Physical Space and the Female Sensibility in The O.A.D. Reader
Physical Space and the Female Sensibility
in “The O.A.D. Reader”
by Ron Rico U. Oandasan
It is a pervasive idea that space is the gargantuan, corporeal reality that surrounds it. Everything that around us is a constituent of space, they are placed in the category of reality, that is, as far as the mundane or the sensible is concerned which stresses the role of the sight, smell, hearing, taste, or touch-of the human senses, being limited in themselves.
By virtue of the limits of sensory perception, such knowledge of physical space is in fact constricted; so that what we deem as real are only those that are perceivable, therefore, we have a vague cognition of the unseen, unheard, unfelt, or whatever it is "beyond" perception. The confinements of sensible reality impede our understanding of the transcendental.
Not so for the poet however, especially, the female poet, one of whose most sentient faculties is intuition, a dominion of the female mind. The intuition is the female dominion, so that through this, Ophelia Dimalanta broadens the horizon of the reader's mind to the reality of the transcendent The Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta Reader Volume I, or simplyThe OAD Reader, in which she brings to life a persona who intuits beyond the physical and serves an enlightening awareness of transcendental truths that otherwise unfathomable. The poems involve a poetic speaker who realizes otherworldly maxims in spite of AND by means of the worldly. It turns out that the material is not a constraint but a manifestation of the spiritual.
In line with the Emerson's thinking in his 1844 essay "The Poet", the writer-in this case, Dimalanta-reports passionately on personal experiences that will stimulate readers embarked on their own spiritual and intellectual journeys. All experience is meaningful; no "sensual fact" (that is, nothing that is perceived by the senses) lacks spiritual significance. The special office of the "poet" (i.e., the imaginative writer) is to be alert to the meanings that saturate all of existence; all persons have the potential to be poets ( which is one way in which the poet is "representative"), but those who actually become poet-geniuses are "sovereign": they are potentates, emperors, liberating gods. Emerson's grand vision of the poet’s powers is akin to Shelley’s in "The Defence of Poetry." In Emerson’s view, the more faithful the poet is to Nature, to Nature’s harmonies, the better will be his or her art. For Emerson, a poem is defined by a thought that is "passionately alive," not by its pattern of rhyme or meter or structure; he explicitly puts content before form. (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism p. 720)
Emerson seems to share with TS Eliot and Ezra Pound that the poet makes things new: "The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object."
Transcendentalist thought-that is, perceiving the spiritual by intuiting (that is, applying intuition on) the material-is manifest in The OAD Reader, as shown in the discussion by the succeeding paragraphs.
Since physical space is too wide for comprehension, I divided it into three: terrestial, aquatic, and aerial space. In each division there are selected poems from The OAD Reader taken into account. The poetic persona's intuitive role in seeing the transcendental through the limits of terrestial, aquatic, or aerial space are discussed below.
Terrestial Space
Most of the poems are inspired by space on dry land, hence, the terrestial space. In the following discussions, terrestial space is used by the poetic persona to come up with transcendental thought, thus emphasizing that terrestial space is not an impediment but an instrument, along with intuition, that leads one to the spiritual.
From Particulars to Universals in Terrestial Space
On land, one finds lots of obstacles that impede bodily freedom of movement. These obstacles are presented in such poems as The Heart of Waiting, in which OAD reminisces the torment of transportation.
"I was in Iowa City. I have been invited to lecture in Omaha City. I was supposed to leave Iowa at twelve midnight. I was there in the waiting station waiting... alone! Waiting for the bus to arrive at the station and waiting for it to take me to my destination. This is about the agony of having to sit in the greyhound bus, without anybody familiar, in darkness, and after a long long wait-I finally arrive in Omaha where I’m suppose to wait for a limo to take me to Sioux City."
"And I realized, it's good to be alone, not to be seen agonizing this way. People may think I’m strong but here I am, crumbling because of being alone."
In the poem, the person is encased from the expanse of space in the confines of a vehicle. Chairs, the aisle, the darkness-prevent stable movement. he physical constraint by the chairs, even the toast and turns of the automobile, prevent the passenger any free motion. The fact that others cannot see the persona’s agony is another boundary of space. Furthermore, OAD share in the interview about the physical suffering endured in such a long excursion:
At first the reading turns out to be about the body's drudgery of travelling by bus, and takes a more spiritual turn when it throws a question on solitude, and finally an unusually realized but enlightening and universal advantage of solitude. This illustrates a start from the experience of a particular person then expanding to a universal truth discussed.
The persona is severed from the unbound expanse of space by the walls of the automobile. Not to mention, suffering the drudgery of traveling. Being unseen suffering this way, being alone, is taken as an advantage, because solitude can itself be an honor at times. It provides an opportunity for the persona to get in touch with herself and unleash her meditative prowess that leads her to realizations that go beyond the limits of exhaustion and space in the bus.
The advantage of solitude gives emphasis on individual by romanticism. Suddenly in OAD’s perspective, being both alone and lonely are taken as good things. Even the melancholy inherent in loneliness is itself a good thing, a very subjective point of view when looking at solitude.
The persona in OAD's poetry is keen in observing particular details. With this observation, she infers universal thought. Such a particular-universal is frequent in the poems especially when it comes to descriptions of the terrestial-more importantly, physical-space that lead to a glimpse of the spiritual.
Terrestial Space and History
In "Meryam Ana at Ephesus", about a visit to the site where the Virgin Mary was believed to spend her last days, the persona is exposed to the nexus of material space and the spiritual-considering the Mary is a dominating figure in Catholic faith. The revered spot celebrates the fact that such a part of an otherwise seemingly mythological faith-where Mary is considered the Mother of God-is certifies its actual place in history, that such a personage really walked on the face of this Earth, that the a larger-than-life figure was actually a human being who lived a peasant’s life and spent her aged years in Ephesus. The awe inspired in the persona by the space-which insinuated a holiness that seemed aloof and unfathomable to human thought-is mixed with a realization of sacredness enhanced by its closeness to human contact, making such a mystery seem closer to human comprehension and not as astoundingly divine as to separate it from mortality, as the succeeding lines suggest:
How dumbstruck we are / here in Mary's House / where it stands already / somewhat marred by countless / human hands and crude / sundry foreign impalements.
And yet somehow, it is this / very openness to touch / which enriches its sanctity, / the sanctuary'y human condition, / the very fact of tis creation../ a Mother in her waning years / grieving not so much over deaths / as of those dyings / invisible among the lives in us, / breath by breath, / love by disenchanted mortal love.
The same testimony to history can be seen in “Pierre Loti Café," in which a romantic story about a poet who writes his best poetry in a place where he had met with his beloved in a tragic love affair-which has the risk of being unbelievable because of its romanticism-is proved to have really existed by presenting the site in which a tragic and unusual liaison actually took place. It is about the great contemporary poet Loti from whom the café was name after. He used to have a tragic love affair with a Turkish married woman, Azayadhe. And the café was the site where they secretly met. When Loti went away, she died in grief. When he came back, he was devastated by her death, and continued to write his best and most inspired poetry in this cafe on the hill where he decided to stay for the rest of his life. This cafe perched on a hill was henceforth named after him.
In the poem, we find a persona herself in the walls of this romantic café, contemplating what it felt like to be Loti having climbed the hill for a cup of “stirrings” of coffee, but really for writing poetry to that never really expressed his longing for the beloved, and after writing poems hopefully as an outlet of his love, the urge to vent such a great love only prompts him to write some more:
These strange stirrings/ of many times removed and therefore / more exciting possible bondings / in a now nothing more than one / draem shore, too flimsy / for safekeeping / . . . / could well have been / for Loti, poetry / to be always written, and never quite / done until the last line's breath, / which is like love's infinity spawling on, endless-
The persona’s efforts to relive such a romantic history exemplifies the mimetic function of art, in which the poem imitates the romantic but still historical/actual reality. This gives the reader the chance to somehow impart in Loti’s shoes, feeling a love augmented by more and more poems that immortalized it. In fact, such a love story of Loti from the turn of a century was so inspiring that more than half a century later, OAD, the poet’s poet, wrote another poem!
""Vigan" Cagliari (Greek: Καράλις; Latin: Carales and Caralis[1]; Catalan: Càller; Sardinian: Casteddu) is the capital of the island of Sardinia, a region of Italy. Cagliari's Sardinian name Casteddu literally means the castle. It has about 160,000 inhabitants, or about 350,000 including the suburbs (metropolitan area) (Elmas, Selargius, Monserrato, Quartucciu, Quartu Sant'Elena). D.H. Lawrence, in his lively memoir of a voyage to Sardinia, Sea and Sardinia, undertaken in January 1921, described the effect of the warm Mediterranean sun-light on the white lime-stone city and compared Cagliari to a "white Jerusalem".(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cagliari)Lawrence's "Cagliari" with the quaint / and curious look, peering from the past/ seen but never really enterred, / a memory of rows of whitewashed houses / with gleaming capiz eyes looking out / into quieted cobbled streets, but there. . . . sings . . . in a / distant note, in a whisper old yet / unailing, alien yet very much of today, / resonant, ending, beginning, and hourly / begun... Vigan, a vignette of dreams / shadowing slowly off, and vaguely / into a noontime, northbound sun. When one peers, one does not reveal oneself comopletely thereby denoting a sense of concealment. In line with this, Vigan--with its 18th century air--comes as a mystery in that it may be an artefact from the past, but still does not permit us to fathom the ethos of a Spanish colonial town; hence, "never really enterred." It may be physically there to captivate the tourist's eyem but nevertheless is not enough to quench the curiosity of the 20th century spectator. Travelling northbound, the persona sees the space of Vigan shrinking from her sight as she leaves further and further on her northbound route. This increased distancing from Vigan also comes to me as the distancing of time's passage, as the world of the Philippines moves on, not necessarily forgetting but nevertheless moving on from and not stopping from the past. Considering this, it occurs to me that the past should not impede anyone from proceeding with the life the extends beyond now, so that one must live and seize the day, unfettered by shackles of histroy, remembering and learning so as not to repeat it.
Time and the Terrestial
On land are also the man-made structures that wear out in time, therefore reminding the transience-the only permanent thing in the world. It insinuates the limits of time on worldly things, the worldly, human life in particular. But in the poem "The Time Factor", what is initially the limit of time on a land(scape) becomes a reflection of timelessness.
Designed to fit the land’s topography , the garden’s uneven landscaping, combined with the colorful variety of flora, is very enticing to the aesthete’s vision, but in the eye of a paramour, rumormongerer, or any other secret-bearer, the land’s irregularity is also conducive to conceal any private correspondence while amongst the dense foliage and shrubberies, which can explain why it is called the Secret Garden.
Contriving with the physical space of the garden, the forbiddance to uncover the hidden is suggestive of limitation limiting the knowledge of something for those who are unaware of, for instance, in the poem, an secret love story between a certain "Wu Ti . . . Or his simpering sibling. . ."and "one of Silla’s starry-bosomed / Maidens, sibylline. . ." The persona said this considering the possibility that she and her presently beloved addressee have been born as different people in a different time and society with an "ethos more ancient than. . ." both of them. The repression of a forbidden love is vented out in the fervorous lines: "I want you in any where or/ Way or how, now or in another time…" And the limiting role of time in "love’s bafflement" is crystallized in "You and I meet, at the wrong tie, / Giants both standing above time, Playing for time, loving against/ Time, living at the midpoint / And crux of timelessness.
The effect of the Secret Garden, even to this day, is its timelessness. It maay be an anachronism in, say, the kand also represents the 20th Century, however, its preserved and collaterally immortalized beauty brings forth the ethos of a past gone by disregarding the passage of time in order to make the persona feel the sp9irit belonging to a culture entirely different and more ancient from hers.
The forbidden lovers of another time are now given the chance to meet aeons later:
"We meet, want, limn in each other’s/ Fictive flesh an allegory of our kind / Of love, conceived and born in this garden/ From the past, and of this moment, / And for the many more centuries to come.
toils that almost if not the entirety of our race must make in order to live.
The Terrestial on Death
You see, even though we may crave for aquatic or aerial space (see page ), we will inevitably return to land given that we are terrestial beings.
This constant return to land resonates an idea of death, a Christian (and an essence in Christianity is the belief in the afterlife, to which death is the only passage) depiction of which emanates from the Holy Scriptures, specifically, from Genesis 3:19: ". . .you are dust and to dust you will return."
In the OAD Reader, death is reflected in the persona's funereal musings as she is surrounded by terrestial space, particularly by a haunted house in the poem "On a House About to Crumble" and another poem that emanates from the first one, "She Must Have to Go and Soon". The thought of a haunted house is suggestive of death. It's ghostliness, resonating the memories of a past relationship (not necessarily a romantic one) even frightens the reader as the former poem goes, ". . .corridors ring spectral and musty / with overhanging shadows and dripping / echoes of remembered loves and hates. . ." and the latter poem pictures, . . . And this one house will languish on / Rocked as she already is by nocturnal / Chills and with the ague of aging, / . . . / Her paraplegic doors mysteriously / Unhinged, swung, shaken at you, / . . . / But she will not go, not yet. Voices musty with age and great disdain / Move her halls where skulking rats / Suddenly litter your path, entrenched / In their own wake of evil. /
The house may seem void of life, but it looks, reeks, filled and ruled by the afterlife looming in the bodiless person of a phantom. Reading it literally, "She Must Have to Go and Soon" does have a ghost in it, a wandering spirit restless due to some unfinished business: "She will not go until you do. / And finally when you do, the ghost of her / Intimate and sensual frame and scent / Will cuddle and cradle your shrivelled body, / The pair of you crumbling back to silver dust / The way staunch and old forgotten houses go." The desire of the (female) spirit for the addressee to "go soon" or "crumble back into dust" signals the destruction or death of the addressee. This grim presence of the spiritual evoked by the presence of the physical on-land space of a house is indeed connotative of death. The literal meaning would stop on the idea of a house haunted by a ghost.
However, it does not end on a negatively horrifying experience for the reader because in
"To a House about to Crumble" is emphasized a transition from a dark vindictiveness of the ghost into the hope of "rising again":
she will come alive again / far abroad, woman deathless / under a copper-colored sky of some tahitian / shores quaint vermilion trees, / achingly arched boughs / formidable with fruit, / and gently growing presence / sweeping across her old ancestral threshold / towards rooms and rooms / tenderly spewing his glitter there / where she at last at last, / empowering overwhelming, / a gauguin vahine heaving / imbrowned with native grace / and sun-fulfillment who / may now finally flower up again / in shining deathless calm."
Whereas in the other poem ("She Must Have to Go and Soon"), the spirit wants to a deadly reunion with the addressee) that expresses an air of vengeance ("someday soon she knows / in her awaited second springing / and with a vengeance. . .") this poem ("To a House about to Crumble") shows the female spirit in the hopes of moving on, without mention of a necessity for the destruction ("the shrivelled body") of the addressee. In fact, in such a spiritual resurrection, the soul of the female doesn't need anybody else to rest in peace ("in shining deathless calm").
From this can be inferred the autonomy of the female spirit: she can move on from the ghosts of the past by herself even if it means living behind that past.
It's noteworthy that from the physical confines, the space of a (haunted) house can communicate the independence of womanhood.
Land and Immortality
The link between land and death is soil ("to dust you shall return"). In the poem He Rages, where the persona encounters the Terra Cotta Warriors,(or Terracotta Warriors and Horses is a collection of 8,099 life-size terra cotta figures of warriors and horses located near the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor The Terracotta Army was discovered in March 1974 by local farmers drilling a water well to the east of Mount Lishan. The terracotta figures were buried with the first Emperor of Qin (Qin Shi Huangdi) in 210-209 BC. Their purpose was to help rule another empire with Shi Huangdi in the afterlife. Consequently, they are also sometimes referred to as "Qin's Armies".The figures were discovered in 1974 near Xi'an, Shaanxi province. from Terracotta Army http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Cotta_Warriors) the clay used by an Emperor for his own immortality becomes a reminder of such a futile effort because even the statues were made up of clay-a material therefore transient thing in the first place. On the other hand, dust from land is permanent in this world: land has been existing for billions of years now. However, it still belongs to a planet that is destructible, hence, that can mean its end. So that indeed, land remains a symbol of mortality. In the poem, the subterranean recesses are the physical space occupied by stolid moreover lifeless terra cotta statues. This is located underground where nonliving sculptures and mounds of soil would place the persona under a funereal impression that she is in a grave. The universal inevitability of death looms over the place. Universal because spirituality is beyond gender. Beholding the thousands of statues in the imperial grave, the persona faces the vestiges and memory of an ambitious man "dying to live on."211 The persona meditates on that emperor's rage in the afterlife at the unfulfillment of his ambition of immortality. . . .but mostly/ he rages against hovering spectres / no armies bigger than continents / may wrestle or subdue, / as he, lord, and master even fo the darkest depths, rages, imperiously / dying to live on, his clay brigade / storming forth into the live open8
The Space of a Picture
The Parthenon Seen and Shot from Hotel Aphrodite is a poem about complementariness, where two elements benefit each other. In the hotel, OAD had agreed with a companion to take shots of each other, one against the window with the Parthenon in the background.
The results were two bungling shots. One was where "The Parthenon is stark clear" whereas the addressee looked nondescript. The other showed "Now, the Parthenon is the ghost" while the persona’s image was definite.
"The Parthenon and you,
I and the Parthenon,
Subject-Object,
One repressed the other
Played up alternately both.
Contemplator and text,
Singer and Song,
Separate and One."
This adheres to a pair’s truism: One isn’t identified without the other.
The poem’s show that what makes space limited is the limitation of the human being. There may be things that we fail to see or sense or feel but possibily, if not actually exist, which is the "who knows?" attitude, casting an open mind toward the possible existence of the "hardly" accessible things to the human senses.
The often Romanticized object Parthenon is subjected to the realistic mishaps of smudged and imperfections of the current time. This shows the crossing of borders from a reverence and idealism of a temple to the rather unlikely juxtaposition with photographic shortcomings. And to think in the poem, that photography which could have been denounced as sacrilege in the zenith of Platonic idealism was actually considered an artistic work with its own message to tell, independent of the constrictions of classicism.
Physical space is captured and bounded by the four corners and sides of a photograph, subjected to the manipulation of the camera. Not to mention, a particular point of view-the view of the camera-from Hotel Aphrodite furthers the limitations. The picture contains the ancient Parthenon juxtaposed with a posing people from millennia after Athena’s temple was erected. The purview manifests the limits of sight, such the unlimited expanse of space is seen by a limited eye. This testifies to the limit of human sense.
But with OAD’s mind, the unlikely outcome of shots were given profound meaning that one wouldn’t expect in a photograph with blurred segments.
Summer Palace involves the presence of fantasy and reality, and the persona's preference for the fantastic. In the end however, the persona realizes that real is beautiful in itself if one should just take the time to look at it for appreciation. 7
. . . it is really / not how fast one goes, / or how many painted beams / have been crossed in this / longest corridor of spawned / dreams but how much he distils in beauty's name the real, / providing fluid link between / crystal lake and gold-honed tale.
Aquatic Space
As in the case of terrestial space, The OAD Reader's poetic persona becomes keen in examining specific characteristics of water, of aquatic space, as she crosses the borders of the particular and reaches universal thought.
Water as a physical space is presented as a seduction of rest and surrender in the verses of Night Sea Swim, where the swimmer is tempted to give up swimming with no shore at sight, that is, as a person tries to move on and keep on moving with no specific result assured. But it may also mean a person in a fatal state, where he has to chose where the peace of death is very tempting option-being the easy way out:
"already her strokes are dismembered.
The calm of the deep seduces.
this sensation of simply giving up…
…awes."
The end of a long swim for the swimmer is quite vague, so that any outcome of laborious efforts remains unseen, thus seem futile as the “calm of the deep seduces” and the person’s familiarity of his journey’s purpose decreases, "the shore, the shore! What is it?"
Water has its advantages and disadvantages as far as physical space is concerned .
Water’s nuances of death are also evident in "An Unexpected Stopover at HangZhou," where the persona is placed in a sudden trance by the silvery yet gloomy appearance of a lake:
Out there, a wizardry of pagodas / And hilltops rising like incense / In a necromantic haze. . . . passing through Hangzhou's / West Lake, a part of me strays, / misses the plain, is forever / Caught and lost among the shreds / Of illusive late summer mist / Clinging to the horizon's willows.
Necromancy mentioned in the verse above is a strong reference to death, given that this is the art of communicating with spirits of the deceased. The “necromantic haze” enchants the persona and leaves her the impression of death the haunts her even after leaving the lake.
Setting aside the negative impression of death, water in the abovementioned poems is representative of death as a form of freedom from the toils of this life. Water has this particular effect on people who are wearily inured to solid obstacles on land that prevent a sense of open space (which is very much applicable to urban dwellers, ith all the buildings and what not surrounding or should I say, trapping them). When one comes in contact or merely gazes at the sea--or any wide expanse of water with nothing solid or "limits" sticking out or floating on its surface, one experiences a pleasurable rarity that the terrestial space cannot give. On such a rare occassion occurs a peculiar sense of freedom: that which the terrestial does not usually offer because of its physical limits. Not to mention, land has its cultural limits: for on land represents the toils that almost if not the entirety of our race must make in order to live. an empty expanse with no obstacles or any other thing on it but waves. At the sight of a wide An exemption to this would be boulders in the river or icebergs perhaps. I think it has something to do with
Through details that easily catches the eye of the female persona, one is given a glimpse of the universal.
In Noonbound, Northbound, where the persona recalls a stopover at an Ilocano beach, the sea waters signify a certain longing for the past, of childhood,
"An otherwise profound blue of the sea / pales into a new translucence. / And we, children all, from nine / to seventy, turn in haste, taking in all / that sea and sun and breeze / coming upon us in one gentle / noontime rush. / And soon, we reaffirm a kindship/ with the restless tides / then grow again to reavow / the old and saving strictures / ofsundrenched,sandstreakedshores.
way back when the duties and responsibilities of adulthood and to be healthy fun and carefree was a child's utmost priority, have not yet bothered the child, when innocence was at its prime. This kind of pleasure on water is worthy of anyone's time, especially for grown-ups when it is about time to take a break and just be a kid again. So that after this fun had refurbished your zest for life, one can return to the shores in the same token as one returns to responsibility refreshed and ready for the challenges that adulthood has to offer. Considering the liberation of the inner child in us, aquatic space still retains its connotation of freedom.
Aerial Space
It shares with terrestial and aquatic space the poetic persona's description of details in arriving at universals.
Just like water, air also is an open space, still unlike land swarming with living and nonliving occupants. The whole world is enveloped by air. This gives air all the more reason to be regarded as a spacious expanse with less impediments of motion and freedom. Anyone or thing on air is most likely to be free of spatial obstructions, free to "fly" anywhere. Basically, the charming liberation in the air lies in its being unobstructed.
This advantage of “unobstruction” is manifested in OAD's poem.
“An Unobstructed view.” It is about a persona in an empty space under the night sky, in the middle of a past devastating crisis that swept everything out, and moving on to start all over again. OAD revealed this poem’s biographical context: "My ancestral house burned back when I was AB dean. I didn’t have anything, not even my signatures [signature clothes]. Unobstructed view... the house was ruined and we got rid of the remnants so that there was this clearing, so that I could see the moon. I realized the clatter of my past life has disappeared and now I’m ready to move on."
By saying “I have all to myself”, the persona recognizes that her succeeding years to come were all in her own hands. With a void space surrounding her, she faces nothingness. Nothing at all but void space in the form of air that she and only she can fill up. Such a clearing provides room to start anew.
yes, i see it all now; / the sky is all there, / no trees shooting up, / no strictures looming / to restrain its flow.
i have it all to myself, / like it has all of me. . .
. . .
nothing is there.
i am myself tabula rasa
. . .
there are no telltale traces / of past me here looking up / into one freely flowing sky / and one singular unfrilled moon. / now i begin to re-establish / links, re-touch, re-focus, / as i pen the text of new days / to come tonight, here / from one unobstructed view.
Aerial space represents a void. Though it is true that it is empty, it also provides the chance for creativity, in which all possibilities are under your own ingenuity. It’s all your choice what to make of the void.
Aerial Space then is associated with freedom. Take note that in the poem there was a house that blocked the view of an otherwise wide expanse of sky, so that when that house with the vestiges of the past it stored have been cleared away, the persona saw a clearing, an empty one, in which she becomes free to fill it up in whatever way she chooses.
Diversity of Physical Space
Most of the abovementioned poems in The OAD Reader are inspired by terrestial space, and only a minority of the poems deal with aquatic and aerial. This reflects the persona's familiarity with land: it is where she lives her life and where she returns at the terminus of such a life. Land is the home of human beings, making us so accustomed to it that terrestial space has lost its novelty and instead gives us the impression of something ordinary, constantly there, and nothing new about it.
Now about aquatic and aerial space, given that no man or woman could spend the most of a life under water or on air, provide a sense of novelty to the beholder. With the limits and the everydayness of terrestial space, the rarity of the aquatic and the aerial attract our interest.
Moreover, the limits of land that we are so accustomes to are forgotten when in the presence of air and water. This provides the sense of freedom-as discussed above-that terrestial space, because of its lost novelty, cannot give.
This testifies to the diversty of that physical space. As a result, the myriad of material things that environ the woman are so rich in implications that appeal to her intuition, giving her more opportunities of arriving at universal thought thereby contributing in the expansion of human knowledge when it comes to the spiritual.
Intuition as a Link between Terrestial, Aquatic, Aerial Space
Through all these, one may wander what the paper says about the woman.
I cannot answer that question without first delving on the female sensibility, particularly, intuition.
Apart from the diversity of space that augments human knowledge of the transcendental, intuition contained in the female sensibility is what terrestial, aquatic, and aerial space have in common, as far as The OAD Reader is concerned. Intuition defies the boundaries separating land, air, and water as the spirit defies the material world; nothing stopping it taking a closer step to understanding spiritual ideas.
In fact, the poem The Glass Chapel unites all three spaces into one poem and still comes up with a universal message.
The said poem is dedicated to Wayfarers Chapel, a church made of glass in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, noted for its unique modern architecture and location next to the Pacific Ocean. The church sits near the landslide-prone Portuguese Bend area.
Inspired by this chapel of glass that sees the land around it, overlooks the sea, and sees the open space of the sky, the poem that immortalizes its physical space combined in it-terrestial, aquatic, and aerial-is significant in this paper in that it combines all three categories of space I have mentioned in this paper. These loss of categories, of boundaries that represent division and separation and unites them in one poem celebrates the theme of the unity that sets differences aside.
Such a “Chapel of no name, for no one saint, / For no one traveller; unmoved,” is not exclusive to a specific religion-not even for Roman Catholicism, which is given to naming a church in honor of a patron saint-treats all people with “an anonymyty that binds,” in that this chapel is for everyone and anyone, not paying high regard for a group or an individual “We, wayfarers of no important face/ And of no measurable importance, Of diverse gods and creeds. . .”
It claims the equality of all humanity regardless of religion, race, disputes or any arbitrarily-established differences. “We are one, it intones. / We are One. No roof, no wall disputes / This age-old myth to disrupt this / Light, for the moment binding / Even to the loneliest of fugitives.”
. . . For a chapel that is often a site of weddings without favoring any particular set of doctrine or religion, the poem The Glass Chapel celebrates the universality of love, of the need to be loved, of the escapism (We… Escapees all) provided by love from the harsh realities of life
The combining of the three divisions of space into one physical space seen thorugh the glass chapel preserved in the poem also testifies to the poet’s power of using the entirety of the sensible world-whether solid, liquid or gas; earth, air or water-to convey what could be universal truths that everyone from all cultures ought to know.
With an intuition that gives woman a sharp eyeing of the details in a particular experience, a woman is able to intuit universal thought, crossing the borders dividing first, second, even third sexes. Her poetry transcends sexuality as it prioritizes spirituality showing. This testifies to the truth beyond any doubt:
thanks to a the female sensibility leads us to universal thought, spirituality knows no gender indeed.
in “The O.A.D. Reader”
by Ron Rico U. Oandasan
It is a pervasive idea that space is the gargantuan, corporeal reality that surrounds it. Everything that around us is a constituent of space, they are placed in the category of reality, that is, as far as the mundane or the sensible is concerned which stresses the role of the sight, smell, hearing, taste, or touch-of the human senses, being limited in themselves.
By virtue of the limits of sensory perception, such knowledge of physical space is in fact constricted; so that what we deem as real are only those that are perceivable, therefore, we have a vague cognition of the unseen, unheard, unfelt, or whatever it is "beyond" perception. The confinements of sensible reality impede our understanding of the transcendental.
Not so for the poet however, especially, the female poet, one of whose most sentient faculties is intuition, a dominion of the female mind. The intuition is the female dominion, so that through this, Ophelia Dimalanta broadens the horizon of the reader's mind to the reality of the transcendent The Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta Reader Volume I, or simplyThe OAD Reader, in which she brings to life a persona who intuits beyond the physical and serves an enlightening awareness of transcendental truths that otherwise unfathomable. The poems involve a poetic speaker who realizes otherworldly maxims in spite of AND by means of the worldly. It turns out that the material is not a constraint but a manifestation of the spiritual.
In line with the Emerson's thinking in his 1844 essay "The Poet", the writer-in this case, Dimalanta-reports passionately on personal experiences that will stimulate readers embarked on their own spiritual and intellectual journeys. All experience is meaningful; no "sensual fact" (that is, nothing that is perceived by the senses) lacks spiritual significance. The special office of the "poet" (i.e., the imaginative writer) is to be alert to the meanings that saturate all of existence; all persons have the potential to be poets ( which is one way in which the poet is "representative"), but those who actually become poet-geniuses are "sovereign": they are potentates, emperors, liberating gods. Emerson's grand vision of the poet’s powers is akin to Shelley’s in "The Defence of Poetry." In Emerson’s view, the more faithful the poet is to Nature, to Nature’s harmonies, the better will be his or her art. For Emerson, a poem is defined by a thought that is "passionately alive," not by its pattern of rhyme or meter or structure; he explicitly puts content before form. (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism p. 720)
Emerson seems to share with TS Eliot and Ezra Pound that the poet makes things new: "The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object."
Transcendentalist thought-that is, perceiving the spiritual by intuiting (that is, applying intuition on) the material-is manifest in The OAD Reader, as shown in the discussion by the succeeding paragraphs.
Since physical space is too wide for comprehension, I divided it into three: terrestial, aquatic, and aerial space. In each division there are selected poems from The OAD Reader taken into account. The poetic persona's intuitive role in seeing the transcendental through the limits of terrestial, aquatic, or aerial space are discussed below.
Terrestial Space
Most of the poems are inspired by space on dry land, hence, the terrestial space. In the following discussions, terrestial space is used by the poetic persona to come up with transcendental thought, thus emphasizing that terrestial space is not an impediment but an instrument, along with intuition, that leads one to the spiritual.
From Particulars to Universals in Terrestial Space
On land, one finds lots of obstacles that impede bodily freedom of movement. These obstacles are presented in such poems as The Heart of Waiting, in which OAD reminisces the torment of transportation.
"I was in Iowa City. I have been invited to lecture in Omaha City. I was supposed to leave Iowa at twelve midnight. I was there in the waiting station waiting... alone! Waiting for the bus to arrive at the station and waiting for it to take me to my destination. This is about the agony of having to sit in the greyhound bus, without anybody familiar, in darkness, and after a long long wait-I finally arrive in Omaha where I’m suppose to wait for a limo to take me to Sioux City."
"And I realized, it's good to be alone, not to be seen agonizing this way. People may think I’m strong but here I am, crumbling because of being alone."
In the poem, the person is encased from the expanse of space in the confines of a vehicle. Chairs, the aisle, the darkness-prevent stable movement. he physical constraint by the chairs, even the toast and turns of the automobile, prevent the passenger any free motion. The fact that others cannot see the persona’s agony is another boundary of space. Furthermore, OAD share in the interview about the physical suffering endured in such a long excursion:
At first the reading turns out to be about the body's drudgery of travelling by bus, and takes a more spiritual turn when it throws a question on solitude, and finally an unusually realized but enlightening and universal advantage of solitude. This illustrates a start from the experience of a particular person then expanding to a universal truth discussed.
The persona is severed from the unbound expanse of space by the walls of the automobile. Not to mention, suffering the drudgery of traveling. Being unseen suffering this way, being alone, is taken as an advantage, because solitude can itself be an honor at times. It provides an opportunity for the persona to get in touch with herself and unleash her meditative prowess that leads her to realizations that go beyond the limits of exhaustion and space in the bus.
The advantage of solitude gives emphasis on individual by romanticism. Suddenly in OAD’s perspective, being both alone and lonely are taken as good things. Even the melancholy inherent in loneliness is itself a good thing, a very subjective point of view when looking at solitude.
The persona in OAD's poetry is keen in observing particular details. With this observation, she infers universal thought. Such a particular-universal is frequent in the poems especially when it comes to descriptions of the terrestial-more importantly, physical-space that lead to a glimpse of the spiritual.
Terrestial Space and History
In "Meryam Ana at Ephesus", about a visit to the site where the Virgin Mary was believed to spend her last days, the persona is exposed to the nexus of material space and the spiritual-considering the Mary is a dominating figure in Catholic faith. The revered spot celebrates the fact that such a part of an otherwise seemingly mythological faith-where Mary is considered the Mother of God-is certifies its actual place in history, that such a personage really walked on the face of this Earth, that the a larger-than-life figure was actually a human being who lived a peasant’s life and spent her aged years in Ephesus. The awe inspired in the persona by the space-which insinuated a holiness that seemed aloof and unfathomable to human thought-is mixed with a realization of sacredness enhanced by its closeness to human contact, making such a mystery seem closer to human comprehension and not as astoundingly divine as to separate it from mortality, as the succeeding lines suggest:
How dumbstruck we are / here in Mary's House / where it stands already / somewhat marred by countless / human hands and crude / sundry foreign impalements.
And yet somehow, it is this / very openness to touch / which enriches its sanctity, / the sanctuary'y human condition, / the very fact of tis creation../ a Mother in her waning years / grieving not so much over deaths / as of those dyings / invisible among the lives in us, / breath by breath, / love by disenchanted mortal love.
The same testimony to history can be seen in “Pierre Loti Café," in which a romantic story about a poet who writes his best poetry in a place where he had met with his beloved in a tragic love affair-which has the risk of being unbelievable because of its romanticism-is proved to have really existed by presenting the site in which a tragic and unusual liaison actually took place. It is about the great contemporary poet Loti from whom the café was name after. He used to have a tragic love affair with a Turkish married woman, Azayadhe. And the café was the site where they secretly met. When Loti went away, she died in grief. When he came back, he was devastated by her death, and continued to write his best and most inspired poetry in this cafe on the hill where he decided to stay for the rest of his life. This cafe perched on a hill was henceforth named after him.
In the poem, we find a persona herself in the walls of this romantic café, contemplating what it felt like to be Loti having climbed the hill for a cup of “stirrings” of coffee, but really for writing poetry to that never really expressed his longing for the beloved, and after writing poems hopefully as an outlet of his love, the urge to vent such a great love only prompts him to write some more:
These strange stirrings/ of many times removed and therefore / more exciting possible bondings / in a now nothing more than one / draem shore, too flimsy / for safekeeping / . . . / could well have been / for Loti, poetry / to be always written, and never quite / done until the last line's breath, / which is like love's infinity spawling on, endless-
The persona’s efforts to relive such a romantic history exemplifies the mimetic function of art, in which the poem imitates the romantic but still historical/actual reality. This gives the reader the chance to somehow impart in Loti’s shoes, feeling a love augmented by more and more poems that immortalized it. In fact, such a love story of Loti from the turn of a century was so inspiring that more than half a century later, OAD, the poet’s poet, wrote another poem!
""Vigan" Cagliari (Greek: Καράλις; Latin: Carales and Caralis[1]; Catalan: Càller; Sardinian: Casteddu) is the capital of the island of Sardinia, a region of Italy. Cagliari's Sardinian name Casteddu literally means the castle. It has about 160,000 inhabitants, or about 350,000 including the suburbs (metropolitan area) (Elmas, Selargius, Monserrato, Quartucciu, Quartu Sant'Elena). D.H. Lawrence, in his lively memoir of a voyage to Sardinia, Sea and Sardinia, undertaken in January 1921, described the effect of the warm Mediterranean sun-light on the white lime-stone city and compared Cagliari to a "white Jerusalem".(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cagliari)Lawrence's "Cagliari" with the quaint / and curious look, peering from the past/ seen but never really enterred, / a memory of rows of whitewashed houses / with gleaming capiz eyes looking out / into quieted cobbled streets, but there. . . . sings . . . in a / distant note, in a whisper old yet / unailing, alien yet very much of today, / resonant, ending, beginning, and hourly / begun... Vigan, a vignette of dreams / shadowing slowly off, and vaguely / into a noontime, northbound sun. When one peers, one does not reveal oneself comopletely thereby denoting a sense of concealment. In line with this, Vigan--with its 18th century air--comes as a mystery in that it may be an artefact from the past, but still does not permit us to fathom the ethos of a Spanish colonial town; hence, "never really enterred." It may be physically there to captivate the tourist's eyem but nevertheless is not enough to quench the curiosity of the 20th century spectator. Travelling northbound, the persona sees the space of Vigan shrinking from her sight as she leaves further and further on her northbound route. This increased distancing from Vigan also comes to me as the distancing of time's passage, as the world of the Philippines moves on, not necessarily forgetting but nevertheless moving on from and not stopping from the past. Considering this, it occurs to me that the past should not impede anyone from proceeding with the life the extends beyond now, so that one must live and seize the day, unfettered by shackles of histroy, remembering and learning so as not to repeat it.
Time and the Terrestial
On land are also the man-made structures that wear out in time, therefore reminding the transience-the only permanent thing in the world. It insinuates the limits of time on worldly things, the worldly, human life in particular. But in the poem "The Time Factor", what is initially the limit of time on a land(scape) becomes a reflection of timelessness.
Designed to fit the land’s topography , the garden’s uneven landscaping, combined with the colorful variety of flora, is very enticing to the aesthete’s vision, but in the eye of a paramour, rumormongerer, or any other secret-bearer, the land’s irregularity is also conducive to conceal any private correspondence while amongst the dense foliage and shrubberies, which can explain why it is called the Secret Garden.
Contriving with the physical space of the garden, the forbiddance to uncover the hidden is suggestive of limitation limiting the knowledge of something for those who are unaware of, for instance, in the poem, an secret love story between a certain "Wu Ti . . . Or his simpering sibling. . ."and "one of Silla’s starry-bosomed / Maidens, sibylline. . ." The persona said this considering the possibility that she and her presently beloved addressee have been born as different people in a different time and society with an "ethos more ancient than. . ." both of them. The repression of a forbidden love is vented out in the fervorous lines: "I want you in any where or/ Way or how, now or in another time…" And the limiting role of time in "love’s bafflement" is crystallized in "You and I meet, at the wrong tie, / Giants both standing above time, Playing for time, loving against/ Time, living at the midpoint / And crux of timelessness.
The effect of the Secret Garden, even to this day, is its timelessness. It maay be an anachronism in, say, the kand also represents the 20th Century, however, its preserved and collaterally immortalized beauty brings forth the ethos of a past gone by disregarding the passage of time in order to make the persona feel the sp9irit belonging to a culture entirely different and more ancient from hers.
The forbidden lovers of another time are now given the chance to meet aeons later:
"We meet, want, limn in each other’s/ Fictive flesh an allegory of our kind / Of love, conceived and born in this garden/ From the past, and of this moment, / And for the many more centuries to come.
toils that almost if not the entirety of our race must make in order to live.
The Terrestial on Death
You see, even though we may crave for aquatic or aerial space (see page ), we will inevitably return to land given that we are terrestial beings.
This constant return to land resonates an idea of death, a Christian (and an essence in Christianity is the belief in the afterlife, to which death is the only passage) depiction of which emanates from the Holy Scriptures, specifically, from Genesis 3:19: ". . .you are dust and to dust you will return."
In the OAD Reader, death is reflected in the persona's funereal musings as she is surrounded by terrestial space, particularly by a haunted house in the poem "On a House About to Crumble" and another poem that emanates from the first one, "She Must Have to Go and Soon". The thought of a haunted house is suggestive of death. It's ghostliness, resonating the memories of a past relationship (not necessarily a romantic one) even frightens the reader as the former poem goes, ". . .corridors ring spectral and musty / with overhanging shadows and dripping / echoes of remembered loves and hates. . ." and the latter poem pictures, . . . And this one house will languish on / Rocked as she already is by nocturnal / Chills and with the ague of aging, / . . . / Her paraplegic doors mysteriously / Unhinged, swung, shaken at you, / . . . / But she will not go, not yet. Voices musty with age and great disdain / Move her halls where skulking rats / Suddenly litter your path, entrenched / In their own wake of evil. /
The house may seem void of life, but it looks, reeks, filled and ruled by the afterlife looming in the bodiless person of a phantom. Reading it literally, "She Must Have to Go and Soon" does have a ghost in it, a wandering spirit restless due to some unfinished business: "She will not go until you do. / And finally when you do, the ghost of her / Intimate and sensual frame and scent / Will cuddle and cradle your shrivelled body, / The pair of you crumbling back to silver dust / The way staunch and old forgotten houses go." The desire of the (female) spirit for the addressee to "go soon" or "crumble back into dust" signals the destruction or death of the addressee. This grim presence of the spiritual evoked by the presence of the physical on-land space of a house is indeed connotative of death. The literal meaning would stop on the idea of a house haunted by a ghost.
However, it does not end on a negatively horrifying experience for the reader because in
"To a House about to Crumble" is emphasized a transition from a dark vindictiveness of the ghost into the hope of "rising again":
she will come alive again / far abroad, woman deathless / under a copper-colored sky of some tahitian / shores quaint vermilion trees, / achingly arched boughs / formidable with fruit, / and gently growing presence / sweeping across her old ancestral threshold / towards rooms and rooms / tenderly spewing his glitter there / where she at last at last, / empowering overwhelming, / a gauguin vahine heaving / imbrowned with native grace / and sun-fulfillment who / may now finally flower up again / in shining deathless calm."
Whereas in the other poem ("She Must Have to Go and Soon"), the spirit wants to a deadly reunion with the addressee) that expresses an air of vengeance ("someday soon she knows / in her awaited second springing / and with a vengeance. . .") this poem ("To a House about to Crumble") shows the female spirit in the hopes of moving on, without mention of a necessity for the destruction ("the shrivelled body") of the addressee. In fact, in such a spiritual resurrection, the soul of the female doesn't need anybody else to rest in peace ("in shining deathless calm").
From this can be inferred the autonomy of the female spirit: she can move on from the ghosts of the past by herself even if it means living behind that past.
It's noteworthy that from the physical confines, the space of a (haunted) house can communicate the independence of womanhood.
Land and Immortality
The link between land and death is soil ("to dust you shall return"). In the poem He Rages, where the persona encounters the Terra Cotta Warriors,(or Terracotta Warriors and Horses is a collection of 8,099 life-size terra cotta figures of warriors and horses located near the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor The Terracotta Army was discovered in March 1974 by local farmers drilling a water well to the east of Mount Lishan. The terracotta figures were buried with the first Emperor of Qin (Qin Shi Huangdi) in 210-209 BC. Their purpose was to help rule another empire with Shi Huangdi in the afterlife. Consequently, they are also sometimes referred to as "Qin's Armies".The figures were discovered in 1974 near Xi'an, Shaanxi province. from Terracotta Army http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Cotta_Warriors) the clay used by an Emperor for his own immortality becomes a reminder of such a futile effort because even the statues were made up of clay-a material therefore transient thing in the first place. On the other hand, dust from land is permanent in this world: land has been existing for billions of years now. However, it still belongs to a planet that is destructible, hence, that can mean its end. So that indeed, land remains a symbol of mortality. In the poem, the subterranean recesses are the physical space occupied by stolid moreover lifeless terra cotta statues. This is located underground where nonliving sculptures and mounds of soil would place the persona under a funereal impression that she is in a grave. The universal inevitability of death looms over the place. Universal because spirituality is beyond gender. Beholding the thousands of statues in the imperial grave, the persona faces the vestiges and memory of an ambitious man "dying to live on."211 The persona meditates on that emperor's rage in the afterlife at the unfulfillment of his ambition of immortality. . . .but mostly/ he rages against hovering spectres / no armies bigger than continents / may wrestle or subdue, / as he, lord, and master even fo the darkest depths, rages, imperiously / dying to live on, his clay brigade / storming forth into the live open8
The Space of a Picture
The Parthenon Seen and Shot from Hotel Aphrodite is a poem about complementariness, where two elements benefit each other. In the hotel, OAD had agreed with a companion to take shots of each other, one against the window with the Parthenon in the background.
The results were two bungling shots. One was where "The Parthenon is stark clear" whereas the addressee looked nondescript. The other showed "Now, the Parthenon is the ghost" while the persona’s image was definite.
"The Parthenon and you,
I and the Parthenon,
Subject-Object,
One repressed the other
Played up alternately both.
Contemplator and text,
Singer and Song,
Separate and One."
This adheres to a pair’s truism: One isn’t identified without the other.
The poem’s show that what makes space limited is the limitation of the human being. There may be things that we fail to see or sense or feel but possibily, if not actually exist, which is the "who knows?" attitude, casting an open mind toward the possible existence of the "hardly" accessible things to the human senses.
The often Romanticized object Parthenon is subjected to the realistic mishaps of smudged and imperfections of the current time. This shows the crossing of borders from a reverence and idealism of a temple to the rather unlikely juxtaposition with photographic shortcomings. And to think in the poem, that photography which could have been denounced as sacrilege in the zenith of Platonic idealism was actually considered an artistic work with its own message to tell, independent of the constrictions of classicism.
Physical space is captured and bounded by the four corners and sides of a photograph, subjected to the manipulation of the camera. Not to mention, a particular point of view-the view of the camera-from Hotel Aphrodite furthers the limitations. The picture contains the ancient Parthenon juxtaposed with a posing people from millennia after Athena’s temple was erected. The purview manifests the limits of sight, such the unlimited expanse of space is seen by a limited eye. This testifies to the limit of human sense.
But with OAD’s mind, the unlikely outcome of shots were given profound meaning that one wouldn’t expect in a photograph with blurred segments.
Summer Palace involves the presence of fantasy and reality, and the persona's preference for the fantastic. In the end however, the persona realizes that real is beautiful in itself if one should just take the time to look at it for appreciation. 7
. . . it is really / not how fast one goes, / or how many painted beams / have been crossed in this / longest corridor of spawned / dreams but how much he distils in beauty's name the real, / providing fluid link between / crystal lake and gold-honed tale.
Aquatic Space
As in the case of terrestial space, The OAD Reader's poetic persona becomes keen in examining specific characteristics of water, of aquatic space, as she crosses the borders of the particular and reaches universal thought.
Water as a physical space is presented as a seduction of rest and surrender in the verses of Night Sea Swim, where the swimmer is tempted to give up swimming with no shore at sight, that is, as a person tries to move on and keep on moving with no specific result assured. But it may also mean a person in a fatal state, where he has to chose where the peace of death is very tempting option-being the easy way out:
"already her strokes are dismembered.
The calm of the deep seduces.
this sensation of simply giving up…
…awes."
The end of a long swim for the swimmer is quite vague, so that any outcome of laborious efforts remains unseen, thus seem futile as the “calm of the deep seduces” and the person’s familiarity of his journey’s purpose decreases, "the shore, the shore! What is it?"
Water has its advantages and disadvantages as far as physical space is concerned .
Water’s nuances of death are also evident in "An Unexpected Stopover at HangZhou," where the persona is placed in a sudden trance by the silvery yet gloomy appearance of a lake:
Out there, a wizardry of pagodas / And hilltops rising like incense / In a necromantic haze. . . . passing through Hangzhou's / West Lake, a part of me strays, / misses the plain, is forever / Caught and lost among the shreds / Of illusive late summer mist / Clinging to the horizon's willows.
Necromancy mentioned in the verse above is a strong reference to death, given that this is the art of communicating with spirits of the deceased. The “necromantic haze” enchants the persona and leaves her the impression of death the haunts her even after leaving the lake.
Setting aside the negative impression of death, water in the abovementioned poems is representative of death as a form of freedom from the toils of this life. Water has this particular effect on people who are wearily inured to solid obstacles on land that prevent a sense of open space (which is very much applicable to urban dwellers, ith all the buildings and what not surrounding or should I say, trapping them). When one comes in contact or merely gazes at the sea--or any wide expanse of water with nothing solid or "limits" sticking out or floating on its surface, one experiences a pleasurable rarity that the terrestial space cannot give. On such a rare occassion occurs a peculiar sense of freedom: that which the terrestial does not usually offer because of its physical limits. Not to mention, land has its cultural limits: for on land represents the toils that almost if not the entirety of our race must make in order to live. an empty expanse with no obstacles or any other thing on it but waves. At the sight of a wide An exemption to this would be boulders in the river or icebergs perhaps. I think it has something to do with
Through details that easily catches the eye of the female persona, one is given a glimpse of the universal.
In Noonbound, Northbound, where the persona recalls a stopover at an Ilocano beach, the sea waters signify a certain longing for the past, of childhood,
"An otherwise profound blue of the sea / pales into a new translucence. / And we, children all, from nine / to seventy, turn in haste, taking in all / that sea and sun and breeze / coming upon us in one gentle / noontime rush. / And soon, we reaffirm a kindship/ with the restless tides / then grow again to reavow / the old and saving strictures / ofsundrenched,sandstreakedshores.
way back when the duties and responsibilities of adulthood and to be healthy fun and carefree was a child's utmost priority, have not yet bothered the child, when innocence was at its prime. This kind of pleasure on water is worthy of anyone's time, especially for grown-ups when it is about time to take a break and just be a kid again. So that after this fun had refurbished your zest for life, one can return to the shores in the same token as one returns to responsibility refreshed and ready for the challenges that adulthood has to offer. Considering the liberation of the inner child in us, aquatic space still retains its connotation of freedom.
Aerial Space
It shares with terrestial and aquatic space the poetic persona's description of details in arriving at universals.
Just like water, air also is an open space, still unlike land swarming with living and nonliving occupants. The whole world is enveloped by air. This gives air all the more reason to be regarded as a spacious expanse with less impediments of motion and freedom. Anyone or thing on air is most likely to be free of spatial obstructions, free to "fly" anywhere. Basically, the charming liberation in the air lies in its being unobstructed.
This advantage of “unobstruction” is manifested in OAD's poem.
“An Unobstructed view.” It is about a persona in an empty space under the night sky, in the middle of a past devastating crisis that swept everything out, and moving on to start all over again. OAD revealed this poem’s biographical context: "My ancestral house burned back when I was AB dean. I didn’t have anything, not even my signatures [signature clothes]. Unobstructed view... the house was ruined and we got rid of the remnants so that there was this clearing, so that I could see the moon. I realized the clatter of my past life has disappeared and now I’m ready to move on."
By saying “I have all to myself”, the persona recognizes that her succeeding years to come were all in her own hands. With a void space surrounding her, she faces nothingness. Nothing at all but void space in the form of air that she and only she can fill up. Such a clearing provides room to start anew.
yes, i see it all now; / the sky is all there, / no trees shooting up, / no strictures looming / to restrain its flow.
i have it all to myself, / like it has all of me. . .
. . .
nothing is there.
i am myself tabula rasa
. . .
there are no telltale traces / of past me here looking up / into one freely flowing sky / and one singular unfrilled moon. / now i begin to re-establish / links, re-touch, re-focus, / as i pen the text of new days / to come tonight, here / from one unobstructed view.
Aerial space represents a void. Though it is true that it is empty, it also provides the chance for creativity, in which all possibilities are under your own ingenuity. It’s all your choice what to make of the void.
Aerial Space then is associated with freedom. Take note that in the poem there was a house that blocked the view of an otherwise wide expanse of sky, so that when that house with the vestiges of the past it stored have been cleared away, the persona saw a clearing, an empty one, in which she becomes free to fill it up in whatever way she chooses.
Diversity of Physical Space
Most of the abovementioned poems in The OAD Reader are inspired by terrestial space, and only a minority of the poems deal with aquatic and aerial. This reflects the persona's familiarity with land: it is where she lives her life and where she returns at the terminus of such a life. Land is the home of human beings, making us so accustomed to it that terrestial space has lost its novelty and instead gives us the impression of something ordinary, constantly there, and nothing new about it.
Now about aquatic and aerial space, given that no man or woman could spend the most of a life under water or on air, provide a sense of novelty to the beholder. With the limits and the everydayness of terrestial space, the rarity of the aquatic and the aerial attract our interest.
Moreover, the limits of land that we are so accustomes to are forgotten when in the presence of air and water. This provides the sense of freedom-as discussed above-that terrestial space, because of its lost novelty, cannot give.
This testifies to the diversty of that physical space. As a result, the myriad of material things that environ the woman are so rich in implications that appeal to her intuition, giving her more opportunities of arriving at universal thought thereby contributing in the expansion of human knowledge when it comes to the spiritual.
Intuition as a Link between Terrestial, Aquatic, Aerial Space
Through all these, one may wander what the paper says about the woman.
I cannot answer that question without first delving on the female sensibility, particularly, intuition.
Apart from the diversity of space that augments human knowledge of the transcendental, intuition contained in the female sensibility is what terrestial, aquatic, and aerial space have in common, as far as The OAD Reader is concerned. Intuition defies the boundaries separating land, air, and water as the spirit defies the material world; nothing stopping it taking a closer step to understanding spiritual ideas.
In fact, the poem The Glass Chapel unites all three spaces into one poem and still comes up with a universal message.
The said poem is dedicated to Wayfarers Chapel, a church made of glass in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, noted for its unique modern architecture and location next to the Pacific Ocean. The church sits near the landslide-prone Portuguese Bend area.
Inspired by this chapel of glass that sees the land around it, overlooks the sea, and sees the open space of the sky, the poem that immortalizes its physical space combined in it-terrestial, aquatic, and aerial-is significant in this paper in that it combines all three categories of space I have mentioned in this paper. These loss of categories, of boundaries that represent division and separation and unites them in one poem celebrates the theme of the unity that sets differences aside.
Such a “Chapel of no name, for no one saint, / For no one traveller; unmoved,” is not exclusive to a specific religion-not even for Roman Catholicism, which is given to naming a church in honor of a patron saint-treats all people with “an anonymyty that binds,” in that this chapel is for everyone and anyone, not paying high regard for a group or an individual “We, wayfarers of no important face/ And of no measurable importance, Of diverse gods and creeds. . .”
It claims the equality of all humanity regardless of religion, race, disputes or any arbitrarily-established differences. “We are one, it intones. / We are One. No roof, no wall disputes / This age-old myth to disrupt this / Light, for the moment binding / Even to the loneliest of fugitives.”
. . . For a chapel that is often a site of weddings without favoring any particular set of doctrine or religion, the poem The Glass Chapel celebrates the universality of love, of the need to be loved, of the escapism (We… Escapees all) provided by love from the harsh realities of life
The combining of the three divisions of space into one physical space seen thorugh the glass chapel preserved in the poem also testifies to the poet’s power of using the entirety of the sensible world-whether solid, liquid or gas; earth, air or water-to convey what could be universal truths that everyone from all cultures ought to know.
With an intuition that gives woman a sharp eyeing of the details in a particular experience, a woman is able to intuit universal thought, crossing the borders dividing first, second, even third sexes. Her poetry transcends sexuality as it prioritizes spirituality showing. This testifies to the truth beyond any doubt:
thanks to a the female sensibility leads us to universal thought, spirituality knows no gender indeed.