Searching for Peace

    Sunt zile când îmi doresc să mă urc într-o mașină și să conduc oriunde văd cu ochii, cât mai departe de familiarul aici, zile în care îmi doresc să fumez un pachet întreg de țigări și să las totul și pe toți în urmă.

     Spuneam pe undeva că libertatea e efemeră și că în viață avem anumite momente în care putem fi cu adevărat liberi. Ceea ce tot caut de la o perioadă însă este liniștea din spatele zumzetului continuu, pacea și puterea de a mă rupe de toate stereotipurile în care simt că mă afund, de toate motoarele supraîncălzite, de tot cenușiul din oameni. Mă caut pe mine, încercând să respir și să văd, să mă regăsesc dincolo de toate acestea, de zilele, săptămânile, lunile de suprasolicitare, de decizii, de rapoarte, proiecte, oameni. Mă caut să mă accept pe mine, așa cum sunt, dincolo de așteptările, de pretențiile celorlalți, de tot ceea ce reprezint pentru ceilalți.

     Și-n propria sălbăticie, sunt zile când reușesc să ajung acolo, sus. În care tot ceea ce fac este să privesc. Și să ascult: ceea ce e în jur, ceea ce e în interior. Mă reîntorc aici, de câte ori pot, simțind cât de mici, de efemeri suntem cu toții în fața naturii, a tuturor lucrurilor care au existat dintotdeauna și care vor continua să existe și după noi. Ascultând acea lume desprinsă din timp, neîmblânzită, atât de departe de civilizație, de domolire, de îmblânzire. Căutându-mi rădăcinile aici, uitând pentru o perioadă de tot. Și încerc din răsputeri să învăț, să îmi amintesc, să respir.

White Noise: Sound of Life and Death

“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise.”

“What if death is nothing but sound?”
“Electrical noise.”
“You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful.”
“Uniform, white.” (228)

Close your eyes and listen – there is so much noise around us: the cars in the streets, the working machineries in old and new factories build inside the city, the background music. The song of birds, heard somewhere among all these. The sound of animals, of trees, of wind, of rain. The sound of the keyboard, of our fingers. The sound in the supermarkets, in schools, in cars, in our homes, our trips, our beds. And the everlasting sound of our brains, the whispers, the buzzing, the sound of pain and angst. Never stopping, never leaving, so old in us that we simply ignore it. But it is there, with us. The sound of our insanity, of our battlefield.

All of these sounds represent Life, and paradoxically, it can also be the sound of Death, death waiting at every corner, in every whisper, in every movement. A wrong movement, a crazy man, an accident of any sort.

White Noise was my first encounter with Don DeLillo. Smart writing, easy to read, unlike some of his contemporary American writers, but with a rich vocabulary. A writer who plays here, in an absurd, ironic way, with two themes: our tremendous fear of death and the society in which we live – consuming everything, having access to all kinds of machines, of pills, of drugs, the era of money, where everything can be found, where everyone is so far away from their archaic selves … .

"Traffic lights swayed on cables in a sudden gust. This was the city’s main street, a series of discount stores, check-cashing places, wholesale outlets. A tall old Moorish movie theater, now remarkably a mosque. Blank structures called the Terminal Bilding, the Packer Building, the Commerce Building. How close this was to a classic photography of regret. (105-106)

"It’s Malcolm, of course. He’s got his jungle. What does she have? A huge airy kitchen with a stove that belongs in a three-star restaurant in the provinces. She put all her energy into that kitchen, but for what? It’s not a kitchen at all. It’s her life, her middle age. Baba could enjoy a kitchen like that. It would be a kitchen to her. To Mother it’s like a weird symbol of getting through a crisis, except she hasn’t gotten through it." (113)

"The truth is I don’t want to die first. Given a choice between loneliness and death, it would take me a fraction of a second to decide. But I don’t want to be alone either. Everything I say to Babette about holes and gaps is true. Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don’t let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?" (121)

"The more things I threw away, the more I found. The house was a sepia maze of old and tired things. There was an immensity of things, an overburdening weight, a connection, a mortality. I stalked the rooms, flinging things into cardboard boxes. Plastic electric fans, burnt-out toasters, Star Trek needlepoints. It took well over an hour to get everything down to the sidewalk. No one helped me. I didn’t want help or company of human understanding. I just wanted to get the stuff out of the house. I sat on the front steps alone, waiting for a sense of ease and peace to settle in the air around me." (301)

"The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead." (375)

White Noise

Alergăm într-un iureș neîncetat, uitând în cele din urmă de când, de ce, încotro voiam să o luăm. Ne pierdem în îndatoririle zilnice, luptând oră de oră să mai ducem ceva la capăt: un curs dus până la final, un copil ajutat, un proiect terminat, un alt raport de făcut, o muncă sisifică de a atinge acel nivel economic decent. Luptăm cu sistemul, câte 8, 10, 12 ore pe zi, luptăm cu propria oboseală și limitele propriului trup, ignorând toate semnalele, îngropându-ne propriile temeri. Și am luptat atât de mult în această maturitate forțată de atâția ani încât momentele în care ne simțim și ne mai amintim ce ne dorim sunt din ce în ce mai puține. Și ironic, am tot luptat de a păstra și a oferi o fărâmă de umanitate în lumea asta tot mai cenușie că ne-am uitat complet propria umanitate, cu tot ceea ce înseamnă aceasta: propria vulnerabilitate, propriile dorințe, propriile visuri.

Din țărână suntem făcuți și în țărână ne vom întoarce. Dar mai vie decât atât este amintirea a priori a apei, mai plină de energie, mai puternică, mai aproape de mine. În acest iureș neîncetat, sunt mici momente de răgaz când ne lăsăm sau suntem obligați să ne debarasăm de toate armele, de toate poverile pe care le-am purtat. Acel scurt răgaz în care nu mai trebuie să încercăm să ne arătăm, să ne rostim vulnerabilitățile, părțile umane din noi, ci în care ne așezăm pur și simplu față-n față cu noi, respirând. Fără cuvinte, fără amintiri, fără dureri, fără regrete, fără teamă. Acel noi vechi de când timpul, eliberat din strânsorile prezentului. Doar privind întinderea din fața noastră și ascultând liniștea din jur. Respirând. 

Life as Fukú and Zafa

"[...] and I, Shabine, saw

when these slums of empire was paradise. 

I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,

and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation."

Derek Walcott

Days have become weeks, and the weeks have become months. Maybe the story began much earlier, but the feelings of vulnerability, the crushing need to move, to do something, to swim, increased in the last few months. And when people are too far away, no matter how near they are, to understand you, when you get swallowed by your own angst, you stop moving. Stop speaking, stop feeling the other world, stop listening to your inner self, stop reading, stop writing. Just working. 24/24.

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the first book that I have managed to finish after a long period of time, and the best that I have read this year. Not that there weren’t things in it which I disliked, but that kind of easy book which plays with (low) culture, with the reader, and the history of the Dominican Republic. I started it on a plane and while I was travelling, I managed to read half of it. What I really enjoyed was not the main character, Oscar – who is rather lame and not so well shaped – but the female characters that take control of the narrative in several chapters, the voice of the daughter who hates the abusive mother, the voice of this mother who tells the events of the past, and her journey to America, the voice of the warm grandmother/tia, who keeps the history of this cursed family and never leaves the Republic.

I also think that Junot Diaz, knowingly or unknowingly, plays with mirrors in this novel. I believe that Oscar’s family’s fukú (=really bad luck, curse) or Zafa (the counterspell of fukú) is a reflection of a simple definition of ordinary life (since the Dominican family portraited here is an ordinary one), that Trujillo’s lusting wishes, that cause so much damage to the Dominicans, are also a mild reflection of Oscar’s hopeless attemps in finding love and sex, that Lola the daughter, who makes everything to rebel against her mother, is a vivid image of Beli before being a mother.  

Oscar Wao is not a book about Oscar – thank God to that! – but a book which can be easily read on Sundays afternoons, when you are unable to read anything and you are lost in your own thoughts and want to escape your own mind. It is about life in the Dominican Republic and the Dominican spirit, about chasing the American Dream as a woman, about surviving in two different cultures. 

Art and Life

“Art is the lie that tells the truth. Don’t try to understand. You have to feel. And I hope this dove makes people feel. The truth. That we are capable of the most horrible violence.  Which is why we must fight so hard against it." (Genius, Picasso)

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/picasso-dove-p11366 

Sky Full of Sorrow

I couldn't hide from the thunder in a sky full of song ...

Feeling like living in a loop. Saying, feeling the same things over and over again, feeling chained in a world in which I do not want to live anymore, feeling a foreigner, an alien, in my own shoes, in a world in which I cannot find myself, or hear myself, in all the noise that surrounds me.

I would like to stay on a top of a mountain, closing my eyes, hearing only my own heartbeats. I would like to be able to ignore the other voices that shaped me. Or be able to express myself freely in a world where everyone has something to say. Being able to open myself – really open and dare to say what I really think and feel (especially feel) – without being judged. This is what I miss the most.

I would like for one single day to unleash all my thoughts and feelings. Be a painter, or a god, and draw the sky of my own song. Be able to stop being the mother, the one who always helps, who always listens, who always protects, who always finds solutions, who is always there. I would like for one single day to stop caring and being the one who receives all that I give. I would like for one single day to stop caring all this heaviness on my shoulders. 

  

Teaching

There are moments when I simply want to get out of the school, of the class, and never look back. There are moments when I ask myself if I had taken the right decision, being a teacher, and if in all this time, I couldn’t have done something else.

And there are moments – many moments – when you simply love what you do. You love being in front of children, of students, seeing their evolution, your fingerprint left in their lives. You love being in front of them. Or short epiphanies, when you realise that despite all the angriness, the nerves that they caused you, despite all their ignorance, you care about those kids, more than you thought and realised.

There is a huge struggle inside myself between the system that I hate and the classes that I love, between the communism which keeps on living on the halls of the schools, haunting all of us, teachers and students, and the things that I give and receive from my students. There are times when I am in the middle of a class, and I ask myself how could I give up all of these. Despite the tiredness, despite the system, despite the papers. Because since kindergarten, I have wanted to teach, to discover in ordinary people the exceptional things.