Panorama. Vol. VIII, No.6 June 1956

Media

Part of Panorama

Title: Panorama. Vol. VIII, No.6 June 1956
Issue Date: Vol. VIII (No. 6) June 1956
Year: 1956
Language: English
Rights
extracted text: ge 5) Planning in a Free Asia JUNE 1956 One-third of the world, uncommitted Culture Is My Business By Pura Santillan-Castrence American Negro in Africa What is race? SQ CENTAVOS CONTENTS Articles Planning in a Free Asia ...... Philip M. Hauser Filipino Resurgence Through Cultural Encounter Alfredo T. Morales 5 American Negro in Africa ........ Raul Barbero 16 Mexican Pieces of Eight for Manila . Sixto D' Asis 20 A Filipino Professor Teaches at an American College G. Fores Ganzon 23 Watchbird in the Wilderness ...... Celso Roque 28 The World Population Is Fast Expanding . . . . . . . 31 Burma's Teakwood .............. Fenix Madura 33 City on Penang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 The Will of a River . . . . . . . . Alfredo Q. Gonzalez 39, Culture Is My Business . Pura Santillan-Castrence 6-.' Mars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael Ovenden 72 Calendar of Prizes . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonard Casper Audubon, Lost Dauphin of France . Iono M~caraeg P Fiction The Hunter Robert L. Peters Regular Features Are You Word Wise? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Panorama Peek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Panorama Quiz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . St> Literary Personality- XVIII: John Crowe Ransom F. ]. Ho/Iman S'o Book Review: The City of Discontent . . . . . . . . . . 6~ In the Beginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . f Fun-Orama by Elmer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . f PANORAMA is published monthly by the Community Publisheri', Inc., 1986 Herran, Manila, Philippines Editor: JAIME LUCAS Business Mana#Jr: MRS. C. A. MARAMAG Subscription rates: In the Philippines, one year PS.00; two yeard P9.00. Foreign subscription: one year $4.00 U.S.; two year $7.00 U.S. Single copy 50 centavos. VOL. VIII Entered as second class mail matter at the Manila Post Office on Dec. 7, 1955 MANILA, PHILIPPINES One-third of a world, uncommitted JUNE 1956 No. 6 PLANNING IN A FREE ASIA By PHILIP M . HAUSER I T MA y BE THAT in Southeast Asia we have the testing ground of the compatibility of economic planning with the maintenance of essential freedoms. We may be witnessing what may, in the perspective of history, be a major cultural development - and I am using the word "cultural" now in the se·nse of an anthropologist or of a socio·· logist, and not in terms of art or literature. You can have economic planning at various levels without necessarily imperiling or infringing the essential freedoms. There are noteworthy examples from which, of course, we should not generalize too hastily. One such example is the United Kingdom. These are patterns for Asia to follow. But, I think the real demonstration is to be made in the years ahead and I suspect it is going to be this part of the world that will make it. "Freedom" and "economic planning" are, on the one hand, regarded as antithetical; and, on the other, as complementary or even mutually dependent. Although the concept "economic planning" is relatively unambiguous, "freedom" may have many connotations. These include political, personal, religious, and economic freedoms. These essential freedoms may be defined as consisting of the ability to make individual choices with a minimum of restrictons and interferences by agencies of Government other than those imposed by broad considerations of h~alth, safety, or morals. Economic planning. may be considered as consisting of a general effort to direct and control a national economy from a central source. Economic planning may embrace very general and broad directions, or minute and detailed controls; the instrumentalities m a y embrace the whole or given sectors of an economy. 2 Certain generalizations may be made for the contemporary world. Where economic planning is practised the most comprehensively a n d intensively, there is the least political, personal, religious and economic freedom. The situation in the communist part of the wor'' containing about a third of the world's peoples, documents this generalization. In contrast, it is in the free western world that economic planning is much more limited; and individual choice is relatively great in each of the fundamental phases of existence to which reference has been made. · The association between economic planning and restrictions upon freedom, as observable in the contemporary world, does not necessarily mean that these concepts are completely incompatible. To begin with, within the free western world itself there are varying degrees of economic planning e v id e n t among, for example, such nations as the United States, the, United Kingdom, and Sweden. Moreover, within the communist countries there are undoubtedly variations in the degree of freedom permitted. I N FACT, a number of the fret. countries of Asia are setting their courses of national economic and social development on the assumption of the compatibility of economic planPANORAMA ning and freedom. In adopting a program of national planning, Burma has. socialized a number of important sectors of her economy. But she has nevertheless left a substantial portion of her economy open to private enterprise. A number of the leaders of nations in free Asia are convinced that economic planning is not only compatible with freedom in their countries, but is a prerequisite to it. And there is much to support their position. In the first place, compared with the advanced countries in their early stages qf development, the less developed nations today are relatively JUNE 1956 , .... ~UfT~~ll~· poorer in level of living and in capital resources, experience much greater pressure of population upon resources, have no access to a "new world," and have relatively little experience with commercial and technological development. Moreover, as a byproduct o! long periods of colonialism and hard-earned political independence, a number of the countries of free Asia are characterized by pluralistic, politically divided and truncated, societies. These countries have yet to achieve integration of their diverse racial and ethnic stocks, political unity, and effective leadership in non-governmental as well as governmental activities. 3 In Burma, for example, the indigenous Burmese, the Indian, the Chinese, in no sense live as integrated unified groupings but, 11ather, as pluralistic, almost independent, semi-autonomous cultures and societies within the broader Union. And revolutionary m o v e - ments which. preceded political independence were understandably impatient with pre-independence le~ders. There was a tendency for many of the nations in this part of the world to get rid of such leadership that existed, not only in the political, but also in other walks of life - the universities, business, general administration, and so on. By a truncated society, I refer to a society with a good part of its head cut off. I N CONSEQUENCE, the free countries of Asia find economic planning a must in their efforts to achieve independence and to raise the levels of living of their peoples. Only through central economic planning can the limited available human and material resources be most effectively mobilized and . employed. The problem is whether the free nations of Asia have the will, the forbearance, and the knowhow to achieve their goals of "'socialism" without infringement of the essential freedoms. * 4 Moreover, once the initial phases of induced economic development are well under way through central national planning, it may be that the free Asian nations will find it feasible and desirable increasingly to depend on free market mechanism to increase productivity and raise levels of living. Democratic and free methods are often slower, more tortuous, and may seem less efficient than totalitarian methods. But succumbing to the lure of the supposed efficiency of dictatorship would mean the adoption of the communist type of economic planning - planning at - the expense of the freedoms, planning at the price of the enslavement of the individual. The fr e e and communist worlds, respectively, embrace about a third of the world's population. The remaining third comprise mainly of the less developed nations of the world, a considerable portion of which is in Asia. Asia may have it in its power to demonstrate to the . other two-thirds of mankind that economic planning can be compatible with freedom. If this can be done, then Asia may contribute a way of life that will take its place among the great cultural achievements of human history. - Adapted from the Conference on Cultural Freedom in Asia. * * PANORAMA JUNE 1956 'Jifiplno c::f? £j,U 'l'fj ena 'Jh'tou9h Cuftu 'ta[ Cncounu't By ALFREDO T . MORALES We have stepped on the threshold of a new world 1 HE EARS of mankind grow deaf with alarums ot war, and the heavens over us darken with clouds of atomic and hydrogen dust. For stoic fortitude and sad consolation, rather than for the happiness and warm brotherhood we seek, our memories preserve during these dq,ys of fear the knowledge that at least our countries' past has martyrs to freedom and the good life. 5 Fifty-nine years ago, in 1896, hastening the end of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines, Dr. Jose Rizal, "pride of the Malay race,'' became the Filipino sacrificial lamb in Manila's Luneta. Born in 1861, close to the year of Gandhi's birth, Rizal· walked to his execution much earlier than the Saint of Sabarmati did to his assassination. Among the thousand of Filipinos who fulfilled their highest duty to their country during World War II, the name which shines brightest is that of Chief Justice Jose Abad Santos. President Quezon left Abad Santos behind in a captive land with the title of head of state, when the former made a dash for freedom from Corregidor to Australia. As the Japanese in 1942 took Abad Santos out of the woods to die on an unmarked spot for refusing to follow them, he said to his weeping son: "Don't weep, my son. I am proud to die for our country. Not every man is given this opportunity to serve her." The lives and ideas of these men typify the superior spirits in the last sixty years or more of Southeast Asian history. For a generation passing through a moral and cultural crisis, as Mr. Prabhakar Pacthye notes, which breeds indifference to issues of vital moral 6 importance, these men are more than emblems of faith. They yield a hard core of historical experience about the cultural encounter of West and East in Southeast Asia from which it is possible to imbibe some hope of filling the spiritual vacuum felt acutely by contemporary thinkers like Mr. Padhye, expressmg the anxieties of the East, and Arnold J. Toynbee speaking for the West. Where the Western historian leaves off after his analysis of a world hit hard by the West, the Eastern mind describes its condition under the impact of Western aggression. It identifies the same loose strand of cultural radiation-technology culture-pattern. Where Toynbee points out the organic unity of the component strands of a culture-pattern-"technology, religion, politics, art, and so on"-and shows that a foreign body social penetrated by a loose srand from a diffracted culture-ray becomes poisoned, he is only describing a fact which all Orientals actually feel and experience deeply. Says Mr. Padhye: The British, whose education and system intensified the spiritual vacuum, tried to fill it up with rationalistic liberalism. Some of the early leaders of the Indian renaissance were products of these efforts. But one cannot borrow a philosophy from alien rulers and make PANORAMA it the lifeblood of a nation. Secondly, this rational-liberal philosophy started crumbling at home (in Europe) even before it could grow into a sizeable sapling in India. Admitting the broad truth of the condition and problem of the intellectual in the whole East-Islam, India, and the Far East-under the impact of Western cultural dissemination, the case of the Filipinos as an actively industrializing, democratk, and Christian people presents many interesting refinements of this generalization. Some ideas of Toynbee's and Mr. Padhye's gain sharpness from insights supplied by Filipino intellectual history. For example, a neglected truth lies hidden in the halftru th of the apparent meaning of Mr. Padhye's observation that one cannot borrow a philosophy from alien rulers and make it the lifeblood of a nation. Similarly, the solution to the question Toynbee analyzes, commonly known as the "Western Question", and the significance of the adoption by an Eastern people of modern Western ways of life, need further elucidation than that supplied by his chosen example of the new Turkey rejuvenated by Mustafa Kemc1l Ataturk. <D URING THE period of American sovereignty in the Philippines from 1902 to 1935, JUNE 1956 when the Commonwealth was established preparatory to independence in 1946, a double revolution using peaceful methods stormed and changed the Philippines. The Americans saw a Spanish feudal culture superimposed on Malayan life. They planned and endeavored to convert the entire system into a modern Western type of social order. Simultaneously the Filipinos under the leadership of Osmefia and Quezon, who were aided by Roxas, Laurel, Recto, Quirino, and Abad Santos, waged a non-violent incessant opposition to American rule and campaigned for independence. Th i s movement, spurred and strengthened by the success of the Americans in administering their program of modernization, gave the Filipinos during the first thirty-five years of this centurY' the dynamic philosophy and spiritual anchorage which Indians later found in Gandhi and his peaceful revolution. The vast scope of the amazing American program of modernization and its results after barely a generation awed the Board of Educational Survey in 1925. The board, led by Dr. Paul Monroe, wrote about the public system of education: For almost a generation a school system patterned on the American plan and using Eng7 lish as its medium of instruction has been in operation. Through this system a Malay people which for more than three centuries Jived under Spanish rule has been . introduced to Anglo-Saxon institutions and civilization. Through this system an effort has been made to give a common language to more than ten millions of people, divided by the barriers of dialect into numerous noncommunicating groups. Through this system teachers have sought to bring to the Orient the products of modern scientific thought. Through this system both , American and Filipino educational leaders have hoped to prepare a whole people for self-government and for bearing the responsibilities of effective citizenship. The Board claimed that no bolder adventure enlightenm e n t undertaken in an Oriental setting can be read in the pages of history. It anticipated, and World War II confirmed, the deep significance to the world of this "educational experiment of enormous magnitude and complexity" conducted in the laboratory of the Philippines: 8 To any one interested in the technical problems of classroom instruction, in the general administration of education, in. the relation of the school to social conditions, in the effects flowing from the contacts of diverse culture, in the more abstruse problems of the ethnologist, or in the wider human problems of the adjustment of races, this experiment will have deep significance. This significance lies pricipally in the Filipino soul's growing so firmly animated with democracy and freedom that it poured its fullest spiritual power into an epic defense of country against an Oriental fascism and imperialism. In World War II, it confronted a Westernized Oriental people wielding for conquest the might developed by a military technology learned from the modern West. What special and parallel significance did the Filipino campaign of non-violent opposition and i n d e p e n d en c e achieve? To students of democratic thought the intellectual history of the campaign compels attention because of the Filipinos' role in reviving old and eternal truths of democracy. They gave these truths an instinctive and living meaning of their own by their fresh and passionate discovery PANORAMA and achievement of freedom. They reopened the eyes of America to the timeless and frontierless vitality of a democratic philosophy. They interpreted this philosophy in argument according to the revolutionary and idealistic doctrine of natural rights in eighteenth century rational liberalism, refusing to yield this doctrine to its nineteenth and twentieth century encrustations of racism, manifest destiny, imperialism, and Darwinism in economics and politics. Their task was made easier for the Filipinos by like-minded great Americans of twentieth century, such as William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. <[ HERE WERE more than 160 years between the American Revolution and the year when the Philippine Commonwealth was established preparatory to a committed independence ten years later. The ideas which Filipinos found in the American Revolution had declined among Americans in the course of their expansion to the Pacific seaboard and then across the ocean. New ideas had taken the place of the eighteenth century philosophy of natural rights. Lexington and Concord were part of the lives of men who died many generations ago and were JUNE 1956 now old stories told fifth hand to little children. The Americans with whom Filipinos disagreed at the beginning of this century grew up enjoying their country's freedom but had not fought to win that freedom themselves. The Filipinos were devoting their lives to fighting peacefully for theirs. To Americans, the American Revolution had passed out of their living thoughts into the oblivion of history books. To Filipinos, twentieth - century American democracy means primarily, almost exclusively, the American Revolution, and is considered at its best when motivated by its revolutionary ideals. During the first period of the Filipinos' struggle for independence, from 1898 to 1906, they pinned their faith on the equalitarian, humanitarian, and libertarian principles of the American Revolution. They traced these ideas back to the natural rights philosophy of eighteenth century rational liberalism, translated politically into the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. They also took advantage of the anti-imperialist movement in America opposing President McKinley. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution interpreted according to the theory of natural rights 9 inspired this movement. In their writings, Filipino· leaders telescoped the ideas of William Jennings Bryan with those of Washington, Monroe, Franklin, and Jefferson. From 1907 to 1920, the second period of the independence movement, the facts and ideas of the American Revolution continued to supply arguments to the Filipinos. When standards of civilization and education were applied to them to show their incapacity for independence, the Filipinos compared themselves w i th Americans with 1776. When it was argued that there were Filipinos who opposed independence and that the welfare of the masses demanded the continuation of foreign rule, the Filipinos recalled the American Tories and quoted Lincoln on kingcraft. The advent of Wilson, his concept of trusteeship for the Philippine with eventual independence, the Jones Law of 1916, and Wilson's World War I aims were hailed by Filipinos as a revival of the spirit of 1776, especially of Jefferson's ideas in the Declaration of Independence. During this period, the concept of social welfare, one of the most important democratic principles America had been developing in the nineteenth century, became a prominent 10 argument of the Filipinos for independence. Fear of big business reached the Philippines from America and her experience with trusts. As a matter of fact, this concept was also prominent in the anti-imperialist movement, w h i c h counted among its supporters such men as Samuel Gompers, leader of the growing labor movement, and Bryan, leader of the agrarian revolt. The third period, 1921-1934, opened with a reaction against the concept of trusteeship, as applied by Wilson in the J effersonian tradition, and the concept of social welfare. During the administration of General Wood, who was appointed to the Philippines by President Harding, pure laissez-faire economics and anti-independence were rampant. The system adopted by General Wood destroyed the autonomy gained under former Governor General Harrison, who had been President Wilson's appointtee. In fighting to preserve autonomy, the greatest advance they had made toward independence, the Filipinos concentrated on the democratic doctrine of separation of powers. Analyzing this doctrine, Osmeiia traced it back to Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton. When the question reached the United States Supreme Court, where a majority PANORAMA decided against the Filipinos, the Filipino point of view was shared by the court's great dissenters, Holmes and Brandeis. AGAINST other expressions of anti - independence during this period, such as racism and discriminatory economic proposals actuated by American economic nationalism during the depression, the equalitarian and libertarian ideals of the American Revolution and the Civil War continued to bolster the Filipino campaign. These ideals found the fulfillment the Filipinos desired when Franklin D. Roosevelt became president. The Commonwealth was established in 19?5 preparatory to independence scheduled in 1946 and carried out regardless of World War II and its ravages in the Philippines. The American and Filipino two-pronged peaceful revolution in the Philippines up to 1935, the transition program of the Commonwealth until 1941, and the crucible of World War II set the stage for the next memorable triumph of Fili.pino democracy almost twenty years later, in 1953. Recently, the well-known author of Land Below the Wind and Three Came Home, Mrs. Agnes Newton Keith, surprised a Filipino editor with her answer to a question , about what impressJUNE 1956 ed her most in the Philippines. Mrs. _Keith's "totally unexpt!cted answer" was: Your last elections. I think I learned to appreciate democracy then more than I had ever appreciated in the States. You see, back home, I took everything for granted, like millions of other Americans. Suffrage, liberty, independence -these were the heritage of our generation---our fathers had fought for them, bequeathed them to us ... We were born into a free democracy. Here-in all Asia-what you have, you have won for yourselves. Your people voted for a change last year, and the whole nation has since abided by the decision of the polls, no matter what. You don't see the import of your past election and its results, but a hundred years from now or so, your people will realize its significance in your history . . . Many Filipinos, but probably few foreigners, share this realization of Mrs. Keith's. The last elections made Ramon Magsaysay president and effected a nationwide transfer of government power peacefully in a young republic in Southeast Asia. After the elections, it was common for any Filipino who was abroad to be asked to interpret their outcome. An answer like that of Mrs. Keith's always struck many Americans, Englishmen, Europeans and Orientals with surprise. It had not occurred to them to feel the way she does. Another interesting fact 11 before and during the elections was the unanimous Cassandralike predictions by foreign press representatives of explosive and shattering post-election trouble expected to defeat the people's will. Their pessimism permeated all commentaries about the soundness and the ability of the republic to stand the violent shocks of the bitterest political campaign in our history and of the election results. However, the Filipino common man held in store a noble surprise for all who underestimated him and his participation in constitutional democracy. The victory of a popular hero of the common people was reassuring and thrilling. Its real meaning and achievement, a lasting and transcendent one, reveals that the common Filipino has come of age in the ways of modern constitutional democracy learned from the West. This event in Filipino history is like a fragrant, golden harvest from a mango tree grown strong and fecund because of good fertilizer obtained from the chemistry of the West. For this harvest democracy has thus reaped in the Orient, America helped prepare the soil of experience in constitutional processes, a party system of government, the separation of powers, the separa12 tion of church and state, civil rights, social welfare, and negotiation by tlw holder of sovereign power with a non-violent movement for natural rights, including independence, or tqe liquidation of colonial sovereignty. <y HIS PREPARATION began at the beginning of this century and evolved a republic in thirty-five years. This is a longer period than the dictatorial intensive renovation of Turkey between 1922 and 1928. The kind of evolution which culminated in the triumphant expression of the people's will in 1953 in the Philippines, however, is perhaps more healthy and promising than the sequel to Westernization in Turkey, the 1950 election of which Toynbee handsomely says: The victory of the Western constitutional spirit in the Turkish election of 1950 is thus a landmark which may perhap!I even signify a tum of the political tide in the world as a whole. To account fully for the resurgence of democracy in the Philippines and its background of cultural encounter, the contribution of the Spanish period, which lasted more than three hundred years, should be remembered. Spanish conversion of the Filipinos to Christianity paved the way for the PANORAMA twofold American and Filipino peaceful democratic revolution of the last fifty years. It made the West through America less alien to the Filipinos than the West was to India. The bird's-eye view of the cultural divisions in the whole of mankind as presented by Toynbee combines Moslems and Christians under a common label of Graeco-J udiac. Consequently, Toynbee finds three great cultural families which may be distinguished from each other: (1) the GraecoJ udiac family of the Christian world, Islam, and Russia; (2) the Hindu society in India; and (3) the Confucian-Buddhist society in the Far East. The Philippines upon the arrival of the Americans may be said to have constituted an Oriental foothold of Graeco-Judiac culture because of the Christian majority, thanks to Spain, and the Moslem minority in its population. Jose Rizal is, of course, the highest example of a Filipino intellectual who was a product of Spain in the Philippines. Besides the influence of Spanish colonial ideology and practice, however, he was moulded with the help of such other influences as: liberalism in Spain; modern continental literature in Spanish, French, German, and Russian; English and American history and liJUNE 1956 terature; the new sciences of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology; and many years of travel to Europe (via the Suez Canal), England and Hongkong, as well as long residence in these lands, a visit in Japan, and a transcontinental trip in the United States. Pi y Margall, who became president briefly during the troublous years of Spanish republicanism in the eighteenseventies, was a constant chessplaying companion of Rizal in Madrid. By profession a physician, who had specialized in Paris as an oculist, and also an artist, writer, and scientific agriculturist by training and avocation, Rizal's general reading ranged from the Greek tragedians to Goethe and Schiller, Balzac and Zola, Turgeniev and Gogol. He knew the complete works of Voltaire, which he recommended to his fellowpropagandist Marcelo H. del Pilar. Among the unfortunately few preserved English books he owned are Shakespeare's Complete Plays, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Dickens' David Copperfield. One of the first books he bought in Barcelona on his first arrival there in 1882 was an expensive Spanish translation of a Lives of the Presidents of the United States, replaced after getting worn out 13 by a History of the Presidents, and a History of the English Revolu,t~on. During his student days in Madrid, one of the books he read was Harriet Beecher's Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Passing through Utah by train in 1888, Rizal the son of a farmer and a student of agriculture wrote in his dairy: "I believe with a good system of irrigation this place could be cultivated." During his exile in Dapitan, in Mindanao, just before his death, he built an irrigation system, using bamboo. He wrote several poems, the best of which, Mi Ultimo Adios, he smuggled out of prison where he had composed it the night before his execution .. H;i.s prose, exclusive of his voluminous letters, include valuable propaganda articles and his masterpieces, two social reform novels-Noli Me Tangere, published in Berlin, 1887, and El Filibusterismo, published in Ghent, 1891. America's father of realism, William Dean Howells said of the Noli that it was "the greatest book written in any language in fifty years." Howells further thought that its author was "born with a gift so far beyond that of any or all of the authors of our roaring literary successes." 14 J3 ANNED BY the Spanish to Filipinos, Rizal's novels were nevertheless read widely in open secret and inflamed their leaders' spirit of revolt. Both novels were found among the books of Andres Bonifacio, the great commoner who actually ordered the commencement of fighting and led the first battle with the famous cry of Balintawak on August 30, 1896. There is no more authoritative and wiser witness of the character of the Filipino struggle with Spanish imperialism than Rizal, who sacrified his own life for his people. He thought of that struggle as one. . . . between the Past, which stubbornly tries to cling to the tottering feudal castle with clutching hands and with curses on its lips, and the Future whose triumphant song is heard from afar in the splendor of a dawning day, bringing the good news from other countries. Of Spanish tyranny in the Philippines, he said: Spain cannot claim, not even in the name of God Himself, that six millions of people should be brutalized, exploited and oppressed, denied light and the rights inherent to a human being, and then heap upon them slights and insults. There is no claim of gratitude that can excuse, there is not enough power in the world to justify, the offenses against the liberty of the individual, against the sanctity of the home, against the laws, against peace and honor, offenses that are committed there daily. PANORAMA It was for the noble end of giving the Filipino a Christian civilization that Spanish imperialism employed this tyranny, which Rizal resisted in inspired word and great nonviolent action. As Father Bazaco writes, the church and state had "united towards a common ideal-the Christian civilization of the country." The end somehow materialized despite the means. President Taft, the first civil governor of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, admitted that the foundation for the future democracy of the Philippines was laid by Spain's success in making the Philippines a Christian nation. Said President Taft: I have had occasion, in discussing the problems of the Philippines and the problems presented to the United States . . . to show the gratitude which the people of the United States should feel toward the Catholic Church and toward all its institutions which have made those islands with their Malay people, Oriental people, apt to accept the benefits which the Government of the United States proposes to confer upon them; that of converting them into a self-governing people .... It is hard to say whether our Malayan Christian democratic culture will gather its borrowed strands more strongly into an organic and creative unity, developing a clearer integrity, continuing to be selfJUNE 1956 fulfilling, and assimilating the best external influences. There seems to be no question that in our . experience borrowed ideas and ways of life can become the spiritual lifeblood of our people for the sake of certain values. This has happened only when the great universal and basic truths of the common man's freedom, human rights, opportunity for progress, and vigilance against any form of tyranny are released as the hidden energy of those borrowed ideas in order to create a genuine and cherished better social order. The Christian faith planted in the hearts of the Filipinos by the church and the parochial school during the Spanish regime, and the democracy taught by the public school system and fostered by American-Filipino public administration during our peaceful revolution have certainly inhaled a genuine reality from the native soil and the daily life of the Filipino people. This reality breathes in the inspiring examples of our truly great leaders. It infuses the simple resounding assertions of the national will, revising widespread miscalculations and low expectations of the common man into a revivified and vigorous faith. This faith in the spiritual vi(See page 55) 15 What 1s race? AMERICAN NEGRO IN AFRICA By RAUL BARBERO NOT TO SOUTH AFRICA, whose Dutch-descended color-hate is as different from the restrained intolerance of Alabama and Mississippi "nullifying" Supreme Court rulings as Fascism is from street gang hooliganism-not to this heart of moral darkness but tu the Gold Coast, jutting chin of western Africa: it was here that Richard Wright, famous American author of Native Son and Black Boy during the proletarian 1930's, went to see what instinctive responses might be reborn in him in the villages and jungles of his ancestors. 16 It was 1954. Wright was quietly enjoying an Easter Sunday luncheon under gray Parisian walls, when a friend suddenly suggested that he visit the Gold Coast, 4000 miles away. Immediately he felt uneasy. Although he knew that perhaps his great-great-great grandfather had left Africa in the hold of a slave ship, he could not help thinking: But, am I African? He decided to find out. Morning in Takoradi, where Wright's ship finally docked, was tense with heat. Black men ran a forest of derricks PANORAMA and cranes with skilled hands. The crowds were clothed in rich colors and were barefoot, except for the police (who wore dark blue wool!). His strangest sensation, however, was to discover himself, for once in his life, not part of a minority. Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah had sent a personal friend to help Wright through customs and to guide him to Accra, the capital. He was left alone for awhile, however, when his guide had to do some shopping. Wright was embarrassed by the black salesmen's questions about what part of Africa his ancestors had come from; it pained him to remember that many Africans had sold their people into slavery. Finally, to their incessant questions, he said softly, "You know, you fellows who sold us and the white men who bought us didn't keep any records." Their smiles of half-mockery stopped. Wright's American directness startled even the Prime Minister who, however, typically was evasive about blunt political questions without being impolite. For private conversations he even used tribal language. But that he was popular Wright could see when Nkrumah's scarlet-clad motorcycle escort took them through throngs of people who cried "Free-doom! Free-doooom!" and "Akwaba! JUNE 1956 NO TIME FOR CHILDHOOD On many occasions in the Gold Coast, Richard Wright felt the absence of a period of "youth" among the Africans. At eight or ten, chi Id re n became adults: tending younger sisters, cooking, carrying water on their heads, trading in the market . .. Akwaba!" (''Welcome! Welcome!") I N THE SLUMS women, stripped to the waist, did a queer shuffling dance of joyous welcome, which words alone could not express - like the adquiescent motion of negro Holy Rollers in small American churches. But Richard Wright, who had never been able to dance more than a few elementary steps in his life was just as ,bewildered by this natural exhibition in Africa as he had always been, as a spectator in America: and again he wondered, What is my heritage? "They're an unspoiled, a spiritually virgin people," Nkrumah said. Who am I? Wright wondered. (Later, in the British magazine Encounter he was to write, "That there was some kind of 17 link between the native African and the American Negro was undoubtedly true. But what did it mean? A certain group of American anthropologists had long clamoured for a recognition of what they had quaintly chosen to call 'African survivals,' a phrase which they had coined to account for exactly what I had observed. And now, as I reflectc·J upon J :ist night's experience, even more items of similarity came to me: that laughter that bent the knee and turned the head-as if in embarrassment! - that queer shuffling of the feet when one was satisfied or in agreement; that inexplicable, almost sullen silence that came from disagreement or opposition . . . All of this was strange but familiar.") At a meeting of women voters, Wright saw pure gold everywhere: in ears, around necks, on arms and fingers. The premeeting ritual was half-Christian (psalm and prayer), halfpagan (corn-wine libation poured to dead ancestors). Bachelor Nkrumah, further fusing tribalism with modern politics, called all the women his brides. In turn, newly elected women officials swore a personal oath of allegiance to their Minister, rather than to invisible spirits or even a flag. The next morning Wright roamed the streets alone. He saw clerks and school children 18 momentarily place their bright pencils in their tight "nappy" hair. Some children carried ink bottles and schoolbooks on their heads, to keep their hands free; or left half an orange on their head while they ate the remainder. Not everything was gay, however: there were also sections of walled compounds, like mazes, where dirt and man were indistinguishable from each other. B UT WHAT frightened WrigM more was the African boy who wanted his help in studying, by correspondence, to be a detective. What criminals would be catch? he was asked. "The English, sar!" he answered, some trained distrust of British colonialism being his deepest emotion, despite the fact that without trade with Britain, and the replacement therefore of manufactured materials, all metal things on the Gold Coast would rust into inconsequence in a few years! Archaeologists have been able to find little of historical remains in the Gold Coast's "red and ravenous clay." Perhaps it was some such invisible climate of affairs which destroyed even the navel-cord of race and freed the individual from his past, Wright suspected. One night he heard drums behind a compound enclosure. He was informed that the wide circle of shuffling, barefooted PANORAMA men and women, with neither joy nor sadness on their absentminded faces, were dancing because a young girl had died. Why are they dancing? Wright 1 wondered over and over. Finally the women held hands above their heads, and the men filed with slow dignity, as in a parody of London Bridge Is Falling Down, through the handmade arches. There was tension in their very relaxation, under the circumstance of death. Why are they dancing? At last Wright could stay no longer. "I had understood nothing. I was black and they were black, but my blackness did not help me." * * * Fishing Eye J NITIAL TESTS recently concluded indicate that an electronic "eye" used by a British trawler in the Arctic fishing grounds may revolutionize fishing game, in some cases, double the catch. For three months, the Hull trawler BENVOLIO has been trying out the device, believed to be the first of its kind in the world, and Mr. G.W.H. Johnson, manager of the firom's fishing industry branch, says that the earlier experiments have proved most successful. He told a London Press Service correspondent: "To operate m;d-water trawls successfully, trawler skippers must know at what depth the shoals are. We believe that this electronic 'eye' answers the problem and is a distnict corrunercial possibility." The "eye" can be lowered to the exact depth of a fishshoal, gauge the depth of any intervening shoal of fish and the depth of the trawl. It can also show what fish, if any, are going into the trawl and what fish are being missed in a horizontal direction. Electronic messages are recorded in the wheel-house of the trawler and give a picture of what is happening under the ship. The device neither attracts nor repels fish. Until the final reports on the Benvolio's trip have been examined, the device will not be adopted generally, but it may be available commercially towards the end of this year. JUNE 1956 19 Origin of the peso MEXICAN PIECES Of EIGHT FOR MANILA By SIXTO D'ASIS I F THE PHILIPPINES had been taken for the West by a Hernando Cortez, a Pizarro or a de Soto, instead of by Legaspi, its history would have been different indeed. In the conquest cf the West Indies, all the Caribbean Indians died by the sword or in the mines. But according to Gilbert S. Perez of the Bureau of Public Schools, Miguel Lopez Legaspi was sent not as a conquistador but as pacificador, by that often misunderstood monarch Philip II, in an attempt to avoid the cruelty of Spain's previous experiences as a colonizer. For years Legaspi had practiced 1 a w in N ueva Espana (Mexico), dealing directly with people in a newfound land. With him was Fray Andres de 20 Urdaneta, acquaintance of another friar de las Cases who had tried, vainly, to protect the aboriginal Americans from racial annihilation. It was the influence of such men from the New World that made the conquest of the Philippines one of the least bloody of the times. Although the islands were part of the hemisphere of influence assigned to Portugal, Legazpi never questioned his sealed orders. For that fact, Mexico was able to help Manila become Asia's "great mart of trade," as Perez calls it, for three centuries even despite the envious opposition of merchants from Cadiz and Seville. After the restrictions of 1953, European linen and silk still could not compete with fabrics from China and India, carried via PANORAMA Manila to Acapulco on sometimes tri-annual galleon voyages. This galleon trade developed a need for an abundant supply of metallic money. Since the mines of Old Spain had long been drained, only in Mexico could the millions of dollarsized silver coins for the Orient trade be obtained. 0 RIENTAL cargoes of silk, spices, ivory and perfumt worth over Pl million went to Acapulco, in return for over P3 million of silyer. The galleons-unwieldy, half-moon shapes displacing 1-2,000 tons-were the monopoly of the Crown. Their crews were largely Filipino, though the commanding officers (salary: P40,000) were always friends or relatives of the Mexican Viceroy. The ships themselves were often constructed of molave, their riggings of abaca. A large shipyard was established at Palantiau in Sor~ogon, then part of Albay. The return of a galleon to Manila, loaded with silver pesos and with new arrivals from Mexico, was an occasion for widespread jubilation. Church bells rang their thanks to God that neither shipwreck nor corsairs had destroyed their prosl"E!rous year. The outward journey took some 200 days, but the return only 70, with the ship traveling light, silver-laden. JUNE 1956 At late as 1591, the archipelago's total population was so small (less than 670,000) and so poor that the Spanish government at first had to subsidize the Island governmentand even would have abandoned these possessions except for the pleadings of a Jesuit missionary. Later the subsidy came directly from Mexico. Manila was largely a distribution point - silver p a s s e d through it to China; very little stayed in the. capital port itself, except for the influential few. Gilbert Perez, however, records that galleons from Mexico brought also the first cacao (1670), coffee (the late 1700s), and seeds of Indian corn, tobacco, cassava, yams and other previously unknown vegetables. (In return, the Philippines showed Mexico how to make tuba; their example was so successful that the importation of Spanish brandy was threatened, and a protest was lodged!) This type of crop, rather than money, economy spread horizontally to the many, whereas silver enriched only the few. Even then, until the eighteenth century, the Philippines depended on China for much of its food. Spaniards were not even allowed to settle the country for agricultural reasons. When the landed, barter Spaniards was the first only 21 form of trade in the islands. There were no coins, although some tribes had gold dust and gold rings and knob-shaped gold lumps inscribed with Tagalog or Malay letters. There was almost no s i l v e r before the irregular-shaped Central American "cob" coins of Legazpi. (Only 2 00 years later were copper coins accepted, since the Filipinos like the Aztecs distrusted them.) Unfortunately, the first silver "cob" coins from Mexico were so easily cut and mutilated that scales were necessary to weigh each coin at every commercial transaction. A MINOR REVOLUTIONthe restoration of faith in hard currency so necessary to a trading nationoccurred with the Dos Mundos coins first milled in 1732, in Spanish America. Two worlds "flanked by the pillars of Hercules" were struck on the surface, and a new integrity was born, an international trust. These were the famous "pieces of ei_ght" (there being eight reals to one peso). So respected were these pieces of eight that they almost put English crowns out of circulation even among the American colonies and were standard payment for Indian scalps. But as payment for delicate Oriental brocades and silks, their use perhaps is more memorable. Sometimes the new coins were even referred to as "silk money,'' so indispensable did they become in marketing. Their edges were milled so that they could not be mutilated. The Chinese themselves rarely defaced the Dos Mundos by restamping them with countermarks, as they did with other coins. Mexican silver kept entering Manila long after the monopolistic galleon trade ended, in 1815. When the SpanishAmerican colonies declared their independence, the Philippine administrators feared the revolutionary legends on the newest coins imported; yet they needed the silver. So they obliterated the legends by countermarking, which however was gradually reduced until, in 1837, it was abandoned altogether, the news of SpanishAmerican independence long since having entered the archipelago. Not until 1897 was a peso coin struck in Madrid for use in the Philippines; until that time all coins were from the Americas - where a more congenial than usual type of colonialism had originated, under Legazpi, and much later democratic support for the building of a Philippine commonwealth. * * * 22 PANORAMA A 1Jiilipittn ~rnfessnr <D:earhes at an Ameriratt Q!nllege By G. FORES GANZON Associate Professor of History, Universit) of the PhilippineF> New horizons ~ HE BELOIT CoLLEGE faculty ~ was holding a two-day conference at Green Lake, a vacation spot about 90 miles from Beloit, when I arrived. This was a before-school-starts get-together of the faculty. Morning and evening sessions were devoted to academic discussions. Some of these concerned a program of implementing the educational aims of the college. Others had to do with solving student and teaching problems, Still others dealt with creating close teamwork between the college administration and the faculty. jUNE 1956 Perhaps, the problems taken up for discussion were no different from common academic problems discussed in faculty conventions at the University of the Philippines. But, they opened new horizons and offered slightly different approaches to familiar problems. There was a great deal of interest shown in the comments of the visiting professor. The faculty was interested in knowing how we, at the University of the Philippines, regarded and acted upon identical situations. Looking back now at the experience, I know 23 one deep satisfaction gained from it by everyone. The discussions made the faculty of Beloit fully and actively aware of what each and everyone was trying to accomplish in his teaching. True, the purposes of the college were clearly defined in the college catalogue. But one is apt to lose track of the obvious and to relegate the familiar behind the unconscious. In any case, the faculty had an opportunity to re-examine the familiar and the obvious and to become newly aware of the goals of the college. I know, from talks with faculty members later during the school term, that, while we struggled to cover "subjectmatter" in the courses we were teaching, we nevertheless, taught with an awareness of what the college was aiming at. Beloit College in Wisconsin is primarily a liberal arts college. In view of the country's problem of shortage of publicschool teachers, it has branched out to include a teachertraining program. The enrollment is kept at about a thousand students-the number that can be adequately taught under the present facilities of the college. All students, with few exceptions, live on campus and are housed in several dormitories. Students whose 24 parents are residents in the community are allowed to live at home. Every student dqrmitory has a faculty supervisor. The student faculty ratio is about one faculty member to every 10-15 students. Students are admitted on the basis of academic standards established by the college, one of which is a more-than-average score in college-entrance examinations. The faculty is carefully selected not only for their academic records in college, but also for their cultural background. Approximately 80 per cent of the faculty have had travel experience in. Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The C o 11 e g e emphasizes teaching ability as the prime requisite for appointments and promotions. Conscious of its role as a small liberal arts college, it concentrates its efforts on good teaching and openly avers that research is to be left largely to universities which have the funds and the facilities to handle this type of work. However, a few faculty members have done research on their own initiative and time. Some have published books, others have served in federal and state agencies as consultants, and still others have contributed academic papers in different specialties. It PANORAMA is the avowed aim of preserving and encouraging good teaching ability that makes the college's administ:rators grant sabbatical leaves to be spent in travel. The normal teaching load of the faculty is 12 hours a week, or 6 hours for those who handle administrative jobs. Under the visiting lectureship grant, I was given six hours a week of teaching. .A, COLLEGE professor m an American college is expected to do more than teaching. He is regarded as a specialist in his line. The community calls on him for that special knowledge he possesses. Is he a professor of literature? Then some women's club which is engaged in a cultural project of getting acquainted with the literary works of an author is likely to invite him to speak on the subject and perhaps, plan a program of activities for the group. Is he an art professor? Then, would he talk before a group who wish to know more about Frank Lloyd Wright's style? Or, perhaps, he is a political scientist. Then, how about giving a talk to the League of Women Voters on what the UN has accomplished in the last ten years? Is he a professor of religion? Then, could he explain the significance of the Dead Sea Scroll JUNE 1956 finds, or perhaps, conduct a study program on the Bible for a church group? During my stay at Beloit College, I came to know that being a professor in Beloit not only meap.t being a teacher at Beloit College, but also a "specialist" in my line for the whole community. Beloit College faculty members were constantly in demand for speaking engagements. In my case, I was regarded as the local authority on the subject of the Philippines, and unofficial spokesman for Southeast Asia. Women's groups, civic clubs, church groups invited me to talk on various topics having to do with the culture and history of our area. These groups were interested in our educational system, President Magsaysay's administration, our Spanish cultural heritage, American influences in our institutions, current problems of the nation, etc. In just one semester, to my surprise and . enjoyment, I was called on for twenty-six community talks, and a tenlecture program on Southeast Asian cultural history to a group of community adults, besides the six-hour a week teaching schedule I had at the college. The pattern for most of the talks included a 15-or 20-minute lecture to set off the key 25 ideas, followed by an hour of open discussion which usually turned out to be highly stimulating to lecturer and participants alike. This exchange of ideas and opinions between two peoples with different backgrounds created m u c h good-will and understanding. 1:T' HE "STUDY" -for this is the ~ aim of such programs c o n d u c t e d by community clubs, is held under very inform.al circumstances. Community signing very often was a feature of the program, or perhaps, there would be a minute of silent prayer before the session opened. Light refreshments, or sometimes a dinner meal are generally provided. The guest speaker, oftentimes, is presented with a remunerative envelope, a corsage, or perhaps, a small gift in token of the members' appreciation. (I thought it might be simpler to file Income Tax Forms in the Philippines without the generous tokens of the American public.) Most satisfying of all to the guest speaker, however, is the charming courtesy of members in remembering what one talked about long after the event had taken place. Often, Beloit citizens would meet me in grocery stores, or places downtown and stop to thank me again for "your talk . the other 26 day" and repeat how much they "had enjoyed it". I found that students every where seems to have an unwritten code peculiar to their group alone. A few of them seemed to live by this "universal" ~ode of being one or two days behind in submitting required work. The excuses offered also had a familiar ring. "I wasn't feeling well the last couple of days," (This is apparently to be considered a ligitimate excuse-in spite of the fact that the assignment was to have been done long before the "couple of days".), or "My paper is all done, but I couldn't find a typist who could do it for me last night", or "The reference books were 'out' and I couldn't get hold of materials", or, "If you'll give me a couple of days" grace, I believe I can submit a better term paper!" The students' universal code also was in evidence with respect to examination is "hard" or "easy" depending upon what grade he gets! It is also regarded as a "cruel thing" to schedule tests before and after a big game or, a school social-this, in spite of the college calendar clearly indicating when the periodic test week is to occur. One who has worked with college students will find striking similarities among them-irrespective of PANORAMA school environment. The students I had were far above the average run, however, in mental ability. They were alert, highly interested, imbued with a desire to "know" rather than to pile up credits. They were also lovable youngsters. They are more likely to talk to you and treat you as a "pal" than would our reserved Filipino students. Coming from a brief vacation outside Beloit, I found some students riding the same bus with me. They were as eager to exchange tidings of how I spent my vacatioJ?. as they were to know of current politics in the Philippines. In tht~ classroom, they are prone to challenge the lecturer's interpretation, argue a point in and outside of classrooms, and occasionally, come out with some startling, yet thought - provoking i d e a s. Teaching is often also learning. I can say, truthfully, that my teaching experience at Beloit has taught me, too. QI: ow ARDS THE END of the semester, the students are asked to grade their instructors on various items, such as, techniques used, nature of examinations, speech, etc. The students' ratings are regarded * JUNE 1956 as a guide to self-improvement for the instructor. Administrators have nothing to do with these forms. This is strictly student-facuity procedure. The students put in their entries anonymously, and the faculty members have some basis for re-study of their teaching technique and shortcomings, if any, as observed and reported by their students. The school administrator is completely outside the picture in this evaluation, and other than as a guide to self-improvement by the instructor, no other use is made of results. The only disturbing thing in my stay at Beloit was the daily struggle with Mr. Winter. The temperature in the area went down to several degrees below zero - too cold for a thin-blooded oriental. It was with an eye to a warmer place that my choice of area for the second semester's work was made in favor of the Southwest. Here, at Las Vegas, New Mexico, I look forward to another interesting semester, and more of the same kinds of friendly interchange of ideas and experiences that have made my stay so far in the United States so rewarding and pleasant for me. * * 27 The story of Florence Nightingale By CELSO ROQUE 7 HE HARDSHIPS she endured in the Crimean Viar, though they made her famous, were to Florence Nightingale herself only a beginning. She had insisted on being a nurse, despite her eminent family and despite an offer of marriage; despite, particularly, the dead and the dying that she found on the Bosphorus, in 1854, just ten days after the great defeat of the imperial British forces at Balaklava, by the Russians: amputees, men with fever and frostbite, men stricken with dysentery and cholera, in four miles of beds without ventilation. Almost singlehandedly she had forced the VI ar Ministry to send drugs, clothes, soap, towels, forks . . . Vlhere government funds were slow to 28 come, she herself paid for their laundry; and once was able to say, "I am now clothing the British Army." Mortality fell from 42'/o to .2% among the wounded, or the diseased. To do all this she could hardly remain a "sweet Lady of the Lamp"; her biographer, Lytton Strachey, was sure that a demon possessed her. Therefore, when she returned to England four months after the peace, Florence Nightingale was hardly ready to retire to the family sewing circle. Although she herself was halfdead from exhaustion, she could not forget her first sight of a military hospital. She discovered that even in England, in peace time, the mortality in the barracks nearly doubled that in civil life. "You might as well take 1100 men every year out PANORAMA upon Salisbury Plain and shoot them," she cried. She worried Queen Victoria and Lord Panmure ("The Biosn," so-called) of the War Office because she refused . to be stopped by red tape. Fortunately she had a friend in Cabinet minister Sidney Herbert, as charitable and benevolent as "The Bison" was stubbornly conservative. Between Sidney and Miss Nightingale developed an unusual intimacy, a mutual respect, with no hint or rumor of passion despite their daily visits to one another. His wife remained one of Miss Nightingale's warmest admirers. '?J ECAUSE OF HER condition of bodily collapse, she found it necessary, desP..ite her initiative and spirit of command, to rely on a few strong friends. These she drove as she drove herself, to the ends of their endurance: her aunt Mai; Sir Harry Verney, a brotherin-law; Arthur Clough, the poet. Clough, having lost his religious faith at the time of the nineteenth century Bible criticisms, regained his spirits only under the influence of this woman and he r tremendous v1s1on. These friends she called her Cabinet. "The Bison" retreated. The Queen appointed a Royal Commission to look into the health of the Army. In a hand-to-hand encounter betJUNE 1956 ween Lord Panmure and Miss Nightingale, the latter was victorious: Sidney Herbert was m a d e committee chairman. Moreover, she had learned that whenever she threatened to publish her Crimean diary, in an appeal to public opinion, Lord Panmure would inevitably surrender to her will and whim. Thus her report on the Army - 800 closely printed pages - was never made public, but did at least form the basis for the Royal Commission's actions. Because no woman was allowed to hold public office (despite Victoria's running an empire on which the sun never set), Miss Nightingale had to coach Sidney in private at every point. Still exhausted, she was driven constantly by the belief that none of her fellow-workers cared what happened. Clough was lazy; Sutherland (a sanitary engineer who literally surrendered 30 years of his life to her s er v i c e ) was muddlebrained; Sidney himself was too gentle for her liking. Singlehanded again, she made "The Bison" agree to her demands - only to have him fly off to Scotland and repudiate the agreement, and claim that gout in his hands prevented him from writing more! It took the House of Commons to vote Lord Panmure out of office and to make Sidney Secretary of State for War. Barracks and hospitals were re29 modelled, supplied with sufficient warmth, light and air. An Army Medical School was established. By 1861, the Army's death rate had been halved, from that of Crimean days. Coffee-rooms, reading-rooms, gyms and workshops were built, acknowledging the fact that soldiers were human. 1lt ISS NIGHTINGALE'S Notes on Hospitals ( 1859) revolutionized the army in India; in 1860, she opened her own n u rs e s training school. But there was still the War Office to change. Sidney was in power only as long as his party could dominate the others. The strain began to show on Sidney Herbert. He had fainting fits; sometimes he kept conscious only by downing gulps of brandy. Despite Florence Nightingale's urging, his hope flagged. When he went to see her to admit his failure in making permanent undersecretary Sir Benjamin Hawes change Army ways, Miss Nightingale turned on her old friend. "Beaten!" she exclaimed. "Can't you see that you've simply thrown away the game?" In a few weeks, Sidney Herbert was dead, his last words "Poor Florence! Poor Florence!" Penitent, she referred to him always thereafter as her "Master." But Clough soon died also, of overwork; and Aunt ¥ai 30 went home to her family. Florence had no choice but to give up hope of reforming the War Office. A LTHOUGH HER hospital work continued, she herself, now an invalid, settled down in a small house for the rest of her 91 years. Yet she stayed busy. Statesmen and generals begged for audiences. At the same time that she conversed with them, she tried to convert the upper_ ranks of society to change the position of women, who still were treated like furniture. Her last days were spent in seeking consolation through the religious writings of mystics - although her biographer wrote of her own works " . . . one has the impression that Miss Nighti·ngale has got the Almighty too in her clutches, and that, if He is not careful, she will kill Him with overwork." Only at the end did she soften, with senility: from a thin, angular, haughty, acrid woman, Florence Nightingale became round and smiling. She slipped gradually into a rosy, formless unconsciousness; but she has never been forgotten: woman healer who had time for every human detail and profited only by the knowledge of health brought to others. PANORAMA The world population reached a maximum of 2,652 million by the middle of 1954, with the population of all the major regions increasing faster than ever before, according to the United Nations Demographic Yearbook 1955, published recently. Of the 2,652 million persons living in mid-1954, 1,451 million or about 55 per cent were in Asia (excluding the U.S.S.R. ), 404 million in Europe, 357 million in the Americas, 214 million in the U.S.S.R., 210 million in Africa, and 14.4 million in Oceania. The most populated countries in the world were the Chinese mainland with 583 million; India, 377 million; U.S.S.R., 214 million; the United States, 162 million; Japan, 88 million; Indonesia, 81 million; and Pakistan, 80 million. During the period 1950-1954, the population of Asia increased by 21 million per year; Latin America by 4 million; North America, Africa, Europe and the U.S.S.R. by 3 million each; and Oceania by 325,000. The regions with the fastest population growth during 195054 were Oceania (2.6 per cent per annum) and Latin America (2.4 per cent). The continent with the slowest population growth was Europe. North America grew at the rate of 1.o per cent and the U.S.S.R. by 1.5 per cent. JUNE 1956 1lte Wo1tld Population tis 1ast ixpandin9 Now 2,652 million The tendency toward a .decreasing rate of population growth in Europe and North America during 1920-1940 was definitely reversed after 1945. The slowing down of the population growth suffered during the war-stricken period of 19401950 affected mainly Asia, Europe, and the U.S.S.R.; growth in Latin America, Oceania, and Africa gained momentum during these years. The conclusion to be drawn from the study of world population figures is that the rate of population growth has definitely increased during the last five years. Such acceleration is related primarily to changes in the levels of fertility and mortality, since migrattion among the large regions of the world is at present playing a minor role in comparison with the natural increase. 31 Among the countries with fastest population growth in recent years ae Venezuela ( 3 per cent), Panama (2.9 per cent), Ceylon (2.8 per cent) and Mexico (2.7 per cent. The countries with the slowest population growth are Ireland (.04 per cent), Spain and Pakistan, (U.8 per cent), and Poland (0.9 per cent). The United Nations Demographic Yearbook dealing with population characteristics observes that typical rural countries are Thailand, Pakistan, Haiti, Ceylon, Yugoslavia, India and Korea, where less than one-fifth of the population lives in cities and towns. At the other extreme, Iceland, England and Wales, and Scotland are the countries with the largest proportion living in urban communities each having more than 70 per cent in cities. If "metropolitan areas" are compared, the five largest cities in the world according to the Yearbook are New York (12,300,000), London (8,300,-· 000), Tokyo (6,300,000), Shanghai (6,200,000), and Paris ( 4,800,000). No recent information is available on Soviet cities. There are more women than men in American and European cities while in the Arab countries ' and Asia the opposite seems to be true. For example, in India and Ceylon, respectively, there are 32 127 and 173 men respectively, to 100 -women in the cities of 100,000 or more. In Denmark, Sweden, and England and Wales, there are about 89 men per 100 women and in the Americas, the ratio varies between 73 in Haiti and 97 in Argentina. The mean length of life, as measured by the average number of years that a group of new-born babies would live if subject to the mortality conditions of the area during a certain period, has varied in recent years between 32.5 years for males and 31. 7 females in India in 1941-50 and 70.6 and 72.8 ye·ars for males and females, respectively, in the Netherlands in 1950-52. According to the life-table figures contained in the Demographic Yearbook, in all coun:tries except Ceylon and India and among the Asian population of the Union of South Africa, women live between twci and seven years longer than men. The highest number of marriages per 1,000 population was registered in Europe (except Ireland) the United States, Canada, among the European populations of the Union of South Africa and South West Africa, and in Taiwan, Ireland and the Latin American countries registered the lowest rates. PANORAMA Fierce tribes tend the woods BURMA'S TEAKWOOD By FENIX MADURA 0 F BURMA'S over 167 million ncres, in general area, 58 '/c is covered with forests, while only 13% is cultivated or used for grassland. In the lower reaches of its western coastal mountains, valuable teak prospers, while the higher slopes are crowned with oak and pine. Whole evergreen forests shimmer in the cold wind of the Shan Plateau. And even the central Burma Basin, one of the world's foremost rice-exporting regions, has monsoon forests of teak, the measure of national prosperity. JUNE 1956 Although vast expanses still are unexplored, the care devoted to this natural resource, in preparation for building a great Asian lumber industry, is reminiscent of Filipino dedication to its own timberland. In Burma, all forests belong to the State; but only one varietyteak, a very hard word-is valuable, and it forms less than 12 7o of the total wooded areas. Even the other varieties, however, according to Tiburcio Serevo writing in Forestry Leaves, still can exert some influence on climate and water control, or are usable at least as fuel. 33 Ordinarily, teak is found in moist bamboo forests, like those of Arakan in the west. Rainfall varies here from 40120 inches annually. The trees shed their leaves during the hot season, February to May, and put on new leaves at the beginning of the rains. Until the British assumed administration of these forests in 1826, they were wasted in the clearing of lands for cultivation. Before the British, the Burmese dynasties slowed down some of this destruction, by declaring teak a "royal" tree, to be disposed of only at the king's order. But even then teak was cut indiscriminately, as it had been as early as the eighth century according to Arabian records, for the shipbuilders on the Irrawaddy delta. E VEN AFTER the arrival of the British, timber was exploited through the abandonment of forests to licensed concessionaires. Only after the Moulmien forests were severely damaged, did the governor-general (in 1855) lay down principles for conservation, under direct government control. Sir Dietrich Brandis, father of Indian forestry, established methods of care which have endured until today, except during the war years, 1942-46. Now, 21 million out of 100 million acres of forestlands are 34 government reserves. Of the total forested areas, 30 million acres are, at present, inaccessible; 14 million, unexplored. Because teak takes 150 years to mature, a minimum felling cycle (rate of cutting) of 30 years has been adopted; and no tree less than 7112 ft. in circumference may be cut. Regrowth invariably occurs, by natural process, wherever bamboo grows in clusters. The rnain human effort is that of weeding and thinning, and protecting teak stands from fire. Wherever taungya (clearings) have been deserted, as the cultivators shift to a new locality, young trees spring up rapidly. For example, the Karens, a fierce mountain tribe traditionally the enemies of the plainsmen, o n c e de·cimated almost 200 square miles of forest with their cultivation. In 1858, the Karens in the Attaran forests offered to replant teak if it could be considered their personal property. In 1868, those in Thoonzai and Beeling followE:'d this new custom of making tree plantations around their villages. To each acre of ex-taungya, 1210 teak plantings were made. The tribes kept their promise of clearing the seedlings of weeds for three years, after which rapid growth became automatic. During early care, bamboos have to be classified as weeds, because they tend to PANORAMA over-top slower-growing teak. In five years, bamboo attains a height of 40-60 feet, while teak reaches only from 15-25 feet. Extended cutting of weeds, therefore, is necessary. In many cases now, the taungya cutters, living i...1 relatively small clearings, are official tenders of forest reserves. Karen· families of 330 cutters can man 1000 acres of reserve a year, in eastern Burma. B Y CONTRAST, because teak is not native in Arakan (the western mountainland), hill tribes like the Kamis and Chins have been consistently and deeply prejuiced against the formation of forest plantations. Partly they have feared infringement of their taungya clearings; partly they have disliked serving forest officials, even at better than average pay. Sometimes Arakan women have cut down teak seedlings along with the weeds; sometimes Arakan men have refused to settle in teak forests because their occult rites (or even ominous dreams of tigers or dead men) dictated that it would be unlucky to do so. Nevertheless, the taungya cutter throughout 'Burma has to be depended upon as the chief means of regenerating forests. No other laborers· can be afforded, other than these situated already in the locality, who cut, burn, clean and tend, when they are cooperative, and give Burma a major source of income. The taungya worker usually plants new trees with his food crop, so that when he moves on, useful timber has stocked the area. Thus, shifting-cultivation is permitted on forest reserves, within limits and in return for services. At the same time, permanent cultivation (and therefore permanent tending of teakwood) is encouraged, through the establishment of forest villages. Burmese culture is adapting itself to a sturdy resource, which will preserve them as it is conserved. * :!< * Benjamin Franklin, having been touched by an impecunious relative to the extent of $50, was asked for a sheet of paper so that the borrower could give him a note for the amount. "What!" exclaimed Farnklin, "do you want to waste my stationery as weII as my money?" JUNE 1956 35 Most of the twenty words given below should be in your reading vocabulary. That is, you should be able to recognize them, although you may not be able to define or actually use them in writing. Select the proper defiRition for each, then turn to page 80 ior the correct answers. Fifteen is passing. 36 1. genuflect-(a) genuine; (b) to beckon with finger; (c) to bend the knee in worship; (d) safety reflector. 2. Jugubrious-(a) car oil; (bt ·mournful; (c) ridiculous; (d) canned preserves. 3. slavish-(aY servile; (b) pertaining to East Europe; (c) Greek Orthodox; (b) copyright. 4. heroine-(a) efpe of narcotic; (b) main female character; (c) below the belt; (d) long-legged crane. 5. embargo--(a) the unborn child; (b) loading barge; (c~mmercia) prohibition; (d) stevedore. / 6. virtuoso-(a) prima donna; (b) practically; (c) violinist; (d) musician with great technical skill. 7. centriluge-(a) refugee; (bVa rotating separator; (c) sanctuary; (d) central market. 8. cus~(a) many cups; ~urved hollow; (c) to curse; (d) aluminumware. 9. analogy-(a) thre¥ooted animal; (b) petition for forgiveness; (c) Freudian; (d,.,. comparison. 10. environment-(a) hard rock; (b) wire fence; (c) envy; (d'f surroundings. / 11. administer-(a)/fo manage; (b) episcopal clergyman; (c) ad-sales. man; (d) tower. /" 12. blatant-(a)_)rladder; (b) French horn; (c) schooner; (d'j noisy. 13. bayou-(aY swampland; (b) the howl of dogs; (c) interrogative pronoun; (d) gun. ~· 14. ornate-(a) commander; (b) excessively adorned; (c) round run; ( d) horned owl. 15. pigment-(a) suckling; (b) pen for pigs; (c) arc of circle; (d) coloring-mjliter. 16. viper-(a)/venomous snake; (b) winshield device; (c) greenish; (d) to hug. 17. grandeur-(a) largesse; (b) Italian balcony; (c) marquis; (d) magnifie<nCe./ 18. Jen-(a) o:t)tical glass; (b) usurer; ~c) e eyelid; (d) flashlight. 19. fatuous--(a) plump; (b) wealthy; foolish; (d) blubber. 20. pogrom--(a) buttered popcorn; (b massacre; (c) printed outline; (d) ·money. PANORAMA CITY ON PENANG s UNLIGHT GLISTENING on the sparkling blue waters of the Straits of Malacca welcomes the visitor to the Island of Penang. The modern white buildings of the city of George Town, the metropolitan part of Penang, ·stretch back from the waterfront to Penang Hill rising in the distance to a height of 2,428 feet. Penang was founded in 1786 and is the oldest British settlement of the Malay Peninsula. The island was almost uninhabited when ceded to the East India Company by the Sultan of Kedah in 1785. In 1805, JUNE 1956 Penang was made a separate presidency of the East India Company. The British colonies of Singapore and Malacca were incoporated with Penang in 1826 as the Straits Settlements. Penang was the seat of the gov· ernment until 1837 when the capital was moved to Singapore. Penang, and later Singapore because of more adequate harbor facilities, were founded to meet expanding trade needs. These ports have remained fr~e ports where men of all nationalities on errands of peace could come freely and peacefully to 37 trade. As Malaya's tin and rubber industries have grown, these ports have also grown in their importance to world trade. Located five degrees north of the equator, Penang is known for its scenic beauty. The island's famed hill railway, an engineering feat, provides easy access to the summit of Penang Hill and a panoramic view of the island's beautiful beaches and luxuriant tropical vegetation. A world-famous site and landmark of Penang is the Kek Lok Si Monastery which towers above all other temples on the hillside of Ayer Itam. Rising tier by tier with the pagoda located on the top, seventh tier, Kek Lok Si spreads over 30 acres. Wark on the building was begun in 1876 when the Head Priest from the Kusan Monastery in Fukien Province in China, selected the location for a retreat where Buddhist priests could live and pray. Built along the style of a Tibetian monastery, the Kek Lok Si Monastery was the site in 1948 of a historic occasion in the annals of Buddhism in Malaya - the mass initiation of 350 Buddhist devotee:;. The Island. of Penang, 15 miles long and 10 miles wide, is located two miles off the western coast of the Malay Peninsula. It has extensive rice, rubber, coconut and fruit plantations and fisheries located at 38 Tanjong 'l'okong and Telok Kumbar. The area around the city reservoir, located high in the mountains, is a favorite holiday relaxation spot. New buildings give a modern, µp-to-date appearance to the city whose multi-racial population live and work together in harmony. The modern history of Malaya dates from the founding of Penang and the economic development of the Federation is reflected in the growth of the island and the city. Penang, in addition to being an idyllic spot whose pictl~resqueness intrigues the visitor, is a shipping center vital to the economic development of Malaya.-Free World. PANORAMA THE WILL OF A RIVER JUNE 1956 By ALFREDO Q. GONZALEZ B Y THE ANCESTRAL home of my wife there flows a river. For a dozen summers I have visited it, and almost every year I make an effort to trace its course back to its home in the neighboring hills, for I .do not regard my vacation there complete without doing that. In common with other streams of its kind, our river suffers much from the summer heat. I have seen it so shrunken that fishes lay lifeless on the parched sand and gravel of its bed; but this past summer I noticed something which I never saw before. Had I been sufficiently observant in other abnormally dry years, I am sure I could not have failed to notice the same thing before. 39 One morning last April, in company with a student friend and my elder son, I started out for the hills to spend the day there by the rapids and cascades at a place called Intongaban. We followed the course of the river. After we have covered a kilometer or more, I observed that the river had disappeared, and only the dry bed was to be seen. I looked around in wonder because past our little country house and out to the sea half a mile or so away, the· river was flowing clear and steady in its usual summer volume and depth. But whi:_re we stood that moment, there was no water anywhere to be seen. All about us the wide river bed was hot and dry. On toward the hills we pursued our way, and not until we had covered another kilometer did we see the stream again, at the point where it had spread itself so thin that it was lost at the edge of the waterless stretch of burning sand and stones. But as we continued our way into the hills, we found the river deeper and stronger than as it passed by our cottage. To many people, I suppose, there is nothing strange or significant in this. Perhaps they have seen such phenomenon more than once before. To me, however it was a new experience and it impressed me with the strangeness of all new experiences. But it was not mere40 ly strange to me. To me, it was highly suggestive of spiritual truths that can both inspire and impart lessons of considerable value. One of the thoughts that immediately came to my mind was the lesson of determination. Flowing down from its cradle in the mountains, just as it was leaving the foothills behind, it was checked by the long, forbidding st r e· t c h of scorching sand. I had read of other streams that upon encountering similar obstacles irretrievably lost themselves in sand or mud. But Bakongfor its way, so to speak, under its sandy bed, choosing, of course, the harder and lower stratum beneath until, at last, at the end of the long obstacle, it appeared again limpid and steady on its march to the sea. And then I thought of human life. I was reminded of many li life that stopped short of its great end just because it lacked the power of will to push through inhospitable hindrances. But I thought most of all of those who, like our river, met with well-nigh insurmountable obstacles but, undismayed, continued their march, buried in obscurity but resolutely pushing their way to the sea, to the sea of their life's great goal. I thought of men like Galileo who continued his work long after his sight had failed, of Beethoven who composed his PANORAMA noblest and sublimest symphonies when already unable to hear a note; of Stevenson who produced some of his greatest works after he was doomed to die of consumption; and of Cecil Rhodes "who was sent to Afriea to die of an incurable disease, but before he obeyed the summons, carved out an Empire in the Dark Continent." Those resolute and sublime lives all remind us of what our river has taught us - that if we cannot overcome obstacles, we can undercotne them. A NOTHER thought I gleaned from Bakong lay in the fact that the river was not merely determined to flow just anywhere but to reach the sea, to reach a great end. Many streams managed to surmount barriers somewhere on their way, but they come out of obstacles after laborious efforts only to end in a foul and stagnant marsh or lake. How like so many human lives! How like so many persons who in the springtime of their youth and in the summer of their early manhood showed splendid heroism against frowning odds, determined to overcome those hostile barriers, only in the autumn of their life to end in defeat, disgrace, and remorse. On the other hand, think of other lives that, like our river, kept true to the very end of their course. I believe it was on our way JUNE 1956 back from the hills that the lesson of faithfulness to duty was forcefully suggested to me. The truth occurred to me that nature often fulfills her duty more faithfully than man does his own. And what is the duty of a river? It is to furnish safe and running water for plant and fish and fowl and for man and beast. Surely, it is not just to flow on and enjoy itself, but to play its part in the processes of nature; to live, in other words, for the rest of creation. And so it should be with the lifo of man. It is not to be lived unto itself alone for its own joy and satisfaction, but for others in glad and devoted ministry. How much life and beauty and goodness, indeed, would perish from the universe if man and nature should fail in their duty! If our river had not kept faithfully to its duty, instead of a landscape picturesque with the varied green of the foliage of shrubs and trees and gay with the voices of the birds that were merrily singing and calling to one another in their branches that April morning, there might have spread before us a wide expanse of desolate and lifeless land, fit for the wanderings of Cain. And part of the ministering duty of a river is to flow on and on; otherwise, it will be foul and unfit for use. There is danger in standing water. But "there is magic in running water; no evil can cross 41 it." Bakong, by continuing its march to the sea, kept itself ready and fit for the service of nature and man and not only that, but it extended its field of usefulness. Does this not suggest that the river of man's life should do likewise? For if in the face of obstacles it lacks the strength of will to go on keeping itself ready to serve and seeking new opportunities for service, it will ultimately become useless to others. As I marvelled at the power of Bakong to push its way through a seemingly impassable barrier, I believe I have discerned the secret - a secret that may well serve as a message for any man. For Bakong was able to carry on, to continue its watery pilgrimage and reach the immensity and sublimity of the sea only because its source is the vast and lofty mountains. Unless a stream draws its power from a source of sufficient height and magni* tude, it cannot do as our river did this summer. It will not have the strength to cut its way through great obstacles and reach the sea at last. Here is one of the marvelous se11rets of life, and how many have missed it! Verily, if a man derives his strength and inspiration from a low and feeble . source, he will fail to "arrive." Unless a man draws his power from some source of heavenly altitude and cosmic proportions, unless the stn:am of his life issues from a never-failing source, unless, in other words, his soul is fed from heights of infinite power, he may well fear that he will not reach the sea. But if his spirit is impelled and nourished by an inexhaustible power from on high, in spite of all obstructions, he will finish his course, if not in the glory of dazzling achievement, at least in the nobility of completed task faithfully done. * * THE FIRST WISE MAN 42 During the 1930's, Barney Ross held both lightweight and welterweight titles. When he lost to Henry Armstrong, he was advised to increase his weight and enter a new category- the middleweight division. "Not that," said Ross, who knew apout the jinx. Instead he hung up his gloves and never fought again, except as a soldier in the Pacific war. * PANORAMA Panorama Peek Photo b11 DERRICK K N IGHT, Shell Photographic Unit, London LECHON, (roast pig) is a must in Filipino fiestas. I SAW THE SMUDGE of brown through the birches and thought it was a buck. But as soon as I had fired I knew that it was a man, and when he screamed falling into the snow I threw the gun down and ran fien..:ely to the place in the balsam clearing where he lay. His body was rigid and blood poured from his back, reddening the pure snow. His cap had fallen off, he was on his face, and his face was partly immersed in a pool of iodine-black swamp water. He looked young and his hair 44 was sandy-brown; his ne_£k was thick and the base of his skull rounded abruptly to it; his shoulders were broad; he was about six feet tall. He was wearing rubber boots with brown leather tops and pale gum rubber shoes. His left arm was extended over the snow. I could not place him; he was not a member of my congregation. But I had seen him somewhere. Was it at hockey? Wa'<! he on the high school team? I thought I knew most of the high schoolers. Maybe I had never seen him; maybe he was PANORAMA a man come up from southern Wisconsin for the hunting. I reached down to turn him over, to see if he might still be alive. As my hands gripped his shoulders, I looked up and the trees seemed to sway out from the spot and soar away; they shook in the wind and drifts of fresh snow fell from them. I reached below his neck and worked my hand under his jacket: my hand back, stood up and smoothed the snow over the place where I had stood, and began to edge away. I leaned against a fallen fir tree and looked back again. A flight of chickadoes swooped down, settled beside him for a minuute, and then flew away. I retrieved t h e gun and t r a m p e d back through the woods and swamp to the car. The tracks I had made going in were easy to follow, and shards of ice clung glistening to the edges of the broken snow. It was getting dark fast. The squat evergreens flaring out like ruffled wings were fading into shadow. My boots cut the edges of the tracks and the snow scraped and whistled and broke. I loosened the top button of my mackinaw jacket: I could b re at he more easily. The rhythm of my walk was even. I tried to consider the shooting: How curious that I, Walter Barker, a wretched man (product of a loveless beginning - my father, who had studied for JUNE 1956 the ministry and failed because of drink; my charmless, fearful mother), I wbo have always yearned for people and yet have never enjoyed a single adequate physical or mental contact with any living human including my wife, must here on this third day before Thanksgiving 1954 be snared against my foresight in the most interlocked and gripping of human jointures - death. Death I have always taken to be a stark but sensuous matter - as Donne, Taylor, and Melville knew it. But for me, in spite of the funerals and searing illnesses I have· seen, death has been as sterile as a thorn tree· i1. snow. And I am passionate - about language. I love our fluent literary masters of the word. I absorb language; I become it. I make impassioned statements on Sundays in the pulpit. Like Melville's Father Mapply my praise and exhortation are individual, personal, separate from the congregation. Through my voice I shake men; but in my single heart there is a fence secret from the ice-bright instruments of love, of therapy and childhood: on one side runs a rampant waste of desert; on the other the heart was still. Deep in the swamp a bluejay cried. I pulled a dwarfed plot of green and growing things. I have not desirE-d that that desert should occupy five-sixths of life; yet 45 it has been so. I sought in the church, with its multitude of human situations ready made, to mould, to form, to absorb, however vainly it may appear, the vital breath and substance· of man. And now death with its swamp-shot. Death has caught me up, pulling me out of myself, forcing me to enter the human dilemma in a final tangled form. A human life! God alone in his lacy fingers could hold an essence so brittle. But man. How unceremoniously he cracks it. I was not expecting to; was it therefore my fault? J WALKED urgently in the crisp snow, hoping in part to e·scape but at the same time eager to reach what would be for me, I knew, a final test: for I alone was the living active partner of this entanglement. In the parking a r e a the ground was rutted with car tracks. I put my gun in its case and laid it on the back seat. I stood and looked out over the clearing. The sky above the trees was red with haze; the moon shone brittle and round with the unreality of a light in day time. An owl hooted in the woods and the swamp alders groaned. I looked back at my tracks; out of the trees they came. The trees were blue against the sky. I could see the top of the tall bare firs two miles away marking where 46 the body lay. I dragged my foot against the lip of a frozen rut. I seemed disjointed, remote. My car was blue. It was a Ford. It had a spotlight. It had red plaid seatcovers. The dash was dusty and the right half of the windshield was scratched where the wiper had ridden hard across it. All this was true. True, too, was that pattern of non-identification, of separation from the grief and joy of others, which had so characterized my life. Then as I stood gazing out at the settled areas of blue-fire snow, I was a student walking in the country. I had passed the Divinity School farm buildings and the road was bordered by hazlenut brush and birches. Thirty yards up the road I saw a man cowering behind a tree, uttering garbled and indistinct shouts. I hurried. Around the bend I saw four boys flinging stones. I stopped to observe; f neither gestured nor spoke. Several stones hit the tree. Two hit the man's shoulders. The man was waving his arms. He was hatless and had a white beard. He now shouted at me, his sounds bitter and shapeless. The boys looked in my direction and jumped out of the road and disappeared into the brush. The old man stopped by the ditch to retrieve his hat, and walked by me, his right foot dragging in the gravel of the road. I PANORAMA Ruthie had shown and how that promise was now God's and that in death there was a victory. At the cemetery I crumbled a handful of earth over the glittering casket top, and the loam on the right was yellow """"";;;;;;;::::::;:~_:-~::;::Cil and on the left it was black. I closed my eyes and sealed the child to God. I could not ~c.....-_.,.. get the picture of a sandwich looked down in my hands; at some time I had picked up a stone. Later, Hawk River was my first church and Ruth Zdanowicz's funeral was my first funeral. Mrs. Zdanowicz sat in my study telling me that her daughter had been struck down in the dark street by a car and that before Mrs. Zdanowicz could get to her two other cars passed over her body. I spoke consoling words and brought Mrs. Zdanowicz some tea. Her face was wet. She wore a marble-colored head scarf, and greytallow strands of hair pushed out from the edges of the scarf. Her eyes were long wet drooping triangles. Her nose was small and red. I saw all these things. Then I went with her to the doctor's; there was nothing for me to do. Two days later I preached a sermon about the promise eleven-year-old JUNE 1956 out of my mind. And now I have shot and killed a man; the pattern is true. Am I doomed to the numbness of a snail, of a cut worm? I turned to the car, got in, ran the engine for a few minutes, backed out of the clearing and headed for Hawk River. It was dark when I reached the parsonage. The yellow-faced clock in the church tower said seven-thirty. I could see Eloise's shadow flickering in the kitchen. I left the car in the causeway, got out, walked into the small white shed to the rear of my study, removed my hunting jacket, my boots, gloves and cap, and went directly in. I switched on the study lights. The warmth of the room, the familiar rows of books, the old leather swivel chair, the wide study desk with the bronze edges, the gilt-framed print of Hoffman's "Christ Among the Doctors,'' the ornate mirror, the rack of horns from the huge buck my father had killed one season, the muted-violet wall paper, the white mouldings, the 47 gre·en metal filing case with the records of birth, death, marriage, confirmation: all these were certain, had plan and arrangement. I SWITCHED ON the desk lamp and sat down. I looked at the yellowed handwritten sermon on the desk. It was my grandfather's, one he had used on Thanksgiving Sunday, 1883. I had been trying to rework it into one I could use for the same occasion, two days hence. Grandfather had first described his study, the exact arrangement of his possessions there. His lesson was that each of us has or should have an ideally arranged nook or room in a house. To this place we should repair to order our chaotic minds and souls. "For our minds are like rooms," he wrote. "At times they are wide, vacant halls filled with nothing but stillness, and this can be a disturbing condition. At other times, they are intimate ordered rooms with furniture and carpets and pictures . . . " I failed to see grandfather's rooms. He had not supposed that a person might be doomed entirely to the mind of his first condition, incapable entirely of the second. He had been inaccurate too in implying that the first was wholly without composure. For it had composure - like that of a thick-watered 48 lake of mud. How to crack such inertia! I swung around and faced myself in the ornate mirror on the wall. The desk light put my face in the shadow, but the specific contour was fairly clear. I regarded the broad ridge of black cropped hair above my forehead, the long, slightly concave sides of the face, the wide eyes, the lean nose, the round almost feminine-looking chin. I looked again at the eyes; they stared unmoving, chilling, empty. I turned and slammed° my fist on the desk. The sound was clear and hollow, like the shot in the woods. "I didn't k n ow you were home." Eloise stood in the doorway. "What was the noise?" She looked taller than usual; she wavered, like a figure in a carnival mirror. "I bumped the desk," I answered. She walked into the room. "You look pale," she said. "Are you all right? Her tone was cool, matter-of-fact. She straightened the yellow shade on the lamp by the door. "Yes. Yes." I said. "I'm hungry, I guess." "Well," she said. "You should have let me know when you'd be home. I've prepared nothing. I had salmon myself; there's some left in a can in the refrigerator." She turned to go. She was wearing a cotton house dress with a wide skirt and PANORAMA black terriers on it. Her shoes clicked on the hall-floor tile as she walked to the kitchen. I turned back to the desk, took grandfather's sermon and the loose sheets on which I had made notes and put them in the right top drawer. Then, after I had placed my mail, unopened, in a neat pile in the center of the desk, I went into the kitchen. Eloise was wiping the range. "I took the salmon out," she said brusquely. I reached a fork from the silver drawer, pulled the tall kitchen stool up to the counter, and facing the squat kitchen windows began to eat. The salmon was thick and briny. Through the windows I could see snow falling heavily into the blue arc of street-light at the corner of the church. The snow would cover the body- and my tracks. Even without more snow, hidden there in that swamp, the largest in northern Wisconsin, he might never be discovered. Very possible. But of course that would not be: I would reveal the shooting in time. When exactly I did not know. I did know it would be whenever I had either found or failed to find completion in the act and afteTmath of death. I knew that I was subverting society. But in matters of the spirit - the high style of the body- I am self-willed. I must first identify the slaughtered man. JUNE 1956 IT w AS SNOWING the next morning. The radio said that six inches were expected. I worked all day on my sermon. I was unable to do anything with grandfather's manuscript, and when my own was finally complete, I had again capitulated_ and had readied a good materialistic homily. I told about a boy who sold Christmas cards all year round, and as he went from house to house he left a sheet of paper on which he listed the other services he was willing to perform - for cash: mow lawns, hoe gardens, clean basements, baby-sit. His aim was to get, first, a new deer rifle; and, second, a bike. I extolled his practical ambition; for this incentive, America's own, had begun with our Pilgrim Fathers. I gave the sermon to a scattered congregation composed almost entirely of women, teenage girls, and children; the men were in the woods. I was scheduled to preach for twenty-one minutes. The congregation had come for pleasant Thanksgiving Day thoughts, and I was prepared to give them. I spoke meltingly about the boy and his salesmanship, my voice reverberating deep in the well of the church; the women were attentive. Several had told me after earlier services that my big frame was imposing up there in the pulpit; and Miss Grady, the clerk in the light 49 and water office, had said that she liked it most when I kept my hands bent over the pulpit edge. From then on I was conscious of my hands as conveyers of meaning. But as I stood preaching capitalism, cornucopias, and derring?do, I felt estranged from that time and place. I was two persons walking over a scummy field with duck weed. I was both a hunter and a minister. Deer up to their necks in the water sat like decoys in the reeds. My shoes were thick with scum. The lake was limitless. The· w o • d s I was actually preaching were brittle flakes of tin falling on cold stone; together t h e y tinkled, spanking bright. The lake was limitless .. Then. "Where are the men?" I shouted, my hands clenching the pulpit rim. The circular rose window seemed to q u iv e r . "Where are the men?" The congregation flinched as one. They drew back into the rigid bleak mahogany pews. Children moved closer to their mothers and grandmothers. I thought of all the birds steaming in ovens in homes and all the pies ready to b eshoved in to bake right after church. I saw the men tramping in the bloody snow pursuing the white tail and the rack of horns. "The world is a great volume, and man the index of that book." My voice rang out, th~ 50 text of Donne clear before me. ''Fishers of men. Hunters of beasts. Which constitutes the nobler page? Which most fully proclaims human responsibility? Is it inhuman to fish for men? If not fish, why not hunt? Both imply destruction, do they not? Now the antithesis of destruction is toleration, the absence of mental or physical coercion." I paused. "If the world's book is to reflect the glory of the burnished medieval page, we must feel a tearing here-" and I pointed to my heart - "a great searing grief for tribulation and pain and death; and an overwhelming joy must embellish our page. Miserable is that wretched man who feels none of this, who neither rejoices nor grieves, who neither fishes to save, nor hunts to kill." I paused, then said, enunciating every word: ''When, 0 Lord, will you permit the hunter to despair?" I leaned forward, my head on my arms. When I looked up, the faces of the women and children were scattered over the church like fallen leaves; beads shimmered on their hats and coats. The brown choir loft stared wide and empty. My head throbbed; my soul was as vacant as a locked library. I did not wait to greet the congregation after the service. At home Eloise was still upstairs; a sore throat had kept her from church. I went to the PANORAMA bathroom and took two aspirin. Then I went to the study and stretched out on the couch. Who was the man I had hunted? Would knowing help? I saw his form again in the snow. Who misses him? Who wants his return? The snow sifted over him. Finally, he was a blur of gray, then a mound, nothing more. He had never happened. The body was discovered four days later on the last day of hunting season. Joe Blake, the owner of the Wadhams filling station, found it. The radio reported at noon that it had been buried under a foot of snow, that it was frozen solid, and that some animal had dug down and chewed at the face. That the man had been shot was very clear, the radio said; he had been shot through the upper left back once; the bullet had gone clean through. There JUNE 1956 were no footprints around the body, but the state troopers were digging down hoping to find impressions in the older snow. The announcer said that the police had not as yet revealed the name of the victim. J KEPT THE radio on all afternoon, but the name was not given. At six-thirty that evening Eloise took a telephone call. I · was in the kitchen; we had just finished dinner and I was about to start the dishes. I was scraping plates when Eloise returned. "That was a Mr. Clark," she said, sitting down again at the table. "He's coming over to see you about that hunter they found in the woods." "Clark? Clark?" I turned the name over in my mind. "I don't know any Clark." I took a towel from behind the door and wiped my hands. "I'll go to the study." 51 I had time barely to get my desk cleared before the bell rang and a tall portly man in a dark-blue fur-collared storm coat came in. He held hit hat and gloves in his hands. He was almost bald; scattered fringes of sandy colored hair stood up by his ears. His eyes were small and dark in his flesh like raisins. The flesh around the eyes was red and puffy. "Reverend B a r k e r ? '' He walked slowly towards me, his right hand extended. His face revealed nothing. "Yes."· I shook his hand. "Won't you have a chair?" He sat down. "That was my boy was shot," he said hoarsely. He had put his brown gloves on his knee and he twirled his grey felt hat slowly in his hands. His rubbers were scuffed and the right one was gashed over the toe. He took a small white card from his pocket. ''Here's my card." The gesture he made handing it over was awkward and abrupt. "I sell Leary household goods," he said. "I'm recent to Hawk River. We moved two months ago. We're living on Elm Street in the Adams apartment." I read the card; it told me exactly what he had said. He kept on talking. "Verne was twenty-two. Fine boy. Came up for deer season from the University at Madison. This was his first crack at deer hunting. 52 Before ... " "I'm very sorry,'' I said, interrupting him, trying to soften the tightness in my voice. "Will you do us a favor, ReveTend?" His tone changed; he almost whispered. "Preach my boy's funeral. We've never been good at church going, but at a time like this . . . " He became more assertive. "Back some years I was Congregational, and Moira, my wife, was Methodist. This salesman's life keeps me moving and we want a service for our boy, one better than the undertaker'll do. The sheriff said you preach for people not joined in a church. It'll help his mother if you do. We'd be much obliged." "You want me to preach?" I stared at him, trying to fit the words to his bland face. "When are yqu planning the burial?" I had not expected an irony so chilling. I. crossed the room to the door, turned, and walked back to the desk. "They've already held the inquest and had the autopsy. We want to bury him day after tomorrow in Indiana. We'll have to put him on the six-thirty train tomorrow night for Elkhart. My folks is buried there out in the country by an old church. The graves is run over with grass; but that's all left of my kin, and now I plan to keep the graves up. I was there last thirty years ago; don't know anybody there now. My wife PANORAMA and l's going to be buried there and we want our son . . . " "Look, Mr. Clark," I interrupted. "I'm not sure about my schedule; I'll have· rnme rearranging of appointments to do. It may not be possible. I'll call you wi~hin an hour. I'll let you know then what my decision is. Can you wait that long?" "Yes. That'll bt: fine. I sure hope you can do it. Folks say you do a mighty good job preachin' and we'll be sure indebted." He stood up and shook my hand. "I'm very sorry," I repeated. "I'll see what I can do." ''Thanks, Reverend." He backed out of the door and I returned to the desk. I closed my eyes, trying to shut out the glares of light in the room. I steadied my right hand on th~ dask. Vernon Clark. Vernon Clark. I knew his age, his occupation, his father. But the vital man, the compassion-inducing spirit, eluded me still, and the meager information I had made him as inaccessible as a soaring balloon. J DUG MY fingers into the arms of the chair. My lips we-re tight. Who then exactly was the sacrifice? Was all this - the slaying, the funeral - an elaborate scheme of God's to excoriate me for my crippled sensibility? If I were a festered beggar at the gate or an ascetic JUNE 1956 in the desert I could settle on some locus of my body to scrape with gravel, or I could tear my offering nature pure with thorns. I drew in my breath painfully. "Man in the snow," I murmured, "freeze me pure." I did not telephone the Clarks but went directly to their apartment on Elm Street. Mrs. Clark, grief-stricken, was in bed. I stayed for an hour and a half. They told me about Vernon, the schools he had gone to, how highly he was thought of in the neighborhoods in which they had lived, what a successful athlete he had been, what a nice girl he had hoped to marry, and the summer jobs he had held. They showed me snapshots of him as an infant, as a youth, as a young man. They showed me four recent letters he had written from the University: he was feeling fine; he had gone to a dance; he had gotten a B in chemistry, an A minus in political science, a C in English, a D plus in French; he liked the meals at the dorm. He was a good all-around American boy, so his father kept saying. "But how exactly was he unique?" .I asked in a heightened tone. "What was characteristically Vernon?" Mr. Clark sitting in a lavender overstuffed chair shrugged his shoulders. I wanted to ask him what his son had thought about the 53 flash of a deer, the look of a lake. What particular \Yards and expressions he had favored. What particular strides and gestures had been his. What were his desires? My hand left damp. Was there nothing in all the living this boy had done and in all the ways he had lived to commemorate his having been? "Stop thinking in terms of similarities,'' I wanted to cry out. "Then only will you grasp what makes a life worth living." But instead I told them that I would be glad to hold the services in the funeral chapel the next day at eleven. I would arrange to have a singer. I drove home. The night sky was bright and clear. A large lop-sided moon sat almost directly over me. Above Hawk River the blue-white street lights flashed and the trees around the town glistened with light. Tomorrow I would say that Vernon Clark had lived mildly; that he was true to his family and his friends. That he was gregarious and good-looking. Tha the would have made a good citiwn and a good soldier. That he would have been a success in engineering had he finished school. The next morning at eleven, to the parents and to the few relatives and friends who had come from out of town, I said all these things. I said too how 54 we must all question ourselves to make certain that if your end should come as suddenly as Vernon's, we would be prepared. Then Mrs. Champnay from my church sang "Fairest Lord Jesus." The brown coffin, unopened because of the condition of the face, was in a small alcove to the rear of the parlor. In the stale incense-softened parlor, Mrs. Champney's voice was clear and full. There were those people, the mourners, sitting in two rows of sombre chairs; behind them, clad in a cutaway, was the funeral parlor official; I sat up front near Mrs. Champney. What was I at that moment? A mote? A beam? If there were a Satan I could throw an inkwell and he could appear to define me·. Mrs. Champney was still singing. S u n l i g h t flickered through the tight crevices of the drawn venetian blinds at the rear of the parlor. I moved my fingers over the c r i s p smooth edge of the Bible in my lap. I was impatient to begin the benediction. AFTER THE HYMN, Mrs. Champney sat in the front row with the mourners. I stood on the raised velvetcovered dais and began: "The Lord bless thee and keep thee; the Lord lift up his countenance . . . " I stopped. I _began anew, forgetting the benedicPANORAMA tion: "I saw Vernon Clark in the snow," I said. "I can tell you what made him different." My voice was. clear; the eyes in the chapel gazed at me. "It was the way his head was shaped, right where it joined his neck. The head was round theTe and it worked in sharply to his cylindrical neck. His head was worthy of a Greek's; the proportion was that accurate." My voice rose clear and strong. "And as he lay in the snow, his left arm thrown out, his right doubled under him, he looked like a man becoming bird, ~ man trying to fly single-winged. Against the pure clean snow he soared. He was beautiful; and * * FILIPINO RESURGENCE ... (From page 15) gor of Filipino culture 1oday finds happy affirmation and determined support from a Filipino president who believes in the common man aud works night and day for him. In passing, one of the most reassuring new signs of good augury for the future comes from the school, where cultural change in the Philippines has always been started and decided. Father Urdaneta and Father Rada set up the first church school in Cebu in 1565 hard on Legaspi's landing on the beaches. American guns and hardly grown cold after firing on Aguinaldo's men JUNE 1956 he requires no angels." The mourners looked puzzled; their faces were long diagonals. Mrs. Clark, a s:out blonde woman who had wept into a b l a c k handkerchief throughout the service, now looked up, her eyes bleak and gaunt. "I was the last person to see Vernon Clark alive," I said, facing the mother, my words as even as the ticking of a clock. "I shot him, accidentally." I sat down. The mourners were silent. The undertaker had left his place by the coffin and was walking towards me. I was tired; I was dejected; but I was involved. * when Filipino children, like Roxas and Romulo, started learning, English at some American soldier's knees. Today, the school's deeprooted alliance with the common man has generated, and is enriched by, our communityschool movement. A new cultural force is growing with this movement, namely, our native languages, which are the medium of education in community school activities. These languages have untapped deposits of cultural riches, especially in the area of our Southeast Asian background. We have stepped on the threshold of a new world of human brotherhood. We move ahead to new cultural encounters. 55 56 One mark of an educated man is the possession of a reasonable fund of reneral information. The highly specialized individual, often dubbed an "expert," frequent17 knows little or nothing outside his own line. Try yourself on the followinc questions, then turn to page 80 for the corerct answers. 1. Every Filipino knows that Laguna de Bay and the Mountain Province have- in common: A. ancient rice terraces; B. the Bcntoc dialec1; C. seedless lanzones; D. the privilege of polygamy. 2. Enriched rice looks and tastes like wagwag, elon-elon or macan but has had added to it: A. white molasses; B. vigoro; C. Vitamin B-1 and niacin; D. Vitamin B-2 and ascorbic acid. 3. The part of the brain which controls temperature, appetite, and peTsonality is known as: A. the hypothalamus; B. the cerebral cortex; C. the pinoy gland; D. hormones. 4. The composers Stravinsky, Messiaen, and Debussy have in common the fact that: A. all are Russians; B.all are jazz artists; C. all have borrowed heavily from Oriental music; D. all are in exile in Switzerland. 5. When Commodore Dewey heard the M archa N acional Filipina, hf;: A. ordered a 21-gun salute from his ships; B. forbade its ever being played again; C. sent two copies to the United States; n: joined in on the piano. 6. The so-called "Switzerland of Asia," which has no barber and no water system, is really: A. Abra; B. Tagaytay; C. Davao; D. Pagsanjan. 7. The first regular airmail service was by pigeon and balloon service, from: A. Alexander's Macedonia; B. Berlin, under Kaiser Wilhelm; C. Troy to Sparta; D. Paris during the siege of 1870. 8. The most thickly populated Asian country, with 593 persons per square mile, is: A. Formosa;· B. Okinawa; C. Mongolia; D. japan. 9. The edible birds' nests taken from Palawan's cliff caves are the product of: A. hollow eagle feathers; B. the saliva of swallows; C. sea-gull nestlings; D. kelp placed by cormorants. 10. Houdini, the handcuff king, was born in: A. Wisconsin, USA; B. Bombay; C. Singapore; D. Venice. PANORAMA Literar:r Personality-XVIII RANJ~M: JHRKEK BUT UNM~Vto By FREDERICK ]. HOFFMAN Gentlemen· don't shiver I will be brief, Assuredly I have a grief, And I am shaken; but not as a leaf. (Chills and Fever) JOHN CROWE RANSOM'S fable, "Armageddon," was originally published in his volume Chills and Fever ( 1924 ). Many of its companion pieces seem to have appealed mighti_ly to him; for, though he would have none of the Poems About God ( 1919) when he made up his Selected Poems ( 1945 ), he selected liberally from the 1924 volume. The many changes he made before he was satisfied with the selection do not violate but merely refine the inten'.ion of the early poems. He is constantly about the business of altering texture without disturbing structure in any profound way. His preoccupation with texture in his criticisms is brilliantly supported in the demonstration of changes wrought upon originals, as years gave him, not dignity but a _more vivid sense of objects. He would restore the "world's body," but is less concerned with its meaning. Particulars in themselves are made rich and "dense"; one comes closer to them while at the same time their implications remain superficial. So, when Ransom would wish to strike out in thought, the texture of his poems become more complex, but the thought is relatively static. It is quite difficult, in modern poetry, to remain profound without risking absurdity. Even Yeats suffers from this difficulty: in his desire to reform his earlier, "Symbolist" manner, he had recourse to a fantastic JUNE 1956 57 and occult "system" which he had himself previously devised. The poems are impressive despite this strategy, but the strategy itself has led Yeats intellectually astray. Ransom's most strenuous essays at profound statement are found in "ables," or allegories. The fable, or allegory, is a natural device of the ironist for evading discursive statement. This makes the task of interpretation difficult, not because of the matter used but because of his strategy in ignoring the need for interpretation. "Armageddon" is such a fable. The Christ and Antichrist of the poem are allegorical figures designed to represent extrem~ of the moral condition. An Armageddon is itself a brutal extreme, in which a duality in human nature, historically developed and enriched, issues in violent destruction for the satisfaction of nothing. Ransom would have us consider the existence of many Armageddons in the history of the human temperament: "These Armageddons wea~ me much," says Antichrist, as the curtain comes down, not upon but before the climactic action. It is a sad observation, and Ransom would sigh with him over what it suggests of a failure of sensibility. A NY direct decision violates the discreet limits of its occa · sion; and the worst sin is to feel too heavily and gracelessly a sense of responsibility. The results are sometimes viewed with an appreciation of their pathos (as in "Captain Carpenter''), but the tragic will is made inactive by the comic i;ense. We become "Desperate women and men,'' as John Black of "Eclogue" puts it, when we grow up to a too serious concern over time lost. This sense of the pompous manner of the human moral concern is linked for Ransom with a severe view of banal or trite emotion. He would not have us grieve for John Whiteside's daughter, but rather analyze our exact emotional state of frustration over a sudden change in physical condition. Our views of death are likewise to be tempered by the story-book quality of a child's uninstructed reaction to the death of a hen, by a coy appreciation of spaces of chills and fevers, and by a. colloquial reminder of a dead cousin's earlier and disappointing weakness. When we forget the trivial (which is the real, as of a given point in experience), we ourselves become exasperatingly trivial. We are too self-consciously "sensible" of our duties to a half-formed notion of ourselves and of time. An Arma58 PANORAMA geddon is for Ransom the extreme to which man's false division of himself leads. Such a catastrophe would be tragic if it were not willed ignobly; but its fundamental source is ridiculous. The tongue and not the heart of Captain Carpenter is all that remains of that vigorously good-willed but ludicrous creature. In its biblical sense, Armageddon is a prospect to strike terror or encourage a terrible righteousness in him who foresees it. In Ransom's view, it is a pathetic end-result of a deliberately willed mistake regarding man's moral condition. It is the mind here, or the moral will, which is "stupidly appetitive." Over the prospect, Ransom spreads a gracefully ironic language. When the two opponents debated the proper order battle, they "fingered chivalry's quaint page." At the moment of decision, "each was loath to let the other's blood." Originally, says the poet, "they were one brotherhood," and once again, to "truce their honorable dispute," they discovered that brotherhood; until, when the patriarch arrived to warn Christ of his danger, he "saw them featured and dressed like twins at food." So that the fable might be endowed with the grare of its unreality, Ransom employs such phrases as "egregious beauty righly <light," "Perruquiers were privily presented," "his thick chevulure," and "For unison of all the retinue." The skillful surprise of this language, its neatness of tone, together with the charm of the slant rhymes and the easy brilliance of the quatrains, is successful in forever softening the implications of the poem. T HE LIMITS of all this are a consequence of Ransom's critical preoccupation. He would not disturb his world of particulars by vulgar direct statement and must therefore disguise such statement (whenever he has occasion to make it) in fable. But the patriculars of the fable are of such a nature as to resist constantly the statement they are designed to embellish. They the·refore prevent the statement from becoming explicit, and in so doing prevent also its being significant or profound. I mean, not that explicit statement is in itself either profound or nece3sary, but rather that the particulars war with each other and dissipate the reader's mood; the effect is quite different in such poem as Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead," where the particulars move toward a re-enJUNE 1956 59 forcement of that mood. The· ambiguity of both "Armageddon" adn "Captain Carpenter" exists not only in the poems but in the mind of the poet, who will not have us consider the impression of eitheT wi.hout a qualifying view that does more to cancel out than to enrich his judgment. - Adapted from the ff'isconsin Athenaean. 60 * * * from CAPTAIN CARPENTER It was a pretty lady and all her train That played with him so sweetly but before An hour she'd taken a sword with all her main And twined him off his nose for evermore. I would not knock old fellows in the dust But there lay Captain Carpenter on his back His weapons were the old heart in his bust And a blade shook between rotten teeth alack. But God's deep curses follow after those That shore him of his goodly nose and ears His legs and strong arms at the two elbows And eyes that had not watered seventy years - JOHN CROWE RANSOM PANORAMA ~ Book Review ,--1 '-?n OST WRITERS of fiction, in an attempt to absolve themselve·~ from the burden of significance, disclaim any living resemblance between characters and situations described by them and those in everyday history; but Mark Harris who has depended on his imagination in reconstructing continuity for City of Discontent, his life of Vachel Lindsay, is correctly not apologetic. Even such intimates as Edgar Lee Masters have dwelt, in previous commentaries, on only those select particles of Lindsay's biography which summarized him for them, that is, which happened to suit their special pleadings. The result has been a handful of "life studies" concerned little with day-by-day living and therefore the credibility of Lindsay's existence as a man rather than as a figure. In order to make well-known major facts sound possible, Harris has invented minor persons, places, things, and ordered them in such a way that those who read biography only when it provides them with dependable footnotes, will not be happy. Men who think in italics and speak in quotations will wonder about this book, or damn it as "Just another Lust for Life"; but those who . have more subtle uses for their learning, who consider literature a usable experience that can be entered into whole activities, will find Harris interested in them and will say, "Well, we've had one season long enough; it's about time." Some of Harris' fictional procedures are as frank in their employment as are the marginal instructions accompanying Lindsay's poetry: immediacy is attempted by constant reliance on a present tense packed with sense objec'.s; occasional na•Mark Harris, The City of Discontent (Bobbs-Merrill: New York, 1952) JUNE 1956 61 tional news-frames situate the chronology within the early decades of twentieth-century happenings, but the uneasy relationship between this single life and the many becomes symbolic of the perpetually current competition of alternatives (the contrast between agrarian simplicity and industrial incoherency; the increased moral responsibility that comes with increased command of science; etc.), more suggestive of an ever-present than of a used-up past; quoted lines of poetry are run-on horizontally as if they were prose, with none of the visual signs usually expected of poetry - no excess margins. capitals, or columnar structures - as if Lindsay's poems were not intended to be seen but to be recited aloud. Formal adaptations such as these indicate the biographer's clarity of purpose, even when the purpose is not always achieved with distinction - sometimes there is too much dependence on the ability of factual chronology to demonstrate its own significance, when it cannot; close to this is the failure of action, earlier sections, to move above the anecdotal, therefore fragmented, level - one sees just how unknowing the "omniscient" point of view can be - and the dissociation of ideas used with great effect to dramatize Lindsay's thoughts in the final sections comes like a new role to his mind: such complexities and conflicts must have existed earlier in life, and therefore his beginnings should have been presented from the same interior point of view. Nevertheless, the method is successfully "interpretive,'' recognizing that "things explained are never understood as well as things learned . . . " '\\)HAT THIS narrative approach to biography does is, principally, to suggest that the process of a poet's life is more important than his products, which in fact are also par~ of that process and not final ends. There is no attempt here to analyze Lindsay's poetry apart from his other experiences. The book can be criticized for not presenting in any systematic detail Lindsay's agrarian ideals, the New Localism;* but perhaps such omission will be forgiven when one realizes how well Lindsay is pictured living those unnamed ideals, singlemindedly fashioning all his actions into one meaning, devotion to humna life, and expecting the response to his actions to be at once personal and communal everywhere. His life was not a by-product of his poetry; nor did he write principally for poets. He was acquainted with Babbitt and, despite his first•See ... Vachel Lindsay: Spring Came on Forever,"' Panorama, Jan. 1956. 62 PANORAMA hand knowledge, was hopeful and would not turn his back. This man, as man, in the process of ratifying himself, is Harris' subject: Lindsay reciting his tribute to Altgeld's name after Altgeld has been forgotten; studying the slick magazines as possible markets for his unlucrafive verse; letting Sara Teasdale wed the vice-president of Royal Baking Powder Company; hustling in Spokane where they assigned him the subject of Astor and he finally wrote about Jackson; juggling his mother's words, "Let us flavor the salad of Springfield civic affairs with the garlic of the church"; letting his electricity be turned off during the depression. The story is that of a man who, in his enthusiasm, felt that every town was his hometown, but in time discovered that the United States hadn't happened yet and he could not belong to them all (he had overestimated their care for him) but only to the place he remembered always with discontent, with a loyalty greater than love, Springfield, Illinois; his parents died, he was locked out of his house, his later family was young just when he was being forced to accept age. How could he keep writing - about Booth, Altgeld, Brown, Lincoln, the forgotten? The past was fact accomplished, the future about to be more of the same. He was a rare traveling salesman; giving, not selling himself, until there was just no more to give; and it was all over, even loyalty- Lindsay considered these facts not irrelevant to his writinggs which grew out of, not away from, his life; and Harris concurs. If the latter makes no attempt to com - ment on poems as poems, it is because his whole treatment reveals a conviction that for Lindsay poetry qua. poetry could exist only as an arbitrary (and, to the personality of the writer, dangerous) division, an attempt at identification by permanent separation which Lindsay as permanently feared. Just where, in City of Discontent, the splices betwee::i verifiable and non-verifiable facts are made, cannot easily be told; and that is to Harris' credit. The reader will often suspect that many perceptions are so intimate that they must be Harris' own, attributed to Lindsay; but it doesn't matter. Whatever in this telling still savors of legend should be attributed to the biographer's sources, who were people and themselves variously imaginative, and to the hybrid ways of memory, but not to willful distortion on the part of Mark Harris. In general, the author has assimilated his subject so well that he speaks for it and does not compel it to speak for him. - from Poetry. JUNE 1956 63 From the foreign office expert Culture Is My Business By PURA SANTILLAN CASTRENCE SINCE THE Bandung AfroAsian Conference there has been a greater awareness with us of the value of cultural interrelations among peoples. Even in the SEATO conferences now there is a greater highlighting of the need for more cultural inter-knowledge among the countries in the SEATO treaty area than there was before. Which is all to the good, I feel, not only for my means of livelihood, but also for the beginning of a realistic view on our part of the role played by cultural understanding in the drama of international relations in which what obtains now is a grave political impasse. 64 As a matter of fact it has seemed strange to many people who are aware of the universal language of culture that the Philippines has been so slow in expanding the frontiers of her cultural dissemination and thereby of the understanding of her by the other countries; they are richers and have had more experience in foreign relations. Our Eastern neighbors are doing all they can to make the world know them through their art and their culture: dance troupes are sent to different countries, sponsored by their governments; art exhibitions; literary and artistic journals, magazines and reviews are sent out as PANORAMA spokesmen of what they are doing in every phase of their national living. In Washington I was impressed by the Indonesian cultural and information services; Pakistan's publications are better than ours, and-are regular features of their foreign service activities, so are J apanese publications, and certainly, not least of all, because among the best in artistry and content are the Indian publications. On TV shown here the Indian films dissect the life, and culture of Ghandi's century; so do the Indonesian film~ the Egyptian films, the Thai films show the respective life and culture of each country represented. All these nations are fully aware of the necessity of having the other nations know who and what they are, what they stand for, what they are striving for. which the group produced, was a beautiful piece. It called attention whenever it was sent. The articles were well written, and artistically illustrated, the reviews, the informative essays on the different phases of Philippine culture, the films showing, about us, not showing us up some thoughtless foreign commercial films sometimes are guilty of doing. Soon we were taking the Quarterly for granted, and the PIC too - good things are generally treated that way. Then there was no more quarterly, no more PIC. It was no longer affordable, cultural dissemination was once again treated as expendable. Then Narciso G. Reyes, SEATO information officer now, worked out a plan with Malacaiiang for a Philippine Information Agency in alphabitical parlance, the PIA. It was a two-man agency really, j\, FEW YEARS back our own but the best two men that government h a d t h e could be had for the purpose Philippine Information Coun- -Mr. Reyes' right-hand and cil, the short-lived but famed- only man was or is, Teodoro during-that-short-life P I c;'i.. Agoncillo, the writer of brave, staffed by an artistically dis- controversial books. They protinguished group of writers, duced during what may be the script and movie-producers, short and happy life of the like Armando Manalo, Fidel Agency (it is dying now, I de Castro, Amado Lansang, am afraid) a number of very Nati Valentin, Corazon Valen- personable publications like cia, Jovi Rodas, Nita Umali, The Philippines which has Jim Austria. been commended here and The Philippine Quarterly abroad. JUNE 1956 65 Mr. Reyes' appointment in Bangkok augurs ill for the PIA -again it is ~ing shown, it seems, that in high-bracket opm10n, Philippine information-dissemination work abroad is expendable. Incidentally our division also published some materials for dissemination abroad and Mr. Manuel Viray's Informf!tion Division, a F o r e i g n Affairs Quarterly which was excellent. Now we are told there is no more money. For local information dissemination, Mr. Hernando Ocampo of ~he National Media Production Center is doing excellent work. His Center has been mentioned as the best of its kind in all Asia. Philippine films, publications, photographs, all kinds of information, from fertilizers, and delousing techniques to the last word in the canning industry, from the Bayambang Community project to the latest in the attempts to control our diseases are available in his office. It is a very interesting office, by the way, and Hernando Ocampo is one of the most interesting men alive. He is neck deep in poetry which I do not always understand, in painting, in movies, and his office is just like him, rich, warm, and full of exciting novelties. The man has imagination. When I have to beg for 66 A cultural officer must translate in his work the basic values of the culture, faith and vision of his country, and J seek wherever he is to make this culture, this faith and this vision understood and appreciated by other peoples; and seek too to understand and appreciate other people's cultures now by comparison with his, which can be divisive and and competitive, but a sympathetic and generous evaluation of them for their own worth. P. Santillan-Castrence films and photographs to send abroad,-for my plight has reached that low, I like begging them from Hernando Ocampo. The other entities I beg from are equally willing, by the way, because they are equally aware of the urgent neednow-that countries know one another, and that, in the case of the Philippines, because she knows her Asian neighbors less than she does many Western peoples, and they know her but little too, this interknow ledge now is extremely important. In this respect the University of the Philippines, has done a great deal of pioneering work, which is a credit to its foresight and its ability to appraise the proper role a state university should play to PANORAMA help effectively the international policy of a country. This is, of course, understandable, and understandable too is the fact that more than any other group, university people are deeply concerned with cultural understanding among nations; in fact, independent of the desire to implement international policy the University of the Philipines would indeed wish to have educational and cultural ties with its Asian counterparts even solely from the humanistic point of view of the need of cultural and spiritual contacts among peoples because only through such contacts are reciprocal understanding and sympathy possible, and is the broad basis of any kind of lasting tie possible. Cultural and information dissemination is, in broad outline, the work of my outfit in the Department of Foreign Affairs. I griped,-! think with some reason,-about the apathy of the resp~nse often given to clear-cut projects for such dissemination. I also breathed an optimistic belief that Bandung and SEATO seemed to have changied the outlook a little. Other phases of the work are well-responded to, however. In the handling of scholarships, for example, the Department's work is much lightened by the cooperation of JUNE 1956 the Bureau of Civil Serv1ice and the other government entities that have to do with the choice of the fields our country should ask for from the foreign donor nation or entity. In this work the Department is using a politics-proof method of screening which has stood many tests. True it is that objectivity-for scholarships as for other things-can a mean a lack of imagination and can sometimes depumanize judgment, but it is often the only way to prevent the putting of pressure to bear upon selections. We are a people who like to play with pressures. The scholarships part of the work is extremely interesting too for me because it keeps me in contact with many young people and I like young people-ambitious, earnest, striving, often, however, too expectant of the marvels to be obtained from Scholarships to suit me. Age and experience have taught me how few marvel.:; there are in this world. I must confess that I am afraid the scholarship bug has bitten many of our students badly. Everyone must go abroad or else he cannot expect success. A b r o a d, of ourse, is still the West, mostly the United States, but that is neither here nor there at this point. At this point what is important is to correct in the 67 minds of our youngsters the idea that their education is always incomplete without the foreign flavor. There is absolutely no doubt that further studies in any subject would be good for any student, and also that travel per se and living with peoples of other countries give a broadening effect t.o an individual's personality, a _perspective and a poise which are wholesome and desirable, and that they also teach the lesson of man's sameness everywhere in a most convincing and graphic manner. But to make of foreign study the condition precedent to success is to have a squinted view of what our educators are trying to do here. We cannot educate here expecting always continuation of the education abroad. Such continuation, if not accidental, should, at least, be only incidental. If it is possible and wise, within individual circumstances all the better for all concerned: if not, there should not be the fretting and the fussing, no moving of earth and heaven that a scholarship may be won. There should not be this unnatural fetish for foreign education which blinds many of our young people to real values. Or, is the answer to one of my columns on the subject right that our present education system is so imper68 feet that our students after graduation are not really prepared for the work involved in their field of study? This is a serious indictment on our educational system. Young people, and people not so young anymore, come to my office seeking to go out "of the country to study some more"; dentists already on the job, nurses already on the job, teachers who are teaching, mothers who are raising family and who are also holding good jobs: they must all go abroad or else. What saddens me is that in some respects these scholarship-obsessed people are right-we do pay more attention to persons who have gone to study in foreign universities or training centers, no matter what they did there than to people who haven't, whatever their real worth. Those with a foreign brand of education, or with a foreign finish, an affected foreign accent too perhaps, secure jobs more quickly, their opinion is listened to with greater attention specially when prefaced with: "Professor Such and So of some-high-sounding-name of-a-university said this and that ... " Another sad part in the fact that in some cases, our professional technical men, say in medicine or nursing, merely PANORAMA A WOMAN'S CHANCES In this Philippines man's world what are the chances of a Filipino woman becoming an Ambassadress, a la Claire Booth Luce? My answer is, she has a chance--but does she want to? My general notion of the Filipino woman, and this is a public confession, is that she does not mind this world's being man's and that when the real show-down comes career will give way to home and family. Therefore even if her chances are these, in all likelihood, she will not take advantage to them. If she does, she may not cut an attractive figure in the eyes of the Filipino man, and she needs that approval. Incidentally, I do not know why I feel proud to make this opinion of the Filipino woman. to give examples, are often not given and even break abroad; they sometimes do not get the training they went out for; because of unequal treatment due to prejurice which still exists in spite of men of good will in the world. They come back after a year with a foregin sheen, a foreign aura, but because they were not given what is due them and what is due their preparation, they really have .no right to the claim of expertness they make on their return. Careful advice should be sought by our people, specially these already equipped with professional preparation here, before they go abroad for further work. This, incidentally, we make a part of our work in the cultural division when counselling students who feel that they must go abroad or bust. JUNE 1956 - P. Santillan Castrence We remind them, specially those who, we feel, need not go out or should not, of the need for workers in the rural areas, the need doctors, nurses, dentists, good teachers. We remind our doctors particularly that often the training here is enough, other professionals like lawyers, that what they would learn abroad is often not pertinent to our conditions, moves and laws here. Lawyers are only an example. We remind them-that is all we can do; they fill up application forms just the same. As a matter of fact our young people often apply for more than onl!! scholarship. It has been our embarassing experience to have to apologize to foreign scholarship donor entities that a certain nominee can no longer accept the scholarship he applied for because he was accepted elsewhere. 69 Wholesale application, I am reminding students, is thoughtless and selfish both to the inviting concern and to other candidates who may be deprived of scholarship chances. Another interesting aspect of the cultural work of the Department is helping Philippine cultural exhibitions in other countries, or other countries or other countries' cultural exhibitions here. Again here, we are handicapped with the lack of funds for the purpose. Government entities are cooperative, of course, in collecting materials for us, handicraft, for instance; art associations and civic organizations are too, and we tap all these resources. We have had art exhibitions, photograph exhibitions, book exhibitions, doll exhibitions, stamp or flag exhibitions in many foreign countries. Indeed, we sometimes get the most exotic and unheard of requests--one time I recall receiving one for self-portraits of artists with whiskers. Well, that request at least was easy to dispose of. Fortunately, for easing up our work a little, our artists do not yet sport the required commodity. But I have a feeling sometimes that these exhibitions give our country a better boosting, and other countries a better understanding of us than some 70 more dramatically - conceived projects to thresh out in speeches the need for strengthening international political and economic ties. The cultural base is, I feel, more solid, more broad, and less susceptible to possible misunderstanding. How grand it would be if there were definite funds allocated for projects, say, of sending our dancers as our musical artists to perform in other countries, or of publishing personable material about the Philippines, or of financing the preparation of films and musical recordings which are badly needed abroad-all these to show people what we are, how we look, what we think and feel, as shown in our art and culture, what is our way of life. The other countries beat us, of course, because really we are easy to beat in the projects. India sent a troupe here, as part of its Asian tour, to show Indian dances, play Indian music, and demonstrate to us how closely interwoven with their life, their religions, their way of thinking are their interpretative arts. We are looking forward also to helping the Indonesian project of a batik and dance exhibition here sometime in summer. A year or so back we had a de Goya exhibit, a Spanish pro·PANORAMA ject, sometime latE•r we had an American-painting exhibit. The Cultural Division also takes care of implementing cultural agreements between our country and other countries, or even the less formal understanding of exchange of publications when there is no cultural agreement. It is the liaison office for receiving donations of books, like encyclopedias, and other cultural materials for the government which it sends to the proper entities. I recall rece1vmg once some exceeding interesting museum collections from Australia, which we turned over to Dr. Quisumbing. Australia also polilothographed for us the invaluable book Useful Plants of the Philippines by William H. Brown which we distributed to the appropriate institution. We received very interesting objects, by the way. Not so long ago The Imperor of Japan sent up on request, to a little girl in the Visayas, I believe it was, two exquisite Japanese dolls by a famous Japanese doll-artist, a screen and a scroll for the school she was studying in. These was a ceremony for the giving and the receiving of the gift, and of course the inevitable photographing of the whole procedure. We also do all sorts of trans1956 lation work whenever we can, in which the University of the Philippines helps us very much. We attend to the most unlikely kinds of assignments like answering cranks from other countries with outlandish requests for helps, for money, for addresses. The scope of culture-friends making fun of me call it Kul-tiahis indeed wide. I have a suspicion that every time my assigning officer gets stumped as to what to do with a questionable piece of correspondence, he stamps it Cultural Division. The grant of our resourcefulness in the Division is expected to be unlimited, you see. We are very little known abroad, or even ill-known. In a public library of a country I visited duirng ~y recent tour-assignment, books about us were listed with those under the United States of America. The librarian was sheepish when I smillingly reminded him that we have been independent (or want to think so at least) for well-high ten years. In another country we are among the Latin-American group. In Strasbourg, France, with which place I was always associated Schwetzer, I was asked if Chinese is our official language. I was very patient with such queries-they pointed out to me how much need(See page 79) 71 Most interesting planet MARS By MICHAEL OVENDEN MARS IS, perhaps, the most interesting of the planets. It is just over 4,000 miles in diameter: a little over one half the diameter of the Earth. Compared with the other planets, conditions on Mars are not so very different from conditions on the Earth. Its average temperature is about minus ten degrees Fahrenheit, some forty degrees of frost: but on the equator, at noon, the temperature may rise above freezing. Mars has a thin atmosphere, the surface pressure being a twelfth of that at the Earth's surface. It has no oceans and no high mountains. For this reason the meteorology of M a r s should be much simpler than the meteorology of the Earth's atmosphere. It may seem a long way off, but we can study the meteorology of Mars by following the motions of 72 the clouds that we see in the Martian atmosphere. Large telescopes are not needed for this· work: some of the best visual observations of Mars have been made with telescopes of less than twenty inches aperture. What we do ne:ed is a large number of observers scattered as widely as possible over the Earth. Mars, like all the planets, shines only be reflected sunlight. But before it reaches our telescopes, the sunlight reflected from the surface of Mars has to pass through the Martian atmosphere, and we can expect that the gases on the Martian atmosphere will imprint on the spectrum. If we compare the spectra of Mars and the Sun, and look for lines that are relatively darker in the spectrum of Mars, we can make a spectrum chemical analysis of the MarPAN<ml tian atmosphere. In this way, in 194 7, the American astronomer Kuiper clearly demonstrated the existence of carbon dioxide on Mars. But the observations are very delicate, and the positive identification of other gases has not, so far proved possible. But we do kn.ow, for example, that if there is any oxygen there it must amount to les than a thousandth of the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. Water-vapour, too, is scarce. But the presence of white caps in the polar regions, which wax and wane with the Martian seasons, prove that there is some water on Mars. The ways in which these polar caps reflect sunlight shows that they are frozen water, but probably with only a thin layer of frost, unlike the snow caps about the poles of the Earth. A casual glance at Mars through a telescope shows not only the polar caps but also brownish-green m a r k i n g s which contrast with an orangetinted background. The optical properties of the orange regions are like those of an oxide of iron (limonite). It is tempting to suppose that any oxygen that might have been present in the atmosphere of Mars has been used up in oxidising the surface: in fact, Mars may be a rusty planet. But we need more observaJUNE 1956 tions before we can draw such a definite conclusion. T HE DARK markings on Mars are permanent features, but they show regular seasonal changes of colour, connected with changes in the size of the polar caps. At the end of the last century, the suggestion was made that these dark areas are patches of vegetation which flourish when they receive water from the melting polar caps. But the green coloration of terestrial plants is due to the chlorophyll they contain, and the spectrum of the dark markings on Mars is very different from the spectra of chlorophyll plants. On the other hand, it does resemble the spectrum of mosses and lichens, and these are, as it happens, among the hardiest of our terrestrial plants, with a great resistance to cold. It is hardly to be expected that exactly similar forms of life should have developed independently on two planets, under different conditions. It is interesting, therefore, to look at the way in which the optical properties of species of terrestrial plants change with changing environment. The vast area of the Soviet Uriion provides a unique opportunity for this work, and Russian scientists have not been slow to take advantage of it: 73 they have coined the term "astrobotany" for this study. Their observations show that plants growing at higher altitudes and lower temperatures have optical properties that approach most closely those of the dark markings on Mars. A strong point in favour of the vegetation idea is the fact that these dark areas must be able to gon growing, because they .are not permanently obscured by the dust-storms that sweep the planet. In 1877, the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli reported that he had seen a network of fine straight lines crossing the desert regions of Mars. The study of these markings was taken up by the American astronomer J. L!>well. He maintained that these markings, now called "canals", also showed seasonal variations of intensity. Lowell believed that he was seeing strips of vegetation flourishing about the waters of actual canals, made by intelli· gent Martians to eke out their meagre water supplies. It must be confessed that it is difficult to find a natural explanation of such a complex system of lines on Mars, if it exists. The trouble is that, while some skilled observers confirm Schiaparelli's and Lowell's observations, o th er equally skilled observers using equally good telescopes deny 74 the existence of canal-like markings at all. They believe that the canals are only optical illustrations: and the eye is unreliable when it attempts to interpret scattered markings at the limit of visibility. A T FIRST SIGHT, it appears a simple matter to settle this question by taking a photograph of Mars. Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it sounds. The light from Mars has to pass through the Earth's atmosphere. Th.is atmosphere is in a highly turbulent state. The image of the planet in a telescope is constantly making small movements in the field of view, and suffering distortions due to the disturbances of the atmosphere. We call this "bad seeing". You can get some idea of bad seeing by looking through a window above a hot radiator; the rising currents of hot air produce similar distortions. The human observer can follow the gyrations of the im~ge of the planet in ltis field of view; he can also mentally reject poor images and store in his memory only images produced in moments of clear seeing. This is only partly an advantage; for the same reason, the human observer tends to see on Mars what he is expecting to see. On the other hand, the photographic plate, PANORAMA while being impartial, is unable to follow the motions of the image during exposure. Inevitably, any photograph of a planet is blurred by bad seeiing, and it shows far less de'tail than can be seen by a skilled observer. Some of the best photographs of Mars, taken at the Pie-du-Midi Observatory, high up in the French Phyrenees, show some of the larger canals, but as diffuse bands, not * as sharp lines. However, in 1950, the 200.::inch Hale telescope on Mount Palomar in California came into use. With this telescope, it is possible to photograph Mars with an exposure as short as a fiftieth of a second. If a large number of photographs is taken with a cine-earner, an occasional exposure may catch a moment of perfect seeing. If the canals really qo exist, they should be seen clearly on such a snapshot. * NEARER TO EARTH In September of this year the planet Mars will be only 35.000,000 miles away from the Earth. Mars comes close to the Earth once every twenty-five months. But the orbit Mars about the Sun is not circular, so its distance from the Earth at such a close approach varies by as much as 27,000,000 miles. This year's approach is a favorable one: Mars will be nearer to the Earth than it has been for the last thirty-two years. At a distance of 35,000,000, Mars appears, to the naked eye, as large as a pin's head seen from a distance of twenty yards: through a telescope with a magnification of 1,000 it appears as large as the Moon seen through a pair of opera glasses. * jUNE 1956 75 T HE PHILIPPINE reader, this year, may happily discover that his Christmas tree need not be put away or junked. Every month, perhaps, will be part of the giftgiving season, and he the grateful recipient. Two years ago the local writer's problem was the overcautious publisher. Even magazines someJimes preferred cheap syndicated American fiction to their own; and bookmakers kept busy gluing and mimeographing textbooks. Then came the Benipayo series on Philippine Contemporary Writing. Now D. H. Soriano's press and others keep an open watch for poetry and fiction. Besides, in addition to Free Press and Palanca prizes, there will be in 1956 Races family awards for short stories and novels. And the achievement of Katha I has more than justified a Katha II. So that now the local writer's problem is only himself: can he live up to such publishers' and editors' expectations? He can hear pesos rubbing hands together in his pockets; but does he have something valuable for the hands and hearts of his audience? If he has, the patient Philippine reader will finally receive his reward, literature worth the effort of concentration. What that reader has been waiting for, one suspects, is 76 CALENDAR OF PRIZES By LEONARD CASPER (An award for the reader) , . r nothing less than the "Filipino experience" - himself - which he has been given so seldom. Vicente Rivera's story of the corrupt politician, Free Press prize-winner in 1954, is a rarity. Perhaps too many local writers still are struggling to grasp the proper relationship between fiction and life; perhaps they are only graduallf learning to take fiction seriously. Otherwise, where are the books about bossism, the provincial or district warlords whose corrupting, crippling tyranny is perhaps not unrelated to the straitjacket discipline of some Filipino family systems? Where are the stories about small-scale McCarthyism, the back-alley practices of student PANORAMA politicians who argue that they are only preparing themselves for national politics and "That's the way it's done in Senate cloakrooms"? Who has written about the oppressive "leader" concept upheld unconsciously by these same schools, believers in castes and an elite, skilled apprentices in human exploitation? Written with the dramatic means which only fiction can provide, with all the supporting substance of person, place and thing, so that the reader cannot escape feeling it happen not to someone else but, with convincing penetration and endurance, to himself; senses his own share in the general guilt or accomplishment; explores his own caves and most sacred grottoes. LARGELY, readers in English are dwellers in cities or their suburbs. But fiction here so far, almost with secret nostalgia, has crept back for subject matter to farl;l'ling or fishing barrios. Where, in fiction, is the Filipino's gradual comprehension of the restless, mobile city life so appropriate a symbol, and even cause, for his own quick-change temperament? It would take the country's best writers to see the world of a jeep driver, or a side-street tienda keeper; the feelings of a taxi driver, bringing his wrinkle-wrung mother and proud-girl children and his jUNE 1956 own tubercles into a more distant relative's garage to live because he is too proud to talk to his prospering brother. How does one put into words the half-thoughts and morethan-whole emotions of the illiterate? the provincial houseboy, in a Malate apartment? the resettled squatter, an outhouse his first outpost, in new suburbia? Is there in the Philippines, with the transplanting of Huks in Mindanao's "Land of Promise,'' any equivalent to the role of the West in the American dream, so prominent that cowboy movies and Davy Crockett on T.V. keep a constant visible image before the American mind? Is there somewhere an irreducible self-reliance, acting as a counterforce to bossism? Who talks of squatters' rights-though it is sometimes said that the Quezon memorial monument has been delayed not only by lack of funds but for the warning given workers by nearby squatters who feel a threat to their way of life? Prize-minded writers-and demanding readers-may realize that the Blumentritt guerrillas still are strangers to fiction, as are the more legitimate city undergrounds. The work of Juan Laya and Stevan Javellana no more exhausts the subject of "Japanese time" than Agcaoili's novel, The Crimson Snow, does Philippine partici77 pation in the Korean "police action." Who will explore, in fiction, the strange souls of men fattened on the sale of war surplus; or of those PC soldiers in Jolo who sold their cartridges to the Moros at one peso a - piece; or of the willing dummies who have been human facades for illegal Chinese transactions? WHY IS THE "dark human estate" m a d e darker here, through fiction's ignoring the daily temptations that might understandably tantalize even an Anthony? Why are the courageous skirmish and brief salient unnoticed as well? Is the press controlled, the writer's mind captive, the reader unwilling to confront himself? A year of free fiction should diminish such suspicions. Besides the panoramic overview, with theme interpreted sociologically, more intimate investigations-the psychological; the family and personal-are open to the writer's hand, the reader's eye. Is the Philippines democratic? Is is Christian? What is on the mind of a man on his knees? What 1s the come-late, leave-early churchgoer like? The base of individual characterization is as broad as the number of individuals in this nation. Not the generalization but the special instance is fiction's forte. The tempering of family discipline 78 with equalty of rights, the balance of respect for the old with respect for the young: how does the real tolerate the ideal? In a given family, what is the effect of the "double standard"~ How did the wife and her overfemale family contribute to that situation, help cause it by their presumption of guilt in the suitor? What happens when loyalty outlives love, or even fails to accomplish that much? Who will tell of the little boy who calls his mother "Ate" because he is raised by his less "havenot" relatives? What cannibal satisfaction is there in the group-gossips' feasting on tender hearts and claiming merely to be their brother's keeper when they forget they are his murderer? Each Philippine day has material for satire, for man's selfknowledge of his own incongruity, for humility and hope. World literature has always measured greatness in theme by its comprehension of the gap between appearance and reality; the tensions between need and want, between wanting and getting. Enough writers in the Philippines have the maturity which can come to terms with everyday exp2rience without exploiting, by exaggerating, its sensational elements. For them, facts are not enough; truth is a composite of political, economic, social and personal PANORAMA knowledge, plus a philosophical frame of reference and the moral poise required to order that knowledge. They respect their material enough to know it intimately, to experience it through the shaping technique of their writing, to dramatize it with the humility of self-denial so that it, not they, will be reexperienced in their stories. Such writers, perhaps some of them now unknown, will be the receivers of awards and givers of pleasure in 1956. For the Philippine reader, the season of rejoicing has just begun. -From the Sunday Times Magazine. * * * CULTURE ... (From page 71) ed is information about us in foreign lands. Why, in the College del' Europe LiQre in Strasbourg there were many students and professors who did not know that we are a part of the Free World and that we are helping in the struggle. There is an urgency for other countries of the world to know us, as well as for us to know them, for, as the French proverb goes, "tout comprendre c'est tout pradonner" to understanding everything is to forgive everything) . In Asia, for instance, how heart-warning it was to find identity with our neighbors as we talked of similar dreams for country, si* milar needs, similar urges for self-expression even similar language problems. In the West, the identity is in the civilization which we have, because of the immemorable dictates of history, imbibed and made ours. There is no apology here, because the facts of our country's circumstances are inevitable. Inevitable therefore too is Spam's affectionately maternal view of us now, Mexico's warmth, America's friendship. We must seek to implement these facts, by filling up the gaps and the lacks and correcting ignorance. We are searching out to know the East more, while not turning our backs to the East, for the only kind of view is the human, global view. If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, and won a satisfaction and triumph, few men ever know. JUNE 1956 79 1. 2. 3. 4. s. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 80 ARE YOU WORD WISE ANSWERS PANORAMA QUIZ ANSWERS 1. A. ancient rice terraces (c) to bend the knee in wor- 2. c. Vitamin B-1 and niacin ship 3. A. the hypothalamus (b) mournful 4. c. all have borrowed heavily (a) servile from Oriental music (a) type of narcotic s. c. sent two copies to the U.S. (c) commercial prohibition 6. Tagaytay (d) musician with great techni· 7. D. Pari$ during the seig~ cal skill 1870. (b) a rotating separator 8. D. Japan (b) curved hollow 9. B. the saliva of swallows (d) comparison 10. A. Wisconsin, USA. (d) surroundings ------·----------· (a) to manage 16. (a) venomous snake (d) noisy 17. (d) magnificence (a) swampland 18. (a) optical glass (b) excessively adorned 19. (c) foolish (d) coloring matter 20. (b) massacre. * * * Jelly Paint A NEW PAINT developed by a British fi.rm has the consistency of jelly when in its tin, but liquifi.es as soon as it is applied. The tin can be knocked over, and the paint will not spill; nor will it run down the handle of the brush when a ceiling is being painted. To support this claim, the fi.rm's demonstrators paint a ceiling - while wearing full evening dress. Secret of the paint, which has a high gloss, lies in it:; new thixotropic base. It is said that painting can be done twice as quickly· with it because the brush picks up 50</o more paint eacli time it is dipped into the tin. The paint is touch dry in four hours, and hard in eight hours. The paint is ready mixed - in fact, it must not be stirred or it will turn liquid and will take 1112 hours to turn to jelly again. The color remains constant from beginning to end, and the paint will not go hard in the tin. Available in ten colors, the paint has coverage equal to high gloss paint, and tests have proved that the loss of color is only 137c after 2,000 hours' exposure to accelerated weathering, equivalent to three years outdoors. of PANORAMA In the Beginninq . .. LISTERINE (an antiseptic) Sir Joseph Lister (1827-1912), a British surgeon gave his name (today a trademark) to an antiseptic preparation. SHRAPNEL (a projectile designed to burst in midair aJld scatter shots) Named after a little-known British army officer, Henry Shrapnel ( 17611842), the modern deadly shell was designed to make war more effective against personnel hidden in trenches . .}UNE 1956 MAXIM (a wise saying) From the Latin ma:rima ("the greatest") comes this modern term which refers to an axiom or "the greatest sentence." 81 'Philippine 1Jaiwra11ia-)(JX Calamba YEARS AND YEARS ago, ,1 very young man still going through the early phases of literary attempts somehow wrote the following: * 82 When I recall the days That saw my childhood wake Along the verdant margin Of a murmurous lake, When I recall the whisper Of wind, fresh from the west, On my brow a tender promise Of sweet refreshing rest, Every time I see The stainless lily soar In the wind, and the stormy wave Sleep meekly on the shore, Every time that flowers. When dawn begins to ; milt: With their inebriating scent My senses all beguile. I remember, remember My childhood's wistful face Wh.ich only a loving mother Adorned with treasured grace I remember a simple town, My cradle, content, delight, Along the cooling lake, Of my love the lovely site. Ah, if my certain feet Explored your somber glade And on your river marg_ins Merrily I played, * Trans lated by Leon Ma. Guerrero. PANORAMA I also, in your rustic temple, With boyish faith did pray, While comforted by purest Breeze, my heart was gay. Your age-old sylvan grandeu1 Showed me the Maker's hand, Never did I suffer sorrow In the bosom of your land. Nor love nor tenderness Under your azure skies I ever lacked, finding My joy in Nature's ties. Oh tender infancy, Oh beautiful town. Rich fountain of my joys And songs that sorrows drown, Come back to my heart, Come back, my tender hours, Come back as the birds Return with the flowers. But alas, farewell! May the Spirit Of Good, whose love is blest, Watch forever over Your happiness and rest. For you my vows and content Will, learning to gain; May heaven grant that I Your innocence retain. The author of this piece has long been dead. His memory is ,revered all over the country and parts of the world. Every year the country celebrates his date of birth and death in fitting ceremonies held not only in this "simple town" but in other towns and cities as well. Calamba, for that is the name of the town, is best known as the birthplace of Jose Rizal, generally conceded as the foremost national hero of the Philippines. Actually, in a country JUNB 1956 that is dominated by those whom Rizal had once fought, Rizal is honore·d more through habit and tradition rather than through a sincere understanding of what he had done. Of course, Rizal had graduated from writing tender little poems to publishing full-length novels satirizing his social environment. C ALAMBA today is a busy town, having a population of about 40,000. The transient, if he goes to the upper part of the town near the lake, will not miss the reconstructed model (by Juan Nakpil) of Ri· zal's home where the hero was born on June 19, 1861. The model houses some of the furniture and the equipment in vogue during Rizal's time. In one. corner of the Rizal lot was set up a concrete marker donated by University of the Philippines students who s e practice before the war was fo march from their old campus in Padre Faura to Paco station during National Heroes Day and ·take a special train to Ca· lamba. The town plaza near Rizal'o; hall has a unique design. It is marked by a structure in the center holding a giant pot on which sides is drawn the map of the different barrios of the town. The town session hall of Calamba is decorated with the painting of the hero's execution 83 m Bagumbayan, known today as Luneta in Manila, and a framed copy of the hero's poem, "Ultimo Adios." Calamba has all the trappings of a first class town. It is a busy bus station, the crossroad to upper Laguna, Batangas and Rizal provinces. It has several theater houses, private schools, and establishments doing business for the town and the sugar and rice regions around it. The railroad station of the town is a major stop of the Bicol express trains. In some barrios, the people manufacture b a k i a (wooden shoes), or bijon (noodles), and raise corn, vegetables, and fruits particularly chicos, avocado, etc. FAMILIAR landmarks around Calamba are the town cemetery on the slope of a hill, one of the spots often frequent* ed by Rizal during his boyh6od; Mt. Makiling, which the herb used to climb with the S p a n i s h officer assigned to guard him when Rizal returned from Europe after writing the Noli; Laguna de Bay, on whose shores, the story goes, Rizal stood and wondered how the people on the other shore were faring. This is the place where Rizal spent a good part of his boyhood, where he began to appreciate the agrarian and economic problems arising out of the conflict between the tenants and the· friars owning huge estates around the town. The same lake, the same mountain and hills, the same brooks, and the same sky are still there. The town itself has shed its clothes from one of a "simple town" to one of a commercial municipality that somehow keeps the memory of Rizal alive. * * BLACK IS WIHITE 84 Hitler's propaganda minister Goebbels used to say that if one hears a lie often enough, he will begin to believe it. In the same fashion, Communist Russia has been busy rewriting history for over 15 years. Following their example, George Orwell in his political satire 1984 cho!le as the three major slogans of his imaginary Ministry of Truth: WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. * PANORAMA *;et.n-tJ't41na, , , , , , by Elmer "Mary-you've forgotten your glasses again" Audubon, Lost Dauphin of France By !ONO MACARAEG 40,000 woodcock in two days F OR A LONG time the life of John James Audubon, famous last-century painter of American birds and animals, was kept almost de.liberately obscure, as if being so extraordinary. a- man, he had to remain half-myth for the enjoyment of backwoodsman and m a i n - s t r e e t e r alike. This strange, handsome, Frenchspeaking man who suddenly but quietly emerged from Southern woods bearing game and colored portraits was believed by many to be the lost dauphin of France, heir-apparent to the royal throne who had disappeared after the e'xecution of Louis XIV during the French Revolution. 86 (Similar stories persist, in our own day, about the children and relatives of Tsar Nicholas, last ruler of imperial Russia, all of whom were allegedly killed with him by Bolshevik terrorists, but none of whose bodies were ever recovered.) In due time, after the pleasure of making him a legend subsided, more credible facts became accepted as his true personal history. His dates now are set between 1785-1851; and he is generally considered the son of a French naval officer and a creole woman from Santo Domingo in the West" Indies. Probably he was illegitimate, although he never adPANORAMA mitted it. That the father was a rn . .:an of substance is shown by young Audubon's spoiled boyhood on a French estate. Here he developed a talent for drawing and a love of the outdoors, especially of birds, which lasted all his life. When John J. was about 17 years old, according to Ludlow Griscom, he was sent to North America to take charge of property near Philadelphia, where he married Lucy Bakewell. With his inheritance he tried several commercial ventures which took him throughout the wild New World that he loved, to Kentucky in 1808 and to New Orleans in 1812. The ventures failed because Audubon could not refrain from continual hunting and drawing. By 1822, having nothing left but a wife, a gun and his precious portfolio of bird drawings, he was regarded as some kind of a strange madman, by the pioneers from Ohio to the Gulf of Mexico. They began to invent a strange past for this peculiar, soft-spoken wanderer; and so, in their minds, he became the lost dauphin of France. Audubon knew their opinion but cared little for it. His dream-to accomplish a series of paintings of every North American bird-had been growing, through the encouragement of his completely unselfish and patient wife. Sometimes they JUNE 1956 were separated for years at a time, while he supported himself by painting, by portraiture and the teaching of drawing. Yet somehow she stood by him, and he attained every objective that he set for himself. T o ALL THE great cities along the eastern American seaboard, back and forth among Edinburg, London and Paris he shuttled, soliciting subscriptions to his project of folios. In 1831, he made his famous expedition to the Florida keys, the outlying sandbars and coral islets, in search of game and subjects. In 1832, he visited the other continental extreme, Labrador, where the birds, complying with climate and scenery, were camouflaged blue, black and white and did not wear the tropical colors of winged Florida. Then he traveled the southern states including the independent republic of Texas. Always he sought the wilderness, the untrod, the fields and for87 ests and streams still a refuge to birds. Between trips he wrote the volumes of the text which, with the portraits, was completed in 1838 at a cost near S 100,000. At S 1000 a set, a total number of less than 200 sets were issued. The project had taken nearly 25 years to complete, but at last success attended John James and his faithful wife. The original folios held paintings of 435 species of American birds. His physical endurance, his energy, his self-dramatization, his confidence and determination-these made him greater in fact than any fictional legend could. He did not have to be the son of a king of France. In 1840, Audubon began work on the octavo edition of his Birds of America, whose seven volumes he completed in iour years. Still he had time for his last and most danger· ous expedition to the Great F1ains and Rocky Mountains although he was nearly 60. Just prior to 1846, he had finished all 155 paintings of the fourlegged animals of North America. Tragically, his health and mind began to fail rapidly in 1848, and he became totaily before he died in 1851. A UDUBON WAS more than an artist. Previous painters had drawn from stuffed and mounted specimens, and faithfully reproduced all P."buor· mal lumps in the body outlfi!C' placed there by the taxider · mist! It was hard to realize that feathers covered the bird's body. Finally, as Griscom says. "the bird was placed on a conventionalized perch or twig, not in the least resembling any twig existing in nature." Audubon knew his birds and their habitat. His paintings were life-size; the bird's attitude· was natural, not posed; and its perch was a flower 1Jr tree true to its surroundin~s. Only occasionally were his colors too bright, the bird's stance a pose. And his bald eag clearly has eleven tail .featht:!ri:., not twelve as it should. Such faults were few and minor. A trained scientists is quick to save new species as proof of their existence; Audubon saved only the painting, w h i c h he expected never to have questioned. As a result, sometimes he painted strange species never seen since and therefore so valuable that science wishes it possessed the: originals. A few European birds which he shot and painted were never heard of again in the New World. Of course there were species he never encountered, havin~ neither field glasses nor easy means of travel, and having only one lifetime for his work. What he failed to know about PANORAMA 1all' ·• •rest and tree-top birds, ..,,· what' seemed to be new spe,. cies but were only immature or plumages of birds, or the color .... ~ases of certain hawks-these ~quired two generations of ornithologists to discover and record. His mere presence in the forests at a time just previous to their being cleared saved, in a visible form, records of birds o.n the Vf}i'ge of extinction: the Labrador duck and great auk, the Carolina Paroquet, the passenger pigeon. As Griscom says, in two days Audubon saw more woodcock-between 30 and 40 thousand!-than a devoted specialist might see in a lifetime today. It is no wonder that even today legend persists in claiming some kind of noble blood for the veins of John Audubon, reader of signs in stream and trail. * * * VOICE OF THE TURTLE Father's in the garden, Straining all his nerves; Mother's in the kitchen, Straining her preserves; Brother's straining muscles - But we can't rejoice, For sister's at the organ, Straining her poor voice. * * 0 CUCKOO Wal king in a wood, a poet cried: "O Cuckoo, shall I call thee bird, Or but a wandering voice?" The school-examiner replied: "State the alternative preferred And reasons for the choice." * A Filipino Profess.' • in an American _ ,; . B.v G. Fores Gan: ;; Calendar of Prizes By L eonard Casper FEATURES BOOK REVIEW Filipino Resurgence Through Cultur