Monday, April 12, 2004
Superstitious traditions
During the New Year, I was pissed off because my friend XXX texted me something banal as I was heading back to the big city. It’s an otherwise nicely-put message about starting the year wrong by being too negative. I retorted, “Cite your source (of that message) or you’ll be shot like the Ceaucescus!” My attempt at light-heartedness failed.
"What’s wrong with being negative if it’s something I take to be right?" I riposted. Besides, I am not affected by all that – starting the year off negatively doesn't necessarily result in one whole negative year – because I don’t give a flying fig about superstitions.
I left home being contrite for everything people shouldn’t do in New Year’s Eve, and I am referring to all those beliefs in good luck which I’ve long taken to be not harmful but actually are – wearing polka dots, setting the noche buena table into a 12-fruit choreographic extravaganza, each piece invariably spheroidal in shape, to signify good fortune, wealth, prosperity. And don’t forget to throw away any glazed figurines representing birds, turtles and owls because they signify bad luck.
What disgusts me all the more, the Philippine trimedia encourage these beliefs in swerti and then cap each segment or news feature with the conclusion that we should seek God first "pa rin, katuwaan lang naman ‘to," a statement I find utterly inconsistent.
For me, it’s like the entire Filipino nation cursing itself for one whole year by appeasing all sorts of unidentified spirits. So go ahead, shoot me, sue me, badmouth me behind my back, tell me I'm bad for business, and call me a fundamentalist, but I half-suspect that putting our faith and fate in feng shui and fortune-telling is an enterprise hatched up by the greeting cards and imported fruits industry, in cahoots with the feng (fung?) shui masters.
My textmate XXX (who just published an article about those crazy Lent superstitions the Church never approved of) laughed out loud to that, saying Amen! Not that we are ecstatic about Paul Lau or anyone else dying all of a sudden, but Lau’s death, like XXX said, is a perfect argument against feng shui because he failed to divine his own sudden demise.
On the other hand, I am reminded of A.C., a psychotherapist, telling us that traditions have a role to play in a society. "Tradition is not that bad. For one, they foster community, they are a source of cultural identity." If we don’t have traditions, indeed, what else are we to do aside from physiological sustenance and our morning ablutions? How are we going to deal with sheer boredom from so drab an existence?
But this piece is not a case against traditions, especially good traditions. By all means, let’s perpetuate traditions. But can’t we create new ones, too? Can’t we have something better and superior?
For me, the only other valid scapegoat to preserving such traditions is the anthropological -- studying our past ways, the better to illuminate the present.
Mango hair in my teeth
Coming home affords me once again the opportunity to take in all that endangered bucolic scene on the road – an entire world I miss out on the rest of the year. The flock of spotless-white herons on the dappled greens from Bulacan to Tarlac, the whole stretch being the heart of Luzon and the country’s rice bowl and granary. The full-grown and lonesome mango tree in the middle of all that verdant vastness, among other such Amorsolo vistas. The fruit stands of blood-red watermelons. Sprawling nurseries of potted bougainvilleas. Hawkers of native fares from bottled bagoong to aligue, crabs and tupig. The houses of both the affluent and the humble half-sunk in laharland. The razed old brick church of Camiling under reconstruction. The decrepit colonial houses and the bright new modern structures that seem to rise from nowhere (katas ng OFW?). Everything framed by the bus window.
I leave the bus window open to let in the wind with all the agrarian aroma of the countryside. A sour note to this trip are the pit stop comfort rooms – or lack thereof, and the long stretch of pigsty stench in Bulacan which I refuse to define under ‘aroma.’
Another sour note is that I wrote this down last year because I didn't come home this holy week. Anyway, I have the mangoes from home.
