The hysteria over Neil Gaiman’s visit to the Philippines hasn’t completely died down yet, although the excitement seems to be on the wane at last.
The sheer volume of people who turned out to see Gaiman was truly unprecedented, to say the least. While Fully Booked has received its own fair share of criticism about its management (or mismanagement, depending on who you ask) of the event, they were no doubt completely overwhelmed by such an unexpectedly large turnout.
I was fortunate to have Gaiman sign my calimba… it’s a thumb piano made from a gourd, wood panels, bamboo, brass, and iron tines. In the quirky spirit of modern globalism, it’s an African instrument made in Indonesia that was bought in the Philippines and now autographed by a British author! LOL
What irked me most about the Gaiman event, however, wasn’t the long lines, nor the pandemonium, nor even the English-speaking coños who sat in line with me. It was the annoyingly pervasive groupie culture that drove me nuts.
A cursory glance at the Pinoy blog entries floating around the Net concerning Neil’s visit show a tone of awe bordering on hero-worship. I have yet to find a single critical essay of the whole thing (barring some rants here and there about the chaos of the event itself).
Even more sadly, I also have yet to come across anyone who has openly declared that s/he has been inspired by Gaiman to write his or her own prose and get it published (even if just as a blog entry or fanfic).
All I’ve seen are just raves from fans.
Of course the people at the Gaiman signings were fans; we wouldn’t have been there otherwise, would we? But after all the squealing elation, everyone just seemed to evaporate into thin air, clutching their prized autographed books.
Now, my question is: what’s next? We’ve fawned over Gaiman and done backflips over his work, but has anyone paused long enough to take a step back and dissect his writing? More importantly, has anyone been empowered by Gaiman to write and get published?
When will we snap out of our enchantment and actually start to do something, anything to give our rich mythology the retelling it justly deserves? It seems daunting, yes, but Gaiman has shown us that it’s possible. We need look no further than into his own writings to see this.
Someone has to tear Gaiman apart, limb from limb, look at the sum of his parts and beyond, and say "Aha! So that’s how he did it!"
The prospect of deconstructing Gaiman’s mesmerizing works seems shocking, kind of like wanting to take apart a Stradivarius violin just to find out what makes it sound so good… followed by the horrible realization that you can’t put it back together the same way ever again.
After all, it’s one thing to dissect the dusty work of a long-dead author, and another to deconstruct one of the literary heroes of your own generation. Maybe we’re afraid to lose whatever magic we feel from Gaiman’s writing. Perhaps we’re afraid to dissect his words lest we kill the soul of his work as well.
But I do hope that someone takes that crucial step. Hopefully, of the more or less four thousand people (!) who lined up to see Gaiman, at least one of them does decide to take the idol down from its pedestal and smash it to the ground.
What we need are a few good iconoclasts. When we lose sight of our gods, it is only then that we are able to discover them within us.
I hope that somewhere out there, someone is inspired to do for Filipino mythology what Gaiman did for Greek, Egyptian, and Norse mythology: to retell our myths in our own way, to reclothe our archetypes in the zeitgeist fabric of our times.
