Death of the Author

"On 25 February 1980, after leaving a lunch party held by Francois Mitterrand, Barthes was struck by a laundry van while walking home through the streets of Paris. He succumbed to his injuries a month later and died on 25 March."


(source: Wikipedia)

Knowledge of the day

You can write and publish three different versions of your own biography and still become a reputable author.

(epiphany from an African-American literature seminar, talking about Frederick Douglass)

Mon chéri

They used to call me a cherry twig.

A cherry twig

can give you the pleasure

of pure white fragile flowers

even in December

when treated with care.

You might have been watering it

with your own tears

Still...

how can you expect

being rewarded

by a sweet red fruit

when your having

the cherry twig

was based on breaking it first?


I am a cherry twig no more

I was broken

cherries stand for innocence

and my pure whiteness died long ago.

My dark blood soaked into the ground

and I came back

as a cherry with experience

a sour cherry that is.

Maybe if you cover me with chocolate

you can still experience the feeling:


I am the best thing you have ever tasted.

Friday the thirteenth

*
Go to sleep late and get up early

tell them to leave you all alone

don't comb your hair, just leave it curly,

and bite the hand which touched the phone

You must not miss them or feel so desperate

You must not think of sun and spring

Read, write and focus to the last bit

or you will destroy everything
*

Happy (?) anniversary

If I should choose a compensatory day for celebrating my birthday, it would be February the tenth. This date reminds me of two extreme experiences which had quite significant impact on my life:

The first took place nineteen years ago, when my parents were recommended -ironically enough, for the sake of MY health- to move from the capital (where I was born) to a smaller city surrounded by mountains (where I then spent almost fourteen years before returning to the capital for my college studies).
Of course, moving flat is no big deal for most (normal) people. But I was taking it really hard. To me, it wasn't about moving from polluted air to fresh air at all.
I saw it only as being kidnapped from a nice, fully reconstructed tenement flat in the centre of my beloved city of perfect springs and autumns, to the prison consisting of four bare walls in a small flat in a scary block of flats in a cold and depressive city of eternal winter and rain.
In the capital, I had many friends and felt loved and understood. It took me much longer than it is usual to find some friends among the hostile strangers.
When we were leaving our old flat on the tenth of February, I was crying, sure that one part of my heart, which I left with the place I considered home, was killed.
But perhaps the worst thing about it was not leaving the friends I had already made in the capital, but leaving those friends, whom I did not have time enough to make by then. Some years later I found out that the first person I thought very highly of in my new place of residence-my scout group leader- used to live in our close neighbourhood in the capital. And more years later I found out that my college soul mate, a boy of whom I cared from the very beginning of my studies as if he was my twin, spent his childhood just a few streets far from my original home. And if I had not left then, we would most probably have attended the same elementary and high schools...

The second reason for this date being of great importance to me is exactly three years old. Once again I could find myself inside a car then. In a car crashed into a concrete crash barrier that is; sharing the consequences of the accident and interrelated adrenalin rush with the soul mate mentioned above. It was only his brilliant reflexes that made it possible for me to be writing this post right now.
I told him then that we should celebrate this day as our new common birthday. The problem was that the consequences of this accident lead to the fact that on the first anniversary I was already not so sure whether there was anything to celebrate and whether this boy was the right kind of soul mate for me.

Nevertheless, I now feel all three of the old pains as being lessened. If I used to think of this day as the date of my coming close to death, first emotional, later physical and then psychical again, now I am able to be more objective. I try to look back at both occasions as at being given a new chance, new opportunity to change my life or to at least think of it in different ways. However painful and difficult it was to cope with the new environment or with the fear of driving a car after the accident or with the dangerous levels of certain relationships, all of it made me stronger in the end. And I might not feel happy right now, but at least I am still alive.

At the moment, I am celebrating this day by writing an email, asking the teacher who has the right to decide about my studies if and when I can come see him and talk to him about my unfinished essay. I wonder - will I succeed or will this be the third time when this date turns my life upside down?

Honing my marathoning

Last night I didn't get a wink of sleep, in spite of my being very tired. I was too nervous because of the final deadline which will decide about my remaining a student or remaining without a degree for the rest of my life.
I am not paralyzed so much by the fact that there are seven essays waiting to be written in one week time, but that there is one more, longer essay, on the topic I do not understand at all. When I got similarly stuck with mathematics at the high school, there was always somebody whom I could ask for help and explanation. But in this Gordic knot case, there is no one.
I can hardly ask the underpaid, over-busy teacher, who already did his best to explain the problems in his lectures (which I attended, but still did not catch it), and when I tried to ask two different girls from our department (consisting of approximately 12 students, most of whom are abroad at the moment), they just did not get what I do not get. So it put me into even deeper depression, as I now painfully realize that I have aimed too high when I applied for this school, as the intelligence and creativity (and perhaps intuition) needed for finishing this particular course is set far higher than mine can ever get to. And still the thought that I got to this point, that I got through nine semesters of studies (as I was kindly reminded today), only to be expelled because of one area of problems my brain can't simply deal with, is unbearable. Of course, I might get to cutting the Gordic knot in halves, given enough time for research and self-study, but there is no such time.
In my self-pitying times I used to blame the "series of unfortunate events" for this great delay, making up a metaphor of car racing for a long distance and being permanently put a spoke in my wheel (whether it was in the form of sore eye, immovable wrist, various kinds of diseases, moving from room to room due to reconstruction of our digs, living in permanent noise and stress, two broken computers, several blackouts, and so on). And I was trying to focus on those of my friends of whom I knew that they wouldn't give up racing even if their car was crashed really badly. I think it was then when I realized that my pride (which I had mistaken for my desire to fight honestly) is my biggest enemy and that I can push my car over the target line only with some support from my friends (whether it was giving advice, lending me a laptop or helping me survive when I was ill).

Now that the self-pitying stage of my life is definitely over, I feel full responsibility for the point I got myself to and I decided to rely on my own feet rather than wheels. The preciseness of this metaphor stroke me today in a bittersweet epiphany:

It is no crime to participate in the Marathon run even if you are not trained at all, but in such case you have to accept the thought that you most probably wont make it to the target line (alive) for the first time you try. I have many former classmates, who stood at the starting line with me and gave up (or were recommended to give up) after two, three kilometres of running. I glanced back nervously as I felt that it was not right for me to run further when such sportsmen were disqualified, but I did not listen to my inner voice and continued running despite being exhausted. And while I kept struggling for air, some of my former classmates got some rest and tried again. This time they mostly managed to get to the tenth, fifteenth, twentieth kilometer and although most of them were unable to finish the race repeatedly, they at least got the feeling of improvement - or they just made sure that this race was not their cup of tea and tried to (and did) succeed elsewhere. Meanwhile, I was crying with pain, stuck between the twentieth and thirtieth kilometre and feeling like dying every second. I envied those friends who were clever enough to give up and move on with their lives; I envied those, who had the courage and strong will to start over and over again and improve continuously. Some of them felt ashamed of their repeated attempts, but I don't see why -
-for what is worse? To reach the target on a fifth attempt (but still reach it and be able to enjoy the victory) or to break down just a few metres before the target line or die by exhaustion right after crossing it with the thought "at least I did not waste time by repeating"?
There is no point in asking the referees: "Why did you let me get so far if you won't allow me to finish?" It's only myself I can blame for all this wrong estimate and overstress.

Well, at least of two things I am pretty sure :

1) If I faint before reaching the line, there is no way for me to be able to undergo this race all over again.

2) I will do whatever it takes NOT to faint and finish the race - except cheating, or using drugs.

Becoming a vampire

I don't know. Maybe I am still feverish, maybe I just have read too much of "that stuff". But I have definitely not been eating too much lately, which makes me feeble and capable of dozing off in full daylight, not being able to fall asleep at night on the contrary. One day I felt angry with my neighbours just because they cooked something very aromatic and used a lot of garlic for it and the smell made me sick.

And, to cup it all, last night as I walked past the mirror, I got frightened by the ghostly shadow I saw where the reflection of a girl should have been. Of course, it was dark, and my skin stays very pale even in the summer, but this was an extreme. Very thin and very pale figure with dark circles under her eyes was staring at me disapprovingly and stroking her long hair which seemed quite white as well. "This is not me", thought I, shook my head and grinned, just to check if the ghost would do the same. It did, which made the "vampire look" only worse. I have always had sort of pointy ears, which made my friends make such comments as "You look like a devil" or "You look like an elf", depending on the situation, and I definitely have a pair of pointy teeth, not sure that in the right place for a vampire, but just yesterday, it made the effect. I studied the reflection a bit closer and realized that the most vampire-like thing about it was the bright red colour of my lips, shining in a supernatural contrast to the transparent skin. I might have bitten them too much because of the fear that I would be expelled (but no need to worry, I will have the whole eternity for repeating the university, if I am a vampire now), or it might have been the raspberry flavour I was adding into water with medicine to make it taste better, who knows.

The fact is that I have decided that -cough or no cough- I have to get myself among other people as soon as possible. I would much rather realize that I behave like a bloodthirsty monster in their presence than that I have gone completely mad because of the loneliness and separation.