Fragrance (novel) [7]
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/.