When Harris arrived at Manila airport, I gave him a rundown:
"I said: 'You don't understand, George. You have to describe Zen a bit more clearly. 'If you can describe Zen, it isn't Zen,' he said. 'Oh, all right then,' I had said."
Harris, who is a first class mathematician, said: "This is absurd. If course the guru doesn't like the shafts of light that open discussion brings."
I told Harris George wasn't a true believer: he was preparing himself for death, by a gradual, slow process of self-obliteration.
George was a loner: his wife, and daughters, lived in Edinburgh. A wife is the best narcotic against night time fears, as I well knew.
"Why doesn't he just kill himself?"
"I don't know: maybe he is too afraid. He says differently, of course: that Zen is his salvation."
"Is it?"
"Well, put it this way. You know what an American general said in Vietnam: we must destroy this village to save it."
In the car, I told Harris about Imelda's hole in the sky.
We were driving past a squattter camp:
"A hole IN the sky?" he said sourly.
We took a bus up to Tagaytay town. Traffic wended very slowly through the suburbs of southern Manila. The Philippines had, until 1946, been a US colony, its only major one. Many churches were clustered next to fast food restaurants, go-go bars and gas stations.
Every highway in Luzon was an endlessly long stringy town, one shack deep, of jeepney repair centres, small holdings, mango shacks, fast food restaurants, banks, cemeteries, more squatting communities, slums, Shacks, factory zones, garbage dumps. Harris was trying to read Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace, but was being constantly interrupted by the sellers that jumped aboard at every junction and tried to foist their
trays of pork scratchings, peanuts, chewing gum, bananas upon all.
Harris went back to biting his nails, poring over his book, dog earing pages.
At a stop, in Dasmarinas, a newspaper seller came on board.
"Must be tough to be a journalist in this country. Or a writer."
We were back in traffic again. Right now, forty heads were moving to the action of the karate video that was playing on the bus's TV screen.
"Well," I said. "literacy is over ninety percent."
* * * *
The safety paradox: because God “protected” him, the bus driver could drive faster.
There was a lake, ringed by ridges, in which monasteries, churches, Zen schools, nunneries clustered, all looking out over Taal lake with its extinct volcano island in the middle. The town itself was centred on a small roundabout where there was a McDonalds, and one day on an earlier visit I had recognised one of George's fellow lodging friends, a Canadian clairvoyant, scarfing a Big Mac.
"What are you going to do tonight?"
"I don't know yet," the clairvoyant said sullenly.
Perhaps he had heard the taunt before.
The monastery was in a converted girls' school, and indeed you were frightened of girls turning up at the end of corridors, long dead and reproachful.
* * *
"I would rather we went for a drink," said Harris.
"I healed someone's TB yesterday." said George.
"Really? Wonderful."
“He was taking penicillin, of course, as a back up."
"Have you ever tried healing someone who doesn't take penicillin?"
"Oh no. That would be unethical."
"So how do you know your healing makes the difference?"
"I am telling you, I healed him."
He put his shoes on, and kneeled down to collect something from under the bed. "My potty - it's full."
Harris and I exchanged glances.
"In Europe, we are so uptight. I love Filipinos - so spontaneous," George said.
There was a picture on the wall of a fat and sleazy looking man - Master Choa and dates of US lecture tour.
"Makes a bit of money then Master Choa?"
George didn't answer; he pursued his lips, and squeezed his big bottom into a pair of slacks.
We went to attend one of the healing teacher sessions. The woman, a fiftysomething Filipina called Faith, talked for two hours, and we had to produce a piece of a paper - a mission statement - which she also talked about for two hours.
"She is in love with Jesus," confided George.
Afterwards, on the lawn, the healer squealed with delight:
"Look, look. Do you see them! The little spirits dancing all around us!"
No. Later, we went to dinner where George fell asleep.
* * *
Faith healing, indeed - let's look at the bigger subject of which faith healing is a part - the influence of religion on health - should not be dismissed per se. Such an attitude is itself unscientific. Both religion and medical care go back together, of course, a long way: were usually dispensed by the same person. Today more and more US medical schools are offering courses in religion and spirituality, and there is a continuing interest both among medical professionals and the general public in the subject.
According to an informal survey conducted at the American Academy of Family Physicians convention, 99% of US general practitioners are convinced that religion can heal, and 75 % of others believe that the prayers of others can help a patient recover.
There have many scientific studies looking at religion as an antecedent to good health - assessment of religious behaviour, frequency of church attendance, the efficacy of prayer, both intercessionary and prayer for the self. There have been assessments of the comfort it can provide, as well as examinations of health differences as a correlate of an individual’s type of religion and as a correlate of the degree of religious orthodoxy.
These findings - which are that religion plays a positive role for health - have been treated by some scepticism by other medical scientists.
A Lancet journal study of studies, while not completely closed to the possibility that religion can play a beneficial role, has found methodological errors in virtually all the studies it surveyed.
For instance, consider the studies that find that orthodox Jews in kibbutz communities and monks live longer. One simple explanation could be that they smoke, drink and eat less. Then there are the surveys that show that people who go to church are healthier, for instance less likely to have strokes. The fact is, people who have had strokes are less likely to actually make it to a service. Then there is the fact that many health factors tend to be measured simultaneously, and there is the tendency to find one that just happens to sink when religiosity falls, though this is not corroborated across a range of measures and the samples are usually unscientifically small. For instance, in one survey, high attendance in church was inversely correlated with high concentrations of interleukin 6 in the elderly but this was only one of eight outcome variables and there was no attempt to control for multiple comparisons.
If for some reason, this message has failed to reach out and or failed to convinced, physicians, who are after all scientifically trained to be sceptical of the super natural, it is not surprising that there is fertile ground among the less scientifically trained population at large for proselytisers for the virtues of prayer - and indeed there is a large industry devoted to faith healing of the masses - different from the quiet prayer at the bedside, it is an industry involving large prayer meetings and a growth in superstar healers, who have their own TV stations and claim to heal dozens of strangers at a time at their live shows which tour the world. (They live, and live plenty, by their donations.)
There's Master Choa Kok Sui, based in Asia, who specialises in pranic healing, which he teaches his faithful to perform in each other. But more famous is Benny Hinn, a fiftysomething in a Nehru jacket and middle eastern accent who touches devotees - people who say they have just been healed - and who fall backwards when treated, legs shaking, all in ecstasy. However reporters found one boy in "coca cola bottle glasses” who had appeared on TV once. "William, baby, can you see now," Hinn had said; the boy told reporters later his ten thousand dollar cheque to see him through rehabilitation had never appeared and he was still, in fact, blind. He had said he had said yes on TV because he had been caught up in the hope of the occasion. Such an example is just utterly typical; one reporter wrote "We have not found one genuine case of a person in fact being truly healed!" and refutations are numerous. There are other tales of charlatanry related:self deputising watchdogs monitor his statements – including such comments that Adam was the first superman, who flew to the moon – to demonstrate his fake nature. Another healer was exposed as using staffers who mingle with the audience in the interval so that the healer’s calling out their names out of supposedly divine inspiration are anything but; and then there's the tragedies, the people who avoid conventional treatment in favour of healing - either administered by the superstars or self administered - and die as a result: four in five children who died after their parents put their trust in faith healing could probably have survived if medical treatment had been sought, according to a study published in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
In one case a child choked on a banana and showed signs of life for an hour while the family around her continued to pray. A related tragic case was one woman with cancer of the spine who was commanded to walk across a stage to meet her healer, discarding her brace that held her spine to do so; the next day her spine collapsed and she died soon after.
The Philippine speciality was the psychic surgeons; it is said that there is one loosely attached to every one of Manila's bigger hotels. They pretend to plunge their hands into the patients body, pull out the offending malignant part, and close up the wound, in seconds, leaving no scars. Their successes have created a touring industry for customers from the west. But one expose showed that the surgeons used magician's sleight of hand, bending the fingers at the first knuckle to give the impression of a plunge, with chickens' liver and blood brought forth from under the arm or table at the right moment, quickly secreted away to leave only a few drops of blood - the chicken's, not a human's. The reason why psychic surgery does work for some people is simple.
The human body can heal itself. Most ailments are self-limiting and disappear in time without any treatment. Naturally, if you visit a psychic surgeon and become well, the former will get all the credit and your cash
There is a regular columnist in the Inquirer, Manila's biggest paper, propagandising frequently for the benefits of this transparent charlatanry. "They thought Galileo was wrong too," he writes, in an effort to make people believe the psychic healers are geniuses misunderstood by the many sceptics in the west .
* * *
We were at the end of Tagaytay ridge, at the Palace of the Sky, overlooking the fields of Manila plain one one side, on the other side, the Taal lake, a huge caldera, 30km across, with a volcano island neatly in the middle. Over the plain, winds, and low cloud were sheeting. It was a bit like being in top of a welsh mountain - the play of light was like that.
It had once been a pleasure mansion; now it was just rusting concrete, with an empty concrete dancefloor, grass growing between the footpath stones that crossed what had once been a lawn on which 1970s celebrities and friends of Imelda’s such as George Hamilon and Gina Lollobrigida mingled and drunk cocktails. It had belonged to the Marcoses; it was left to ruin by the subsequent people power government.
"I hate this country," said Harris. "They like the Americans too much."
"You're not a typical anti-American are you? That's so boring," I said.
"No, it's the fact they worship them. They have the same faith and belief in America will sort out the problems of the world, before coming back to sort this country out as they do in God coming to solve their proiblems. But in neither case it's going to happen. They go to church to get God on their side; but all day long they live like votaries for the American dream: the baseball caps, obsession with the worst parts of US trash culture."
"You think Marcos was a solution?"
"They need a revolution."
We went down to see George: he had been done to one of the squatters' camps, where someone had died and was lying in wake in a shack. "Really interesting, like peasants in a Russian novel," he said. He politely accepted my printouts of articles from medical journals on faith healing, and took us out to lunch, where he got so excited by retelling old work yarns that he attempted to do pranic healing on a 26-year-old female stringer from an international news magazine. "Only take a minute," he said, drunkenly and stupidly and when we all tottered out of the Chinese restaurant, I noticed he had left the refuting documents behind.
***
When I finish writing, I stand up, stretch, and switch off the air conditioner, and fan: damp heat soon fills the room. I look in the mirror: the humidity has aged me in only three months. I switch off the light, which has given the shuttered room a sickly yellow diorama glow, the light of the plotting bedsit
murderer. Back in one of the rich people's subdivisions.
When the ringing in my ears subsides, as I stand in the dark, see my silhouette in
the silvery light of the mirror. Sounds outside: the thump of the hostess's son
playing basketball, the Filipino national sport, potting shots into a basket in the
drive. Voices, hoarse pubescent.
"Hey. dude - go for it."
"Go lick a dog's ass."
Thud.
"That was, like, todally COOL."
Silence. Then, a television.
Stocks on Wall Street today,..." click "Do You feel your support group is helping you get over your problems!" "MTV Asia -leave the dial RIGHT there."
But the sound is drowned by - a roaring, crumping sound, rising. I go outdoors, hoping, expecting, it to be people emerging from every house, every doorway, every side street the patter of feet, of a river of people converging, hastening, rushing forwards…
But it is only the rain.
