RESOUNDING How does the writer artistically portray the selection? Read on to find out. Spirit and Literature by F Sionil Jose In our part of the world, a lot of phenomena cannot be explained by rational analysis or cold, scientific deduction. Some would easily dismiss all these as ancient superstitions, sleight-of-hand occurrences, or even products of fervid imagination. But they persist because, in a very real sense, they exist. It is no wonder, then, that even highly sophisticated political leaders would consult in Indonesia the dokun, in the Philippines the fortuneteller, for good signs that would assure them of success in their ventures. To this day, | cannot get over the sight of long lines of women, and some men, waiting for their chance to consult a fortuneteller who has positioned himself and his candle on a Tokyo sidewalk. | grew up believing in ghosts, in spirits, in small creatures that inhabit the bowels of the earth. | have sometimes brought these up in my fiction, not as incidents of rural‘culture, but often as metaphors and as a way by which | explain people’s eternal fascination with the unknown. In ultra-modern Singapore, they have a Hindu festival—Thaipusam, | think itis called. On this day, devotees go to the Hindu temple, their faces smothered with gray ash. Some of the men have their cheeks and tongues pierced with skewers of iron. There is no blood, and they go about as if nothing extraordinary has happened to them. The most amazing sight—it was difficult for me to believe it when | saw it—was of men with hooks in the flesh of their backs. These hooks were attached to carts or sleds that they hauled as they walked. There was no pain in their faces, no blood Streaming from their backs. In the early sixties, my family was in Sri Lanka, which was then known as Ceylon. On the week of our arrival, | was asked if we wanted to see firewalking. | have seen firewalking in the Philippines, but on a small scale. We arrived in this Tamil village outside Colombo early in the evening. The village was Surrounded by coconut groves:and the villagers were preparing the site for firewalking. The site was a dozen meters long and a meter and a half wide and was covered with stones, and the villagers were piling dried coconut leaves and burning them. Judging from the mound of ashes that had been gathered on the side, the leaves had been burning for some time. While they burned, the villagers chanted and danced nearby. By the time the last leaves were burned and their ashes removed, the stones were glowing like coals; the heat was so intense that a leaf thrown into the bed would immediately burst into flames. The dancers then filed onto the glowing bed of stones, dancing and chanting as if nothing was under their feet. What amazed me was that the children who joined in also seemed to enjoy dancing on the stones. A woman's sari caught fire, but she quickly extinguished it. This went on for several minutes, the dancers quickly changing places when they stepped out, until the red-hot stones had cooled. But when I went near, the stones were still very hot. | was told that a Caucasian missionary had once tried to show that firewalking was just a matter of self-hypnosis. Maybe it. was, but he immediately landed in the hospital. During the same period, | visited Bhutan, the ancient Himalayan kingdom that is even more isolated from the world than Tibet. Being a guest of the Royal family, | was accorded every hospitality that would make the trip comfortable. We were the first people to go up the new highway, carved out of the sides of the mountains. Before the road was opened, we traveled to Bhutan on horseback, taking more than a week. We passed through rainforests, then went up a road that hugged the mountainside. At times, the grade was so steep that we looked down thousands of feet into the chasm below. We were guests of the Royal Bhutanese government, and Tashila Dorji, the sister of the queen, introduced us to her brother, Jigme Dorji, who was prime minister. The young king, Jigme Dorji’s nephew, was away, studying in Switzerland. Jigme Dorji’s wife was Tibetan, and when she found out | was interested in Buddhism, she told me about her reincarnation. She could remember well her two past lives, and forthwith, she started telling me about them. Unfortunately, | do not remember the details anymore. We were later taken to the dzongs, those massive edifices where the monks lived and prayed. Out of a population of only 250,000, ten percent were monks. We went to the major temple in Paro, a magnificent building constructed completely by hand. The roots were huge slates of wood kept in place by rocks. We entered the main dzong and were greeted by two huge figures: a man and a woman, their face contorted in anger and pain. We were later told that these figures were in the act of copulation. According to this branch of lamaistic Buddhism, copulation is not what most of us would regard it: a sexual act, or an act of love. For the monks, it was holy, an act of creation. Several celibate monks in purple robes were painting frescoes on the walls. The act of painting, like the act of making Buddhist tankas, was one of worship. | looked at what the monks were painting and was quite shocked. They were painting sexual scenes—couples copulating in many Positions —but in the stylized manner of Bhutanese art. That same week, | was taken to a small temple up in the mountains, just below the Snowline. It was colder there, though winter had not yet arrived, for it was mid-October. The trees adorned the mountains with a cloak of many colors. Inside the small temple, in a corner where light filtered in from a single window, a monk was seated in a lotus position. A patina of dust covered him; he was motionless,and | was told he had been in a state of suspended animation for the past six: months. He seemed dead to me, but | was assured he was not. Someone produced a mirror and held it close to his nose, and sure enough, the mirror steamed a little as he breathed. | asked how long the monk would be like that, and | was told that it could be years. In fact, he could be that way till he chose to wake up or die. ; —_ The spirit world is very real, but as some anthropologists would say, this reality is known only to those who are part of the culture, which is to say that outsiders with a particular set of beliefs are not able to experience what insiders can easily witness as reality. | met Father Giron, an SVD priest on Bali, an island known for a mysticism that evolved from its deep-rooted Hindu beliefs. He had been called several times, he said, to perform rituals of exorcism. In some instances, he said, he could feel that the spirits he faced were powerful, manifesting themselves in a frightening manner. He mentioned @ case in which a bicycle shop owner asked him for help. The man said that one of the wheels of a bicycle that was suspended from the ceiling of his shop was revolving so fast that it could not be stopped. Father Giron visited the shop and saw that the front wheel of the bicycle was indeed revolving at such a fast pace that to arrest it would be to invite harm. No one was turning it around. He proceeded with his liturgy and, he told me, he could feel powerful forces surround him and try to Strangle him, almost preventing him from finishing what he was doing. When he finally finished, the wheel stopped turning. My first experience with the spirit world came when | was in grade school, with a faith healer who often visited our village during the harvest season, when the peasants had something to give him. He was a cripple, a thin, ascetic-looking man who was carried to our village on a chair because he could not walk. The chair was placed on a platform, and the villagers lined up before him; over the head of each Person, he placed his hand. There was nothing . When my turn came, he Placed his to expand, the blood in my temples throbbed, and | sometimes joke about this experience and say thi since. my hair seemed to stand on end. fat | have been swell-headed everWhen | neared them, the ball was at their feet selfish. | looked at them then; they were not boys at faces and eyes that burned like charcoal. | turned ani them, too, ran behind me. —I told them that they were very all, but very old men with wrinkled id fled. My companion, having seen The two of us did not attend school the following day as we both had very high fevers. When our house burned down a couple of years later, we moved to a much bigger house with a galvanized-iron foof, thick burl walls, and a wooden floor. Life was normal until one evening during the dry season; shortly after dusk, when we had closed the windows for the night and were getting ready to sleep, stones started falling with loud thuds. They came from nowhere. For three nights, this stoning occurred. We gathered the stones, some of them muddy, till they filled a small bamboo basket. After the third night, my mother decided to hold a novena; an old sacristan came to the house every night, and with the neighbors we prayed the rosary. From the first night of the novena, nothing more happened. I narrated this story to Father Miguel Bernad, a Jesuit scholar and friend, and he told me there was a similar occurrence in Cagayan de Oro City recorded in the Jesuit journals. The owner of the house had also asked a Jesuit to offer Prayers, after which the priest said, “I suppose there will be no more stoning after this.” The moment he concluded his sentence, a stone crashed through the wooden wall and hit him on the knee. He was not hurt, and the stoning did stop after that. Father Jaime Bulatao, who studied similar phenomena, said the cause was a Poltergeist. Whatever it was, | am convinced that there is energy in the heavens that sometimes plays tricks on us mortal beings. Father Bulatao took me to a place in Navotas, where | witnessed ritual hypnosis. Later, | used this experience in a novella, Platinum. Faith healing is a fact of life in the Philippines. In fact, many foreigners come to Manila for such miracle cures; many of them are gypped, but a few do return to their countries with stories of astounding recovery. When | was a journalist, | did a story on a faith healer in San Fabian, Pangasinan. He was an ordinary-looking man, and | watch him do his thing for one whole morning. | remember most his extraction of a tooth of a farmer who had been bothered by a giant toothache for days and whose mouth was swollen. The healer looked at the tooth, then with his thumb and forefinger, he effortlessly pulled it out. | looked at the farmer’s mouth; there was no blood where the tooth had been, and he said there was no pain, and that the ache was gone almost immediately. As most of us know, Ermita was the scene of massacres during the Liberation of Manila, and many of the houses in the district, particularly those that escaped destruction during the war, are supposedly haunted. Way back in the early eighties, when the pub beside our Solidaridad bookshop was still intact, the waiters said that the pub was haunted. Sometimes in the early eighties, Max Soliven took me to a faith healer in Pasig. According to Max, this was a man of considerable prowess because he was able to make the late President Marcos urinate. | had diabetic problems, and Max had very high cholesterol, which he wanted to be rid of. Now, as most Filipinos know, Max isa distinguished journalist and is as cynical as they come, but there we were, at five in the Morning, in the “clinic” of Tomas Blanche, the faith healer from the llokos. He wanted us to be early because that was when his powers were most potent; in the afternoon he would No longer be able to heal.The clinic in Pasig was a small wooden chapel with banners about ispiritistas, May went first; he removed his shirt, and Tomas Blanche, in a T-shirt and with his bare hands, started kneading Max’s back. Before my very eyes, orange granules formed under his fingers, and these he threw into an ash can. Then it was my turn. | stripped to my trousers and lay down on a pad, one fluorescent lamp above me. My wife, who had come along, watched the proceedings. | closed my eyes so that | could experience every sensation to the fullest. Tomas Blanche starteg kneading my stomach, and | could have sworn that I felt his hands go under my skin. | could feel the skin break and his hands rummage through my insides. When he removed his hands, there was no wound at all. Then he got a spoon and pressed it to my stomach, and from my skin there oozed a thick brown liquid that filled the spoon quickly. He emptied this in a pail, and then he pressed the spoon again, repeating the gesture three times, until no more liquid came out. Afterward, we went to Max’s house for breakfast, and there | took my pill for my diabetes. Driving back in midmorning to our house, | felt the onset of hypoglycemia, which happens when blood sugar suddenly drops. | began to feel very weak and hungry and started to perspire all over. | pulled over to the sidewalk while my wife hurried to a nearby sari-sari store for a bottle of soda. That, to me, was incontrovertible proof that Tomas Blanche had taken sugar out of me. If | had not taken my diabetic pill, my blood sugar would not have gone down so quickly, and | would not have needed the soda to restore my blood sugar level. Given these experiences, | have sometimes felt it necessary to use them. In Mass and Po-on, are anecdotes about the spirit world, and in Sins, sorcery is a crucial element in the plot. | also draw upon the many things in our geography that give a sense of unreality to the harsh reality that is ours every day. | often say that, in the Philippines, fiction has difficulty catching up with reality, and though literature is “lies,” the fact is that it contains far more truths than the newspapers. The writer, knowing his milieu, can make sense of the unusual and the bizarre around him, giving them the authority and verisimilitude of metaphor. The continuing wonder of this world, which usually can only be appreciated by the child, is also the writer's enthralling domain; but only if he is able to see these wonders as the child does and then give them form as an artist and innovator. When the writer accomplishes this, the mystical, unreal experience becomes normal, @ part of the life that is not usually lived but can be vicariously experienced—a" experiencing that is, after all, one of the continuing pleasures of literature. Source: Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing. Volume 18, No. 1, 2006, University of Hawaii