The baby boomers’ empire strikes back

By some quirk of Maytime fate, a couple of bosom buddies of ours happened to launch books on the same week  proving that this is still a country for silver-haired writers. That they’re both baby boomers that bonded together in the Sexy Sixties suggests a charming conspiracy to tell Generations X, Y, and Z: Hey, look & hear what we’ve got from our empire of memories.  

Tales from My Lost River by Recah A. Trinidad, illustrated by A.G. Austria (Merryland Publishing Corporation), was launched on May 8 at the lobby of the Executive Bldg. of the Mandaluyong City Hall.

Bad traffic almost made us miss the event totally. But we were still lucky to catch many old friends we have in common with the dear author-buddy of over four decades, among them our adored goddess Gilda Cordero Fernando, who was flanked by Erwin Castillo and Danny Dalena as they sported their championship canes for a group shot.

Ding Marcelo, Vince Pozon, Pete Lacaba, Marra PL Lanot, Nini Gaviola, Nene Reyes, Kiri Dalena and Abba Dalena were also still around, having their copies signed by the brawny one.

Erwin Castillo writes in his intro-blurb: “… My Lost River is a fictional account of Recah’s much-loved stretch of the river Pasig in Mandaluyong, its changing community and the impending doom of its geography. Guardian and sentinel to its bucolic past is the old man, Itay Kayong, lamed by personal loss, and leaning on his grandson Francisco, a green sapling pressed by love and necessity into a cane. These two journey among memorable characters — simple folk, as well as powerful politicians and celebrities — through wrenching events including war and betrayal, up and down the tides and eddies of time and the river.”

Recah’s prose is muscular yet supple, treating the reader to riverside vignettes centered on Itay Kayong, all through the main section of the “Tales” that is titled “Stolen” — evidently referring to both the river and time past.

The young boy Francisco goes through bonding rituals with Itay Kayong in a charming series of recollected, or rather lovingly preserved, episodes of urban-bucolic mythology.

“For the coconut climb, Francisco was first told to breathe down the navel, the better to maintain balance, groping and gripping at the same time, in clinging safely onto the thick scaly trunk. The true test was on his young legs, mainly on the heels he had to use with chimpish dexterity. He had to gamble with his chest whenever forced to pause and cling bodily onto the palm trunk.

“It took time and great effort, but he was up there soon, the bunch of young coconut now close to his face. He succeeded in completing the chore, but only after he first fondled hard and twisted one young coconut to the right, then farther back to the left, feeling its hardy twig break, and sending it, blogging to the ground with one hard snapping pull.

 â€œFrancisco did not expect it but after he had clambered down, Itay Kayong was already there waiting to hand him something.

“The old man, looking good and robust minus his thick spectacles, dug into his pocket and brought out a folding pocket knife, every neighborhood boy’s obsession, with a deer horn for a handle.

“Francisco had passed his first test of courage.”

This lengthy first part, the “Tale” proper, is followed by three brief faux-tales that form a comely coda of sorts, bestowing a post-modernist layer to simple storytelling that also reads very much like loving memoir.

It’s a slim book, a good read, quick and satisfying, with echoes of a simple past that yet reverberates with its treasure trove of memories both personal and historical. Thus, the novella even manages to assume the roman-à-clef feature, with President Ramon Magsaysay in a cameo role as he hands an American company quarrying rights to the river.

“He towered like the legendary basketball star Carlos Loyzaga, toast of the sporting town.

“President Magsaysay, a mechanic and former secretary of defense, indeed loomed like a living monument.

“Everybody wanted to shake his hand.”

Not the old man, who sees through “the applause, the instant celebration,” and hears instead “a monster’s gurgle, a dreadful metallic grind and growl that seemed to rock the Earth’s foundation.” It was “the Sacred Beast his sister Crisencia had warned against.”

“The hidden desecration, the rape and abortion of his beloved river, had begun.” 

The Tales’ tail-end goes back farther in time, celebrating and commenting on the memories of Bonifacio vs. Aguinaldo, the Makapili during the Japanese Occupation, the “tragic champ” Pancho Villa, whose “funeral was attended by wave upon wave of grieving countrymen, a gray ocean of admirers who walked behind his hearse all the way to La Loma Cemetery in the longest, most massive funeral procession witnessed in Manila before the Japanese War.” 

Then there’s the curious reportorial account of Hiroshima, tying up with the earlier episode on the Japanese straggler in Mandaluyong and his sorry fate. And to further gild the postmodern aspects of the novella, Recah Trinidad appends a poem of appreciation entitled “Few Words from the Author,” followed by “Notations” that are scholarly footnotes to what has been a most charming read.

The author’s fiction and inventions are as bucolic as the metropolitan river he steps into twice, thrice, and forever.   

On May 10, at The Bean Connection in Dumaguete City, on the first weekend of the 62nd Silliman University National Writers Workshop, launched in turn was Caesuras: 155 New Poems by Cesar Ruiz Aquino (UST Publishing House).

The author had a command audience of such sportive range as his latest collection of verses brief and pun-ny as well as long-ish and as cerebrally indebted as quiet corners of quantum physics.

Workshop director Susan Lara and all-around facilitator Ian Rosales Casocot led the assembly together with John Jack G. Wigley, director of the publishing house as well as first-week panelist, and his co-panelists Danny Reyes and Dean Alfar. Joining in were SU officials and the city’s culturati, including Annabelle Lee Adriano and La Rissa, as well as the workshop Fellows, of course, plus the legion of Dr. Sawi fan-boys and fan-girls led by bromancer Bron Teves and poem reader Nicole Villanueva. Why, the event was even emceed by Miss Dumaguete Kaye Vintola. 

Music was provided by Meriam Quizo, Jia de la Cruz, Cole Geconcillo, and J Marie Maxino, with official photographer Greg Morales practically lending us a teleporter’s capsule for virtual participation in the occasion.  

All well and good for Dr. Sawi Aquino, the Moon Whisperer himself, whose stand-alone sestet “A Lecture in Metaphysics” may be said to properly clue one in on the strange if deep flavors of his sui generis poetry: “Stein means glass./ Einstein, one glass./ Eisenstein,/ There is only one Einstein/ And tomorrow no class./ See a movie, class.”

As the publisher’s remarks delivered by John Jack C. Wigley have it:

“Cesar Aquino appears to be the Philippines’ answer to the American language poets, for he is, at heart, a wordsmith: He fashions new words as easily as a blacksmith forges metal, and the pleasure he derives from playing with them is as searingly palpable as the red-hot iron.

“And it manifests so visibly in his verses: The title alone — Caesuras — is discernibly a play on his first name and the poetic principle of ‘that break between words within a metrical foot.’ This collection is peppered with puns, deliberate misspellings, and double entendrés (though not all are risqué), all of which disclose his delight at toying with words at his disposal.” 

True. All true. But it is in his longer poems where lunar incandescence blesses us, with lyricism almost like still life, with memory a la Borges’ Funes, with poignance so perky that it does not only approach philosophy but actually applies an endearing stranglehold on all its paradoxes and antinomies.

In brief, aqui sila tumba (in Chavacano) with this Aquino. In his wide-ranging poetry, the antic muse and the ludic mage cohabit, never intensely, but in a light-hearted coupling marked by the nearly inaudible grunts of lilt and languor, especially in the straightforward narratives of personal history rendered in lyrical stillness.

From “Trees”: “When my aunt died I visited the town in May/ 2006, a quarter of a century/ Since last I’d seen it. No trees in sight, not a leaf/ Nor a blade of grass. Absolutely no plant life// And it was May! In the house in Dumaguete/ I look at the trees forever. Three mango trees./ A chico. I won’t see them in my seventies/ If I cut them. ‘The tree of life is green.’ Goethe.// Mother outlived her younger sister by two years/ And the property has gone to the four siblings/ Gogong, Rose, Oning, Wiit. An acronym, grow./ All abroad, they asked me, ‘Draw the family tree.’”

And again, in the simplicity of a quatrain, “After Amorsolo”: “I saw two girls from a mountain village/ at the park; both looked no more than sixteen./ Scientists celebrate the new space age; poets, the countryside where I’ve just been.”

Complex or simple, this poetry’s relationship with the world, even with red-hot social media at its core, is never complicated. Yet it astounds with couplets and haiku, auto-renga, Cebuano in IT, “Kalisud a la Superman,” “verseliterations” … indeed, with a horde of thunderous hooves that invoke and provoke delight. Truly, he is “Eyoter” (a terrific long poem). So that we cannot but concur with W. P. Sanchez’s back-cover blurb addressed to Cesar Ruiz: “You’ve always wanted to be a mage, and now in answering to higher forces you’ve become one without question.”