Teologie pentru azi

Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș

Fragrance

(novel)

*

And we, who wants to say, we, the sole of the country, remain unwritten, sir! Instead of letter 10, to us is break. Instead of being Stan Limbă’s slippers, it’s Mahmud’s slippers, who could this turk be, because I don’t feel like reading about him?! That it encompasses me such a flaccidity, a hallucination, a self-loathing when I want to read. I see the letters, because I know them. But when I read some words, maybe they make sense, but to me they don’t. Or they make sense, but not all of them. I understand that some people use some dictionaries or the phone provided to search like that, all kinds of words. But why should I put my head with all the words? Because what is the word, good people, friends, people with a good heart? What is the word that we say so easily, that we pull it out of our mouth like the conjuror from sleeve?

But what is the word?! Because if the word were that easy, everyone would write like the author of this novel. They would write pages upon thousands of pages. But the word is something that gives you a headache! You read three phrases and you get hungry. But what a hunger: wolfish hunger! You feel like drinking beer like the crazy after a page. The beer goes up to your mansard, although it also goes down in discharge, and you still can’t finish. Because the book is like a long and wide vineyard, which your grandmother makes you dig up with a spade, then put vine props on it. And it’s better to take a plane to Spain, via Craiova, go there and humiliate yourself picking oranges, than to dig up your own vineyard from the field. That’s the book, heavy! And, as I tell you and repeat, I have big problems with the history, with what is written in these books: I don’t have the time or, better said, the strength to read. And these being said, I stand like a cow at the new gate instead of opening the book, I eat a little one[1], but I don’t understand some priceless thoughts.

The railwaymen are broken of sleep. They are day commuters, because they work at night. And since they have the guild facilities, they all sleep like piglets in first class. We must protect their sleep. We speak slowly, among ourselves, so that the train with many restrictions can crawl like a snake changing its skin. We will not dream of the chinese arrogance of 1000 km per hour. Because we go slowly, leisurely, so that we have something to talk about, something to see, something to sleep about. The chinese don’t want to see, they want to arrive. They cross mountains with bridges, they cut through rocks with colossal machinery, they build high-speed trains under the ocean.  Because the internet, some say, goes under the ocean and doesn’t stay in the air, in satellites. Some people put their hand on the end of the world, the peace is negotiated in Alaska, street art is always an unexpectedness. Because you never know when the one who will excite the audience for decades will step on stage. He steps on, no one believes in him, but he knows who he is. And when he brings the audience to their feet, it’s no surprise to him, because his real work is behind the scenes.

Why does your mouth smell like flowers in Roșiori? Because here poetry lies in the human heart. And the flowers bloom in your mouth, spread everywhere, make noise, and Leo sings about his brother. Because if you have a brother, you have someone to argue with. Or if you have a brother, you have someone to back you up. Behind you is your brother. The one who smiles at you like an armful of gladioli.

At Scrioaștea, the novels are written in your heart. Here is the world of writing, where you write essential things. When you want to write, this is where you learn the writing. And you go with it to Bucharest, you live with it in the house, and you are full of color, with a plural perspective of reality.

At Belitori, people rip off meanings from reality. And hang them on people like travel bags. Because at Atârnați, the art hangs on people like the smell of ascetic perfume.

By mistake I presented the return tickets. A sign that I had already bought them. Then the morning ones too. Because the wind outside is good, but the first-class air is restful to the heart, invigorating, and we are in no hurry at all. Why would we rush on vacation?! The rest of vacation is unhurried.

Tranca-fleanca, fleanca-tranca and you read, drink aloe vera, read, pray, contemplate, write a novel, write your memoirs, you grow leaves, houses, worlds in your heart. Don’t rush, don’t worry, the worries are for those who don’t travel. If you got on the train, it means you’re not in a hurry. Because if you did, you’d call a helicopter to pick you up. But you, taking your time, are here with us, you are part of the people who are resting, who are preparing for work, for life. Because, undoubtedly, the life is a pool in which there are no ships floating, but only those ignited by the heat. With different panties on and bras of different sizes. Bras are always aggressors. They are visually aggressive. Even children have under- stood that bras are not clothing, but intrigues. Countless questions and uncertainties begin from an amorous intrigue. Why would someone like her be with someone like him?! Or vice versa. There’s something dirty in the middle. And aunt Romera thinks incisively in this sense. Who is she and her mother? What have she learned in her life, that nothing has entered in her head? It goes in one ear and gets lost in the sahara desert. A desert like all days.

The question of the day is related to intensity. If people are patients without intensity, what kind of deglutition do they have? The pH index is low in certain stations, which denotes a significant increase in gigacalories. The spokesperson for Romania or woe to his mother, how he is called in people, speaks rarely, so that people don’t understand. He speaks to them bluntly, to each one of them, and they don’t understand a thing. Or does everyone understand what they want. So much so that, in big political arguments, whoever understands less screams louder. The shrill scream, out of love for the country, is delightful. The one who has jokes at oneself and doesn’t love any country, is also ordinary abomination. That Cocoloș’s Gica had heard about get out of the country, ordinary abomination, and she felt discriminated against.

[1] To be seen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mititei.

Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș

Fragrance

(novel)

*

To decontextualize the state of spirit means to deny art. The postmodernism of poor-quality collages senselessly. I can also make fun of postmodern mockery. Any laughter can be transformed into an even more insensitive laughter. But literature and art cannot be empty spaces, but spaces full of their authors, of their message. The death of authors is as credible as the death of banks, when everything is done with bank money. The author does not die, because we are looking for personalities and not xerox copies. If a banal copy of Dali is as valuable as the original, then let’s burn the originals painted by the spanish genius! But we sell them for millions of dollars and that’s not because the author is dead, but because the author is alive through what he left us. And he is more alive as we understand his art. With other words, Dali sold less well during his lifetime not because he wasn’t great, but because we understood him much worse.

– Has the hot water arrived?

– No, it hasn’t! It has an embarrassment…It hurts in the elbow from us, that’s why it is not coming.

– It’s the queen of the ball, it comes when it wants. But, especially, it comes when we don’t need it.

– Maybe, for regeneration, they will also take away our light! Because why do we need light, if we have Netflix? A good movie can be watched and with the light off: you can imagine it! Because even so, if you see it, in the end you must give yourself a summary of it, a briefing. Because the movie is not with summary, it’s a whole salami.

– Sibiu salami or saxon salami? But today I found out that in Alexandria they eat quails. With and over quails. Quail carcass, spicy quail sausages, quail eggs, now in a casserole, at 400 grams each, fresh quail eggs, but also boiled and peeled, so you can quickly put them in your mouth, so you don’t waste time. It doesn’t matter that they make sounds that make you despair. But here on the farm, all these realities are real, just as real salami has more meat than eccentricities.

– But since we like missing hyphens, with or without a farm, you can be a non-functional speaker at any age. You may or may not have all your teeth in your mouth, but a few enormous errors of expression are like a mustard stain on a t-shirt. The stain should not be erased, but spread! You can do muscle or eye stretch, to see what the person across the table is writing, but not to his wife, but to that slut. Because when you write to your mistress, you have a charming air, you’re tricksy, bring out a smile in you. But when you write to your wife, you write on the run, as scheduled, wanting to finish it faster. And that’s why I assumed it was the other one and not the one you need.

– Why do loves end badly, when they do end?

– But who said it ends?! To put a relationship in parentheses, we say it ends, but it doesn’t end. That we are still thinking, analyzing, assuming. What is she doing now? Does she still think about me? And if she is thinking, why is she not showing any signs of life? But so that we don’t mess up the jars, we pretend that we don’t care anymore, that it wasn’t good, that we forgot…But why forget things that we can remember? And if we do remember, what a big deal are we making? Because the memory is a history book that we don’t want to film. It’s our closet of „junk” (from a young perspective, because we hold on to it with our teeth). They’re mine! Leave them there! You keep coming back to it over and over again, you don’t want anyone to know about its existence, but you still give a few details. You keep bathing it. You remind yourself of what you want in public. The public waits, you sweeten things up, you rewrite them, you fantasize them, you literaryize them, you transform them into a symbol, into a myth.

And while some want to „demythologize” the Church’s religious books, the same ones all want to mythologize their life in the public area. Let it be known about Ion that he was a man, that he didn’t do anything in his life anyway! Let it be known that he ate, drank…and died, poor thing, of liver, of high grass, of waiting, of drinking indiscriminately lately. The drink, a delirious liquor, made on Ion to be a non-man. Why did you die, my, Nicule, so young and full of diseases, when you still had days, my!!! You didn’t want to drink the wine this fall either! You were an enemy to us, my, Nicule! You let us drink your wine for alms! Eh, and if it’s alms, let’s be good to us, because even the dead man liked the life! And if he didn’t like it anymore, we like it, because we’re going to die for nothing anyway. Because I say the State is to blame! Because it didn’t tell us what to do in life. How to do it, what to do, when to do it, so that it’s good, so that we too can become like Marin Preda, so that we too can have our own Moromets, and not some scorched lives, some boring lives of total embarrassment.

That let’s be committee people and think straight! We have great lives, but we don’t have writers to write our lives. Because we also have Jupuitu in the village, and Colțatu. Mărin Bășină is our guy, fat, a beer drinker. Gicu Gâscă is as smart as a duck when it quacks. Răgălie’s rapes young women, the Police are investigating him, but not really, because they haven’t caught Țugurel’s either, from the bottom of the orchard, who stole the geese, one night, from Bleau’s Anica. We have material of genius here, in the village, we have everything we need, but we don’t have genius writers to describe to us at leisure. Because we drink at the bar until the morning and we swear by the mother of fire, and we like work, but we stay on social assistance, because it’s easier, we are superstars in intrigues, we give in our head for a palm of land, we have essence of a novel, but they are not the authors we need. That and the authors, I notice, write more about the city, about bars and hotels, about how they crowd with a woman in the mountains, at the sea, on vacations.

Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș

Fragrance

(novel)

*

The abilities of man, many of them latent, manifest themselves when he is put in a hurry. You know you must get off the bus, you have luggage in your hand, and you make certain gestures, on the spot, while the car is moving, because otherwise you would have fallen. You find solutions in a second. You didn’t think to hold on to that bar or lean on the chair or hold things in a certain way in your hands, but without them you would have fallen. When we think we can’t do it anymore, we find solutions. Yawning is also a solution: it chases away sleep. Or, if you doze off in your chair, short sleep breaks are an awakening, a cure for fatigue, because you come back as if from a great recovery.

We cannot face the horrors of war! Or, in the end, everything is forgotten. Territorial amputations are uprootings. When you start to distort your language, because you are forced to stay outside the borders of your country, then you realize what the linguistic unity of a people means. And when laws are made against you, against the citizen, they only aim at your immediate depersonalization.

I know when we don’t have hot water from the street corner. Because someone, lonely, a physicist of boiled water, with two pumps, draws hot water from the depths of the street. Insolent damages, almost weekly, and he watches over the proper functioning of your bathroom in the middle of the street, even if you don’t notice him. And you wash in the basin, because the basin has a future. When the light falls, the lamp has a future. Or the candle of prayer, if you are filled with the peace of God. Because simple things are the foundation of complicated things. But we, always wired to technological novelty, feel bad without online, without our light, and food remains in our throats. Because we have learned, oh well, to have the people of the day sing to us or talk to us. We eat and they break their chests for us. They terrify us with all the ideas they have in their heads. Or, on the contrary, we laugh at their laughter, at their irony, at their stuttering, which is also ours, because we don’t have a solid general culture either. We shouldn’t be surprised by the crowd! The concerts are for the crowd, not for singers with sloppy and obscene lyrics. The concerts are a football match, a ruckus, a sweat that we think we need. Because we must scream somewhere, right? At home you can’t make a lot of noise, because the neighbors are listening in on you. On the street, the same: the Police will take you at small money.

Excessive words are an infraction. And we must go somewhere where there is shouting, where people push each other, where rudeness is accepted to a certain extent, so that we can burp too. So that we can also remove the fumes, the gases, the lubricities. So that others can hear that we also know the organs said without a curtain and in how many sayings they can be woven. Our phone, with which we film the star, is our perspective on him. We watch him from our own perspective, as his drones fly over the concert and the footage is interspersed. We have a diachronic perspective on the concert, which we post on TikTok shortly, we are interested in the nuance we want to highlight, sometimes to the detriment of the artist. Or we correct his slip-ups through our paparazzo effort. But we are not journalists, but we get into it like a fly in milk, into the picture, into the context! We want our mouths to be heard, even if we don’t have much coherence in what we say. But our right at beak, at gossip, has been infused mediaticly by televisions.  They taught us that we too can, that we too should know, understand, regardless of whether we have no voice or superior power of understanding.

The School idiot can be an influencer. The one who knows how to fix something on a car can pose as the inventor of the car. The grandmother of the two young men, suffering from mongolism[1], sat on the inside step of the car, because one of them was sitting on the raised seat in 385. And, gallantly, he apologized to the man next to him, for sitting partially with his back to him, because he was talking to his family. And that one excused him. And when he saw his grandmother, who was wearing white pants with Paul Klee paintings[2], standing on the stairs, he also stood on the stairs, the second one, who stuttered. The one in the chair was making big mouth, making mistakes when he spoke, his hair was dyed yellow and blue, and the grandmother had blue strands, and I saw them as winners. Both the young people and the grandmother, because they assumed their health status. The grandmother wasn’t ashamed of them, but talked to them and explained everything to them as if they were healthy people, while they were overcoming themselves every moment. They were overcoming their handicap and living their life.

Because, after all, it’s not the pictures we take of ourselves that matter, it’s not what we say about ourselves, it’s what we experience within ourselves. That the woman leaves the house with her hair done, her lipstick on, her hair sprayed, and you can think she’s happy, that she couldn’t be happier. But she’s just going through the silence after the divorce!  Through the painful desert of separation, the one where you must carry all the accusations behind you. Or the murmur behind their eyes. That he’s to blame! That he cheated on me. That’s her version. But if you go to him, if you talk to him, the whore left first, she’s the head of the evil, and she stole the money and took it to her mother. That her mother would teach her what to do, because he wished us harm. In fact, she didn’t agree with us from the beginning, since we met…

And Mimi, the gallant, with high heels, with insensitive movements, is actually a whiner. She cries, she is crying out of pity, and so does Lili when she accepts that he turns her intestines inside out, in front of the children, and this while they are at the table.  That the soup wasn’t good, that I don’t know what else was needed. And that the mood you have when you come home is like in prison…That’s when the woman knows how to cook, no joke. But the man, when he wants to make fun of you, makes you bite your nails. Theatricalization of gestures drains them of dramatism. And that’s why I can’t stand seeing plays where they’re not acting, but rather theatricalizing, caricaturizing gestures. I’m a playwright, I know how to put feelings in stage, how to put the life in stage. And I expect the director and the actors to do their job. To learn the dramatism of life and to speak from the midst of pain. But if you, beginner, come and pretend to understand my text, without acting it out in its truth, you are not dramatizing, but babble the play! The same with the poem. You must understand its state. With what state it was written, and with the same state it must be spoken.

[1] To be seen: https://donaonline.ro/sanatate-dona/ce-este-sindromul-down-cauze-simptome.

[2] A group dedicated to him on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Paul.Klee/.