Content about Signos

Sorsogon is now a city. I realized that when I went there last week to evaluate a non-governmental organization. With that appellation comes the expectation of a busy place and people with some sort of sophistication in taste. We expect angst in the crowd and pollution around. And yet, the citification of towns and communities are not exactly promotions in status; they are predictions of more problems of all forms.

Jessie was first a cousin. But she became a poet, a good one, published and winning many awards. When presented with a choice between medical internship and a fellowship at Silliman University, she opted to postpone her medical studies in favor of a summer with poets and writers.

I step out of the house while the wind howls like an old man with gout. The weather is appropriate: bleak now, bright now, with just the right amount of sorrow. It is the last day of the year and even if this terminating of the year is a fairly recent human invention, we are convinced really that the 31st of December of any year is the last day of the year. And, sorrow and regrets are fashionable and smart response to this realization.

If for a moment God would forget/ that I am a rag doll and give me a/ scrap of life, possibly I would not/ say everything that I think, but I/ would definitely think everything that I say.

     I would value things not for how/ much they are worth but rather for/ what they mean.     

-Farewell Letter ascribed to Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The 8th of December in the Catholic calendar is Immaculate Conception, a mystery of infinite density that non-Catholics would find allure in. Years and years ago, in 1941, this tremendous mystery, however, vanished with the skies filled by what were called then enemy planes.

That day was the beginning of the Second World War in our country.

The way we call each other now resolves a long and interesting debate about kinship. The old debate was between the search for the universals in human relations and that which saw in the terms we used to address each other the trait of languages – fluid and symbolic.

(The exhibit from students of Department of Media Studies was caught between the Tercentenary celebration of the devotion to our Lady of Peñafrancia and the semester break that followed it. This article pays tribute to the young artists and saw publication on the Art Page of Business Mirror where the author is the resident Art And Media Critic.)

When she passed away, she was far, far away from the island of her birth, Ticao. But no matter, Manay Coring always managed when she was alive to link us to that land with her suman latik, a type of suman the preparation of which was long and tedious. The glutinous rice had to be soaked overnight in water before they were wrapped in banana leaves. The leaves themselves had to pass through a scrutiny as regards its age - not too old and not too young.

The Catholic Encyclopedia defines "excommunication" as being excluded from the communion. This act must be one of the most mysterious acts of the Church. The same encyclopedia describes excommunication as "the principal and severest censure, is a medicinal, spiritual penalty that deprives the guilty Christian of all participation in the common blessings of ecclesiastical society.

Amidst the festive rush and celebration of the Tercentenary of the Peñafrancia devotion, there was something else happening in one of the resorts out in Carolina. The place is called Casa Ofelia, owned by one of the students in the batch, Roger Cariño. The former classmates coming from Manila and other places in the region were gathered to celebrate a teacher and his memories.

Nostalgia always has a charming place when people try to remember things. This group, added something to memory - and that was action. They launched a project that transformed the book of Fr. James O'Brien, SJ, into the more accessible electronic form.

A day after the Traslacion, I was with kin in the old shrine of the Lady of Peñafrancia. We were waiting for the next Mass, and I was outside looking up at the façade of the Shrine. The icon atop the portal of the church is a copy of the Virgin de Pena de Francia in Salamanca. She is a Black Madonna in the original but in the Shrine she is all dark brown monochrome. She appeared not to resemble at all the image inside.

Certain towns are near but if you do not go back there, they recede into the distance, and become very far.

The fiesta in Canaman has brought me back to the charming town that even academics from as far as the U.S. are well aware of. I met, in fact, an American anthropologist who told me he feels he has been to Canaman already, just by reading the essays about it.