Presently past futures

That was supposed to be me. I seem to have been clothed in a beautifully embroidered garment. My face was obscured by what I think is a mass book held by the late Monsignor Cirilio Almario. He would have been the parish priest of the Saint Augustine Catholic Church in Baliuag, Bulacan at that time. This would have been the Philippines back in 1974. The Monsignor would have been anointing my forehead with the oil of catechumens. I believe this ritual of anointing with oil was meant to strengthen the catechumen—the one receiving the sacrament of baptism, me in this case—to resist evil, temptation, and sin. This would have been the moment I was welcomed into communion with the body of Christ, the Roman Catholic Church, in this case.

And indeed bound I was to the Catholic community of the faithful. At the very least I was bound during all those countless hours I spent being educated by the Religious of the Virgin Mary at Saint Marys Academy from kindergarten to high school and by Jesuits at the Ateneo de Manila University.

As to this business of resisting evil, temptation and sin, well I can definitely say that I have had my fair share of falling off the wagon and still continue to do so. Perhaps what is different at this point in my life is that I feel I have come to apprehend what sin is closer to its supposedly technical meaning in archery, that of missing the mark.

What would that mark be? When I look back it appears that in the more distant past I may have had a more superficial apprehension of what this mark is. The mark I was aiming for back then would be what the young ones today would call normie goals. Do well in school to get into a good university. Do well in university to get a good job. Get a good job to be a good provider to your wife, kids and family. And so on. Not that there was something wrong with these goals per se. They were perfectly fine goals to have. However unmoored from higher transcendental ends in themselves, as I began to attain, attained, and continue to attain these normie goals they left me feeling empty. I felt a hollowness in the ground where my would-be achievements stood.

Living processes that veer to one side of the extreme usually at some point in time flip to the other side. Likewise, I flipped from assiduously pursuing clearly specified normie goals to a wild teleo-nomadic valley-crossing walking different paths for the heck of it and simply feeling my way through each cross-road without the definition of a specified endpoint in mind. The goal of goallessness. The joy of doing something not to get something else but for simply the joy of doing it, a funktionslust. Lust for the function itself not the product of the function. This teleo-nomadic foray has made my present life infinitely simpler, more complex, exciting and challenging at the same time.

Now I’m drawn into aspiring toward infinitely revealing ends. More of an expanding horizon than a fixed destination. Even in my goallessness experiments, I must admit there still was a point which pulled my goallessness efforts forward. The point was there albeit ill-defined. Now I’m feeling a more defined orienting direction. Defined not in a reductive, finite way but more in a transcendental, there’s always more towards this direction way. It feels less of an endpoint and more of a never-ending web of stories that aspire towards the truest truth, the greatest good, and the beautiful.

The man with spectacles looking at the Monsignor was my father. There’s something in this snapshot of his facial expression that fascinates me. I sense a melange of thoughts and emotions inside him at that time. The woman holding me was my godmother Ninang Beth. Behind her, the woman, two-thirds of her face obscured by Ninang Beth’s hair tied in a bun was my mother. In the one eye of my mother captured by the camera, I similarly sense a lot of emotion bubbling from deep inside into the surface. The other women gathered around would have been my godmothers as well.

Of course, all these sensings of emotions and thoughts I am doing right now spring from a fleeting moment back in 1974 captured by the lens of a camera and developed within the dark, wet bowels of an old-school photography lab. Yet when I hold and gaze at this thick paper monochrome photograph, it does something to the instant of my body’s biology and psychology. It affects my affect. And in that way this piece of 1970s paper is effective. I am reminded that the present is never just the present. Each present ephemeral moment I experience that pops in and out of reality are affected by an indeterminate number of causes and conditions of many things that have happened before. At the same time, each present ephemeral moment is pulled by an indeterminate number of imagined, aspired and feared futures.

Everyone was looking at the baby apart from my father and the boy weaving his way through the crowd and was captured by the camera in a deer-in-headlights pose. I am reminded of this pattern of centre and periphery. What is already existing reorients themselves towards a possibility in the process of incarnating into an actuality. I have not had children of my own but most of my friends do. When I visited these friends and stayed with them for a period of time I noticed how their lives have been predominantly reoriented towards supporting and enabling the children particularly when they were young. Then the children grow up and move up I see their lives forced to evolve and reorient towards another focal point of attention. I feel this fractally applies in a self-similar way to my single life. Now the centre to which I put most of my attention is the craft of acting and I see how this has and is reconfiguring how I allocate my physical, cognitive and psychological resources and who I interact with the most and in what manner.

In a very real way whatever I put my attention to repeatedly, religiously creates my present, recreates my past and enables possible futures.