The Titans Came Dancing
"The Titans came dancing." This is how the book of the UP High Class '57 begins. This is the expression of the theme. We, the Class '57, gather as in the tradition of the great tribes of the Cordilleras.
Guided and blessed by their gods, we pause in reunion and tell of our journeys in life.
Uncertainties and trials marked our travels. And they have been won and ended. In this gathering, each one describes a triumphant odyssey. Not one battle is small. To each life, each battle was bitter and each victory was great. Because each one is a Titan, a noble hero looked upon with admiring regard even by the divinities of Olympus. And so we tell our stories alongside the Greek mythical heroes that we realized we also are. Hopefully, the narrative style will lend the reader a new eye to discern the metamorphosis of our ordinary lives to epics of a Grecian color.
We refuse to view our lives as boring daily routines. Although on every new day we wake up, say hello, make breakfast, survey our room, explore the view down the street, drive to office, turn on the computer -- there! all the same crap as yesterday. And yet, in a secret place in our brain, in a little room in our heart, there lives a story we tell only to a friend.
And last year, in the UP High reunion, we found so many friends. Without asking, their hearts let out their stories. And we freed ours.
Stories that now fill this book.
Heroes coming together. That scene in the beginning will be revisited at the book's end, and lead the reader to re-read, re-live, remember all over again, even look forward to another reunion of friends.
Each one of us tells two stories each time -- one is the present, which is visible, that we choose to talk about. The other is a persistent remembering of an experience, a past, a secret wish, a longing, a regret, a pain, a conflict that takes over one's reverie.
We shall tell our stories in short vignettes. We will highlight the pivotal episodes, the turning points, the low points, the crossroads.
Each story struggles to take over the present, like a shadow passing over a spot-lighted face. When the shadow merges with the face, when the hidden other half of his life has melded with the life he wants to be seen, then he is complete.
The book editors and writers expended all efforts to extract honesty from our classmates, especially when their shadows are featured. Our work, as the editorial group, was not a search for lost time, but an attempt to discover and highlight the grotesque beauty that can be discerned in the hues of darkness; from then on, secrets will not find shadows as a place to hide.
While the story-telling is stylized, there is no fiction, only verifiable facts freely given to us, the editorial group. We are privileged in our work to be first to see images or narrative scenes that are exciting, irresistible, but something we felt are dangerous to tell.
Our common experience is reading disjointed anecdotes and unfinished tales, truncated by fears of embarrassment over long-kept secrets. Follows our most arduous task of persuading the suddenly red-faced friend that confession lightens the soul. As colorful as they can be, the variegated lives sometimes do not lend for a straightforward portrayal or unstressful reading. Then, the burden of discerning value from a mosaic of experiences, and the process of deciding how one, or which, image is to see daylight becomes a story in itself.
We laid out and lived by standards that rule our value judgement. We preferred the appreciation of the quality of life to the customary recapitulation of family growth or professional progress. We selected segments of histories to which friends and family can relate and peer into the hearts of our friends, glean an understanding. Even draw an inspiration.
We found stories that evoke universal appeal, those of courage, patient endurance, and faith. They are stories that jolt apathy into concern. Complete strangers will recognize themselves in us. If lessons are to be learned from these our legacies, then they are reasons enough for us to to be remembered when we are gone.
~Noe Caagusan, 2007
