Tag Archives: Philippines

embroidery and textiles

handgeweorc : : leading the soul camel home

Camel

It has been five days since I returned to Darwin after a month-long visit with family and friends in Manila, and only today do I feel comfortable with being back home and taking up residence within my old life again.

The first two days were something out of Dante’s Purgatorio…I was using the words ‘lost’ and ‘disoriented’ repeatedly, to describe the way I was feeling. Often these words were accompanied by a strong urge to cry. During the daytime I wanted nothing more than to sleep the time away…sleep as though dead; but at night I would fidget and squirm next to my husband, complaining of restlessness and imaginary discomforts.

“Oh, jet lag!” the modern world would diagnose, and prescribe pills or a bizarre schedule of waking and sleep that involved long walks, alcohol, and caffeine. But jet lag (extreme tiredness and other physical effects felt by a person after a long flight across several time zones) just doesn’t manage to explain away the full range of ‘effects’ experienced by someone who has just traveled, over the space of a few hours, from a Third-World Asian megalopolis like Manila, to the relatively sparsely populated, big empty streets of a small-scale city like Darwin in Australia…with the total time difference comprising a mere hour and a half.

Neither is culture shock (the feeling of disorientation experienced by someone who is suddenly subjected to an unfamiliar culture, way of life, or set of attitudes) to blame when, as now, the traveler is having difficulties assimilating the details of her own home environment!

What has really been going on? The way I see it, I was traveling too fast this time, and my soul was left behind. In Singapore, actually.

Life is so short, we must move very slowly.
—Thai proverb

I have hardly ever traveled by plane. This recent Darwin-Manila (and back again) trip has required my first international flights since 1979, when my parents took me, aged 5, to the USA. Otherwise, Kris and I pretty much travel overland on foot or by bicycle…further afield, we go by bus or car; we move between neighbouring islands by row boat, pump boat or ferry, and between neighbouring countries by sailboat. The few times I boarded a small plane for a domestic flight I experienced a confusion and disruption similar to (but only for a few hours…a day, at the most) my recent condition.

In his books, essays and interviews on the subject of modern travel, Alain de Botton explains:

“There used to be time to arrive…time to get used to the idea of being in a place…nowadays, people constantly get to their destinations too quickly…arriving in Mumbai or Rio, Auckland or Montego Bay, only hours after leaving home, their slight sickness and bewilderment lending credence to the old Arabic saying that the soul invariably travels at the speed of a camel.”

My soul arrives at the speed of a camel…(may as well be a camel, then, eh? Why not? A Soul Camel) to which ancient wisdom I would like to add that, according to my grandmother, the Soul—like a small child—is easily lured away from its familiar (hence boring) body by all things new and unexplored…charming little colonial streets, marketplace tchotchkes, the beckoning wonders of a foreign land. What am I saying? I’m saying that when I took the train into the city of Singapore and got off at Bugis Station, my soul took one look at those little shops with marzipan mouldings in pastel colors, and parks full of modern sculptures, and went off to explore the place on its own…taking all of five days to catch up with me in Darwin.

Makes perfect sense. Explains a whole bunch of things that neither jet lag nor culture shock can. Alain de Botton (sort of) concurs…and that’s always a good sign. What is more, my grandmother moved through her life with the purpose and authority of a military commander—looking much less lost, insecure, and confused than a lot of so-called rational and scientific people I have met—so why wouldn’t I take her word over theirs?

What to do till the camel comes home…

Don’t fret, for it will catch up. In the meantime, don’t make too many demands on yourself…accept that you’re not quite arrived yet—not all of you, anyway—so you can’t expect to snap perfectly into your old life like a piece of Lego.

Go slowly, be patient with yourself and others, find activities that you can work on quietly and in solitude.

Activities that ground you, similar to the ones witches recommend after working a major spell or raising a cone of power, are good: gentle housework or manual tasks like sprucing up the pot plants, weeding a patch of garden, doing dishes, folding dry clothes, or an easy craft that you know well and won’t have to think too much about…anything that you can do without having to make big decisions or come up with creative solutions, can help ground you.

Such actions connect you to the physical reality of where you are; they help build mini routines, that in turn help to re-establish the bigger routines that made up your life before you went traveling. Routines are firm shells that enclose and delineate space, so that your soul camel—with its creativity and passion and expressive fluidity—can feel safe to check in, unpack, and then jump on the unmade bed until dinnertime.

I planted one packet of marigold seeds and pruned the basil………I brushed the cat for an hour each day………I did the laundry………I brought my bicycle back up to snuff (replaced two broken spokes and trued the rear wheel, changed one tube, cleaned the gears, removed a troublesome mudguard)………

I started on a journal. I worked slowly. On Tuesday I stitched the paper and wooden covers into a coptic binding. Yesterday I played with a few headband ideas that didn’t work out. No matter. I undid everything and went at it from another direction.

This morning I think my soul camel finally arrived—every hairy, harrumphing inch of it—for I was suddenly vacuum-sucked out of my lethargic and bewildered state, into an absolute frenzy for everything I was doing before I left Oz in early March…embroidery, bookbinding, writing, mail art, visual journal pages, reading, working out, designing things, drawing, gardening…oh my god, I want a finger in all these pies, and a lifetime of plums!

I’m back. We’re back. How’ve you all been? ◊

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embroidery and textiles

Oh Shoot…

From the perspective of memory, photography appears
as a jumble that consists partly of garbage…

—Siegfried Kracauer, Photography

I’m going to be in Manila soon, for a month’s visit to see family and friends, and of course I’ll have my camera with me, though I didn’t use it much the last time I was there (in 2007.)

I did a search for some sort of “list of things to shoot while you are traveling” on the internet, and found a few that were sort of what I was after, though because these lists are guidelines for all travellers, to all countries, they’re pretty broad. There were basic topics like water, old people, young people, religion, sports, socializing, rich, poor, economy, food, art, history, views, architecture…

There was one category called “Odd/whacky/other”—like, huh? Why would you want to take anything else?

Investigating a camera. Butbut, Tinglayan, Kalinga 1948And there was that ever-popular theme (embodying everything there is to deplore about hackneyed National Geographic fodder) called Modern Vs. Traditional. One is assailed immediately by images of a water buffalo and farmer against glass skyscrapers in the setting sun…or hot young things walking leggily past wrinkled old women hunched over rice paddy mud…or lion dancers in full costume taking a burger break at McDonald’s…or (this one was offered by my friend Jan Carter) the photographer and his camera, with a zillion ragged members of the tribe (take your pick…Peru, Sakhalin, Kalinga, Angola) gawking behind him. The clichéd ‘cultural anthropology’ photograph.

I realized that if I took the lazy approach and followed someone’s internet list, I’d end up with a collection of mediocre photographs, good for little more than some cheesy Visit The Philippines website, a low-budget travel agency’s brochure, or yet another educational DVD marketed to schools (like this photograph, which was used to illustrate the geographical event “A river” As in, a generic river. Oh boy.)

So I got off my lazy butt and wrote a hit list of my own:

  • meat and fish markets
  • the slums
  • prostitutes
  • transvestites
  • the stark, the raving, the mad
  • street children and beggars
  • funeral parlours and tombstone carvers
  • the train tracks and the slums along the tracks
  • Chinatown and Muslim town
  • signage
  • the heartbreaking and nightmarish Manila Zoo
  • the pedophiles
  • the animals: horses pulling the carts, the alley cats, the pigeons, the dogs…
  • street food and street vendors
  • pedicabs and jeepneys, because they’re awesome
  • portraits
  • canals
  • Jesus
  • salesgirls
  • clergymen
  • plus many of the conventional topics I mentioned at the beginning of this post, of course…

In the end, it’s all garbage, anyway, but if I’m going to collect garbage, it may as well be different from everyone else’s garbage, no?

I think that because it was My Home for 31 years, I have never bothered to photograph The Philippines seriously. Took it for granted, as one does those all those familiar, everyday sights and places. This time around, however, I feel a real desire to take pictures of the things that make her distinctive (perhaps this is my way of gently acknowledging or announcing, to myself as well as to others, that Manila is no longer My Home…nor is the Philippines my ‘homeland’ anymore, for that matter. I have grown estranged from her, I have grown away. I could not go back there to live, and be happy, again.

Sad, yes, but hopeful, too…it is a re-enactment of the ritual of the child who grows up and walks away from the place where she was raised, this way that human beings have spread out into the world for centuries: driven away by conditions at home…or in search of conditions that couldn’t be had at home.

There are those who choose to stay—if you take them away, they wilt like Dutch flowers at the equator, their hearts are so emotionally woven into the soil of their families and homeland—and there are those who cannot wait to get out, desperate to shake off the ties that bind them to a place.

Kris and I were born the latter: he built his first wooden boat—in the dirty courtyard of their Communist-era apartment in Prague, and having never seen the sea— at the age of 10. And the first time my mother found me gregariously engaged with strangers, several heart-stopping blocks away from our Makati City apartment, I was three years old.

I’ve been wandering off, further and further afield, ever since. So much that I approach this upcoming trip to Manila like a tourist (with a list of subjects to shoot!), having moved so far away from it in my heart. Is this what Eliot meant when he wrote “And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”?


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embroidery and textiles

Festive Faking for the Holidays

I have been experimenting with felt circles and embroidery for the past two days. I was trying to make flowers but—and I blame the Morphic field for this—everything I have made so far looks like an elaborately decorated cookie. Better than actually baking trays of cookies, at least. Me and sugar, we don’t like each other much.

At a time of the year when everyone in the Christianized world is baking pretty things, or is preoccupied with eating and decorating, with buying yet more things, and with social get-togethers of one kind or another, my lover and I are settling in for a couple of quiet weeks at home, to read some books, draw and paint, to make things, and ride out the Christmas storm on our boat…with the pelicans and the crocodiles, who don’t give a damn about it either.

We don’t make a big deal out of Christmas in my home.  I long ago decided that, as far as  my life was concerned,  the cons of Christianity far outweighed the pros. And if I can’t get excited about the substance behind the holiday, then I can’t really work up much enthusiasm for the empty shell of overeating, enforced heartiness, compulsory family reunions and frantic shopping that’s left. Furthermore, my belovéd and husband, Kris, was raised by atheist parents in communist Russia; when he did espouse a religion, he chose Islam, for its sobriety, circumspection, and austerity.

I, on the other hand, was raised in the Philippines, where the holiday that commemorates the birth of a boy to a Jewish-Aramaic couple takes the form of a nationwide hysteria that brings forth, among other delights,  13-hour gridlock traffic jams in the cities, a sharp incline in crime, and a plague of street-hardened-urchins-turned-’carolers’ who descend upon people’s homes as soon as night falls, banging on large tin cans as viciously as they are able, shouting—

shouting, not singing (in their whole lives have these rough little imps heard a single word that was gently sung and not shrieked threateningly at them?)

—their carols in words so far removed from the language they were originally written in that they could not be more meaningless if they had been taken from the Ket language of Central Siberia (these kids don’t have a clue as to what they’re bellowing, it’s just a tradition of the season, god help us, and a lucrative one, and so it thrives.)

Quiet folk, who work for miserable wages all year so they can spend it at this time, escape their own homes (and the thirty groups of carolers that nightly beleaguer them) by going to the malls, where the Christmas decorations have been sparkling, and the Christmas music has been on shuffle-repeat, since October. It is also a tradition to squeeze, with thousands of others like them, into the parking lots, onto the escalators, into the food courts, down the shop aisles, and past the deft hands of the pickpockets of whom—along with traffic cops, urchins, beggars and muggers—it can honestly be said, love and value this time of the year more than anyone else.

To my adopted country, Australia,

You cannot imagine how refreshing it was to arrive in a city where “the Christmas Spirit” didn’t follow you home, caterwaul outside your front door in a pack, prowl around the back of your house nicking any small thing that was foolishly left in the garden (like the stepladder at my mom’s house, last year), and then run a roofing nail along the side of your car as it left. Thank you for leaving us in peace. I love you.

XXX, N.

Christmas dinner at home, when the last of the carolers had rattled noisily away at 10 p.m., was an emotionally fraught affair. The combined stresses of having to endure your family and possibly other relatives for long stretches of time (maybe even having gone shopping and then sat in 4 hours of traffic with them), Mum’s brittle exhaustion from having done “all the work”, Dad’s peevish, infantile insistence that nobody touch the food on the table until he had taken a dozen blah photographs of it (like we would never eat again? it’s just food. get over it. we’re starving. it’s late.), the bickering that would break out among us while we were eating, and then more fights after dinner as paterfamilias tried to drag everyone to church for the midnight service, despite our feeling quite the opposite of loving, peaceful, joyful…

Santa suit in the bottom drawerOh, Christmas! Your every little scrap of prescribed, fabricated festivity, the comic wretchedness of the Christian, suburban, middle-class family bound by tradition to punish itself this way, year after year, is lodged in my memory like the splintered bones of roast bird. I consider myself lucky to have escaped your rosy red claws, at last.

If you are crazy about your family, you don’t need a time like Christmas to remind yourself or to display that affection. If you’re not all that crazy about your family, not even Christmas with The Puppini Sisters in Dolby Sound can make it better.

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