Everything done by man become ghosts in the run of time. It is a fact of entropy and how this universe moves ever onwards. It is hubris to think things stay the same way forever. Even the claims of science change and fade with time. Every belief as well. Even we ourselves eventually find our own end.
But that things end is not as big a tragedy as that they become forgotten. And this is why stories are sacred each in its own way. Stories too will pass away in their own time. But while they live every story requires its right to live.
When a person wants to remember something or wants something to be remembered it is only natural he or she will write its story. The stories themselves come back to life in the retelling. Are the stories true or not? It does not matter as much as that they are retold and travel from one person to another, from one geographic space to the next, or persist through time. Their life comes from their retelling.
The late great painter Pablo Picasso was credited for saying “art is a lie which tells the truth”. There is sense in his words even if it requires a special understanding. Another late great painter Martino Abellana once also advised his students not be constrained by what you see with your eyes. You should only be guided by it.
He was of course retelling an age-old tenet of philosophers and, oddly enough, artists who called themselves “realists”. The truth is often hidden and invisible. Francisco Goya’s paintings are often distorted as if his world was much different from that which we see. As in the paintings “The 3rd of May in Madrid” and “Cronus Devouring his Children.” These paintings seek to tell the story not as they might have truly appeared but as what they might truly have been. To get at the soul of anything one must paint of the soul and from the soul. And that can never look like the real world. It must go beyond it. Appearance always hides more than it reveals.
While they lived in that old haunted house in Ylaya, Dumanjug town, 73 kms South from the city, they never wondered if ghosts were real or not. They never asked that they be believed. They determined only for themselves whether to be afraid or not. It was never a fixed determination. Sometimes they were not at all afraid. But there were also nights when they could not help feeling safer being with someone as they walked into the shadowy old house.
Even when they did not believe and were not afraid, it was always a good idea to say “tabi” before they threw anything or even spat out the window. And since the toilet was an outhouse a bit distant from the house it was the custom to piss into a pot or out the window in the balcony. As they did this in the middle of the night, they always whispered, “tabi”. Better safe than sorry even though they did not believe in ghosts or thought of them as myths.
When they were children they played at night in the street fronting the house especially when the moon was full and everything was cast in shades of blue and gray. They played tubig-tubig, dakup-dakup and tago-tago. When their elders called them in, their reason was never just because it was late. It was always to keep from being taken away by other-wordly entities.
The story was told of their lairs in ancient trees and how they enticed you there with their beauty and enchanted food, how they put you to sleep or sent you into a dream forever to be lost to reality and the real world. And if you ever returned it would be to a different world and time.
And so you sat together beside the vintanilla of the old house peering out into the blue night searching for the slightest glimpse of it. None of you had ever seen that world and of course you wondered. And yet, truth or myth, you retold these stories to each other. And you always listened. Here was how you learned how to tell a story yourself. Here was how you learned how lovely they were to listen to. You might have realized also how your world was enriched by them.
And so now you might as well remember we are only as real as the stories we truly own and hold dear in memory.