DRY THE RAIN #07: "Futura" by Melissa Villa-Real Basmayor

DRY THE RAIN is an essay series on Contemporary Philippine Poetry, where I devote an hour of thinking and writing about some selections from the anthology UNDER THE STORM (self-published 2011, edited by de la Cruz and Toledo). This is the seventh of the series. This took me a couple of hours, though! Heady ideas. Oh well! At any rate, I hope to add to this as often as possible.




THE NEW SUBLIME: PART 2 OF 3
(PART 1 IS HERE)

The Uncertainty Principle postulates that somehow, against traditional tools and classical interpretation, matter is both a wave and a particle, of a certain measurable velocity and of a certain measurable mass, but we can only perceive and measure one of the two - not both - at any given time; or rather, to measure its velocity means to allow it to move, which means to not measure its mass, and to measure its mass means to stop it from moving, which means to not measure its velocity; or rather, the more precise one aspect is measured, the less precise the other aspects can/will be known; or rather, the observer can never truly know everything as they happen at the same time, can only really know only one aspect of any one thing at any given time, never in its entirety at any given time; or rather, to measure precisely one aspect of any one thing means to risk ignoring everything else about that one thing; or rather, the observer's precision is always limited by the observer's perception; or rather, the act of observation is always subjective.

Which as a foundational critical literary theory - as a way of thinking and writing and reading literature - can mean two things: 1) that interpretation - regarding, writing, reading, reregarding - is always personal, merely all in our heads, which means that all art - all the creation, consumption, and appreciation whether critical or not - is always inevitably by default egocentric, despite all effort to say and do otherwise; which means that every piece of art ever made, every piece of art that will ever be made, and every attempt to analyse art, is inevitably a confessional, a postulation, always inevitably uncertain, always missing the big picture, always just about you; and 2) that a piece of art - the interpretation of, the creation of - is perceived as personal as we currently have no other way of perceiving it as anything else other than personal, even when a piece of art can in fact - against traditional tools and classical interpretation - be one of many things; which means that uncertainty is all a matter of perception; which means that all things can be known absolutely, but we can never absolutely know them.

Thus Melissa Villa-Real Basmayor's "Futura," where the uncertainty of perception is anticipated and accommodated by nothing less than the opening line, "Let the following be postulated:" and its voice playing at objectivity by way of cold scientific observation and/or attempts to purge memory from the self; where the sublime is again not mountains nor rivers but the persona's conjuring of the precision of geometric trajectories of architecture and cartography, i.e., knowable and absolute, played against the persona's imprecise attempts at etymology and memory, i.e., unknowable or ambiguous.

It is postulating that this time, the sublime - the unknowable, the all encompassing, the infinitely deep - is not mountains nor rivers nor even the distance between the Milky Way and Proxima Centauri - given a long enough ruler, all three have precise and knowable measurements - but the self; or rather the acceptance of the self that even if/when all things can be known absolutely, the self can never absolutely know them; or rather, the New Sublime decentralises not just by postulating that everything is the center of something, but also by postulating that the self is indeed the center of everything, only against traditional tools and classical interpretation, the self will never know everything, will never know the center, despite all effort to say or do otherwise.

CONTINUED HERE.