Passion transformed
(First of 3 parts)
In the spirit of the New Year, and because a number of people have suggested that I reprint my contribution to the book Life on the Cusp for my space in this paper, I am doing so right now. I had, in fact, been told that it would make a good piece for the New Year, since the subject of my article, “Passion Transformed,” deals with a transformation in one’s being, hence the title. The publisher was Karina Bolasco of Anvil Publishing, Inc., and the editors were Rita Ledesma and Mert Loinaz.
Soon after the book was launched, someone told me that it was published almost verbatim in a magazine. There were no authorizations given by the editors or myself, the author. What was really bad was the fact that the magazine artist, who did two big sketches that came out with the article, misinterpreted the word “passion” as referring to passion in sex. One of the sketches showed a woman in absolute ecstasy.
Life on the Cusp was published in 2003, and among the other contributors invited to write about their respective cusps were Joy Virata, Jaime Zobel de Ayala, Alfredo Roces, Maribel Ongpin, Lourdes Montinola, etc. It is available at Powerbooks and National Book Store. So, here goes…
Faulkner, upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, said that the only things worth writing about are ‘the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.’ He also seized that occasion to remind us that man alone among God’s creatures has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. ‘The poet’s, the writer’s duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.’
“This is the reason I am writing my story … my story of passion; in fact, of passion transformed. It is the story of the turning point in my life, the story of the very crux of my being, when I found myself on the cusp of a new beginning. It is the story no one else can write responsibly and reliably about but myself. Perhaps I couldn’t have picked the setting or the cast of characters in the beginning of my life, nor the conflicts I was born into. But the human species, with its drives and conflicts, is a constant. A Cro-Magnon man of 35,000 years ago, were he dressed in blue jeans and T-shirt, would not look out of place today. We are born into history … our animal optimism and our cerebral capacity to plan our own personal futures exist independently of history.
“Thanks to televisions and computers, we have become savvy in ways past generations never experienced. I remember how my late father had so hoped that he would still be around when the first man landed on the moon. Well, he was, and he would have marveled and enjoyed it even more had this unfolded before his very eyes through the click of the mouse wrapped around his fingers.
“But our generational savviness in the age of imagery and sound bytes is a matter more of imagery than the heft of real things that matter — pain we helped relieve, compassion that helped someone’s heartbreak heal, the smile on a child’s face that we somehow put there, tears that disappeared upon our reassuring embrace, or a mother’s forehead I kissed and then realized that in spite of her total memory loss the touches of tenderness she has not forgotten by the way she moves her unseeing eyes; or the most piercing eyes that never left me while his strength was leaving him and he struggled to deliver a message through them to me. We certainly cannot but learn more of the world’s heft as we have taken it into our hands … we took it up reverently for it was an old piece of clay with millions of thumbprints on it.
“The story of passion transformed began about 24 years ago. But its complete story started in the Sixties soon after I got married to the most dashing, most brilliant man I have ever known. He was the exclusive source of my passion and the enthusiasm I felt over life. My emotions, my feelings, my excitement were dictated by him. When he had a great day at work, to which he was extremely dedicated, I too had a great day at home. My cares as a mother were transformed into educational adventures, my concerns into enlightened revelations. When he came home with a headache, some magical mystery made me develop one myself. Everything looked brighter the next day … the sunrise in a spectacular display of affection for him and me, on to the sunset where the dimming hues were as amazing as they were supernatural, because the day had been a good one for him, and therefore a good one for me too. The promise of an even more wonderful tomorrow was the song that carried me through the day until he arrived home again that night, and once again swept me off my balance. He was the stimulus of my joy, the trigger of every ecstasy and even every passion. I remember someone quoting from somewhere during those times and telling me that I had such remarkable passion. The hunger for passion is universal, I was told … that total emotional absorption which makes us feel vibrant and fully alive. And I had it in such abundance! What magnificent passion! What an enviable situation!
“I found out this was not so. For when that stimulus vanished suddenly and mercilessly, I found myself paralyzed and pain oozed out of my every pore. My senses, though functioning like automations, were completely devoid of any awareness. An aching feeling of helplessness set in, then an indescribable sensation of drowning. And then devastation giving way to despair! I cried out loud but nobody heard me. I shouted out loud but the choking came before the sound escaped from me. I didn’t cry because I couldn’t cry. Fright overpowered me, for the total deprivation I was going through had stunned me into numbness every single day of every single week of every single month of that year 1978.
“I sat down but I felt numb. I moved around, I still felt numb. I went through every day doing the things I had to do, and I was so aware that the numbness was there … it was a numbness that gnawed and gnawed cruelly. I was still numb when, for the first time since I lost my passion, I looked around me and became aware of this world in which I live. I found a friend who dedicated himself to helping me go through my anguish, and his gentleness touched me. But the pain hovered and did not keep still.
“As I looked around me, probably for the first time, I realized that the numbness was dissipating, dying out, in fact. I was appalled at the absurd paradox of a world desperately in need of every penny of its wealth to properly house and feed, to educate and protect its people, wasting millions and trillions on nuclear weapons that could never be used because to fire even one was to doom her very existence. I was shocked at the raw cruelty of so much filth and stench in the squatter areas of my country and the defeated look on the faces of their dwellers. I saw the saddest eyes on the faces of malnourished children and the despair evident in the expression of a mother hungry and unhealthy, trying in vain to suckle her baby.
“Or perhaps one day, after all the sordid, ugly headlines, all the radio and television reports of one more story of corruption in high places, in a series of too many, or of a politician’s sordid hubris shamelessly inflicted on the Filipino, it will all reach a kind of emotional critical mass and give me the feeling that something fundamental is wrong in the world. I never saw all these when everything was so right.
“A caring friend gives me a copy of a speech delivered by Dan Rather, well-known broadcaster in the early Eighties. I am struck by the compassion portrayed by Rather as he quotes from author James Agee, who captured this in his description of an old lady he talked to when he was doing his Great Depression piece, ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.’ Agee found her in the hollows of Appalachia, in a little shack with dirt floors, no heat, no plumbing. Agee asked the woman, ‘What would you do if someone came along and gave you some money to help you out?’ As Rather tells it, the old lady rocks in her chair and shakes her head … she’s thinking. Finally she nods and says, ‘I guess I’d give it to the poor.’ That was compassion in its magnificence! Selflessness in its purest essence!”
(To be continued)
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