How I Painted You

Illustration by Sophie Blackall
@http://www.brainpickings.org/ 

On my inner walls, I painted you. I put my palms around your frail cheeks and I painted you. When sad eyes looked down, I rewrote the script and planted a smile instead. When your weary eyes bowed in disbelief, I planted faith and a drop of my smile. When your face twitched in fear, I sowed the seeds of courage and hoped that something inside would water them and help them grow. When you looked sideways longing for a forgotten yesterday I was there to remind that there’s still today left. A twitching eye, a fugitive look, a fidgeting body helped to build space. And then, words started flowing between us; in their conventional flow, your eyes would look down  as if building a protective film around the windows of your soul. It’s alright. I knew it all the way. And when words had no meaning their secret tempo spoke instead. The trembling voice, the nervous “aaaahs”, and the awkward lines filled a gap that reason never could, otherwise. In the midst of a nonsensical conversation, the mystery of the self would surge from the depths of the being. In its genuine nature, that surging self spoke uncensored truths that words could never reveal without leaving on the residue of purposefulness. There, in that humbling awkwardness, truth decided to nestle. Yes, in that poor attempt to put together a couple humble words, some sort of mystery was being transmitted. They were born under the sweat of temples and the calling of the heart, whose impulse is to infuse order through word in that whirly medley it oddly produces. While the mind is churning those unspoken signals, some sort of fellowship between the heart and the mind occurs that blesses the being with an inner harmony. Or maybe it’s the sense of accomplishment the creator feels upon building a new world. In the silent toil that makes that new world alive, raw beauty blossoms.     

“Dude”- The Curious Case of a Fairytale of Words

So, after having a conversation with one of my classmates on fairy tales, I discovered we are both enthusiasts of the mentioned genre. We both agreed on the intrinsic value fairy tales carry with them and that’s practically how this blog post was born. It occurred to me that “fairy tale” is a pretty flexible category and under the “right” molding, it can be used to suit the purpose of the writer/speaker. Thus, I think each word is a fairy tale in itself, and I've probably written a couple encrypted fairy tales up to now. Some call it etymology, cultural background, etc. or other technicalities, but to me each word is a fairy tale. Why? Well, just as simple as that. Because I like words and I believe in their whimsicality. I like to mold them, bend them, make them cry, make them shout out loud, or just make them be. Because each word renders a universe, a frozen instant of thought and it carries an invisible story that gets to be uttered in one breath. That’s all it takes to let it out.

But does anyone ever think of the birth of that word, of how people carved it moment by moment? It’s as if words are witnesses to all the cultural and historical movements. Most of all, words are witnesses of people, of personalities. They can be anything you want. They mimic the human universe to the point of merging with it. And maybe in the making of an universe, we think of words as our own property, a good granted through birth whose importance is less diminished unless it honors ours. But to grant them the importance of their existence is to honor our existence as humans. The conscience of a word is the conscience of a thinker. And what better opportunity to treat words right as being in another country? My love for English kept my enthusiasm alive and maybe where some saw the ordinary, my world painted itself in the whimsicality of the meaning. “Every day a new word” was a pledge I found it hard to keep but it was the one rule animating my fairy tale of words. Those fickle words that eluded me so often, that fooled me with their make-believe attire.

Because sometimes they did. I've grown to know how shifting the sands can be in the informal language. An assumed mask tells the opposite fairy tale or marries two fairy tales of meaning, subject to human creativity. “Dude” spelled out for me the tale of the young male, coming out of the mouth of youngsters. It just exuded pure masculinity to me, assigned in slang-ish contexts. I was extremely puzzled to find out it might as well be applied to the feminine representative of the human species. The fact in itself had a mind-boggling effect on me, but in the process of rationalizing the findings, the view seemed less incongruous. I mean, there wasn't anything that exclusively masculine in the poor word. An amazing return to the “wordy” senses! To make matters worse, a fraction of the same underground issuing power decided that there should be a proper feminine version to the unisex “dude”, namely “dudette”. Now, this does sound like a vindication of words’ rights – a masculine word should naturally have its feminine counterpart. In the process of the word creation, retort to French word formation is naturally inevitable. I guess it just adds some of the romantic mystery of less spoken language in the Anglo-Saxon scenario, or is there another reason that eludes me?

The curios case of “dude” is nothing but a mere example of word mobility in a language displaying severe symptoms of offhanded, but welcome creativity. Word on, dear friends! 

Naah, That’s Not Art!

The Butterfly Effect

You pretty much can’t call art what I do with words. But it’s what I do for now. My words are all I’ve got and arranging them in comprehensible patterns is the job at the time being. My art is my attempt and if you feel differently you probably do because you have the double right to feel that way: well, weren’t we born with the innate right to feel differently and secondly, I grant you the right to dislike all I write because there isn’t much greatness to it. But in the seemingly meaningless meanders of my keyboard, many thoughts churn inside my head whether I like it or not. I guess I chose to do it, but I’m still praying to God to give me the wisdom to know the difference. I’m not sure if that sounds sarcastic or not, but it sure wasn’t intended so. I haven’t come to terms with myself whether I should stop the ramblings or get up and fight the demon with a new shield, encrusted with better, stronger words that coalesce to better form a mirror of the world, and of my world. It’s about acquiring an exquisite technology of the word. The struggle is tough and in the making of a phrase many voices soar and roar and preach: ”You better stop doing this. Naah, this isn’t art!” 

And they might very well be right, I know I walk on a thin layer of ice and who knows what lies beneath in the murky depths of universal reactions. You can hate it if you want to, I promise I won’t take it to the heart. I might stop or I might rise again to the surface; a humbled Venus of the lake, risen from the scum of shame. I wonder if Venus was literate at all and if writing had any draw for her? It would have been pretty awesome, though. In the meanwhile, I’ll pretend she’s my avatar and that in the making of my flash-stories, she’s able to write and if the result isn’t that great, well, I found my scapegoat.

An Abridged Tale of Memories

Photo retrieved @
 http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/the-persistence-of-memory

Projected memories have this smooth silky coating that allows them to float around carried away by the wings of a vivid imagination. It’s time to look back on the past and sort through what it truly held and what projected in the previous “past”, as if we are awarded several “pasts”, that we are free to chunk up according to our will. Or wits. But it’s true, we have that ability but we probably ignore it for most instances. I don’t know if I should dare look back on my high school years and try to recall those instances when I indulged myself in the sweet memory of a rosy future, or of a different future.

I might not have had the world my feet, but in my Cinderella clothes I dreamed. I dreamed of other days and somehow that projection carried me away in a depersonalized me, a me that had little to do with the past or present, cause in dreams you simply have the ability to do so. I know such a projection has little value, but in my emotional geography stakes are high. There was an instant of my being that was dedicated to that faraway future and discarding it would mean discarding a part of myself. What kind of future, and what lie ahead of it, is of little importance to the reader, for the treasures of my soul are treasures to myself solely. My riches are your rags.

But from afar lurks the sense that this recollection of memories is a brush up of those forgotten corners of the heart, in which the protruding light of consciousness failed to shine on. But it feels good to dust off those old fragments of thought, like frozen tokens of time, shaded by the passage of time. Just because sometimes you have to give little things a grand time. We've only been assigned a one-chamber life and inside those four walls, time piles memories high, sometimes orderly, other times in a beautiful chaos. And in the sweat of my temples, I seek the forgotten ones; I sift through them hoping to reconstruct a puzzle that has neither a beginning nor an end.  

The Eye of a Stranger

At first it was curiosity and chance. Not the fulfillment of a dream, but the lazy stream of chance. And it was that chance that prepared the ground to turn it into a clean slate. It took a significant amount of liberalism and mindless youthfulness to have that taste for the new. But the novelty of the scenery bore the mark of strangeness and distance and maybe for the first time geographical distances had little to do with that feeling of separation. Not for the first time, that lyrical nature is thrown in the midst of a whirl of functionality, a victory of the working hands over the thinking mind. A time of profound challenge and the subsequent sense that in the midst of that loneliness of the self a self-sufficient hero had to emerge. That hero would wear silent clothes, would dress its braveness in meek words but a steady pace would always go along with it. And then there were mountains to be climbed and demons to be fought. But there's more than meets the eye, and the eye had to confront itself with matters whose inner nature shared few similarities with the obvious, the tangible.

In every move, in every passing street, the eye made a statement of its awkward presence. There were piercing looks, inquiring looks, lashing looks or even friendly looks, all bending under the weight of those silent whys. They'd sometimes abandon their heavy silence and then the eye would bow to confession, a non-cathartic confession for it all repeated itself to unfruitful ends. And even if it didn't repeat itself, that confession wouldn't necessarily equalize the inner world whose core was drenched in a sea of doubt. Like a faithful companion, solitude stopped by, in the close vicinity of the secluding doubt. There was solitude to keep him company and the shouting waves of the ocean, screaming sky-high. And in that tower of solitude, the eye looked upon the world. Myriads of judgments could be cast, but the eye knew, it'd be to no avail and unfair as well. Other eyes would look upon him with love, that wall-shattering inquiry, and many other eyes too, that would one day break the shells they lived into. But the eye had so much more to do other than breaking his own shell; others had their own shells as well. And in front of that revealing vulnerability, voices waver, looks go down in diffidence. But words, words flew, back and forth and where looks couldn't speak, words did. And their power humbled the heart and awakened it from it numbed indifference. And in the midst of shells and other outer coverings, the eye saw the veil drop and truth and fabricated genuineness coming apart. Blessed by a jarring silence.

Rupt din vis

Iată-ne amândoi ajunşi la un stop
C-am început să scriu e pur noroc
Iar când alb si negru din nou se unesc
Voi ştii să te găsesc acolo, în livresc

'Teachers! Leave them kids alone!'

The The War on Kids is a 2009 documentary taking a radical stand against education policies. After watching it, school spells out prison and control in my opinion. The first part of the documentary depicts the virulent “zero tolerance” policy for drugs and weapons which is basically divided in two sections in the documentary: one dedicated to weapons and one that obviously deals with usage of drugs in public schools. Driven by an almost irrational need to provide security, school authorities increase school clearance and cameras are monitoring every aspect of the student life, from classroom, hallway, recess areas, all in the name of increasing security for the student and the parents. But what it actually did and continues to do is to ruin any sense of normality to students who are slowly given the convict treatment. 

Photo retrieved @ theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com

After comparing the security policy in a couple of high school with the one offered in a prison, the differences were slim; which makes one wonder to what extent is a school any different from a prison and if this unhealthy environment prepares the next generation to function normally in a democratic society? And what kind of understanding of democracy will this generation have after experiencing a genuinely oppressive environment?  Children are practically devoid of real legal rights; given how school conflicts are delt with: the principal questions the trespassing student and takes notes on his testimony, the student thinking that the situation will be taken care of at a school level. The next step is the student’s testimony being handed over to the police, who in their turn hand it over to court of law and then a warrant is issued.

Take the “no weapon tolerance” policy, for instance: a nail file suddenly becomes an assault weapon and children are being prosecuted and charged with a felony record before they are even aware of what that legal situation entails. Then there’s the “no drug tolerance” policy that adds to the equation. Technically, it all makes sense, and keeping a drug-free school environment is a reasonable ideal; but not the measures that are taken in this sense.  The extreme security measures that schools choose to take away the individual freedom and the opportunity for a healthy mental development. A lot of schools choose to assume that there is drug activity and students are randomly checked through violent police raids. Teachers and school counselors support this anti-drug policy which is beneficial at its core. But on the flipside, the same staff makes sure that young children who challenge the authority of a teacher in the most minor ways ends up with a psychiatric diagnosis that eventually results in a medicated treatment. Is ADHD a real disorder or is it just a concept coined to benefit both the pharmaceutical companies and teachers and parents unwilling to educate children whose behavior is seemingly “unruly”? Can medicating them really make a significant change in their behavior? The documentary reports that 90% of the Adderall usage in the world is taken by the US, which makes one wonder indeed. The DSM IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) mentions ADHD symptoms among which: the inability of a child to focus constantly, sit still, stay in his chair, play with other objects during class, etc. all pretty much normal drives a regular child has. So what does medication do? It floods the brain with dopamine, the neurotransmitter of pleasure, calming down the brown activity; and in doing so, the personality of the child vanishes away, neither happiness nor sadness is expressed – it literally transforms the child into a zombie. 

On the long run effects worsen and studies showed that children that were administered medication for their childhood disorders ended up having underdeveloped brains, hormonal dysfunctions and once medication stopped suicidal attempts or even murder attempts were recorded. Ironically, it all happened in the same environment that promoted “zero tolerance to drugs”. Hopefully the extreme state of things will call for more fortunate choices somewhere in the future when there will be enough people empowered to say “no” to abnormal unhealthy education environments.