What’s your religion? someone on his way to church asked me one Sunday morning of doing my laundry. Must have noticed I don’t go that way at least once a week.
Because he was to my mind just another bastard son of a gun who worships his bike more than God, I had insouciance enough to say Oh I believe in myself I believe in my life amen aren’t you going yet? to which he just said “that’s cool”. I really didn’t feel cool. In fact, I was feeling sore because I was beginning to dislike that compound. Not because the laundry area was getting slimy and the drainage clogged with cellophanes: It was looking like I was on my way out again because people were once again beginning to ask questions about my life and I never like lying about lived lives, least of all mine, and if I shut up people would think I have ugly secrets or that I was getting on like I’m not one of them. But if I talked, I would be saying something repetitious or frivolous and thoroughly out of the way to be immediately comprehensible and appreciable. I hate asserting my difference because the effect is always an assertion of my superiority over a beleaguered majority; a setting of one’s self apart from the daily grind of the groveling humanity; and humanity generally don’t like freaks of nature. So when I can’t avoid talking to people, I lie, I learn to lie, a way to survive, and I'd say yeah, it’s a fine day even if it wasn't.
But religion is something hard for me to lie about and there’s no asking me to smile ever so sweetly around someone who thinks himself the mullah. So if I want to keep the friendship of someone in the compound, I try to keep him away from the subject of my religions. As I said, people generally are bigots, even in their own yards, and all they often care about is to beat you down to it, there’s no other way of seeing it. And whoever it was that said that the most violent wars are fought up there in our heads, in the ideological plane, he was damn right. If people don’t see things your way, there’s little hope they will soon, unless you’re a community organizer slinging an Armalite or a badge of some success story like Obama.
When I was in Silliman I had this Greek for a Religion teacher who was Protestant, but I had a hunch he was Pagan. He liked to dwell on the seedy intrigues of the Old Testament and every now and then he would break into a mock rant yelling praises for the much slandered many gods of the Old Testament as against the One God that New Testament Christians have pledged their lives to. I did enjoy him. He liked this idea of an old temperamental Grandfather God who went berserk in the vicinity of the temple, cursing and whipping merchants and moneylenders and toppling cashboxes and shouting Frauds! Hypocrites! One day someone in the class said that she doesn’t see much sense in all this propaganda about Eve and sin because if the story in Genesis was true at all, then we all of us owe it to Eve’s disobedience and the little help of her serpent friend that we are here at all procreating or just lovemaking.
“Besides, Sir, I could not imagine living in a state of bliss forever and ever like creation stopped there?”
His blue maybe green eyes shone lights. Yes, yes! he said. Oh there is hope, there is hope for this country. Most days he feels like his life is over, he said, that he is decomposing, right there in the middle of the room, but he has faith, he has faith, yes, because every once in a long while he always finds one, some out-of-the-way Religion Class student, some fine mind who always surprises him.
How profuse was his praise one somehow thought if them white men generally think of the benighted Filipinos brain-deficient or just brain-dead, but he and his wife soon left Silliman for Greece and we hadn’t heard much about him since, but if there was anything I appreciate a lot about him, it was not the worship of wine and women (which I doubt he indulged in as much as I do now), but William Butler Yeats. His favorite poet, he said, is Yeats, how about me. At the time it was “But I don’t and couldn’t read or write poetry, Sir! I find most poetry books hard to comprehend!” I thought then that I was just a fictionist and that my talents and imagination wouldn't go further that there. So I just told him, thinking of Benilda S. Santos and Fatima V. Lim and Jason Montana and Emmanuel Lacaba and Don Pagusara, the slew of Latin novelists and African poets and playwrights, and the rather overrated clump of critics and writers of Manila that I’m more into contemporary poetry, can’t appreciate old English, which was really a sham because I was getting straight A’s in my Shakespeare class, and he said, looking all his 70 years of disappointment that William Butler Yeats is a contemporary poet, no poet is more contemporary than William Butler Yeats! Impromptu he recited Yeats’ The Second Coming, that part that ran turning and turning in the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer things falling apart the center cannot hold, down to the last two lines about the shape of a beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
Wherever he is now I wish to tell him that because of him, I dug Yeats’ bones up, and had read most of his poems but understand better his plays. That I had shed most of my presumptions about what I then thought as old-fogey universal-truth poetry. And that today I’m not going to either Heaven or Hell, I’m not seeing any woman or taking any white wine; I’m just on my way to the city library to see if they’ve got a copy of his Princess Kathleen, a satire about preachers and soul chasers at a time when people were dying from famine in God-stricken Ireland.
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