Tribu Paraiso, Diadi, Nueva Vizcaya, Philippines

   
     *****

     They invested their time and energy, nay, ego-minds, in an activity that exposed them to ridicule and all sorts of reactions that, it appears, irritate them.

     Their arguments against the burial of a dead man have become irrelevant.These discourses are mere expletives, routinely parroted by like-minded individuals and speak of the kind of persons that they are--unreconstructed human impostors enslaved by time-bounded psychological thinking of simpletons.

     President-elect Rodrigo Duterte is more circumspect,  kind and human. He should be admired for giving closure to the situation that has divided the country for the past years--the burial of the late President Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng Mga Bayani.

***

Memory Boosters

1. avocado
2. Green tea
3. Oily fish: salmon, mackerel, sardines, herring
4. blueberries
5. dark, leafy vegetables like spinach and broccoli
 6. Nuts and chocolates

POST THAT DREW REACTIONS

     The blogger has always maintained that the past and the future are illusions. The past may illuminate but on the whole it does not serve a purpose. That is also true to the future which is not there at the moment. What is important is the Now, the present moment, where we exercise power and have our Being, that inscrutable entity that is there but has yet to be discovered.

     Where is this Being? Inside of us? Outside of us?

     Here is an inspiration from the spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, quoted by March S. Allen in his preface to the former's "The Power of Now," published in 1999.

     "...Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence. This means that it is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature..."

    Yes, as spiritual books that include that of Mr. Tolle, say, we are all subjects to psychological time with its emotions of anger and hate and all that is negative. Does love feature here? We don't know.

     Here is my FB post three days or so ago:

     I am honoring this present moment by swallowing hook, line and sinker that "ultimately, proof lies not in intellectual arguments, but being touched in some way by the sacred within and without."

     The quotation comes from the preface of the above-mentioned spiritual book.

The Padsan River in Laoag City, Philippines, looking east towards
the Cordillera mountain ranges. Photo by blogger from the Gilbert Bridge.

OPENING WINDOWS FOR REBIRTH

 Let go the person you used to be, says writer Lama Surya Das. In fact, "Letting Go The Persons You Used To Be" is the title of his book  which advises that if we want to change and move on, we have to do away with attachments that impede our way out of the miserable life we have been living. These attachments include beliefs, people, places, possessions like books, even the house we have been living for a number of years. It is these attachments that cause our pain and sorrows, he said.

Ilokano writing icon Dr. Aurelio Solver Agcaoili of the University of Hawaii at Manoa (in blue)
in a meeting with an Ilokano writing group at the Mandarin restaurant in San Fernando City, La Union.


EDSA AS BAGGAGE OF MEMORIES

EDSA I was not our metamorphosis.
Filipinos bungled it all after the fall of Ferdinand Marcos by putting into power Cory Aquino who merely sat on her asses in Malacanang and spent precious presidential time plotting  revenge against the dictator she believed caused the assassination of her husband.
Benigno Aqiuino, Jr., bless his soul, was only a loquacious politician who wanted to replace Marcos. He joined forces with the former caudillo of the Communist Party of the Philippines, that ordered the bombing of the miting de avance of the Liberal Party in Plaza Miranda. Aquino bartered our claims to Sabah to the then Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad Mahathir in exchange for the latter's support in toppling Marcos.

Cory and the presidents who came after her including his son Aquino 111 entrenched the powerful oligarchy that catapulted her into power and the mistaken notion that her husband was a hero.

Or has EDSA entered into the realm of myth? What happened to the heroes? Or were they heroes?

PHILIPPINE LAUNCHING OF "UMAYKA MANEN, GANGGANNAET/COME AGAIN, STRANGER" EXPANDED VERSION

We look forward to a Philippine launching of the expanded version of "Umayka Manen, Ganggannaet/Come Again, Stranger", an anthology of Ilokano and English poems. It will be in the summer.

The slim collection was first published in the Philippines in 1998, with introduction by the late regional director of the Philippine Information Agency based in the Ilocos administrative capital of San Fernando City in La Union.

Dr. Aurelio Solver Agcaoili, coordinator of the Ilokano program at the Univesity of Hawaii at Manoa, made a critical introduction of the expanded version.

Mr. Alcantara's introduction will also be included in the new book, in the last pages.

For the most part, "Umayka Manen, Ganggannaet/Come Again, Stranger," is protest poetry but there is no intention on the part of the blogger to change mindsets. Nor ruffle feelings or criticize acts of fellow writers. But we believe in what Mr. Alcantara once said: the poet is a guerrilla or did he actually say, the guerrilla is a poet?

Whatever, we share our experience as journalist and poet in our humble presentation of the scheme of things in our country.

That said, one can also say that the anthology is a documentary in poetic form,

Here is an example from the book:

the slaughter of journalists and other political perfidies

the inner sanctum could not err
quote deny not the little woman unquote
----
.....
the newspaper version was a pain
thing from lethe
like the eternal scourge
like the paradoxes of thieves
in the apex of their discontent
like the dream echo
of a surreal world. 

The author (in red polo) with some Ilokano writers that include Martin Rochina and Freddie Lazaro.

Most, if not all, of the poems in this expanded edition is found, some in parts, in Abel blog.

An installation  of an artist representation of the Ilokano carabao-driven sugarcane
 crusher (dadapilan) at the Laoag City, Philippines plaza.

The vanishing Ilokano barn in Paoay, Ilocos Norte, Philippines

"Let me be vile and base, only let me kiss the hem of the veil in which my God is shrouded. Though I may be following the devil, I am thy son, O Lord, and I love Thee, and I feel the joy without which the world cannot stand. "-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

             

UMAYKA MANEN, GANGGANNAET/

COME AGAIN, STRANGER

                                                               

An Anthology of Ilokano and English Poems

by PETER LA. JULIAN

l

Critical  Introduction byDr. Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

University of Hawaii at Manoa 

THE IDEOLOGY OF HEAVEN VS. THE IDEOLOGY OF HELL

In an essay in his Facebook account, Dr. Aurelio Solver Agcaoili, an Ilokano writer and professor of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, mentioned the ideology of heaven and the suicide bomber.

Dr. Agcaoili did not elaborate on the concept of the ideology of heaven and whether the suicide bomber has an ideology. Some readers came forward with the idea of hell, perhaps, in contrast to heaven, as a reward for people's deeds in their earthly lives. As regards the suicide bomber, a reader was wondering what's going on in the mind  of the suicide bomber as he does what he is tasked to do.

We are no ideologue, but we shall simplify the complex issues by asking simple questions, thus:

What and where is heaven?
What and where is hell?
What is the ideology of a suicide bomber?

As far as I know as Bible translator, heaven and hell are Christian concepts. That's where sinful people go after they die. Jews, Muslims and other faiths have their own versions of heaven and hell.

The suicide bomber is a phenomenon created by followers of Islam like Osama bin Laden. It is practically a weapon of mass destruction. Against the West. Against infidels. A recruit or a volunteer would be strapped with explosives concealed in a vest. After saying his vows or whatever is the ceremony, he goes to a specific target, and detonates the device, killing or maiming as many people as possible. The usual targets are mosques and churches and any house of worship.

Bin Laden was killed two or three years ago by American Navy Seals in his hideout in Abottabad in Pakistan. But his idea lives on and suicide bombers have killed thousands of people, mostly in the Islamic countries of Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Heaven is supposed to the the dwelling place of the Deity or God. From his throne, he judges the people and decides where they should go in the afterlife. If they did good, obeying His commandments in their earthly lives, Peter will give them the key and they will be with Him, needless to say, in heaven or Paradise. For those who transgressed His laws, they will be thrown in that hell of fire and sulfur and suffer forever.

This is the concept of God, at least among the ancient Israelites of the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible that also contains the five books of the Torah of the present-day Jews.

As a Bible translator, we learned about the tetragramaton from an American, a certain Dr. Noel D. Osborn, who was our coordinator in the Ilokano Bible Project in Baguio City in the 1970s. This is a four-letter Greek word, theonym, transliterated into Latin as YHWH, a holy name that was too sacred to be pronounced or articulated that the ancient Jews made substitutions that included "Adonai" (The Lord) and "The Blessed One."

We don't know whether Allah resides in heaven, honestly. It must be a different God. In our readings, the ancestors of those who are Muslims by faith now, worshiped deities and one of them was called Allah. Their version of Paradise or Heaven can be gleaned by the phenomenon of the suicide bombers. Although they become body parts as they are killed in their attack, they are assured their place in Paradise as their reward as martyrs to the cause of Islam. They will be met by seven virgins in their eternal abode.(In one incident recently,  a suicide bomber worked his way through a crowded marketplace in Baghdad and detonated his explosives, killing an estimated 74 people.)

From these beliefs in God, sprung the opposing religions of Christianity and Islam in mostly the desert lands of the so-called Holy Land.

And comes the eternal question: is religion good or evil? Is it stoking the horrible wars now raging in the countries of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon?

Heaven must be somewhere. Anyway,  did it exist on earth in Biblical times? Was it Eden? Or was it in a beautiful garden East of Eden? In the original holy lands that include Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories and Israel. there are place names here that existed in Biblical times. In Iraq, there is a province there called Nineveh mentioned in the sacred writing; and there is Palmyra, too, the ruins--temple, buildings and other artifacts- of which have been reduced to ashes by ISIS.

Heaven as a metaphor for good and pleasant place does exist. Or there is such a thing as a heavenly place or heavenly feeling.  Or something close to heaven where there is peace and contentment, love, charity and understanding. where there are no suicide bombers. Hawaii? Japan? Singapore?  Or somewhere in a corner of the Philippines, an island, perhaps? Is there a Shang-rila where there are no problems, where one is forever young?

Heaven is in the mind. You can live amidst the chaos, even in Manila's squatter areas or cardboard dwellings under the overpass. Heaven on earth does exist. Even in the troubled Middle East where the Caliph has established residence in Mosul and rule his people with heavy hands. And according to the strict sharia law that imposes punishment such as beheading, killing even innocent women and children, cutting of female genitals.

And hell? In a domed area in the sky above the heavens? Fly an airplane to go there?

Hell is everywhere on earth. Hell is where Eden was. That is, it begins there and it is growing in size, now a one big hell created by the followers of a totalitarian barbaric ideology.

The Kingdom of Heaven. Versus the Hell of Sulfur and Fire--the eternal threat to wipe out Mankind and the many gods. Bloody political horses are now riding high in the wide scorching desert where were born the Christ and the Anti-Christ and the Prophet.

Fight the murderous, brutal ideological forces? There is a choice. Fight or let pass the chaos and mayhem, the killing and the burning. But for Christians, there should not be another choice, but fight to the End Times. They, too, like the Jews and other non-Muslims are marked for annihilation--this is in the Qur'an, the sacred book of the barbarians.

ANA AND SIMEON

My cousin Ana, 89, who lives with her husband Simeon, 92, in a senior's home along Avalon avenue in Carson City has been undergoing dialysis for the past three months or so. Thrice a week, the hospital vehicle would come, in the morning, and take her to the facility for this procedure that would leave her weak and tired. She usually sleeps after the hospital personnel take her home.
Manong Simeon is the one preparing her wife's meal. Sometimes, their daughter Malou, who lives with her family on Treyton street, also in Carson would come during the week and do the cooking for her parents. Malou, 62, a nurse, works in a hospital in the city where a Filipino from Bacnotan, La Union became mayor but was removed from office because of corruption.

In the morning of July 19, Manong Simeon, doing her ritual of the day, collapsed at the bathroom of their apartment. Manang Ana, bedridden, heard the thud at the bathroom which is opposite her room and,  alarmed and had to forced herself out of bed, called 911; she also phoned Malou, informing her about what had happened to her father. The 911 vehicle arrived and Manong was rushed to the Harbor UCLA Medical in the city. He underwent several surgeries--his big intestines were removed-- and stayed several weeks at the hospital's ICU department.

Manong Simeon was supposed to die that night but his determination to live was too strong he got his wish. Their sons and daughters, from Canada and New Jersey including the Philippines--Susan, Edwin, Rolly, and Nora-- arrived in Carson expecting the worst for their father. But Manong Simeon lived on, and was later transferred to the ward section of the hospital.

We went to Carson to visit the couple and stayed in the city for ten days. Malou and Nora came to fetched us in Menifee.

The ICU is located at the third floor of Harbor UCLA Medical Center, a 6-story structure. From the parking lot which is usually full of cars and Nora had to drive around for a space to park, we would walked to the first floor, undergo a security check and ride an elevator to the third floor. We would line up for a visitor's card at a table manned by uniformed guards--blacks, Latinos, and one time an Egyptian-- who would take our names and other relevant information in our IDs. Only two people are allowed inside the ICU and one of us would stay in a room, a holding area.  Inside the room, there is a sign at the wall that says in two languages: Room of Bereavement/Cuarto de Condoleci. It is here where  guests, mostly Latinos, wait for their turn to visit relatives and acquaintances confined at the hospital's ICU and wards.