BANANACUE
REPUBLIC
Vol I, No. 3
Sept 22, 2004

 
 
 by Dulz Cuna

ARCHIVE #015

Table of Contents 

Archive:
September
October

Website:
synaesthetica
 

EDUCATION:

My Very Own Oblation

Yes, it has been twenty-five years, and we did have a very steady relationship then...my very own "Machete" (Remember the movie?), and last July 21, 2004 , at UP Visayas Iloilo, we celebrated our strange conjugal partnership in a most grotesque idolatry...What I mean is, I received my 25th year Service Award as a member of the faculty in the University of the Philippines System and got home to my mother unit in UP Tacloban, showed "Him" my Gold Medal and Certificate and said: "Hey Honey! (beaming), here's what I got for the 25 years of our marriage! Aren't you proud???"

Of course, the "husband" is no other than the Oblation itself, a figure of a naked man, arms outstretched and face pointed upwards, symbolizing selfless dedication and service to the nation, a sculptural monument done by Guillermo Tolentino in 1935  and a major landmark in every UP campus. But here, my very own Oblation, is a replica so skillfully casted by National Artist Napoleon V. Abueva sometime in the mid- '90s.

I could say I took care of my very own Oblation in a strange Galatean worship. I watched in reverence as the National Artist himself, Billy Abueva wheelbarrowed the pumice stone rocks for its base pedestal and sat down to wipe that prolific brow of his with his kerchief as he gave birth to the replica in bronze cast and soldered metal..

In summer I watched as its patina came to show and then the College decided to paint on the natural metal.  

Weeks after, I had the shock of my Apollonian romance when the whole statue stood painted in a sickly hue of dull yellow green! The Dean had to calm down this frantic faculty member who mumbled something about "Sirian Invasions" and "Incredible Hulks" in her office--and the Dean said that the PPO office had a dilemma in color theory...what automotive paint to mix together to get the color "flesh"?--I fainted.

"Bronze!" I squeaked. "Can't they buy the color bronze in the Hardware stores? I guess they could get advice there for the mixing..."

So they got to work. Bronze was some sort of metallic brown right? The trick of life is to make it look easy. They scoured the paint stores for charts that gave them the rudiments of paint mixing..

Three days after, my Oblation was in Lucifer Red... "We tried to get the Bronze color, but there was none...the Copper looked Green to us..so we decided on this hue of Brown..." Rolling my eyeballs, I went into a litany of the hues of red: Crimson Lake , Brick Red, Alizarin Crimson, Burnt Sienna...Holy God, Holy Mighty One..."

The week after that, my exasperation was on high gear when he stood facing the angle of Magsaysay Blvd and Sto Nino Extension in the chocolatey color of Yaphet Kotto, a famous African-American movie star...and he was that for a couple of months to a year.

Papa Oble, as I called him, chameleoned into the Millenium and now stands in the comfort of Gold paint..at dusk, after I wrap  up with my consultation hours at late afternoons, I venture out to its pedestal, its stylobate, to rub my aching back against the stones...I have just discovered my own academic massage spa.

Behind it is the quadrangle, where students meet, discuss and rally, and where many minds meet in the Multi-Purpose Building to give treatises of knowledge, dissent, protest actions and social criticism, expressions of public service, nationalism and patriotism and also the human enterprise of fun and frolic...

I remember a poem written by a dissenting student in a creative writing exercise in Literature years back, which stuck like a glowing epitaph of the 25 years gone by:

        "The Grass beneath the Statue
         Refuses to Grow..
         He, who throws his
         Genitalia to the Wind..
         Leads a Matchboxed MPB
         The parched classrooms
         Of children that tossed
         Away their toys..
         Ours is a campus
         In Menopause..."

But Papa Oble could always don a new Color...

Of course, the "husband" is no other than the Oblation itself, a figure of a naked man, arms outstretched and face pointed upwards.

UP Tacloban Oblation