All text & images copyright © 2000 Joseph Robertson
[None of the contents of this page may be reproduced or distributed without the expressed, written consent of the author, who retains all rights & priveleges.]

Abanico [ Philippine Impressions ] continued...

2.

The culture that inhabits these 7,100 islands has been many times diluted and then further ossified by each the conquistadores, the misioneros, American colonials, and also by commercial influences from the great East Asian empires. Dusty streets yield varied species of light. An estuary of candle flames, flickering their humanizing way into night recalls the occasion: a religious festival in a place steeled by its faith.

Scattered electric globes adorn a grappling tamarind and a Virgin.   Laying the scene.  Scatterling icons behave like fairy-life, the bodies of angels, a recollection of a prior world of light. These motivations underscore the scene, the roiling gloom, the sauna. They are internal truths, and this Festival uses light, purpose, and gathering to bring them to the surface.

It is the prosperous who host the Festival, who finance it, who march through the town, who hold the focus. They display themselves, their actuality, to the less fortunate, the unfortunate, the systemically excluded. They are saying: we know the life, the magic of the human element; we will take hold and one day bring you to fulfillment, comfort, paradise; we believe we can show you the way. This is what is imagined. This is why people are smiling.

The shock is not overwhelming. It comes gradually and in minor increments, in moments of pale recognition, centering on some small but terribly tragic scene: a compact universe waiting at the door to the games. It is the slow creep of poverty, and its consequences.

Here, a word like Independence does not roll. It gathers moss. It dwells dormant in a broken refrigerator, slowly colonized by parasites. Mysterious intonations arrive to agitate the word from all sides. Poverty tries to alter the word, diminish it, punish its sometime insolence. A word can withstand only so much impatient battery. It recedes. To people who know the word and revere it as a necessary and effective totum, it seems altogether unavailable here. Community emerges in its place. From hot secret springs. From faith. From necessity.

It strkes me, as a visitor, as symbolic that among these 7,100 islands, it is an irrefutable tradition of communal fate that describes the relentless vibration of what seems a culture, a code of being, a mandate for pursuing or deserving sustenance.

3.

Today we met the Shy Plant, a small, weed-like species of vegetation whose leaves display themselves to the sun as fronds, the many leaflets of which curl and cache themselves immediately, if touched. The plant bows down into this pattern of retraction, one imagines, with thoughts of camouflage, or playing dead. If I can’t see you, you can’t see me. In this thick air, just maybe.

I am feeling the same reflex with this immense heat. Philippine heat has size. The brain becomes heavy, graduated, almost fractal. Everything which might incorporate the use of words is beginning to seem devoid of meaning. Only the heat has meaning. Life here is amorphous; it must be. It is difficult to achieve any poetic formality, or even a reasoned or ecstatic rupture with form.

So many reasons which might invest the Catholic faith with its appeal obviate themselves under this liquid sun. The faith has acquired, over the centuries, a form, a formality. It is everlasting. It beautiful, rich, bearing a certain health, which is often elsewhere interpreted as sickness, this rigor.

I am beginning to recall my position. I stand at the center of a puzzle not near to completion, a puzzle which has never been wholly conceived, it seems, or witnessed, even by its inhabitants, but also a puzzle which is my enigma to ravel, to stow away, to intuit.

It is not an easy thing to find the crystalline essence of things in a land so foreign as this corner of Asia, though English be widely spoken. One finds himself relying on others, with their experience, to guide and to filter environs, stray perceptions. One needs a community flush with native reasoning, to see clearly.

If it may be said there is a baroque self-indulgence in me, a knowledge born of caprice and consumption, it languishes here. A bed of hot coals, the grill of a people’s history neatly laid out, portraying itself in simple lines beneath the froth, the smoke of feebler flesh, all this aromatic distribution of otherness becomes the correction of an ego, or the sojourn from obsessions, the seed of new foci. The mind reels with denotations already self-evident, repeating, altered. Old words are hard choices, slippery devils, not the poetry of this place.

I find myself writing, gingerly, with determination:

Life runs away. Mud is fast. No hope of cold air. It is not enough. Fragments of the story exist, call to one another, gather. There is a hint of truth in our mosaic passage through this weather. It is just the beginning. Communities may emerge.

We must take difference very seriously. It is neither possible nor wise to make an overarching generalization about all of Asia, nor about all the Philippines, nor even about this particular Philippine island, nor of all Bacoor, nor of the family I am visiting. The just observer sees difference, variance, personality. And traffic.

There is traffic here like bronchitis writ large. There are these scars of modernization, and there are people breathing the air, desiring and pursuing happiness, living, working, eating, dying. Traffic chokes every corner of Metro-Manila, the Old City, the new Makati, and every suburb within reach. The air burns, and there is dialogue beneath the fire, but the dialogue fades, is not heard, does not surpass the ribboning scars of modernization.

I feel myself curling and caching, seeking answers in dark, remote regions of my own inner world, places reserved until now for precisely the interpretation of this experience. It is this turning-inward that moves me to travel, overstep horizons. It is these new old regions of my inner life that I have been granted by the relentlessness of Manila. It is a quiet unrelenting. An undercurrent that whispers irrefutability, without offering details, offering only details, seeking the detail lurking inside your own experience.

I have lost old assumptions in twenty days of perspiration. What I never imagined was that I would be re-introduced to deep meditation while touring the Philippines. The tension, the traffic, the heat, the luxury, the quiet and the noise, these have brought me to asking in silence long series of questions, deconstructing questions, answering the deconstructions, deconstructing the answers, inventing, in the end, new uses for language.

4.

Taal (pronounced Ta-al) is one of those places. So elegantly made it enters you, meeting no resistance, and sets about re-ordering the constellations in your mind. It stands simply, beautifully, gently, firm. Offering itself as it must be offered, as nothing other than what it is. Bare and lush. Hard and liquid. Possible. It is a place you have never quite imagined, but it strikes you as highly possible. It adequates itself to a certain meandering perfection, like a tune from Bach. I could have taken up residence, because the view made sense, spoke eloquently of chance and of change.

Taal is a word that calls attention to itself. A word that lies in wait, deferrent but irreverent toward time's passing. The landscape of the volcano is itself a sort of code, an expression of evolved and departed realities. A word. One senses certain eternal aspects of one's being. The water, the hidden fire, these are within us.

It is cooler, the air is cleaner, here in Tagaytay, in the mountains. One is beckoned to pause, to 'take time', commune with the quiet posture of the hills, the verdure of things unsaid. The thought occurs in me that I will recall my time here as a visit to a holy place. I do.

Holiness has direction. It is a spirit made arrow, leaning away toward some variant of the Elsewhere. At Taal, it seems there is a sublime access to what is often difficult to see. Secrets and gentler truths creep out into the open. Bent or damaged thoughts are healed. It is already a successful day.

5.

The strangeness of this country is palpable.  It sits like an unnecessary film of steel, guarding my body against escape.  And yet, this strangeness has a potency born of curiosity.  Colors match here in ways I have never seen.  Heartbreaking pink of carnations sides with the harsh pallor of dry earth.   Deep, almost bloody, green fronds of buko tree ply blue ripples of air under blinding white skies. 

People explore things, and the things explored become like siblings, spiritually.  Determined always to either disappoint or exalt, but never to be abandoned, a permanent attachment.  And so we commit them irreparably to memory.   The things we have explored.  I have a sense that I am standing at the center of memory, in this place so strange and beautiful to me. 

[ copyright © 2000 Joseph Robertson ]

[ return to Tintas Travel page ]