December rapped with knuckles of rain. I opened the door to the balcony to be all ears—and all eyes—to the downpour.
I all but spread my arms towards it, and must have felt the same thrill as the one in an ancient poem upon seeing the drizzle which signaled the arrival of the beloved. The wonder was why the rain did not come earlier. We had sweltered for weeks, unusual for this time of year, when successively we would be whipped with a belt of typhoons. Instead, we had, not just days, but weeks of dry weather, so dry that I had need of lip balm, which I secretly administered for fear of being misunderstood.
After which, the deluge, sort of—as one would expect, and I did. But what I failed to reckon with was that, after we waited for practically the whole month of November, the rain should fall as though on the dot, at the first hour of the first day of December. Which was an acceptable surprise.
It seemed that a note was struck, of freshness, that December would be different, not just from all the other months—and not to forget that, in relation to them, already December is privileged (Christmas, and all that)—but also from past Decembers, but in the matter reliance is on the unreliablility of memory, because obviously there were rained-out Decembers before.
Note that this freshness is not of the daisy; it is the freshness of weeds, pictured by Hopkins as feral—on wheels, shooting long, lovely and lush. A wild freshness, in other words.
Which seems to be the note struck by Mark, when he describes the appearance of John the Baptist. He introduces him with a passage from Isaiah: “Look, I am going to send my messenger before you; he will prepare your way. A voice cries in the wilderness: Prepare a way for the Lord, make his paths straight.”
The key word is “wilderness.” The wilderness was where John made his entrance, “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” As the people came to him to confess and be baptized, John reminded them, “Someone is following me, someone who is more powerful than I am, and I am not fit to kneel down and undo the strap of his sandals. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
There is in waterlogged December the wildness of John, who wore a garment of camel-skin and lived on locusts and wild honey. And incidentally the rains connote the baptism that he performed.
What about us, where exactly is the wilderness? For surely one heavy morning rain does not a rough country make.
At noon, the second of December, my taxicab tailed a jeepney that had this line painted on its back—“I love the way you lie.” Now jeepneys are known to carry wild sayings, which are aimless and nonsensical, but ever droll. And the one moving before me kept me musing on what exactly it meant even after the taxicab had lost the jeepney at an intersection.
Was it addressed to someone in bed? A painting similar to Goya’s La maja desnuda would have been more to the point, and jeepneys are veritable mobile museums of postmodern art. No doubt, the author’s intendment was towards vagueness, for the meaning to be explored on several levels.
One such level might suggest the manner in which the other person tells an untruth, which seems to the speaker to be more charming than malicious, unless the speaker wants to be ironic in his remark.
Nonetheless, the remark hinted at a wilderness, a wasteland, in which deception has acquired a value, even if only as amusement. A lie is a lie is a lie.
Of course, I should guard against being a philistine. And, of course, I have no wish to denigrate poetic language, of which I am enamored. (I myself asked my students at one time to write a poem in which every line was a lie.) Still, in a way, although I regret the unfaithfulness and dissemblance that have brought it about, I am glad that now, here, there is such a loneliness. Because, as Eusebius of Caesarea said, “It was in the wilderness that God’s saving presence was proclaimed by John the Baptist, and there that God’s salvation was seen.”