Real Monsters

Had an interesting conversation at Sarah's (a drinking place near the state university in Diliman) with a few of [identity-protected]'s friends. Basically, one of them was narrating a story about encountering something out of local folklore, a monster called manananggal or wack-wack.

The guy, a tibak (activist) and law student, was relating how he had holed up one night in a small hut with an old man while in the province. Hearing a noise outside, he took hold of a machete and peered outside to see the said monster, complete with sharp fangs and long tongue. Fortunately, the old man hit the guy on the back of the head and the latter backed away from the window. The old man, said the guy, was warning him not to provoke the monster further.

The conversation after (translated from Filipino) went something like this:

Me: How did you feel when you saw the thing?

Activist: I was afraid of course! But I had the machete and I was a true warrior! (Sorry, that's more or less how what he said!)

Me: So how did you manage to reconcile what you saw-- something that had both a supernatural and evil nature-- with your being an atheist and a Marxist?

Activist: Good question! It was something that bothered me the morning after. How could I relate what I saw with the writings of Karl Max? In terms of historical material, there was no problem but in matters dialectic, ah...!

Another guy at the table (a fervent mountaineer) in turn related his own experience of the supernatural. It seems that while on one hiking trip with three other people in Mount Banahaw in Quezon province, the group had been threatened by a ten-foot tall being.

At first I thought he was describing a kapre but he said it was a 'guardian', possibly because there was hallowed ground nearby. He added that there were signs prior to the event that the 'elementals' were not happy with their presence in the forest (like they had forgotten their tent posts, etc.).

Likewise, he said that despite his long experience in hiking and mountaineering, he had gotten lost from the group for a solid two hours. He presumed it was a kind of punishment set on him by the 'guardian'. It was that experience, he said, that more or less made him a believer of the supernatural.

Me: So you didn't believe before?

Mountaineer: I did. I already saw other stuff before, like a white lady and a tikbalang. But being lost and seeing that 'guardian' reinforced that belief.

Me: So how could you have seen those things and not believe in them?

Mountaineer: Well, it's one thing to see these things from afar. It's another to be directly affected by them.

Me: Ah, like violence? We know what violence is but unless we're direct recipients of that violence, we really wouldn't know?

Mountaineer: Exactly.

Hmmmm... personally, I keep an open mind about these things. As the quote by William Shakespeare goes, "There are more things on Earth and heaven than are dreamt off in your philosophy."