Here's That Rainy Day

Maybe I should have saved those leftover dreams?
Funny, but here’s that rainy day.
Here’s that rainy day they told me about
And I laughed at the thought that it might turn out this way.
Where is that worn out wish that I threw aside
After it brought my love so near?
Funny, how love becomes a cold rainy day.
Funny, that rainy day is here.


Of all the days of the year that it had to choose from, a typhoon passed directly over my island on Christmas Eve – at 9 PM, no less. For two hours I listened to the approach and departure of one express train after another. At 11 PM it tapered off, with an occasional train swinging back to remind me of the storm’s power. I managed to drift off to a nervous night’s sleep after midnight, blowing out my candle and only using the battery-powered fibre-optic Christmas House that I bought in a fit of nostalgia 11 years ago as a much-needed nightlight.

A snowstorm would’ve been preferable. A snowstorm would’ve been welcome on Christmas Eve. Indeed, if it had been a powerful blizzard that dumped three feet of snow, with drifts burying cars, that paralyzed transport, cancelling flights and closing the airport, it would’ve been welcome on Christmas Eve. If the mayor told everyone to stay home, to not venture out, who needs to go anywhere on Christmas Day? And even if there were a power failure, as always happened whenever it snowed or sleeted in the South when I was a boy, it would call forth the image of a family huddled for warmth, perhaps before a blazing fireplace, sharing the priceless gift of being together.

Here, when the power fails, my electric fan stops working and, even at night, I begin to sweat. The only difference, now that I am acclimated, is that I no longer mind sweating as much as I once did. And early last Wednesday on Christmas morning, everyone ventured out to survey the devastation. Whole groves of banana trees had been felled; trees that had hung on to their branches were denuded of leaves. You could almost see a horizon. Houses you didn’t know were there appeared, missing their jungle cover. The sun was unobstructed and incredibly bright. The shade of the palm trees was no longer there. But if I showed you a picture, before and after the typhoon, you wouldn’t be able to see much difference. Natural disasters, that come in many guises in the Philippines, expose the fragile infrastructure to devastating damage. It seems at such times that the country is only held together with scotch tape and string.

I feel like I’ve blundered into the last stanza of Larkin’s “Here”:

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

Since my arrival in these climes of tropical weather, I have seen my personal record of successive days living without electricity broken three times. (My original record was three or four days, established, if memory serves me right, in 1971, when an ice storm knocked out the power in Columbia, South Carolina.) Here on my island in 2008, a typhoon called Frank knocked out all the power for nine days. Then, in 2011, an earthquake left me without power for 14 days. And then, as a sort of culmination, typhoon Haiyan, called Yolanda here, took it away for thirty-seven days. It would be wise, I suppose, to learn to live without electricity, since its absence brings about so much – what else can I call it but suffering? But that would require the unlearning of a lifetime of habits with which I am unable part.

If I wanted to describe to you what it’s like to have power restored, for a bare lightbulb on the ceiling to suddenly come to life and shine through the darkness (oh, what darkness!), I might allude to the experience of a prisoner of war, tunneling his way toward freedom, and after interminable days of labor and subterfuge, always on the point of being caught and finding all of his labors go to waste, he climbs out of the hole to find that he is outside the wire, that he made it. Now the run to freedom begins in earnest.

So here it is - the last day of the year. If I bothered about auspices, this moment is most auspicious. Alas, the circumstances couldn’t be less auspicious. One of the most common superstitions among these people who live in the dark (and who seem to like it there) is when the palm of your left hand itches, it means money is coming. But you mustn’t scratch it, or the money won’t come. Just like living here – having an itch you can’t scratch. As much of a skeptic as I strive to be, I find myself annoyed by such folk ways. Yet whenever my left palm itches, I sometimes stop myself from scratching it. It reminds me of Primo Levi, who once found himself in a situation - in Auschwitz – in which he came close to renouncing atheism:

This happened in the October of 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death. Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the "commission" that with one glance would decide whether I should immediately go into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it. (The Drowned and the Saved)

I wouldn’t want my skepticism to be tested on the point of death. I don’t think I could be so resolute.

As for my resolutions, I hope to be wiser one year from today. If I can be richer, let my riches come in many forms. Out goes the bad old year. In comes the new.

Holography: Addendum

Sunday I was watching a Discovery program called Rocky Mountain Railroad (10 years in the tropics has made Canada look like paradise) and a man in his early twenties, enthusiastic about his job with Canadian Rail, rolled up his sleeve to show off his employee number, what looked like eight digits, tattooed on his forearm. All I could do was shake my head. Think of all the numbers, social security and bank accounts and PINs, that we all have to memorize. The young man admitted that his job is very important to him, and that he plans to make a lifelong career out of it. But even this doesn't excuse him. No one but an idiot who has never heard of the Nazi concentration camps, in which inmates had their prisoner numbers tattooed on their forearms, would get a tattoo of their employee number, social security number, or a girlfriend's cell number on his forearm. Do a Google search for "who had numbers tattooed on their forearms?" You won't see a photo of that Canadian guy.

So I gave the kid a little credit, but not much, by thinking that maybe he got the tattoo in all innocence, that he did not know about the tattooed forearms of concentration camp inmates. But that doesn't pardon him either: knowing about those inmates' tattoos and getting a tattoo of your own anyway; or living 74 years after the end of the war against fascism that someone in your family, a grandfather perhaps, took part in and not know anything about those tattoos? It's unlikely that the young man has not seen one of the X-Men movies. In the very first installment, set in "Poland 1944," the boy who would grow up to be "Magneto" notices the tattoos on the forearms of the prisoners. Does it ultimately matter where we get our information, as long as we are informed? As I argued in my previous post, I have to believe that it does.

In his relentlessly shattering book, If This is a Man, Primo Levi recounts his "Initiation" into his life as a prisoner in Auschwitz:

"Häftling [prisoner]: I have learnt that I am a Häftling. My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.

"The operation was slightly painful and extraordinarily rapid: they placed us all in a row, and one by one, according to the alphabetical order of our names, we filed past a skilful official, armed with a sort of pointed tool with a very short needle. It seems that this is the real, true initiation: only by "showing one's number" can one get bread and soup. Several days passed, and not a few cuffs and punches, before we became used to showing our number promptly enough not to disorder the daily operation of food-distribution; weeks and months were needed to learn its sound in the German language. And for many days, while the habits of freedom still led me to look for the time on my wristwatch, my new name ironically appeared instead, its number tattooed in bluish characters under the skin.

"Only much later, and slowly, a few of us learnt something of the funereal science of the numbers of Auschwitz, which epitomize the stages of destruction of European Judaism. To the old hands of the camp, the numbers told everything: the period of entry into the camp, the convoy of which one formed a part, and consequently the nationality. Everyone will treat with respect the numbers from 30,000 to 80,000: there are only a few hundred left and they represent the few survivals from the Polish ghettos. It is as well to watch out in commercial dealings with a 116,000 or a 117,000: they now number only about forty, but they represent the Greeks of Salonica, so take care they do not pull the wool over your eyes. As for the high numbers, they carry an essentially comic air about them, like the words "freshman" or "conscript" in ordinary life. The typical high number is a corpulent, docile and stupid fellow: he can be convinced that leather shoes are distributed at the infirmary to all those with delicate feet, and can be persuaded to run there and leave his bowl of soup "in your custody"; you can sell him a spoon for three rations of bread; you can send him to the most ferocious of the Kapos to ask him (as happened to me!) if it is true that his is the Kartoffe/schalen-kommando, the "Potato Peeling Command," and if one can be enrolled in it."