Non Serviam

I draw a picture of my own life from the beginning – "30" meant settlement and stability, it meant my own home, my own family, teaching and writing for a couple of years. It meant breathing, it meant living, not surviving. However, as I get close to this age, I found myself breaking into pieces this settlement and stability that I have always been searching for, having no clue what I want to do next, what I enjoy, what is the best road to be taken. And I hate this insecurity, this point where I have broken into pieces all the things that I knew since childhood that I wanted.

I don’t know for sure if this restart is good or bad. I dreamt of teaching in my school last night. And I keep on saying “my school” although I do not want to. Like it or not, I miss the students, being in front of the classes, the atmosphere that I managed to create. I don’t miss the papers, the system, the stupid close-minded thinking of some of my colleagues – schools need new things, not old, dictarioal notions. 

I met myself at 18 in a book, and now, inside my mind and soul the echo of a “non serviam” keeps on hitting my walls. Non serviam. Easier said, written, than done and felt. Non serviam – feeling its true heaviness, its real meaning.  

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”

I shall not serve “my home, my fatherland, my church”, or the old systems that do not form human beings, but mechanic, meaningless creatures, and destroy (my) being. I feel myself in an exile from my own place, in my attempt of breathing, of finding, grasping myself. And in my minimalism, my silence, my defeat – because this is how it feels – I try to find, to connect the old and the new self.

Rushdie and the World of Puzzles

I am in front of a huge table covered in tiny puzzle pieces and I can’t wait to put them together. I love puzzles – the play, the expectation, the waiting. I play, invent, construct, destroy, reconstruct puzzles in real life, trying to find the best fit, the best final image. And I love challenges, in books, in people, in life. 

I finished reading Midnight’s Children and there are so many things to be said about this book that it’s difficult to start from somewhere, to find the right words and to put them in the right order. All this year I have been expecting, searching, for a book to challenge me, to discover something new, to represent me when it comes to literature.

I loved the Scheherazade style, the way the story flows on the page, sometimes going straight, sometimes divagating, playing with the past and the present. I loved the puzzle metaphor in contrast with the wholeness for India (and not only) – the multitude of religions, of people, of opinions, of beliefs, of histories, and the whole that it gave in its wars and divisions. I loved the narrator and the reader play, the unreliability of Saleem, the way literature and imagination reflect society in their own way. I loved how mundane, the day-by-day life becomes connected with the Change… And what maybe I loved the most at this book was the new meaning that it gave to “history is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, the way personal history mingles in social, historical one, becoming one – even if this part was the most difficult for a reader like me.

 Once in a while, I like to find different cultures, different ways of living, like in all the days of my lives I try to find different people, different thinkings. There is a literature that we know, easy for us to grasp, despite maybe the challenges found in style (like Joyce, Faulkner, McCarthy, etc.). And there is a literature unfamiliar to us, with topics, histories that we did not think of – like Rushdie, Pamuk or Mo Yan.

And, at the end, what is India? For us, Europeans, for cultures like us, for them, Indians, and their diversity. What is left after their independence? How can one grasp the wholeness, how can they escape cosmopolitism? What is now left from Rushdie’s India, or from the image that we made of it? And can one who is outside this culture really grasp its true meaning, really understand it, or do we just see a part of the puzzle?

109/ Sur le fil piano

Încă nu e septembrie, încă nu e toamnă, încă nu sunt aici. E greu să definești, să găsești cuvintele potrivite cu starea pe care o tot porți năucă în tine, pe care o tot îngropi sub pragmatism și zidurile pe care le-ai tot ridicat. Și-n minimalismul meu, pe care uneori aș vrea să-l sfarm în bucăți pentru a mă face auzită dindărătul lui, găsesc cuvinte-oglindă, cuvinte-tăiușuri, cuvinte din spatelele icebergului construit lăuntric în tine, care reflectă, care trădează, care mă redau în acest ceas de vară târzie.  

Voiam să rămân în septembrie ...

                                                                                                             Nina Casian 

 

Voiam să rămân în septembrie

pe plaja pustie și palidă,

voiam să mă-ncarc de cenușa

cocorilor mei nestatornici

și vântul greoi să-mi adoarmă

în plete cu apă năvoade;

voiam să-mi aprind într-o noapte

țigara mai albă ca luna,

și-n jurul meu – nimeni, doar marea

cu forța-i ascunsa și gravă;

voiam să rămân în septembrie,

prezentă la trecerea timpului,

cu-o mână în arbori, cu alta-n

nisipul cărunt – și să lunec

odată cu vara în toamnă…

Dar mie îmi sunt sorocite,

pesemne, plecări mai dramatice.

Mi-e dat să mă smulg din priveliști

cu sufletul nepregătit,

cum dat mi-e să plec din iubire

când încă mai am de iubit…