Into the Depths of Spirituality: Critical Analysis on Literary Mysticism

INTO THE DEPTHS OF SPIRITUALITY: CRITICAL ANALYSIS ON LITERARY MYSTICISM
By E.J. Caoile, C.L. Castilla, W.M. De Guzman, C.T. De Torres & G.A. Dimasin

Filipinos are known to be religious and inclined to spirituality, and it is needless to say that they believe that there is more to life than what meets the eye. They understand that things that concern spirituality exist, though they are intangible. Being a Christian nation, Filipinos possess beliefs about life and death that accords with what the Bible says—that life is temporary and when it does come to an end, a person will arrive at some destination. James 4:14 states, “Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” In addition to this, Hebrews 9:27 says, “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” Even Filipino literary pieces regarding this thought reveal the Filipinos’ acknowledgement of these truths. Examples of these pieces are the poems “You Can Choose Your Afterlife” by Mario Eric Gamalinda, “Is It the Kingfisher?” by Marjorie Evasco, and “Gabu” by Carlos Angeles, and the short story of Gregorio Brillantes entitled “The Distance to Andromeda.” These selections all meet at an intersection point—the understanding of life’s impermanence and its perpetuation in the “afterlife.”
Firstly, these beliefs of Filipinos are being resounded in Mario Eric Gamalinda’s poem “You Can Choose Your Afterlife,” a poem which talks about death. The speaker starts to express his or her line of thoughts about death by narrating the “strange customs/ Of the T’boli.” He goes on to say that the people of this tribe conjectures that a person is judged by the kind of death he encounters, and he furthermore enumerates the kinds of death and the afterlife that corresponds to each. Obviously, the recognition of death’s existence is present in the poem. In addition, it is as if the speaker, in his storytelling, makes us feel like death is but a real and normal thing. It is because the prevalent tone is not horrifying, sad, or bitter, but rather, it is unemotional, straightforward, and matter-of-fact. Although there is a little bit of a questioning and pensive feeling added in the latter part of the poem, particularly in the lines “And you didn’t tell us/ Why you wanted/ To go”, the speaker returns to his previous tone, especially when he said, “You won’t miss us/ Everything moves in the same direction.” As we can see, this poem does not look at death as a rare occasion, but as a plain and everyday happening.
This poem, however, goes beyond the concept of death; it also talks about the “afterlife.” All throughout the poem, the readers are being told that there is something else to experience after the event of death. For example, he who dies as a hero in a battle goes to some kingdom where he is hailed, he who drowns goes to the depths of the sea, and so on. The speaker tells the reader that there is always a destination or a place where a person will go to after he dies, and that things won’t end just because of death. We can also notice that there is not much punctuation marks used in the poem to end a thought or sentence. This can be interpreted as an emphasis on the point of the poem that death does not put a period or any punctuation mark on the course of a human soul, but instead, it is a door to some other world out there. These apply not only to the T’boli, because the more that a person reads this poem, the more will he see that the situations described by the poem can also apply in real life. It is indeed notable that the author cleverly manipulated this strange custom of the T’boli to give a brighter picture of death and the afterlife to the reader.

YOU CAN CHOOSE YOUR AFTERLIFE
Mario Eric Gamalinda

According to the strange customs
Of the T’boli
Who believe we are not judged

By good or evil
But by the kind of death
We meet: to die by the sword

Is to enter the kingdom
Where everything
Even the sound of water

Is red. They welcome you there
With the tintinnabulation
Of copper bells

And the lamentation
Of bamboo violins
And all night long

A wounded sun hovers
Over your place of business
And those who drown

Return to the navel of the sea
(That’s what they call it)
Where they become subjects

Of Fon Muhin, god
Of all creatures
Who breathe water. And those

Who die of sickness
Go to Mogul
Where they receive everything

They’ve always desired
But are not free of suffering
And those who kill themselves

Go to a place exactly like earth
But where everything sways
Even in sleep

And you didn’t tell us
Why you wanted
To go

We can only imagine you
In a world where
You can’t keep a cup

Of coffee still
And people keep changing
The rules of soccer

Because the ball
Keeps rolling away
You won’t miss us

Everything moves in the same direction. You were always
One step ahead

The poem entitled ‘Is it the Kingfisher?’ by Marjorie Evasco is also an example of a Filipino poems that shows how temporary our life is and how the heart yearns for something or more importantly, Someone eternal. This is evident on how the persona in the poem is describing everything that surrounds him as ‘blue’ which is defined in the book Colors by Luciana Boccardi (2009) as something that symbolizes immateriality. Everything that the color blue encompasses becomes free of their physical substance. Hence, the book also described it as a color of distance.
In the first part of the poem, it is notable that the speaker is reflecting and contemplating passionately on how he desires God. The word “desire” is actually a heavy word. It means a strong passion, and by that we can tell that the speaker does not have petty emotions, but rather a powerful, innate drive within him. For him, God is essential for every human being as he characterizes God as “basic.” He also described God as “blue” which could possibly mean that God is infinite, immutable, and eternal, the total opposite of life here on earth. In the middle part of the poem, the speaker made use of the word “kingfisher” which is also present in the title itself. A kingfisher is a bird and birds are associated with the human soul based on the book 1000 Symbols by Rowena Shepherd (2002). According to this same book, birds are also represented as a form of communion or conversation between the heaven and the material world. This exhibits the meditation that the speaker had done which made him suddenly realized that nothing in this world is permanent except God who is the eternal and immutable one.
With these realizations, the speaker has finally found the answer to the question he had been longing for from the start. As stated above, the speaker understood that all life here on Earth will eventually cease or perish. We are all meant to die whether we like it or not. The thing that comes next after death or the destination where our souls will go to after dying is the main thing that the speaker has been reflecting on. The speaker has already been seeking for something eternal or of high spiritual worth from the beginning. This thing seems so distant from the speaker which could be seen from the multiple or repeated use of the word “blue” in the poem. Just like what Vasilij Kandinskij stated, ‘the more you seek to grasp blue, the more it seems to recede, to flee.’ This statement shows how the speaker’s quest for the sublime cannot be grasped fully while he’s still alive. It just seems to be moving farther away. The speaker had finally comprehended that that something eternal he had been searching for could be fully achieved only after our life here on Earth.

IS IT THE KINGFISHER?
Marjorie M. Evasco

This is how I desire God on this island
With You today: basic and blue
As the sea that softens our feet with salt
And brings the living wave to our mouths
Playing with sounds of a primary language.
“God is blue,” sang the poet Juan
Ramon Jimenez,
Drunk with desiring, his hair, eyebrows,
Eyelashes turned blue as the kingfisher’s wings.
It is this bird who greets us as we come
Round the eastern bend of the island;
Tells us the hair breath boundary between us
Is transient in the air, my skin and yours
Transparent as the sea, permeable to the blue
Of tropic skies and mountain gentian.
Where we sit on this rock covered with seaweeds, I suddenly feel the blueness embrace us,
This rock, this island, this changed air,
The distance between ourselves and the self
We have longed to be. A bolt of burning blue
Lights in my brain, gives the answer
We’ve pursued this whole day:
Seawaves sing it, the kingfisher flies in it
This island is rooted in it. Desiring
God is transparent blue – the color
Which makes our souls visible.

Gabu, another Filipino writing regarding this topic, is a lyric poem which is handcrafted by the artist Carlos Angeles. The said poem has existentialism, which is a philosophy that begins with being the human subject himself, as its predominant idea. The poem tells us that our lives are impermanent, just as the sea that always moves to the shore. This fact that life is fleeting and that death is certain is well-known. The lines “Farther than sight itself, the rockstones part / And drop into the elemental wound” and “All things forfeited are most loved and dear” tell us that everything here in Earth will come to an end. The words “daylong bashing” tell us that the beating of the sea only lasts for a day. The “spilt salt” can also tell us of the same thing. Salt represents the corporeal, or the bodily and material, element of life, and if this symbolism is used, “spilt salt” can mean the death of the physical body. Salt is also used to preserve food, and in that context, “spilt salt” could mean a failure to preserve this life. As the sea waves can stand for the violently crashing problems in our lives due to the violent images that the diction brings, it can likewise be interpreted as the colossal dilemma that a person finds whenever he realizes that life will soon end and when he looks for something permanent to which he can hold on. The last line “It is the sea that pursues a habit of shores,” which could be a conclusion of the raised matter, can attest to this. The word “pursues” speaks of the constant efforts of “the sea” to secure or attain the stability that it searches for. The persona understands that although the “shore” or death ends life, it also brings rest from the “battering restlessness of the sea.”

GABU
Carlos Angeles

The battering restlessness of the sea
Insists a tidal fury upon the beach
At Gabu and its pure consistency
Havocs the wasteland hard within its reach.

Brutal the daylong bashing of its heart
Against the seascape where, for miles around
Farther than sight itself, the rockstones part
And drop into the elemental wound.

The waste of centuries is grey and dead
And neutral where the sea breached its brine
Where the spilt salt of its heart lies spread
Among the dark habiliments of time.

The vital splendour misses. For here
At Gabu where the ageless tide recurs.
All things forfeited are most loved and dear.

It is the sea that pursues a habit of shores.

The Distance to Andromeda is a story about Ben and how the movie he watched with his friend Pepe affected his views about life. At the start of the story, there is a scene where the main character and his friend are watching a sci-fi film about the survivors of Earth and their search for a new place to live in. The survivors are inside the rocket ship during their quest. The rocket ship can symbolize their faith which brings them to their “destination”. The line “A sun looms up from the blackness, more golden and more gentle than the star they have always known...” implies that the survivors finally finished their search. The movie suggests that life here on Earth is temporary but we will definitely reach our “true destination” if we have faith.
Throughout the story, Ben is contemplating about the meaning of life. He also wonders about his importance in the world in comparison to the vast universe; it is hinted in the line “He stands alone on the bridge, and he is suddenly lonely, the vast humming turning within him, waiting… He feels very tiny, only a boy, shrinking, helpless, standing between the dark river and the lights in the sky.” Bridges symbolize the links to two separate realms—the Earth, visible and known, and Heaven, invisible and unknown. His internal conflict is resolved during their family dinner when his father revealed to him the meaning of the movie he watched. He realized that despite his helplessness, he is still important and loved by his family. This story is not about the literal distance of Andromeda but the distance or journey of the human beings to God, which is their ultimate destiny.
Life is considered as a journey in order to arrive where we want to be. During that journey, we have our ups and downs. We earned some achievements during that journey that makes us more motivated to go through this entire journey. Also, we encounter many problems that serve as obstacles which make us stronger and more confident that we can reach our destination on the right time. During that journey, we may encounter people that will become part of our lives for that moment, but there will come a time that they will need to leave and you cannot do something to prevent or to stop it. Life here on Earth is not permanent, and we will all end up to our final destination.
As we can observe, the selections meet at a common ground although they present different perspectives on this in different approaches. All the pieces argue that life here on Earth—the life we know that is surrounded by the palpable and visible things—is only temporary and that despite this mortality, the human soul still continues its course even in the afterlife. These reveal that Filipinos believe that death is not a rare occasion but a natural thing to happen. When their time comes, they know that they can’t do anything to prevent or to stop it and that their only choice is to accept what is destined. However, when a person leaves this material world, he will soon arrive at some spiritual realm. Death is the end of the life here in Earth but it also marks the beginning of our new life. Tracing the roots of these beliefs, we can see that it all goes down to the belief in a Divine Someone—in God. If not for the recognition of God being the Creation, His creation would not see Him as a final resting place.

References:
Boccardi, L., Pescatori, V.,& Vighy, L. (2010). Colors: Symbols, History, Correlations. Venice: Marsilio Editori

Shepherd, R. (2002). 1000 Symbols: What Shapes mean in Art & Myth. New York: Thames and Hudson.