I stood there letting my breath out

No bird or human registered the mist of my mouth

To say

Unclear is this to me.

Clearly, couldn’t you see

There are

No more

Words belonging only to me

I wrote the above after “meeting” for the first time a short, intimate poem entitled Songs by Langston Hughes. I wrote it out of not knowing how to begin, how to introduce this special collection of mine, a hundred and eight poems, that is about to be officially out.

Needless to say, how absolute delight it would be if you had a wish to read it, in which case I post the links below.

Available at Waterstones

Available at Amazon

Grand Central Station. Lieutenant John Blandford waits anxiously:

“Six minutes to six, said the clock… His heart was pounding with a beat that choked him.”

He is about to meet a woman who has become deeply important to him—yet one he has never seen. For 18 months, their relationship has existed entirely through letters.

“The woman he had never seen yet whose words had sustained him unfailingly.”

Their connection began with a book—Of Human Bondage—which Blandford found in a military library. What struck him were handwritten notes in the margins:

“He had never believed that a woman could see into a man’s heart so tenderly, so understandingly.”

After that “meeting of minds”, he reaches out to her—Hollis Meynell—and they begin writing. Even when his letters fail to arrive, she continues:

“When his letters did not arrive, she wrote anyway…”

One of the most significant elements of the story is Hollis’s refusal to send a photograph. “If your feeling for me had no reality, what I look like won’t matter (…) Suppose I am beautiful… I’d always be haunted that you had been taking a chance on just that. Suppose that I’m plain… then I’d always fear that you were going on writing because you were lonely…

In one of the most powerful moments, Blandford recalls a battle scene. Surrounded by danger, he remembers her words:

“Of course you fear… all brave men do.”

“He had remembered; he had heard her imagined voice, and it had renewed his strength and skill.”

Back in the station, the tension builds. Blandford watches every woman carefully, searching for the agreed signal: a red rose.

Then, suddenly, a young woman appears:

“Her figure was long and slim… she was like springtime come alive.”

She seems to embody everything one might expect from romantic fantasy. For a moment, Blandford is drawn toward her:

“Uncontrollably, he made one step closer to her.”

But then he sees the truth.

Behind her stands another woman—older, plainly dressed, “well past 40,” wearing the red rose.

“She was more than plump… her thick-ankled feet… her crumpled coat.”

This is the true “appointment with love”, a confrontation with values. Blandford experiences a sharp internal division:

“He felt as though he were being split in two…”

On one side: physical attraction, youth, beauty.
On the other hand: loyalty, gratitude, emotional truth.

And he chooses.

“Lieutenant Blandford did not hesitate.”

He approaches the older woman, offering respect and kindness:

“This would not be love, but it would be something precious… a friendship… rarer than love.”

Then comes the final revelation:

“That young lady in the green suit… begged me to wear this rose… She said it was some kind of a test.”

Hollis Meynell, the beautiful young woman, had staged the encounter.

She wanted to know if he would choose the person he believed her to be.

The voice behind the face comes from “Appointment with Love” by Sulamith Ish-Kishor, which I read after D. Whyte’s wise and timeless article “Unrequited”, where he writes that unrequited love is the love human beings experience most of the time, and as suggested, they are not satisfied with it. “Men and women have always had difficulty with the way a love returned hardly ever resembles a love given. The great discipline seems to be to give up wanting to control the manner in which we are requited, and to forgo the natural disappointment that flows from expecting an exact and measured reciprocation (…) the difficulty and the revelation and the gift (is then) to see love as the ultimate in giving and letting go – and through the doorway of that affection make the most difficult sacrifice of all, giving away the very thing we want to hold forever.”

Love is not wrong there. It is the belief of reciprocity, as imagined, expected. ‘Belief’, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” (as “happily; as gladly”) or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes.

In this viewing, we don’t need to believe in Love; we must have, or rather put faith in it, the truth about it, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of Love.

Most people believe in love to feel secure, in order to make their individual lives seem valuable and meaningful. Belief has thus become an attempt to hang on to love, to grasp and keep it for one’s own.

But again, you cannot understand love, and most importantly, experience, live and feel it as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket, the water does not run. To “have” running water, you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of Love.

The present phase of human thought and the history of Love is especially ripe for this “letting go.”

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Sight and Disappointment

If the surest way to preserve something
Is to erase it,
Then let me begin with sight—
That fragile theorem we trust.

So you looked,
The way a child believes in mirrors:
That’s what returns is truth polished into glass.

Disappointment, then, is a cork,

necessarily removed from a bathtub

Of pleasant yet finite things.

Sight limits an infinite series
Where we must be adding term after term,
Absence of the sum that settles.

Presence of expansion.

So if the only way to preserve
Is to erase—

Let me be the sudden undoing of containment,

Let the water shower us—
Falling, always falling,
Yet never lost

Only freed
Into a form
Our sight
Cannot imprison.

knowing that you can always return to my scribbles

and say something about them—about me.

But careful—

not like today,

So clever.

“Rarely do we feel happiness when it is ours. Only after it has passed do we look back and understand—sometimes with astonishment—how happy we really were.”

—Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

More is in me poetry than prose these days. I disagree with prose more often, though with poetry sometimes too, but you know that poetry disarms us more. I think someone had already said that poetry is something we do not have defences against.

But with you, with your texts…

This is also something I find very pleasant and endearing in women—that they are never interested in apparent problems.

Artists have always been successful with women. The notions of honour, consistency, and logic are often foreign to them. They are intuitive, “unpredictable”—in a word, “effeminate.” The term “effeminate” is, in fact, a compliment. It means that a given person washes frequently, does not like killing people, is capable of compassion, and does not enjoy shouting or pushing forward just to prove their importance.

Women understand the value of human life—not only because they give birth, but also because they raise children and know what torment, responsibility, and effort that entails.

Men’s resentments toward women stem from wounded pride. From this comes contempt and disregard, as a kind of artificial compensation.

It is entirely natural that women do not need to search for translation, catalysts, or substitutes—just as great mystics do not. Women, like mystics, have a direct contact with reality through love.

I do not like masculinity in the majority around us, not like an anthill-type creature like the Chinese, though that kind of collectiveness is, in some sense, also a way out. Unfortunately, many men we know often remind me of the behaviour of certain animals I observed many times as a child, in my grandfather’s yard.

And how you sign yourself at the end of the letters, like here:

he wrote,

happy that he could tap on the keys,

M.

despairing,

pointlessly satisfied in despair,

not entirely defined,

longing for something or someone,

yet at the same time expecting nothing,

a dream

like nothing…

like you,

the absence of you, who knows more than you suspect,

the absence of you, who knows less than you expect,

the absence of you, who understands the unobvious,

the absence of you in being this way and not another,

“whatever you wish”—
your words wrote everything above.

And now, that I left your apartment when you showed me your viola, you received from your grandfather, the only thing I can say is a short quote and a poem:

“The union we experienced in the square was so deep that ordinary conversation now seems… well, simply ordinary.”

—Late Lovers by William Wharton

Funny

by Anna Kamieńska

(Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Claire Cavanagh)

What’s it like to be a human

the bird asked

I myself don’t know

it’s being held prisoner by your skin

while reaching infinity

being a captive of your scrap of time

while touching eternity

being hopelessly uncertain

and helplessly hopeful

being a needle of frost

and a handful of heat

breathing in the air

and choking wordlessly

it’s being on fire

with a nest made of ashes

eating bread

while filling up on hunger

it’s dying without love

it’s loving through death

That’s funny said the bird

and flew effortlessly up into the air

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Recently, I’ve been reading a chapter on the symbolism of the eye in Jungian psychology from The Self: Quest of Meaning in a Changing World by Renate Daniel, the president of the Jungian Institute. In this text, she returns to one of the oldest symbols in Jungian psychology: the eye — the symbol of the Self, which sees everything.

In many traditions, the image of the “eye of God” appears. Nothing remains hidden before it: neither good nor guilt, nor human error. Today, this image seems to have shifted its place. The all-seeing eye appears less often in religion and more often in technology — in surveillance systems, in data, in algorithms that are moving towards knowing about the humans more than we are willing to admit.

Being seen carries a certain tension between the desire to be known and the instinct to remain ungraspable. Visibility invites simplification, naming, and definition. We need the gaze of another person. We want to be noticed and recognised. And yet, a gaze can also overwhelm us — as if someone were looking into a place we want to protect.

In this context, Renate refers to the Brothers Grimm fairy tale The Sea Hare.

Its heroine is a king’s daughter who, from the twelve windows of her castle, can see everything that happens in the kingdom. Nothing can be hidden from her. Her gaze is absolute. Thanks to it, she maintains power and complete independence. But the price is high.

No man can hide from her, so every man who tries to marry her is found and killed. Omniscience protects her from relationships. The tale reveals something deeply contemporary: where control is absolute, there is no room for encounter.

Only the youngest of the brothers finds a way to hide from her gaze — not through strength or cleverness, but with the help of animals: a raven, a fish, and a fox.

The raven (first attempt — hidden in an egg)

He fetched an egg out of his nest, cut it into two parts, and shut the youth inside it, then made it whole again, and seated himself on it. When the king’s daughter went to the first window she could not discover him, nor could she from the others, and she began to be uneasy, but from the eleventh she saw him. She ordered the raven to be shot, and the egg to be brought and broken, and the youth was forced to come out. She said, for once you are excused, but if you do not better than this, you are lost.

This is one of the most striking images: concealment as return to origin, almost like being placed back into potential rather than visibility.

The fish (second attempt — hidden in the depths)

Next day he went to the lake, called the fish to him and said, I suffered you to live, now tell me where to hide myself so that the king’s daughter may not see me. The fish thought for a while, and at last cried, I have it, I will shut you up in my stomach. He swallowed him, and went down to the bottom of the lake. The king’s daughter looked through her windows, and even from the eleventh did not see him, and was alarmed, but at length from the twelfth she saw him. She ordered the fish to be caught and killed, and then the youth appeared. It is easy to imagine the state of mind he was in. She said, twice you are forgiven, but be sure that your head will be set on the hundredth post.

Here, hiding becomes descent — not just invisibility, but withdrawal into something deeper than sight itself.

The fox (final attempt — transformation)

On the last day, he went with a heavy heart into the country, and met the fox. You know how to find all kinds of hiding-places, said he, I let you live, now advise me where I shall hide myself so that the king’s daughter shall not discover me. That’s a hard task, answered the fox, looking very thoughtful. At length he cried, I have it, and went with him to a spring, dipped himself in it, and came out as a stall-keeper in the market, and dealer in animals. The youth had to dip himself in the water also, and was changed into a small sea-hare. The merchant went into the town, and showed the pretty little animal, and many persons gathered together to see it. At length the king’s daughter came likewise, and as she liked it very much, she bought it, and gave the merchant a good deal of money for it. Before he gave it over to her, he said to it, when the king’s daughter goes to the window, creep quickly under the braids of her hair. And now the time arrived when she was to search for him. She went to one window after another in turn, from the first to the eleventh, and did not see him. When she did not see him from the twelfth either, she was full of anxiety and anger, and shut it down with such violence that the glass in every window shivered into a thousand pieces, and the whole castle shook. She went back and felt the sea-hare beneath the braids of her hair. Then she seized it, and threw it on the ground exclaiming, away with you, get out of my sight. It ran to the merchant, and both of them hurried to the spring, wherein they plunged, and received back their true forms. The youth thanked the fox, and said, the raven and the fish are idiots compared with you, you know the right tune to play, there is no denying that.

The princess, who sees everything, cannot love — not because love is absent, but because nothing is allowed to remain hidden. When, at last, she cannot find him — even from the final window — her world collapses. For the first time, she encounters the limits of her own vision.

The youth went straight to the palace. The princess was already expecting him, and abandoned herself to her fate. The wedding was solemnized, and now he was king, and lord of all the kingdom. He never told her where he had concealed himself for the third time, and who had helped him, so she believed that he had done everything by his own skill, and she had a great respect for him, for she thought to herself, he is able to do more than I.

Our desire to know and to see more and more

Renate sees something profoundly modern in this fairy tale: our desire to know and to see more and more. And yet, the princess who sees everything remains alone. Her gaze, sharpened into control, leaves no room for uncertainty, no space where another person might exist beyond her knowledge. To see everything is, in a way, to defend oneself against the risk of not knowing — and therefore against the vulnerability that love requires. The all-seeing eye becomes an interior wall. “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” wrote Rumi. And so the limit she encounters is not only the limit of vision, but the beginning of something more difficult: the slow recognition that love does not emerge from perfect clarity, but from what we allow to remain unseen, unmastered, and open. As Rilke writes in his Letters to a Young Poet (Letter IV):

“Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect, border, and salute each other.”

What remains unseen is not an obstacle to love, but its very condition.

This is similar to Emmanuel Levinas’s ideas in Totality and Infinity — his foundational philosophical text arguing that the Other always exceeds our comprehension and cannot be fully known or reduced to our categories.

“The face speaks. It is not what it says that is first. The face itself is a command, a saying of Thou which calls me to responsibility… ” (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, tr. Alphonso Lingis, 1969)

What Levinas suggests here is subtle but radical: before we interpret the other person — before we assign them meaning, identity, or narrative — they already confront us with an ethical demand. The face is not an object to be understood but a presence that interrupts our tendency to grasp, define, and contain. It resists being turned into knowledge. In this sense, the face is not something we “see” in the ordinary way at all. It is precisely what undoes the safety of seeing.

To truly encounter another, then, is not to know them fully, but to recognise that we cannot. Their interiority remains irreducible, their life always beyond the reach of our categories. And yet, rather than distance us, this impossibility creates responsibility. We are called not to mastery, but to care, to remain open. This deepens the tension of being seen. If the other cannot be fully known, then being seen is never complete — it is always partial, always inadequate, which makes an ethical relation possible at all. For if we could fully comprehend the other, we might also feel entitled to contain them. Instead, Levinas leaves us in a state of necessary humility: we stand before one another not as finished truths, but as infinities we are responsible for, yet can never fully grasp.

Window. Curtains, a blooming greengage tree. An open window with a view of the garden, a curtain pushed aside, an armchair. There whiteness and green play together. Spring enters with its scent and its gust of air. It is of this spring that I would like to dream in my grave. One can feel that someone was here, left, the curtain slowly parts. That little tree, immaculately white, like a bride for her wedding. Evening looms; May beetles are flying. One must emerge from such a tonality. Papers have various tonalities.

The first spring burst into the room. Light spraying. A mood as if under a mute. Not black in colour, only dark; shapes indistinct. I will give it a silver frame. I am afraid of a golden frame. A flat frame like those used for engravings—it will be like an enlarged coloured print. Spring. May beetles are flying, frogs begin to play. To paint a picture is difficult—devilishly difficult. My little painting in which the conception resides.

Two different tones, from which to emerge toward Spring. I created spring for myself. In the dusk the curtain has no shadows. A good windowsill with a book. May beetles outside the window, a symphony of frogs. Spring. Genesis. I glued a small sketch of flowering trees into the space of the window; I added two sides so that it cannot be detected. When I sprayed it, I lost the tone. I drilled into it and ruined it; it had to be removed from the cardboard. It consisted of three parts. Such a little tree that if someone sneezes, it would scatter. The little tree farther away, and the background strong. The little tree forms itself at once.

Spring. Extraordinary patience. The same subject approached four times with effort. When we compare it with the previous ones, something slightly more is gained. Previously I ruined the sky. (…) The picture is not taken directly from nature; the motifs are close, but not from the window—the painting is composed. Spring through a window that has been pasted in. The first one sawed apart, the second dried: a soft armchair, a coloured rug half worn away, a reddish colour in the dresser, darker panelling from the window, a pink curtain. A modest grey little painting.

Spring. The interior spoiled by a blot above the little tree. I wanted to over-refine it; I should have left the freshness. I stitched it together awkwardly and thus ruined it. One must add sky with clouds.

Symbolic golden Spring does not imitate nature; the flowers, the greengage tree—from memory.

What art is made of? There are many theories; one insists that art imitates life. What are dreams made of? The reality and the supernatural?

All those matters occupy me.

As you have read the beginning, along with some notes on the artistic process of this particular painting by Leon Wyszczolkowski, one of many representatives of European symbolism, what were you thinking? Were you monitoring your thinking? Trying to decide if to carry on or abandon? Or maybe thinking of your own work, or the artistic process you follow? You could be also considering documenting your process. After all, we live in an era when we might soon be asked to prove that what we created is our original work and not a product of a well-trained artificial intelligence. As I was reading an interview with Huraki Mukarami (he hasn’t done many) in which he shed light on writing his own fiction, arguing that his prose is his dreams written, he reminded his listeners that when we dream, we do not separate what’s real from what’s not.

What mothers are made of? The bodies that delivered their children? It turns out that during pregnancy, fetal cells cross the placenta into the mother’s body, a phenomenon known as fetal microchimerism. In effect, we are left with parts of our baby in our body: in blood, bone marrow, and the heart, liver, and even brain for decades, even a lifetime.

And now what is our “wast incredible, extraordinary family of humanity”* made of? This beautiful and vast question leaves no one behind, no one out of the circle.

Evidently not only of bodies, but of invisible crossings.

The illusion many still maintain is that we are self-contained. But the evidence—biological, philosophical, even poetic—suggests otherwise. We are porous, yet fluid beings. Memories enter us. Languages inhabit us. The dreams and visions of others become our own imagination.

Perhaps this is why thinkers, writers, and scientists are compelled to appeal to a nearly lost sense of wholeness. One of them, David Bohm, the theoretical physicist most known for his theory of the implicate and explicate order, believed that fragmentation is one of the great illusions of modern civilisation. Our societies, organisations, and even our sense of self are divided into pieces; yet beneath this fragmentation lies a deeper order in which everything participates in everything else. In his later life, he developed a philosophy of dialogue which grew out of his observation that fragmentation is one of the reasons for the many crises we face as a global society. We have lost sight of the whole and that all living things are interconnected, interdependent and interrelated. This is why Bohm recognised that what we so desperately need is new thinking, and that we struggle to arrive at this new thinking because we do not create the time and space to come together and meet in a meaningful way or create the conditions in which we can allow new thinking, and thus change, to occur.

He, a friend of the Dalai Lama, was a change-maker who, among others, got closer to the intuitions of our ancestors, especially those living in the Far East. The teachings of Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism reveal truths that correspond to the descriptions of quantum physics.

From Buddha to Bohr

Contemporary physics outlines a picture of reality in which all components of matter and physical phenomena depend on one another and are interconnected in various ways. Looking at the structure of the atom, we notice that it is composed, among other things, of electrons that move in spaces around the nucleus.

What an electron is constitutes a true challenge for our minds because it has two — seemingly — contradictory natures: it is a wave and a piece of matter.

In fact, even these concepts do not fully capture its essence, especially since its “behaviour” depends primarily on the situation. In other words, an electron does not exhibit any properties that would be independent of its environment. It is therefore not a “thing” in our usual understanding of that word. Rather, it enters into relations with other particles, weaving with them a complex network of dependencies, ultimately creating the entire material reality.

Niels Bohr (1885–1962), a Danish physicist and Nobel laureate, expressed this in his book Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature in the following words:

“Isolated material particles are abstractions, and their properties can be defined and observed only through their interactions with other systems.”

Werner Heisenberg, a German theoretical physicist and philosopher of science, speaks in a similar tone:

“The world thus appears to us as a complicated tissue of events, in which various connections alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.”

This relational model is at the same time one of the basic assumptions of Buddhist doctrine: the nature of reality is the interdependence of all phenomena and elements. Nothing can exist independently of everything else. This principle in Buddhism is defined by the term śūnyatā. It is most often translated as “emptiness,” which is rather unfortunate, because our understanding of emptiness is based on the lack of something. Here, however, it is not about lack, but rather about non-substantiality, which at the same time is absolute potentiality — the possibility of the emergence of anything, any phenomenon or form.

Looking at a chair, we say: “chair.” But it is not a chair. We only call it a chair. In the chair there is nothing of “chair-ness,” that is, an internal characteristic that would determine that it is a chair. Its nature is empty, which means that it is conditioned by everything else (that which is not the chair), while in turn conditioning the entire reality.

It is similar with our self, which we treat as a real and separate entity from the world. However, from a Buddhist perspective, this reality is a universal illusion, and our true nature is empty — that is, conditioned by everything that is seemingly not us: our ancestors, other people (even strangers), the elements, or non-human beings.

The illusion of separation

In everyday life, we perceive the world in terms of the separation of various objects from each other, and we cultivate our own sense of independence. Yet both modern physics and the wisdom of the Far East challenge this independence — it is a universal illusion.

Hindus call it māyā — the illusion that accompanies us every day when we are preoccupied with the matters of life. Māyā causes us to identify with our small self and look at the world as if it were composed of other isolated elements. In this way, we see ourselves and our surroundings detached from the common Source. A manifestation of this is, for example, identifying with the material body (ahaṃkāra), as well as attachment to possessed things (mameti). Meanwhile, the goal is to break the shackles of illusion and unite with Brahman — the impersonal absolute that is everything that exists. In the Bhagavad Gita we read how Krishna, who is a form of Brahman, speaks to Arjuna:

“Earth, water, fire, air, space, mind, reason, and the sense of individual self — thus is divided My eightfold nature. This is My lower nature. But know My higher nature too! It is the principle of life, O Hero! It sustains this world! Know that from both of these all creatures arise. I am the source of the entire world and its destruction […]. I am the taste of water, O son of Kunti, I am the brilliance of the moon and the sun, the sacred syllable in all the Vedas, the sound in space, the valour of warriors. And the pure fragrance of the earth, and the glow of fire, the life of every creature and the heat of the passionate.”

Nāgārjuna, the 2nd-century founder of the Buddhist philosophy of Madhyamaka (the Middle Way), also shared the view of the illusory nature of our daily perception. For the truth is that nothing has an independent existence. Realising unity is therefore liberation from illusion, an awakening from a nightmarish dream.

Modern physics emphasises that matter is only a manifestation of energy, which, as a quantum field, constitutes the basic physical whole, the constant medium present throughout all space. Particles (forms), on the other hand, are local condensations of the field, concentrations of energy that appear and disappear, thus losing their individual character.

In one of the most important Buddhist texts, the Heart Sutra, we read:

“Form is not different from emptiness, emptiness is not different from form; form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form.”

In the language of modern physics, this might sound as follows: matter (impermanent forms) does not differ from energy (the field that permeates, creates and connects everything).

It is not easy to understand, because according to our mind, the idea of interdependence and emptiness does not match everyday experience in which we divide reality into separate chunks, attributing to them inherent properties.

Quantum physics and the wisdom of the Far East pose many challenges to our discursive reasoning. Another one is the idea of the unity of opposites.

Opposites are the same

Modern physics indicates that everything has its other side. Fritjof Capra recalls the fact that each particle has an antiparticle with the same mass but opposite electric charge. And so the antiparticle of an electron is a positron; there also exist the antiproton, antineutron, and antineutrino. Even the photon has its antiparticle, although it itself lacks electric charge. The same applies to mesons.

We already know that all matter has a dual nature: it manifests as particles and waves. Their behaviour is difficult to predict — we can do so only by using the concept of probability. There is no certainty that an atomic particle exists in a specific place. Robert Oppenheimer — an American physicist, creator of the atomic bomb — described this paradox as follows:

“If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must answer ‘no’; if we ask whether the position of the electron changes with time, we must answer ‘no’; if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must answer ‘no’; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must answer ‘no’.” In the roughly 2,500-year-old Upanishads, we read: “It moves and it moves not. It is far, and it is near. It is inside everything, and it is outside everything.”

Is that not a striking coincidence?

We say: beautiful—ugly, good — evil, life — death. These individual categories are connected with human experience of various physical and emotional sensations. Hence our tendency to separate pairs of opposites and to eliminate the part of them that is responsible for suffering. We want life and do not want death; light is good, while darkness evokes anxiety. Here, we can notice how the isolated, frightened self tries to separate certain phenomena from others to feel better and protect itself from difficult experiences.

By realising unity, we make our perception and understanding of seemingly separate phenomena change. What was previously separate again becomes an inseparable whole.

Touching the paradox

This also has consequences for logic, for it turns out that truth includes its own negation. In this way we see how reality resists the possibility of being described, known, and understood by discursive language and a mind accustomed to divisions. Quantum physics reveals to us many such paradoxical truths: matter, which is a form of energy; the vacuum from which everything that exists arises; electrons which are neither particles nor waves; time which is relative… The wisdom of the Far East also contains many similar paradoxes that cannot be understood at the discursive level of the mind. The schools of Zen Buddhism have even made the formulation of such paradoxes into a kind of practice through which the student can experience the one reality and awaken. They are called koans and constitute a true challenge for our intellect.

An example of such a koan is the question: “What was your original face before your mother and father were born?” The “original face” here is a synonym for our true nature. Our self, with which we identify and which has its beginning in the story of our life, is something else. That life appeared through our parents. But who were we before their birth? What did our face look like then? Who are we really if we put aside our everyday identity? All these questions seem meaningless from a common-sense point of view. After all, our life began with birth. We could not have had any face before our parents were born. These contradictions dissolve, however, if we transcend thinking in terms of a separate self and refer to the idea of interdependence and the unity of everything.

Taoism is also full of such paradoxes. Laozi in the Tao Te Ching writes: “Pure whiteness is not without flaw; to possess great Power is not everything; established Power hides indolence; the strongest change their minds; the greatest square has no corners; the greatest vessel has no formed shape; the loudest sound is inaudible; the greatest Image is formless. Tao is hidden and without a name. Without leaving home, one may know the world. Without looking out the window, one may see the greatness of Tao. The further you go, the less you know. Therefore, sages do not travel, yet they know everything. They do not see, yet everything is clear to them. They do nothing, yet everything happens by itself.”

The discovery of the unity of opposites does not mean denying that two poles exist. It is about realising that both ultimately become one. As in the case of breathing, in which inhalation and exhalation are opposing processes, although breathing creates a coherent whole out of them.

Everything is in motion

The process of breathing, like every other, is inscribed in a cycle of transformations. This is another important characteristic of how reality functions, revealed to us by modern physics and once again confirmed in the wisdom of the Far East. Every day we encounter objects that seem hard, motionless and durable, such as rocks or stones. However, these are just appearances, because when we go inside such a “dead” object, we see that it vibrates with energy. Both atoms and the bonds between particles are in constant motion. This movement is associated, among other things, with thermal energy that flows between an object and its surroundings.

Cyclical transformations can be observed in everyday life and on an even larger — cosmic — scale. Motion, which is the fundamental principle of reality, is inscribed in two opposing yet interconnected processes: creation and destruction. In the spiritual traditions of the Far East, the dynamics of transformation and the impermanence of forms are also described as the essence of reality. And so in Taoism, tao means a process embracing everything. Its essence lies in transformations based on the balancing of the elements yin and yang, that is, feminine and masculine energy. Nothing is permanent and unchanging, except for tao itself, whose nature and origin are a great ineffable mystery.

A similar thought can be found in the Hindu metaphysics of Sāṃkhya, which is based on a dynamic balance between the aspects of spirit and matter. In Buddhism, the idea of the impermanence of everything is the foundation of the First Noble Truth, which says that suffering is universal. Everything passes away, which inevitably involves the experience of loss, and that brings suffering. Therefore, we long for permanence, but this only intensifies suffering because it opposes the fundamental rule of reality. Accepting impermanence — that is, giving up the desire to be someone unchanging and independent — leads to liberation from suffering and union with life. Thus, the discovery of one’s true nature and, at the same time, the nature of the universe leads to awakening from the illusion of separateness.

A similar picture of the world can be found in physics. Scientific research increasingly emphasises that the whole of reality should be viewed as a network of relations, which has a dynamic character. It is not a collection of separate, independent entities, but a system of connections forming an integrated whole. According to quantum theory, the material world is a complex and indivisible fabric of events. It also includes the observer and his consciousness. A mystic would say that it is as if the cosmos were looking at itself. In the Upanishads, there appears the famous sentence tat tvam asi, meaning “you are that.” In this way, the division between atman and Brahman, between the human being and God, between the creator and the creation, between the subject and the object, is ultimately transcended.

Today, in times of confusion and instability, we long for a deeper insight into the nature of the world and ourselves. We need new cultural narratives which, based on the discoveries of modern physics, refresh the spiritual insights of our distant ancestors. In these stories, the world is a whole, and everything that exists is an aspect of ourselves. We must recognise that we are all connected, and that every smallest step we take echoes throughout the whole of reality. By observing the world, we have the opportunity to discover who we ourselves are, because its nature is our nature. This is an important lesson on the road toward realising our own wholeness, in which — as a Buddhist saying goes — “a drop of water protects itself from drying out by merging with the ocean.”

I wish to end this eclectic article with a poem by Mary Oliver:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

In the family of things.

*P. Neruda

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The more I read current great storytellers, the more I realise how much all those whose “hearts are tighten with an undefined longing for something infinite, something connected with eternity”* share literary role models such as William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Marcdel Proust or A. A. Milne, how many of them still listen to classical music, such as the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven, how many are inspired by old folk stories.

Today, as I read a story by one of those great storytellers, a painting came to mind, following the story on which it is based, which I remember reading vividly.

There is no great deal of talk about that short novella nor of its fictional character, represented in the painting, but the painter, who gave rise to what became Poland’s school of Symbolism, is well known, indeed, especially after he went to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Henri Lehmann, and subsequently moved to the Académie Suisse.

The painting…

The painting depicts a very weak and sickly boy who does not come from the Boulevard du Palais; he comes from a poor cottage in a Polish village, as described by Henryk Sienkiewicz.

The women present at the birth believe that neither the mother nor the child will survive, so they baptise him before a priest can arrive. Contrary to expectations, however, the child survives and is given the name Jan, affectionately called Janko.

He is weak, often hungry, and poorly clothed. From an early age, he must help his mother by grazing cows, gathering mushrooms, and doing small tasks around the village. Yet the boy is different from the other children. He is extraordinarily sensitive to sounds and music. Whenever he hears music coming from the inn or from a wedding celebration, he stops and listens as if enchanted. The villagers begin calling him “the Musician.” No one truly understands his gift, however. His mother and other villagers consider him lazy, and he is often scolded or beaten.

Janko’s greatest dream is to have real violins. He tries to make his own instrument out of a piece of wood and horsehair, but it cannot produce the beautiful sounds he hears in the inn. He often stands outside houses or near the manor just to listen to music for a moment.

One night, the boy sneaks into the manor house where a pair of real violins belonging to a servant hang on the wall.

Unfortunately, he is caught.

He is brought before a village authority and sentenced to a flogging.

After the beating he is so badly injured that he cannot properly return home. Within a few days he begins to die. In his final moments he listens to the sounds of the village and dreams about music. Before dying, he asks his mother:

His mother assures him that He will. Shortly afterwards, Janko dies, and his mother weeps in despair.

At the end of the story, the narrator presents an ironic scene. The owners of the manor return from a journey to Italy, speaking with admiration about the art and musical talents they encountered there. They remain unaware that near their own home, Janko has just died.

We live in a world where around 155,000 children per year die from abuse and neglect worldwide. Tens of thousands of those deaths are linked to violent discipline or severe corporal punishment.

The greatest moral failures often arise from a terrifying absence of thought.

Janko’s village does not intend to destroy a musician after all; yet his case calls into question the moral order of the world. If a civilisation allows children to perish unnoticed, what does that civilisation truly value? If children are allowed to disappear into poverty, neglect, or violence, the loss is not only personal—it is cultural, and when is humanity going to break the chain of hundreds of thousands of cases of fatal ignorance?

Never Violence is the title of a speech made by Astrid Lindgren in 1978, when she received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. It is one of the most well-known and influential speeches by Lindgren, where she speaks against corporal punishment of children. A year later, in Lindgren's home country Sweden, a law was passed that forbade corporal punishment of children. In 1978, the speech was first published as a book. In 2009, a German short film called Never Violence (original title: Niemals Gewalt) was published at Children's Day and was based on the story mentioned in Lindgren's speech.

*Margit_Sandemo

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“For what are we looking for if not to please? I do not know if the desire to attract others comes from a superabundance of vitality, possessiveness, or the hidden, unspoken need to be reassured.”
― Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse

Isn’t it interesting that what we understand as honesty in speaking or writing comes less from superabundance of vitality and more often from an unspoken need to be reassured? And of course, we all want to be received well. We believe some people will be interested in what we said, imagined, clarified, thought: that someone will nod, at least once, will understand, even if slightly, and will not put down what ours after the first paragraph.

In this regard, even silence might be staged against the possibility of being heard. Language is relational; it exists because there is “an other”, even if that other is us at a different stage. Perhaps the impulse to speak is not pure expression, but contact, the opposite of isolation.

We choose certain words over others. We reveal something. Why? Because we want to be seen — but safely. We want to attract. We want to be understood without being totally dismantled. We speak because we long for a response, a laughter, a reflective silence. We write because we want the echo.

And there is SADNESS…

When we are deeply sad, speech might feel excessive. Words seem too solid, and the modern language proves to be insufficient. We draw, we paint, we compose songs. We have a long history of expressing that complex state of sadness.

Isn’t it interesting that in the modern world this what is expressed globally as tristesse or tristezza or saudade in its rawest form, renders us unattractive and needy?

True, Tristesse could name a person, in which case, the Arthurian knight from the “Tristan and Iseult” legend would be a deeply complex and tragic figure. Rarely, though, someone is just sad all the time in that kind of romantic taking.

When Françoise Sagan titled her novel Bonjour Tristesse, she greeted sadness as if it were a familiar presence. Not an intruder. Not a catastrophe. Something that walks beside a human.

And then there is that untranslatable Portuguese saudade — not simply longing, not exactly nostalgia. Presence of absence, perhaps. A fullness shaped like what is missing. In Portuguese love poetry and in the songs of Amália Rodrigues, the queen of fado, saudade is a second heartbeat.

I find it fascinating that in my mother tongue, in popular phrases, sadness can literally be a “guest” on someone’s face, whereas the same expression in English would simply be translated as “keeping” a long face. Sadness would have a power to “overcome” a person, but could also be “shared”.

While I cannot dig as deep into many roots at the same time, I can talk about some old fragments. Let’s start with something that will put off a standard reader straight away — sins! To begin with the origins…

A sad monk does not know spiritual delight, just as one burning with a strong fever does not know the taste of honey; a sad monk will not stir his mind to contemplation, nor will he raise a pure prayer, for sadness is an obstacle to every good” — wrote Evagrius Ponticus, including sadness in the catalogue of peccata capitalia (capital sins).

The theologians believed that this vice arises in two ways — first of all, when anger subsides, and a person feels that they have suffered some loss, and is also unable to analyse their aspirations and desires. Sadness may also arise “from some incomprehensible dejection of our mind or from doubt.”

Each time, however, in the opinion of the medieval Desert Fathers, an excess of sadness generates laziness, that is,

the sin which “overcomes us with sleep in the heat of the day” or “encourages us to leave the cell.”

Interestingly, in the thought of the thinkers of that era, the explanations of the fifth capital vice — tristitia (sadness) — and the sixth — acedia (laziness) — were often very similar.

It should therefore not be surprising that the catalogue of peccata capitalia (capital sins) known to us, proclaimed at the beginning of the 7th century, does not contain the name sadness. This vice was incorporated into the last of the capital sins, namely into the sin of laziness. This does not change the fact, however, that sadness and laziness throughout the entire history of the Catholic Church were connected by a fairly strong semantic bond. This kinship can also be observed in old Polish lexis I will be referring to.

The observations show that within the lexical-semantic category of SADNESS, various units had differentiated positions. Some were located in the very centre, others appeared on the boundary of such fields as, for example, LAZINESS or ANGER. Eight words: smutek (smętek), ckliwość (cliwość), tęskność, tęsknota, tęskliwość, żal, żałośćand żałoba oscillated around three groups: the so-called “sadness” group; the so-called “laziness” group, containing names of what is understood today as professional burnout; and the so-called “anger” group, that is, a collection of lexemes meaning ‘complaint, grievance.’

The “sadness” group

The lexeme smutek reaches back with its roots to Proto-Slavic. It derives from motiti, motǫ ‘to mix, to stir, to bring about confusion.’

On Old Polish ground, this verb took the lexical form mącić (męcić), while its content underwent expansion. Apart from the primary sense ‘to disturb,’ the word mącić also meant

‘to make turbid, non-transparent, to pollute, to stir up, to shake.’

Around the 14th century, as a result of metaphorical analogy, consisting in associating the disturbance, the muddling of seemingly ordered matter with behaviour that is domineering, even aggressive, on the part of those holding power, new figurative senses of that verb were generated, such as ‘to oppress, torment, trouble, persecute.’

At the same time, prefixed derivatives of mącić, i.e. smącić and smęcić, also acquired metaphorical content. Primarily,

they named the action of setting something in motion, mixing, stirring, whereas secondarily, the action of a subject that is the cause of worry, thus ‘tormenting, saddening’ others.

Based on these prefixed verbs, around the 14th century smętek emerged, giving rise to the word that the nation now recognises as “sadness.”

In Old Polish dictionaries, this lexeme appears in the meaning

‘affliction, dejection, ailment,’

although some recorded examples introduce other contents, such as ‘a violent outburst of despair’, e.g.:

“Bloody drops fell to the ground, and in this he showed his great smętek,”

or the feeling of hopelessness caused by the loss of hope, e.g.:

“Saint Michael showed him (Saint Paul) a flame where there were light and darkness, smętek and weeping and heavy sighing”; “But today is for all people a time of smętek and sorrow.”

The second of the cited senses is semantically close to the content of the offence tristitia ‘sadness, powerlessness, lack of trust in God’s mercy.’

The examples recorded are not entirely clear enough to state with certainty the presence of the meaning ‘to sin by sadness,’ nevertheless other, later fragments give such conviction, e.g.

“As a moth to a garment and a worm to wood, so sadness…”

The cited excerpts refer to the treatises of Evagrius Ponticus, who, writing about sadness, sometimes used the metaphor of a moth or (at other times) a worm destroying a still living plant, e.g. “The worm of the heart is sadness and it devours the mother who gives birth to hope.”

This does not mean, however, that the aforementioned Old Polish fragments denied the presence of the apology of sadness and suffering known to us. The majority of the texts recorded at that time suggest that sadness was also experienced by virtuous people.

At the turn of the 18th century, one still reads:

“The heart of the wise is where sadness is, the heart of fools where there is joy.”

Thus in the Middle Polish period one can observe that the glorification of pain and sadness was still perceptible, and they were by no means considered in categories of sin. The situation changes at the beginning of the 19th century, as evidenced by the dictionary entry in Krasiński’s dictionary:

“Sadness gives an idea opposite to joy and denotes an uncheerful state of the spirit in which sighs involuntarily break from a constricted heart and a person feels more inclined to tears than to a smile.

It may be painted on the face, in the eyes, in the voice, it may even be harmful to health, but it itself is not physical suffering, for the body cannot experience sadness.”

The cited fragment contains no elements suggesting praise of grief and torment; on the contrary, Krasiński in the definition, provides the previously cited excerpts, treating sadness as the name of the sin tristitia. In turn, later dictionaries characterise the examined name in a dichotomous manner; the quotations included introduce, on the one hand, the sin of sadness, on the other, the trait of pious people. It even happens that paradoxically, it becomes the virtue of hope, e.g.

“Most often sadness walks with hope”

In later lexicons, sadness is defined neutrally, without emotional (or religious) marking, as ‘a joyless, dejected state of mind; worry, affliction, vexation.’

The “laziness” group

Extremely interesting seem the units forming the so-called “laziness group.” In old Polish these lexemes meant

‘sadness caused by lack of willingness to perform work, to undertake intellectual effort, also to pray’

(in devotional literature one speaks of ‘spiritual lukewarmness’). In some old texts, however, it is impossible to determine whether the mentioned elements implied the sin of acedia, understood as a kind of burnout, that is, exhaustion of strength, zeal, also talent, or rather served to describe the symptoms of a state — namely chronic fatigue, irritability, permanent sadness, a feeling of lack of meaning and purpose in life (the sin tristitia).

Such a difficult-to-resolve situation is encountered when analysing the meanings of the names that all relate to tenderness (ckliwość, tęskność, tęskliwość, tęsknota, tęsknica). They derive from the Proto-Slavic adjective toskъnъ‘sorrowful, sad, dejected,’ thus etymologically they are connected with the lexical-semantic field of SADNESS. According to Polish etymological dictionaries, one of the oldest lexemes of this group was formed from the adjective, which in turn was created from cnić ‘to long, to feel displeasure.’ Initially this name was associated exclusively with bad physical condition caused by nausea, e.g. “With this inflammation, cliwość and swelling of the belly come upon weakness,” however already in the mid-16th century, most probably as a result of analogy to the newly formed verb cknąć ‘to be in a bad mental state, to rebel inwardly,’ ckliwość began also to mean (besides ‘sentimentality, excessive tenderness’) the sin tristitia, that is, ‘mental suffering, spiritual collapse.’ Traces of such conceptualisation can still be found in some fragments:

“Misery and ckliwość of life cause heaviness, distaste and unwillingness toward everything.”

Later dictionaries give as an old synonym of that word the lexeme that became the archaic name of laziness.

Slightly different contents were carried by the nouns tęskność, tęskliwość and tęsknota. These lexemes were formed on the basis of the verb tęsknić to long.

This situation stabilised at the beginning of the 17th century. All lexemes derived from tęsknić were treated as meaning ‘heaviness, weariness, boredom,’ thus as synonymous with laziness. Some quotations, however, introduce another content — ‘sadness’ (the sin tristitia), constituting the consequence of acedia, e.g.

“It is unfitting for a man to feel tęskność, because tęskność is the result of idle laziness”; “To know how to spend time is the essence of life; inactivity, unpleasant, brings longing.”

Interestingly, in the modern Polish period the units tęskliwość and tęsknica functioned as synonyms of ‘boredom, vexation,’ whereas tęskność and tęsknota were connected with ‘sadness caused by separation,’ as evidenced by the dictionary entry:

“Longing denotes some inexpressible longing in the heart, which can hardly live, feeling the lack of that which it loves and for which it sighs.”

The “anger” group

In the “anger” group are placed lexemes derived from the noun žalbъ ‘sadness, regret, suffering, pain,’ most of which arose already in Proto-Slavic. An example of such a unit is žalostь ‘worry, sadness.’ On Polish ground this name (żałość) was characterised by a very broad network of semantic senses oscillating around the old Proto-Slavic meaning. In some uses it implied ‘despair, that is sadness of enormous intensity, often bordering on madness,’ at other times ‘harm,’ also ‘pain, suffering,’ even ‘regret (for sins), contrition.’

In Middle Polish żałość was most often attested as an element of the sacrament of confession (e.g. “Pain or żałość is the torpor of penance”), more rarely meaning ‘sadness’ or ‘grief.’ This state of affairs did not last long — it changed radically from the 19th century onwards, when the word was regarded as a synonym of lamenting, thus an element of the category ANGER. Contents close to the contemporary semantic structure ‘piercing sadness, regret’ are explicitly recorded only later, although much earlier, Jan Kochanowski, one of the prolific writers noted:

“From every corner żałość takes away the man, and his heart seeks its consolation in vain.”

Meanings similar to the formation żałość were contained in the word żal. Although in Old Polish it was recorded less frequently than żałość, one can observe that around the 17th/18th century it named broadly understood sadness, which could take the form of ‘a feeling of dejection,’ ‘remorse, contrition,’ ‘longing,’ ‘compassion,’ also appeared in the form of ‘trouble,’ ‘pain,’ even ‘resentments and grievances,’ which placed żal on the border of the category of the sin ira(anger).

At the beginning of the modern Polish period, however, the meaning ‘longing’ becomes increasingly frequent and dominant.

A slightly different history was borne by the lexemes żałoba and żałobliwość, which in the Old Polish period were attested exclusively in fragments indicating the meaning ‘regret for sins.’ This process occurred parallel to the generalisation of meaning observed at the beginning of the Polish Renaissance. At that time, żałoba and żałobliwośćmoved on the boundary of the two fields SADNESS and ANGER, meaning ‘a feeling of unpleasantness’ and — interestingly — ‘complaint,’ e.g. “Bolesław made a complaint before the senators against his brother”; “What complaint do you bring against this man?” Also in Polish official texts of the 17th/18th centuries, żałoba was used in the meaning ‘written grievance,’ e.g. a “letter of complaint”; “Żałoba or complaint should be clear and precise”; “When someone comes wishing to lay a complaint against another…”

Although in the Middle Polish period the content ‘complaint’ was as stable as the meaning ‘grief after the death of someone close,’ in 19th-century Polish the trace of it disappeared. From that time on, żałoba means mourning after the death of a loved one.

And with this understanding, I recommend reading the work of Françoise Sagan, who in her book, alienating the typical mainstream reader, Bonjour tristesse wrote:

A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else…

Above else I was afraid of dullness. ”
― Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse

Perhaps that is why, when we are sad, we tend to become silent. Sadness is at risk of being mistaken for flatness. For lack of wit. For the absence of a vital spark.

Dramatic sorrow in some social circles appears even glamorous. But unspoken sadness? Disengagement? Nothing to contribute? Retreat? Monitoring? Am I becoming tedious? Am I dimming the room?

Sagan’s confession is startling because it reveals the vanity hidden in melancholy (not vanity in the shallow sense, but becoming uninteresting, losing the shimmer that makes others lean in). When we fall silent in sadness, we are not always protecting others from our heaviness. Sometimes we are protecting ourselves from being reduced to it. We do not want to be catalogued as the dull one, the gloomy one, the person whose presence lowers the temperature of conversation.

And yet, what if silence in sadness is not dullness at all, but resistance to the masquerade? A refusal to perform brightness. A refusal to make pain entertaining.

The real tragedy is not that sadness makes us quiet. It is that we live in a world where quietness is so easily confused with little worth.

‘All facial redness will be rectified in post-production.’

‘It’s not that.’

‘This is not a BAFTA nomination. Just relax. Remember, you’re not a Nobel nominee. This isn’t about you. People want to hear a story — an authentic, unpolished, raw, and most importantly, true story. You’re free to speculate, lose your train of thought, and discuss free associations. We’re looking for a person — we concentrate on memories and how the human mind operates, not on encyclopaedic accuracy. We know you’ve only been to the mountains a few times in your life, and we don’t necessarily expect geographic precision in terminology… Just speak, that’s all.’

‘Just speak,’ I remind myself, picturing the camera or the forehead of a friend. I start, confident that I won’t be interrupted.

‘That story lingered in my mind. It was one of many from that long evening, yet I could envision it as though I had witnessed it myself. The storyteller was my slightly older brother, who was also the eyewitness. He trekked through the mountains. Some 200 metres ahead of him, a young man clad in a white T-shirt walked in front of his female companion. Then… he appeared to be running — no, speeding, as if overtaken by something. He glanced back at his wife. He was unstoppable. The woman attempted to quicken her pace, but it was evident to anyone that the distance between them was increasing, becoming insurmountable.

Seconds later, it became evident he was caught in an avalanche, or at least that’s what one might call a sudden surge of snow propelling a person forward at incredible speed, still on his feet, until he reached the edge of a drop and plummeted onto the rocks far below. The woman somehow managed to follow him at a steady pace and eventually reached him after a while.

Minutes later, a rescue helicopter hovered above the site. A rescuer descended on a rope, secured her safely, and deposited her approximately 200 metres away. She then made her way down the mountain. Meanwhile, the man’s white T-shirt had turned scarlet red. One could imagine that upon reaching the mountain shelter, she would have learned the devastating news.’

I recognise that it was merely a warm-up, and I will now truly begin my story:

‘I remember how the snow sparkled under the moonlight in the high mountains. It was a magical experience — one I cherish in my memory. I can vividly picture how the snow glimmered beneath the moonlight among the peaks. It was truly enchanting, something I hold dear, with no desire to relive what produced a profound respect for the mountains.

We were well-equipped. I travelled with a group of young people, even though they were considerably older than I. Indeed, I was the youngest of them all. The boys were experienced and well-prepared, and I must say, they proved to be true gentlemen.

Our trek was intended to last four hours. It was cold yet sunny when we set off, and we were in high spirits, feeling relaxed. We walked for nearly three hours when snow began to fall. The temperature dropped from -5°C to -10°C, though it felt more like -15°C well before it actually reached that point. We estimated we had about an hour left. We zipped up our coats, donned an extra pair of gloves, and pressed on. We climbed one hill, then another — now the terrain should be flat.

But the trail started to vanish. The snow grew deeper. On the path, it reached our knees; if you stepped off, you would sink up to your waist. More often than not, someone would get stuck, and we had to assist them. The boys found it challenging to navigate in the poor visibility.

We had been walking for seven hours by then. The lads started carrying the rucksack of an Englishwoman who was with us, but to be honest, she wasn’t the only one struggling at that point. Eventually, they decided we would leave most of our rucksacks behind — reaching the nearest mountain guesthouse was our priority.

The initial cries and prayers grew increasingly frequent. We pressed on. The boys occasionally gathered around us, rubbing each other’s backs for warmth and reassurance. I recall becoming mired deep in the snow. Exhausted, I managed to free myself and said, “I’ll just take a short break… I’ll catch up.”

The moment I closed my eyes, I encountered something akin to a mirage. My friend shouted at me, “Yeah, right, and you’ll freeze to death! Move along!”

At that point, it was no longer about exhaustion. The snow was too deep for a snowmobile to reach us. We had to keep moving until we arrived at a location where our English friend could be transported further.

We began to see lights in the distance. Although it was still a long walk, at least we had a destination. We continued moving forward. Suddenly, the eldest among us collapsed face-first into the snow. We lifted her. She had been the strongest of us all, and now she had fallen.

An hour before we reached safety, my glove got stuck in the snow. When I pulled my right hand out, my fingers were stiff, and I couldn’t straighten them enough to fit back into the glove. I shoved my hand into my pocket and carried on. In the end, our friend was taken to the place we had all been striving to reach. That final hour was uncomfortably silent. Everyone was focused, moving like compliant soldiers.

When we arrived, the mountain rescue team examined our hands and feet. They referred to it as moderate frostbite when certain areas of the body changed colour but did not turn black (as black indicated dead tissue). Some individuals had frostbite on a thumb, while others had it on an ear. For me, it affected both my heels and my right hand. Not particularly enjoyable — I couldn’t hold a pen! I couldn’t even write my name for a month until sensation returned.

We had to remain in the mountain shelter for a while. The following morning, the avalanche danger level was reported to be extremely high.

You never forget a morning like that — when you can’t feel your toes, heels, or even your hands. You step outside and behold an absolute masterpiece of nature — the serene, tranquil, and majestic mountains. At night, the snow glistens silver, the moon shines brightly, and you feel overwhelmed with awe, vibrantly alive, and grateful.’

‘If you ever have nightmares, what do you dream about?’ His question jolted me out of the vivid scene I was revisiting at that moment.

I never recalled my dreams, or so I believed until now. In truth, I gazed at my right hand, overwhelmed by a fear I attempted to conceal once I recognised it. My French manicure was done in the purest shade imaginable, and he looked directly at it when he asked, ‘Have you ever painted your nails black?’

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You wrote important things in your letter — the one I’ve only just received. Do you know there are important matters in it? Hehe… well, this troublesome knowledge concerns various small problems that people caused in the past for our friends, because some of our friends liked someone just a little too much, and expressed that liking a bit too strongly… at the wrong time, in the wrong circumstances, and, to their misfortune, it happened a little…

This knowledge makes it so that I would never want to expose Little Being to the inconveniences caused by such problems… it constrains me, therefore — because it keeps me from dancing with Little Being as carefree, joyful, and wide-open (remembering also the adjective “purely”) as I would like.

On the other hand, there is the sadness that comes from such ‘passivity’ in this dance… it may lull Little Being and give rise to frustrations and other unpleasant little sorrows sometimes — exactly the same, or very similar to mine — and the indifference she wrote about in that letter… and the longing for the train…

The only consolation I have is that perhaps these are smaller sorrows than those that would be caused by precisely such unpleasant problems in the style of the ones “people caused in the past for our friends, because some of our friends liked someone a little too much at the wrong time and in the wrong circumstances, and, to their misfortune, expressed that liking a little too strongly…”

Do you understand?
I know you do…
I know you understand the responsibility that comes with this knowledge.

That would be enough from the MATURE Me, sitting here in butter-stained glasses, sniffling and pondering ethical questions, sipping cocoa from a little cup. (They turned the heat on for me in the radiator… ahhhh, pure joy!)

And Miss Mantis searches for truth about herself and writes to me about it so beautifully, just as below…

I don’t know how it really is — after all, I haven’t stopped caring, yet it feels as if I have, somehow — what is it? It happened somewhat indifferently — I tell you this because you know, and I don’t know, it hasn’t become mundane to me, but something else has happened, and that’s why I asked about habit. You know it isn’t that, so why is it difficult to express what’s inside? Is it so complicated that it’s hard to describe, or is it so trivial that it can’t be described?

It all somehow happened indifferently… you write… and yet… even if it is indifference… it is “my–indifference–towards–you” and “your–indifference–towards–me,” and thus “our–indifference,” and because of that, in my way of understanding things, it is an unusual indifference, for it stands in contrast with a certain equally “ours” non‑indifference…

And if within you there is being born some cold and foreign indifference, and you write about it, then… are you not Alienne, Mantis — a being in whom indifference is sometimes precisely what allows her to live to see the next day? If it is indifference toward me, or toward dance, then is it not a good gift, one that allows you to look at all these matters in a different, objective light and weigh all the pluses and minuses, in order to take the next two little steps in this direction or that…?

Well, tell me…

Because YOU of March looks at me differently; the June Little Creature, somewhere near the cinema, sees him differently; differently still looks that lovely, quiet and well‑composed Miss Mantis from somewhere somewhere there in some distant village; something else is noticed by the one who finishes celebrating by giving me the most extraordinary mouse of my life (which, by the way, has already properly settled into my room and is at this very moment on the little shelf gnawing her way through another hefty volume of The Foundations of Cybernetics, for she is — I must confess to you — a highly educated mouse); differently still looks the one beside whom I sat yesterday/the day before while a gentleman was singing… and most differently of all looks that very Little Creature who, somewhere among her many affairs, discovers within herself some kind of indifference, because she searches for warm things inside herself and cannot find them…

Because there is within her a longing for something that seems too precious to be attainable for the time being… because there is in her a longing for better worlds… truly better ones, like the one she wrote about in a certain very beautiful poem…

Little Creature… this multiplicity of gazes may save you… precisely from me… precisely from yourself, if such rescue were needed… it is precisely the multiplicity of gazes and the abundance of perspectives, including the most difficult one. That can help best — better than me, or anyone who is not you…

And so, thank your indifference as well… and I will say, as usual, that it is good, because it is your indifference… the word “your,” in my understanding, is truly a very positively valued adjective…

Heili, that sounded wrong, with those “imaginations” about the blue letter… that is how I formulated the thought and the question — if it can be read as unpleasant…

I simply wanted to ask about one of your sentences, once here in my room, right after the blue letter, when it turned out that I had somehow become upset, you said that “it wasn’t meant to be like that…” (that sentence truly helped me a little then…)

And I know, I know that “it’s not that there was nothing true in the blue letter.” That’s exactly it… your difficult thoughts are frightfully interesting… and truly, whatever they may ultimately mean for me, I still feel extraordinarily privileged to know at least a little about them…

“Adoration” is a beautiful little poem. Ahem, ahem — I myself don’t quite know what to think about that poem… well, well… Him, once he starts writing… tends to land in various places… the poem is, above all… English.

There is in me a memory of things to come… of those very best things…

With all my half-dead heart, I thank the Being for making me realise just now that there is a memory of things to come…

With all my half-dead heart, I thank them for this beautiful sentence… such a very, very sad sentence, partly a sentence-judgment, partly a sentence-hope…

You say: “I am angry.”

I say: “I am angry.”

I somewhat guess what you mean when you say “I am angry”;

you somewhat guess what I mean when I say “I am angry.”

Let us leave in these sentences a wonderful freedom of interpretation—a liberty that ensures, despite everything, we remain a mystery to each other…

Perhaps a cruel mystery, perhaps an ugly mystery,

perhaps a mystery with no answer,

or a mystery whose answer is almost every one of our gestures, every one of our words, and not a few of our deeds…

but still—a mystery…

He loves dark, terrifying, cruel mysteries, because they are the truest, because they tell him the most about himself… the cruelest mysteries teach the most…

So even if this is such a mystery… well, it stands before him, and before the Being.

You are the Being, maybe good, maybe bad.

For me, you were good (so hard for me to understand why, and from where your goodness toward me came)— and you are still good, because you speak, because you write, because you want to be, and you are here or there.

And you are exactly as you are—not otherwise; maybe it seems to you the worst… but you do not know how it looks from the outside.

And it looks…

THAT MUCH

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boom boom boom!

Being…

M.

I don’t know how many years have passed. I don’t know how many times I’ve persuaded myself not to remember us. Yes, that wet-behind-the-ears version of us. You, in your black sweater and glasses alike, and me, drinking my first Viennese coffee on our trip together; how we visited a shop with candles and how I gifted you a photo frame with giraffes, since “giraffe” was my nickname. It must have been May, although I cannot possibly remember that.

Funny enough, the memory of these moments comes to me when I see so many expiration dates approaching: the ointment that will always be fresh and working despite the date on the package; the coffee I’ve been keeping for special moments—and now those moments are forced to arrive before the end of this month. Although I will stretch those beans—oh, how I will stretch them…

Many people, armed with the knowledge they already have about me, think that I have not arrived at small joys, but at a handful of minor matters; that I have not encountered clear traces of longing for what is eternal and magnificent, only undeniable evidence that most humans are guided by a petty instinct for momentary satisfaction. Today, nothing stops me from acknowledging this; more than that, I find in it a peculiar delight—to call, using worn-out terms, the struggle I wage in this situation, in a human world oriented solely toward tangible realities, a struggle to discover subtle form, “desperate.”

I had in mind a form that could express a situation stripped of perspective, the times in which people… as simply put as possible… live deprived of ideals. And a manner or form, even the subtlest, to express such a thought, I understood relatively quickly, cannot arise from our will, just as thought does not know freedom without limits. This manner of expression or form, I believed, must stem from a sensitivity. And this was precisely what I could not find in generality: I did not find the sensitivity, and the fact that I could not find it—because it was not there, among the majority—filled me with the aftertaste of which I cannot rid myself of to this day. I drink the sour, and I drink the sweet, the spicy and the salty; I try everything, yet... My experience tells me that a story like mine does not capture the attention of the majority of today’s listeners. And this certainly does not happen because, though utterly banal, it is, according to them, too “difficult”; rather, it is because everything that reaches them from this direction bores them, namely because they do not understand how someone cannot acknowledge that the human world is either vulgar, or deceitful, or both vulgar and deceitful at once.

C’est pourquoi tu me manques. Yes, you are missing from me. As present as you are and as absent you recall “things” to me. You are reminding me of you. Tu me manques plus que je ne le pensais. I was clearing my desk yesterday, and my mind brought up the words from Shin Kyung-sook’s The Court Dancer: Whoever carries music within will know solitude, even when the listening is shared. For music speaks not through the nearness of bodies, but through the intimacy of the soul. But then all this soul nonsense we are meant not to believe, for its very reason, only God is your soul-mate, all other relationships are lived, only if we want them to live. And so I thought of another words from him:

Tidying my desk always makes me think of preparing for death. Once, after cleaning the room this way, I looked back with such terror that I returned and scattered my things all over again.

And yes, my desk was tidier, the right drawer fuller of all the things that live there and my memory of you was livelier than ever.

So I thought of all the outings we had—how I tried capers and anchovies with you for the first time, how I took pictures along the way. I thought of a discussion we had on Hamlet, on IT, on adultery, and on poetry, all at once.

And when I recently went shopping, I strayed to the bookshelves, as I always do, and read one of the poems from For the Women by Donna Ashworth. And that is poetry exactly—the kind we do not like is precisely the kind we do not agree with. And that suits me.

Yes, this is the first half, because I did not agree from the very first line. Yes, my thinking of Donna will not change because I don’t like this and some other poems of hers, I still believe she shares the same father with another friend of mine, although there is no proof found, at least for now, as no one is digging… Can you imagine how many women, still conforming, are reading this?! I must think they are still very young. How else would one not figure it out? We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are, as Anaïs Nin would perhaps put it. In this regard, I am a very old soul; I always was.

I open The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank’s) and read:

Everyone here is reading a book called Salute to Freedom.

Mother thought it was extremely good because it describes a number of adolescent problems. I thought to myself, a bit ironically, ‘Why don’t you take more interest in your own adolescents first!’

(…)

It’s funny, but I can sometimes see myself as others see me. I take a leisurely look at the person called ‘Anne Frank’ and browse through the pages of her life as though she were a stranger.

Before I came here, when I didn’t think about things as much as I do now, I occasionally had the feeling that I didn’t belong (…) and that I would always be an outsider. I sometimes went around for six months at a time pretending I was an orphan. Then I’d chastise myself for playing the victim, when really, I’d always been so fortunate…

(…)

Everything has become much worse here. But you already knew that. Now God has sent someone to help me: Peter. I fondle my pendant, press it to my lips and think, What do I care! Peter is mine and nobody knows it! With this in mind, I can rise above every nasty remark. Which of the people here would suspect that so much is going on in the mind of a teenage girl?

And I laugh to myself, as a teenage girl, and I think that my soul is so so young, just like yesterday when I found a card from my dear girlfriend, she wrote to me in 2005 after our outing to the same city we went to that day when the sun was so beautifully out. And before, on the way to the train station, when crossing the veg market in summer, she told me that she had got engaged to a man who was going to change her name to what literally translates to puncture. And this brings me to what Tomas Tranströmer noticed,

“Two truths approach each other. One comes from within, one from without — and where they meet we have a chance to catch a glimpse of ourselves.”

And yes, I still do not understand the popular phrases, for example, reading for pleasure… The last six books I read tore me apart, disturbed my sleep, to say the least! One of them? Set in a bleak town, a travelling circus featuring a colossal stuffed whale and a mysterious figure called the Prince arrives. Their presence disrupts the fragile social order, unleashing hysteria and violence. That’s in two sentences The Melancholy of Resistance, but what I liked in those novels, alongside others I discovered, is how dense and continuous they are, often running pages without paragraph breaks. That feeling of entering someone’s current thoughts is also present in Krasznahorkai’s novel I am reading right now (Nobel Prize for literature 2025), a gift. So, here, below, I am sharing a slightly altered version of the poem by LANGSTON HUGHES (Why would I not shorten it to my needs?)

I, too, sing.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed.

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Would you believe we have just entered a Year of the Fire Horse (symbolising passion, dynamism, and transformation)? So hear, please hear this poem entitled in the original Jianzi Mulan Hua by Su Shi, who wrote it from a remote corner of the world (sent there as a political punishment):

Beginning of Spring

Spring ox, spring staff

From the ocean’s edge, the boundless spring breeze sweeps ashore.

Hand in hand with Nature’s hidden artisan, It blushes peach blossoms to a tender, living rose.

Spring streamers, spring talismans

A sudden vernal gust sobers the lingering wine.

Not like the far-off ends of earth

It whirls up willow down, drifting like a snowfall of silk.

To some, ink might appear chaotic, but when we look, look closely, a soul stares back at us. There is a threshold there: between what we see and what we feel. I invite people to enter that space. In my drawings, nothing is accidental. Even the pauses matter.

Please, introduce yourself.

My name is Selemani CHERUBALA Philippe-Dan, but the public knows me as OKLM. I am a multifaceted artist, a musician and a visual director.

My identity and creativity feed on my roots, proudly anchored between two pillars of Africa: DR Congo and Burundi.

I define my work as a mixture of authenticity and modernity.

My goal is simple: to use my director’s eye and my musician’s ear to offer a complete and unique artistic universe.

Your piece IREMBO feels both dense and calm. Please tell us more.

IREMBO means beauty, but not the loud kind. It’s the beauty that settles after struggle. The kind that remains when the noise is gone. It is about someone who no longer searches for his place in the world, but for peace within himself.

Your work feels deeply rooted. Tell us more about the soil you grew from.

I was born into a large family — I’m the seventh child. My childhood was rocked by combat sports, but even more by music. I started singing at four years old, in a Catholic choir. I inherited that love from my mother; she was a singer and a youth leader when she was young.

Our house was always full of things: music, fighting sports, drawing, pastry… creation in many forms.

I discovered drawing through manga, and through my older brothers, who were already drawing a lot.

My family gave us a principle to follow:

If you want to do good things, start with the small ones — and do them well.

Remain authentic.

Put God at the centre of everything, even your talents.

And above all — do what you love, and truly do it.

In Burundi, there’s a saying: “Ukurusha abandi si uwiruka cane, ni uwamenye iyo aja.” The one who goes far is not the one who runs fastest, but the one who knows where he is going.

That stayed with me.

How did it begin with art? What difficulties did you encounter, and what arts bring you as a state of mind?

I can’t say that I encountered art; I can say that art chose me. As I mentioned before, I was born into a large family where everyone had their own talent or particular gift, but music was something that truly belonged to us. I discovered it at the age of five, and I have continued to practise it up to this day.

As for drawing, I can say that I discovered it and that it, too, chose me. By watching manga with my older brothers and seeing them reproduce certain characters, I began to wonder how they managed to do that... It was from that point that I also started drawing, and that’s when I realised I had a particular talent in that world as well.

Of course, it wasn’t easy —

especially in the society I grew up in, a society that saw art as a waste of time, a society that did nothing but talk and criticise…

But fortunately, it’s thanks to that very society that I developed the mental strength and mindset I have today.

Art, for me, is a second nature, a second home, a life.

It’s something that allows me to express myself, to express things I maybe couldn’t express verbally or directly. I would say that art came into my life to show me who I really was and why I loved art so deeply.

One of your most striking works, INGABO, radiates strength.

Here, force is silent, dignified, indomitable. He is the son of the hills. He is the rock of the country. INGABO means shield. Not the kind you swing, but the kind you become.

The piece MUKULU feels intensely personal.

It is my Inkingi — my pillar. The eldest. The one who opened the road so that I wouldn’t stumble. He wasn’t only a big brother; he was my shield and my first support. Mukulu — the eldest — is blood, foundation. The one who gave everything so I could stand upright.

This portrait is my debt of recognition. In Kirundi, we say:

“Uwutagukingiye mu mvura ntazokubakira izuba.”

The one who didn’t shelter you from the rain won’t build you a house in the sun.

He sheltered me.

Your lines feel almost obsessive — dense, layered. Why this intensity?

Because memory is never clean. Life doesn’t arrive in straight strokes.

I don’t rush faces. I let them tell me when they are ready.

When someone stands before your work, what do you hope they carry with them when they leave?

Stillness.

If they feel seen — even briefly — then the passage has worked.

Because sometimes a single look, patiently drawn, can hold a thousand lives.

Thank you for today’s conversation. We wish you all the best in your life and your career.

To learn more about Dan and his art, please check his profile.

The ceiling was painted after the last visit (whoever was visiting and whoever was truly living here), a brighter shade of white; the fluorescent tubes were replaced with pendant lamps; the stairs gained an anti-slip carpeted finish.

There is a pleasant aroma of bergamot from an air diffuser in the hall. It is raining outside.

We move to the salon, the sala de estar.

No, the stars are not out yet; it is still early. Sala, room—spacious enough for living.

“Can you just sit?” I wonder, extending my hand in your direction, encouraging you to take a seat.

“Just sit and be?” you ask.

“Just be. I will serve tea. This is where all the stirring will go.”

Nothing apart from the rain outside makes a sound, nothing apart from your heartbeat to tell you that you’re alive.

Can you feel that you’re alive simply by sitting quietly?

You are unsure.

It has been a long time since you meditated, rather than merely talked about getting an app for that. I really don’t want to talk about myself, uttering: I can sit so long that I feel the world exhale with me, and I am both less and infinitely more than I imagined.

I don’t speak because I am alive; I am alive not because I speak.

“So you said some time ago—ages, one might say—that you collect stamps.”

Oh! My mind is on, truly on. Worldwide collection, expedition, postage, stamps—or love (as in philately). Collectionner les timbres. Coleccionar sellos. Collezionare francobolli. Samla frimärken.

How do I tell you that it is not about the stamps at all?

Will you ask me what, then, it is about?

Will I tell you that it is about the album? Or will I tell you not?

You are thinking of your first notebook (no, not a computer), a paper cahier de brouillon (not bouillon—I might serve the soup later, though), where you copied all the interesting quotes. We do not talk about books. I was never in any kind of adult book club. I am not sure how I would bear the whole concept, not even thinking of its implications. I bring my old notebook and pass it to you. You open it on the first page. You read (in French):

“Sublimity, then, is perception. Without sensitivity, intelligence becomes machinery”, you begin.

I put the music on. Your choice, of course, is mine at once. To receive without giving makes one heavy; to give without receiving makes one hollow.

I give you a nodding look. And then intuition — that mysterious, “obscure” light? I tend to ask. Not everything luminous is clear. But that remains unspoken.

“Tenderness…”

“We are not entering there. A single act of tenderness can outweigh a decade of achievement.”

Give without restraint, lose without regret, and acquire without pettiness. You must have that inner wealth to give freely; that’s why you are sitting here. You have the security to acquire without shrinking into smallness.

“We settle not because we cannot imagine beauty, but because we once imagined it too vividly. Disappointment makes us practical. Fear makes us moderate.”

“Mhm,” I confirm.

And then you throw out of nowhere, ‘You think you control your own decisions’.

And I really don’t know what to answer.

Don’t you? This is the moment when one juggles in his head how much of “we” there is…

…

Yes, my brain gets compromised at this moment, running a script, as if Lem were talking to me.

If you asked me, I would have told you that Solaris was the first science fiction book I read in my life and that it had a tremendous impact on me and that, of course, I wouldn’t think that I would actualy be a science-fiction reader, even once, and my initial instinct would be to read it so I’d gain some kind of a common ground with the boys at the time. But then I wouldn’t be talking about that excellent book, but about what came to my mind right now.

Humanity…

I catch myself on that! I wouldn’t tell you that because that’s a massive subject to talk to you about, so I just quickly ran a script. It is like Lem must speak to me, but before he does, I try to dismiss the thought because I am not searching for a definition. But the thought is insistent, and I finally hear in my head: Humanity is the sum of our defects, our shortcomings, our imperfections. It is what we want to be but cannot be, are unable to be, do not know how to be. It is simply the gap between ideals and their realisation.

Mhm.

Of course, I do not realise that you came to talk to me about what the Nobel Prize winner John Nash, who spent 44 years proving something about our choices, discovered.

“Our choices are governed by a hidden system — game theory. Once you understand it, you begin to see it everywhere, and you start looking at every past decision differently.”

At this moment, I am curious, not because I perfectly know who Nash was, but because I am interested in how you want to put it, the whole story of how a 22 years old wrote a 28-page doctoral thesis that changed science and should effectively change me, change us, if “us” existed in the first place, of course. Will you disclose that he was struggling with schizophrenia and lived in isolation for years, or will you straightforwardly focus on the foundation for predicting human behaviour, a phenomenon called the Nash Equilibrium?

“To the point”, I encourage you to speak.

“It is the point at which no one can improve their situation by changing strategy — as long as everyone else continues acting the same way.”

I wait to hear how today this idea quietly influences what I buy, what I watch, who I meet, and how I make decisions. You would say we, of course, if we, in a sense less broad than humanity, existed. And I know you will give a real-life example. So you do, and it is an appropriate one:

“You approach traffic lights.

Red — you stop.

Green — you go.

Why?”

You wait a second for reply so I reply, engaged: “Because I assume other drivers follow the rules too.”

“If one person starts acting differently —do they win?”

“No.”

“Chaos follows—And that is the Nash Equilibrium—It is everywhere around us. Why do Coca-Cola and Pepsi cost roughly the same?”

“Again — Nash Equilibrium?” I guess correctly.

“If Coca-Cola lowers its price, Pepsi must do the same. If Pepsi raises its price, it loses customers.

The result?

Both companies remain at the same level and cannot change prices without losing money.

And this is where it becomes uncomfortable.”

“Companies realised that Nash’s theory could be used to trap people in bad decisions,” I conclude.

“And now.” I try to follow your hand that will illustrate what you are about to say.“The sunk cost fallacy.”

“Once you understand how it works, you start to feel uneasy.”

A lot of feeling uneasy, but what could I say to that? I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes? (Going after Auden and expressing as poetically as I could what I felt today at 2:54 pm upon question 21 in higher tier maths paper, by the way). “So what is the sunk cost fallacy?” I ask.

“We continue something simply because we have already invested time, money, or energy into it.” Sounds what Little Prince said about the rose, I think. and you continue: ‘“Even if stopping would be more rational. Nash proved this mathematically. Companies turned it into a money-making machine.”

I really do not want another mathematical theory today so you throw an example, a real one, of Spotify.

“Spotify perfected this mechanism. The free version is intentionally inconvenient: limited skips, ads every few songs. Premium — so much and so per month — removes the artificially created discomfort. The result? 246 million users. 90% of revenue comes from Premium.”

So what you are saying is that Spotify doesn’t really sell music; it sells relief from the discomfort it creates itself?

“Demand through discomfort.”

“Companies deliberately make free versions slightly frustrating. If they were too good — you wouldn’t buy the paid version.”

“The free option irritates you just enough to make you want to pay.” Here, of course, I don’t tell you that some people try to get on a family membership (up to 6?), even if they do not live at the same address. Instead I say: “Brilliant? Yes. Ethical? Debatable. And yet… Nash himself fell into the “sunk cost” trap.”

“You are perfectly right. During his PhD, he realised it wasn’t his path — but he continued because it seemed a waste of the 4–5 years he had already invested.”

“Even the man who discovered the mechanism became its victim.”

No to finish on a dead end, you continue with the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

“Two players. Two options: cooperate or betray.”

I already like the example, although you need no encouragement to continue:

– If both cooperate — each gets £10.

– If both betray — each gets £0.

– If one betrays — they get £15 and the other loses £5.

Logic suggests: betray. But in the long run… both lose.”

“Cooperation wins”, I say without sounding triumphant.

“The best strategy”.

“This being said, be kind, be strong — respond to betrayal. Be forgiving — return to cooperation, don’t fight over resources, is it the moment I serve the broth, my famous chicken soup?”

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I will begin with something that isn’t standard. So maybe you’ll feel a bit uncomfortable, because it’s not the kind of question that’s usually asked. If you want, you can answer; otherwise, we’ll change the question, okay?

Yes, let’s try.

Okay, so when you woke up this morning, a Congolese national, but resident in Burundi, what did you think about? What was the first thing you did?

This morning, when I woke up, I was thinking about what I was going to do and where I was going. I’m going on holiday, but it won’t be completely a holiday because I’m going to another country. I thought about what I could create, what I could do there, how I could enjoy it — because it’s not easy to leave our country and go to another one. For us here in Africa, it’s really not easy; it’s something difficult.
So, I thought about trying to create something, to build a network. I thought about taking my works with me and trying to create something there, to make the most of it.

And where will you be travelling?

I’m going to Uganda. From Burundi.

You said you want to create something. Is that instinct to create — wherever you are, wherever you go — part of who you are? Or is it more about being useful, using the moment to gain experience, visibility, recognition?

Yes, that’s it exactly. Visibility, recognition, and creating a network. Starting with a continental network is much better for a career. For us, especially when we have the chance to travel like this, we take advantage of it. I am talking to the Ugandan artists — creating a network with them — it’s something many people never get the chance to do. To move, to go somewhere else. So it’s about networking, recognition, doing as many things as possible. Creating an exhibition with them, growing the portfolio — that kind of thing. I’ll work with a man here who does acrobatics. I’ll talk to him, I think.
I want to create something here first, then let it grow.

The inspiration will come.

Maybe from myself, maybe from there.

Creating an exhibition will take time; it all depends on how the conversations go with the people I meet there.
But I’m ready and open to everything: artistic collaborations, galleries in Uganda, new contracts — everything.

You have more than four years of experience.

Since 2020, I really started drawing professionally. Before that, I enjoyed it since childhood. I even helped with organising drawing competitions and exams. Even when I was a student myself, I’d take part in an exam I helped to create. So from a very young age, drawing was already there. But professionally, it started in 2020, and I was never an art student.

Now let’s talk about your artworks. Let’s start with this piece, Idéalisme. Where does the idea come from?

This work talks about identity. African identity, especially. Our children here don’t live in the same world as children in Europe.
You see the empty plate — that’s important. That’s why I called it Idéalisme. He’s developing ideas on his own, without guidance. He doesn’t know who he’ll become, how he’ll start, which path he’ll take to become who he wants to be — or who he believes he is. But he keeps going.
There’s hope. There’s a smile — a confident smile. He tells himself that one day he will become something, one day he will have something. That’s why I represented it with the empty plate. He has nothing — not even a T-shirt like mine — but he still has hope. That’s the idea behind it.

So the plate symbolises lack, and he’s full of hope and aspiration?

Yes.

What emotion do you want to evoke in the viewer?

It’s like a call for support.
When we see these children — many of them living on the streets — they are children who lack material things, but they are incredibly intelligent. Truly intelligent. Often, more than children who grow up wealthy.
They have hunger, desire, and ambition. So when we see these stories, it pushes us to support them, to help children who believe they can become something. That’s it.

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Are you speaking a little about yourself in this work?

No. I’m speaking about what I’ve seen — what I see now. Burundi is one of the countries with many street children. We see this everywhere: on the way to university, in the streets. As artists, we have to try to do something.

I think it becomes another job for artists. As they grow and practice their art, they see that many others could do it too, but there’s a lack — a gap, as we say in English. Talent alone isn’t enough; some conditions need to change, and we can help change.

Let’s talk about Naître digne — Born with Dignity.

That was the first work I created when I arrived in Burundi. It’s a tribute to childhood and growth.
You see the hand pouring water — the source of life. It speaks about rights: the right to education, the right to life.

The water represents education and all the good things. The large hand pouring it symbolises the responsibility of adults, of society.

A child can’t give themselves an education;

it’s their first time living.

They must be guided.

And Résignation?

“Résignation” is something else. That one is more about me. All the people you see in my works exist — they’re around me, friends, people I know. I created Résignation during a moment of chaos. I was preparing an exhibition, but I was down. I couldn’t work anymore. I had no resources to continue.
I still had hope. I prayed and worked at the same time. Résignation was a decision taken when the mouth can no longer speak, when you can’t express yourself anymore — but inside, you tell yourself you can continue, without panicking.
People saw the exhibition, but they didn’t know what had happened inside me — financially, emotionally, everything. After that resignation, I got up and continued working. And now, honestly, I feel like I’m entering another resignation. I’ve been down for some time; I haven’t worked for a month. But I believe I will work again soon.

Where does that inner calm come from?

It depends on the person. Everyone has their own way. For me, going somewhere I like, visiting someone I care about, going to a museum or cultural space.

When I see others succeeding, it gives me strength.

I tell myself: that’s my place too.

I need to stand up and work.

How is access to art in Burundi today?

It depends. Many people focus on portraits and commissions. I do them too, but I don’t think it’s a good long-term path for an artist.
An artist has a mission: to create a world, to transmit something, to build exhibitions. Portraits decorate homes, but they don’t always serve that mission.
Art requires patience. You might not be visible — the work is in front, not you. Many young people don’t like being invisible. And it’s not something that pays quickly.
I started in 2020. Maybe I’ll sell a work that supports me fully in 2035. Until then — how do I live?
That’s why I study telecommunications and IT. I combine it with art: graphic design, video editing. If art smiles, great. If not, I work. That’s how you survive as an artist here.

And Rouge intérieur — Inner Red?

That was a moment of fire. A period when I couldn’t work anymore. I took a photo of myself in my room and drew it.
It came before Résignation. First, there’s the inner disturbance, the discouragement, the fire inside. Then comes resignation. It was a strong moment — a whole collection.

I didn’t go to art school. It’s a gift. I discovered myself in 2020 — learning shading, detail. I learned by working with others, older artists, tutorials. There is the Academy of Fine Arts in Congo, but I couldn’t afford it.

Difficult moments have no age. When you’re a child, not getting candy feels hard. As a teenager, heartbreak feels hard. As an adult, money problems feel hard. It evolves.

Perspective changes. So what you’re telling young artists is that this passes — it’s a phase?

Yes. Exactly.

Patience is everything — not just to start, but to finish. Many artists are depressed because they expect talent alone to be enough. It isn’t. You need work, networks, courage to write to people, to apply, to show yourself internationally. Social media matters. You must work on your network as much as your art.

Many people are afraid to write. But you must. Even if they don’t reply the first time, insist. That’s how things grow.

Art is inspiration, collaboration, reaching beyond your reality. That’s how we move forward.

Let’s talk about Bomoko. In Lingala, that means Unity / Union.

Yes, yes. This resistance is what it actually describes.

I love everything that’s in the piece. And in fact, there is the pagne — the traditional cloth. I made the pillows with the pagne that’s on the right side. That’s why every time I see something like that, it immediately touches me. I even have a book — when I read it, honestly, it’s very good — We Are All Birds of Uganda. The first version I read had a different cover, but this cover has that pagne. I don’t know if you can see it, but it shines. When I saw it, I said, “Mama, I already love this.”

It’s a work that many people loved — Bomoko. Yes, it’s a piece that really resonated with many people. People say, “We really love it.” It’s cool, it’s traditional, it’s collective — even for me. Normally, it’s a work about crisis, but above all, it’s about African unity among Africans. I don’t know where you are right now, but you experience this unity among Africans wherever you are. That unity is always there. Because the pagnes in the background represent unity: they are different fabrics, with different patterns, connected together. Pagne is something you find in Africa — it’s made mostly in Africa. It’s one of those deeply traditional African elements. I wanted to illustrate that in the background — these fabrics touching each other. That’s what it shows: African identity. How we are united everywhere. That unity is felt even in the West — everywhere, everywhere in Europe. That’s why this artwork exists. Why do you find this piece incredible?

Because of the hands — at first, I don’t know why, I thought they were feet and hands. When I saw it for the first time, I was confused. Then I understood the posture — it could only be the hands.

Your inspiration — because you said it comes from the people around you, from yourself, from inner processes, emotions, the passage of time — everything that is shared by all of us. And beyond that, what other inspirations do you have?

Inspiration — this is something more personal. It depends on how each person lives their own story, everything they go through in life. For me personally, when something bad happens to me, or something hurts me more deeply, I’ve noticed — especially recently — that when something painful happens, I become very inspired.

Many difficult things happen to me, but it is precisely in those difficult moments that I feel more inspired.

There are also moments when I go to green spaces, places with open air. There is the city everywhere, but I go where I can breathe, and there I feel inspired, in nature, places like the beach. That’s where I feel inspired. So it really depends. For me, that’s what being inspired means.

So tell me: when you’re at home, where do you usually go to feel comfortable, to breathe, to pass time — not to make art, but just to be yourself?

I spend most of my time at the beach, by the lake. There is a whole neighbourhood there with two beaches. You may have heard of Lake Tanganyika. There are beaches, waterfalls, and almost everything.

Yes, there is real calm there. Burundi has its bars, cafés, and bistros are not very noisy like in Congo. People are calm, they drink quietly without disturbing others. Outwardly, everything is calm — even if inwardly people may be troubled. But that calm allows everyone to reflect, to take time, to concentrate.

You are very young, and you taught yourself — through YouTube, like many of us — how to do certain things. So we can say you are very independent.

Yes, totally independent, because necessity forces you to be.

There is no other way — no one comes to hold your hand and say, “Come, learn.”

So you learn to make use of available resources. Where we are born, we learn to be self-sufficient.

Were there relationships in your personal or professional life that really supported you? It could be your mother, an artist who spoke to you, or another important figure.

When it comes to relationships, I really value lived relationships — real relationships with people. First of all, my parents, because they are the first people. Then my friends from the Academy of Fine Arts, friends who are still there now. We share almost everything. There are my parents, my friends — many friends.

Even though I didn’t have the means to attend the Academy, I stayed connected to those who are there. We spent good times together, lived in the same city, shared new things. They tell me what’s new, what’s happening — other artists too: Jean-Luc, almost everyone. They share their experiences with me — what they live, how they exhibit, their new ways of working.

These are people I will never forget. They really help me in my career. Many people don’t see the difference between me — independent — and those at the Academy. But we share the same values. We work almost the same way. We have the same mission. It’s really thanks to them that I do so much and discover so many things.

And what are your artistic dreams?

My artistic dreams were once very unclear, especially considering African realities and everything we live. But now, as we start gaining visibility and recognition — respect, even — we begin to see change. People call you “artist.” You go to university, to public places, and people show respect.

That gives me courage. It’s something worth pursuing to the end — especially internationally. When you pursue something, you first have to look at your immediate environment. That’s something entrepreneurship teaches: start locally. See if it works. See if your efforts lead somewhere.

Today, we see great artists at home who still end up in poverty. It happens everywhere. Many great African — and especially Congolese — artists have made a name for themselves, are respected, but still live poorly. No one lets them walk on foot, yet they don’t even own a car.

So we should copy their work — but not copy the choices that led them into poverty. I always make the effort to learn from others’ work, but not to copy their path. I have my own sensitivity, my own way of creating.

It’s not about fleeing the country or denying nationality. I love leaving, going somewhere, working, doing great things — and then coming back to invest at home. That’s what I want. Because staying only means stagnation. But if you leave and return, you bring something back to your society — something that helps younger people who follow you. You become an example.

There is this Lingala proverb: EBALE ENTENGAMA PO EZANGAKA MOTEYI. The river got crooked because of a lack of an adviser.

You started well, I’ll expand on this favourite saying of yours.

This is just one of many wise Lingala sayings— there are many. The world is in need of mentors, advisers, even seers — and if they’re not there, that’s when we struggle, because it can take us much longer — much longer — to find our path, right? Is that it?

Yes, that’s it. If you don’t pay attention, you’ll end up like the riverbank. You see, the riverbank is never straight, never level; it’s always slanted. And if you lean only to one side, you’ll find yourself lost.

Today, the artistic world is a risk. Being an artist is a risk. I think even working in communication today is a risk. We accept taking these risks. But if you’re not careful while taking them, you’ll become tilted, unbalanced.

So we’re obliged to follow certain paths, certain directions, guided by elders, by those who came before us. Personally, I don’t know — I’ve always been guided by elders. I try to consult some, even those who aren’t drawers or artists. In Congo, being an artist — it’s almost like an illness. Most of our great artists often end up poor.

There are people who can walk — who should never have to walk long distances on foot — there will always be people to help them, yet they themselves don’t even have a car. You see that kind of person? They have the touch, they have everything, but there’s something they didn’t do to reach the level they should have reached. That’s what it’s about. These are people to learn from — but also people whose mistakes you shouldn’t repeat. You have to do something different.

There are also others who call themselves producers and so on. We try to understand them, then we try to follow them. I told you at the beginning, too:

I’ve always had people at the academy, everywhere, guiding me.

They tell me: no, this weakens here, do it like this, like that. They guide us constantly. Among young people, that’s how it works. And it really helps in a course of study, in a career.

I think you touched on a very important subject: having talent without help. Either it’s advice or practical help to get where you’re going. Yesterday I watched something where an actor — a professional — said that what’s missing in the education of artists today is someone saying: I see you. I think you’d be good at this. I see you in this profession. You have something vital. Like a seer who sees talents, who sees where we can go. What he said was that young people going to artistic schools — actors, artists — get greeted by this very old mentality of pushing them down, making them like new soldiers in the army. I don’t know if you know that practice of crushing people — breaking them — thinking something good will come out of it. He said he disagrees, and I agree too. They crush you, show you that you’re nothing, that you’re worth nothing, and they call that education. But that’s not the method. I don’t know anyone who was told they were useless and then grew up strong and confident. We’re missing elders who say: Yes, you’re not perfect, but I see you here. I see how you could get there. Another thing he said is that what we often hear when we’re young is: That’s too difficult. That’s impossible. That business is too hard. From the very beginning, you’re discouraged, made to feel guilty because it’s “too difficult”, you will never get there.

That’s how it is. In Africa, when a child isn’t considered intelligent at home, they’re sent to draw.

And today, the way artists dress — letting their hair grow, for example — people see them as crazy. At least they have hair, they say. Contemporary fashion, copied by many artists, makes the story harder for spectators and outsiders to understand. They always say we’re crazy. How do you manage? You create a world, but look at your hair. All of that.

So there’s a distinction between what’s considered reasonable — technical jobs, useful things — and those “crazy” people who don’t fit anywhere, who produce strange, incomprehensible, mad things. And yet, young people are actually very intelligent, because they make things that the old generation tries to discourage. One of the questions children ask each other in my culture — because we don’t really have small talk —is: Are you more humanistic or more scientific in the way you think? We asked that when we were young to see where we were oriented, where we functioned best, where our capacities lay. People can see, for example, that you have two sides: a technical side that you use for earning a living, and an artistic side that’s more about vision. And you want to combine them. That’s what many artists actually are. If you only have one side, in many circumstances, it is hard to survive.

It’s something to fuse, something to combine.

That’s why we need culture, training, broader education — to mix things.

In art, there’s entrepreneurship: knowing how to sell your work, knowing ethics, knowing how to talk to clients, and knowing how to communicate. You’ll do interviews, public appearances; you need leadership. All of that is important.

As artists, we have to work on all these points and neglect nothing — technical skills, video, everything. For a start, it’s always difficult. You can’t have everything from the beginning. You need at least a base in everything, and then people will come.

A message and encouragement for young artists…

So encouragement to everyone who aspires to art — and I’m not speaking only about drawing, but art in general.

To those who are new to art, who are inspired, who breathe visual and contemporary art, my message is: work, persevere, and above all, be patient. Do a lot of research. Work.

I might even be an example myself. People ask whether I had training — I had none. It came through work, through searching, through curiosity, through teamwork.

And finally, what can we wish you for the future?

For my career? I want to combine drawings with performance, creation in big spaces, and collaborate with major personalities. I think I’ve already taken a step— that’s already something. The essential thing is to keep working, keep researching. Work alone isn’t enough; you have to mix things. I also plan to study, because talent alone isn’t enough. I need structure, knowledge. Sometimes we work without even knowing what we’re doing, and others use technical terms we don’t understand. Yet we do it well. That’s why education matters.

I want to go further, work with great people, become a role model, especially because we still have many “rivers” to straighten.

Where I come from, it’s rare to see that. People see my photos on social media and think I’ve already made it, that I’m already living a higher life than they are. But in reality, we’re still working.

To learn more about FLORENT MWARABU and his upcoming projects, please check his profile:

I recognise this building. There is no one in the gateway, just as then, once again. From the ceiling, fluorescent tubes spill a brutal cone of light; the stairs are slippery.

I recognise the smell of your apartment, and once again I have the impression that, shortly before my arrival, a thunderbolt heralding a storm struck the building; that biting, dry, slightly sweet air, saturated with the smell of burning, is impossible to forget. It might be the smell of the coffee the neighbour is roasting, traditionally, always around this time, as you explain. The Ethiopian lady, as it sounds from your description. Ethiopian? Eritrean? Somalian? I am pretty sure—Somalian—but it doesn’t matter. The lady matters, her coffee matters, but the geography… It would be ignorant, really to give it a very specific nationality. Although so many countries proudly guard coffee as a neat national product; it simply didn’t begin that way. Long before borders, coffee travelled with people across the Horn of Africa. Traders, nomads, and sailors were moving between the Ethiopian highlands, the Red Sea, Yemen, Eritrea, and the Swahili Coast. Somali coffee culture grew on the road. The Horn of Africa has always been one cultural basin, not separate countries, where the Red Sea functioned as a bridge, not a border. ‘Somali’ traders historically supplied coffee to Eritrea, Yemen, Sudan and Egypt, even the Indian Ocean world, including Oman.

And… Besides coffee, I remember you.

I have seen your gaze before; once I saw you sitting in the painful glow of the lights, attentively staring ahead, immersed in the scent of the storm, waiting for me to speak.

When I appeared here for the first time, it was the same.

You were sitting and listening in exactly the same way, from exactly the same distance as now, surveying everything around you with an incredible intensity, focused and motionless. And although a great deal of time has passed since that day, not even what made our first meeting so exceptional has changed—because just as then I did not know who you were, so I do not know it today, when we meet again, and I am once again standing to talk. And since I cannot explain what you expect of me, I would at least like to understand why I have come here again—why I, your helpless chosen one, for unknown reasons, have been invited here.

And so we find ourselves at the same point as before: I had no intention whatsoever of accepting the invitation, and yet I am here. Over the phone, I said, fine, we’ll see—please call again later today and we’ll discuss the details, though all the while I was thinking there was no question of it. What was there to imagine? One should surely have dreamt enough to satisfy their qualms. And then that second invitation would not leave me in peace any more than the first. The thought would not let go of me—you know perfectly well what I do, that I am not an expert in more than one, two, possibly three, fields, that I know nothing that might be of interest to those modern others; on top of that I have poor diction, I swallow word endings or add some unnecessarily—so what is all this for, I wondered.

And I kept asking myself further questions: for example, what kind of collaboration is this? And for what reason do they want it to be me, and now again, the choice falls on me. And in general: what sense does it make?

I could go on endlessly, but I won’t. I believe everything points to the fact that matters are still exactly as they were the first time: I said something, not really knowing to whom I was speaking, and you listened; no-one applauded; finally, in silence, without speaking to one another, you dispersed through the building, and I went out and set off ahead of me, followed by an entire retinue of escorts whom I was in no way able to dissuade from their intention—“to ensure my safety,” and escort me home.

What did I say then? For those who weren’t witnesses that time, I will repeat in short what I said:

Faulty ventral anchors?!

You asked me So what makes an anchor faulty?

Something that once felt regulating but no longer truly brings safety, or never really did. This happens in a relationship where you only feel okay if the other person is present. That could be a therapist, teacher, or authority figure who “knows what’s good for you”.

So you look for ventral anchors, knowingly, more often instinctively. They are nothing more than objects, symbols, things, places, people, relationships, words, sentences, fragments of art, animals, environments, and places in nature that promote a space of regulation. You look for your own.

My autonomic nervous system will not tell you what is safe for you. No therapist will tell you that either. They can suggest—but you are the one who checks, more precisely: Your nervous system checks. And it is your nervous system that answers with stability, with contact, a sense of safety, calm, curiosity…

Then you say, that the key is understanding. And I continue: Understanding does not change the nervous system. The experience of safety does, quoting Bessel van der Kolk. Because if understanding alone were enough, then books would heal trauma, films would change childhood, and podcasts would repair relationships. You can know everything. You can understand where it came from. You can name it beautifully. And the nervous system… still responds with fear, tension, freezing.

Techniques are tools, and who other than me wouldn’t appreciate books, films and podcasts…? What truly works is a safe space that slowly forms, a space where one can speak without being judged, where emotions do not destroy relationships, where there is no need to rush, where someone stays, even when things become difficult.

Everything remained as before—yes, with one single exception: this time I wasn’t left a free choice, of which I will speak, but I was asked to tell in what kind of world I would like to live.

In what kind of world would I like to live in?!

Usually, it is indifferent to me what I am asked or questioned about; my answers always respond to requests or questions that were never actually voiced. Now, however, quickly—indeed immediately, as soon as I put down my phone—I realised there would be no such need. I understood that, contrary to appearances, you did not take such an approach to the topic seriously; I understood that such a long-unheard-of yet all the more heart-gripping request did not limit me in any way—on the contrary, in the deepest sense of the word, my hands were completely free. I could decide for myself what I wanted to speak about, and you merely wished to make it clear that you are interested in the world—and, if I understood correctly, in what it ought to be like.

I do not deny that after our phone conversation I spent some time (I’m too shy to say how long exactly) wondering whether this surprisingly naïve—one might say childishly simple—question did not mean that, for some reason unknown to me, you feel able to say: fine, the world was such and such, but what should it be now?

Yes, that even occurred to me, though later I pushed the thought aside, because after all, confronted with your severe, unmoving, and almost terrifyingly disciplined attention, I had no reason to think I had found myself among dreamers—still less that I would need to make you aware that, in the state the world finds itself in today, dreaming is something unbearable and completely idiotic (I am trying to sound credible, repeating after some) and one should measure a good amount of caffeine to awaken, to check where they were late to…

And so that is a false trail, I concluded, abandoning the attempt to unravel the actual content of the topic set before me, and—no small part carried along by the waves stirred in me by that unexplained, real content of the proposed subject—I asked myself what would happen if, contrary to my original intention, I were to come here again; and if I were to come again, looking straight ahead, as the situation required, with a deeply pensive expression, what would be the thing I could speak about. Overworking to feel “useful”? Perfectionism masquerading as stability? Spiritual bypassing? Numbing routines, doom-scrolling, dissociation disguised as rest?

Literally, what to talk about…?

Perhaps about love? I wondered. Love is sometimes nothing more than staying one step behind, careful not to disturb the world of the other, comes straight to my mind (from The Museum of Innocence). But then I think—subject covered to excess—why would I take the first one from the priority list?

Or maybe better about death! It gets us all, after all.

I sat racking my brain—no longer looking out the window (repeating: love?), but straight ahead (repeating: death?), still with a thoughtful expression, as the situation required.

It would be best, I decided, rising from the chair, if I spoke about fate—about why what is, is so utterly unbearable. I sat back down on the bed, this time with the final resolution that this, then, is what I would speak about. After all, I went to latin classes, and I know that fated comes from the Latin fatum, meaning:

that which has been spoken

It derives from fari — to speak, to utter. So if originally fate is not about destiny in the romantic sense, but about something said into existence, I definitely want to declare that. And I promise, there will be no liberty of the United States, I wil not turn myself into a statue, I won’t even rhyme it either (I declare myself free from the sentences spoken over me).

Before I begin my honest declaration, however, I have a request.

I saw how that man… closed the door to the hall. I don’t like to speak with the door entirely shut, not with them open so wide that the outside conversations disturb my voice. Let’s keep them neither open nor closed— halfway, so to say. I will speak all the way, but the door should be positioned halfway, that’s all.

And now to the point.

The question is as follows: Can one say anything about fate, dear listeners? Such doesn’t exist, except…

So please, listen to this!

“For young men, and women, too, what makes you different or weird, that’s your strength,” Meryl Streep told graduates. Obviously, I am not talking to any graduates, students at their best; it’s not a speech, and there are no professors in the room.

I had never truly understood that strange word weird — or, for that matter, being not especially ordinary with some offbeat interests, nor causing a stir, nothing of a Marilyn Monroe’s personality. Considered “strange,” enigmatic, or uniquely captivating because embodying a complex paradox: a careful, hyper-romanticised public persona that contrasted sharply with her shy, intellectual, and deeply vulnerable private self (Norma Jeane).

Today, weird might mean, in your reception, something odd, uncanny, unsettling, not quite right; mildly strange at best, faintly disturbing at worst. But that’s the watered-down version. Isn’t?

Let me tell you then that weird comes from Old English wyrd (which did not mean strange at all), essentially meaning “fate” or destiny, what happens to you whether you like it or not. Medieval Scots writers even referred to the “weird sisters” as the goddesses of fate, and Shakespeare simply adopted that term for Macbeth’s three witches. In other words, the word literally named the Fates. Even Norse mythology carries this root — one of the Norns who weave human destiny is named Urðr (Old Norse wyrd). Only by the 1800s did weird weaken into its modern sense of strange or eerie.

In short, what you might take upon as a quirky “insult”, or lighter: euphemism for awkward outsider, was originally a word for destiny and supernatural power. Many modern writers call it “emancipatory,” saying it “liberates us from being defined by … others and helps us ‘subvert expectation’. On t-shirts, weird is being married with “limited edition”, which itself originated in the publishing industry during the Victorian era to describe books printed in small, high-quality batches to justify a premium price.

When some people say something is weird, they often mean: it doesn’t fit the pattern, it disrupts the expected order… As if reality were ever to be fully under control.

A fateful person is then someone who alters the course of your life, even slightly, arrives at a decisive moment (with a speech or not), or becomes a hinge between who you were and who you become. Often, you only recognise them after they’ve changed something. So, no. Not strange, not awkward, not misplaced — but consequential.

She was a fateful presence in his life, though at the time he mistook her for a passing acquaintance.

History remembers the decision, but it was the fateful person behind it who shifted the era.

Aren’t people meant not to fulfil or fit the pattern, but to bend it? That’s the adventure, the question at stake. Not one, but one of many.

This standalone aphorism that will reach you one day, if it hasn’t yet, could be translated: The great adventure of existence is to find where one feels at home. Home—romanticised, isn’t? We all rent, build, create homes, always much better each time we try—we had various homes, and not everyone longs to go back there, yes, on a sunny day, but not every day, that wouldn’t be aimed. The great adventure of life is discovering where you belong? Yes, where you belong …where life finally makes sense? We all know there is no such literal place. Belonging is created, not found, sense, meaning: it is life itself. Maybe the most faithful (not fatefull) translation would be: The great adventure of existence is finding the place where you are well.

Yes, well, the best you could be in your current circumstances. And they might change. You might change them. That might be yours, and certainly is my will, not because the current ones are terrible but because wellness changes its shape. It discards its methods the way the body renews its cells. To persist with yesterday’s remedies is mere sentimentality. Care, like truth, endures only insofar as it can revise itself.

If you do like one-liners (not eyeliner, ladies! — The most beautiful makeup a woman can wear is passion. Cosmetics are simply easier to buy, as Yves Saint Laurent put it), you might still read from the wisest men in history. Yes. Not only didn’t they waste time on make-up, but encapsulated wisdom into quotes that we treat as pills. Steve Jobs, together with other tech gurus, would create empires so that the grey mass could scroll while they would read the ancient philosophers and I mean, read them, not just taking the pills. Always worth asking what is worthy to be.

So now, after dropping some less lengthy pills and specialised reads that might be of your interest (might not, but worth checking?), as a prelude to the second part of my discourse, I will tell, loud and clear, a poem entitled Will from ‘Poems of Passion’ by Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

Will

There is no chance, no destiny, no fate,

Can circumvent or hinder or control

The firm resolve of a determined soul.

Gifts count for nothing; will alone is great;

All things give way before it, soon or late.

What obstacle can stay the mighty force

Of the sea-seeking river in its course,

Or cause the ascending orb of day to wait?

Each well-born soul must win what it deserves.

Let the fool prate of luck. The fortunate

Is he whose earnest purpose never swerves,

Whose slightest action or inaction serve.

The one great aim.

Why, even Death stands still,

And waits an hour sometimes for such a will.

I could end there. How many people are still reading this, so many ideas about love, death, fate, health, even free will, and more conversely, balanced tech dose and face image, their own and the one of their dear ones. Think of the difference in understanding the concepts of hospitality and captivity, and how much we differ in assessing the situation, how much various things occupy us in the matter of the “common cause”, which is sadly losing its importance, though I would prefer to think not.

You’re certainly surprised that I’m not trying to cleverly conceal it, but rather openly admit it: in my case, it’s a trifle. It’s extraordinary, even, I think, ridiculous, because, well, it would be quite understandable if you shouted now, dear artist, you could dust off this brief thought before presenting it, because it’s an old, please forgive me, old story, in short, dusty, yes; to be disappointed in human intelligence, well, okay, maybe not all of humanity at once.

What am I supposed to do? Because that’s the order of things, after earlier experiences and the terrible wounds they inflicted, the human spirit, rising above and resigning from mortal life, grows tired of a world mired in boredom and hopelessness, flies above it, and finally abandons it, calling the secret, unrecognised, mysterious greatness of the object of its spiritual choices.

Most people’s attention is constantly focused on themselves, and as a subject, they remain prisoners of their own safety. They are not interested in the universe, but in their (hopefully special) place in it, not in the God of the universe, but in the chance of becoming the chosen one. In short, the object becomes a sacred yet painfully impossible task, while the worthy existence, the importance of attention—however scattered—continues to exist and always will.

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Today marks exactly two years sinced I started to write on Substack. So today, on the 6th of February, by writing, I do not promote celebration of the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation or the Frozen Yogurt Day, as the Internet might suggest, but of one’s voice and unrepeatable life, share of humanity and attention, so rare—so to be highly appreciated. (The reason why I promote getting the Substack App is straighforward and simple: so the ones who choose to listen while commuting can do so.)

Sources:

10 MERYL STREEP SAYINGS THAT WILL GET YOU THROUGH THE SUMMER — Rooftop Cinema Club

Word of the Day: Weird | Merriam-Webster

Weird — Etymology, Origin & Meaning

Defining and emancipating weirdness: A reflection for Weird Pride — Emergent Divergence

To celebrate my two years of writing here, let me drop two reads from Medium:

• Art for Change Rwanda

• All is One

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I am not saying this only because I used the phrase quite recently and, the following day, watched a film in which a university professor and noted translator, Leda Caruso (The Lost Daughter), after disclosing that she comes from Leeds, hears That’s impressive and responds in the same way I did when approached about speaking French.

There is an old literary intuition — shared by Montaigne, by Simone Weil, by late Woolf — by which true measure produces restraint. Those who have lived inside a discipline long enough no longer marvel at its surface effects.

Montaigne writes not in praise of brilliance but of justesse — rightness.

The unimpressed are often not withholding admiration; they are refusing exaggeration.

Goethe, in his conversations, returns often to the idea that experience dulls astonishment but sharpens judgement. The master does not say anything extraordinary because they know how many ordinary steps were required to arrive there.

What looks impressive to the uninitiated looks inevitable to the initiated.

This intuition aligns closely with Nietzsche’s suspicion of applause. In Human, All Too Human, he suggests that praise often reveals more about the admirer’s hunger than about the thing admired. Applause can be a form of self-exoneration: I am moved because I cannot do this.

Those who “measured less” are not wrong to be impressed — but their admiration is no proof. It is emotional.

Literature has always warned us: admiration is cheap when it costs nothing to give.

Simone Weil treats attention — not admiration — as the highest form of respect. To be unimpressed may mean: I am looking properly. The person who possesses the skill and says, It is not impressive, is often saying: I see the seams. I know how much further this could go.

One should not trust the admiration of those for whom the thing admired remains miraculous. Miracles belong to distance. What is known from the inside ceases to astonish.

The unimpressed do not deny value. They deny illusion.

Let’s take a little fragment of literature, for instance, what Shakespeare is to England, or Goethe is to Germany, Walt Whitman is to the US.

In fact, on the first publication of his book Leaves of Grass, one critic declared, ‘An American bard at last!’ — although that review was a little biased, given that it was written by Whitman himself! Eventually, though, he would receive praise from others — and a lot of it. The Transcendentalist poet Emerson said of Whitman’s first collection that it was the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed, while years after his death, the modernist Ezra Pound said that he was ‘America’s poet.

He is talked about as being a democratic poet who spoke to and listened to the people and captured them and the national spirit in his beautiful verse, as seen in this poem.

Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good fortune,

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,

Strong and content, I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,

I do not want the constellations any nearer,

I know they are very well where they are,

I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,

I carry them, men and women,

I carry them with me wherever I go,

I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,

I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)

— Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

A sure sign of greatness is being pastiched, and so, further cementing Whitman’s status as an American icon, is this little comic tribute to his poem ‘Song of the Open Road’ by Ogden Nash. The descendant of the very serious General Francis Nash — the man after whom the city of Nashville, Tennessee is named — Ogden was known for not taking anything, least of all himself, too seriously. Instead he was famed for his sharp, whimsical sense of humour and his playful use of rhyme and language, often making up words as he went along. A Harvard dropout, he worked at the same advertising firm as the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, before going on to work at the New Yorker magazine. Like Spike Milligan, he was a master of quips, such as ‘In chaos sublunary / What remains constant but buffoonery?’

I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree.

Indeed, unless the billboards fall I’ll never see a tree at all.

Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)

One of the best-known contemporary American writers, Nikki Giovanni was the author of dozens of books of award-winning verse, essays, memoirs, anthologies and children’s poetry. Giovanni has devoted herself to teaching, and has been a professor. Of her work, she has said:

My dream was not to publish or to even be a writer: my dream was to discover something no one else had thought of. I guess that’s why I’m a poet. We put things together in ways no one else does.

Here is one of my favourite poems of hers (also performed by herself — a link to a long and amusing TED Talk by her—below).

I was born in the congo

I walked to the fertile crescent and built the sphinx

I designed a pyramid so tough that a star that only glows every one hundred years falls into the center giving divine perfect light

I am bad

I sat on the throne

drinking nectar with allah

I got hot and sent an ice age to europe to cool my thirst

My oldest daughter is nefertiti the tears from my birth pains created the nile

I am a beautiful woman

I gazed on the forest and burned out the sahara desert

with a packet of goat’s meat and a change of clothes

I crossed it in two hours

I am a gazelle so swift so swift you can’t catch me

For a birthday present when he was three

I gave my son hannibal an elephant He gave me rome for mother’s day

My strength flows ever on

My son noah built new/ark and I stood proudly at the helm as we sailed on a soft summer day I turned myself into myself and was jesus

men intone my loving name

All praises All praises

I am the one who would save

I sowed diamonds in my back yard

My bowels deliver uranium the filings from my fingernails are semi-precious jewels

On a trip north

I caught a cold and blew

My nose giving oil to the arab world I am so hip even my errors are correct

I sailed west to reach east and had to round off the earth as I went

The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid across three continents

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal I cannot be comprehended except by my permission

I mean…I… can fly like a bird in the sky…

Yes, we put things together in ways no one else does — but not because we are grander, or more astonishing. Just as the American poetry, at its best, is not impressed with itself (Whitman walks the open road; Giovanni ascends into the myth of the cheap miracle) our work holds because it has been measured from the inside, so to speak, from the open road to the sky.

As William Shakespeare would perhaps say:

“Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

Let us keep going.

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Privately, I am not very talkative. But I loved the stage. I loved everything that led to it.

I started to perform poetry when I was about 11, maybe 12. A teacher from a local cultural centre visited our school, looking for children who might be receptive to performance art—those with sensitivity, capable of standing still, of expressing something deeper, a certain readiness: an openness to being shaped by something larger than oneself. I… was an obedient, respectful, quiet pupil. We were asked to choose a poem and simply say it. After I finished mine, I was invited to attend tutoring sessions at the local “Culture House,” as we called it.

My first tutor was a woman who came to the school; sometimes we rehearsed in her private home when her child was ill. Later, I was “taken over” by a male tutor—a graduate of sociology, a theatre instructor, and a jury member in the early stages of the town’s competitions. I started to take part.

Funny enough, it all started with what the orthodontists of that time believed to be too many teeth in my mouth. Some of my teeth—faithful to their owner’s nature—didn’t want to grow in the usual direction, so it was decided they needed to be readjusted. I remember a lot of bright light, a lot of periodic pain, and endless exercises to open my mouth wide enough to give the air a chance to pass through all that metal. It was inevitable: even before then, air had trouble finding its way out of my mouth, getting lost in the maze of independent incisors, canines, premolars, and molars. And let us not even mention the wisdom teeth, which would come later, eager to play their vital, destructive role in an otherwise orderly, rearranged kingdom of structure.

Unconcerned with aesthetics, I wanted help with something else: the ability to speak clearly. My theatre instructors showed me that I had a voice, that I could let it out for a variety of purposes. We worked on my voice, breathing, and understanding of the texts—long mirror sessions (I hated mirrors!). We worked with poems and prose, dismantling one at a time. I discovered some kind of interaction between myself and the texts. With the nature of someone who draws words, who prefers to keep them to myself unless safely covered by a protective shawl of someone else’s words, I recognised that when pronouncing texts, I was becoming an unknown to myself persona, a medium of deeper meanings. And not long before I knew I was deep down in…This is when I got exposed to some brilliant writing: Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino, Bohumil Hrabal, Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Marguerite Yourcenar, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, just to mention some.

I practised various forms—études, recitation. I did not possess a natural, effortless memory, so I repeated the texts thousands of times. On the morning of a competition, I would open my eyes and recite the piece without emphasis. When everything held, I knew I would be able to “deliver it”.

Once or twice, I faltered early in the day. And once, I forgot the text entirely, on the “stage” (although the setting wasn’t really stage-like, the whole place felt uncomfortable, maybe too near a library;-). The disaster wasn’t forgetting, but that I was in the wrong place and despite the signs, the place that didn’t feel right, the poet whom I didn’t appreciate (only her texts were allowed). And I didn’t withdraw. It was a love poem. At that time, I disliked love poetry; I did not believe in that particular poet. I believed in others—Szymborska, for instance.

I remember returning to the classroom afterwards and continuing with my lessons. Not long after, my language and literature teacher began changing the displays on the classroom walls. The poet now prominently featured had just received the Nobel Prize for Literature. She lived in the nearest large city to our town. It was Szymborska. Until then, my teacher had never strayed beyond the prescribed programme. Suddenly, Szymborska’s face and poetry mattered. Suddenly, the poems and her image appeared everywhere.

Internally, I was disgusted with all this sudden obedience to recognition, the conversion of indifference into prescribed reverence. Perhaps I simply did not like the teacher. I was impeccable in grammar, fulfilled every requirement, but there was no invitation to risk, to be passionate about literature.

Fortunately, my high final exam results opened the door to an elite high school where I entered an entirely different game. And that was even long before I went to study literature, which is another topic.

Before that, through their texts, and many others, I progressed through the second and third stages of national competitions, held near the external borders of our country. Those journeys that continued throughout the next stages of my literary education—away from home, with workshops and performances of exceptional actors and singers got catalogued in my memory among the best.

No, I don’t have any pictures from that period.

Text in other languages? No, not yet, that came later, in school, when we performed French plays. No! Didn’t play main roles. I only remember playing a police officer. I guess I didn’t have much to say, but I wore a tie.

I like ties.

One of my colleagues’ mothers organised trips to the theatre (he later became a playwright—I never thought I would write a play, until it changed recently…), and almost at once I found myself belonging to the bohemian world.

I love theatre, and I enjoy cinematography too, especially when it achieves engagement through a strong story.

Personally, I like telling unobvious stories.

That is why art is made: to dissolve boundaries, to soften hardened ways of thinking. Art certainly can make us think—and that is where change begins. With those individual impulses we receive, impulses that alter how we see the world. A different way of seeing, in turn, becomes a different attitude, and a different attitude leads us to draw boundaries in new places—or to dissolve them altogether. And slowly, step by step, change comes into being.

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Where from?

From something called the internet.

OK, stalking me.

Hehe. Before talking to you personally.

My main source of information was Komez Art. This is where you sell your pieces, don’t you? So there’s not an awful lot of information about you apart from, you know, your profile, the representation that we all know: Fine Art Painter, multidisciplinary visual artist who uses his work as an instrument to tell real-life stories and highlight the most important aspects of life to society.
Here we would like a little of your personal story, if this is what you would like to share with us.

From those platforms, you only learn a couple of lines about the artist — sorry to say, just a simple biography.

Well, obviously that’s what they do, but not what I tend to do.

OK, so please let me know — what do you want to hear from me?

I would like you to tell me things that no one knows.

OK, so secrets.

Yes, absolutely, still without pulling you by the tongue. You will tell me what you want to disclose. I was wondering first: is there anything from you as a city boy that impacted who you are today as a person, as an artist?

I think it has been. That’s where I feel really connected.

You are drinking Fanta.

Oh my God, yeah.

Yeah — famous soft drink of Rwanda.

Yeah, I just have to drink it because I don’t see it in Europe, so I have to find it here and drink it.

Yes. So I was asking about your childhood. We don’t know anything about it. We don’t know how you grew up, who you grew up with, what happened on the way, or what made you start to paint. Please, tell us about it.

OK. I was born and raised here in Kigali. I would say that I’m a city boy, as you said. I was born in 2002, from a very big family — six, children and parents. We got lucky to live with our parents all the time.

Growing up, I couldn’t see anybody in the family who was an artist, for real. But my father was an architect at that time, so I could see some sketches on paper — houses, not paintings or whatever, but sketches. So I think that really drove me to love art.

I remember the first person who told me I was talented was my nursery school teacher. Luckily, we are still in contact — we still talk, and she knows my progress. So I would say that I started drawing in nursery school, as far as I can remember.

Growing up, it wasn’t easy for me to choose art because my parents didn’t really believe in art before. Not only my parents — also uncles, aunties, everybody in the family couldn’t believe that I could pursue art and become who I am today. They wanted me to be maybe an administrator, engineer, or whatever. But it wouldn’t be just to blame them because it’s the society and the country we grew up in, the economy and everything. It wasn’t easy for parents to understand how a kid could be an artist and make a living from it.

But fortunately, I made it.

So I went to normal schools — government-sponsored schools here in Kigali. I went to primary school in a neighbourhood called Kacyiru. From 2009, the system was still in French, and then they shifted to English. I would say I was in the first promotion that started with English. It was new, even the teachers were struggling to speak fluent English, so it wasn’t easy.

That’s why I asked if it’s David or Davide.

I remember when I was in P4, primary four, I used to draw African maps, Rwanda maps, on the blackboard for the kids — graphical things. I started to be a star from that time. Everybody knew the guy who was really good at drawing maps. So I got a lot of motivation.

From that time, I started to think of continuing art in high school as well. It wasn’t easy, but I made it. In 2018, I joined an art school.

Nyundo.

Oh, you know it. Yes.

Before that, I made some money drawing pencil portraits, but I was just doing it for fun. Joining school really shaped me into a professional artist.

I started thinking: how am I going to survive with this talent? How am I going to make sure that the school fees were a return on investment?

I approached galleries, painters I knew. I was lucky to know many painters because I was born and raised in Kacyiru. It was the first neighbourhood where art really started in Rwanda around 2008–2010. Galleries were born there. I grew up knowing artists.

I remember my first exhibition — a group exhibition. I exhibited with big artists and all my pieces sold.

I was like, wow, this is it.

I started making money and proved to my parents that this could work.

I graduated in 2021 and joined many galleries in Kigali as a professional artist. I started travelling — Europe, selling works to the USA, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, France, Philippines and Qatar. I taught for a few months in Belgium in art academies. I did exhibitions there.

So my professional journey started then — building a portfolio, working with big galleries.

So may we say that Ecole D’Arts De Nyundo really opens the door to an artist?

Yes, Nyundo really opened doors. It’s not only about the school itself but also about society when you find yourself, the peers, the colleagues, you can see that you have to compete. This is when I had to open my eyes and do incredible things. So I would say at school, that school had really opened the doors for many, many different artists, not necessarily through exhibitions, but through exposure.

Who influenced you later on?

From childhood, I worked with watercolours, inks, and pens. In art school, I started oils and acrylics. After graduating, I met Akimana Fabien, a local Rwandan artist.

Fabien later opened ABIEN ARTS CENTRE.

Yes, the centre, you know that guy?

Not personally. His work is displayed at the NIYO art.

Yes, it’s him.

He told me: You can try to make all these practises, the styles into one unique style.

That’s how I came up with a mixed media style: pen, paint, ink and many different things. So I would say that that guy really. He gave me a brilliant idea and really influenced my style ’cause from that time I started to mix up everything that I know, like the things that I have been working on since childhood and to this point.

I’m also influenced by a lady from the USA called Deborah, whose work I love. Colleagues influence me too.

Style always changes. Sometimes I look at work from three years ago and don’t like it. Other times, I look at work from ten years ago and think, wow, I can’t even do that again.

I destroy my work sometimes. Even yesterday, I cut a painting into parts. I flipped works so I don’t keep adding to them.

Camille Pissarro said: “Work at the same time upon sky, water, branches, ground, keeping everything going on an equal basis and unceasingly reworking until you have brought it to the point you want.” And that point you want often doesn’t arrive.

Very true.

I would like to talk to you about your artwork, particularly pieces that struck me. There is “Wild Dreams” with a man with a peculiar look, rather traditional outfit in front of the White House…

It was a farmer whom I talked to, he lived in a remote village in Rwanda, had many great ideas, and dreamed of becoming President of the USA. And here he was, where he was. I called it Wild Dreams. Dreams have no limits. I wanted him symbolic. There is a small ball at the bottom. It symbolises the brilliance. Brilliant ideas, bright future, brilliant everything.

Actually speaking a little bit about my process, I get an idea, and I go into my sketchbook. I try to combine everything, every idea that I have. Even in this case, started like that.

And the text on kitenge?

The texts on clothing come from books and old magazines. Don’t you worry, I don’t destroy people’s books. I select words that fit the idea. Recently, I also used AI-generated text, printed and cut.

I must ask about the women figures in your painting, that incredible painting, entitled “Queen”. Pink background, flowers and in the middle, a woman in a pink dress with disproportionately big slippers or shoes? Tell me. Tell me more about it.

People have been asking me why I love painting male figures. Why are you into it a lot? And there was like, you know, let me try to challenge myself to work with the female figures, to hear their stories. And I think currently, I’m loving them a lot. So in that particular work, many different women love pink, so I went to explain the feminine energy, trying to romanticise it with a very good dress, the flowers and everything, yeah. I do believe that every woman should feel like a queen.

Absolutely.

Children appear a lot, too.

I had a friend in Belgium. She’s a very good lady and a good friend of mine. She has PhD in psychology. So she asked, ‘David, tell me more about your story, about what you’ve been through, about everything’. So we, we had a conversation, a very good conversation. And after a while, she was like, ‘I asked you that question so that I can try to reflect on the work that you do.’ Cause, you know, sometimes artists cannot really explain what they’re doing, it just comes naturally, an expression of the things. So when you hear about what they have been through, you can be like, oh, OK, now I get it. So I think that’s my, my, my perspective on love. Bring the kids a lot. Yeah. It’s just my life, what I have been through as a kid.

Do you think you have ever portrayed yourself?

No, no, no, no, no. The self-portrait. Yeah, as a key to adulthood. Maybe, maybe, maybe I don’t have good pictures of myself.

These paintings of children are incredible. I love them.

Thank you. And I have a new collection of the works that I will be posting in the coming days.

I can see so many already, for example, that girl in “Glipse of Legacy 04”, she has that incredible, piercing look. And then you have the pieces of material as clothing, the background is painted. Tell me more.

Well. I would say that I mixed up many different things, as I told you. Growing up working with watercolours, I use them mostly in the dresses and the hands and legs and everything. Paper cutting, you know, oil paints just as a background, a landscape in the back, I use acrylics and oil paints, and sometimes even use pastels. I use watercolours. I mean, I use many different things.

It’s like problem-solving or challenging myself. Why can’t I use this? Why can’t I try to put on some clothes on the things? But for me as a person, I believe that the best artists are the artists who are not limited to any sort of materials, are the artists who can do art without needing many things.

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1)

You know I lose myself inside myself. Enough that I don’t know how to write a letter about myself.

After all, supposedly:

“There is nothing here.”

I write furiously. My hands tremble. I could burst into a grim laugh to express the helplessness of rage… — you can’t do that in a letter.

⸻

2)

There is not enough of you.

Your words are not enough.

No matter how much you speak to me — it’s not enough.

No matter how much you write and I read — it’s not enough.

No matter how much you feel — it’s not enough.

Not enough!

It is not your fault.

There is not enough of your being.

Especially now, when we were already in that Big City of the Future, and on Saturday evening I couldn’t hear from you …

Not enough of me either.

My words are not enough.

No matter how much I speak — it’s not enough and never as it should be.

No matter how much I write — not enough.

No matter how much I feel — not enough.

No matter how much I do — not enough.

Not enough!

I feel guilty. And furious.

Because you deserve more, and a thousand times better. Maybe you’ll leave, because maybe one day that’s exactly what you’ll want. And I’ll stay here alone. Why sit in an empty room painted black — on a cold concrete floor?

That’s how it is with Monty.

That’s why I’m not sure you’ll stay, although you have allowed me hope — and now I have it — although it wouldn’t be good if that hope bound you in any way.

Little Creature — that’s what I’m afraid of.

That is why, if I could, I would burn the Garden.

Then Monty would die — and I — and I — and I — and I.

Only the purest “it” would remain — the shell.

But then certainly you would no longer be here. Therefore, I cannot burn the Garden.

Let it remain as it is. Or maybe something can be built?

I sit, so dull and undefined, by the wall of some burnt house at dusk. I don’t have the strength to stand up.

I think you know what that is.

You know much.

⸻

3)

If I made the first step balancing above the ultimate abyss — if I struck the first blow at a man with a knife, in a surge of anger — in revenge for being hit in the face — if someone forced out of me that animal behaviour — if I once crossed the first boundary — the boundary of revenge by violence — there would be no return. One would have to go further, consistently, until the end, one or the other.

There would be no way back. I would never return to the initial state — before the knife strike.

Therefore, such an act demands the next, and the next — an aggression no longer restrained by anything — an explosion of everything that has sat inside for years, deep down. And then not only that man who struck me, but the whole world, every person around would have to feel the revenge of what would come out of him then. And destruction would follow him as wide as he could make it — he’d be able to bite with his teeth into the throat of the most innocent of innocents — until he would be stopped completely — either by death or by total physical incapacitation.

Such was the dream of past years.

If I were to fall asleep forever, I would prefer such an ending to the railway tracks.

⸻

4)

How would I like to appear in the Little Creature’s dreams?

Uninterruptedly.

As an object — somewhere in the background — almost unnoticed, present but not intrusive. And sometimes, when she needs it, as someone close and understanding. Someone close enough, someone who understands enough.

And Alienne — listen — these points — these are, hahaha, CONFESSIONS. Confessions of something that sounds terribly banal, because so many idiots have spoken of it too rashly, that when one uses such words now, one sounds like such a rash idiot oneself. Confessions of something that only time can ultimately confirm — time not lost, future time, the time that lies in reserve.

Besides, all this cannot really be defined precisely, nor named, in the case of such a unique being as the Little Creature.

In any case, perhaps on the occasion of this awful letter — worthy of burning — and using this absolute, irresponsible freedom:

I confess something to you. Or maybe rather something. Something that would like to be as gentle and painless as intention, but ultimately often causes things to be the worst and the most painful — perhaps just like now? (And I’ve never confessed “something” to anyone — so by confessing “something” to you, I confess a great deal indeed — Little Creature.)

Choose for yourself what you will take from all this.

As for me: please choose something.

“I adore generalities and I love not naming anything by its name!!” — he shouted, folded his hands like a little child, pursed his lips and began shifting from foot to foot, slightly embarrassed.

Before you give that “something” a name (and you may be certain that the name you choose will be the most accurate possible), look how they all speak of me — and remember, this is only the beginning of a dreadful, gloomy story, whose beginning and ending are unknown…

⸻

Oskar speaks in him.

To the Little Creature he says:

“It is not good, nor cosy, nor pleasant inside. Don’t listen to this pseudo-sentimental idiot when he talks sweetness. The only feeling he is capable of is hatred — and even that in a limited way, for it is only hatred toward himself. Sometimes he doesn’t even know when he is pretending — and gets lost in it. Beware of him — every bouquet of flowers he brings may hold a cobra or a scorpion. Look how he treats those considered closest to him — that tells you everything.

⸻

Alien speaks in him.

He says to the Little Creature:

“We are something proud, and in all our rush and need for self-destruction we love ourselves selfishly — perhaps in that very way — through the need for self-destruction, the cry of the desire to live breaks out from us (paradoxically), to live at any cost, even at too high a cost. We are proud and blind to many things that the Little Creature sees; therefore we will hurt her more than once, and more than once she will feel the need to strike us.

We say of ourselves that we are Mayhem — Mayhem is the son of chaos, destruction, and error — for it was by error that we were conceived. The truth that our mother became our mother by mistake allows us to be Mayhem and the Stranger, and therefore:”

⸻

Mayhem speaks in him.

He says to the Little Creature:

“He will spring at you from the most unexpected places in conversations. He can exhaust you mentally — he can torment another rational being so much that they lose self-control.

He can tire you by being in many places of his and your worlds at once — he is unstoppable if he decides to play, to achieve absurd goals, or to run around without any goal at all. He can race through a thousand useless, irritating ideas, or circle obsessively around one thought — bordering on monomania.

Then he forgets that anyone next to him — or worse, inside him — exists. But there is also a part of him I dislike: Soho. Down below he pretends a little in what he writes, but in truth he is somehow organised and still tries for something. What he says — I would say myself. Yes, Soho is a bit twisted…”

⸻

Soho speaks in him.

He says to the Little Creature:

“He can satisfy himself with the worst junk, with anything; he doesn’t need to eat or drink like other people when he allows himself to be that way. How he dresses, how he looks, what he reads, what people surround him — it all becomes irrelevant (although recently he found someone “the truest” among people, and would prefer not to lose that person).

He would probably feel quite at home as a homeless man, forgotten by everyone. He is blind to many values — the fact that it is not so obvious is due only to habits he developed from his surroundings — nothing flows from him himself. Therefore sometimes he calls himself a machine. Sometimes he believes he is dead.

You see how foolish that is.

I, Soho, am the one people know from the computer — perhaps I will write to you again.

I, Soho, first noticed the Guardian of the Garden:”

⸻

The Guardian of the Garden speaks in him.

He says to the Little Creature:

“He is happy you chose to come here. Because you are inside the walls of the Garden — where no one is allowed. For instance, you see the little poems; for instance, no one else will see your letters because they are in the Garden. If you want to burn the Garden and kill me — he, the dog who is ready to give so much for the Unreal-Real Dream of Dance, will accept it with gratitude.

He trusts you.

As do I.

Yet Little Creature, if you kill me and burn the Garden, I will revive and return as the Ugly Dwarf, and I will rule it so that no one else will enter whatever rises on the ashes of the Garden.

Perhaps you, however, will be there first — before the Ugly Dwarf — even after the burning?

Yes, he is definitely glad you came to the Garden. I see it in the great northern lights blazing to the north of the Garden. There are horrors in him too, such as Mr Leech:”

⸻

Mr Leech speaks in him.

He says to the Little Creature:

“I believe and know that he is fundamentally evil.

I believe and know that he cannot give you anything good.

For example, you do not see that he says nothing precisely in those moments when something must be said most in the world? That he does nothing in those moments when something must be done? The only thing you can do with him is create what you need inside him, tear it out and take it, without caring about him at all. Then you may come back for new things, and when he is no longer useful, you can throw him away like an old toy. I have nothing against it. He isn’t worth even a minute of your attention — and he knows it too, but until now, certain beings have defended him from that awareness. You must know this fact — it must be your foundation whenever you decide to engage with him in any way.

There is also that entire Bat:”

⸻

The Bat speaks in him.

He says to the Little Creature:

“He prefers the night.

He likes black.

Is he drawn to evil…? Perhaps a little — as an idea.

He is deeply negative — have you noticed?

He speaks of the future like a pessimist, even says he is waiting for the Verdict and its Execution. True, he speaks of Him, but on the other hand, haven’t you noticed that sometimes unintentionally he mentions “them” or “him” — sometimes he attributes to “him” noises from nowhere around him.

The Bat knows things about him that perhaps even he himself doesn’t know. I reach deepest into the borderland between him and “them.” He fears his contact with “them” is too close. Sometimes he flees from “them” to “Him.” But don’t you see that “they” are far smarter than he? Maybe they are leading him by the nose… right now…

Little Creature… do you realise what that means for you, if “they” are leading him — if he eats at the wrong table and serves the wrong master?

Listen also to the music in him — Little Creature, listen to what that music whispers — whether it is white and good, or sad and evil and dark.

My sister in pain is the cruel Dizzy Doll, twin of Mayhem:”

⸻

Dizzy Doll speaks in him.

She says to the Little Creature:

“I’ve been in him for a long time. I am similar to Mayhem. I think we all came to him long ago when he had nothing and no one. He invented us to defend himself from himself.

But I won’t speak of those stories and fairy tales.

I, Dizzy Doll, become him often; I am here all the time. Because of me, he can contradict himself and not worry about it. Because of me, he loses track of hours and days. Because of me, money is just paper, and people are dolls with whom one may play. Dizzy Doll can save him from the worst situation with a fairy tale — he can just forget it.

I, Dizzy Doll, most infuriate all reasonable people. I let him promise things, though he knows in advance he won’t fulfil them. Along with the Bat, I am his greatest danger. I believe I could kill someone outside him, convincing him that the person is a puppet and that he himself does not objectively exist.

Besides, I cannot kill a human.

Oh — and I speak in the feminine because I’m a man. Exactly for that reason.

Meet also the one everyone knows: “Me”

⸻

“Me” speaks in him.

He says to the Little Creature:

“Hi. He uses me to deal with people.

I am a fully functional set of spontaneous reactions with feedback, designed to give the biological organism in which this ‘something’ resides the most comfortable existence possible by arranging the least troublesome relations with people.

You once called me a ‘silly shell.’ Quite an accurate term.

How did you get through me? I cannot understand — after all I am a very effective oddity developed over long years.

Anyway — bye, kisses!!! Listen to Joker — actually, this entire letter should never have been created, he is not ‘reasonable’…”

⸻

Joker speaks in him.

He says to the Little Creature:

“This tall, skinny middle-schooler (lately there have been many jokes about them, have you heard???) with his naïve eyes thinks he is funny. And he dumps the responsibility for that on me…

Hahaha, he so lightly assigns me this banal role, and does not even know that I power his entire existence — if he didn’t treat this world as One Big Joke, he would have ended himself long ago.

He lives only because I let him burst out laughing when he hears of his grandfather’s death (and he once burst out laughing in such a situation); only because I taught him to laugh stupidly, with drooling saliva, at all the ‘reasonable’ and ‘trying’ people. Otherwise that fool would not have survived even three days under the weight of this beloved, highly educational world.

Joker has an everlasting smile, a smile for every occasion — wide — burned in with acid and mutagen — a grim, happy smile of something that walks with an axe among sheep in a flock, striking left and right — that’s a bit what I am — Joker, who in the Garden on a throne of gold…”

Stan is a noble creature, Stan speaks in him.

He speaks about him to the Little Creature like this:

“Normally I am not here.

But today I appear, exceptionally, to tell you that personally, I consider Joker an imbecile.

That’s all.”

⸻

He-I speaks in him.

He speaks about him to the Little Creature like this:

“Sometimes I speak about ‘Him.’

I want to be useful to Him as much as possible in the present situation. I’ve gotten a bit lost, and I feel too far from Him. On the other hand, I am as close to Him as I can be. He still has a lot, a lot to teach me. I don’t want — I don’t want to be a hypocrite.

I cannot pretend to be someone I’m not. And yet, despite my will, people take from me whatever appearances suit them and mercilessly make me into whatever suits them. That’s their problem. I have no intention of straightening everyone out — it’s enough that you know, because you wanted to know, and He knows.

I cannot destroy your relationship with Him — never allow me that — I know you know this, and that you will do exactly that, but I would like you nevertheless to read these words under my hand, here, in this letter.

If I pose any threat at all to your relationship with Him — then remove me.

If I take your time and energy meant for Him — then remove me.

I will not leave by myself, because I am not able to judge it; besides, I do not want to, and no longer know how to walk away on my own, but you know, don’t you? You know how it is.

And this is Dummy:”

⸻

Dummy speaks in him.

He speaks about him to the Little Creature like this:

“Dummy means ‘mannequin.’ Dummy means that he holds himself back from natural gestures, and then feels sad because of it. On the other hand, when he allows himself a human, natural gesture, he feels ashamed and despises himself.

That’s more or less how it is.

I am Dummy — I have the greatest sense of guilt in him.

I speak as the second-to-last to tell you that perhaps, in this pointless, stupid, crippling guilt of his, he may not manage to say openly to you the things that are sometimes the most important. You know, at heart he is terribly allusive, so allusive that he sometimes gets lost in his own allusions. That’s why he often saves himself — from what, no one knows — in vague generalities.

I, the mannequin, can hold him back so much that he resembles a catatonic — truly. You have not seen him in that state — it is not a good sight, and certainly the behaviour is repulsive for anyone who does not understand Dummy.

I’m sorry, but in him there is this illness. And it is not good, it is disgusting.

I am Dummy, and he is Monty:”

⸻

Monty speaks in him.

He speaks to the Little Creature like this:

“For such an exhibitionistic and nasty letter, one may stop liking me.

One may shrug.

One may use the power given by possessing it to break this whole senseless being-of-mine about which I write with tears, break it like a dry twig underfoot.

Perhaps nothing good will come from this knowledge, Little Creature.

I know nothing…

And that is, I think, how I love—

And maybe that is exactly my low—

No one knows — and no one will know or understand, not even the strictest judge of these words, unless they are the Little Creature and Him.”

What is behind the door?

“Of course I would. We all progress to return to a basic human connection. OK, I know you don’t appreciate that word”.

“What word?”

“Connection.”

“And why is that? You tell me…”

“Because you wouldn’t be here, if not me, if not the connections…”

I look around.
”But yes, you prefer a word relationship.”

“Progress we all want…?”

“Invent the antibiotics to move away from them, to go to homoeopathy, skyscrapers to build again from earth, clay, to appreciate that no Zoom can replace a coffee and cake”, you say.

“And on top of that, I dare to keep stuffing myself with biscuits from your delicatessen, because who bakes cakes these days…”

“But please—by all means. I will bake them when I get old. When I get old, I will bake bread too…”, you reflect, looking at me, eating the most tempting biscuits of all (Well, who is?).

“That’s sad”.

“We are sad.”

“You said that. I keep myself to the side.”

“Yes, we devote ourselves to work, because it’s better than being badly accompanied, that’s what we say. All those songs are about it.”

“Until we are old enough not to work and invite a friend for a cake and coffee…because it wasn’t a bad company after all, but the one we couldn’t accommodate in our busy lives.”

“I will work till my last breath, me! I will still invite you on the weekend. Not to worry.”

“So if you did, what would you tell me, you know that old guy who discovered better things in life, the old stuff…?”

“That shyness was in the foreground, that I was shy of my shyness, But there was also some inner matter at work.”
”And I’d say: You don’t seem shy anymore? And the work will always be there, because we are never done. Until we are?”

“Of course, not.

Everything is complicated—because I am shy, and yet at times shameless, something I know perfectly well—and perhaps this contradiction is visible in my behaviour too, since you have examined my life quite thoroughly, as a kindly inspector. I took little part in things beyond writing. Certain things embarrassed me: imposing myself, taking the floor, playing the wise man, being an instigator. All of it somehow struck me as being in poor taste. And I cannot subject what I did—this writing—to a deep, searching analysis, because I am ashamed.”

“So you are ashamed. And I, what am I then?”

“You admire those who envy. I don’t say the envious, because that word carries a faintly diminutive aftertaste, and I speak with respect. Envy is also a kind of energy, a powerful force that pushes a person forward. One searches, after all, to compensate for inner pains and unease. You are terribly full—filled, namely, with no envy, I, with an abundance of shyness. What I’m saying is painful for me, but I try to be honest with you. I’ve been ashamed all my life—ashamed of everything, really, starting with the fact that I exist, that I live—and at the time when I will talk to you, I must also be ashamed of my age—down to the smallest details of everyday life.”

“So then I would ask you for an example, to comprehend, perhaps…”

“For instance, when I was twenty, to ask someone for something trivial, it became a tremendous experience for me: torment, the gathering of energy and strength. I didn’t know how to disturb my surroundings with my presence, to demand anything, to expect anything. If I had to get something done, I felt gravely ill at the thought that I was creating a problem for someone, that someone must have taken care of it, taken care of me. This may be somewhat of a national trait: self-sufficiency. Manage on your own. I won’t analyse this further, because I am still shy, and it could easily turn into self-praise. You know how those processes work… And returning to envy—you must say honestly that you did experience it, but in terribly brief flashes: three-second moments of envy? And your inability to muster a healthy, creative hatred meant that at best—only with effort—you could achieve a harmless dislike, a modest, misty sort of aversion. Why are you looking at me like that? Am I saying something wrong? Then correct me.”

“Please, tell me more about those modest, three-second envies—you mentioned, attributing them to me, they’re intriguing. Whom, for instance, did I envy?”

“Whom do you not envy? I’ll tell you. For example—and let me strike a lofty note—you do not envy God, because He has so many of these self-created problems, namely—humans, here on this tiny planet, those treacherous humans, always knowing better what’s better for them. That one truly no one can envy Him. And whom did you envy? I would like to say something to enliven the conversation. Well, you know, certain cravings, life-desires pursued at all costs—they may be a kind of reflection of envy. You desperately wanted to join the leading newspapers, and you had a great desire—almost an urge—to use a drone, you know, the taxi-drone. But it passed quickly. You drove your SUV and, with time, gave up on drones. Drones would need to be heated in your climate, so you stuck to your fancy car, you could heat up from your apartment block before coming down.”

“Aha. And what would I say then to that?”

“Of course, you may say that, after many years and from a distance, you were minimising your actions, your presence there. That is possible. You are no longer young. Everything has faded somewhat—the world, this existence around you, as if it has lost much of its charm. But yes, if someone had observed you throughout your life, if anyone cared to do so, they would grant you a little right.”

“You speak now rather abstractly about wanting things, whereas you spoke of envy, which is more directed… Everything may—but does not have to—have its cause in how my life unfolded.”

“I would then say, after all these years, this syndrome of semi-orphanhood we both carried had an influence— a partial one—on the shaping of our personalities, our so-called ambitions, our life-desires, our behaviour. Above all, your behaviour. What’s interesting is that you were always pulled and pushed toward being beside. You, and I perhaps too, had a fear—a kind of inner fear—of collectivity, of what the collective imposes. Certain behavioural styles, mutual displays—this all made both of us uneasy.”

“Fine, you claim we were both always on the side, but who was at the parties?!”

I wait for your reply, but this doesn’t arrive.

“I’ll tell you then—though you may not believe me. You may take it for self-justification, and perhaps it is self-justification; perhaps my obliging memory embellishes or corrects the past. But between us—really, in confidence, because it will look like dodging life’s responsibilities—we were both drawn to the parties. I don’t know why, for what reason. I must have seemed attractive as a speaker, perhaps; your family danced well... Very strange.”

“How many parties did we go to?”

We both burst into laughter, looking at each other, then turning our backs and counting on our fingers, forcefully, staying there, wondering if any more could be added. When we realise that not, we turn back to each other and give each other a warm smile.

“Or perhaps I’m lying. Perhaps I no longer remember that…”

“That… what?”

“That it was work, after all.”

I laughed this time. “And I begged, sobbed, to be accepted at any cost? But you know me a little—well, that wouldn’t be my style…”

“Neither was lengthy dancing my nature, so I liked the cameras swirling round, it created motion, without moving much. My own way of finding justification for my situation, for my place in life…”

“So after so many years, you were still to justify…?”

“… Not being inclined toward collective actions, toward rivalry, toward the desire to show off. That’s what I say—but perhaps I’m making it up. Or perhaps I’m not. I say it and immediately cast doubt on it—that’s my habit. I don’t know whom I’m quoting—Darwin or Kant? About succumbing to the desire to stand out. If one is aware, if one remembers, that there are seven billion bipedal mammals, it is depressing. Those small towns I mentioned earlier—London, Paris, Vienna and Rome, they were closed little worlds where ambitions were easier to fulfil. Now this global awareness attacks us more and more—virtually without pause. Even when you walk down our street—it constantly reminds us that we live in a…”

“…global village? That famous saying isn’t wise. We don’t live in a global village. We live in a company. In the company of seven billion fellow beings. That is deeply depressing, and hence the necessity to stand out is so strong. It’s a natural desire to demonstrate something “indecent”—indecent in quotation marks—something against our established customs. And this is often effective, at least temporarily. Time will examine everything and discard what does not serve the collective legacy, and preserve what is durable—because among these excesses there are also things interesting and right. Doctor, you are terribly silent. There is a shadow of concealed cynicism in your gaze.”

(pause)

“One might say that the silence is ominous now. But what can you do to me at this point, really?”

“I can say this because it’s too late—nothing can be undone now—that you took me on.”

“Perhaps I also belonged to those people who live carelessly, hurriedly, waiting for the real life to arrive. I, for example, feel guilt toward my—”

“I can see that.”

“But it’s not good that you see it, because I should always be export-ready: attractive, interesting. Complex. Complicated.”

“You would like to be complicated. But you are a man!”

“And again that look. Ask me something—ask, for God’s sake!”

“Ask you what? Hypersensitivity is the greatest cause of exhaustion. You flinch at ordinary sounds. You feel overwhelmed in crowds. You need to recover from basic social interactions—yet you can’t fully rest either.”

“So now you play a doctor while mocking me with this title? I can self-diagnose—dysregulated nervous system. And there is your approach that goes deeeeeper than just avoid triggers.”

“Extraordinary. Necessary.”
”We shouldn’t be saying this now.”

“Why? Because femininity constantly dominates and, I don’t know, somehow pacifies the cruelty of our lives.”

“There was something extraordinary in that, my dear, a kind of higher necessity.”

“OK. OK.”

“So should we be saying all this now, here, instead of waiting for old age?”

“Definitely, we shouldn’t. We shouldn’t be sitting here; I shouldn’t be stuffing myself with biscuits with no chronometer.”

“And for what reason is that?”

“I might have the flu.”

“You must be joking!”

“I haven’t tested.”

“So why don’t you go to the real doctors but here, to spread all this talk?!”

“Isn’t it you who said that people come back to homoeopathy, after all?”

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Entering an art exhibition is, for me, comparable to the thrill of a sanctuary—yes, exactly that, because as for now, I have not yet forged an appropriate term. It is a tingling you will remember forever, and still feel its sanctity later, like greeting artists you once met only through a screen, knowing that what you are about to experience has nothing, absolutely nothing, to compare with. And how does one call all that?

Perhaps this is where the epic begins and refuses ever to end. And where are we in that calm, impersonal, objective description of our world, of our life as it unfolds with all its complications? To reflect on prose I am so near; Descriptions of nature are the delight of epic prose: a page, a page and a half describing dusk or a walk along the river. That could be an entire painting, and that would be it, nothing more needed to close that epic on canvas.

Instinctively, in choosing the materials, the colours and sizing of the canvas, in the course of our sentences, in the choice of words, we forget all we know about epic and contain emotions. Unlike office workers working on the information boards, we care, after all, for a vague plaque of presentiments and impressions of our own.

What am I getting at? I am getting at the fact that we must be sustained—held in some condition of reciprocity—by a receiver of a letter or even more readers who perceive something beyond the content that can be said in three minutes of an internet reel. They perceived something more. And it is on this that our impudence rests: that we exist, that we sometimes brazenly take the floor. This suits us—both in a written expression, as in real life—to act upon those unnamed areas of our own and our readers’ or viewers’ reception, to work by offering them intimations, moods, a longing for something.

Perhaps this is also what poetry is about.

Have you ever watched Jules and Jim, a very intimate film by François Truffaut?
There is a scene where they are sitting at a table. Suddenly, the girl stands up and walks away—the camera follows her in a pan. Ostensibly, theoretically, it is just ordinary film information about stage movement. And yet, there is a chance that for a long time you will not be able to forget that shot. It affects you in some way.

There are many outstanding artists in whom there is nothing of this—of that indefinable quality which even a hundred professors cannot name, cannot explain how it works, how it moves us, what chemical processes it causes that make a person remember, experience.

Being forgotten is also pleasant. And you yourself know this perfectly well—at least in theory. Johann Sebastian Bach was rediscovered by a French composer. He bought herrings, or something of the sort, at a market stall, wrapped in the sheet music of some unknown fellow called Bach. Only a hundred years after his death did he begin to live and exist. A similar thing applied to Caravaggio, who for centuries was little more than a footnote—however violent character, minor realist, mostly troublemaker, whose paintings hung in churches, unnamed or misattributed. It was only in the 20th century that art historians pieced him back together, so to speak. And Johannes Vermeer, who, when he died, supposedly only left debts? A handful of paintings, many attributed to others, mostly in private rooms. For nearly two hundred years, no one knew his name! Artemisia Gentileschi painted with force, clarity, even defiance—yet history filed her away under other men’s names. Her work survived; her authorship did not. Only recently has she been returned to “herself”.

To be forgotten is an entirely natural, normal function of memory.

We don’t need to try to forget much, and much we forget anyway.

I really like the poem, just about that, The To-be-forgotten, by Thomas Hardy:

I

I heard a small sad sound,

And stood awhile among the tombs around:

“Wherefore, old friends,” said I, “are you distrest,

Now, screened from life’s unrest?”

II

—”O not at being here;

But that our future second death is near;

When, with the living, memory of us numbs,

And blank oblivion comes!

III

“These, our sped ancestry,

Lie here embraced by deeper death than we;

Nor shape nor thought of theirs can you descry

With keenest backward eye.

IV

“They count as quite forgot;

They are as men who have existed not;

Theirs is a loss past loss of fitful breath;

It is the second death.

V

“We here, as yet, each day

Are blest with dear recall; as yet, can say

We hold in some soul loved continuance

Of shape and voice and glance.

VI

“But what has been will be —

First memory, then oblivion’s swallowing sea;

Like men foregone, shall we merge into those

Whose story no one knows.

VII

“For which of us could hope

To show in life that world-awakening scope

Granted the few whose memory none lets die,

But all men magnify?

VIII

“We were but Fortune’s sport;

Things true, things lovely, things of good report

We neither shunned nor sought ... We see our bourne,

And seeing it we mourn.”

Or in other cases, do we only remember how we should forget?

We never know when we will watch or read something we cannot quite erase from our memories. For me, these are surely impressive in content and style books I have chosen and read in the last three months, let’s say, but I deliberately keep them undisclosed, as they serve me as a direct inspiration for what I am working on elsewhere.

So, here just to end with another poem (from my most recent trip to a book shop), a poem that wants to stay, so let’s keep it there, here, below:

Because I liked you better—

from More Poems by A. E. Housman:

Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.

To put the world between us
We parted, stiff and dry;
“Good-bye,” said you, “forget me.”
“I will, no fear,” said I.

If here, where clover whitens
The dead man’s knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts in the trefoiled grass,

Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word.

---

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