The Philippine Online Chronicles

How sad is it that at 27, too consumed by my day job, I have morphed into one of those yuppies who has begun to think, “What use does poetry have?” More specifically, my thoughts started running along the lines of poetry doesn't have much use outside the University, does it? It does not have a practical function: popular though he may be, I would not recite Pablo Neruda to a class of call center agents I'm training to do five-minute surveys;  nor would I use Louise Glück as a reading exercise on idioms for struggling learners of English. I could use neither poets' approach in coming up with copy for your five-year-old child's favorite chocolate milk. But tonight, while watching the film Edge of Love, I was 16 again, trying to decipher verses from Dylan Thomas' poem “In My Craft or Sullen Art”, and found myself redeemed from the world, nay, from my own grown-up self, through poetry:

I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

All 27 years of age and still being saved by a few brilliant lines written by a womanizer and drunk (as per the movie), reminded me of the bigger world beyond paychecks: where hearts that keep a thousand little secrets and harbor a million desires live, waiting to be discovered and, eventually, pierced. I was 27 and learning from my wiser 16-year-old self: how in times you grapple for certain truths, poetry in all its seeming impracticality is the one thing that could come closest to redeeming you from the great lies.

My lessons do not just come from poetry and here is where I blur the lines between a song and a poem. Think of this blurring as very simplistic; one rooted in function rather than a stringent analysis of stanzas and meters. Three years ago another Dylan, the one named Bob, saved me. I was in another country, jobless, and was drowning in a cacophony of language I could not comprehend. I was three months into a job hunt and all I was getting were doors slammed shut, with signs that read “non-natural English speakers keep out” hung all over the place. The future was looking very bleak and in a fit of desperation, I put on a dress and lipstick, and for a night or two sat with fellow Filipinas pouring whiskey for tired Japanese salarymen looking for some de-stressing at the end of a tiring day. Did you know Filipinas working in Japanese night clubs referred to themselves as “artistas”? Their job, after all, mainly involved providing entertainment. From what I had witnessed, there was no direct sexual monkeying around that went on; all were implied through simple acts of body language and innuendo-laden jokes. But I was too dumb at Japanese to throw those jokes and I looked too Oriental to be taken seriously as a “Pinay artista.” Yet, from where I was sitting in that posh dimly-lit bar, I was telling myself what a big disgrace I was being.

I quit after a week, ready to just wave the white flag and go home if I couldn't get a job that wouldn't make me hate humanity. Life was not all bad though; the weekend I quit, my Mom took me to a nearby beach and there I found myself having a Cameron Crowe moment: clear skies overhead, wide open sea, lone seagull flying above and I was cast as the girl looking lost sitting by the bench, beer in hand. My brain was on all the things I love and had just lost: my old familiar city, a comfortable job, the friends who would crack jokes about the irony of my situation, and my untarnished feminist dignity. Then from out of nowhere, someone on the radio started assailing me:

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you ?

This was the first time I had heard Bob Dylan's “Like a Rolling Stone.” There was nothing intimidating about the first ten seconds of the song. It sounded upbeat and pretty harmless. And then Bob Dylan, harmonica in hand, started to sing and blow. Line by line, note by note, Bob began to tell me that the point of being in one's early 20s is to allow for some aimlessness; to get lost.

You used to laugh about everybody that was hangin' out.

Now you don't talk so loud. Now you don't seem so proud

About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

I also knew through his stanzas that if I were to somehow find my way back, I would not be the same person I was. One, I had found new respect for our OFW artistas. Dylan singing “You said you'd never compromise/ With the mystery tramp, but now you realize/He's not selling any alibis/ As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes/ And say do you want to make a deal?” was like a slap in the face because really, it was a jab right smack at the pseudo-privileging my education had afforded me; how come I could not sit through working an honest job entertaining people and they could?

How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

There will never be anything glamorous about compromising your beliefs, but maybe at 24 it was what I needed to cross the line from being a child who trusted on an imagined luck  to being an adult who acknowledged her biases and stuck to certain beliefs, even if it meant going hungry.

When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

I was finally listening to the music. Stripped of everything that was familiar, Bob Dylan's song gave me something: a name. That at that point, I was rolling like an aimless stone. The image may not be the most reassuring one out there but in a place where no one was talking back at me, I had found having a metaphor immensely liberating.

Great songs, powerful poetry: both have the capacity to knock us back to our senses. And we all know that to change a perspective is to change a universe. Three years ago, a song had helped me cross an unseen line. Tonight, a Dylan Thomas piece had just exposed the jaded adult I was turning into; maybe I was filling myself with too many books about making a living and not reading enough writing to remind me about those things that money could not pay for because by themselves they are enough.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

Certain poems and certain songs do the deed of paying attention to griefs and wishes. They might seem like thankless and futile exercises in space and language, but do not be fooled; they aren't. If you let them, they could be as tangible as those objects you keep by your bedside to which you hold on to in moments of cynical need and desperate questioning. They could certainly mean more: like soft bullets, they possess the capacity to pierce through you and jolt you awake.

Photo: “Día del Libro” by Cat, c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved