Car­los Celdran’s Tours
URL: http://​cel​dran​tours​.blogspot​.com

Car­los Cel­dran is some­one who is try­ing to change the way peo­ple see Manila, one step at a time. And he does this via his tour-slash-history lesson-slash-play-slash-production num­ber. I joined his Intra­muros Tour two weeks ago with my office­mates and I had done his Binondo Tour awhile back. And I found both tours to be very good.
Just as the tour is not your typ­i­cal “on your right is the Church of San Agustin run by the Agus­tini­ans, etc. etc.”, Cel­dran is not your typ­i­cal tour guide. He …

Got the chance to join Car­los Celdran’s Intra­muros Tour last Fri­day. It was a great expe­ri­ence. And it made me think about a lot of things after­wards. I will be talk­ing about the tour itself on Mon­day, in AngPere­grino Rec­om­mends. Right now though are ran­dom (and not so ran­dom) thoughts about our way of look­ing at our­selves as Fil­ipinos, about our national soul, and on our cul­tural iden­tity crisis.

Con­rado de Quiros once told a story about Jose Rizal who boarded a boat bound for the south. While on the upper deck of the boat, where the well-off pas­sen­gers were, he met a Spaniard. The Spaniard was amazed that he spoke Span­ish very well. Rizal replied that he had stud­ied and lived in Madrid and Barcelona for some time. The Spaniard was impressed.

“Soci­ety for the Fil­ipino is a small row­boat: the barangay. Geog­ra­phy for the Fil­ipino is a small local­ity: the bar­rio. His­tory for the Fil­ipino is a small vague say­ing: matanda pa kay mahoma; noong peace­time. Enter­prise for the Fil­ipino is a small stall: the sari-sari. Indus­try and pro­duc­tion for the Fil­ipino are the small imme­di­ate search­ings of each day: isang kahig, isang tuka. And com­merce for the Fil­ipino is the small­est degree of retail: the tingi.”

The Matrix has been called by some movie­go­ers as a modern-day ren­di­tion of Plato’s Alle­gory of the Cave. We notice for exam­ple the dif­fer­ent binary oppos­ing themes found in both the film and the Alle­gory: appearance/reality, dream/wakefulness, shadows/forms, vir­tual reality/actual real­ity. Sim­i­lar to the Alle­gory of the Cave, the basic ques­tion of the Matrix is: what if what I think of as the real world is not really real? What if I am in “a cave”? Or more specif­i­cally in the movie: “How do I know that this world I’m liv­ing in, is the real world and not a vir­tual real­ity pro­gram cre­ated by arti­fi­cial intelligence?”

Which also sounds like Descartes prob­lem in Med­i­ta­tions on First Phi­los­o­phy. How do I know that I am not just dream­ing? That I am not a fool imag­in­ing all this in my mind? How do I know that I am not being deceived? And a more fun­da­men­tal ques­tion: of what can I be cer­tain about? Where can I find the ground of cer­ti­tude?

In Cagayan de Oro City, where I grew up, our jeep­neys have character.