By ALEX MAGNO

It is curious how one can remember encounters with Lean simply as snatches of conversation: over cups of pale coffee between meetings, across quick meals on the run, commentaries on books read while waiting for the microphone, over a small beer talk between political campaigns.

Lean was always in a hurry, always with a sense of the brevity of life, the paucity of time. He would come home at midnight and read until dawn. He read during pauses in meetings, aboard buses on long rides, through the course of irrelevant lectures that infest the university. Food and books share common fate with Lean: They were consumed with great haste by his voracious appetite. 

It would probably be banal to refer to Lean Alejandro simply as a political leader or as an adept militant. That would require reducing this great bundle of energy—this mind drawn to diverse directions by a broad range of curiosities, this eccentric entanglement infatuated with the Renaissance Man, this extremely literate activist—to only one dimension of his totality, to only one star of a complex galaxy.

Lean was an unnatural sophomore when we first met. I had heard of him before from the small school we both came from. Even then, his classmates thought him “different.” It is not the awkward beanpole figure one recalls from that first encounter but the intensity of his gaze, the confidence that abounds, the great mass of questions he posed with sincere enthusiasm.

There was that certain recklessness in his bearing. A great thirst for learning. An infectious drive to get things done and move quickly ahead. A large dose of impatience. A lively mind gifted with an irrepressible tongue.

Irrepressible. This adjective probably best suits Lean. He was never daunted by newfangled ideas, nor stymied by tired formulation. He thrived in difficult situations. He had that rare ability of rising above commonplace chatter and breaking out of those discrete prisons established by everyday life.

Lean had a remarkable talent for pulling the unexpected. He mocked the preppy student culture by wearing rubber slippers to school. He settled many intellectual disputes by throwing in an elegant phrase as one would a monkey wrench or deriving an absurd conclusion that brings everyone to a pause. He would shift quickly from a discourse on Althusser to a peroration on fine cooking. He made the most blasphemous remarks about his own closely held beliefs.

In chess as in politics, Lean never took defeat lightly. He becomes totally consumed by the realization of his own weak points and puts every effort into correcting them. He put such energy into learning something new each day, so much so that one suspects he nursed a terrible phobia for mediocrity. He would never have agreed with that aphorism about not being hurt by what one does not know. Lean left ignorance no quarters.

Lean was a man thoroughly fascinated by the vagaries of his own brief season. He was thoroughly engrossed with the ideas and movements that govern this epoch. He was never daunted by the perils of struggle and was moved by that certain quality of conviction that forms the stuff of great crusaders and martyrs.

This is an age that requires intellectual clarity to be complemented by definite courage. Those with faint hearts cannot possibly muster the intellectual honesty to pursue a thought through to its practical consequences. Lean was of stout heart and robust mind. He was a gift to the age he was born into, a testimonial to the necessary heroism with which this age must be lived. For this is an age that imperils those who think honestly and act sincerely.

One is reminded of Morris West’s advice: “It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment or the courage to pay the price… One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.”

By this standard, Lean definitely met the requirements for a full life and a full human being—the shortness of his stay compensated by the intensity with which his life was lived. 

Not a few comrades and friends have remarked that Lean was in too much of a hurry, that he was moving too quickly for his own good, that he tempts burning himself out. But Lean’s speed was always matched by brightness, by that intrinsic brilliance that sets him apart from most of us.

In a sense, Lean may be compared to a meteor: a shooting star that, for a brief moment, marks the dark heavens and makes the night memorable. By his luminescence, he gives us a rare glimpse of dawn. He was a thunderbolt rebelling against the darkness, a spark that denied night monopoly over our collective sensibility.

In life, Lean gave us a fine example of humanity: of commitment to grand principles, of selflessness in its heroic proportion, of courage in such surfeit it becomes contagious. He gave us a standard of passion and enthusiasm to live by and taught us how to love a cause so deeply, and feel so much for so many that even death could not eradicate the afterglow of such love and such feeling.

In death, Lean marks a path in the direction of a new future where pristine humanity is possible; where clarity of thought shall cease to be an act that invites peril; where men live for each other and not against each other; where we can laugh and cry, sing and dance, love and be loved in an atmosphere that is not poisoned by fear; where ideas are not suppressed by terror and lives extinguished by the fear of freedom; and where each may speak one’s own truth with great tolerance for the truths others speak.

Let those who thrive on terror tremble before the spectre of an undying symbol. Those whose unbounded ruthlessness shattered Lean’s jaw shall soon realize they failed to silence him, for he continues to speak to us—to all of us who thirst terribly for justice and freedom—through the wisdom bequeathed by a life well lived.

A comet of great intensity has passed.

While we celebrate the moments of brightness that it shared, we also mourn deeply its passing. Those who seek to cast darkness upon our lives shall find us not cowed in wait at dawn but furiously raging against the dying of the light. ●

Published in print in the Collegian’s October 30, 1987 issue, with the headline “A comet has passed.” Alexander R. Magno is an academician. He studied political science, for bachelor’s and master’s degrees, at UP Diliman, and obtained a certificate from the University of Poitiers in France in 1980. He taught at UP Diliman and served as executive director of the UP Third World Studies Center from 1994 to 1997. Former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo appointed Magno as director of the Development Bank of the Philippines. He also worked in various capacities as special adviser and consultant to different government agencies and institutions. 

Lean Alejandro wrote features for the Collegian and established the Center for Nationalist Studies (CNS) in 1983. He served as chairperson of the University Student Council, from 1983 to 1984, and in 1985 became the first secretary-general of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN). On September 19, 1987, Alejandro was assassinated on his way to the Bayan office in Rosal St. in Cubao, after a press conference at the National Press Club where he had called for a nationwide strike against the military. A van intercepted his car, rolled down the driver's window, and gunned Alejandro down with a single shot. His death triggered widespread condemnation of extrajudicial killings during Corazon Aquino’s presidency.