LYNN M. GROW Reviews
The Erotic Space Around Art Objects: Selected Stories (1996 – 2026) By Eileen R. Tabios
(Sandy Press, 2026)
The Erotic Space Around Art Objects is yet another testament to the fecundity of its author. Eileen R. Tabios has, since departing from full-time occupations in journalism and banking (in which she rose to vice-president of a Swiss bank), produced works in both literature (in most genres) and visual arts (especially drawing and painting) seemingly endless in their innovative scope. Her written works have been translated into 13 languages, and up to 2019 she had exhibited her visual art in four countries. In addition, she has made major contributions to literary theory and editorial practice. She invented the “hay(na)ku” (a tercet structure adopted by many of her contemporaries), the MDR Generator (which can create poems up to, theoretically, infinity), the Flooid (a poem genre based on performing a good deed), and a monobon poetry type anchored in the monostich.
The all–inclusiveness of Tabios' artistic and literary endeavors should not be surprising, given her explicit espousal of Kapwa, which in its full sense contextualizes all that exists. As she memorably puts it in her book The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: “In the indigenous myth, the human, by being rooted onto the planet but also touching the sky, is connected to everything in the universe and across all time....All is One and One is All.” (203). This ontological stance is “rooted onto the planet” in daily life.1
The interconnection of all means that art and life are interwoven; the title The Erotic Space Around Art Objects says as much. In fact, if the title were The Art Objects Around Erotic Space, it would still be cogent and apt for Tabios' book. Concrete manifestations of the principle throughout Tabios' literary works can even be taken as exemplifying the view that art is life, and life is art. At its core, this assertion posits that daily existence is a creative masterpiece, an intrinsic expression rather than a detached “other.”
The first component of The Erotic Space to catch the reader's eye is of course the cover. The depiction by harry k stammer2 could represent the cosmos, its dark blue middle distance superimposed on a lighter blue background speckled with faint white dots, receding further at the speed of light from the galaxies, circular or elongated, enclosing solar systems of planets (pale yellow white dots in the front cover lower left circle enwrapped and sprinkled by tiny white dots of stars). This interpretation imbues both the art objects and the spaces between them with an ontological significance, which of course is shared by the book lying behind the cover.
Another perspective is, in keeping with the predominant visual art motif of the book, to see the cover as exemplifying the painting techniques of swirls of impasto, found in art instruction books to explain how to produce textured surfaces. Immediately, among renowned practitioners, Van Gogh, Willem de Kooning, and Frank Auerbach will come to mind. A third interpretational possibility is, as the narrator of the story “About Face” (91-102) puts it, that “...that forest that Courbet once painted and called 'The Origin of the World,'” is the generative erotic space.
stammer's four engravings are also presented in The Erotic Space. All four appear on the unnumbered first page immediately after the front cover, but not in the same order as in the text. In the former, their details are indistinct, due in part to their small (2 ¾ x “2 ¾) size. When they appear as section dividers (pages 9, 143, 159, 175), they are larger (4 ½” x 4 ½”), and so their details are more distinct, but they still resemble floor tiles excavated from an ancient archaeological site: uncolored except for white, black, and, for Engraving #2, light grey; well-worn; and somewhat weathered. In the center of each is a square with one side incomplete. In each successive engraving, the incomplete side is different, which creates a visual sensation much like that of clicking a selector dial into the next position. The square's sides are wide enough to resemble a door frame. In and around the door frames are swirls much like those on the book's covers.
Having perused these engravings, the reader will no doubt wonder what they mean and how they relate to the short fiction. Although engravers often use their work to illustrate a text—French artist Gustave Doré's famous wood engravings accompanying Dante's Divine Comedy (1867) is a notable example—such is not always the case.3 One prominent example is the ironic contrast between the depictions of “The Tyger” in the poem of the same name and the accompanying engraving in William Blake's Songs of Experience (1794): “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night, / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” The engraving shows a small, harmless tabby. The message is not to succumb to a fear complex and in so doing create a mountain out of a molehill.
But stammer's “artist note” takes a tack that is, if not unique, extremely rare:
“The engravings function as a deliberate diversion. They are meant to draw attention away from the book's stated visual–art inspirations rather than reinforce them. They do not correspond to the artist or art works mentioned, nor do they operate as secondary or derivative inspirations drawn from the author's own sources. Their role is non–relational and interruptive–an intentional visual interference. Like the persistent speck in a Francis Bacon painting, it keeps pulling the eye away from what appears to be the subject, resisting coherence and discouraging easy readings of influence.”
As radical as this sounds at first, it is completely accurate. However, it does not mean that the engravings are meaningless or artistically substandard. Both their meaning and their artistic merit lie in the same interpretive possibilities that the cover art brings us, unrelated to the visual artists and their art that the short fiction contains.
The centered incomplete square can represent the breakdown of order and stability because complete squares are associated with rationality, permanence, and even civilization. The incomplete squares can connote imperfect human endeavor or the intrusion of the natural, chaotic world into structural reality and thus transition or decay. Another, more likely, application here is that, as it has from the Renaissance, the incomplete square denotes a work in progress, elevating artistic process over finished artifact. Another symbolic significance can be moving from the material world to the spiritual, a less likely application here than its meaning in Suprematist art, in which a partial square reflects defiance of traditional rules and acceptance of “thinking outside the box,” resulting in a creative or innovative representation. The latter two possibilities are the most plausible, just as the conclusion that the cover art depicts painterly swirls of impasto rather than circles symbolizing spirituality is. The impression of origin in antiquity that the engravings evoke serves as reassurance that here we have nothing “trendy” or faddish. The human quest for ontological reality and cultural value is always ongoing.
Part I:
That these selections are “ekphrastic tales” will take no one by surprise, granted the book title, since ekphrastic literature bridges the gap between verbal and visual arts. The writer is enabled to dialogue with the visual artist over time and space via the visual artwork. In a poem like Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) the bridge needs to be of the expansion variety, spanning many centuries and two distinct cultures. It is, as Earl R. Wasserman has so eloquently pointed out in The Finer Tone: Keats' Major Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967; orig. pub. 1953): 11–62. Aged though this close-reading commentary is, it well defines what to this day is the functional relationship between literary art and visual art:
The urn…did not directly communicate at all, but allowed the individualized self of the poet to come into the presence of its mystery...art does not communicate by thrusting its meaning on the observer but by absorbing him into a participation in its essence....Art, then, raises the substance of thought beyond the dimensional restrictions of thought. (51-52)
The second word of the section heading, “Tales,” is also significant. Although “story” and “tale” are often used interchangeably, a tale is typically shorter, more imaginative, focuses on a linear progression of events, and, particularly salient for Tabios' work in The Erotic Space, often conveys a
moral stance and/or cultural values.
The “moral stance” and “cultural values” specifications are especially important for a reader to bear in mind when perusing the short fiction of this book because many passages would call for an “R” or even “X” rating were they movies. Certainly, the short fiction of the book is for adults only were they movies. Love-making scenes leave little to the imagination, and domination/submission are in them. But the latter two realms–which can be very dark–are not dark here. There is no violence and no compulsion. The liaisons are not ongoing; they end when one character or another says that they do.
Historical perspective is also valuable to keep in mind. In the Philippines, a few Angela Manalang-Gloria poems became the targets of moral opprobrium; now it is a head scratcher why “Querida” (1940), for instance, had that effect. Since as Sylvia Mendez Ventura pointed out in Ragtime in Kamuning: Sari-Sari Essays (Metro Manila: Anvil, 1992: 120), had the poem been titled “Hospital,” nobody would have objected. The Spanish Conquistadores didn't leave their querida tradition behind in the Iberian Peninsula when they splashed ashore in the Philippines and had “Querida” appeared in 1944 under the title “Clandestine Hukbalahap Meeting,” everyone except perhaps the collaborators would have enthusiastically applauded.
However, the first ekphrasis tale, “Red 'Afterbirth,'” is very much a “G” rating piece aside, perhaps, from the “I LOSE CONTROL” interjections. The tale opens with a quotation from Clinton Palanca's novella Identifications, part of the 1996 anthology Catfish Arriving in Little Schools.4 Its significance is that Palanca asserts that writing is a polemic designed for the sole purpose of convincing himself that his novella's “...elements, in intensity and extent, are contained in my own history.” (13) It could well be said that “Red 'Afterbirth'” does the same for Rose, the narrator. Her artist's perceptive eye is immediately attuned to the predominant characteristic of Noel (a sculptor a year younger than she is, though she doesn't know right away about his occupation or his age): his ruddy complexion. This she processes artistically: “...the sun's red stain on his cheeks....The sun…only deepened the ruddiness on his skin until it evoked an ember of coal flickering its last breaths.” (13) She “...thought of blood and afterbirth...” (15)
How appropriate the characters' names are to the tale's title. “Noel,” of course, identifies a carol celebrating the birth of Christ. If Noel and Rose seem destined for each other, we might see a good omen of that possibility in “My mother and his mother were best friends during high school days in the Philippines. My mother renewed their acquaintance when she left the United States to retire in Manila. Mama showed them catalogues of my paintings when they visited her.” (18) Rose's first solo show at a prestigious New York gallery garners rave reviews, and her dealer sells everything in the show. Noel's five shows are also critical and popular successes. His first show features “...eight sculptures, each comprised of a single black rope interacting in angled patterns against the gallery's white walls....The pieces were all titled 'Rose' with the numbers '1' to '8' after my [Rose's] name to differentiate one from another. In the note he [Noel] wrote, 'The first time we met, you turned your back on me. And a single strand of hair separated itself from your receding presence. When I picked it up, it clung to me. It clings to me still.” (18-19)
Rose's mother returns to Manila after viewing Noel's fifth show, bringing with her a catalogue showing that “...this time, the ropes were stained dark red....In the letter he sent with my mother, he wrote, 'I have these sculptures formed from the soil where your studio stands.'” Upon reading this, Rose changes the title of the red canvas by her studio door from “Wound” to “Afterbirth.” (20)
Overall, this is a charming, delightful story narrated in a prose style rarely seen in Tabios' works: bantering, lilting, even flirtatious in tone, reminiscent of Angela Manalang-Gloria's in her poems “Angelita” (1925) and “May” (1940).5 It would adapt very easily to T.V.'s Hallmark Channel6 except for the crescendoing “WHEN I LOSE CONTROL” refrains. These are a blare of herald trumpets in what otherwise is the lively placidity of a Mozart folk piece like “Deutscher Tanz” (“German Dance,” K.605, composed in 1791). In “Red 'Afterbirth,'” following an initial variant wording and content (14), each refrain (16, 19, 20) turns up the volume by adding a sentence to the previous interjection. Each is in all caps and separated by quadruple spacing from the text before and after it. The effect is to emphasize that beneath the genteel and undisturbed surface of the tale lies a volcanic eruption of passion, as we see more explicitly in the tales that follow in The Erotic Space.
Immediately following is “La Luna 'Before Silence of Winter Comes,'” a lengthy, richly allusive tale that could well be considered the anchor piece of the ekphrasis section, though its prose style is as lively and light as the prose style of “Red 'Afterbirth'.” Although the narrative of “La Luna” is laced with information about visual art history and method, it is interwoven subtly.7 The title refers to both the celestial body and the first-person narrator's painting “La Luna Naranja” (“The Orange Moon”). The painting depicts a “red orange” moon; the narrator opens the story “I was looking at a scarlet moon” and explains that virgin moons are swathed in blood,” a cue for the reader to bring out a palette and a bandage. The narrator then continues to link the “virgin moons” to the human experience associated with them:
“They first appear studded in red, the longest wave light emanating from the spectrum of the sun as it sinks beneath the horizon. As night matures and the moon reaches for the stars, la luna whitens. Since I preferred the radiance of a ruby to the self-effacement of a pearl, I considered the moon's nightly cycle as emblematic of time's dangerous potential for diluting the spirit.” (23)
An orange moon is frequently called a harvest moon because it signals the end of the growing season and the gathering in of crops, the resources enabling survival during winter in cold climates. Though it signals the imminence of significant change, even transformation, it is a time for “harvest home” celebrations like Thanksgiving in the United States. As such, it is associated with spiritual awakening and zest for life. The second element of the tale's title, “'Before Silence of Winter Comes,'” sounds markedly poetic, much like the Tara Shannon poem included in Shannon's Facebookpost of December 19, 2021, the first two lines of which read “There's a stillness in winter / a silence” (lines 1-2).8 The effect created by the lyric lilt of the title carries over to the smooth rhythm sustained in the body of the tale in spite of its length. As she is looking at her own painting, La Luna Naranja, the narrator's thoughts about “an infant” moon she saw in Mojacar, Spain9 are interrupted by a man's kibitzing comment “You don't know what you are doing...” Naturally, they will become lovers, but at this moment Jason Yardley10 introduces himself. Yardley is also a painter, but what immediately magnetizes the narrator's attention is Yardley himself. What she notices about him immediately alerts us to their forthcoming romance: “...his eyes remained as green as they were on the cover of the country's leading art magazine: a dark green like the dimness of underbrush, a green like lament, a green like a sonata.11 I also noticed his height.” (23-24)
What brings the narrator and Jason together initially is that both are lionized by the “witch” (art dealer) as practitioners of “Formal Gesturism,”12 whether or not either of them actually painted in this manner. But the witch sells paintings and gets top dollar for them, to the degree that “...seemed poised to rival Mary Boone's influence on the 1980's New York art scene.” (25)13
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, as the cowboy sagas of yesteryear have it, the narrator, still at the gallery, feels like “a modern-day version of Miss Kitty from the prior century's cowboy-popcorn, 'Gunsmoke.'” (28)14 La Luna's “Miss Kitty” quickly being enthralled by “La Luna's” “Matt Dillon.” She is certain that seeing his unfastened shirt collar would impel her to “press my tongue to trace the pale blue line [of a vein] etched against his skin.” (29) Not long thereafter she senses “...his gaze like a warm, salty surf lapping at my body” (33) and detects “...his eyes lingering on the small tattoo of a rose peeking out from beneath her left ear.” (34) These romantic sensations are exterior, but immediately preceding them is the interior counterpart, of course expressed in visual art perceptual terms: “Wouldn't it be glorious to be utterly lost in fog? Nothing to intrude from seeing inward–where perhaps gray is silver and yellow is gold?” (33) The personalized interior feeling / exterior artistic manifestation nexus here aligns with the macro particle / micro particle nexus about which the witch has just discoursed.
The lengthy tale “The Caustic Surface” comes next. As usual in Tabios' prose fiction, the title of the tale is telling yet withholding. “Caustic” in its literal sense means “capable of burning,” or “being eaten away by chemical reaction,” which is a technique an engraver might use, rather than corrosive chemicals, instead perhaps via laser, to create a caustic surface. By precision sculpting of a transparent material like acrylic or glass, an engraver can produce specific and complex caustics (light patterns) when light passes through it or reflects from it. Better known is encaustic painting, a related technique employing molten, beeswax–based paint to create heavily textured, layered surfaces. Ancient Greek painter Pausias (ca. 380-330 B.C.) used this approach, and much more recently (1954-1955) American Jasper Johns did in Flag. “Caustic” can also take the form of written or spoken acidic comments, e.g. James Bond to Tiffany Case in the 1972 film Diamonds are Forever: “That's a quite nice little nothing you are almost wearing” (though Bond did immediately add “I approve”).
The tale's narrative weaves together literary art and visual art, as the meanings of “caustic” suggest that it will with life as well. In addition, as in “La Luna,” the art of music is added to the tale's intricately woven fabric. In the fourth paragraph Nina describes Jill's hair, which “...seemed to fall forever, its length like the duration of an operatic high note maintained to avoid inevitable death.” (45) Jill's voice sounds to Nina like a wind chime (50). Bruce, a character introduced in mid-story, is a “renowned composer.” His reaction to Jill's “J.K.” series of paintings (honoring Jill's full name–J.K. Lang”) is that “these paintings don't sing.” (60)15
Music is but a tributary to the flood tide of visual art allusions throughout the story, beginning in the second paragraph. Nina is undecided about how to position three paintings in a group show at “a small but prestigious gallery.” One painting is caustic; it “had a protruding surface built up from four months of layering paint to approximate the floor of a dense forest while the others were flatly-surfaced and barely washed with their colors.” Jill approaches and addresses Nina. Jill reminds Nina of Edward Muybridge, “...the pioneering photographer credited with inventing the cinema for using three cameras with trip wires to snap photos of motion at three angles.” (46) This introduces yet another art—cinema—into the mix of poetry, visual art, and music.
Part II:
Part II of The Erotic Space is “Flash Fictions from 'ONE.'” Flash fiction is a sub-genre of prose fiction, consisting, as the name implies, of extremely brief narratives (typically under 1,500 words) that tell complete, self-contained stories. The sub-genre facilitates intensity of reader focus on singular “spots in time,” as Wordsworth would have had it, dispensing with the narrative arc of building momentum to a climax and then receding. These spots may be “squares inches of ivory exquisitely carved,” as was said of Emily Dickinson's poems, but they aren't necessarily as “compressed as telegrams,” also said of Dickinson's verse, either. The readers sense that they have “cut to the chase,” not been presented with miniaturization.
Part II opens with its own equivalent of a dedicatory piece (145). At first glance, the Longyearbyen, Norway bar setting may sound as though it would have made a suitable world geography question for the 1955-1958 T.V. quiz show The $64,000 Question and /or that this one-paragraph dedicatory selection presages a Tabios foray into the realms of fantasy and science fiction, a foray that someday might come to pass. But the town does exist. Located on Spitsbergen Island, high in the Arctic Ocean, it is the world's most northerly inhabited town (2,817 residents of 50 nationalities at last count). It is a tax-free zone but has a very high cost of living, as well as extreme Arctic landscapes, so not many tax shelter-oriented people are likely to prefer it to Monte Carlo or Dubai. As Tabios explains, it is illegal to die there because bodies don't decay in the permafrost. Furthermore, we could add, it is required that outside of town everyone must carry a weapon for protection against polar bears. If these aspects of Longyearbyen make it sound like a deleted segment of Johnny Horton's 1960 song “ North to Alaska,” it may seem almost incredible that the town does host tourism, and it does have worthwhile facilities, including a secure backup storage area for the world's seed crops and two museums, notably the Salbard Museum of Natural and Cultural History. The last two sentences of this dedicatory paragraph are, of course, fiction: “These flash fictions were discovered on paper napkins by one of the workers charged with demolishing the bar. He took them home to his niece, Eileen R. Tabios.”
The first story in the Flash Fiction section is “Polmost Spirytus Rektyfikowany Vodka,” a one–paragraph piece set in “ONE,” a bar in which each patron is enjoined to “enter alone, drink alone, and leave alone.” (148) The third–person narrative opens with the unnamed protagonist awakening from a dream about being in Chichen Itza “...searching...for a mural depicting the Maya rain god Chaak” (147-148) because he needed to verify that he had recreated the original, ancestral technique for making Maya Blue,16 granted that “...he'd had to persevere through tests that initially disputed its existence.” (148) But all of this is alcohol–induced dreams. It raises doubt about whether “the world's strongest alcoholic drink, courtesy of Poland at 192 proof...” (147) explains the protagonist's vodka “excavations” from a New Zealand “wine cellar owned by a silicon valley financier who built an escapist utopia on the island country” or “...punishing the financier for hiring mercenaries to assassinate a Maori activist concerned about the safety of sea creatures.” (147) His and the story's closing comment “...I both lack hope and am hopeless” (148) certainly proves that he is not James Bond.
Another story, “Brutality” is, as Tabios volunteers (189), a reworked excerpt from Eileen R. Tabios' trunk novel17 Clandestine DNA. The most conspicuous element of the reworking comes at the story's end, which is set in the “ONE” bar where one must drink alone. This ending provides a direct link to “Polmost” and other flash fictions. Otherwise, “Brutality” stands out from Tabios' contemporary approach to prose fiction in terms of its subject matter and style. In fact, it reads a good deal like a piece of 1930's “hard–boiled” detective fiction. We can't quite project “Brutality” into the world of detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1930), written by Dashiell Hammet, but “Brutality” has echoes of that past. The plot unfurls when “Mr. Doe”—the quintessentially anonymous John Doe—plans to steal the sketches Lord Elgin made of the Parthenon in the early 19th Century, though Elgin's real purpose in visiting the site was to heist over 200 blocks of its beautiful marbles to grace the British Museum. Doe hires “...Laura of Clan 18, one of Bogota's gangs, to hijack the sketches during their transport...” To do so, Laura seduces Gordo (whose 450 pounds accounts for his nickname), who is the manager of the transfer. She quickly does so “When she shoved her cleavage high through push–up bras...” (151) On the way to the transfer, Laura, who is a master of combat sambo18 as well as push–up bras, overcomes Gordo and takes their car to a rendezvous with “three ruthless members of their gang,” who trade the sketches with Mr. Doe for “beaucoo bucks.”
As we expect from the size of the Flash Fiction stories, there is only nominal presence of either art objects or erotic space. The plot of “Polmost” does revolve around the successful quest for Maya Blue, a color valuable for visual arts and only retrieved from the past by decades of scientific endeavor, but there is only the faintest glint of sexual allure: the bartender's “... wavy red hair over gleaming white shoulders bared by a strapless top.” (147) “One Eye Open” has nary a trace of either art or eroticism. “Brutality” centers around the Parthenon Marbles and Lord Elgin's sketches of them, works of art in both cases, but the only erotic mention is of Laura's charisma “...when she shoved her cleavage high...” (151).
Part III:
Part III of The Erotic Space is the shortest section. Its opening emblem is transcribed from the Wikipediaencyclopedia: “The legacy of Leonardo Da Vinci's 'Vitruvian Man.” (161) Its title refers to Da Vinci's famous ink drawing that illustrates the ideal proportions of the human body, uniting art, science, and philosophy. It depicts a man within a circle and a square, a figure that symbolizes the Renaissance humanist conviction that humankind connects the divine (the circle) and the earthly (the square) and thus is a microcosm of the universe. The drawing is based on the De Architectura(“On Architecture”) of Roman architect and civil and military engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (ca. 80-70-ca. 15 B.C.) Vitruvius insisted that structures must have firmitas (strength), utilitas (utility), and venustas (beauty). He is honored in Italy by his appearance on the Italian 1-Euro coin.
The section’s second tale, “Letter to a Newly–Lapsed Nun & Other Philosophers (An Epistolary Monobon),” supports Tabios' choice of title for her autobiography—The Inventor—because the epistolary monobon is a sub-genre she pioneered. Epistolary prose writing has been with us for millenia, from the Epistles of St. Paul in the New Testament of the Christian Bible through the 18th Century English vogue of such masters of the epistolary novel as Samuel Richardson with Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1739) and onward to the present. But the epistolary monobon is Tabios' creation, which she defines in her note on p. 191: “...a prose poetry form comprised of a letter whose sign–off is a monostich (one–line poem).” The letter occupying pages 167-173 in The Erotic Space is signed “Eileen,” but readers should remember that this is fiction and that the author's real-life husband is not named “Gregorio.”
Before “Eileen” lays out her narrative, she provides the rationale (printed in italics) for making love for the first time with her fiance: “The brain is a powerful sex organ, and I wanted to know my marriage would give me great sex.” Gregorio pushes the mood envelope by his scholarly commentary: “Did you know that the oldest umbilical scar is from a 130–million–year–old dinosaur, the Psittacosaurus? Unlike reptiles and birds that lose their scars within days to weeks after hatching, its umbilicus persisted until sexual maturity. The Psittacosaurus gives us the oldest record of an animal umbilicus and the first in a non–avian dinosaur.” (171) This sounds like the bull in a china shop approach to romance that the character Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory T.V. show would take, but apparently the narrator is so in love that it doesn't matter.
At one point her focus drifts to fond recollections of home. She remembers her aunts “...who loved to gossip over the young men populating their teleseryes.19 She recalls what her “... slutty neighbor Rina liked to say about her tabachoy20 boyfriend...” She sees her preference for a trace of a beer belly on her man as a “match” for “the voluptuous 'beer belly'” she has, “... courtesy of my favorite food, fatty kare–kare21 over steamed white rice with dollops of bagoong. Oooooh, those kare–kare tuwalya22 sure look like spent manhood after I spent them...” (168) All that links this story to the introductory Section III emblem is the narrator's passing comment, “I came to cherish bellybuttons when I learned about da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. In drawing his concept of ideal proportions for the male human body, Leonardo centered his image on the navel.” (170) This could be the only occasion in art history in which da Vinci's ink drawing stimulated an erotic reaction.
Part IV:
Part IV of The Erotic Space contains just one story: “The first Poetry Book.” Its preceding emblem is four words by Frida Kahlo, the renowned 20th Century painter of Mexican / German parentage: “Truth is, so great.” The quote continues “that I wouldn't be able to speak, or sleep, or listen, or love,” from a handwritten letter to Diego Rivera, a Mexican painter and muralist. The letter is included in The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self–Portrait. New York: Harry N. Abrams, and London: Bloomsbury, 1995.
“The First Poetry Book” ends The Erotic Space in a manner that the reader could not possibly foresee. The story opens quietly with third–person narration (in mid–story switching to first person) as the unnamed protagonist opens the red door of the Café Mandarin. The red color is symbolic of tranquility in the form of welcome and hospitality, historically a reassurance to travelers that they had a safe place to stay. The Chinese tradition invoked by the name “Café Mandarin” is even more redolent of red's positive connotations because, among other celebratory occasions, it is prominent in weddings. Hongbao (red envelopes) signifies protection, love, and reinforcement of familial and social bonds. And all seems well when the protagonist is greeted by the young woman who is the café's waitress. The protagonist recalls that the waitress, as a child, “had been proud of her just–colored picture of a butterfly with rainbow–colored wings flying away from a brown husk towards a blue sky....The borderless sunlit sky...” (179-180)
The butterfly with rainbow–colored wings is the sweet bird of borderless youthful idealism, for which the sky is the limit. At first, it seems as though the daughter in the family who were also in the café has come from the same mold: “...She's seemed to grow into a lovely person, in character as well as physically. She had turned aside a modeling then painting career to become an arts therapist at a juvenile detention center,” even though her own art “actually showed great promise.” The daughter had titled an early painting titled Amorsolo “...because it explored what Fernando Amorsolo had mastered: sunlight.” (181)23
But all this is merely the calm before the storm. The family were seated at the next table to the protagonist's and the wife recognizes her. She scornfully says to her daughter: “This is the woman who has the honor of being your father's last affair.” (180-181) The daughter gets up and after moving close to the protagonist's table says, “You knew he was married, and you went after him anyway. You're despicable.” (182)
As the protagonist leaves the restaurant, she looks back at the family “tableau” and thinks that “...would be the fitting cover for my forthcoming first book of poetry which I'd titled The Naked Flagpole.24 Before I met him, I'd often felt I hadn't yet experienced enough of life to write meaningful poems. Through him and the memories he helped me make, I created the poems in my first book that a future critic would deem worthy of trees being scarified for paper.” (184-185)
The protagonist also recalls an artwork and anticipates: “My book's cover will bear a reproduction of Frida Kahlo's 1936 painting, 'My Grandparents, My Parents, and I.' The oil on zinc and tempura painting, measuring 30.7 x 34.5 cm.,represents the artist's family tree. Frida is depicted as a nude child holding a red ribbon to symbolize her family lineage. The ribbon matches the red cord to a fetus painted atop her mother's white dress as well as linked to the portraits of the artist's parents and both sets of grandparents.” (185) It might be cynical to see this painting chosen for the cover of the protagonist's book of poetry because of a parallel between Frida's life and the protagonist's, but the parallel does exist. Diego Rivera was married to his second wife, Guadalupe Marin, and had two children, when he began his affair with Kahlo. Rivera and Marin had married in 1922; Rivera divorced her in 1928 and wasted no time, marrying Kahlo in 1929.
With The End of the Affair, to purloin Graham Green's 1951 book title, we come to the end of The Erotic Space, which has enlarged and enriched the context created by Tabios' many other visual art works, literary creations, and the nexus enlargements facilitated by her inventions and innovations in theory and practice across the creative spectrum.
Notes
1 Katrin De Guia elucidates these applications to everyday existence in Kapwa: The Self in the Other: Worldviews and Lifestyles of Filipino Culture-Bearers. Pasig City: Anvil. 2005.
2 Her Erotic Space collaborator, harry k. stammer, who contributed the art work, is also a diversely talented arts practitioner. In addition to being “a writer, musician and painter” (195), he is skilled in the art of fine, aesthetic printing, in the tradition of Wallace Nethery, late editor of Coranto: Journal of the Friends of the Libraries, University of Southern California. Nethery used a variety of tasteful, classic type faces and styles and deckled edge pages to create the elegant sophistication of the journal's physical appearance.
3 A related function is to celebrate or honor an occasion, as in the case of the Dipylon Prize Graffito of ancient Greece, as Kevin Robb explains in his article “The Dipylon Prize Graffito,” published in Coranto 7.1 (1971): 11-19. The Graffito was probably a jug “...bestowed by a spectator who thought one of the dancers ought to receive some prize for the pure energy and crowd –pleasing efforts of his lively (but seemingly not very graceful) performance.” (13-14) It is not the occasion or the quality of the performance that matters most; its place in human history does: “...the “Dipylon inscription still remains the oldest piece of classical Greek writing extant and the oldest piece of alphabetic writing the world....The graffito consists of one complete dactyllic hexameter verse plus some readable letters of the beginning of a second verse” (11) and thus is a poem—a work of art, certainly nowhere near the quality of the productions of Homer or Archilachos but it does introduce the possibility of ekphrasis derived from two different arts at the same time, assuming that we classify fine pottery as a product of art as well as craft.
4 Palanca was at least as much renowned as a food writer.
5 Best accessed in what is now the de facto standard edition of her poetry: The Complete Poems of Angela Manalang Gloria, ed. Edna Zapanta Manlapaz. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1993, pp. 25 and 110 respectively.
6 In no way is this a denigration of the channel. In fact, it is admirable for the foreign settings of many of its movies, in which characters travel to different countries for what they intend to be brief outings and then find themselves so drawn to a country's culture that they decide to live there permanently. Much of the time romances develop between people of different social classes, occasionally between people of different races, and in at least one instance (though between supporting characters only) people of the same gender. Although the movies are cosmetic and very idealistic, their common motif, underlying the surface of falling in love, is that everybody's problems are resolved with cooperation and tolerance rather than opposition and withdrawal into the shell of self. Also, art is a significant motif in a number of Hallmark Channel movies. Main characters are sometimes artists; royals open their palace art collections to their subjects, etc.
7 As I have remarked elsewhere, the amount and quality of visual art related information could constitute a respectable university art history introductory course. If we factor her other books DoveLion, The Balikbayan Artist, Drawing the Six Directions and The Erotic Space into the equation, we may need to elevate the course to the upper division level.
8 However, this is either a coincidence or a derivation from Austrian poet Georg Trakl's “Helian, which Tabios notes (190) as her inspiration. The narrator recites this line to Jason (30), along with four more lines from the same poem: “At this hour the eyes of him who gazes / Fill with the gold of his stars.... // softly yellowed moons roll / over the fever streets of the young man.” These lines represent the “painterly” Expressionist style of Trakl's poetry, featuring vivid, intense colors (blue, red, gold, black) or as some commentators claim, borderline surrealist (cf., René Magritte's 1944 Les Chasseurs an Bord de la Nuit) rather like a late Romantic Period approach. But Trakl's themes are more comparable to the late Victorian / Early Modern Celtic Twilight School, featuring decay, twilight, and melancholy bordering on the morose. This thematic element is clearly present in the first line of the narrator's recitation: “Overwhelming is the generation's decline,” from Trakl's poem “Untergang” (“Downfall” or “Decay”).
9 A town in Almeria, once impoverished but in the 1960's transformed into a prosperous bohemian colony, largely by artist Jesus de Percevel. This was made possible by the discovery in the Cueva de los Letreros of a 4,500 year old Neolithic figure which looks like a man holding a rainbow. It was adopted by the locals as a powerful protective symbol against evil spirits and storms. Many people painted this figure on their homes.
10 His surname symbolizes British elegance, luxury, and heritage because it is the name of a storied perfume establishment, associated with high quality, nature–inspired scents like lavender, appropriate because “Yardley” derives from two Old English terms: geard (“enclosure” or “yard”) and leah (“a wood,” “a clearing,” or “a meadow”). Perhaps this is why she does not take offense when later he comes up with “You smell good.” (29) Ordinarily, this is not the most highly recommended approach a young man interested in a young lady should take.
Yardley's given name, “Jason,” of course conjures up the well–known 3rd Century B.C. Greek epic poem of Apollonius recounting the Argonauts' adventures in their quest to recover the golden fleece and return it to Colchis, where Jason can recover his throne. One obstacle Jason faces is the sorceress Medea, with whom he has a love affair. The sorceress in “La Luna” is Mindy “Witch” Babson, the gallery manager. She is a creative menace, not the siren that Medea was, because she tries to tell artists what and how to paint, but she “... frequently touted them to those in the art media with whom she long enjoyed an incestuous relationship borne of free painting and generous use of her bed...” (24) This almost Shakespearean boffo comedy may also owe something to the 1963 icon fantasy film Jason and the Argonauts, noted especially for its stop–motion special effects.
11 This sounds like a companion piece to Nick Joaquin's poem “Verde, Yo Te Quiero Verde,” readily accessible in his book Prose and Poems (Manila: Florentino, 1963): 179.
12 May be similar to what is often labeled Gestural Abstraction, a style characterized by expressive brush stroking that emphasizes the physical movement of the artist's arm and hand. The canvas is thought to record the act of painting, rather than be a static, finished artifact, to achieve the sense of painting as event, rather fait accompli. Emerging in the 1940's and 1950's, this style within Abstract Expressionism involved large gestures, sometimes even pouring or splashing paint, as in Action Painting. Notable practitioners include Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Hans Hartung.
13 Boone is a collector as well as a dealer. She closed her galleries in 2019 and served prison time for income tax evasion, but she is now back as a viable figure of the New York art scene.
14 This long running T.V. show (1955-1975) featured James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon and Amanda Blake as Miss Kitty, a strong, independent woman who owned and operated the Long Branch Saloon. Matt and Kitty were depicted as close friends but not lovers.
15 The paintings of Melissa Mc Cracken, Sarah Kraning, and Julia Hamilton originated in chromesthesia, the translation of musical sounds into visual art, and it is now not unusual either for a poet to see visual art in terms of music.
16 Although the ch'oj tropical indigo paint native to Central America from which Maya Blue comes is an easily found woody shrub and most of Maya Blue's components were known by the 1960's, there was a “missing link”: copal resin and the requisite heating process for it, not discovered until 2008. Even though the vibrant and very durable Maya Blue had been used for more than a millennium, it had not been for almost 200 years prior to indigenous sculptor Luis May Ku using the traditional process for new ceramic sculptures in 2023.
17 A trunk novel is a completed book manuscript that a writer does not decide to publish, instead consigning it to a drawer or a trunk, usually because the author wants to fine tune writing skills and / or find a distinct, personal voice with which to address the reading public.
18 A predecessor to modern mixed martial arts.
19 Filipino soap operas or serialized dramas, characterized by melodrama, daily weekday frequency, and high popularity.
20 A Tagalog word meaning “chubby” or even “fat.” It need not be demeaning, however. It is frequently used among friends and family members as a playful, even endearing nickname.
21 Kare-kare is a popular stew in the Philippines. It is beloved for its thick and savory peanut sauce, usually made with oxtail, beef shank, or pork hack. Traditionally it is served with bagoong, which can be either fish/ krill paste or shrimp paste, but shrimp is more standard. Bagoong ista is the fish paste made from anchovies or other small fish.
22 Tuwalya is Tagalog for “towel,” but in cooking it means beef tripe because it has a textured, towel–like appearance.
23 A very accurate and succinct account of Amorsolo's paintings and place in Philippines art history is in Tabios' The Balikbayan Artist 87-88.
24 Although this is a very similar to Tabios' own book title Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (East Rockaway, New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2002), we should resist any temptation to read anything autobiographical into it.
*****
Lynn M. Grow is Emeritus Senior Professor of English, Broward College, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He received all his degrees from The University of Southern California: B.A., English and Philosophy, 1967; M.A., English, 1968; Ph.D., English, 1971; M.A. Philosophy, 1972.
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