A robust doorstop in need of a reprint

“Great blurbs, yes, as in A Treasury of Great Blurbs. Or: Immortal Blurbs, an Anthology. I should blush to the roots of my hair when I remember that I once shamelessly wrote fantasy blurbs for my own still-to-be-written novel, entirely dreamed, wholly nonexistent (the year was 1988)— but, shame on shameless me, I don’t and here in fact is doing it again. That opening sentence above, breaking the comma splice rule, is a blurb for this book, written and maneuvered by the author into the body of the work itself to make sure no edition of the work does without it.

“… Yea, here be Stories from a Day, Poems through the Night. A haunting work of imagination, yeah, meaning in the sense that the book is only imagined, ha-ha! still unwritten, imaginary, dreamed. I have dreamed that your arms are lovely, as the song goes. Normally it’s the subject of a book that’s imaginary if it’s a book of fiction, but in this case it’s the book itself that does not exist, at least as I write this. And I am haunted by it, by that elusive abat of a title, for that is what the whole obsession so far has amounted to—a title among other titles that have proliferated: Suspicious Chronicles... A House On Unreal Street… Children of the Abat: Cebuano Gothic... Once Upon a Time in Dumas Goethe… Return to Zenda… Last Exit to Yukyuknapatawa Country... Mr. Mxyzptlk Pops Into the Equation… An Orificer & a Genitalman… Like a Shadow that Only Fits a Figure of Which It Is Not The Shadow... Ouroboros in Borobudur... On The Moon There Is No Moon... Lure Me with Laurel... Laurels Lorelei...”

Aquino is wordsmith, punster, voracious reader, erudite and ludic philosopher. Besides love poems, he crafts memoir, fiction, existential commentary, thesis, metapocrypha. A fount of literary allusions and delusions, he takes a sudden swipe at the Alain Delons of the world who steal our muses—all girls being as mythical as music.

“I can’t write a novel is how I’ve come to decide autobiography is what it’s going to be, if failed nonfictionist as well. Autobiographer manqué. At any rate I will be the book. Or rather the book will aspire to be me. But of course, you will say, what book isn’t the author? I mean some reader, perhaps a French girl traveling in the Philippines, who knows English, will read it in bed on a winter’s night, fall asleep still holding the book, and wake up startled by the sensation of a man lying beside her and talking in his sleep, in a word, dreaming. Paris! Friends will recognize the slouch, the somnambular way of walking, the footsteps. The strange inconsistency in speech, by turns articulate and groping (now running over, now clamming up). The stranger inconsistency with the eyes: at times, from a natural inclination, riveted on—at other times, by habit, averted from—the face of the person he’s talking to. The palms. Which are what really rouse the young girl from Paris, though he’s caressing her only in a dream. His dream. 

“… In the calculus of daydream the work is done. I am paring my fingernails—or eating them—the book is published in both hardbound and paperback editions and lo! the bulbiferous blurbs and the launch and the party and behold! the author is there and is not there.

“… Zamboanga is the word of my life. Few other words, or names, for me possess what the French Symbolists call the evocative power of words, the magical ability of words to make something absent present.

“As a boy it seems to me I already recognized this Symbolist notion regarding words. Certain words had an effect on me so keen as to be well-nigh physical. ‘Eat one’s words’ wouldn’t have been idiomatic to me had I heard it. And I actually invented some words, although ‘invented’ may not be the exact word for it, inasmuch as these words just came to my child’s mind. And they were words that meant nothing, as they had not been meant to mean anything. I’d keep uttering these words to myself, like an idiot, and they had a very strange effect upon me indeed. They were a child’s strangest toys.

“It is World War II—everyone is restless about the Japanese in town. We are swimming in the sea at the wharf and Siquijor, mysteriously, is just strokes away. So that we are literally floating even before I kiss you and Sta. Claus comes and sees us. In the dream he is a little boy. Does this mean it would take a world war for me to do it? Does it mean I ought to have done it as early as 1961? But you were only eleven; moreover, I haven’t come to Dumaguete yet. In the other dream, the other kiss, I kiss you among the windfall and the lotuses and you laugh and say ‘Why not?’”

These fragments are part of the first chapter. The author goes to Dumaguete’s Silliman, UP Diliman, UP Baguio, joins enfants terribles among the literati, wins prizes, works with a media agency, teaches, mentors, muses on muses, reads, reads, reads, and writes sporadically, then a lot.

Where does it all go? Vadis we quote, vaporize and vanish into a vanity of bon mots turned into bonfires. He is cornucopious throughout. He can’t help it, even the glossolalia. He’s mage and sage. Another publisher should ensure more copies of an eventual classic. Why would it become one? Because only Aquino can dispense recollections of writers dating back to 1962, from Leonard and Linda Ty Casper, Edilberto and Edith Tiempo, Franz Arcellana, Nick Joaquin and so on, as well as movies and movie stars as far back as Rosa del Rosario in her Darna or Jaime de la Rosa in Enkantada, early writers of Pagadian and the Visayas as part of the movable matrix, older chess masters he trounced as a teen wizard, such as Florencio Campomanes.

Over 60 years of amusement that also intersperses prose with poems, and detours into sudden fiction, or strangely didactic lyricism. The transformations can be as beguiling as turns of phrase that grow as chain stories posing as Mobius strips.

More generations shouldn’t fall short of Z for Short.