Two quotes encapsulate for me why I came to Manila. One is from James Hamilton-Paterson’s book America’s Boy, one of the best accounts of the Marcos era: “There are moments when it seems that the world’s affairs are transacted by dreamers. There is a sadness here in the spectacle of nations, no less than individuals, helping each other along with their delusions. What is thought to be clear-sighted pragmatism may actually be shoring up a regime’s ideology whose hidden purpose is itself nothing more than to assuage the pain of a single person’s unhappy past.”

And this, from Imperial Grunts by Robert D. Kaplan: “Just as the stirring poetry and novels of Rudyard Kipling celebrated the work of British Imperialism . . . the American artist Frederic Remington, in his bronze sculptures and oil paintings, would do likewise for the conquest of the Wild West. . . . ‘Welcome to Injun Country’ was the refrain I heard from the [U.S.] troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq . . . the War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier.”

The first quote, for me, summarizes the Rosebud view of historical (and contemporary events) while the second is about the enduring power of mythology and potent image to justify, well, whatever you want it to.

I arrived in Manila over the Christmas holidays in 2005 with a pretty specific agenda. A few years earlier I had been reminded that the former first lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, was a habitué of discos during the late ’70s and early ’80s. This would have been the era of Studio 54, Regine’s, Privilege, and Le Palace (in Paris) and other velvet-rope clubs. This was also, um, the era of martial law and heavy censorship in the Philippines. Being a fan of some of the club music of that time I wondered if it might have supplied the sound track for a person in power like Imelda. Could dance music be a vehicle through which to tell a story like hers? A story of power, personal pain, love, and social class? Was the lightness, effervescence, and headiness inherent in that music—and the drugs that went along with it—similar to the feeling one gets when one is in a powerful position? And was there even a story to hang this idea on?

I also had another agenda, another reason for being attracted to a project such as this—I wanted to see if there was a way to tie a group of songs together besides the fact that they happen to be on the same CD. I wondered, in this form, would songs play off one another and receive some added weight from one another? Why not, if the same characters recur now and again? In this format, the listener would get some additional insights and progress on the characters’ lives and feelings so songs would be informed by other songs. Within a song cycle like this could songs strung together become more than the sum of their parts?

I’d spent about a year reading and doing research and I soon became attracted to what I saw as a story that perfectly elucidated Hamilton-Paterson’s proposal that politics and history are a kind of personal psychological spectacle. The Philippines is an extremely class-conscious society, and Imelda, who grew up in an unsuccessful branch of an important regional family, was, after her mother died, raised by a servant, Estrella, who was only a little older than she. Being that close to being socially accepted, but not quite, Imelda had a pile of psychological baggage to lug around from pretty early on. I saw part of a possible story being about the initial closeness of these two women and their subsequent estrangement, and also about Imelda’s “class struggle”—her need to be accepted, and her working out that need in public on a grand scale. The project would be about her conflation of fantasy, personal pain, and politics, a combination that played itself out in a tragic and dramatic way in the history of that era.

I contacted Fatboy Slim, the British DJ, to cowrite songs that I felt would embody what these two women were feeling at various points in this story and that, when appropriate, would sound authentically clubby. Sometimes I used the women’s own quotes, or texts from speeches or interviews, as a basis for the lyric material, which was a new experience for me. It was liberating to write almost exclusively from their point of view—and sometimes even use their words. Not that I hadn’t written through characters before, but having their own words available made it easier to find truly unique and surprising phrases that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own.

One of these quotes serves, for now, as the title of this project: Here Lies Love. In a contemporary interview done for the Ramona Diaz documentary Imelda, Mrs. Marcos is quoted as wishing that her epitaph, what she wants written on her tombstone, should not be her name, but the words here lies love. In her view she has, in the words of a classic Filipino song, “done it all for you.” The “you,” from her point of view, being the Philippine people.

I believe that politics is, besides being pragmatic, social, and psychological, also an expression of a wider surrounding context. That includes everything that might affect what people feel and do—music, landscape, food, clothes, religion, weather. Politics is a reflection of the streets, the smells, what constitutes eroticism, and the routine of humdrum lives just as much as it is a result of backroom deals, ideologies, and acts of legislature. Sometimes this occurs in obvious ways. The Philippines is a Catholic country with animist roots, spread out among scattered islands the geographically isolated towns of which are distant from the capital, Manila, and those factors all contribute. Sometimes there are visual and other clues to things that influence events—attitudes expressed and made visible via posture, body language, humor. A visual and gestural language is by nature untranslatable into words, but nevertheless indicative of attitudes and even ideologies. I wanted to catch some of that, or at least as much as I could.

Just as there are elements in our genes waiting for chemical keys to allow for expression as a chicken liver or a human heart, there might also be elements in a place that trigger expression through politics, action, and culture. Much human behavior is a manifestation of these keys being inserted and turned—keys that open genetic, geographical, and cultural doors—through which the latent tendencies pass.

I was given a few contacts in Manila by friends and acquaintances in New York, and I asked a few of them if they thought it would be crazy for me to bring a bicycle in order to get around Manila. Some of them thought I was nuts or just plain obsessive but a few said, “Why not? The streets are pretty crowded and chaotic, but you could give it a try.” I packed up my folding mountain bike and after a long flight I looked out the plane window at Manila and the surrounding bay and wondered what I’d gotten myself into.

Joel Torre, a local actor, generously meets me at the airport and everyone says hi to him as we walk to the car pickup area. We drive by Imelda’s Cultural Center on the way to the hotel—a giant Lincoln Center-type edifice that Mrs. Marcos had built on landfill. She wanted both to put the Philippines on the world cultural map and to encourage local talent. And, especially with the film and theater schools that she established, she definitely accomplished the latter.

I’ve booked myself into the Aloha Hotel, a small pink building facing the bay. Some friends in New York recommended staying in Makati, the more upscale district of modern high-rises, fancy hotels, and glass-walled shopping malls, but geographically this less-chic area seemed closer to the historical and political landmarks I’d been reading about.

Across from the hotel is an esplanade that borders the bay. It is lined with kiosks, vendors, and outdoor bars and cafés, some of which have either live or piped-in music. Appropriately enough, as I unpack and assemble my bike in my hotel room the disco beats from one of the cafés waft in through the window. There’s no chance of taking a postflight nap with the music booming, and since there are only a few more hours of daylight I force myself to stay awake and get out and see something.

I must say, given that I’m filled with thoughts of this project, the disco music is actually inspiring rather than annoying—though I’m glad it doesn’t go on all night. A song with a fairly radical synth playing a squealy pulse gives me some musical ideas. A cover version of 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” is the last thing I hear as I pedal along the esplanade toward the old city center.

Postindependence and post-World War II the United States continued to maintain a number of massive military bases just north of Manila. From here supply lines were established to what would become the Vietnam War. From the United States’ point of view, any politician who ran the Philippines had to be aware of what side their bread was buttered on, so as a result there was always a tight relationship between the two nations.

Why is it that all third-world markets are structurally more or less the same? I am reminded of similar ones in Kuala Lum pur, Cartagena, Marrakech, Salvador, and Oaxaca. It’s almost as if these markets were all designed by the same person the world over, as they take very similar forms everywhere. The human scale and the pleasant chaos must be part of an unconscious, though thoroughly evolved, plan, as are the smells and the piles of refuse here and there. One of the stall owners sweeps the rainwater and mud out of the street with a broom. This is evidence to me of an unwritten layout, a subconscious form, and an invisible map, which extends even to an unwritten system of self-maintenance. I suppose this recurring pattern and structure emerges because human scale automatically self-regulates the manner in which similar goods are best sold, how they are most efficiently displayed, and where. It is as if some genetic architectural propensity exists in us, that guides us, subtly and invisibly, as to how to best organize first a kiosk, then a stall, and from there add incrementally as our innate instincts guide us, until soon enough there exists a whole marketplace and neighborhood. Some tiny part of our DNA tells us how to make and maintain places like this in the same way that genetic codes tell the body how to make an eye or a liver. That architect who designed all those markets the world over is us. Could it be that our genes tell us not just how to make ourselves but how to make the built external world? I’m glad the whole city hasn’t been malled, as some of the guidebooks claim.

Oddly enough one could say some of the same things about the newer built-up areas of many big cities, where many of the districts of condos, glass-walled offices, and chain stores could have all been designed by the same person—a very different person—who would by definition then be the most widely hired and ubiquitous designer/architect in the world, despised by some, a source of pride for a few, envied by others. I think with modern shopping malls and glass office buildings there is a little more conscious borrowing, ego display, and one upmanship at work than in the pleasant hodgepodge typical of the stalls and tiny shops in front of me.

Victor Gruen built the first mall in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina in 1956, and one could argue that he was more a conceptual developer than an architect. Malcolm Gladwell, in a New Yorker article, says that Gruen didn’t just invent the mall; he invented an archetype, as so many other malls followed the exact same model as this first one. I would agree that both the mall and the souk tap into some kind of meme for social shopping that reproduces itself prolifically. A kind of self-replicating architecture.

Along the bayside walk that I take back to my hotel, there are outdoor restaurants, many of which feature cover bands. As rumored, the bands are all surprisingly good—if by good you mean amazingly faithful in their ability to reproduce well-known songs. Close your eyes and it’s Seals and Crofts, or Neil Young, with an ever-so-slight accent. The singing and playing is uniformly competent and professional, though of course completely unoriginal, which is by design. One man sings on a little stage with two glowing plastic Santas on either side of him. I wonder to myself if I should consider using one of these bands or these singers for a live band for Here Lies Love?

Butch’s place is beautiful—a spacious loft apartment with tropical Zen decor and windows at one end offering a view over some tin roofs to the expanse of Manila Bay. “Not so many years ago this was one of the quietest places in town,” he says, “but now there are car stereos and burglar alarms, police klaxons and sirens, open-air karaoke on the bayfront, and more scooter traffic—the noise level is so much higher.” As a New Yorker I am used to the noise so it doesn’t seem excessive to me.

I am joined by editor Jessica Zafra (her magazines Flip and Manila Envelope, both in English, are wonderful), poet and columnist Krip Yuson, photographer Neal Oshima, restauranteuse Susan Roxas, performance artist Carlos Celdran, adman David Guerrero . . . and eventually even more filmmakers and writers wander in.

I describe the Here Lies Love project to everyone as best I can, which isn’t saying much, as I wasn’t prepared to make a pitch. The CD of demos I brought and especially the compilation of rough edits of video footage done to the music explain the concept much better than I am able to do verbally. The videos especially are well received. They’re mostly edited from stock and period news footage from the Philippines and elsewhere cut to specific songs. Some of these folks view them intently, with fascination, as if their own lives were being replayed, so theirs is hardly an objective view. Painful memories, some of them.

Sol Vanzi joins us. She lives on the same floor. She informally handles Imelda’s relations with local and international media. (Imelda returned to Manila from Hawaiian exile after Marcos died. She now lives in a nice apartment in Makati.) Sol also runs a Web site that collates Philippine news: http://www.newsflash.org. She’s sixty-one, she tells us, and she immediately sits down, cracks open a can of beer, and launches into a tirade during which she disputes all the conventional wisdom about the Marcos regime and Imelda. She just naturally assumes (rightly, I suspect) that she’s not addressing a group of Marcos loyalists. However, most of the others here seem to know her, so her rant is mainly directed toward me.

I would have assumed that the events at that time—the era of martial law—would have split Philippine society down the middle between the loyalists and the exiled and repressed. But it seems that here everyone knows everyone else, and almost always has, and everyone crosses paths often enough for a weird tolerance to have developed. People I would have assumed to be natural sworn enemies sit down to have a drink together. Things here are not as simple as they were in my preconceived picture. I’m glad I’m here.

Sol continues her monologue directed at me. She says that she instructed a video cameraman to hide in the basement of the palace when it was being overrun—this was minutes after the Marcoses fled—with instructions to record the state of things as they were the moment the family left. She claims that this video proves that the various stories of half-eaten tubs of caviar and other evidence of extravagant excess were “urban myths,” as she referred to them. It is evidence that these things were planted—by Cory Aquino and others in the opposition parties, or so she claims.

She also claims that it was the Americans who most likely killed Benigno Aquino when he returned to the Philippines to challenge Marcos in 1983. (I thought Marcos said at the time that it was the commies? Or that it was the insurgents, who were also allied with the commies?) Sol pushes on, claiming that Imelda was never poor as a child, which, to be fair, is a statement that could be seen as being relative: Imelda certainly wasn’t as poor as the people living in the shanties squeezed along the riverbanks in a lot of Philippine towns.

But by all accounts she did live in a garage as a child—with a car still in it—while the children of her father’s first wife continued to live in the main house. Things went downhill from there; for a while Imelda, her brother, sister, and their servant and pal Estrella lived in a nipa hut—a shack made of woven palm fronds. So, no, she maybe had had it better than many, but for someone from an important local family she was relatively poor. One could say more psychologically poor than economically, in that she was ostracized by the more socially acceptable part of her extended family.

Sol segues into a riff on how limited class mobility is in the Philippines. How if you are from a provincial town you are automatically handicapped, even if you are from a “good” family in that town. (This mirrors Imelda’s situation.) Sol implies, as do others, that it is almost impossible to rise above your station, as your class will be revealed by your accent. Even if that doesn’t give you away folks will probably ask you where you’re from, and then the game’s over. Shades of the UK, where your regional accent can limit your chances for success in some fields.

What I am learning, despite all her endless protesting and the refuting of claims that no one has even voiced, is that things are not as black and white here as I, or many other left-leaning Westerners, might prefer to think. The Marcos regime, though corrupt from the start, was no more corrupt, at least at first, than many others. Maybe even less, at the beginning. What distinguished the couple in some ways was that they did actually build clinics, highways, roads, bridges, cultural centers, and a high school for the arts, as well as instigate a health plan and many other programs that they promised in their campaigns. (That high school of the arts produced many of the creative types who are still active—friends of people in this room.) Similar programs had been promised by other politicians every time election season came around, but Marcos actually delivered. Ferdinand and Imelda were therefore truly loved by many Filipinos—at least at the start of their tenure—and, according to some, they continue to be loved in the provinces even during their ouster, an event which somewhat baffled the country folk. At one point (in the ’60s) the couple intentionally modeled their image on that of the Kennedys—posing for family snaps in Malacañang Palace wearing hand-tailored versions of native dress and generally looking young and glamorous—which they were. As was the case with the Kennedys in the United States, the public loved it. So did the international media. The Marcoses were featured in Time, Life, and publications around the world—they were a very photogenic couple. Everyone bought into the fantasy—just like the media bought into the Kennedy myth, which was being created at around the same time.

On the way back to the district where my hotel is, Butch says he needs to stop at a karaoke bar to say Merry Christmas to his production designer and erstwhile muse, Marta, who is now “playing for the other team” and is there with her girlfriend. We are led by an attendant down a buttery-yellow hallway past a series of identical doors and the assistant opens one and there are four of Butch’s friends singing to a TV screen. We order beers but lamely fail to join in the singing festivities. Someone programs “Burning Down the House,” maybe in hopes that I will sing, but I just stare at the screen as a guy who looks like an ’80s Bon Jovi poses with a guitar while a model house burns in an image superimposed behind him. I guess I’m a bit of a party pooper, but this did take me by surprise. Marta, exuberant and very pretty in plaid pants, sings along with the song, though it seems my phrasing on that song was a little tricky.

Some claim karaoke was invented here in 1975 as the Sing Along System by a man named Roberto del Rosario. TVK/ Video karaoke clubs are everywhere and come in all shapes and for all incomes. Maybe it’s a way to allow everyone to sing. Even though I was a party pooper at the karaoke club, I know from experience that singing is therapeutic, and fun to do. They sing Western pop songs here—and some Filipino pop songs too, many of which are sung in English. For a Filipino, singing Western pop songs is not like singing a foreign song. Western pop, especially U.S. pop, is such an integrated part of Filipino culture that Filipinos feel it is their own culture too. And it is, in a way. Who, or what nation, can own the experience you have when you hear a song? There’s even a karaoke TV channel. Endless cheap corny videos with music playing and scrolling lyrics. You can stay at home and sing along with your television. Like some kind of radical conceptual art piece—but unlike conceptual art it’s super-popular.

Biking here in this upscale neighborhood is not always easy—there are no bike lanes as there are along the bay area, and the fumes from the jeepneys and tricycles (a motorcycle with a sidecar that can hold maybe two passengers) are overwhelming. Foreigners notice the jeepneys right away. How can you not? They are super-colorful, freakish progeny of leftover U.S. Army jeeps that have morphed, elongated, and mutated into a kind of cheap, tricked-out form of public transport. Jeepney drivers adorn their vehicles with names and sayings: Lovely, Mama-Cita, Metal Mania, Pray For Our Way, Grandma’s Pet, Reconnaissance Patrol. This one reads Simply the Best, no doubt quoting from the Tina Turner song. There is a kind of jeepney wisdom.

The traffic sometimes devolves into borderline gridlock, but mostly things move along with a chaotic grace, and I of course make better time than most of these four- or even three-wheeled vehicles.

The Philippines, for many Americans, is the land where maids and nurses come from, and that’s about all they know about it. I have to admit I’ve seen quite a lot of men and women in medical attire. Filipinos are hopeful that Japan, for example, might employ some of their highly trained medical personnel, but the Japanese are notoriously uncomfortable dealing physically with foreigners, and the idea of being touched by one, God forbid! The Japanese instead prefer to develop robots to take care of their own mundane housekeeping and medical needs. Racism as a spur to technical innovation.

After riding around Makati, visiting a mall, and getting lost in a gated community (a white man of a certain age on a bike, like me, is naturally waved in by the security guards), I head back toward the bay to explore the landfill area where Imelda built many of her cultural projects, one of which—the Film Center—now hosts an all-Korean cast doing an Egyptian themed drag show. This large building is reportedly haunted, or cursed, as part of it collapsed during the rushed nonstop construction that Madame Marcos mandated, and it is rumored that some of the bodies are still in the concrete, haunting anyone who visits. I am told that Koreans don’t believe in ghosts, so that’s why their show is running here.

The grand Cultural Center and the Folk Arts Center are in this area as well, and those are still quite active. I visit the Cultural Center one afternoon to pore over their photo and video archives of the Marcos era. Surprisingly, there isn’t all that much here—most of it is at the university archives now, or in private hands. Who owns what footage seems unclear, which is worrisome, because in a way photo, film, and video archives are recent history. In many countries videotape that was used for news reports was erased and reused over and over, to save money—which means those outlets have no record of many events in the recent past.

Inside the palace I see the chair where in 1972 Marcos signed the declaration of martial law that suspended habeas corpus, and allowed him to jail political opponents and censor the press, keeping people in the dark for more than a decade—all in the name of maintaining order and homeland security. On the walls are numerous photos commemorating People Power, the mass movement that resulted in the ouster of the Marcoses in 1986. There are images of students giving flowers to soldiers, and lots of people wearing yellow. Yellow, it turns out, was adopted as an opposition color due to the pop song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” which was chosen and sung in anticipation of the return of Benigno Aquino, Marcos’s only serious rival, to the Philippines. Surreal, these pop-music connections—who would imagine a link between Tony Orlando and Dawn and a grassroots uprising that overthrew a dictator? It makes my head spin. Unfortunately Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino was gunned down at the airport as soon as he stepped from the plane . . . but Cory and her supporters stuck with the yellow from then on.

The large central room is filled with glass cases of memorabilia commemorating previous Philippine leaders—but there is a glaring absence. All the leaders are represented except for the Marcoses, who are relegated to a couple of (not insubstantial) back rooms. Their absence could be seen as a lacuna, a hole, in history, but these back rooms more than make up for it—they are stuffed with commemorative dolls, clocks, and of course paintings, many of them portraits that the couple commissioned themselves.

Looming over me are two famous paintings in which Ferdinand and Imelda had themselves depicted as the Ur couple of the Philippines—the Adam and Eve of tribal Philippine mythology, who, in the traditional legend, sprang from a piece of split bamboo, the strong man and the beautiful woman.

The idea inherent in these paintings was that the Marcoses were fulfilling destiny, facilitating a kind of rebirth and renewal of Philippine identity—symbolized by their embodiment of the primeval couple. To be fair, a rebirth did happen, to some extent, and these paintings make explicit the couple’s wish to also become part of the national mythology. The desire to find a slot for oneself in the collective national psyche runs deep. George Bush and Ronald Reagan were often photographed wearing western clothes despite one being a New England WASP and the other a Hollywood movie star. If a politician appears as a fighter pilot, a cowboy, or as Adam or Eve, the attraction and potency of these images are so powerful that we often respond as desired, even if we know it’s an act.

She brings me to a back room, which is fairly large, and is filled with rude wooden bunk beds, most without sheets. This is where the bar girls sleep and rest, I think to myself. She hollers again, and then, from a room farther back emerges an attractive girl in a red dress who immediately escorts me back into the club room asking me, “What would you like? You like girls?” Her face is painted white—as if she is in the middle of a facial. I remember toenail girl had this white-face thing going on as well. With her full red lips she looks like an erotic clown.

I recall that the pharmacies in town are filled with skin-whitening creams, and I’ve seen numerous TV ads for these products as well. Four out of ten Southeast Asian women use skin-whitening creams. In many countries a lighter complexion implies wealth and class—manual laborers have darker skin from working out in the sun. Odd that in North America and Europe a tan has become desirable, maybe because it implies the reverse—that you can afford to spend time in the sun instead of working.

But why is this girl asking me these questions? Ohhhh, now I get it! Duh. These places are all whorehouses! Why didn’t I notice all the signs reading No Condom—No Sex? And there’s live music and karaoke (naturally) to bide the time while you’re making up your mind. Here are some choices:

I walk on. I see a few girls lazing around, some doing their washing by hand and some sitting and chatting over a soda. Signs read Check Your Firearms at the Door.

Though I doubt these places regularly cater to foreigners, the Philippines used to have a reputation as a popular sex-tourism destination. I thought the epoch of underage sex for foreigners here was over, but it seems not. There are at least two Anglo geezers in my hotel sporting young Filipinas on their arms—the girls seem to be around twenty, so maybe they’re not underage. On my bike meanderings in Manila I’ve seen quite a few more of these May/November couples—over there is Mr. Buster Bloodvessel looking for love and farther down the street I spy the Professor out for a naughty holiday. It seems this country is still occasionally the place for a foreign man to get whatever it was he never had, or get what he craved but was discouraged from indulging in back home. Maybe here in this “western” town of Laoag one can fulfill one’s lifelong dream. When it’s put that way it almost sounds sweet.

I also spy some foreigners with local rent boys—one overweight limping Yank with a southern accent has two! In a restaurant he orders them around, “Salt, I need salt . . . and pepper.” One of the boys dutifully goes and fetches the salt. “Toast, is that toast over there?” One of the boys fetches him three pieces of toast. He seems temporarily satisfied. One can see the temptations of power at work—the more he senses he has power the more he will flex it, to witness and enjoy it in action, to feel the pleasure of command.

“Coffee and cigarettes,” he announces.

Then, “Coffee and cigarettes is my breakfast back home.”

To be fair, not all western/Filipino relationships are necessarily about power or sexual fantasy. A family in the hotel restaurant here in Laoag is composed of an Australian man and his attractive Filipina wife and their kids. He grumbles and grunts in response to the kids’ entreaties while she texts someone on her cell phone. Hardly a perfect relationship, but not obviously predatory either.

It’s Christmas in Laoag, and in the Wild West kids are carol ing on the streets just after the sun sets. I sing “Joy to the World” along with one group, and then they look at me, expecting money—and not just because I am a foreigner. As I wander off I see them going from house to house, hoping for small handouts . . . and that does not mean a hot chocolate.

I begin to take tricycles on short trips. This is not a kiddie bike but a motorcycle with a driver and sidecar-type thing attached. My bike has been left in Manila, as I want to make longer day trips using Laoag as a base. A tricycle affords a limited view, so they’re not so good for sightseeing, but they are everywhere, and hailing one only takes about a minute. And they look great.

Coupled with the ubiquitous jeepneys and the buses, which only leave from designated depots and travel mostly intercity, the tricycles make an incredibly efficient public transport system in these smaller towns and villages. They have a lot to recommend them except for the hideous pollution they generate. New York has a pretty good public transport system, one that rivals, say, Mexico City, though the New York subways are not quite as clean. But this improvised Filipino network seems much more user-friendly.

I continue by bus to Batac, a small town where Marcos lies in state (supposedly it is his real body) in a refrigerated glass casket that sinks into the floor when no one is around.

The mausoleum has piped-in liturgical Mozart music, creating a creepy haunted vibe, and in the air-conditioned chamber there are a number of staffs on either side with sculpted metal tops featuring icons that resemble weird Masonic symbols—crescent moons, stars, spades, hammers, and some that are indecipherable. The security guy can’t tell me what they all symbolize. The effect is deeply mystical, mysterious, almost Egyptian. Marcos’s embalmed body sure looks more like a wax-work than the real thing. The glass coffin is bathed in an eerie blue light, and photos are strictly prohibited. Rumor has it that the real body lies deeper below, slowly decomposing and still denied burial among the other former presidents by order of the present rulers.

The center of town does indeed abound in the type of old buildings of which only a few remain around Laoag and even fewer in Manila. Mostly they are wooden structures that withstand typhoons pretty well due to their flexibility, but that usually require periodic upkeep because of the tropical dampness and the termites that will destroy them after a number of years. Bit by bit, part by part, houses like these will be renovated and every wall and beam will be replaced. Impermanence is an accepted part of life in the tropics. There’s a permanence embodied in the continuity of patterns and relationships, but not in physical buildings or things.

Here’s one outside the town center—beautiful architecture made without architects:

In later years she built a “shrine” here in Tacloban, ostensibly to Santo Niño, the Christ child. The entrance opens into a large chapel with a wild altarpiece—the child floating, surrounded by disco lights. The shrine is mainly, however, to herself. Jeepneys heading to this destination from downtown Tacloban simply give “Imelda” as the direction on their windshields. The shrine houses lots of her furniture collection, but more important, she commissioned a series of lovely dioramas depicting her life story—or her life story as she imagined it.

Here is a nice one of her as a young girl at the shore having a family outing with an image of Marcos looming in the sky—her future husband awaiting their fateful meeting.

The rest of the “shrine” is structured as a series of “bedrooms” and “dining rooms” (in quotes because none of them were ever used for those purposes). They function more as regional theme rooms that also each contain one of the above dioramas detailing the Imelda myth. There are fifteen stations, or bedrooms, of the cross.

Back at my hotel for lunch I hear “Climb Every Mountain,” possibly the version by Tom Jones, on an endless loop—for an hour! Climax after climax! Climbing that mountain over and over. Occasionally I can hear other diners quietly singing along to themselves.

One theory regarding language is that it is primarily a useful tool born out of a need for control. In this theory written language was needed once top-down administration of small towns and villages came into being. Once there were bosses there arose a need for written language. The rise of the great metropolises of Ur and Babylon made a common written language an absolute necessity—but it was only a tool for the administrators. Administrators and rulers needed to keep records and know names—who had rented which plot of land, how many crops did they sell, how many fish did they catch, how many children do they have, how many water buffalo? More important, how much then do they owe me? In this account of the rise of written language, naming and accounting seem to be language’s primary “civilizing” function. Language and number are also handy for keeping track of the movement of heavenly bodies, crop yields, and flood cycles. Naturally, a version of local oral languages was eventually translated into symbols as well, and nonadministra tive words, the words of epic oral poets, sort of went along for the ride, according to this version.

What’s amazing to me is that if we accept this idea, then what may have begun as an instrument of social and economic control has now been internalized by us as a mark of being civilized. As if being controlled were, by inference, seen as a good thing, and to proudly wear the badge of this agent of control—to be able to read and write—makes us better, superior, more advanced. We have turned an object of our own oppression into something we now think of as virtuous. Perfect! We accept written language as something so essential to how we live and get along in the world that we feel and recognize its presence as an exclusively positive thing, a sign of enlightenment. We’ve come to love the chains that bind us, that control us, for we believe that they are us.

The Marcoses in some ways were embarrassed that the world was seeing Filipinos in such unsophisticated conditions (and fifteen years later the discovery was claimed to be a fraud by the media after the Marcoses’ departure). This reaction followed visits by social scientists, journalists, and film documentarians whose intrusions the government said were changing the Tasaday. So Marcos restricted the area—no visitors could disrupt the Eden of the Tasaday—except for a 1976 visit by Gina Lollobrigida for a book and film, the sightseeing granddaughter of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, and working teams of medical doctors.

Charles Lindbergh visited for several days in 1971 and ’72, and his request to the government played a key part in the declaration of the protected reserve for the Tasaday, which still exists today.

Hamilton-Paterson called the Tasaday a clear-cut hoax in his Marcos book, America’s Boy, but he retracted this a few years later in an article in the London Review of Books, realizing perhaps that in the Philippines things so seldom are what they seem at first, even Edens, even hoaxes.

A man named John Nance, who has had many contacts with the Tasaday, says that the claim of a hoax was the real hoax:

I see a sign on a building in Tacloban that reads: The Fraternal Order of Utopia. A man zips by on a motorcycle with a Santa hat wildly flapping.

Though Ferdinand and Imelda’s conflation of national mythology with their own lives to align it with their political strivings was blatant, it’s also pretty obvious in the staged contrivances and the carefully managed press of many other governments. Sometimes we can only see ourselves once we step far enough back to have some perspective. The “story” of the inevitable triumph of democracy (and of messianic Christianity too) is a powerful myth that is easily sold, a grand story that the media often goes along with and accepts as right and good and as an a priori assumption. Manifest destiny, the march of progress, and the triumph of civilization are presumed to be common, universal beliefs, at least until recently. Once “stories” like these are in place, believed in, and accepted, one need only supply the appropriate images, news stories, and anecdotes to continually reinforce the myths and make them seem self-fulfilling and indisputable.

Living “in” a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don’t always know what narrative it is, because I’m living my life and not always reflecting on it, but as I edit these pages I am aware that I have an urge to see my sometimes random wandering as having a plot, a purpose guided by some underlying story. I imagine that if I could step back and look at my life, I’d see that this series of meetings and events wasn’t simply random, that it had to happen the way it did. As history gets rewritten over and over and over again I begin to imagine that our lives have so many possible narrative threads—all existing simultaneously like parallel universes—that the number of human histories is certainly infinite. Heroic, tragic, boring, catastrophic, ridiculous, and beautiful. We all live those stories, and often our narrative includes more than one of them.