WALA LANG
En route to dreamland, I pass in review reminders of past and present. They’re in and around cabinets crammed with odds and ends that I’ve been picking up since I was a kid, including seashells and my life savings of one-centavo coins.
The oldest object is maybe 770,000 years old and the newest, four months old. In between are things treasured from the time the very first Filipinos—the very first humans—reached these shores.
WUNDERKAMMER A cabinet of Philippine curiosities and some of its contents.
The 770,000-year-old objects are a couple of tektites, natural glass objects that look like black pebbles. Scientists believe that long before humans evolved, a giant meteorite fells somewhere in Kazakhstan or Siberia with such force as to liquefy everything down to the earth’s mantle and blasted the molten rock so high into outer space that it fell as glass pebbles onto our part of the world. They have been found in Mandaluyong (hence Tektite Towers in Ortigas Center), Bicol, and possibly elsewhere. Ancient Filipinos called them taing bituin (literally star poop) and wore them as amulets.
The newest object is inside a red velvet box, the souvenir medal (made of light metal and enamel) I got during PBBM’s inauguration on June 30.
On my balcony table is a sampling of in-between stuff before a side table with a medium size early 20th-century image from Samar of San Jorge (Saint George, England’s patron saint) dispatching a dragon that looks like the offspring of a buaya and a dalág:
- a small polished black stone shaped like an axe blade used by our ancestors of the Neolithic Age, about 8,000 years ago when they learned to make and use tools and weapons of hard stone. These objects have been called ngipin ng kidlát or lightning’s tooth;
- a small decorated pot of baked clay, a palayok that was probably a toy or used in celebrations maybe a thousand years ago;
- a celadon saucer with a double fish design imported from China during the Song Dynasty (1127-1279 CE). They were valuable items that accompanied the dead and recovered in Santa Ana, Manila; Pila, Laguna; Puerto Galera, Butuan, and other places;
- a necklace that is a rosary in disguise, with 150 Hail Mary beads of the joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries. The beads are tortoise shell and the pendant is the so-called Alitagtag cross, modeled after the original in the Batangas town made of wood from a miraculous tree;
- a crucifixion scene assembled inside a bottle, said to have been made in the late 1800s by inmates of Bilibid prison as occupational therapy and source of income;
- arras, a set of 13 coins attached to a crown traditionally used in wedding ceremonies to signify that bride and groom would share their worldly goods (that was before lawyers invented pre-nups). This one is made of 10-centavo silver coins issued in the 1930s. The old-rich like to use Isabelinas, gold coins with the image of Reina Isabel II minted here during the 1860s or better, gold hilís-kalamay (Latin American cobs) of the 1600s and early 1700s;
- a clothes iron that was used with glowing charcoal, so small as to be either a toy or for ironing lace trimmings.
There are religious items: small wood images of the Immaculate Conception mostly from Bohol; ivory pieces also of the Virgin carved in Goa, India that were brought here in the 18th century; several silver pax that deacons would hold to be kissed by the faithful on important feast days; small 200-year-old paintings depicting the Nazareno, San José, and San Juan Evangelista; a couple of saints’ heads (one dated 1819); a silver dish used during the offertory at Mass; and a set of four small figures from a Cordillera mumbaki’s ritual box.
Then there are a Wedgwood powder box probably brought here in the 1800s by the wife of a Brit running a trading house; several anting-anting; excavated Song Dynasty and Sawangkhalok jarlets; blown glass figures of a couple in mid-1800s costume; landscapes painted on mother-of-pearl shells; a pair of silver mosquito net hooks; and quite a few more.
Note: Europeans came to discover the land and peoples of the New World, Africa, Asia, and Australia during the 1500s and formed rooms that displayed the owner’s collection of minerals, birds, and small animals, shells, textiles, weapons, jewelry, relics, small paintings and sculpture, and other unusual (to Europeans) objects.
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