Trust

Such a strong word. Such a difficult notion to be understood. Such an intriguing feeling to offer. And such a simple word that makes all the difference in the world.

We work day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. We get home and we start thinking of the things which we haven’t finished. We keep on saying that this will be the last weekend/the last Friday afternoon/the last extra activity that we accept and do. But that weekend becomes this weekend and then the future one, and so on. We neglect our bodies, perhaps our souls, and we keep on going … where to? What for?

Somehow, I think that it is more to this life than the simple things that we all wish for, from a home to a stable working place. I feel all my bones and cells literarily cracking, but at the same time, I feel all my energy and inner self rushing through my veins, not letting me sleep, not letting me stop, being at the same time my creation and my destruction. As one of our Romanian poets said, I need a mountain to be my body, I need a mountain with its tops and valleys, forests and lakes, summers and winters, to keep all that I carry inside myself.

Beyond all the long working hours, beyond the side-effects of all these, beyong the irritation that I am sometimes kicked out of my own room because I work so much, there is one thing that keeps me human, and that’s trust. Daring to believe in the (insane) human being, daring to think outside the box, and maybe more importantly – daring to trust my own guts.  

Because, after all, we all need something to believe in, don’t we? 

Unwritten symmetry

There has always been a skipped beat between my mind and my heart, on a real, body level, and on a metaphorical one; one keeps moving, thinking, working, creating and destroying, building bridges, the other one tries to keep up with the former one. And sometimes, it barely succeeds. It has always been a search for the perfect symmetry between these two, it has always been hard to find the right people, to find someone who really understands what I am doing, what I am, and maybe more importantly, why I do it.

Maybe I should have been a doctor, using this burst of energy and insanity to save lives …but  I would like to think that we, as teachers, if we don’t save lives, at least we shape them. Not all of them can be saved. Or want to be saved. … You meet day by day glimpses of yourself, mirrors of what you would have been, or mirrors of inner selves, mirrors that are very close to your soul or, on the contrary, who are very far of who you are. But you always see the human being – naked, vulnerable, shaped by the environment, by the parent, by us, by their inner, complex mechanism… Because this is who I am, seeing the soul behind the mask, the shell.

I try to make a difference day by day. Sometimes, like today, I wish my brain would stop whispering and going into all the directions and let me rest. Do you know that feeling, when you hear all the sounds around you, like you are caught in a bubble of sounds and noise, but somehow, paradoxically, you cannot reach them, because of tiredness, because of being too far away, because your day was way too different from those noises? …

You close your eyes and you try to breathe. You hear the beatings and the knockings and you try to count them, but you can’t. This week three people told me that I was not made to stay in one place. Not created to settle, added a dear old friend and teacher, but having to find my own tune … and I keep trying to find that note, that missing beat between heart and mind … 

Who will save me from myself?

Are you nobody, too?...

Era ieri un gând care mă chinuia și nu îmi dădea pace. Un gând ce părea vechi de când lumea, sau cel puțin la fel de bătrân ca toate amintirile pe care le port, un gând, o propoziție, care rezuma tot ceea ce simt de la o vreme.

M-am săturat de superficialitate, de la niveluri personale la cele naționale. M-am săturat de oameni care privesc doar în ei, care nu știu să asculte, care se aud doar pe ei, care nu ies din ideile lor fixe, care nu știu să se schimbe, care nu știu să îi privească pe ceilalți, care sunt dispuși să îi sacrifice pe ceilalți doar pentru bunăstarea lor. Oare când vom învăța să fim umani?...

Mi-e teamă să nu sar. Sau mi-e teamă de supra-raționalitatea mea, care cenzurează fiecare pas care ar putea fi greșit. Mi-e teamă de acest urlet venit din rădăcini, zguduind, tăind, sfâșâind din interior. 

Simt uneori că urlu. În felul meu. Minimalist, timid, șoptit. Dar un urlet venit din adânc, ca acel gând de azi noapte, venit parcă dintr-o lume înrădăcinată-n mine, un urlet care pentru cei avizați, care dacă ar ști să asculte, ar acoperi toate urletele și toate strigătele de astăzi. Am simțit că urlu ca un animal rănit. Și aș fi dat orice pentru ca cineva să-l fi auzit. Un simplu gest de ,,I am here, I can hear you". Atât. Nu indiferență, nu tăcere. Dar poate pentru că nu vorbesc limbajul oamenilor normali, sau poate pentru că oamenii sunt prea preocupați de propriile lor răni și traume, nimeni nu l-a auzit. 

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 .....