elitră lipsă. găsitorului recompensă

Obliterăm împreună

riscurile de aliterare

literaturând

cu literă mică sau mare.

Alătura-mi-te-aş şi n-am cum

Alăturea de orişicare drum.

 

bucuriile mici

Ce bine că pot

Să mă tac făr’ să mă prefac

Să mă tic fără să mă stric

Să mă toc făr’ să mă sufoc.

Ce bine că ştii

Să mă mustri-atunci când mă îmbii

Să-mi spui pas dându-mi totuşi nas

Să-mi laşi loc să nu dau în foc.

Ce minunat, minunat

Că-mi trebuieşti rezonabil şi cumpătat

Că piticii din ţeastă s-au maturizat

Că-mi trebuie doar trebuitul, şi ăla moderat.

Dar cel mai şi cel mai bine

Ar fi să reuşeşti (alt tu, cel generic) să-ţi ascunzi

Cât mai ai de cărat sacii ăştia cu tine.

- Care saci? Nu cumva mă confunzi?

 

strong/weak if you do, strong/weak if you don’t

There are many standards that we never consciously picked up – they are more or less „infused” into our very substance through their pervasiveness. There are things we admit or not, things we share or not, because there are standards about what is share-able, and placing yourself on one or the other side of certain standards makes you immediately „one of those people who…”. But given that this page is not (read: pretending really obstinately to itself not to be) an exercise in (narcissic) likeability, but rather one in being honest to oneself, I’m questioning my standard.

I’m on a (rather severe) diet.

I read blogs of people who write about body image; I can agree with lots of stuff, I can get judgmental and wonder whether continuously writing about it doesn’t affect the extent to which you think about it – and it really shouldn’t be that important… I admire some of them for their sustained effort of embracing themselves instead of media images. And I am, by no means, one of them.

I have long ago tacitly embraced the standard that a woman might joke about her weight, but a `strong` woman should never show that she actually has issues with her body – because, well, she’s not that shallow and self-esteem cannot possibly be influenced by something so `worldly`. Yet, the same `strong` woman should never `let herself go` and turn into a middle-aged shapeless potato sack. It’s always perverse – because, to obtain the `cool and composed` attitude, you should never visibly count what you have on your plate – or else assume the consequence of being a different sort of fretting woman. And to obtain the `decent`, `I have everything under control` silhouette, you should do something about it – something that involves time and effort. But it shouldn’t show.

Therefore today I am writing about it. I’m on a diet: it’s awful and masochistic to bake cake for your kid’s school birthday party while working your willpower to its end not to touch the frosting; it’s a test of dealing with frustration, putting it in perspective, coping with low energy in a demanding life pattern; it’s time-consuming in preparations and asocial because, apparently, all social things at work and at home are organized around food; it’s really boring if you’ve developed gourmet tastes; it’s a journey of confirming that this is my weakest physical and possibly psychological spot; it’s possibly demeaning in the eyes of others who are struggling on a daily basis with how their body, of whichever shape, is themselves and needs to be loved. But I’m tired of this game of constant guilt, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I’m giving it my best shot, and if it saves me thinking about this for the next 10 months, at least, then it will have been worth it. If I can extinguish the desire to press delete whenever I look at pictures of myself, even if it’s only temporarily, it’s worth it. (Of course, it won’t be, given that, when I weighed 10 kilos less than today, I was desperate to find a gym where they know what you should do about your upper arms (that was perhaps around 21). ) But it turns out that there’s strength to be found in all positions on a spectrum, and today, I’m sticking by this decision: I caved in to society’s ruler – I’m a wimp on a diet.

 

nu ştiu

Zilele astea mi se pare că n-am nimic de zis. Se-ntâmplă lucruri prea mari, faţă de care am senzaţia că trebuie să mă poziţionez, dar n-am instrumente, n-am suficientă informaţie şi bănuiesc toată informaţia de inacurateţi ample… Cred că pricep, pe ici, pe colo, dar sunt aşa de departe în creier, aşa de străină, parcă nu pot să contribui nici măcar un pai. Mut doar informaţie de colo-colo, cu sentimentul unei furnici în reţea, sperând că ce asociez eu le-o folosi şi altora. Cred că lucrul pe care l-am citit zilele astea cu care am rezonat fără rezerve este ăsta (în ciuda faptului că nu sunt suficient de informată în privinţa conţinutului actelor despre care se vorbeşte şi, ca atare, nu mi se pare că am dreptul la niciun cuvânt). Dar pare şi că a tăcea şi a aştepta să se aleagă apele e o laşitate, ca atare dau mai departe măcar atât. În rezumatele pe care le fac seara pentru bărbatu-meu despre ce-am citit peste zi, mormăi în continuare că, politic vorbind, nu-i alternativă, şi că mie aia-mi trebuie. El zice că e bun şi vidul la ceva, dacă se obţine, că sare întotdeauna cineva să-l umple. Şi nici nu l-a citit pe Zizek .

 

PS – Văd că se flutură în dreapta şi-n stânga cu Zizek ca stindard pentru o chestie. Am fost, cuminte, la lansarea de carte de la Bozar din noiembrie, unde se adunase un bobor întreg să-l audă vorbind. Pe cât de mult mi s-a părut că pricep de la el pe vremuri, pe atât de perplexă m-a lăsat sofistica lui opţiune pentru „stânga” în condiţiile în care argumentele pe mine mă duceau în afara spectrului cu totul… Deci menţiunea de mai sus e făcută cu gândul la dispariţia lui „discours du maitre” şi nu la un loc pe care şi-l atribuie personajul Zizek (sau i-l atribuie alţii) în discursul public actual.

 

about nostalgia

Once upon a time, in the nineties, on a St Patrick’s evening, I listened to a band full of the most amazing lust for life play Irish music in one of the stiff and serious music halls of Bucharest. Somewhere towards the end one of the girls sang this song, with a divine voice and in an accent in which the stanzas made no sense to me whatsoever, but I could just about make out the chorus properly enough to melt into tears. I looked for the song for years after that, forgetting to ask Matthew Sweeney during his creative writing seminar what it was called (not that I could reproduce enough of it, with melody, for someone else to recognize it, but it would have been worth a shot). I found it last year, when I decided to transcribe what I remembered of the chorus word for word in the google bar (Hail, Google!). I’ve listened to it a few times since then. It’s still beautiful to me. Maybe also because I remember now my student self from when I listened to it, who was moved by nostalgia for a time of purity and grace and community togetherness before that… and that’s where the harsh sound of the needle scratching the LP breaks my construction, like in kids’ TV-series.

It’s not then. It’s never been then. I know everybody says this all the time, and yet, even when you understood it, it is difficult to feel it, because it’s so damn easy to make `then` feel absolutely perfect, to purify it of everything that was not idyllic, or, just the opposite, to fill it with all sorts of anger that are actually not about then, but are much easier buried there. `So we did, so we did and so did he and so did I/ And the more I think about it, the nearer I’m to cry…` And it’s so easy to melt down in this invented collective memory which my generation puts in PPS-es with all the lost products of the communist age that we grew up with. Because `then…`

It’s not then. It’s now. It’s now that my daughters splashing each other in the tub laugh so beautifully that the back of my throat aches with suppressed tear-bliss. It’s now that I feel the ocean of fear for whatever world there will be ahead for them. It’s now that I’m grateful, furious, amazed and drained at the same time. It is the now that is loaded to the brim with ideology, politics, communication, life, work, meaning. I’m nostalgic, as I write, about every bit of now that I wasted thinking about how differently serene things have been before. Instead of looking for my serene point from which I can absorb and deal with today. It’s now.

 

Gaura ca temă recurentă

Zicea băiatul ăla cândva

Că gaura din steag se va umple cu sens,

Că scopul va deveni palpabil, ca pe pahar vizibilul condens,

Că gaura e mai mult decât ea.

 

Ziceau şi la cunoştinţe despre natură că puloverul cel mai gros

Nu-ţi ţine cald cu lâna, ci cu ochiurile rotunjite pe andrea

Că pledul de aer din spaţiile circumscrise e… aşa

…un fel de termopan avant-la-lettre miţos. 

 

Să zicem, prin urmare, că şi gaura asta din stomac

Între când, carevasăzică, totul urmează şi totul a fost

Are, probabil, un rost,

O pupăză sau măcar un colac.

 

 

risk

It’s like playing a sort of Risk with two, you know? With each of the players having a different objective on the start card and neither of them knowing what the other’s objective is. And while one is playing the entire time to win as many continents as possible and assuming that the other has a similar goal, the other’s card might just say `you both win when you have an equal number of armies and there’s a truce`. There is no way of obtaining that in a game with just two, because there’s nothing that might bring about a truce, if there’s nobody else. Therefore if your winning is conditioned by harmony, you lose from the start. That’s sometimes how it feels – as if consensus is a non-notion, there are only different positions on things you care or not enough about to defend. You lose each battle that you win and you lose each battle that you lose. And it wasn’t about losing in the first place, it ought to have been about playing together, but somehow the game is perverse and doesn’t allow you to play for fun – you either win or fold altogether – which is not acceptable, because that is your own rule number one.

 

vertigo 2

Breathe in,
the snowball is rolling
you can see the change coming
you can feel yourself falling,
breathe out.

Breathe in,
it’s been a long way up
to the elusive peak
you weren’t mindful of the ever steeper drop
breathe out.

Breathe in,
is this as good as it gets?
is this `happy`?
is fulfilment a backpack of worries and frets?
breathe out.

Breathe in,
stick your fingernails
into the shapeshifting reality
hold on to it tight, before it bails
out, breathe out.

 

Vertigo

Suntem prea mari ca să cădem, îţi spun,
ştiind însă din bancurile cu blonde
că ne putem sinucide sărind de pe tocuri,
- cu capu-n tavan nu-i nicio garanţie.

„Vai, sărmanele mele picioare”,
îmi spun, deşi ele n-au cum să cadă,
sunt bine împlântate în torentul de mâzgă lăcrămoasă
încă mai ştiu de unde-au venit.

E-o cuşcă aurită, îmi răspunzi,
nu poţi creşte şi nu poţi da-napoi,
în povestea asta
sticluţele n-ajută decât să uiţi
că eşti prea mare să cazi
şi destul de mic să te ia cu ameţeală.

 

about languages… and stuff

This is about bilingualism. Or at least, that’s where I started. Then it turned out to be about identity. And then about history and information in general. I am in awe at the fact that people ever manage to stick to one `subject` – to me everything seems connected with everything else. It might be time to convert to some native religion on some virgin island .

Aaanyway – an article about unbalanced bilingualism got me thinking about why it was that I seem to have trouble speaking my own language with my children, although it is a language I am still very comfortable in, of which I love the versatility and of which, conceptually, I want them to have the benefit. Of course, there are all the contextual excuses – that the home language is the same as my partner’s language and the school language, therefore it’s far more contexts of Dutch to outbalance Romanian exposure; that I have to switch a lot and that I am not comfortable with the people in the room not knowing what I just forbade the kids to do or the people in the supermarket not being aware of the contents of a conversation that has them as a subject (`please let this lady pass in front of us at the register`, `watch the cart!`) etc. But there was a question in the article addressing one’s potentially internal reasons for linguistic inconsistence. And, while painting walls in the study, I went with it to see where the answer might take me.
It may be that what I often perceive, while translating, as shortcomings of Romanian in comparison to some Germanic languages is also perceived, consciously enough, as proofs of shortcomings in the `signified`, of empty spots in the fabric of `the world according to the Romanian` (because I strongly believe that language shapes the way one sees the world). It may be that those shortcomings (that I supplement linguistically by long and uneasy periphrastic constructions) become symptoms of where my original identity was lacking perspective, symptoms that I compensated by adding new layers of identity on. It might be that the fact that I am embarrassed to place the kids in front of even DVD’s dubbed into Romanian because of the sloppiness and fake tone of the translations, the unnerving quality of the TV shows when we are there on holidays and the `quick-and-dirty` way of making money by publishing children’s books/CD’s with idiotic poems/songs illustrated with a couple of animal shapes printed off the Internet without paying the rights, or printing Disney’s integral with texts that twist the language in ways it was never supposed to be twisted – drastically reduce my linguistic exposure resources – but also, mainly, get me down. It might be that my guard is down insofar as speaking Romanian is concerned because I’m all the time angry at and dissapointed with my country and that it takes an effort to filter the `now` out of the legacy of beauty that I need to pass along.
And that took me to another thought. I am very much aware that there is no such thing as absolute truth where personal or national identity and even history is concerned. But, for the sake of the game, we hold some stories to be commonplace in order to be able to relate to one another. Obviously (to me), Romantic nationalism put in place all sorts of fictions about nations and collective identities and especially about reasons to be proud of what you are (even though you have no merit at all in being born where you were born and even less in not trying to see how anyone else sees the world). These fictions have been, to large extents, debunked at some point in the 20th century – in any case to the point that nations had to admit the existence of quite a few skeletons in their closets. However, manuals all over the continent kept selling plenty of the Romantic dough – and many of us didn’t question it. I have met an extremely intelligent Finnish guy who claimed unflinchingly that the Kalevala was an absolutely unique product of national genius and that no other nation had ever produced a saga (he was a bit appalled at the wikipedia page with which we opposed his stance). Just as I have only met Dutch people being very-very-very proud of being Dutch – because oh, their commercial and colonial history and oh, their standing up to everyone and anyone and oh, such a little country among so many powerful nations and water… And of course, when asked, they will tell you that it’s not always the nicest of histories and that in fact it is based on a lot of suffering for others and mistification afterwards, but the core is unchanged – whatever is objectionable can be swept under the carpet of national pride. Where I come from, relativity in this sense has become the norm – because we know that the communist-nationalistic manuals we learned our history in gave a very warped vision of the world and because we are aware that their predecessors stem from a rather nationalistic age as well, I, for one, have no clear idea about any historic truth (apart from years and wars – which can be interpreted in all manner of ways). My lack of trustworthy information about the place I come from makes me relativise all messages I’ve ever received about my identity. Having been fed `national poets` whose value I couldn’t really, objectively, appreciate and `national values` which turn out to be inexistent in a free world, there is this fundamental lack of `pride` in my identity: there are, of course, wonderful things where I come from, but I see them being destroyed year after year by greed, stupidity, cowardice and, more than anything, a basic incapacity of working together towards any goal. So the strange thing is – I question other people’s rationale of national pride and can even find it misplaced, but, for the simplicity of self-definition, I miss it.
And this might be it – we live in a world in which nurture, as far as values are concerned, is placed significantly above nature. If you are a greatly successful farmer on land where your ancestors were greatly successful farmers, your added value is seen as minimal. If you come from a modest family and make something of yourself intelectually, it’s all your merit – these are, I think, strong and widespread beliefs (maybe `well-bred` as a concept is going to win back some force in the years to come, who knows). Conserving your given identity feels like little work, shaping a new and better one gives you an individuality which you can take pride. It might be then that it is sometimes easier speaking a foreign language because it is the signifier of who I worked to become instead of the signifier of a random complex of events shaping me from the start. With the added bonus that the people that I tried to approach were actually happy being what they were, as opposed to the people I was slowly drifting away from. In which case the right operation to sort this out might be embracing all of the identity layers instead of unconsciously fighting some of them; and only buying one’s resources at an old books’ shop .