Sanctuary

"When we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey".

 (Wendell Berry)

I have always longed for stability and believed in the good in people. My design was pretty common and simple, the dreams of every human being, since the beginning of time, in a life where we run from loneliness. But somehow on this road something broke loose, and I started building wall after wall, moulding a sanctuary to hinder the pain that was inside.

We are never too old for pain, and we do lose control in front of strong, overwhelming feelings. Not all of us feel loved and worthy. Not all of us have a home to go to. Not all of us are surrounded by friends. And some of us have only us to cling to. Most of us are not seen, when the only thing that we need and want is the feeling of belongingness.

And like me, people have built up sanctuaries in places and with things that eased their pain. Some went to churches and dedicated their lives worshiping the unknown, others got lost in drugs, in sex, in alcohol, others in too much work, others searched for that holy meaning that we all search in their own children. All of us ran from pain into our own sanctuaries, chaining ourselves, not aware that our own sanctuaries are our own prisons where the only inhabitants are us, our loneliness, and that pain that we were actually running from.

Photo: https://naridarbandi.com/ 

Imagine

"Imagine all the people, living life in peace"

John Lennon, Imagine 

I lost my faith in our future a couple of years ago. There are too many wars, too much violence, and this planet does not deserve us. However, I strongly believe in those people who “carry the fire”, who are different, and I strongly believe that children can be moulded and taught to carry this fire, because they are all born with it. 

I was reading the other day Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and I came across the myth of Cain and Abel, and perhaps the first story of an unloved child by his father. And I agree with Steinbeck, that this is square one, the birth of anger, bitterness and inflicting wounds to other human beings, and we are all Cain’s ancestors.

“I think this is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody’s story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul. […] The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt – and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe there would be fewer crazy people. I am sure in myself there would not be many jails. It is all there – the start, the beginning. One child, refused the love he craves, kicks the cat and hides his secret guilt; and another steals so that money will make him loved; and a third conquers the world – and always the guilt and revenge and more guilt. The human is the only guilty animal. […] Therefore I think this only and terrible story is important because it is a chart of the soul – the secret, rejected, guilty soul.”

 (John Steinbeck, East of Eden, 271)  

The World can Wait

... ironically, when you were feeling that there was no time left, no time to stay

... when there were people to be saved, including yourself

... when Change was simply knocking on your door

.... when you were swimming in a sea of turmoil ... 

                 and suddenly you forgot to swim. And to breathe underwater. And everything hurt. And from the one who tried to save everyone, you became the one in need. 

So yes, the World, and Life, can wait. 

Underworld

Imagine a bomb being dropped in the middle of life, spreading everyone in thousands of directions. Now, imagine that instead of killing these people, this bomb becomes a kind of gravity on how someone’s life develops: some, from housewives become artists, others, from typical teenagers become killers, and so on. You can now change the word “bomb” with “Cold War” (or any kind of war). And ask yourself, are we the product of history, or do we have some agency in front of history? Who, or what molds what we call a Life?

“Reverse” is one of the keywords for DeLillo’s Underworld, because "‘I suppose in this case it’s not the ending we need but the beginning” (314). On the one hand, if we ignore the prologue, we have its reversed structure, starting from the end/one of its endings - 1992 - and ending when the story actually begins – 1952. “Reverse” also because sometimes you struggle to read those almost 1000 pages, asking yourself what this book is really about because, as we find inside the novel about the Underworld from 1927, “The plot was hard to follow. There was no plot. Just loneliness, barrenness, men hunted and ray-gunned, all happening in some nether-land crevice” (430). But when you finish it, you know it’s that kind of book you will carry inside you, with that type of language that only a few writers manage to powerfully use. And although DeLillo seems to tell us that history is the nightmare we will never awake from, Underworld is about Everyman and Everywoman, about the humanity of the simple man/woman in the age of waste and consumerism.

* 

“Men passing in and out of the toilets, men zipping their flies as they turn from the trough and other men approaching the long receptacle, thinking where they want to stand and next to whom and not next to whom, and the old ballpark’s reek and mold and consolidated here, generational tides of beer and shit and cigarettes and peanut shells and disinfectants and pisses in the untold millions, and they are thinking in the ordinary way that helps a person glide through a life, thinking thoughts unconnected to events, the dusty hum of who you are, men shouldering through the traffic in the men’s room as the game goes on, the coming and going, the lifting out of dicks and the meditative pissing.” (21) 

“There is a balance, a kind of bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it’s true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second. He thought that we were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time.” (235)

“Seasons ran together, the years were a stunned blur. Like time in books. Time passes in books in the span of a sentence, many months and years. Write a word, leap a decade. Not so different out here, at his age, in the unmargined world.” (236)

“Civilisation did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered pihosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn’t discard, to reprocess what we couldn’t use. Garbage pushed back. It mounted and spread. And it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics. [...] We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it.”(288)

 

 

 

 

 

Our haunting past of parenthood

In family we find our heaven and hell, our construction and destruction, our blissful moments and/or most ever-lasting traumas. One of the questions that haunted me for ages was why children, in the end, take after the traits of the parent that hurt them the most. Why at a certain age one was deeply hurt by a particular behaviour and after a couple years, the child who is now the grown-up behaves exactly in the same manner as their parent, inflicting in his turn on their own child – or beloved one – the same treatment.

While writing my B.A. paper, I found one answer to this in Adler’s psychology. We are creatures of habits, of patterns, and to get away from those patterns is a fight, perhaps also a trauma per se. I guess one other reason for embracing the unembraceable is love, and paradoxically, memory and pain.

Succession, a TV series that I have been watching for a while, seems to play with my question, going with and against these patterns. And I guess that for all of us – either if we choose to take the easy route, or to fight our own demons, everything is summed up to this: “I can’t forgive you. But it’s okay. And I love you.”  

Eden

Uneori viata pare a fi o piesa absurda, in care ajungi sa te detasezi de propria persoana si sa privesti de undeva din afara lucrurile care se intampla. Alteori aceasta nu este ,,cronica unei morti anuntate”, ci se opreste sau se schimba cand te astepti mai putin. Iar acest absurd pe care uneori il mai prindem din cand in cand la televizor pare ceva indepartat, desprins dintr-o carte, care nu ni se poate intampla noua. Pana se intampla, o data, de doua ori, de trei ori.

O singura data, lucrurile care mi-au schimbat viata, au fost in cel mai ciudat mod posibil anuntate. Si atunci, nimic nu mi-a stat in putere sa le schimb. Nu stiu cum se va termina totul, nu stiu cum lucrurile se vor schimba, sau cat vor sta in aceeasi stagnare, nu stiu cati dintre noi suntem constienti de lipsa de control pe care o avem. Nu stiu cate depresii ne mai asteapta si daca cineva, candva, chiar va sti sa ne asculte. 

“Memory is identity”, si este cu siguranta identitatea mea. Daca ar exista un Dumnezeu, i-as cere sa o pot lua cu mine pentru ca in amintiri avem putinii oameni pe care ii indragim. Si pentru asta, da, as lasa si acele amintiri care bantuie sa o mai faca o vesnicie. Nu stiu cat am reusit sa fac aici, nu stiu daca am pus vreo amprenta in viata cuiva, nu stiu daca am reusit sa fac o diferenta pe unde am calcat. Dar as vrea ca putinii oameni care au facut pentru mine o diferenta sa o stie.  

The Passenger

“I suppose in the end what we have to offer is only what we’ve lost.” (376) 

McCarthy’s prose is poetry that acknowledges the evil in the world and inside each of us. The darkness, the despair, the fall, the pain and the loneliness. Written and uttered in a paradoxical minimalistic way that for me is very personal and intimate. McCarthy’s language is my language. And yet, inside this darkness/the Shadow, there is also light, there is also goodness – in all of us, in the simple human beings. Besides all of these, The Passenger is perhaps McCarthy’s last novel (if we see it and Stella Maris as a whole), a mature and challenging novel about friendship, family relationships and forgiveness, modern issues of the world, literature and philosophy, and why not, physics. And of course, what remains at the end of a day/of a life.  

*

“His father. Who had created out of the absolute dust of earth an evil sun by whose light men saw like some hideous adumbration of their own ends through cloth and flesh the bones in one another’s bodies.” (368)

“Let’s just turn out the lights and call it a life.” (16)

“There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust.” (115-116)

“You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world. As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you cant help but lose what is being described. Every inquiry displaces what is addressed. A moment in time is a fact, not a possibility. The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you dont. Not in your heart you dont. If you did you would be terrified. And you’re not. Not yet.” (128)

“You have to believe that there is good in the world. I’m goin to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life. You may be wrong, but if you dont believe that then you will not have a life. You may call it one. But it wont be one.” (174)

“I think I would have found my life pretty funny if I hadn’t had to live it.” (293)

“I believe in the reality of the world. The harder and the sharper the edges the more you believe. The world is here. It is not someplace else. I dont believe in traveling about. I believe that the dead are in the ground. I suppose at one time I was like old Pau. I waited to hear from God and I never did. Yet he remained a believer and I did not.” (380)