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.