The Spy in the Sandwich

Sunday, April 20, 2025

9:00 AM | A Note on Resurrection

What defines my life—and perhaps everyone else’s, in a frenetic world—is busy chaos. But finally, I have found some time for myself, after endless skirmishing with a flirt of schedule, to fit in a moment like this: it is a perfect sunny Wednesday morning in the middle of Semana Santa, with hardly any traffic snarling outside. It is unusually quiet for a Dumaguete day, the silence broken only by the occasional whirr of tricycles, and the soft music that blares from my Spotify.

I am on an 80s mode. First, there was El Debarge (remember them?) singing “Who’s Holding Donna Now,” and now I have Madonna singing like her old self. All those classics from my growing-up years, from “Like a Virgin” straight to “This Used to Be My Playground.” And somehow I begin to feel so much at ease in my skin. I have not even taken a shower yet, glorifying in the snugness of last night’s clothes, and going about the room thinking of everything and nothing, a cup of brewed coffee in hand.

Deep inside, I wish life was always like this—something suspended in uncomprehended, quiet joy, with the soundtrack of your life swirling around you, an orchestra of utter contentment.

It is very much a breath of fresh air.

Maybe it is the prospect of not having to go to a classroom tomorrow to teach. Can you imagine that? Tomorrow’s a Thursday without its prerequisite pressures: there is none of the rituals of having to wake up early, like an automaton, and be the paragon of collegiate springboard of pre-packaged knowledge. I like teaching, but the damn thing can take its toll on one’s nerves.

Maybe it is the kiss of a beginning summer, although I abhor the fact that they have changed the school calendar and I still find myself teaching during a sweltering summer day. I’ve always believed that Dumaguete is always more beautiful in the summer, which is the only time I really love the sun. The humidity is just so, and for the most part, what envelops is a dry heat. That, coupled with the blue of Tañon Strait and the sky, and that general sweet lethargy in the air … what’s not to love?

But maybe it is also the fact I feel that everything around me is clean. Spic-and-span. Smelling softly of rose, citrus, and Lysol. I went to sleep in the early morning today, around five o’clock, after I finished cleaning the whole afternoon, from top to bottom. I had to. The pad had been showing signs of housekeeping neglect of late, due for the most part to the realities of April for a college instructor. There had been an abundance of dust, even those little pests we call agay-ay. After a while, my body and my senses begged for something, anything, to happen.

Last night, the trigger was washing dishes. Which led me to clean the counter top, which led me to the windows, then the chairs, then the floor, the whole enchilada. It takes me about six hours to finish everything. It is not because I am a slow-poke when it comes to cleaning. (Cleaning is my genes; Ma is a virtual obsessive-compulsive when it comes to that, it had to rub off on me.) I like taking my time, mindful of the fact that I do not just consider cleaning house a chore; it is necessarily a kind of therapy, even a meditation. Sometimes I see the world so much better with a mop on one hand, a broom in the other. Can you imagine that? While you’re struggling with the stain on your countertop, you think of this dilemma and that vexation, and you think of the various solutions as well. (Sometimes, the action of scrubbing jogs your brain to come up with creative solutions.) The stain also becomes the metaphor for the problem in your head and in your life, and your rubbing with damp cloth and alcohol becomes the symbolic remedy you know is forthcoming.

I love cleaning the house. At night. It is not at all unusual that my cleaning habits take me to nighttime, almost always around midnight. There is something comfortable about cleaning the house when the rest of the world is asleep. The action of sweeping, dusting, and scrubbing the floors under the shadow of night takes on, for me, a symbolic meaning. It reminds me of a favorite tigmu—or bugtong for Tagalogs and “riddle” for the rest of the English-speaking world:

After a sleepless night covered with a blanket,
It rears up laughing.

This is an ancient Philippine gnomic verse, whose answer is “flower,” although many of my former students in Philippine Literature class would also venture the “butterfly,” even “a chick coming out of its egg shell.” All true, of course, but I like the idea of a flower better. Granted, one can readily see the literal meaning of that riddle: that under the cover of night, a flower blooms.

But it is its metaphorical and metaphysical levels of that tigmu which fascinate me. Why? Because the small verse paints perfectly the underlying process of nature, and to a considerable extent, the process of much of our lives.

Consider the flower. In the evening, it is an inconsequential bud, all closed up, its final beauty lost to us in its being hidden. During the night, botany tells us that the flower virtually “sleeps”—but such sleep is one that is actually full of silent processes, all of its biology working to produce the bloom by early morning’s light.

Or consider the butterfly: it starts out as an ugly, wriggly caterpillar, which must soon go to “sleep” encased in a cocoon, and triggers a process that would soon produce one of Nature’s greatest metamorphoses.

The riddle thus tells us that everything evolves (or revolves) under a process of dark quiet; that when the proper time comes, we can then burst out into the world, laughing.

Isn’t that such a hopeful thought? And so appropriate for Easter, too!

But how is this even related to house-cleaning?

I like the process of preparing for another day, and another week, sweeping everything clean. Clutter and dust diffuse the possibility for change, or for welcoming the new.

When this column comes out, it will be a Sunday, on a note of Resurrection. It is so much easier to face that, all clean, all ready.

But, of course, I will take whatever it is that makes me smile today: genuine, unforced smiling—something that keeps from within—is something rare, and it is very much welcome. Then again, I have always liked the symbolic significance of holidays and red-letter days—Christmas, New Year’s, Valentines, or Easter in particular, or even The First Day of School. They give a kind of emotional deadline to finishing things. And I have so many things to finish: for the first time in so many weeks, these responsibilities have now acquired a patina of possibility.