Hot summer
Musings on Luis Cabalquinto's "The Picnic"
April 2006
Summer is the best time to curl up on a good book, eat a mouth-watering halo-halo, frolic with friends in the mall, or just be a couch potato the whole day. These activities people would do to get away from the scorching heat, to cool themselves away from the discomforts of the roasting climate.
Going to the beach is one thing that most families anticipate, to get together and do one thing at the same time, bond and get away from the cares of the day.
(Postcard was a gift from Janet Lyn "Selena" Go-Alano back in 1997 in Ateneo de Naga)
Yet, some thirty summers ago, one promising poet perhaps fresh from the Tiempos’ Dumaguete workshop, rendered a picture of how one picnic can be one opportunity for something more than frolic and picnic.
In “The Picnic” by Luis Cabalquinto, a Bikolano writer based in New York, the persona does more than observe the sights and sounds in a beach, perhaps like Boracay.
The first touch of bare feet to sand
Makes of us reborn children
We drop invisible weights
and smile like a seashell.
Our limbs are light as the wind.
Our heads clean as clouds.
Loneliness is the vague land
on the far horizon.
Published in the Manila Review in August 1976, “The Picnic” features a persona who observes more than what he sees on the beach.
For the persona, the beach getaway is an opportunity to not only refresh the body, but to rejuvenate the soul. The cool respite from the heat takes him and his companions away from the hustle and bustle, from all the car[e]s of the day, so to speak:
We are all good people on the beach:
We are quick with our movements
to help
one another—
With the baskets, with the towels,
and our lunch.
We retrieve a smooth pebble
For a stranger’s two-year-old daughter
Against an advancing wave.
The persona sees the people’s good dispositions, of those who have gone to the beach to relax. He sees that people who go to the beach must really be there “for the keeps.” They are certainly there to make fun and have fun just because they are [fun]! They are good people; they are kind ones; or, they become what they don’t seem to be:
We give freely: our gestures generous,
large
as the mothering sea.
We eye each other’s bodies in the spirit
of a free-love commune:
We are ready to sleep with other men
Or secretly lend our wives.
The beach is an open space, like an open mind that can be polluted anytime. In the preceding stanza, the persona slowly delivers the poem’s tension. In the recesses of the persona’s mind, he ponders duplicity, he contemplates infidelity.
As in any other beach, which must be brimming of picnickers, the beachgoer is indeed thrown open [literally] to hundreds of possibilities, being given more choices than what he can contain. For one, his mind can go freely as to accommodate delicious cravings or [for freethinkers] or go overboard as to contemplate unspeakable acts as sleeping with his own kind [for moralists].
The beach affords the beachgoer chances to sin. The persona can entertain such thoughts as flirting with anyone, or trading off one’s filiations, if any.
Perhaps the 1970s—the period in which this piece was written—was some substantial years after the liberation of ideas, philosophies and lifestyles in the West from within college campuses and beyond. In this poem, Cabalquinto echoes a freethinking sensibility; through his craft he becomes the herald about treacheries [and also truths].
Very well, Cabalquinto who hails from Magarao, Camarines Sur, sees issues beyond sights; he rather sees metaphors in trivial objects or situations.
In a rather fun-seeking rendezvous, the poem’s persona gets to speak out more nasty intentions; the poet [literally] flings open the realities of the “fling.” Flirtations among men and [even] between them have never been antiquated as in this poem written some three decades ago.
“The Picnic” persona, of course, may just shrink in comparison when—he comes to know some three decades later—what he chooses to do is not something to be wary of—it is not anymore something frowned upon.
Times have changed, radically.
Had the poem’s persona been alive now, he may not have to hide his affection for anyone whom he desires in one island beach. There will be no more need for corals or shells to speak for what is rather forbidden:
But—
We are not wholly people on the beach:
Back in our houses, back in our cities—
We live on other rules,
follow
different
tides.
Even as we leave on the last jeep
to town—
Our grip grows strongly
over a gold cowrie
We picked off a coral.
We slip it into a pocket quickly,
Away from our neighbor’s
greed
and eye.
Recently, a local daily here ran a story on gay prostitutes being barred from Boracay due to their violations on some regulations in the island. The burgeoning business of gay prostitution says only one thing. The business is boiling [high] because the demand for it heats it all up. These facts are clear, however. Most if not all foreigners or even local tourists who go there are not [only] after the beach. They are after the experience from being clients of a healthy and thriving flesh trade—oh well—legitimized by the rest of the world.
In the hot summer, spirits have already been scalded and scorched by the fires of hell so as to be intense about anyone’s sexual preference. Now, duplicity is not anymore duplicity. For if in the past, duplicity lurked in the realm of the uncertain, today, duplicity is the certainty.
April 2006
Summer is the best time to curl up on a good book, eat a mouth-watering halo-halo, frolic with friends in the mall, or just be a couch potato the whole day. These activities people would do to get away from the scorching heat, to cool themselves away from the discomforts of the roasting climate.Going to the beach is one thing that most families anticipate, to get together and do one thing at the same time, bond and get away from the cares of the day.
(Postcard was a gift from Janet Lyn "Selena" Go-Alano back in 1997 in Ateneo de Naga)
Yet, some thirty summers ago, one promising poet perhaps fresh from the Tiempos’ Dumaguete workshop, rendered a picture of how one picnic can be one opportunity for something more than frolic and picnic.
In “The Picnic” by Luis Cabalquinto, a Bikolano writer based in New York, the persona does more than observe the sights and sounds in a beach, perhaps like Boracay.
The first touch of bare feet to sand
Makes of us reborn children
We drop invisible weights
and smile like a seashell.
Our limbs are light as the wind.
Our heads clean as clouds.
Loneliness is the vague land
on the far horizon.
Published in the Manila Review in August 1976, “The Picnic” features a persona who observes more than what he sees on the beach.
For the persona, the beach getaway is an opportunity to not only refresh the body, but to rejuvenate the soul. The cool respite from the heat takes him and his companions away from the hustle and bustle, from all the car[e]s of the day, so to speak:
We are all good people on the beach:
We are quick with our movements
to help
one another—
With the baskets, with the towels,
and our lunch.
We retrieve a smooth pebble
For a stranger’s two-year-old daughter
Against an advancing wave.
The persona sees the people’s good dispositions, of those who have gone to the beach to relax. He sees that people who go to the beach must really be there “for the keeps.” They are certainly there to make fun and have fun just because they are [fun]! They are good people; they are kind ones; or, they become what they don’t seem to be:
We give freely: our gestures generous,
large
as the mothering sea.
We eye each other’s bodies in the spirit
of a free-love commune:
We are ready to sleep with other men
Or secretly lend our wives.
The beach is an open space, like an open mind that can be polluted anytime. In the preceding stanza, the persona slowly delivers the poem’s tension. In the recesses of the persona’s mind, he ponders duplicity, he contemplates infidelity.
As in any other beach, which must be brimming of picnickers, the beachgoer is indeed thrown open [literally] to hundreds of possibilities, being given more choices than what he can contain. For one, his mind can go freely as to accommodate delicious cravings or [for freethinkers] or go overboard as to contemplate unspeakable acts as sleeping with his own kind [for moralists].
The beach affords the beachgoer chances to sin. The persona can entertain such thoughts as flirting with anyone, or trading off one’s filiations, if any.
Perhaps the 1970s—the period in which this piece was written—was some substantial years after the liberation of ideas, philosophies and lifestyles in the West from within college campuses and beyond. In this poem, Cabalquinto echoes a freethinking sensibility; through his craft he becomes the herald about treacheries [and also truths].
Very well, Cabalquinto who hails from Magarao, Camarines Sur, sees issues beyond sights; he rather sees metaphors in trivial objects or situations.
In a rather fun-seeking rendezvous, the poem’s persona gets to speak out more nasty intentions; the poet [literally] flings open the realities of the “fling.” Flirtations among men and [even] between them have never been antiquated as in this poem written some three decades ago.
“The Picnic” persona, of course, may just shrink in comparison when—he comes to know some three decades later—what he chooses to do is not something to be wary of—it is not anymore something frowned upon.
Times have changed, radically.
Had the poem’s persona been alive now, he may not have to hide his affection for anyone whom he desires in one island beach. There will be no more need for corals or shells to speak for what is rather forbidden:
But—
We are not wholly people on the beach:
Back in our houses, back in our cities—
We live on other rules,
follow
different
tides.
Even as we leave on the last jeep
to town—
Our grip grows strongly
over a gold cowrie
We picked off a coral.
We slip it into a pocket quickly,
Away from our neighbor’s
greed
and eye.
Recently, a local daily here ran a story on gay prostitutes being barred from Boracay due to their violations on some regulations in the island. The burgeoning business of gay prostitution says only one thing. The business is boiling [high] because the demand for it heats it all up. These facts are clear, however. Most if not all foreigners or even local tourists who go there are not [only] after the beach. They are after the experience from being clients of a healthy and thriving flesh trade—oh well—legitimized by the rest of the world.
In the hot summer, spirits have already been scalded and scorched by the fires of hell so as to be intense about anyone’s sexual preference. Now, duplicity is not anymore duplicity. For if in the past, duplicity lurked in the realm of the uncertain, today, duplicity is the certainty.
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