Dwelling Place
I just finished a book recommended by one of my favorite bloggers, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits.
The title was The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.
I did not know that lemon cake could be sad, and the child in the book did not, too. At the back of my mind was the other book/movie Like Water for Chocolate but I suspended the animation, not wanting to color this latest book with my own perceptions (or that other book’s perceptions). Which were pushed back to the forgotten anyway (which reminds me, I have to get to that book again).
Of late, I have been reading several books where people have super powers. Except they are real and not in the realm of the imagined.
Okay. I may be naive but that was my takeaway: these people are real and they had problems. No, not problems, but abilities which are so far off center that it becomes a disability.
Like people who can taste emotion in food, which mostly, interestingly, is one of pain.
I remember feeling that once, when I was looking at the statue of Our Lady of Manaoag being paraded before me (she visited Cavite). I could have sworn I felt her pain, and that it was palpable in the air. A statue! She had been bearing so much pain and my child-mind wondered why. I said to myself, then, God must be real and He feels. Or at least she (the statue) does.
And then, in the book, there was a person who could smell the feelings of other people. It must be scary. This character was known to put a strap to cover his nose and mouth from the assaults of smells/feelings. In the (literal) end, that character smelled his own death. I could only imagine that was probably disconcerting, with a ring (ding!) of finality that one cannot comprehend nor stop.
And then (again, in the book) a person became a thing – escaping or integrating – into the thing. Becoming invisible. Yet not. Becoming a chair.
And at once I am reminded of a mantra. Become the tree. Be the tree. Maybe it is possible.
And then the condition called “synesthesia” from children’s book author Pseudonymus Bosch. That is, making music with colours and/or musical notes with smells (there are varying types and degrees).
At the end of it, humour. And reality.
Why these are paraded before me, I do not know. Why we have a spate of books like those – and all in my radar – I do not know. I am not one to look for signs, or see warnings and encouragements in signs.
But it just makes for a magical, amazing, interesting world.
There is so much we cannot fathom. And an author – an author – has the license to delve deep, dig within, to something that not even the brain can see because these things, they can only be felt (or whatever it is that sixth sense does). They are imagined, yes, it has hue and colors and an outline yes, a germ of a an idea, but only a mind that does not dismiss possibilities is the mind that can conceive those.
The message: there are no limits.
It is us who put the limits, the boundaries, the barriers within and outside ourselves. There are so much more to discover – about ourselves, about the world, about others – if we let ourselves explore.
I sometimes think the television is a miserable contraption because it gets us out of ourselves, because we need to focus on it to be fully assaulted by it – light, sound – that our minds are engaged and it is encapsulated, imprisoned by the experience.
That this, what we call the fireplace of the 21st century, is but a distraction from us getting to our truest potentials.
How hard are we to peel from our favourite TV shows? Yet life revolves. Things happen in the minutiae, without us even acknowledging, accepting or celebrating it.
It is a campfire without the conversation, or a one way conversation.
If we are made of stories, how much are we made of other people’s stories, of television?
Is that good, is that bad?
Maybe it is not all bad. Maybe, it is also how we communicate. We just need to know when to draw the line and give in to our inner synesthesia.
Our inner abilities.
Maybe, it is just there lurking somewhere.