Worlds and Words

Worlds and Words
By Conrado de Quiros

Actual speech given at the launching of his fourth book “Tongues on Fire” at the Peta Theater Center, Quezon City on Sept. 21, 2007. This speech was personally transcribed by me with the aid of the shortened version he published on the 24th and 25th of September in the Inquirer. Enjoy, fellas.

There are a couple of interesting events today, or thereabouts today.

The first is the 35th anniversary of martial law. Or at least that is how martial law is reckoned in history books. The real 35th anniversary of martial law, as I wrote about yesterday, is this Sunday, September 23. Ferdinand Marcos merely antedated his decree to September 21 because he believed that the number seven and its multiples were lucky for him.

Maybe it was because it managed to make martial law last for more than 14 years, though if that were the case, 14 is also a multiple of seven so that number couldn’t have been entirely lucky for him. Apparently the only thing it proves is that, as Cassius said, “The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.” Or probably the only thing it proves is that if fate were decreed by numbers, it is only by the numbers of those who congregate to make People Power.

The other interesting event thereabouts today is that “There’s the Rub” will soon be celebrating 20 years of life.

Frankly I don’t know where all the time went. I just went from beating one deadline after the other and before I knew it, it was 20 years. Every time I see my daughter Miranda and my son Miguel, I find my brain humming, “Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play?” My brain swells into a chorus at the next line, which is “I don’t remember getting older.” Goddamn, I don’t even feel it except that the gout comes around after I indulge a little too much in Bacchus’s divine brew and it gives me exquisitely painful reminders.

Both events, the 35th anniversary of martial law and the 20th anniversary of “There’s the Rub,” are a good time for me to ruminate on certain things. I was tempted to say auspicious things in lieu of good things but you might think I have become a convert of the auguries foretold and realignment of stars. These two events have compelled me to try to answer a question some friends and strangers have asked me over the last few years. Which is: “Don’t you sometimes get tired of writing columns given that things don’t seem to change at all?”

It’s an excellent question. In fact things don’t just seem not to change, they seem to be changing for the worse. We seem to be stuck in a bog, as I said in a column recently, and if we’re moving at all it is only in the direction of sinking in it. Three and a half decades after the declaration of martial law, and 21 years after the declaration of Edsa Revolution, we’re back to where we started. And unlike what T.S. Eliot said in “Little Giddy” which is that at the end of all our exploring, we’ll be back to where we started and see things for the first time, we haven’t really explored anything. We’re just looking, like fools or people who don’t read their history, at the same things for the nth time.

Just as well, since I started writing “There’s the Rub,” I haven’t seen a country move forward, I’ve seen a country stagger backward. From Cory to Ramos to Gloria is not an ascent, it is a descent. Or as motions go, it rotates us all the way back to where we started, with Marcos as point of origin. Some friends and strangers have asked me: “Why haven’t you stopped criticizing our leaders?” But given where they’ve brought us to, with no small thanks from us ourselves, I’ve always replied to that question: “Give me one goddamn reason why I should.”

But which brings me to the earlier question if I haven’t gotten tired of writing columns because things haven’t changed at all.

And my answer to that is: Oh, Yes. A thousand times, yes. In fact, I haven’t just gotten tired of it, I’ve despaired of it. Enough to contemplate joining the lemmings that are hurling themselves off into the abyss of overseas work. Some years ago I even thought of working in a newspaper in Jeddah, imagining the bane of others, which is isolation, to be my boon. I thought I could always use time as vast as the desert, which has buried the soul of many an OFW in the sands of boredom, to write a novel with. Alas, or thankfully, a friend of mine (who is here right now, actually, Sammy Santos) disabused me of the thought, telling me that while working there he found himself at one point talking to his computer as though it were his girlfriend. That thoroughly cured me of my temporary insanity.

Each time I am tempted to leave the country out of despair to live elsewhere in search of hope, I remember what Winston Churchill said about democracy: It’s a horrible system, except that all the others are so much worse. I guess it’s the same thing for me living in and leaving this country. Living in this country is horrible. Except that living elsewhere is so much worse.

Quite apart from that, I take comfort in the thought that the better writers of this world have themselves been filled with anguish and despair at the seeming futility of their words. The great W. H. Auden for one in a moment of bitterness, arraigned himself thus: “No poem of mine saved a Jew from the gas-chamber.” If someone can say that about a poem, which is not really meant to meddle in the course of secular affairs, then one can say that about columns which exist for that very purpose. It’s enough to make me expostulate every now and then: “No column of mine ever saved a Jonas from oblivion.”

In fact, in these days of diminished expectations and augmented consternations, it’s enough to make me say now and then: I can only hope that a column or two of mine saves me from the monstrous malefactions of the merchants of mayhem.

Thankfully, Auden’s remark itself spawned a host of detractors who rightly pointed out that it wasn’t true at all that his poems haven’t saved a single Jew from the gas-chamber. They have probably saved many, if only by the doubt or hesitation they filled the heart and mind of those who pulled the lever in other chambers. In any case, the effect of words on life has never been direct. It has always been indirect. Words have a tempering effect on minds and hearts, giving people to see life not as a necessity but as a choice. Of course it is one thing to be presented by a choice and to pick the right one. Or it is one thing to know what to do and quite another to do it. I should know. I know I shouldn’t drink because it will unleash the demons of gout upon me. But it’s everything I can do, particularly on occasions like this, not to.

I do not know if any of my columns has saved a single kid from Palparan’s or Esperon’s clutches or claws. But I take comfort in the thought that maybe they fill the mind or heart of the executioner with a moment of doubt and hesitation enough to not let them pull the trigger or slide the knife across the throat. I do know the sum of my columns has not stopped this country from sliding full circle down the circles of hell, but I take strength in the belief that words do not really affect the laws of the physical universe like magical incantations, they affect the way we act and move like the woeful wails the cotton pickers chanted in unison or the heaves of slave rowers also cried out in unison.

Like God, the Word, written or verbal, works in mysterious ways. Like the Greek Oracle, the word, in the beginning or made flesh, offers intriguing truths.

There are a couple of speeches in this book that make what I’m saying a little clearer. They are truths that certainly helped me go on in those times when I cursed heaven from the gout, when I cursed the landlord from the rent, and when I wonder what in God’s name I’m doing, doing what I do when it doesn’t seem to matter.

The first is the speech about Anne Frank and the power—and transcendence—of witnessing.

There are several ways you can fight tyranny. You can take up arms against it, as the Polish resistance did, and push it back with the power of physical force. You can speak out against it, as Mark Twain did when the US embarked on its imperial venture, and push it back with the power of moral force. Or you can bear witness to your times, if only by talking about the fury of young love and dreams amid the swirl of war and intolerance around you, and by doing so push back tyranny with the power of the word.

Anne Frank did the last. She did not, of course, survive Nazi-occupied Holland. She and her family were discovered in their hiding place and sent to separate concentration camps, where she herself died of lupus not long afterward. But Anne Frank’s diary, the scribbling of a young, innocent and hugely talented girl full of life’s longings has become one of history’s greatest single acts of defiance against insanity—a true beacon of light in a wind-swept sea. More than the deaths of six million Jews who became unholy experiments in how fast human beings can be exterminated, the life of this one teenager has become the most powerful testament to the obscenity of the Holocaust, and living proof—yes, living—of how long the human spirit can survive.

The patent lesson I draw from this is that truly victory and defeat are not always patent. It is perfectly possible to be defeated at the moment of one’s triumph, as I have seen among friends who have been maimed in spirit at the time of their seeming progress, and it is also perfectly possible to be victorious in defeat as I’ve also seen in many friends who have found in their adversity, including prison, a bountiful source of joy and reward. In the end, history will have different things to say about who won and who lost.

But there’s one other, infinitely more subtle lesson I draw from this. Which is that victory and defeat are not just determined at the end of things. They are determined in the middle of things. Or they are not just found in the nether regions of posterity, they are found in the hard-edged space of the moment.

The power of Anne Frank’s diary, whether read or watched in play or movie form, is the wonder and magic of her life and that of her family in that small space of time between their taking to hiding and being found out, in that small space between the wall panels of a warehouse in Amsterdam. Suddenly that crack of time expands to encompass eternity; suddenly that crack of space expands to encompass the universe. Suddenly that life quite literally takes a life of its own, transcending the borders of the before and after, transcending the borders of the within and the without.

That holds a special meaning for me coming as I do from an activist background where I learned to believe for a while that things mattered only in the end. Victory was had only after a tyranny was brought down, a new life began only after the new world was built. Well, if Anne Frank's life has anything to say to me now, it is that that isn't true at all. The human worth is not found at the end of a life, it is found in the course of it. Victory and defeat are not found at the end of struggle, they are found in the course of the struggle itself.

You want an image for that, take The Last Samurai where Katsumoto asks Nathan Aldren what happened to the 300 Spartans who fought the Persian hordes. Aldren replies: “They all died.” Katsumoto smiles and leads the charge against the enemy hordes. I think of that, and somehow it doesn't seem so bad that this country has gone to the dogs in the 20 years that I have been writing "There's the Rub."

The other speech in this book that I draw comfort from has to do with reading, in which connection I recall that wonderful book and movie, "Goodbye Mr. Chips." Mr. Chips is a teacher of classical literature in an Oxford school. When he begins teaching, which is before the First World War, the world is still kinder and more hospitable to the things he teaches, which represent the crowning glories of civilization. But his relevance gets to be challenged as time goes by.

The war comes, his students are drafted, and several die in lonely ditches in strange parts of the world. He himself despairs and wonders what the point of civilization is in a world where the barbarians have broken through the gates. The war ends, but his relevance isn't challenged less, it is challenged more. He now teaches classical literature in a world grown materialistic and utilitarian, one that defines getting ahead as getting going, getting rich, and getting laid.
Still Mr. Chips perseveres, trying as best he can to light the way for future generations with the wisdom of the past. And finally, in the evening of his life, he is forced to take the measure of himself, to ask himself what it all meant. Did his life really amount to anything? Did the things he teach really matter? Was the effort he exerted really worth it? He himself finds the answer to his questions while talking to an old friend. He says thoughtfully: "We did teach them to be more polite to each other, didn't we?"

A commonplace way to say the profoundest thing. A simple way to say the most awesome thing. For maybe that is what civilization is after all. If the generations that had come before had simply learned it, and if the generations that would come after would simply learn it, then maybe there would be no wars, then maybe there would be no “salvagings,” then maybe there would be no rotating full circle through the circles of hell.

That is how I console myself these days, when the bones creak, and the roof leaks, and the world reeks of rain and ruination. I tell myself: "I have tried to teach them to be more polite to each other.

"Haven't I?"

Thank you and good night.