Lifeboats and small good things

In-betweenness. Sinking or navigating the storm. Protecting or giving it all up. Staying or leaving.  Sanctuaries turned into prisons. The borderline is not a place of peace, but of being torn in two halves: hoping and giving it all up. 

Perhaps what matters the most is what you leave behind in people, although they won't remember it. And we are all covered in billions of fingerprints of others, most of them not even knowing that they are there, on us, whether we accept it or not. In all the chaos, and chains of narcissism, the small good things keep you breathing: from passing people who see you as "mother's mothering" or compare you, unknowingly, with the people who once shaped you. 

And perhaps, in this borderline, these small good things are our lifeboats. 

  

Long Dark Night

Nick Cave’s latest album somehow echoes the depths of one’s soul, the struggle to find peace in this world, of letting go – of trauma, pain, or dreams deferred – of jumping into life, but learning how to float inside of it.

We only live once, or at least we remember this one life until that final day. And still, days repeat themselves moment by moment: we wake up, we go to work, we return home. We do our chores on repeat, and from time to time we have our moments of joy: a child smiling, or hugging, a friend’s calling, a walk in the forest, all the things, and all the people we long to, whom we call family or sanctuary. From time to time we dare to try more. And we take a step back from the routine and a step forward into the unknown. 

Burnout and Routine

We get up every day, drink our coffee, go to work, and then back home. On repeat, day after day. We help people around us not because we want something back, but because we still believe in humanity. We want more to life than just work, but somehow we keep on failing on what we want on a personal level. And we give, and we work, and we give again, until one day our body just says stop.

It feels like fainting, like being drained of energy, and everything hurts. It feels like something that you have eaten too much and now your stomach just refuses it. It feels like the pain, the emotional one, gets so high that it turns into numbness. It feels like you want to fight it with all your being, but no pills, no vitamins, no coffee can help you now. It's you against yourself.

And so you stop. And try to take breaks on your own. You remember how much you once used to love travelling, and how much you missed that. You embrace the silence, the getting away from the routine, from all the noise, from all the struggle. It's another kind of tiredness, a good one, that puts your mind at ease. You stop trying to forgive, you just let it be. And you try to be for once a human, with its own needs, with its own pain. And slowly, really slowly, you start breathing, not sure yet if you can stay on your own feet or the direction you suppose to go to now. 

Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1

The news of Paul Auster’s death caught me somewhere in the middle of 4 3 2 1, one of the novels that I enjoyed most from this writer. I don’t know about others, but I do dream from time to time about how my life would have looked like if I took another road, if some events from my life never happened. What would I have become if I hadn’t had a sister, if I chose another profile, another road, other people, if I said what bothered me from the beginning, and so on. There are the small things, when we look back in time, that make all the difference.

I don’t want to write a review here, because the world is probably full of reviews about this book, as it should be. Because I was already familiarised with Auster’s work and his plays with literary techniques (especially Travels in the Scriptorium), I already knew what to expect here, and how the book would end. What is, after all, the difference between us as fictionalised characters and us in the real world? Which ones would we prefer? Is there any way we can make the difference?

I guess that what Paul Auster does here is to write about all the aspects of Life, and that maybe he teaches us here that "Memory is identity" (Julien Barnes), and it’s not only those pieces of our puzzle that make our lives, but it’s also what we chose to remember as part of our identity and conscience, those people who were there for us in times of need and moulded our personality, from the presence (or absence) of parents, aunts, uncles or cousins that pathed our way to the importance of friends who later on in life became part of the family. No matter how many lives we have, no matter what roads we take, for all the Fergursons all those little things matter, because in the end, these are the things that make us humane, and this is in the center of this masterpiece.

Thus, Fergurson’s lives gravitate around these topics: motherhood (Rose who is always described as an ”extraordinary” mother, a devotion to her that almost resembles Cartarescu’s depiction of motherhood in his novels) and the lack of a father from his life (and people who successfully managed to substitute this role) the importance of sport, of good friends and how they have impacted his life, of sex and love, of the history of America (especially the way Afro-American people have been perceived or the influence of the Vietnam war inside America’s university campus), and the glue that keeps everything together: his passion for writing.  4 3 2 1 is among other things an encyclopedia of books that influenced Paul Auster’s career, and from time to time, there are hints and references to other ideas/books written by the author himself.

To put it in a nutshell, Paul Auster reminded me - perhaps when I needed the most - that I believe in the humanity of the human being, and if there is only one book that you should read in a year, I think this would be on the top list. 

Some of the lines that I mostly enjoyed: 

"The word psyche means two things in Greek, his aunt said. Two very different but interesting things. Butterfly and soul. But when you stop and think about it carefully, butterfly and soul aren't different, after all, are they? A butterfly starts out as a caterpillar, an ugly sort of earthbound, wormy nothing, and then one day the caterpillar builds a cocoon, and after a certain amount of time the cocoon opens and out comes the butterfly, the most beautiful creature in the world. That's what happens to souls as well, Archie. They struggle in the depths of darkness and ignorance, they suffer through trials and misfortunes, and bit by bit they become purified by those sufferings, strengthened by the hard things that happen to them, and one day, if the soul in question is a worthy soul, it will break out of its cocoon and soar through the air like a magnificent butterfly." (140)

"[...] remembering how his mother had ultimately replaced God in his mind as the supreme being, the human incarnation of the divine spirit, a flawed and mortal deity prone to the sulks and restless confusions that afflict all human beings, but he had worshipped his mother because she was the one person who never let him down, and no matter how many times he had disappointed her or proved himself to be less than he should have been, she had never not loved him and would never not love him to the end of her life.” (518) 

"No impulse to reinvent the world from the bottom up, no acts of revolutionary defiance, but a commitment to doing good in the broken world she belonged to, a plan to spend her life helping others, which was not a political act so much as a religious act, a religion without religion or dogma, a faith in the value of the one and the one and the one, a journey that would begin with medical school and then continue for however long it took to complete her psychoanalytic training, and while Amy and a host of others would have argued that people were sick because society was sick and helping them adjust to a sick society would only make them worse, Hallie would have answered, Please, go ahead and improve society if you can, but meanwhile people are suffering, and I have a job to do." (996-997)

Joy/Vertigo

No matter what the future holds, there is the moment of today of pure joy, which reminded me of the first novel I read long time ago by Paul Auster:

“Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us—every man, woman, and child—and with enough hard work and concentration, every human being is capable of…the feat….You must learn to stop being yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground."

(Paul Auster, Mr Vertigo) 

Bird set free

„Every time I find the meaning of life, they change it.”

(Daniel Klein)

You see, I’ve had a design, and I don’t know where I did wrong. Cuvintele parafrazate ale lui Faulkner, la care te tot întorci. Iar acest design a fost paradoxal acea simplitate a vieții, departe de vacarm, acel belongingness.

Nu știu să spun ceea ce simt. Uneori mă gândesc că poate e mai bine așa, a nu da frâu liber emoțiilor, bine ascunse în zidurile reci ale rațiunii și ale logicii, și a continua să plutești, uneori să înoți, în acea mare de zgomote din care nu poți vedea încă uscatul. Este poate și asta o lecție, a învăța să respiri când totul sufocă.

Mă gândeam azi din tramvai, urmărind fugar fețele oamenilor de lângă mine, încercând să mă sustrag de la a auzi toată agitația din jur, de a nu respira tot aerul înădușitor și umed, de a nu simți mirosurile de praf, de oameni – ai străzii, ai orașului, bătrâni, tineri, grăbiți sau încercând să amăgească timpul – , miros de ploaie, de noroi și de parfumuri, toate amestecate laolaltă. Mă gândeam că uneori simți că ai eșuat în viață, că poate nu ești acolo unde ți-ai dorit, că nu ai făcut nimic din ce era important și că poate e prea târziu de a încerca și altceva, și în același timp, ce este acel altceva? Poate un alt domeniu (și ce te face să te gândești că nu ar fi același sentiment?), un alt loc (și nu ar fi același program, aceeași muncă?), o altă viață. Mă gândeam la oamenii din jur și la oamenii din viața mea, la noi începuturi și la veșnica teamă de a nu face parte din grup, de a nu fi acceptată, de a fi nevoită să faci totul singură.

Mereu am dat totul. Nu am știut însă niciodată să cer sau să țip atunci când trebuia. Și poate că acest a da totul, a da o parte din tine indiferent de ceea ce faci, e un înțeles al vieții, a fi true to yourself, indiferent ce s-ar întâmpla. În relații, în muncă, în ceea ce-ți amintești, în grija pe care o porți, în ceea ce simți. Suntem uneori creatori fără creație, sau părinți fără a avea un copil, suntem roboți și la final de zi cădem rupți de oboseală și de acea umanitate care doare în paturile noastre sau în paturi străine pentru ca a doua zi să o luăm de la capăt, iar singurul lucru care ne mai rămâne e de a spera că într-o zi vom fi acceptați așa cum suntem, că într-o zi, vom reuși să ajungem la țărm, și că până atunci singurul lucru care ne rămâne e acel to go ahead full steam. Oricât de singuri suntem, oricât de tare doare.

 

Memento

Felt it in my fist, in my feet, in the hollows of my eyelids

Shaking through my skull, through my spine and down through my ribs

(Florence and the Machine - Blinding)

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It’s true. When you hit the bottom of the sea and you lose all your words, and everyone and everything has hit you, you either die or you learn to breathe underwater. And then you start floating – not swimming, but floating, accepting and letting go of your own fury, pain, and all the unforgivable things.

We live in a world of hypocrisy. We teach something to our children, but we show off in front of others to be seen as cool people; in reality, we are self-centered and would sell everyone for our own well-being. Money is everything in this world. In psychological books narcissism is a disorder, in real life, it’s part of normality, and those few with strong principles and that kind of morality that goes beyond stage 4 of Kohlberg’s theory ofmoral development are the abnormal ones.

A small good thing. Like in Carver’s book, you don’t get that small good thing in times of need from the people that you expect, but from strangers.

Empathy vs. Pragmatism. They can go hand in hand. And during this week I have understood the point where my empathy ends. As long as we have ourselves, there are solutions. We are all in pain, on the same ship of fools, but while others take their grief and bury it inside themselves and are capable of seeing others and always giving a hand to those in need, others scream and demand to be heard and have a different status, not taking into account what others feel. The only time when there is no solution is when you have lost yourself.

Vulnerability can also be a strength. On my road to breathing again, I received this question: "How can you make vulnerability your strength?” We tend to hide our own vulnerability, be ashamed of it, and we want to protect ourselves. But do we really protect ourselves when we hide? Few people dare nowadays to show vulnerability, and fewer know how to see it as their own strength because everything is like a coin with two faces, with its strengths and its weaknesses, and nothing is only black or white: vulnerability, empathy, independence, memory, and so on.