It's tempting to say that our country has already gone far enough without having to rub in the fact that our people, too, have already gone vast distances in a trip as short as a lifetime. It's been more than a century since we've gained independence, yet it seems quite disturbing to think that while some of us have been to places far and wide, we remain strangled in the corpses of the past, like an unholy ghost that haunts us in the dead of the night, much so in broad daylight.
As we look back, we ponder on the things that made history as what we know of it today. We recall the madness and ingeniousness of the revolutionary times that created accidental heroes and brave souls which, upon reflection, tend to be just one and the same. We recall the lives that were sacrificed before the altar of freedom and of enslavement in skin and bones. We recall the sheer weight of the task of facing an ominous death while the rest of your brethren and sisterhood burn under the fires and ires of the colonial monsters that sailed the vastness of the oceans for god, glory and gold, whichever comes first. The dead heroes who once walked this patch of land must have seen their lives cascading before their eyes in slow motion, like a delayed movie, while the enemy pierce their swords and bayonets right through their flesh. We recall the triumphs, real and imagined, and downfalls, sweet and bitter, like extensions of who we are and who we have become, more like Heidegger's ready-to-hand. We recall these things, or try to recall them, as if we survived them all and lived to tell the tale. We stare back at them long and hard like a distant memory for, after all, it is a distant history separated from us by more than a century.
And we attempt to reach into those depths with arms and mind perhaps for a lack of understanding or for a deprivation in empathy, sometimes out of our own doing, and sometimes out of the absence of being able to relate ourselves with our history that is so familiar yet so foreign to our senses and sensibilities.
Friedrich Nietzsche has a way to put it. If you stare long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss stares back at you. Substitute history for Abyss and the contrast still stands, if not more. Which reminds me of a high school friend who went berserk, or paranoid, after confusing a tree in the middle of the night for a headless man.
It was about eight in the evening and we just finished practicing for a group presentation the next day. Four of us were walking down the road towards the exit of the school, and we were walking separately, about a few meters apart. Just as we were nearing the school gate, someone noticed that there were only three of us. We hurried back and saw our classmate standing motionless, frozen before the presence either of God, or of something surreal, or something larger than life, or something to that effect, while his gaze was fixed on a small tree that stood beside the school chapel. I tapped his shoulders with a gentle force and soon enough all four of us went on and parted ways. The next day, he was telling a story about a headless man near the chapel steps who seemed to have locked him into a stare. Of course, the three of us knew he was referring to that young acacia tree, and we sort of suspected him for being on the verge of losing his wits.
What can I say? The gravity of learning has its own ways of playing tricks on our minds. And we weren't even the geniuses in the batch. We were, well, only smart by virtue of our mothers' beliefs, although in some cases we felt like jubilant pupils out to conquer the world and destined to carve a mark in time. I don't know but something tells me it's about time to rethink and look back in those moments of, in the words of Dale Pendell, inspired madness. Maybe we were inspired, or just plain mad.
The experience kept me thinking for a while. Stare into the Abyss long enough and it stares back at you. Or stare into history long enough and it stares back at you with cunning eyes. I suspect that the more we study history, or read it in the dusty pages of archaic tomes, the more we give life to it, the more we bestow meaning unto it. Which is perhaps why some people have become prone to saying that we are a forgetful race, unable to cope with the lapses of our memory precisely because we simply cannot afford the time to contemplate our history. They say past is past, and it won't rise from the grave and walk the plains of the world again. But I doubt that. Sometimes it makes me think if Buddhists laugh at the world for disbelieving in rebirth, or reincarnation, knowing that history sometimes plays cruel tricks on us by repeating itself like a pirated CD. There's a saying that those who forget their history are bound—no, damned—to repeat it. But that's another story.
It might as well have become the case that we are no longer snatching the life out of our violent, and bloody, history. More so, it might as well have become the case that we are killing it, page by page, leaf by leaf, book by book, hero by hero.
That is so because we rarely dispose ourselves to stare back into our history, caring less to breathe more life into it. That is so because we might as well be a nation determined to leap into the future by abandoning the centuries of turmoil and torment that has for once made this country a little less difficult to live with. But you know what they say, it's better to leave the old baggage behind. It's better to sweep off the debris. It's best not to carry any baggage, especially in an epic travel a sane person would call life.
Technology has hastened everything else that a person using an abacus, or sticks and pebbles, in the haywires of Metro Manila would be obscured to a microscopic point. Life has become lightning fast, especially for the older generations although I would have to say I don't speak on their behalf but I might soon just as well be. One can simply dial numbers on a communication device, preferably on a cellphone, and one can easily talk to another person halfway around the world. The rise of the internet transcended geophysical boundaries, and the development of new technologies continue to challenge our very idea of ancient, or jurassic: today your new phone might be the talk of the town, tomorrow it can only be an outmoded piece of plastic. Why am I saying these things? For one simple reason.
We've already gone too far, too far that we may have already lost our grip on the simplest things that distinguish us from the rest of the world. I recall a local documentary which featured how some Filipinos are literally lost for words in singing the national anthem, let alone failing to remember the melody of the song. At best, they can only remember the noontime novelty songs that rip through the television speakers incessantly. I too recall another local documentary which showed how some of us are at pains in recalling what in the world the national tree, or bird, or flower, is. At best, they can only recall their forgetfulness.
Which pins us back to our recollection of our history, of the grotesque and glorious times that went before us. That haunts us like an unholy ghost but fails to lock us in a long stare or, at the least, a fleeting glimpse.
Alas, history is a debris for the person of hubris.
As we look back, we ponder on the things that made history as what we know of it today. We recall the madness and ingeniousness of the revolutionary times that created accidental heroes and brave souls which, upon reflection, tend to be just one and the same. We recall the lives that were sacrificed before the altar of freedom and of enslavement in skin and bones. We recall the sheer weight of the task of facing an ominous death while the rest of your brethren and sisterhood burn under the fires and ires of the colonial monsters that sailed the vastness of the oceans for god, glory and gold, whichever comes first. The dead heroes who once walked this patch of land must have seen their lives cascading before their eyes in slow motion, like a delayed movie, while the enemy pierce their swords and bayonets right through their flesh. We recall the triumphs, real and imagined, and downfalls, sweet and bitter, like extensions of who we are and who we have become, more like Heidegger's ready-to-hand. We recall these things, or try to recall them, as if we survived them all and lived to tell the tale. We stare back at them long and hard like a distant memory for, after all, it is a distant history separated from us by more than a century.
And we attempt to reach into those depths with arms and mind perhaps for a lack of understanding or for a deprivation in empathy, sometimes out of our own doing, and sometimes out of the absence of being able to relate ourselves with our history that is so familiar yet so foreign to our senses and sensibilities.
Friedrich Nietzsche has a way to put it. If you stare long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss stares back at you. Substitute history for Abyss and the contrast still stands, if not more. Which reminds me of a high school friend who went berserk, or paranoid, after confusing a tree in the middle of the night for a headless man.
It was about eight in the evening and we just finished practicing for a group presentation the next day. Four of us were walking down the road towards the exit of the school, and we were walking separately, about a few meters apart. Just as we were nearing the school gate, someone noticed that there were only three of us. We hurried back and saw our classmate standing motionless, frozen before the presence either of God, or of something surreal, or something larger than life, or something to that effect, while his gaze was fixed on a small tree that stood beside the school chapel. I tapped his shoulders with a gentle force and soon enough all four of us went on and parted ways. The next day, he was telling a story about a headless man near the chapel steps who seemed to have locked him into a stare. Of course, the three of us knew he was referring to that young acacia tree, and we sort of suspected him for being on the verge of losing his wits.
What can I say? The gravity of learning has its own ways of playing tricks on our minds. And we weren't even the geniuses in the batch. We were, well, only smart by virtue of our mothers' beliefs, although in some cases we felt like jubilant pupils out to conquer the world and destined to carve a mark in time. I don't know but something tells me it's about time to rethink and look back in those moments of, in the words of Dale Pendell, inspired madness. Maybe we were inspired, or just plain mad.
The experience kept me thinking for a while. Stare into the Abyss long enough and it stares back at you. Or stare into history long enough and it stares back at you with cunning eyes. I suspect that the more we study history, or read it in the dusty pages of archaic tomes, the more we give life to it, the more we bestow meaning unto it. Which is perhaps why some people have become prone to saying that we are a forgetful race, unable to cope with the lapses of our memory precisely because we simply cannot afford the time to contemplate our history. They say past is past, and it won't rise from the grave and walk the plains of the world again. But I doubt that. Sometimes it makes me think if Buddhists laugh at the world for disbelieving in rebirth, or reincarnation, knowing that history sometimes plays cruel tricks on us by repeating itself like a pirated CD. There's a saying that those who forget their history are bound—no, damned—to repeat it. But that's another story.
It might as well have become the case that we are no longer snatching the life out of our violent, and bloody, history. More so, it might as well have become the case that we are killing it, page by page, leaf by leaf, book by book, hero by hero.
That is so because we rarely dispose ourselves to stare back into our history, caring less to breathe more life into it. That is so because we might as well be a nation determined to leap into the future by abandoning the centuries of turmoil and torment that has for once made this country a little less difficult to live with. But you know what they say, it's better to leave the old baggage behind. It's better to sweep off the debris. It's best not to carry any baggage, especially in an epic travel a sane person would call life.
Technology has hastened everything else that a person using an abacus, or sticks and pebbles, in the haywires of Metro Manila would be obscured to a microscopic point. Life has become lightning fast, especially for the older generations although I would have to say I don't speak on their behalf but I might soon just as well be. One can simply dial numbers on a communication device, preferably on a cellphone, and one can easily talk to another person halfway around the world. The rise of the internet transcended geophysical boundaries, and the development of new technologies continue to challenge our very idea of ancient, or jurassic: today your new phone might be the talk of the town, tomorrow it can only be an outmoded piece of plastic. Why am I saying these things? For one simple reason.
We've already gone too far, too far that we may have already lost our grip on the simplest things that distinguish us from the rest of the world. I recall a local documentary which featured how some Filipinos are literally lost for words in singing the national anthem, let alone failing to remember the melody of the song. At best, they can only remember the noontime novelty songs that rip through the television speakers incessantly. I too recall another local documentary which showed how some of us are at pains in recalling what in the world the national tree, or bird, or flower, is. At best, they can only recall their forgetfulness.
Which pins us back to our recollection of our history, of the grotesque and glorious times that went before us. That haunts us like an unholy ghost but fails to lock us in a long stare or, at the least, a fleeting glimpse.
Alas, history is a debris for the person of hubris.
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