Recently someone remarked to Villa that he found Villa’s poetry ‘abstract,’ contrary to the general feeling for detail and particularity that characterizes most contemporary poetry. Villa comments: “I realize now that this is true; I had not thought of my work in that light before. The reason for it must be that I am not at all interested in description or outward appearance, nor in the contemporary scene, but in essence. A single motive underlies all my work and defines my intention as a serious artist: The search for the metaphysical meaning of man’s life in the Universe—the finding of man’s selfhood and identity in the mystery of Creation. I use the term metaphysical to denote the ethic-philosophic force behind all essential living. The development and unification of the human personality I consider the highest achievement a man can do (1955, 1035-1036).
Actually, if one examines carefully Villa’s 1940 essay “Literary Criticism in the Philippines” or the 1953-54 essay “The Condition of Philippine Verse,” one will easily find abundant recurrent motifs about essence, unity, synthesis, etc. For example, he contrasts the “essence of prose” as substance, inferior or secondary to poetry’s essence, which is “magic and magic of utterance” (2002, 291). Antithetical to a dialectical mode (as in Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas), Villa’s thought exhibits close affinities to an Augustinian dualism (positing binaries such as sacred intellect versus profane body), which manifests a Manichean tendency that leads to a Gnostic conception of life and a Neoplatonic cosmology.
In short, Villa has remained uncannily faithful to his earliest fundamental insights or convictions about art and poetry. His belief in some essential property of language that is inherently “poetic” resembles the belief of romantic poets in some divine or supernatural inspiration. This is an old notion already proved fallacious by modern linguistics. In the early decades of the last century, the famous linguist Roman Jakobson laid to rest both the romanticist and Russian formalist’s search for the poetic essence of language as something separate from its communicative and expressive functions. Nonetheless, the continuity of Villa’s error is premised on a habitus or entrenched mentality of aristocratic individualism sprung from a tributary feudal social formation, a belief that some incommensurable virtu or thaumaturgic mana inheres in the poet’s soul or spirit that the human body and worldly reality cannot fully realize, hence the singular identity of the poet transcends time and space, biographical particulars, sociohistorical specificity. It floats as a monadic presence, angelic in cast but parasitic on the immanent forms that somehow fail to achieve rising to the level of transcendence. This, together with the concrete facts about Villa’s location in Philippine society and his U.S. situation, contributes to explaining the roots of Villa’s dogmatic stance in his criticism and peculiar views about society and ordinary life. Further research into the influences and crucial turning-points of Villa’s life is needed to confirm this hypothesis.
About E San Juan Jr
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