At this point, I would like to expound upon that operational aspect of diwà, pagsasadiwà or “articulation”, as a crucial cognitive-linguistic facility in art and the creative practices.
In the process of articulation, as in diwà, the role of precision, logic, and grammar is crucial. In language or speech, whether mechanical, vocal or other, the rules of division into syllables or words characterize “articulation.” This makes it possible to distinguish articulate sounds from other sounds. “Articulation” entails “pagsasatinig” (to give voice to), “pagpapahayag” (to give discourse or declaration), thus, a “pagsasadiwà”(the diwà – essence, consciousness, the rules of balance in its externalized form). Together, “diwà” and “articulation” suggests a process that goes beyond romantic “expression.” In the arts and creative practices, this enlarges the creative universe or “sansinukob ng kalinangan at paglikha”, where sense and meaning (diwà’t kahulugán) flow into each other.
Diwà assumes a structure upon which meaning is created, rather than simply being a representation through which meaning is expressed. Thus, one can also say that pagsasadiwà entails a regard for the creative process as transcending the limits of representation and expression as it positions the artist outside the universe of two worlds, outside the traps of ontological dualism.
The (neglected) British aesthetic philosopher R.G. Collingwood claimed humanity to be a finite being and that the artist is not a self-contained and self-sufficient creative power. Although this is true as shown by the limits of our neurological functions, unless severely subjugated by “habitation” into the registers of evolution, I am of the opinion that our facility for pagsasadiwà entails infinite exercise of finite power. I believe Collingwood’s “hands-on philosophy” in fact demanded of this in his ardent belief that the task of philosophy is to see. Here, he posed a very urgent challenge to artists, an ethical burden upon aesthetics, that the artist
“must prophesy not in the sense that he foretells things to come, but in the sense that he tells his audience, at the risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts… The reason why they need him is that no community altogether knows its own heart; and by failing in this knowledge a community deceives itself on the one subject concerning which ignorance means death… Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness.”
In his analysis of Collingwood’s philosophy of art, professor of art and music philosophy Aaron Ridley explains “the consciousness is corrupt whenever it seeks to discharge its service to self-knowledge through technical means. It is corrupt, for instance, when it misunderstands the medium through which its work is to be done as a mere vehicle for the thought or feeling it is attempting to clarify.”
Here, the romantic conflations of “expression” is dismantled by the precise and demanding process of “conversion”, that is, because the exploration of one’s feelings and thoughts in art is necessarily mediated, art must therefore consist in the exploration of the medium in which the conversion is to be attempted. Just as I have expounded with diwà as an aesthetic equilibrium based on life, the creative act is a process of balance against corruption and extinction. This is more than just the artist learning more about paint in painting, or discovering more about video in video art and such things, because in pagsasadiwà, the artist’s medium is a cognitive-linguistic medium – it completes the dialectics of knowledge and body, of kaluluwa and ginhawa.
Interestingly, the history of the babaylán – the spirit medium – of Philippine society parallels this ethic of aesthetics, the need of a philosophy, and the process of aesthetic equilibrium. However, the babaylán has been dispossessed of this role, just as artists and members of a community have surrendered their powers of diwà to the institutions of media, business, education, politics and religion. At the moment, because of “habitation”, we are only capable of reflexively repeating the propaganda of these institutions. Current celebrations of “new media” as technologies of liberation and empowerment may thus be gross and fatal miscomputations. We must remember the ethical burden of aesthetics, we must first re-acquire our sensitivity to “pulses.”
In Philippine folk medicine, one of the techniques of diagnosis is palpitation or pulse taking or what is locally known as pulso. The pulso is considered the outer manifestation of the inner equilibrium in the human body, connoting the idea of an "inner space." The terms of this "inner space" are frequency, regularity and amplitude, with each having their hot-cold qualities. The conditions of major organs of the body are "read" through pulses on the radial artery at the wrist. The arteries radiate to the fingers, each finger indicating different types of pulse beats in relation to the major organs of the body.
In pulse taking, the element of environmental time (or space-time) is also very important. At night, the pulse is slower because the influence of the moon is stronger - much like the tide of the sea. In the daytime, solar energy is stronger and the pulse is faster and stronger. At dawn, the sun-moon influences are in a dynamic state of equilibrium, and therefore dawn is considered the best time for pulse reading. There is also a close relationship between pulses and the seasons: the seasonal conditions of alangaang-papawirin (the changing pressure in the upper and lower atmosphere) reflect specific pathological effects. These changes, which are caused by the movement of cold (amihan or north wind) and warm (timog or south wind) metereological fronts, and diurnal and nocturnal wind oscillations within a 24-hour time span, must be known by the careful practitioner of pulso.
Pulso is a very complex and rigorous method of diagnosis taking one year to study and over 10 years to master. It is very precise, comprising a computation method that can predict pregnancy, predict a person's lifespan, predict the number of days a person with a terminal illness will live, the overall health of a person and the condition of individual organs, as well as spirit possessions. It is important to note – with reference to creative practice – that pulse taking is actually not only diagnostic but also predictive. Palpitating the pulses serve as a method of divination; it is used, for example, in determining the future of business transactions, travel, family life and relationships.
Determining the pulse of the environment is likewise crucial to survival in general - it establishes rules relating to medicine, agriculture, engineering and travel. With panahón or a time-space continuum, the environment becomes "computable", where its pulses may be likened to vectors or points in a given dimension. Survival rules are codified for the security of the life force of future generations.
In the creative process, the artist engages in a technique congruent with pulso. Like mastery of pulse taking, it takes much time and experience for the artist to develop a very high sensitivity to medium, self and environment. The artist has to listen carefully, to the frequency, regularity and amplitude of the pulses, that is, to the inner structures.
A farmer who tills the soil because he or she has decided to live in that place has intimate knowledge of the soil, the seed and the seasons. This knowledge is crucial to the farmer’s survival, and it is a knowledge that is passed on to future generations of farmers. But in the denial of life and life force from farm labor, the farmer is forced to see the soil and the seed as mere means to an economic end, as temporal and dispensable mediums.
I had a discussion once with a cab driver who, being a native of Manila, talked about the internal migration of people from the countryside into his city. I asked why people were moving into Manila even though they knew there would be no source of livelihood for them there. He said the lights attracted people. I asked if he would want to go to the countryside when he retires. He said he tried it before but he could never survive because he was no farmer and all his efforts at agriculture failed. I asked him about the old women begging in the streets who I have not seen before. Oh, he said, they are Badjao people from Mindanao, and the city mayor will soon send them back to where they came from. I asked what they were doing here since I assumed they were not simply attracted by lights. He said they were fleeing from the RP-US “war against terror” in Mindanao. One often sees images of the Badjaos in beautiful tourist postcards and television programs, never as old women begging in the streets of Manila.
The following day the women were gone. Soon Mindanao will become globally known for images of cosmopolitan cities, exotic resorts and international festivals. Articulate American ex-pats and their local companions will be Internet blogging from the islands of its rich diversity and progressive business climate. Mindanao will become “prosperous” after the life and culture of the indigenous people, those who sprung from the earth, have been destroyed.
But I must admit that I have no easy answers or solutions to the Philippine or the global problem. Until my own pagsasadiwà is established, I have also postponed the luxury of “new media art.” Diwà is not concerned with employing “new media” or “new technologies” for conceived ends.
Diwà rather challenges the artist to recover a universe where aesthetic structures are made comprehensible, where the various positions of the aisth?t?s may be made visible and can be compared with each other, where – as in both divination and biological computation – various logics can be simulated, computed and tested. If art is self-knowledge, then it should allow us to inquire within ourselves, re-visit our aesthetic equilibrium of knowledge, language and body, and – as much as the pain of the world is the pain within us – confront that pain from within and test it against buhay and bisà.
Thus, the challenge of diwà for me is the re-thinking of everything that I have been taught about the world, because the world speaks to me of a very different reality. We are taught, for instance, in visual art that images produce knowledge. I think that this might be a gross misuse of our bisà, our biological endowment. However, this seems to be exactly what is happening in our highly mediated environment, and this is what accounts for the miserable lack of knowledge and participation in a society full of slogans, billboards and moving images. The challenge of diwà is to stop and then to think more carefully how we might regain a balance more closely in congruence with the principles of buhay and bisà.
