Sid
Posted by: Fats in: Fats, Vitamins & Minerals > What and WhyStrange how one reads more deeply upon the writings of someone who just passed away. It is like reading the letters of somebody you secretly love.
Over the past three months, Sid has been emailing me on a few topics: one was an invite to participate in an exhibition that he was organizing with Dopy for the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Then a few weeks later, a “happy new 2008″ greeting with a note that the exhibition, originally scheduled for February 13, was being moved to September, and that would give them time to think about my reservations about joining. Another was to tell me that the NCCA announcement for Websining was incomplete and that he was submitting his entry to the Open Call for Art anyway. I guess he liked Websining - last year he was one of the moderators for the KURO Satellite Forum on “art competitions” and participated in another KURO forum hosted at the CCP. I also had fun working with Sid on Yankee Doodles some five years ago.
Trevor met Sid once, at another forum at the CCP, and Sid joked how some westerners he meets overseas often asked him if Filipinos could really climb coconut trees … 
(Of course, when Trevor and I went to Bohol, and saw those kids climbing the coconut trees along Loboc River with lightning speed, and then diving into the water, one would feel most compelled to get to know someone who could actually perform such a feat!)
A friend wrote that Sid actually went home from hospital, so everyone thought he would recuperate. Sid was born to the world on a Christmas Day. I guess, when fate called, he didn’t want to leave the world on an April Fools Day.
Goodbye, Sid, we will all miss you - till we meet again.
Sick Leave
(With reference to Juan Luna’s painting, “Parisian Life”)
Like a patch of skin spared
from sunburn by a shield
of cloth or sunblock lotion,
there’s a rectangle on the wall
lighter than the wall itself,
where a painting used to hang.
Now that the artwork is gone,
visitors ask, “What used to be there?,”
and “What was it about?,”
as if they hadn’t seen the piece before,
or maybe not carefully enough.
‘Wasn’t there a woman seated
in a café?, Didn’t she have a glass
of wine, or some company?,”
The damp ground, eavesdropping,
almost shifts, holding up the house
whose wall holds up a rusty nail
in its perpetual upturned pose,
holding up no answer.
On my fourth day in hospital
with dextrose feeding me twenty
drops a minute, I picture in my mind
a space I may have left behind,
not entirely empty, but of air
made thinner by my absence,
or of lighter tissue,
so that people pause, inquire,
and imagine what used to be there.
“So where’s the painting now?”
vvvvv
Sid Gomez Hildawa (1962-2008)
Artist, Poet
Department Manager
Visual, Literary and Media Arts
Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP)
