For how long will I be writing about storms and typhoons?
I can understand the filmmaker who does films about the poor: he or she sees it everyday, hears the hunger, and soon, savors the wild aroma of despair. Instantly cinematic and with the wealthy Western world a ready market, the films about us become the legitimate/illegitimate porn display of our identities.
Poverty storm there is; is there a typhoon porn as well?
The two are close to each other—poverty is the bed of the destruction the typhoons bring. Have I seen the word “bed” linked to storms? My memory did not fail me. Indeed, Pablo Neruda in his Ode to Storm writes about it as a woman: She came all of a sudden/newly unleashed/out of her furious planet,/her cavern in the sky;she longed for sleep/and made her bed:sweeping jungles and highways,/sweeping ountains,/washing ocean stones,/and then/as if they were feathers,/ravaging pine trees/to make her bed.
When the first typhoon registered Signal no. 5 battered Bicol, I was aware of its intensity. I listened to the sound of the wind. I would not sleep. Never sleep through a storm, my father would remind us. Never sleep through tragedies. Who knows if you need to run away, to escape the winds and seek refuge somewhere?
Our grandparents’ home in Ticao Island was a refuge for many. During one of those calamities, the old, grumpy parish priest sought shelter in our house. True to the singular (sometimes irrational) hospitality of our culture, we had to move to a kin’s home beside us so the priest could have the big room.
The regularity of typhoons makes us experts in the area of annihilation. We do not ravage the surroundings explicitly (for that would be another topic on ecology) but we know how Nature can banish structures and memories. We know how unforgiving Nature is when it unleashes its forces against us. We see Nature as a person, and like our culture seemingly operating without logic.
On November 11, 2020, Wednesday, the lessons on typhoons came to us again. I was holed in at a regular hotel in the city. It was a day after Typhoon Rolly swept through our city and the region. For weeks already before that super-typhoon, another typhoon has reduced the supply of electricity in the area. I needed to write. There were deadlines to beat. Like traffic, a typhoon has ceased to be a viable excuse for not doing anything or fulfilling an obligation.
In that Wednesday, I went out to have my lunch. A folding umbrella was what I thought to be good enough in the rain. Walking to the mall, a strong gust of wind started rushing through the dilapidated structures of illegal vendors near the mall. I was in disbelief. Knowing my storm, I knew how to conduct my life before a Low Pressure Area; living and dying also could go on in a 100-kph-typhoon. That wind that stopped me at my tracks and pushed me to run to the side of a building was different.
In a matter of minutes, the typhoon was at our doorstep, and yes, pardon that dumb idiom.
Rushing to the mall and rushing through my lunch, I ran from store to store to buy a stock of bread, at least. The stores were pulling down their shutters. In minutes also, the crowd in the mall could not go out anymore as the wind started to howl.
I was barely able to make it to my hotel after I called a taxi to bring me there.
That night, the wind whistled. The online postings were unanimous about the sound of this recent typhoon. It did not moan—we leave this modifier to some poets; it whistled. The whistling was not lonesome—again we leave this sensing to the bad poet who may not be in the eye of the storm.
Correction: not in the eye of the storm but in the storm. See! Idioms do not apply to the real adventures, for to be in the eye of the storm, as an expression, means to be in the middle of a conflict or debacle. And yet, as some (we need to tread lightly on being scientists) meteorologists would assure us, the eye of the storm is the calmest part of the monster.
We have to be aware of the “wall of the storm.” Last night, that wall was around my old city. It flooded the towns around this city, covered communities, and made poor people poorer.
Last night, the typhoon became a person again. People were praying that it leave soon. In many complaints, the typhoon was a temperamental female; to some a divinity.
Then, a thread online started to gather intensity. It was about what took place last September, during the Peñafrancia festival, when the procession was called off. This meant the icon was not carried in a procession from her shrine by the river to the cathedral. Some devotees believe it was this omission that is now the cause of a series of typhoons causing havoc in the region.
A debate has ensued. One party believes the Mary who figures in the ritual is not a vindictive divinity. Mothers can never be cruel. Another side pontificates about the primacy of material correlations.
But we continue to think, to write up a storm. In the middle of the strongest, whistling wind, we can always ask many other questions. Why are there storms in a region that believes in the good God?
We can think about many things related to the tempest? What is its color? Neruda offers a dream: Last night/she/came,/livid,/night-blue,/wine-red:the tempest with her/hair of water/, eyes of cold fire-/last night she wanted/to sleep on earth.
Despair can make us think of destruction in colors. Despair can make us write on and on and on.
In the middle of the roar of rains, we can think of silence, as Neruda says it again: All of a sudden/there was a silence:/a single leaf/gliding on air/like a flying violin-/then,/before/it touched the earth,/you took it/you blotted out/the noise of grass/or stars…
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