Introduction to ‘tokology’
Despite the Web and social networking everything that happens still begins to happen in real life and in real time. Word-of-mouth is still as powerful as ever. This fact is encouraging. It suggests at least that the virtual world has not yet entirely swamped us. Real culture still survives. Take the giant among house lizards, the gecko, the ubiquitous toko.
Before the toko there had been a bubble for the tarantula. Only recently did the Maker discover that there were native spiders who lived in soil, did not spin webs but instead hunted like any other predator. He thought there were only kaka, usually sold in little plastic balloons to little schoolchildren near little school gates all over the city. He worried, of course, for the implications this practice has on the local kaka population. Still, the sight of kaka hunters burning up brushes on the hillsides on moonless nights would qualify as a sight to gawk at and surely with awe and trepidation. Still it seemed inevitable that soon a bit of cult-public attention would refocus itself towards another species of spiders entirely. Enter then, the myth of the tarantula.
Tarantulas are land spiders that can be raised in an aquarium and live on a diet of little insects, including cockroaches. When large enough, they will even eat mice. “Large enough” means as big as a saucer. Indeed, the idea is to buy a small one and then raise it until it becomes enormous. There is a market daw for large tarantulas in Manila as well as the rest of the world. The talk on the streets was that the returns could go to six figures. And so people began raising tarantulas.
The myth of the tarantula would grow on its own volition and time: There were tarantulas who were hairy and should not be raised by those with asthma. On the other hand, there were tarantulas that did not shed. There were tarantulas imported from Brazil, which were, of course, more expensive than the native ones. Some were more poisonous than others, some even fatal. And those who did not like tarantulas could always raise scorpions. Soon, young students began taking their poisonous arachnids to school to impress their peers. Eventually the field of exotic pet-raising started growing, becoming in its own time a sort of industry and subculture.
The Maker still remembers the first time he went into a pet shop selling what it called a “desert gecko.” It was priced at P9,000. For the life of him the Maker could not make it out as any different from the gecko living in his ceiling blessing his household with the wonderfully familiar music of its croaking, which, as the stories go, is also a precursor of rain. Whatever, it rid his house to some extent of pesky flying termites, which regularly visited his lightbulbs at odd times.
But now there are stories of geckos being sold for hundreds of thousands of pesos if you can get it to grow to over 300 grams. The stories continue that there have been geckos that grew to many kilograms (of course in China), which sold allegedly for millions. Why are people buying geckos? The word is that Malaysians buy and eat the geckos for the medicinal properties of their meat. But perhaps we abuse the Malaysians with this talk. Even so, everyone seems to be sure the market is there. There is a bubble and the hunt is on.
The Maker’s musician friend and fellow XO? member Oliver Seville tells how a group of his neighbors were drinking and exchanging notes on the toko one night. The banter was eventually disturbed by a thunderous croaking from an old man’s shanty nearby. Before the night was through, the shanty would be practically demolished. Apparently, the poor thing fled into the bamboo haligi (post) of the shanty. Surprisingly, this sortie did not end in a fight. The old man had himself overheard the conversation and quite voluntary joined in the hunt. The toko turned out not as big as it sounded owing perhaps to the sound-amplifying properties of the bamboo house, now missing one of its posts. Worse, the toko shed its tail as they are wont to do when scared. This meant a few grams off the weight and at least four months waiting for the tail to regenerate. Not to worry, bamboo posts are easily replaced, especially if replaced in part by the dreams we exchange between each other.
And of course, if nothing else, all these prove that despite the age of computers we will always fall back on our ancient oral tradition, the act of myth-making, stories over stories of tales told and retold by word of mouth spawning a world in and of itself. In the real sense, this is “our own world.” Here we are not constrained by Western science and the prerequisites that allegedly define what truth should be. In many ways, here is a world that is at least more wonderful than what is regularly fed to us online and over cable TV. This, especially because it is in the truest sense of the word a world more real. Whether or not factual, they motivate us to action, the actions in turn becoming part of the mythology moving us to tell the tale to each other, and laugh. These are the tales we need. Here, finally is the battleground of art and literature. Despite everything, there is still a world out there. And it will ever be contested ground.
