205.

Din nimic, ridicam sau doboram munti, asa cum ne jucam cu si printre cuvinte. Fie ca vrem sa cucerim mari si tarmuri cu ceea ce simtim in interior, fie ca suntem mereu prezenti pentru celalalt, ambele poluri cauta acelasi lucru: gratitudinea tradusa prin a fi unul dintre oameni, printre oameni, de a fi acceptati, de a fi intr-o barca cu ceilalti, nu azvarliti de fiecare data cand ne simtim mai in siguranta peste punte. Si pentru asta, fie ca inca mai incercam sa pastram umanul din noi si inca mai credem in bine, fie ca ne-am instrainat demult de tot ce poate fi omenesc, asa cum personajul cartii a facut-o, am da toate marile, si toate tarmurile cucerite.

 ,,O odaie alba si goala, cu tine in mijloc, rasunatoare la fiecare pas al tau. Pretutindeni sclipeau in razele trecand prin crapaturile paretilor valtrapuri grele de panza de paianjen, si muste mari sagetau zbarnaind prin aerul vested, punandu-se pe rahati uscati omenesti ce de veacuri, parca, intinau podeaua. Stand acolo, chiar in miezul odaii celei desarte, te-a izbit deodata, ca un topor in crestet, singuratatea. Te-ai vazut o clipa asa cum erai: cel mai singur om de pe pamant. Ti-ai inchipuit ca te afli in iad si ca asta este pedeapsa ta: o nesfarsire petrecuta-n acea odaie. Mai curand te-ai fi-nvoit sa fii cufundat in plumb topit sau jupuit de piele pentru cat tinea vesnicia.”

(Mircea Cartarescu, Theodoros, 599)

Ode to My Family

        Adeseori uităm să spunem un ,,mulțumesc”, uităm prea repede mâna întinsă, sau ne luăm cu viața de zi cu zi și trecem prea repede cu vederea de ceea ce ceilalți au făcut pentru noi. Adeseori ne amintim când este prea târziu, desi poate pentru celălalt acel mulțumesc ar fi făcut toată diferența.

            Nu știu cum se face că uneori suntem mai sensibili la oamenii pe lângă care trecem fugar, și le vedem singurătatea, în timp ce o ignorăm complet în oamenii de lângă noi, fie că suntem prea învățați cu singurătatea acestora, fie că credem că acei oameni vor fi mereu acolo. Suntem sensibilizați în fața efemerului, a poveștilor pe care nu le știm, dar pe care noi, atâta timp cât nu-l cunoaștem pe celălalt, avem toată libertatea de a o scrie și rescrie.

            În decembrie ni se amintește că trebuie să fim mai buni. Împachetăm rapid cadouri pentru copiii orfani, le aruncăm într-o sală sau poate facem chiar efortul de a-i vizita, și apoi ne vedem mai departe de viață. Punem apoi poze cât mai colorate și mai pline de fericire pe rețelele sociale, iar cei care au rămas într-un alt timp, în ignoranța și egoismul lor, încă mai întreabă când ceilalți vor face un copil sau când se vor căsători.

            Fiecare dintre noi are o poveste în spate, și fiecare dintre noi, atât cât poate, se chinuie să supraviețuiască și să rămână măcar pe linia de plutire. Poate că unii dintre noi ar da toate acele realizări care sunt puse sub semnul tăcerii în preajma sărbătorilor pentru ceea ce societatea ne cere, sau pentru niște sărbători alături de oameni, în care să ne uităm de propria singurătate. Iar când aceasta devine prea mult, cedăm.

            Și-abia atunci îmi amintesc și eu de zile de nașteri demult uitate, de mâinile întinse într-o altă viață, de acea energie pe care nu mi-o imaginam că va fi cândva îngenunchiată, că fiecare dintre noi, oricât de puternic poate părea, păstrează în el umanul și că poate aș fi putut spune la rândul meu mai des un mulțumesc. 

Ain’t Got No, I Got Life

At the end of 2023, I feel defeated on all the levels, but somehow, I feel freedom at the same time. I don’t know if it’s numbness or a kind of awakening, or perhaps just simple acceptance when you feel, as a song that I keep listening to these days, “all out of fight”, and I stopped struggling, or trying to find reasons why.

            At the end of 2023, I am with my eyes wide open. Yes, I do sometimes cry for all the dreams deferred. For the Sanctuaries that came up to be other prisons, for trying to find home in places where I shouldn’t have searched for this, for all the things that I postponed and now it’s too late for them. For all the words that I didn’t dare to say when I should have.

            At the end of 2023, I feel that I have lived half of my life, and now I have to look straight into the eyes of the other one. Somehow, perhaps that is why I feel it like a new beginning, leaving behind the youth, the one who dared to hope, and all the mistakes that I did.

            At the end of 2023, maybe the most important part, I came to accept my own loneliness. You see, I had a design, and my design was belongingness – how I cherish and value this word. How I fought for it, and gave, and searched, and longed for it. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s the world, or the destiny, or an ironic, cruel God. But at the end of the road, you have yourself, and your memories and feelings – be they as they be - , and your own life, and your own words, and it should be enough, shouldn’t it?

            Memory is my identity, and perhaps my true sanctuary, and my home. This is what I take with me and this is what some of us only have. And acceptance, without strings attached, for my own life and for the others. In order to give peace a chance, you need to embrace it all. To all the insanities of the human mind and soul, to all the coldness and the blindness, to all the superficiality, to all that burning pain that you either learn to live with it or you die by it, to all the unseen and unrecognized kindness.

 

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)