Ebb and flow: Where floods, people, and secrets spill
When the German cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin visited Naples with his partner Asja Lascis in 1924, he noted the city’s “rich barbarism”—a striking blend of the sacred and the savage, where fervent Catholicism coexisted with vicious criminality, whose inherent contradictions its citizens seemed to shrug off rather nonchalantly.
He spoke of the porous quality of Naples: the tiered and jumbled architecture of the port city, the masses of citizens and commerce spilling out into the cobbled streets, the blurring of boundaries between public and private spaces, and the transience that pervaded everyday life where “the stamp of the definitive is avoided,” and “no situation is intended forever.”
Porosity in action
I thought of Walter Benjamin and the idea of porosity and impermanence as relentless rains lashed the country recently—drenching municipalities in floods and keeping schoolchildren home for almost a week. I wondered what he would make of Manila during the rainy season, or indeed, at any time of the year.
He would no doubt have noticed the performance of piety, as well as the performance of politics: how the private became public as homes were swept away by the downpour and people clung on to rooftops in the absence of shelter.
And how even in the floods, the streets did not so much heave as bob with people floating about—turning waist-high waters into swimming pools teeming, not with chlorine, but with sewage and nasty microbes. Like Naples, “porosity is the inexhaustible law of life in this city, reappearing everywhere.” Here, it is made literal by the fact of weather and water, of rains seeping into walls, of polluted rivers welling over, of crops being drowned in the fields, and of workers coming home from work, sodden.
As porosity seeps through, it reveals many things. The glaring inequalities between the haves and the have-nots in our society are evident enough (without a typhoon driving home the point) that becoming climate resilient should be a national priority. Calamity strikes, and it becomes clear that the poorest are the ones most affected because of the insecurity of their dwellings, especially for those living in informal settlements.
However, another aspect of porousness has also proven to be our saving grace. In a city—nay, a country—of ever-shifting structures, goalposts, and even familial and political allegiances, there exists what Benjamin called the “commingled” private life, which translates to a strong sense of community. When spaces are scarce, life spills out of the home and into the streets.
Recall, during the era of notorious brown-outs, how people would converge in the malls to be cooled by airconditioning; during typhoons, they flock to the malls for shelter from the rain until it is safe to return home. The same sense of community also spurs people into action, setting up relief operations to rescue the stranded or feed the displaced.
Upstream and downpour
Perhaps porosity is primarily a feature of port cities or island nations, where one border is water, and the other is humanity on borrowed land that the sea may one day reclaim. It implies movement, settlement, departure, trade: a constantly changing and evolving cityscape that somehow manages to retain its essential character, which I would argue, in the case of Manila, is chaos. It is, paradoxically, an ordered chaos that is comprehensible to its denizens, even as it infuriates and frustrates.
And what of the criminals who flee to the Philippines, not just to evade justice, but to continue running criminal empires? Pedophiles, alleged Chinese spies, extortion gangs, puppet masters of disinformation rings… the ability to disappear into obscurity in a country that could be called a macrocosm of the bar “Cheers”—where everybody knows your name and your business—makes for an unmistakable marker of porosity.
Just ask Alice Guo, who manufactured an entire Filipino identity without even knowing her birthday. Or Q of Q Anon, who was hiding in plain sight for years on a pig farm south of Manila, of all places.
If you prefer your fugitives aristocratic by birth and rogues by nature, look no further than the famous Lord Lucan, who allegedly bludgeoned the nanny, mistaking her for his estranged wife, and promptly vanished into thin air. Or, as some have theorized, to the Philippines.
He at least spent some time in Manila, according to the widow of his good friend, Antony, Lord Moynihan, another noble fugitive who fled the UK in 1970 facing 57 criminal charges, among them fraud.
But then again, criminals have always been among us. Some of them even hold public office.
