Letter to Minnie - Rethinking Ethical Standards

Voice-over narration would certainly have taken the video to a different level. I have a friend who's done broadcasting in high school. Ryan has that quintessential Midwest accent we've come to associate with broadcast sound in America. He's agreed to work on my projects; I just have not chosen to expend more time on finessing the product. But, yes, if you're in the area I would love to avail me of your talents, too. In this exciting age of the wildly creative use of moving images and sound, taboos are as quickly demoted as they are promoted. Standards are for those times we don't feel creative. We fall back on dogma when we can't experience the real thing - call it God or art or, in Andalusia, duende. (My company name is Duende Arts.)

It is precisely because I recognize that knowledge advances that I adopt a tentative approach to the current teachings of the Catholic Church. I am not anti-Catholic, or anti-religion but after struggling 30 years against conclusions that went against the grain in Western-tradition-bound societies I can't go back. Once you open your eyes and see Ursa Major, Orion, and Scorpius (I'm a Scorpio, by the way, which may describe but not explain my obsession with certain topics like religion) in the sky, you cannot not see them again. St. Paul wrote that the woman or man who accepts Jesus as Messiah or Christ ceases to be a child and becomes a fully functioning human being. Good enough for those times but not, I don't think, for the 21st century when the challenges to human beings have changed. While much of the world's people still struggle with the same hardships as the Mediterranean peoples of the first 300 years (as measured by Pope Gregory XIII's modification of Julius Caesar's calendar) today the challenge to Western democracies is different. We must lead the way for religions to co-exist rather than fight each other. (The debate about building a mosque in downtown Manhattan is a painful example.)

More, religions have to share ethical space with other branches of human expression like science, politics and psychology. It's a delicate balance because only by immersing ourselves in a tradition do we advance in its path but to immerse ourselves like that is often to forget there are other rivers in which to be baptized into enlightened life. But I don't think (as even U.S. North District Chief Judge, Vaughn Walker, writes in his impressive ruling on gay marriages in California) that morality needs to be based solely on religious beliefs anymore. Religion has up to this point been the one authority for what constitutes morality but when religious beliefs (Christian or Muslim or Hindu or whatever) conflict we must arrive at more Paul-like standards for ethical conduct.

On the flip side I continue to admire and love many aspects of Christianity, especially its ancient liturgies and its many centuries of literature on alternative meanings to biological life or how many angels can dance on a pin head. For me theology is an expression of human creativity, is as much art as Debussy's impressionistic music (did you know that he was music teacher to Nadeshda von Meck's children? She was Tchaikovsky's patroness and muse and his music was altogether different) or a Jackson Pollack canvas. But artistic truth is one thing, and truth that hurts people and destroys life because it is false is a whole other thing. History is not just intellectual exercise in futility. We can't know what happened before our time but we can take hints from what we discover that we not commit the same mistakes again. We do, but that's no excuse for not trying!

Your example of parenting styles illustrates how beliefs abetted by science or, as I believe, forces beyond our intellectual comprehension (thumb and forefinger creates our unique prehensile ability, thus to comprehend is to grasp) change. Those of us with some education must set an example to take care with what we believe. Because I still believe education, the exposure of our minds to different, far-ranging ideas, can help us avoid becoming tyrannical with our views. The age of tyranny must end. To hold fast to destructive beliefs makes literal the expression "diehard." Religions should foster aliveness, the capacity to grow and change with grace, not death.

"I may be simple but I am not like that..."

I don't know what this refers to. Was I calling you simple? I happen to think that to live simply is the hardest thing to do. I recall Oscar Wilde: "I have the simplest of tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."

After a life-changing experience at a nine-day Buddhist meditation retreat (the hardest thing to date I've done!) in 1986, it was my friend, Jean Alice, who was at the time prioress of Our Lady of Carmel on Cold Spring Road (where the VAH is located in Indianapolis) who helped guide me back to "normal" life. In meetings with me for close to a year, she used the metaphors of Teresa of Avilá and Juan de la Cruz to help me come to terms with ineffable Buddhist concepts. Once she told me that her Catholic faith was for her like a helicopter. It was a vehicle to take her someplace. Her helicopter metaphor mirrors the Buddha's metaphor of Dharma (there is no word for Buddhism in Indian and other Asian languages; an -ism is a Eurocentric concept) as a boat to take the practitioner to "the other shore." Buddhism enabled me to come to peace with the contradictions of the Judeo-Christian tradition and Jean Alice, bless her heart, was there to help me pilot the helicopter.

In exchange, at her request, I led a Buddhist meditation retreat for her and the other sisters at the monastery. Those nuns were nothing like the brown-clad Carmelites whom I glimpsed through the fence next to the giant Catholic church in my hometown. (I'm sad to say that the nuns gave up their monastery to the archdiocese a few years ago. They were all growing too old to maintain it and the community was not attracting enough young novices to make it work. I am devastated.) To be fair, Vatican II had come and gone, bringing new life to the church while, in my view, also taking some things away. That's the nature of change.

Since then I've tried various spiritual disciplines, including Ignatian exercises. For 2 years I apprenticed myself at a conservative Quaker meeting even as I undertook the study of scriptures of various religions. I went back to the Pali canon of Buddhist scriptures, read on the scholarship of both the Torah and the Christian Bible, and even did a video interview of my boss, the Muslim psychiatrist who owned the clinic where I worked for seven years. I danced around Pagan bonfires, sweated in First Nation sweat lodges, taught at the Spiritual Life center of our largest Methodist mega-church, retreated at St. Meinrad every few months, attended fairy gatherings, etc. The journey has been wildly exhilarating. I honor the crazy way of the Spirit even as I've retained my quizzical eye, remained the Doubting Thomas when interacting with Spirit. I'm not Carl Jung. A half century can make that much difference!

In Buddhism doubt is enshrined as a virtue on the path. It took acquaintance with another Eastern religion (Christianity was born in the East, what we refer to now as the Middle East) to move away from dogmatism. Heresy comes from the Greek meaning "able to choose." The Catholic church, then the only Christian organization, changed the word to mean wrong belief. I think it's time to forge new standards for ethical living. Religions continue to have value in our pluralistic societies but we must make room for other arbiters of right living. At a time when we have growing access to the varieties of human insights, it is in my view a mortal (i.e. leading to death, muerto in Spanish, mortis in Latin) sin to live in ignorance.

The picture owes inspiration to Chinese scroll paintings where human beings are tiny in the expansive landscape. They are constant reminders how little we are in the total view of the universe. It in this Spirit I offer you these thoughts.

Leaving the Dream Behind

In December 1975, less than a month after arriving in America, I packed my few belongings into a spanking new Dodge Dart (recommended by Consumer Digest) and with my then best friend, Aldo, drove from New York City to Indiana.

I’m still here. Each time I visit New York memories of those exhilarating first months rush through the floodgates of my mind. Kathy, fiancée of Richard Cassone who had recommended me to his program in Newark, helped me find my first apartment. It was one of four tiny studios above a carpet warehouse a block from the Pulasky Skyway. I didn’t buy a car until just a couple of months of leaving so on the weekends I wasn’t on call I’d walk to Journal Square to take the PATH train to Manhattan. I got off at the Christopher Street exit because I fancied Greenwich Village. It was my idea of everything I wanted from the Big City. I loved the Bleeker Street cafés, the off-Broadway theater on Grove Street, the funky shops on W. 12^th Street, the cornucopia of wildly intoxicating foods at Balducci’s on Sixth Avenue (no one called it Avenue of the Americas).

Of all my memories of food, I remember best my first slice of pizza at a tiny pizzeria in Jersey City just outside the train station on Journal Square. It was a piping hot thin slice of dough with crisp, golden edges encircling steaming cheese and rounds of pepperoni like a crown. Jersey City was like Little Italy. At the corner of Newark and Central Avenues was an Italian bakery, across the street from an Asian grocery and just steps away from a butcher shop where one could buy veal as well as lamb, pork and beef. It was all a dream come true.

What happened? After the "dream" became reality, how did I end up living the last 35 years in Indianapolis?

Meeting the Buddha

In 1986, two months after resigning from my first and only employment position, I flew to Boston to meet my friend, Paul. For weeks before the trip I had worked on my fears about it. I slowly weaned myself off foods I would not be able to eat the ten days that we were going to spend at the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, two hours from Boston.

As it turned out, food during the retreat was ethereal. I fell in love with organically grown, vegetarian food fixed mindfully and with love by the volunteer staff at the center. Ruth was the perfect teacher. I struggled with sitting motionless day after day, the body reacting with intense, unbearable pain from the unfamiliar discipline.

The pain did not go away but one day suffering was gone. It was as if someone had wiped the window clean of years of dirt. I saw clearly.

The most important insight came one evening when ruth gave a dharma talk about karma. This morning, before meditating, the insight took form again as I read Tarthang Tulku's Openness Mind:

"As we observe our fears, we can see that they form no essential part of our natures, but instead are patterns that we have constructed," writes the tulku. We create our experience from karma shaping physical sense and mental stimuli into perceptions, feelings and patterns. Seeing this is to realize I don't have to respond to them in the habitual way I do. Seeing them as constructions of the mind I can choose what to respond to and how to respond when I decide to respond.

What is real is redefined as the mind stuff I choose to respond to. All that a person needs then is to develop the value system upon which that choice depends. It's a huge task that may require one's lifetime to discover and evolve impeccably but not as huge a task as when blind to our ego's creation we respond willy-nilly and create more patterns and make life more complicated than it is.

Boracay Island Paradise for Natives and Foreigners Alike

My family lives on the island of Panay. It's the big island adjacent to Boracay, now a destination for mostly European tourists looking for cheap living in the gorgeous squalor of a tropical paradise. From my hometown in La Paz, Iloilo, it is a tiring five- to six-hour trip by crowded jeepney, dusty bus or air-conditioned hired car. Tourists can fly directly to the island from Manila, less than two hours by plane.

Boracay is famous for its fine, white sand, not like the vaunted beaches of the French and Italian Riviera covered with gravel. White Beach is the main area that most people first see of the island after arriving from mainland Aklan by pump boat. The harbor is better now. Passengers walk down the gangplank instead of jumping into the water to get to dry land.

By day there is wind-surfing, swimming in the often shallow water so clear you can see down to the sand below. Beach chairs and cabins can be rented and you can spend the day just people-watching. Better yet, hire a two-rigger and circumnavigate the island to find your own private cove or beach. There are other smaller islands like Carabao Island for exploring underwater caves and cliffs overlooking the South China Sea.

White Beach is lined with typical touristy cabins behind coconut groves and hibiscus shrubs but slowly big hotels are taking over the prime areas. At night torches light restaurant after restaurant with surf side tables overflowing with the sea's bounty and, of course, lechón, the Filipino version of roast whole suckling pig. There are souvenir shops galore and Internet cafes.

Many German and Swiss men have married local girls and themselves gone native. Of a morning I follow my nose and wend my way through the narrow paths most tourists don't even notice to fresh-baked baguettes and other crusty European breads the expatriates often sell right off their porches while their children play barefoot under the houses, dark as the native kids. Life in paradise is sweet!

How The East Was Won

We live our four-score years a matter of genetics, family influence, personal choice, and, largely, luck. I’d like to think I make deliberate choices. I’ve bought into the American dream: individual freedom reigns. But I’m Asian at the core: interconnection determines not only the life we live but who we become. We are jewels caught in Indra’s net that weaves us into one, indivisible fabric.

While working at the USAF base in Angeles City, Pampanga, trying to forge connections to land me in America, I met one of the women in that weave of destiny. Mattie was an African-American nurse who one evening, from what goodness of the heart I’ll never know, invited me to her house on base for dinner.

I remember the feeling today. There I was a man-boy, desperately trying to put himself back together, the shining future he had once envisioned now shards of broken glass. The base was a capsule of America. On school buses, teenage girls chewed gum. Servicemen would fly McDonald burgers from CONUS and shared the smell and taste of home with his friends. The base insulated Americans from harsh reality. They shouldn’t have to deal with more war than the war in Vietnam. To me the base was the Promised Land, exciting and scary.

I don’t remember what Mattie served for dinner. I remember sitting at her spinet afterwards to play and sing American show tunes. She left me alone for a minute and came back with a book she felt I should read. I was Asian, of course, shouldn’t this be my natural bent? The Bhagavad Gita was every bit as wise and inspiring as the Christian Bible. I didn’t know what she was talking about.

Aside from my aunt, Dayde, Mattie was the first person to crack the door of orthodoxy into a whole, other world beyond. Back then, Asian art, religion and history were below my mind’s periscope. I was miserable and anxious only to escape. The West shone on the horizon like Abraham’s Canaan. There I would find home because where I was didn’t feel like home. No god dealt covenants to me. I had no choice.

It was only after I stopped attending church that my mind opened to other varieties of religious belief. In the early 1980s I found myself swept into the New Age movement. I went to gatherings in Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, New York and California, met new friends, tried on new practices: Sufi dancing, Midsummer festivals, channeling, unorthodox Franciscans, energetic bodywork, men’s groups, Gaia, etc. I was agog. Here were the inner fires I’d been missing.

Like breath, like water, the soul needs fire. We catch fire wherever we connect, whether we choose it or it flows to us from life’s amazing cornucopia of surprises.

The First Blooming of Dark and Light

In high school I had a friend in freshman year who singlehandedly changed the course of my life.

Francisco (his family called him Paking) was visiting his grandparents from Cebu. I believed him to come from a more illustrious, more prosperous family than mine. Back then I had a huge inferiority complex. I think his father was a successful attorney in Cebu City. I didn’t understand why his family had enrolled him at the cow-pasture campus of ICC but that decision put us two together. We became inseparable.

The friendship was like being in love. We wrote each other notes in invisible ink (milk that showed up when the paper was gently warmed over a candle flame) or with a special blue pencil we used just for writing those notes. Francisco had lighter skin. I attributed it to Spanish blood. I was thin, dark, with Chinaman eyes. To this day I see those two boys, one light, the other dark, in khaki short pants, sitting dangling their thin legs on a low branch of the big acacia tree near the Burgos Street gate. We were oblivious of the students passing below us. What we talked about is now lost to time but I remember the closeness, what I later came to call “being on the same wavelength.”

Without seeming to exert effort, Francisco soared to the top of the class. Students were assigned to classes by grades. We were both in the first class of freshmen. I wonder now if I was in that class only because my uncle was high school principal. I certainly don’t remember getting good enough grades at La Paz Elementary. There I remember just sliding to pass. My mother taught home economics to fifth-grade girls. She would ask her male colleagues to do my shop projects. I was a marginal student.

My admiration for my new friend inspired me to shine as he did. I wanted to be among the first to raise my hand in class with the right answer to the teacher’s question. I learned to love getting perfect scores on tests. I did not become more intelligent; I just studied harder. My older sister was two years ahead of me. Since we had the same teachers, her old notebooks helped but mostly I just put in more hours studying than the average student. I’d found a way to feel good about myself.

When Francisco left the following school year to return to Cebu I took over the class lead and held that position through graduation and into college at San Agustín. Scholastic honors became the foundation not only of my self-esteem but were the whole of who I was. The stratagem proved its core inadequacy when I moved from the small pond of Iloilo to Manila but that was six or seven years later.

My friendship with Francisco became the first of friendships that later on I saw in Herman Hesse’s Demian und Goldmund, the strange pairing of opposites that bring two people together. Boys and girls are as unlike as bugs and elephants but, in high school, hormones blooming in their blood stream like springtime in the Midwest, they discover in their differences that dangerous taste of intimacy. Thenceforth we search the world over and beyond to recapture our loss of innocence, our coming of age into a simpler, driven life as adults outside the gates of Paradise.

Of Processions and Pilgrimages

It rained too during Holy Week but most vividly I associate the commemoration of the Passion with searing hot days. Streets were deserted under the fierce sun until evening when people began emerging from darkened houses to walk about, talk to neighbors and friends, and enjoy a respite from the stifling indoor heat.

In Spanish-influenced cultures we have the pasacalle, droves of people walking through the main drag of towns and cities in mass socialization. I was surprised to see the survival of this phenomenon last year when we toured Northern Spain. In Barcelona, the people thronging the Ramblas towards the sea were festive but one had to look out for pickpockets. At San Sebastian, it was heartening to see families, often mothers with small children, loiter and walk from the Catedral de Buen Pastor to the famed La Concha beach.

During Holy Week, people gathered in the evening to process around town, the men bearing richly ornamented and lit portable altars on their shoulders, the women singing hymns and praying the rosary. The snaking line of lit candles flickering in the dark evokes even today tremblingly sweet feelings transcendence and quiet joy.

Religious processions are not unique to Christianity. Many religions prescribe peregrinations. Buddhists and Hindus circumambulate counterclockwise around stupas and temples. Muslims circumambulate the Kaaba in Mecca during the annual hajj. On the way to Santiago de Compostela we saw scallop shells carved unto distance markers and city sidewalks, reminders that the most famous of all Christian pilgrimages was very much alive today. People not just from Europe but from all over the world respond to the strange, atavistic call to walk long distances, simply, arduously, thoughtfully, escaping for a few days or weeks the relentless cycles of work and practical concerns. Pilgrimages remind us of other values that can make our mundane peregrinations more meaningful, more tolerable.

Passacaglia became a widely used musical form after it moved from Spain to the rest of the continent. Variations of a theme moved over a ground bass pattern. Most famous, of course, is Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor.

Movement of bodies, movements of souls: we link minds, hearts, and bodies when we move communally in the joy of being alive, celebrating our social nature, connecting with ourselves and with others.

Tenebrae: Lightening the Pain

Before the rains come in June are two of the three major religious feasts of my childhood. In late March or early April comes semana santa, Holy Week, and on May 24 the town fiesta.

The Christian calendar is a schedule of liturgical and devotional commemorations intended to focus the believer on what keeps his faith alive and his soul from hell. The holy days disrupted the bleak landscape of childhood; they were the highlights of my days.

I am nostalgic for those years of innocence when the world was largely shades of gray but at opposite ends of the spectrum were incontrovertible black and white. Compared to my world today, those early years were as comforting as cartoons with their clearly outlined shapes and unambiguous primary colors.

Then everything was both simple and unfathomable. What I didn’t understand didn’t bother me because I had not yet discovered that bothering with mysteries I could unravel them. It was the simplicity and bliss of ignorance. Today when I watch cartoons anticipatory pleasure quickly turns to ennui. To grow up is to substitute colors for all those shades of gray, no matter that colors are more of a struggle to live. When they are bright life is joy, when dark they are hell on earth.

In grade school I lived with my grandmother whose house at La Granja was within walking distance of the school. I often walked home alone after school, delighting in discovering ways of getting home without using the street. A child alone learns the pleasure of invention, the thrill of making the commonplace new.

I cut across the yellow rice fields with a view of the crocodile-like green mountain in the distance, the island of Guimaras. Gingerly treading the narrow ridges of the dry, empty fields, I felt closest to God. A child prone to solitude develops intense friendships but his most intense relationship is with the person he communes with in his most private moments. It establishes a self-defeating precedent. The rest of his life he will seek that intimacy which is nothing more than narcissism, a relationship with a reflection of himself.

In those early cartoonish years, two-dimensional for lack of experience and breadth, God was more personal than family or friends. God’s death on Good Friday is prefigured in the service of Tenebrae. On Wednesday evening, people gather at church for readings from Lauds. In reverse of the Jewish holiday of Chanukah, fifteen candles are extinguished one by one after a gospel reading or psalm until the whole church is plunged into darkness.

The congregation fumbles their way outside where the dark sky still suffused with summer’s sunset colors reassures them with the familiarity. At its best, religion teaches us how to endure life’s hardships. We learn to use contrast to lighten our dark pain.

Wisdom of Sorts from Nostalgia

When the monsoons came, flooding inevitably occurred. Ditches ran along the streets, open waterways we called “canál.” In dry season, from October to May, the mud dried and cracked and they were overgrown with weeds. With the monsoon season from June to September they filled up into stagnant pools teeming with mudfish (“puyo”), in areas strewn with lilac-colored hyacinths, and the occasional water lilies, yellow, pink, white and red.

In heavy rains and typhoons the ditches were inadequate to the task and water overflowed fairly regularly. Many old-time city houses, built of bamboo and nipa (a low-growing palm by slow-moving tidal and river waters) were on stilts, just as they more commonly were in rural areas. In the provinces, the elevated houses left ground room to raise poultry and hogs; in the city, they provided for flooding. In a matter of hours, the neighborhood turns into little Venice with bamboo and wood planks balanced precariously on rocks and tree branches to form desultory narrow bridges across the muddy water. Back then, floodwaters were occasion for playing. Now playing in the water is playing with death from leptospirosis.

I grew up in more innocent times. I was innocent, more than the times that viewed from the present are haloed in nostalgia. If I write today about a Philippines now largely unknown to young Filipinos I am indulging a fundamental curiosity. We are the memories of our conscious lives. Getting older, a strange desire grows to dig up the past as if, as in archaeological excavations, to finally understand how we came to be who we are.

A historian or student of history, according to Bernard Lewis (From Babel to Dragomans, Oxford, 2004), on a rudimentary level, tries to find out what happened. At a more sophisticated level, he finds out how it happened but most interesting is to understand what happened. Nostalgia is bittersweet. We revel in its tender woundedness. But going into nostalgia we can gain insight into human nature and destiny, something that might qualify for wisdom in these times of fads and fashion.

Lewis again writes: “Anyone who studies the evolution of a civilization must, in the course of time, devote some thought to the broader and more general aspects of his topic…” From the specific we deduce generalities, a process admittedly prone to error nonetheless teaching us in the long run the fragile nature of truth. What is more vital than the truth of ourselves?

On Quezon Avenue

For two years while on a leave of absence from medical school I floated precariously, awash on a compass-less sea. My parents were surprisingly generous. They continued to bankroll my stay in Manila without, I don’t think, understanding what I was doing. They had already spent a small fortune on my medical education. Maybe they just wanted to salvage what they could.

I moved to Quezon City. Then largely residential, Quezon City was a new city compared to Manila. It was created in the early 1900s to be the future capital of an independent Philippines. I needed something new and fresh because I needed to make myself new and fresh. The old had failed; I couldn’t go on the old me. The tree had dried up. No sap flowed up its roots, trunk and branches. I needed something fresh, something live and flowing.

I rented a room on Quezon Avenue, a short distance from the Welcome (now Mabuhay) Rotunda where old España Boulevard ended and Manila became Quezon City. España was the main thoroughfare in front of the University of Santo Tomás. I needed to distance myself from that scene but I didn’t want to go too far. Like it or not I concurred with my parents. I had sunk too much into the enterprise to start anew.

The room was in an L-shaped, ground floor, one-story building behind the owner’s two-story house. It opened onto a small dining room, kitchen and the other rooms for rent in the complex. One room had its own private entrance adjacent and at right angle to my side window.

One evening, sitting by the window, staring at nothing (perfecting the art of mindless staring was one of my ambitious goals those couple of years), I espied a woman unlatch the short gate separating our rental compound from the main house. She passed in front of the window, rummaged briefly inside a modest, black purse for a key and slipped into her room.

I was intrigued. I found myself waiting for her to appear every evening. In the chiaroscuro twilight, she was a curious aberration, an apparition like Hamlet’s ghost but benign rather than foreboding, momentarily interrupting the solitary, senseless guard I kept at my window. Her appearance was an event in an otherwise featureless, gray landscape. I began to watch for her in the evening and began collecting details. She wore her hair short, cut simply, sometimes with a simple tortoise-shell barrette or a light-colored satin ribbon. Often she wore a dark, narrow skirt just past her knees in length and a white cotton or ecru blouse. She appeared older than me by at least ten years.

We met in the kitchen one afternoon. I had gone to take something out of the communal refrigerator; she had come out to fill a small teapot with water. I found out her name, Lina.

She had just returned to the Philippines from doing graduate work in English literature in the U.S. We bumped into each other a couple more times before she invited me to her room. It was as simply appointed as my room, a bed with no headboard, a thin, pallet-style mattress with two thin pillows under a drab orange spread. By the bed were a tape recorder and a small, round clock with yellowish-green luminous hands.

Lina didn’t have many visitors either. We began to spend more time with each other. We didn’t go out. I would visit in her room or she in mine. We might not see each other for a few days and then like a heaven-ordained conjunction we’d seek each other out and there it was again, our own private island, a miniscule corner of the universe where the whirlwind outside did not intrude. We must have felt something for each other but what I remember most was the strangely luminous congruence of our little world.

I had vague ideas then of immigrating to America but thinking of the future felt iniquitous. I was living in the moment, barely, while learning what there was to live. We didn’t speak much about her experience in America. I didn’t know why she was back in the country. I think she had finished her study program and was looking for a job. During the day she worked somewhere in Manila. These were irrelevancies. Lying on her bed or sitting on the bench outside her door under a mute, unmusical night, we spoke of books and the gorgeous power of words, poetry and its mysterious cadencies, the utter nakedness of images, the languorous deadliness of ideas.

Throughout life I’ve met people who long after they’ve exited continue to walk beside me, sitting down when I sit down, lying down with me at night when I dissolve into sleep and uncanny dreaming. Lina is one of these people. Nothing momentous happened when we were together. What we gave each other neither one of us needed but when it was over we didn’t need as much. When the dry season is over, on its own, the sap begins to flow.

Idealized Forms for Secret Thoughts

My relationship with Tina spurred me to work with words. The elevated feelings of love give way to noble thoughts. They seek outlet in words of tenderness and acts of giving and sharing. The first words I tooled together for other than required academic work sprouted from these feelings and thoughts. Like people similarly affected through centuries immemorial I wrote lyrics, lines meant for singing.

In a cramped room on an empty ward at Clark Air Base Hospital that I shared with Arturo, I began to write verses in a blue-and-red lined Corona Stenographic notebook. While my roommate was on duty at the Emergency Room, busy with Med Evacs from the war then raging in Vietnam, I jockeyed words together to express what I was too scared to say aloud even to myself. Poems couched secret thoughts into idealized forms.

Emptiness

18 September 1973

I tear myself away

From deep within the caverns of my room,

Scene of my cantonment rich in gloom.

Outside the leaden skies hang low.

The air is rank with not-yet-fallen rain.

No-sound proclaims the habitude of pain.

Upon a cankered yellow rose I watch

Ants build mud cradles for the flood,

Oblivious to my emptiness inside.

Ay, Rosing!

Just like little children today, I spent more time with my mother than with any other member of the family. But like many children in middle-class Filipino families of the time, there was another woman. For me this was my yaya, Rosing (probably short for Rosita or Little Rose).

The family teased me endlessly for supposedly being in love with Rosing. This was a little boy of two or three years. I remember Rosing’s face and the flowered dress she wore so my memory is probably false. That’s how she looked in a photograph in the family album. My mother indulged, maybe even initiated the teasing. She would take out her maroon-bound volume of sheet music from inside the piano seat and play the Ilonggo song, Ay, Rosing! Hapless I would be persuaded to sing the love song in my reedy, childish voice.

Thus are we trained about love the puny understanding of which we carry the rest of our lives. Some of us, already feeble with age, divorced or with a string of relationships like school trophies on the shelf, are still searching for that elusive fairytale we were introduced to as children. It was an almost embryonic closeness we try again and again to find in sexual, physical or emotional intimacy.

Many of us find it, but late at night, sleepless and queerly restless, we ask ourselves if we’ve simply given it up as a dream. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things….” Maybe growing up is a matter of putting away what we treasured as a child. To each season are its own treasures. We have to throw out the old to make room for the new. Others do, not I. For me the past beckons even more today, promising treasures I have yet to unearth.

Salvador, My Father

One of the few details I know about my father was that he was a graduate of Silliman University in Dumaguete. Silliman was the first American-founded university in the country, and it's oldest Protestant school. Graduating from Silliman, I gathered, was a singular achievement during his time. It set the bar for us kids in terms of academic achievement.

Today I wonder about the relationship between my father and Silliman. How did he choose to get his college degree there? How did his stay there affect his fundamental values? I remember him to be anti-religious. In a country that was predominantly Roman Catholic, did his education there in any way help push him into atheism? He never attended church with my mother and us kids. We would come home from church on Sunday to his grumbling about the wasted time. He had already done this and that. Church was not important to my father as it was to me during those early years.

While I don't remember him talking about literature or the arts, he must have at one time loved literature. Or did he study English at Silliman only as a means to an end, as his passport to steady income? How did he become associated with the Lopez family that owned Iloilo City Colleges where he taught? Was he interested in politics or was the connection purely financial? What were his fundamental beliefs in life?

For years now I would joke about my father's name, Salvador. In Spanish, Salvador mean savior. Despite his tough exterior my father was tenderhearted, some family and friends would say gullible. A frequent image from childhood is people waiting in the living room to speak to him. He didn't always publicize his generosity. He was largely an unknown quantity although increasingly I sense his influence on many facets of my own character and choices in life that I’ve made.

Imagination and Memory

I remember a sense of unreality when we came back to Iloilo after a visit to Manila. I was maybe four or five years old. I sniffed the inside of our suitcases as my mother or the maid took the clothes out that we brought back from the trip. I imagined I could smell the aromas of that other place that now resided only in memories. Smelling them I tried to convince myself that other place was real.

Back then I already distrusted memory. Memory was someplace else and some other time. The child begins to differentiate here from there, then from now. In his developing sense of dichotomies he senses the idea of worlds rather than just one world. Each world comprises its own reality.

It was simpler then. The child didn’t have to choose between worlds. He could live in memories instead of the evidence his physical senses were constructing for him in the moment. And he discovers an even more powerful faculty of mind: imagination.

Between imagination and memory there is often not a great deal of difference. Equipped with these, a person awakens to the possibilities of fiction, thence to literature and art, philosophy and theology. The child grows into a man.

The Captain Connection

Of the two books from my mother’s bookshelf, Captain cast the more lasting influence. It prefigured my fascination with cultures and the origin of cultures. It prefigured my obsession with identity, not just who I am but why others are who they think they are. Reading that book was the first step towards an almost intrinsic bent to deconstruct reality itself.

Back then the book was just a story that somehow held my interest until I finished reading it. Who knows how our interests take shape? From the moment we become conscious we make choices. As children the adults regiment much of our time but they can’t regiment what we think. Our interests first find expression in what we think.

I read the book and didn’t recognize it as fiction. It described people and places different from what I saw in my life outside the book but I was ignorant of the difference between real and fictional. Back then I didn’t jump to conclusion as quickly as I do now. There is something to be said for innocence.

The Vast Inner World

My parents owned books that they kept prominently displayed in a man-sized bookcase in the living room of the house on Burgos Street. My mother’s were novels and children’s (and, as the kids grew older, juvenile) books that occupied four of the shelves. On the bottom shelf were my dad’s odds and ends. He taught high school English but didn’t own any book worth listing nor did I see him ever read one. His life was completely taken up with administrative work at ICC and, when he came home, his horses and calesa business.

I read my mom’s books. Off the top of my head I remember two: Captain from Castille (published 1945) by American author Samuel Shellabarger and Rebecca (published 1938) by British author Daphne du Maurier. The 1938 edition of Rebecca sells for $187 on Amazon. Captain was republished in 2002. Two copies of the out-of-print hardcover edition are available for sale for $57 each. The effect of these books on my young mind is priceless.

From that 13-year-old boy’s world to my world today is immeasurable space yet no more difficult today to visit than the snow-covered garden outside the door. In fact the inner tundra begs to be revisited. To visit it again is to pay my dues in appreciation and gratitude. It’s like paying a debt, word for word.

Making a Life

Others wiser than I declare: we make our path by walking. Life is what we make it. No one has a ready-made path that ensures he gets what he wants every time and in the end. We each stumble about in the shadows (since the future is always dark from where we are in the present), take one step after another, steps that on looking back appear a coherent whole. Why, I know the plot, I know who I am, I understand why I did that!

In Manila while struggling through medical school I met Tina who became my first girl friend. Girls had tried to get close to me before but I was too immature to see what they were trying to do. Tina represented an ideal and suddenly I understood the concept of a girl friend. I learned many things about myself those first years in Manila but this discovery ranks among the most far-reaching.

Tina inspired me to write poetry. In my cramped room at Clark Air Base Hospital I wrote verses in a Steno notebook that today make me blush to read but they were the real start of my love affair with words. I took a break from medical school one summer and took classes on English and American writers and the philosophy of literature back at San Agustín. I little knew then how important that time was going to be. Those two classes were the only classes I took in literature that informed my writing through the years. English Lit and Comp classes in high school and college were useless. I memorized what I needed to pass the tests and that was all.

On those dark nights in that cramped hospital room, writing by the light of wall sconces not meant for reading, somehow I elaborated my wild scheme of escape. Books had opened windows into a world that felt to me wondrously open, bright where my world was in shadow, and wide enough to contain fledgling hope that somewhere in a larger world I might find myself.

Elements of Style

I came across Strunk and White's The Elements of Style with irrelevant, playful illustrations by Maira Kalman. Years ago, Strunk and White's book was the first book on grammar and style that made sense to me. Rereading it reawakened a sensitivity to words and phrases that decades dictating psychiatric reports have eroded to jargon and carp. There's hope for me again. Unlearning a thoughtless way with words, like unlearning the wrong ways I learned to play the piano, feels a daunting, hopeless task. Kalman's irrelevant pictures reminded me of the value of insanity. When we don’t take it so seriously, a daunting task lifts and becomes, if not doable, at least a joy.

Duende Notes

Why write? For the mind to be so fiercely occupied. In Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner wrote (he died in 1982) that a writer's goal was to create a "vivid and continuous dream." To write is to leave home and occupy for the time the dream persists some fearsomely foreign place as someone else—maybe dreaming the life we are living. To be able to write such a world into being beats even reading a good book. There is more life inventing it so well that it becomes a dream to wake up to.