Читать книгу The Eye Of The Fish - Luis H. Francia - Страница 8

IF THIS ARCHIPELAGO COULD COMMENT on my existence, what would it say? What memories, if any, would it have of my passage? Did mountain talk to plain, and plain whisper to sky that bore me away, to ocean that separates me from these islands? Did Manhattan’s bedrock pick up, through riverine delta, through tremor, news of an Asian walking its grounds? Did it decipher in an islander’s footfall and read in a Spanish name a tangled history of blood and bone and spirit? Imagination, trace if you can this landscape’s ineffable power, its sources of joy and sorrow.

I had been coming back to the Philippines regularly over the course of more than two decades, a process that began as something purely instinctual, moved by the same urge that compels salmon to travel up the waters of their genesis, moved by the need to feel familiar ground, to add to the store of memory and association that nourished me in my sojourning. The trips gradually took on a conscious edge. Upstream to home: what did that mean? Where was the “I” in all this, where the “we”? Death for the new self, resurrection of the old? But home had changed. And so had I. How then to measure each other? And what of that other sea—passionate, calm, deep, shallow, hot, cold—to which I returned after each visitation, a sea called New York City? I: awkward fish swimming simultaneously in different oceans.