Fragrance (novel) [27]
Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș
Fragrance
(novel)
*
When Saint Pavlos used the word fragrance in both senses, on ὀσμὴ in II Cor. 2, 16 BYZ, he spoke of how incense makes some people happy and others sad. For if I were to incense someone who smokes me with his tobacco, I would be happy, but he would be extremely annoyed. And if I preach the word of truth to him, he, the one who does not believe, considers it death, when the divine word is his life, but he does not know this. If they knew, the fragrance of the divine word would be „the fragrance of life unto life [ὀσμὴ ζωῆς εἰς ζωήν]” [Ibidem]. But he, no and no, considers it to be „the fragrance of death unto death [ὀσμὴ θανατού εἰς θανατον]” [Ibidem]. And so, he remains in his smokes of Hell, in the eternal smokes of Hell. And the correlative of ὀσμὴ [osmi] is fragrance. It is odor[1]. The odorization of rooms is a great boon for our minds. I need the smell of fir, the smell of the forest, which is why I put fir essential oil in the air purifier. And, suddenly, the forest appears in my room! And the forest is essentialized in the smell of fir, in the strong smell of cleanliness. There are many forms of incense. Both natural and man-made. And if you want to buy strong, healthy odors, liturgical odors, now you have where and what. And the good fragrance of the Church is this incense of many kinds, in addition to myrrhs. And they are a lot. But the good fragrance of the Church is the holy life of the faithful! The holiness of the faithful is the beauty of God’s Church. And when you want to breathe the life of a great man, of a ghostual man, you have to see him in the flesh, you have to see him serving, speaking, comforting, in order to understand how much you need him.
„But I don’t want to waste time at Church! What can the Church teach me?!”. Phrases and phrases, wastes of time…From your point of view it’s a waste of time, but they, the many, need our time. Because they don’t know they’re dead. Because they don’t know they need exactly what they’re contesting. Because they don’t know what we know…And the fragrance which I am writing is about sincerity. The need for sincerity is the need for air. There’s a need for closeness and to talk. Because, in the end, what we write in others is what remains.
On the one hand, I know I was cheated: the wooden frames for my paintings from the last millennium, which I now want to put on the wall, to see them up close, cost too much, but, on the other hand, they waited too long. And, for this long, seemingly endless wait, I internally agreed with his arrogant, money-sniffing silence, pretending not to understand. I needed simple frames of fir tree and I’m going to buy some heavy ones. But it’s too much! The time, sometimes, doesn’t wait for us. Just as my manuscripts, finished or in various stages, await their publication. You must review every line, every page, to bring the book to completion. All together is your opera. If for some people certain parts or certain books do not find their place in the opera, for you they all make sense, because they are all your opera. And in each one I have put fundamental things from myself, which you must understand.
When I was writing by hand, I didn’t think about books, because I was interested in manuscripts, that is, their writing. When I came to the need for a published book, I ended up writing it on the computer and, finally, writing it directly on the keyboard. And now, as if I hadn’t written hundreds of pages by hand, the immediate writing or my writing is this, on the computer keys, so that it can all be edited and hoarded electronically. When I publish the book, it becomes mine. Because I have publicly assumed it. My manuscript fragments, up to the book, although edited online, are parts of the book. And my reporting to it, as well as that of the readers, is like a book in progress. Which may have various improvements until publication. But the next editions also mean updates to the book. And I always decide what things need to be added and what the corrections are for the new edition. Because each edition is a step further towards the definitive edition, towards the author’s edition. Which needs continuous brushing over decades and centuries. You need to dust off the author’s tongue. And each editor of the book updates the text without mystifying it. Because you put the author in the foreground, the one you help travel through centuries in a row.
[1] In the Vulgate.