In My Crap Or Sullen Art

ANOTHER ONE TO CELEBRATE is West Coast journal ZYZZYVA's 35th year of existence (it was first to publish Murakami in English translation in 1988), so I'm sharing a few signed selections from an old anthology launched 25 years ago by its founding editor Howard Junker--Strange Attraction: The Best of 10 Years of ZYZZYVA (University of Nevada Press, October 1, 1995), the affirmation I needed to tell myself I was good to go with my arse poetica. Have a great one tomorrow, and thanks for the recognition, Mr. Junker.

Traveling Light

DRUG SLANG CAN BE colorful. I was in the middle of working on this piece when COVID-19 struck, and the project was delayed for months because I had to work the reality of the pandemic into it. Of course, racial discrimination and homelessness among Pinoys in the U.S. have always been there, though largely unwritten about. So this narrative exercise, a product of this year's growing season, is for kabayans who are the lowest of the low: the homeless, undocumented, discriminated against and diseased drug addicts. One can have it all, I think. Thanks to the Mary Evans Picture Library for The Ignis Fatuus drawing (1860).

For The Fignorant

"I have not cut down any fig tree. Why then does calamity befall me?"

                                   --Ravana, the ten-headed demon-king of Lanka, in Ramayana                      

GLAD TO FIND this book order in the mailbox upon our return from our trip to Binghamton for Sara's 18th birthday last Labor Day weekend: ecologist Mike Shanahan's fascinating book Ladders to Heaven, published in the U.S. as Gods, Wasps and Stranglers. This highly informative book could be among the Complete Idiot's Guide titles.

“In his insightful book, Mike Shanahan combines poetry and science, history and humanity, to tell a story not only of the fig tree but of life on Earth in all its beautiful and astonishing complexity.”--Deborah Blum, director, Knight Science Journalism Program, MIT; author of The Poisoner’s Handbook

"A must read."--The Daily Mail

"The tree in the Garden of Eden was very likely not an apple but a fig.”--Annie Proulx

"Fig trees fed our pre-human ancestors, influenced diverse cultures and played key roles in the dawn of civilization. They feature in every major religion, starring alongside Adam and Eve, Krishna and Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad. They evolved when giant dinosaurs still roamed and have been shaping our world ever since. These trees intrigued Aristotle and amazed Alexander the Great. They were instrumental in Kenya’s struggle for independence and helped restore life after Krakatoa’s catastrophic eruption. Egypt’s Pharaohs hoped to meet fig trees in the afterlife and Queen Elizabeth II was asleep in one when she ascended the throne. And all because 80 million years ago. these trees cut a curious deal with some tiny wasps."--Mike Shanahan

From Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco

Buwan Ng Wika

FLORANTE BOUND to a big higuera or balete tree. This famous soliloquy of Francisco Balagtas' hero in a dark Albanian forest reverberates in my brain from an advertisement of a Manila memorial park called Himlayang Pilipino when my siblings and I were kids, watched on our neighbor's black-and-white Radiowealth console TV when the dog was fed and dishes done after dinner and mother said yes. The stanza was translated into English by Luisa Igloria who writes a poem a day and is Virginia's Poet Laureate. I have a grit of discomfort with her translation of the words "lilo" which in Mindoro means "traitor" and "ininis" which means "suffocated" as in overcome by coronavirus, so I had to do my take.

Sa loob at labas ng bayan kong sawi
Kaliluha’y siyang nangyayaring hari
Kagalinga’t bait ay nalulugami,
Ininis sa hukay ng dusa’t pighati.

Inside and out of my broken town,
The tears are the king,
Good and kind are getting tired,
irritated in the pit of martyrdom and grief.

                        --Francisco Balagtas, Florante at Laura, trans. by Luisa Igloria

Inside and out of my ill-fated land,

Treachery reigns supreme,

Righteousness and reason are sunk in defeat,

smothered in a grave of suffering and grief.

                        --My Take

Fig tree next to an abandoned military facility on a hill above the city of Sarande in Albania

The Good Bride

AND THERE SHE IS. Not in a sham marriage but one with a hairy roasted wild boar. "Although the courtship period has a varied set of rules and ceremonials, the marriage itself is as simple as possible. After the consent of the parents has been obtained, the unceremonious first sleep of both the spouses together is considered as wedlock itself," according to Mangyan Heritage Center. And true to her nature as a shy, self-effacing Mangyan girl, she chooses a quiet life deep in the jungle, far from the prying eyes of land-hungry lowlanders.

The groom was waiting

And here came the bride

This hidden wedge high up the branches seemed like the spot

Where she could make a happy home, singing an ambahan. Maybe to a baby?

Ako gabay putyukan

Ako dayo mangaptan

Baliti nan gubayan

Nakan kis-ab sugutan 

Bunglo kasagunsunan

Ho bay si dis mangaptan

Sa sanga panulusan

Bilog bag-o sangbayan

I'm a common honeybee.

I don't want to settle down

at the side of the fig tree.

The reason: because I saw

many marks of ownership.

The place where I'll settle down

is a branch close to the top.

Only there will I be glad.

                    

                    --Ambahan 216 ("Marriage" from Treasure of a Minority, trans. by A. Postma)

The Death Of A Toad (Take N)

RE-REWORKED THIS OLD sonnet for this guy who breathes through the skin. Two viruses together: COVID 19 and systemic racism.

The Toad’s Elegy

What a season this is to be described:

the air is toxic, and noose poles arrive.

Shall I stay at home, as dumb as a fish

copped out because the sun air fries the skin,

no donned N95 to mask its hiss

exhaling voodoo that poisons the rain?

Let at breakneck speed the deluge run wide,

slay a sun breached by the mirroring tide,

genuflect before the crown, this burnt flood,

detox amphibious hearts fed with foul blood.

I shall wear this voice until it is gone,

hip hop on the death of a jaundiced sun.

I shall wear this hide that gifts me with breath,
kill with warts those viruses from the wreath.

Dogeaters In Coney Island

NOT ABOUT MANGYANS, but recently discovered book The Lost Tribe of Coney Island by journalist Claire Prentice is a welcome addition to the imperial Gothic shelf, especially because its story took place on nearby ground. The event was an offshoot of the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, not out of government initiative but private enterprise this time, when Truman K. Hunt, doctor and conman in charge of the Igorot village in the Midwest, returned to the Philippines after the exposition closed and recruited his own band of Igorots comprising 51 men, women and children who were eventually exhibited in Coney Island and became a hit at its old Luna Park (nothing to do with the new Luna Park with the Cyclone roller coaster) in the summer of 1905. Their exploitation, deception and degradation in the big city is told and documented by Prentice in this amazing book. "Americans gone rogue, as Prentice puts it, have long been a part of the Philippines’ landscape, but Truman Hunt, an inveterate liar, a bigamist and a slave driver, seems nearly unparalleled as far as scoundrels go. In some sense, this slick-talking charlatan becomes a stand-in for America itself, or a certain version of America in its more opportunistic historical moments, blind to its own faults and willing to do anything to turn a buck. As Antoinette Funk, Hunt’s lawyer, declared at one of his trials: 'The government set the example of exhibiting the people. The government was the first to bring them to this country for show purposes.' She had a good point, if not a defense."--Robin Hemley in The New York Times 

A young Igorot girl at Coney Island in 1905 (via Claire Prentice)

Seeing $$$: Truman K. Hunt with some Igorots at the World's Fair in St. Louis in 1904 (via Claire Prentice) 
Credit...

Children Of The Ash

 RANDOM FILES FOR THE weekend.

Mangyan children collecting charcoal on the side of the Bongabong River. Wood is covered with soil and rocks and set on fire for a certain period of time to produce charcoal. The temperature of the wood must not be too hot for the wood to produce the best charcoal. After the wood cools children help sift through the sand and soil to get every small piece of charcoal they can find. (Photo and caption by Jacob Maentz)

The Postma Manuscripts

I COMPILED INTO A BIBLIOGRAPHY (in neither the MLA or APA format) all of Antoon Postma's work deposited at the Mangyan Heritage Center library in Calapan, accumulated in his almost six decades of working and living with Mangyans from 1958 to 2016. Aside from the five books and about a dozen journal articles he has seen publication during his lifetime, the bulk of his remaining documents are unpublished manuscripts, many of which one may consider as overlapping and repetitive, but testimony to Postma's accreting and evolving understanding of his subject. I am most interested in information I am yet to discover on subjects like Mangyan reducción efforts by early Spanish missionaries, Mangyan interaction with the American imperial government during the early 20th century, abuses committed against Mangyans by the military and lowland Christians in more recent times, and information of anthropological importance (or curiosity) like the rituals in gathering of honey, boiling water to make salt, removing poisonous substances in wild tubers to make them edible, and so on. I wish Postma had done research on the shore-dwelling Mangyans in Bansud before they were driven inland by Christian settlers from Marinduque (the name of the town came from "basud", Mangyan word for "delta" where they once farmed, fished and flourished before turning to the mountains.) But there is none.

With what is available however, book-worthy nonetheless, I have asked Emily Catapang, Executive Director of MHC, to have their text typed up in a CD and submitted with hard copies to UP Press or Anvil for consideration, and she is open to the idea. To enter Postma's world in Panaytayan, Mansalay, Oriental Mindoro, click on his photo in Kurt Hoerbst's slideshow.

(by Kurt Hoerbst, 2007)

Postma's 2004 handwritten transcript (first page) of Karyo's account of his travel to America in 1904, as gathered by Fletcher Gardner in 1939 

Down Fern Hill

HARAO! BUT BOKAL doesn't need a whack of yantok Mindoro to ford the stream.

Downstream from Manihala Falls, Bansud, Oriental Mindoro (Thanks to Xplorra)

One For The Crewman

I ENJOYED WORKING on this, but fun does not always mean good, so there may be changes. I encounter and interact with a lot of Pinoy ship crewmen in my job, all hardworking but underpaid, and this is my tribute. Galley cook photo by Martin Florin Emmanuel. Happy Leap Year!

Man Friday Repost

BECAUSE I WANT TO GET BACK into its groove after serious history stuff, I am reposting this piece from two years ago. Subway papercut art by Asian-American Bianca Levan. Have a great Pinoy Thanksgiving!

The Folk Element

BECAUSE I BELIEVE THAT the most unadulterated version of folklore is one that was collected (in accessible English) long ago, I was glad to find a copy of the first edition of Filipino Popular Tales (1921) by Dean Spruill Fansler, an early scholar of Pinoy folklore from Columbia University and protege of Franz Boas, "Father of American Anthropology". From 1908 to 1914, Fansler taught at the then young University of the Philippines.

The Most Moral

I DON'T KNOW HOW FORMER editor of The Brooklyn Eagle Charles Montgomery Skinner came to his conclusion about Mangyan morality in Myths And Legends Of Our New Possessions And Protectorate (1900), maybe from reading Dean Worcester, but I'll take it. The earliest book on Philippine mythology in English I've encountered so far.

Weeding Casualties

MAYBE THE UNIVERSITY OF WINNIPEG (then United College) should have held on to this first edition of Manuel Arguilla's How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife and Other Stories (1940), if only its library weeder foresaw the close to 80K Pinoys that would later call its city home. Weeding a collection is a tricky task dictated by a number of factors, poor circulation and plain ignorance among them, and unfortunately the book had no library due date card when it arrived to give me an idea of its circulation history. Mabel Cook Cole's Philippine Folk Tales (1916) from the USC library had the same fate, but maybe books such as these are better off safeguarded in a private library.

Flash Friday

I INSTANTLY ADMIRED the work of Kristine Ong Muslim, a Filipina writer based in Maguindanao, Philippines, after reading this short piece a while back in Tin House Online, proof that world-class writing in English can be done by Pinoys who choose not to leave the home country.

The Golden Bough Revisited

Contempt and ridicule or abhorrence and denunciation are too often the only recognition vouchsafed to the savage and his ways. Yet of the benefactors whom we are bound thankfully to commemorate, many, perhaps most, were savages. For when all is said and done our resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our differences from him; and what we have in common with him, and deliberately retain as true and useful, we owe to our savage forefathers who slowly acquired by experience and transmitted to us by inheritance those seemingly fundamental ideas which we are apt to regard as original and intuitive.--"Our Debt to the Savage"  

The Sibyl Deiphobe with a golden bough in J.M.W. Turner's 1834 painting

Pangutkutan, the Mangyan ritual of exhuming the bones of the dead

IF THE RESEARCH DONE BY Douglas Pennoyer (1977), Thomas Gibson (1986) and Masaru Miyamoto (1988) on Mangyan ritual and religion were published in the early 20th century (although Fletcher Gardner and H. Otley Beyer might have had some by then), they would have made for rock-solid material for Sir James George Frazer's 12-volume book The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1906-1915), an influential work on comparative anthropology and mythology. A required reading (then in Collier paperback) in a graduate seminar I took decades ago, it was a book I don't remember having written a paragraph about, much less paid attention to its criticism, but when I found a copy of the first single-volume, abridged edition of the book (1922), my fascination was rekindled. The book got its title from an episode in the Aeneid, where the Sibyl Deiphobe (then more than 700 years old) tells Aeneas he can only enter Hades to meet the ghost of his father if he offers Proserpine a golden bough from a sacred tree in an adjacent forest, which he finds and presents to Charon, the ferryman, to gain entry to the underworld. The incident was depicted in a trademark 1834 art work by English Romantic painter Joseph Mallord Wiliiam Turner. In a nutshell, the thesis (or theme) of The Golden Bough is that human intellect evolved from a superstitious belief in magicians to a religious belief in priests and gods to enlightened belief in scientists, a proposition that many critics found hard to accept.

Although there are graphic (maybe questionable) accounts of Bagobos, Apayaos and Ifugaos drinking the blood and eating the entrails and brains of their slain enemies to gain courage, and rituals of other Filipinos included in the book--Tagalogs, Tagbanuas, Igorots, Tinguians (who avoided naming the dead), Negritos, Zambals, Italones (unfamiliar to this writer, who I learned are from Nueva Vizcaya), and Agutaynos (another unfamiliar one from Palawan), there are none of Mangyans, which may be fortunate because pundits of the time (thanks to Wiki) found fault with the methods Frazer used to collect his materials; he never spoke directly to people of the cultures he wrote about but relied instead on other researchers' findings and on questionnaires he gave to people traveling to other lands, and many elements of his text were later debunked. "Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages" wrote Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, "since his explanations of their observances are much cruder than the sense of the observances themselves."  British anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt wrote that the book "had little or no relevance to the conduct of life in an Andamanese camp or a Melanesian village, and the whole, supposedly scientific, basis of Frazer's anthropology was seen as a misapplication of Darwin's theory of biological evolution to human history and psychology," noting that even during Frazer's lifetime, social anthropologists "had for the most part distanced themselves from his theories and opinions", and that the lasting influence of The Golden Bough "has been in the literary rather than the academic world." Social anthropologist Edmund Leach was even more scathing: "Frazer used his ethnographic evidence, which he culled from here, there and everywhere, to illustrate propositions which he had arrived at in advance by a priori reasoning, but, to a degree which is often quite startling, whenever the evidence did not fit he simply altered the evidence!"

The list of literary figures The Golden Bough had its impact on is indeed long: T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Robert Graves, H.P. Lovecraft, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, and so on. Make a separate list of non-writers like mythologist Jessie L. Weston, psychologists Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and Ron Howard of The Da Vinci Code.  Fanciful and contrived or illuminating and prophetic, the book has a leave-it-or-take-it thesis, and I am inclined to take the latter position. I also believe that human thought progresses by accretion, that elements of savage ritual and magic and religion persist in modern human scientific thought, as man continues to make sense of and survive the challenges presented by the world around him. Maybe that's why we see evidence of voodoo being practiced in New York City, or simply enjoy a bloody steak sizzling on the barbecue after a stressful day. (In Mindoro we have this ritual of tossing the first shot of gin bulag, or Ginebra San Miguel, to the bushes for the dead, and I swear one will keep drinking the contents of that anointed bottle until it is empty.) In the last chapter of the book entitled "Farewell to Nemi", Frazer proposes that while science is the sturdiest form of thought, it is possible that another future system of thought may replace or improve it, and he doubts the ability of science to protect the human race in moments of apocalypse such as when the sun expires. This brings us these questions: if science is not the ultimate stage in the evolution of human thought, what is it and what will it be like? Can the next stage in the development of human thought, after science, save us from the death of our solar system and bring us to another blue planet? Did Stephen Hawking have anything to say about this?

Yet the history of thought should warn us against concluding that because the scientific theory of the world is the best that has yet been formulated, it is necessarily complete and final. We must remember that at bottom the generalisations of science or, in common parlance, the laws of nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high sounding names of the world and the universe. In the last analysis magic, religion, and science are nothing but theories of thought: and as science has supplanted its predecessors, so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some totally different way of looking at the phenomena—of registering the shadows on the screen—of which we in this generation can form no idea. Brighter stars will rise on some voyager of the future—some great Ulysses of the realms of thought—than shine on us. The dreams of magic may one day be the waking realities of science. But a dark shadow lies athwart the far end of this prospect. In the ages to come man may be able to predict, perhaps even to control, the wayward courses of the winds and clouds, but hardly will his puny hands have strength to speed afresh our slackening planet in its orbit or rekindle the dying fire of the sun.--"Farewell to Nemi"

Goat head in Brooklyn's Prospect Park: voodoo in the city? (Marc Lallanilla)

Kurtz' jungle readings in Apocalypse Now

Kepler 186f: after science, what stage in the development of human intellect can bring us there?

Of Ferals And Fetishes

WHILE I'M ON THE SUBJECT of American imperial Gothic (and not-so-Gothic) fiction about the Philippines, I am posting several more stories that I have come upon in this foray. The first is "Mivins" (1902), the only short story on this subject as far as I know that is not available on public domain, by our mysterious writer Sargent Kayme which appeared in Metropolitan Magazine, a copy of which I found on Biblio. Here the barong reminds us of the awesome blade that hacked the head off a carabao at one blow in Apocalypse Now. The second is by another little-known writer Charles E. Meyers: "The Anting-Anting of Maga" (1895) in Overland Monthly, which has shades of Robert Louis Stevenson and W.W. Jacobs. Then the three Laguna hag tales (1902-1903) by African-American U.S. Volunteer Army captain Frank R. Steward (whose narrator doesn't identify himself as such) in Colored American Magazine, and are the subject of University of Texas scholar Gretchen Murphy's angle of reading. What I consider the most sympathetic of the group are the poignant last two stories, also from Overland Monthly: Pierre N. Beringer's "Joseppa, Sweetest of Tagalog Children" (1900) and William O'Connell McGeehans's "The Spirit of the Philippines" (1902).

Mangyan amulets (Masaru Miyamoto)

Capt. Frank R. Steward

Pot Training

MY BALETE BANYAN (Ficus philippinensis) bonsai-in-training ($50 FedEx included, Wigerts nursery in Florida) had to come in while still with its moorings and take its reserved pot ($20, pick up at Home Depot) when the temperature outside dropped below 60°, and is already firing up the imagination. Not yet permanently planted, the aerial strangler roots are there, anchored in the ground but still too young to tackle a giant dao tree, and the main branch is leveled for a kapre to smoke his postprandial cigar on. Shaping a bonsai is a long and slow process especially for a newbie like me, so I'll be coming back to this specimen about a year from today to check on its progress, saving in the meantime for a phone with a better camera. And to be clear, this pot has nothing to do with weed!

Imperial Gothic

WHO WAS SARGENT KAYME? Because I like mysteries, I did some online sleuthing on a recently acquired book to shed light on the identity of the author behind Anting-Anting Stories and Other Strange Tales of the Filipinos, a well-received book of short stories (in 1901 when America was fascinated by the exoticism of its new possessions) but only came upon one interesting lead. Written under a pseudonym, the book was thought to have been written not by "a soldier in the United States service but a well-known New England author" (Current Literature, 1901) and indeed reminds one of Kipling out of other writers of the Gothic during the imperialist period--Conrad, Croker, Perrin, Bierce, Crawford et al. "Mivins", the only other known work ascribed to this nom de plume, was a short story in the July 1902 issue of Metropolitan Magazine (More on this later). So if the writer was a well-known author, why use a pseudonym? Wouldn't using the real name help sell a book, much more one of demonstrated quality? Care to take a stab? I've given up, going instead for a story in the anting-anting collection that touches on Mindoro and gives one a taste of Moro terror and raw swift's nest.