On With the Book!
By Dr. Diwata Drake
Claro Mürk, the renowned archeologist of the unconscious, in defining the Self, astutely revisited what Galileo on his deathbed said of the earth: it moves.
What is a book?
It’s in flux.
What is a man?
An unfinished tome.
And what’s the state of the postcolonial country founded on the image of another’s desire?
Undone.
So let’s get on with it already.
I enclose here, perhaps rashly, the urgent progress of the manuscript, warts, queries, and all, a history of a book deferred and interrupted.
We cannot wait any longer.
This work, annotated by yours truly—a mongrel, mixed-race foreigner, true, an American-born professor formerly of Magdalen College, Oxford, now on [voluntary!] sabbatical—and translated by, okay, a too-young Fil-Am grad student, born in [unknown Filipino place-name], educated in Manila and Cornell, not quite a.b.d., and, sorry, randomly interrupted by that whiny, I mean, wily, Waray, fulsome scholar of nationalism, Tacloban-born-and-bred, Estrella Espejo, who first presented details of the ms. at a conference in Milwaukee, not Kauai, while on sabbatical—rest in peace, Estrella! in your sanatorium!—this work, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, is a pre-emptive text, one might say.
We publish it before judgments settle and understanding congeals.
We publish it in haste as advance copies of the book have inadvertently leaked out. (Contrary to others’ blind insinuations—the culprit is still at large.)
And already critics promote vile rumors.
I will attempt here a brief calming note.
Yes, it is true that a pall hangs over this manuscript, a tragic tale of both loss and recovery. Yes, especially in its midsection, from Entry #33 onward, it is an adventure story without a corpse, a mystery without a detective, an autobiography without a cause.
Be patient, read on.
No, it is not true that the original manuscript has completely disappeared.
Reader, keep calm.
We possess fine translations.
As the publisher Trina Trono says: it is a hazard of history.
Trina Trono advises all concerned that the actual manuscript in the fragile forms of its slapdash conception is forthcoming, she is rummaging through her personal effects given the violent passing of some abominable typhoon, she has lost contact with—and the line was a bit garbled—she has lost Internet service, et cetera, et cetera.
Do not worry—in Manila, something always comes up.
But the future cannot wait forever.
So we present this bundle, a small cosmogony, one might say, of indecisions and revulsions.
An uncertain universe, true—but what else is there?
Pardon its unglamorous state therefore, the scratches in its margins, and this unappeased aporia, appalling in its own way—patched up as our enflamed reading progressed.
Critics of the pirate copies have decried “a paratextual prolixity . . . that tears at the Filipino soul but holds on to its stitches,” a bitter calumny.
If you will notice, by the end of the document we were silent (or at least those of us with tact kept our mouths shut).
Especially in the latter entries, we made it clear Raymundo Mata spoke for himself.
However, the reader will observe that the beginnings of the journals, Part One and some sections of Part Two, embody awkward morphologies of larval textual forms and other distressing aspects of the memoirist’s gestational phase.
In short, scripts and scraps of botched and fractured texts begin the story.
We deemed it best to address those spirited voids—hence, the footnotes.
Some of us, you will agree, were more lucid than others.
In these first sections the writer seems to test his strengths and finds unwitting, at times unwilling, vessels for his verbiage.
Francisco Balagtas, a.k.a. Baltazar, the eminent Tagalog poet, plus a slew of dead French novelists writhe in their graves, trifled with, preyed upon.
Let them squirm.
Like any biographical tale this text contains false starts, red herring, dead ends, mysterious trails.
The patient reader will embrace the flapping embryonic gills, the infant passages from which Nation emerged, including alphabet games, morality plays, Catholic litanies, and frank delusions.
Bless that reader.
May she meet us one day in paradise, or maybe a book club in Queens.
The rest may proceed at your own discretion.
Those who wish to begin elsewhere, say at Entry #21, when Raymundo finds the weapon of language in Manila, or even later, at Entry #25, a critical moment of initiation, may do so.
Go ahead. The text exists at your leisure.
Tumble through it as you wish, but please do not blame us for your concussions.
Finally, a quirk of this text is that it includes an editorial unraveling.
Filipino scholarship has an endemic originality: it is stained by passion.
You will note a chronological set of querulous attachments, a marked departure from critical protocol that some experts of the advance guard have assailed with paltry wit as “a scholarly dissipation,” “not academic arrangement but derangement,” et cetera et cetera—and so it is that their gross applause provides ground for this edition’s remarkable candor.
Enclosed herewith are the underbeams of the text’s construction—a rumbling exegesis by email, anathema, and dyspeptic scrawl (o writer, you know who you are), which I am loath to qualify or condemn without a lawyer nearby.
Caveat lector.
However, I suggest that this construction is no different from what anyone has vaguely divined about the world: that history is a devil’s brew of the three I’s—I, I, I! Among others: innuendo, ideology, and idolatry.38
Let the reader embrace history as it lies: ecce homo.
Here’s the book!
38 Not to mention imitation, invocation, and inspiration. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
The Revolution
According to
Raymundo Mata
by
Raymundo Mata
Part One
A Childhood in Kawit
In which the hero learns the alphabet—Spends time with playmates Miong and Idoy at idyllic Binakayan stream—Recites Balagtas at precocious age—Enrolls at Escuela de Niños—Reads a lot—Recalls Terror of Cavite (also known as Cavite Mutiny)—Records history of family—Mother, a Visayan artist, dies of tuberculosis—Father, dramatist, actor, and fan of Cavite Mutiny’s Padre Burgos, flees Kawit—Uncle, assistant parish priest of San Felipe, brings up abandoned child—Enrolls at Latinidad de Jose Basa—Meets best friends Benigno Santi and Agapito Conchu—Passes time with fruit bats—Alludes to Rizal’s historic Noli—Meets father, in disguise:
