Tasio’s swallows

It has become a habit of mine to be sensitive to at least two stories in any kind of book I read. When the Locsin versions of the Noli Me Tangere and the El Filibusterismo came out a few years back, I read them again and was gifted with not only a literary account of social and political history but a natural history of place as well.

It was a simple statement from Noli Me Tangere’s Pilosopo Tasio whose house was described by Rizal to have "hanging on the walls," "collections of insects and leaves, among maps and old shelves full of books and manuscripts…" but it revealed a lot in terms of what he knew about his place. When Tasio took to his preferred task of writing manuscripts for "other ages," Tasio justified his work this way:

"This kind of work, besides, keeps me company, when my guests from China and Japan leave… My guests are swallows."

The "guests from China and Japan" were not people but birds – swallows. Pilosopo Tasio spent enough time observing, sauntering in his native place that he understood who comes and who goes, not only among the townsfolk but also among the birds. He knew that birds did migrate. Rizal traveled a great deal but it took this character, Pilosopo Tasio, in his novel, who seemed to have spent most of his life making sense of life in the town, to make this observation credible and grounded. Such is also the story of Walden-rooted Henry David Thoreau, whose famous work "Walden" was a beautifully written account of his natural observations of and living in that place in Massachussetts. But there was another fellow who stayed put and gifted the minds interested in natural history with his pioneering work and also thought a lot about swallows in a very interesting way. His name was Gilbert White.

Gilbert White (1720-1793) was the author of the History of Selbourne (published in 1789), a village about 40 miles southwest of London. This was a small book but a landmark book in the field of natural history. Remember that this was long before Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking work on evolutionary theory, "Origin of Species," was published. White’s book contained a detailed observation of the natural life of Selbourne, especially its inhabitant animals and their daily habits in their place. The book took White 18 years to write. He contemplated his place a lot. In fact, he did it so much that he probably did not have room to consider ever leaving it at all. He was not your stereotypical idea of the "wild naturalist" in that age of British explorations who trekked the vast corners of the Earth to find out what was out there or were paid by their royal sponsors well-enough to risk themselves getting killed in "wild areas." At one point, he was so convinced that he had enough stories about the secret lives of plants in Selbourne that he used this to coax famous naturalists/explorers like Joseph Banks (who accompanied Captain Cook to Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia) to visit him and risk ruin of Cook’s monumental round-the-world expeditionary schedules. White even sulked and "threatened" Banks and the other naturalists he had been inviting to Selbourne if they did not accept his invitation: " I must plod on by myself, with few books and no soul to communicate my doubts and discoveries to." The threat and moping did not work. Banks discovered, among other things, kangaroo in Australia and never did visit Selbourne.

Pilosopo Tasio must have had White’s "History of Selbourne" in one of his shelves and must have started writing notes on it. White’s book contained some fascination about the "private lives" of swallows.

Swallows are one of the most skillful acrobatic flyers. One kind, bank swallows are known to court and copulate while in flight and passing a white feather back and forth at that. They snatch insects to feed themselves while in flight and like to build their nests on quiet trees and housetops. For all of White’s powers of observation, however, he still could not believe that swallows did leave at certain times for other places where the insects were more abundant because of seasonal change. He looked for them in their nests at these times and they were not there so he entertained the thought that maybe swallows hibernated in streams and rivers during winter. David Quammen, acclaimed author of Song of the Dodo, in his "Wild Thoughts from Wild Places" (Scribner, New York 1998) affectionately attributed this naturalist oversight not to any deficiency in naturalist skills but to an overpowering of "the natural history of the human soul." Quammen sensed what is inevitable at the end of any life dedicated to scientific or naturalist pursuits – symbolisms and emblems of what really drives the human mind and soul to know the Earth and his/her place in it. And Quammen believed that this ridiculous idea of a "swallow hibernating underwater" was indeed a creature, a "creature called yearning." No doubt it is the same creature that Pilosopo Tasio and Rizal cared for in the fringes of San Diego, of Filipinas.