Fragrance (novel) [32]
Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș
Fragrance
(novel)
*
The taste for art is formed by great art. When you encompass a lot in your soul, the encountering an exhibition full of worthless things, of things made in haste, is like a bad meal when you are hungry. You come to buy nothing. You come to leave naked. But the artist prostitutes himself visually, he makes fun of himself, so as not to be excluded. He considers the social exclusion harder than his own failure, when things are the other way around. That public opinion doesn’t fulfill you, but what you do is your fulfillment. And if at 50 you make fun of yourself, after you started promisingly, no one will make you great at 70. In fact, those who you think will laugh at you, your opponents, the jokers of the dozen, want you to be brave and not cowardly. They speak ill of you not so that you believe them and eat them out of the palm of their hand, but so that you mind your own business, to be cold to the mockers. Don’t care! Yes, don’t care about anyone!! Make your painting, your book lines every day, because these are the treasure hidden within you.
The precision, the rigor, the greatness, and the value lot are the answer. And what was left of Ioșca in the end? His silences and not the unrealistic sexual intercourses, done according to the norm. What remained was the raw experience, which you know very well, and not the mannerism of fantasy. I liked his style, the alert communication, without many corners, and that’s why I wanted to talk, to make a dialogical book together. But, one year away, his few novels remain like a deaden spot of color, somewhere far away in me, and all I have left is their silence. Maybe the silence is the true dialogue between him and me. But the silence without dialogue has no gioia perenne[1], but I am at the end of the world, beyond what you don’t know about me. And what could have been, we don’t even know how important it would have been for both of us or whether the differences would have been the same as the silence now.
The pork cracklings made at oven had a complementary taste with the white grapes I recently bought. Sometimes I eat fasting chocolate, my dark chocolate, with melted cheese or some butcher’s sausage, although I know it’s not good to put the end before the beginning. But, when I’m in a hurry, I say that’s where they all end up, no matter what order I eat them in. Although the sweet, before, don’t fall me well at stomach. But starting the meal with its end is the theological perspective of the Church. To know where you must go, you have to start with death, with the thought of death and the Judgment that will come. The value of each day does not consist in how much you do and how much you earn, but in who you become through everything you do. You, your problem, is the problem of the end! The good end is the beginning of salvation. When you look at who you should be, then everything you do has inner coherence, because you don’t want to show who you are, but you enjoy who you are with God and with people. The ostentativity is chocolate in appearance, because you eat it first, you eat it too easily. But the difficulty of life is not what you look like, but who you are every day. Because even when you are not seen, when you are not noticed, when you are not understood, you are the one who lives piously, you live in the peace of God.
Last night I needed to paint to calm myself down inside. The painting as a need, not as a hobby, as a whim! And I discovered the peach pink for the space between the faces. White was first, blue, something purple, and this autumn peach, restrained with white, was my own rest. And after the minutes of painting, suddenly, as if I had nothing, I was able to sit down to watch TV, to the mathematics of the poker game, and then fall asleep peacefully. Towards morning I woke up from a dream in which I was writing, I was writing about this very novel, I knew where I was, but I had the false impression that I had done something wrong, that I shouldn’t have written about that thing. But, in definitive, you can write about anything. And one can write from close up or from a distance, more focused or in passing, without this not making a topic of discussion a topic of interest. Because everything is important, but not for everyone. And in literature you learn this from your first written book: that one thing is what you transmit and another is what the readers read. Everyone is prepared to understand according to their level of understanding. You can put the important things in plain sight, you can emphasize them, but he stops at his level, at his taste, at his need for truth. And when he argues with you, he argues with his understandings and not yours, and when he admires you, he admires what he was able to understand from you and not everything about you. Much remains on the outside, the rereadings still teach you something, but your inner growth means a different understanding of things. And you don’t have to be afraid of what you don’t understand, but you must enjoy your current understandings, because they are the steps for the never-ending ladder.
[1] eternal joy