I own seven pairs—sunglasses mainly— and some unmatched with my face—

although I would like to think otherwise.

I forget them regularly

just as a piece of jewellery,

thinking there will come a time

when I might need them,

a time when I would like to embellish

myself with their scratches—not yet earned—

marks of the world lightly rained on,

fallen, picked up, at times

lost in feverish summer.

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We tell each other kind things. 
We tell each other hard things. 
Locked in the little box of the car, 
We tell each other things.
Perched souls,
We tell each other things.

The world is trying to drive too fast.
We don't want to be organised.
Like clockwork.
Little mouths that know the answer careless of us.

This is the time — though no man can see —
For people saying true things.
There is no need for the alife truth to die 
And the lie to live

This is the Time
You own the words
Thought to keep.

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Available at Waterstones

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We laugh at them for their glitter-search flurry. They are known for that.

They laugh at us behind wooden fences. We are known for that.

They ask: Why are you counting us?

Four dreams are wisdom, five are greed, one is virtue. 

Don’t you know those who want yet another language, 

so and so many children, 

countries, loves, summer and regular houses, 

second chances 

sang to their irises, and yes, corneas, retinas? 

Now, in so many years… One east. One west.



Do not catch them. 

Do not count them.

Stand beneath the widening sky while five shadows cross your face at once.

It can be quickly divined I am no friend of the counting glass.

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I sit calmly editing, another hour, that chapter that I am finally getting liked
When the sirens go, the helicopter, not one,
Many in Manny
Hover around.

My building. But not only.

The whole area.

Something is happening in the Man’s city, I think, as I get my sleep ready

I’m supposed to worry and feel incapable of closing my eyes

Because anything can happen any minute now,

The misfiring neurons would make me incapable of lots of stuff…

So I guess I don’t care in a purely French way,
And if I am not caring, what should tell me — my brain,
Then it’s not my brain that wants to talk but — theirs.

Those who want me to bleed so that the grass under me
Will have something to drink. No way!
Yes, it is my very own idea of slipping off the pier
But not a bridge, in a spectacular jump of cooling down
The racing heart excited, eager, thrilled by its own liking
Not a bomb. Or a bridge. Or an unfortunate flight.
I am not a fan of dying this summer, Man.
I might be fanatical about living my own page right now.

You hear crimson in blue; 

you understand warmth through coldness

and all of it comes in half-grey tones, 

in cold blue whispers that no one understands but you.



So I speak,

and you listen in just that way.


And how does she listen?
She… listens with her tympanal apparatus most beautifully. 

She listens precisely on the most difficult frequencies.

She knows how to listen…

And she wants to listen, although I don’t know why… 

Well, why would she?


“Because that’s just how it is,” she’ll probably answer, 
and then once again she’ll sail her sailing canoe up the Amazon 
to hunt Siberian koala bears with a suction-cup pistol made by Philips, 
bought from an Argentine greengrocer’s shop
standing in the middle of the Gobi Desert, 
while out shopping with him...

And I will return to my tiny little house with its 523 rooms, 
no windows,
and a single storey with a basement. 
As usual, I’ll sit down in the dining room 
to catch a hammerhead shark in a three-litre bathtub 
standing on a lawnmower and made of blue Panasonic toilet paper, 
bought from an Argentine greengrocer’s shop 
standing in the middle of the Gobi Desert 
during the nicest shopping trip of my life.

And afterwards we’ll tell each other all about it. 
You’ve driven me crazy epistolographically.
You have.

By rights, this piece should be resting soundly with its sisters in Garden Out of Dust. How it slipped away, I can’t really say.

Moreover, I performed un triage in which some insignificant writings got scissors’ work, but this one deserved the tiroir, among the bien-aimées, every time.

So, dear reader, this was a rescapée making her fugue here, in preference to the company of my five-star drawer.

Those who evidently landed in Garden Out of Dust:

order here

The machine did it coldly,

as if no human hand had hidden behind the order

just merely placed,

and these streets, these geraniums on a hand-tended windowsill

are already the past 

in the machine’s cold eyes.

Can there be a pause in a war

long enough to vaccinate children,

to supposedly preserve life,

but not long enough

to end it—

and stop ending lives?

The reader is disappointed.

Bored, to hear the truth:

Whose hands order a daughter’s wedding cake

with Crane’s-bill decorating it

could also order a young man into the mouth of winter’s bloody frost?

Tell him

of the dripping of strategic red lines,

of the grave’s remarkable uncovered simplicity.

Write,

as your job in a damn journalist tone

the presenter lines,

who’ll, in a professionally cold voice, deliver

to the quivering like wind-blown petals

sea-fish

covered with the net

banded ones.

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*Signe Gjessing, SECTION VI OF LE BATEAU IVRE

Find my poetry book’s links below:

To everyone, to everyone

Not for everyone

Who would believe in such universality

Whenever a sourdough bread and probiotics don’t appeal to all

How could one made-for-all quilt cover all our heels and ankles snugly?

How one lamp could attract the flies and mosquitoes, but no warmth or a single fly of a butterfly type?

Nothing can contain all of the sun of the invincible springtime

Only

I am thinking

If that essence, flour and song on earth,

Not a crystal buried so deep

No one can figure out under which tree,

If the people, doorways and dark bread

Were to receive that essence, receive themselves

Believe that they can put a loving hand on their forehead

And then everything could go calm and quiet…

Yes,

I will tell everyone, all I don’t know a tiny bit,

Who will never hear my name,

Those who live along this or other river or lakes sparkling like glass,

To you, to whoever, without knowing it, has waited for me

In non-universal recognition, I place my hand on a mashoire

On all fronts that heat not, that go calm

At the crossroads, at the exits, on the colourful paths.

And to those who wake and dress in the dark

Closing the buttons, they would find without a look, a regard

The way the egret stands at the edge of the water, meeting something that has not yet surfaced,

Patient from the knowing that what is coming is already on its way —

To you, then. To the heel that no quilt reached.

To the ankle that does not mind

To the fly that flew toward it —

Because what else is there to fly toward

But to that that goes to no regard.

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If you would like to revisit some past work, they are accessible here:

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

with TNT

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.

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