In Lieu Of An Effigy, Burn This

Months of lock-down have seen the passing of some friends and acquaintances not necessarily due to coronavirus, and quarantine and travel constraints prevented us from paying our final respects, such that send-offs must be mostly virtual these days.

- Zoetrope Juaniyo Arcellana

Sometime April the teacher and writer Edel Garcellano went on ahead, a little over four years after his old haunts, the UP Faculty Center, burned down. At the FC during a launch of a volume of Caracoa poetry journal in the ’80s, he was sipping some hard stuff from a plastic cup, and after the contents were consumed he placed the cup on the walkway and kicked it as if it were a football.

There were the occasional visits to their professor along Maginhawa Street, along with his ladylove Chato as well as their bosom buddies, philosopher poets Edong Orozco and Doming de Guzman, the gang inclined to further inebriation if not already solved with novels of Dostoevsky.

Once he told me that one of his grandsons had the same name as me, which somehow rang a bell. In 2013 during a trip to Singapore Art Fair, came across the work of his daughter the painter Lyra, a large canvas occupying a good part of a wall in the air-conditioned gallery.

Was a time he shared third place for essay with a famous writer at the Palanca awards, and they couldn’t be made to shake hands, lest one call the other communist.

In May it was the visual artist and chess player Benjo Laygo’s turn to pack up, the longtime artist in residence of Graphic magazine leaving an emptied bottle or two of pale Pilsen at the corner of Pasong Tamo and dela Rosa.