Dr. Cirilo F. Bautista
Conferred AY 1986-1987
Professional Profile:
Dr. Cirilo F. Bautista was conferred the Order of National Artist in 2015 by Philippine President Benigno C. Aquino, Jr. Nominated to this highest honor by his peers for the sheer quantity and substance of his literary production, Cirilo F. Bautista has become not only an exemplar in the University but is also an inspiration to young Filipino writers in the archipelago and wherever they may be in the world, for them to enrich the body of Philippine Literature with substance and song.
His magnum opus, the epic “The Trilogy of St. Lazarus,” published by De La Salle University Press in 2012, reimagines the journey of the peoples of the Philippines throughout its history and boldly reinvents through the epic singer’s voice and temperament the unending quest for freedom from want, from oppression, from the forces of society that threaten the dignity of the individual citizen, especially the poor.
CIRILO F. BAUTISTA’S LYRIC SENSE OF HISTORY
Pagpupugay: A Tribute to the National Artist for Literature
By Marjorie Evasco
In a lecture called “Shaping the Past” delivered at his alma mater, the University of Santo Tomas, National Artist Cirilo F. Bautista revealed that it was his father who had given him the words which defined the poet’s ground of being and gave him his lifetime errand:
“I became a writer because I took to heart my father’s advice to “shape the past.” He did not tell me how, but I thought writing was the way to do it. He did not tell me why, either, but I felt it was to gain some degree of happiness, some ascendancy over the travails of existence…And a strong desire to make of the past something beyond the past drove me into a fine madness and defined the borders of my artistry. And so, every time I am asked when I decided to be a writer, because, strangely enough, I did decide to be a writer—I answer, “When I first got mad.” That moment, of course, was not accompanied by a roar of thunder and a blaze of lightning; like all life-altering decisions, it developed quietly and gradually until, many years later, I found that I was irrevocably engaged in the fashioning of prose and poetry. I discovered that writing was the most effective way of configurating the elements of reality into an ever-fresh world and that literature was the only possible, faithful, and unassailable reconstruction of human values in a gaudy and duplicitous environment.”
One of the marks of the lyric poems of Bautista is the constitution or the making of the image or eidos of persons who are familiar in Philippine society and history, like Rizal, Bonifacio, the tear-gassed man, and even the one who says he is being used by big shots for target practice. Eidos here is used to mean “that which is seen, the form, shape, figure, or its Latin meaning, as species.” Bautista reconstitutes figures from history by giving them an individual speaking voice. This lyric imperative is best seen in the light of the Greek concept of the figured masks or personae that represent the self as well as others like the self. Bautista reconfigures figures from history by giving them an individual speaking voice.
In the poem “What Rizal Told Me,” Bautista presents to us the personae of Rizal and Cirilo, the poet’s double. The discursive situation is a conversation through 13 stanzas of 4 lines each between the man that Filipinos hail as the nation’s hero and the poet Cirilo. The voice, as we read from the title, is the voice of Cirilo, retelling the reader what Rizal told him. The retelling, however, is in the dramatic mode, and from the first line to the last, it is Rizal’s voice that is represented in the poem.
I have learned the subtle virtue of regret,
how it can ride a mad horse and not fall off.
At times it is necessary to invent
Illusions that would change the map
Of your consciousness, if only to feel
you could not have done things any better.
A man is bound, shot, and carted off
to argue with worms—is he less valid
as an agent of peace, will you break
the bones of his philosophy?
The voice is that of a man of intellect engaging the poet in the rhetoric that burdens an otherwise peaceful man with the irretrievability of the past and places the law “between violence and violence” where there are “…angels and vampires/ whose diction vexed [my] blood”. Language, such as that used by the colonizers was used to turn worship into a terrorizing religion. On the other hand, language, such as the one used by the revolutionaries turns idealists into beasts baring their teeth for the kill.
In the middle of the poetic discourse, Rizal faces and addresses Cirilo directly but in a conspiratorial tone assuming a friendship that has shared many a secret:
…You know
how it was, Cirilo, you saw the hole
I was cramped in and despaired enough
to write that I failed because I left
no proof of “bloodstains on broken stones.”
There it is again, the phrase that is a consistent refrain in the poems of Bautista, and it is always always spoken in the tone of anger and continuing confrontation with failure. Here is one of the sharpest examples of what Bautista calls his choice of a “reasoned romanticism” over “unreasoned skepticism.” Rizal reasons to Cirilo that even as the failure is irredeemable, the “sweating mass//…the roadmenders and gardeners,/ the glassblowers and plowmen..” who are ignorant, need some solace, some hope:
I am the first thing they seek when they bleed,
I wipe the sorrow from their brow,
my throat sings their children to sleep,
they stick my face where fear has been,
I shape the lies that enliven their hopes—
That is how we rescue each other
from the rigors of obedience.
An elegiac statement concludes the poem: “History is the other side of regret.” At this point the voices of Rizal and Cirilo merge, and the nature of the pain of regret is made intelligible. Behind the mask of the hero, there is only the naked human face of a dead man. Behind the mask of the poet, there is the vulnerable human heart of the poet singing an elegy to the race.
In the light of his poetics, Bautista must believe in the power of poetry, and betray the duplicitous world that passes itself off as true. In the poem “The Intensity of Things” in which Bautista memorializes one of his earliest teachers, a medicine woman named Anselma Carpio, the dialogue of a hard realist’s wisdom with that of the poet’s reaches out of the long and common history of the dying poor in this country:
Believe and betray—is that not
the system we support to survive,
chance and certainty commingling
in the acts we put up and then regret?
Bautista asserts that Anselma “was the only sane person” in his insane world in his youth in the slum areas of Balic-Balic Sampaloc after World War II. It was a world haunted by death and the proximity of bitterness and despair. But like Selma, he “never despaired of [my] situation” but believed that there was a way of squeezing from the world some astonishment by becoming a poet.
The betrayed poor can only return to faithlessness for the treason that is committed against them. But in the same breath, the lyric voice enjoins them to understand the price of choosing to live:
But we say to ourselves, “We will be strong,
life is long,” though we quake in the saying
of it, in the terrible burden of it.
This is the heart of Cirilo F. Bautista’s historia, his sense of history, his intimate knowing of the story of our people. In his poem called “The New Philippine National Anthem,” the speaker concludes:
But I will always love you, Philippines
because in the dead of night, when the enemies
creep closer to the gate to break the bones of our hate,
when the pale men with foreign tongues pillage
your mountains and meadows for minerals of money,
money, money, when we are broke and hungry and cold,
you keep us together with the warmth of your voice
whispering such word as “Peace,” such word as “Freedom.”
We listen to the cadence of this song and know it is our anthem, too, the dream we share with Cirilo F. Bautista, poet of the first order, who serves to “reinstate words to their position in the social imagination.”
We as readers, lovers of words, believers in the language of “peace” and “freedom,” have the task to engage, under the instruction of the poet, in “respecting and safeguarding the language of the soul.”
Only then can we stand side by side with Cirilo F. Bautista, speaking like him unflinchingly to power, to ensure that the language of our soul is never going to be corrupted by the greedy and the malicious. Poetry like Bautista’s shapes for us our first and only frontier of being.