A serenade of crickets
Every morning, I wake up to the sound of hundreds if not thousands of crickets chirping in my ears. I will hear them for the rest of the day — every second of every minute of every hour — until I fall asleep.
There is practically no escape — not earplugs, not even the “white noise” prescribed by websites unless it (or some music) is played at intolerably high volume. Pressing my palms against my ears merely adds a percussive instrument to the orchestra, the thump-thump-thump of my beating heart.
We live on the UP campus in Diliman, in the shade of towering mango trees. For some time, I simply assumed that there were, indeed, choirs of crickets up in those branches, making love or at least just making noise, as crickets are supposed to do.
And then one day, I undertook a foolish experiment — foolish, because what hadn’t been a problem suddenly became one. I went to a place where I was totally sure no crickets would be found, or no external sounds would get through — and I still heard the same relentless hum. It was in me, with me, wherever, whenever.
Before long, I realized and had to admit that I was going through bouts of anxiety and its flipside, depression. This came as a huge surprise to someone who had prided himself on his wakefulness and presence of mind.
A small voice in me says I should be panicking and screaming. I remember an old horror show I saw on TV as a boy, where an insect — which I would later learn was an “earwig” — crawls into a man’s ear and stays there, deep in his ear canal, and burrows into his brain until it turns him into a raving lunatic.
A doctor performs a delicate operation and — much to the man’s relief — takes the wriggler out. At that point, the doctor holds up the dead insect in his pincers and gravely announces that “It’s a female — and it seems to have laid its eggs.” The patient screams and screams. The show is titled "The Caterpillar" and the second episode of the Night Gallery series, circa 1972.
There have been times, these past many months under lockdown, when I’ve felt that way, as if some dark fluid monster had insinuated itself into my brain, my body, and indeed my spirit.
I emerged from sleep, drowning in a huge flood compounded of fear, sorrow, and regret over everything in general and nothing in particular. The mere mention of another friend’s death or intubation sent my imagination spinning, asking questions for which I had no answers, like “What will be worse — passage into a black void with no consciousness whatsoever, or immortality, forever aware of every little thing in the universe, and also forever alone?”
I knew what people would be telling me — have faith in heaven, in angels, in the enveloping welcome of a blinding grace, and as a good Christian schoolboy, I found comfort in those pastel promises of deliverance. But it was hard to believe anything in the state I found myself in, where even familiar walls and ceilings seemed inescapably malignant.
It probably didn’t help that as the long lockdown began, I resolved to use the time to catch up on a heavy backlog of writing jobs going back years, and against all odds, managed to complete the drafts of five book projects within five months in a dizzying frenzy. I felt superhuman until I woke up one morning feeling all hollowed out.
Before long, I realized and had to admit that I was going through bouts of anxiety and its flipside, depression. This came as a huge surprise to someone who had prided himself on his wakefulness and presence of mind.
In my last job before retirement as my university’s VP for Public Affairs, I was constantly on call to the media and the community, explaining our policies and positions with what I hoped was clarity and composure. Suddenly all that coolness vanished; I felt uncertain, tentative, unmoored.
The crickets remind me there is time, and no need to hurry toward that inevitable infinitude of absolute silence just ahead.
A call to a psychiatrist-friend led me back on the slow road to wellness; I’m still on it, managing from day to day with a combination of medication, exercise, prayer, and time for nothing but nothing (i.e., Netflix, fountain pens, old books, and typewriters).
Beng and I dream idly of our next adventures in faraway places — St. Petersburg, before the COVID curtain fell. I find it relaxing to watch an hour-long YouTube video on “codicology,” the archaeology of old books, as well as another on the recovery and restoration of a 1937 Bugatti Atalante. I am nourishing my sense of wonderment again, finding reassurance in a remembered past to which we all hope to belong.
The only downside to my recovery has been this case of tinnitus, this constant ringing in my ears, listed as a rare side effect of my antidepressant. I recall from my graduate studies that the ancients posed a theory about the “Music of the Spheres,” supposedly the harmonious hum produced by the movement of celestial bodies in space, imperceptible to the human ear. Fancifully I imagine that perhaps I had broken through some dimensional barrier and was hearing this orbital buzz.
But a serenade of crickets seems just about right and maybe a tolerable price to pay for a patch of sanity. Turning 67 last week, I thought of all the books I have yet to write in the time I have left, and for which I have to stay sensible and alert.
The crickets remind me there is time and no need to hurry toward that inevitable infinitude of absolute silence just ahead.