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Articles of Faith |
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Every morning I die. Every morning some recurrent darkness overcomes me. There it is, the newspaper, settled innocently on my table, its silence ominous. The newspaper reeks of screams of mindless bloodshed, so thick you can perhaps cut the screams with a knife, pun unintended. And as soon as I muster enough courage to untangle the stories about the previous day, it shatters the fragile shell that weakly holds my sense of ought-to’s. In a way, it’s magical when terror
actually becomes anodyne, relief, some sort of painkiller. Read all the bad news, and the
senselessness of it all begins to turn around and becomes something that calms you down.
Depression becomes euphoria. And Mondays become good days. And when night comes I dream, and when I
dream, I am actually shedding off all those useless and potentially harmful information
that would have otherwise undermined my mental health (that is, if I can still be
considered ‘mentally healthy’). I dream about social order because there’s
no social order. I dream about god because there’s no god. I dream about peace on
Earth because there’s no peace on Earth. In dreams, my poor brain expresses the
things I can never articulate in words. Other writers who came before me—intellectual
giants who’ve won cool accolades like the Nobel or the Pulitzer or, in a lesser
sense, the Palanca—have succeeded in doing so, but only to a certain dismal extent.
Language is inert, it is dead, and words are cheap, wanting; there is so much in human
experience that can never be explained in mere words, that can never be captured with the
cold syntax of oral communication. Maybe I will disappear without understanding
what the world is really about in my waking life. I will understand it only in dreams,
only in the blur of everyday images and sounds, only in the blink-of-an-eye flux of my
sensory experience. In other words, the only way I arrive at The Truth is through the
fluff of what can be considered as illusions. But sometimes, epiphanies come when the
right moment finds the right place, allowing me to slip through a shortcut to The Truth. I
once found one such epiphany in a tragic part of Joseph Heller’s novel, Catch 22. Yossarian, the main character, discovers
the entirety of human existence when anti-aircraft flak blasts his comrade, Snowden.
Yossarian holds the dying Snowden in his arms, stares at Snowden’s entrails
slithering down to the floor in a soggy pile and screams in horror. He sees Snowden’s
liver, lungs, kidney, ribs, stomach and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten for
lunch and right then and there, Yossarian realizes human beings’ real worth:
“Man was matter... Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and
he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit
gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.” The newspaper spills out Snowden’s
secret each morning. And each morning, I struggle to find a place to inhabit its truth, no
matter how bitter. And each morning when the magic comes (when terror becomes relief), I
wait in my corner and watch the rest of the week fly by like mindless pelicans. And after that, you know what I do? I go
home.
There is a strange new smell from somewhere,
wafting through the half-open window. There is another crease on my mother’s
forehead, and my father’s laughter has lost yet another almost inaudible strain of
surety. And on a wall in my room, there is a spidery crack that I never noticed
before. I go home to a house that, like a long day,
now feels rolling towards sunset. It is the house I’ve grown up in, my cradle for
almost two decades. I know its every crevice, every flake of peeling paint, every chipped
concrete off the wall, every amber-colored layer of age on the furniture. On idle days I
walk about and make random taps on the walls or look closely at jambs and awnings and
wonder how the house would look like long after we are gone. The house feels like a wife
you know will outlive you, and you spend nights thinking about the next man she’ll
love, the next man who will sleep with her in your bed. Would he be gentle with her, would
he understand why she keeps trimming her nails and frowns when it rains? Would he
patiently wait when she takes too long in the bathroom? Would he be brave enough to
pretend delight when she botches a recipe? I tiptoe up the stairs and touch the
handrail as I would brush a woman’s skin. I turn the doorknob with the same
gentleness I would hold the hand of a loved one. When it’s my task to clean the
rooms, I pursue every lint and piece of dirt with the decisiveness of an avowed savior. I
go out in our little backyard in the morning, the sun crisp on my skin, and look at the
house’s crumbling lines and tangents and think, this house is a human being, the
sixth member of the family, the silent witness when long ago I discovered I’ve
inherited a biochemical defect that dooms my neurons and condemns me to be genetically
stupid for the rest of my life. The house has voices that echo about the
walls when every other sound has died down: the ghosts of children’s laughter,
good-natured banter of friends that came and gone, worried murmurs, Carlos Jobim from the
phonograph, the long-ago hum of Sunday afternoons. When I enter it sometimes I am greeted
by an odor that brings back the sweet smell of my mother’s bosom—the scent of
some baby cologne she once shared with her kids, the scent that reminds me of when my
mother was 31 and slim and beautiful and I was small and the de-facto defender of an even
smaller brother. The house is a squeaky stage where the five
of us players continue to cling to our roles in our own little soap opera. Often, my role
is inescapably escapist, the Prince of Denial, the last to believe when a sad fact
descends—like how I still refuse to believe that my mother is now hypertensive and my
father now struggles with his memory and judgment. When talks veer toward ‘necessary
upheavals’ (weddings and us children eventually leaving the nest, for example), they
are often attacked by nameless fears and a deepening sense of things getting narrower and
shorter. And during such times, when my mother’s blood pressure shoots up and my
father stammers for the right words to articulate his pain, I tell them everything will be
all right. Then I go to my room and try to sleep, painfully aware that at such times, even
the old house, our sixth member, loses its power to reassure and calm; that without us, it
is after all an empty shell. Sleep the sleep of the just, so
they say. And now I think the crack on the wall is longer (an earthquake of enough
intensity might soon tear my room in half). A song from somewhere rises thinly in the air
like vapor. The song, Tracy Chapman’s, plays tug-of-war with what I’m thinking.
“Sometimes a lie is the best thing,” Tracy sings. “Sometimes a lie...”
I begin to hum along as I drift off to sleep, waiting for the magical anodyne twist,
waiting for the mad laughter to kick in, waiting for the old house to come alive and tell
me everything will be all right.
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