how should I feel now? I just dropped “yesterday” into the past, but it was a day when I added something. so, it’s a double throw. now I should be at the learning curve level of two days ago. but what if the things I added yesterday are linked with the day before? then you have a triple throw. and if you keep going back in time, by throwing only one of your days into the past, then you just threw them all and are at the learning curve of to the day you were born.

therefore, being enlightened means having the state of mind of a new new born. ta-daam.

She touched the strings a little harder and I exclaimed “wow, that sounds just like Sonia running and climbing and riding her bike!”. She was so receptive immediately that this could turn into a new game and asked me “How do we play a blanket, mommy?”. I said I don’t know, let’s look at one and see how it feels like. Sonia decided it looks “soft and warm and cozy”. Ok then; let’s see how do we describe it using the guitar. And she touched just one string at the time, very gentle. Then she discovered by herself a very cool move – we called it “the scrub”, because it looked like we were scrubbing the strings. Then we made echoes, and played “grandma opening her mail” and “daddy at the computer” and such. I let her take the lead and what followed was pure magic and the feeling of it is going to stay with me forever.

I will try to reproduce it exactly, but it’s hard, I don’t have her talent at story telling.

“Now the clouds are ruuuumbling like a tummy and fall on the sky, and everybody ruuuuns under the table, because there is a humongous stoooorm on the ocean and there is thundeeeeers and lightings and I turn the lights off to see the sky and I go under the table and save everybody” – all of this while playing the strings faster or slower, harder or like in a thriller, just one string at the time to get your nerves to react. And she declaimed magically, with a voice that followed the music- bass here, baritone there, soprano where needed -, and improvising on that guitar in the same time, like a true minstrel.  The best moment was when she used her sweet fingers to imitate the rain drops on the strings – , with her cheeks on fire from so much passion, bathed in pure golden light like an angel,  and I was in awe and wishing to be a child again. To see everything just the way it is, a big rumbling tummy falling in the sky and asking for a hero to save the world from some little soft rain drops.

 Don’t let the fact of Mr. Kirill Shtengel being a cute guy to distract you, just read his article. It’s a free ride to WhatTheHeckUniverseAreWePopulating and What Are These People’s Brain Made Of sort of interrogations.

This is one of the things I do when I am disturbed by my own (dis) functionality. Trying to force myself out of myself by saying hello to other worlds. The more hermetic the worlds and their language, the better and faster my own recovery. Curiosity killed the cat, but in my captive case, it saves it every single time. Well, at least it did so far and I am very grateful to my best friend for reminding me tonight to rely again on my curiosity as my best feature.

When I try to decipher this sort of things, I am at first overwhelmed and scared (what is quantum mechanics anyway?), annoyed (this is difficult English for me), anxious (do I really need to do this? Don’t I better try a pill or something?), not really interested (I will not understand anything anyway), resentful (they are really smart, not like me), rebellious (can’t they put in some extra effort and make this comprehensible for average Joe? I want to know what’s going on with the world too!).

Do you already see the analogies with our condition in here? If not, I will elaborate them again later, but let me first introduce the goal.

I know I am facing the unknown in its best materialization while reading this type of articles or when I am opening a book written in Spanish (El Pelegrino, for example) while I don’t speak Spanish or when I’m trying to draw Cyrillic letters while I don’t have a clue of their meaning. My premeditation to go through with it is dictated by the fact that fear of unknown doesn’t have a specific trigger when the person suffers from panic disorder or, as in my case, of post-traumatic stress disorder (which has anxiety and panic attacks as common symptoms). Therefore, while I cannot change my fear, at least I can change the type of “unknown reality” I am anxious about it.

I don’t know if this could work for people with general anxiety disorder (different from panic disorder), but I think is worth of a try. It’s my own experimental self-cure and it’s mainly caused by the fact that I cannot possibly take medication for my condition – I tried for a month or so, searching for the one that fits, but I had to quit. Therefore, I have to use my brain, my will, and my entire being to find solutions for recovery. Can I really have any hope of success here? I don’t know. But I know for sure the journey is fascinating, however excruciatingly painful it gets at the times. Did I have success so far? Well, yes and no. From several attacks per day that lasted few months I managed to have none for another two months after. But it started again recently and I’m back in business of being my own guinea pig and exploring new paths.

 As an ambivalent person, I am laid back with most of the things, but meticulous with everything that requires reasoning. I have to dissect it in order to understand it; otherwise I’ll not accept or integrate already digested recipes. Mr. Shtengel here has an amazing approach (from small to big, from simple to complicated), one that could be an inspiration for everybody, not only for people like me. If you and I can get over the difficulty of understanding the subject discussed and the language, I think we can be in for a cool ride.

What do you first notice when you’re done with the first paragraph and then after, but until it starts using numbers? (If you don’t like this article, find another one or another activity that is totally new to you, the steps will be the same and listed behind parenthesis) Let me list them neatly, so you can easily ad to the list or make your own, inspired or not by mine.

1. The “smiley approach” (the overall tone of it). There isn’t much of a scientific language at the beginning. Funny thing, the author uses essays techniques to catch the reader’s attention and I dare to say a very simplistic language. The quotation made me smile also, just read it and say it isn’t so. “it might tell us much of great interest about the strange phenomena that occur in complex situations”. In other words, following Alice into the Rabitt Hole it might not tell us much about the white rabbit, but we might find interesting things about the complex world of dreaming of a queen of spade.

2. Now, the words used by science (the aestetic of things), look at these beauties! Bosons and Fermions. I mean, come on, what could it be more magnificent than Fermions, whatever they are? Close your eyes and experiment what the first man felt when invented the first word. He mumbled bodon, modon, closon, troson, soson, BOSON, evrika! Maybe he was looking to baptise his dog, the first animal ever tamed by humans. Fermions sounds like an unicorn name to me. Abelian and Non-Abelian is pure poetry, Moral and Amoral, Being and Non-Being. “You, abelian morning, rise from the night’s womb and wrap yourself with imortal light”. Huh.

 3. The content, the subject, the message conveyed (and if you’re playing Pictionary for the first time, what is the game all about?). Can you translate it to another person, as new as you at this game or as uneducated about a subject, as I am right now about quantics? Let’s try it. You have two bosons who interact, therefore if you draw their interraction as a wave form, you’ll end up with a symetrical wave. If you play with fermions, the wave will not be symetrical. Do we really need to know what fermions are so far? It’s the principle that matters for now and, in fact, our ability to overcome the fear of unknown by spliting up the unknown in small bites.

 Now read this and tell me science is not actually user friendly: “In two dimensions, swapping the positions of two particles in a clockwise manner is distinct from doing it counterclockwise. “ Well duh, dude, it’s pretty self explanatory that if I move from left to the right is different than moving from right to the left.

Tell me if you don’t already feel better about yourself and your anxiety isn’t almost completely gone by now – that’s because your mind is occupied with something out of yourself and you start getting excited by this “Unknown” monster who is slowly taking the shape of a beautiful story under your curious breath.

All you need to do is to ease yourself into taking the first step of a “smiley approach”. Tell your fear you’re not her enemy, but just a stranger who is as anxious about strangers as the anxiety itself. Then try to tell the anyons’ story using your own words and working your brain to simplify what you read or use graphics to depict what is said - and by sharing, you move your focus to somebody else, you already serve another person in need to understand what the heck is this cute Mr. Shtengel talking about in here.

 Transform the story if you want. Compared with scientists, we don’t have any responsibility to stick with the factual truth, but with the emotional one.

So far, I do understand that when you throw some electrons into the captivity of low energy, then the show starts – electrons pretend to be anyons, for some reason. The lower you go, the more alchemic shows you’ll see. The deeper you dig, the more white rabbits you’ll see.

Is your anxiety gone yet? How do you feel now? ‘Cuse I’m feeling quantic.

Sleep well, live well, my friends.

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I tried. Ten seconds go by as ten centuries. I should choose the number nine instead of the ten. Ten is too compact; one would only expect repetition after a ten, under a mask of another cycle. With a nine, things are a lot different. There are all the numbers behind it, but nine is not the last one in line. Nine is as paradoxical as the soul – the soul migrates through a number of years and even if the flesh attends the number ten as the finish line, the soul doesn’t know it yet. There is always that hope that keeps the soul trapped within the number nine – an echo after the wind swept the song away.

I am happy without knowing it. My flesh doesn’t know it; maybe that’s why it hurts so much. My soul seems not to know it either. Then who’s the happy one in here? My plan to be happy is happy, that is. My plan transcended into an entity in itself and it now takes a will on its own. I suppose it borrows it from my will, otherwise where did the other half go? I’ll answer this one too: where it goes every time when I’m having a panic attack while trying to stay happy. To the limbo’s PO box of lost “nine” souls, I guess.

Tears, huh. Let me tell you, these little rascals are something else, you know? There is not only the water composition (very picturesque), it’s also the weight. This weight takes something tangible (salt and water) out of your body and brings you back something intangible, such as a tender calm. The same goes with a sigh, it takes out air, it brings back hope. I hope tears and sighs have a soul too, a tiny one, like a pixie.

 Flesh is magic in that matter. One would think flesh is stupid, just a programmed matter under the influence of immovable laws, probabilities, and accidents. I see flesh is like a mailman carrying tons of mail never addressed to him, but he has to obey the route, the destination, and the traffic rules. When everything else suddenly decides they don’t want to act upon that piece of meat called the mailman (as in human body), and then the human body doesn’t have a choice or a will, it just dies. The laws and the rest act like a heartless queen who moves on to another chocolate cake, another horse-riding trainer, another throne. The flesh is magic because the flesh doesn’t really care. When the time is up, laws and happiness can beg on their knees for another ten, aaa, nine seconds of life, nothing happens, nada, nula, c’est fini la comédie. Flesh always wins, because flesh just is.

What keeps the happiness going is my ambivalence. I love(d) my mother. I hated my mother – that’s what a shrink told me. I don’t think I hated her. I think I am angry with the fact that she didn’t stop the abuse and she sided with the abusers. Actually, she adored them both, she died for them. But hello, I was talking about happiness here, not about the past. As in an adulterous story, I the public vituperate against the vilified home wrecker woman, not against the guy who broke the marital vows by committing the adultery. I am not that angry against my abusers, I wonder why? But I have a grudge with my mother. As with happiness, it comes and goes, that’s why I said it actually stays. It should feel like staying, don’t you think? Happiness is the adulterous guy who is domestically sharing himself with us half of the week, while the other half of the time he’s in love. So, it means he’s staying, as long as he’s not totally and definitively leaving us, right?

Fooling around trying to count the blessings I can bring to the table for Her Highness Happiness, I end up short-handed. She doesn’t need me. My life happens to her, she being the flesh of life. I happen to nobody, me being the air of a sigh taken away by the wind. I mean, right now. But tomorrow I’ll be the song itself, nonetheless.

I bet my happiness misses me when I’m not around it.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot, duh – the recipe to stay happy for as long as you wish, candle or no candle. Look into the mirror until your breath gets it all foggy and use syllables for this afformation: Among of all the cosmic accidents cracking this humongous universe during every nanosecond and from all the infinite possibilities given by gazillion stars and particles, my life had to happen to me and only me. That makes me pretty fucking special. The end.

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Let it be – this is my prayer for you and for me. Let it all wash out the same way it comes upon you. Let the boulders be boulders on top of your heart. They will eventually get bored with such a passive victim and will roll away to somebody else more willing (because of being scared) to fight them off.

I came to believe that there is a bigger and more authentic courage in not fighting it. Fighting means to run away from the truth at hand: you cannot possible win such an absurd battle. So, obviously, fighting means a pledge to lose the battle. Yes, there is a virtue in non-action, the virtue of seeing the big picture – repeat after me what is this big picture about: I cannot understand why the trauma happened to me, because I am not the abuser. Logically, if I want to understand, the only way to succeed is to become an abuser. Isn’t this what most of the former abused children become as adults? There you have it! The risk is real, are you ready to accept it?

Most of the times, the abuser doesn’t understand it either why is he an abuser. Therefore, step two follows smoothly: if I cannot understand, I cannot act upon a conclusion. Three, I cannot change the conclusion, even if I know it. Four, I cannot undue the abuse, I cannot change the abuser, I cannot change myself, I cannot chose to be somebody else, I cannot be somebody else – these sound pretty familiar, isn’t it?

These are all captive dreams of impossible endeavors. And I also came to believe that a big part of the cage that keeps us still captive is painted by these dreams, which are unrealistic goals of clarification and closure. There is no such thing and who says otherwise is just a Fata Morgana mirage trader. Yes, I do dare say this assuming the known risk via most psychologists.

That’s what they try to sell to us, isn’t it? Go to therapy, eventually take medication, and you’ll see the light in maybe few years, maybe less, most possibly never, but at least you’ll have it under control.

My prayer for you and for me today is exactly this: I pray for you to let the f control go the f away. It’s not going to work if you try to gain, re-gain, maintain, and obtain this psiho-pupu illusion called control.

I pray for you to see that the light comes only after you voluntarily give up the dream of controlling an absurd world, such as the world of being a victim and the world of abuse and the world of stolen childhood. Why would somebody wish to gain control over such hell? I pray for you to let it all go back to the hell where it belongs. I pray for you to lose control over it and let it all melt away with your tears and stop dreaming of conquering your pain now or ever. It will never happen this way. It’s not meant to happen this way.

I pray for you to gain insight into acceptance. It is what it is – this is my new mantra. I cannot change the past and I don’t know the future. When it comes to the present times, all I can do and remain free in the same time is to live it, not to fight it.

How does that happen? Let’s say it hurts. I acknowledge it – ok, it hurts, this is what it is, I let it be, I let the pain do its thing without any sign of fight from my part. I gave up trying to understand it also. It just is, the same way leaves are in a tree and apples on my plate. The more I rebel that I don’t want it to hurt, the more it hurts. The more “why?” I scream into the ceiling’s direction, the more pain I get; and certainly no answers.

Every action is in vain. The only thing that works so far is to let it be on its own and then let it go the same way it came upon me. This is my new prayer – the non-prayer. Actually, the non-nothing, because I am not doing anything. I am not even thinking of something. I am a big blank page for every storm that is looking for some three-dimensional form to destroy. I am not offering anything anymore to this ghost and the ghost leaves me alone after trying a lot, maybe even hating me more because it leaves here still hungry for more souls.

Why is that? Because of the pain feeds itself from the thoughts and feelings and memories you’re offering to it. I came to discover via reasoning (yeah, my big defense, I know, so what?) that part of the pain is the food itself and if clearly left without nourishment, then the pain would be less or not even that much.

Dwelling over the past, over what was this and why was that and who said what and who did what – a road to nowhere, believe me. There is nothing to understand of a place where is no light. What good does it do to us to go back into the dark room and be afraid again, but this time ten zillion times more, because now we are adults, now we “understand” better? Believe my word, there isn’t any new discovery to be made. Love was not there. And if it was love by some who knows what twisted definition, then it was a sick mtf type of love and it doesn’t nead our understanding, it doesn’t need one more sacrifice on our part; it needs healing. And we are not healers via Stockholm syndrome, we are the victims! There is no shame in it. Live with it, share it with the world (the world should be ashamed, not us), heal other victims. Let the past heal itself. And learn to love again. That’s about it, there are no other secrets about this path to “recovery” (I call it the path out of the cave, to the real light, via Platon).

 Love doesn’t hurt – we already know that. That’s all the answers we need, right? Do we need to find out anything else, now really? Then why the craving of painting the rainbow in black and white, as if we didn’t already see it that way every second of our lives and where is the psycho-whatever benefit in doing so? Let it all be, let it all go away on its own.

Who can possible stop a tsunami? Who can fight a solar storm? Who can resist on Mars without oxygen? Now think about it – these memories are of the same power as the ones mentioned above because these memories can also kill you. Maybe not in a second, but after some years of intense stress of so-called journey into your own past, I bet it’s possible. I actually know for sure it’s possible. Your body cannot take it and it will shut down. It’s like a double dose of arsenic – you escaped the first one thanks to a miracle and want to try it again, tempting the fate.

I know there are many voices out there that will claim that only a journey to your past will help you clean the place and start a new, but I don’t believe it anymore. I don’t need to destroy my old house in order to build a new one on the exact same spot. I can leave that old ruin where it is and I can go somewhere else and build there. If I have to build, but do I really have to build another load to drag after myself for the rest of my life?

The most difficult part is to achieve the state of nothingness, but it comes with practice. Not the practice of becoming nothingness, but the practice of too much pain. One gets sick of pain and wants something else. Such as at least less pain. If I’d attain that much, I’d consider myself a former captive child. Not freed yet, but nobody’s perfect, not even the normal people.

As I recently told another captive friend, when I fall into the abyss of excruciating pain, I tell to myself: “I am my own hero. I made it so far, therefore I am a hero. My own abusers didn’t make it to where I am today. It doesn’t matter if I make it to another day, I am still a hero. I let go of so much pain, that the Sun would have disappeared in a black hole of ice if it would have had to endure it.”

And this mantra gives me the emotional distance to make it to another day and another day and another day, doesn’t matter what I feel and how I feel and who cause it and why cause it, cognitive therapy or not, closure or not. I keep moving on no matter what and how, because I know this is the purest victory of all: even if you’re kneeled by life and forced to crawl in the dirt, never to give up. Not even the Sun and the stars have a will on their own, think about that! We do. As painful as it is to be who we are, it’s still one of the most beautiful of all beauties in the universe. With that perspective in mind, think of your cage as to a pint of sand, because compared with the stars, you are truly free.

With all my love, to all my captive friends, let it be and let it go.

Have a blessed Christmas.

a.

I am writing this for myself and also having in mind all the artists and craftsmen out there who need to remember the basics, like I do now. This is a reminder I will have to revisit anytime I’ll try to fake the game again – something that I’ve seen it happening with all the talented, but LAZY people who know they can get away with a finished product without much work, only based on their little talents. When I say “work”, I am talking about real work, valid work, the one that enhances your art and your core, not about the struggle, however exhausting, to meet some dull requirements and deadlines.

First of all, art is going to get back at you if you betray it. I found myself in the last few months being dishonest with my artistic inclinations and building my video production skills on fear of failure. Guess what? If that’s what drove me, then that’s exactly what I’ve got in return: a big fat beer belly cuckolded failure. Crash, boom, bang! I really don’t/shouldn’t care what others thought about my final products (usually nice and mellow feedback), I know they are passable, but I also know they are not earthshaking. And it used to be a time when I’ll take earthshaking or nothing. When I say I don’t care about what others think, I mean that I should be the first to know the value of my work. I do appreciate any feedback. I also believe that the real confirmation comes when your heart is so elated after you’re done and you hear the angels singing in heaven – then you know you gave your true best to honor the world, yourself, and the consumer of your art work.

In my perception, art is this shapeless unknown promise of happiness and fulfillment hidden behind everything that’s created in this world. If I try to squeeze it into predictability, to tame it, so as not to overpower me (as if it’s possible), I’ll end up with a shitty kitschy crap. I knew that beforehand, I always knew it. Then why in the hello I screwed up so gigantically? I know why and I am sharing it with the world, as the second lesson of the day: let yourself be led by art! There is a miracle within every single rock you fall in love with and hear the call to sculpt it and it’s not gonna get out of that darn rock if you hammer it down as if you are out for a revenge or a fight. Listen to its rhythm, follow its wondrous voice, be like a child watching the moonlight reflected in the lake and don’t try to move the lake or the moon to a place where is more convenient for YOU.

My third revelation after all this experience is that actually there is no excuse for failure. Yeah, just like that, sorry whiners (me included). I don’t mean to beat the dead horse here with self-flagellation, but now honestly, think about it. I also need to hear myself saying it, to exorcize it. We all know that we have to stay true to ourselves and as soon as we try to take a shortcut or to wear a masque, guess what’s gonna happen? Karenina reloaded, we get hit by the train, that’s what’s gonna happen. We cannot just purposefully attempt to get by in art – or in anything else, for that matter. I used to claim that I rather stay stupid, but honest. Because I always knew that with honesty comes everything else: an honest person deliberately does her best no matter the challenges or else. But when one just tries to get by in whatever field, that’s a lie. And lies attract more lies and the failure is predictable.

My main lie in the last several months was that “this is how much I can give, I’m already doing my best”. Bullshit. I can give gazillion times more than this and it’s a shame I didn’t do it. No art comes with excuses on a price tag.

No wishes, no thoughts of wishes, no hopes trained to grow up to become wishes, no thoughts. I think it’s called rock bottom because emptiness doesn’t have a shape on its own and it has to borrow a random one from that pile of boulders right there in front of me, blocking the horizon from here to the eternity. The outside of me is the rock bottom.

The beauty of being within of and surrounded by a rock bottom is that there is only one way out of it, if I want to get out, that’s it – through every rock bottom that piles within me to mirror the wall around me. The way you make rock bottoms irrelevant is not by trying to crumble each and one of these countless grains of purple sand into another pile of countless rock bottoms, but by staying still. Giving up the will, giving up the fight. Peace. Rock bottom is peace.

No tears, no struggle, only the assonant music of nothingness. I am not when I am so forcefully against the rock bottom, against myself. I am when I am not any more against rock bottoms.

Let it all come to you, become you – that is the only way it will all go away. Accepting our condition as grain of sands is the only way we can transcend this condition. Breath. Still. Breath. Still. Breath. Welcome home, you prodigal soul.

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Example to follow below the cut.

This morning, my turn at the cash register at Costco. After the usual greetings, the gentleman behind the counter wrongfully notices out loud:

-       I see you brought your husband with you today.

First of all, I don’t know the Cashier guy, I am not a regular shopper at Costco, and when I shop there once in a blue moon, I usually don’t bring my male harem with me followed by paparazzi, so this guy would be entitled to pretend he knows me from somewhere. Second of all, I didn’t know who was standing behind me, but after a sudden and confused look (which became a terrified one after the revelation), he could have been my grand daddy and somehow my worst nightmare (you’ll see why). Before I regained my brains to make sense of this bizarre incident and chose to ignore it, thinking that the guy confounded me with someone else, swipe my card, and move on, the second genius of the day come on the stage to apply for the clownery of the male kind award (yeah, I know, I feel my biatchness coming upon me now). So, the guy standing behind me and who was attributed the otherwise he would never dare claiming merit, starts forming vowels and consonants with his xstrlgndhdgbtsf lips, bless his soul:

-       Oh noooo, I already have a wife at home and I don’t need two! Are you kidding me? I’ve got enough nagging and yelp yelp (here, he gesticulates and makes a doggy face), no no no.

Then he backed off literarily raising his hands toward me, as if I was Medusa, the monster from Alien movie, and his in laws, all in the same time, in this way increasing the insults tenfold.

In that moment I almost forgot I do love men, in general, and how I think they are great poets and builders of the world, in general. It came into my blood only the ancient memories of my female ancestors who had to put up with these mutants’ manners and bad characters for thousands of years, in general. I wanted to have all of the women’s voices one with mine, so I can tell this beep beep specimen what a worthless piece of xxxx a baboon grand grand progenitor he is, in general.

Does he remember who picked up his mammoth fur from the cave floor because he couldn’t be bothered with the task, million years ago? Did he remember the endless days and nights his ancient wife spent marinating the deer meat, slice it, store it, keep the best bites for him, so he would not have to do it when he would come back to the cave every few months? Is his heart capable to recall what a dangerous and courageous enterprise all of his past wives who still live in his wife’s blood did when each and one of them would have used a razor made out of sharpened cow teeth to shave her legs, so his furry hand would find a place to rest after his many battles with the world and with himself? For God’s sake, his atavist wife used dog grease to style her hair or even leaches, arsenic, and lead to make herself beautiful for the I don’t name it, the beast.

Speaking of generalization.

No, I didn’t retaliate the way I felt it would have been fair, manly, eye for eye type of a battle. I feel how the Amazons in my blood are enraged and the first women who fought for the right to vote are deeply disappointed with me today for I have kept my bra on, my motherly smile carved into my face, and answered gently, the same way I pick up the toys after a playdate: “I already have a child at home and I don’t need another grown up to act like one. Happy holidays to your wife, Sir”.

Although, it is food for thought why would I want a Kindle? While it took me forever to start writing directly on the computer and even now I am still more…muse blessed if I pick up my favorite yellowish paper and a black tin pen (it has to be black), cuddle up on the sofa, use a pillow as a portable desk and the world atlas book as a support and write. While all I’ve got from home when I emigrated were my books, hundreds and hundreds of them, knowing very well that nobody else would ever read them, but I knew precisely that if I would have abandoned them at home, that would have been the ultimate betrayal of my soul.

I love real books. I do know that the planet is depleted of resources and a tree is better left untouched and still cannot help myself. I do love and appreciate the Internet and still, nothing compares with shuffling for hours through real books searching for information that the web would offer it to me in a matter of seconds. I also realize that it might be about the power of habit here, which is fine; books do deserved to be loved with a pure love. This is not a sin.:-)

I believe that the reason why I am staring at this amazon deal is the fact that, above the medium and despite it, I love the written word more than its shape and form. That magic thing over there, called Kindle, is a treasure box filled with goodies. It doesn’t look spectacular and doesn’t smell as dreams, but it’s still a magic box.

Ok, let’s shut down the computer now and keep my promise. After all, I learned from my beloved books that you shouldn’t allow anything to overpower you like a black mouth of depersonalization. When you feel that’s going to happen and you’re too obsessed or too addicted to something, the best thing to do is to fast from it.

I once wrote on a Romanian forum that I finally discovered what „contemporary theatre” is when I came to the US of A. I was belligerently reminded about Andrei Serban et comp. The lady who belittled my knowledge still lives in Romania and obviously didn’t understand what I was talking about.

My childhood was deserted. I was a Little Prince living for and with my rose – my imagination. The reality was so painful, that my survival instinct created a parallel world, one where I could go outside at night (my mom sometime came to terms with my weirdness), walk around counting the trees to see if they match Eminescu’s poem, peeking through the neighbors’ opaque window curtains to witness their life (I thought I don’t have one), and recite poems to myself. I once fell asleep on my balcony reading to the poplars. Mom found me in the morning laying on the cold floor and hugging the Literature textbook I used so I would attend to the ignorant trees, my accomplices. I’ve read them „Seas under the deserts” by D.R. Popescu.

Unsolicited, I used to offer rhetoric about the meaning of life and most of the time the meaning was „to fight for” either justice or dignity. As a teenager, I extended the list with new words: poetry, friendship, love, creation, innovations, new discoveries, adventures, hot water in the shower, oranges, good books. As a young woman, I switched the order a little and improved the hierarchy: poetry (equals life itself), friendship (which is eternal, compared to love), dignity (considering I lived in a bribe-based culture), virginity (my first boyfriend told me I don’t have the fire and left me for „a real woman”), revolution, and politics. 

Then the Revolution came.

Before that, still a kid, I had a favorite place I used to go after school with my friends or by myself. There were these half-millennium old ruins of Walachian ruler Mircea The Old fortress hollowed into the grassy slopes along the Danube River. To watch the sunset there was an out of body experience. We used the cracks in the rocks to imagine royal thrones for our rag dolls. Lizards were everywhere, as rapid victims of our curiosity, and snakes would have been burnt at midnight to invoke the ghosts and black witches to disclose our smoky future. Then the ghosts of coming home too late would splash their dance on the nude skin taking the form of a parental wooden stick.

From the ruins shore, we would snatch a boat that didn’t seem to care of changing owners for a while and ran down the river channels splashing the water and knocking the big vessels with the oars, as a sign we’ve been there, we’ve witness them, we are the doers of the river.

Somehow I felt that what I experienced was unique, but nothing like in the books we read (censored or not). I mean, not worth telling a story about it. It felt strange and with a pint of imposture that I would have had such a magic childhood parallel with a wounded childhood. Which one was the true one? I didn’t think that my life was of such amplitude as to deserve being immortalized in a book. Back then, my people and I were smashed under the concept of “think big” even before our capitalist enemies found out about it. It had to be something extraordinary in order to be worth sharing. Like a secret whispered away from the secret service’s ears, for example.

That’s why when I first came to America I thought that artists here are out of their mind for daring (that’s the word, as in how do you dare do such thing?) to write, paint, and play about insignificant aspects of their plain lives. I thought they are plain stupid and out of real inspiration – the inspiration that creates Ulysses, Scheherazade, Karenina, Jean Valjean, Romeo, and such. But no, American artists didn’t have any shame of expressing average Joe type of feelings, describing ordinary acts of the day, using street dialogues, etcetera. I felt the same way as when I tried to spy on my neighbors hoping I’ll find out what a real life looks like. Here, everybody thought big by taking small steps and small words and smacking small colors first on art’s panoplies. I felt betrayed, especially after I met so many people with incredible destinies and real real real adventurous lives, better than the ones in the books, better than mine anyway.

I was terribly conflicted on my first encounters with the American culture.

I was terribly conflicted on my first encounter with a revolution. As I said before, the Revolution came in my country in December1989. It was on the 22^nd when everything was still for like half a day, that’s how much it took me to walk home for miles and miles from a little village where I worked as a substitute. I remember the voices screaming from the street megaphones, a woman crying, some kids yelling, bullets, and new official characters talking about the dictator leaving with a helicopter. I felt insignificant because my only thought during that revolutionary street stillness and air silence was of my mom.

Then I wanted to go and have a slice of revolution for myself, but unfortunately mom locked me inside the house. I escaped soon enough using a lie and went downtown to witness the big change, a change worth writing about, right. I didn’t like the revolution unrevealing in my little port town though. The same people who had the power before, some drunks, some agitators, and some screamers. And women – whom I found disturbing again, what are women doing on top of a military tank, waving the flag with a hole in the middle? Aren’t they afraid?

I wasn’t afraid. Actually, my fear was of fear; therefore I was not afraid by being afraid of being afraid. Still, aren’t people afraid to expose themselves? Ok, poetry equals life, but still, writing poetry is a self-autopsy done in public. Making a revolution is eviscerating all your credos in front of others, risking the most rejections of all – incarceration, public stoning, bullets, and death. Writing contemporary theatre and literature seems to me like cooking your favorite dish ( of uncertain virtues and qualities) in front of the window curtains wide open for everybody to see, smell, and gossip about. And that’s exactly what bewildered me when I first tasted American art.

Doesn’t anyone feel safe behind big secrets, a.k.a. big stories anymore? Doesn’t a “real character” need tons of symbols and mountains of underlines and rivers of subtext to express a thought and a feeling? Could someone just say directly what it is to be said and be…what? A writer, an actor, a painter? Just like that?

I thought Adrian Paunescu was entitled to write poetry because his poetry was about big stuff, such as a big national hero (Ceausescu), big character (Romania as a chosen nation), big actions (fighting against imperialism and capitalism), big self (man, he was indeed bigger than life) – the poetry that changes history; the Big Poetry.

Why would somebody write about oars kicking the waves? Why would nobody write nothing about anything?

(to be continued)