The wolf-man

By DR. LUCIO F. TEOXON, JR. ©

Hermann Hesse rose to popularity as a writer among university students way back in the sixties and even up to the present in the US, Japan, India, etc. when his major works got translated into English from the original German. He was one of the early European fictionists who had a great interest in Oriental culture and lore. His writings showed the unmistakable influence of Eastern ideas. His novels indicate this: Siddharta, Demian, Narcissus and Goldmund, Magister Ludi or The Glass Bead Game. They all dramatize the fundamental conflict in which the battlefield is the human heart—flesh and spirit, body and soul, or the worldly versus the other-wordly pursuits. He shares with Dostoevsky the same knack for the introspective probing into the inner as well as the outer constitution of man. As the internal evidence of Hesse’s novels indicate, there is no doubt about his literary indebtedness to the Russian master. It might even be said that his Steppenwolf is a direct progeny of the Underground Man.

Very much like his fictional predecessor, Harry Haller, the Steppenwolf (or the wolf-man), withdraws from society which he abhors for what he perceives to be its mediocre culture and shallow bourgeois values. The whole structure of the novel and its complications purposefully and artistically depict the process whereby Harry finally understands and arrives at a knowledge of himself. Thus, the action of the novel moves inwardly, not linearly in a horizontal fashion. We are let a glimpse into his psyche and there behold what so troubles his spirit as he dreams and hallucinates his way into himself.

The truth about Harry’s case is that he is neither a saint nor a renegade. He stands midway between the extremes of asceticism and debauchery. So much so that given the auspicious initiation, he may yet ascend to the heights reached by immortals like Goethe or Mozart who had transcended the dichotomies of mundane existence in a sort of elevated universe where all of life is affirmed with the eternal Yes. However, these immortals are marked off as eminent for having been already shorn of the sense of the self, having lived out all its thousand habiliments.

Harry has to start with the necessary first steps upon the path to enlightenment. Because of his classicist temperament as an artist, he has despised popular culture or anything that smacks of the vulgar and the worldly. He has thus shunned contact with mass culture and lives in isolation from the stream of ordinary humanity to avoid the contamination of philistinism. He prefers his self-absorbed preoccupation with contemplation and communion with the Muses. This is the height of his elitist eccentricity.

Such an activity has led him farther away from ordinary life and in the process develops psycho mania. He feels a sense of extreme estrangement to the point of toying with the idea of suicide. In fact he made a vow to himself to cut his life on reaching the age of fifty as a way of ending his ennui that eats away at his will to live. What Harry in fact needs is a return to nature and rediscover the lost fragments of his personality long submerged in the thick layers of his past. He really should go back to the elemental passions which he scoffs at and undergo the bath of the senses in order to achieve a harmonious balance between the intellect which he overvalues and the strong passions which he blocks from running high.

Human beings are at once a creature of intellect and a creature of the emotions. Reconciling these warring aspects of his nature makes up the core in the process of Harry’s education. He further needs to come to the realization that man is more than just a creature of counterpositions. He towers above them. He must of necessity renounce the conventional idea of the fragmentation of life into such polarities as flesh and spirit, body and soul, etc. and know that man is actually a multivalent, multifaceted entity consisting not just of one or two or three but a thousand selves.

In other words, Harry must play the game of life by becoming everyman and yet nobody in particular.

But first, the multiplicity of the self should be recognized, accepted, and lived through—the sex life included to make him feel human enough and not some kind of abstraction as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man has so emphatically warned against. Obviously, the process of integration which consists of the piecing together of the splintered little selves and coming to terms with them must be done by going into life in all its expressions and dimensions. Before any man can face death as Harry intended to do, he must accept life to begin with and live it fully well. This is best facilitated by man’s innate sense of humor or the ability to laugh, and laugh at oneself and one’s follies. Then only may it be possible for the individual to grow into what Abraham Maslow called a fully self-actualized human being whose consciousness becomes pure, unqualified and all-embracing.

The root of Harry’s trouble is that he takes himself too seriously. He has forgotten the cleansing power of laughter. It is an affliction, a nasty form of self-deception to disdainfully think that one is superior to other people by reason of his elevated tastes, cultural literacy or even his individual achievements. As long as he sneers at what he considers to be the vulgarities of the man in the street, a snob like Harry is bound to remain alienated from ordinary reality and a question unto himself.

Carl Jung holds that the divorce of the intellectual from the emotional side of life leads to psychic disorder. The most unfeeling criminals are those intellectuals who skulk in their underground holes like spiders. Remember Raskolnikov who committed the perfect crime? So, man’s cerebrations must be balanced by his feelings so that to think is to feel, and to feel is to think. To live in harmony with himself and those around him, the pedant must let the intellectual colossus that he professes to be come to terms with the cloven emotional freak into which he has degenerated.

Seriousness or aloofness is a petty infirmity. We must, as Harry promised himself to do in the end, learn once again to laugh the cosmic laughter of the gods the way the immortals like Goethe or Mozart do in their rarefied existence. ©

(Republished with special permission from the author)

Email address: jun_teoxon@yahoo.com

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The queer bird's fate

By DR. LUCIO F. TEOXON, JR. ©

There is an interesting but little known story of a royal falcon that looked so different from others that the King’s minister decided to trim its claws, beak and wings. “Now you look like a decent bird,” said the man. “Obviously, your keeper has been neglecting you.”

History is replete with stories of individuals who suffered persecution, imprisonment or death simply because they chose to be unlike others or pursued their own vision uncompromisingly in defiance of conventions or authority.

Socrates was made to drink hemlock for remaining the way he was: a gadfly who made his fellow Athenians uncomfortable by pressing them into the realization that, for all their pretensions to the contrary, their fond beliefs or opinions were in fact without solid basis. His no-nonsense search for the truth earned him their displeasure and they falsely charged him with impiety to the Greek gods and corrupting the minds of the youth in ancient Athens.

Jesus was crucified for tapping into cosmic consciousness from which vantage point he declared that he and the Father are one. The Jews, particularly the scribes and priests whose knowledge about God was chiefly derived from books and in thralldom to their unenlightened minds, accused him of blasphemy, an offense punishable in their canons by death.

Both of them were given trial, or rather the semblance of a trial. They were meted out the sentence of death. Socrates died a martyr to the love of wisdom; Jesus died as a ransom for the sins of the world.

Jesus’ vicars in the person of the grand inquisitors were to commit similar crimes by consigning to the flames whomsoever they branded as heretics. The case of the great iconoclastic scholar and philosopher Giordano Bruno is well known. He was burned alive at the stake in Rome in 1600. His crime? He advanced the idea of an infinite universe and postulated the possible existence of an infinite number of worlds inhabited, like this one, with intelligent beings. He prophetically envisioned space travel and what we now dub as intergalactic odyssey.

Even Galileo, who sought to prove Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, would have suffered the dire fate of incarceration had he not the prudence to recant what the Holy See then regarded as heresy in blatant opposition to the authority of the Scriptures. Still, during his formal abjuration he muttered under his breath, “Nevertheless, it moves.” Meaning that the earth moves round the sun. For the rest of his life he was placed under house arrest in Florence.

Also lamentable was Baruch Spinoza’s misfortune. Called the God-intoxicated philosopher, his unorthodox thinking ran counter to the theistic beliefs of the Old Testament. He questioned the many contradictions in the Bible, the basis of the Jewish Torah. In his philosophic flights, God is conceived as the essence underlying reality, phenomenal nature or the cosmos. Both mind and matter are attributes of the Divine substance. Hence, Spinoza was excommunicated from the Jewish Synagogue of Amsterdam. He was anathematized by the Jewish community in Holland and from the people of Israel.

In contemporary times, there is the sad story of the Jesuit priest-paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He held that the evolutionary movement of the human phenomenon heads toward superconsciousness. This is the birth of the ultra-human, the Omega point in which the human and the Divine converge. His vision is a grand marriage of evolution and mysticism, of science and religion. But in his lifetime he was forbidden to publish his works. To a writer and thinker, what greater injustice and pain could there be?

That is the grim reality of intolerance in the realm of philosophy and religion.

Equally virulent, if not more so, is it in the social and political domains. On a massive scale at that. Any person or group of persons going against the grain is marginalized if not totally ostracized. Anybody who does not toe the line nor abide by the official doctrine ends up in concentration camps or else summarily liquidated.

Remember the purges of communists by fellow communists under Stalin? Or the Gulag Archipelago? Or Fort Santiago? Or Fort Bonifacio? Remember Kintanar? Or Tabara? You can add to the list what you will.

The academia where academic freedom is supposed to sustain the life of the intellect is not spared. Even right there, irrational prejudice and bigotry are just as rampant. Any local literatus knows Jose Garcia Villa who was expelled from U.P. for writing what was then considered as “obscene” poetry.

Again, we can multiply ad infinitum the instances. Why, oh why is this the case? Who will save us from ourselves? ©

(Republished with special permission from the author)

Email address: jun_teoxon@yahoo.com

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The man from underground

By DR. LUCIO F. TEOXON, JR. ©

Among the continental masters, Fydor Dostoevsky stands out as showing the ability of the modern imagination to do the “paradoxical task of standing both inside and outside itself, articulate its own formlessness and encompass its own extravagant possibilities.”

In the Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky, whom Andre Gide regarded as the greatest of all novelists, demonstrated his unusual power in describing the lower depths of the human psyche and the inner states of the mind. His psychological penetration which made him a towering figure in world literature is matched with his equally powerful gift for new ideas, the philosophic import of which had a wide-ranging significance for the world at large. In Dostoevsky, therefore, as shown in the fictional work cited, we find the exemplar of the continental master who exhibits the ability of the modern imagination not only to take stock of the inner world of the individual self with all the mysterious forces locked up within it but also stand outside the self and discover awesome truths about itself and its relation to society.

The striking thing about the Underground Man, a forty-year old employee who retired from the civil service, is his exceptional ability to look with sharp clarity into himself self-critically. He knows and is fully aware of what troubles him—and that is the fact of his self-contradiction. He is sundered from within between his will on the one hand and his reason on the other. The root cause of his torment is the endless conflict between these two sides of his individuality. Underground Man also knows that his ultimate salvation lies in his ability to integrate these extremes of his makeup by means of the power of conscious will and freedom of choice. He is nameless, which means that he is almost a nonentity, and also that he could be everyman.

The primitive elements in him prompt him to stand up against the forces in society that do violence to the passions that make for a heightened sense of life and sensitivity to the natural pleasures they afford. And he sees quite rightly that so-called culture and civilization have only succeeded in crippling his natural human propensities such as the appetite for the pure act of living and its simple pleasures. Systematic morals and social conventions suppress the primal passions, the instincts and drives surfacing from the wells of the unconscious. Society has but succeeded in producing a new type of human being characterized by artificiality of manners, phoniness, and the cold sophistry of reasoning exemplified in the inexorable formula ‘two plus two makes four.’

But Underground Man scoffs at this systematic conditioning that stripped him of the true qualities that make him human. He argues that reason itself and the fanatical worship of the intellect have not really transformed him any better but instead estranged him from himself, from the foundations of his human reality as a flesh and blood individual. So, he affirms the will and passion as against mere intellection or cerebration, of involvement with life from which modern man is tragically divorced. He is for life minus the veneer of civilization, life in the most naked form that Camus’ Meursault enjoyed on the sun-drenched Algerian beach.

That is why he goes underground and lives apart from society which he cannot stand. In his underground hole on the outskirts of the town he sharpens his insights all the greater and gains the proper perspective to look at the world out there. He speaks truthfully if haughtily when he says: “…there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don’t even know what living means now….”

For modern man has not lived a fully integrated life. He merely drifts along through existence as a walking corpse, having weaned himself away from the primal sources that give life its true sustenance and richness. “We are oppressed at being men—men of real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea.”

All along, Underground Man is himself pretty much aware of his own self-divided nature. Right at the outset he confesses that he is a sick man and that he is not a pleasant man at all. It is true that he himself has the longing to go back to society; and in Liza, he is offered the opportunity to lead a normal life regulated by social institutions. She brings to the fore his own unconscious desire to join mainstream society, to be one among the many. That is why he loses his own self-respect because he sees his own transparency, his own unresolved self-contradiction. He even becomes spiteful and cynical about himself.

Yet in the consciousness of his freedom to make independent choice, he sets himself above the common run of mortals, the herds who are already dead but wander about the workaday world of socialized living. Salvation for the outsider like him, owing to his self-divided nature, lies in integration, in self-transcendence.

What ultimately Underground Man holds out to us is that what we most need in order to live fully is to cease from living in abstractions. We also need passion. The passion for life. for living. It is this passion, bordering on madness perhaps, that enables us to touch base with the universal force. It is this that builds and creates, the power that conjures up for you and me worlds upon worlds of infinite possibilities. This is the daimon referred to by Federico Garcia Lorca. This, too, is what Plato meant by an inspiring power that takes possession of the poet in the creative process so that what he says carries a density of significance.

All great works whether of art or philosophy extend our vision of what the world could be and sharpen our discernment into what or who we truly are. Yet in the final analysis, self-mastery is a matter too important to be left to the writers or philosophers alone since everyone is a stakeholder in the human enterprise. For we are all participants in the endless act of creation and the clearer we get to know our part in the grand scheme of the cosmic process, the better our chances of coming upon the deeper meaning of what our life is for. ©

(Republished with special permission from the author)

Email address: jun_teoxon@yahoo.com

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The burden of self-importance

By DR. LUCIO F. TEOXON, JR. ©

There is an uncommon lesson that was discussed by the anthropologist Carlos Castañeda in several of his series of works (which span over thirty years) on the teachings of Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian seer in Sonora, Mexico. It will be recalled that Don Juan had introduced Castañeda into the world of non-ordinary reality by means of psychotropic plants like peyote, mushroom, and jimson weed. In the course of his apprenticeship, Castañeda went through various forms of initiation to which Don Juan had subjected him.

Don Juan told him that one formidable roadblock to becoming a warrior (a metaphor for a man of knowledge) is the lack of understanding about what the self is. He said that the self is the source of everything that is good in us but that it is also the core of everything that is rotten in us.

What prevents the full unfolding of the luminosity of man’s true nature and the unleashing of his unlimited powers, Don Juan in effect explained, is his self-importance. The main problem with the average man is that he takes himself too seriously. He is doomed whenever he thinks he is at the center of everything or imagines that he is the sun and all others outside his skin are but satellites going round him. His great undoing consists in allowing the centripetal movement to get the better of himself so that he always thinks in terms of what he can get for his own personal gain without the counterbalancing action of the centrifugal force which should enable him to consider what he can give of himself to others.

It is of the utmost importance to keep in mind that the laws of nature which regulate our surroundings out there equally govern our lives and they do not operate like a one-way lane. Life is a give-and-take affair. For instance, the very act of breathing which we do involuntarily involves the drawing in of air and expelling it. This is the universal rhythm. To try to hold our breath for long stretches is next to impossible and this can even lead to suffocation and death.

Self-importance is not the same as self-esteem. The former must not be mistaken for the latter. Self-importance glorifies the self at the expense of others. “I” increase and “you” or “they” decrease. The reverse of this is selflessness. Or better yet, altruism. But the I-increase formula is the governing principle in the culture of narcissism prevalent anywhere in the world. Self-esteem is a healthy sense of well-being which according to analytical psychologists results from the process of individuation or the integrated personality.

From what has been said, it should be clear that self-importance is an undue attachment to the ego, and thus a burden to man, a terrible encumbrance if not actually his own greatest enemy on the path to enlightenment. Yet there is a doable antidote, though by no means the only one, to being fixated on the lesser self, that is, a sense of humor, the ability to laugh at oneself and one’s follies. This is a time-tested way to lighten a bit his psychological luggage which is fraught with nothing but his own self-interest. Man, a wise Greek observed, is the only animal that laughs. What is suggested is not sardonic laughter which is a form of mockery or aggression but belly laughter which releases man from the tyranny of his shoddy little self.

Self-transcendence, in other words, is the much needed order of the day. This is the ability to rise above oneself or go beyond the constricting confines of the ego. There is, of course, no question of going beyond the self without a self to begin with. It is true that the factual self remains. But the pull of the lesser self must of necessity be overcome so that it grows into something larger than its pettiness, like a seed that must die to itself in order to attain the magnificence of a towering sequoia.

Growth and renewal involve the act of dying. Yes, the worship of the self must end. It is only when we are nothing that we become everything. (This must be understood not as a discursive statement but an intuitive truth disclosed by the seers of all time, Don Juan being just one of them.) Yet we are all afraid to be nobody and cling to being somebody.

It is the dethronement of overweening self-importance that the man of wisdom strives after. Toward this end he musters all the powers at his command. In truth he cannot do anything less if he is to fulfill his sublime destiny, which is the supreme experience of being attuned to the source of all that is. ©

(Republished with special permission from the author)

Email address: jun_teoxon@yahoo.com

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"Are We There Yet?" : A Reflection on the 100 years of Filipino Legacy in Hawaii

By ARIEL PONCE ©

(Editor’s note: This essay won first place (three-way tie) in the 2006 Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) Literary Contest (Essay Division) from over 300 entries. The theme of the contest was, “100 years of Filipino Migration to Hawaii.” Names of the winners can be viewed at http://www.cfo.gov.ph/filtiesfebjuly.pdf.)

Our plane left for the “Big Island” on a Sunday afternoon, only to arrive there right smack on an afternoon of? the same day! Nothing can be more confusing to a 13-year-old than figuring out how one can travel for more than 10 hours only to arrive hours earlier than the time one left and on the same day at that. Somehow the perennial questions of a bored kid like, “Are we there yet?” asked for the umpteenth time to now nearly deaf parents seem totally irrelevant and all at once unnecessary. My studies in a local science school never even prepared me for the outright confusion that a simple thing called “international dateline” can do to one’s system. Shades of Phileas Fogg! But for a kid totally unfamiliar with Einstein’s linearity or Hawking’s singularities, no explanation could remove the confusion I felt that day.

In September of 1973, I was fortunate enough to have been sent to Hawaii on an all-expense paid trip, in the guise of a cultural mission, by being part of the very first team assembled by the then post-Martial Law government to woo our countrymen back to the Philippines and, of course, have them spend their hard-earned dollars on our beautiful shores. Fittingly dubbed the “Balikbayan Project,” the program’s name has since become historically synonymous with any Filipino coming back to the Philippines (not to mention the humongous 70-pound brown boxes that our homecoming countrymen seem unable to do without) whether they be OCWs or former citizens. By being a part of the world-famous “Pangkat Kawayan” (Bamboo Orchestra) and blowing on a simple bamboo tube that could only produce one note, I was able to tour Hawaii and California, states known to have the most number of Filipinos enmeshed in their respective communities. Our group, through a series of variety-show performances designed to create a strong sense of nostalgia among our countrymen (now bearing American passports), showed scenes and montages of what they had been missing the entire time they had been away from home. Since we deliberately picked the right amount of nostalgic pressure to put on our audiences, they never had a chance to remain unmoved. Indeed, they cried buckets of tears through heartbreaking scenes of a kid hopelessly waiting for his pamasko (Christmas gift) from a ninong (godfather) and ninang (godmother) who’ve been away in the States for so long, while totally missing the taste and aroma of the Noche Buena feast set before him. And if we did not have them crying, we had them clapping through folk songs sung in their respective dialects. Or had them singing all-too familiar tunes or desperately remembering lines from long forgotten songs.

Other “Balikbayan Projects” would get to tour other parts of the States seeking to bring in more of our prodigal countrymen back home, but the record set for the most number of balikbayans to arrive at our shores following that glorious September tour would be unequaled! So I heard.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. For what really transpired in the mind of a 13-year-old during that fateful trip is what this essay is all about after all. I only remember in a haze the mad rush to have our uniforms fitted, or the proper table etiquette lessons hastily given (to this day I still cant figure out which was the salad fork in what looked to me like more than 50 pieces of silverware set with the same number of plates, bowls and glasses). I remember, too, using a shoehorn to hastily pack 50-pound suitcases with 70 pounds of clothes, or the lessons on what an ambassador of his country is supposed to represent. My parents only added to my dread by informing me that I should never stray from the group and if ever I got separated from them I would be lost forever. Gee, thanks Mom and Dad, you really made a 13-year-old stain his pants with that great advice.

Hawaii! The name alone was already alien to my young ears. Lets see now, was it pronounced “hah-why” or “hah-wah-yeeh”? Would the natives there be wearing grass skirts or sarongs, or, worse, would they be wearing anything at all? So many questions, so many questions… Was it true that they made necklaces out of flowers but instead of the familiar sampaguita they used calachuchi, a flower strongly linked to funerals in the Philippines? Let’s see now, its one of the states of the United States of America, but why is it a group of islands? These and more questions, I finally said to myself would have to be answered when I got there!

Our Philippine Airlines direct flight for Honolulu left on a wet, cloudy and gloomy Sunday afternoon. How fitting, I said to myself, since I didn’t want my group mates to see the tears of fear that were then slightly staining my cheeks. Boarding cramped quarters with windows pretending to be viewable, and seats that felt more like electric chairs welcoming a sentenced inmate rather than the padded comfort they were supposed to be, we set off towards the sunset and into the waiting arms of?

CONFUSION!

We stepped out of the plane and into a warm sunny afternoon which made me wonder back then, “Why on earth are we wearing thick business suits anyway?” “Wasn’t ‘the States’ supposed to be cold?” What made the whole thing bizarre was that I distinctly remembered that we experienced a night and an eventual daybreak in the cramped quarters of the plane, which meant that we should have arrived the following day, Monday, right? Wrong! We arrived on a Sunday! Not the week after but the same day that we left. By some H.G. Wellsian paradox (which I would later in life come to read and enjoy) our flight must have turned into a time machine, as I reflect on it now amusingly. Thank God for my much more learned partners, I was informed that our plane crossed the international dateline and we had but to merely set our watches accordingly. No, no, no… That can’t be right? No resetting of watches would ever make a day return. That’s just way too inconceivable.

But watch-resetting would have to make do for me that day as I boarded a shuttle that picked us up from the airplane steps and hastily deposited the crew and I to another big question mark and a much bigger horror awaiting me in the form of my FOSTER PARENTS! Now let us not forget that while the tour was indeed meant to be diplomatic and we were for all intents and purposes “ambassadors of our country,” the truth was we were a 60-member contingent. And funds for hotels and similar living conditions were allotted for the “stars” of the show, not for us kids. So by hitting two proverbial birds with one very cheap proverbial stone, it was decided that we would live with Filipino families willing to share their resources and their homes to us. We would get to experience life among our Filipino brethren and, at the same time, save up on allowances and that all too precious diplomatic funding. I’ll never forget that terrifying moment when our director said that one of the band members and I would be staying with a family named Palafox. “If it’s got a fox on it, then its an American name for sure!” I thought to myself. As my roomie and I were ushered on to meet our foster parents, a very strong feeling of fear suddenly hit me and every step I took was like dragging a ton of bricks. And suddenly there he was, a strangely built American bearing a sign that had our names on it, too small to even be called American and too dark to be one either. He had on his face this small impression of a mustache and a salt-and-pepper hair that made him look actually distinguished. But still you can never quite tell about these Americans. As he slowly approached us, he looked at my partner and I, and at that moment I could definitely feel his eyes peering into our souls and gauging us. That is, until he opened his mouth and said, “Kumain na ba kayo?” (Have you eaten yet?) in that all-too familiar Tagalog with an accent that seemed somehow to be hitting too close to home. With that simple question, all fears melted away and, suddenly, I wasn’t on an island hundreds of miles from home, but as if still in the Philippines safe and sound.

His car was huge! My partner and I could have easily played agawang base at the backseat alone. “This Mr. Palafox guy must be one rich Filipino-American!” I thought to myself on the drive to his home. But glancing out the window of the car made me think twice about that statement as more huge cars darted past us on an eight-lane road that seemed meant for landing aircrafts than accommodating vehicles. The big island was an amazing place! With blue skies, bluer seas and tropical weather all year round, is it any wonder that Hawaii easily becomes the first choice for any Filipino wanting to migrate. He was Dr. Palafox, not the medical kind he then told us, but the Ph.D. kind. Which in the mind of a thirteen year old didn’t really make much of a difference; it seemed that a doctor was a doctor to me back then. He then added that he also teaches at the University of Hawaii’s East-West Center, a place that my buddy and I would later remember as a box-like building too big to have any specific purpose but to house thousands of students.

His home was like any other home you can find in the Philippines. A three-bedroom bungalow that had a two-car garage, and just to make sure we would really feel at home, a Filipina mother was waiting for us at the front door. Mrs. Palafox was my mother, my roommate’s mother or like any other Filipino’s mother for that matter all rolled into one. She had a ready smile that was as genuine as the grey locks on her head. And a body-type that was capable of carrying babies, cook up a storm and wash clothes all at the same time. She was polite without the usual stiffness that accompanied it, and she greeted us with a hug fit for a long lost son. As she started the five-cent tour through her well-maintained house, we discovered that she had already raised two very athletic boys who were at that time out for college, which easily explained why she volunteered to be one of the foster parents for the program, the availability of a spare room.

The welcome meal which was served to us looked very familiar to me. We had rice, meat and that weird concoction my own mother prepared in our kitchen back home… dinengdeng, a potpourri of local vegetables that was cooked in boiling water and for taste a pungent fermented fish-sauce was strained and mixed in. The smell was so reminiscent of home that I couldn’t help but ask, “Excuse me, sir, ma’am, but by any chance are you Ilocanos?” The reply was a string of Ilocano words spoken with such gusto that my young ears strained from over-translation. It seemed that they had migrated straight from Ilocos and that Ilocano was their cradle language with Tagalog coming in at a distant second. How glad they were to have an Ilocano for a ward, so they said, while continually pouring more of the green broth into my plate. And until my partner and I were herded into our rooms, I could still hear Dr. Palafox excitedly talking to the missus about their guests and how they wished we could stay longer.

Looking back at that experience of more than 30 years ago still brings a smile to my lips. I wonder what ever happened to the Palafoxes? The last letter I got from them was a reply to my own short letter as well. And as time, busy- ness, and the mad rush to grow up eventually took its toll, I slowly bundled all my memories about them and my great experiences in that faraway land of blue skies and white beaches and traded it all in for newer ones. But as I write about this now, nostalgia, it seems has a way of creeping in and grabbing you by the seat of your pants when you least expect it. We spent two weeks in Hawaii before leaving for the mainland, but they were two weeks well spent. And while I even got to know more Fil-American families in other cities in California, like the Nobles (pronounced in the dignified Anglo Saxon manner rather than the Filipino nob-leh) of San Francisco, the Cortezes of San Diego, and other kind-hearted families, heck, we even got to meet Mickey Mouse in Disneyland, it would be in Hawaii that I would get to know two very special Filipinos who gave me a home away from home and prepared me for a bigger United States of America than I ever even dreamed of in their own small three-bedroom bungalow. And not unlike the early Filipino settlers who became part of the culture we now all know as Hawaii, they left their country to take a chance on a dream, to dive head first into that great unknown and try their luck at a chance to better themselves and their children. Whether through pineapple-picking or as professors in various universities, Filipinos have shown amazing resiliency and unwavering strength. And through it all they have held on to their own identities with passion while being passionately true to the old red-white-and-blue at the same time. They’ve chowed down to McDonald’s as well as dinengeng and kare-kare and not once felt a wee bit of difference. They’ve managed to become contributing members of their own little communities while keeping track of what’s happening to their own Filipino communities back home as well. They’ve gotten used to unfamiliar sports like football and baseball while retaining their enjoyment of their own homegrown activities. They’ve managed to raise responsible children with eyes looking towards the future while at the same time deeply rooted in their past.

As to that all too familiar question that I asked one of my foster parents as we headed towards their home, “Are we there yet, sir?” The answer is simple: we had always been there because for them they never really left home. They grew roots in their respective homes and touched branches with their motherland. Sharing their dreams with other kababayans (countrymen)with similar dreams, they proudly called themselves Americans with every Star Spangled Banner sung or every allegiance pledged to the flag of the United States, while never forgetting the lessons of the past or their own very familiar dialects. The old and slightly overused Tagalog quotation that loosely translates as “Those who do not bother to look where they came from will never get to where they want to go,” can never be more applicable than in this case of American-accented migrants (because if they speak with a thick accent, they would not be understood in those parts) who switch from one language to another with ease. And as I now fondly recall the smiles on my foster-parents lips which kept spouting a stream of unending Ilocano words with ease, that old famous saying that goes “Home is where the heart is,” comes to mind and I tell myself that that very familiar saying may not be too far off. For in that land hundreds of miles away from anything familiar, where days come in late, swaying coconut trees abound, blue skies, white sandy beaches, blue seas and year-round perfect weather they decided to build their homes… close to their dreams and closer still to their hearts. ©

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Weaving a Network of Life in FEU

By Ariel G. Ponce ©


(Editor's Note: This piece won second place in the Angel C. Palanca Peace Program Essay Writing Contest, professional category, in October 2004; published in Tambuli, Vol. V No.1, March 2005)

“And what are we to say of man? Is he a speck of dust crawling helplessly on a
small and unimportant planet, as the astronomers see it? Or is he, as the chemists might hold, a heap of chemicals put together in some cunning way? Or, finally, is man what he appears to Hamlet, noble in reason, infinite in faculty? Is man, perhaps, all of these at once?

Bertrand Russell
Wisdom of the West

Amazingly they were waving back!

Not really knowing all of them, except as familiar faces that I constantly pass along the covered pathways of the university, it still borders on both creepy and astonishing that they would even bother to wave back. But that’s how it’s always been for me in this university, since the time way back in 1994 when I decided to call the Far Eastern University my home and they decided to make me part of their “family.” While some may have decided to take the lonely “Thoreau-ish” path, head bowed as if in prayer while walking the twisting corridors to get to their respective classes seemingly seeking “inner peace,” I had decided ages ago to take the more socio-culturally relevant path of walking around campus as if headed towards the marketplace, waving constantly to friends, giving high-fives to students (both past and present), smiling and nodding my head constantly at familiar faces. But isn’t that what gives a place warmth anyway? With this simple act of waving, strangers were no longer just individuals trying to get by in a cold four-walled structure, but transformed into neighbors, friends and confidantes, sharing the same dreams, hopes and aspirations for a better world. With a simple gesture, we had all become equals, feeling as if we were sharing the very same over-packed jeepney ride to Lerma. With nothing more than a raised hand and a shake of the fingers we became part of a whole rather than missing pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

It’s scary to think that we as educators have forgotten to act as educated individuals. Preferring to act like snot-nosed emperors awaiting bows and curtsies rather than brethren braving the wilderness on their way to the Promise land. It still makes me shiver whenever I see or hear co-workers spouting lines like “Trabaho lang ’to, pare, walang personalan” (Don’t take it personally, it’s just a job, man!), in imitation of some cheesy Filipino actor replete with a .45 caliber pistol and a towel draped over his neck. The sooner one thinks of this school as merely a place of work rather than a “home away from home” then that is what it has merely become for them, a seemingly bank-like institution where one draws the money one deposited. How totally antiseptic… How truly impersonal…

Unfortunately for these deposit-withdraw savants, the world is quickly expanding and for some much too quickly for comfort. Finding warmth in such a broad expanse may prove to be too difficult at times. Yet like some metaphorical over-bent Juan trying desperately to fit into such a small blanket, the university has adapted to the call of expansion. Spearheaded by then FEU President Edilberto de Jesus, the university decided to follow in the wake of the Canadian theoretician Marshall McLuhan’s dream of a “global village” and bravely faced a future and a world interconnected to each other by streaming signals of light passing through kilometers of thin plastic fiber-optic lines. It had created in its wake the so-called “electronic” or e-based utilitarianism that this university’s “e-generation” can no longer live without. And with that decision allowed all of us to be linked to so much more than just ourselves. Now, through various computer set-ups within institutes, teachers, students and employees are walking in different corridors… that of cyberspace. Suddenly, with a mere flick of a switch, we had become nothing more than a “mote in God’s eye,” and the realization that we are now walking through a much larger expanse than just the usual brick-paved paths is simply unnerving.

Life in this university as we once knew it has changed! We brave freezing Antarctic conditions and burning sands of the Sahara, climb oxygen-starved summits of the Himalayas, walk in strange landscapes of far-off Mars and all these while remaining within the confines of our air-conditioned classrooms. With almost the speed of thought, we’ve given a whole new meaning to the word “connected,” and spared the mailman his near-masochistic trips through snow, sleet and hail to deliver your mail. Yes, life has indeed changed! But are we, as educators, meshing well with this new found “network” of knowledge and fount of wisdom? Knowing full well that not only has it changed our views on how we deal with people but it has also brought with it a new set of responsibilities. For as with places we can visit and learn from with just a click of the mouse, we in turn can open up places of both total neuroses and immoralities just as quickly. Filling up not just vacuums of the mind, the net has also dangerously filled up those of lust and decadence as well. Does this not then leave one to call to mind, in eerie recollection, Uncle Ben’s words to his nephew Peter Parker a.k.a. Spiderman? That “with great powers,” he states, “come great responsibilities!” A sociologist once said that man is slowly devolving to this present state of anonymity because it is what he wants. And who can argue with that statement? When all around us is the reality that we are conversing through high tech equipment designed specifically to hide not just our facial expressions but our vocal inflections and physical nuances as well. If the impersonality of life before computers was already prevalent, can you imagine what it would be like right now? With computers, impersonality has gone not only tenfold but probably a hundredfold. And no amount of logging in to the “Friendster” network will ever draw us all back to that same feeling as a face-to-face casual conversation, a tap on the shoulder, a nod, a smile or a wave.

Is this any way to form bonds then? How do we weave networks of life when we never saw the value in the life that was in there to begin with? First we hid in self-made walls of standoffishness and then we buried ourselves in the anonymity of the net. Either way the results were the same, purposeless individuality and complete and utter loneliness. How truly sad… Even the dictionary is very direct in its description of life, that it is marked by the very difference between animate and inanimate or between living and non-living organisms. How ironic that we as living beings would prefer the cold, lifeless face of a computer monitor to that of a flesh-and-blood one, which is living, breathing and (if you wave just right) responding. If it is truly our desire to reach out and form true connections, then we need not reach too far. For all around us is a constant reminder of what life really is. From the moment we enter the high-tech turnstiles, that seem to have a life of its own when the fancy do-hickey is placed wrong side up, to the time we leave them behind, we are constantly bumped, tapped, tripped and touched by a myriad of faces and souls all doing the exact same drudgery of trying to get through the day. While we would like nothing better to do than to just trudge through the day with merely a shrug and a grunt, the truth is this: that man is and always has been a social creature. Not even Henry David Thoreau with his magnificent essays and his Zen-like quest for the “sound of silence”, would ever compare to a smile, a handshake, a buzz, a whisper, a shared secret, a giggle, a high five and a wave. We desire company because we were built that way. If our Creator wanted an oven toaster or a coffee maker then He would have just created one of these. As it stands He created us, complete with frailties, passions, desires, dreams, ambitions and a longing to be with others just like us. Which, if you come to look at it, really isn’t all that bad! And that, as one writer once put it, is that… life in a nutshell.

Life will never ever be a bunch of quotations or clichés; life is a reality as solid as the art-deco architectural structures that surround us or as real and felt as the person right next to us. We have within our midst the greatest example of diversity in all its richness: the Manang who’ll always run a block for you just to make sure your coffee is hot; the Manong in barong who’s always there to make sure your turnstile accepts your magstriped ID; the co-teacher (from another institute) who always shares the same lunch table at Nitz with you just because you happen to look familiar; the older guy who fills you with so much stories of the good ole days that you’ll be wanting to write a book about it someday; the friend who’s wallet will always be an extension of yours especially in lean times; the Dean who’s persistent prodding pushes you to new heights of achievements; and thousands upon thousands of students (quirks and all) with eyes open wide to a future rife with possibilities of what we can impart to them. With such diverse and countless faces to share your life with, can you even have time to be anonymous in the net with a million more?

The university is already bursting at the seams with new faces and with thousands more being added to it every year. With such a vast number of people weaving to and fro and the probability of meeting the same face in an hour’s time lessening, the need for interpersonal relationships become all the more crucial. I firmly believe that while the net is indeed vast and endless in its scope and possibilities, it is also a great way to lose our identity and push us all apart. With its gray cold features, the computer will never ever hope to replace the warmth and compassion of a friendly face. If we truly desire to weave networks of life (and lives) into our great institution, then I say “knit Juan and pearl Toto.” Let us start the process of knitting and weaving this very network of life by reaching out to those whom we see every single day. Let us look upon these strangers and know that we share a bond much deeper than just a winning basketball team or an institution steeped in tradition. Let us allow the dreams and hopes for a brighter future to become the very threads of existence that binds all of us together. And it all starts with a smile, a handshake, a buzz, a whisper, a shared secret, a giggle, a high five and a wave.

And don’t worry I know for a fact that they’ll always wave back! ©

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CREATING RIPPLES OF PEACE: An Essay on Peace and the Youth

By ARIEL EDGAR.G. PONCE ©

“I wish that [the] youth would start preparing themselves for building a better world right now. I wish that representatives of the youth of different countries would get together and hammer out the constitution of the world they want to build. They must not only prepare by planning for the future but also by taking immediate action… They can do it.”

The Crazy Ape
Albert Szent- Györgyi
M.D., Ph.D., Nobel Laureate for Medicine

Seven…

Seven is my personal record for that childhood preoccupation called stone-skipping, a game one plays with the aid of a flat stone and a large body of water, preferably a river, a lake or an ocean (although the ocean may prove to be much too choppy for that). With one mighty heave on that fateful day I managed to let my carefully chosen piece of flat rock skip seven times, seven splashes, seven ripples until it finally met its watery end. A fitting adieu for something so trivial…

That event, however short or trivial, held for me so much more than a mere childhood moment complete with personal “bests,” bragging rights and a memory that for now seems too distant to even remember. For if I was to quote Leonardo di Caprio at that point in time, I would have shouted at the top of my lungs, “I am the King of the World!” And no one or nothing was better than I was at that special moment… No one that is until a gorilla of a next-door-neighbor threw a cannonball of a shot that sent his flat stone to an unbelievable twelve skips, a monster of a shot compared to my measly seven and a record that stands to this day. Damn his thick hairy arms!!!

Twelve skips… What an amazing impossibility! One for Mr. Guinness and his record books no doubt. And looking back on that very same event now, still produces nostalgic memories of childhood, one that can’t help but put a smile or two on my lips. Of how such measly efforts seem to have produced such gargantuan achievements in the eyes of a child. But in foresight that very same childhood memory started me to thinking about ripples, both real and metaphorical. For are we not, as teachers, in a sense trying in our own way to create ripples within the still waters of our students’ young minds? Unfortunately, for some, the Orwellian epitaph of, “some are more equal than others,” seems to reverberate more soundly in their ever-doubting crania than they would like to admit. For not unlike my own personal childhood experience with the thick-limbed Neanderthal of a neighbor, some teachers are finding it harder and harder to create ripples among their highly-strung, videogames-immersed and 3D graphically-savant students.

Never mind the fact that these very same online wanderers seem to relish the way that they can solve their problems by hacking their way out of it, we teachers are trying desperately to capture their attention with limited devices at our beck and call: our voices, large pieces of white, shiny boards and markers. And the ripples seem to be getting smaller and smaller with each new online game introduced. What a challenge indeed!

Now add to that melee an intangible concept called peace and you have before you a soup-mix straight out of some South American jungle tribe’s medicine man concoction. Often depicted by Westerners as a white dove holding an olive branch in its beak, peace has become as fleeting (or at times as rare) as that olive-holding dove, not to mention the rarity of olive branches to begin with in this part of the world. And with today’s computer-wielding young peoples’ preferences ranging from simulated battlefields to extreme sports, is it any wonder then that the concept of peace has become that elusive? When they start believing that the only “good alien is a dead alien” and the only way to solve a problem is with a sharp edge of a broadsword then truly, allowing them to grasp the concept of peace is close to impossible. Even cinema has reached new heights of mayhem and destruction by registering unbelievable records in ticket sales for those who wish to watch the “end of the world” over and over and over again. It almost feels as if the slogan “the more you destroy the better the movie” has become the newest Hollywood catch-phrase. So how then are we to push peace when our young people would rather push the destruct button?

The answer, I firmly, believe is not in the learning but in the unlearning process that only we as teachers should be willing to implement. When the bad habits of computer-maiming and destruction have reached new depths of blood and gore, the only way to go about changing it is by “re-installing,” if you will forgive the pun, a cleaner version… To create, so to speak, a tabula rasa or a blank slate within our young people’s mindsets and acquired bad habits and replacing it with the idea of peace. To create still waters within them that will reflect, as well as manifest, every minutest ripple that will touch its crystalline surface. A silence so enveloping that one can literally hear a pin drop. Or in this case feel the growing presence of “peace settling in”. The Beatitudes of Jesus Christ deals very directly with the idea of peace, in it the Christ is quoted as saying to the multitudes: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called sons of God.” Peacemakers as heirs to the Kingdom of God, can any reward be greater? But such a promise may prove to be too costly in the here and now, since the peace that some have been striving to achieve for so long may in the long run end with a not-so-proverbial bang or perhaps, in this nuclear age, with a very literal mushroom cloud of nuclear debris and fallout. Dr. Albert Szent-Györgyi, who won the Nobel Prize for his studies on metabolism and the discovery of vitamin C, believes in the capability of education to further peace. In his book entitled the “The Crazy Ape,” Dr. Szent-Györgyi expounds on the importance of good education and its ability to promote peace: “For this,” Dr. Szent-Györgyi writes, “we need an educational system based on the real understanding of moral, esthetic and spiritual values. There is enough beauty, grace and greatness in the world to fill the mind; there is no real need to go out and kill people in order to shake off boredom.” Bravo Dr. Szent- Györgyi!!! For you have with but few and eloquent words, managed to encapsulate the real reason why peace has become elusive: BOREDOM! Complete and utter boredom… Obsessed with the desire for self-gratification, our young people have doggedly pursued any if not all possible means to relieve boredom. They have gone to the point where their only means to survive in the real world is to “escape” into alternate worlds peopled with faceless entities and filled with endless vistas of virtuality and illusion, if one can truly call such an existence “living” to begin with. Peace for them has become elusive because tranquility is akin to silence and inactivity, and that for them is tantamount to boredom. Welcome to the New Church of the Youth! Where their god is hedonism and their patron saint is multi-sensory overload.

Do we still wonder then why young people choose modems over Sirs and Madams or hard drives over hard and soft covers? It is and always will be because the classroom, for them, has become the most boring, God-awful place in the universe. And we as mentors are partially to blame for this. When we continue to delude ourselves into thinking that the “one-and-a-half-hour-non-stop-you-can’t-take-down-notes-just-listen-to-me lecture” is worth an entire lifetime (and it may feel exactly like that when the students listen to it), when we believe that silence is “gold” and decide to invest one and a half hours of it every classroom session or when we believe that only stupid people ask questions, then we have driven them to their own Ragnarokian universes rather than to corridors of learning. And that is indeed a fate worse than what any “God-mode” button can do.

The computer is truly a powerful tool! But just like the devil’s own little workshop of horrors in an idle mind, it can weave so much more than mere magic in a bored young mind. But the good news is that we can fight fire with fire! Like some Biblical solution of loving your enemies and “thus heaping burning coals on his head,” we can use the computer to our advantage. To maximize its potential in the classroom or even beyond it to allow them to learn more about the message of peace on earth or as recent websites have shown through various 3D artists’ concepts, perhaps even expand the message to the entire universe and beyond… All we need to do is to start with one student, one mind and one spirit! One willing student that will take the message to his brethren and thus create a chain reaction more powerful than any fission bomb ever concocted by either Einstein or Oppenheimer put together. The message is simple: reach one mind with the message of peace and you reach the whole world. A ripple effect, so to speak, that will expand to the water’s edge of war, violence and fear and wash over it all like some Galilean baptism.

Now imagine that number multiplied by forty-five, the exact same number of minds we come into contact with every time we meet one class. And the results alone are beyond comprehension when we see the numbers raised to that power. Summed up in one word the results are INFINITE! We all, therefore, are at crucial crossroads, ones that could very well change the entire way in which we all think, act and interact. With every classroom session held, we have within our grasp the possibility to, if you will pardon my quoting Mr. Michael Jackson, “change the world.” To create ripples within a multitude of minds who in turn will create more ripples of peace that will change lives and better this world which for so long has been in the strangle-hold of violence. Harry Joel Osment, who portrayed an elementary school student with a novel idea in the movie entitled “Pay It Forward,” devised a brilliant idea of changing the world by “paying good for good forward.” It was a brilliant concept that couldn’t have been more applicable than in this case. His character’s formula, which can only be compared to cellular multiplication, was simple: you do good deeds to five persons and in turn those same five persons do good deeds to five more people each and so on and so forth, until you eventually have the entire world doing good to each other. Sounds simple, right? But then again, in theory everything sounds simple. It’s usually in practice where everything begins to unravel. Practice, “the great equalizer,” the one that puts all theories to the trial of fire and makes all that fall short of their capabilities mere slag. How are we then to truly know the potential of such a concept if it forever remains a concept, an idea and an intangible? This then is my challenge to all those who have had their fill of violence and wars, of terror and fear, of oppressors and slave makers… To those who have been given the incomparable and unlimited capacity to reach out to young minds daily, I urge all of them to practice the truest form of peace, by living it and sharing it to the world.

It’s been many years since my giant of a neighbor broke the stone-skipping record, but my thoughts still return to that fateful day. Of how we all gritted our teeth in frustration while watching his flat rock skip to its twelfth splash and the undeniable reality of a record throw that we all knew would never be broken, not then, not ever. And what significant numbers they were, twelve splashes, twelve skips, twelve ripples… Jesus Christ in His desire to change the world chose twelve disciples, twelve simple people, some fishermen, some tax collectors, and yet with these twelve simple people He changed the world and spread the message of peace on earth. In our classrooms we are privileged to have forty-five simple young people, forty-five minds open to the possibility of accepting peace as the best way to change their world, forty-five souls willing to contribute to a future made perfect through peace. With just a one-and-a-half-hour session we can, if we so wish it, break my neighbors stone-skipping record by making ripples in the hearts and minds of forty-five individuals. With one mighty heave we can set the best record for creating ripples of peace. And so what if we have a next door neighbor who can throw one better than us. The results will always be for peace and the promise of a better world. Are we ready? Then I say, “One, two, three, heave….” ©

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The Evolving Paradigms on the Nature of Art

What is Art? According to the Greeks, art is an imitation of reality. Art is imitative or representational: it copies something in the real world. Perhaps this is the simplest and earliest view on the nature and meaning of art. The painting of a landscape copies or represents the real landscape.

For Plato, the idealist, Art is an imitation of an imitation. In his Republic, he uses the example of a bed. The painting of a bed is a copy of a concrete bed, which is itself a copy of the ideal form of a bed. If art is imitating an imitation of an ideal, then, art is doubly divorced from reality and doubly inferior.

For Aristotle, the realist, art is still an imitation, but imitation not of the ideal world like Plato but the real (physical) world. Art is a mirror of reality around us and within us.

The notion of art as mimesis (imitation), has a long and profound influence. And, the meaning of art is that which it represents.

The difficulty in this kind of understanding is what it implies. Works of art are judged according to similitude, that is, the better the imitation, the better the art. A perfect copy would be a perfect art. This view sets art squarely against documentary photography. A good school ID photo would be a good art.

Today we know that not all art is imitative or representative. There are surrealist, expressionist and conceptual art.

While some art are representative, the mimetic understanding alone cannot account for the nature or the value of art.

The rise of the Enlightenment in Europe gave new insights to the understanding of the nature and the meaning of art.

The essence of art lies in its power to express something, not only in its mimetic capacity.

According to the Romantics, like Benedetto Croce, RG. Collingwood and Leo Tolstoy, art is primarily the expressions of feelings or intentions of the artist. Not solely an imitation of an external reality, as earlier understood, but the expressions of an internal reality. And the best way to interpret art is by trying to understand the original intention of the maker of the artwork itself—the painter, the writer, the composer.

For Tolstoy, art is the contagion of feeling. This means that, the artist expresses feeling through the artwork which in turn evokes that feeling in the viewers (audience). Art is interpreted or judged by the quality of feelings it expresses and “infects” with us.

For Croce, art is the expression of emotion. Emotions are very real and a primal type of knowledge. When expressed and evoked by great works of art, it becomes powerful, often cosmic.

For Collingwood, the original intention of the artist is the actual art. The inward psychological vision of the artist is so primordial and it does not matter whether or not that vision ever got translated into art forms for the public.

Modern “hermeneutics” – the art and science of interpretation – still depends on this view, that art is the expression of an original intention or feeling or vision of the artist. Noted theorist along this line are Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Emilio Betti, E.D. Hirsch. The key to correct interpretation, – whether artistic, linguistic, poetic – is the recovery of the maker’s original intention, a psychological reconstruction of the author’s or artist’s intentions in the original historical setting.

The paradigm of art as expression was historically paralleled by the trends of expressionism by the artists themselves. The 19th century Expressionists and Post Impressionists – Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch – directly opposed the realists’ and Impressionists’ imitation of nature.

Van Gogh wrote to Theo, his brother, “Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly.”

The Cubists and the Fauves reacted similarly. Henri Matisse said, “What I am after above all is expression.”

The various manifestations of Expressionism, including Kandinsky and Klee, and the abstract expressionism of Pollock Kline and de Kooning was not a mere stylistic alteration of external representation but a complete break with the mimetic tradition.

An offshoot of the broad Romantic movement is Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud. It pointed out that many human intentions are, in fact, unconscious. These intentions, though unconscious, can make their way in disguised forms into everyday life as neurotic symptoms, as symbolic dreams or as slips of tongue. The artist, writer or poet, like everybody else, has various unconscious intentions. These intentions in disguised forms would leave traces in the artwork itself. Hence the significant part of understanding an artwork is the unearthing of these unconscious drives, intentions, desires, wishes, etc. Art criticism in this respect requires psychoanalysis.

Aside from the Freudian unconscious intentions, there are other types of unconscious structures in the human being. The Marxist pointed out that the artist exists in a setting of techno-economic structures. His works will inevitably reflect the “base” of economic realities. The correct interpretation of a work involves highlighting the class structures in which the art is produced.

Feminists aggressively tried to argue that the fundamental and hidden structures were primarily those of gender. The Marxist were not spared of their thinly disguised intentions of patriarchal power.

A sudden surge of isms followed – racism, sexism, elitism, speciesism, anthropocentrism, androcentrism, phallocentrism.

All these isms view a particular artwork as symptomatic/ indicative of larger currents or forces, which the artist is often unaware of – sexual, economic, cultural, political, ideological.

Art, then, is an expression of an original feeling intention or vision of the artist who might have structures of unconscious intention.

The interpretation of art rests in the decoding and exposing of the hidden intentions, whether individual or societal.

A reaction to the expressive understanding of art is the “formal” view of art. Intentions alone, conscious or unconscious cannot define the nature and value of art.

The other side of the Enlightenment is Rationalism. The realist trends in literature and painting (Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, Courbet) had influenced the Impressionists. The impressionists repudiated much the Romantic-Expressionist trends.

The Impressionists (Monet, Renoir, Manet, Pissaro, Degas) sought to capture “the immediate visual impressions” and render them impersonally. The emotions of the artist becomes secondary. The objective rendering of contemporary and actual experience was sympathetic to the realist attitude, at the danger of becoming documentary.

The nature and value of art is in the form of the artwork itself. Formalism had its origin in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, in the music theory of Eduard Hanslick and in the visual arts of Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Other notable Formalists are the Russian formalists Jakobson and Propp; the American Critics Wimsatt and Beardsley; the French Structuralists Levi-Strauss & Barthes; the neo-structuralists (early) Foucault and the post-structuralists Derrida, Paul de Man, Hartman and Lyotard.

In Formalism, the meaning of an artwork is found in the formal relationship between elements of the work itself. The elucidation of these formal structures makes a valid interpretation of the work.

Formalism rejects/ denies aggressively the significance of the artist original intention. The artist is totally irrelevant to the work. “Amputate the art from the artist,” according to Barthe. For Monroe Beardley and William Wimsatt Jr., the artist intention is “neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of art.”

The viewer or audience must essentially look at the artwork itself. For, how can one possibly know the intent of the artwork if it is not expressed in the art itself? Intentions might be interesting, but if they don’t make it into the artwork, then they are not part of the work. Interpretation should center, first and foremost, on the elements intrinsic to the artwork considered as a whole in itself.

Eduard Hanslick maintains that the meaning of music is in its internal forms – rhythm, melody and harmony.

Roger Fry and Clive Bell both maintain that the nature and meaning of art is to be found in its “significant form.” Cezanne being the great exemplar.

Thus, Formalism places the nature and meaning of art, not in the intention of the artist, not in what the artwork represents, not in what the artwork expresses, but in the formal or structural relationship of the elements in the artwork itself. ©

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Learning to Look or Listen: The Four Basic Relationships of a Work of Art

by MARJUEVE M. PALENCIA

“…only an enlightened audience can appreciate great art.”

Every work of art, such as a poem, a novel, an essay, a play, a musical piece, a painting, etc., has four basic relationships: 1. the subject matter 2. the artist 3. the audience and 4. its own form.

In analyzing a work of art, one may ask questions regarding these relationships, such as: (relating to the subject matter) What is it about? What does it depict or represent? What is it trying to say?; (relating to the artist) Who created it? What sort of a man is he? What does his work reveal about him?; (relating to the audience) What is its relevance or importance? Of what value is it to me? How do I react to it?; (and to its own form) What is the nature and structure of this composition? What expressive elements have been employed to carry and convey the meaning of the work? How are these elements combined and integrated to convey this meaning? What principles have been observed in the integration of these expressive elements? Does the application of these principles (and the choice and integration of the expressive elements)

These four relationships of a work of art are the bases for the four principal approaches to art criticism and appreciation. These four approaches are:

1. mimetic (based on the subject matter)
2. expressive (based on the artist)
3. pragmatic (based on the audience)
4. aesthetic or formal (based on the form) succeed in conveying the meaning of the work?

1. SUBJECT MATTER

“Art is an imitation of an imitation of reality…”

Plato, Greek philosopher

“Art is a reflection or a mirror of reality.”

Aristotle, Greek philosopher

With respect to subject matter, art is an imitation, depiction or representation of some aspect of nature or life. That which is imitated, depicted or represented in art is its subject matter.

Anything in the universe may serve as the subject of art: aspects of nature such as the sea, the sky, fields, forests, mountains, animals, etc., (often depicted in paintings), human concerns in the realm of the experience, action and deed (as recounted in fiction, narrative poetry and the drama), and emotions and moods (lyric poetry) and ideas (the essay), spatial forms (sculpture and architecture), tonal forms (music) and plastic forms in motion in space and time (dance).

According to subject matter, art may be classified into two types:

1) Representational or Objective Art portrays or depicts something other than its own form. Examples are Venus de Milo, Da Vinci’s Monalisa, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake. Literature is principally representational.

2) Non-representational or Non-objective Art represents nothing except its own form. Examples: the Pyramids of Egypt, Mondrian’s non-figurative paintings, the symphonies of Mozart. Among the major arts, architecture is most nearly always non-objective. In non-objective art, subject matter and form are one: the form is the subject.

The concept of art as imitation may be traced back to two Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. Plato, the idealist, believes that art is far removed from reality which exists in the realm of Ideals or Universals, of which our world is but an imperfect imitation, and art is, in turn, only an imitation of our world. He places art on the same level as shadows and reflections of things on water – all these being mere illusions of illusions of reality. Aristotle, an empiricist, rejected the belief in the realm of Ideals. He taught that reality exists right in our own world, around us and within us as perceived by our senses. Art is “a mirror of reality” and therefore brings us in contact with it.

The approach to art criticism through the subject matter is called mimetic (derived from the Greek word mimesis, meaning imitation.) The mimetic approach stresses the importance of subject matter or content in art. According to this approach, the merit of a work of art lies in its subject; the beauty of the subject and its significance are the basis for aesthetic judgment. This approach has been discredited by modern critics who assert that the aesthetic quality of a work of art depends not so much on what is depicted (the subject) as on how it is depicted (the form).

To modern critics, therefore, a poem in praise of the splendor of God is not necessarily beautiful than another poem expressing a lover’s complaint about the horrible smell coming from his lady’s armpits, and a painting depicting a lovely woman by the sea does not necessarily have greater aesthetic merit than another painting depicting a drunken old man sprawled beside a huge pile of garbage. What we should appreciate is not the subject but the manner of presentation of the subject.

2. THE ARTIST, WRITER, OR CREATOR

“He who touches this book, touches the man.”

Walt Whitman, an American poet

“Leaves of Grass”

From the point of view of the artist (poet, essayist, fiction writer, dramatist, composer, painter, sculptor or architect), art is a means of expression, a medium for communicating an idea, an emotion or some other human experience, an impression of life, a vision of beauty. And because the artist puts something of himself into his art, it becomes an extension of himself, an objectification of some aspect of his personality. Our experience of a work of art, therefore, brings us in contact with the personality of the artist. The individuality of the creator is revealed to us through his creation. However, the degree to which the artist has revealed himself varies from one form of art to another, from one particular work of art to another.

The expressive approach to art criticism stresses the relationship of the artwork to its creator. In this approach, the artist himself becomes the major element generating both the artistic product and the norms by which the work is to be judged. Interpreting art in the light of the knowledge that we have about the artist has some degree of validity: it is an admitted fact that something about the artist, his life-history, his philosophy and beliefs, his character, certain circumstances in his life which may have influenced the creation of the artwork in question, his background, the era during which he lived, and other pertinent information places us in a better position to interpret and evaluate his work. While the possession of such knowledge certainly enhances our appreciation, modern critics assert that it is unnecessary. They question the validity of the expressive approach and insist that an artwork be judged according to its intrinsic qualities and merits and in judging its aesthetic value, we must not take into account its relationship to its creator.

Moreover, in passing judgment on the aesthetic merit of an artwork, we must not be influenced by our personal regard for its creator or his reputation. Hence, we should appreciate a symphony by Mozart, not because this composer is one of the most delightful and admirable personalities in the world of music, but because that symphony has certain aesthetic qualities which make it worthy of appreciation for its own sake, regardless of who composed it or what sort of man he was. Richard Wagner, another composer, was an extremely disagreeable person – selfish, conceited, arrogant – but the fact remains that his music is glorious!

3. AUDIENCE OR READERS

“Literature, to be of importance, must be simple and direct and must have a clear moral purpose…”

Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist and short story writer

“The purpose of literature is to teach, to moralize, to instruct…”

George Bernard Shaw, Anglo-Irish wit and playwright

From the viewpoint of the audience (readers in the case of literature, viewers in the case of the visual arts, and listeners in the case of music), art is experience; for what is a poem unless one can read it; what is a painting unless one can see it, and what is a sonata unless one can hear it? Art always has an audience, even if this audience is none other than the artist himself.

One aspect of art, which is of importance to the audience, is its value, function or significance. Aside from its essential value (aesthetic), art may have secondary values: religious, philosophical, moral, historical, political, social, scientific, commercial, sentimental, practical, etc.

The approach to art criticism, which emphasizes the value and importance of art to its audience, is known as the pragmatic approach.

Pragmatic critics attach little importance to the aesthetic value and instead judge art according to how useful it is to the audience. For instance, they are partial to artworks that have moral value – that aim to teach, to instruct, to ennoble, or to mold the moral character of the audience (this view may be traced back to the Romans, Horace, and Cicero), or else they have preference for those for those objects of art that are useful or have practical value. Marxist-Leninist-Maoist critics are classified as pragmatic because they assert that the role of art in the socialist order is to contribute to the fulfillment of the objectives of the state, to serve as a vehicle for propaganda in the people’s struggle against imperialism, etc. Again, modern critics reject the pragmatic approach because they consider all the values of art, aside from the aesthetic value, as merely secondary, therefore incidental, non-essential.

It is the prevailing view in the field of art criticism that the merits of art are found in its own form and that these merits are there regardless of whether they are grasped and appreciated as such by the audience or not; only an enlightened audience can appreciate great art. Pragmatists attack this view on the ground that it is “elitist”—that it confines art to the enjoyment of the favored few and shuts out the great masses of people who are not “enlightened”. The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, a pragmatist maintains that a work of art attains more greatness the more it gives moral upliftment and pleasure to the greatest number of people.

Modern critics assert that the aesthetic judgment of the masses is far from reliable, the masses being for the most part uneducated, ignorant; that the greatness of a work of art does not depend on, and cannot be measured by, its popularity with the people; that a gaudy painting of Mayon Volcano from a shop on Mabini Street is not necessarily greater than an abstraction by Picasso simply because it is understood and appreciated by a greater number of people, or that My Way by Frank Sinatra is superior to Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 for the same reason.

4. FORM

“There are no moral or immoral books; they are either well-written or badly written.”

Oscar Wilde, Anglo-Irish wit and playwright

Preface to his book, Picture of Dorian Gray

With respect to form (the manner of imitation, how the subject matter is handled and presented), art is a composition, a whole consisting of various parts or elements; the selection, organization, and integration of these elements according to certain formal principles and employing certain techniques constitute that which we call the form of art. Hence, in poetry, the organization of such expressive elements as imagery, figures of speech, tone, movement, symbols, sound values of words, meter, rhyme, etc., using language as medium, creates poetic form. In music, the integration of such expressive elements as rhythm, melody harmony, tempo, dynamics, and timbre, using tone as medium and following the basic principles of organization – repetition, variation and contrast – results in the creation of musical form. A film in achieving its objective to tell a story (the subject matter), employs and combines many elements: screenplay, acting, direction, cinematography, pacing, editing, set design, background music, costuming, make-up, casting, etc. How the story is presented in terms of these elements constitutes cinematic form.

Modern critics, advocating the formal and aesthetic approach to art criticism, stress the importance of form in a work or art. They uphold the motto, “Art for art’s sake,” which is attributed to the English playwright, Oscar Wilde. This view seeks to liberate art from the chains of morality, religion, political propaganda, social, reform, etc., and sets up art as something worthy of appreciation for its own sake. The formal approach considers the form as the basis of aesthetic judgment and other considerations are secondary. This approach requires that the audience be knowledgeable, which is the reason why pragmatists charge that it encourages snobbery and elitism. Analyzing the form of a painting (or any work of art for that matter) is an intellectual undertaking that employs a systematic method to arrive at aesthetic judgment. The following may serve as a guide in the analysis of a painting:

Every work of art involves an element of choice; certain possibilities have been employed, others have been rejected. It is absolutely essential to consider alternatives to see what these choices are and why they occur. One may begin by considering the physical properties – size, shape and medium – of the work of art. How do these affect its immediate personality as an object? One can then explore the more complex qualities of the work. For the sake of convenience, try to isolate factors, but keep in mind that they have an organic or functional relation to other aspects and to the whole. Consider what is depicted (the subject matter). What is it? Why is it there? What can be said of the groupings of objects or figures that the artist makes? What personality traits are given to these objects or figures? How are these accomplished? How are these objects of figures depicted, what mode of presentation employed: realism, idealization, distortion, abstraction, or surrealism? What are the choices of posture, position, gestures, expression, in other words the physiognomic qualities of the figures? Balance: formal or informal? How achieved – by masses, tones or colors? What preference as to shapes in objects, areas, colors? What lines are employed? Straight, curved, vertical, diagonal, horizontal? How do they behave? Static, full of movement, restless? Rhythm: regular or irregular? Quality of lines: thick, delicate, fine, erratic, precise, nervous, awkward, graceful, firm, etc.? What about the role of the tone (shading) in the painting? The relations of light and dark areas? Their distribution and concentration? What is the source of light in the painting? The sun, fire, candlelight? What is the quality of this light? Intense, glaring, mellow, dim? Is the transition from light to dark gradual or sudden? To what effect? What qualities characterize the colors of the painting? How are they brought into contact with one another? How are transitions managed? Functions of color: natural, harmonic, symbolic, decorative, affective? Is there a pervasive feeling to the use of color? Gay exuberant, solemn, somber? How are spatial conceptions handled? How is the sense of depth achieved? Linear or aerial perspective or both? Single perspective or multiple? Tempo and mood? Affective character of the work? Any textual interest? How handled? What about the actual painting materials? How treated? Qualities of surface. Brush technique? To what effect? Shape and nature of frame and relations of objects to it? Scale of figures? Values attached to the different elements? Economics of statement: direct, plain, austere, or lavish, extravagant, elaborate? Variety and consistency of expression? Spontaneity? Organizing principles employed: repetition, variation, contrast? Sense of unity achieved? Appropriateness or coherence of choices for their meanings conveyed by the picture? Degree of success of the painting (judgment). The considerations listed above may be hard to differentiate at times. This is because in a work of art, all factors and elements exists simultaneously and interact with one another. One does not have to follow the sequence given above and may proceed according to convenience and necessity. This brief discussion of the four relationship of a work of art and the four principal schools of art criticism may be concluded thus: We can appreciate a work of art only when we grasp or comprehend what it is the artist is trying to say (theme, subject) and realize how well, how effectively, how beautifully he says it (the form). ©

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