Orangecat

Now there are the 2 big categories: dog lovers and cat lovers. For some reason the dog lovers will always expressly underline that they prefer dogs, NOT CATS. And then comes the argumentation: cats do not love you, they are selfish, come at you only to ask food and treat you as their servant – give me that, pet me, put me there etc. I thought of adding some more on the list. Cats see your house as a various scratchable  devices place starting with your boyfriend’s real leather sofa and finishing with your Zara silk blouse. If you have guests the cat will jump in their lap for a quick sniff, indifferent to one’s pet preferences in general. If you want to organize important documents or read the newspaper the cat will jump right in the middle or plunge right on the table between the tea cups and the food on the plates. When you do not pay attention, she will sneak on the table and taste things, which are publicly placed after all, on plates, and since everyone is allowed to serve himself/herself, why would the cat be excluded? The cat has absolutely no doubt she is at least equal, if not superior to people. At night it’s always a good time to chase some suddenly unidentified ringing object on the wooden floor. The cat doesn’t need to sleep all night since she can do that immediately after breakfast, which by the way has to be served first to cats, if you want some quietness in the house on mornings. If one tries to make the bed the cat will always help by playing right in the middle of the sheets or on the nicely organized blanket. If during dinner somebody drops food, the cat will reasonably consider it hers. Food on the floor: only for cats.  Food on the table: food for cats and humans as well. If there is an annoying flying and buzzing creature the cat will tell him first a few very menacing words in order to make it land and be nicely cut and eaten by the cat. Somehow, for some reason these flying insects are rarely impressed and therefore they will not turn themselves in. It is also very well known that if the cat runs and ends up in small accidents, everything is actually 100% perfectly directed and intended by the cat itself. That is why the cat will instantly stand up and continue walking with a natural dignity and seriousness as if nothing has happened. Some cats have put some thought into it and concluded humans are not obviously very smart creatures and therefore if a cat wants to sneak without being noticed, then she should just keep her ears tilted on her head. This way she becomes absolutely invisible to humans.

I am afraid I love both cats and dogs.   To me it seems people prefer  prejudices on cats and tend to idealize a bit the canine species. I say we stop overreacting, they’re all animals and if we start assessing the sheep’s flaws and the Komodo dragon’ s behavioral issues, we might conclude with a long list of difficult animals.

I have been faced again with the old topic people want to torture you with, in the absence of any other inspired conversation topic: the kids, when will you have it? You do not wish children? Why not? It is in our nature, it is a woman’s purpose in life. What are you living for? God, when are you going to defeat that selfishness of yours? Oh, BUT they bring
beauty in your life and take care of you when you are old and lonely.

Ok, I got it, still for other reasons I don’t dream of having them. Parents with/without children do not misjudge those who just see life in a different manner. People find happiness in different things in life. Some find  it in adopting pets, or in creating many many mini THEM, others in moneybringer careers, others in the solitude of a a
religious life.

That day the heat was slipping inside under the windows, the green of the leaves was melting slowly preparing the skeleton of the autumn leaves. The robins were singing their happy song of life. I finally decided to stand up from the tiles where I had kneed, in the small bathroom of the dorm. I was 20 years old, but on the inside I felt life had run faster, sickened by some  disease of time. My head was about to explode of pain, nothing seemed to cure the wound of a heart taught to dream and to sweeten reality. What had happened? Such an ordinary story, that words seem almost dusty to describe it. I have the irony that comes with aging now, not many intense emotions survive the time, but back then my heart used to play a different rhapsody. I was 19 when I met him. At our first date,  the long lines on his face reminded me of a clown, it was late night and his smile only predicted to me what was later about to happen. Stepping on my doubts, I smiled too and I thought a man should not be judged just based on his facial expression. During out later dates, I visited his apartment, we sleeped in the same bed, wearing our everyday clothes, I kept my jeans and even my long earrings, he said we will only kiss and it was exactly like that…that night. Love was blossoming with every moment, I was sure he had never met anyone like me, I was convinced he had to idolize me for my young beauty, for my innocence and in the end for my love for him. The first time when he embraced me I felt small, disappearing;  in my heart angels of happiness were dancing in a circular move, the kisses were dropping one after another like rain on my face, on my neck. The world finally stopped and I looked to see the love right there, the vibrating light in his eyes. Outside guarded by the moon, he said  “I think I have fallen inlove with your shadow”. My heart was already struggling between hoping it was true and realising words are as easy to be said as breathing.

Then it happened. An embrace brings more, a kiss the rest. I was armed with my previous conservative rules about sex, the entire procedure and its results. In highschool my boy colleagues were updating every year the number of girls left virgin in our class, so that when we graduated, me and a few colleagues remained kept on a short list. Maybe other women are earlier prepared for that, I wasn’t.  At the beginning of my youth, I had not experienced any affair, I was bored and depressed in my stand-by existence. Nothing ever happened. Living in an ex-communist country, in a family of limited financial means, you can not expect life to bring you many presents. I had waited
with every cycle of school to meet someone, but noone ever showed up. My mother said ”I have one of the prettiest girls in town, yet noone wants her”. I felt my qualities were in vein.. In my room, I was crying secretly, especially at night, a habit  I kept long time in my later life. Considering the greyness of my adolescence life, I exposed my heart on a silver tray in a short while after I started dating him. Afraid of the physical act, but longing for it, I was preparing for the first night. When it happened, dissapointed and obviously not sharing his same extasy, I said “ But I thought there will be fireworks, this was it?!, and all this talk, a history of prohibitions for everyone, all for this?!” Somehow
embarrassed he placed  a pillow in the front of his naked body and retreated from the room heading to the bathroom. In my mind, I had offered him a priceless gift. Now he will love me for life, I thought. How many women are still in my state at my age? Unfortunately I was in the wrong country. Maybe if it had been the wedding  night of a muslim wedding… Later I learned that despite the fact women are gifted with several ways of experiencing physical pleasure, men are still more tributary to their orgasm, deriving from an exacerbated instinct that turns life on all sides in the world. In the next weeks I had to leave the hometown, to return to my university city. It was winter, my birthday would come soon and I was accompanying a colleague to a clinique. While I was waiting for her, I suddenly had to take a seat on the closest bench in the building.   Just picturing him had made me miss him so much that I felt a striking pain in my chest. I was asking myself why am I loving him so much and so fast? He lacks most qualities or features I knew would attract me. Zoomed with a magnifier, his life hung like an unfinished painting on the wall of hopes and ideals. To weak to give up drinking, not skilled enough to overcome his limited and poor existence, he was walking through life as a blasé individual. He had no hope, not even I could have any expectations of him. While he was describing me his pathetic  joys in life, as drinking to death with his friends of plastic glasses and eating ribs with eggs in the morning, I was wondering if I could fit into this simple life game. Naïve as you can only be at that age, I ran to my mother to let her know one does not need much in life to be happy, maybe just sincere love, like we had; that I can forgive as many others have before me, the absence of physical satisfaction, the lack of money and of common friends, of everything, just because noone will ever love me as he does. I am perfect, I will save him from drinking from being a slave of sorrow and of failure. My life had turned into some cheap soap-opera. I went back to him forgiving his recent absence.. But love is a temporary disease. I learned a bit of the intricate map of my heart. He practically ceased calling me soon, he stopped answering the phone, he suddenly had no need to see me anymore. His lust had ended. In my desperation, I paid him an unplanned visit, rewarded with a locked door. Maybe, I wouldn t have suffered so much, if I had immediately met someone else, as the delicate buds of new love force the winter’s death of another romance to be forgotten. But the void of my previous life had come back, a heavy water dragging me for a few years more in the same state. During our last conversations he mentioned ”This should be a good life lesson to you, everything that has happened”. I thought he turned mad, and embarrassment slowly installed itself in my heart. I was a sort of Madame Bovary, who tried to fill her monotonous life with some disguised attachment feeling. With the right make up and the adequate circumstances in his favour, he had been capable of sneaking into my heart. But how many sins can one actually forgive to the loved partner? Many but not unrequited love. Returning to my dorm, I had to face the remarks of of my roommates,”Well, maybe next time you won’t skip the basic phases of a relationship”, “ In time maybe you will learn how to keep a man next to you”. Some evenings I would take a bath sinking under the warm water of the tub, pretending the curtain of the bad play in which I had the main part, could then be dropped. The snow  started to stretch its claws on all benches in the parks and among trees, and I thought the autumn of my heart had finished. Autumn is itself a love preparing to die. My birthday turning 20 I celebrated with no joy. It was then when my expectations of him coming back started. Maybe on Christmas, on New year’s eve, maybe at the end of the vacation or on Valentine’s day or.. .. An obsessive thought encouraged my one year depression: it was my first love and it had finished so quickly and with no common sense reason.

I believe now, that women have a masochist talent of analysing their personal dramas as the saddest story ever happened. They turn back hundreds of times to the same terrible details, until they feel torn enough to cry for hours. I am  also sure now that  love comes in life as open as a summer rainbow, not camouflaged under masks and rehearsed lines. I also know forgiveness in love doesn’ t mean lying yourself
that tortured specimens can be saved of their vices. After all a woman is a not a vaccine against all deserted dimensions in a man’s life. And much less against the infirmity of not having feelings for her..

All novels about orphans are depressing, but they often end in a cheerful note. This time it’s not the case.You do not want to be the orphan from the novel “The Childhood”. I have madesome effort to continue reading and to finish this book. I wasn’t exactly digesting it smoothly. The story line is simple, portraying the life of Alexei Peskov, who is an orphan not by coincidence, but by the criminal ”intervention” of his uncles, and who has to turn with his mother to live in the grandparents house during his childhood. If written from a different perspective, the story could easily be descriptive enough for how to follow a pathological path and to become a medical case. In the house of his grandparents, Alexei meets on a regular basisthe physical attacks of his grandpa. Nobody intervenes to save him from being beaten until he faints and has to stay in the bed for months to recover. The grandma and the mother simply stay quite in their acceptance of violence attitude, as if it is a natural order of the world. They also get beaten and never fight back. There is a perfectly accepted hierarchy: men above all others, and older above young ones. Alexei has to be beaten because his grandpa was beaten as well as a child, and because these adults can’t simply control their brutality. Yes, there are both psychological and material reasons for it: their own previous existence and traumas, walking through the same crosses of despair and violence, the daily unbearable life lacking elementary things. Domestic violence always goes against those that are weak and in the proximity of the aggressor.

In another Russian novel, I once found an at least original, if not outrageous scene, where the upset husband punishes his unobedient wife by burying her alive, up to the neck into the ground outside his house, during a winter day.The Russian literature deals with what some call ”the Slavic soul”, the struggling typical Russian character, merging
shocking opposites. Of course most people are let’s call it “cocktails” of features, of good and evil. But what strikes me in the Russian novels goes to these unusual combinations of contradictions, as in Gorki’s novel:  absolute cruelty switched later to saint’s compassion. Unexpectedly, the psycho grandpa (a bit more and it could sound like a horror American movie) I was mentioning above, has his moments of real mildness, forgiving his daughter who married secretly with a poor man and even got pregnant and protecting her inheritance from being stolen by her brothers. Still, my question is directed towards the minor hero of the book, the little orphan: how could anyone survive mentally intact to so much suffering, a house of constant violence in front of the children and against them as well, arguments and hate between all the members of the family on the splitting of the inheritance and not only, endless poverty, hunger, the abandon of the mother. Yet sometimes the demons are put to sleep, and these people start weeping when one of them plays the mandolin, simple people reacting to music with a moving sensitiveness. They also pray regularly to God each in his own representation of divine characteristics, but all sharing the same ardent faith. The prayers are small speeches of thespeaker himself. His God is as strict and rigid as he imagines it (the grandpa) or as kind and forgiving as grandma’s. I will not reveal the end of this novel, which is part of a trilogy and apparently deals with passages from
Gorki’s real childhood and later life. Find the patience and maybe the heart to
read it.

There are songs that easily sneak into your heart from the moment you first hear them. There is always a novel you read several times not because it defines you, but because it reveals an exercise of fantasy, a sleep from reality. Not often a director manages to combine so brilliantly a painful love story with dramatic music, charismatic actors and unusual landscapes as it successfully does in the movie “The Lover”.  Though despite my efforts, I could not find the novel (“L’amant”, by Marguerite Duras is the novel which inspired the film) to read it, this movie impressed me from the first time I’ve watched it, which was many years ago, and it still does nowadays. It happens quickly, a passion affair between her, the 15 years old French girl coming from a ravaged poor family and longing for one extraneous intimacy) and the Chinese wealthy man, twice her age, enticed and eventually fully captivated in a lifetime love. Such an unusual couple gains first the physical closeness, with the consequence of a substantial number of forbidden under 18 scenes.  Far from listing this movie as indecent, the story aims to much deeper meanings. You witness the unexplainable love that when you least dreamed of, bursts into your life and craves painful marks meant to last over seasons and decades. After all, each outstanding love incorporates a heaven-hell paradox: one in the state of love stands on the edge of an abyss, tormented and puzzled in his emotional storm, incapable to block its end, which will inevitably bring a sink into an outstanding sadness.

There is the happiness of hanging up there, so much higher then what the average of people can crawl to, and then there is the intensity of agonizing and losing such forceful emotions, the price of any great love. The power of the “The Lover” movie resides in the force of kidnapping you from your seat and placing you violently in the exotic Vietnamese landscape, in the skin of an impossible love bound to die. Last thing I would mention refers to the revelation Chopin waltz in the end, which is not only brutally beautiful in its pure sorrow, but also acts as a consciousness instrument for the female character.

Last week I have finished a wonderful book that I would recommend to anyone, the American novel “Of men and mice”. First I should mention I have not read any critics or other official interpretations of the book. Therefore, the following remarks represent only my personal view on the novel. A good book is often like a mirror, as it can reflect the temporary projection of the one who has the patience to read it. Personally, I consider the writer intended to exhibit a clash of two opposite worlds that not only reject each other but also cancel mutually. The story describes the short adventure of two friends that travel looking for work at American farms.
A simple epical line, one would say. What gets them from the very beginning out of ordinary is the shocking differences between them. While one is short, thin and clever, his friend impresses and also terrifies by his unusually massive body structure combined with a low intellect.  This last character’s physical force is doubled by some unique tenderness for soft textures as silky hair and mostly little animal’s fur.Very often he will catch a mouse in his hand and start petting it, a gesture followed by the death of the animal caused by the uncontrollable physical force of the giant’s fist.  He has a history of such accidents or incidents where he has been always misunderstood and “hunted” later for punishment reasons by the local community.  But not by his close friend. Beyond the obvious differences between the two, their relationship reveals the deepest compassion proof that can lie between humans. Their friendship simply abolishes any barriers. Still, when they find a new job at a farm and the naive giant
commits a murder, his best friend decides to take his life to spare him from
the others hunt. The other world, an universe of cruelty and uncompromising intolerance to any handicap has crushed  and has eliminated the unusual, the type that just doesn’ t integrate. Since there is no institutional justice, the stronger specimens have the power to maintain their own order and rules. Their punishment is radical, to execute the handicapped fellow, without any trial/any effort to understand the circumstances. It is always the easiest to destroy what you don’t understand. His atypical personal features are irritating, for he has the physical strength of several of them together and the sensitiveness that they are not familiar too. The final gesture of his friend by killing him to unleash him from a painful revenge can be interpreted as a resignation to his values, the only solution against a merciless campaign of the others.In the end there could start an entire discussion regarding the reasons that justify a murder. In a legal modern society, the giant’s irrational murder is always exonerated by his lack of discernment. On the other hand his possible execution by the others can be
retained as only an act of released brutality in the absence of any authority.

Yes, I do have high interest for novels about far East, everything you can buy in a Romanian bookshop, but they have to describe a medieval world .The universe painted in my books is one with locked doors and still grimaces,  where words seem to have been the rare privilege of the age. A traditional community in the Asian meaning of tradition: the elder make all the main decisions in the family, life flows between birth, arranged marriages and giving birth, and of course death.  A family is often as of strangers, for there is no real dialog between its members.
Women and men mix together when the married couple has to work together
on field or to procreate. The liberty of man is much superior then of his wife, he can take as many wives as he wants and those have fulfilled their duties when boys are born. And God they had many children (the stories must be true, just look at China’s population)! It is indeed touching when despite the endless painful life dramas, the birth of a child quickly erases the bleeding hearts and hence the cycle repeats itself on and
on.

I was deeply impressed especially by the novel The Mother, the sad story of a Chinese farmer woman, who is abandoned by her superficial husband and forced to live by herself in the smallest village of the world, carrying the public shame of the left behind wife. I found myself crying with real tears, while reading the description of her connection to the land on which she depends so much, the field which she has to work with endless efforts all her life. A similar love between the peasant and his piece of land, which in one Romanian novel “he kisses at the dawn as if it were his fiancée”, only someone depending with his own life on the life of nature can share.

In a world, where everyone has an opinion on anything and where we  have the joy to verbalise, let us all take a seat in our cozy modern ”caves” and type a few thoughts through blogs.. Happy to have been born in the right century

Vella