Fragrance (novel) [22]
Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș
Fragrance
(novel)
*
All kinds of faces. How long do you remember them and why? Or why, after years of not seeing them, do you know a face very well, someone’s, without them being your friend? Yesterday, when the beautifully dressed mothers were taking their children to School, and they were only in black and white, I had the feeling that all these children came out of somewhere, that they had been hidden all summer. Now, at the beginning of the school year, mothers are no longer women, they are no longer just any, ordinary people, but they are responsible. They take their children to School, wait for them, pick them up from School, they are like hens taking care of their brood. The average woman is relaxed, has her own thoughts, lets herself be carried away by dreams. Not so the mother with children! She is always with their care. Do fathers have worries?! And how many more! But they, being taken to work, seem to have none. But the whole life of the family is in their salary, in their work, in their resistibility. Working fathers are imagined as beasts of burden who just carry day long towards their family. The mother carries the house in the back, being carried behind by her husband. Do they still have time for themselves, as husband and wife? Are children too much for them or are they just their natural? And when the children leave, when they move away from home, because they make their own home, do spouses find themselves increasingly united or increasingly distant from each other?
We are taught with group, general questions, when each case is unique. The entry of artificial intelligence into the equation makes many believe in fast, immediate writing. But writing means personalizing, describing from within and not from outside reality. The watertight, secured cities, where the State knows all your social data, all your good or bad movements, are an anti-future. Because they don’t help you be yourself or get rid of yourself, but they don’t give you any chance at freedom, at your real freedom. Freedom is the one without supervision. Freedom is when you choose and you yourself realize what you chose. Freedom is the audacity to live. That the food you bought from the restaurant with advertising everywhere was not to your liking, is their problem. You will not step foot in their place again. Your freedom, tomorrow, is to not repeat the mistakes of the past. Because your mistakes have cost you, made you indisposed, and that is why you do not want to repeat them anymore.
My writing hours are a peaceful silence. They are a cool, good fragrance cell that doesn’t stop me from my rhythm. From my inner rhythm, which hits the keys. The black keyboard, illuminated in letters, is part of the silence, although it produces noise. But its noise is a productive one! The noise of the keyboard is writing, it is fulfillment, it is inner liberation. Sometimes I think I can’t hear it anymore, because I become a follow-up of my thought. My inner prayer is not interrupted by writing, because it is also part of writing. Without the prayer from the rhythm of my heart, of my love, my thoughts are blown by the wind. And she, the hungarian, comes and tells us nonchalantly that she practices the „profession” of whoredom. TikTok is a world full of the unforeseen. From decrepits to impostors, from hooligans to rascals, from young women in search of to widows in need. And I moved on to Moromeții 2[1], part two, reading from the book in cars, traveling. I have the large letters, 150 font on ReadEra[2], with 15 lines, but I’m at 787 out of 2657, making the novel seem endless. And I read not so much for the novel, not for the action, because unheard-of things don’t happen in it, but for the author. I know the communism on the inside, I do not support extremist ideologies, I know the smallnesses of democracy too, but our author, Marin Preda, the one so close to my Scrioaștea[3], is my need for understanding. Because he was in the same situation as me, that I wouldn’t have been understood at home, among my fellow villagers, if I hadn’t left. I write in Bucharest like him, I write at home and around my house, but my problems of understanding are in my village, in my country, in their narrow way of looking at things.
[1] To be seen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moromeții.
[2] I’m referring to: https://readera.org/.
[3] The village of my childhood: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comuna_Scrioaștea,_Teleorman. And the novelist Marin Preda was born near my village. Hence my interest in the man Marin Preda.