Noli me tangere, touch me not, Jesus says to Mary Magdalene in John 20:17. Filipino writer and hero, José Rizal, used the phrase as title for his first novel, a book that frankly I've only heard of and admired from a distance. I tried reading Leon Ma. Guerrero's translation after my second visit to the Philippines since leaving it in 1975. I am ashamed to say I didn't go far beyond the author's preface where his choice for a title is explained. His novel, he wrote, was his "endeavor" to uncover the cancer that afflicted Las Islas Filipinas, a disease that made it untouchable because people dread contact with the sick for fear contagion.
Rizal was able to see the Philippines from the objective distance of Spain, the "mother country," where he had gone for education with other Filipino illustrados, bright, young Filipino intellectuals whose families had some money, enough to send them abroad. He wrote the novel in Madrid, Paris and Germany. He had become a cosmopolitan but the wider view made him more acutely want to do something for his home country "for as your son your defects and weaknesses are also mine."
In transliterated Greek, the Latin phrase, noli me tangere is me mou haptou. The verb can be translated as "touch, hold on to, cling to." The Oxford New Revised Standard Version of the New Testament translates the verse:
Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'"
Do not hold on to me. This more contemporary translation of John's verse doesn't move me as the King James version does. To touch some thing is to cause it to enter us in a new way. Before touching it is just a thought in our minds and a thought infinitely elaborates into the many shapes that plague our waking and sleeping life. Touching it joins us in the flesh: we establish a carnal relationship with the thing. It gains physicality and incarnate the relationship to it more likely yields tangible fruits. A plague upon your houses, cries Romeo. A plague, at least, awakens us to our bodies and what bodies do: they are born, they live, and they die. In the course we might make something of value to survive us when we're gone. Or not, it does not matter. It is enough to have lived in both our minds and bodies.
Two years into my "new career," I must confront what I have dreaded touching. Enough dreaming, I say. Touch and take the terrible risk of becoming contaminated. Contagion sometimes is necessity. We have never ceased being putrid dirt to which we shall all return. Dirt is as beautiful as moonlight or star shine or the yellow of tulips in springtime, the hush of oncoming evening in summer, the weight of someone dear on your chest in winter huddled in warmth together as though time and seasons had ceased. Every "thing" imagined and physically lived has the potential to justify and elevate our dirty lives. For everything do we call the endeavor art.
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