Entry #4
That was the beginning94 95 96
94 Diyan nagsimula. Original phrase in emphatic Tagalog. No period. A grammatical and existential mystery. Is it a clause that stands alone? Wherein the schoolboy essay “The Terror of Cavite” is the antecedent of the subject-pronoun diyan? Or maybe the demonstrative pronoun is an expletive—There began—awaiting its nominative, the force that through the green fuse makes sense. Or consider the verb nagsimula—sole action, past tense. But then again: if you view it as a suspended, helping verb (as in, nagsimula mag-almusal? nagsimula manguto?: he began . . . breakfast, he began . . . picking lice) there are so many intriguing predications, permutations of possibilities. So much depends. (Trans. Note)
95 Grammar is the existential mystery. We exist only in language—our tragedy is that it is not enough to make ourselves whole. “The unconscious is structured like a language; the conscious, on the other hand, looks a bit like certain funny little Andean goats” (Mürk, Miscellaneo XXIII). (Dr. Diwata Drake, Lima, Peru)
96 Oh shush! There is no mystery here. It follows “The Terror of Cavite,” the beginning of the hero’s political consciousness—his personal Cry of Balintawak, or storming of the Bastille, if you wish. The piece is the single expansive testament to the Mutiny in revolutionary memoirs. Rizal, ever traumatized, barely refers to it in his letters, and in an autobiographical fragment (“Memories of a Student in Manila”), he does not mention it at all. Of that pathetic Mutiny, I will concede this—the Caviteño Raymundo’s radical prose uniquely recaps history. A shrewd eruption here: Diyan nagsimula. There it began! Prophetic! Visionary! If only other memoirists had such eloquence: the brevity! the pith! (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)