Isidro “Manong Jon” Santos: A Taste of Ambrosia

by Michael Ian Lomongo

 

Isidro Santos was born on May 15, the feastday of San Isidro Labrador, the patron saint of farmers, carabaos, and ricefields in the Philippines. He grew up in a place that was, and still is, popularly known as “Pulong Matsing” (“Isle of Monkeys”, though nowhere near an island, nor populated by real monkeys.) In his youth, “Manong Jon,” as he is called by many, swam with his cohorts and friends in the river of Angono, then already polluted by the grayish effluent of the quarrying site known as the Concrete Aggregates Corporation. He cavorted and played with these childhood friends in the streets of Barangay San Roque, which might be occasionally littered by cow and carabao dung (Yes, Virgilio, there were still carabaos then in Angono!).

He grew up surrounded by these rites and rituals of harvest (from both the lake and the fields) and the passing of the seasons. Many of these simple rites and rituals of offering and thanksgiving to the bounty of nature have been acculturated into a Catholic Christian meaning. (A matter of cooptation, or successful concealment and adaptation?) The advent of the holy week in Angono signals one long concatenation of religious rites that necessarily involve not just fasting, but more so, feasting. In May, aside from the feast of San Isidro, the whole month is devoted to the Virgin Mary through the Flores de Mayo (offering of the flowers of May) and the SantaCruzan. November has “Todos Los Santos” where the cemetery grounds of Angono become virtually the site of one massive picnic; and of course, the town fiesta in honor of St. Clement, which has somehow been eclipsed (at least, to outsiders) by the so-called “Higantes Festival.” The town proper will not shed its festive character until after the Christmas season ends in January with the Feast of Epiphany, or traditionally, the Feast of the Three Kings.

Even Manong Jon’s rites of passage and coming of age would have been marked by these rites and rituals. He most likely would have gotten circumcised with other pubescent children by the lakeside on a Good Friday, chewing and spitting guava leaves into the cut, and then jumping into the Lake of Bay, hopefully in some part where the water is not too murky. He would have espied his first love through the religious processions, and either boldly or discreetly followed her as she made her way to the church during “Simbang Gabi.”

But the Siren that would eventually lure Manong Jon was not any modern mortal femme fatale, nor the typical simple barrio lass, nor even the mythical ones embodied by fairies and mermaids in Angono’s myths and folklores. Unwittingly perhaps, he had followed Her. Too closely. Without knowing why. Without even knowing who She was.

And that’s when She bit, and gave him a taste of it.

Life. Love. Death. Immortality, too. All at once. A heady affair.

Ambrosia. The food of the Gods.

And he has been feverishly at work since then. At first, trying his hand in the form of figurative works. Later, experimenting with abstract forms. It is in his dalliance with his abstractions that he will figure out what he has been trying to accomplish.

Manong Jon would realize that his random and free-flowing abstract forms would somehow coalesce into some dimly-lit and vaguely identifiable image coming out of the haze. Sometimes, they would be intimations of something ethereal and hanging in the air. Other times, they would be as palpable and visceral as spilled blood congealing, or the innards hanging out, or gray matter dashed to the ground. It’s as if his abstractions themselves are crossing, transgressing the very boundaries of abstractions, and are becoming figurative… as it were, desirous of some “Transfiguration” themselves.

Is he seeing things? Or has Manong Jon become a shaman?

“The series of works here are like snapshots of transformations from the physical to the transcendental, taking inspiration from ritual practices done by people to appease their gods. It’s like feeding the gods.”

Rather than seeing himself as a shaman, Manong Jon likens himself to a photographer who documents ritualistic phenomena, at the very moment of their occurrence, in this case, at the very moment of their Transfiguration from the profane to the sacred. If we are to view every rite and ritual as a form of Sacrifice, that is, as a “making holy or sacred,” then what Manong Jon affirms in these works is the potential visibility and accessibility of the sacred liminal. His works essay to capture the very moment when the commonplace of the everyday ephemeral acquires the sheen of the Eternal, and thus provide some sketch of a gateway to the Divine.

The offering to the Gods is in fact a strategy to elude, or at least postpone the coming of Death. The Sacrifice satisfies (the Gods). And Death is detained, made to wait. At the threshold. Not denied. Never denied.

For what are the offerings of Sacrifice but mere memorials to Death? Animals get slain, bouquets of flowers wither, votive candles die out, the flames of the hearth become embers and ash.

Death finally, ultimately, with finality, comes.

The funny paradox is that we mortals are the Ambrosia, the food of the Gods. We get eaten by time, our very life, work, passions, hobbies, possessions, distractions, obsessions, and all the many little things that constitute the sound and fury of this world.

But it is in this very effort to memorialize our passing and Death, in the very process of recognizing the ephemerality of our existence, that we truly live, manifest our common humanity, and celebrate our Divinity.

There is an old Latin saying, said to be derived from Hippocrates: “Ars longa, vita brevis.” (“Art is long; life is short.”) Shaman or not, Manong Jon offers us these “snapshots of transformation” as a serving of his brand of Ambrosia.

Will you take a bite?

Again, in life as in love and in art (and in Latin too!), “Caveat emptor!” (“Let the buyer beware!”)

 

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