While remaining influenced by the grammar of motives, we never failed
to satisfy that morbid curiosity of ours, despite the awakening resistance
to unsettling habits, because of pride that could hardly bear the modesty
of demeanour. ‘So what?’ you ask, reading Horace or Ovid. ‘Barbarians
like us, unless they delighted in words, would admit that life is a process
of elimination.’
Perhaps we learn by constant repetition, but even when my nose bleeds, it is nothing
but watered-down ink dripping onto a creaky wooden floor covered with a cheap rug
pretending to be tapis polonais. One glance at Buster Keaton’s face, like a bookmark
marking scenes with bygone meanings, and I already know that there is no comfort
in the last feeling I want to experience.
I don’t watch films any more, just distant memories
of films I have already seen. Sometimes I even think
that perhaps Roundhay Garden Scene is all I need.
After all, what really draws my quotidian pictures
is silence.
I wake up for a brief moment from indefinite slumber just to shed a tear
over trifles that somehow slipped out of my reach, hoping that I can stay
like this for a little longer, and it doesn’t even hurt when I strike a chord
easy enough to play along, although sometimes I wonder how it could be
that these moments that are mine and mine alone all of a sudden turn me
all defensive, even though I know that your ugliness is an acquired trait
and there is no way of saying if I ever have what it takes to brush it off
just because it’s my imagination.
I have never been particularly fussy—a glass of tap water and a piece
of contemporary drama would be enough to nourish the body and soul
of my own creation. So, spoiled by all the words I read by the dim light
of streetlamps, I disregarded that seemingly fading shadow perched like
a crow on my windowsill since it was supposed to disappear eventually.
But instead, it brought Bucha and Izium. But instead, it brought Zahedan.
One could say that as long as death is in our blood, life remains nothing
but an aspiration.
Sometimes I wish life had a better score than just the foleys. It could be
that I care so much about the music because I have a precarious influence
over the script and the direction seems, to say the least, uncertain, and yet,
I dare to believe the clef would set the pitch so that every word embraced
the soft-spoken. If only I dared to admit that it was really about covering
the silence.
I don’t like cut flowers. I have always preferred the unexpected sight of a wild one,
sprouting between the flagstones at the edge of the pavement, in an unclean gutter
just beneath the eaves, or in a crack in the façade of a building, as if almost casually
reclaiming its rightful inch of the concrete jungle.
I have never been quite sure of the first sentence,
but what is the worst that could happen—a shrug
or an equally adequate reaction? At least words,
unlike orchids, do not wither. Except who needs
words in a world made by a chimerical florist?
A man’s whole life in a single stanza—what would that be? An arbitrary anecdote
with a half-baked punchline over a pint of lager that dared to turn into a good work
of fiction in the attic of a morgue? Perhaps. But this would imply that it is possible
to live multiple lives as if there were no end at all. An exhausting prospect, indeed.
Fortunately, we have an immeasurable capacity to make every conceivable choice
comfortably trivial. After all, it’s just life, isn’t it?
hidden pilcrow 