the fantasy stories about Buck Rogers and other rocketeers with jetpacks, Chinese kung fu films with flying swordsmen, to the present-day real-life practitioners of flight with the aid of aerodynamic wingsuits and kerosene-fueled wingpacks, men have always had visions of taking to the sky.
My thoughts came to dwell on these flights of fancy because of several events not totally unrelated to one another. One was coming upon that felicitous interview with Shamcey Supsup. (Also impressive was her answer to the question if she could be somebody else who would she want to be: “Jose Rizal, I’m curious how his brain worked.”) The second incident was looking up at a huge sign at the Quezon Memorial Circle announcing that the zipline craze was already here in QC! The zipline might as well be the safest thing in artificial human flight now available, for those who do not have the means and the guts to jump off peaks and planes with wingsuits and chutes. I have read about ziplines over the forests of Mindanao and recently in Tubao, La Union, where thrill-seeking zipliners share airspace with nature’s flyers, and now the zipline in Quezon City makes me wonder if this could augur a new pastime in the urban setting. Ziplines between the steel and glass skyscrapers of Metro Manila?
Then there was the exhibit of Carlos Palanca Hall of Famer and UP professor of Filipino Literature Reuel Molina Aguila of bird photographs with poems inscribed on them. The birds-and-bards exhibit is appropriately titled “Sa Pakpak ng Tula (On Wings of Poetry).” One of the poets whose poem appears in the show, Marne Kilates, writes about fellow poet Aguila and his project:
“With eagle eyes and telephoto lenses, he shot and soared with the most colorful wings as his subjects. To which he and some of his friends lent their verses to create some of the most fascinating bird photography in recent times, if not for the first time.
“The Red-breasted Flower Pecker looks like it has a wounded chest, so its verse equivalent becomes another of Aguila’s haiku saying: Awit sa hangin/ Lunting kapaligiran/ duguang puso.
“Or, an aggressive-looking Yellow-vented Bulbul, as it claims dominion on a treetop, is paired with excerpts from the classic self-proclamatory poem by the first Filipino modernist poet, Alejandro G. Abadilla: Ako ang Daigdig… ako ang tula…ako ang daigdig ng tula.
“Birdsong takes on a plaintive note when a shot of a fluttering Sunbird is partnered with a quote from a Jesus Manuel Santiago poem: Tuwing maglalakbay/ nag-iiwan ako/ ng panandang awit/ upang kung sakaling ako’y maligaw/ maging gabay nawa sa aking pag-uwi/ mga butong nota ng isang kundiman.”
Subtitled “Birds and Verse, an Exhibit of Bird Photography by Reuel Molina Aguila, with accompanying haiku, tanaga, and short poems in the tradition of haiga,” Sa Pakpak ng Tula was on view at Gallery 1 of the UP Diliman Faculty Center.
And lastly, I received an e-mailed invitation to Pin(t)alaya (Pinta para sa Paglaya ng mga Bilanggong Pulitikal), an art event sponsored by various NGOs, led by Karapatan, campaigning for the release of the country’s political prisoners “through general, unconditional, and omnibus amnesty.” This brought back memories of the bird-inspired drawings of Pablo Picasso for Amnesty International, and the bird-themed prison art popularized by Fr. Edicio de la Torre and his Wall Décor Production Group at Camp Bagong Diwa in the late seventies.
Whether as primordial dream of transcendence, or sustained yearning to break free from all manner of prison, the bird in flight endures as a metaphor.