remembering Fidel, as ever
[ Reviving the memories, and that life passage, with Claude and the Skandhics. Sometimes the day itself asserts what the post might be; this is one of those days. ::chuckle:: ]
Exactly 25 years ago, this post in TFR: February 13, and I remember Fidel
That post itself was 17 or so years removed from those events in the early 1980s as Philippine society was convulsed in what would turn out to be the waning years of a dictatorship, made decrepit by venality, deep corruption, and the karmic comeuppance of the dictator who was then suffering with lupus.
So, a lifetime ago. And yet many of its aspects remain vivid in my memory. The time he and I ran around the U.P. oval at the tail end of one of our long runs through the neighborhoods around Diliman, right at the peak of a typhoon in the monsoon, acacia tree branches crashing down around us along with the pelting, horizontal rain.
Listening to him strum his guitar in the choir loft of the Church of the Risen Lord, where dad was chaplain; Fidel's home was just around the bend from the road in front of the parsonage, Aglipay Street, in Area 1 of the U.P. campus, making us neighbors. Not far from us, the home of the Lansangs, a legendary surname in the annals of the underground Communist Party of the Philippines.
But the one moment I shall never forget until the day my constituent atoms and molecules fly apart in the last decohering ::chuckle:: is waking up after a siesta one late afternoon in Fidel's room. I remember sitting up from my banig on the floor and gazing at his sleeping form for a long time, Fidel looking for all the world like he was at peace with it, notwithstanding the violence he had suffered, and the fact that he had come within a centimeter of death itself.
I was visiting the Philippines that time, in the summer of 1985, as an LFS-USA/UC Berkeley delegate to the League of Filipino Students' National Congress that year in Bacolod, Negros Occidental. And before heading there, spent time with my dear friend, as he recuperated from the ghastly bullet wound he suffered some months ago at a rally in Mendiola, students from U.P. and other college campuses gathering there en masse in support of a national peasant farmers' organization, and at which the Philippine Constabulary opened fire on the students and farmers. (See story in TFR post above.)
Now that I think back on it, it's clear I was doing zazen that time, meditating on my sleeping friend's form, and on the spells History was casting upon us at the time, and on our long-suffering but patient people.
Notwithstanding the fact that memory is a notorious trickster, confabulating and hallucinating things and moments already decades in the rear-view mirror of life, these memories I have about Fidel are about things that really did happen, in one vertex or another, in the mesh and matrix of my lived experience. While I have rendered them in a gauzy, muffled voice reminiscent of Gaussian-blurred images, the sound I am trying to conjure does exist clearly in my mind, and I hear it as pure as the ringing of a small Tibetan bowl I recently had but bequeathed to the lost world by my absent-mindedness and so it exists only in memory now.
It's the sound of Fidel's guitar in that choir loft, oh so clear after all these years. I wonder if he still strums on that instrument's descendants, singing to his son.
[ Looking up at the front of Marina Middle School late one night, I saw a human form on the frieze, that I hadn't noticed before, such was the backlit quality of it... ]
