Feel

There are some things I can’t quite explain. So I don’t bother understanding them anymore, in a logical kind of way, that is. Yet, I know there’s a gem of truth at the way I feel about certain things.

Like for instance writing here. I feel like being on stage and washed by floodlights. One gets conscious with the attention and couldn’t help not playing up sometimes to the audience, giving in to what pleases them.

There’s nothing wrong with that per se except when you end up not enjoying or fulfilling yourself anymore at what you do.

One feels it inside the inner bliss and contentment derived from an intimate communion with the audience or for that matter, you, the reader.

The challenge is how to remain oblivious to the attention without getting insensitive to you, and keeping the intimacy albeit imagined, with you. No writer would want to lose his or her readers.

So much for that. I have a feeling I’m thinking aloud.

But that’s not just the only thing I find unexplainable.

I shouldn’t be bothering myself with things that happened more than a century ago yet, unexplainably, I feel moved by them.

Take for instance the demolition of the Parian Church in 1879 as instigated by the Spanish Augustinian friars who felt jealous and bitterly envious of the opulent, marvelous church built by the Mestizo Sangleyes of Parian. In the first place why would supposedly religious people do such an unchristian act of ordering a church’s demolition? Well, given the record of the friars during the Spanish colonial period what they did shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Still, every time I read about it or pass by the fire station where it once stood - and whose pillars are said to be that of the old church - I feel an unexplainable rage, sadness, a feeling of tragedy and loss. Just imagine how life in the downtown area would have been like, had that church remain standing up to this day. Maybe it would have helped preserve the way of life there and more of the physical structures that once stood in the 19th Century (or am I just being too nostalgic?)

Now one returns to Parian and console oneself with a scattering of old houses and seemingly nondescript structures. Perhaps it’s the neglect that renders them nondescript.

I said in the preceding paragraph "…one returns to Parian" as if one used to live there and returns. One’s ancestors did and it’s the descendants who come back to visit the place. One finds not the warmth of home but the feeling of loss like a gaping hole; so huge it leaves a hollowness inside one can’t quite explain.

The Parian Church became the center of Parian’s life. The rich mestizo Sangleyes lavishly supported the Church partaking of their vast wealth amassed from trading and planting cash crops for export to the world market.

Parian was a separate town from 1755 to 1849 before the gremio (administrative ward) system was put in place. (Mojares, 1983) Also in 1849 Parian parish which was founded in 1614 ceased to be a parish and was placed under the jurisdiction of the Cathedral. In 1879, the Parian Church was demolished.

One doesn’t dissect feelings or their expression in works of art like a laboratory cat. So bear with me here as I try to write (not explain) the unexplainable like my feeling a terrible loss for the demolished Parian church, and the old Parian itself whose absence paradoxically, left a haunting presence in the lives of a generation born long after it ceased to exist.