Memorabilis

THE DAY Kitkat’s last litter of kittens found their climbing legs meant a catastrophe of sorts for my books. She moved her four kittens to a corner near a bookshelf, where they broke their 24-hour napping and nursing to explore the vastness of our half-a-duplex unit.

One of the books dislodged by feline curiosity was a slim volume that slotted perfectly between the shelf and a sack of rice where it opened like an accordion of newsprint pages, which Mo, Mongha, Heart, and Q decided was a good repository for piss and poo.

So when I had to check again Julian Go’s “American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico During U.S. Colonialism,” I found the fallen volume reeking unmistakably of kittens but fortunately spared their claws.

Cleaning off the worst of the kittens’ memorabilia, I wondered if Q and company had used their toilet break to browse through Go and left their tokens as proof of their opinions on: a) the U.S. colonizers, b) Filipino politicians at the cusp of their tutelage in the oldest profession of selling their nation for lucre and power, or c) the historian’s take on a contested past.

History is anything but objective and dead. I only have to scroll Facebook for five minutes to be bombarded by the War of Colors blooming among advocates for politicians making their bids for 2022.  

Underneath what is dangerously veering to become a pissing contest of hues and tints are attempts at conversations on how the past relates to the present and the nebulous future everyone, no matter their color preference, has in their sights.

I went back to Walter Benjamin (fortunately, filed digitally), a thinker whose reflections before World War II have bearing on what seems to be trending, from Facebook to Twitter: “what really happened in the past”.

For Benjamin, the view of the ideal to be achieved in the future reduces the present to an “anteroom” where “one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity”. Yet, one can also view “historical time” as “constituted… via the existential modes of memory, expectation and action”. 

Agreeing with him that the present is an “interruption of history” or an “arrest of happening,” I see it as a grievous mistake to focus on current disagreements and throw away communication and relationships. 

After the winners and losers are tallied in 2022, are we restarting life with people sharing our beliefs and biases? Unless culling takes place, the current motley company, human and feline, continues. The present is more than kindling for the future, beneath the piss and poo.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 17, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Angels and demons

WHY cannot the Filipinos forgive and forget what the Marcoses did? It is the Christian way to forgive the sinner and condemn the sin. Ferdinand Marcos did some good for the nation, too. And he is long dead.

My tita expressed these views online and in public. She gives me pause because she is not a troll, a web ‘bot, or a social media influencer. 

When she wrote, “Am a Marcos loyalist,” Tita made me think of the Angel of History, the “Angelus Novus” in the Paul Klee painting first owned by Walter Benjamin.

I believe that Ferdinand E. Marcos (FM) is the author of the darkest and bloodiest chapters in the history of our “democracy”. My tita thinks that FM is the best president this country had. 

I was born in 1965, the year FM moved into the Palace. Bongbong Marcos (BBM) aspires to become the 17th president of the country and follow the footsteps of his father, the country’s 10th president. 

If the son succeeds, there is the number 7 that conjoins son to father in the history that will be rewritten again by the Marcoses. In numerology, seven means perfection. 

According to 6.7 million sites (rounded off, the figure is 7) turned up by Google to my search in 0.53 seconds (just 0.17 away from the number 7!), people with 7 in their “angel chart” have an angel sitting on their left shoulder, whispering answers, and making their life profound and meaningful.

The Angel of Numerology is not Klee’s emissary. Looking not so much disheveled as battered by the storm called “progress,” the angel is stupefied by the past but remorselessly drawn to his appointment with history, as the philosopher Benjamin theorized in the essay, “On the Concept of History”.

Nazism, with its mad dream of the Master Race and the campaign of genocide that erased six million Jews who fell short of Aryan perfection, affected the work of Klee and Benjamin, as well as claimed the life of the latter. 

As Benjamin wrote, “A storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. This storm… propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward”.

Despite Klee’s apocalyptic depiction and Benjamin’s depression and seeming surrender to racism and authoritarianism, the Angelus Novus (New Angel) emboldens the viewer to sustain the struggle resisting inhumanity and contesting the abuses of power.

Weary but not defeated, citizens must sift through the rubble of lies “piling wreckage upon wreckage” in BBM’s recasting of our future in his father-and-son narrative. 

The father may be buried but he is not dead. In 2022, the dead should stay dead.

Source of image of the “Angelus Novus” by Paul Klee: sfu.ca

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 3, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”