After long negotiations with trucking services and door-to-door deliveries, my 40-year-old life in Manila arrived in the old city where I now reside. This “life” came via cargoes packed by my former live-out cleaner who formed a team, which placed in boxes everything in that apartment.
What should we pack, Kuya? Everything, everything… except the shelves and cabinets. Leave the old refrigerator and stove. Leave the tables and chairs. Leave the pails and basin—everything in the toilet and the back kitchen. Be careful with those little things, objects, on display and atop the TV cabinet. All the CDs please…wrap them well… Use bubble wrap.
As days went on, they would send me real-time video of the things lying around, including the broken glasses and figurines. The rats had the run of your home for more than a year.
After the arrival of the cargoes, I did not have the energy to unpack them. They were kept in the storage at a friend’s property. There was a reason for my unease and this was the nagging thought of what could have been left there. What would I not be able to account for? I was not going to blame the team organized by the cleaning lady.
One day, the arrival of more boxes of books not mine prompted me to attend to my own cargoes. One realization: I needed to unbox everything before I would be able to decide what to keep, give away, or throw.
One by one, the boxes, with the help of an assistant, were opened. There were books still tightly wrapped in cellophane. They were artefacts from the pre-pandemic days. The Big Bad Wolf came to Manila again by the end of February 2020. One of the books, J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire. What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, is the same book that would animate my theme for this week.
But first the contents of boxes and how I dealt with them.
Throwing away things was not easy. I designated boxes for the unwanted. The old clothes went into these boxes. Swaths of curtains, wide blankets and bedsheet. The crisis came when the tiny objects appeared from newspaper wrapping. Should I throw a set of cufflinks? I do not use them, never used them. What about these boxes of pencils? But they brought back my interest in sketching after my two eyes were cleared of dense cataract.
I came to a decision. The CDs would be given to my three siblings. Those that had been signed by an elder brother who had passed on more than 20 years ago would go to his children. He was attempting to catalog them back in the 90s when CDs were rare and quite expensive. The rest would go to my other brother. My sister gets to keep all the Don McLeans; the singer and the songs are her second religion.
There remained my collection of “horses.” Years of stay in Japan had introduced me to the varied folk interpretations of the horse—from the black Yawatauma of Aomori Prefecture to the Shinobigoma straw horse offered for good rice harvest, and Haniwa clay models of horses. They all go to my younger brother. That was my decision forged in a vow. And yet when I started gazing upon the tiny figures, I began to think whether I could keep two or three of them.
Removed from the shelves and now being gazed upon, the horses had assumed a luminosity. When I began keeping them, there was never a thought to give them away. And here I am, giving them away; it is not a fact but a promise.
Something was bothering me.
My eyes fell upon the smallest of them all, a white ceramic horse. It appeared to be readying for a jump, its two eyes the only dark spot on that graceful head. “Let me keep him.” But as I picked it up, another horse reared its blue neck. All its legs were broken. “You are going to stay with me.”
Why do these objects affect me? They are not alive, are they? But I have invested in them decades of my life. Could I push the arguments of J. Scott Turner’s and attribute sentience and intentionality to these objects? That they are not merely ceramics and stones but vessels of my own caring? I have cleaned them and kept them and now I am giving them away that they may add to the memories of my siblings and their children. That long after I am gone, they would still have these horses with their own stories, and, hopefully, their feelings about the beauty of these representations may guard their long, aging days when there is nothing to do but contemplate objects on the shelves without regard for time and the world’s passing.
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