This doomsday thing is despiriting, despairing to all including exiles like us, we who depend on the eternal mercy of God for our redemption from this exile.
It makes you wake up in the morning and count the hours before the Tuesday morning that, by that numerologic account of the wrong--the absolutely wrong kind--makes tomorrow as the six-six-six: 6-6-6.
Or the day of doom.
Or the end of the world.
Or The Day of the Beast.
Or the apocalypso/apocalyse/apokalipsis promised by whoever misinterpreted the Word.
That one must be declared an inefficient, unscholarly, unprofessional practitioner of hermeneutics, exegesis, eisegesis, semiotics, pragmatics, and symbology.
S/he is a bad linguist and thus to be exiled in the River of Lethe so that there, s/he will eventually forget his terrorizing idea about the world ending.
That, of course, will not happen.
I wage the pennies I have collected, the pennied on my clear jar on my window sill.
The world of symbols is a world that is open only to the honest and well-intentioned, not to those who are wily and crafty and who have ruses in their rotten heads.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, the 6th of the sixth month of the sixth year of the second millenium is not going to go through any of these annihilation and extinguishing and end-of-world millenarianist illusion and craving and delusions and fantasies of those who can afford to think thoughts of these kinds because they have lived the good life, they have had enough of this world, or just plain nuts.
Tomorrow is going to be a new day, a new morning the Lord of Life will give us, believers and unbelievers alike, heathens and pagans and fanatics alike, seekers and receivers alike.
The sun will shine tomorrow and I dare say that--and that the sun, that small god of luminosity that gives us warmth in bad weather--will shine on all of us.
Unless you have gone through a dermatological wonder of wonders and you have said, Salamat po, duktor, sa aking kutis, ilong, eyebags, pisngi, ngiti, at sa discount sa pagretoke sa aking utong--then, the sun will also shine on you and you will be warm.
Anyone in his or her lucid mind would understand the typology of The Beast metaphor in Revelation.
The Beast is that damn beast of a terrorizing ruler who was inspired, among others, by his lack of humanity, by his sense of lack of self-respect, and by his idea of oppression and injustice.
He was that ruler who too drunk of his imperial power, his wealth, the irrevocability of his small
wor(l)d as against the gargantuan wor(l)d of the divine, the spirit, the life forces, the life-giving acts of those who are loving, kind, caring, and humane.
His name was Nero, and this is where ART begins, the art of the camouflage, the art of saying things more than we are allowed to say, the art of saying more by saying the least or saying nothing at all, the art of suggestion, the symbolic.
It is the subversive and the revolutionary in art, the liberating, the redeeming by the use of metaphors and hyperboles and tropes to get away from the wrath and rage of the powerholder without losing sight of the meaning to be communicated.
In the history of the Filipino people from the time of Spanish colonization--and evangelization till today--this has happened to us, this subversion, this sub + verso, under the word, under the word of the ruling elite, the oppressive system.
In effect, you create a language that is not in accord with the inhuman, a language that is against language, this last one the dominant language, the language of power and control and administration.
The capitalists of the apocalyptic trash of literature, small l, must be happy again.
America has so much of this, and their publishers are laughing out loud in an ulol-like way.
In our mind as exiles, even as we witness the ringing of cash registers in Barnes and Noble and in Borders, we hear them say: Tanga, tanga kayong mga exilo kayo dahil naniniwala kayo sa 666.
We can always justify our senselessness by pointing to those who are not exiles as the gate-openers of this kind of a belief that is worthy, right on the dot, of the trashbin, the black one, not the green one, never to be recycled again come next millenium, on June 6, 3006.
The cash registers in our land of exile are endlessly ringing because some people, exiles included, could be so idiotic to believe that Nero is alive and kicking.
He is not, unless you have kept him refrigerated in a sub-zero crypt somewhere in the tropics.
So tomorrow, we will have to thank the spirit of life for the many graces we have received and will continue to receive.
In the end, we become receivers in this sacred act of reception of ruach like what the Qabalah says.
We become vessels of goodness, grace, grand thoughts.
That is the meaning of June 6, 2006 and all the days after.
Time is eternal, if you have not yet thought about it.
Time is not going to end.
Time will go on and on as time.
It is high time we see that.
A. S. Agcaoili
Torrance, CA
June 5, 2006
No comments:
Post a Comment