Panorama Vol. XII, No.12 (December 1960)

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Title: Panorama Vol. XII, No.12 (December 1960)
Issue Date: Vol. XII, No.12 (December 1960)
Year: 1960
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extracted text: ■ DECEMBER 1960 75 Centavos CONTENTS Articles: Fireflies .................. ............................................................. How Universities Can Help Develop Southeast Asia ........... Vicente G. Sinco Leprosy Is Going................................................................ Hokkaido’s Ainus .......................................................... Is the Death Penalty Necessary? ... Giles Playfair The Challenge of National Growth to the Filipino Writer.......................Edilberto K. Tiempo “Permalife”.......................................................................... An American Storyteller ................................................ Sunshine and Darkness in South Africa ................ Chinese “Amahs” ................................................................ Holiday for Snakes ......................................................... The Lens: A Great Invention .... Jerome S. Meyer Luleaa: A Town That Defies Darkness..................... 2 3 11 14 17 28 35 62 75 83 84 85 Carol Coghill 87 A Model Elevator......... •............................... 91 Space Probe of Jupiter.................................................... 92 Drama: Man In the Moon Alejandrino G. Hufana 36 Regular Features: Book Review ,— Stanford Short Stories, 1960— .. Leonard Casper 79 Literary Personality—LXXI—SE. Morison: History Was There................................................... 81 PANORAMA is published monthly by the Community Publishers, Inc., Inverness St., Sta. Ana, Manila, Philippines Editor: Alejandrino G. Hufana Foreign contributing editor-. LEONARD CASPER Art director: NARCISO RODRIGUEZ Business Manager: MRS. C. A. Maramag Subscription rates: In the Philippines, one year P8.50; two years P16.00. Foreign subscription: one year $6.00 U.S.; two years $11.00 U.S. Single copy 75 centavos. Zell your friends about the Panorama, the Philippines’ most versatile, most significant magazine today. dive them a year’s subscription — NOW! they will appreciate it. Subscription Form ...................1 year for P8.50 ................. 2 years for P16.00 ................. Foreign subscription: one year $6.00 U.S. Warne .......................................................................................... . Street ........................................................................................................ City or Town .................................. Province .................................. Enclosed is a check/money order for the amount specified above. Please address all checks or money orders in favor of: COMMUNITY PUBLISHERS. INC. Inverness St., Sta. Ana, Manila, Philippines FIREFLIES From a distance you see a tree all lighted up at night and you wonder whether somebody has set it afire. You expect the flames to leap to the surrounding trees and bushes but as you approach it you note that the tree is not on fire. Fireflies are flitting about the tree. Like a string of tiny electric bulbs wound all around the tree, they light up the tree. Fireflies are not flies but beetles. They belong to the order Coleoptera. The adult fireflies are about half an inch long and are dull colored. Their bodies are softer than the other beetles. The wingless females and the larvae are called “glow worms”. Their luminescence which is accompanied by al most no heat is one of the marvels of nature. They have a row of luminous spots on several segments of the body which flash light intermittently. These enable them to find their mates even in the dark. Fireflies have mouth parts adapted for sucking juices from plants and small insects. They feed voraciously on plant lice. Larvae are usually found in wet decaying logs feeding on vegetable matter. 2 Panorama VOL. XII____________ MANILA. PHILIPPINES______________ No. 12 How Can Helf Ttivdof SouikM By Vicente G. Sinco President University of the Philippines On AN OCCASION such as this it seems to me timely and appropriate to ask ourselves in what way a university, such as yours and mine, may be of maximum use and service to our common region of the Southeast Asian communities. To be able to suggest any kind of answer to this question, an answer that may have any me rit and validity, we should not proceed without first recalling the basic nature and the speci fic purpose of a university. We should ever remind ourselves that a true university is not a social club, nor a political par ty, nor a business organization, nor a center for sectarian or ra cial propaganda. It is primarily an intellectual center, a commu nity of men and women seeking knowledge through the instru mentalities and processes of art, philosophy, and science. It pursues its career not to satisfy mere idle curiosity, nor to fill the empty hours of those who can afford to lead a life of ease and luxury, but rather to devel op the mind and the spirit of man so that he may under stand himself and his environ ment, improve his capacity to meet the problems of life, and make himself capable of render ing useful service to his commu nity and to human race. Thus we come to a university to pre pare ourselves for service; for the ultimate purpose of a uni versity is human service. Any departure from that purpose is a corruption of the idea of a university. The universities in Southeast Asia are mostly young institu tions when we place them side by side with the centers of high er learning in Europe. Perhaps the oldest university in this re gion of ours is the University of Santo Tomas in Manila which was founded by Catholic priests of the Dominican Order in the year 1611. But since the latter part of the last century and dur ing the present century other universities have been estab lished in different countries in Southeast Asia and their in fluence upon the education of the people has been steadily in creasing. The benefits they con fer on the individual and the group have been varied in di rection, quality, and extent The effectiveness of their perform ance and their academic stand ards doubtless account for such variations. But in addition to these causes, there are other factors affecting their program and work over which they could exercise but slight control. These factors proceed from the social, economic and political atmosphere of the nation where each one of these universities is situated. This is naturally an unavoidable condition because the school and the university alone and by themselves do not exactly constitute an all-power ful agency that can determine the social temper and mold the national character. Nevertheless, education is a major social force. To a certain extent it has the capacity to de velop characteristics and traits which a nation particularly and passionately desires. Therefore the social preferences and the established character of a peo ple give color and shape to its. nature, aim, and direction. A democratic society is likely to produce a system of education that gives emphasis on the de velopment of individual initia tive and individual freedom. An aristocratic society may be ex pected to encourage a system of higher education designed to produce a ruling class. A high ly materialistic society pro motes an educational system directed towards the enhance ment of purely economic ends, technical efficiency and physic al strength. The program of higher educa tion and the mission of a uni versity to advance the frontiers of learning impose on the uni versity the responsibility of keeping the educational system of the country ever dynamic and ever watchful of new and progressive ideas and ever ready 4 Panorama to try to assimilate, and to dis seminate them. The successful accomplishment of this task re quires a condition in which the free play of the university, on the one hand, and the social or ganization as well as the politi cal system, on the other, is not only made possible but is ac tually encouraged as interacting forces. We are fortunate... that we live in an age of expansion of democratic ideas, a growing ap preciation of democratic prac tices, and a gradual understand ing of the basic advantages of a democratic social and political system. It is true that this sys tem today is far from being Uto pian. It is likewise true that actual democratic procedures in the political field are still in their early stages in many coun tries in Asia and Africa today were they are often disregard ed as they clash with ancient tribal practices or adverse tra ditional customs. One significant thing, however, cannot escape our attention, and that is the growing sentiment against any attempt to throw a monkey wrench on the gear wheels of the machinery of democracy even in the newly independent nations that have arisen in the last few years. This sentiment of disapproval against any ac tion that seeks to thwart or to suppress democratic practices is observable even in the older independent nations where the spirit of authorita rianism and reaction now and then gains adherence from ambitious elements aspiring for special privileges and undue advantages. The role of a mo dern university is to develop insistently those ideas which encourage the creation of social conditions conducive to a deep understanding of the values of democracy. This is the challenge to the universities in Southeast Asia. With this statement, it is not meant that European and Am erican universities cannot con tribute much towards this end for this part of the world. They have done so and are still doing it. In many ways learn ing and education are univer sal in their character and Western universities have been centers of democratic ideas. /^UT EVERY COUNTRY and every region have their special problems, conditions, and needs arising from particu lar features of their histories, their customs, their traditions, their social outlook, and their ways of living. For these rea sons, every university in South east Asia should feel as its special obligation to perform those distinctive services which no university in any other part of the world with a different social environment and directly serving peoples with distinct December 1960 5 needs and idiosyncracies may be able to perform with a large measure of interest, enthusiasm, and familiarity. These considerations should convince us of the error or the inadequacy of indiscriminately importing the educational prac tices of foreign countries in their entirety. We should real ize the nearsightedness of a policy that merely copies the pattern of Western educational systems and their specific met hods and procedures. The wiser policy to follow, in my opinion, is to adjust the pattern, the process, and the practice of our universities to the distinctive character of each of the coun tries in Southeast Asia, taking into account our own conditions and our immediate need for mutual understanding and co operation. An imitation of Harvard in the Ryukyhs, of Columbia in the Philippines, of Sorbonne in Vietnam, of Cambridge in Ma laya, of Oxford in Thailand, of Leyden in Indonesia might im press thoughtless people and superficial scholars who think of universities not in terms of agencies for the development of their geographical environ ment and the cultivation of the national ethos but as institu tions isolated from the society in which they are physically located. But a university is in capable of rendering usefulness to the nation if it stands apart, psychologically, spiritually, and socially, as an ivory tower. The learning a university pursues, the scientific ideas it produces, the researches it undertakes must be useful to the place and the people where it is located, otherwise the university will be a mere luxury or a costly toy. It should be able to draw from the cultural assets of the na tion, to develop them to the highest degree of excellence, and to offer them as its dis tinctive contribution for the en richment of human knowledge. In expressing these views, it is not suggested that a univer sity in Southeast Asia should take pains to promote the spirit of ultranationalism. A univer sity never can be an ultra-na tionalist; for if it works toward that end it is bound to die as a university. It will be no more than a center of bigotry, en couraging pettiness of spirit, promoting emotional prejudices, and working against the very purpose and aim of a higher institution of learning. On the other hand, a univer sity in this part of the world cannot afford to neglect the study of the great philosophical thoughts of China, India, and other Asian countries while studying the basic ideas of the West. It cannot afford to dis regard the need for a deeper acquaintance with the lang 6 Panorama uages, the histories, the cultures of the countries in Southeast Asia and other parts of Asia. Such omission is not only wrong but in a sense culturally perfidious. But again, in our desire to develop what is dis tinctively our own culture, it would be equally wrong to turn our minds away from the great ideas of the advanced societies of the world. That would be fatal. Most of Southeast Asia lies in what has been described as the underdeveloped areas of the world. The idea of an un derdeveloped country is that of a land that has not exper ienced a satisfactory measure of industrial development and an advanced system of agricul ture; and its people do not en joy a satisfactory standard of living. In a general way, an underdeveloped country is a materially poor country, eco nomically backward, and educa tionally unprogressiv.e. These are the factors tnat economic thinkers and Western leaders consider as signs and charac teristics of underdevelopment. Perhaps we might question the use of some of these criteria for classifying a country as un derdeveloped. At any rate, the degree of development which a people should attain is not easy to define in absolute terms. For each nation has its condi tions by which to determine the attainment of the good life, the life of peace, happiness, material welfare, and spiritual satisfaction. It is the university of the country that should iden tify the proper standards of development and should devote its energies to helping the peo ple attain the proper conditions of progress and general well being. '-7’here is no institution bet ter than the university to develop men and women capa ble of understanding the use of science and technology in the solution of the agricultural, tfie industrial, and other economic problems of the country. Pov erty is a normal condition in many places in Southeast Asia. Nowhere is the statement that the poor is always with us more applicable than among peoples in this part of the world. This is a serious problem among us. It is not merely economic in its effects but also social and political. To abolish poverty altogether is well-nigh impos sible. Its causes are not con fined to economic and social conditions but are also trace able to personal and individual habits and conditions. But it is certainly within the realm of possibility to abolish a general condition of abject poverty. Mass unemployment, especially the involuntary kind, is primar ily a problem that addresses itself to social leadership, ecoDecember I960 7 norpic enterprise and political statemanship. But these instru ments of amelioration could acquire a great degree of effec tiveness with the aid of the education which universities provide. The application of the physical and biological sciences in such activities as agriculture, fishing, forestry, manufacturing is rendered highly feasible through experiments and re searches in the laboratory and workshops of the university. The development of trained craftsmen and technicians in polytechnic schools is not easy of attainment without the as sistance of the university in the educational preparation of men and women who are to handle or manage the classrooms and students of these institutions. For let us remember that the skills and techniques required for an efficient operation of farms, fisheries, and factories have to change and improve if economic development is to continue meeting the increasing needs of fast growing popula tions. The university has to provide the kind of men and women that could help turn out workers capable of meeting these changes. For it is not enough for a country to have highly qualified engineers and top-level scientists. An extens i v e economic development cannot take place without skilled craftsmen and ordinary technicians. The countries in Southeast Asia are in great need of these classes of workers. Their vast natural resources on land and at sea will remain greatly undeveloped unless well-trained workers are made available for their proper ex ploitation. Capital investments, whether local or foreign, will not be capable of solving the problems of development with out numerous trained hands under the supervision and man agement of superior adminis trators. But we cannot even begin to. plan for economic development, for the abolition of poverty, for the raising of our standards of living if the problem of peace and order in our commu nities does not receive cons tant attention from those en trusted to perform this duty. This is principally a problem of government. Disregarding for the moment the serious troubles and disorders arising from foreign sources, the main tenance of internal peace with in each country in Southeast Asia should naturally be the concern of the police. But ex perience shows that the solution that the police or other armed forces usually provide is no more than a temporary expe dient, uncertain in its effects and doubtful in its efficacy. A more lasting stability and great er assurances of security to life Panorama and property could be expected only through the creation of a preponderant majority of edu cated persons in every commu nity who understand not only their individual rights but also their personal and social obliga tions as citizens of a free na tion. Thus, it is increasingly real ized by governments all over the world, governments led by men and women who are moved by a deep sense of responsibi lity, that the tranquility of the nation can be better safeguard ed through the inculcation of civic education among the masses and through the ad vancement of higher education of those who hope to be their leaders. No wonder then that in several countries today, countries that cannot be con sidered underdeveloped in any sense of the word, public funds spent for education are cons tantly being increased to figures exceeding even those set aside for military defenses. The leaders in Southeast Asia would be doing work of high states manship if they follow the sam ples set by these countries giv ing the highest priority to pub lic investments for education. HOPE THAT this brief des cription of the problems common to Southeast Asia will give us an idea of the role that the universities in this region are expected to play if they should faithfully perform their fundamental obligation of serv ing the individual and society in this part of the world. They might be recreant to their duty if they leave to European and American universities the sole task of preparing men and wo men for the various fields of activity in these areas. They have to assume the responsibi lity of producing the type of scholars, scientists, and techni cians that can best understand the difficulties of the problems pecu :ar to this region. To make ’hemselves equal to this impoi^ant assignment, our high er institutions of learning should improve their perform ance and raise their educational standards to the highest possi ble degree. This is the first duty of every university if it is to win the respect of the aca demic and the scientific world and if it is to attract to its halls the most highly qualified and intellectually gifted men and women in the different Southeast Asian countries. For purpose of giving the proper culture and education better suited to their environment, our universities should do what is necessary for keeping our fu ture workers and leaders riglit here. From the point of view of financial and economic con siderations, no country in Southeast Asia is in a position December 1960 9 to support the number of men and women for higher training abroad. But the work of each univer sity in this respect could be enhanced and rendered more effective by cooperation with other universities. There are different ways by which this could be accomplished. One is through the establishment of a strong, active, and compact association of colleges and uni versities in the different coun tries in Southeast Asia, an as sociation with energetic mem bers moved by a vision of a progressive and self-reliant Southeast Asian community. It should plan a program of cons tant and regular contacts with one another through regional bilateral conferences. It should provide a system of exchanges of visiting professors and ad vanced or graduate students. It should have a common publica tion to which scholars and scientists of the different univ ersities should contribute the product of their studies and re searches. It should provide for an exchange of publications is sued by the different universi ties and of books and pamph lets written by their respective professors. In addition to the association of colleges and uni versities, mutual cooperation and more effective understand ing could be achieved by the establishment and maintenance of one or more associations of individual scholars, scientists, and leaders of the different countries of Southeast Asia. Through these different methods and devices, we may yet hope for the development of a strong and well-knit com munity of the countries in this particular region of the world that can be instrumental in raising the standards of living, in strengthening the cause of democracy and freedom, and in promoting peace and prosperity through education. ¥ ¥ ¥ Empirical Guesses “He drove straight to his goal,” said the politi cal orator. “He looked neither to the right nor to the left, but pressed forward, moved by a definite purpose. Neither friend nor foe could delay him nor turn him from his course. All who crossed his path did so at their own peril. What would you call such a man?” “A truck driver,” shouted someone from the audience 10 Panorama Go away, go away! Leprosy Is Going Fur years ago, 12 men bearing the old stigma of leprosy began a new life in an isolated valley in the Philippines. Led by a young American missionary, they faced a chal lenging future: to prove that former leprosy victims can sup port themselves and continue to live as members of normal, happy families. Many other former patients who had tried to establish homes in this wilderness had given up the attempt. Plagued by drought and then flooded by rain, frustrated by their in experience and the outside world’s seeming indifference, those first settlers finally re turned to a life dependent on the sanitarium colony 17 kilo meters away. The discouraging memory of this defeat had made it diffi cult for the missionary—Harold Baar—to recruit new volunteer settlers from cured or “nega tive” cases at the sanitarium. But Dr. Casimiro B. Lara, who was then chief of the sani tarium, fully supported Baar. For he knew after many years of service how important it was to restore former patients to their normal place in society. Twelve men eventually ag reed to attempt the new mis sion. They swore to themselves that they would succeed. Wisely, they first organized themselves into an executive body. They called this the “Culion Agricultural Laboratory Farm (CALF) Board.” They named Baar their pro ject coordinator. A Catholic priest who offered his garden as an experimental plot agreed to become their adviser. From dawn to evening, the men dedicated themselves to the backbreaking tasks before them. They cut and cleared a trail through the choking thickets so as to allow the first jeep to reach their settlement. Not long afterwards, the national December 1960 11 Government took steps to as sist in the project’s success. Meanwhile, with help and advice from the missionaries, the volunteers tested varieties of seeds on the soil. They dis covered which plants would grow and multiply. They learned to rotate crops and to grow only those suited to the changing dry and rainy seasons. And they kept the rough road open and cleared of landslides caused by seasonal downpours. As months passed and the men labored, help started to arrive. Asia Foundation donat ed vegetable seeds from its Seeds for Democracy program. The Cooperative for Am erican Relief Everywhere (CARE) sent garden and car penters’ tools. And a farm machine manufacturer willing ly donated a plow and a har row to new settlers as they arrived. In the first year, the men selected and surveyed a 250hectare area in the valley. They laid it out into farm plots of four hectares each. P a t a g Village today has grown into a community of 19 families. It is rapidly building itself to become part of the political and economic life of the Philippine Republic. The villagers have elected a Barrio Lieutenant (village head) who shares his authority with two policemen. Patag’s community spirit is kept alive by many self-help projects. The villagers “pay” taxes one day a week by do nating their labor for the cons truction of a park or play ground, the repair of a road or some other civic undertaking. The men also are busy pro ducing hollow blocks of rammed soil mixed with cement. Two blockmaking machines recently donated by CARE can produce as many as 400 blocks a day. Two teams of five men each operate the machines with in creasing skill as the days pass. With some of the blocks the men have produced, the com munity already has constructed a generator shed and a perma nent piggery. The blockmakers also have entered into a con tract with sanitarium officials to build a two-story recreation building for the colony. Baar and his associates fore see other industries thriving at Patag before long. They point to shell craft, basketry, leather craft, fishing and weaving as “promising potentials.” So far, the community already has started a modiste and tailor shop, barbershop and a general store. Life in Patag is exemplified by the family of Hipolito Miano —one of the 12 volunteers who set out to build the settlement four years ago. 12 Panorama Hipolito’s wife was among the first women to volunteer joining the new pioneers at Patag. Soon after her arrival, the Mianos welcomed a son— the first to be born in the com munity. The newcomer seemed a good omen for the family’s future. A working carabao, along with Leghorn hens and a Lan caster rooster, were “advanced” by the village board so that the family could get a good start in farm life. As Hipolito’s farm began to produce, he started paying ins tallments for the carabao which he now owns in full. He re placed the original poultry stock with one-month-old chicks. He began selling part of the farm produce to people in the outlying colony. Meanwhile, the Government’s Magsaysay Cattle Dispersal program reached out to Patag. And today, the Mianos proud ly own a sturdy young heifer. Hipolito’s day begins early. Leaving his wife and four children in his palm-and-bamboo house, he heads for his four-hectare rice plantation. He plows and harrows his fields or weeds the paddy and vege table beds. Once in a while, he cultivates his banana and pineapple plants. His wife helps with the farm chores. She also sews for the neighborhood to help increase her family’s income. The Mianos go to church on Wednesdays and Sundays in the village chapel. They spend some of their leisure watching or playing games in the com munity playground or park. A rural health team visits Patag Village each week. It gives doses of “DDS”—the mi racle drug Sulphone—to help safeguard the villagers from ac quiring leprosy over again. Except during the rice plant ing and harvesting seasons, Hipolito gives “bayani”—cooper ative labor—for community pro jects every Friday of the week. Today, he proudly wears a Special Policeman’s badge. He says that it reminds him cons tantly that although his commu nity’s “first fight” has been won, “we must continue to be indus trious and responsible citizens.” * * * December 1960 13 A case of survival Hokkaido’s Ainus rE LIGHT-SKINNED, hirsute Ainus, fast-disappearing decendants of Japan’s earliest known settlers, are to experience some of the ameni ties of modern living that few of them have known. Such is the plan of the Hok kaido prefectural government, which has charge of the few remaining Ainus. The Ainus, whose origin is indefinite, once were the sole occupants of this country. The approximately 16,000 who are left live in a few settlements on Japan’s northermost main island. Once such group of about 1,000 dwellers in Shiraoi, a vil lage whose name in the Ainu language means “Place of Many Horseflies.” The Hokkaido authorities concerned with Ainu affairs are putting the finishing touches on a five-year program to im prove the lot of this myster ious, dying race. With an ex penditure of 144,000,000 yen (about $400,000) the prefec tural government hopes even tually to bring all the Ainus out of their ramshackel villages and settle them in more com fortable housing with electri city, and communal cooking and bathing places. These fa cilities are enjoyed by few Ai nus today, although they are available to virtually all the 92,000,000 Japanese, whose warlike ancestors drove the Ai nus north. Now it is the Japanese offi cial problem to make the Ai nus happy, and keep them that way. Giichi Asari, the Japanese Mayor of Shiraoi, a town that contains one of the largest Ai nus communities, says that the Ainus generally have little lik ing for the settled, industrious life of modern Japan. At the same time, there is little chance of deriving a satis factory livelihood, by Jap anese standards, from the tra ditional Ainu occupations of hunting and fishing. Formerly confined to reservations, the Ai nus are discouraged from pur suing their old nomadic way of 14 Panorama life, even if it were practicable in a country where nearly all the land is occupied and indus tries are developing fast. Mayor Asari said about 1,000 Ainus of Shiraoi live a typically casual existence. The men will work three days at fishing or cutting firewood, for which they earn about 1,100 yen (about $3). This will keep them in comfortable idleness, satisfactorily lubricated with sake (rice wine) for the next five days, the Mayor said. Af ter the money is gone, he add ed, they report for work again for two or three days. Come live well by their own standards, with even less exertion. An example is Tomoramu, the hereditary chief of the Shiraoi Ainu clan. The 53-year-old, heavily bearded patriarch and his wife, whose lips have been deeply outlined in the blue tattooing that once was a universal fashion among Ainu women, earn their living by posing for tourists’ cameras and showing their traditional Ainu house. The one-room thatch house has a single door and window and an altar to the Ainus’ primtive deities. The Ainus religion is animistic, as cribing souls not only to men, but also to animals and inani mate objects. The efforts of the United States occupation authorities on Hokkaido to improve the Ainus’ lot has shown few lasting re sults, Mayor Asari declared. The Ainus enjoy the equal vot ing and other civic rights de creed by the occupation forces and still honored for all Japan ese citizens, but the benefits of the land redistribution order ed by the United States mili tary regime failed to interest many of these non-agricultural people, the Mayor said. The land reforms under the occupation gave the Ainu fami lies of Shiraoi with about 1,800 acres, he said, but nearly all of it now lies abandoned. At the same time, according to Gov ernment records, slightly more than half of the dwindling Ainu community depends partly up on the Government dole for support. Many younger Ainus have drifted away from the home settlements to work in Tokyo or elsewhere. These often mar ry non-Ainu girls and are ra pidly being absorbed into the Japanese population. But the older folk, Mayor Asari said, remain simple, uneducated, and apparently unable to compre hend modem principles, such as the value of property ow nership and regular work. December 1960 15 While their race is rapidly disappearing, these anachronis tic people live out their days as either feckless casual workers or as living museum pieces for the education of tourists. It is hoped by Hokkaido officials that the prospective five-year uplift program will bring the remaining Ainus into closer attunement with the bustling life of the new Japan that is pass ing them by. * * * Carbon Materials for Missiles Diamonds, apart from being a girl’s best friend, are among the hardest things known and find many industrial uses. They are a form of carbon. Graphite, another form of carbon, also finds many uses in ato mic reactors, in lubricants, and in pencils. Now another form, pyrographite, has been deve’oned by the Raytheon Company sponsored by the Navy Bureau of Ordnance, as a possible answer to some of the problems in missile construction. The material, a high purity form of graphite, withstands temperatures up to 6700 degree Fahren heit higher than any other known element, and re mains strong, chemically inactive and impervious to gases. The secret of its great heat stability is that heat 'is conducted along its surface 500 times better than through it, thus preventing any excessive build-up of heat. * 16 Panorama Are you joking? Is the Death Penalty Necessary? by Giles Playfair In June of 1955, a blonde London model, named Mrs. Ruth Ellis, was hanged for shooting and killing her faith less lover. The execution caused considerable criticism of British justice even in countries which still retained capital pu nishment for murder, one Paris newspaper remarking editorial ly that it symbolized “a pitiless legal system which, alone in the world, refuses to recognize the human sentiments of life.” As a matter of fact, the hang ing of women murderers in Bri tain had become much more ex ceptional than usual. Although both English and Scottish law made the death sentence man datory for any kind of murder — in other words, left the trial judge with no choice but to im pose it — the Home Secretary had by virtue of the royal pre rogative of mercy, a power of reprieve. Of late years this power had been exercised more and more liberally, with the re sult that a male murderer’s chances of escaping the rope were now better than even and a female murderer’s a good deal better than that. Quite possibly Mrs. Ellis was ill-served by all the clamorous publicity that her case aroused, for this may have decided the then Home Secretary that if he spared her he would appear to be yielding to pressure and to be betraying the principle of ca pital punishment — a principle to which his government was staunchly committed. On the other hand, her execution pro vided so-called abolitionists with an opportunity to launch a new campaign to o u t - law the death penalty for mur Dfcember 1960 17 der, which except for treason was the only remaining capital offense in Britain. The new campaign was in tensively conducted and muster ed very influential support in and out of Parliament. But all it won in the end was a prom ised reduction in the number of possible executions and in the already low number of likely ones. This was brought about by a half-baked piece of gov ernment-sponsored legislation called the Homicide Act, which became law last March and which, while it reaffirmed the necessity of retaining the power to hang, in the interests of law and order, enunciated the bizar re proposition that henceforth only some types of murder (for example, murder by shootings as opposed to murder by any other means) need be considered a sufficient threat to law and or der to be called capital! Such an outcome was for two reasons illogical. In the first place, every other European country, save France and Spain, had long since renounced the death penalty for murder yvithout any consequent undermin ing of public safety. Secondly, the allowed penalty in Britain was clear indication of a declin ing faith on the part of succes sive governments in both the moral rightness of capital pu nishment and its practical use fulness. One must conclude,, there fore, that however close the Bri tish people may be led to aban doning the death penalty in practice, they are, as a whole, peculiarly resistant to abolish ing it in principle. But whatever may be true of Britain in this respect is true of nearly all English-speaking countries, and particularly of America, where devotion to the principle of capital punishment seems more firmly rooted today than it was a couple of genera tions ago. Back in 1917, aboli tionists had excited a nation wide interest in their cause and appeared on the verge of win ning a nation-wide victory. Twelve states had already pass ed abolition acts, and in several other states legislation to out law the death penalty was pend ing and had been promised pas sage. But with America’s entry into the First World War, and the concomitant atmosphere of insecurity, a sudden retreat from abolition began, which has yet to be halted. In those states where legisla tion to outlaw capital punish ment had been introduced, the bills, almost immediately, were either dropped or defeated. Since then six of the twelve for merly abolition states have res tored the death penalty, while under federal law capital of fenses which, numbered four in 1917, now number nine, three 18 Panorama of the additions — peacetime es pionage, dope-peddling to mi nors, and causing death through sabotage of a commercial ve hicle — having been made in the last three years. By con trast with the position in 1917, the abolitionist cause today, so far as the country as a whole is concerned, seems almost dead. Indeed, theoretically, America now makes a wider use of the death penalty than any other civilized nation in the world. Throughout its jurisdiction, state and federal, some twenty different capital offenses remain on the statute books, including such archaic-sounding ones as train-wrecking. Though the ma jority of these cannot be fairly called more than capital in name, executions do in fact take place for other crimes besides homicide and treason. Thus in 1953 the Rosenbergs were exec uted for wartime espionage on behalf of an ally, another couple were executed for kidnaping, and in the South six Negroes and one white man were execut. ed for rape. A year later, a Negro was executed in the South for armed robbery. There have been three comparatively recent executions in California for aggravated assault, and this year there has been an execu tion, again in the South, for burglary. yHE American people do not have to look as far as Eu rope for evidence of the practi cal needlessness of the death pe nalty. That evidence exists, and perhaps even more impressively, within their own borders. A sta tistical comparison has been made over five yearly periods between contiguous abolition states and states that retain ca pital punishment. In these states, where social conditions are undeniably similar, the ho micide rate is about equal and is subject to almost identical fluctuations. For instance, the homicide rate per 100,000 of the population between 1931 and 1935 was 5.0 in the abolition state of Michigan and 6.2 in the retention state of Indiana; between 1936 and 1940 it was 3.6 in Michigan and 4.3 in In diana; and between 1941 and 1946 it was 3.4 in Michigan and 3.2 in Indiana. Moreover, while throughout the country the power to impose the death penalty has been but tressed and widened during the past forty years, the actual ex ercise of that power has, just as in Britain, become steadily less likely. Between 1930 and 1950, the average number of annual executions under civil state and federal authority stood at 143. That number has dropped since to 79, and according to present indications will continue to drop. While the great majority 19 of executions that do take place are for first-degree murder — virtually all of them outside of the South — statistics show that at present the chances against a person convicted of intentional homicide ever entering the death chamber are a hundred to one. Several states which remain obstinately loyal to capital pu nishment in principle have in practice, apparently, ceased to use it at all. There have been no executions in Massachusetts, for example, since 1947. And South Dakota, which, though once an abolition state, went to the trouble of restoring the deatn penalty in 1939 for three offenses — murder, killing in a duel, and harming a kidnaped person — has conducted only one execution since then. Nor, though the pardoning power exists in American juris dictions, as it does in Britain, is this solely or even mainly res ponsible for the dwindling num ber of executions. By contrast with the position in Britain, the imposition of the death sentence in America is now largely left to the discretion either of a judge or a jury, and this discre tion is being less and less used. Only in Vermont and the Dis trict of Columbia is the death penalty for first-degree murder mandatory. For rape, and which accounts for the second largest number of executions, it is man datory only in Louisiana. Un der federal law it is not manda tory for any offense — not even for treason, which is generally conceded to be the most heinous of all crimes and is still punish able by death in every Eu ropean country save Western Germany. This increasingly bashful use of the death penalty makes non sense of the two main argu ments for retaining it: namely, that it is a necessary form of ret ribution — the only adequate means of expressing society’s condemnation of a particular crime—and a necessary deter rent against this same crime. Clearly, if first-degree murder is legally defined and some firstdegree murders are punished by death and others are not, so ciety is using the death penalty to express its condemnation of selected first-degree murderers rather than of first-degree mur der as such. Hence the dividing line between retribution and vengeance, always a thin one, disappears; and an objective ap praisal of such executions as do still take place, alike in Britain and America, strongly suggests that they are mostly vengeful in character. Thus it would be hard to deny, judging from the statistics, that the death penal ty for rape in the southern Am erican states exists essentially as a discriminatory weapon against Negroes. The most flagrant ad mission of this occurred in 1915 20 Panorama As for deterrence, any parent should know the absurdity of threatening a punishment and then not carrying it out. Indeed, by definition, the deterrent ef fectiveness of a penalty 4ePends on the extent to which it is cer tain to be imposed, and the per petrators of capital offenses must be well aware by this time that even if they are apprehend ed the death sentence is far from certain to follow. But this is not the only rea son why capital punishment, if it ever was a truly effective de terrent, is now plainly no longer so. By definition again, the more fearful, the penal ty, the greater its deter rent value must be. But capital punishment is not such a fear ful thing as theoretically it could still be, and as undoub tedly it once was. Gone are the days of preliminary torture, boiling in oil, burning at the stake, burying alive, and so forth. The whole tendency dur ing the past fifty years and more has been to make the death penalty as “humane” as possible. Executions are now held in private rather than in public; in America, though this is not true of Britain, the bodies of executed people are returned to their relatives for burial in consecrated ground. The twen ty-six American states that have substituted electrocution for hanging, and the eight that have substituted lethal gas, have done so in the belief that these are less, not more, fearful ways of dying. And the British have kept hanging as their method of execution only because they have yet to be persuaded that a practicable alternative method exists that would cause the vic tim less suffering or provide more certainty of instantaneous death. T^ie fact is that capital pun ishment belongs historical ly to a penal system based on violence of an unspeakably bru tal kind; and the morality which allowed this system to operate has for some two hund red years been in retreat before the advance of humanitarian and scientific influences. Hence there is no wonder that the death penalty should be falling into disuse. It was already an anachronism during the first half of the nineteenth century when, initially in America and later in Europe, the system of assaulting the bodies of crimi nals was replaced, broadly speaking, by the system of as saulting their minds, through so litary confinement in penitentia ries. Today, no civilized society would permit capital punish ment to be practiced in accord ance with the penal theory that fathered it. Admittedly, it can still be effectively employed, and is unfortunately from time to time in authoritarian coun December i960 21 tries, for preventive purposes — as a means of wholesale politi cal suppression. But otherwise, regardless of whether or not it is morally justifiable, there no longer seems to be any logical point in its retention. One may wonder, then, whether it remains an issue of any real importance. Couldn’t it be safely left to disappear on its own? Orthodox abolitionists would answer no to this question, be cause if and when the annual number of executions falls to one, that, from their point of view, will still be one too many. Further, they could fairly argue that so long as the power to im pose the death penalty exists in principle, the chance and the danger persist that, under excep tional circumstances, it will be wielded in practice. This was shown at the end of the last war when the traditionally abolition ist Dutch, Norwegians, and Danes executed native traitors. But there is another, and per haps more compelling, reason why the issue cannot be disre garded. Though capital punish ment was. a contradiction to the chosen methods of nineteenth century penology, which had re volted against violence, that penology still accepted the ne cessity of exacting retribution from criminals. Present-day pe nology, by contrast, puts its em phasis not on retribution, nor even on deterrence, but on re habilitation. It combats crime by such reformative and essen tially non?punitive means as probation and psychiatric help in and out of prisons. It seeks eventually to replace the old concept of “the punishment to fit the crime” with a quite new notion: “the treatment to fit the criminal.” Clearly, the death pe nalty is wholly inimical to this aim, inasmuch as it serves the purely punitive ends of retribu tion and deterrence. Hence its retention is bound to produce a confusion of purpose in the whole penal picture, and to im pede those reforms which are necessary before a policy fully in accord with modern penolo gical theory can be put into ope ration. Regrettably, organized aboli tionists are apt to make little of this point. They are chiefly con cerned with the moral objection to punishment by killing. They give the impression of being nineteenth-century penal refor mers in the sense that to them abolition is an end in itself, and they are prepared to buy it with promissory notes of alternative punishments which, they claim, would prove no less retributive and no less deterrent. Thus in Massachusetts re cently, after an abnormal youth named Chapin had been sen tenced to die for a horrifying but motiveless murder, aboli 22 Panorama tionist spokesmen made no at tack on the idea of punishing rather than treating this boy whose mind was clearly dis ordered. They urged clemency on the curiously illiberal grounds that life imprisonment would be just as terrible a punishnment for him as death, but would avoid the affront to so cial decency which his execution would entail. And, indeed, from the point of view of the individual, natural life imprisonment as an alterna tive to capital punishment is apt to be little better than the substitution of a slow death for a quick one. In both cases the convicted man’s only way of putting paid to his debt to so ciety is through dying. But while natural life imprisonment is unknown in European aboli tion countries, where the out lawing of the death penalty clear the way for a curative ap proach to the problem of crime prevention, it is the alternative to execution that has been adopted in the American aboli tion states. In 1919, for example, a psy chopathic young hooligan, nam ed Joseph Redenbaugh, who had spent most of his brief life in and out of reformatories, was convicted of first-degree murder in the abolition state of Minne sota and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Prompted by an illusory hope of regaining his li berty, and through exploiting an innate intellectual curiousity, Redenbaugh accomplished a re markable job of self-reform or cure. He grew from an unmoral, undisciplined, semiliterate “tramp kid” into a peaceable, law-abiding, highly educated man. It is years now since both the prison and parole author ities in Minnesota were persuad ed that Redenbaugh, who has become learned in an immen sely varied number of subjects and the master of several trades, had conquered his crimi nal aggressiveness; years since they were persuaded that he would no longer prove a danger to society. Yet Redenbaugh re mains in prison. Short of spe cial legislative action, there ap pears to be little or no chance that he can ever be released. It is not surprising that this man, when he looks back on some thirty-eight years of what now seems wasted effort to equip himself for freedom, be lieves that from the individual’s point of view it is better that the death penalty should be re tained than replaced by natural life imprisonment. At this point, certainly, his punishment would appear to be as vengeful in character as any execution, and to make as much of a mockery of the new penology, which places rehabilitation before re tribution or deterrence. In short, the abolitionists are content. December 1960 23 ^His may go far to explain the olligocal reluctance to suggest life imprisonment as a suitable alternative to the death penalty, they are in effect offering society an alternative form of vengeance, without giv ing society and solid reasons for believing that it will be bet ter off if it accepts it. So long as vengeance is so cially permissible in certain circumstances, the average citizen, who does not happen to share the abolitionist’s emotion al objection to punishment by ropekilling, prefers to stick to the rope or the electric chair or whatever it may be as the most satisfying method of exacting vengeance which the law, in theory at least, allows. An unhappy illustration of this was provided a few years ago by the acts of William Ed ward Cook., On December 29, 1950, Cook began a hitchhike from El Paso, Texas, that turn ed into a homicidal rampage. At the end of the following week he had been in and out of Okla homa, Arkansas, New Mexico, and California, and had fled to Mexico City. He had shot and killed eight people, including a whole family. Murder on such a horrific scale inevitably excites a de mand for vengeance. Cook was in an unusually weak position to escape, or be protected from, the satisfaction of this demand. He was young man of twentytwo from a broken and under privileged home; he had no mo ney, friends, or influence; and he was grossly unbalanced men tally. He was tried, first of all, un der federal law at Oklahoma City. Presumably on the advice of his attorney, he pleaded guil ty; and one may doubt whether he could have supported an in sanity plea (his only possible defense) before a jury. The pro secution had mustered three psychiatrists to say that he wasn’t insane. Their view may have been correct according to the strict legal test, which de fines sanity as the ability to make an intellectual distinction between what is right and wrong (punishable by law). Though this test was originally pro pounded by the law lords of England more than a.hundred years ago, and is entirely out moded by medical knowledge, it remains in force in most Am erican jurisdictions. Nevertheless, the federal judge used his discretionary po wer to circumvent the death pe nalty. He had appointed four independent psychiatrists to ad vise him and, on the basis of their findings, he decided that though in law Cook might be responsible for his actions, in fact this derelict young man was “hopelessly insane.” According 24 Panorama ly, he refused to sentence him to death, as the prosecution urged, and instead sent him to prison for three hundred years. The decision prompted Cook’s own attorney to an almost lyri cal flight of appreciation. “The result proves conclusively,” he said, “that even the vicious, the homeless and the friendless can be dealt with compassionately and justly.” He spoke too soon. The state of California demanded Cook’s extradition, so that he could stand trial for the murder of one of his victims, whom he had killed within the jurisdiction of the California town of El Cen tro. This demand was backed by a bloodthirsty local newspa per and radio campaign to which the El Centro district at torney and sheriff were promi nent contributors. The United States attorney general op posed no objection. Cook was removed from Alcatraz, where he had been sent to serve his fe deral sentence, and was handed over to the California authori ties. By then he had been publicly called “Badman” and “Butcher.” Moreover, Colifornia’s purpose in extraditing him was openly and avowedly to do the job that the federal judge had shrunk from doing. The result of his trial, therefore, could hardly have been other than a foregone conclusion. Under California law there was an automatic ap peal and, one is tempted to sug gest, an equally automatic re jection of it. On December 12, 1952, William Edward Cook was gassed to death at San Quintin. Here was a flagrant example of the kind of legalized ven geance that the existence of the death penalty encourages — and one all the more remark able because it happened in Ca lifornia, which, with its wide use of such rehabilitative techniques as prisons without bars, has the reputation of being among the most penologically advanced jurisdictions in the world. Yet the federal disposition of the case was also an attempt to satisfy the public’s thirst for vengeance, and, looked at ob jectively, showed little of the justice and compassion that Cook’s attorney saw in it. True, the court’s hands may have been tied. But that does not al ter the fact that to punish a “hopelessly insane” man by im prisonment in Alcatraz, toughest of the federal maximum-securi ty institutions, is only in degree less barbarous than to execute him. The interests of society must, of course, be placed before the rights of the individual! and no judge would be doing his duty if he permitted men of Cook’s kind to remain at large. But so ciety’s interests would have December 1960 25 been adequately protected in this case if Cook had been com mitted to a custodial non-punitive institution until he died or was cured. Society’s interests would have teen far better pro tected if he had been committed before and not after he killed eight people. This last suggestion is some thing that could and would have happened under a genuinely cu rative penal system. Though murderers of Cook’s type are not legal madmen, they are often popularly referred to as “mad dogs” — a fact which makes their treatment under the criminal law as fully respon sible people all the more ironic. Murder is seldom the first crime they commit, and a competent diagnostician, given the chance, can usually detect their homici dal tendencies before these erupt. Certainly Cook’s murder ous rampage was predictable in general terms. He had a history of antisocial, psychopathic be havior dating back to his ninth year. At the Missouri interme diate reformatory, which he en tered when he was still in his early teens, he was classified as incorrigible. Consequently, he was transferred for closer custo dy to the state prison, where he was held until, on the expiration of his sentence, he had to be re leased. In other words, though his condition was diagnosed in a rough-and-ready sort of way, no attempt was made co treat it, and no power existed to prevent this obviously sick and danger ous boy from reentering the free world once he had paid his socalled debt to society. But nothing much better can be expected so long as an ar chaic legal test of sanity allows psychopaths and other grossly abnormal people to be held ful ly responsible to the law. The practice of punishing rather than treating these people, who are incapable of helping them selves, does worse than violate the right of the individual: it threatens public safety. For, as Cook’s case illustrates, while punishment has no beneficial ef fect on them, its infliction means that society cannot be permanenlty safeguarded from them unless and until they com mit a crime of such gravity that the legal sentence is life impri sonment or death. The law of criminal responsibility must be reformed if the problem that the abnormal offender repre sents is ever to be solved by curative means; and this is a re form, vital to modern penologi cal principles, that the death penlaty and other purely puni tive symbols are holding back. Yet there are examples to demonstrate how much society would have to gain from it and how little to lose — except the right to vengeance. Some two years before Cook was executed 26 Panorama in California, a number of psy chiatrists and other public-spi rited people had successfully launched an attack on the “right and wrong” test of sanity. Like Cook, Brettinger anti social history dating back to his childhood! like Cook, he had not responded to punishment; and like Cook he was a severe psychopath. Unlike Cook, he pleaded insanity. He was incapable, they said, of controlling his impulses; he had virtually no moral sense. One of these expert witnesses, the late and distinguished Ro bert Lindner, boldly predicted from the stand that if Brettin ger were not treated and con fined, if he were merely sent to prison for a determi nate term, he would even tually do murder. It was this prediction which in all probabi lity decided the jury, after much debate, to accept Brettinger’s innsanity plea. So in stead of being punished again, he was committed to a hospital for treatment over an indefinite period. Today, seven years la ter, he has been released on parole. He is holding down a good job, and shows every indi cation of being a useful mem ber of society. The moral of this story has, unfortunately, not been widely heeded, but it provides, surely one of the most persuasive mes sages for abolitionists to proclaim. Granted a reform in the law of criminal responsibility, murder can be prevented through cure — not every mur der, obviously enough, but a great many of the murders which, in practice, the death pe nalty is retained to punish. ¥ ¥ ¥ Cooking Adage Which reminds us of the newest cook book from deepest Africa, “How to Serve Your Fellow Man!’ December 1960 27 Hear ye! hear ye! The Challenge of to the Filip I don’t think there is any ■ poet, essayist, or fiction wri ter who wouldn’t be pleased to know his work could produce a laudable course of action. In this afternoon’s discussion I shall attempt to present the point of view of a fiction writer and that of a student of literature, parti cularly in the field of criticism, poetry, and drama. I post the following as my thesis: If a li terary piece must contain propa ganda, such as Mr. Soliongco seems to suggest, then the pro pagandistic content of the work must possess an internal rela tionship with the other artistic elements of the work; the writ er’s effort must follow the con cept of necessity, or inevitabili ty, as Aristotle calls it; it must have intrinsic rather than ex trinsic conviction. I shall discuss the idea of necessity, or inevit ability/ more fully later. |U ote that I used the conditional if — if a literary work must contain propaganda If literature were nothing but propaganda, then probably we shouldn’t be meeting in this conference. We should be at editorial desks, or standing be fore pulpits or on soap boxes, or in government bureaus of infor mation. The danger of any ex tremism in assuming the func tional category is the resulting demand for literature with an overemphasis on utilitarianism or moralism which sacrifices everything else that is in the work. In our own lifetime we have seen two movements that stres sed the utilitarian function of literature. First, there were the literary humanists, whose fol lowers are still among us. They insist that modern literature has generally lacked centrality be28 Panorama National Growth ino Writer By Edilberto K. Tiempo cause it ignores the ethical core of human experience. The hu manists demand that literature be the handmaiden of whatever they assume to be the Supreme Good. There is nothing funda mentally wrong with that de mand, but the literary human ists so accentuate the moral and ethical content of literature and what results is didacticism. The other movement, popular in the thirties, was the leftist movement which flowed from the Marxian concept of the class struggle and which required the conscious utilization of litera ture as an instrument of revolu tionary action. In what may be come a lopsided stress to make literature an instrument to pro mote national growth, we may sound like Michael Gold» the most famous representative of left-wing writers in America, when he said: “One of the basic tasks of the writer is to stimu late and encourage and help the growth of proletarian literature ... We must realize that only this literature can answer these intellectual abstractions into which petty bourgeois people fall.” I may mention another school of thinking whose persuasion may not be too distant from the values we may be considering at this moment. I refer to the American muckrakers near the turn of the nineteenth century. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, The Octopus by Frank Norris are examples of this school. The intention was to use fiction to rake up America’s muck in the last decades of the nineteenth century, hoping that in the pro cess of aeration its various ele ments would be bleached clean. My reason for mentioning these movements is that in de December 1960 29 fining the function and scope of the creative writer — or any artists of the fine arts, especially in relation to his milieu, any prescriptive injunctions are arti ficial and can choke the growth of any artistic enterprises. I ca tegorically affirm that our Phil ippine writers concern them selves with the local — the na tional — scene, but doing so is only the initial step in the wri ter’s creative effort — if he is still concerned with art at all. What he does with his material is his most challenging, his most important task. In dealing with issues and events, the writer must be aware of certain dan gers. One of them is this: If the writer aims to present a system of ideas as ideas, he will end up not as a poet or fiction writer but as a theoretician or a pam phleteer. There’s nothing wrong with being a theorist or a pamphlete'er; we need them in the Philippines. But a novelist and a pamphleteer belong to two different irreconcilable catego ries. Literature, we must recog nize, is not so directly concern ed with finding answers to social problems that will be imme diately embodied in action; and, furthermore, novelists and poets are not equipped to substitute for political or economic lead ers. Their concern is not so much to act as recorders of life and events, for that is the func tion of the historian or the so ciologist. The writer’s chief concern is that of interpreter, of generalizer. Literature common ly follows in the wake of life and events, and the writer’s task is to give them synthesis, to give order and coherence. It is only as he creates universal form and coherence that the writer unconsciously assumes the role of legislator and pro phet because he speaks the truth that is above the petty wranglings of his time; because he speaks for all mankind. The writer’s acceptance of utilitarianism as a primary con sideration amounts to an expli cit disbelief in the autonomy of the writer’s art. “Art,” said Goe the. “is but form-giving.” Art is giving form to an idea. In ex plaining that incisive definition John Addington Symonds says, “There is not a work of art with out a theme, without motive, without a subject. Th-? presen tation of that theme, that mo tive, that subject, is the final end of art. The art is good or bar according as the subject has been well or ill presented.” It would indeed be conven ient to point to Rizal as a fine example for the Philippine wri ter. I am bracketing Del Pilar, Mabini, and Lopez Jaena with Rizal because the first three were unadulterated propagand30 Panorama ists. Rizal stands above his con temporaries as a writer. Setting him as an example for our gen eration of writers I heartily en dorse. In the words of William Dean Howells, the eminent cri tic and novelist/ Noli Me Tangere was the greatest novel writ ten in any language within a hundred years of its publication. Noli Me Tangere is great not because it is propagandistic, but because it is a brilliantly exec uted novel. I say this in spite of the fact that the novel has the characteristic flaws of nine teenth century novelists like Thackeray and Dickens. Since we are writers, in evaluating Rizal as a novelist I should like to bring out the criteria by which novelist and critic James T. Farrell evaluates Dostoevski. First, are we going to slam into his ideology, disprove it, which is easy), and then throw him into the discard? This approach remarks Farrell, oversimplifies our extra-literary functionalism. Second, shall we say that Dos toevski was all right for his time, that for his time he was or was not reactionary# that in any case he was a revolutionary in his younger days, was exiled to Si beria, and once was even on the verge of execution before a fir ing squad? This method, Far rell says, would stow Dostoevs ki away in a museum, and attri bute to his novels only the in terest we find in any historical curiosity. Third, shall we recog nize that his characterizations are among the most profound and incisive to be met with in any novelist? Using this ap proach, which is a universal ap proach, Farrell concludes, we assimilate Dostoevski’s values in and for our time. If we use these criteria for Noli Me Tangere, Rizal would emerge as a triumphant figure in our literary history. The strongest proof of that asser tion is this: that Rizal’s dreams for reforms are past history, but Noli Me Tangere still lives in Sisa and Dona Consolacion and Padre Damaso and the philoso pher Tasio. Rizal lives in the indignation with which he pre sented the errors of his day. It is this persistence value that makes Noli Me Tangere a living novel. While still on Rizal, 1 should like to comment on the so-call ed “genuine Filipino tradition” which stems back, so responsible people among us say, to the tra dition of the propaganda move ment, to the days of Balagtas, Del Pilar, Rizal and Lopez Jaena. Let us not forget that Balag tas, Del Pilar, Rizal and Lopez Jaena were using the tools of Anglo-European culture and tradition. The outstanding writer of them all, Rizal# used the same satirical approaches as Juvenal, Voltaire, and Jonathan Swift, and commits the same December 1960 31 fictional flaws as Hugo and Thackeray. It‘s a fine thing to be nationalistic, to be truly Fi lipino, but we will be losing our perspective if we denied the continuity of the Anglo-Euiopean tradition of our forbears and denied the extension of this tra dition through the Americans, in spite of Longfellow. Ameri can literature itself is a contin uation — and until the middle of the nineteenth cer.tury a weak echo of English literature. English literature itself, one of the greatest conglomerations in history, had its roots in and its directions from Continental Europe. From Beowulf through Bede * through Chaucer, through the Renaissance and Shake speare, through Dryden and the Neo-classical period, and then through the nineteenth century, Continental influences continu ally poured in to help shape English literature. Literature is complex in origin and growth. Our own Filipino balitao — and we may not find a better illustration of an indigenous art from than the balitao — is a mongrel product. It traces its history back to Pro vence in the Middle Ages, and from there through Spam. As a Filipino writer I have not the least embarrassment or apology for riding down on the stream of Anglo-European-American tra dition, since this Anglo-Europ ean-American tradition itself is a mongrel breed. I am proud of of it and blessed with it. The Philippines has been in a uni que position in Far Eastern his tory; to deny the impact of ex ternal influences upon cur own culture is to deny the facts of our history, of which we should all be proud. The writer — the Filipino writer — must begin with an idea, with a theme, with a sub ject. But granting his theme, whether it be propagandistic or anything else, the writer’s chief interest is to make that theme siginificant, and this he can do only through his art. If he w’ere not concerned with his art, with his manner of communicating his subject, no matter how sig nificant the theme, he has no business being a writer. Thus the statement of Mr. Emilio Aguilar Cruz that at this confer ence the delegates are ‘appar ently apathetic to the problems of craft,” if this were true, w'ould be a wilful evasion of our res ponsibility as creative writers or as students or patrons of li terature. I do firmly advocate the writ er’s involvement in his milieu because this gives him authen ticity, a solidity of specifica tion, as a contemporary critic calls it. And if a writer aims to propagate a course of action * in other words, if a writer’s work must embody propaganda, the work must contain that in 32 Panorama ternal consistency and that es sential external reference, it must follow the concept of art istic necessity, or it is no work of art. The propagandistic no velist’s fundamental weakness lies in his inability to apply the principle of necessity in an es sential and compelling manner. Inevitability must necessarily flow as events and implication from what has already been presented in the structure of events. If this principle is vio lated, then what emerges is the subjective imposition of the au thor’s plea for a course of ac tion, or whatever it is that he wants to present in the name of progress or morality. Regard ing this subjective imposition the poet and critic Shelley warns that the more exclusive the writer’s emphasis towards ethical or utilitarian demands, the farther it is from artistic realization. ONTENT is important in living literature, but this content must not be taken as synonymous with formal ideolo gy, generalized themes, and the explicitly stated ideas of a writ er. This content — whether of a public or private nature, whet her it is about exploding a na tional policy or about a char acter’s salvaging of his own pri vate failure — this content must be the shaping of life itself into literary form, or in the words of James T. Farrell, “a way of feeling and thinking and seeing life that the creative artist con veys to his audience — the structure of events, the quality of characterizations, the com plex impact of the work itself.” In evaluating Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, we do nor judge Shakespeare’s personal position in the conflict between the Ro man aristocracy and the ple beians (the bias in this play happens to be patrician), but the evaluation should be on the basis of the inevitability of Coriolanus’ decision, as he vin dictively stands with his con quering army before the help less city of Rome. In other words, the basic critical ques tion is: When he decides not to attack Rome, and by this de cision his own life is endanger ed the hands of his allies, the Volscians, has Shakespeare pre pared us for this final prostra tion of Coriolanus? Shakespeare, as in his other plays, has given us adequate foreshadowing for this scene, one of the most dra matic in all of Shakespeare, in fact in all literature. Through the artist’s craft we forget the issues of empire for the more vital problem of a man who must make a crucial decision upon which his life perilously hangs. As a summary of what I have said, I suggest that what ultimately counts is what the writer does with his material. December 1960 33 If this were not so, then we are relinquishing our primary responsibility, then we may even pretend to bear the name of creative writers. The main business of the creative writer is not preaching. By the tools of his art, his main concern towards his audience and to wards his material is that of bringing a shock of discovery, of recognition, of revelation, so that in his work the reader sees himself in new awareness and evaluates himself with a more quickened spirit, and is given a richer insight into life and into his fellow beings. Thus the successful writer transcends the incidents of his time and becomes a sage and prophet. The writer of the highest integ rity can rest his case on this. Artistic revelation is his final responsibility to himself and to his art. High-Power Camera An Japanese camera firm recently announced the entry of the world’s brightest lens system which it produced experimentally in the current Interna tional Camera Show at Cologne, West Germany. The lens system has four times the resolving power of the human eye in a standard lens of fifty millimeters made up of five groups of seven lenses each. If the system is used along with an ASA 2,000 high sensitive film, the camera can easily catch fast moving objects in the dark, its maker, the “Canon” firm, said. Canon cameras using this system of lenses will be put on sale sometime next year after some fur ther improvements, it was announced. * 34 Panorama ’’PERMALIFE” Modern book paper withers so fast that nine out of ten books will crumble in only fifty years. A Virginia librarian, however, has now come up with a durable and unexpensive book paper he says will last for 300 years or more. William J. B arrow, chief of Document Restor ation at the Virginia State Library, worked with a group of chemists for several years to develop a new chemical wood pulp formula called permalife. Permalife is now being produced by Standard Paper Manufacturing Co. of Richmond, Virginia. Competitors are expected to start turning out their own versions soon, however, because the state library has published the basic formula. In seeking a long-lasting paper, Barrow and the others found that aluminum sulphate caused most book paper to dry up, become brittle and then crumble. They sought a way to reduce this acidity built into the paper. They dismissed rag fiber, which withstands acidity, as too costly. Finally, they discovered the material they needed in acquapel, a commercial product developed by Hercules Powder Co. Acquapel is reportedly similar to nylon although its formula is a secret. One of B arrow’s collaborators was A. L. Roths child, Standard Paper’s chief chemist. Thus, the company was able to jump into permalife production almost immediately. Standard Paper officials acknowledged that permalife is unlikely to capture even one per cent of the mammoth paper market since the biggest paper consumers, such as newspapers and magazines aren’t concerned with the longevity of their paper. But Charles Beckler of the company’s sales force declares that “whenever books of lasting value are published, this will_be the logical choice.” December 1960 35 Drama MAN in t by A. G. Hufana Our time starts at 7:00 a.m., December 29, 1896. Fort Santiago chapel. One long bench and the steps to the altar are the most prominent fixtures of the scene. A sevenbranched candelabra, in turn, is the most prominent fixture of the altar which is draped with a blue mantlepiece with yellow trimmings. Lording over it is a painted full-moon-like Host on which is etched the Great Eye of God'radiating unto a painted chalice. Enter Rizal, in black suit and derby hat, with Spanish officers. Scene 1 RIZAL (looking around, fixes his eyes on the altar, and takes off his hat) Are you sure this is the right way, gentlemen? I thought you were taking me back to the cell. OFFICER (taking off his cap; the others follow) The Gen eral’s order, Senor Rizal. RIZAL (facing officers polite ly) I see. It is very fine of the General. (Walks up to the al tar; turns back) But what shall I do here? M. CHAPLAIN (coming in) Prepare your soul, my son. I offer my services. RIZAL Oh... oh. Thank you very much, Father. (Walks up to the altar, mounts the steps and fingers the candelabra) Would you mind, senores? M. CHAP. Be it so. We have nof much time left. (Walks up to Rizal) RIZAL (lighting the candles with a match) Father, I prefer to be alone, if you do not mind. (Walks down to the officers) Would you mind, senores? OFFICER As you wish, senor. As long as you will not receive outside visitors until further orders. RIZAL I appreciate the orders very highly. And it was an ho nor to have had breakfast with you. The roll and the coffee cake were very good. The cof fee — Dutch, I suppose? 36 Panorama he MOON OFFICER (chuckling in spite of himself) Very Dutch, senor. Recently imported. RIZAL (chukling with officer) Aliens produce our wants. (Seriously) Father, this matter of soul... I feel queer about it. M. CHAP. Queer, indeed, my son. That is why we cannot help being human. Every hu man being must be guided to understand. RIZAL Understand? To be guided to understand? (Looks at the altar) I have kept you long and I have kept God wait ing. Father, I shall be very glad to borrow your books on meditation. M. CHAP. Be it so. I will have them sent. God be with you. RIZAL Thank you. God for everybody is God for nobody. Thank you, senores. Oh, before you go, may I ask you a favor: Would you let in my pupil who is detained by the guard at the door? (One of the officers goes and returns with a boy of 17, held by a guard who begins searching him) RIZAL You need not look for contraband on him, guard. I did not teach my disciples to carry arms. (To the boy who looks happy at being freed) How are you, Doming? GUARD Remember: ony five minutes. OFFICER Man, you are giving orders! Remember yourself that Senor Rizal is to be given all courtesy due to a prisoner. GUARD Excuse me, sir. RIZAL Thank you, guard. You are very civil. Come, Doming. We have lessons to do. (Exit officers, chaplain and guard) BOY (taking Rizal’s hand; kiss es it) What did they do to you, Maestro? RIZAL Not that I discourage you but from now on, you must not kiss anybody’s hand if you are an orphan. A man should not worship another man. Now, to lesson two. You must not... December 1960 37 BOY Can we not go home again, Maestro? Will they not let you go? RIZAL (troubled, walks up and down) Yes, the farm must be harvested by now. Our chick ens are starved. Tomorow, you go back to Dapitan, huh? That is lesson two. I am afraid I have to stay for a while. You see. . . they got me. . . and. . . (forces himself to smile) You are really a big boy now. How tall are you? Let me see. (Makes boy stand up and stands back to back with him) Just as I thought: you are tal ler by three inches. BOY You are much stronger, Maestro. RIZAL Keep s rong: that is the secret of strength. Come, let us test ourselves. (They play In dian wrestling on the bench. Trick lighting fades in the Da pitan pupils of Rizal — rang ing from 10 to 16 in age —and they gather around the wrest lers. They clap when Rizal wins the match) Oho! You surprise me. How did you get here? BOYS Bravo, Maestro! We. were fencing by the river as you told us to when you left. (They show Rizal the big sticks they carry) RIZAL God! Do not mob me again with these, ha? Be good: I am not always with you. Tell you something? I never really left. How did you know I was back? BOYS Cosme Paez shouted it from the tree up there. VOICE (upstage) Heliow! I am here, Maestro! I saw you riding on your handkerchief over the surface of the river. You land ed on the other side. Then you jumped over to this side. RIZAL Lord! I could not be lieve it myself! That is twen ty feet across. Cosme, can you reach for the moon up there? VOICE (upstage) O, yes, Maes tro! I could even see the fiesta in Dipolog. Climb up and see for yourself. RIZAL You are joking, Cosme. Come down before you see too much. BOYS No, Maestro, he is not joking. Have you forgotten that you drew the map of Minda nao from the top of that tree? RIZAL I am not sure. Be care ful of legends. They are only told for entertainment. BOYS Show us how to shoot, Maestro. RIZAL (taking a gun) Very well. Whose initials will I shoot on the bark of that tree? BOYS (together) Mine! Mine! RIZAL Easy! Easy! Since I cannot please all of you I will have to please Cosme. He likes to see people shooting except at himself. (Levels gun up stage) Aim, hold breath, stea dy, count one, two. . . three ... (gun report) VOICE (upstage) Eeoow! (A hat flutters down) 38 Panorama RIZAL (laughing) Do not wor ry, Cosme! I just closed your eyes. That is it, boys: do not shoot to kill. Aim high. Now, do not play with guns. Run along now. See you. (Trick lighting fades out boys) BOY (pointing to Rizal’s back) Someone comes, Maestro. (Trick lighting produces a 20year old girl with a waterpail who picks up Cosme’s hat and approaches) GIRL Doctor, I want to see you... RIZAL (turning around) Bonifacia! How are you? GIRL I heard the shot. I was down to get water. O, it is good to walk again. RIZAL Do be careful yourself. Relapse is a harder thing to cure. (Trick lighting produces Josephine, big with child) JOSEPHINE (eyeing the girl crossly) I’m sorry. He’s my husband. GIRL (innocently) Are you. . . you. . . married? JOSEPHINE Can’t you see? (Embraces Rizal) Who’s she, darling? GIRL I am his patient. I have the right to know from my doc tor what is wrong with me. JOSEPHINE Okay. Okay. Nothing’s wrong with you that’s not the matter with me. If Pepe and I are not married, we think we are. And that’s as good as any of your outward ceremonies. RIZAL Josephine! When will you behave? Love is not a public scandal. I am sorry, Miss Elumba, Miss Taufer is my wife. GIRL (sobbing, produces, from her bosom a packet of letters tied with a red ribbon) Burn these for me. . . (Rizal takes the packet. She stares at him undecidedly. Rizal stares back at her and is about to put a hand over her shoulder when she shrinks and runs away, sobbing.) JOSEPHINE Well? RIZAL (absentmindedly) Well. JOSEPHINE Well, I didn’t know you had written her so many. Aren’t you going to re view your relics? RIZAL (skimming over the let ters) From my sisters... ex cept Narcisa and my favorite sister who died when I was four. I’m condemned to love one woman. That woman is you. Believe me. JOSEPHINE But one called Leonor? RIZAL Leonor is dead. Forget her. JOSEPHINE Let’s not quarrel again, darling. I shalln’t bur den you, I promise. You’ve other problems. RIZAL Problems! I’m out of politics. Now I can attend to my own house. Let’s live here in peace. You and I alone. (Josephine swgons) Josefina, what’s wrong? December 1960 39 JOSEPHINE Nothing... I just fell down the stairs. No... I struck against the iron stand. RIZAL The child! It’s my fault. I’ll tear down that step. I wish it is that friar who bungled with our license. I’ll wrench out that stand. I wish it is that friar who played politics with our love. JOSEPHINE Darling, take me home. I feel it kicking inside. RIZAL It’ll be a boy! 1 * 11 barter with heaven for it to be a boy! JOSEPHINE Pepe! It’s dead ... I know. . . I know. I am seeing things... (Trick lighting pro duces a man carrying lamps.) MAN It is just Tamarong. RIZAL Are you also part of this bad dream? MAN In person. . . fulfilling his personal promises. I promised when you restored my sight I would light the way to town so that no soul would stumble in the darkness that I once knew. Well, here lam — with the lamps. RIZAL What there! Who tempts me again? (Trick light ing produces a lay Jesuit with a bandaged finger) Ah, Brot her Tildot! LAY JESUIT A leak in the dike. I stopped it with a finger till your boys came to the res cue. RIZAL Brother, you are a hero. But please do not mention this incident again. The dam i? dreamed up by Father Sanchez and everything dreamed up by the Fathers ought to stand for ever. LAY JES. Do not be modest, Jose. The dike was laid out on your plan and direction. I sent the plan to the Governor this morning — with your name. I affixed mine in the order as constructor. RIZAL I am absolutely out of politics now, Brother. You could have signed the plan alone. LAY JES. And tell a lie in science? RIZAL Until science is known by another name. As of now, even God and man are inter mixed. Brother, please look after the mixing of the con crete. One of cement, two of sand. I will come down later. Come, Josephine, to our ivory tower. (Trick lighting fades them all except the boy who falls on his knees in the atti tude of silent prayer.) Scene II (The boy is seen still on his knees when Rizal reappears from the shadows) RIZAL On your feet, Doming. That is lesson four. What did I tell you about our past? BOY There was the Dawn Man. .. the Little Man. . . the Tall Man. . . the Brown Man. . . the Men of Cham pa. . . then Men of Band jar. . . I forget easily. After them I think no more. 40 Panorama RIZAL More, Doming. And more. Our history is an honor roll. We have only to sit back like in a moro-moro play. But someone has to call these players out. They know their audience. You do the calling, Doming. I like to pretend I enjoyed them myself. Do you know who comes next? BOY Lima. . . Lima. . . Limahong? RIZAL See? You forget be cause you are serious. What did I tell you? Take it easy. History is not catechism. To refresh your eye on the past, the next is a suicide. BOY One who killed himself? RIZAL Why not? History is the lives of suicides. BOY I do not get you, Maestro. RIZAL I do not even get my self, Doming. Someone did get himself. This someone got himself after getting ano ther. Lapu-lapu! (Trick light ing produces a well-built, nigh handsome warrior with long hair kept in place by a headband. Around his neck is a string of teeth. The most strik ing part of his body is his Gstringed torso, a deep bronze like the suntan of a recluse, on which leans a huge kampilan. He holds a big shield by his side. A man, in battered Span ish coat-of-mail, lies at his feet. The face of the lying man is bloodless and were it not for his bushy beard, we could take him as cut out of marble. His hands and the flesh out of his metal dress are caked with blood) WARRIOR (sternly) What do you want? BOY (fearfully) He is asking what you want, Maestro. RIZAL (matching his voice with the warrior’s) Relax, Mr. Lajulapu. I am a friend. WARRIOR If a friend, why do you not speak my tongue? RIZAL Ay, ay, kalisud. . . WARRIOR Kalisud... Aha, you are just a poet. So what? RIZAL So what? Poets have no country. I, without a country, respect you, with a country. Hail, Patriot! WARRIOR Stop it! Stop it! You are flattering me. I fear flatterers. They do more harm than a fighting enemy. The enemy can only kill or be kill ed. A flatterer can sell or buy you. I must be on guard against your kind. You can not buy me with talk as that Humabon and that Zula were bought. Pshe! Humabon with his granary! Zula with his goats! It is really their flat tery I fought this morning. This stranger (pointing to the man at his feet) was their me dium. He stood in my way so I cut him down. RIZAL By cutting him down, what did you get? WARRIOR Flatterers, that is all. Myself, above all. December 1960 41 RIZAL Why so? WARRIOR You are like a his torian. Historians are like wo men. They are very fertile from the neck up where wo men are from the neck below. RIZAL (determinededly) Why so? WARRIOR You are like a hunter. You please me. (Re laxes) RIZAL Not to flatter you or anybody, because I do not flat ter easily, I know the facts. Long long before and long long after I meet you today I was, am, and shall be used to you. WARRIOR Ay, ay, kalisud. It is my regret that I am Lapulapu. Today I have become an anito. Everybody is asking me to tell his fortune, to cure his mother-in-law, and so forth. I should not have led the day. It is far far better to have slept through the battle and to eat and sleep and live and die nor mally. I even had to please a newborn which could not be fed but with coconut milk. I climbed that high tree there, and fell. I stood up for fear of displeasing anybody. But I was really hurt by that fall. I am hurting all over now. But what can I do? I am Lapulapu so I have to stand here, pretending to be as useful as a dog and as long-lived as a cat. RIZAL This pretense will kill you. It is too late: you cannot die anymore. That is the trou ble. WARRIOR Be gone! You are telling the truth. Truth is very hard to take. I‘d rather climb many coconuts and fall many times than take the truth. If you desire passage, I give it free, but be gone! Be gone like the sea wind! RIZAL I am a magician. I could send you to the shades if I like. But I would not do that. I will bring your enemy to life so that you can rest at ease. You see, it is this killing that really bothers you. Blood is on your mind. Magellan, come forth! (The prostrate man arises, shakes himself as if from deep sleep, and looks around but seems not to see anybody) RESURRECTED MAN Pobre me! What a nightmare! (Laughs to himself) Killed by an Indian! Me, killed by an Indian? (Looks at himself). But I am wounded and it is painful. Where are my. . . Barbosa! Serrano! The co wards! They have left with the boats. Nothing but seagulls in the distance. I wonder if the birds will feed me with worms. Not even roots perhaps on this godless reef. Exiles usually choose their domiciles but now I reside actually on no thing, without family, country and church. And what did I 42 Panorama think once? Ha! Ha! An em pire. . . An empire on a reef? A reef for the Queen? That Queen has a vast amor propio. She fell for my fish talk about a land of onions, garlic and pepper where the sun pops up every morning unmindful of current events. Now where is this land of the morning? This? (Scoops up dirt from the ground) This? What will the Queen say? Poor Queen! She cashed in her jewels in this hide-and-seek on an outdated paper map that promised spices. I pity her. She has been dieting on the King’s dog bis cuits just to let me have five boats to look for onions, garlic and pepper. O, she must be very thin by now. Dieting on a husband’s dog food is very bad for a blueblooded wife. I should not have played with her amor propio so. Now, she must be dreaming of me and onions and so forth. Hungry women have hungry dreams. If I could only kiss her lips to lips — I am not very old for a lover, am I? Then she would forget I bring her this earth— a fistful of barren earth. But I could not do that. A woman’s lips are reserved for a man who tickles with sweet pro mises, not with results. Such a man is the King. Wait a min ute! I got an idea! I am always leading with misleading ideas. I hope they lead me back to the Queen this time. There are footprints on this earth. Aha! I named such a foothold of dust on March 17. Would the Queen understand and for give? I have not known any woman who understands and forgives. The King could not even advise her without ad vancing grounds for divorce. Ah, me, Spain’s darling! RIZAL I would that you were criticized to death. To be cri ticized is to be immortalized. R. MAN (looking around) What is that? It sounds like my scriptwriter Pigafetta. Pig^fetta is always whispering greatness into my ear. Pigafet ta, if you are alive come out and do not converse at the back of my head! Come out to be seen! RIZAL He has written your epitaph, Magellan. You will like it next to an empty sto mach. R. MAN Who is that who speaks unseen? Pigafetta has never been like this. He com pliments in the face. He values face values very much. Piga fetta, come out to be seen! You have not been false to anyone. I thank you, Pigafet ta! We are the only ones left. The others have run away. A pack of cowards. Pigafetta, can you hear me? You have always stuck to my side like a spare sword, December 1960 43 even in thirst and drunken ness, how coud you talk at my back like that! You who have willingly made me a shadow, I respect you! Come, let us drink what is spilt and be sad and forget we are alive! Let me hang unto you. I wilt let you hang unto me! WARRIOR Stranger, it is blood that is spilt, not tuba. Look at me. R. MAN Alas Pigafetta... I (Feels Lapulapu from head to toe) By my soul, I seemed to have met you before... WARRIOR Dawn this morn ing, old scalawag! R. MAN What are you, dear lad? RIZAL May I have the plea sure of introducing you to each other? You were not in the the mood for formalities this morning. Mr. Lapulapu, meet Mr. Magellan — a Portuguese sailor in the service of the Spa nish Crown, circumnavigator of the globe, discoverer of the Philippines. Mr. Magellan, meet Mr. Lapulapu, chief and stubborn individualist of Mactan, a gentleman without humor. R. MAN Ha? You are that La pulapu who could fight like me when I was younger? Well, I am glad to know you. I want to offer you my sword but I see it is broken. WARRIOR You broke it on my shield. You were a brave man. It was my honor to have killed you. You are foolish: you work for nothing but a crown. Tell me, are you from hell? R. MAN From hell? My young friend, you do not say that even in jest. With an interest ed third party here... RIZAL I am sorry to be a wit ness to your amicable settle ment of a little quarrel out of court. I am glad to be of use, however. I am Jose Rizal from the present. R. MAN You infer that we (pointing to himself and the warrior) are from the past. The past is the refuge of those who could not exist. Better know what you are talking about. (Rizal laughs) But, Mr. Lapulapu, you have a good place out here. WARRIOR Do feel at home, Mister. Your companions — they were so scared — were asking for your body before they left I know not where. . . and... RIZAL 115 are all that is left of Mr. Magellan’s men. They are still looking for spices but all they can meet with is hung er. You will not go hungry anymore, Mr. Magellan. R. MAN You mean . . . WARRIOR Yes, you are con quered, Mister. But you, Mr. Rizal, you are butting into this polite conversation. As I was saying, Mr. Magellan, your 44 Panorama companions were asking for your body but I did not let them. They would only com mit you to the water whereas I intend to preserve you in a jar with full military honors. R. MAN A pagan burial! Am I truly dead? RIZAL Neither of you is dead or alive. You are very much a set of political inspirations to the future. R. MAN Que barbaridad! Mur der is cleaner than suicide. And I thought of committing suicide. So it was you who killed me, Mr. Lapulapu. I remember it all now, can you forgive me? WARRIOR So it was me you wanted dead or alive, Mr. Ma gellan. Can you forgive me too? I will give you my kampilan as a souvenir. Here. R. MAN I do not need it. Let us bury our wrongdoings here and npw. I am tired. WARRIOR I am tired too. But you sleep first. I watch over you. RIZAL Too comfortable to be true. History is fun, no? And the fun of it is played out of history. Before you retire, Mr. Magellan, I have news for you. R. MAN Out with it quickly. This is not a play. This is real. And I am so tired...ex cuse me. (Falls down at the feet of the warrior) RIZAL (reading) “Thus our light was extinguished.” Signed Pigafetta. R. MAN (sleepily) Never mind that. Pigafetta is always playing with words. He can not be serious. Playwrights are punsters. They have noth ing to say. Ho.. hum ... the earth is very warm, and sleep is healthy. WARRIOR Go, Mr. Rizal! Can you not see that my righteous enemy wants to be left alone? And what are these sons-ofdirty-loins going to do? Hey, you! (Trick lighting produces a number of men setting up a papier mache obelisk) RIZAL In memory of Fernan do Magallanes, killed by Lapu lapu through some slight mis understanding. That is the best they can guess to do. WARRIOR An excuse for a holiday? Hey, you! Do not trespass! RIZAL (addressing men) Real ly, my countrymen, you should not... Some other time, not now. There will be a time for monuments. Let us honor the past with more worthwhile work. Go home and raise ve getables. (Trick lighting fades out the men, Magellan, and Lapulapu in a final glow of triumph) MESSENGER (enters with books) Padre Cordero sends books to you, senor. He says you can keep or give them December 1960 45 away. He wants a last word from you. RIZAL Convey my deepest gratitude to him, will you? MESSENGER Something deeper than that, he says, senor. Something like what you are thinking between to day and tomorrow. RIZAL I am not prepared... Well, I am not the last man. BOY Maestro, I was thinking ... what if you are him? RIZAL Him what, Doming? BOY The Last Man ... RIZAL Last Man. Oh, Last Man. I see what you mean. Of course, you are not the last to say I am the Last Man. You are carrying history too far, Doming. It does not end with me or any last man of yours. There simply is no Last Man. (To the messenger) Can you take down dictation? I have a message for Padre Cordero. I could write it my self but my hands are trem bling. (The messenger takes out pad and pencil) Are you ready? I will pronounce very slowly so that you can take down every word I say. Ready? (The messenger nods. Rizal looks longingly at the altar, breathes deeply, and walks slowly up and down) Now and... at the hour ... of our death ... we ask for . . . strength to accept... the lot that we deserve ... O God... O Amun-Ra ... O Buddha ... O Tao... O Allah... O Batha la ... (The messenger looks up disturbed) Never mind then. Padre Cordero will understand perhaps if I do not say any thing. (Absentmindedly) Be cause the worst world wars happen in the soul... what if only those who are driven by thoughts of death live? O, it is cruel... it is like disturbing someone in his grave... to look for buried gold or for a needle in eternity. Doming, let me see how you can endure a prayer. After this you can go. I shall have set you free. (He falls on his knees, motions the boy and the messenger to fall on their knees on his sides) Scene III (Rizal is seen awakened from a nap on the bench by a voice loudly expostulating offstage in the direction of the guards at the door to the chapel) RIZAL (peeping outside) Good evening, guards. Have you ever been in love? VOICE I am not allowed to speak to you. No puedo aceptar ninguna responsabilidad ... RIZAL Espero se servira despensar buena acojeda. And you, master, could you tell me if the moon is out by now? SECOND VOICE The moon might not rise until Three Kings, senor. RIZAL Oh! I have been in doors too long. I feel I could 46 Panorama walk through the walls. How are the other prisoners? SECOND VOICE They are all snoring. One is talking in his sleep. RIZAL Ah, blessed are their bones! I would like to walk among them. Sleeping men remind me of breathing tombs. How young is the youngest? SECOND VOICE Hard to tell. A new one was brought in yesterday. He was running high with fever. He was cry ing for milk and wanted only his mother to give it to him. RIZAL I feel like a child my self. It is not joke to be a child. A child must always have a mother. This afteroon my mother was here. She looked very old. The hard years have caught up with her. (Swooning) O, I nay! (Trick lighting produces Doha Teodora beside Rizal. They embrace lovingly) DONA TEODORA My son! My son! RIZAL (tenderly) Inay! (Checks his emotion and holds D. Teodora apart) There: my big old lady has never been so little and young looking! Your tears are like the tears of someone who is sixteen, and in love. Here, my handker chief is scented with April blossoms. Let me wipe the tears of my sweetheart. (Wipes her eyes) Are you happy? D. TEODORA (shedding tears anew) Pepe, I pleaded to Senor Polavieja. RIZAL (stunned) For what? For my life-imprisonment, Inay? D. TEODORA Yes, yes. It is better than losing you forever, my son. But he would not listen. He did not even re ceive my petitions asking life for you, even in prison for ever. RIZAL (absentmindedly) That is better. O, you did not see me about these things, Inay. How are my sisters? What do they think about me? D. TEODORA They came with me. We can only see you one by one. They are waiting out side for their turn. Josefina is in the fort, too. Not with your sisters. RIZAL Josephine... so... so un happy. Inay, it was a long time. It want to see them ... all of them... one by one ... D. TEODORA Not until I go out, Pepe. I am jealous of them all now. Let me feel how much you are still a baby. (Fulls him to the bench; takes his head to her laps and combs his hair with her fin gers) Do you remember ask ing me big questions when you were so little? RIZAL Little questions have big answers. I ask myself: Are the people on the other side of the lake happy? Why does December 1960 47 the moth dive to sure death in the flame? Inay, I have done nothing to make you happy. I have been a very naughty boy. D. TEODORA Filio! My Pepe is filio! RIZAL When I operated on your eyes I felt God take over the operation. Miracle! I could not believe I did it. D. TEODORA Love guided your hands, my son. Then I could see Hongkong clearly. Such a new world! Not like Manila which ends at walls every turn you make. There were the kites! The rockets! The tinpans! Was that a fiesta below your terrace? RIZAL (laughing) That was the Year of the Horse and the Chinese Day of Lovers. I wore my mother’s heart that day. (Trick lighting fades out Dona Teodora. Rizal goes to the door and peeps outside) Can one of you stand guard inside? (A guard bearing a lantern enters) Thank you, guard. I feel weak. The flesh is weak. Can you tell me something about the dungeon which somebody said I am lucky not to be in? GUARD Nine cells run down to it. It is like a deep well. I would lose myself in it with out a companion. The pri soners there do not receive any sunlight. The jailer him self smells of moss when he comes up. RIZAL I am luckier then. GUARD O yes, senor. The new prisoner was taken down there this morning. He took the chains of the oldest one I knew. This old one was trans ferred to your cell. You could not know him if he were your twin brother — beard a foot long: I think he has not much time to live. He does not talk of dying. Perhaps death has missed him. RIZAL Life has missed him equally. I am luckier I guess. At least the sun had been reaching me in the cell. I had visitors, both friend and ener my. The first one greeted me after the misa de gallo. (Trick lighting produces Lt. Luis T. Andrade, defense counsel of Rizal, extending his hands) ANDRADE Merry Christmas, Pepe. RIZAL Same to you, Luis. You are risking everything in haggling for my freedom. ANDRADE This can be a page in history, Pepe. I think we can make it if we bluff well with our last card before the Council. The hearing will be resumed tomorrow. RIZAL (contemplatively) No, Luis, that would be gambling a page of history on a story stake. ANDRADE But, Pepe, do you not see what the stake is? Your life! You are on trial as a traitor and you are still 48 Panorama talking about the rightful course of events. RIZAL Who cares? Is there no law? ANDRADE There is only your honor system which makes it hard... even for me ... to ... Pepe, come! Come to it! Do you not see that if we oblige them a little you shall live? RIZAL And remain bowed though the strong wind shall have passed? I thank you for everything you are doing for me. ANDRADE (clasping Rizal’s hands tightly) On your honor system then. If I lose I will not be able to face you again. Goodbye, Pepe. (Trick lighting fades him out) RIZAL Guard, where are you from? GUARD The Sacromonte hills, senor. RIZAL You are Cale then? I am sort of gypsy too. My name is Jdse Protacio Rizal y Mercado. Friends call me Pe pe. What is yours? GUARD Zumel. Julian Abad Zumel. I am better known as Gitano among my comradesat-arms. My Spanish is not good because we gypsies al ways speak Cale at home. RIZAL Any language will do as long as you can express yourself in it. But next to Tagalog, I like to know enough English to come to think in English about the prophecy of our fellow gypsy Jagor. He is a very free man. (Trick light ing produces Feodor Jagor, in a German professor’s clothes of the 19th century) JAGOR Hello, Don Jose. The Spirit of Good Voyages put me ashore and told me to see you. I did not expect to find you here. RIZAL You look well yourself, sir. JAGOR Ugh... I feel spent. The trouble with the few of us is we are everybody’s con science. RIZAL Who are with you? JAGOR Progressives. We are. a boatload. Most of us are dead but each time we put to shore, the dead come to life again. Does it not tickle you to read Apocalypse? That is our boat’s name. It is really the Flying Dutchman’s ship. We seized it from him. It is keeling with barnacles on which the living feed on in mid-ocean. The dead are nour ished by memory. RIZAL No politicians on board? JAGOR I assure you no rats, no pearls, no swine. We might sink with them. But we are a merry lot. When we weigh anchor we are again in our element. RIZAL I was about to ask you something but I have forgot ten it. It is tipping on my tongue. December 1960 49 JAGOR Ask it and it shall be answered. If I cannot, I can summon one of the crew to answer it. That is our univer sal purpose. We are called to answer the nearest call. First come, first served: we also practice this capitalistic creed. RIZAL Your prophecy about an English-speaking people who will someday succeed the Spanish ... I was thinking over and over that if we are to have another master ... JAGOR Did I put that down in black and white? O, yes, I published it. I even copy righted it. But I imitated it. I cannot remember how I imi tated it. It just came about when I was lonely, I guess. And in the confusing course of my travels, I unwittingly wrote it down in my diaries. I should have burned such an emotion. Emotion only hap pens in a play. The players memorize the emotion and deliver it an emotion. Nothing is original with them. They mouth substanceless memory. RIZAL You could not have imitated the players, sir. JAGOR O, that I myself could play the part I write for others! But I must observe the ethics of visiting. I could talk on and on but I am not your last visitor. Hmmm, what do you have here? (Picks up one of the books on the bench) De la Irrjtacion de Cristo y Menosprecio del Mundo. Nice book. Suppose you talk with Thomas-a-Kempis. He is mas ter of imitation. I simply could not imitate anybody but myself. Excuse me. RIZAL I will. Thank you, sir. Auf wiedersehen. (With a goodbye flourish of his hand, Jagor fades out. Trick light ing fades in St. Thomas-aKempis.) A-KEMPIS How do you do, son of man? RIZAL Is it you—in the flesh? I will not touch you lest I will not believe. A-KEMPIS (laying his hand on Rizal’s head) Christ be with you. Faith is too much of a confidence but,, in all faith, you can confide to Christ. RIZAL Kindly, O Saint, re move this mortal agony from me. (Sinks to the bench) I feel very sick at heart. A-KEMPIS Promise me you will not join the Apocalypse. I am not one of them. RIZAL I promise. I promise you everything if you relieve me of this exceeding sorrow. A-KEMPIS Belief can only make you happy. You have not believed sincerely. Let us pray. (They cross themselves and pray silently) RIZAL (stands and looks up at heaven) I believe! I have al ways believed! A-KEMPIS Therefore be hap py. Feel happy. Do not think you are unhappy. That is the 50 Panorama whole of life. Life stays the earth while it turns the stars. RIZAL For a little while... (covers his face with his hands) O, it is terrible, Saint, to know I have done nothing. A-KEMPIS Then you feel you have done everything. Know ledge comes to naught. Love is the only reality worth knowing. RIZAL So ... if I... if I do not love at all?... if I only loved myself? Myself is my death. Grass will cover me. A-KEMPIS Eternity has hum bled you. Christ will raise you from the grave. RIZAL My most serious doubt has been the existence of life after death. A-KEMPIS Doubt is the first step to faith. I doubted much. Very much. But I troubled hell with my doubting. The devil: came in the form of a torch singer. I stood my ground against that thing and many things afterwards. When I was ready, I was conferred faith. Faith is a crown, only the coronation takes place in side you. All hell will clear off your path when you walk and you will walk back to God. RIZAL (inspiredly) Eternity, Eternity, here I come! But how could I earn it, Saint? A-KEMPIS By not denying the Resurrection and the Life. RIZAL It takes a lot of cour age to do that. A-KEMPIS A lot of humility. Heaven is at the bottom of humility. To be humbled is to be awed as to be gentle is to be in love. It is only through the eyeview of the worm we see that to be hum bled is to lose pride and to be in love is to begin to lust. RIZAL Death, then, can only be proud? No human being can? A-KEMPIS Life alone can be proud. (Unbares his chest) Look: I once burned myself with a torch, with which I conquered my first desire. How does the firebrand look to you? RIZAL (tracing the tattoo on a-Kempis’ chest with his fin gers) It looks like a burning bush... a flowering cactus. A-KEMPIS You know much of plants and flowers. RIZAL Rice, orchids, every thing that has roots. A-KEMPIS With all the care for other plants, it is a won der how a cactus grows un aided, no? It does not even begin with roots. It thrives best where other plants could not grow. But is not the de sert more deathly without the cactus? Life is in the strangest places. Over death it plants its burning bushes and flower ing cacti. Trust there is no December 1960 Si end to this and you trust in life. Creation goes on and on. RIZAL You have died and arisen: what agonies must these experiences be! O, Saint, you are calm: how do you suffer and not show it? A-KEMPIS (producing a cruci fix which he kisses and extends to Rizal who kisses it) Re sign yourself to the Divine Will. He who conquered death for you and me was also born to fear the death of the body. If He was God why was He not able to save Himself? If a mortal, why did he not run away? Lest we fall into temp tation, son of man, let us pray. (They fall on their knees. Trick lighting fades out aKempis) RIZAL (dazedly) I must have fallen asleep. Gitano, has my visitor gone? GUARD Visitor? There is no one but us' here, Senor Rizal. You were talking about the sun reaching you, then you were talking about man reach ing the moon. You were mur muring many foreign names. RIZAL Dr. Ferdinand Blumentritt... ever constant to the last moment... (Trick lighting produces Blumentritt, walking in with a cane, and with a pince-nez which he takes off on seeing Rizal) BLUMENTRITT Happy birth day. Jose. RIZAL (surprised) O! Thank you, Doctor. Yes, it is June 19 again. 1861 to the present. A long time... BLUMENTRITT You were not down at the coffee shop. So I came up to know what is so important that keeps you from breaking your fast. RIZAL I thought... But did you not meet my double on the street? I sent him to eat my usual toast and eggs for me... a little while ago. BLUMENTRITT Man alive! You are exhausted. It is late morning outside. RIZAL Did the kingdom change much the last three days? BLUMENTRITT Not at all. But I have taken to stretching my legs around town at sun rise lest I start forgetting their use. They are not meeting yours in the park or in the museum anymore these days. RIZAL (laughing, feels for something in his pocket) Ah, the invitation to the tea ses sion at Hidalgo’s three days back. (Takes another piece of paper from his pocket) Oho! It seems I have stood uo a sweet senorita at the Filipino colony’s party which was intended for her. BLUMENTRITT There! The kingdom is palming you these symptoms of decadence. (A newsboy’s voice cries offstage: “El Anuncio! El Anuncio!”) 52 Panorama Hear that? They usually shout the whole headline at some world-shaking event. Today, it is just some banker that shot himself, or another bishop has been incarcerated by the long arm of the Minister of Ultramar. Or another who could have been a Caesar has been stabbed in a free-for-all. (Female vendor’s voice cries offstage: “Roses! Roses! Fresh roses!”) Or another bachelor hood and spinsterhood have happily terminated. Or ano ther boy and girl have eloped and returned asking forgive ness. But flowers always re mind me of death. Spring is too pretty to hide her frailty like a bride. Death never misses... RIZAL Death never misses ... death never misses. That is a very pretty phrase. Doctor, if I did not know you were a scientist I could call you a poet. BLUMENTRITT (mockingly) Or another canned soup is advertised. Very soon we will also forget the use of our teeth. There are not even volcanoes now to shake us in to our senses. RIZAL Krakatoa gutted itself out for its own sake. We can not always apply science on humanity without dismember ing it. BLUMENTRITT Leave that to the police and the Cortes. Genius does not even get mini mum wage. Come, you need food. (Trick lighting fades him out) RIZAL What time is it? GUARD Five to six by my timepiece. RIZAL Mine has stopped at 12:00. It has been behaving this way since the verdict. (Trick lighting produces Polavieja presiding over the Council of War. Andrade is standing beside Rizal who is seated. The Council men nod. A clerk of court stands up) CLERK OF COURT Will the prisoner please stand up? (Rizal stands) Be it known to all present that: Whereas the defendant, Jose Rizal, was found guilty of the charges brought against him which are, to wit, rebellion against the Church and State and treason appurtenant thereto, by official decree of His Excel lency, the Governor-General, which is concurred upon by the Council of War assembled and Her Majesty, the Queen Re gent of Espana, the said de fendant is ordered to be exec uted by a firing squad compos ed of his countrymen. . . (Ri zal gasps in surprise at “coun trymen”) ... at seven o’clock in the morning, Manila time, on the thirtieth of December in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred ninetysix, on the field of BagumbaDecember i960 53 yan. The said defendant is further required to indemnify the court the sum of twenty thousand pesetas for damages. That is all. POLAVIEJA Senor Rizal may now say what he wants to say. ANDRADE I will speak for Se nor Rizal as his legal defense. Your Excellency, you will be only igniting the fuse of war by. . . RIZAL (holding Andrade) Lieutenant, a word with you. (Take him aside) Luis, I thank you as I have not thanked any body before. Give me your hand. (They shake hands wordlessly) Thank you, Senor Polavieja. I have nothing to say. POLAVIEJA I hate to do this, Senor Rizal. However, if you change your mind and wish to retract, I might still consider... ANDRADE Pepe! Now is your chance, Pepe! RIZAL (smiling) Hundreds have already read the truth, Luis. I do not have the strength to rob them of their reading pleasure. Even you, I think, consider the truth good fiction. Read it someday and remem ber me. (To Polavieja) I have nothing to say, General. ANDRADE Goodbye, Pepe. Think kindly of me. RIZAL Goodbye, Luis. Pray for me. (Trick lighting fades out Polavieja, Andrade and the council) RIZAL I am always asking the time from guards. I think God has a hand in this. Both time and God seem... (Cockcrow in the distance) It is dawn. Not much farther is. . . Gitano, how long do you expect to live? GUARD As long as I may be in my right mind, senor. When my time comes I hope to mum ble a little adios to my friends. RIZAL In bed? I wish I could die in bed and choose the friends I like to see me leap like a bird to the sun. It must be terrible to die in the night, Gitano. GUARD Not if in the open, se nor. RIZAL There is not always a mcon to look up to. Right now it is a dead moon up there. It cannot borrow light from the source. The earth stands be tween, a shadow. I wonder if in the shadow I could find. . . (Trick lighting produces Trining, Rizal’s sister, wearing a bandana with which she tries to hide her tears) TRINING Kuya! RIZAL (turning to her) Trining! (Embraces her) O, you have grown up overnight. Do you gather mushrooms for Paciano? How you used to hate me in the season of mush rooms! TRINING I love you, kuya. RIZAL (holds her chin up and 54 Panorama takes off her bandana) Quick, smile. Why these tears if you love me? TRINING (smiles forcibly) We have lost you after all, ku ya. We have burned a thou sand candles at the Virgin’s feet for many nights and days. But she has not heard us. She has not heard us, kuya. RIZAL Virgin Mary is the Mo ther of the living, Trining. God also wants to father me and he has bidden St. Joseph to lead me to my Brother, Jesus. Jesus is very glad to have me be cause He has only few play mates. Thrice a night I wake up to Him calling me from the darkness. (A child’s voice: ‘ Pe pe! Pepe! Pepe!”) And I find him looking for little lost lambs in the starlight. He touches me and I am again a child. (Guard’s voice outside: “Hurry up! Hurry up!”) But man also calls you back. We are too near this world to be able to stay in that real life. TRINING I will not leave you, kuya! I will not leave you! RIZAL (takes her by the shoul der to an alcohol lamp) Re member me to Mrs. Tavera. She warmed me with this little lamp the nights in Paris. There is something inside. I wish you keep it safe. (Trining receives the lamp, wipes her tears away, faces Rizal bravely. Ri zal smiles. She puts back her bandanna and slowly goes out) RIZAL Do you believe in ghosts, Gitano? GUARD I have never seen one, senor. RIZAL You must also believe what you do not see. Look at the dogs. I think they are more religious. They detect ghosts. This is a time when ghosts walk back to the scene of their crimes, no? (Dogs howl in the distance. Two white habilimented priests enter) FIRST PRIEST Well, Jose, we can work together for your par don if you will just cooperate. RIZAL I am not clear on ibis thing, Father. SECOND PRIEST No, Jose, you made your stand against the Church very clearly. RIZAL What else could I do? F. PRIEST Retraction is anoth er way. RIZAL How? How can one be born a Christian and die in an other way? S. PRIEST Masonry, Jose, ma sonry. It is the enemy of the Church. RIZAL Once upon a time men wanted to know. Their eyes saw glory and they were baf fled. Finally, the question had to be asked and an ignorant judged, harried to decision by a mob of truth-seekers, did question the question: “What is truth?” S. PRIEST We have come a long way, yet the truth is never December 1960 nearer with our philosophizing it. We have come only to feel and not to use wayside facts to measure how far truth is still from us. There is a thing as wisdom of the heart. RIZAL We have come a long way to become single truth seekers. One thing is sure: no body is sure of the truth. It is the seeking that counts then. It is a virtue, unless virtue is sin. Did Pilate will it so? F. PRIEST Pilate started an age of doubt and it will not do us any good to make him a re ference. The origin of man can lead us to the truth. Man does have a soul. The soul is the ab solute truth. We are interest ed in knowing the nature of the soul. RIZAL Something in a fish tells me there is in it little that man has improved on himself. S. PRIEST Use your heart, Jose. It is, given you to feel. You can use your mind only against yourself. RIZAL Father, I am a-grieved. I felt like this a thousand times before. When I am writing a poem, I am praying, praying, praying. Between verses or prayers I am also thinking that this cannot be happening.... happening to me. O, no, not me! Yet, despite what I am thinking I keep praying or writing till the rosary or the poem is whole. Only then can I go back to my body which cannot understand again what I have just done. Father, the truth cannot be had in a sin gle lifetime. F. PRIEST We are all guessers at it, Jose. Sometimes the Ho ly Spirit does inhabit us and we get a glimpse of glory. But no one can get all what he wants. Now, will you sign? (Produces a document) RIZAL The earliest Christians were pretty sure that they would have. They signed with the figure of the fish when they were sure of being watched. The synagogues were full of eyes and I wonder if hell is not as packed as that. S. PRIEST. Just your signa ture, Jose, and you will be saved. Do you not want to live? RIZAL How can a human be ing live? All my life I have been asking myself: How can a human being live? F. PRIEST It is a pity that so gifted a youth shoud not have used his talents in a better cause. Jose, my son, masonry is the enemy of the Church. RIZAL My religion which is your religion has no enemy. Nobody could pretend to peace without reliigon. It is just our human practices that make re ligion inhuman. Hervosa, my brother-in-law, cannot even rest in death. Extreme unction was denied him. Suppose my 56 Panorama soul will fly around like that without anchor... Father, I prefer to be buried in Paang Bundok —with your permis sion. Will you give me your blessing? S. PRIEST See, you are just a shy Catholic, Jose. RIZAL I am a sinner. Father. F. PRIEST Reconcile with the Church now. The times is near. RIZAL Have I not been al ways with it? Vengan los mas valientes! (Enter Joesphine in immaculate white; a white mantilla makes her look like a bride) JOSEPHINE Darling, please live! Live for my sake! (To the priests) Father, I feel... un wanted ... RIZAL (approaching her) Don’t say that again, Josefina. I’ve always wanted you as no body ever did. Right now, I want you to be my wife and I’m asking you to live for my sake. Father, will you marry us? F. PRIEST Until you sign, Jose. JOSEPHINE I want you, Pepe! I want you, darling! RIZAL I am so earthbound I want to crawl. For your sake, Josephina. (He signs the docu ment which the priest extends to him without reading it) Whatever you say, Father. Now, will you marry us? S. PRIEST (handling Rizal a blue scapular) This is our greatest hour. God is looking down. JOSEPHINE (sobbing) Fath er, if you have power set Pe pe free. We’ll go to Borneo. . . far, far away where you’ll not see us again, I promise. We’ll not come back to this place. RIZAL Josefina. . . (takes Jo sephine aside: they embrace lovingly) This is not the place to talk of places. Why, we’re here! Together! And in a mo ment we’ll be united. Come, come, give me a smile. F. PRIEST (on the steps to the altar) Come now, Jose, Jose fina. RIZAL Now, you stand here. Be beautiful and you’re beauti ful. I’ll stand at the steps. I’ll be waiting for you there. This comes once in a lifetime. Pre tend you’re walking on a mountain trail which is straigh/t Be careful not to fall. On either side is a deep abyss. Let me see if you can walk your own. . . JOSEPHINE (walking slowly and fearfuly; midway she be comes braver and attains Rizal’s arms) O, Pepe, it’s fear ful in the imagination! Hold me! RIZAL Imagination’s always ■viul my dearest. Control yourself and you control everything. Now, you can walk alone. December 1960 57 JOSEPHINE Can I? O, darl ing, can I? RIZAL Yes, yes, yes. Now, are you ready? Father I am ready. (The ceremony is performed. S. PRIEST I congratulate you, Jose. Good luck, Josefina. (Produces a carving of the Sacred Heart) Jose, do you recognize this? RIZAL (taking the carving) The image I carved when I was a student. It has not aged... F. PRIEST Things God shall not be dated. They are only re discovered. RIZAL I wish to contemplate on the Sacred Heart for a while. JOSEPHINE Father, I wish to be with my husband alone for a while. S. PRIEST May you find peace, my children. Dominus vobiscum. (Both priests exit) JOSEPHINE (embracing Ri zal) Pepe... RIZAL Josefina. . . JOSEPHINE Pepe, we’re to gether always? You’ll be with me once in a while? RIZAL I will. I will. We find ourselves in difficult circum stances. I can only give this (gives her a book) as a remin der. The most is the giver though. JOSEPHINE (reading the de dication) “To my dear and un happy wife — Josephine. De cember 30th, 1896, Jose Rizal.” About Christ! O, darling, it’s beautiful! RIZAL Christ will always look after you for me. JOSEPHINE Look, darling. . . (points to the painted Host) It’s like our moon in Dapitan. RIZAL Will you always look for me in the moon? JOSEPHINE I wish I’d follow you soon. Tell me there’s a land somewhere where we’d be alone. RIZAL No land, no earth but this one, Josefina. We all leave our loves behind here. We sur render to love here to be re deemed in the next. The next life will be all thanksgiving. . . and further work. Leaving the earth is an escape at its worst. Don’t do that. JOSEPHINE And you do it? RIZAL I’m forced to do it. Inay said I’d always amount to nothing. It’s true. Perhaps the people at Balintawak have been right after all. I didn’t believe at first in their method Now, now. . . O, Im just a Man in the Moon. I objected at first to my name used as a battlecry. Very soon I’ll be forgotten and what the people did will be remembered. Any way I’m happy. I’ve supplied the madness to their method. Josephine, what will you do after this exile? JOSEPHINE I can teach. I can join the guerrillas. I can 58 Panorama cook, and I can... I... can cry. . . RIZAL Don’t cry. Here, pro mise me, you’ll never cry. Once I saw you dancing. . . JOSEPHINE I danced alone — with our unborn. I didn’t know you were peeping. RIZAL Don’t be a wallflower. Even if you step on your part ner’s toes. Everybody wants you to dance. And dance you will (Shouts offstage: “Viva Espana!” thrice) JOSEPHINE They’re coming here, Pepe! They’re coming to get you. Pepe, I’ll follow you. RIZAL Josefina. . . (Embraces her) Josefina. . . JOSEPHINE Pepe. . . I dream ed you died but came back to life. . . RIZAL 0, never mind. Let them come. This is the last station of the cross. Gitano, what time is it now? GUARD Some minutes to se ven. I cannot see the numbers very well. What is the matter? RIZAL Open the door, Gitano, and admit the light. The altar lights are going out. Josephine, can you see me? JOSEPHINE No, Pepe, I can’t. . . Where are you? Voices at the door: “Kill the traitor! Kill the traitor!” Guard opens the door. Early morn ing light floods in. Voice: “At tention! Sergeant of the Guards speaking to guard in charge of chapel. Acknow ledge!”) GUARD (presenting arms) Guard in charge of chapel ac knowledges Sergeant of the Guards. VOICE OF THE SERGEANT Deliver the prisoner at once! (Shout offstage: “Kill the trai tor!”) RIZAL (standing at the en trance, in the full force of the light from outside) My body is safe through the night, ser geant. I am committing it to you. I was just accustoming ' my eyes to the light. O, I see: my escorts are ready. Pedes trians are lining the drive. They do this in victory pa rades, don’t they? It is like the homecoming of a hero to ac cept the key to the city. (Voices: “Viva Espana!” Three men break in —an Igorot, a Moro, and a contempo rary Filipino — and breath lessly take hold of Rizal’s hands, hat, clothes. . . ) SERGEANT (entering) Three wise men, eh? Do not be fun ny. You are only civilians. You are not bound by the articles of war. You do not have poli tics. Go before you break the law. I., M., & C. F. Law? SERGEANT Ignoramuses! The King is the law. GUARD Really, my friends... SERGEANT Friends? You call these friends? They cannot even write or read, I know. December 1960 59 GUARD May I have the per mission to speak to them, sir? SERGEANT All right, all right. Out with your talk. GUARD (to the three men) The King is the law, yes, my friends. And the King is noth ing but a human being that is obeyed. One Who disobeys is an outlaw. It is only an out law that is free. But who is the king that wants his people free? To be free is to help on ly one’s self. And who will help the King if everybody helps himself? SERGEANT Quickly! Quick ly! I., M., & C. F. Well, let him help himself. GUARD Think again and do not blame the King for being the law. He does not know any other occupation but being the law, poor King! SERGEANT What, Zumel? Poor'King? Clarify your state ment. GUARD Yes, sir. May I conti nue? I will clarify your state ment on politics. My friends, politics employs the King. Without politics he has no in come. If he has no income he has to resort to juez de cuchillo. So do not blame us soldiers too. Soldiers are only civilians working for the livelihood of the King for fear of their own lives. Now, go on. You have only to run in and out of luck: it is your game. The King and his men have to stay lucky: it is their duty. RIZAL Go on as ordered, my countrymen. I., M., & C. F. Dimas-Alang, a last message for us. RIZAL My message is known. Widows and orphans will only multiply if you do not watch out. SERGEANT Finished? You, you, and you, get lost! You do not, huh? Guard throw them in the dungeon. GUARD Sir, we cannot afford to multiply our enemies. SERGEANT Zumel, tomorrow your generation will be saying; ‘ Why did we have such a co ward for a father?” GUARD Other soldiers would comply with your wishes. . . SERGEANT You... you? Hey, guards! Throw them all to the dungeon! (Guards enter and seize the three men, in cluding the guard. The ser geant sizes the guard’s gun and rips his shirt) As of this mo ment, consider our connections ended. I will recommend you for dishonorable discharge. (The guards take them out) RIZAL Sergeant, may I have a last wish? Will you set them free? SERGEANT The order is or dered. I cannot change it. Come, yourself, senor. You are delay ing. . . (Shouts: “Kill the trai tor! Kill the traitor! Viva Es pana!”) 60 Panorama RIZAL Just a moment. Jose phine. . . (Josephine comes to him ) Cheer up. Now you stand here again. Be beautiful and you’re beautiful. Imagine I’m there at the altar as before. Pretend you’re walking on a mountain trail which is straight. Be careful not to fall. On either side is a deep ab yss. . . JOSEPHINE Kiss me! (Rizal kisses her) Pepe, the way. . . the way. . . is dark. . . RIZAL Can you manage it? JOSEPHINE O, Pepe, it’s fear ful. . . RIZAL Imagination is, my dearest. Imagine there’s a moon and I’m in it. Now, walk up to it. Are you ready? (Jose phine starts to walk up to the extinguished altar. Rizal sadly looks at her till she attains the steps and has fallen on her knees. Rizal smiles and turns to the sergeant) RIZAL Shall we go. . . our way? (The sergeant leads the way out. Shout: “Viva Espa na!”) ¥ ¥ ¥ Eat While You May Two cannibals met in a mental institution. One was tearing out pictures of men, women and chil dren from a magazine, stuffing them in his mouth and eating them. “Tell me,” said the other, “is that dehydrated stuff any good?” A Political Definition Another example of marvelous equilibrium is a politician standing on his past record. December 1960 61 You know him — An American Veteran out of the wars before he was twenty: Famous .at twenty-five: thirty a master — Whittled a style for his time from a walnut stick In a carpenter's loft in a street of that April City. Thus Poet Archibald MacLeish recalls one of the great American writers in his davs of early glory, back in the 1920s, when it always seem ed to be April in Paris. To day Ernest Hemingway is a long way from Paris and a long way from April. He was 55, but he looked older. He cruised in a black and green fishing boat off the coast of Cuba, near where the Gulf Stream draws a dark line on the seascape. The grey-white hair escaping from beneath a visored cap was un kempt, and the Caribbean glare induced a sea-squint in his brown, curious eyes set behind steelrimmed spectacles. Most of his ruddy face was retired behind a clipped, white, patri archal beard that gave him a bristled, Neptuneian look. His leg muscles could have been halves of a split 16-lb. shot, welded there by years tramp ing in Michigan, skiing in Swit zerland, bullfighting in Spain, walking battlefronts and hiking uncounted miles of African sawari. On his lap he held a board, and he bent over it with a pen cil in one hand. He was still whittling away at his walnut prose. Five thousand miles away in Stockholm, a white-starched, tail-coated assembly of the No bel Foundation was about to bestow literature’s most distin guished accolade on the pro ducts of his pencil. Then, “for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration,” the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Ernest Miller Hemingway, ori ginally of Oak Park, Ill. and la ter of most of the world’s grand and adventurous places. 62 Panorama Storyteller Few would deny that Ernest Hemingway deserves the trum pets of fame. As an artist he broke the bounds of American writing, enriched U.S. literature with the century’s hardest-hit ting prose, and showed new ways to new generations of wri ters. He was imitated not only by other writers but by un counted young men who, in fact or fancy, sought to live as dash ingly as he. From Paris bistros to Chicago saloons, he is known as a character — not the sallow, writing type with an indoor soul, but a literary he-man. When his plane crashed on safa ri in Africa one winter and for nearly a day he was believed dead, even people who do not like his books felt a strange, per sonal sense of loss, and even people who never read novels were delighted when he walked out of the jungle carrying a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin, and was quoted, possibly even correctly, as saying: “My luck, she is running very good.” The hero of th egreat He mingway legend was still not sufficiently recovered from his accident to travel to Stockholm for his latest, biggest honor (hit herto awarded only to five other American-born writers: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Pearl Buck, T. S. Eliot and William Faulkner). Furthermore, the first announcement of the Nobel award and the bustle of publi city that followed had thrown Hemingway off his writing pace. He took to his boat in hopes of getting back to work on his new novel about Africa. “I was going real good, better than for a long time, when this came along,” he said. “When you’re a writer and you’ve got it you’ve got to keep going because when you’ve lost it you’ve lost it and God knows when you’ll get it back.” Hemingway’s African injuries were a ruptured kidney, bad burns, cracked skull, two com pressed vertebrae and one ver tebra cracked clear through. December 1960 63 These were added to scars that cover perhaps half his body sur face, including half a dozen head wounds, 237 shrapnel scars in one leg, a shot-off kneecap, wounds in both feet, both arms, both hands and groin, all acquir ed in the two World Wars. In a few weeks he was much im proved, but his back was still bothering him. When he sat, he lined his chair with big flat pic ture books and a backboard. “I have to take so many pills,” he said, “they have to fight among themselves if I take them too close together.” His daily quo ta of alcohol, though still sub stantial enough to keep him in good standing among the alltime public enemies of the W. C.T.U., had fallen far below the old records. Gone were the unin hibited wine-purpled, 100-proof, side-of-the-fnouth bottle-swig ging days of the swashbuckling young Ernest Hemingway who was “the bronze god of the whole literary experience in America,” the lionhunting, tro phy-bagging, bullfight-1 o v i n g Lord Byron of America. “I’m a little beat up,” Ernest Heming way now admits, “but I assure you it is only temporary.” Even though held in by in" jury and age, Heming way’s life — on a small plan tation ten miles outside Havana, called Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm—is still the special He mingway blend of thought and action, artistry and nonconfor mity. The Hemingway of 1954 still has a bit of himself for the many sides of his life—and plenty left over to populate that private Hemingway world where the Hemingway heroes and heroines live their lives of pride and trouble enduring with courage as long as they can, of ten destroyed but never defeat ed. For Ernest Hemingway, when he is writing, every day begins at 5:30 in the morning, before any but some gabby bantams, a few insomniac cats and a can tankerous bird called “The Bit chy Owl” are awake, he goes to work in the big main bedroom of his villa. He writes standing up at the mantelpiece, using pencil for narrative and des cription, a typewriter for dialo gue ‘in order to keep up.” Rising up from one side of his villa is a white tower from which he can gaze meditative ly at Havana and the sea, or at his own domain—the iinca’s 13 acres, including flower and truck gardens, fruit trees, seven cows (which provide all the house-hold’s milk and butter), a large swimming pool, a tem porarily defunct tennis court. In the 60-foot-long living room, heads of animals Hemingway shot in Africa stare glassy-eyed 64 Panorama rom the walls. But most im posing of all are Hemingway’s books. He consumes books, newspapers and random printed matter the way a big fish gulps in plankton. One of the few top American writers alive who did not go to college, Heming way read Darwin when he was ten, later taught himself Span ish so he could read Don Qui xote and the bullfight journals. Hemingway has never slept well, and reading is his substi tute. Finca Vigia holds 4,859 volumes of fiction, poetry, his tory, military manuals, biogra phy, music, natural history, sports, foreign-language gram mars and cookbooks. For 15 years Hemingway has lived in Cuba. “I live here because I love Cuba— this does not imply a dislike for any place else—and because here I can get privacy when I write.” But his life in Cuba is not quiet. Guests at the finca are apt to include friends from the wealthy sporting set, say Winston Guest or Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt; pals from Hollywood, such as Gary Cooper or Ava Gardner; Span ish grandees, soldier, sailors, Cuban politicians, prizefighters, barkeeps, painters and even fel low authors. It is open house for U.S. Air Force and Navy men, old Loyalists from the Spanish civil war, or for any of the eight Cubans, Spaniards and Americans who served with Hemingway on his boat, the Pilar, early in World War 11 when Hemingway and the Pilar cruised the Caribbean hunting for enemy submarines. And even if there are no guests, there is always the long-dis tance phone, which may carry the husky voice of Marlene Dietrich, calling to talk over a problem with “Papa.” For Mary Welsh Hemingway, 46, an indefatigable former newspaper and magazine cor respondent from Minnesota, it is a fortunate day when she can reckon by 7 p.m. how many are staying for dinner and by 12 how many for the night. Life at Finca Vigia is, as she once reported it, a “perpetual weekend . . . involving time, space, motion, noise, animals and personalities, always ap proaching but seldom actually attaining complete uproar.” In the past, when the routine at Finca Vigia grew too dis tracting, Hemingway found es cape along grand avenues—a return to the plains below Ta nganyika’s Kilimanjaro or ano ther trip to Venice, or a nightclub-and-museum-crawling trip to New York. But for the bat tered and mellowing Heming way of today, the favorite re fuge is his boat. December 1960 65 Ana seagoing day (his first after winning the Nobel Prize), Hemingway’s big Buick station wagon bounces through two Chrysler engines, built to the suburbs along the Havana wharfsides by 9 a.m. The Pilar is a hardy, 42-foot craft with Hemingway’s specifications 20 years ago. Hemingway careful ly supervises the provisioning of the Pilar’s iceboxes for a hot day afloat—several brands of beer for his guests and the mate, some tequila for Skipper Hemingway. He consults with his mate, an agile, creased Ca nary Islander named Gregorio Fuentes. Then Hemingway shucks off his shoes and socks, chins himself on the edge of Pilar’s flying bridge, throws one leg up, and, favoring his sore back, slowly raises himself to the roof to take the set of con trols. The Pilar glides trimly past Morro Castle. Hemingway delightedly' sniffs the sea-grapescented air and gestures to the whole ocean. “It’s the last free place there is, the sea.” Gregorio deftly baits four lines and trails them from the stern. In fluid Spanish, He mingway and the mate decide to fish the waters off Cojimar, the little fishing village near which Hemingway set The Old Man and the Sea. The air and the baking sun make him feel good. In the sea haze, from the blue water, amid the occasional flying fish, ideas seem to appear—Heming way notions about how things are. “When a writer retires deliberately from life, or is forced out of it by some de fect, his writing has a tendency to atrophy just like a limb of a man when it’s not used.” He slaps his growing midriff, which in his enforced idleness, is spreading fore and aft. “Any one who’s had the fortune or misfortune to be an athlete has to keep his body in shape. I think body and mind are close ly coordinated. Fattening of the body can lead to fattening of the mind. I would be tempt ed to say that it can lead to fattening of the soul, but I don’t know anything about the soul.” In a sense, Hemingway per1 haps never fully faced up to the concept of soul in his writing. Religion is a subject he refuses to discuss at all. He is equally ill at ease in the world of the ruminative intel lectual. But he recognizes that in that world there is much worth knowing. In the bright sun, Hemingway recalls the s’ ut-in figure of Marcel Proust. “Because a man sees the world in a different way and sees more diverse parts of the world does not make him the equal 66 Panorama of a man like Marcel Proust,” says Hemingway humbly. “Proust knew deeper and bet ter than anyone the life of which he wrote.” Suddenly Gregorio cries out: “Feesh! Papa, feesh!” Proust is gone. Hemingway reaches down, grabs one of the rods by its tip and pulls it to the roof. He jerks once to set the hook, then with slow, graceful movements he pumps the rod back, reels a few feet, pumps, reels. To protect his back, he lets his arms and one leg do the work. By the shi very feel on the line he can identify the catch. “Bonito,” he tells Gregorio, “Good bonito.” With smooth speed, he works the fish close to the stern. Gre gorio grabs the wire leader and boats a blue-and-silver bonito of about 15 pounds. A broad, small-boy smile flashes through Hemingway’s old-man whiskers. “Good,” he says. “A fish on the boat before 10:30 is a good sign. Very good sign.” Gregorio takes the wheel and Hemingway lets himself down to the deck and sits down. His voice has an ordinary sound, but high-pitched for the big frame that produces it. For all his years away from his root land, he speaks with an unmis takable Midwestern twang. Ab sentmindedly he rubs a star shaped scar near his right foot, one of the scars left by mortar shell which gravely wounded him at Fossalta, Italy, in 1918 when he was a volunteer am bulance driver. Nick Adams, hero of many of Hemingway’s short stories, was wounded at approximately the same place in much the same way. So was Lieut. Henry of A Farewell to Arms; so was Colonel Cantwell of Across the River and Into the Trees. A critic named Philip Young last year pub lished a book attributing He mingway’s approach to life and his artistic creation most ly to the Fossalta wounding (plus some brash sights witness ed when he was a boy in Mi chigan traveling with his doctor father on emergency calls). He mingway does not think very highly of that book. “How would you like it if someone said that everything you’ve done in your life was done be cause of some trauma?” he says. “I don’t want to go down as the Legs Diamond of Let ters.” I n the past, hardly anyone ■ ever suspected Hemingway novels of symbolism. Then, in The Old Man and the Sea, peo ple saw symbols — the old man stood for man’s dignity, the big fish embodied nature, the shark’s symbolized evil (or maybe just the critics). “No good book has ever been written that has in its symbols arrived at before hand and stuck in,” says Hemingway. December 1960 67 “That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Rai sin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.” He opens two bottles of beer and continues: “I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true en ough they would mean many things is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.” He looks ahead at some float ing sargasso weed, where some flying fishes are skittering through the air. “Could be fish there,” he says. A reel gives out a soft whine, and Hemingway goes into action again. “Beauti ful!” he cries. “Dolphin. They’re beautiful.” After landing his fish, shimmering blue, gold and green, Hemingway turns his at tention to his guests. “Take him softly now,” he croons. “Easy, Easy. Work him with style. That’s it, up slowly with the rod, now reel infast. Suave. With style. With style. Don’t break his mouth.” After the second fish at last flops onto the deck, Hemingway continues his re flections. “The right way to do it—style — is not just an idle concept,” he says. “It is simply the way to get done what is sup posed to be done. The fact that the right way also looks beauti ful when it’s done is just inci dental.” This feeling about style, per haps more than anything else, has always been Hemingway’s credo—whether it concerned the right way to kill a bull, track a wild beast, serve Valpolicella or blow up a bridge. And it was usually the redeem ing feature and ultimate triumph of his characters: they might die, but they died with style. They left behind them some aura of virtue, nose de fiant statement of this-is-theway-it-should-be-done that am ounted to a victory of sorts. The matter of style reB minds Hemingway of ma ny things, things, including his Nobel Prize. He knows just what he would like to say if he went to Stockholm for the ac ceptance ceremony. He would like to talk about a half-forgot ten poet and great stylist—Ez ra Pound. Poet Pound used to look over Hemingway’s early manuscripts in Paris and return ed them, mercillesly blue-pen ciled, the adjectives gone. In dicted for treason for his pro Fascist broadcasts in Italy dur ing World War II, Pound was declared “mentally incompe tent” in 1946 and confined in Washington’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. “Ezra Pound is a great poet,” says Hemingway fiercely, “and whatever he did he has been punished greatly and I be lieve should be freed to go and 68 Panorama write poems in Italy where he is loved and understood. He was the master of T. S. Eliot. Eliot is a winner of the Nobel Prize. I believe it might well have gone to Pound ... I believe this would be a good year to release poets. There is a school of thought in America which, if encouraged far enough, could well believe that a man should be punished for the simple error against conformity of being a poet. Dante, by these stand ards, could well have spent his life in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for errors or judgment and of pride.” Alongside the Pilar, the bait bobbing and Dante gives way to the dolphins. In little time the Pilar boasts 15 beauties. Excit ed as a boy, Hemingway over looks a promise to quit early and take a late afternoon nap. Not until almost dusk does the boat put in to harbor. The sun seems to be setting only a few yards off a corner of Havana, four miles distant, and Heming way savors it as if it were his first sunset—or his last. “Look!” he exclaims. “Now watch it go down, and then you’ll see big green ball where it was.” The sun falls as if jerked below the horizon, and for a long instant a big green, sun-sized ball hangs in its place. As the Pilar turns the harbor mouth, Hemingway takes the controls. Ceremonially, Gre gorio the mate hands up to him what remains of the tequila and a freshcut half of lime. Heming way does not actually drink the tequila, and the whole thing bears the appearance of a ri tual, as if to ward off sea ser pents. Only at the dock does he pass around the bottle. “We went out and had a good day and caught plenty fish and got pooped,” he says. “Now we can relax for a while and talk and go to sleep.” With a tired smile on his tired, grizzled face, he lumbers up the gangway and off to his car and home. TIRED OR NOT, Hemingway is B is a man who likes to re lax with memories. Once, he remembers, there was a bat tered old prizefighter in Key West who wanted to make a comeback and asked Heming way to referee. “It was a Negro section,” Hemingway recalls, “and they really introduced me in the ring: “The referee for to night’s bouts, that world-famous millionaire sportsman and play boy, Mr. Ernest Hemingway! Playboy was the greatest title they thought they could give a man who has heard plaudits like that?” While Hemingway was per haps never a millionaire, the playboy title often fitted him. Oak Park, Ill. (pop. 63,529) saw the earliest Hemingway— the versatile, out-doors-loving December 1960 69 son of respected Dr. and Mrs. Clarence E. Hemingway. Later Oak Park’s people wondered, as one of them put it, “how a boy brought up in Christian and Pu ritan nurture should know and write so well of the devil and the underworld.” (He was born a Congregationalist, became a praticing Roman Catholic, now apparently does not go to church). The city room of the Kansas City Star saw him fresh out of high school and itchy for excitement. He left after only seven months of co vering “the short-stop run”— police, railroad station, hospital. He lied about his age (18) to join the Red Cros ambulance service. Soon, postcards came back from the Italian front. “Having a wonderful time,” they said. The Hemingway who first stepped into Gertrude Stein’s salon in postwar Paris was 22, “rather foreign looking, with passionately interested, rather than interesting eyes.” But the Hemingway she remembered later, after they had parted company, was “yellow . . . just like the flatboat men on the Mississippi River as described by Mark Twain.” In his Paris days, he often refused good newspaper assign ments and lunched on five sous’ worth of potatoes in or der to write his stories his own way. Even before any of his work was published (1923), word of Hemingway’s fresh new talent floated like tobacco smoke through Paris’ expatriate cafes and salons. He impressed and became friends with many of the literary greats of the day, including James Joyce. “Once, in one of those casual conversations you have when you’re drinking,” recalls He mingway, “Joyce said to me he was afraid his writing was too suburban and that maybe he should get around a bit and see the world. He was afraid of some things, lightning and things, but a wonderful man. He was under great discipline —his wife, his work and his bad eyes. His wife was there and she said, yes, his work was too suburban—‘Jim could do with a spot of that lion hunt ing.’ We would go out to drink and Joyce would fall into a fight. He couldn’t even see the man so he’d say, ‘Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!’ ” The Hemingway of the late 1920s, prosperous and confident, dealt successfully with all comers. But he had his trou bles. His first marriage to Had ley Richardson of St. Louis, broke up in 1927, and his fa ther committed suicide in 1928. Hemingway was later to mar ry two more St. Louisans: Vo gue Writer Pauline Pfeiffer 70 Panorama (1927) and Novelist Martha Gellhorn (1940). From his first marriage he has one son, John (“Bumby”), 32, a World War II soldier and OSS man who is now in a Portland, Ore. in vestment house. From his se cond he has two more sons, Patrick, 24, who has bought a plantation in Tanganyika, and Gregory, 22, who is completing premedical studies in Los An geles. The Hemingway of Death ■ in the Afternoon (1932) was passionate about bulls, ma tadors, violence and the art of risking death. Max Eastman, the pundit and critic, wrote in Bull in the Afternoon that He mingway seemed to have “be gotten ... a literary style ... of wearing false hair on the chest.” One afternoon three years later, 54-year-old, relatively unhirsute Max Eastman was confronted in Scribner’s New York office by bull-angry, 38-year-old He mingway, who ripped open his shirt to prove that the chest hair was real. The scene cul minated in the notorious scuf fle whose true outcome has long since vanished in the fog of subjective claims and counter claims. The Depression and the Spanish civil war produced the short-lived Political Heming way. In To Have and Have Not, Hemingway’s only full length novel with a U.S. setting, he sounded vaguely socialist. Some critics, particularly the Communists, grasped at the death of the novel’s hero, Har ry Morgan, because he died insisting that “a man alone ain’t got no . . . chance.” One critic saw in the book a plea for some form of social collectivism. He mingway wore his heart on his sleeve for the Loyalists in Spain, but For Whom the Bell Tolls clearly showed his con tempt for the Communists. They, in turn, denounced his books for being militaristic and lacking social significance. The Hemingway of World War II wore a canteen of ver mouth on one hip, a canteen of gin on the other, a helmet that he seldom used because he couldn’t find one big enough. Accredited a foreign correspon dent for Collier's (he jokingly called himself “Ernie Hemorr hoid, the poor man’s Pyle”), he took part in more of the European war than many a soldier. With Colonel (now Major General) Charles T. Lanham’s 22 nd Infantry Regi ment, he went through the Normandy breakthrough, Schnee Eifel, the Hurtgen For est bloodletting and the defense of Luxembourg. Gathering 200 French irregulars around him, he negotiated huge allotments of ammunition and alcohol and assisted in the liberation of 71 Paris. Hemingway personally liberated the Ritz Hotel, post ed a guard below to notify in coming friends: “Papa took good hotel. Plenty stuff in cel lar.” The postwar Hemingway ■ settled into another good hotel, the Gritti in Venice, to write “the big book” about World War II (a draft is now finished). But a piece of gun wadding went into his eye dur ing a duck hunt and started an infection that doctors feared was going to kill him. Wanting to get one more story out of himself, he put the big book aside and batted out Across the River and Into the Trees, which most critics found a middleaged love fantasy with an ad mixture of bad-tempered mili tary shoptalk. Said Hemingway about the critics: “I have moved .through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in cal culus. If they don’t understand that, to hell with them.” It is impossible to overlook the adolescent in Hemingway —his bravado, his emotional friendships, his vague but allimportant code, his deep sen timentality about the good, the true, the straight, the beautiful, and occasionally the unprint able. But to preserve some thing of the adolescent through three decades in a world of li terary critics, parodizers and cocktail-party highbrows takes a certain admirable courage. Above all, Hemingway can laugh at himself. Typical of Hemingway making fun of He mingway is El Ordine Militar, Nobile y Espirituoso de los Ca balleros de Brusadelli—which means, more or less, the Mili tary Order of the Noble and Spirited Nights of Brusadelli. It was founded by Hemingway in Italy, and named, as he ex plains in Across the River and Into the Trees, “after a particu larly notorious multi-millionaire taxpaying profiteer of Milan, who had . . . accused his young wife, publicly and legally through due process of law, of having deprived him of his judgment through her extraor dinary sexual demands.” As Commander of the Great Chain of the Order, Hemingway dis tributed knighthoods to friends; after his recovery he returned to Cuba, and mailed reports to fellow members. A sample writ ten just after he had finished writing The Old Man and the Sea: “Your Cuban representa tive has not been able to do much for the Order in the last year due to the deplorable ne cessity of writing a book . . . The book will be published on Sept. 8th and all members of the Order will observe a mo ment of silence. The password will be: ‘Don’t cheer, boys. The poor readers are dying.’” 72 Panorama |1 ow does Nobel Prizewia" ner Ernest Hemingway stand with his surviving read ers? The Sun Also Rises, which offered an ironical thenody for the “lost generation,” is today appealing mostly as a period piece. But even if Hemingway had stopped after the fine short stories written in the 1920s and A Farewell to Arms, he wojld have won a roomy place in Am erican literature. Years later, when his style had become a fix ture and when Hemingway prose occasionaly dipped to ward banality, the importance of the beginning was sometimes not considered. Much of his out put of the ’30s seems below par today, but For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) was one of his best, and in The Old Man and the Sea he is better than he ever was, more mature and less man nered. Unlike most American writers, who seemed inexplicab ly to wither after their triupmhs (e.g., Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Hergesheimer, Thomas Wolfe), Ernest Hemmingway has con tinued to grow. Almost from the beginning, critics have talked about Hem ingway’s obsession with death, all the dark and clinical tear and bleeding on the battlefields, in the bull rings, in the lunch room where The Kilers wait, with gloves on, for their victims. Yet somehow, in an atomic age, Hemingway seems much less macabre and violent than he did in the pacifist climate of the ‘30s. Hemingway still stands out from a pack of introspective and obscure writers with a dazzling simplicity, rarely politicking, ne ver preaching, never using Freu dian jargon. Some, including 1949’s Nobel Prizewinner William Faulkner, think that his world is too nar row. “(Hemingway) has no cou rage,” Faulkner once said. “(He) has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used.” Hemingway has indeed remained in the carefully deli neated, cut-to-the-bone world of simple, palpable acts. But at his best, Hemingway has a sense of fate recalling Melville, an Am erican heartiness recalling Mark Twain (who never used big dic tionary words either). Heming way can carve icebergs of prose; only a few words on paper con vey much more beneath the sur face. The taut, economical style contains more than meets the casual eye—the dignity of man and also his imperfection, the recognition that there is a right way and a wrong, the know ledge that the redeeming things of life are measured in the pro found satisfactions that come from struggle. Said Dr. Anders OsteAing, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, in Stockholm this week: “Courage December 1960 73 is Hemingway’s central theme— the bearing of one who is put to the test and who steels himself to meet the cold cruelty of ex istence without, by so doing, re pudiating the great and gener ous moments...” John Donne provided Hem ingway with the title of For Whom the Bell Tolls. “No man is an Hand, intire of it selfe,” said Donne. Says Hemingway now: “A man both is and is not an island. Sometimes he has to be the strongest! island there can be to be a part of the main. (I) am not good at stating meta physics in a conversation, but I thought Santiago (the Old Man) was never alone because he had his friend and enemy the sea and the things that lived in the sea some of whom he loved and others that he hated.’ ’ His lifetime has brought Er nest Hemingway recognition, distinction and reward that only death and passage of time bring to many others. Hemingway is satisfied. He would not change any of his life or of his writings —anyway, “not yet.” He feels now as he did some years ago, and he is willing to rest on it: “You only have to do it once to get remembered by some peo ple. But if you can do it year after year after year quite a lot of people remember and they tell their children and their chil dren and their grandchildren re member, and if it’s books they can read them. And if it’s good enough it lasts forever.” * * * 74 Panorama O, say, can you see? Sunshine and "Darkness in South Africa ^TILL SPLASHING from the A inexhaustible fountain of fantasy that is London’s South Africa House are bright invitations to immigrate or tra vel to South Africa. Bewilder ed by beckonings to ‘Sunshine Plus!’ and ‘Exhilarating South Africa’, Britishers who have read their newspapers or watched television with any at tention during the past few weeks must wonder whether Sharpeville could ever have happened or whether the news of it has somehow escaped the notice of South Africa’s diplo matic representatives abroad. For what sort of people are able to find South Africa after exhi larating, or the persistent police assaults on Africans in the streets of South African cities an attraction second only to the sunshine? The invitations stand, lighting the corridors of consulates and competing against other playgrounds along the walls of travel agencies all around the world. To believe that the South African Government is merely brazening it out is to catch just the glitter on the iceberg pass ing by. The South African Government is capable of brazening it out precisely be cause it sees no reason at all for doing otherwise. No admi nistration that had so assaulted the conscience of the world by its acts would have such insult to such injury unless its own conscience remained quite clear of disquiet. The truth is, of course, that the South African Government still believes in what its own posters proclaim, and to remove them would be an admission of guilt that it is morally incapable of making. T^he South African Govv emment feels no guilt over Sharpeville because it recog nizes no wrong in killing 68 people and wounding over 200 December 1960 75 more in defense of white supre macy. If it condemns itself at all in the lobby of its heart, it does so only in whispered doubts of the prudence. Yet, conditioned by the stock res ponses of its own electorate, how could it have supposed that the outside world would have reacted with such a hurri cane of horror to the death of a few dozen black men? Was white supremacy to be risked at the cost of a little shooting? And if a salutary lesson is to be given black resistance again, is prudence to dictate the sui cide of rule? There are many who still doubt that the South African Government planned the kill ings at Sharpeville. Yet much larger crowds of protesting Af ricans than the one which as sembled outside Sharpeville po lice station have since been dis persed with warnings, baton charges, shots in the air or the wounding of a few front-line demonstrators in the legs. And surgeons giving evidence at the Sharpeville Commission of En quiry claim that three-quarters of the Sharpeville wounded whom they examined in hospi tal had all been shot in the back. Eye-witness affidavits that no warnings were given by the police emphasize the signi ficance of this. The Govern ment decided upon a massacre at the outset of the anti-pass campaign, as the show of in transigence that it had for so long been promising the coun try. It is unfortunate that the show should have excited so much censure abroad, but no lo yal Nationalist considers the show any less right or necessary than had the outside world ig nored Sharpeville altogether. J government capable of Sharpeville is unlikely to be turned from the highway of defiance it has chosen by the pluckings of protest. The cen sure of the outside world may may be inconvenient; but white South Africa has suffered cen sure before, without feeling it necessary to make any changes in its conduct. In time, as oth er countries flare into the head lines, attention will wander and the censure abate; Dr. Verwoerd himself has often spoken of apartheid as though all it needed to do was to last out its moral blockade before achieving ultimate acceptance as a sort of universal religion of race. The lunatic who believes himself to be the Archangel Michael is not open to dissuasion on the point; whatever scepticism he encoun ters, he ascribes to ignorance or wilful self-deceit. And in just the same way does white supre macy react to the rebellions of reason. What the South African Gov ernment has never ignored is the possibility of restraint. In 76 Panorama dustrial action by world trade unionism, economic sanctions by the United Nations, the phy sical prevention of further con trol over the trust territory of South-West—any of these three * forms of action would tumble the walls of apartheid merely by trumpeting. On two occasions in the past, the Government rapid ly changed its mind about utili zing convict labour to break Af rican stevedore strikes when it was threatened by Internation al Transport Federation repri sals. Commerce and industry in South Africa are already rock ing under the effects of the Emergency, and the whites are more than ever aware of the economics essential with his bible among the clear flat hori zons of the veld. He listens to commercial radio in his subur ban flat arid dodges the drear iness of work among paper backs, the films and hire-pur chase furniture. Blood is not nearly as important to him as privilege; he fights to “keep the kaffir in his place” only in or der that he should not run any risk of competitively losing his own. Such people, however shrilly they threaten it, do not die in the streets as their ulti mate sacrifice to obsession. They submit when they see at last that they have no other choice; it is so much easier after all just to go on living. The outside world has a ■ choice between break ing the back of white suprema cy and actively assisting it to survive. There can be no mo ral escape into mere acceptance. For the Saracens and sten-guns that alone can contain black resistance are bought from ab road with the profits of the vio lence they allow. Behind the policemen who fired into the fleeing throng at Sharpeville are those who trade with South Af rica, from the dock-side to the shop, exchanging or allowing the exchange of oil for diamonds, machinery for gold, bullets for fruit. They are accomplices in the force against which they protests are not only hollow but insulting. Sharpeville is yesterday now, with its 68 dead and over 200 wounded. Only in newspaper files can it still be seen, a sud denly arrested moment in the agony of Africa, twisted across the paper before being loosed in to the past. The killed and the broken of Sharpeville are now a forgetting, the fading of faces under the glare of this morn December 1960 77 ing’s front page. And along the walls of airports and travel agencies round the world re main the coloured posters ad vertising ‘Exhilarating South Africa’. If the revulsion against Sharpeville has any meaning at all, it must make another Sharpeville impossible, paying to those who died that Monday suddenly in the sunshine the respect of some purpose. * * * Journey into Learning When the journey from means to end is not too long, the means themselves are enjoyed if the end is ardently desired. A boy will toil uphill with a toboggan for the sake of the few brief moments of bliss during the descent; no one has to urge him to be industrious, and however he may puff and pant he is still happy. But if instead of the immediate reward you promised him an old-age pension at 70 hjs energy would very quickly flag. ---- BERTRAND RUSSELL Sign Language This sign was posted on the marquee of a Nebraska theater on a 95-degree day: “Our air con ditioning system has broken down. Please bare with us.” * 78 Panorama Stories, 1960 * * Wallace Stegner and Richard Scowcraft., Stanford Short Sto ries 1960 (Stanford: 1960) By Leonprd Casper Boston College Book Review That sense of power arched and violent, yet suspend ed”— in its image of equestrian magnificence Joanna Ostrow’s “A Decision to Withdraw” provides a monu ment to the high art of fiction practiced at Stanford. Were the stories not arranged alphabetically, according to author, Miss Ostrow’s own surely would be among the foremost. Her contempt for “the Money” and his wife, presumptuously pre paring for an Olympic dressage beyond their comprehension as well as their prowess, finds justification in her narrative’s properly fierce, rhythmical shape. Stanford fellows often are chosen for the promise of mutual provocation which their per sonal variety can provide. But here an authenticity of more than private detail and specialized lore emerges: that wise ac curacy which proceeds only from whoever, while training a horse, trains himself and so trades pretension for durable self estimation. The same certainty of experience held accountable after long vigil shines through Tillie Olsen’s “Tell Me a Riddle.” Cornered by death and its demands for assessment, a bickering old couple find in themselves sufficient human resource. Dur ing the agony of his wife’s last day, Granddad is begged to “come back and help her poor body to die,” on the promise that some more incorruptible self had already recovered, in memory, the day “when she first heard music.” The narrative style is as cun ningly incoherent as that passionate inarticulateness which so well defined Mrs. Olsen’s earlier story, “Hey Sailor, What Ship?” December 1960 79 (Best American Short Stories of 1957). With the precision of a James Agee, she resorts to poetic utterance to express her char acters’ half-stifled outcry, their primitive truth. All living things inform against the turned down hearing aid: the grandchild ren’s attendance on Disaster Day, the “Rosita” cookie comme morating the Mexican newly-dead, the closeted child, fugitive recollections of prison camp, the tape-recorded inner mono logue. The meaning of life is in its being lived. And the author’s power comes from the respect she gives her charac ter’s truth of experience. C everal other stories aspire to the magnitude and control of • these two, and a few approach them. Olympia Karageorges’ “Career” alternates between local appeal (the Greek family in Egypt) and sentimentality (the farmed-out servant’s child) per haps because the point of view is too autobiographical to be characterized objectively, until the last ironic moment. John Waterhouse’s “The Small, Gentle House of Bertram Camm” (the bully sent to frighten Camm from his property is routed when snit defiles his boots) and Robin MacDonald’s “A Red, Red Coat” (an idiot girl looses his ferrets on a tubercular who has dared to compare their needs) suffer from too little in terim reserve of insight before the strong tolling of their end ings. Yet their undeniable seriousness makes them superior to the tabloid unsubtleties of “Martin Fincher, Tripod Man” or the coy-comic inflation of “The Baseball Business” and “The Pride of Scotland,” hand-me-down jokes. Least understandable are the inclusion of two selections from student novels whose windy rambling not only contri butes nothing instructively to the solution of short fiction’s problems but is unforgivable in the company of Tillie Olsen’s novelette, in which no word is wasted and every nuance of sound or image is an opportunity. It must be little consolation to such novel ists-by-default and by-attenuation, if Mrs. Olsen’s story is so incomparable that even she must sometimes des pair of its duplication. —From New Mexico Quarterly. 80 Panorama Literary Personality LXXI THoiison: Kisto^xj Was Tltete 'amuel E. Morison is both retired Professor of History at Harvard and a retired rear admiral. Although he has written much about the first founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, their problems of body and soul, he will likely be known to posterity as a writer of the sea. Two biographies, of Columbus and of John Paul Jones, have already won Pu litzer prizes. And he will certainly receive some kind of ac colade for finishing the fourteen volumes in his History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. What distinguishes Morison from so many historians is that his has never been a sedentary life, and now in the mid70’s still is not. He has sailed Columbus’ route to the new world and has been everywhere that Jones went, except Rus sia. When World War II broke out, he felt that necessity of a historian’s being on the front to record data properly. As a hint he sent President Roosevelt a copy of his Columbus biography, in 1942; but FDA failed to take the hint. Lucki ly he was, at that time, part of a committee studying the Hyde Park library in FDR’s home district. He attached a one-page outline of his naval plans to the report to make sure that the President would read it. He did; and Morison be came an admiral. He was equally welcomed by Admiral King in the Pacific, who knew his work on Columbus. As a result Morison sailed officially on 15 ships and won seven battle stars. One cruiser on which he served was hit by a torpedo, another by a kamikazi. Yet he kept taking notes, and the first volume of his series came out in 1947. Technically his is not the official naval history; but their own records could not be more precise, nor more interestingly December 1960 81 told. Over 220,000 copies of one volume or another have been sold, with 1958’s Leyte in the lead. y^is style is unexpectedely relaxed, for a Boston Brahmin. Yet he himself belongs in history. His office, next to the stacks of American books in Harvard’s Widener Library (second in size only to the Library of Congress) once belong ed to Edward Channing, a long-line Bostonian chronicler. His home is the house in which he was born. It was built by his grandfather while Daniel Webster was tearing down his own house, so his grandfather walked over and took Da niel’s living room mantelpiece from the scrap heap. The sec ond floor which used to house servants now holds Morison’s extra books. Sometimes the Morisons store the heavy furni ture from several rooms in a moving van, call in an orchestra and have a party. Other times he keeps moving: from Har vard, to Washington, to Newport, Rhode Island (for naval archives), to his favorite hideaway, Mount Desert Island in northern Maine. While he was working on his fourteen naval volumes he found time to turn out eight others; and one is a slim 81 pages, called The Story of Mount Desert Isle. He himself declares that “it is not merely an island; it is a way of life to which one becomes addicted; and if we are per mitted in the hereafter to enter that abode where the just are made perfect, let us hope that it may have some resem blance to Champlain’s Isle des Monts Deserts. 82 Panorama CHINESE “AMAHS” 'T'he hard-working Chinese “amahs” (house maids) 1 of Hong Kong are the unsung heroines of the cold war. Since the Communists captured the China main land eleven years ago, “amahs” have been flocking across the border, from Hong Kong into Red China, in increas ing numbers. They go on short-term visits, from three days to a week, armed with Hong Kong re-entry permits which get them back across the border after their visits are over. The main purpose of their trips is to take food to hungry relatives in Communist China. A side product of their trips is one of the most heart-rending stories of conditions in China today. The Chinese amah works from dawn till the house hold is asleep for 365 days a year. Those who make the trip—thousands every month—spend their meager earnings on foodstuffs such as oil, meat, dried fish, noo dles and sugar which they take across the border to their relatives. Amahs make up a large proportion of the estimat ed 10,000 Hong Kong residents who visit Red China monthly. Office and factory workers cannot leave their jobs too readily. Household employers, in view of the hardships in volved usually give their amahs about a week off, twice heart-breaking trips. And they are heart-breaking. Many of the amahs come home in tears. During the past few weeks, amahs have returned to Hong Kong with stories of back-breaking labor in Red China and hunger bordering on starvation. Their stories are highly colored by their emotions but all of them have the common denominator of “too much work and too little food.” Information gathered from official Chinese Commu nist sources supports the reports of food shortages and mass labor campaign. December 1960 83 Holiday for Snakes jOU’re a reporter and you’ve flown 5,000 miles / to cover a story—a story of serpents. Lou land in Cocullo, Italy— the district of snakes, and the peasants are in a holiday mood. You don’t like snakes your self, but you watch with fasci nation. White snakes entwine the instruments of the local orchestra as they play. The kids are tossing snakes instead of baseballs and you see rep tiles slither and crawl up and down the statues of San Dome nico Abate the patron Saint of this town. You’re on a story so you for get your squeamishness for a minute and tell Ezio Graffeo, your photographer and inter preter to shoot the groups of kids with the hundreds of ser pents. You remember that the snake got Adam and Eve kick ed out of heaven and has re mained a symbol of the devil even to the present times. But you also remember the snake is the symbol of healing and i^ part of the Doctors’ insignia. In Cocullo, where the inha bitants wear wooden shoes and where no radios exist, the whole town earns its livelihood from snakes. Today is a holiday — the “Feast of the Serpents” in honor of the patron Saint and protector against snakebites. On this day no snakes are caught. They are feted. Before this big day, many snakes are fed bran and kept in darkness for two months so they will turn white—almost albino. Many of the men have their bodies tattooed with snake images year after year—for centuries past, this snake rever ence has continued, and the patron Saint revered. As long as there are snakes in the woods of Cocullo, life and live lihood will go on. 84 Panorama THE LENS— a great invention by Jerome S. Meyer Hundreds of millions of lives have been saved by curved glass. Hundreds of millions of eyes have been helped toward better vision, and countless millions of peo ple have been entertained through the use of curved glass which enables them to read books, magazines, newspapers, movies, and television. With out this curved glass, otherwise known as the lens, there could be no microscope, and the sciences of optics and bacterio logy which have wiped out the epidemics and plagues of years ago, would be unknown. Photo graphy would also be unknown and millions of us would be cheated out of proper vision. Navigation would be affected adversely without the lens; so would surveying and mapping and modem building since all engineers’ transits contain tele scopes. As important as the lens is, nobody knows who ac tually invented it. Spectacles were worn for nearly a hundred years before the microscope and telescope were born. Salvani D. Armato, an Italian, and Nicholas Bullet, a French priest are credited for being the inventors of curved glass spectacles as early as 1282. Anton Van Leeuvenhoek, the inventor of the microscope had designed 419 lenses, most of which were double convex type, which is the kind used in pho tography and moving picture projection today. The science of optics was developed through the efforts of Christian Huygens who in vented new methods of grind ing and polishing lenses, the principle of which is used this day. Newton was the first to show that light is composed of many different colors and that when light is bent these colors ap pear in the form of a spec trum. He explained this in terms of waves, wave lengths and vibrations. December 1960 85 The thoughts and research■ es of these men enabled the scientists that followed to formulate new laws of optics based on the nature of light rays, and soon photographic lenses began to appear. In stead of one piece of double convex glass, these lenses con sisted of several pieces cement ed together in many different ways. There are six types of lenses; the piano convex, piano con cave, convexo concave, concavo convex, double concave and double convex. The double con vex lens is the one most fre quently used, since it is a mag nifying lens as well as project ing lens. Both the surfaces of a double convex lens are curved outward like the outside of a watch crystal or a section of the outside of a sphere. The double convex lens also reduces. This is otherwise known as a reducing glass and is used occasionally, together with lenses in the construction of optical instruments. ¥ ¥ ¥ Pink Snow? The snow that falls in the Arctic is white snow but Arctic snowbanks sometimes look pink because of microscopic plants. When you stand close to the snow bank the color isn’t noticeable, but at a dis tance of 100 feet or so the snow will seem to be pink and sometimes quite red. At times the re flected color or these snowbanks give the sky a pink tinge. ¥ 86 Panorama £uleaa: Ct Toum lltat. Defa Darkness by Carol Coghill Twn life in a harsh cli mate must, one imagines, inevitably be drab and dreary. One pictures its archi tecture as functional but grace less, its inhabitants as worthy but dour. Luleaa, coastal capital of Sweden’s largest county, Norrbotten, is there to prove one wrong. Close to the Arctic Circle and with a winter tem perature that makes most southerners shudder even to think of, sometimes down to minus thirty-five degrees centi grade, it is still one of the gay est and most active communi ties in Sweden. One of the reasons is doubt less its mushroom growth, for it has trebled its population to the present 30,000 in the last fifteen years and is still ex panding. Many of its citizens are first generation immigrants from the wild and desolate Norrboteen countryside and have not yet acquired a city dweller’s mentality. If you live in Luleaa you are likely to be working either in the iron ore or timber indus tries (it has one of the most modern steel mills in the coun try), in shipping, shipbuilding or engineering. For though Lu leaa harbor is icebound five months of the year, the town has since the end of the last century been the main port for shipping the ore from Sweden’s richest mining areas, and it al so receives much of the timber from her vast northern forests. Your home may be in one of the century-old red painted wooden houses that give the town such a bright welcoming look, or in the ultra modern blocks of flats that ring the su burbs. In either case you will have a beautiful view free of charge, of the Gulf of Bothnia stretching away on one side and the distant snowcapped mountains on the other. And December 1960 87 being a citizen of Luleaa, you will have a life enriched by co lorful tradition as well as by modern invention. The traditions have deep roots. Until the early Middle Ages, the Lapps roamed alone with their herds of reindeer in the country of Norrbotten. When the Swedish fur-trad ers began to settle along the coast they devoted large sums of money to building churches to which people would travel from all over the North. Spe cial housing had to be provid ed for those who came long dis tances and thus there grew up communities called “church villages,” cottage settlements which were inhabited only spo radically. This is how Luleaa grew up and the old town, “Gammelstad,” with its magni ficent fifteenth century church, still fulfill? its ancient func tions, although Luleaa itself has moved eastwards, as a result of the gradual emergence of land from the sea, an after-effect of the Ice Age. Though modern communica tions have largely solved the problem of long-distance travel and secularization has under mined the religious basis of the church villages, people still gather from far and wide on feast days and celebrate wed dings, christenings and funerals in this medieval setting. The fact of inheriting the trappings of a rich past does not prevent the people of Lu leaa from living fully and ener getically in the present. If you come to the town you are in fact more likely to be shown the ultra-modern Shopping Center before being taken on a visit to the Old Town. *yHis seven-story building, covered by an aluminum dome, was built by private enteprise in 1955, and has alrea dy caused quite a change in the life of the inhabitants. For it is nothing less than another “town,” as unique in its way as “Gammeslstad.” Built on the lines of an American shopping center, it has been shaped by its architect, an Englishman Ralph Erskine, with an eye to Swedish habits and ideas, one might even say, dreams. When you walk into “Shop ping,” as it is fondly called by the locals, you will still find yourself on a “street” with the shops lining it rather in the style of an Oriental Bazaar. But it will be a street with an even temperature of plus eigh teen degrees centigrade, and the southern atmosphere will be still further emphasized by soft music and bright lights. You will even be able to disco ver miniature squares of the piazza type with fountains and cafes. There are none of the esPanorama calators that give such an ef fect of hurry and bustle to the most modem shopping emporia; you go upwards by means of staircases of a few steps at a time. The human gregariousness that was the basis of the crea tion of Gammesltad today flourishes in “Shopping,’* where often up to 25,000 visitors are registered in a single day. Some come, of course, for ser ious shopping among the fifty odd stores, others simply to lounge in a cafe. In the even ings the building is used for political or religious meetings, dances, art shows, mannequin parades. The boys and girls of Luleaa’s many schools love the warm, relaxed atmosphere under the big aluminum dome. As a result “Shopping” has had its fair share of the “teddy boy” problem which seems insepara ble from modem city life. Dif ferent solutions are now being offered in the form of the crea tion of youth councils and clubs with headquarters in the build ing. While Gammelstad provides amusement and interest at the Protestant church festivals the year round, and “Shopping” gives the city a winter Riviera Nature herself also supplies ac tivities and entertainment dur ing a large part of the year. The surrounding archipelago offers unlimited facilities for boating and swimming, the great Lule river fishing, and the forests and hills of the hin terland marvelous skiing areas. In Luleaa, for all its up-todatedness, the winds still car ry a taste of the wilderness— it is not, after all so far to the woods where bears and wolves still make rare appearances. Emissaries from these regions — the Lapps in their brilliant blue and red costumes — can often be seen in the streets. Mostly, however these proud nomad people keep to the hills. Anybody who wants to know more about their way of life, without actually following them there, can drop into the Norrbotten museum, which has extensive charts of their wan derings and a remarkable col lection of Lapp chattels and costumes. The strange joy of living in this town bordering on the wilderness is perhaps most po ignant on a winter night, when the snow glistens coldly under skies shimmering with the strange radiance of the North ern lights, to which the neon blaze of the town, with the shopping center in the middle, gives out an answering bril liance. You will feel the triumph of defying the cold and the long dark winter days, knowing that the reward, 89 though far off, is awaiting you: a few hectic weeks of summer when the whole countryside will burst into leaf and flower and you will be able to enjoy the “sunlit nights” of the north ern summer with day merging into day, separated only by a few hours of twilight * * * Lilliputian Logic' One evening grandmother was reading to fouryear-old Cheryl from a book for little folks. The next evening Cheryl brought the book and laid it on her grandmother’s knee with this request: “Talk to it. ** * Children can try A MODEL ELEVATOR Materials needed: A wooden board Metal coffee tins A small cardboard or wooden box Pieces of string Long nails A piece of modelling clay Hammer Procedure: A working model of an elev a t o r can best illustrate changes in the direction of forces. It can easily be made from simple materials. For the rotating drums or sheaves, me tal coffee tins will do. With a hammer and large nail, punch holes in the exact center of the bottoms and lids. Replace the lids and mount the tins on op posite ends of a board, taking care that they both turn easi ly. For the elevator car use a small cardboard or wooden box. Attach pieces of string to both ends of the box and wind them around the sheaves as shown. A piece of modelling clay can be used for a counter-weight and should just balance the weight of the car. Operate the elevator by turning the sheave that has the double turn of cord. A model of this kind is very similar to real elevators, but the sheave of a real eleva tor is turned by an electric mo tor. December i960 91 Can you do it? Te world’s largest radar antenna soon to be built in Puerto Rico will be used to probe the surface of the pla net Jupiter. If radar signals are reflected by Jupiter, U.S. scientists ex pect to gather new informa tion about the planet’s surface. If no signals are reflected, Scientists will know for the first $me that this largest of the outer planets is shrouded in a de£p atmosphere that absorbs radio waves. The giant radar, to be the biggest in the world, is being financed by the U.S. Depart ment of Defense and will be used by Cornell University’s new Center for Radiophysics and Space Research. The radar is to have a 1,000foot receiving dish nestled in a natural bowl of coral limestone. This antenna is four times lar ger than Britain’s powerful Jodrell Bank unit which now holds the record for contacting Venus. The Cornell-designed radar unit is to be able to probe at distance of 40,000,000 miles. It will operate on a peak power of 2,500,000 watts and a fre quency near 420 megacycles a second. The finger-like radar beam will te able to sweep 20 degrees in each direction, and may shed new knowledge on the earth’s own ionosphere. In addition, the radar will be able' to bounce signals from the moon, Venus, Mars, Mercury and the sun. The new Center for Radio physics and Space Research will be directed by Thomas Gold, 39-year-old professor of astronomy, physics and electri cal engineering. Other installa tions planned for the Center will include a radio astronomy receiving station south of Itha ca and a transmitting station on Cornell’s campus. 92 Panorama Republic of the Philippines Department of Public Works and Communications BUREAU, OF POSTS Manila SWORN STATEMENT (Required by Act 2580) The undersigned, C. A. MARAMAG, business manager of PANORAMA, published monthly in English at Inverness corner De las Aias Streets, Sta. Ana, Manila, after having been duly sworn in accordance with law, hereby submits the following state * i->ent of ownership, management, circulation, etc., which is required by Act 2580, as ■ nended by Commonwealth Act No. 201: Name Editor: Alejandro Hufana business Mafiaaer: C. A. Maramag Owner: Community Publishers, Inc. publisher: Community Publishers, Inc. Printer: Community Publishers, Inc. Office of Publication: Community Publishers, Poet-Office Address Inverness cor. De las Alas Sts., Manila Inverness cor. De las Alas Sts., Manila Inverness cor. De las Alas Sts., Manila Inverness cor. De las Alas Sts., Manila Inverness cor. De las- Alas Sts., Manila ic. Inverness cor. De las Alas Sts., Manila If publication is owned by a corporation, stockholders owning one per cent or more >f the total amount of stocks: SOFIA S. SINCO ARTURO G. SINCO VICENTE G. SINCO Inverness cor. De las Alas Sts., Manila Inverness cor. De las Alas Sts., Manila Inverness cor. De las Alas Sts., Manila Bondholders, mortgagees, or other security holders owning one per cent or more of total amount of security: NONE In case of publication other than daily, total number of copies printed and circulated of the last issue dated March 1959. 1. Sent to paid subscribers .............................................................................. 2.900 2. Sent to others than paid subscribers ................................................. 600 Total 2,500 (Sod.) C. A. MARAMAG Business Manager Subscribed and sworn to before me this 1st day of April, 1960 at Manila, the affiant exhibiting her Residence Certificate No. A-305233 issued at Manila, on March 30, 1960. (Sgd.) AMBROSIO SAN PEDRO Post Office Inspector NOTE: This form is exemnt from the payment of documentary stamp tax(Known in the UJS.as Miofdo 17 lithoprint) •' The most moaern Offset pless of Hi sine (14 x 20 Mchos) * The easfait to operate with its centralised central panel and push button operation. * No dampening rgHers to bother with its patented Rotafount, givInf mocMnioaftp ubnlroHad damp, inf. * Hairline register-ideal for mutHeolor Jobs on any typo of paper at low cost and freat speed. . . Actual Demonstration now going onB You are Invited to see COMMUNITY PUBLISHERS, INC. PRINTERS * LITHOGRAPHERS * PUBLISHERS Inverness St., Sta. Ana Tel. 5 * 41-96