FG’S Eulogy for Dr. Lagmay

[An edited version of this eulogy is to be found in Social Science Diliman (January-December 2007) 4:1-2, 137-140.  The version below was transcribed by myself from Dr. David’s printed-out copy. –Ethel P. David, April 17, 2009]

FOR A.V. LAGMAY: A EULOGY

Palma Hall, U.P., Diliman, Q.C.

20 December 2005

T.S. ELIOT, a great Nobel Poet, broods in his famous play, “Murder in the Cathedral”: “…death comes as a thousand faces and walks by a hundred ways.” Death comes at an unexpected time and place.  A person may slip on a flight of stairs and break his head.  He may choke on a chicken bone at his meal.  He may go down in nature’s fury.  Anyhow a person departs, he does, not with a bang but a whimper.

Despite that it comes in many an unexpected manner, death comes too commonly to be novel.  In a lifetime, a person may witness it intimately in various situations and vicariously in countless numbers.  Yet, in every instance that death is witnessed, it immensely arrests the mind and saddens it with grief and finality.  Death is the stranger face of life–the face that shows only once in a life as a formless shadow, and getting used to it never ever happens.

This is the manner that the final passage of Dr. Lagmay strikes each of us now.  It draws our minds to one thought: There he is lain bodily and still, and his disembodied mind has departed forever.  We wish that he were with us for one or so more decades, more than the eight-and-a-half he had had with us.  Eighty-five years is man’s normal span of life.  But life must span beyond normal for a man above normal.  This is a fair wish, if fair it is to wish.

Where I now stand, that is my wish.  But only wish it is.  Fate is fate and fair is fair.  But fate is never fair.  I can merely brood and let my mind reminisce in spell to hold Dr. Lagmay for a delay.

He was about 43 years old, when I first met him 43 years ago in June 1962.  He looked younger than his age.  His hair was cut, neither short nor long, combed well, showing his forehead half-crowned atop his gentle gaze.  His face looked fresh, without a trace of sweat, reflecting a life that coped well with stress.  He wore a tie on a white shirt, tucked into an ivy-league pair of trousers.  He was formal, seated at his large desk; yet he came on with equipoise.  Equanimity is a better word.  He was the Chairman of the Psychology faculty, then secured at a room in the east end on the second floor of the College of Education.  A divider up to the ceiling separated his office from the three desks for the other faculty.  His office, with book-filled cabinets, opened to the north-end by a large divider that fanned in or out as a room-size door or window into the University oval of serene acacia trees and greens beyond.

A first impression lasts, especially if it comes strong or well.  It kind of sets the mood for any ensuing enterprise.  Chaos theory phrases this as sensitive dependence on the initial condition.

Dr. Lagmay, 18 years my senior, came to know about me through a junior member of the Psychology faculty.  He himself had known me a little before but only by name, because both he and I were members of the U.P. Writers’ Club.  Once I had sat, he said he was inviting me to join the Psychology faculty, first as an interim teaching assistant.  I already had an A.B. degree in English and Comparative Literature, with a year of teaching English at the U.P. Department of English a year before, but never had a class in Psychology.  At that time, I was the operator of the audio-visual equipment at the U.P. Listening Center on the Second and North Floor of the U.P. Main Library, playing poetry readings and classical musical for students in Humanities.  The Center was a project of the U.P. Writers’ Club, with equipment and volumes of long-playing records donated to the University by the Rockefeller Foundation.  I was enjoying a year of reading philosophy, science and mathematics, deciding whether I should proceed to Law or to Science, like Physics, while I was having a rhapsody with classical music and poetry readings.  Psychology was not in my plan or on my mind.  I had only informal intimacy with it, out of my reading of some volumes of Jung, Freud, and a few like them.

I told him I liked his invitation.  But I needed some two weeks to think about his offer.  I had to read of Psychology beyond Jung and Freud, especially of areas in the very science of the discipline.  I said I could get interested only in the science of Psychology.  Jung and Freud were literature to me.  He replied with a shade of smile that he would be pleased if I chose the experimental and physiological area of Psychology, since the Department at the U.P. is designed to be a science.  I did not know that he had a Ph.D. from Harvard, or that he specialized in Experimental Psychology under the tutelage of Burrhus Frederick Skinner.  I did not know that he had a B.A. and an M.A. in Philosophy under Dr. Ricardo Pascual, the academic who brought logical positivism into Philippine academe and who had himself studied under Bertrand Russell at the University of Chicago.  I did not know.  Did I not say a mouthful?  I did not know.  I was young at 25, and Socrates should overlook my self-assurance and ignorance.

Dr. Lagmay had a streak–to say a vision would be self-serving to me.  He took me in, despite that I was a tabula rasa in worthy areas of Psychology.  He could only go by my unknowing commitment and by the weak fact that Skinner himself came from English Literature.  He took a gamble, most likely a bad one.  He perhaps went by good faith or sheer obstinacy to make a case for me.  I knew he made a strong case, through academic channels, to the Board of Regents.  Now, looking back, I am sure that many a one then took his action as foolhardy, especially someone who was very much more qualified than I was and who had really liked to join Psychology.  But Dr. Lagmay would not take ’no’ for an answer or yield to objections to actions he took with apparent deliberation.  He had been that kind of man–gentle, non-combative, unlike some academic baboon, but nevertheless resolute to push on with his cause.  He had been that kind of an academic man, who had built the Department of Psychology from a fledgling discipline with four or five faculty members, ’squatting’ at the College of Education.  Now, after only a half-century or so, the Department of Psychology, if by size it were a college, outranks the lower 50% of some 23 colleges on the Diliman campus.  In this respect, it is unique among the many academic departments.  It has more than 32 regular members in its faculty and 500 or so students in its A.B., B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. curricula.  Alone among the academic departments in the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, it sits secure in its own edifice.  How much more established the Department of Psychology could have been, had Dr. Lagmay not been given respite from administering the Psychology Department after 22 years of being its Chairman, from 1955-1977.  After all, he was some institutional builder who had also built himself.

There, his body is lain.  Wherever his free mind is now in any possible world, as twinkling light or gentle cloud, he must be poised among his peers: Socrates, Russell, Skinner, Lao Tze, Tagore and the like.  How could he not be but the perennial academic–academician, indeed–whom I had known for 43 good years?  I had know him simply as an unblemished academic in the classrooms, in discussion forums, or on corridors and corners of the academe, ready to quibble even about quintessence.   Yes, he should be in the company of such lofty and august men, discoursing about theories as if theories were facts–facts of everlasting attributes in Plato’s world of absolutes.  He was my senior of 18 years; but where he must be now, he must be my senior as is Einstein or Socrates.

I can only think about him.  I can only reminisce.  I can only dream.  But in all of which, he is real, as real as I think, reminisce or dream.  This time, though, I should not even dream to make the unwise and un-Socratic gesture of accepting his invitation to join his company, should life also turn now its other and shadowy back on to me.  No, thank you, Doc, for you could be wrong the next time around; or I could not make your measure at such time.  No, thank you.  Instead, adieu.  Now it is proper I must let you rest in peace.  Eighty-six years of taking a solid poise must deserve all of it.

As the lands divide the waters of the earth

As heavens parcel into millions of milky ways

As time’s fingers move on to make sine waves

As death comes on with many, thousand faces

May you now have your very peace and place.

-fg david