The Intransigent Aura of Cities
By Glenn Diaz
Francis Jerimiah Manaog - Crossing (2023), Digital photograph
Image description: The photograph features the exterior view of a building. Its walls look worn-out and industrial, with streaks, graffiti, and metal pipes running across them. Towards the left of the image, a group of individuals are shown standing in the building, leaning against a railing. They wear neon-colored safety vests and masks.
I
Years ago, desperate for a break after months of mind-numbing work on a state-sponsored encyclopedia of literature, I said yes to an invitation to spend the day at an arts high school by the mountains south of the city to listen to students talk about their writing. I had been drowning in hyperbolic biographies and obscure bibliographic information, laymanized literary history and synopses of so-called major works, not to mention endless meetings on workflow management, deadlines that were constantly shifting, and vexing exchanges with egotistic writers and undermanned accounting offices. I could use the mountain air, the time away from the screen on which the drudgery of so-called cultural work unfolded, the near-constant temptation to smuggle typos into the sanctimonious pages.
We left the campus at half-past-seven and took the newly opened Skyway, which was slowly beginning to cover the city like a massive roof. The journey that typically took more than three hours was threatening to wrap up in just over one, an unheard of pace in the morning rush hour. What happens I suppose when the trip is unhampered by landbound gridlock. At some point the elevated highway went over an elevated train line, built over some elevated overpass or other. Stretches of pliant concrete scraping the clear blue sky. The sight of a near-empty stretch of road made me wince, as if I was breaking some sacred pact of suffering with my fellow city-dwellers below. At every patch of familiar skyline, I’d locate our van in my mental map of the metropolis, collapsing the height.
My companion, an older academic of some stature, looked up from her phone and said she had mistakenly sent an article to Animal Studies instead of Asian Studies. The quiet van was briefly enlivened by polite laughter; even the driver, who probably didn’t understand, cracked a smile. The paper, she said, looks at novels set and written in certain cities—Manila, Singapore, and Bengaluru—and she argues that the ecology of the places exerts a determinative force on the texts, not just discursively and structurally but via an “intransigent aura” that exceeds both authorial intent and the exigencies of human history.
An indifferent hmm floated in the van, probably from me but possibly from something else entirely, a sigh from the bored universe, in any case a lull long enough to change the subject but which the academic took as curiosity, a signal to elaborate.
She was in Bengaluru, she said, many years back for a conference when she found herself trapped in an auto-rickshaw. She frantically waved toward the busy roundabout down MG Road where the conference venue was located, but the driver insisted on taking her first to his cousin’s jewelry shop, just three kilometers away, madam, he promised. At the time it had been less than a year since a young woman was brutally gang-raped on a bus in Delhi, which crossed the academic’s mind. She recalled waking up that morning to the sound of a crow maniacally pecking at the glass window of her hotel room in a quiet part of the city. She was torn between the terror she had always associated with crows and the novelty of what was happening, the surely numinous message that was being sent through this encounter. On the bedside table was a paperback that she had picked up at the airport—a Bengaluru-set novella whose lucid dissection of the thin line between tenderness and violence that is always blurred between family members she found surprisingly moving. An early chapter, she recalled, opens thus: the sound of loud pecking barging into the stirring consciousness of the unnamed narrator, which he later realized was a good omen. The scholar settled on a simple gold necklace at the jewelry shop. She had been adamant about not getting anything, but then she ran a finger on one of the dusty display cases and concluded that the place didn’t get much foot traffic, tucked away in the basement of an ancient mall right next to a similarly deserted temple. Just before leaving, the grateful autowallah told her that the pendant of the necklace was not the vague outline of an archer’s bow as she had thought but that of a swift mid-flight. A good sign. She should treasure it. He dropped her off at the venue, late by just ten minutes to her surprisingly well-attended panel. Recounting the ordeal to worried acquaintances, she was told, in one of the long digressions lonely scholars often fell into, that the shopping mall where she came from was in an area of the city that developed after a plague epidemic at the turn of the century. Later that day she had been smoking at the balcony on the sixth floor when she noticed eagles gliding around the building, unnaturally low, she thought, almost level with the treetops that lined the noisy road. They’re kites actually, someone chimed in, not eagles, after she remarked about the birds to her group. Just looking for rodents, the stranger went on, although more and more they’ve begun turning to people food. Which is weird, he said, because on the other hand, the crows that used to pester the locals so much had started to noticeably disappear, and they also eat rodents. They say it has something to do with the mushrooming of glass buildings everywhere thanks to the outsourcing boom. Glass and steel replacing the trees where they nested. If you want to see birds now, you have to go to the lake, or the botanical garden[SA1] —
She thought about birds and dust, she said, rodents and glass buildings, epidemics and auto-rickshaws. When she went back to the novella that night, the human characters receded into the background and she could only pay attention to the things around them, which generated a vibrancy through which the narrative also moved, a second repressed plot, like inchoate desire. Since then she began to look for such things in the cities, both in the text and the world. The rivers and quays and manmade lakes, the slums and apartment blocks and condos, the salt in the seaside air and the perfumed interiors of hotels locals rarely stayed at, the malls and cathedrals and crumbling temples, the skyscrapers and reclamations and botanical gardens of colonial provenance, the trees that climbed up walls and hugged belltowers, the loitering cows and random thunderstorms and mysterious puddles, roadworks and birdsong and rallies against austerity, the roar of idle engines and shouting at open-air markets and easy melange of languages that supposedly signaled harmonious co-existence. These are alive, she said.
That must have been scary, being brought somewhere against your will like that, I said, to prolonged silence, as we slowed down to join the queue at the toll booth and, with a grunt, the driver fished a crisp five-hundred peso bill from his wallet.
The force of things was how the theorist from whom she drew her framework had put it, assemblages of objects thought of as inert and lifeless whose moments of sensuous enchantment the scholar sought to apply to narratives created in, by, and from respective places. Because of the nature of her argument, she said, she read the novels while moving around, almost like a shaman divining wisps of connections only discernible between the lines, not in the syntax alone or action or ideas but their aggregate vigor, how the things behaved and what behaviors they in turn invited from other actants.
I was going to say it still sounded like a textual approach, but she referred to the blinding vista outside my window. I’m sure you notice how the Skyway behaves. How it moves things around a certain way, or facilitates a certain freedom of movement. You can see vehicles accelerating, drivers relaxing maybe. She turned to the driver, who had stopped pretending to be interested. But remember—these are learned. From signs that mandate the speed limit. From car commercials that never show cars in traffic. From car-centric policy that drivers reliably internalize. The Skyway acts in concert with all of this. But even if it embodies culture, materializes culture, reproduces culture, its materiality, its vibrancy, reveals its artificial nature and thus the inherent violence of its very existence. She gently gesticulated as if to say Look around. It’s way too much concrete. We are way too high up. In the summer after it rains the asphalt releases vapor. If you’re not in a vehicle, you intuit how the thing is a monster. Its scale and materiality are not human. You see it right next to apartments and playgrounds and storefronts and realize that it’s a hunk of unwelcome stone, shaped to contain you, not offer freedom. The enclosure that enables the velocity impossible on the ground also consigns it to a reality where this freedom is only possible by being part of the monstrosity, by joining the monstrosity.
She gave me a quizzical look—I was wondering if she had somehow read my mind earlier—then went on. Meanwhile, in Singapore, ever notice how things are always made to replicate, or approximate, the natural world that they feel they’ve been denied—or which they’ve bulldozed and promptly forgotten. But they can’t quite help but go bigger and more spectacular, let’s add a light show to the huge fake trees, how about orchestral music to go with the huge fake waterfall, and of course there is always an Hermès store within a five-hundred-meter radius. People who have no temporal connection to the place, like tourists and migrant workers, are inevitably turned into spectators instead of someone just experiencing the trees or the waterfall. Things profess qualities of being natural and being built. Organic and artificial. And in between is the money. Capitalism. Things are always at a remove. Always mediated. Always a spectacle. Where is the history here? It’s an approach to civilization that is uniquely Singapore. And the awe over it is complex, self-defeating, and again enacts culture as much as reproduces it. Yes, it’s a capitalist nirvana but even this quality is camouflaged and mystified by its ecology of weird things, adding to the layers of fantasies and self-reflexivity toward the production of these fantasies. What kind of consciousness and relations do these things create? And how does this manifest in the architecture of narratives—
Like base and superstructure, I offered.
Her mouth twitched. I can send you the paper so you can read it yourself.
The malls in Manila had always struck me as monsters, I said, attentive to her reaction. Sprawling in all directions and eating everything in their path through which it becomes bolder, shinier, more monstrous. From gray drab boxes jutting out of the empty landscape to a sleek body connected by membrane to a train station, a hotel, an office building. To becoming the landscape itself. The city itself. The country itself—
Some Marxist cultural studies scholar or other had said all of that in the nineties, she said, deflating onto her seat. What I mean is something completely different.
Francis Jerimiah Manaog - Bagumbayan (2023), Digital photograph
Image description: The photograph features a small tree standing in front of a big building, behind a row of garden beds. The building in the background has sleek gray walls and glass panes. Sunlight shines down on the entire tree and casts shadows on the left side of the building.
II
For some reason we didn’t take the Skyway on our way back to the city; maybe punishment from the driver for the deliberation that had taken longer than anticipated. It was quiet in the van as we joined the standstill of vehicles; our eyes were assaulted by the endless red glare of endless taillights. We would move a couple of inches every five minutes or so; the academic would groan in frustration, more or less the way she had groaned during one of the student presentations.
The presentation was based on an admittedly strange project: a fictitious memoir of a man claiming to be a lover of Rizal’s, erased from homophobic nationalist historiography. Included in the text: snippets of conversation between the two that seem to parody the long back-and-forths in the Noli (somehow always ending in sex, which is described in graphic detail and shockingly contemporary language); letters written in response to letters that again appear to be a distortion of Rizal’s known missives—to Leonor Rivera, to Paciano, to a former teacher, to Blumentritt; decidedly juvenile comments on Rizal’s known hobbies, e.g., Tagalog folklore and chess and water systems; long complaints about him being such a textbook Gemini; and a plaintive sketch of his naked back (after sex, the caption read, 23 Oct 1904). But most of it are mesmerizingly straightforward accounts of banal things and activities: Rizal eating a duhat, Rizal throwing a fit over a panned essay, Rizal refusing to bathe for an event because it is too cold, like Berlin in January. Bits and pieces of context reveal that the memoir is set in an alternative historical timeline in which the Noli, after being swiftly translated into local languages and circulating widely, helped galvanize the revolution that led to the defeat of the spent Spanish forces and the Johnny-come-lately Americans. In other words, a timeline in which El Fili didn’t have to be written, and so the exile to Dapitan didn’t happen, and, more importantly, the execution at Bagumbayan didn’t happen. Halfway through, in fact, Rizal joins the newly organized socialist party and easily wins as governor of Laguna, which by the end of the memoir is renamed Rizal.
Did you have fun writing this? the academic asked, not smiling, once the giggling had subsided after the presentation. Because maybe that fun overtook whatever sense of history a project like this demands.
Good grief. I must have dissociated from the frustration. We were exhausted; it was the sixth and last presentation of the day. The first five transpired uneventfully—they went well, with equal parts effusive praise for the triumphant parts and careful troubleshooting of those that were almost there. The student would smile—one mock-curtsied—cue the rest to applaud, to punctuate the ritual. Done. Next.
Not this one. The academic launched into a surgical unpacking of the myriad issues of the project. First the seemingly laudable experimentation and irreverence that were, in fact, old hat, see also Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy or even Marcelo H. del Pilar, whose correspondence with Rizal was thankfully absent from the particularly egregious letters section. The anachronism in the language that was only matched by the implausibility of the history and the schizophrenia of the politics. The humor that felt dirty, shameful after laughter. The parody that felt lazy, self-contradicting, reactionary. The shock value that dissipated after the first outrageous shock. There is a point to these things. Done haphazardly, the cost to final seriousness is fatal.
Of course I had to say something. Recalling the ordeal while catatonic in unmoving traffic, I realized I should’ve interrupted sooner instead of letting her finish (blame my Gemini rising, come to think of it). When it was my turn, I told the room, diplomatically I thought, that among the unfortunate constraints of an exercise like this is the little time for impressions and otherwise sensible observations to marinate, much less cohere, the pressure to quickly mete out summary judgments, which every now and then results in, perhaps inevitably, intransigent misrecognitions.
The reference to her paper, and the relish in bringing it up that surprised me the moment it left my mouth, created an undercurrent of casual malice that only the two of us recognized. I thought I had imagined the change of energy in the room, but she would bring up the ordeal many years later during the despedida of a common friend, a Donne scholar who was leaving academia (and the country) to marry a cruel curator in Basel. The other people in the room just looked on, either nervous or entertained.
The scholar was cornered into qualifying (minimizing?) her outburst. This is just me of course. Just one opinion. She added that she quite liked the part where the lovers take a day trip to Dagupan, where Rizal mysteriously becomes irate after days of eager anticipation, which the lover charges to the just begun Ghost Month (one of the such-a-Gemini episodes). The scholar explained that, as you know, Leonor Rivera the childhood sweetheart was forced to marry a British railway engineer, and Dagupan was the terminus of the project that he oversaw. For some reason, however, the train station in the text sounded closer to how it looked today, abandoned and vandalized and unused, complete with a sampaloc tree growing out from under one of the faded archways. But you see, she pivoted anew, Rizal as a text is not an empty canvas. Using him entails certain responsibilities.
But play is the operative word here, isn’t it? I replied, eyes on the student even if at this point none of these concerned him anymore. Play as key in uprooting Rizal. Isn’t the point of the exercise the construction of this hyper-self-aware, hyper-contemporary consciousness using Rizal, maybe manhandling him a bit and making fun of our routine veneration of him as text, to assert its own funny, profane, and queer subjectivity? Seen this way, what’s stopping us from applying anachronistic paradigms to someone whom I frequently imagine blathering endlessly on Twitter? Or from foregrounding the banal moments of a life that’s still invoked every December 30 to delineate the contours of heroism? Or from imagining the transformation in his politics had he read and believed in Marx? Or from making sense of his macho cross-cultural womanizing by imagining him as a queer desiring subject, which to be fair is by no means new—
I got off at Cubao to meet up with someone, another writer and a long-ago dalliance that for good or ill ended in friendship. Our usual spot murmured with the usual half-drunk conversations. After telling him this story, he laughed and joked that I should’ve brought up that the scholar, for all her stature and the esteem in which she was held, only has one book to her name, her reworked dissertation on children narrators in Martial Law narratives, or something. I couldn’t focus on his usual quietly diabolical pettiness because, sitting down earlier, he had shown off his newly pierced right ear, and it reminded me that he liked being licked there. For a moment, my tongue could almost taste the foreign metal. For the person licking, the ear was quite unlike other body parts—it didn’t visibly respond to stimulation, its irregular concavity not even wholly conducive to erotic probing perhaps. It was just there, unchanging, resolute, conceited skin and cartilage. But for the person being licked, there was an extra sensory dimension—they felt the tongue and also heard it, its slithering and its wetness, its earnest effort to dig and dig, all haloed by the usual moan of ecstasy. Just imagine the symphony of stimuli. The bar’s resident cat climbed onto the empty chair next to us and brought me back to the moment, and I caught the tail end of the friend’s enthusiastic description of his latest project, which I’d find out months later at a zine event was a novella set during an all-night orgy told from the perspective of the least attractive participant.
Francis Jerimiah Manaog - C5 (2023), Digital photograph
Image description: The photograph features a view of the bottom of an overpass whose pillars are half-covered with hanging vegetation. An empty road is in the foreground. In the background, vehicles and tropical trees are visible.
III
Years later, the damned encyclopedia work finally coming to a close, I went on a supposedly beginner’s hike with some friends (more writers) and took a Grab to the foot of the mountain (another mountain). We had met at a McDonald’s near the station from where we were supposed to take a train to the eastern outskirts of the city, but when I absently entered the far-away address on the Grab app, it said we could take advantage of the heinously privatized transport system and, for a little over a thousand pesos, take a car instead. We were a bit packed at the backseat, but the drive was nice. Up the hilly, zigzaggy roads of Rizal, past the occasional jeepneys and Sunday bikers, amid the crisp mountain air and with the threat of the once mighty Skyway network nowhere near the renascent sky. The driver was nice, too, a congenial fellow from Abra who amiably accepted our apologies after the pinned address turned out to be at least two kilometers away from the kick-off point of the hike, which was even more inland, away from the main road. A short, cheesy orientation video told us that the humble mountain—just shy of 600 meters above sea level—had been reforested decades ago by a sixty-something explorer-type with a famous oligarchic family name with the help of the indigenous people in the area, not quite explaining why the mountain had been deforested or what he was doing there in the first place.
The peak was nondescript, but the makeshift bamboo bench might as well have been the center of promised land after three hours of strenuous hike. Strenuous because unfit. Unfit because (I tell myself) the city was built to be inimical to the human stride, and here in the mountains there was nothing but the human stride, its breathless left right left repetition. During the hike, I told them about the latest egregious episode this homestretch of the encyclopedia project: a well-known writer of personal essays and one unremarkable novel demanded to check the entry on him and his works lest mistakes and omissions be reproduced for posterity, spread like wildfire by well-meaning but careless grad students and researchers. The laughter and derision were muted by fatigued breathing and birdsong and the faint echo of what sounded like a videoke performance reverberating through the Sierra Madre. Someone brought up the children’s book author who had recently written a long, angry Twitter thread on the crisis of reading and the neoliberal attack on the humanities after a talk and signing of hers attracted a grand total of three people. I am always caught off guard by writing-related delusions, especially from Filipino writers (I blame Rizal; the writer, not the province). I am of course not immune to similar seductions, but working on the encyclopedia had all but demystified whatever intransigent aura literature held, like how staring at a word for too long erodes signification and leaves in its wake a gibberish combination of letters.
Do you believe that places like this mountain exert an aura? I asked the person closest to me, a scholar on urban placelessness, during a rare lull in the hike, a blessedly level path bounded by beautiful anahaw trees.
Sweat dribbled down his usually pristine face, and I could hear his heavy breathing. Huh?
Didn’t you argue somewhere that the procedure of walking, say, around Manila conjures a kind of alternative historiography—non-linear and fragmented and deeply corporeal—precisely in the inherent discrepancy between the authority of the map and what is mapped by the feet? In the latter do you refer to something similar to an aura, I wonder.
His lips contorted into a weird smile. This doesn’t look exactly like flâneuring, does it, he said, swinging his bamboo hiking pole, just before we braced ourselves for another steep section.
In our only group photo at the peak (taken by the guide), errant branches of a tree—santol? banaba?—drooped above us. Behind us were thick clouds. Rolling mountains. Four out of five held on to our hiking sticks. Our differing heights and postures formed their own erratic range in front of the wooden sign with the dubious name of the peak that we decided to stand in front of. Outfit-wise, one of us was the most prepared, complete with arm guards and a hiking hat. Another—the urban studies scholar—was in a fleece jacket and jeans, looking ready for a nice stroll in Baguio. I was in running shorts, which was a mistake. The fatigue was nowhere in our faces, all of which looked serene, perhaps thinking that the worst was over.
The day before, we had heard news of an encounter between government troops and communist rebels somewhere in Negros, where a well-known revolutionary poet had been brutally murdered. Perhaps on a similar-looking mountain trail. Or a routine trip to town for supplies. This was not brought up at all during the hike, even though I knew that he was friends with at least two of the people we were with. It feels silly bringing it up in this story, a punctuation to a questionable political point. So let me end elsewhere. During the launch of the encyclopedia later that year at the cultural center, I looked up at the huge capiz-and-crystal chandeliers that dangled over the throng of hobnobbing people at the lobby like shiny guillotine blades. I spotted the scholar that I had gone to the arts high school with talking to a poet who worked for a government think tank during the first Marcos regime (no doubt at home in the Imeldific building). I recognized another writer whose sloppy work on the encyclopedia was belied by the cheer with which she devoured the hors d’oeuvres. Someone smiled for the phalanx of photographers at the photo booth. Islands of people taking selfies. I turned to the proud stacks of encyclopedias by the stage, the long line of people getting copies that would probably languish on shelves and coffee tables, in public school libraries and a bookstore or two, skimmed during moments of boredom, consulted in rare cases of actual need. During one such instance, someone might catch a kind of typo that was too recurring, too exuberant to be an oversight. The last couple of weeks before the encyclopedia went to press had been chaotic. A new team of proofreaders was brought in, but as the deadline approached it became clear that they weren’t going to make it, fast and experienced though they were. We joined the fray; most grabbed a bundle of proofs and went to work, while a few others, including myself, were in charge of inputting any last-minute corrections. We barely slept those days, and our eyes, pardon the pun, were exhausted beyond words. A typo, sadly, is not a bomb.[1]
Endnotes
[1] At around 3:43 a.m. of 9 February last month, three trucks filled with a couple tons of still-unknown explosives entered different points of the Skyway and, minutes later, slowed down at strategically weak spots—away from structural supports—where they simultaneously detonated their load. The explosion instantly knocked down portions of the highway: somewhere in Bicutan at one of the highest point in the system, at the corner of G. Araneta and R. Magsaysay near where the first shot of the Philippine-American War rang, and the old location of the beloved and much-missed eagle monument that used to mark the border between Manila and Makati. The entire network ground to a halt and all further constructions stopped (a section of the LRT Line 2 was also damaged). At least ten motorists were killed. Blame was quickly assigned all over: the communists, the communists from overseas, disgruntled elements from the military, the CIA, radical climate change activists, anarchist bikers, even heritage conservation enthusiasts, some of whom recently vandalized the Skyway pillars in Paco that had been erected right in the middle of a Spanish-era park.
Glenn Diaz is the author of The Quiet Ones (2017) and Yñiga (2022), which both won the Philippine National Book Award for Best Novel in English. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Rosa Mercedes, Liminal, and others. He teaches literature and creative writing at the Ateneo de Manila University.
*
Francis Jerimiah Manaog is a photographer, documentary filmmaker, and bike courier from Quezon City, Philippines. Their everyday life revolves around doing any available precariat/freelance work and their longest photo project ‘Picture lang’ shows everyday Filipino images in their simplest. Francis also works with Mayday Multimedia, an independent media collective that creates works highlighting the struggles and aspirations of the Filipino working class.
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