Wave or Drown: The Symbolic Meaning of EDSA
The Symbolic Meaning
of EDSA:
A Right of
Passage
By Danicar Mariano MA-LCS
As Texts can Oppress, So too
can Texts can Set Free
There’s
an old Chinese curse that goes: “May you live in interesting times.” And
certainly, we are living in scintillating and literally explosive times
where, more than ever, we are coming to understand the necessity of “reading
as if our lives depended on it.”
(Rich) Until now, we may have thought of this dictum as “OA”[1] –what
GMA and her detractors accuse one another in what can be seen as a childish
game of mirroring insults.
[To paraphrase:
FVR/Opposition forces: Declaring
State of Emergency, How OA!”
GMA forces: Why are you reacting so violently about
declaration 1017? You’re the one that’s OA! ]
Needless to say, we have been taught that
reading is not for us. “At most we have been taught to read as if our grade
depended on it, the next scholarship, the next job, fame…No questions asked
about further meanings.” (Rich) But now, as the State of Emergency proclamation
1017, has us whipping out The 1987 Constitution, and reading between and
beyond the lines of newspapers for hidden insights to our countries uncertain and
fluid future, we know that reading is not the theoretical,
academic game we’ve often thought of it to be. Especially since “the democracy we’ve signed up for may be altered
through interpretation, by those who hold power.”(Hilbay) Indeed, what does reading
and writing mean in these times of chaos and turmoil?
The
one word answer: Everything. We’re coming to understand, more
than ever that “reading and writing is a matter of survival, and not to
reinvent the word and world is to disappear.” (Rich). This notion isn’t just being OA. Many authorities
want us to believe its OA so we
wouldn’t engage in it, so we wouldn’t access its revolutionary potential.
Especially in times of censorship, we come to understand that researching,
rewriting and re-visioning history, knowledge and our lives—more than being a
matter of survival, is also an act of being radical.
Language is the battleground. Language is the propaganda. Language has been used to keep truths and
rebellious thoughts as bay. Language has been used to lie to us, over and over
again so that we finally believe them to be truths.
But the call is
not to reject language. That’s as much possible as it is for a fish to reject
water. The call is to be disturbed, to “learn how to read…allowing what you’re
reading to pierce the safe and impermeable routines.”(Rich) There is much more
at stake than just multiple question quizzes and grades. What is at stake is
where we put our stakes. What is at stake is whether we go on believing in a
language that manipulates and oppresses or go on a quest for a language that
will set us free.
As Conrado de Quiros’ article goes:
These are times of
murder and mayhem, of the strangling of sovereign will of the voters, of the
stifling of angry voices, of the voiding of all that is decent and fair. These
are times of cynicism and despair, of growing indifference to injustice, of a
rising capacity to tolerate abuse, of an expanding ability to factor in the
worst in us. What do you do in the face of this, believing that language can be
employed either as a weapon of self-defense or as a scintillating stratagem to
keep thoughts at bay? (qtd from de Quiros)
The value of reading,
the value of revision: we could succumb to others people’s readings, allowing
ourselves to drown in the sea of collective opinion, or we can learn to swim,
reading these symbols and re-experiencing them as our own. But we must also be
warned, there’s a price to pay for freedom of the mind. In a country where
democracy is an illusion, freedom of the mind is often paid for with
incarceration of the body, like in the arrest of Argee Gueverra, Randy David,
Liza Masa (and many other less prominent people who participated in the rally
commemorating EDSA.) But we are in between a rock, and a hard place. If we
refuse to write our lives, we will have no life, just as if we don’t know what
we want, we will never get it. “If we don’t know what we want, we end up with a
lot of things we don’t want” (Palahniuk).
Use It or Lose It
Our unconscious has the power to expedite our greatest
dreams but we refuse to engage it because we within it also lies our greatest
fears. When we detach from the great wave of the unconscious however, which at
its depths, connect to the national unconscious—our long buried patriotism—we
strip ourselves of the capacity to feel and to imagine fully. It is to deny the
source of our creativity and our sense of history. It is to refuse to
acknowledge the side of us that knows how to read dreams and symbols, the side
of us that knows everything is cybernetic: constantly influencing everything else;
the side of us that grasps synchronicity and the responsibility of meaning. (Ka-hulug-an
–The Heaviest of Burdens.)
The synchronicity, for example, of GMA Southern Leyte with geologists cautioning that the topography is still very “unstable and
declaring emergency rule the day of the anniversary of Edsa –the alignment that
“the very day dedicated to the fall of martial should be dedicated to its
resurrection 20 years later” (de Quiros). The synchronicity, for example, of
938 people buried alive in Guisaugon,
dangerous,” and with rescue workers admitting that “we don’t have much hope,
but we are not giving up yet.” –With all the muck we are in, they might as well
have been talking about the whole country. Whole memories can be erased. Even villages can be “wiped off the map.”
The
Weight of Symbols, The Power of Myth
The symbol of EDSA—often
highly contested, sometimes idealized in nostalgia, sometimes manipulated in
propaganda—is always an open invitation: connecting us to our national collective consciousness and transporting
us into a portal of time where we can re-experience it. Symbols, as we’ve
learned, allow us to be both character and interpreter, director and actor at
the same time. We get to experience and feel what the symbol of EDSA really
means even if we weren’t there. This experience of a symbol is “intensely
personal, and surprisingly political.” (Hampl)
Symbols are dangerous, dynamic and powerful things. They
are touchstones, yardsticks. They judge what we have become and who we will
dare to be. Every symbol connects those who have experienced it, to those who
are experiencing it, to those who have yet to experience it in the dimensions
of past, present, future, whose distinctions, the unconscious and quantum
realms know does not exist.
You never force a symbol to serve you: lest it rebels
against you. We’ve seen this with GMA trying to use “EDSA” for her vested
interests, but having it escalate to a massive unrest instead. We are not the
masters of symbols; but if we are lucky, being faithful servants to symbols
gives our lives meaning and weight. “It’s not what you want, but rather what it
wants” that is followed (Hampl).
Rather than ask a symbol, “Symbol, what do you mean?” we
are urged to ask instead: “Symbol, what do you want of me?” (Mitchell) That
is the proper reverence with which to approach a symbol –moving beyond us arrogantly
scrutinizing its meaning, to us being humbly moved and propelled by it.
Re-experiencing a symbol allows us to live twice. This second living is both “spiritual
and historical” allowing us to reach “deep within the personality as its grasps
the life-of-the-times as no political treatise can.”(Hampl)
Indeed, a symbol is even capable of inciting passion and
rebellion. Fortunately for us, you cannot incarcerate a symbol.
Fortunately for us, you cannot close down a symbol when it does not agree with
you. Fortunately for us, no one owns a symbol, just as “no one owns the past.”
(Hampl)
Truly, a person’s
education is incomplete, until (s)he learns to read her dreams. Until we know
how to read symbols, until we know how to surrender to our deeper consciousness,
all knowledge is worthless.
At
best, all we can do is allow a symbol to work through us. “You do not choose
your topics,” Conrado de Quiros and Patricia Hampl both agree: “your topics
choose you.” Who wants to write about pain and suffering when you can write
about daffodils and sunsets? Yet you write about it because the voices in
your head will not let you rest until you have; because your life will, all
the more, revolve around them until you do, and because, as de Quiros tell
us “you bear witness to the blood in the
streets.”
Rina
David and Chuck Palahniuk tells us that “we are living in a state of perpetual
deja vu, all over again.” For sure “everything here is a spinning in the
circle; to that there is no doubt. The question is how and in what way we can
face this circle, instead of continually closing our eyes in the face of it.” (Nietzsche)
Filipinos, in our trauma, often refuse to remember. The weight of the past is
too much. It is easier to not talk about it. It is easier not to ask any
questions. It is easier to just become
what we hate rather than fight it.
But this
administration’s hatred for terrorism is making it one of the biggest
terrorists of all. Total order (military rule) or total chaos (anarchy), can
only lead to a monster. Totalitarianism, the suppression of sexual, religious,
political and ideological difference and the logic of Holocaust and Martial
Law, is at work whenever we do not allow our own biases and authority to
be questioned. That’s when you really have to wonder what kind of basis that knowledge
and authority is grounded on: as solid
as the mountains of
Southern Leyte
, we can say.
The denial of difference does not lead to harmony or unity. It leads to derangement.
It leads to Multiple Personality Disorder.
A
rite of passage is a right of passage, and no one has the authority to quash
that call towards growth. Those in the past who did were overthrown. Crisis, in
its Chinese ideogram, connotes danger, but it also connotes opportunity. (The Yin-Yang)
A rite of passage is all about finding that rebirth in a simulated death. Every
symbol has its opposite—and that’s why speaking in symbols is the only way to
give justice to the chaos, beauty, and complexity of life. “It is its translation, but also its
metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing.” (Octavio Paz)
The
call is simple, but not without challenge. In light of “interesting times” that show us so many are
out there, ever-willing to erase memory, and ever-capable to suppress
imagination, “we must do the work
of creating this personal version of the past,” lest we run the risk of having “someone else do it for us” (Hampl). More than ever, there is a need for us
to remember, to “touch the radiance of the past.”
In the act of
remembering and writing we yearn for a world that is “gone or lost, effaced by
time or a more sudden brutality…into the endless and tragic recollection
that is history” (Hampl). That is the earnest but urgent call: to read and write
as if our lives depended on it; to communicate our answer, or otherwise
be dependent on the world’s answer.
[1] Overacting
