Freedom in silence

Our title could very well be one of Simon and Garfunkel’s favored songs, The Sound of Silence, which to those of my generation was made famous in the film, The Graduate.

We are not promoting an old film, or an old song. We are entering one of our revered methods of focusing, centering, via negativa (among old monastics), the fructification of silence. Or the art of doing nothing! Corollary to silence is active listening, paying attention to sounds, from within and without.

Our marathon reflections this past three weeks, some of which made it to the pages of this paper, constituted our state of consciousness this ending of a year as we listened to its closing toll and the beginning of chimes in the new one. Our heart being thoroughly and unapologetically American, and our mind, a glocalis in China, we were also bi-located and multi-situated.

America is in the Heart is an autobiographical novel of a Filipino-American in 1946. Our affinity to Carlos Bulosan stems from his origins from the same region in Manong Philippines (Ilocano) where I grew up, and in his conviction that the America of his experience is not in ideological revolution or constitutional refinement but on the freedom-loving heartthrobs of those who labored beside him in the plantations and the canneries, kitchens and labor union lines, of the Pacific shores.

He is an older brother in time, but a comrade-in-heart forever; he struggled on the dance floors of California where it was frowned upon for a Filipino to dance with a Caucasian. I married one in ’67 shortly after the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to make race a condition for licensing a marriage.

Though commissioned to write an essay on Freedom from Want in the Saturday Evening Post series on FDR’s articulated Four Freedoms in 1941 in a State of the Union address, he was blacklisted by the FBI for his social activism later, and found himself wanting of employment, and wallowed instead in the debilitating effect of alcoholism that took its toll on his fragile health.

Ironically, FDR’s freedoms (1) of speech and expression, (2) of worship, (3) from want, and (4) from fear, have since been used and abused by subsequent administrations. Bulosan found himself muzzled by authorities on freedom of speech and expression. Carlos’ memory comes to us at this time because some of our expressed sentiments against Uncle Sam’s policies are viewed as un-American; that I make a whipping boy of the old Uncle’s military escapades and that I must desist, particularly given the large number of veterans in the Marianas.

What I have written and what has been received are, of course, two different matters. I explain comments I made and wrote in Manila during the Marcos era that a critique on a policy is not a blanket condemnation of a whole administration. The United States is not a monolithic structure, and training Peace Corps volunteers in the Philippines in the ’80s, we pointed out various voices of: (1) the State Department’s Embassy, (2) Defense’s military bases for the Air Force’s Clark and the Navy’s Subic, (3) the Chamber of Commerce’s Makati ghettos, (4) the corps of educators that propagated the language and the culture of England and America, (5) the Roman Catholic and Protestant missionary network of forked tongue, (6) the media including the propaganda arm of the USIS/VOA, in various levels of sensationalism and myth-making, and (7) the U.S. Peace Corps, at the time, with its supporting disestablishment counter-culture of America’s young.

The diversity in the United States is its strength, e pluribus unum. Of late, we commented on the widespread implications of our freedom from fear, or what is now referred to as the “homeland security freedom,” with more than half of the discretionary budget going into defense, particularly when married to the current strategy of preemptive option that we use when we want to eliminate someone we do not agree with, using sophisticated robotics like drones. But we have not spared anyone, of fault or praise, of the above seven categories.

FDR himself went against his own speech, proclaiming that as a future policy, we might look toward massive disarmament as a goal. But in 1941, he urged for the massive production of arms, ironically invoking the fear of the “foreign peril” as a rationale. To the democracies, he said: “We shall send you in ever increasing numbers, ships, planes, tank, guns.” But then, his guys turned off the oil spigot on Japan and Dec. 8 came; thus making the expressed intent operational.

For now, we enter that stage in our journey when we appropriate “nothingness” as our mode of being and in the depth of silence, we shall find home. Lao-tsu of old said:

We shape the clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
But non-being is what we use.
[/I] In Silence, we now begin.