palihog

I love my morning commute to work - I pile into a Jeepney with 8-10 other filipinos and barrel through a madman's city past crumbling spanish villas and informal corner stores: my ride delicately belching its way through streets so crowded I could easily touch viturally everyone and everything we pass - the ride, though it may seem incogruous, forces me to relax - one cannot hang on to control and must sublimate themselves and their lives to the will and expertise of the driver who simultaneously smokes, shifts gears, makes change, fingers his rosary when passing one of many churches, picks up passengers and navigates obstacles on the road (like water buffalo, pedicabs or people). The only time I've felt this safe was on an ice-floe hunting seal in the middle of an arctic dusk. Surrender.

Definitions of culture can be dangerous. The danger lies in the fact that as we define something, we tend to essentialize it - to make it absolute. In addition to this, we also tend to define in by what is not, a project of almost constant comparison. I'm not immune to this, but I believe that the key is to understand how we make those comparisons and the subsequent power we attach to definitions of culture. Without sounding like too much of a douche, cultures are always produced and re-produced - there are no absolutes, rather we rearticulate our culture constantly, through language, mass communication, films, books, etc. Culture is never fixed, nor is it absolute and the best attempts we can make at understanding culture are to look at the ways in which we reproduce it - the constant iteration of who we think we are...

One aspect of my culture is an obsession with order. We create systems that make order transparent - think of lining up for movies, getting on transit, filling out government forms, traffic lights, buildings with addresses, streets with posted names, etc. Having grown up in this, and having a propensity toward anxiety, I find these articulations of order comforting. The rules are transparent and I can rely on those rules to govern how I inhabit the world - I can reassure myself that even if I feel like I don't have control, the evidence of control is there and subsesquently I can abandon myself to my ordered world. I am reassured when my bus stops at bus stop; my subway arrives within 4 minutes of the last one leaving the platform; my toilet flushes and the water that comes out of my tap I can bring immediately to my lips. I am at home in an ordered world.

I'm not sure I believe that I'm at home in order anymore. I find my body shifting into a new mode. The Jeepney presents the first and most obvious evidence of this crumbling sense of order. They stop wherever a passenger is and stop wherever a passenger wants to get off. You pay by passing your money through the hands of the passengers packed into two rows of bench-like seats and receive your change through the same chain of hands. There are no traffic lights, rather each driver (and anything on the road) constantly manoeuvers crowded intersections and warns their fellow drivers that they're passing by honking quickly on the horn. I've yet to see an accident.

It would be unfair and wrong to suggest that there isn't an order here. The key difference however is that this order (which to my eyes seems evidence of a lack) is more explicitly negotiated than the one I'm used to. It feels as though there is more room to assert one's self (and one's vehicle) here and driving is more like a conversation between drivers and vehicles than a tacit, regulated, silent 'sharing' of the road. Perhaps this is why I find that my commute to work is so liberating - I don't rely on order to comfort myself, rather I understand that here, like in life, I am responsible for where I am and how I inhabit space. Without the same rules that I'm used to, I must insert myself into a larger conversation - I must trust that I know where I'm going.