– para-essay –
Warm, windy day, in a café in our city, just across the building of the Italian Embassy. The feeling I get when I enter is a bit strange and I slowly realize that it is a result of the new, stylish image of the staff, perfectly matched, adapted, an image that corresponds to the color, the bearing of those hyper designed bodyguards, sentries and administrators from across, dressed in black, white, red and hypermodern outfit.
And when they enter as on stage or in a movie, in an extremely cool manner, a clash with the rival clique is to begin; their glossy brilliantine hairdos, perfectly macho sunglasses (regardless of its momentary presence and intensity up on the horizon) together with the arrogant, untouchable look, they create an impression of a theatre. When we encounter these figures an imagological duel takes place, and the winners are, with no exception – the Other ones, seemingly the sleeker, the more stylish, the more elegant.
Why, since they can authorize their looks (exterior) to the maximum, and contently favor their well-off, western identity, my fellow-citizen and myself will mainly direct ourselves towards self-justifying and self-observing our dubious interior, lavishly filled with a bunch of unaccomplished and untouchable dreams of the beautiful, careless, authentic easy living.
With constant efforts to await for and comprehend our identity, unable to decide who we really are? Are we the ones who are recognized and valued on the outside according to some countable qualities and indexes of the modern cultural and life style or are we the ones the exist on the inside, that strive, grieve, forced to act out the identity compelled by the society, remaining in schism with our undoubted spiritual, in touch with the circumstances of time and space, but still painful qualities.
While the woman lector of a rich, almost neighboring country, sometimes picks up her kid from school in a car whose built-in car alarm is fascinating, I still “drive” mainly through magazines, overdosing myself with texts and ideas, crucial for surviving these glamorous times of status symbols and icons of power.
In meantime my boss also protests, being unable, from his point of view from his private pools and summer houses, to reconcile with my hypertrophied hunger for texts (hunger for expression) my scattering of time and eros; the eros of my sad captive ecstasy of the everyday life.
The pain and un_self_identification of the intellectual, their experience of a marginal character, outsider, refugee; on their own background, in their own country and culture that no longer considers them valuable as themselves; penetrates me and upsets me deeply. It causes schizoid experience; identity crisis, frustration as a dominant modality of self-bearing, feeling guilty, for still not having an appropriate and consequently a legitimate proof of my conformity with the imperatives of cyber-space, virtual reality, the silicon valley.
And, is it really that, love is all you need?
And is it really possible that even symbolically biology triumphs over ideology?
And is it really that in times like these, love, being the only alternative, is more likely to be associated with compulsion, a never ending process of insomnia and deprivation?
In my own disconsolation, aware of being a puppet of helplessness, a relic of the Otherness, expected to vanish, to be defeated, worn-out and swallowed.
Is it really that waiting, Waiting itself, as wisdom, patience, as faith of the passing of time, that passes cruelly by, carrying the evidences of my life; is the waiting going to remain the sole, only my decision (or action)?
Waiting for my turn, regardless of the rigid hopelessness and homelessness in the world, in the society, in the family, in Myself:
Waiting in a line, regardless of the increased threat and loss of substantiality;
Waiting, as an irretrievable, endless, postponing of identity…
Life as waiting and sedimentation.
Bitterness of the self-postponing.
And uneasiness in the wrinkled mirror.
Translated by: Nora Buklevska