Dreams

There must be so many cowards hiding behind their dreams!

A life full of dreams is just as full and just as empty as a newly freed hotel room: thousands and thousands of absences floating around, filling the corners, thrilling the bed sheets. Everyone‘s in there and no one‘s to be found.

“Never give up your dreams!” is a dangerous modern edict. And – as perplexing as it sounds – a humiliating ideology, an insult to our intelligence and adaptation abilities.

No, we cannot do anything. And no, not everything is possible. There is nothing positive about “positive thinking”, and the idiotically positive views on “personal growth” have made more losers than winners.

Optimism is not about ignoring the bad, but about acknowledging the slightest form of anything remotely good that comes your way. How can you detect it if you never pay attention to reality? And how can you pay attention (and respect) to what is yet to come if you are too busy refining our dreaming skills, building up on air?

A most beautiful dream is no more than a very absence. The more extensively dreamt, the more absent and pressing would become. Until it will swallow you in. And then, it will no longer be you working on a dream, it is going be the dream working on you, haunting your rooms, switching your lights off, sucking your powers, turning you into a zombie ready to throw out of the window for the sake of his master.

There’s no higher existential “savoir-faire” than managing your ideals; that is, knowing when and how to give up your dream for saving your reality. For a start, never check in a double room, if single. It will only double the absence. 🙂

dreams

(Foto: inpluvia.deviantart.com)

What is Truth?

Lies. We live with them. Depending on the occasion, social circumstances and spiritual availabilities, we tolerate them, we ridicule them, we ignore them, we underestimate them, we detest them, we cherish them, we refine them and, if we really must, we fight them. Often than we realize, we take all the above necessary “psychological actions” at the same time.

No one has a comfortable relationship with one’s lies; yet, we’re grotesquely profuse in fables, misstatements, disinformation, near-truths, partial-truths, exaggerations, calumnies, tricks, well-intentioned untruths, subterfuges, false colours, and other stories. We’re a breathtaking parade of voluntary and involuntary distortions. We display a fascinating representation of misery and excess, an irresistible lack of equilibrium and dignity, a tumultuous propensity to dissipation and abuse.

Indeed, we often are what we lie. Just as we are best defined by our goals – that is, by our yet-to-be’s -, we are also defined by our lies; that is, by our most synthetic could-be’s.

We often end up living our lie as if it is our most painful and crucial truth.

I’ve seen liars who would gladly let themselves be crucified for their lie. They would know all the answers to Pontius Pilate’s questions.

truth

(foto: theroadtofaith.com)

Season Closed

Long-long time ago, the gentlemen had to hunt the ladies they liked. Not so long ago, the ladies went out and started to hunt for their Mr. Perfect.

Today, however, nobody’s hunting anyone. People of both sexes sit and wait. Sometimes, every other weekend, people like to take other people for granted, as they come their way. Ladies and gentlemen of all ages and social conditions don’t even BOTHER to invest energy in hunting. Chasing is ridiculous, shooting is forbidden. Nobody wants somebody THAT much to consider chasing, nobody wants a stable relationship THAT much to actually consider shooting.

We enjoy saying that we live in post-religious times. How come nobody’s noticing that we’re directly engaged in post-relationships? People already live with the disillusion of the disengagement without EVER being emotionally (or officially) tied to another person.

„But why should we hunt really?” ask the young. „Isn’t hunting degrading, after all?” No. Hunting is flattering! And healthy. For both, the hunter and the hunted. Hunting is a commitment in itself. And a paradoxical partnership between the “venturer” and the “victim”. Even if for a short time, the hunting brings exclusivity: one hunter, one prey. Also, it brings very specific desirability-criteria that holds the prey valuable and the hunter focused.

People SHOULD DARE and SHOULD BOTHER doing their worst and their best for the ones they could love. Otherwise, they might as well hang their weapons on the wall and buy a good popcorn machine.

season closed 1(Foto: historia.ro)

MONKEY-BUSINESS

(To be read by men only)

Worthless things seem to gain in value once they enter the area of a woman’s interest.

If it’s about the lamest man alive or about a Louis Vuitton replica purse, women love to make the worthless seem praiseworthy and the other way around. Nothing excites her more than making up strategies and tactics for turning cheap into dear, and gold into trash. She is the acknowledged governor of all understatements, and the crowned queen of all overstatements.

She can make everything happen, in any (im)possible way. More precisely, she puts a great deal of wit and a generous piece of passion in making up a new reality, conformable to her wish.

It doesn’t matter how striking the dissimilarity between her PR tactics and the actual object is, she’ll do everything to enforce her own truth on the most skeptical people.

Her determination is perplexing yet pathetic, puerile yet perfidious, and, above all, frightfully efficient. Trust me with this one: even often than assumed, the whole world ends up believing what she believes.

Dear Sir, for your innocent eyes, it may look comfortable to let her talents guide your views, because she gladly bends the reality until it suits your expectations. Yes, she’ll do that for you. If she really wants to. But she’ll tear everything down and declare it null and void the minute she changes her mind, leaving you aimless, overwhelmed by contradictions.

It is her natural condition to constantly work for you or against you; so don’t worry, or watch out. Nothing warms a man’s heart more than noticing how – if the woman wants it to be so – his mediocrity turns to sheer wisdom, right under his very eyes. Oh what a treat. Oh what a threat.

monkey business

(Foto: thepioneerwoman.com)

The Fillers

Some people look back over their shoulder in anger, in anguish, in vain. The world is moving ahead, so marvellously wrong and wide, but how were they supposed to know? They drag themselves along the ground, licking the dust off that narrow path back to themselves. They wouldn’t trade their own little „Kingdom of Good Ol’ Days” for anything in the world.

Some other people have already set their foot on the Next Year’s shore, and set the bridge on fire. If they would ever feel like looking back, there will be nothing to see; not even a damn burnt shoe. These people are their tomorrow-s; or else, they’d be nothing.

Indeed, some march forwards, some crawl backwards. But most float aimlessly. They fill the interstitial spaces between two years, two days, two seconds, they fill whatever gap, whatever crack, orifice, pause or void, they fill whatever can be filled, they are the fillers.

There is something grand about their superfluous nature, I sense their hidden will to conquer the world by topping off its holes, by stuffing its pores, making it BURST with confusion. I fear these people. I think they possess some kind of twisted, grandiose knowledge that enables them to feel comfortable in their idleness, to float above the hard facts, to sneak between two crinkles of the world. Even when, for a moment, caught in the convulsions of life, they’ll break the chains eventually. And they’ll eternally return in that liminal zone of do-nothingness, filling the interstice between 2016 and 2017, between here and there, now and forever.

the fillers

(Foto: Tabloul autoarei, ”The Comfort of being Small”, foto: Andrei Ținu/StreetLenser)

WHAT FOR WHOM?

Not every missionary has a mission, and for sure not every mission is entrusted to a missionary.

Sometimes, a true mission gets lost in the sea of absurd ideals and abandoned hopes, or melts into the boredom of the common guy next door like ice into water. He would never fish it out; he didn’t even know he was supposed to.

Some other people are born with the obsession for a mission they’ve never been entrusted with. Which is even more tragic: there’s nothing sadder than a missionary stuck in a false mission like an ant stuck in the mud. What this missionary lacks is the distance from himself and his own beliefs. Not all burdens have to be carried and certainly no obsession can turn into a “true call”. It takes no more than a twist of mind, a banal psychological turnover for our missionary to be no longer interested in his “vocation”.

Eventually, almost every comfortable belief is false. And almost every indisputable vocation is a mixture of sheer vanity, paranoia, honest enthusiasm, and imposture.

A true missionary will most likely feel that his mission is beyond him.  Yet, “the call” cannot be resisted. The missionary will not release himself from his obligations, but he will hesitate. He will doubt himself and his vocation to the point of capitulation.  And it is precisely this peculiar, ambivalent relationship with his “true call” that certifies its realness.

You cannot seek it and you cannot avoid it. The moment you make a choice for any of these extremes, you are disqualified. And look around, the world is full of tasks that will never by found by  their proper achievers; and full of apostles that will never come across their gospel.

missionary

(Foto: en.wikipedia.org)

AS A MATTER OF TASTE

I’ve read an interview with Gianni Vattimo where he said that he would gladly let his kids in the care of someone who has read the same books as he did. I really liked the idea. Why? Well, mostly because everything I know I’ve learned from books. Life has been a terrible teacher to me. And I, in response, have been a lousy pupil, trying to do as little homework as possible.

I’m not a „bookworm”, no. And I don’t normally trust a bibliophile, particularly because I find his (or her) way of approaching books 1. too compulsive, 2. too submissive, and 3. too much of an alibi for overlooking his or her existential commitments.

Excessive reading is, at the end of the day, an excess. And, like any other excess, is not only less honourable (embarrassing at times), but also the sign of some, well, psychological mismanagement.

But who am I to put books before life and still escape from „bookworm” label? I dare defend myself this way: I make an intimate, deliberate option for every single book I read. I refuse to „feed” myself with books (as I often hear people saying), I refuse to „pass time” with reading, I refuse to „devour” good literature and essential theoretical writings with the guilty appetite of a lady on diet who has just found a brownie well-hidden in the fridge in a hot summer midnight.

I say NO to chaotic reading. For me, a book is an existential choice; neither an abstract, nor a compulsive requirement. It may sound like a lousy slogan, but a well-read good book is a chance for a better and more meaningful living. It’s the right antidote not only for a lazy mind, but also for a lethargic spirit that couldn’t, perhaps, prove itself in the comforting mediocrity of day-to-day living. This is another commonsensical observation, I know. But no less important.

Real life is not always designed to challenge its “owner”. And some of us don’t know how to change that.

However, most people wouldn’t dare life to its limits. A few have tried though. And most of them failed. And here comes the right book or the right author. Like, for instance, exposing yourself to extreme virtues and vices through Dostoevsky’s writings. Or get to the core of loneliness with Pessoa.  Feel the pain with Kafka, fear the time with Julien Green, or experience women’s labyrinthine reasoning with Montherlant or Nabokov. You’d have to live long and painfully in order to experience (and turn to good use) all those „living tricks” available in books.

An „uncultivated” person is, before anything else, someone who fails to recognise the subtleties of the world he lives in. Someone who, generically, does not understand. Someone who cannot put his finger on his less obvious experiences, and however cannot imagine anything that’s not obvious. He betrays himself by ignoring all those ingenious hints that life throws at him. He, instead, thinks that life is worth living when someone throws something tangible to him, something like a bone, a stone, or a party. All in all, he does not quite know how to handle the infinitesimal quantities of daily grace.

To come to an end, I think that people these days learn, read and write enormously – from blogs and Facebook posts to treatises, from huge exam materials to desiccated scientific magazines. It’s a kind of sick, static and fanatic interest for all possible „intellectual” actions. But any vocation is gone. And what a painful lack of criteria!

Indeed, the moment we forgot how to live, we forgot how to read.

Now change the word „book” with the word „music” in the above text. It’ll work just as well.

books

(Foto: knigoboz.ru)

Broken Wisdom

Clever words, sayings, mind blowing, penetrating ideas and sophisms – they circulate everyday on social platforms. They’re un-dignifyingly called „inspirational quotes”. Bits of brilliant knowledge that, for years and centuries, were kept prisoners between the covers of books and magazines, hidden deep in strange, dark places like archives and libraries when no man ever set foot without a certain sense of purposefulness and commitment. They were made for few eyes; and for even fewer minds.

Now they’re everywhere, coming and going like clouds in a windy spring day. Sometimes they make you read them twice and mumble to yourself „good one this one!”. So you „like” it or „retweet” it. And then you move on to a YouTube jam and then you play FarmVill, and then you go shopping.

We like sophisms and „inspirational quotes”. We like them precisely because they were taken out their original context. Someone did the dirty job for is, kindly removing the trash out of our way, so that we can savor the pure beauty of some words of wisdom. Who needs context when we can have the essence? Who needs the story when we can have the plot? Get to the point, say it quick, say it smart! Don’t get entangled in a web of branchy explanations!

We have no time and no respect for broader, cumulative perspectives and, to be honest, we don’t even understand that s**t. It is hard to get, therefore irrelevant. That complicated stuff is not inspirational, it just give you a headache. Again, get to the point. Say it smart. Hit it hard. Be yourself an inspiration or find an inspirational quote to hang out there, on your wall.

You and your followers will forget it minutes after they liked it anyway.

And, in the large scheme of things, these quotes mean nothing. They change nothing and no one. They live gloriously a couple of minutes, hours, a few days at the most. Like insects. Like scattered ashes of some great man.

The internet is indeed the medium that glorifies the choice; anyone’s choice. It is the medium of all non-stake options, of false hierarchies, of derivations, and of everything that is irrelevant and reversible; a refined thinking is one click away from an obtuse debate and all platforms promote, as a rule, an abstinence from meaning. Good, bad, and neutral values, news, polemics and pieces of information are meeting and merging together forming a swarming orgy that not even a strong, ascetic mind could successfully dominate.

The use of online resources – inherently lacking in precision – easily leads to the “infantilisation” of us all: we have grown accustomed to ask more and more questions about everything, without taking the time to examine the profound nature of the answers we receive.

We have grown accustomed to wait for the inspiration to come in the form of some quotes coming from a great book written by a great man we know nothing about. We rely on nothing, but broken wisdom.

(Foto: darpanmagazine.com)

On Idiots (III)

All idiots are actively and enthusiastically idiots.

Imbecility is, among other things, a profession de foi.  Especially for the educated ones. They all live with the illusion of depth and omnipotence. So they talk loud and a lot. For the most part, they talk sports, nutrition trends, entertainment and sexist subtleties. They also love to exchange inconsistent arguments and re-launch clichés about life, health, and politics.

Commonly, they are vocal and critical about everything and everybody.

When they have to confront someone who is very different from them, they remain perplexed.

For a moment, the change of perspective is the end of the world. A conversation with someone who is inexplicably uninterested in their views comes as a shock. „The Otherness” leaves them in a short, but tragic state of frustrated speechlessness.

But once they overcome the initial difficulties, they have a new goal in life: to nullify that enigmatic difference between them and The Other!

For this grand purpose, they show some teeth and muscles. They laugh, bark, sniff, fawn, drool, snarl, yelp, bite. They’ll do literally everything that’s humanly and doggingly possible to affirm their status as qualified holders of  power and knowledge.

Once they start to make threats, there is no way you can escape their violence. Because one is not stupid enough if not malevolent enough.

Active, enthusiastic vileness makes a dummy grow into a fully stupid man, into someone who aggressively plucks you out of yourself and puts you in the shoes of his victim.

But how do they do it? After all, they are idiots.

All educated idiots have developed sly manners of getting what they want.

For instance, they insistently ask you the wrong questions until you end up playing a part that has never been yours. They instinctively RE-organize YOU in a manner that suits THEIR goals. They turn you into an „erroneous something”, into a kaleidoscopic monstrosity with indistinct opinions and weak arguments, into someone saying „no” when meaning „yes”, and „yes” when meaning „no”, into someone who has no longer access to one’s essential concerns, into someone who can safely be called a bleeding, pitiful prey.

They enslaved you with their vileness. And so there’s no other victim worthier of pity than the victim of an idiot.

Trust me with this.

(Foto: taurusarmed.net)

On Suffering

Giving wrong meanings to your suffering is a terrible (and dangerous) thing to do. The lack of meaning is often better than false meaning.

Actually, dealing with your misery is the most significant and crucial occupation you’ll ever have. Some say there is some kind of „existential dignity” in dealing with it „in style”. Well, I personally am not that sumptuous.

I believe that the only justified exigency in hard times of misery is to try to assess its actual depth, consistency, impact, and limits.

The planet as a whole may be a lot happier than a single person. But only a single person can be a lot more miserable than the whole planet.

Indeed, our capacity to suffer is monstrously great, incommensurable even. And we rely on it. We take advantage of it; we even manipulate our own enormous ability to suffer. We play with it; like kids playing the doctor game.

So every day, we make false claims of unhappiness. But God knows we’re slightly happier than we believe; and a lot unhappier than we let others know.

(Foto: dy0719.com)