Apropos to Cubism

A POET In the making

Dear Gavin - It is almost difficult to ignore the things around us when there is so much life in it. It doesn't stink as you would imagine, it even turns itself into something beautiful, unfolding within the recesses of our own imagination. But isn't life a series of imaginations? That it goes beyond any human knowledge, the residue of which is for you to find out. And by doing so, you'll often find it mysterious to value life, to find it worth living when it leaves a mindful of experiences. Such is its fury, raging. But an expression is worth a thousand words. One feels the need to express and eventually spell all doubt, releasing an extensive flood of words and gestures. The problem, however, of expressing a definitive statement of a particular thing, say, the death of a person, sometimes leaves us in uncertainty. And this same startling condition makes dear life even more gripping. As you said in your last letter, you find it so hard at times to justify your expression by simply uttering a word and thus excuse you of any meaning more than its denotation and while away yourself in turn by not saying anything at all. And the reasons are much too much for you to handle. You begin to doubt. And there erects intellectual stagnation and emotional madness. Although life may exude a certain kind of attractiveness in itself, society, almost spontaneously, hides its face from it. Its traumatic relationship with the former turns individuals into a mass of broken limbs. Life's nakedness has always been in malicious row with society's censorship. This is so since most of us, myself included, are more obsessed with anything contradictory than in taking possession of simple common sense. Unconsciously, we pride ourselves, whether we admit it or not, of being misunderstood most of the time. But any misunderstanding pertaining to its sojourn probably springs out of our ignorance of the realization and uniqueness of our potential as a human being. So take it easy, my boy, don't be too hard on yourself. In my assessment, the poem you have written is a result of an imaginative mind, a kind that perks up the human spirit. These collection of yours, I should say, of putting into account an enormous number of individual lives overcoming and changing the world, tragically, makes us all the more the same. You may have triumphed over adversities, and have made some valuable pieces for the pleasure of your readers, but your singular and oftentimes peculiar reaction to certain things, your indispensable attitude, especially to criticism, tells the difference. You can either load your life with simple terms, and find beauty in it, or overload it with a lot of complexities, and initiate confusion. My life has had its own share of uncertainties, too. In fact, my confusion was even more problematic than the one you now have. But we no longer are in crisis. Although the spirit now dwelling in our society is one of permissiveness and relativity, that there are no longer genres to lie upon, and that there is only meaningless contentment or inevitable wasting away, I suggest that you take it all in stride. During my time, the prevalence of mindless fun so filled me with zest and disgust at the same time that even the actual writing itself was mindless to me. I have written a mammoth of stories without truly provoking a thought. Youth indeed was an opiate, I tell you. No matter how much risk we take in extracting words from our incessant struggles, the tendency to shout uncertainties remains to the many a compelling and unbridled human outlet. And having said that, your work as an artist is necessary. The images found in your collection may be of motley styles, language and content, but, by simply presenting these verses as it happened, their literary value lies in how you tell how distinctly a character deals with life. The realities of these prose poems may not be as biting and bold to the discriminating tastes of your critics, but I think your frank and lucid delineation of characters and complications makes me peep into my own slide as well, eventually revealing that restive thought with poignancy and primeval wit, but promising freedom, and life in return. Always remember, uncertainty is life devoid of life. Keep writing. With love and longing, ARVIN TAMPUS