SPACE AND TIME

Historians, in evoking images to accentuate their accounts of nations or civilizations, select picturesque titles as labels for certain periods. We meet with words like Pleistocene, the Glacial Age, the Axial Period, the Renaissance, and so on, coined by different writers to designate different overlapping periods as illustrative of their interpretations of those periods. Confined to the affairs of the world, their accounts of the evolution of human civilization and thoughts are comforting, showing the ascending stages from the primitive to the modern. A few, imbued with scientific élan and forever pushing the frontiers of knowledge, chose as their turning points in human history the stages in the unfolding of cosmogonic discoveries -- from the geocentric to heliocentric and lately to galactic systems -- throughout which Man's concept of self had to pass through the gauntlet of frustrating realizations of his diminishing importance. When in the Ptolemaic concept Man thought himself to be the center of the universe, he now is tragically aware that even his life-giving Sun is only an insignificant star burning along the edge of the vast Milky Way. And the Milky Way itself is a galactic system among other immense galaxies swimming in a vast emptiness around an unknown Center.

There was once a TV cartoon, the message of which -- that there are many levels of physical existence -- is obviously beyond the grasp of children's minds. It is about a world of men contained in pollen of a flower. And its inhabitants desperately knew that they were about to be destroyed by gigantic human beings who picked the flower they were in. The major portion of the cartoon strip was involved with the frantic scramble of all the people in that microscopic world to make themselves heard by the giants. They tried to make all kinds of noises, but slowly realized the futility of their efforts. They decided to make a pyramid of a motley of materials they can get hold of so that one of them can get to the top and raise a yell to "heaven" and be heard. Near the end, a small boy, hitherto ignored by the people, became the last resort to climb that pyramid and give his shrill cry for help. And was heard.

Then it was their turn to pick a small flower, and after some time, also heard a little call for help coming from that small flower.

Such a perilous situation applied to our universe seems scientifically difficult to imagine, although the primitive mind can accept the possibility that there are beings greater than our visible universe. There is, within the depths of our collective unconscious, the dread of the immense Unknown. During my first realization of how vast the universe is, I remember feeling an oppressive inexpressible dread. My mind could not grasp or imagine the endlessness of that firmament I see above me. And when I came across Steele's narration of "The Man Who Saw Through Heaven", I had feelings of kinship with that troubled man and understood his overwhelming torment in possessing the crushing knowledge of astronomical realities. Perhaps Steele too went through that emotional ordeal, or else he could not have presented the problem so touchingly.

The story is about a clergyman, whose religious beliefs were circumscribed by the simple poetic logic of the Bible. He chanced to join his wife in an educational tour of an astronomical observatory. And there he was fed the awesome facts of the universe. He saw the stars, which are suns and could possibly have their own planets or worlds like our own, and was informed that the immense distances between them are measured in light-years, or the time needed for light to travel in one year. He was also told that the visible universe, compared to the Whole, might be contained, figuratively, in the gem of his ring.

The shock of such a scientific revelation turned out to be so traumatic as to make him leave his wife and disappear into the wildernesses of Africa. The eventual search turned up a trail of crude idols seated on mud thrones, and the natives referred to him as "our Father Witch". The wife, seeing the growing evidence of her husband's idolatry, became disenchanted and could not understand his apostasy. Finally, as the searchers reached the end of the trail, the last crude sculpture of the dead apostate showed a large figure of God staring at a gem on His finger. And the wife finally understood that her husband, in a burst of renewed faith that cost him his life, had spread the belief that "Our Father Which art in heaven", keeps watch over man even if he were but an infinitesimal part of the vast universe.

The mind is boggled by the idea of infinite space. Yet, there is still more to benumb it when we consider its twin concept -- Time -- and its implications on our physical existences. Life spans are measured in years -- what is it? seventy years? Each year is an accumulation of 365 days; each day a summation of twenty four hours; and down, down to nanoseconds or time measures used to rate the speeds of computers. Our calendars indicate almost two thousand years, a long, long time indeed. Yet historians tell us that millions of years stretched before our turning point, the Christian era. And cosmologists estimate that billions of years more lie in the future of our Mother Earth.

How would it really feel to have eternal life? when you know you will have no end? We are so used to think about duration as having a beginning and an end -- and of the interesting middles -- that to confront and cogitate on the idea of eternity could be difficult to comprehend. And yet I know that everybody wants to live forever. I do too, but sometimes when I really get to think hard about what I shall be doing with all those milliards and milliards of years and more, I get migraine trying to imagine what that could be. At that point, I welcome the idea that Death is not that horrible. We need ends to all the troubles that plague us in our lives.

So why waste time thinking about galaxies and trillions of years? There are more pressing problems to attend to, such as raising money for daily sustenance and to pay bills and taxes; waiting for Maynilad water to flow in every other midnight; plugging leaks during heavy rains; getting rid of vermin and termites, and so on. Never mind the prospects of colliding universes and cosmic catastrophes that could obliterate mankind in a flash. Or infinite time. Or the meaning of being. Those are not as important as our present day-to-day struggles to survive. I must tear myself from my efforts in contemplating the sublime and rouse myself to face the humdrum. And face the fact of my ephemerality.

If such emotional burdens begin to weigh heavily and seem insuperable, I think we need to raise our tortured minds to transcend the mundane and reach for the stars, figuratively, of course. Too close involvement with the nitty gritty problems of life could be oppressive (and may drive you either insane or to suicide) that there is the escape offered by the rarefied air of philosophy, or, in my case, such scientifically arcane subject as cosmology. Such a breather can preciously lengthen your life (not that it matters). Socrates must have had myriads of domestic problems in supporting his family that Xanthippe's badgerings drove him to indulge in his version of lofty naggings as his vengeance on and escape from demeaning realities.

Once we have savored the exoteric airs of, say, philosophy trying to comprehend the secrets of the universe, then as we go back to "earth" we can view the affairs of the world with indifference and treat them on equal levels of importance. It becomes difficult to categorize problems -- which are minor and which are major. People who have not soared the psychological heavens will then treat you with distaste, or even with contempt, for being so nitpicking when you try to worry about small things, or for being impractical when you concentrate on matters that lie beyond any man's control.

UNDER A CANOPY OF STARS

There are moments in my life when I wonder if what I am experiencing is not solely in my imagination. I wonder if what I see, hear, and feel are events that others also see, hear, and feel. Am I only in my mind? Somehow, reading a number of books assures me that there are really things out there and not merely inside my brain. That there are other people, living or dead, which have ideas that are similar to mine. Or if not similar, their ideas raise issues and give me points to think about and ponder. I am particularly conscious about Kierkegaard’s Concept of Dread, giving me the feeling of angst about my human condition.

I had been through the deaths of my father, mother and three sisters. However, it was only when our dog Conan, a half Japanese Spitz half poodle, died when I seriously wondered about the existence of souls. What is the stuff of souls made of: energy? When Conan the dog died it struck me that while the physical body becomes lifeless, his life force must have gone somewhere. If life is made of the same stuff, whether human, animal or plant, we must be immersed, not in discrete clumps of energy, but something else in an energy field. God? However, we have such phenomena as ghostings, where the likeness of the persons are seen and recognized as distinctly as someone known to have existed before. These are not perceptions unique to an individual but are shared with others.

Before one of my sisters died she claimed to have seen the bluish apparition of our maternal grandfather walking around our ancestral house in the province. Even prior to that, she also saw the ghost of the doctor who used to lease a space for his clinic in front of our ancestral house but was murdered by a drug syndicate. I have never seen a ghost yet. I do not know how I will react if I do. I surely know how to be scared. I have always been apprehensive about seeing manifestations of known dead people. On the other hand, I have tried to face up to such eventuality. For instance there was haunting in one of the offices I was assigned to. One of our computer programmers died on a Friday, but everybody swore that they saw him mingling with a group of programmers in the parking area the following day. Then when something manifested in his space in the office after he was buried, there was panic among the programmers, who rushed out and refused to go back inside. I went inside the hastily abandoned office and tried to confront the apparition but nothing appeared to me. After that, the programmers returned, believing that I had exorcised the ghost.

I’ve always wondered how it is to die. Perhaps there is truth to the pain of being punished for sins committed in life. Somehow, I also think there is oblivion and forgetting. Shakespeare was very candid about the question, especially in his famous soliloquy of Hamlet. Life is the interlude of remembrances of things experienced in our present existence but begins and ends in eternal forgetting. And yet, while I walked the streets and see the flowering bushes and the luxuriant green of the trees lining the streets of the suburban village I live in, I could not help imagine the nostalgia of being beyond living. After death, can we really remember our lives spent on earth? Still, I could not put so much belief in reincarnation and the claim that we can remember past previous lives. Most of the regressions, the process of being hypnotized to raise past memories, always resulted in persons being pharaohs, or queens, or Roman warriors (like Patton) that could have been influenced by readings on history.

On the other hand, why not wonder what life is? We think about death and dissolution. We think and hope for immortality and endlessness. But about life, what is it? It takes nine months of gestation for a human being—shorter time spans for some species, longer for others—but the process is the same: fertilization, gestation, birth. However, even the beginning or even before fertilization there must have existed something that has to unite with something to “become.” At the more physical level, we have come to know charged particles that combine to produce more complicated organisms that could even become pulsating entities that have life. Plants, animals, men.

What is life really? Coupled with consciousness, awareness, and intelligence. To know, has it really many levels? Conan, my dead dog, surely had consciousness, awareness. He even manifested having a conscience and a seemingly deep sense of guilt. He used to slink away with a guilty look if he somehow accidentally hurt someone among my family. Or he knew with whom he could feint ferocity and play being aggressive. He knew enough to understand my signal “Green Cross” (the rubbing alcohol) for him to leave the room or else get a spray of the liquid which he detested. But even when he obeyed me, he would turn around at the doorway, face me and growl his objections. Why was he the gentle, harmless dog that he was? His life, what was it?

What is our life? An awakening from nothing? And to die, to sleep once more into nothing. Life is not merely the accumulation of atoms in different combinations to last for a particular duration depending on the binding force of the constituent building blocks of a living entity. What is the purpose of all the studies and the accumulation of knowledge turned over to us by those who lived before us? Do we really need them in the state of our nothingness? In the prospect of eternity, does it matter for man to acquire knowledge? And for what? How could his knowledge of Earth matter in the enormous expanse of the universe with its myriads of galaxies?

Additionally, thinking about life somehow makes me wonder how it would be when I die. I leave behind this set of writings, which will outlive me and perhaps rage, maybe not in the same high level and character as the classics, in the minds of those who will read and understand me. Or perhaps I am merely deluding myself that my works will outlive me. Instead, the magnetic imprints I manage to activate would be erased by an electric force. And even if I manage to have these magnetic impulses transformed into hard copy, or on paper, nothing will prevent their obliteration by fire or water.

I try to look at the skies every evening as I walk home. I can see only a few stars due to the clouds and the pollution. So far, every summer evening I can only recognize the belt of Orion almost at the zenith, giving me an idea where the ecliptic passes through. If the Moon is a crescent, whether waxing or waning, it also gives me an idea of how far it is from the ecliptic by the angle of its horns. Every time I look at the heavens and realize the spread and distribution of the stars, there ought to be some influences exerted by them. Then there must be the record of the amount of stellar radiations in effect during particular times in the past. Astronomers turn cosmologists and hypothesize a lot about the beginnings of the universe. Radio astronomy claims to tap and record the radiations of the stars that occurred millions of years past. But their discourses and writings are so filled with mathematical equations that leave me confused as ever. Myths are more interesting to read. Possibly because these mythical presentations arouse the archetypal images and emotions in our individual humanity.

There was a time when I was with a group of people sitting in a circle and engaging in “sharing” feelings about religious experiences. When my turn came, I started to recall and share my experience standing alone at night in the desert of Saudi Arabia and looking at the myriads of stars under the starlight, which was as bright as moonlight. I realized my insignificance standing there on the skin of the earth with nothing mediating between me and the heavens. No trees, no bushes, no clouds. Nothing. The recollection of what I felt that night in the desert overwhelmed me at the moment of my recollection and I wept unashamedly before that group of strangers whom I had met for the first time. It was a strange experience — the uncontrollable flow of tears and suppressed sobbing — that somehow humiliated me. From then on, I refused to join any group that sought to bring out “sharing religious experiences.” I don’t want to expose my emotional frailty. I doubt if that crowd understood the emotional stress and pain I underwent in recalling the cosmic loneliness I suffered in the desert. I still am haunted by that vision, and the memory does not fail to give me emotional pain and tears. Even I cannot understand why I had to undergo those bouts of distress. Somehow I think I understand why the great religions are born in the desert wilderness. When you stand alone in the midst of emptiness, you become conscious of Something much much greater than you are.

Awaiting the end of life, nothing seems to be important anymore. I wonder why we ever trouble ourselves accumulating honor, knowledge and wealth. What are the important things really? Jesus truly said not to place priority on things of this world.

And so, I still have to write down my life from the dim memories I can dredge from my mind.

Strangers Among Kins

“A traveler returning to his own country after spending some time abroad obtains a fresh vision of it. He still wears his traveler’s antennae – a sensitivity to nuances of custom and attitude that helps him to adapt and make his way in strange settings.”
Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness

I have a brother who is much much younger than I am. In fact, I was practically “nursemaid” to him as a baby, and he grew up under my care until I left the family to study under a government grant. After a few years, and I was already in the government, our lives’ paths met again and, as is normative to our society, I had to help him through his education. Failing to trace the steps I took towards a comfortable career, he nevertheless made it to join the naval force of another country and dropped out of my life.

Ten years after, more or less, my government gave me a subsidized observation tour of the foster country of my brother. I remembered him and thought it my fraternal duty to see him. After some effort to trace him through that country’s defense organization, I got in touch with him. My itinerary and his assignment gave us the opportunity to meet.
We met and shared a room together for two days. I realized, however, that although we are brothers, time and distance have changed both of us. True, we shared common origins – we have the same parents, blood, and name – but we had become strangers to each other. After a brief exchange of hellos and news from home – mostly about our parents – we had nothing more to talk about. I tried to tell him about my life during the last ten or so years and he his, but I sensed that we were listening to each other like strangers who met for the first time and were sizing each other up. Then, we parted as if with finality. We have not seen each other since then.

Nothing surprising about that. After all, ten years is a long time. I can shrug that one off, but strangely disturbing is the similar estranging situation that developed between me and my maturing children. After only six months of being out of my country I was lucky to be home again, but the reality of estrangement dawned on me once more. Where before I had an almost egalitarian relationship with them – as if they are my true siblings – that homecoming did not prevent an invisible barrier in the form of civility and respect towards a parent from coming between us to set us apart. There was stilted exchange of views and notes. And soon I was left alone to ponder the perplexities of being a stranger in one’s own home.

I strongly believed I have not changed; they changed. Yet I suspect that having stayed in a foreign land immersed in a different culture had really altered me, and the subtle changes in my behavior was perceived by them. Time and distance have made us into strangers, and eroded the communality of our lives. We no longer share the familiarity of our respective milieux and are thus strangers to each other, seeking in our momentary encounter the “nuances of custom and attitude” those bits of the past that will hopefully paste together the edges of the chasm our lives have created. (The situation between husband and wife caused by separation lasts but momentarily. Their physical reunion, intensified by fantasies engendered by the enforced abstinence, rapidly re-establishes the community of their interests.)

Our country, in the concrete, is our families and friends, and we are chained to them by our memories of common experiences. Returning to our country, we take great pains to obliterate strangeness by awakening memories, such as during reunions with friends. However, once we are drained of past recollections – when we fail to remember the intimate details of those shared joys and pains – we become aliens and uncomfortably “free”.

In order to stay unmolested, particularly in our moments of providential fortunes, we must be careful not to stir the dust of the past. Yet, we cannot really escape our relatives and friends. Their Necessity will seek those chains that bind us fast, demanding that we share our fortunes (not our misfortunes) with them.

Loneliness

Loneliness can be sonorously serene as Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, or as sharply intricate as Paganini's Concerto No. 6.

How does one cram the expression of loneliness into a few paragraphs? Overseas workers usually call this "homesickness" or"boryong". Loneliness is more than this, though. It is too much of an insolvable problem to cope with, because it cannot be assuaged by good food, luxurious quarters, fine music and clean sports.

There is incompleteness of feeling. The need for intimate companionship is there. I know that there's no need to write about it since everyone who have been away from home country feels it. Yet, there must be my expression of it; I need to communicate the feeling I had during the complete isolation I suffered years and years ago. Maybe it is the desert that magnified the cosmic oppression I was burdened with. When I stood in the desert with the mountains out of sight, it is as if I was on the outer skin of the earth and in direct touch with the emptiness of the universe. Nothing mediated between me and the heavens. I had become lost in space. And the oppressive feeling of cosmic loneliness weighted me down with Stygian tenacity. It is very unlike the feeling when you see the cloud cover in the Philippines that is so like a security blanket over you.

Being alone in feeling shut me off from humanity although I knew some Other feels it too. I became confronted with memories. Why is it that when we conjure past joys we suffer most agonizingly? All memories are agonies to be suffered -- unrequited love; lost love; secured love; memories of the anguish of a hopeless war in Vietnam; of the Vietnamese people I've learned to understand even with my scant knowledge of their tonal language.

But the happy moments are the most painful to remember. And most obsessive. Like the memory of a year-old girl trying to pirouette even as she struggled to make the few steps she had learned to take. Or the memory of a quavering voice of a five-year-old daughter singing a plaintive love song the words of which she had yet to understand.

Even as I am back with them... but they are so grown up and have their own lives to live. Ah, but there is still the loneliness for the past. The yearning for things that are not retrievable and cannot be relived.

To keep busy is to momentarily drown out the pains of remembering. Loneliness, far from home and in the society without women, is its own excuse for weeping.

Years hence, back home, and counting the dwindling number of contemporaries who like me creep to their end, I will again be lonely. I shall feel loneliness once more for the loneliness of Saudi Arabia ... for its invisible women, and the forlorn men gripped with anguish and desire for their lost youths and embraces.

THE ANTI-INSURGENCY DEADLINE

Recently, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo ordered the AFP and PNP to end the insurgency in two years. Earlier, according to the Defense Secretary the time needed to wipe out the NPA is ten years but after the order was given, some quarters said five years is a reasonable time frame to accomplish it. However, since our country is an immense Theater of the Absurd worthy of being staged in the manner of Samuel Beckett or Eugene Ionesco, I think the two-year time frame can be attained.

There are certain factors – not necessarily police or military -- that can be exploited to facilitate the attainment of the Presidential objective – whether in sequence or simultaneously. These are: the schoolroom model, the private military contractors in connection with the wars undertaken by the US in any part of the world, and our erupting volcanoes.

Let me talk about the volcanoes first. According to Phivolcs we have 18 active and 19 inactive volcanoes, and these will aid in eliminating insurgency. If we can mobilize our scientific geniuses who can activate these volcanoes, they can program them to erupt at certain intervals in specific locations in order to flush out the insurgents from their hideouts in those areas. Even if we cannot scientifically activate the volcanoes, their violent stirrings will assist in our national effort. With the threat of being burned to death by the lavas, drowned by the lahar, and suffocated by the volcanic ash the military and police can cordon the area to await their exodus. Whether by truce or surrender, we would be able to round up sizeable numbers of the insurgents. However, if the insurgents who flee from the erupting volcanoes are disguised as “innocent farmers” we would be faced with the problem of handling large numbers of displaced persons that need employment.

This is where the private military contractors (PMC), like the Blackwater company, come in. We can subtly allow these disguised and unemployed insurgents to be recruited as volunteer soldiers or mercenaries to fight the imperial wars of the United States. (We can even extend the arrangement to the Muslim secessionists, although the PMCs might be hesitant to accept them.) Obviously, the remittances from these volunteer soldiers will be a boost to our national finances. We thus solve several problems with this arrangement – unemployment, insurgency, and the strength of our currency.

Additionally, the schoolroom model may solve the insurgency problem. As most of us know by now, the schoolroom shortage was solved in a few hours through a redefinition of terms and conditions. We can eradicate the insurgency problem by repudiating the existence of the NPA by the end of 2008. Or the PGMA Parliament can pass a law abolishing the NPA. Voila! Instead, these armed groups in the mountains will become mere bandits or syndicated extortionists that can be dealt with through police action by the AFP.