Monday, March 26, 2007

Bernal: His Vision and Search for Redemption

Fernando V. Beup Jr.
Film 102
26 February 2003

Bernal: His Vision and Search for Redemption
(or Why Elsa in Himala Is Not a Hoax)


In Ishmael Bernal’s 1982 film masterpiece "Himala," Elsa, the main character played by Nora Aunor is shown kneeling, hands drawn together, eyes closed, her face turned towards heaven in fervent prayer. Over many years, this shot has been reproduced many times in different publications, making it perhaps one of the most recognizable still photos culled from Filipino films. The shot has indisputably attained a classic status so much so that even in the absence of the movie’s title, it almost never fails to bring to mind the film from where it was taken, and ultimately draw attention to its very creator—Bernal himself. If anything, this attests to the immense power that the image possesses.

Few would argue that a very fine actress like Aunor has lent this image a strong visual appeal. But how could one explain its enigmatic magnetism and credibility? How could such a photo command so much attention and be rewarded an iconic significance in the annals of Philippine cinema? The question inevitably requires us to take a look at the picture again and closely examine the elements that make this particular image so powerful as to become a celebrated and revered symbol of excellence in Filipino filmmaking. To make it even more interesting, it should be noted that its creator had been widely acknowledged to be an outstanding filmmaker, something that has been affirmed with his being accorded, posthumously, the status of National Artist for Film in 2001. Could it be that the strength of the photo of Elsa in a prayerful trance is but a part of a visual narrative style employed which transcends the filmic image, implicitly communicating the inner “moorings” of its author? What then are these internal moorings?
To arrive at answers to the above questions, it becomes imperative to subject Bernal’s films under close scrutiny and reveal, if at all, semiotic relationship between Bernal’s films and his personal beliefs, convictions, or disposition. It is the purpose of this paper to explore the inner moorings of Bernal as can be gleaned from his style in filmmaking particularly as regards his themes and visual narrative techniques. Himala and Nunal will serve as the focal points of the paper’s inquiry being considered among Bernal's most artistic works, with the rest to help support the paper’s theses. Ultimately, the paper will show how these elements converge to reveal Bernal’s importance as an artist and his recurring vision of moral order and his constant search for hope and redemption in his films.

It should be noted that Bernal was a very prolific artist, having made prior to his death in June 2, 1996, more than 30 films which touch on various topics and genres.[1] Not all of these films are considered outstanding, however. In fact, Bernal’s films were largely commercial, though it is noted that most of them bear his distinct touch and commitment to artistic pursuits.[2] Among his most famous creations were Pagdating sa Dulo (1971), Nunal sa Tubig (1976), Manila by Night (1980), and Himala (1982); all of them bearing important statements about society in general. The oppressive political situation at the time of President Marcos and the rise of activism among the students and the intelligentsia may help explain why many of Bernal’s films were loaded with statements regarding Philippine society’s ills.

Bernal was very good as a political satirist as evidenced by Pagdating sa Dulo and Manila by Night. Yet it is not through these films that Bernal becomes outstanding and truly remarkable. His widely acknowledged greatest work, Himala, though itself bears political implications, is not, in its most immediate sense, about politics. The movie tells about a simple country lass who one day declares to have witnessed the Virgin’s apparition and from thence attracts a large number of believers, miracle-seekers and all sorts of people, consequently bringing into the once sleepy village numerous vices and social evils. The movie ends in the shocking assassination of the “visionary” after she reveals that she does not perform miracles—that in fact there is no miracle.
The film, for all its richness in meaning, is essentially about the general gullibility of Filipinos who, in their desperation and ignorance, are driven to believe anything or anyone—regardless of the subject’s veracity. It is evident that Elsa’s richly layered character had been deliberately crafted—and aurally enhanced—in such a way that would lead viewers to create an ambivalent judgment of her: is she, or isn’t she? The question inevitably becomes a question of faith in the viewer: Should I believe or not? Why should I believe?

It should be of interest to note that toward the end of the film, despite Elsa’s pleading that there is no miracle, that miracles reside in the hearts of everyone, the viewer still gets the feeling that she is a messiah, and that the bullet from an unknown assassin is not only underserved but tragically wrong. After the chaos the assassination had generated, the people once more—perhaps even more strongly—believed that Elsa was indeed a messiah, that in fact she was a martyr. Vicariously, the viewer cannot but feel a sense of loss of a potential messiah.

The strength of Himala, among other things, undeniably rests on this ambivalence the movie creates in the audience. Interestingly enough, Bernal’s Nunal sa Tubig creates a similar effect in its totality when viewed within the context of faith and fortitude. The same is true with Hinugot sa Langit as regards the issue on abortion and, subordinately, as regards poverty and social justice. Bernal’s mastery of provoking this ambivalence reveals his subtle skill in manipulating the mise-en-scene to create an atmosphere that subconsciously helps the viewer to sense the spiritual, hence, the “religious.”[3] Incidentally, Nunal, Himala, and Hinugot all have obvious connections with religion and, understandably, possess strong moral overtones. In Nunal, Carmen (Maricel Soriano) physically and verbally affronts the man who killed her landlady (while she is in the middle of a prayer), screaming, “You have no right to kill!” In Nunal, the mythical island populated by people who are reluctant to embrace religion and modernity (science) succumbs to bad luck, eliciting the remark, “It must be karma,” from the daughter of a fishing investor.

Yet it is not the dialogue itself nor the themes that elicit from Bernal’s films spiritually unsettling feelings. Rather, it is in Bernal's cinematic (visual) expression that the audience can find his statements about the spiritual (sacred) most compelling. Can such a visual expression exist? Referring to Amedee Ayfre's idea of such cinematic style, Michael Bird in his essay Film as Hierophany writes:

…there is a cinematic approach to the sacred that discloses not only its surface appearances but also its inner striving that point to its depth. "Genuinely" religious films, by no means restricted to explicitly religious subjects, are those in which the cinematographic recording of reality does not exhaust reality but rather evokes in the viewer the sense of its ineffable mystery. [4]

In Himala, the scene on the hill where Elsa is first seen worshipping the Virgin is so visually powerful and mystical that both the viewer and the filmic characters would likely to simultaneously believe in the authenticity of the apparition even when no explicit sacred manifestation had been shown. The desert-like features of the hill, the luminescence of the midday sun, the blowing of the wind and the twisted and lifeless trees that allude to the crucifixion of Christ all subsume the viewer and reduce him to a mere mortal witnessing the spectacle of the divine. The effect produced by this particular scene aptly demonstrates Birds's assertion on the manifestation of the sacred in art, particularly in film:

If art cannot give a direct representation of the dimension of the holy, it can nonetheless perform an alternative religious function: art can disclose those spaces and those moments in culture where the experience of finitude and the encounter with the transcendent dimension are felt and expressed within culture itself. Where art is unable to portray the face of God, it can on the other hand show man's struggle to discern the divine presence. While lacking the capacity to represent infinity, art can locate, emphasize, and intensify those striving in culture for the transcendent that occur at the boundary of finitude.[5]

The lingering focus or gaze of the camera on Aunor's face as she undergoes a hypnotic trance further reinforces the sacred’s significance in the scene in which the French philosopher Mikel Duffrene would call "sensuous realism," or the theologian Paul Tillich's "belief-ful realism," both of whom are concerned about meanings behind reality as opposed to mere physical representations of the sacred.[6] Using Duffrene's idea of the "sensuous," the visual image Bernal thus created becomes central to his motive of highlighting the "authenticity" of Elsa as a visionary, in effect creating a disturbing duality (she is/she isn’t) in the character that must have only been intended to create an ambivalent attitude towards Elsa on the part of the viewer. Hence, to view Himala and dismiss the character of Elsa as a mere “hoax”[7] is to miss, if not simplistically and summarily veto Bernal’s vision of dividing the audience into two main categories: the believers and non-believers, and, ultimately, inviting the audience to find their way between right and wrong. Indeed, Elsa is not a hoax any more than Bernal wishes his audience to believe she is. If at all, this gives the viewer an insight into the workings of Bernal’s mind both as an artist brought up in a society steeped in religiousity and, more importantly, his understanding of the film medium’s ability to convey the mysterious.

Bernal's vision, hence, starts to unfold as basically a moral one, if not Catholic. It is moral because his movies thematically tackle moral issues such as hypocrisy and abortion (Hinugot), hypocrisy and opportunism (Himala), spiritual emptiness and ignorance (Nunal), moral decay (Manila), etc.; and Catholic because they bear references to the Catholic faith, directly or indirectly. It appears then that Bernal is a moralist, though he does not appear strictly to be didactic. That he is not didactic fairly accounts for the widely acknowledged fact that Bernal’s film can be approached at different levels at the same time, meaning that one can deduce what one wants from the point that he wishes to see Bernal’s films. In Himala, the playful frolic of Nimia with the boys at dusk creates an unsettling feeling of ambivalence: A veiled Nimia framed in iridescence of the setting sun conjures the image that she is the Virgin. In effect, Bernal seems to involve the viewer once again in that already familiar guessing game: is she?/ isn’t she?

Bernal’s strength as a filmmaker seems to come from his understanding that film must create “moments” that would serve as tools for discovering the covert meanings in every scene. Nunal and Himala are rich in these “moments,” instances which coax the viewer to put meaning into the film rather than get them. It is in this fashion that Bernal demonstrates his great artistry in manipulating the film medium to convey meaning not through direct representation but over and beyond representation. In this manner, Bernal echoes Rudolf Arnheim’s suggestion that “art is distinct from ‘mere’ imitation or representation—art is a creative transformation ‘rather than mechanical reproduction’.”[8] In Bernal’s case, the transformation occurs in the careful composition of the filmic atmosphere and characters to create a sense of the holy (good) and the unholy (evil).

Why Bernal would choose to narrate his story in a “belief-ful” realist mode while credibly casting doubts on the authenticity of Elsa as visionary deserves a closer look. It is reasonable to assume that Bernal intentionally utilized a form of storytelling “conspiratorial” in nature so he could involve the audience to come to terms with their own moral dilemmas by subtly but forcefully presenting to them two equally competing forces: good and evil.

For Bernal, the choice between good and evil presents a difficult and exhausting problem. In Hinugot, Carmen is tormented by the dilemma of having to choose between keeping her unwanted baby or having it aborted. The choice could have been settled on that level, but Bernal complicates the story by adding into the story a rigorously Catholic, guilt-ridden former abortionist Loring (Charito Solis) who psychologically harasses Carmen about the latter’s moral choice. As the situation complicates, one can palpably sense the dialogues among the characters acquire an internal monologue tone. In the scene where Carmen is confronted by Loring about the former’s decision to abort her child, the conversations suggest that Carmen is wrestling with her conscience (Loring) in an apparent state of (Bernal’s) soliloquy.

Somehow the internal monologue tone is not confined within Hinugot alone. Himala when listened to intently creates a similar impression; so does Nunal; so does Manila. The overall effect, then, is that as one watches the characters exchange words, one is eventually able to hear Bernal conversing with himself in an obvious tug of war with his conscience, vicariously absorbing the viewer into Bernal’s own psychological disposition. If so, the recurrence of this phenomenon in Bernal’s films very well echoes, if not boosts, the particular notion in the auteur theory that “to a certain extent… the auteur is always his own subject matter; whatever the scenario, he always tells the same story, or…has the same attitude and passes the same moral judgments on the action and on the characters.”[9]

Corollary to this is the interesting manner by which Bernal brings to the screen his idea of evil. Bernal tends to signal the sinister and the occult by afflicting his supporting characters with some form of neuroses. Loring’s rigorous efforts (resulting from her tremendous guilt) to save her soul by appropriating her resources for the church at the expense of the family squatting on her property displays her distorted moral priorities. She is, in a clinical sense, obsessive-compulsive. In Nunal, Maria’s (Elizabeth Oropesa) sister uncharacteristically sweeps the courtyard in the afternoon, knowingly smiles at the misfortune of Maria, giggles at the clumsiness of the priest, and leads a government statistician into trouble. Bernal pushes this further by showing both women (Maria and sister) wearing shawls, walking as if in procession, conjuring up visions of the dark and the Gothic reminiscent of the final river scene in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973).

Curiously enough, Bernal shows a fascination for signaling moral bankruptcy by emphasizing “lack.” Himala and Nunal both show the loss of moral fortitude through the absence of water. In Himala, it was through a prolonged drought; in Nunal, it was the drying up of the well. For Bernal, the lack of water suggests the drying up of the spirit, implying the people’s “thirst” or need for spiritual nourishment. Not quite incidentally, water plays a very important symbolic role in religion (Catholic) particularly in baptism and consecration, and acquires an even more profound meaning in one of Christ’s last words, “I’m thirsty.”

That both Himala and Nunal could generate rich interpretations can be attributed to the manner by which they are presented with their emphasis on the atmosphere rather than through cinematic montage. In this manner, both films closely approach the level of literature, where the spectator interprets (puts) rather than passively watches (gets) the films. It appears then that Bernal is at his element when he approaches the realm of the sublime and the intangible, the mystical and the psychological.

Interestingly, Bernal’s cinematic style finds its parallel in the works of the Colombian writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez; the French-Czechoslovakian Milan Kundera; the Austro-Hungarian Franz Kafka; and the Irish James Joyce, all of whom are considered rooted to the existentialist school in terms of the themes they tackle. It seems plausible that Bernal himself may have asked the same questions existentialists have asked; and basically, these have to do with the question on the purpose of one’s existence—the “being and nothingness” of Sartre, the anxiety of Soren Kiekergaard over the absurdity of his existence, and finally, Friedrich Neitzsche’s idea of the death of God, meaning that faith in God is gone and can no longer solve man’s miserable condition. Principally, the questions they have asked are moral ones; and Bernal may have found in these philosophers an excellent company.

It is unfortunate that so very little has been written, if ever there was, about the personal, religious, and psychological aspects of Bernal as these could provide us a deeper understanding of the inner workings of his mind, and subsequently, better understanding of his “religious films”. It is evident, however, that Himala and Nunal—perhaps his two richest films in terms of visual imagery, multidimensionality and mysticism—are rendered superior by their style in tackling the spiritual and the intangible—in other words, the moral.

It would have been most interesting to understand him as a person so that insights can be gained as to the personal meanings he had put into his films that presently we can only surmise. It might take some time before Bernal can be deconstructed through his works, but it may be Himala, his greatest work, that may yet give us the best clue to his mind: Why does Bernal confuse us—and confuse us deliberately—about the authenticity of Elsa? Is it because he believed that man is “condemned to be free”—free to make choices—just as Sartre had believed? Why was Elsa killed? More importantly, who killed her? If we put Elsa in substitute for faith, or God, only Nietzsche can give us a most chilling answer:

We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers…Whither are we moving now?... Do we not now wander through an endless nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? [10]





***


[1] Mario A. Hernando, “Ishmael Bernal: Merging Art and Commercialism,” Far East Banknotes(Third of a Series), 1981.
[2] Ibid.
[3]The “religious” or religion in film is thoroughly discussed in John R. May and Michael Bird, eds., Religion in Film (United States: The University of Tennessee Press/Knoxville, 1982).

[4] Michael Bird, “Film as Hierophany,” Ibid., 14.
[5] Ibid., 4.
[6] Ibid., 8.
[7] The word “hoax’ constantly appears in various articles, particularly in the summary of the film.
[8] Bird. Ibid., 10.
[9]Andre Bazin, “La politique des Auteurs,” Cahiers du Cinema, no. 70, April 1957: extracted in John Caughie, ed., Theories of Authorship (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1981), 45.
[10] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. 1882. The Joyful Wisdom; quoted in T.Z. Lavine, From Socrates to Sartre: the Philosophic Quest (United States: Bantam Books, 1989), 324.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Learning about the past (from The Economist)

Learning about the past

Where history isn't bunk

Mar 15th 2007 DUBLIN, ISTANBUL AND SYDNEY
From The Economist print edition

Across the world, approaches to teaching children about their nation's past are hotly contested—especially at times of wider debate on national identity.

IF THE past is a foreign country, the version that used to be taught in Irish schools had a simple landscape. For 750 years after the first invasion by an English king, Ireland suffered oppression. Then at Easter 1916, her brave sons rose against the tyrant; their leaders were shot but their cause prevailed, and Ireland (or 26 of her 32 counties) lived happily ever after.

Awkward episodes, like the conflict between rival Irish nationalist groups in 1922-23, were airbrushed away. “The civil war was just an embarrassment, it was hardly mentioned,” says Jimmy Joyce, who went to school in Dublin in the 1950s.

These days, Irish history lessons are more sophisticated. They deal happily with facts that have no place in a plain tale of heroes and tyrants: like the fact that hundreds of thousands of Irish people, Catholic and Protestant, fought for Britain during the two world wars.

Why the change? First because in the 1980s, some people in Ireland became uneasy about the fact that a crude view of their national history was fuelling a conflict in the north of the island. Then came a fall in the influence of the Catholic church, whose authority had rested on a deft fusion between religion and patriotism. Also at work was an even broader shift: a state that was rich, confident and cosmopolitan saw less need to drum simple ideas into its youth, especially if those ideas risked encouraging violence.

As countries all over the world argue over “what to tell the children” about their collective past, many will look to Ireland rather enviously. Its seamless transition from a nationalist view of history to an open-minded one is an exception.

A history curriculum is often a telling sign of how a nation and its elites see themselves: as victims of colonialism or practitioners (either repentant or defiant) of imperial power. In the modern history of Mexico, for example, a big landmark was the introduction, 15 years ago, of text-books that were a bit less anti-American.

Many states still see history teaching, and the inculcation of foundation myths, as a strategic imperative; others see it as an exercise in teaching children to think for themselves. And the experience of several countries suggests that, whatever educators and politicians might want, there is a limit to how far history lessons can diverge in their tone from society as a whole.

Take Australia. John Howard, the conservative prime minister, has made history one of his favourite causes. At a “history summit” he held last August, educators were urged to “re-establish a structured narrative” about the nation's past. This was seen by liberal critics as a doomed bid to revive a romantic vision of white settlement in the 18th century. The romantic story has been fading since the 1980s, when a liberal, revisionist view came to dominate curricula: one that replaced “settlement” with “invasion” and that looked for the first time at the stories of aborigines and women.

How much difference have Australia's policy battles made to what children in that cosmopolitan land are taught? Under Mr Howard's 11-year government, “multicultural” and “aboriginal reconciliation”, two terms that once had currency, have faded from the policy lexicon.
But not from classrooms. Australia's curricula are controlled by the states, not from Canberra. Most states have rolled Australian history into social-studies courses, often rather muddled. But in New South Wales, the most populous state, where the subject is taught in its own right, Mr Howard's bid to promote a patriotic view of history meets strong resistance.

Judy King, head of Riverside Girls High School in Sydney, has students from more than 40 ethnic groups at her school. “It's simply not possible to present one story to them, and nor do we,” she says. “We canvass all the terms for white settlement: colonialism, invasion and genocide. Are all views valid? Yes. What's the problem with that? If the prime minister wants a single narrative instead, then speaking as someone who's taught history for 42 years he'll have an absolute fight on his hands.”

Tom Ying, head of history at Burwood Girls High School in Sydney, grew up as a Chinese child in the white Australia of the 1950s. In a school where most students are from non-English-speaking homes, he welcomes an approach that includes the dark side of European settlement. “When you have only one side of the story, immigrants, women and aborigines aren't going to have an investment in it.”

Australia is a country where a relatively gentle (by world standards) effort to reimpose a sort of national ideology looks destined to fail. Russia, by contrast, is a country where the general principle of a toughly enforced ideology, and a national foundation story, still seems natural to many people, including the country's elite.

In a telling sign of how he wants Russians to imagine their past, President Vladimir Putin has introduced a new national day—November 4th—to replace the old communist Revolution Day holiday on November 7th. What the new date recalls is the moment in 1612 when Russia, after a period of chaos, drove the Catholic Poles and Lithuanians out of Moscow. Despite the bonhomie of this week's 25-minute chat between Mr Putin and Pope Benedict XVI, the president is promoting a national day which signals “isolation and defensiveness” towards western Christendom, says Andrei Zorin, a Russian historian.

Because trends and ideas take time to trickle down from the elite to the classroom, Russian schools are still quite liberal places. In a hangover from the free-ranging tone of Boris Yeltsin's presidency, teachers can portray the past pretty much in whatever way they choose. But they are bracing for a change. As one liberal history teacher frets: “I can imagine that in a year's time we will be obliged to explain the meaning of the new holiday to first-year pupils.” And part of the meaning is that chaos—be it in the Yeltsin era or prior to 1612—is a greater evil than toughly enforced order.

In South Africa, where white rule collapsed at the same time as communism did, the authorities seem to have done a better job at forging a new national story and avoiding the trap of replacing one rigid ideology with another. “The main message of the new school curriculum is inclusion and reconciliation,” says Linda Chisholm, who helped design post-apartheid lessons. “We teach pupils to handle primary sources, like oral history and documents, instead of spoon-feeding them on textbooks,” adds Aled Jones, a history teacher at Bridge House school in Cape Province. It helps that symbols and anniversaries have been redefined with skill. December 16th used to be a day to remember white settlers clashing with the Zulus in 1838; now it is the Day of Reconciliation.

By those standards, parts of the northern hemisphere are far behind. A hard argument over history is under way in places like south-eastern Europe: this battle pits old elites that see teaching history as a strategic issue against newer ones that hope for an opening of minds.

In modern Turkey, classrooms have always been seen as a battleground for young hearts. Every day, children start the day by chanting: “I am a Turk, I am honest, I am industrious”—and woe betide the tiny tot who stumbles because Turkish is not his main tongue. Secondary schools get regular visits from army officers who try to instil “national-security awareness”.

In such a climate, it is inevitable that “history is considered a sensitive matter, to be managed by the state,” says Taner Akcam, a Turkish-born historian, whose frank views on the fate of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 have exposed him to harassment by Turkish nationalists, even in America where he now lives. But text-books have changed recently, under pressure from the European Union: the latest still call the British “sly and treacherous” but are a little kinder to the Greeks. Neyyir Berktay, an educationalist, calls the new books “significantly better” than what went before; but they are still far from accepting the idea of more than one culture within Turkey's borders.

In neighbouring Greece, there is a bitter controversy over a new textbook for 12-year-olds. Its approach is a challenge to some historical vignettes that are dear to modern Greek hearts: for example the idea of “secret schools” where priests taught youngsters to read and write in defiance of their Ottoman masters.

While Ireland's religious nationalism is in retreat (because the Catholic Church has lost influence), Greece's Orthodox leaders, like Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens, are putting up a harder fight to preserve the nationalist spirit which their predecessors embraced, reluctantly at first, in the 19th century. Ranged against them is a new school of Balkan history that reflects a cross-border dialogue between scholars. The net result is a fairer story—though when books try to be fair there's always a risk of being bland, says Thalia Dragona, a Greek educational psychologist.

Meanwhile some Greeks retort that 11 or 12 is too young to go looking for facts. In a web-discussion of the new Greek textbook, one participant thunders: “At university, the goal of historical research is the discovery of truth. But in primary schools history teaching has an entirely different aim—to form historical consciousness and social identity!”

Rizal Vs. Gandhi: The Perils of Comparisons

The idea of writing this essay was triggered by an unexpected comment from one of my students in Asian Civilization subject. This was after the viewing of the film “Gandhi” in class. The student said that her very high esteem for Jose Rizal, the national hero of the Philippines, was “diminished,” implying that Gandhi was a far greater person than Rizal and therefore deserves a higher respect or admiration. In this essay, I argue that while comparison has its place in learning, one must not lose sight of the fact that it also has its pitfalls. One tragedy that can befall the person making comparisons is his or her failure to situate the things, events or persons being compared in their own historical milieu.

Rizal Vs. Gandhi: The Perils of Comparisons

(Coming up!)

Monday, March 12, 2007

TO MY STUDENTS AT GCIC

To my students at GCIC:

At the start of the semester I asked you one question: "Do you like History?" I clearly remember that most of you answered in the negative. It was therefore a challenge for me to teach you because I know that most of the things taken up in History cannot help you in your most immediate concerns, like passing the Nursing Board Exam, for instance. At the start of the semester, I had the hope of changing your mind about the subject. Now that the semester has ended, I am not sure if I succeeded at all.


I would like everyone to know, however, that the semester I spent with you had been a very enjoyable one. Perhaps the most interesting part of it was reading your essays--the last exercise I gave you. Some of you wrote very touching words--words that inspired me to further develop my skills as a teacher.

Personally, I believe that students owe 80 percent (or more) of their knowledge to themselves. The remaining 20 percent (or less) they owe to somebody else. I know that you owe me very little for what you know, but what matters to me is the possibility that I may have influenced you in a positive way, no matter how seemingly insignificant.

I recall having asked you to momentarily look back and think about your life. How much of your past can you remember? Not much, right? It is pretty much the same with your History class. The moment you step out of school to face the so-called "life," there is not much that you would recall from the subject. Nobody expects you to, including me. The human brain is designed in such a way that you would recall only bits and pieces of your experiences. Chances are, you will recall only the things that you choose to highlight. So, you see, I do not expect too much from you. For, after all, what are the names and dates that you can remember from history? You will find no use for them. At least, not until one day you find yourself being quizzed about history in a TV game show, or you find yourself lost in the middle of Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.

So what gains can be had from taking History class? There are too many to enumerate here. But eventually, it is not the facts and names of people that matter to you or anyone. What matters is that you have gained new perspectives and new ways of asking questions about the realities that surround you. In other words, that you have grown intellectually and gained wisdom and maturity in the way you apprehend things.


I suppose that the students who found the most satisfaction from this class were those who sat through the entire semester with all the patience they could muster in order to listen and understand the lectures. I say this because one of the greatest satisfactions that can be had is the thought that you have conquered yourself--your weaknesses and all. The least satisfied students would of course be the ones who just waited for the semester to be over without taking a moment to value the opportunities of learning. Not all learning experiences can be quantified. One can therefore treat the whole subject as an exercise in character-building. If you think you succeeded in this, congratulations! If you think you failed, then you are bound to repeat the exercise somewhere at some other time in your life.

I am most happy by the fact that even those who did not do well in their exams did very well in writing their last essays. I am very pleased that the essence of education was not lost on them. In the end, it is not the number of facts and events you can remember that matter most but how deeply you have thought about them so you will not be running blind in the larger context of the world.

Do your best, and good luck!

Sometimes I Just Know

(I wrote this poem when I was 26)

Sometimes I Just Know
By F. Vidal Beup Jr.

Sometimes I just know
The mountains are there
Quiet in their presence
To overwhelm me;
That rains fall
In cold remembrance
Of my sunny days.

Sometimes I just know
Winters can't be that cold,
And storms can't be too harsh.
I just know they're there
To remind me of your presence--
Much stronger,
Much more cruel
Than they are.

Like When You Write A Poem

(I wrote this poem when I was 21 years old).

Like When you Write A Poem
By F. Vidal Beup Jr.

Your brush doesn't paint
In colors that draw
The world to its face--
Like when you smile
After a war has crippled
The man in you;
Or as when you go
And return
With your eyes empty;
Or as when those hands
Wave goodbye
As I leave.

Your words
Are void of cheer
As when you say
These cares would all fade
At the break of dawn.
Your voice simply betrays
The sadness of it all.

You see, I have a way
Of knowing
If you're lying--
Like when you pen
Your thoughts
In delicate patterns
And break me twice
In recognition of you.