Ana Toader

How different we are from all these people that think us the same. How us we are. My heart bleeds violets. My hands polish your name.

Seven years, ten months and fifteen days ago, we were walking together the streets of Granada among geometrical gitanos and flute players. A hedonistic waste of flora and history for our pleasure. Remember how midnights founds us in cafes, my mysticism in scrimmage with your atheism? And then those excessive night acts that Spanish air invites…

Americans sat at neighbouring tables speaking loudly, unfolding their pristine enthusiasm and interest in everything. The city of Lorca and Dali! Alhambra! To some Old World hearts, this is tiring, but I always found it brings hope to mine.

So I married one, yes. There are no rooms in his heart sculpted with a needle, like there are in mine or yours and he likes everything I show him. My fingers wear his kisses like an invincible safety net.

You wouldn’t like him at all.

I must go now, my love of clean bone. The child tugs at my skirt, she has seen a dragonfly. I like your house, it’s like a park of crosses and cherry trees. Till next time.

A knot. And the world braids and unbraids from it, flutterring like ribbons, like blind Medusa.

“Shhh, Shhh
It’s nice and quiet
Shhh, Shhh
But soon again
Shhh, Shhh
Starts another big riot” – Bjork, It’s Oh So Quiet lyrics

Last summer, Miro taught me the aesthetics of objects in pure space. Gracias. Free pass to my carnival. Fill the space with rose tints today.

Come Aristotle and Plato eating cotton candy, insane apple tree blossom snowing down your throat, drown fragantly, baby… dumdeedam, Marie Antoinette dancing like Salome to get her head back, served on a tray from history students’ cafeteria, the ferris wheel spinning classicism, baroque, romanticism, realism and Protheus of modernity, how many 8s can your belly do, Scheherazade, rambla pa’ aqui, rambla pa’ lla, esa la Rumba de Barcelona, juggle hearts and porcelain tea cups and don’t drop any, Alice, mirrors in the funhouse for Quasimodo to live in a world where everyone is distorted and in the middle Picasso with a paintbrush and Dora Maar with bleeding fingers from playing too much 5-Finger Fillet, Degas’s ballerinas spilled like a basket of flowers, I wear a blue cardigan and pale skin and everything runs, throbs, flows, yells, transforms, takes shape and melts into everythingness only to be born as something else, somewhere else, at some other time and the music never stops, never stops.  

Come, sweetheart. You are among friends.

Percy is dumb, dumb, dumb as dumb can be. Percy is also rather old, which, one must say, hasn’t helped her sense that much.

Nor her waist, for that matter.

The eyes are open, the mouth moves, but Mr Brain has long since departed, hasn’t he, Percy?

Extraordinarily dumb. Hopelessly dumb.  I stand rebuked and eat a muffin, it seems the only sensible thing to do. Maybe two muffins.

When i am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me.  Indeed, when i am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink.  At the present moment, I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins.

Have you seen Percy’s pores? Horrendous. What age will do to you. Are you having that muffin?

Oh.

Well, would you consider teacake instead? I am so very fond of muffins and there’s only one left.

Heartless? Why, Jack. 

 Fine, if we must be strict.

(Still got a better waist than Percy, though.) 

(Blackadder + The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde)

Virpi Pahkinen discloses herself to herself, we just happen to be there and witness it.

Like a geisha trained in optical illusion, she blooms manifold. Light builds around her, turns her white skin blue, purple, she exposes angles and curves as if presenting us one after another symbolist masterpieces.

She is beautiful and harsh and poised.

Like a newborn alien child, like a fresh heart, she pulsates. The coordination of her tiniest bones is supreme – she moved an ankle and three fingers and defined a space, suddenly eaten by new spaces as she Rubik cubes herself.

Things come together and burst open in a million ways and we see goddess, tree, bird, flower.

She’s a new form of cherub.

http://www.pahkinen.com/

I turned my eyes back to the miserable ones because they cried for me. The heels on parquetry, the table cloth stained with wine, the pairs lost in themselves, each interpreting and reinterpreting the music to their own experience.

This is despair.

“Other music exists to heal wounds; but the tango when sung and played is for the purpose of opening them, for the purpose of sticking your finger in the wound and to tear them until they bleed.”

Whoever said that? Piazzola cries his Balada para un loco and we are all a little mad, emotion confined to the straight geometry of the dance. My back is completely bare and under leopard skin, my spine glows ruby, glows human. It speaks of all the passions and sadnesses raking our flesh like hurricanes, skinning our souls, crushing our chests.

Cheek to cheek, hand in hand, we spin faster to precise rules. The tango has turned chaotic, the madman is running around. Looking for, never finding, eventually growing tired. So this tango ends and my colleague in despair, my disciplined fellow soldier of tango moves lets go of me. I am unglued from him like an open wound. Exposed like a naked battlefield.

And then Gardel starts A Media Luz and suddenly things are not so desperate anymore, only filled with regret. Lips that once kissed me and now kiss someone else. It isn’t that I am unhappy now, it never is about that.

Meditatively, I fill my mouth with wine and smile, listening to Cambalache.

“Que el mundo fue y será una porquería, ya lo sé,
en el quinientos seis y en el dos mil también”

I like rain. I like returning. I like night.

A melodic-sad list of pleasures. And no matter what I like, in the evening I always like you.

“Me gustan los aviones, me gustas tu.
Me gusta viajar, me gustas tu.
Me gusta la mañana, me gustas tu.
Me gusta el viento, me gustas tu.
Me gusta soñar, me gustas tu.
Me gusta la mar, me gustas tu.
Que voy a hacer,
Je ne sais pas
Que voy a hacer
Je ne sais plus
Que voy a hacer
Je suis perdu

Que horas son, mi corazón
Me gusta la moto, me gustas tu.
Me gusta correr, me gustas tu.
Me gusta la lluvia, me gustas tu.
Me gusta volver, me gustas tu.
Me gusta marihuana, me gustas tu.
Me gusta colombiana, me gustas tu.
Me gusta la montaña, me gustas tu.
Me gusta la noche, me gustas tu.
Que voy a hacer,
Je ne sais pas
Que voy a hacer
Je ne sais plus
Que voy a hacer
Je suis perdu

Que horas son, mi corazón
Me gusta la cena, me gustas tu.
Me gusta la vecina, me gustas tu.
Me gusta su cocina, me gustas tu.
Me gusta camelar, me gustas tu.
Me gusta la guitarra, me gustas tu.
Me gusta el reggae, me gustas tu.
Que voy a hacer,
Je ne sais pas
Que voy a hacer
Je ne sais plus
Que voy a hacer
Je suis perdu

Que horas son, mi corazón
Me gusta la canela, me gustas tu.
Me gusta el fuego, me gustas tu.
Me gusta menear, me gustas tu.
Me gusta la Coruña, me gustas tu.
Me gusta Malasaña, me gustas tu.
Me gusta la castaña, me gustas tu.
Me gusta Guatemala, me gustas tu.
Que voy a hacer,
Je ne sais pas
Que voy a hacer
Je ne sais plus
Que voy a hacer
Je suis perdu
Que horas son, mi corazón”

www.manuchao.net

Picasso’s rendition of Francoise Gilot. A digression from and towards the chamber play. 

As a principle, all characters are equally important. 

There are flowers everywhere, if you look carefully. Spending their beauty, giving it away. I wish I could marry a flower.

“AGNES: Tell me, why do flowers rise from dirt?

THE WINDOW FITTER: (kindly) Flowers hate dirt. They hurry to rise towards light, to bloom and to die.”

Between bloom and death, do flowers fall inlove?

“THE LAWYER: I am poor.

AGNES: It doesn’t matter, if we are inlove. In any case, beautiful feelings don’t cost a thing.”

Rain is expensive, when a child keeps crying into your breasts. So are sun, soil, colour. Beauty is sold first…we must eat, we must eat. Close that door, it’s freezing.

“AGNES: It’s horribly difficult, being married… it’s more difficult than anything else! You must be an angel for it, I think.

THE LAWYER: Indeed.

AGNES: I think I’m about to hate you.

THE LAWYER: Then poor us!… But we must not let hatred overwhelm us! I promise you I won’t say a thing about cleaning the house… even if it’s a torture for me!

AGNES: And I will eat cabbage, even if it makes me sick.“

We have cabbage for dinner and dust on our tables, my love. The child has stopped crying.

– quotes from August Strindberg – A Dream Play

The Other Woman is, strangely enough, an individuality.

…as I drag my fabulous crimson dress across marble floors…

She has eyes and hands. Almost like me. Not like me. No one like me. He said so. My mind turns black.

…and the violins so harmonious and my shoulders so round… 

Each sign that he acknowledges her existence is a possible peony swelling dangerously in my heart. Each praise, a hammer. Each sexual joke, a nail.  His white gold ring on my finger doesn’t keep me together. 

…silver spurs, summer wine. Incomprehensibly beautiful, I exist. Mirrors appease me… 

He says he is free to do as he wishes. So am I. As time slides by, my blade becomes dull. I love him less, I care about her less.

… carrying a heart as a soldier carries a flag, I smile to others. They smile back. They are enchanted. Soon, they shall tire of me too. It is a new beginning, pregnant with death…

 … only now, I dance better… 

Smiling, I crash into something soft and scented.

I feel it rolling in my guts, gargling up my body, then gushing out inextricably. I am laughing so hard at the skies, my jaw seems to border on disjointment.

Because -

I am I and no one else is. I am a sum of atoms and a sum of seconds that I cannot transfer completely to someone else. This is not an attempt.

I am in the middle of most things.

I was part of a group of sparkling teenagers in an old European highschool with its pure high-brow scholar traditions. Around structures, we built details. Not as many new things under the sun as you might think, but that’s not a tragedy. Enough moaning, Miss Electra. 

By 17, our minds were finer than those of average teachers and we could communicate meaningfully with extraordinary teachers. Perhaps largely because of that, there has never been a void between me and adults. By 18, either I had read books that the vast majority of adults I knew had not or I was able to articulate better around them. The pristineness of someone discovering late what I have read early makes me smile.

I have both Renaissance streaks in terms of breadth and beauty of form and Gothic manner of subordinating form to idea. I string words with care and pisceanly realise things can be communicated in other, more complete ways.

I play the poliphonies of satiric Romanian, clean English, polished French, earthy Spanish, Aristotle’s logic and its late consequences, our computing machines, the sirens Douce and Kennedy, numbers as exhaustive pure mathematics on one end and useful applied mathematics and the conventions of accounting on another, Picasso’s rose circus, the beauty and tidal waves of bodies expressing ideas, networks in all senses, hollow men and Lazaruses, esoterism as unfolding of One in infinite Multiples to be realised as thumb on a page and lightning, sublimated poetry for correct aesthetics and this is not something I mean rigidly, neither lightly, universes in novels and theatrical cubes, formalizations and theories of soft and hard things, points and counterpoints, labyrinths, interconnection of systems. 

Art saves me from science. Science saves me from art. I have now chosen an equal to close such circles in me.

And yet…. And yet, despite having all the right potential and things being generally very amusing, I am not a hiheelselitistbitch. I wear flats among dandelions and sometimes that is all that is.