I was up till 1:00 this morning and woke up at nine. I stayed up to watch Butterfly Effect: Revelations. Before I could watch the main feature I had to endure a dozen or so previews. The DVD from Netflix belonged to the After Dark Horrorfest 2009, lots of gore and mindless stories with no other redeeming value than titillation. I have never understood why people love watching murder and mayhem on theater and TV screens, various psychology theories notwithstanding. There already is so much violence and terrors in our lives.
Okay, maybe not terror. Terror belongs to a group of emotions that zoom us to big mind, to consciousness beyond the trivial that we experience through faceless, indistinguishable days. Like awe, terror is huge. It pushes us to the stratosphere of experience where we fly among clouds and angels, among archangels, principalities and thrones. Is this why people watch horror flicks? They need a taste of heaven even if heaven drips with gore?
I didn't set the alarm. I thought I'd wake up early as I did yesterday and Friday without benefit of an external timekeeper. I slept deeply though fitfully: the blankets were bunched at my feet under the comforter when I woke up. The furnace came on and off through the night, one of the coldest this month that brought snow last Sunday. I felt more rested though than any morning this past week. I have been adjusting my wake time to be at my desk at work on software by nine. My body however wants its Shylock-full eight hours. Finding the most productive way to spend my days is an ongoing project. Life, to be presumptuous about it, is process, process, process...
The sun this morning shares its field of blue sky with a herd of curvaceous clouds. The painterly clouds brought to mind the clouds on the baby-blue altar wall of my hometown Aglipay church. They surrounded the imagen of the town's patroness, Nuestra Señora de la Paz y Buen Viaje, that stood at the main altar. The statue gave her name to our town, La Paz. She had also given its name to several other Spanish settlements around the globe from the capital city of Bolivia to the capital of Baja California in Mexico. The Spaniards must have dreamt of peace while wielding swords and muskets to gain possession of those lands.
Peasants from poor Extremadura sought a better life for themselves and their families. Basque sailors lusted for more seas to conquer. When I was old enough to study Philippine history (from mostly Spanish Augustinian and Dominican friars at their Spanish-era "universidades reales"), I recoiled from the senseless cruelty they must have perpetrated ("perps" they were called in last night's movie) against the hapless natives, my people, but visiting Spain in 2001 I realized conquistadores and the many others who followed in their wake—administrators, parish priests, and hacienderos—were as humblingly human as we are today.
Last night driving home from Bally I heard Tavis Smiley interview the Rwandan-Canadian singer, Corneille (Cornelius Nyungura) on the radio. The 32-year-old singer was born in Germany where his Rwandan parents had gone to college. He grew up back in Rwanda where his father, Émile, became leader of the political party, PSD. Both parents were killed in the genocide of 1994. Corneille managed to flee to Germany with the help of his parents' friend. In 1997 he moved to Montreal to pursue his studies in communications at Concordia College.
Corneille was telling Smiley that for years he told people he had forgiven his parents' killers. He only started to come to grips with the emotions he had buried inside after he married his Portuguese-Canadian wife, Sofia. He told Smiley that the four-year relationship taught him the intricacies of loving someone and in the process he began to feel again. He reclaimed the horrors of his teen years in Rwanda and in this spirit wrote the song, "I'll Never Call You Home Again" in his first English-language CD, The Birth of Cornelius.
Every period of our lives brings its own challenges and opportunities for growth or suppression. I didn't lose my parents violently but it was in my teens that the seemingly monolithic foundation of my family's religious faith began to crumble under me. As a child, I lived for the church's cycle of holy days, foremost among them Advent and Lent. The priest resplendent in lace and silk embroidery presided over moving dramas at the altar accompanied by a choir of women singing soprano and contralto parts. On the main high fest days, the women were joined by tenors Malvar and Tino. The color, drama, and music transported me to another world. They became the seed that later blossomed into my interest in art and classical music, and even my enthrallment with ideas and the world of the intellect.
But transcendence may need to be balanced with earth-rooted authentication. To fly with angels and the asparas of Hindu and Buddhist myths is well and fine, like smoking cannabis must be for many of our youth today. (The use of marijuana among college students recently gained media attention after Olympic star, Michael Phelps, was photographed taking a hit from a water bong.) They loosen the darkness in our lives without our losing them completely. Sun and sunlit clouds may divert and entertain but maybe creativity requires deep drafts from forgotten wells of darkness and terror.
Men and women from all climes and times are imbued with the same emotions I feel so vividly today. The world outside (at least on our tiny planet, Earth) may have changed appearance wherever humans have settled and made their homes but inside we harbor the same ageless demons and angels. History, and the memories that serve us, show how little we have changed. With all the modern conveniences and extravagancies we now enjoy we forget how naked we really are.
Tuesday in Spanish is martes. In the Latin calendar what is now the third day of the week was named after the god of war maybe in recognition that warfare is intrinsic to human nature. As they did in our ancient myths, bright and dark mythic forces fight each other in the field of our consciousness. To see the fight with clarity and compassion and transform them into a personally satisfying life may be what matters in the semana santa of our lives.
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