The Spy in the Sandwich

Friday, August 17, 2018

9:00 AM | All the Cricket Songs in the World

I can only wish the poet Carlos Angeles is right—what relief it would have been to be on the nose about things, the world becoming a lens for desolation; it would have been so much easier to behold a landscape of bleeding sunrise in knifed horizon, peacock stain upon sand, the wreck of air, the murdered rocks refuse to die. Sadness sings in a Carlos Angeles poem, and I envy its odd redemption of cricket sounds.

Do you know this poem? You should read this poem.

But it has been a beautiful day, so I gather. I am told by the dearest someone beside me that it has been a beautiful day, and I cannot disagree with him. Outside, much later, the Thursday mid-August night settles into an ordinary sort of rhythm you will recognize for Dumaguete calmness, in the way this town of a city always does: the screeches of tricycle tires on asphalt gradually softening, a kind of simmering inside the darkening houses punctuated by the blue of television glow, the hurried talk of the young as they catch what remains of gentle city traffic on the way to some party somewhere, Escano perhaps.

It is the last stretch of Mercury in retrograde, in the middle of the ghost month, and the days I am told are beautiful.

I see this.

Everything in its full lightness—and how I envy the easy joys of the people I see, how I envy their capacity for life. The sun shines, the half moon plays hide and seek with the night clouds, and if I find myself by the Rizal Boulevard to see what becomes of the horizon, I will see how the bright blue-green of the surf plays magnificently with tropical light. I see this. I just do not feel any of it. The day is a ghost, and I am in the throes of the deepest sadness I know.

Sadness brings its own version of clarity—a small and shifting and acrid stillness in your brain that is the only stable thing in a tumbling sea of shadows, and the shadow of shadows. You grasp at this small thing, this precarious balance, this bedeviled clarity, and you make it your crutch. Thus to the world, you appear calm, you walk in measured steps, and there are occasions you even laugh. You pay bills, do the moribund things like cleaning the house, like going to work, like enjoying the rib-eye steak at this digs in a new food park somewhere in the bowels of Claytown. You somehow exist, and for now that is enough.

But there is no use confiding to people—not many will understand, will dismiss things as mood swings you should be able to handle, their advise is “to snap out of it,” a judgment you accept because it takes too much energy to argue otherwise. Besides, you know this is the only vocabulary they have in this language of psychology they do not speak. You know the world would not bother to read the dead depths in your eyes. If they looked closer, they would have seen a gaping void where no light lives, where nothing makes sense, where everything disperses into the wreck of air. You wish for the fantasy and simplicity of snapping out of it.

The last happy year, as far as I can consider the vagaries of days and memory, was 2012—the year the world was supposed to end if the ancient Mayans were to have their way. It did not end. The calendar from those ancient days pointed to the conclusion of a b’ak’tun (a time period in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar), which contemporary archaeologists had determined to be the 12th of December, 2012. That abrupt end simply did not account for a tomorrow, and how that made everyone go on a tizzy—do you remember?—but I was happy. I felt that my life by then had rounded all corners, had satisfied most of my dearest dreams. Life was full, and if it were to end in the name of the Maya, so be it. I remember my own anticipation of December 21 when it rolled into the calendar, to meet its dawn like it was probably the last, and to feel from the earth any signs of mysterious stirrings that were supposed to signal some catastrophe that would end everything. I waited till midnight. Except for reports of an earthquake somewhere else in the world, the world did not end.

Did the scientists read the calendar wrong? Or perhaps the Mayans were the first trolls, laughing from somewhere among the nine layers of their Place of Awe, their version of the hereafter, at our gullibility? Or did we just place too much of a superstitious emphasis on the meanings of relics we have scarcely come to understand? I doubt there are suitable answers to these questions, and I am not an archaeologist.

Some time ago, I read a tweet that posited another probability. Perhaps the world did end in 2012 in some otherworldly cataclysm our human brains simply cannot begin to comprehend, and we are now merely wraiths living in the shadows of that catastrophe we cannot see. Which is why the world is what it is, at the moment, a topsy-turvy purgatory. We are all dead—and the world right now is just the long sigh of the consciousness of our collective soul going into that cosmic bright light. Perhaps. I have never felt right since 2012, and a part of me is inclined to agree. As of this writing, in about three hours, I shall turn 43.

Somewhere where I cannot hear them crickets despair in ambushing me with their song.

Labels: birthday, life