Looking for the Summer ...

Not for the summer as a season - you know how much I like winter. But for the sun and rays as change. Hope. Safety. Time for myself and for my soul. Maybe new beginnings. New roads towards my Ithaca. And maybe learning to trust again. Breathing, breaking down all those walls and windows (as Woolf said of someone else). And believing in something. 

“Consciousness of consciousness, literature about literature”

I like being a teacher. But I love with all my heart being in the world of letters ... Being a critic. A scholar. A writer. 

 “[…] consider literary criticism to be itself a form of literature. It is a form which takes as its theme not that experience of natural objects, other people, or supernatural realities about which the poet and novelist write, but those entities after they have been assimilated into the work of some author. Literary criticism is literature at a second degree.”

“[...] the literary critic, like the novelist or poet, is pursuing, however covertly or indirectly, his own spiritual adventure. He pursues it not by way of his own experience, but by the mediation of the experience of others. His work is far from disinterested or detached.”

(Miller, “The Geneva Critics”)

“What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art-and, by analogy, our own experience-more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

(Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”)

Trainspotting

I don’t like weak people. I don’t like people who keep blaming their life, their family, their destiny, a divinity for their own mistakes. I don’t like hearing “this is what my mother/father did when I was a kid, so I cannot be otherwise.” Yes, you damn can. With great effort, and indeed with some side-effects, but you can. All of us can. Because after all, isn’t what all of us want, to be a better person, and to be happy in life?

I understand that life’s a bitch. Meaningless, pointless, and there are few chances that in the future things will be better (although, as humans, we keep on hoping). But as Cormac McCarthy has kept on saying, we, the few ones, must “carry on the fire”, in this bad, absurd, vicious world, despite knowing that things will always be the same, that we cannot change humanity, that God won’t appear from nowhere and say “I’m here, I’m back”, that the world will keep pushing us down and didn’t care for our own suffering.   

I read half of Trainspotting. If I had to vote for the worst book that I read this year I think this would be. I get its point, I see the struggle, the misery, the absurdity of life – but is it the only book of literature that does this? And it is simply not the book for me. 

People may be attracted to it because of its Scottish dialect, its overuse of words like “cunt” and “fuck”, of its easy, neat construction of episodes. But when it comes to style and technique, it is just a novel that depicts well the world of addicts, and that’s it. Moreover, when it comes to the construction of characters one can easily observe how empathy and remorse are absent: when friends are dying, when babies are found dead and everyone asks for another injection. You could read in this book how someone is stealing something or how a baby dies, the language to describe these events is the same. And on a psychological level, I can get the author’s point of view: for an addict, nothing matters, only the drug.

I guess that my problem with this book is on a personal level. I really know that life’s a bitch, and life for the unprivileged ones is harsh, I know that everybody wants a goal, a difference in this life, but in the end, we all wish for that house, that family, that car and that steady job, for personal happiness. But I simply cannot read about such weak characters, who use drugs to escape the cruel (or invented) reality. Where is their will to get up from that place, from that apathy, where is their character? And if you have read this novel (or at least some pages of it), please think of Jack Kerouac’s The Road or Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets.

Literature depicts Life (and Death), in all of its (their) aspects. I want to hear from it the struggle. The war within. The madness and the creation.  

December Blues

“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”

And this is what winter/December has always meant for me. Not material gifts, not tiredness from all the cleaning, not school holiday, not PhD. time-to-read, not coldness. But warmth, stability, tranquility, kindness. That only time of the year when you expect to receive a small part of what you gave during the year. A hug, a warm gesture. And definitely not wishing, foolishly trying to run from another “deja-vu” December .....  

Shape of my heart

I am sitting on the verge of an abyss, reading Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I try to look around, see a shape, a colour, a being. But it is just us, with a book between. The other half sits this time next to me, smoking a cigarette. We don’t speak. We just listen. The sound of silence, the sound of people, the sound of life and death.

I think that if one reads this book with the eyes of the present it does not say a damn thing. It is old, too pathetic, full of misogyny – and we don’t like this, do we? But you see, going beyond that, looking at it with the eyes of the past, it does say the things that we carry inside ourselves, the things that we learnt, the things that greatest writers try to teach the human kind … things that most of us maybe we don’t hear, or see, or understand.

I close my eyes and I try to breathe. I can’t. I only feel her chilling breath beside me, and the smell of smoke and dust raising in the air. It is my world here, but it is she who is more alive than me … so the abyss becomes my sea, and I feel the cold water beneath my feet. I don’t want to open my eyes. I don’t want to fall. I don’t want to listen to her, although ...

We all knew this before, what Nietzsche said … I knew it, somehow I believed that all human beings carry inside themselves this a priori knowledge … but do they?

We know that we should not think only of ourselves. And still, so many are so blind by their selfishness. It is that “I”, that “ego” that is the most important. The one who destroys families, countries, people … the "I" who shapes wars. The "I" of greed. The world would be indeed a better place if we could all give (and forgive) more … but human beings simply can’t go beyond the “I”.

We know that we should not have children only for the sake of species, for our fear of death, for the way the world is and judges. And still, too many of us have children for these reasons.  

We know that we should offer kindness, generosity, the better half of us to the humanity. But let’s face it, how many of us do this? And if we do, what does humanity offer in exchange?

And we keep saying that “I want to be a better half of me” … what does this mean? Do we really become better halves or do we just become the image of the world, of other billions of humans before us? We are born, we get married, we have children, and the circle goes round and round. We believe that we are different, but we are not. From our parents who sometimes we hate, from our ancestors that we didn’t know, from all the people that we keep on criticizing, unable to see us in them. We are all just dust, just nothingness, with illusions, fragile bodies and minds, the image of the first man and the last one closed in our breathing. I am the first and the last Eve (and Adam), as we all are.

Those who do, those who give themselves to the world, those who dream to make a difference, those who shut up, those who forgive, those who know how to listen, Ubermensch, to please Nietzsche (and Uberfrau, dear friend) … how much can they last in this world? And what is beneath their shells?  

The one who is behind me. The sea who is beneath my feet. Who will save you now? Rejecting life with its absurdity, that’s your whisper. “I’m fine”, although I am not. Disappointment. Fury. Storm. Pain, deep, like the sea beneath me. The other half, who smokes her cigarette, always there – the only one who has always been present – waiting. For the jump. For the volcano. For the control.

And I just wanted to be happy … 

The Sound of Silence

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a streetlamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dare
Disturb the sound of silence

“Fools” said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you”
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said “The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence”

Nuanțe de cenușiu

Îmi vine să decupez cerul acesta cenușiu și să fac soarele să renască. Să îl așez într-un colț de cer – nu prea mare, nu prea puternic, dar călduț, prietenos, asemănător frunzelor de toamnă de care nu am avut timp să mă bucur. Îmi vine să alung ploaia asta rece, monotonă, care nu spune nimic, și să o înlocuiesc cu ploi călduțe, scurte, de octombrie. Nu îmi amintesc de un alt octombrie mai cenușiu, mai rece, mai gol, mai iernatic.

Detest toamna aceasta. Plină de ploi și de frig, plină de mii și mii de nuanțe de cenușiu, care nu zic nimic. O toamnă goală, rece, lipsită de speranță și de tot ce-mi amintește de umanitate. Detest lipsa ei de culoare, detest frigul care s-a instalat mult prea repede, detest cât de mult o compar cu o toamnă trecută, colorată și plină de viață. Și detest cât de dor îmi este de ultima.

Mi-e dor de culoare și joc. Aș vrea să cred, să sper, că pot/putem aduce acel octombrie mai prietenos, că pot decupa simbolic cerul, că pot face soarele să reapară, că pot simți sau da mii și mii de nuanțe de culori – altele mai calde, altele mai reci, altele mai jucăușe, altele mai simple ... Că pot trece peste oboseala mea, peste oboseala timpului, peste tot haosul din mine. Că pot lua o cretă colorată și desena, ca Julio Cortazar, un șotron – mai colorat, mai puternic, mai plin de viață. În care cenușiul să nu existe.

*

,,O lume de cretă colorată se învârtea în preajma lor și-i amesteca în dansul ei, cartofi prăjiți făcuți cu cretă galbenă, vin cu cretă roșie, un cer pal și gingaș cu cretă albastră, cu puțin verde înspre fluviu.  O dată în plus aveau să arunce moneda în cutia de havane ca să oprească fuga catedralei, și chiar prin acest gest o vor condamna să fie ștearsă pentru a reînvia, să piară sub șuvoiul de apă pentru a se reîntoarce, linie după linie, cu cretă neagră și albastră și galbenă.” (378)