If we can so misunderstand, then why have we invented the word “Love” in the first place?—Peter to Jerry in Edward Albee’s “The Zoo Story”
Albee has nothing to do with my story about the New Year. But the “zoo” has everything to do with how many of us confront, face the near future, and how we prepare ourselves for the coming year. It has to do with animals.
The firecrackers were few this year. In the old hotel where I stayed for Christmas Eve, there were e-firecrackers: bunches of what looked like lethal strings of the most threatening tiny bombs that cracked and crackled without smoke. While this was happening, the bellboys and other hotel staff were covering their mouths and ears. I looked around where the metallic hiss was coming and it was from that red contraption mixed with the tinsels looking over a huge, lonesome reindeer. Or was it a caribou?
Many things have changed except the narrative of animals who, as the plot unraveled, were called to the side of Buddha. Up to now, I cannot understand why an enlightened teacher would summon animals if only to concoct a cocktail of plots that would make use of zoology as destiny. Was it Freud who said “biology is destiny?”
I am confused. I must admit I am dazed. The arrival of the new year causes us to be alert when we start writing the dates to any document we create. Be it an essay or a poem hurriedly inspired by the obscenities of a leader, or a letter written just for the sake of exercising one’s fingers and hand—the need to write the date is an obligation, almost a compulsion, a desire to be correct. So, as we face the white screen or, on rare and
lovelier occasions, a blank sheet of paper or, even rarer and more majestic, an expensive parchment, the duty of every writer is to those three short words and number. Write the month first, then the date, and finally the year now changed. It takes a while to get used to writing down “2019.” Like love, the old year is difficult to shake off, for bad or good.
For every arrival of a new year, memories of a grandmother who believed in taboos and rituals of avoidance come back not to haunt me—for that is cliché—but to guide me. Do not oversleep or you will be oversleeping the whole year. She uses the old term from Ticao Island, mamulaan. Almost like a corollary to Emilia’s belief system was my father’s contribution from the lakeside town of Buhi. His voice, with such a terrific homegrown adeptness at old sayings, is clear still: Never wake up when all the dew on the leaves had already dried up. But there was also a grandfather—Elpidio—who never believed in any of this. This grandfather who talked of ritual kidnapping when he was a strapping young man was a Mason. He balanced for me the Space.
So, my New Year complex of beliefs is original. I am mighty proud of this.
I am, however, alone in this faith enterprise. When New Year comes, the botany takes over first before the zoology. Fruits are unwilling victims in luring a Universe to reveal itself. Interesting is how these fruits should be round. Does this tradition of thoughts disqualify the strawberries as fruit of good omen? What about the atis or sugar-apple? With its rough, segmented surface, what chances are there that this extraordinarily ordinary of fruits can whisper to our cosmic ears the fate of the days to come? And, who do we offer these fruits of Circumstance to? Do we eat these offerings or are these what Faith causes “boys to pile new plums and pears/On disregarded plate?”
But as soon as the fruits are eaten, discarded as rotten or forgotten, the animals rise to the occasion. And so, this year is the Year of the Pig. Happy and fortunate, that is the Pig of this reading. To the person born during the Year of the Pig—1959, 1971, 1983, 1995 and so on—one is said to be not romantic but warm, not a good conversationalist but good with people and so on.
Then there is the notion of what goes well with pigs. Let me rephrase that: What person born under the aegis of other animals go well with those born in the Year of the Pig. As the auguries go, Pigs are compatible with Goat, Rabbit and Monkey.
I don’t know with you, but I am not about to put my stake in identities
circumscribed by animals. Believe me, I subscribe in transcendence but I find it difficult to transcend this earth as I look into the eyes and wide ears of a pig, however the latter can stand for good fortune and wealth.
As the New Year rolls in, I’d rather look up to the stars. Those twinkling eternities that seduce prognostication and romance. But a point of clarification, I shall not venture a reading of how these stars are positioned. Some of them may be constant and some may constellate. I don’t care. I am for the stars that mystify, the ones that look down upon us all and convince me there are mysteries that cannot be written down. They are the stars (supplemented by the Moon) as simple, as difficult, and as dense as those of Emily Dickinson’s, the ones she spoke of: But, Moon, and Star,/Though you’re very far—/There is one—farther than you—/He—is more than a firmament—from Me—/So I can never go!
As for Albee’s story of the zoo, it has, after all, something to say with the New Year. More than the animals and even more than the stars, more than all the imagined shapes of pigs and more than what the horoscopes can contend with the mere holographs of the Truths out there, Love and its companion, Understanding, are all that matter for the Universe not to stop expanding.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano