THE ART AND SCIENCE OF STARTING ALL OVER AGAIN

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

This week has been quite a ride. I had to be in Manila with my two sons, Gabe and Odon, to attend the wedding of another son, my namesake, from a previous relationship, whose mother passed away years ago due to illness which I ascribed to stresses and worries on account of her incarceration under the martial law regime.

The day after we arrived, my son brought us to her future wife’s family and I dutifully answered anticipated queries on my life story. I felt I had to assure them that despite the convulsions in my personal life decades before, I started all over again in Bohol and now I am living quite a normal life.

Although they were civil about it, I knew I had to somehow erase possible worries that they might have  about my past and their daughter’s future as part of our family.

A day before the wedding, a Sigma Deltan, from a sorority allied with our fraternity, Upsilon Sigma Phi, during our student days at UP Los Banos, arranged lunch at a Makati Resto so I could meet three fraternity brothers whom I had not seen for half a century. Over a two-hour lunch, the topic was more on what happened to me from the time I disappeared from the campus in the late Sixties. They saw each other quite often after graduation and I sensed how close their families were since they maintained contact over the years and had no need to be in some kind of question-and-answer forum during lunch.  

During the wedding ceremony held at the chapel near what is called the Archbishop’s Palace in Mandaluyong and the reception at a restaurant called Lemuria at nearby Horseshoe Village, the overriding theme of the various events in which I participated was that of starting over again. 

While on the plane back to Tagbilaran, in-between naps and exchanging smiles and occasional pleasantries with the pretty and heavily made up Air Asia stewardesses, I preoccupied the conscious and subconscious part of my brain with thoughts about what seemed to be the art and science of starting over again. I realized that this theme prosaically termed starting over  again is quite a dominant one in our personal and real life, in literature or sometimes in our own imagination.

Outside the routine of daily existence, this theme is elegantly packaged as, say, hope and redemption, death and resurrection, despair and triumph of the spirit, and so on. This theme of falling and rising each time we fall and similar admonitions from early childhood to old age, in the inevitable journey from birth to the end of mortal life, we are caught in what seems to be the Art and Science of Starting Over Again, presumably after we fall.

The Art aspect may refer to the unique ways we do it as in writing a poem and doing a painting; each one decides on how to start a new life from the ashes of our misfortunes, so to speak. Do we start another fire and do we collect the ashes and bury them so that we can have a symbolic gesture to begin a new Life? Indeed we start all over again in our own unique way.

The Science bit is how to do the basics of logic-based methodology of slaying the dragons of incomplete knowledge, misconceptions and subjectivism in defining new objectives and strategies as we mend the mental fences wreaked by miscalculation in our planning and in reading motives of friends and other relations involved somehow in our day-to-day decisions.

And so it came to pass as I went through the wedding ceremony as a father to the groom, whose visits to our place became fewer each year which was probably his assertion of independence, financial or emotional, half of my brain was processing the circumstances of our life together, its ups and downs, and the many starting overs we had to go through as we sought to define and re-define our respective roles as father and son through varying stages of growth and reflection and re-growth.

And so it came to pass as I narrated briefly during the wedding reception our story as father and son in the context of a people’s struggle against injustice and oppression and eventual liberation, at least in symbolic terms rather than in substance, half of my brain was processing the myths and phantoms of imagination we have pursued and discarded over the years characterized by countless starting overs, each time with a resolve to have a new lease in life despite previous downfall and misfortunes.

And so it came to pass as I answered queries regarding where I have been during the past half a century from highly-esteemed fraternity brothers Gerry Collado, Rey Villareal and Naz Racoma, whom I knew as college scholars during our UPLB days and are now distinguished alumni from Harvard, Rutgers, Cornell and AIM, half of my brain was processing the life and times of 33 of our generation, arrested, tortured and made to vanish from mortal existence to achieve immortality in the lives of those who continue to start the struggle all over again in the hills and slums and remote islands using digital tools of mass awareness and redemption from poverty and despair.

In-between those events related to family life and social affiliations, which have endured through decades of physical absence and non-Facebook existence,  I have subsisted on a mixed mental diet of news from both print and TV and it gave me a sense that this country after several administrations  run by the elite classes, is also going through a process of starting all over again.

The recent national election was framed in the popular imagination as a battle between good and evil. Which side you are on depends on which candidate you choose and not the party to which you belong.  

Indeed it’s democracy Philippine-style which is actually reflective of the cacique system, of landlordism, in the context of a modern capitalist state with landowners owning the means and tools of the new market place and have evolved  into lords of industry and political power while the poor remain poorer and multiply their kind so many times over year after year.

As in previous after-elections scenario, the elected Great Leader has proclaimed a new era of CHANGE in capital letters and portrayed himself as the knight in shining armor this time ready to charge the windmills of crime, illegal drug trade, corruption and incompetent governance.

This starting-over-again drama, however, has a new plot, interesting and creative in several respects:

-a President,  self-proclaimed leftist of a different hue but actually neither of both sides, committed to eliminating crimes and to decentralized governance through Federalism but showing dictatorial tendencies and also crude public behavior(perhaps only for appearances to appeal to macho psychology of the Filipinos, probably part of the Art of Starting Over Again, eh?) ;

-a Vice President, self-proclaimed pro-poor leader but without portfolio in an administration that is supposed to be pro-poor;

-a minority party of 3 members transforming itself as a majority coalition for change across diverse political persuasions signing up  more than 300 members in less than three weeks after election, which validates the view that our politics still revolves around personalities, feudal and dynastic lords actually, rather than principles and firm stand on issues;

-the party of the proletariat transforming itself as collaborator of the predominantly elite classes in a coalition of convenience to get better deals  in a global capitalist-driven economy for the benefit of bigger nations and their monopolist investors;

-the majority religions trying to gain moral leadership and political influence after harsh criticisms about some lapses indicating corrupt practices and moral lapses among some bishops and priests;

-the militant youth and labor sectors unable to mount credible opposition and expand their mass base to be an effective force for social transformation in Philippine society;

-the established mass media, particularly those in Metro Manila, being mocked almost from day to day by the President-elect as being tools of vested interests rather than a credible partner for nation-building;

-the social media now dominated by the more articulate and affluent among the youth who use irreverence, as well as weird syntax and language, to confuse their elders and attract attention to themselves in pursuit of the greater love of self; and

-the continuing practice to mix entertainment gossips and publicity stories with legitimate news in programs broadcast nation-wide followed by soap operas from 7.30 to 10.30 p.m. Monday to Friday to feed our voracious appetite with mostly romantic stories about love triangles and juvenile loves.

Now back to the scene of my son and his bride getting married in a Catholic ritual with a priest who now and then would interrupt in good humor recitation from a prepared script. At one point, he said he knew my son was not that religious but he should follow the counsel of the Church and those present in this most solemn of ceremony so he and his wife would remember Christ always and the need to love and serve Him.

There was no mention about the country and the poor but, I suppose, it was sort of given that you consecrate your marriage vows in the unspoken context of liberating the poor from the constraints of poverty and inequality. Otherwise, despite our privileges and entitlements, we will be distracted now and then by noise of protests and probably gunfire, in a country now on the eve of starting all over again in a never-ending cycle of hope, despair, redemption, despair, hope …

I now enjoin our teleserye nation to kneel and pray as we start all over again a new cycle of despair and  redemption -  hopefully with the real heroes and heroines winning in the end.

 For comments, email: npestelos@gmail.com

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NMP/24Jun2016/11.36 a.m.