A Review of Angela Blardony Ureta’s A PILGRIM'S DIARY, PASSAGES AND INNER LANDSCAPES

A Pilgrim’s Diary, Passages and Inner Landscapes mirrors the highly evolved soul of its author, Angela Blardony Ureta. The language, which at times is magical and at others philosophical, is generally spiritual in its obviously effortless fluency and spontaneity expressive of a synthesis: the honed experience of a journalist and the fantastic talent of a born litterateur. The wide ranging appeal of this small volume carries the reader right to the light-hearted person of the author by way of her infectious sense of humor that brings warmth to one’s feeling. It likewise projects the cerebral depth of her penetrating insights that challenge the equal depth of one’s understanding.

A Pilgrim’s Diary uncovers and outpours postmodern spirituality which Charlene Spretnak in her State of grace: the recovery of meaning in postmodern age (1991. San Francisco: HarperCollins) calls ecological postmodernism—“a passage beyond the failed assumptions of modernity and a radical reorientation that preserves the positive advances of the liberal tradition and technological capabilities but is rooted in ecological sanity and meaningful human participation in the unfolding story of the Earth community and the universe.” It is likewise a strong affirmation of what David Ray Griffin calls constructive or revisionary postmodernism [“Introduction to SUNY series in constructive postmodern thought” in D. R. Griffin (ed.) Spirituality and society (Albany NY: SUNY Press)] which synthesizes modern and premodern truths and values including the latter’s notions of divine reality, cosmic signification and the enchantment of nature. It is a construction of a postmodern weltanschauung through a revision of modern premises and traditional concepts uniting scientific, ethical, aesthetic and religious intuitions.

The author has in a sense “circumnavigated the globe” and the book gives us the rare chance to feel the exhilaration that goes with serendipity and the awe-inspiring mystery of life in a tapestry of varied cultures and peoples, environs and emotions, idealities and realities. Her encounters with “celestial” personalities were golden moments that no material riches in “all possible worlds” (Leibniz) could ever match. Just like Paulo Coelho, Angela Ureta is an “adventurer of the spirit” who has allowed herself to be swallowed by the mystery of the unknown which is the essence of honest-to-goodness adventure—someone who’d rather pass the time in bars rather than patiently march with typical tourists in a procession to museums. Ben Okri of The Famished Road fame agrees: “The bar saw its most unusual congregation of the weird, the drunk, the mad, the wounded and the wonderful.”

But the seemingly indefatigable globetrotter has deeper impressions of and a more poignant attachment to her geographical roots. Her stories of local engagements allow us to discover things that are supposed to be known to us but unfortunately not quite and hence bring us to near-embarrassment and humble acceptance. Her Batanes sojourn transports us to “Shangri-la” so that we now know in that picturesque locale “[c]rime is practically unheard of and homes are left wide open at all hours of the day because theft is a strange word to the Ivatan.” On second thought, however, an anxiety pervades the soul for “reality is in constant flux” (Heraclitus) and in that light, Michel Foucault had long realized such anxiety: “At the end of the 18th century, people dreamed of society without crime. And then the dream evaporated. Crime was too useful for them to dream of anything as crazy—or ultimately as dangerous—as a society without crime. No crime means no police.” (Power/Knowledge)

Romanticizing is almost certainly a weakness of a writer enthralled—paradoxically, a weakness that strengthens one’s power to express in vivid terms the passion of a mystical encounter. But too much transcendence can also be disorienting to the point of amnesiac forgetfulness. So that in Nietzsche’s reminder, too much celebration in monumental history and excessive romanticizing in the antiquarian could blind us of the gains of liberation in the heart of the critical. The author’s paean to the “Heavenly Treasures of Laguna” is so captivating it almost unresistingly pulled me to the apeiron and numbed the critical in me. But at the point of recovering my senses, lessons of history had rehearsed itself before me the blood, sweat and tears of cruelty and oppression—the inhumanity of the human being to another of the same species—upon which most if not all of these “houses of God” had been erected by the colonial power of a dark era.

However, by and large, A Pilgrim’s Diary is truly a “journaling” of a traveler’s search for her Self. Thank you so much, Angela, for the “tiny sparks” of your journey in this lifetime have exceedingly inspired an incorrigible romantic in me to go on in this very same lifetime venturing the unknown on my own, alone.


© Ruel F. Pepa, 02 September 2005