Islands in the blue
Savage beauty, I wrote.
Tucked at the foot of storm-swept hills, there where ocean meets cliff, where the brightness of blue meets the softness of black, is a secret place. Here the marriage of water and rock. Here the fire of the sea embraces the coldness of stone.
A slow symphonic movement takes a sudden turn and climaxes with a roll of drums and a clash of cymbals. The sea quakes to a crescendo, then hurls itself against the cliffs and the rocks. Whaaam! Here before your eyes is a concerto at its most tempestuous peak. Water breaking into a million crystalline pieces. It is pure music. Salt melts in your eyes, suddenly you are no longer afraid.
That is an excerpt from a piece I wrote (“Sabtang’s Secret”) about being on an island in Batanes.
When world and national events weigh down on all of us, and especially on those whose job it is to keep tabs on what is happening and be the harbinger of good and bad news, there is always an escape route. One’s thoughts or imagination. I think of islands and shut out the noise. There are bad days and good days, and today is one of them.
Bloody Mary singing about Bali Hai in the musical ”South Pacific” made us dream of islands in the sun, islands on the horizon, paradise islands, islands in the mist. “If you try, you’ll find me, where the sky meets the sea … Here am I your very special island, come to me, come to me…” Bloody Mary’s eyes had the glimmer of that island such that her song made the GI boys forget they were at war in the Pacific.
Right now, far from home but playing out in our gadgets and media networks are wars between nations that destroy lives and homelands. Here at home, the war against hunger, poverty, ignorance, corruption, and injustice continues to be waged and at such great cost.
And so, the need for the imagination to take flight to one’s island. There is something about an island. It stirs something primordial in us. It is small, something we can relate to, settle in, inhabit, develop, dream of. It could be so complete it could float dreamily forever in the eternal sea. But people cannot be islands in themselves. As the poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island.” Trappist monk, author, mystic, and poet Thomas Merton used it as a title of one of his books.
The dream islands/islets people fancy inhabiting are small, so they can walk all around them, leave their footprints on the shore for the waves to carry away to the sea. What a lovely life, staying on an island. But not forever and alone.
D. H. Lawrence, in his short story, “The man who loved islands,” showed why. “An island,” he said, “if it is big enough, is no better than a continent. It has to be really quite small, before it feels like an island … how tiny it has to be, before you can presume to fill it with your own personality.” An island, Lawrence said in so many words, did something to people.
It could be beautiful. “What could be more cozy and homelike. It was four miles if you walked all round your island, through the gorge and the blackthorn bushes, about the steep rocks of the sea and down in the little glades where the primroses grew … And many birds with nests you could peep into, on the island all your own. Wonderful, what a great world it was!”
It could be fearsome. “So autumn ended with rain, and winter came and dark skies and dampness and rain … The island, your island, cowered dark, holding away from you … Then in the night, when the wind left off blowing in great gusts and volleys, as at sea, you felt that your island was a universe, infinite and old as the darkness not an island at all, but an infinite dark world where all the souls from all the other bygone nights lived on, and the infinite distance was near.”
With the scent of home are our own islands, more than 7,000 of them, big and small. Fiesta islands was once the come-on plug for tourists. We are, in fact, all islanders.
I love going to small islands. Some I’ve visited and written about: Pag-asa Island, the biggest in the Spratly group in the West Philippine Sea. Claimed by the Philippines, it has a runway and military men stationed there. It is now a municipality belonging to the province of Palawan. Marinduque, to write about and photograph for a church publication Marcopper’s deadly poisoning of the environment, years before the huge toxic spill, the disaster that was waiting to happen.
Boracay, of course, and Camiguin. Coron and Culion Islands in Palawan. I needed some immersion in Culion because I was part of a coffee-table book project (funded by a Spanish funding agency) for the former leper colony’s 100th anniversary. Guimaras, for quiet days in the Trappist monastery, Panglao in Bohol, historic Corregidor in Bataan.
Sabtang in Batanes, and its secret. That place where sea and mountain wed in one turbulent embrace. Where, on some azure-sky days, there is only the dancing of the cathedral waves folding and unfolding.
—————-
Send feedback to cerespd@gmail.com
