Cavort with Angels

Alberto Florentino’s drama Cavort with Angels lays down the story of two sisters who sell love to men as a means of living. They were left orphans after the war and this has become the life they have been meaning to survive since then.

The drama opens with the seventeen-year-old Lita bringing a man inside the tenement room she shares with her elder sister. The place was described as small and dingy, containing scanty furniture and it only had a single narrow window wherein one still has to find a good spot just to take a look at the sky.

Picturing this out, we are revealed to the truth that the sisters are in a dire economic state. Plato, one of the pioneers of classicism, made mention of mimesis or the imitation or representation of truth. There are two kinds of mimesis: the good and the bad. Good mimesis mirrors the truth and Plato’s version of the truth is idealistic, meaning all things should be bright and wonderful. Meanwhile, bad mimesis is a reflection of the depraved world. Cavort is undoubtedly a bad mimesis. Just like other dramas written by Florentino such as The World is an Apple and Cadaver, readers are exposed to the different faces of poverty.

However, there is a point to consider with regard to Florentino’s way of writing his dramas. He does not use the vernacular, instead, his characters are eloquently speaking in English given they were not educated in formal schools. His characters are oftentimes from the slums, either urchins or prostitutes. Doreen Fernandez (2004) in her article “Philippine Theater in English” stated that Florentino’s works were eventually staged in Tagalog translation and years later, the playwright himself declared an end to his writing of dramas in English. Dante Alighieri, in his De Vulgari, believed that there is beauty in the common speech. Alighieri suggested that the readers (or public) must be given confidence to participate by using language to elevate their status and make the arena of understanding literature a level playing field.

Florentino has a way of using metaphors and parallelism. Firstly, Lita thinks she and her sister are human cockroaches when she said “in the day they hide in dark corners but at night they come out and roam all over the place to feed on left-overs.” Subsequently, Lita has this pet rat she calls Mariquita (derived from “marikit” or lovely). Her elder sister tried to kill this rat several times yet Lita is secretly gathering all the rat poison in a tin can saying she has “collected so much poison— enough to kill every mouse in the city.” They say that in the chase between the cat and the rat, the rat most likely wins; because the cat is only after its food while the rat runs for its life. In the drama, we see the parallel fates of Lita and Mariquita in the third act.

Is there a sense of the sublime in Cavort with Angels? Somehow, yes. Longinus posited that a reader enters the sublime when he/she is transported. But judging whether a work is sublime or not is mostly subjective. Now we shall try to see which part is sublime in the drama. Cavort means dance or gambol. So what does it mean when one says dancing or horsing around with angels? The sisters may have been the angels, without wings, who struggle to pay the rent, and only go out with strange men when the light is gone. Lita, who hopes for a better life, is the angel who eventually perished, pale and cold, when the night faded out.

In classical literary theory, as postulated by Plato, the function of poetry (or in this case, drama) is to delight (dulce) and instruct (utile). Cavort certainly does not bring delight since it’s a heavy and dark read. On the instruction part, Plato does not agree with the end justifying the means. The sisters are living as prostitutes to survive and when the elder sister confronts Lita of her hallucination and hopeless dreams, she makes it appear that prostitution is the only choice they have to live with. Analyzing this drama in the classicist perspective, Plato would not approve of this being staged. Hence, Cavort with Angels would be censured. Plato supposed that bad mimesis corrupts people’s minds and weakens their souls. For him, literature with this kind of mimesis must fall within the bounds of censorship since the text “engenders laxity of morals among the young.”

In the olden times, or even now, people go to the theatres or cinemas to find catharsis. As per Aristotle, catharsis is the purgation of negative feelings, clarification, or purification of the soul. In Cavort with Angels, a reader could sense that a tragedy is looming by just looking at the parallel hints and symbols. Just like the rat, everyone wants to get rid of it by laying traps and it takes great caution for the rat to stay alive. Lita is like the rat Mariquita who was still not able to escape the reality that the world can still be so cruel even with bad things pouring free of charge. Cavort is cathartic because it places the readers in the shoes of the character, making them experience the struggle, and eventually helping them purge those feelings of pity (for the poor life they can relate with) or fear (should this tragedy happen to them).

Horace’s view on drama asserted that a play must not be shorter or longer than five acts. This is to show that a writer is not too deficient or self-indulgent in his writing. However, Florentino divided Cavort into three scenes. Horace then must have regarded him as a playwright who must have been in need for more words. But of course today, Cavort’s structure could give theatre artists or filmmakers the freedom of interpretation since it is not too tight in its style; it doesn’t even follow Homer or Virgil in their use of meters but just the common way of speaking. But then again, the only pitfall was Florentino’s use of the foreign language.

However, Cavort met Horace’s view on the sincerity of emotion. He believed that “as the human face smiles at a smile, so it echoes those who weep: if you want to move me to tears, you must first grieve yourself.” A reader can only express so much sympathy for the sisters; especially for Lita who was not able to realize the hope (false it may be) that always springs from her own soliloquys when alone.

This piece of art by Alberto Florentino transports us into that claustrophobic room of two fallen angels whose lives were like abandoned bricks that continue to crumble after the war. Lita and her elder sister danced with strangers and men who speak of false promises making the drama Cavort with Angels a window for us to witness the narrow and ostracized world of poverty and prostitution.


*I do not own the photo used in this blog. No intention of copyright infringement. 

The Three Kings

How does one write about a certain event in history if he has not really witnessed or experienced (first-hand) the occasion by which he is subjectively expressing in poetry?

Of course there have been age-old accounts and other traditional stories one can read but there is also what we call poetic imagination. And this is exactly what Ricaredo Demetillo did in his poem, The Three Kings.

It is implied that the three magi are the ones speaking in the poem— recounting their journey to finding the Child of God; however, there is no mention of Christ or Jerusalem or Herod in the poem. Demetillo used the power of imagination not just to chronicle (in a brief way) the story of the “three kings” but also to give us the privilege of hearing what he assumed to be the thoughts of these men. If one doesn’t know about the Bible or the Christian history, it would have made a different interpretation.

One of the features of a Romantic literature is the obscurity of time and space. As per Edgar Allan Poe, an American romantic writer, the reader must be put into some distant and vague past to “alienate [him] from the everyday world and to thrust him toward the ideal and the beautiful.” This is also for the sheer reason that the writer wants to concentrate more on the theme and atmosphere.

The first stanza of the poem is quite analogous with the Genesis’ introductory verses wherein there is darkness in the beginning and the use of “we” and “three” which could also connote the Trinity. But as the reader goes through the entire poem, it is revealed that it is really the magi who are narrating their intuitive experiences as they wade through the shadows, encountering cunning leaders whose material interests are rotting. The following lines describe how the magi have always known (or felt) King Herod’s evil motives towards the Savior: “Rulers were sly. They bent, politic, to our words, But all the time we sensed the fox-tongue shape their words. One saw they had such vested interests that they would rather slaughter innocents.”

In the poem, intuition is used frequently by the narrators. We see this in Demetillo’s use of words such as “inkling” and “sense.” In Romanticism, intuition and emotion are more important than the intellect. For the English poet William Wordsworth, poetry is the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings [that are] recollected in tranquility.” Therefore, we can understand that although it focuses on the primary emotions, the thoughts are contemplated in a long and deep manner before being translated in actual composition. In addition, Poe asserted that the sole province of art must really have a direct impact on the emotions.

Demetillo created an image of splendid merriment inspired by nature when he wrote: “How celebrate the miracle of light? By day, the bonfire of the sun; By night, the lustrous drowsiness of stars, And in our thoughts, light merging into light, Word cradled by the word.”

A romantic poem or story finds the extraordinary in ordinary things we see every day. Its purpose is to delight and instruct its readers with the use of common language and poetic thoughts and values coming from familiar happenings in a person’s life.

In stanza 8 of The Three Kings, we see the expectations of the magi in the lines: “What did we hope to find? A kingdom’s heir perhaps deep-canopied, Pillowed by proud love on downy coverlets?” But what they eventually witnessed was a humble nativity where they “kneel before truth cradled in the homely fact.” Indeed, it was humility they learned anew when they realized that their worldly expectations were not met. It was really wisdom, coming from their own mortal ignorance of how God really works, that finally came unto them.

It is delighting to read The Three Kings in a romantic point of view given Demetillo’s focus on the sensory which reflected more life. Its fresh metaphors and simple language made it more captivating since we are delving into a more personal account of how the three kings have “seen and understood.”


*I do not own the image used in this blog. No intention of copyright infringement.