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. [Keep Reading :: « Back One]