(Precis: Man's conception of paradise is largely about nature (or "God's creation") without man (and the intrusion of his ugly inventions), so does that mean heaven is a place that is free from things like, uh, Crocs and polyester barongs?)
The ugliest-ever creation of tailors -- or proto-fashionistas -- is the polyester barong. It is a modern Filipino shirt that's worn as a formal or semi-formal office wear for men. It is ugly because wearing it feels and looks like wearing laminated cardboard. The darned barong distorts the sheer beauty and dignity of the Filipino version of guayabera by using an el cheapo, downright tacky fabric, polyester, a synthetic material, needless to say -- a product of man's engineering ingenuity perhaps, but one that's aesthetically offensive from all camera angles.
I happen to have worn one in my former life as a faux office employee -- in reality, a glorified computerized sweatshop peon -- and I tell you, it was a taunt magnet - or a flame and troll bait, in today's lingo, especially for a metrosexual-fashion virgin like me. I didn't get my quota of Facebook and Friendster invites because of it, you could say. To use a fave phrase, it was a "painstakingly ugly" tailor-made creation, which I wore with pride anyway because, heck, I thought it was cool to look like an MMDA traffic enforcer.
Ha-ha! Kidding. Seriously now, my polyester barong office uniform eventually drove me to self-esteem issues and existentialist questions that recalled surnames like Barthes, Derrida, and Wittgenstein. (Oh wait, the last one is not a crazed Frenchman.) Until I came to point of defiance, that is: Go to work in just my underwear.
Eventually, I was driven to ask, "Didn't God create a beautiful world, conceiving of it originally as Eden? Isn't He/She of exceeding beauty Himself/Herself? And yet, while man is believed to be the apex of God's creation, why do we create stuff that are considered exceedingly ugly? I mean, can you associate heaven with plastic plates with yucky flower designs, bubble-wrapped fake-leather sofa, elastomer jewelry, genetically engineered lettuce, and.. polyester barongs, not to menton flannel underwear (something that Woody Allen made fun of in an old and really laugh-out-loud essay)? It doesn't add up for me and certainly won't with most of you.
For that's what most of us oftentimes conceive the perfect world to be, judging from the way we choose our posters and paintings in the living room: ones totally bereft of man's intrusion.
Which is a terrible problem, really, because it's contradictory. That must be the underlying thought too, especially of environmentalists, if you think hard about it. Take a lovely photograph of a "green" or "eco-friendly" nature scene, for example, and contrast that photograph with something that includes a hint of man, and what is your visceral reaction? Chances are you'd conclude that man's intervention uglifies the natural scenery, fouling it up with his pollutive ways. I am reminded of my departed relative who exclaimed how big and beautiful America was when she same back home for a brief vacation, adding that, in America's wide streets, you won't see "people dirtying the street scene." I thought, wow, America must really be very beautiful because there are no people interrupting nature. Environmentalists, I assume, wil have the same reaction, and will applaud only at pics that show men only when depicted in Rousseau's "return to nature" or Jack London's "call of the wild" (which is a thought that's really Darwin's influence). A picture of a primeval rainforest with an oil and gas refinery in the middle, or a greenhouse gas-spewing factory, or a perfluoro-1,2-diisopropylidene-3,3-dimethylcyclobutane and 6a-methyl-17a,-hydroxy-pregna-1,4,9(11)-triene-3,2 processing plants in it would be a dirtied-up picture.
If heaven is indeed all-natural, made of whole-wheat fiber, then we can safely conclude that, in heaven, there are only diamonds, gold, silver, carnelian, agate, etc. However, arguably (though we can't argue with God), you can't have any of those scintillating stuff without the aid of the violence and pollution of mining, solid natural science knowledge, and intricate engineering technologies, not to mention a sound (= profitable and income-generating) business side, with PR, admen, and media joining the fray, the act of dirtying up Adam and Eves's abode, if there ever was one. There's still a trace of, ahem, man and his ugly self.
But the question, nevertheless, is worth making, revised this way, this time, to make things more accurate: Will there be a place for synthetic chemicals and chemical compounds in heaven? Don't laugh, I'm serious. I'd love to ask a mystic if there are. Because if there are none, what does that mean? It only means stuff that man can truly claim to be his own creations may be fun in a faddish J-pop sort of way, but totally inferior to natural stuff, inferior enough not to pass heaven's Quality Assurance team.
It is therefore with divine jubilation when I encountered an essay, "A Family of Landscape" by René Dubos, which restored my respect for the species and his so-called civilization, particularly his conception of capitalism (without the excess, of course). Laugh out loud with me in the following gloriously naughty passages.
"Some of the landscapes that we most admire are [actually] the products of envronmental degradation. The denuded islands of the Aegean Sea, the rocky shoes of the Mediterranean basin, the semidesertic areas of the American Southwest are regions that appeal to countless people from all social and ethnic groups, as well as professional ecologists. Yet these landscapes derive much of their color and sculptural beauty from deforestation and erosion, the two cardinal sins of ecology. The immense majority of people, furthermore, elect to live in places from which the wilderness has been eradicated and which have been profoundly transformed by human habitation. Orthodox ecological criteria are therefore not adequate to evaluate the quality of a particular environment for human life.
"Since the humanization of Earth inevitably results in destruction of the wilderness and of many living species that depend on it, there is a fundamental conflict between ecological doctrine and human cultures, a conflict whose manifestations are most glaring in Greece.
...
"On two occasions during the past few years, I visited the eleventh-century Byzantine monastery of Moni Kaisarianis, located some five miles southeast of Athens.
...
"As is so often the case in Greece, the building - whether pagan or Christian - derive a dramatic quality independent of their architectural merit from their natural setting. But the lanscape surrounding the monastery is not natural; it has been transformed by several thousand years of human occupation.
"The grounds associated with the Moni Kaisarianis monastery are planted with almond and olive trees, two species that have long been part of the Greek flora but originated in south central or southeastern Asia. The road that leads from Athens to the monastery is shaded with eucalyptus trees introduced from Australia. Beyond the monastery, the Hymettus is stark and luminous but its rock formations were originally masked by earth and trees. Its bold arrchitecture became clearly visible only during historical times as a result of deforestation and erosion.
...
"The humanization of the Greek wilderness has been achieved at great ecological loss. Writers of the classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods were aware of the transofrmations brought about by deforestataion in the Mediterranean world.
..
"In his poem "The Satyr or the Naked Song," the Greek poet Kostes Palamas (1859-1943) sees in the stark eroded structures of the present landscape a symbol of the austerity and purity of the Greek genius; the lanscape triumphantly proclaims the "divine nudity" of Greece.
"In [Henry] Miller's words, these rocks "are symbols of life eternal." He does not mention that they are visible only because of deforestation and erosion."
Then the naughty Dubos would go on to write this clincher:
"I have wondered whether the dark ferocious divinities of the preclassical Greek period did not become more serene and more playful precisely because they had emerged from the dark forests into the open landscape. Would logic have fluorished if Greece had remained covered with an opaque tangle of trees?
"There is no doubt that people spoiled the water economy and impoverished the land when they destroyed the forests of the Mediterranean world. But it is true also that deforestation allowed the landscape to express certain of its potentialities that had remained hidden under the dense vegetation. Not only did removal of the trees permit the growth of sun-loving aromatic plants and favor the spread of honeybees, as Plato had recognized; more importantly, it revealed the underlying architecture of the area and perhaps helped the soaring of the human mind.
"Ecology becomes a more complex but far more interesting science when human aspirations are regarded as an integral part of the landscape."
Dubos is, in effect, saying that, even those we consider naturally beautiful, naturally paradisial, are actually 'disturbed' somehow by man and his activities. That we must be a part of our conception of paradise, at least the earthly one. That it's laughably ironic to think of paradise as one where Adam and Eve is absent. He has a nice point, no -- at least from the perspective of interpreting ecology, which traditionally, and correctly, sees man as a destructive predator and major cause of species extinction?
Nevertheless, one would find his objection untenable if we extrapolate that point to man's prevailing concept of that other paradise. I'd hate to intrude into Dubos' elegant prose, but it can't be helped. The original question remains: Are there instant noodles, styro cups, cigarettes, violent computer games, neo-punk bands, pet foot spa, raccoons made of reinforced resin, Manny Pacquaio boxing match, T-back undies, cockfighting, and yes, polyester barongs, and all other paeans to man's ugliness, in heaven?
What?! What do you mean "No"???
What the...!
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