Reverse Criticism or How My Words Landed in Incognito Dissection
By: Iris P. Concepcion

“And now those entities known as foreign countries would occasionally present themselves for inspection---over the littered and clamorous sundecks/ In Paris he sat at café tables, watching the sullen French faces go by. In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world. In English hotels he read Sprengler and Marquis de Sade/ (Ligas) People in my town have a way of putting it that is unlike any other in the world-----they speak of this pag-i-sung-ko which means, literally,to meet, to go to the cemetery to meet one’s dead and hold converse with a cherished presence indistinguishable from the fragrance of ripening grain, the murmur of creeks, the whisper of bamboo grooves.”

Take hold of the bars, the separation in slants in the quotation above, wonder why they are used even outside poetry. If you have lain in my bed, these are passages from three different books sleeping with me till eternity. The first one is extracted from a British (Amis) author who created a character on a boat deck, the second one an American (Kerouac) in that cultish road book and Kerima Polotan, a Filipina who is peerless in her own league this side of the planet. I strung them together for a purpose.

In the mystical world of letters, exceptional writers are created equal. One may be sipping tea, the other gorging on hamburger and the last one, suman (rolled sticky rice), with diverse economic backgrounds to boot. But in sentences, they can slug it out and provide details to a world as fine as, if not superior than visual Nature itself. And they truly SEE.

And thus, one damp day, as my mother’s house clothes (daster, duster, I do not know the origin of this word) were hung in hangers on a recently dead tree which reminded me of Yamamoto’s black clothes displayed over Japanese flowery blossoms, as I am confined to connecting these linking dots again, I was lent a book on criticism by a person in fisherman’s hat who seemed to have skipped from a leaf as the last standing actor in one of my short stories. Sometimes, graces fall on my lap that definitely alter Time itself.

I know De Egg adores Eliot and in the local setting, most of my Valentine recipients too, particularly the driving Quixote and Bone.

Here is my experience of opening, reading, skimming the criticism pages, all the while marvelling over its pencilled annotations. I planted myself to its print as if I were ink. In this rather gauche exercise, I encircled my own, ballpenned, marking :”nice” which is attached to a Bech-ian persona (I was compelled to encircle it repeatedly until my conscience pinched me that I do not have this edition). There is likewise a mention of a “reward”, a gift perhaps from the Galaxy and Star Troopers. The editor is a fusion of Wonder Woman and Bionic Woman combined.

I am struck by the “About the Editors” information on the backcover. Eliot is regarded as “one outstanding novelist, playwright or poet.” The editor is likewise ascribed as a distinguished teacher or critic. The word “or” is used instead of “and”. It is as if the presence of one crosses out the other.

If I were an apple, I would like, not to be pared down, but cored (remember Portnoy and his own experience with this fruit?) like what the knowing contributors had studied in Eliot’s works.

Once upon a time, Mr. Updike wrote a review of P. Larkin’s works. The critiqued poet must not have understood his works as skillfully as Updike had uncurtained them. Yes, it is “Your lovely pear tree, pear tree, pear tree” in K. Mansfield’s Bliss. “Look, look what you’ve done,” as one Australian rock band had sung (Jet), imploring the naïve writer that what he had originally sought purely as a process of becoming one with his words, no doors slammed in between, resonated beyond the sphere of selfhood’s word quests. Like a still river awakened as a newly opened fountain by a thrown bottle, the author finds his words, not as mere formations of language but, in a startling manner, extraneously dressed up: clothed with the usual suspects symbolisms and meanings, plus the most important adornment of all, a genuine creative familiarity.

I summed up this reading experience as a heave of release. Indeed, writers are one’s best connections to a world that is remote, apathetic and cold. They make remoteness near, apathy sympathetic and coldness warm.

Being eye to eye with them is nothing, like a haze to a snowstorm. The real wuthering action is in the mutual recognition of the felt “flimsy proof-sheets”. These are where the lady and unladylike, gentle and ungentle men of letters confoundingly meet.

The hornest’s nest is finally, stirred.