Superfluous it will be to use hyperbole in describing Sawi.
He is himself the hyperbole, the suspension of disbelief in real life. Not because he is not realistic, and fails to dwell in the human condition, but because to the unfamiliar, he seems to be too good to be true — an exaggeration, until one gets to know him up close.
It was November 1989, my third year in high school, at the Silliman main library Reference section when I first heard (of) him.
Heard because, as I was looking down reading a book, his voice reverberated to my vicinity from a table in front of me – he sounded like he was talking to someone and consciously trying to keep it low even though his baritone escaped restraint each time he quipped and laughed and ejaculated phrases like… the multitudinous seas incarnadine… as normal conversational expression, the way he does it in his classes up to this day or in meetings with friends on a walk to the downtown area, most of the time if not always, to a bookshop.
I had to look up and see for myself where this animated articulation was coming from. From what I saw, I supposed he was describing to a library assistant a particular book he needed, this in spite of the many hardcovers sprawled on his table.
Seemingly, he was doing research, a bit hurried yet absorbed, occasionally uttering and savoring musical words repetitively to himself long after the student assistant left to look for his request, squinting at me from time to time. They were quick but examining glances, at times penetrating, even suspecting. Yet, as if still conjuring new rhymes for his next verse.
I would still catch those quirks in the next three years, usually in the library — anonymous yet larger-than-life and solemn in that academic ambiance of curiosity — before we got introduced by a mutual friend, Mickey Ybañez, in the presence of the other “magus” (as Sawi would fondly label us) Mark Cornelio, Gerard Pareja, and William Go at the Katipunan Hall lobby one late afternoon.
It was a comfortable first interaction, funny and comical without you knowing where the fun was coming from — what I remember is we just clicked and the group’s private jokes subtly became mine, and I became one of them.
I could not feel the slightest distance from Sawi at all, not even a chronicle of those suspecting eyes three years before. I do not remember addressing him as “Sir”, everyone in the gang would call him “Sar” (short for Cesar, subliminally, Tsar), something he never minded but only fondly responded to with childlike lightness.
After presiding over our daily 5 pm I Ching sessions at the amphitheater, Sawi would lead our walk, sometimes in single file, to Building 3 of the Public Market for our dose of Susing’s hot balbacua with red labuyo chilis – we would all be sweating profusely, laughing at the mere start of Sawi’s “Do.. da (the)..” pickup like whatever yo call it or at the out-of-the-blue Muse allusion of “Where are we now..” by anyone.
Discussion of poems and other literary works interspersed every sip we had of the soup, Sawi spearheading it passionately yet comically, we chuckling while market people passed by.
One time at The Cottage (beside what is now Moon Café along Silliman Ave.) while we were reading the Tarot when Lua Padilla came in with her boyfriend, Sawi would call her to sing a capella at our table, quieting the student-packed restaurant before bursting into applause after Sawi’s one-liner and word play.
Ma’am Myrna Peña-Reyes a couple of years ago commented, “He is a wordsmith.” It seems like the word and the play of it is his lifeblood, and subsequently, the gang’s; although one should be ready when Sawi interrupts your word-playing by saying, “Punning is the lowest form of a joke…” and then we would all laugh, to a bewildered and “beweirded” public.
As a business student back then, my campus life was carefree and by osmosis, literary. In my other group, The Society of Discourse, Sawi would produce and direct the first-and-only of its kind Greek play Medea at the Faurot residence.
He would maximize audience participation, the whole house being the stage — the stairs, the room entry points at the mezzanine, the kitchen doors — to achieve a natural sensurround, especially when the story climaxed.
It was a spontaneous idea and one of those moments when one got to see Sawi intoxicated at merely feeling the group’s enthusiasm — demanding daily marathon practices, living the horror of the play as if the characters were alive, and getting exhausted each time.
He did all this without financial compensation, only soothed by seeing our performances, strictly according to his instructions.
When I came back from the corporate world in 2006, and eventually enrolled in the Creative Writing program, my one-on-one short story writing workshop session with Sawi became a record-breaking six hours, ending at nine in the evening; with him paying attention to every detail, cross-examining plot — why this, why not that, why –– enriching them with his insights, as if in a master class.
In his element, Sawi does not only read a poem, he becomes the poem. He delivers beautiful lines, even a whole piece, to substantiate his point, and quotes some more from memory to dramatize the human condition or any metaphysical implication he can make of it — his hand making squiggles in the air or raised like a baton, with a telling look at our faces, if not beyond walls.
My feeling is, after 40-plus years or more than half of his life communing with the written and spoken word, it never was about money.
He always tells me, “You do not write for money or to win literary contests. You only write to worship the Muse.”
Others may say he has forgotten the practical, but I guess it is where he finds joy.
The great Erwin Castillo describes him as A Singular Poet — in a league of his own in the Philippine literary scene.
Carefree and grounded, no amount of SEAWRITE or Palanca Awards could inflate his ego. One wouldn’t be surprised to find him on a given day sitting on the floor at National Bookstore or at Booksale, enunciating book titles like incantations as if he had found a long lost friend in the crowd or the Holy Grail.
It seems like, Ang Borges ng Dumaguete, as one Writers Workshop Fellow would ascribe him, doesn’t really mind — he writes not for the awards, but for himself.
By doing so, he created a culture and model among his followers and friends, by sheer example. His is a subtle kind of influence you only detect through your heart, or sometimes through a modulated voice echoing metrically inside your head in the quietude of a writing moment.
I must admit that I wrote one of my first poems based on his Song’s first lines “For I have fallen under the surface of your love/Like a boat under the sea..,” which goes, “For I have found my weakness in my strength/ Like a fish drown in the sea…”
Although, sometimes I’d think I’m not really a poet but just someone who happened to be carried away by the duende of his quatrains and linguistic alchemy making exotic words like tetragrammaton, virgule, vendaval, etc. delectable in the smorgasbord of poem writing.
I console myself just by remembering him saying, “Being able to write verse or rhyme your lines doesn’t necessarily make you a poet. To be a poet is so much more. You have to choose to live that life, inside out.”
If a literature class can be likened to a long dining table, students would be his children and he, at the head, acting as the father, ensuring everyone ate well and treated the food — the word — with utmost reverence.
I can go on and on dipping beyond the iceberg tip and, just like his Word without End, end up as if still on the surface of his holographic life.
Read his works, and if you’re lucky, look him in the eye beyond those John Lennon glasses (or was it John Lennon wearing a Cesar Aquino), and I need not say more.
Although some friends would tease me that in my private “taxi” he is my Super customer and I am his tsuper, I’m starting to believe now and feel honored that he’s actually, indeed, a rockstar — perhaps in Philippine literature — after hearing a young female poet declare, I find Sawi’s mind sexy.
One student of his would say, He’s a kid inside; sayang he’s retired and they’re not rehiring him. To Michele, he is always, Tatay. Perhaps a god in a Saoist/Sawist Temple showing his devotees rather than telling, the Tao of Saoism. His following is supraliminal, cutting across all literary demographics. To another beautiful friend, he is ultimately His Royal Highness.
Yet, he is more.
Because he is not only true, but truer.
