Watching His Language

“Filipino time, Mr Javier!” Fel Santos says out loud when I arrive ten minutes late to our meeting at Carmine’s on Broadway.

Sporting a black New York Rangers hat, fashionable goatee, and a slick new pair of horn-rimmed glasses, he welcomes me to the table with a warm hug. I’m almost convinced this mercurial sound poet is actually glad to see me.

“Are you okay if we order family style?” he asks.

After blowing off our meeting last October—the second time in a month—without so much as a follow-up email or call to explain himself, Fel texts me two days ago insisting that we get together. Tonight. Especially.

“It’s URGENT!” he writes. “I promise I will answer all your questions then.”

Two years ago, I published my analysis of Fel’s sound poetry in the journal Ear: Wave: Event—the opening chapter of a planned book-length study that focuses on his experiments with gigil, “a Filipino term for the trembling or gritting of teeth in response to a situation that overwhelms one’s self-control.” I’ve been fascinated with Fel’s sound poetry and its incorporation of gigil ever since I attended his salon at my friend Charles’s apartment seven years ago, a performance I liken to a medium channeling spirits.  I planned to follow up my analysis with another essay:

chronicling Santos’ demonic possession during the month of July that he summered in New York City in 1986: when he absorbed, on consecutive days, an episode of the Twilight Zone involving a faustian pact between its characters (‘I of Newton’)…

but instead wound up composing Ur’lyeh, a poetic response to Aklopolis, Listening Center (David Mason) and Fel’s bewildering 40-minute symphonic collaboration “of underworld language and postcolonial haunting,” published recently by Texte Und Tone. Our meeting in October was supposed to mark a return to my study, with questions prefaced and emailed to Fel in advance:

Typically, in cinematic depictions of demonic possession, the victim becomes the foreign entity. Suddenly, they are Other: Satan; Jinn; dwende, etc. And in this Otherness, physical change is always preceded by the supernatural ability to speak in entirely new, alien languages.

I wonder, then, Fel: when you "sold [your pre-teen] soul to the devil" that hot summer night, were you sub/consciously seeking Otherness?

Perhaps in anticipation of your family's plan to move to the U.S. in the next three years, news of which you gleaned from your mother earlier in January?

Our waitress takes Fel’s order of Caesar salad and vodka penne. That’s a lot of food for one person, considering the restaurant’s family-sized portions. Did he forget my text about having a prior dinner reservation elsewhere scheduled later that night?

“My friend is joining us,” he says, pouring me a glass of house cabernet. “Speak of the devil...”

Seemingly out of nowhere, his friend Mike pulls up the chair next to him. Tall, thin, mestiso, and babyfaced—even by Asian standards—, Mike easily passes for a college undergrad. He is forty years old, and lives in Utah with his wife Laura, who joined him on this trip to NYC and is, herself, hosting old friends from Manila in another part of the cavernous restaurant. Mike and Fel grew up together in the late-70s and 80s in BF Homes, a suburb just outside of Manila. They finally reunited a couple of days ago. Neither had seen one another since 1990, when Fel moved with his family to the U.S.

“He was the leader of our group,” Mike says, while Fel pours him a glass of wine. “His cousins and I would all pretend to be Spandau Ballet. Fel would play Tony Hadley, and we’d sing backup to all of True and Through the Barricades in his parent’s garage.”

Fel pushes his face into his palm, obviously embarrassed by such a memory. It’s funny: I always pegged a serious poet like him to be into a synth band with punk roots like New Order or The Cure, both huge in Manila at the time. According to Mike, however, Fel’s obsession was always new romantic pop.

“He sent me your article about gigil. Very interesting! I think I read half of it,” Mike says, laughing. “I only found out he was a poet the other day. It surprised me. Fel loved to play basketball and watch movies. He was always listening to the radio station KBL 89.1, whose deejay liked to play a lot of Culture Club. One time, I remember we called-in a request for ‘War Song,’ and we made it on-air! We even recorded this call on tape, and played it later to our friends. But other than Archie double digests, I can’t remember him reading too many books.”

The server arrives with the order, promptly filling two plates with salad and penne. I decline to eat. Much as I appreciate meeting Fel’s old pal from his Manila days, I have less than an hour before my other appointment: dinner crosstown with the missus and a couple of her co-workers. In fact, I would much rather Fel respond to my previous questions than to hear more about his and Mike’s wonder years.

But his friend continues: “Fel was always the leader of our group. It included myself; his two half Canadian cousins, Patrick and David; Marky, this American kid from the rich side of the village; and Mikko, a super artistic kid who liked to talk to himself.”

“Sounds like the Wild Bunch,” I say, clinking glasses with a toasting Fel.

“The kids in the park would always try to pick on us because we were a group of small kids trying to play basketball in the big kids’ court. During prime time, too, at 4 pm. I remember one day the two older bullies on the court, Jerome and Boom Boom—”

“Boom Boom—that’s his real name?” I ask. Mike and Fel laugh out loud.

“Yes. He and Jerome wanted to make an example of Fel by forcing two of his classmates, Arturo and Einar, to fight him. Bad idea. For every punch thrown by Arturo and Einar, Fel responded with three or four direct shots to the mouth and nose. I remember Fel getting Einar in a headlock. Einar, whose dad was from Amsterdam, was almost a foot taller. Fel took the fight to the ground and held on to him until Jerome and Boom Boom broke it up.”

“But why pick on him specifically?” I ask.

“I don’t know; maybe because he was the shortest one,” Mike says, turning to Fel. “Pare, ikaw—why do you think?”

“Prolly cuz I was the dark one in a group of mestizo kids who only spoke English to each other,” Fel says.

“Why not Tagalog?” I ask.

“I learned to speak it much later,” Fel says. “I grew up in an English-only speaking household. Same with my cousins. Marky’s parents were American, and he attended an international school, so he didn’t even bother with Filipino. I guess my parents assumed I would pick it up on my own. Easier said than done, of course. Look who I rolled with.”

“So you get bullied for being in a crew of eccentrics….”

“There was probably some class resentment, too,” he says, only this time in Tagalog. “Maybe they thought I was showing off.”

“I remember [those bullies] even made you fight with Marky!” Mike says.

“Wait a sec—your homie?”

“After beating up Arturo and Einar, Jerome threw Marky at Fel—who ended up knocking out his front teeth,” Mike says.

“That’s fucked up,” I say.

Mike laughed. “Marky cried all the way home.”

“Did you stay friends?” I ask.

Fel nods. “I just sent him a birthday greeting on FB.”

“How did the bullies treat you after?”

“Oh, they gave him high fives!” Mike says. “And then they left us alone. Thank you, bro!” Mike playfully punches Fel’s arm.

“Yeah, and Jerome and Boom-Boom ended up in rehab,” Fel says.

“We were both adventurous and curious when we were kids,” Mike says. “We wanted to try nonsense activities.”

I check my phone, conscious about the time. I need to be leaving soon, and Fel still hasn’t responded to my questions. He also promised to give me more details about that night at Tudor Towers in ‘86. And I’m about to cut to the chase when Mike asks Fel: “Does he know about that time you and I tried calling the devil from your parents’ landline?”

“Not yet,” he answers, almost in a whisper.  Shifting in his seat, he removes his glasses, and begins cleaning them with a cloth wipe. He keeps them off when he turns to me, addressing Mike: “I wanted Paolo to hear it from you.”

2

In his liner notes to Aklopolis, Listening Center (David Mason) writes:

The gigilation of Fel Santos has been described as sound poetry; it seems to constitute a language of its own, can be profoundly disturbing to listen to, but also is challenging in a way that invites the question, what language?

According to the poet’s mother, Rio Santos, the gigil they spoke at home comes from her paternal side of the family. But the nature of Mrs. Santos’s private language is typically playful, funny, loving. Fleeting, too: it usually lasts no longer than a few words or phrases. Fel’s version, on the other hand, is often mani(a)cally dark, guttural. On previous recordings of him “gigilating” (my term), his daughter Lyra underscores its duration (sometimes up to an hour). In performance, his gigil tends to overwhelm the listener/recipient with its torrent of occult sounds, aspects that Mason foregrounds in Aklopolis to “[give] the impression of a one-man radio play written for a demonically possessed performer.” And Mason isn’t just relating a concept here, but acknowledging Fel’s foundational experience with demonic possession—whose details continue to be withheld from me tonight. Instead, Fel wants Mike to tell me about some supernatural contact they made together back in the day.

“It was recommended by some friends and classmates to try it. You dial the number ‘9’ nine times or the number ‘0’ nine times (I can’t remember specifically) and you will hear something strange.”

“Why those numbers, specifically?”

“I have no idea,” Mike says. “I remember Fel wanted to wait until dark, around 6 PM, to make the call.”

“What were you hoping to accomplish? And where were Fel’s mom and dad while you both attempted it?”

“Working, I guess.”

“Touring Europe,” Fel says. “One of my mom’s younger cousins, Ate Nona, stayed and watched us for the month.”

“And doing a poor job of it,” I add.

“Fel’s parents had the new push-button phone, so we thought it would be cool to try it there,” Mike says.

“Try what, exactly?”

Mike switches to Tagalog, suddenly self-conscious about the kind of conversation we were having in public. “Call Hell, of course. Or maybe the Other Side. Honestly, we weren’t too sure who we were trying to reach...”

“Did anyone pick up?”

“...Instead, what we hear {at the other end of the line} is like a weird heartbeat, a very unexplainable sound. This goes on for a few seconds. And then the phone starts to malfunction; we weren’t able to receive or make outgoing calls. But it keeps on ringing; ringing and ringing and ringing for hours after.”

“Let me guess—it keeps on ringing even after you pull the plug from the outlet,” I say with obvious sarcasm.

“Well, to us, it felt like hours,” Mike says, switching back to English. “We were in grade five, scared out of our minds. Everything seems {more pronounced} when you’re that age.”

Including this tale, I want to say, but bite my tongue. Because it sounds like nothing more than a pair of impressionable young minds falling prey to a local urban legend. Every culture has its own, and Manila is no exception; where I attended elementary school, classmates would faint upon crossing the threshold of a girls’ bathroom reputedly haunted by “the white lady.” (In a Catholic country like the Philippines, where even ghosts are forced to observe bathroom gender protocol.)

“We told each other not to do it again,” Mike adds. “Basta nagka phobia na tayo (we were turned off from it).”

I glance at my vibrating phone. The missus just sent a text: she and her co-workers are on their way to the dinner spot.

“I had forgotten about {this experience} until Mike reminded me a couple of weeks ago, when he got in touch with me about his trip,” Fel says. “I thought you would appreciate hearing about it.”

“About what?” I ask.

“Well, we made this call in February ‘86,” he says. “Obviously, it was a dry run for my own [successful demonic] summoning two months later in NYC.”

3

Here’s the gist of Fel’s possession story: sometime in May of ‘86, after trying all month to summon the devil, he finally succeeds in his godmother's studio apartment in Tudor Towers, a well-known apartment building in midtown Manhattan because of its dramatic view of the UN Building and East River. This life-altering event happens while Fel watches the ending of Children of the Corn on cable TV, when the pagan god of the cornfield, speaking through Isaac, the slain cult leader, rises from the dead to claim the soul of Malachai, his former right-hand man turned assassin. Fel is all of ten years old.

His experience interests me for two reasons. For one, it connects to the development of his version of gigil, which is at the heart of my study. After “being possessed,” the poet claims that his own private language became manifest at home. Secondly, I’m hoping to articulate Fel’s extreme private language as a unique response to Empire. I liken his incorporation of gigil into poetry to blazing his own trail of “historical consciousness by way of the unconscious,” to borrow from Alan Clinton’s critical study on automatism, Mechanical Occult. As Mason points out in Aklopolis, gigil “sounds like aural ectoplasm, but it seems possible that it is a mediumistic conveyance of a primordial psychic material - rather than a by-product - actually in reverse expression on its way back through the collective unconscious.” It’s this second point that I was hoping to clarify tonight via Fel’s response to my questions: what exactly was he seeking that night he “{sold} his soul to the devil”?

As we replay the event, Mike excuses himself to check on his wife and her friends dining on the other side of the cavernous restaurant. I hit stop on my phone’s recording app after the newly arrived group of tourists next to us become way too noisy. I also need to leave in five minutes. Naturally, it’s at this point of our meeting when Fel decides to fill me in on the rest of his experience with the devil. Below are my notes:

Like viewing through a camera fish lens. “Think Fallen Angels by Wong Kar Wai,” he says. (Was he trying to be punny here with the film title?) Doesn’t remember what happs during possession, only aftermath. Slips in and out of consciousness. Immediately terrified of the color red. Swaddled in blankets on godmother’s murphy bed. Frantically yells at his godmother about “feeling” the devil’s presence hiding in red fabrics Throughout the room; put them away immediately. Instructed her on what/not to cover him with—nothing that bears even the slightest resemblance to red. His father pressing the apartment buzzer nonstop, rushing inside the studio to use the bathroom to pee. The strong sound of his pissing. His father asking in Tagalog: “What is going on here?”

Fel claims that he has no memory about the actual possession. And he can’t even say which demon got summoned that night: Tiamat, Marduk, Ereshkigal, Asmodeus, Nerigal, Pazuzu—none of these all-stars dating back to the Sumerian period rings a bell. Then again, it’s not as if the poet particularly cared which entity took over his body when he began chanting for one back in the summer of ‘86. He claims to have derived his chant (“I’ll sell my soul to the Devil”) from an episode of the Twilight Zone. Based on a Joe Halderman story, “I of Newton” featured the late (and great) Ron Glass and Sherman Helmsley, whom Fel idolized from years watching The Jeffersons and 227. In the episode, Helmsley plays Sam, a frustrated math professor who yells out to an empty classroom “I’d sell my soul to get this thing right!” to solve an impossible equation. Glass’s devil—unnamed in both the TV episode and original story—suddenly materializes. For reasons he’s yet to clarify, Fel believes that his (nearly identical) version of the chant would summon the devil after uttering it three times in succession. So he spends his vacation month in NYC testing it out, pushing himself to utter it throughout the day, but with one catch each time: he would halt right before the third repetition. And this eventually becomes a daily ritual of approach/avoidance, until that fateful night in his godmother’s studio, when he breaks on through to—well, you won't say now, will you, Fel?

The poet recognizes my disappointment when I put on my coat unannounced, readying to leave. He promises me the following: 1) a recording of his godmother sharing an account of her side of the story, and 2) a typed-up transcript of this exchange. “To save you the trouble,” he says of the latter endeavor. Maria, his godmother, will be visiting from Florida in April. Fel assures me of her willingness to discuss the incident, evidently no longer a taboo between them.  A couple of years ago, I asked if I could interview both Maria and his father, which Fel immediately dismissed, citing their unwillingness due to “hardcore Catholicism.”

I glimpse Mike weaving his way through the insane bar crowd of the restaurant. He is accompanied by a woman, presumably his wife, likely heading toward our table. Too frustrated with Fel (and perhaps a bit hangry) to exchange further pleasantries, I act like I don’t see them coming, give Fel a pound, and slip out the front doors of Carmine’s with tote bag dangling on my arm.

4

In his contribution to the seminal anthology Vestiges of War: The Philippine American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, Filipino American video artist Paul Pfeiffer writes about being possessed at ten years of age on the island of Negros (actual name) in the Philippines:

And as I looked around the room my sense of space was becoming monstrous and strange: my vision felt decentered, like i was floating through the wrong end of a telescope. Or maybe the room was looking at me. It was full of a presence that penetrated me with a gaze that seemed to come from every direction at once.

Aboard the S train, I re-read this excerpt in the same journal I jotted down notes tonight about Fel’s encounter. Their similarities are striking.

Randomly flipping to an earlier page, I arrive at another relatable quote, this time from scholar Neil Forsyth’s The Old Enemy: “it is possible the redness of {Egyptian god} Seth helped make RED the second most common color, after black, of the Christian devil” (caps mine).

It would be tempting to chalk up Santos’s (memory of) possession as some kind of childhood excrescence of Filipino Catholic paranoia and dread. And I know the culture too well not to want to draw this conclusion: a former altar boy myself, who had an aunt who would assist priests in local exorcisms, the old enemy presides over the deepest regions of fear in the Filipina psyche. It’s no surprise that in a big, crowded city such as Manila, you can throw a rock in the air and expect to hit a parish.

But I don’t buy Fel’s experience as a manifestation of/reaction against his Filipino Catholic background. He’s never badmouthed the Church to me, nor has he openly disavowed his Catholic practice. Earlier that night, in fact, he made a passing reference to Mike about celebrating Christmas in December with his wife and toddler.

I flip to another page in my journal, and am seized by a quote from Claude Cahun (nee Lucy Schwob), pioneering surrealist photographer, writer, and Nazi-resister: “Selling one’s soul to God: is to betray the Other.” Perhaps the accounts I heard tonight from Mike and Fel are ultimately about the Filipino sound poet’s prepossession towards “the Marvelous”—what Suzanne Cesaire locates as

the domain of the strange….a domain scorned by people of certain inclinations. Here is the freed image, dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming. Here are the poet, the painter, and the artist, presiding over the metamorphoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucination and madness.

And this connection between poetry and the occult has existed for time immemorial. In his groundbreaking study of the subject, Colin Wilson foregrounds the poet as someone “in whom the links with our animal past are still strong... aware that we contain a set of instinctive powers that are quite separate from the powers needed to win a battle or expand a business....{for} no animal is capable of the ecstasies of the mystics or the great poets..."

As I step out of the Grand Central Terminal doors, I realize I’ve answered my own questions to Fel. Perhaps the meeting tonight isn’t a wash, after all. I pause on the corner of 42nd and Lex to type this in my phone.

Walking down East 52nd to meet with S and her co-workers—in what turns out to be a rich and satisfying ramen dinner—I can’t help but draw parallels between the narrator’s aside at the conclusion of Halderman’s "I of Newton," and my own continuing engagement with Fel Santos and his poetry:

[The demon] had a supervisor, who was to him as he was to Sam. The supervisor was a hundred billion light years away now, doing something unspeakable, on a scale that would make Gengis Khan look like a two-bit hood.

But in a way that is His alone. He was also in that room, standing behind Sam.

Watching his language.