Not God

by Raymund L. Fernandez

Kinutil, CDN / 24 september 2014

A bit of a funny conversation with his kids: "You know everything! Are you God?"

He suspected sarcasm at first. But no, it was said in earnest. A child's innocent gratitude for a matter-of-fact answer for what seemed to the child an impossibly difficult question.

No, he does not know everything. No. He is not God. But he likes the Buddhists who think we have a bit of God inside us. It would be a little child-God waiting to grow up. The Christians too have an idea similar to this. The fact of the soul and how it persists till forever.

"How old are you?" The daughter asks. 

"You were there when Jimi Hendrix was still alive? You must be very old." 

"Yes, I loved Jimi Hendrix and also Jim Morrison, Roger Daltry, Jimmy Page…"

"Wow! And I thought we were just the same age. Like, we were best buds!" the daughter exclaims.

What can a father say to that? "Yes. I am very old. And God willing, I will die ahead of you. Better get used to that idea. Make sure you will still keep playing your piano and still do your art and music, or whatever, after I am gone. Think you can do that?"

The child cannot, of course, give a guarantee. She has been silenced by the thought. The father presumes she has taken time out to converse with the little child-God inside her. Her silence is infectious. He also spends the next silence conversing with his own little child-God.

He thinks to himself: No, I am not God. No, I do not know everything. I do not know what happens from here on. I cannot even be sure when I sleep at night if I will wake up tomorrow. Indeed, I know very little. Not even, how you will read this, if you will read this at all. And what will the little child-God inside you think of all this? 

 There is an inescapable construct in the act of reading and writing. The writer seems like God but only inside his words. And only because he has written the words we are reading. By the act of reading him, we surrender some form of autonomy. We become subject to what he is writing but only to the extent required so we might deduce the meanings from his words. But the reading is never ever universal. Words are always an imperfect cue.There is a certain uniqueness in how we personally interpret the words, the way we picture the writer as we read him in our minds.

Do we picture the writer now as his picture on the heading of this column? We would be misguided. That was him, fifteen or so years ago. He is much older now. He still has long hair and a bit of a stubble threatening to be a beard at odd times. Once he was accused by an engineer of looking like a hermit for his long hair. A hermit would seem at least closer to being God than an engineer. But this is only his own bias.

As he told his kids, he is not God. But his only proof is that he does not know everything. He just gets lucky at times. Indeed, he would rather think, he does not know anything for sure. If he did, he might start wondering. He does not feel discomfort from this, the fact he is not God.  He finds this fact quite reassuring, given the condition of the world today. If he were God, the buck would stop with him. 

He is not God. He is happy for that. And still, he feels the need to correct whatever misconception his children might have where this fact is concerned. If it seems as if he is God sometimes, it is not entirely his fault. It is only the fact of writing. That, and being father.

###      

Losing Freedom

by Raymund L. Fernandez

Kinutil, CDN / 21 September 2014

He remembers this day exactly. In 1972, it began as any other. He was a young teenager at Leon Kilat street, near Lane Theater, buying parts to repair his Jeep when a jeepney made the rounds of the downtown area, a public address system on its roof. It blared over and over again the voice of Francisco "Kit" Tatad reading the full text of Ferdinand Marcos' proclamation 1081 declaring martial law all over the country.

"NOW, THEREFORE, I, FERDINAND E. MARCOS, President of the Philippines, by virtue of the powers vested upon me by Article VII, Section 10, Paragraph (2) of the Constitution, do hereby place the entire Philippines as defined in Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution under martial law and, in my capacity as their commander-in-chief, do hereby command the armed forces of the Philippines, to maintain law and order throughout the Philippines, prevent or suppress all forms of lawless violence as well as any act of insurrection or rebellion and to enforce obedience to all the laws and decrees, orders and regulations promulgated by me personally or upon my direction…."

The words were read rather mechanically. No clue there, that all over the country, Marcos' perceived enemies were being rounded up or invited into government internment facilities. He would not know of these until weeks later when rumors began filtering in. The papers printed only news the regime wanted the public to hear. 

But on this first day of martial law, his initial reaction to the declaration was the typical  Cebuano's complete obliviousness to Manila, the national capital. Cebu, in Marcos' time, was beyond the edge of the margins. It was opposition country. And so the typical Cebuano hardly took anything political too seriously. Manila was far away. Its "natives" were generally oblivious of them. For Cebuanos, the feeling was completely mutual. They presumed life would go on as it always did. And so it did at first.

Indeed, it seemed almost to get better. If by better, one means, the garbage would finally be collected with greater regularity, so to speak. There was less criminality in the streets. A curfew was declared. For most parents of young teenage kids, this must have been all for the better. Which must have been why most people supported martial law initially. Or if they opposed it then they did so silently.

Silence is, of course, all that is needed for certain profound myths to grow and acquire a life of their own. All the more easy for them to become monumental lasting decades thereafter. The main myth was that all we really needed to do was behave ourselves and then the country would get better. "Sa ikauunlad ng bayan disciplina ang kailangan." Leave everything to the Marcoses and their henchmen.

But as all myths go, the truth lies always in the blank spaces, the things hidden from sight, or left unsaid. They haunt the innermost corridors of what people believe in, especially where they believe because it serves them well to believe. The more astute among them might later recall an old tale they read in the grade school, something about the emperor's new clothes. Everyone praised the emperor for the grandness of his new robe even if they plainly saw how the emperor was naked in front of them. And still, they cheered him on. In the end, they would all see how you can keep up an obvious pretense for years on end, for over a decade, even.

There would be other lessons to learn from all these, how cheap freedom is for those who do not need it for themselves, choosing rather to go about their lives just looking after their own personal betterment. People are so easily bought and most of the time for nothing more than what they should have gotten anyway in the natural course of things. 

The loss of freedom divides. Some lost their freedom. They languished in jail, or hid in the underground networks, or were tortured and killed away from the public view. And yet, there were also others who gained more than they lost. It would be fun to remember those years by way of an economic audit of people's fortunes. How much was actually gained and by whom? But in the end, we would only find out how life is, for some, only a throw of the dice, a seasonal turning of the fates. All the more so, when we use mere fortune as the measure of how much a person is worth.

Freedom is an odd thing. Unless a person loves it, he or she would not know what it really is; and so by that knowing could actually mourn its loss. For others, this day was and will always be, just business as usual.

###  

The Philosophies

by Raymund L. Fernandez

Kinutil, CDN / 

Filipinos need to clarify their understanding both of Western and local artistic history. We have a problem acquiring a whole big picture of both histories. The problem has to do with the fact of distance. 

When Westerners read history they are reading their own story over time. Not much distance divide them from its concrete manifestations. The museums, the old buildings, the architecture are close by. And so too the general Western mindset as well as the observable cultural "ways". For the native Westerner, they are a fact of growing up.

We, on the other hand, have to observe this culture from a distance and through vicarious means such as media and books. This method of viewing is inherently faulty. Consider for instance that looking at an original Van Gogh painting in a museum is by no means equal to the experience of looking at the same painting from a book or screen. The two experiences are profoundly different. 

This tells us that the act of reading history from the details, so to speak, is not quite effective unless one has the general picture of it. And yet, the standard educational practice is to teach history "chapter by chapter". At no point, in the teaching of history is the "position" of the student clearly defined. In most instances, the student is left with no better option than to memorize the details of history just to pass the course. Clearly, the study of history is pointless unless the student makes sense of it.

Where art history is concerned it is better for us to identify the general "philosophical" transitions as a prelude to studying the periods and movements which represent the transitions of history. The periods and movements are many and finely detailed. To try to acquire all of it to a high level of mastery is pointless unless one identifies this to be one's specialized field. The philosophies on the other hand can be apprehended and tested from our own personal life experiences. 

For most artists, it is better simply to divide history into its general transitions in the sense of philosophy. In Western art history, the classical philosophies are pertinent from the periods of the ancient civilizations all the way to the late 1800s when Modernism began. Modernism was the major philosophical background for the Modernist art movements operating until the late 1960s. After this, the fact of mass communication and new technology would change the world to the extent that we see now. This period is called the period of post-modernism. 

There is some argument as to the whether we should use the term "post-modern" or not. There was a certain intellectual and academic "pretentiousness" which accompanied the usage of this word in the West. We, Filipinos, should not abide by this discomfiture with the word. If we do not use it, we cannot understand it fully. All the more impossible for us to define it for ourselves and our own culture.

Thus, the philosophical transitions of history are Classical, Modern, Post-Modern, until the Present. The first three are established philosophies in history. They are not too difficult to understand. They can be summarized and Kinutil will certainly try to do this by the next essay which comes out on Sunday. 

The "Present" on the other hand is, for now, indeterminate especially because it is in flux and so therefore argued about. Most traditional history books begin from the earliest remembered past. But one must wonder if this is the best way to go about understanding history. We are better off to start from the confusion of the present and then work our way backwards into the philosophical and historical clarity of the past. All the better for us to define first and foremost our own position or where we are coming from, as we establish for ourselves a clearer "sense" of our own past.

The study of history should clarify rather than muddle our understanding of the world we live in. We should have a palpable indicator for whether these essays have helped us. These should, at the very least, lead us to losing our fear of talking about art. A better understanding of art can only lead us to see that all that a person really needs to know about art can be learned from the simple and common understanding of life itself. What the books tell us is all very well, but really only secondary.

###    

Imperfect Story

7 September 2014
Kinutil, CDN

by Raymund L. Fenandez

for Kinutil CDN, published September 7, 2014

Two men are talking by a sidewalk. One puts thumb and index finger to his nostrils grasping an indeterminate number of nose hair. He gives it a vigorous and deliberate pull. The outcome of this act is painful. He winces, a small tear forming from his right eye. His companion laughs. Then both look closer counting the number of hair the fingers hold. Not for an instance do they break their collective mirth. They talk only after they regain their composure. There was a lesson to be learned here. One hair pulled from the nose will hardly be painful. Two is only slightly so. Three is probably near the threshold of impunity. But six?

The most pragmatic among us would have this for an analogy of why we should study history. Something about not repeating it. Or lessons of value, such as that you should rather use a pair of scissors to tame the length of nose hair. But somehow this rationale seems insufficient.

The better reason is really the fact of history being interesting. Indeed, being such a wonderful story to read through, to picture, to imagine, and to countenance. Here, the stuff from which some of the best tales may be drawn and told. And when this concerns the history of ourselves, then it is all the more all these. For this is a story we truly own. And we may tell it every which way we like.

It is true that Cebuano art history contains many blank spaces, many missing parts that must be filled up in the future. But we know where these blank spaces are. We can tell what and where they are because it is possible for us now to form the big picture of it. And if we know this big picture then it is possible for us to make permutations for what the blank spaces will most likely contain.

We know there are remaining objects of Philippine expressive culture from the pre-16th century. Some of these objects are of stone, bamboo, wood, fabric, terra-cotta and metal, including gold. We know we have to do away with the concept "art" to fully appreciate these artifacts. The term "expressive culture" is much more useful. There would be a whole transition of these objects of "expressive culture" that we can account for at a future time. The problem entails only to identify them with classifications and dates and notes of provenance. It would be a difficult task but not at all impossible. These artifacts would only lead us eventually to the objects which are easily accessible to us now.

We can make an educated conjecture of what these objects might be. We know how the period of colonization came hand in hand with Christianization. We know how members of the Katipunan subverted the tenets of the religion to serve their revolution at the end of the 1800s. We still have examples of the magical vestments Pantaleon "Leon Kilat" Villegas used to armor his troops against the superior arms of the Spanish. We know the story of how the revolution played out.

And yet, by the beginning of the 1900s Catholicism will still be the dominant force in the Philippine cultural life. The ceiling paintings of Raymundo "Rey" Francia, Canuto Avila and others tell us that even in the 1920s the Catholic church would still be the main patron for the production of Western-derived art in these islands. Only after the 1920s would secular art become more popular.

This period would be marked by the rise of a more affluent middle class. These would sponsor the production of other art. Photography would slowly become more popular as technology that could record and represent the story of a rising middle class. Photographs would also become a means for producing painted portraits such as would continue to be done by local artists after World War II. Of these, the most prominent in the post-war years was Martino Abellana. His style of modernist naturalism would become dominant for artists following after him, this style lasting even to this day.

Thus, we can make the educated conclusion that the art of the late Martino Abellana and his contemporaries rode on the crest of the rise of Modernism in Cebu. Generations after them would bring this modernism up to the present day when can be seen the first glimmers of a post-colonial manner of thinking and art production.

This is the story of our art. And it is of course an incomplete story unless we filled in its blank spaces with more names of artists and the pictures of their works. Every artist's name is a story in itself. So too, each of his or her works. Taken together, these would form for us the structure of a plot that would tell for us the story of where we have been and who we now truly are. It would be a lovely story even in its imperfection.
###

Cebuano Painting

by Raymund L. Fernandez

for Kinutil CDN / 31 August 2014

Many years ago, he did a research project for the University of the Philippines to photographically document the church-ceiling paintings on some churches in the islands of Bohol and Cebu. Most of these were done by Raymundo "Rey" Francia and Canuto Avila.

Of these churches the most beautiful were the churches in Tubigon and Sibonga, both with ceilings done by Francia. The former was destroyed in the most recent Bohol earthquake. The Tubigon ceiling paintings would probably still be there pressed somewhat under the fallen roof. He can only conjecture the state of it now. And then pray they will not be destroyed in the course of restoring the church structure. 

In the course of that research he found that the greatest  problem in accounting for the history of Cebuano painting is the lack of much of the archival material. Even while they were doing this research they found ceiling paintings being destroyed in the course of repairing and renovating churches. They came only days too late to document the ceiling paintings at Barili Town. When they got there, part of the ceiling paintings especially of the four Evangelists placed originally at the nave of the church lay in a scrap heap under the acacia outside the church.

He wished so much to load them into his car if only to preserve them but ethics got the better of him. It would have been stealing. There is, of course, the problem of seasonal typhoons and earthquakes, which are the other reasons why these paintings get destroyed. But beyond that, there is the general lack of understanding of the value of these works. This has something to do with our expectations for what these works should be and how they should look like.

Compared to the works of Michelangelo these paintings would perhaps seem to appear primitive. But this is only because of our modernist Western bias. They are beautiful. But one would have to understand a bit of history to understand this. The figures have a look about them which would seem strange even distorted to our contemporary eyes. One would have to understand that these paintings reflected exactly how the artists viewed their world inside the context of the religiosity current in their time. They were beautiful to their eyes. Because of this they are true historical testaments. 

The learned onlooker tries to come to an understanding of their beauty instead of passing their own subjective judgements. And then he or she would see how the paintings reflect so well an earlier world quite different from what we see now. The learned person knows this is the true way to see history.

The church at Sibonga is still there. It sits right across the plaza complex only a few hundred meters away from the beach. The church ceiling paintings are signed by Rey Francia and is dated 1927. This date seems not too old. But if one wanted to trace the history of Cebuano painting backwards from where we are now, it is a good enough age. 

Before Avila and Francia, there would have been generations of painters whose works still have to be searched for. Avila and Francia distinguish themselves for having the most accessible and accountable body of works. After them there would come a generation of Cebuano painters who formally studied painting in Manila and bring back to Cebu the Manila "academic" style. This generation includes Martino Abellana, Julian Jumalon, Carmelo Tamayo, among others. They have contemporaries who did not earn their degrees in Manila and who like Francia and Avila were largely self taught. After this generation, at least three more, leading to the young artists we see today. 

What does this mean for us in the present day? Clearly, we have material available now for writing our artistic history at least over the last one hundred years. The story of Cebuano art ought to be written soon if only to provide the impetus to preserve what material are still left. It should be written because it can. Not too many places in our country can claim this for itself.

###

Rain, Thursday

by Raymund L. Fernandez

for Kinutil CDN / 31 August 2014

Its been a long time since he stopped asking who Kathy is. He remembers the song.. Paul Simon starts it this way: 

I hear the drizzle of the rain,

This was no drizzle. It was a downpour catching them in the mid-life of afternoon traffic along Escario Boulevard. It poured large drops, making a mist in the distance. It poured with a roar drowning all other sound. They were on a motor bike, their experience, transformed completely. The mundane suddenly becomes adventure. Many years have passed since he got rained on this way. A short trip from Carcar, his friend Javy, his back rider. Now it was his daughter, Linya, as the song continues: 

Like a memory it falls, 

Soft and warm continuing, 

Tapping on my roof and walls.

In this instance, the rain tapped on his helmet and his eyeglasses. There is a trick for rain getting on your glasses. You never touch them or wipe them with your fingers. This only makes it worse. Leave them alone. The wind blows them away. Speed up. You will have no problem seeing your way through. 

From the shelter of my mind, 

Through the window of my eyes, 

I gaze beyond the rain drenched streets, 

To England where my heart lies. 

He does not understand why part of his heart still lies in UP even after 30 years of teaching there, but it does. The office called. Documents needed to be signed. And though it seemed the rain would come sooner than later, his daughter urged him to go anyway. And so they came. and by the time they got here, they were drenched to their underwear's. They were wet in the most abject sense, dripping their way through the hallways and up into the office.

Paul Simon continues his song with a declaration of his love for Kathy whom we do not know, with whom his thoughts lie as on a warm dry bed on a cold rainy afternoon. And Kathy there, sleeping, dreaming of rain. To ride a bike inside a downpour is to enter into her dream. There is more than a hint of danger. On that trip with Javy, he could feel his tire slip tenuously on the asphalt road polished by years of suburban traffic and greased by a patina of clay left there by truck tires. 

When both wheels make as if to slip on the ground this way, he cannot stop by using his brakes. As soon as his tires lose traction, he knows he will fall suddenly and without warning. He can only downshift. The trick is to drive slow. Which is not such a bummer since the faster he goes, the colder it gets. It can get so cold, he might begin physically to shiver. And yet, he dreams to get there quickly, get to where he is going, get home.

Rain, Thursday, brought on a flood, turning the roads into rushing creeks and rivers. And when the traffic stopped them on the road, they had to put their feet into the water and pray the rain would not kill their engine. 

There is an instrumental interlude at this point in Kathy's Song. The guitar sings the lyrics. But he imagines his daughter improvising her part on the piano. She does not worry about traffic and being safe. She will have fun, loving the rain as rain should be loved. On her face, a big smile. She tastes the rain in her mouth, feels its cold caress, her clothes sticking to her body as if they were not there. The rain flushed into the gutters: 

And as i watch the drops of rain,

Lead their weary paths to die,

I know, that I am like the rain,

There, but for the grace of you, 

Go I.

###

The Roots of Our Art

by Raymund L. Fernandez

for Kinutil CDN / 27 November 2014

Using the diagrammatic representation of a tree, how would we correctly represent Philippine art history? Would it be grafted to the trunk of the Western art history tree, growing out like a branch from the European High Renaissance? Or do we have a tree of our own with roots that reach back longer than we can remember?

It is true we can trace our history all the way to our own stone age. We have many examples of Philippine stone age artifacts. The book "Barangay: Sixteenth Century Philippine Culture and Society" by William Henry Scott gives us a good view of how we were before the Spanish came. Cebu even then was an active trading center with a long tradition of commerce with foreigners. 

And while we did not have an exact single word for "art", as we still don't, we forged metal for tools that we used for farming and carving wood. We built excellent boats, carved our own deities, wove cloth, inlaid gold into our teeth, and otherwise had our bodies tattooed to advertise our proudest feats. In other words, but for the absence of the word itself, we had a healthy living "art" culture. 

Magellan's chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, drew a list of Bisayan words from his travels here. One discovers from this list how most of the words survive to this day. Which must be interpreted to show how the culture itself has survived through the colonial experience. 

But still, one must worry if we have not become irrevocably Westernized. The first question that immediately comes to mind is why "kinutil" itself is written using one of the languages of the colonizers. A note might be made here how both colonial languages, Spanish and English, are derived from the Latin of the Romans. The answer can only be this: Eventually, in a more enlightened time, these words, will be translated into Bisaya and will thus be enjoyed by more of our people to their greater pleasure. But for now, they have to be written in the language that works quickest for these times; for better or worse, English. But certainly the story itself would gain much from being written in Bisaya. And then we could read this as final proof of how our culture will survive well into the future.  

And it would be easier for us to understand that the tree of Philippine art has a root system dating back to precolonial times. This root system represent the island cultures each with their own strain of the local languages. That these languages are still spoken tells us how much of our pre-colonial past has been conserved. That we can speak English well only tells us how well we are adapted to the requirements of a more global post-colonial time.

Since the 16th century, the line of our history became a single trunk of Philippine history. The story of how this came about is described well by the history books we read in school. These narrate how we lived for 400 years under Spain. This period ended with the Katipunan revolt in the late 1800s, precisely around the same time that Modernism came to Europe.

But it was in the 16th century when the Western conception meaning "art" began to percolate inside the local culture translating itself into the production of religious icons which the Spanish themselves found useful. The production of religious art describe the first stages of local colonial art history. Some of the best and earliest examples of visual arts from these times come from Bohol in the form of religious paintings on wood panels. There is a charming primitivism about the works which best defines their beauty.

But even so, we must understand these "Western-derived arts" with a note that the early stages of colonization did not end indigenous art practice. The Philippine crafts of metal working, weaving, terra cotta, jewelry making, etc. continued on into the present day. There might have been periods when there were temporary interruptions and transformations resulting especially from the introduction of new technologies, machineries and material. But all considered there is a clear continuity in the history of these artistic practices. 

This fact moves us to consider if we must disabuse ourselves of the notion that the crafts are inferior to art. This bias is only colonial thinking that we must now carefully qualify in our minds if we are ever going to develop for ourselves a viable post-colonial manner of thinking. And then perhaps we would realize how we are not entirely the consequence of colonizing cultures. Our sense of what is of value and what is beautiful is uniquely our own and it has grown with us since time immemorial. 

###