I will be using the Bikol image of tawong lipod as a personification of my poetics, especially when I deal with the themes of eros or desire. For this sharing, I will be using the terms eros and desire interchangeably without, of course, discounting the risk of the conceptual errors which the academicians might hurl against me.
For my purpose, hence, I will use the term eros as that amorphous power that makes us desire desire itself. Being amorphous, first, I see desire as that drive in us that lurks in what is unseen; in that which is intangible that its exposure is its own betrayal. I describe eros as amorphous in another sense, too. It is a clear calling or demand in itself yet also a blurd, hazy, (in the sense of malibog) power. These two senses of desire are what I experience as poet who grapples with my own eros, or with my partner’s eros and who takes the poetic process itself as a process of the epiphany and the completion of desire as such.
In line with this, to write poetry, on my own point of view, is to lay down naked in the world of imagery, ready for submission and even subordination to that body which I truly desire as a writer: language. And I, its beholden and chosen partner, shall piece by piece unfold its body, a body that only visits me in the darkness of my thoughts. It is to wait for the arrival of him whom I love and desire, and therefore, I always want to keep by my side, yet I cannot induce to arrive at my own time. As Roland Barthes says, “Am I in love?—Yes, since I am waiting.’ The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.” (Lover’s Discourse)
As I am the one at the waiting side, I am at the mercy of that which I desire: language. If this is the case, I see poetry as a donation of language, itself en-fleshing through my tongue. It is an endowment sustained by faithful desiring for that amorphous object of desire, so formless at the beginning that I stammer to name it; I stammer to give a form to that which is slowly taking shape at the tip of my tongue. In this event of donation, my body becomes a tongue, a becoming-pentecost, celebrating the arrival of that long-delayed metaphor. Poetry is eros made flesh.
But, how does the desire for desire arrive? Or does it arrive in the first place or is it something that I already have, something that is at my own disposal? I believe that desire arrives. It is not at my own disposal, it even catches me off guard most of the time. It is a phantom that awakens me to that which my body truly remembers. “Haloy na panahon na pinagsuruhay/ an kalag sa hawak/ an hawak sa laman/ an langit sa siram/ an banal sa makasalan.// Alagad siisay/ an nakapagpapasararo giraray/ kun bako an sakuyang hawak/ na minahinghing/ sa sako kun hain daa/ an hinahanap/ kong kaogmahan.//” (Long was the time of divisions/ the soul from the body/ the body from flesh/ the heaven from pleasure/ the sacred from profane.// But who/ unites these all again/ if not my body/ whispering/ where can I find/ my glory.) (From Ini an Sakuyang Hawak)
Now, to the how of its arrival. Its arrival, I believe, is has great similarity with the manifestation of the Tawong Lipod. The tawong lipod, literally, an invisible human being, and in its invisibility, it is an amorphous being. If indeed, in the beginning there was darkness, the tawong lipod are the primordial beings of such an originary world. As beings of darkness, their amorphous form are their non-beingness. They are nothing to the eyes of those who are children of the light; yet they are what they are to those who are enthralled in the primordiality of darkness. In my poem, Mga Tawong Lipod, these beings proclaim who they are: Ipinangidam kita sa kadikloman, sa kasuripotan nin kadikloman! Ibinados kan an bulan hinalon kan yawa, ipingaki na kaulmong an dampog na panganuron. (We are conceived in darkness, in the graciousness of darkness! Conceived when the dragon swallowed the moon, born sheltered by the rain clouds.)
The tawong lipod’s formlessness, however, is not equal to powerlessness. They have the power to manifest themselves, even overpowering the children of the light. They remain unseen but they make themselves felt by their objects of revenge whom they punish by afflicting them with sickness and even death; their objects of haunting whom they never permit to sleep nor rest nor eat; and their object of love whom they transport to their world and who become oblivious of the human time and space, perhaps experiencing eternity in the world of tawong lipod.
The event of the coming of the tawong lipod is the event of the unfolding of desire. It sings its power, it recites its spell, it dances its formlessness to whoever it has chosen to the cite of epiphany as in the story of the manifestation of Eros to Psyche: “while she dined, sweet music breathed around her: a great choir seemed to sing to a harp, but she could only hear, not see, them. Throughout the day, except for strange companionship of the voices, she was alone, but in some inexplicable way she felt sure that with the coming of the night her husband would be with her.” Under the power of desire, the lover and the beloved become orphans being taken care of by the assuring darkness.
Eros as Bikol’s tawong lipod does not seek light. It lurks in that invisibility and it is its very own being. Light is its betrayal; its being bared into the open is its exorcism, perhaps, its very death. While for the Greeks Eros just departed when Psyche lit the lamp and later Psyche still wins his love, tawong lipod departs, but remains in that amophousness. Tawong lipod remains to be the desire that whispers into my body, now becoming-ears, bidding me to touch myself for he is ready to commune with me, to overpower me by dispelling the light which has taught me I am more than my body. And I submit. And darkness has not failed me again and this much I know, when I submit, I have not betrayed desire.
What then, for me, makes an erotic poetry? It is when it is open to darkness which is not only an absence of light but that primordial experience of darkness; when its ritual is the dance of the amorphous, ever becoming—. An erotic poetry is the dwelling in that audible groan of bodies remembering its geographies of desire; it is a hiding that is not a surrendering from that which needs to be kept as sacred secret; it is to let the tawong lipod come and be glorious in my body which becomes the tongue of the coming language without exorcising it with the promised salvation of light.
(photo credit: http://www.astramate.com/astrolog.htm)
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