How "sincere" is a private notebook? how "true" is a confession? how "historical" is a memory?

Filipino playwright and director Anton Juan was in town a couple of weeks ago. Currently a tenured professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, he spent a weekend in Oakland, visiting our friends Manny and Dang Canteras. The internationally renowned artist (knighted twice in France, conferred a presidential honor in Greece, elevated to the Hall of Fame in the Philippines) wowed us with his pancetta carbonara. He talked about the tough decisions involved in moving to America, as well as scheduled trips back home to pursue ongoing projects in the islands. He deplored the Philippine government's neglect of local artists, the pitiful circumstances his contemporaries had to deal with. We talked about giving or not giving up rights to have our award-winning works made available online. He offered thoughts on a story I'm working on about a town mayor, a town idiot, and a filmmaker. He suggested I write a play about it and center on the conflicting voices of storytellers and the elusiveness of truth. I took his photos:



Last month, I read a volume of Coleridge' transcendent biography, authored by Holmes. Below are some of the passages that struck me:

How "sincere" is a private Notebook? how "true" is a confession? how "historical" is a memory? One thing is certain: Coleridge dramatised himself in his most solitary moments (as we all, on reflection, do); and his Notebooks can never be accepted as the last word on anything (least of all as the last word from Coleridge). Coleridge was a man who could confess spiritual despair at midday; and dine out brilliantly at midnight.

During this period Coleridge must have been producing something like fifty lines of blank verse a day, and a tremendous sense of liberation came over him. From the mundane problems of "bread and cheese", his eyes lifted to the hills of the Quantocks and his imagination soared towards immortal works. It was at this time that he produced a celebrated description of how a modern Epic poem should be produced, with massive preparatory labours worth of some intellectual Hercules. The subject had perhaps arisen in conversation with Wordsworth. There is a perceptible undertone of self-parody so characteristic of Coleridge, since it was a definition given to his publisher Cottle who had been waiting so patiently, week after week, for the poet to finish his proof corrections.

Observe the march of Milton - his severe application, his laborious polish, his deep metaphysical researches, his prayers to God before he began his great poem, all that could lift and swell his intellect, became his daily food. I should not think of devoting less than 20 years to an Epic Poem. Ten to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Mettalurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine -- then the mind of man -- then the minds of men in all Travels, Voyages and Histories. So I would spend ten years -- the next five to the composition of the poem -- and the five last to the correction of it. So I would write not unhappily hearing of that divine and rightly-whispering Voice, which speaks to mighty minds of predestined Garlands, starry and unwithering. - Coleridge

In the sudden release of unconscious images, which Coleridge credited to his opium "reverie", the poet becomes both the controlling magus of this power, and also perhaps its sacrificial victim.

The haunting almost proverbial, Romantic folk-myth which the poem seems to embody, takes much of its memorable force from the uncertainty about the poet's own fate. Does the power finally anoint him as an emperor of the Imagination, or destroy him as its slave and sacrifice?

What Wordsworth could not have known was how long Coleridge had been unconsciouly gathering the incidents and images for the poem in his own life, from earliest childhood. The ballads heard in his nurse's arms; the sea-bird shot by Philip Quarll; the moving sun and moon on the Ottery church clock; the "grinning" thirst experienced on his Welsh undergraduate tour; the hallucination of the dragoon in the Henley Pest House and the seizures at Bristol; the idea of the spiritual sea-voyage in his cottage at Stowey; and even the lawys of hospitality protecting the little mice: all found their place magically in the ballad. No one could have given him those.



As a biographer I have tried to show how deeply and instinctively the image of the lonely sea-voyage runs through all Coleridge's thought, which is curious when one considers that his only maritime experience up to 1798 was his crossing on the Chepstow ferry... The whole idea of a writer's life as perilous, solitary, oceanic expedition passes powerfully into nineteenth-century poetry -- in Shelley, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, for example. It still affects our responses to such modern works as the novels of William Golding, the accounts of solo circumnavigations by Sir Francis Chichester (and many others) and such a maverick, masterpiece as The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, by Nicholas Tomalin, 1970. As a Romantic legend -- for that is what it has become -- the Ancient Mariner would make a superb opera, or even a modern ballet, as Michael Bogdanov's stage-experiments have shown.

Hazzlit seemed to associate Coleridge with many of the political and emotional disappointments he had experienced in his own adult life, and he attacked the older man with a personal vindictiveness that suggests he was unconsciously attacking something in himself. This gives all his writing on Coleridge -- but most notably in The Spirit of the Age (1825) - a brilliant surface of satire, with a deep undernote of passionate elegy. It is a tone that a biographer might aspire to.

Regarding Sid

The last email I received from Sid Gomez Hildawa was dated December 25, 2007, his birthday. “Dear Willi,” he wrote, “I’m here in Israel for my 45th birthday. I’m including your intentions when I visit Bethlehem this Christmas day…” Sid, a Filipino architect and a prizewinning artist and poet, was in the Middle East to help install “Open Doors”, the first Philippine monument in Israel. The installation commemorates the Filipinos’ hospitality and courage when the islands made available ten thousand visas to Jewish refugees fleeing Europe during the Holocaust. Made of metal and Philippine marble, it features footprints of some of the refugees.

(Above, Sid in the middle, in Israel)

And so it came as a shock when a friend emailed me today that Sid passed away last night. Like everybody else, I kept hoping that it was just some horrible April Fools joke. But it was on the news on the Internet. Stunned friends shared online testimonies: Sid will be terribly missed. Apparently, Sid had not been feeling well. He was hospitalized in Manila, where last night his liver and spleen gave in and he succumbed to typhoid and dengue fever. It's still not clear where he contracted the virus. While at work in our new office in downtown San Francisco, I kept reading Sid’s last email. I was too shaken, I had to get off work early. How apt that Sid had emailed me in Israel, celebrating his last birthday with Christ, in the place where the Holy Family escaped to and the Messiah was born; and that he was there, as an architect and artist housing the memory of opening doors toward safe havens.

Sid and I first met in Manila in the early nineties, got acquainted in the beginning through a series of phone calls. I was then working at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), part of the team that launched the First National Theater Festival. Sid, on the other hand, talked a lot about art and Cuba. (Too bad, I can’t remember the details. Ten years later, Sid presented an installation art for the 7th Havana Biennial in Cuba: upright cards with sketches of dream homes made by people who still live with their parents, all arranged in a grid on the gallery floor, a “suburb of frustrated dreams”, according to Art in America.) Nonetheless, we finally did meet and our first eyeball took place at the CCP cafeteria. It was summer and I was in my early twenties; Sid a few years older. That April day, we drove to the highlands of Antipolo, the pilgrimage capital of the Philippines, to visit a local artist. Later that day, we drove to a viewpoint where he took black and white photos of the hilly landscape. A few days later, we picked up the contact prints and from those, he had a few frames developed. He picked one image and gave it to me. So why this particular landscape of hills and clouds?

“See those low scattered clouds just above the horizon?” Sid asked me.

“Yeah?”

“Well there’s one big cloud and it’s not in the photo. We only know that it’s there - looming above - because of the enormous island of shadow it casts in the middle of the photo. I like the way how something that is not there can split the entire picture in half.”

If I wanted to, I suppose I could turn Sid’s words, turn it inside out, and search for meanings. But of course those weren’t his actual words (twenty years ago, come on!) But it’s close, quite close, at least closer to how I want those words to mean to me now. Ah, the shadows it casts. My other memory of Sid during those years was when he would come to visit me at night with drafts of his early poems. He was very eager to hear my advice: to sometimes end a line precariously with thoughts on a precipice, with cosmic hooks and suspended words. And then I left the country.

I moved to Thailand and we lost touch. It would take almost ten years before our paths would cross again in Bangkok during a workshop on Southeast Asian architecture. He gave me an old cassette tape with a dedication, “Thank you for the gift of words.” I, in turn, told him that I had just bought an old, medium format, twin lens Rolleiflex camera. He was thrilled to hear that I had taken up photography, how our interests in the literary and visual arts had flowed both ways. Later that night we went back to my apartment: he was particularly curious to see my portfolio of cross-processed prints. He even suggested that next time I return to the Philippines, maybe we could arrange a talk and show some of my works in his class. That never materialized. But in one of my homecoming visits, I was able to arrange a meeting between him and folk artists from my hometown. Sid was then managing CCP’s visual, literary and media arts department.

The last time I saw Sid was in 2005, the year I completed my term in Thailand. I went back to the Philippines and met him in his office. I told him I was moving to the United States. As a keepsake, he gave me a copy of his masteral dissertation, entitled “Regarding Space”. On a page was a passage mentioning me, and that veiled time many, many years ago when he showed me his early poems. I was happy for him and even happier the following year when, while traveling across America, I learned that Sid had won a national award for his poems. Not only that. In 2006, Sid also got accepted for a fall residency at the Vermont Studio Center. I had just missed him in the East Coast, where I had spent summer. I was already back in the Bay Area when we spoke on the phone. Our last conversation. We wondered if we could meet in New York before his flight back home. He gave the address and a number. But it was all tentative. I had been traveling from winter to summer and months of transience had taken its toll. Maybe next time.

Sid, sorry I didn't call you back. I did not even reply to your last Christmas email. Yes, I’ve covered a lot of miles and I’m just about ready for another leg; and yours, on the other hand, have ended with California poppies and buttercups dotting the hills here. But just to let you know, the personal intentions you prayed for me in Bethlehem were granted; and that there is one photo that has traveled with me for almost twenty years now, across hills, borders and seas - one image survived, rooting my transitions under your unseen cloud, your looming rainfall of suspended words.


(Antipolo, April 1990, photo taken by Sid Hildawa, 1962-2008)