BREAKING away from run-of-the-mill living is not an easy task, especially if one’s only weapons are words. Ramil Digal Gulle, a former associate for poetry of the Center for Creative Writing and Studies, faces the challenge in his third poetry collection, Textual Relations (University of the Philippines Press, 2007).
Gulle, in the introduction, laments how people exhaust their time on mechanical practicalities just to survive, rather than spend it understanding the words and sentiments of an authentic life that can be recollected in the pages of a text. Survival, after all, wins over reading a book.
The former managing editor of the Varsitarian criticizes the “cultural deprivation” where he finds himself in a “hellish system” that saps creativity, virtue, and faith from one’s soul. Ours is a culture that lacks principles and transcendent purpose, he says.
The book is divided into six sections, each one containing a particular theme that reflects postmodern conditions. The first section, “Arcanda Mundi,” exposes the stifling effects of materialism. Gulle highlights the 10 essential things that one only needs to live on earth: help, shelter, books, prayer, the ability to smile, noise, sleep, privacy, refuge, and laughter.
“Gonzo Department,” the second chapter, tries to find meaning in making love in poems such as “With Us,” which shows how love was once the key factor in the world’s creation. He says, “God left us to make love, love first/ Seen in the beginning of the world.”
Even the fear of death is tackled in the sections “Haunts” and “Memory Palace,” such as in the poem “Marked,” where the author reveals how man becomes the means toward his own destruction by stretching his life to the extremes. “I pull on the edges of my fate, stretching it tight at the hairline, behind the ears and under the chin.”
Gulle stresses how one dies the moment he gives up on life’s struggles in “Brink,” a poem about how one loses by default the instance one begins to yearn for the end, with the line, “You’re gone, just gone, the moment you want it.”
The section “Mons Veneris” pays tribute to women, while “Studio,” the final chapter, describes the creative process of writing. He claims that writing is a whole new world altogether in the poem, “wordwords.” “Living in a house of language/ is not the same/ as sleeping, eating, or going to/ the toilet.”
Textual Relations is Gulle’s attempt to regain what is denied to him by what others consider as “real life.”
Through his cleverly selected words, he tries to recapture the moments in his life when he was able to live, rather than to be merely alive.
Reading Gulle’s works is like drinking a cup of coffee, in a way that easily goes down the throat. As he delivers his points, the readers are left with a thirst that could not be quenched until the final line is reached. The theme of each poem also acts like a wake-up call to those whose souls have been culturally deprived of values. However, his use of erotic phrases and imagery has a chance of losing its impact as he repeats this approach for almost all of the poems.
Textual Relations is an engaging attempt to make sense of a world rapidly falling toward artificiality and monotony. Gulle presents lessons about life and humanity that are often taught by experience, but then again, rarely learned and reflected.
