By JP
Malig
EVERY MAN, in his youth -
and who is to say youth is ended? - meets for the last time a shaman, the man
who made him what he is finally to be.
In a brief description, man confronts himself - his own self, which in
its manipulations, will precipitate a last miracle, or like a sorcerer's
apprentice, wreak the last disaster.
It is of this last miracle, however, that I would write. To do so, I have
to describe my closing encounter with the personal shaman of my youth, the man
who sets his final seal upon my character.
To tell the tale is to symbolically establish the nature of human
predicament: how nature is to be reentered; how man, the relatively unthinking
and proud creator of the second world - the world of culture - may revive and
restore the first world which cherished and brought him into
being.
I was twenty-three years old when I met that man, and it was, of all
unlikely places, in a busy thoroughfare of Nonhabudri, Thailand. I was about to
enter a building to meet a colleague and had come in through the facility's side
doorway.
I was slowly climbing a great staircase in a slanting shaft of afternoon
sunlight when I distantly became aware of a man loitering at the top of the
steps, as though awaiting me there. As I climbed the steps, he swung about and
began to descend.
At the instant I saw his upturned face, my feet faltered and I almost
fell. I was walking to meet myself.
The massive brows and forehead looked up to me as if to demand an
accounting of the last few years of my life where I held and let go of various
jobs, relationships, friends.
Unwilling step by step, I climbed the stairs before his baleful eyes. We
met, and as my dry mouth strove to talk to him, I was aware that he was passing
me as a stranger, that his gaze was directed beyond me and that he was hastening
elsewhere.
His eyes, were not, in truth, fixed upon me. I held the image - but not
in reality - of my own self.
Phantom or genetic twin, he passed by and the crowds of Thailand closed
inscrutably around him.
I groped for the marble railing and braced my continuous ascent. Around
me, travelers moved like shadows. I was a similar shadow, made so by the figure
I had passed.
But was that indeed myself whom I passed by on my way up? In so many
cultures around the world, tales of doppelgangers or personal doubles have been
documented. Of men and women meeting a mirror image of themselves in person and
in flesh.
But what terror, save the terror of meeting yourself face to face could
have enveloped me in those few minutes?
On a taxi ride going back to the hotel I was staying, the answer
came.
I HAD been betraying
myself. It was this that brought the terror.
I
had been wandering for the past few years. But all the time, a part of myself
strove to maintain a sense of direction - the I, who strove for inner
contentment. Finally exteriorized, he stepped down the stairs to confront me in
that afternoon twilight.
Whether he had been imposed in some fashion upon a convenient facsimile
or was a genuine illusion was of little importance compared to the message he
brought.
For the first time in many months, I left unfinished personal businesses
and sought the silence of a nearby cafe. I was pale and drained of physical
strength, but I knew that it was time for a change. My zest for life was
returning.
I once journeyed for several days along a solitary stretch of coast. By
the end of that time, from oddly fractured shells on the beach, little distorted
faces began to peer up at me with meaning.
I had held no conversation with a living thing for many hours. As a
result, I was beginning, in the silence, to read again and to read like an
illiterate. The reading had nothing to do with sound. The faces in the cracked
shells were somehow assuming human significance.
Once again, in the night, as I traversed on a vast road on foot, the
clouds that coursed above me in the moonlight began to build into archaic,
voiceless pictures. That they could do so in such a manner made
me think of a paper
written by an anthropologist-friend that the reading of such pictures long
preceded what we call today as language.
Language, when it first appeared, is the very cradle of the human
universe - a universe displaced from the natural in the very common
environmental sense of the word. In this second world of culture, the arts and
music, forms and images arise in the brain and can be transmitted in speech,
both written and oral, as words are found for
them.
And it is we, those of us who make our living through communication, who
constantly shape languages. From this gift of language, we are able to
manipulate the outside world, transpose objects or abstract ideas in a similar
fashion, and make a kind of reality which is not present, or exists only as a
potential in the outside world.
It is this sense of power to create and to destroy has made men of the
greatest imaginative power conscious of human inadequacy and weakness. There
emerges a person's desire for a "rebirth."
Stimulated by his own uncompleted nature, man seeks a greater role and
purpose, restructured beyond nature like so much in his aspiring
mind.
Thus, we find the Zen Buddhist, as described by the scholar Suzuki,
intent upon creating "a realm of emptiness where no conceptualism prevails and
where paradoxical 'rootless trees' grow."
The Zen Buddhist, in a true paradox, would empty the mind in order that
for the mind to adequately receive or experience the world. No other creature
than man would question his way of thought or feel the need of "sweeping clean"
the mind's cloudy mirror in order to unveil its insight.
WHEN I was a small boy, I once lived near a stream
that wandered over the ricefields in our town. Between occasional floods, the
area became a tall reed forest, taller than the head of a
man.
Young boys roved this
wilderness in groups, and guerilla combats with reed spears sometimes took place
when boys from another part of town ambushed the hidden
trails.
Now and then, when a
raiding party sought a new path, one could see from high ground the reeds
shaking and the closing over the passage of life below. In some such manner,
nature's green barriers must have trembled and subsided in silence behind the
footsteps of primitive man - he who stumbled out of the vine-strewn morass of
centuries into the
full sunlight of human
consciousness.
The reed forest of
personal and racial childhood is relived in every human generation. One reaches
the high ground and all is quiet in the shaken reeds. The nodding stalks spring
up indifferently behind us, the way a part of the past is lost when wefinally
turn to look back.
There is something
unuterrably secretive involved in man's intrusion into this second world, into
the mutable domain of thought. Perhaps, he questions still his right to be
there. Some act unknown - an initiation - is still demanded of
him.
For this purpose, he
has travelled far and wide, but all in vain. A greater sacrifice is demanded.
For what is increasingly required of man is to pursue the paradox of
return.
So desperate has been
the human emergence from fence and thicket, so great has seemed the virtue of a
single act carried beyond his nature, that man hesitates, as I had similarly
shuddered to confront a phantom on a stair.
Written deep in the
human subconscious is a simple terror of what has come within us from our
childhood, which sometimes haunts our dreams. Man does not simply want to
retrace his steps down to the margin of the reeds and peer within, lest by some
reason, he be permanently recaptured in his origins.
Instead, men and women
prefer to hide in the cities of their own creation. I know a friend from Manila,
who, when she visits the countryside, complains that the crickets keep her
awake.
I knew another who had
to be awakened screaming from a nightmare of whose nature she would never
speak.
As for me, a long time
student of the past and of human culture, I too have my own puzzling
dreams.
Deep within the
subconscious, the dreams impart a subtle message. For by no slight effort have
we made our way through that reed forest.
Something unseen has come
along within each of us. The reeds sway shut, but not as definitely as we would
wish.
The glimmering lights
of the urban forest man has created farther and farther lured him away from the
swaying reeds. The concrete jungle would better contain his thought and fix his
dreams upon the night sky.
Nevertheless, man's
crossing into the realm of the modern world has forced him equally to turn and
contemplate with renewed intensity the world of the reed
forest.
It is this reed forest
that nourished man in his infancy and childhood. It took four million years for
us to find our way through that reed forest, and after that, only a few
millennia to head for the stars.
The story of great
thinkers, whether Judaic, Chinese, Indian or Greek, is the story of man in the
process of enlightening himself, not simply by modern tools, but through the
inward growth of the mind that he may yet fully master through knowledge of
himself.
"The poet," Ralph Waldo
Emerson once wrote," must reach a point nearer the sky than all surrounding
objects down to the earth, and into the dark, wet soil, or neither is of
use."
Today, that effort is
demanded not only of the poet, the writer and the musician. It is demanded of us
all.
For without genuine
self-knowledge of one's roots, he will head nowhere.
He must seek his way
home.