Remembering Laon

Not enough has been said to honor Laon, the greatest God of the Bisayan cultures. It took William Henry Scott to put his name down on paper in his book, “Barangay: 16th-Century Philippine Culture and Society.”

It has been written that Laon will have nothing to do with the vain mundanity of humans. And so he lives away from them in the bowels of the great volcano, Kanlaon, smoking by himself impervious to everything that happens beyond his lair. What does he do here? All we can say of him is only conjecture verbalized into his tenuous and fading myth. Is he really there? What is he smoking? What language does he speak?

It is possible he speaks only in the language of unspoken thought. It is possible he deals with us that way. Entering dreams and putting ideas into our heads when we are not watching. It is possible he secretly watches us this way, watching from the great distance, pleasuring himself secretly with our pleasures, laughing at us derisively for all our mundane troubles, our transient sadness, our vain hopes. Where does Laon come from? Who or what made him? Does he even know?

We know every true God must be impervious to time. The principles of new physics requires this. For it is only illusion which makes us think we are trapped in the present this way. Only the singular acceleration of our travel holds us here. Travel faster or slower and then we would move somewhere and sometime else. We would move forward or backwards in time. Which only makes perfect sense where Laon is concerned. He lives in “forever” this way.

And as new physics tells us, forever is only a point in space and time. This point could well be inside the bowels of Mt. Kanlaon. It could well be everywhere as it could be anywhere else in the universe. What after all is the size of a point? Even the infinitesimally small would be a whole universe for the infinitesimally smaller.

Which is why it is most possible that an even bigger God made Laon. He made him this way for a good reason. He is impervious and uncaring of humans only because he would have been harmful to them if he were made differently. Had he been a meddling and caring God, he would have made humans less free than they are now. By all practical applications this can only mean they would be un-free.

Surely, there might have been less trouble, less human problems, less poverty, less children being killed, less suffering for all of us. He might have damned pork-stealing congressmen to Hell; or even perhaps made them disappear in a snap. There would have been no Vladimir Putin, no Assad, no Barack Obama. There would be no need for them. But what an empty life this would have been?

If pork-stealing congressmen, Putin, Assad and Obama were not here, we would have to invent them. The same way we would have had to invent bleeding-heart liberals, Republicans who wish for an Obama who would not ask anyone’s permission to bomb a foreign country. The same way we would have had to invent naughty gays, entrancingly beautiful lesbians and people who dream of the old days when all of them lived only secretly in their own little underworlds away from the attention of prejudiced fascists who still wish for enforceable laws against sodomy, those who still hold on to the creepy idea that God gave us AIDS to punish homosexuals.

Laon, for himself, would never do that. He occupies only the realm of thought and dreams where nothing is truly real and all truths are only stories, only claims, only fantasy, only myths, which are in turn only food for all manners of faith. Laon requires no adoration, no altars erected in his honor. If humans made one for him he would not go there.

Some say: Because of this he is therefore a useless God. Laon would have nodded his head and simply replied in the language of thought: How do you know I am he? Why not she?

And then he would fly or float or even flit into another person’s thoughts placing inside it another small thought. Perhaps a thought that would change the world. Or keep it the same way. Or even a thought of no consequence besides the consequence of rhyme, a beautiful phrase, a pretty line wonderfully weaving into the fabric of Einstein’s universe and hiding there, invisible just like Laon himself or herself or itself. We remember you Laon, one God among many, perfectly made, inside the failing memories of the Bisaya. May they live forever.