As the year was coming to an end, a Blue Moon was declared. The name conjures mysticism but it really is just a term given to the phenomenon when two full moons appear in one month. But names are names and the unusual always leads people to magic or business. Soon, over free national television, people were making the most of interpreting what this colored moon means.
For those who looked up the sky the night of the last day of the year, there was something more astounding than a moon turned blue and sad. That night, the clouds were arranged in soft squares. They were terrifyingly spread all over the space with the moonlight behind to provide eerie patterns of light.
It was a sight to behold. It was a sign waiting to be read.
Some days after, a man calling himself a seer was predicting like there was no tomorrow. It did not matter that the fortune teller was struggling with his loose dentures. His words were even looser.
That's the problem with people who predict: Death, which is predictable, is their weapon. A member of the film industry is going to die. But, of course, each year someone belonging to the film industry is going to die. What matters with this prediction is for someone to pinpoint what kind of a member, what magnitude is the celebrity of this mortal man facing his mortality? And yet, we believe what other people say of our future. We love to listen to men and women tell us what we like to hear. For every dismal reading, there is always the flattering about our love life, about our personality, about the little successes that will come our way. Things that do not need to be predicted because they belong to the everyday. In other words, "the quotidian that will have its day." The unremarkable. The everyday.
If my grandmother, Emilia, were alive today, she would have been an emeritus of the Cloud Appreciation Society. Yes, it is a real organization, with real members whose members "pledge to fight "blue-sky thinking." Their manifesto - poetry in motion really - speaks well about them. The first paragraph states: "We believe that clouds are unjustly maligned/and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them." The second paragraph declares: "We think that they are Nature's poetry,/and the most egalitarian of her displays, since/everyone can have a fantastic view of them."
The manifesto is not only about the value of the inconsequential but only to "remind people that clouds are the expressions of the/atmosphere's moods, and can be read like those of/a person's countenance."
My grandmother and great-grandmother were into the countenance, too. A red-tinged display of clouds during sunset announced typhoons. More yellow and a dash of reds meant storm in the coming days. The stars were not spared and surely not the moon: A star almost touching the moon (from the human vision) indicated that lovers were eloping. I wonder how stars and other heavenly bodies intervened in the human affairs. Perhaps, it was a way for the generation of parents to escape the shame of being not followed by their sons and daughters. When children's fate - from baptism to marriage and to residence after marriage - were still under the mercy and guidance of parents and grandparents, there was no way for partners falling in love to be married other than through elopement.
In Ticao, the act of eloping despite the fact that two lovers have decided mutually, is still a male-ordained act. "Tabag," is the word used. It is the same word used to describe the mother cat, her newly born kittens clutched by their neck, scampering to hide from preying eyes her children.
The imagery and metaphor come full circle, with the evil sweet moon flirting with the star, a man runs away with the nearly limp, submitting body of a woman in his mouth.
While the cat figures in the brazen act of man taking away a woman from her family, the rat is the distinguish icon in the courtship act itself. "Pigkikino" is the word I often hear from friends when they talk of how a man insists and persists in seducing a woman, often without the parents knowing about the deed.
The planetary bodies and the animals commingling and cooperating to give us the meaning of the universe do not only happen when the moon is blue. The Chinese and the Japanese and their calendar of animals do not have a monopoly of the heavens and the earth and the hells. In our land, we have the birds predicting strong wind, the ants announcing great floods, and the lizards the harbinger of visits and messages from good friends. Well, even our table utensils intervene in our life. Think of the spoon dropping to stand for a woman coming and the sharp protrusions of fork a news of the phallus, er, a man arriving.
This coming month, when the campaign begins, I pray that the skies go crazy with the designs. I do not want the many corrupt politicians to read signs from the stars and the clouds. After all, even if fate is written in the stars, there are always chances of being star-crossed, like lovers.