In 1984, I was a fresh-grad, hyperactive high school teacher auditing an MA class under the legendary Doreen Fernandez at Ateneo college, just up the campus road from where I was teaching. Ateneo teachers got to take classes at the university for free and I took full advantage by studying the Russian language as well, with a resident teacher from Russia (I was her only student, and if you’re wondering, I cannot remember anymore exactly why I decided to study Russian, just another quirky, youthful adventure). 

But I clearly recall why I sat in on Doreen’s class. There were several others there, all trying to earn their master’s degree. I had no interest in the degree. I only wanted to learn about Philippine literature from a master teacher, partly because I was trying to teach it to restless teenage boys and partly because she was Doreen Fernandez.

In her refined, almost aristocratic style, the venerable professor, then in her prime, effortlessly walked us through the glories of our own literature in English, from Paz Marquez Benitez to Bienvenido Santos to Nick Joaquin and Ninotchka Rosca. One day, Doreen announced that we would have a guest lecturer, an accomplished writer in the flesh. 

In walked Alfred “Krip” Yuson, a mustachioed, hippiesque figure with an earthy baritone voice. I had only read of him as the recent winner of an international short story contest, among other claims to fame. I was seeing another legend for the first time, an instant addition to my personal pantheon of literary mustaches that included Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Marquez. I expected a kind of whimsical, Daliesque jaunt through contemporary fiction. Instead, he introduced us to a grim and determined “poet warrior” named Eman Lacaba who had died at the romantic age of 27 as an NPA guerrilla in the 1970s. 

Before martial law, Lacaba had been a mustachioed literary hippie himself, experimenting with mind-altering substances in the course of producing a body of poetry that captured the counterculture zeitgeist of the period. Then he went underground by going to the hills, his poetry transformed in tone and subject matter. In more straightforward language meant to rally his comrades, he composed widely circulated lines like, “We are tribeless and all tribes are ours. We are homeless and all homes are ours.” This clever use of the literary device of “antithesis” also neatly grasps the paradoxical and even noble nature of the guerrilla’s life where he eschews all loyalties and attachments except to “the people.” As a romantic myself at that age, such purposeful sentiments mesmerized me, even if I was too attached to my creature comforts to follow in Eman’s homeless footsteps.

But I meander. What I recall from Krip’s gig in Doreen’s class that day 41 years ago was a simple but profound haiku, also by Eman. 

Krip wrote it on the blackboard:

In puddles and rivers

Pebbles hit bull’s-eyes

Before targets are drawn.

The imagery was striking, and again paradoxical, for how could you hit a bull’s eye before it even exists? Well, anyone who has thrown a pebble into water will realize it’s possible. But to imagine it as a targeted bull’s eye, and suggest through that insight that no action is wasted even if the outcome is not pre-defined — that’s why poets are poets. 

In that literature class in 1984, I had found another hero. I would devour Eman’s poems when his collection, “Salvaged Poems,” was published a couple of years later, when the word “salvage” still had loaded, conflicting meanings. 

I never took up arms, and couldn’t even grow a mustache, but in my mid-20s I developed a kind of warrior’s intensity in whatever I was doing  — whether it was teaching, traveling, or later earning my stripes as a rookie reporter. 

But back to Doreen’s class, which also made me reflect on my then self-absorbed angst. Even if I was just auditing the class, and not meant to be graded, I wrote the final paper anyway, where I focused on “Dead Stars,” the classic short story by Paz Marquez Benitez, a pioneer in Philippine literature in English. As a single ready to mingle back then, I was amused by the shyly flirtatious dialog between the main characters, even if I found some of the prose clunky. The author seemed to be flexing her new vocabulary with words like “piquant.” But that could have been typical of the time. What makes “Dead Stars” immortal was the sullen, unconventional theme of falling out of love, just as common and resonant perhaps as “falling in” but not as often evocatively written about. At age 23, when I sat in on that class, I had been brooding as well over a long-distance relationship that was ebbing in its commitment. I was the Alfredo in that story, the lovelorn who went through a journey to discover he had lost it. 

Fast forward a few decades, and I am reminded of that overwhelming, sinking feeling by a poem by none other than Krip Yuson. 

On the occasion of Krip’s recent 80th birthday, his short and despondent elegy “Falling Out” was posted online and affectionately explicated by Dumaguete literary lion Ian Rosales Casocot. I had never read it before. The poem in full:

Falling Out 

Saddest thing.

Falling out.

World smells

Of cat poop.

Even catsup

Needs catsup.

Sun stings.

Moon blinds.

Pet stars sway

Out of reach.

Wind feels, sounds

Like sandpaper.

“Even catsup needs catsup.” What was once so savory tastes (or feels) as bland as that.  

“This absurdist play on words, typical of Mr. Yuson, suggests that even simple pleasures, like a favorite condiment, have lost their ability to satisfy,” Casocot writes. “The world is out of balance, and nothing is quite enough.”

We’ve all gone through those doldrums at one time or another. 

All the great writers and poets will just throw their pebbles out there. Somewhere, some time, they will hit the bull’s eye.