Pinoy Penman

Commentary for Newsbreak, January 24, 2005



A FEW WEEKS ago I had a very interesting (not to mention delicious) dinner with some long-lost friends in San Francisco, California. Despite the passage of more than 30 years since we had seen each other last, our relationships remained strong and warm; we were all veterans of the struggle against the dictatorship that was then impending, and that later became realized as we had always thought and said it would be, like a swollen river overflowing its banks. We lost many other friends and comrades to that cataclysm, and as these spontaneous reunions are wont to do, we raised a toast to all the absent, in whose stead we now spoke and whose prematurely truncated lives we continued to live.

All that was to be expected; what I didn’t foresee was the impassioned debate we were soon having in our corner of the dinner table over contemporary politics and our positions and roles in it. We disagreed quite vehemently over Garci, GMA, where the crisis had taken us, and where we could go from here on.

A very strange division emerged: my dear friend who had been away all these years found himself supporting the embattled (though now resurgent) Arroyo, while I—who had willingly plunged into the morass of our politics and its culture, writing sundry speeches for all five Presidents from Marcos (yes, the sometime enemy) to Arroyo—disdained her patent opportunism and insincerity, arguing that I expected my President to be better than myself.

He didn’t use these words, perhaps out of deference to his guest, but my friend came close to saying how naïve I was to believe and to hope that my candidate (as GMA was, in May 2004) wouldn’t cheat if she had to, like everyone else did. My only defense was to say that belief was one thing, and hope another: that my acceptance of—and even complicity in—our political realities didn’t mean that I should stop wishing for better things. “It’s called idealism!” I heard myself saying a bit too loudly, and thankfully we decided to suspend the argument with the entry of another bottle of wine.

As the evening wore on, my friend and I rediscovered and reaffirmed the preponderance of other things we had in common, and the dinner party broke up as congenially as it had begun.

But it left me wondering how we had come to this pass—and how, as my friend and I both shook our heads in consternation, as if to confirm a basic unity, yet another old comrade could have become such a rabid “Bushie.” And again I tried to understand how my friend could be so different in his perceptions from mine. It’s too crude to suggest that he came to his conclusions from living so far away—because, in fact, some of Mrs. Arroyo’s staunchest lieutenants were also our old buddies in the struggle; and from my friend’s point of view, how could I be so close to things and be so wrong?

Perhaps there is, indeed, no logical reason to expect that those of us who marched against martial law would remain of one mind two decades after. Martial law was the last thing that united us, and Edsa 1 was the last time we were all together. In the aftermath, our fundamental differences—of class, character, and vision—proved stronger than our shared rejection of Ferdinand Marcos. Alliances around rejections—around negative things—are always the easiest to make, but also the easiest to break. If there was one thing that Edsa 1 failed to do, it was to parlay that unique moment into a generation’s worth of basic reforms. The reforms never happened, the moment passed, and we reverted to our old selves.

Lately it’s become something of commonplace for Filipinos to call Edsa I a waste—of fervor, courage, and, above all, of a historic opportunity to really change things. Half the time you hear this from people who were never there—maybe because they were too young or yet unborn, or because they were so severely disillusioned by its aftermath that they now feel Edsa 1 itself was a mistake.

In the depths of dismay over the most recent twists and turns of that continuing aftermath, I have to admit to feeling like this, sometimes—not perhaps to the extent of calling the whole enterprise a mass misjudgment, but enough to know never to rush to the streets again for a quick change of faces at the top.

But even as we seek to redeem ourselves from the failures of two Edsas, there’s still some hope to be derived from the faint glow of the first one. When the word “idealism” popped out of my mouth at that dinner table—despite and after years of immersion in realpolitik—it was like I was marching as a younger man at Edsa. Sure, it felt a little silly, but it felt good, it felt warm, and for a minute back there, it felt like all kinds of wonderful things were possible, all over again.

(Here's a talk I delivered before a group of doctors at the Medical City last November 15, 2005; I originally gave this talk before the Philippine Medical Association of Michigan in Detroit, Michigan on June 16, 1990--yes, that long ago!)



MEDICINE AND literature have many things in common, the best of which might well be the art of lying. Almost 75 years ago, a doctor by the name of Joseph Collins observed that “The longer I practice medicine, the more I am convinced every physician should cultivate lying as a fine art. There are lies which contribute enormously to the physician’s mission of mercy and salvation.” Literature, certainly, requires a lot of lying. We cannot say it often enough in writing classes that fiction is the art of the believable lie. It is a necessary lie that must be told to express some truth that, if we read it in a newspaper or hear it from a friend, might be too painful, too bizarre, if not too banal to be believed.

The artistic lie can save the writer as well. Literary biography is full of stories about writers for whom writing was the medicine, or the drug, if you will, that kept them from falling apart, at least for the time being. In one of her brightest moments, the American poet Anne Sexton, who suffered from severe depression, wrote that “Suicide, after all, is the opposite of the poem.” In other words, the poem or the creative work can reconstitute what the ravages of life have torn apart. Tragically, Sexton commited suicide anyway, like her good friend and fellow-poet Sylvia Plath. Even so, poetry-writing remains a popular and presumably effective instrument of therapy today. Poetry heals and humbles even the doctor-poet himself like William Carlos Williams, who saw the poem as coming “from the half-spoken words of such patients as the physician sees from day to day,” so that poetry “comes perhaps to be the occupation of the physician after a lifetime of careful listening.”

Medicine and literature have both been around long enough to produce many fine specimens of that wonderful hybrid like Williams, the doctor-writer, or, if you prefer, the writer-doctor: the French Renaissance satirist Francois Rabelais, the Russian playwright and short story master Anton Chekhov, the American essayist and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes (father of his namesake, the equally famous Supreme Court Justice), and the British writer W. Somerset Maugham. In our own literary history, of course, we have Jose Rizal, and the short story writer Arturo Rotor.

The great Russian writer, Anton Chekhov, perhaps best exemplified the man who was able to integrate the two disciplines in a kind of frenzied harmony within himself. Despite the fact that he had tuberculosis, Chekhov supported the family when his father died by producing what by any standards was a prodigious amount of writing--six hundred stories over seven years. What is even more amazing is that during all of these trials, he managed to become an MD at Moscow University, and had a busy but financially unrewarding practice. His biographer tells us that Chekhov took medicine very seriously. In his most difficult moments, he called it “his only salvation”; soon he was calling it his “legal wife,” whereas literature was his “mistress.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. achieved professional acclaim both as a writer and as a physician. Before he began writing light essays and poems for the Atlantic Monthly, Holmes authored The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, considered to be the first major contribution to medicine by an American.

William Carlos Williams, faced early in his life with a choice of becoming either a doctor or a writer, was only half-jesting when he wrote that “It was money that finally decided me. I would continue medicine, for I was determined to be a poet; only medicine, a job I enjoyed, would make it possible for me to live and write as I wanted to.”

On another end, Somerset Maugham never got to practice medicine beyond helping to deliver a few dozen babies—but his medical training was indispensable in shaping his first masterwork, Of Human Bondage.

Instead of talking about all these illustrious but dead people, however, I thought I would deal mainly with the experiences of three contemporary American doctor-authors. (This was before I became aware of the work of the British Dr. Oliver Sacks.)

Among the three, Dr. William A. Nolen comes across as the pragmatist, your regular hard-nosed but warm-hearted physician whose mind is abuzz with the practical concerns of his job, but who has found a new kind of pleasure and challenge in writing about those concerns. I remember coming across a condensation of Nolen’s first book, The Making of a Surgeon, in Readers’s Digest about 35 years ago, and having been fascinated as only a high-schooler can be by the minutiae of life and death in the operating room of Bellevue. Today, of course, after countless Friday the 13th’s and Nightmares on Elm Street, our kids think of anatomy in its grossest forms as no big deal. Dr. Nolen has since written a number of other books about the doctor’s life, including Healing: A Doctor in Search of a Miracle and A Surgeon’s World. Having chosen to serve as a doctor in small-town Minnesota, Nolen is typically down-to-earth, occasionally ornery, and even funny.

Not surprisingly, some of the subjects Nolen writes about have made him enemies among his colleagues—malpractice, fee-splitting, the great war between private practitioners and academics. On the other hand, no doctor and doctor’s spouse can possibly disagree with him when he writes that “Every doctor’s wife has to put up with late meals, canceled trips to the theater, even—worst of all—an occasional interruption at a critical period in an hour of romance.”

The case of Dr. Michael Crichton is remarkable because of his extraordinary virtuosity. Many of you will recognize his name as the author of very successful and excellently-crafted works of popular fiction such as The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, The Great Train Robbery, Eaters of the Dead, Congo, and Jurassic Park. He has also directed several movies for Hollywood, including the cult-classic Westworld, Coma, and the film version of his own Great Train Robbery. I was a Michael Crichton fan long before I learned to pronounce his name and before I learned that he had been, briefly, a practicing MD. He graduated from Harvard Medical School, and went on to become a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute; his non-fiction books include Five Patients: The Hospital Explained, which deals with his experiences at Massachusetts General Hospital. Gifted as he was, Crichton had always been a reluctant medical man. Even while he paid his dues as a medical student, Crichton thought of quitting, and when he finally convinced himself that he was never going to be a happy physician, his superior sighed and said, “I thought you would quit in the end. Your fantasies are too strong.”

For Crichton, the tightrope act had become too tricky. “I was,” he wrote, “supporting myself in school by writing thrillers, and my imaginative tendencies were overpowering. I often listened to patients, thinking, How can I use this in a book?... Of course, when you go to a doctor, you don’t want him to view you as a book chapter.... I understood that I was not behaving like a doctor that I would want to consult. So I thought I ought to quit.”

But Crichton had other reasons as well for his disaffection with medicine. He thought that the new breed of physician-scientist had become too focused on enzyme levels, treating people, he says, “as a sack of biochemical reactions” rather than a complex whole. He thought that many doctors themselves had ceased to be a complex whole.

“My classmates tended to think that literature, music, and art were irrelevant distractions. They held these ‘cultural’ matters in the same intellectual contempt that a physicist holds astrology. Everything outside medicine was just a waste of time.”

Crichton’s quarrel with his scientific colleagues brings me to Dr. Richard Selzer who, unlike Crichton, went on from medical school to a distinguished career in general surgery and teaching at Yale. Like Crichton and Nolen, Selzer has had his problems being appreciated by some of his colleagues. When students at a medical college in Milwaukee tried to invite him for a lecture, their proposal got a brisk and flat rejection from the dean. No clear explanation was given, but as soon as you read the work of Richard Selzer, you can guess why. In his book of essays titled Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery, Selzer addresses his central interest, the relationship between passion and pathology:

“Someone asked me why a surgeon would write.... Is it vanity that urges him? There is glory enough in the knife. Is it for money? One can make too much money. No. It is to search for some meaning in the art of surgery, which is at once murderous, painful, healing, and full of love....”

This quote demonstrates the strength of Selzer’s writing, which is inspired, graceful, and precise. (“Surgery,” Selzer writes, “is the red flower that blooms among the leaves and thorns that are the rest of medicine.”) At the same time, Selzer also shows what to some of his fellow MDs might seem a weakness—that is, his refusal to separate philosophy or spirituality if you will from physical medicine. If you think it silly to speak of a colostomy in the same breath that you would speak of love, then Selzer may not be for you.

Beyond Nolen and perhaps even Crichton, Selzer has gone on to write serious fiction about the world of healing—not only about doctors, but about their patients and the lives they lead beyond the hospital. In one of his stories, a woman’s husband dies and his organs are given away to seven different recipients in Texas; she is happy for them, but, of course, is unhappy for herself who now has absolutely nothing left of him. So she tracks down the man who has received her husband’s heart, and much to his surprise, requests him to let her listen to her husband’s heartbeat through his bare chest for one hour. The man and his suspicious wife refuse. She persists, and finally he relents.

It is a bizarre and also funny story—a superb illustration of the humanism we all aspire to, in that it reminds us that the simple needs of human life are still more complex than all the transplantation technologies we can dream of. In dealing with this widow’s grief, Selzer achieves physicianship on more than one level. This perfect synthesis of writer and healer, of sensitivity and technique, was on Selzer’s mind when he answered his own question:

“No, it is not the surgeon who is God’s darling. He is the victim of vanity. It is the poet who heals with his words, stanches the flow of blood, stills the rattling breath, applies poultice to the scalded flesh.... Did you ask me why a surgeon writes? I think it is because I wish to be a doctor.”

Address to the Graduating Class
University of the Philippines Baguio
April 23, 2005



(This isn't one of my Penman pieces--although I did publish an abbreviated version--but it's been making the rounds of the mailing lists for some reason or other, so I'm making the full text available here.)


LET ME thank you, first of all, for the honor of addressing you, the graduating class. I had always dreamed of doing this—preferably as a valedictorian, but that was not to be, so I must settle for second best, the role of the guest speaker.

I hope you will not be offended or disappointed if I say that what I have to tell you today is something that I have already told many other students on other occasions—chiefly, my classes, and a year ago, the newest members of the honor society of Phi Kappa Phi. But this is a message that I would like many more thousands of Filipino and especially UP students to hear—and you don’t even have to be an honors graduate or a scholar to listen to it, although it’s been part of the UP tradition for us to consider ourselves scholars, despite that “3.0” in Math or that “INC.” in Philosophy.

Former President Nemenzo—whom I was privileged to serve—was frankly not too fond of the phrase iskolar ng bayan to describe the UP student. We are all, of course, scholars of the people in this university, in the technical sense that our studies are subsidized by the sweat of the poor, whose hopes we bear upon our shoulders.

But the President’s point was that scholarship remains a distinction to be earned not merely by scoring well in an entrance examination, but by adopting a lifelong attitude of critical inquiry and rational judgment.

This, sadly, is something that many of us lose upon our entry into the University and our immersion in its life—not only its intellectual and academic life, but also its social and professional life. The curiosity ends, the magic fades, the writing dries up, and we retreat to a cocoon—to a dimly lit room marked “Me & Myself”—there to spend the rest of our career sulking over the next fellow’s promotion and so-and-so’s research grant.

Five years ago, when I submitted myself for the chairmanship of the Department of English and Comparative Literature—among the oldest, largest, and historically most contentious of UP departments—I gave the usual homily about achieving excellence in teaching, research, and extension work.

And then, I said—and I quote from my vision paper—“I expect our members to be actively engaged in interests other than their immediate subjects—in social and political concerns, in creative projects, in new technologies—to save them from the kind of small-mindedness or tunnel vision that can result from locking yourself up at the Faculty Center. In other words, get a life.”

“Get a life” has been one of my lifelong mantras. I have always believed that while a formal education is a wonderful thing, what I call an active life—with all its serendipitous detours and little accidents—is even better. It is a cliché by now to say that there are many things we can never learn in school—but for those of us who are in school, it is even more important to remember this.

As a mentor to many young students, I have always advised those burning with the desire to teach or to go on to graduate studies—in other words, those who want to stay in the university—to spend a few years first outside of it, so they can get a sense of what everyone else goes through. And then they can return, enriched by their experience.

Let me repeat that to make things very clear for you: if you want to teach well, first spend a few years outside of school, and take a job that will put you in touch with everyday realities—sell insurance or pharmaceuticals, deal with customer complaints, do volunteer work among the poor—before deciding, with the intelligence of experience, whether the academic life is indeed for you.

Don’t teach because there is nothing else you can do. We already have too many teachers whose minds have become very small from being boxed in. Teach because you have something to teach, something more than what your own teachers gave you, which is your own well-formed sense of the world.

This is also true for those who want to become writers and artists. A master’s or a PhD in creative writing won’t make you a good writer if you don’t have the talent and the sensibility of a writer to begin with. Graduate school can help you deal with the discipline of writing and the rigor of criticism; it can open your eyes to other possibilities and teach you technique. But it won’t give you material, it won’t tell you how to feel, it won’t hit you in the gut and leave you breathless.

I always tell people who ask me what the secret of good writing is that “To write well, read well.” To that I should add “live well,” by which I don’t mean sipping the finest wines and driving the fastest cars—although that would be nice—but rather partaking of as rich a range of experiences as you can, away from the home, the office, and the library.

When people I value dearly complain to me about the emptiness and confusion in their lives, I feel terribly inadequate and inutile because I know that only they can ultimately help themselves. But there is a principle in fiction writing—in plotting and characterization—that might offer a solution to the perplexed. When my writing students tell me that they no longer know what their characters should do to solve their overwhelming problems, I tell them to take their characters out—literally and figuratively. Get them off their butts, make them walk, make them ride the MRT, put them on a ferris wheel, bring them to the Navotas fish market at four in the morning. Too many stories try to resolve themselves in small cafes and bedrooms, behind shut doors and windows, in exchanges of airy witticisms that display nothing but the writer’s own vast vocabulary but limited talent.

Some of the best things happen when we step outside of our own lives and begin to be engaged in those of others. Often, the answers to our own problems lie in others, and in their larger predicaments. While involvement in a great cause can also create its own kind of blindness to everything else, I believe that, at least once in our lives, we should embrace a passion larger than ourselves; even the disillusionment that often follows can be very instructive, and will bring us one step closer to wisdom. One of the best ideas I ever heard came from a friend whom I used to play billiards with until the wee hours of the morning: “Everyone,” he said while cleaning up the balls on the table, “should be entitled to make at least one big mistake.”

I would not have been the writer I became if I had chosen the safe path and stayed where I was supposed to be. It took me two years to finish my MFA, and only three to finish my PhD. But before that, it took me 14 years to get my AB.

At 12—like your chancellor—I entered the Philippine Science High School. As my parents never tired of telling anyone who cared to listen (and even those who didn’t), I was the entrance-exam topnotcher of my batch, No. 1 of about 6,000 examinees. However, what my parents didn’t say was that after my first year in Science High, I was going to be kicked out—with a 1.0 in English and a 5.0 in Math.

What happened? Well, you might say that I got a life. From the grade-school nerd who read two books a day in our all-boys Catholic school, I suddenly discovered girls, parties, and fun. What did I do? I used my 1.0 in English to save my 5.0 in Math, by writing a letter of appeal that began with “At the outset, let me say that I bear malice toward none…” I guess it worked, because they put me on probation for a year, and I survived PSHS by the skin of my teeth.

At 16, I entered UP as an industrial engineering major—and promptly got a 5.0 in Math 17, for too many absences—the bane of the arrogant Science High graduate, even the perennial flunker like me who thought he already knew more Math than he needed to know.

At 17, still a freshman, I quit college—over the tears of my mother, whose fondest hope was for me to graduate from UP just like she did. I wanted to join the revolution, like many of my comrades; at the same time I was impatient to get a job. At 18, I was working as a newspaper reporter covering hospital fires, US embassy rallies, suicide cases, factory strikes, and typhoon relief operations. I spent most of my 19th year in martial-law prison. At 20, I was a husband and father. At 26, I took my first foreign trip. At 27, I learned how to drive—and went back to school. At 30, I got my AB, and decided that what I wanted to do was to write and teach for the rest of my life, so here I am.

I have been shot at, imprisoned, and worst of all, rejected by more crushes than I care to remember. Aside from my abortive career in journalism, I once worked as a cook-waiter-cashier-busboy-janitor, cutting 40 pounds of pork and chicken every day before turning them into someone’s dinner. Much earlier, I worked as a municipal employee, checking the attendance of Metro Aides at seven in the morning, and then I studied printmaking and sold my etchings cheaply by the dozen in Ermita. Incidentally, it was at that printmaking shop that I met my wife June, who’s here with me today, and for whose patience with my colorful moods I am forever grateful.

Some of these events have found their way to my writing; most of them have not and never will. I believe that creative writing should generate its own excitement, beyond whatever may have happened to the author in his or her own life. But neither can I deny that my outlook has been influenced by what I have seen out there, as bright, as indelible, and as disturbing as fresh blood.

If we are to abide by the Phi Kappa Phi motto to “let the love of learning rule humanity,” we should first ourselves be ruled by the love of learning—learning from books, and learning beyond them.

On the other side of the equation, let me observe that there is, today, a nascent but disturbing strain of anti-intellectualism in Philippine politics and society. The vulgar expression of this sentiment has taken the form of the suggestion that we can dispense with brains and education when it comes to our national leadership, because they have done us no good, anyway.

It is easy to see how this perception came about, and how its attractiveness derives from its being at least partially true. Many of our people feel betrayed by their best and brightest—the edukado, as we are called in our barangays—because we are too easily bought out by the powers that be. Marcos and Estrada had probably the best Cabinets in our political history, well-stocked with prestigious PhDs from places like Oxford and Stanford; but in the end, even they could do nothing against their President and his excesses.

For us UP graduates, the seductions of power will always be there. Power and wealth are also very interesting games to play, and few play them better than UP grads—the power side more than the wealth, as I suspect that Ateneans and La Sallites are better at making money than we are.

But even these can put you out of touch. I have friends in Malacañang and Makati who seem to have lost all sense of life, thought, and feeling on the street, beyond what their own commissioned surveys tell them. Worse, they seem to have lost touch with their old, honest, self-critical selves. They forgot all about Sophocles and poetry and mystery and music you can’t buy at the record store.

To be a UP student, faculty member, and alumnus is to be burdened but also ennobled by a unique mission—not just the mission of serving the people, which is in itself not unique, and which is also reflected, for example, in the Atenean concept of being a “man for others.” Rather, to my mind, our mission is to lead and to be led by reason—by independent, scientific, and secular reason, rather than by politicians, priests, shamans, bankers, or generals.

You are UP because you can think and speak for yourselves, by your own wits and on your own two feet, and you can do so no matter what the rest of the people in the room may be thinking. You are UP because no one can tell you to shut up, if you have something sensible and vital to say. You are UP because you dread not the poverty of material comforts but the poverty of the mind. And you are UP because you care about something as abstract and sometimes as treacherous as the idea of “nation”, even if it kills you.

Sometimes, long after UP, we forget these things and become just like everybody else; I certainly have. Even so, I suspect that that forgetfulness is laced with guilt—the guilt of knowing that you were, and could yet become, somebody better. And you cannot even argue that you did not know, because today, I just told you so.

You graduates of UP Baguio have an additional mission: to remind the country and the world that Baguio is far more than the bigshots at the Country Club and the beggars on Session Road. It is both, but more. Baguio occupies a special place in the Filipino imagination, or perhaps the Filipino fantasy of escape, something that I, as a lowlander, have fed into since my first visit here as a four-year-old boy in October 1958, taking the train to Damortis and the bus up Naguilian. You are privy to realities that escape the weekend tourist, and those realities deserve to be shared by you.

Let me end with five brief exhortations, of the kind we’ve been hearing since elementary school:

First, read a good book. Not another novel, if you’re already a writer, nor another paper on the molecular theory of turbulence if you’re already a physicist. Perhaps we should exchange books, for the purpose of—using one famous definition of education—turning an empty mind into an open one.

Second, learn how to play the guitar. By this I mean find some form of artistic expression, or some source of artistic pleasure. The solace of art is often the truest and the most enduring.

Third, learn how to swim. Be independent, and learn how to fend for yourself. But also learn how to swim so you can save others from drowning. Lord knows this country needs all the lifeguards it can find.

Fourth—and they didn’t say this in grade school—have fun. Too many academic papers deal with the sources of our sorrows—as if we didn’t know them, already. Give us something to feel good about, and find us the way to happiness, now and forever. It doesn’t sound like a scholar’s task, but if happiness isn’t worth our minds and labors, what is?

Lastly, get a life—and get a good one.

Congratulations, and thank you all!