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[Sursa]

Can we change?

Most of us have all the reasons to hope for a positive answer. Perhaps most of these most also have reasons to despair. The answer nonetheless seems to make such despair unreasonable. The answer is positive – of course we can change, since we do change. Being unable to recognize people is not exactly unheard of – and I do not mean by that being unable to physically identify an individual. Think of finding yourself saying: ‘He wasn’t himself anymore’, or ‘Doing that is not at all like you’.

Let me raise the bet. We fail to recognize ourselves too. Nasty – and once in while nice – surprises are likely to lie ahead. ‘I wasn’t myself when I said that’. Who were you then?

Perhaps the question was meant as: ‘Can we change at will?’. But here too the answer is positive. It sounds like a harder thing to do, but sure.

We shouldn’t make the question easy. I won’t say anything about personal identity puzzles. Some puzzles might not be there, since substantially there isn’t any identity. Well, I just said there can be change. I will say some other things however. Idiosyncratically, as it happens.

Adding the will into the question changes things. The time frame is different. Awareness and goal-directedness come into play. We don’t notice life-long changes, how we become different people over decades. But we might be pressured to change something about us rapidly. Change is costly. So what pays for it might be getting out of a crisis, or a high reward (getting out of a crisis is a high reward, but you get the picture).

 Suppose you are in a crisis of some sort. You drink a lot. You like the drinking, always did, but find consequences worrying. The job is on the line, friends avoid you etc. You decide to do something about it and you succeed. You are in some weak sense a new person. Call yourself born again if you must.

Is there anything else to tell? Yes. Are you yourself? Is this new you real? You don’t drink anymore, granted. But is this you, is this who you are? Perhaps dealing with an addiction makes things harder to see. But think of mourning for someone. Think of losing something really important. Think of having an accident and being paralyzed. You may succeed – on some standard or other – in dealing with these events. You function well, as psychiatrists like to say. You designed a project for yourself and you worked it out.

Still you may find yourself a stranger at home. Such a success may leave you exhausted, with a persistent feeling that something went terribly wrong. One must give something to the phenomenology of it here. You feel this is not the real you.

There is no need to push this into even larger obscurities, but this resistance might show us something about the limits of willed change. It might indicate when the concept of controlled self-sculpting starts to disintegrate.

There are things about us we can’t change. Some of our traits we wouldn’t want to change. We are sometimes proud of being unchanged by difficult circumstances. And we should – we give credit to those who resisted war, torture, or totalitarianism as sane and decent individuals, as persons of character. But sometimes we like to distance ourselves from our traits, if they are unpleasant or shameful. To postulate that they are not really us doesn’t strike me as a good idea. In any case, I am interested in the harder case – that in which there is no denial that something that makes me me cannot be changed.

Take the case of mourning. It is supposed that one is mourning in a healthy manner if one is able to move on after a certain period. Notice how this works. One is not expected to give up, say, an especially painful autobiographical memory. While the content is retained, one is expected to remove the motivational and emotional impact of such reminiscence. The role of that piece in one’s mental life must change dramatically for that to happen – and one is moreover actively implementing the change.

Suppose however that all that happens is mere censorship. One keeps things under control. One fights the emotional havoc the memory could trigger, but it is there nonetheless. The memory preserves its full force. One might even have the impression that things have changed, only to notice, in the right context that they didn’t. One moment of weakness and the demons are loose.

It doesn’t make much of a difference why some things can’t be changed about us. Perhaps childhood leaves too deep a fingerprint on us, perhaps some events in our adult lives cannot be displaced, but only managed. It is as you like.

Failure to change and there being limits to change are nothing new, of course. But there is something here worth thinking about. We may be stuck with stable physiognomies we couldn’t and shouldn’t like - stable in the sense that they anchor our attempts at change, that they frustrate our projects of ‘growth’ leaving them permanently unfinished.

 We may carry with us indefinitely wounds and desires for which there is no resolution. We may know that – to the extent that we know ourselves – and still force ourselves into the people we want to be. Perhaps with a loss of authenticity, and with a feeling of liberation when we crack and lose control. But worthy of respect. The discourse of authenticity unpardonably masks the misfortunes of so many people and their sometimes heroic civil wars.

I have sympathy for self-destructive losers – recently I saw two films that tell post-war German stories. Der Himmel ueber Berlin and von Trier’s Europa. Bruno Ganz, who plays an angel turned Berliner, repeats, as narrator, this phrase: ‘Als das Kind Kind war…’.One knows that the child will nevermore be child. Sometimes one feels its legacy so vividly nonetheless.

As for the narrator in Europa, he counts, as a hypnotist. In an almost unbearable final scene, he says: ‘You are in a train in Germany. Now the train is sinking. You will drown. On the count of 10 you will be dead. 1,2…’. And the man drowns. ‘You want to wake up, to free yourself of the image of Europa – the narrator continues – but it is not possible.’

We have little choice but play the hypnotist with ourselves. We even tell ourselves: ‘At 10, you will be dead’. And that is unbearable. At times, we wake up.

3-4 mai 2008

Ştii cum aşteaptă oamenii?

Pun o carte pe colţul mesei,

îşi toarnă o ceaşcă de cafea,

bat cu degetele în volan,

dorm,

scuipă printre dinţi,

intră în rândul lumii,

clipesc – şi-şi dau seama de asta,

se fâstâcesc, se încruntă.

Le e ruşine să aştepte,

aduc o singură ceaşcă.

Dorm pentru că plouă şi e beznă.

Şi trage la somn.

Îi trădează privirea.

Până la urmă toţi se uită la ceas.

Şi cearcănele.

Mulţi ştiu că degeaba se uită la ceas.

Dar e de înţeles.

Oamenii aşteaptă ca şi cum

ar fi pândiţi de ceva,

ca şi cum travestiul lor

în altfel de fiinţe

ar fi demascat aşteptând.

Şi totuşi e ciudat,

pentru că oamenii aşteaptă de obicei

alţi oameni –

vii, morţi, nenăscuţi, visaţi, oameni

de care nu mai ştiu nimic.

Aş vrea să fie altfel.

Cred că cei care aşteaptă

au motive să nu dorească

să fie recunoscuţi.

Mulţi nu ştiu pe cine aşteaptă,

sau au uitat,

mulţi aşteaptă să spună

că erau în trecere doar

şi uite ce minune.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress is a novel like no other that I’ve read. It was written by David Markson in the late 1970s and was published with great difficulty in the late 1980s. At some point in the text we are told that Wittgenstein had no mistress [not that that is exactly true]. So what is this story about?

It’s about Kate – Kate being also who tells the story. Though it takes her more than 200 pages to state it explicitly, Kate thinks she’s the only person left in the world. So she has been for a while – years. ‘Time out of mind’. It’s also ‘time out of mind’ since she gave up looking for any person, or any cat, or any seagull. A piece of tape that scratches at a broken window is eventually accepted as a cat, called Vincent for a while. And Kate also burns pages of classical literature and lets them fly in the wind to simulate seagulls.

Most of the time, however, she lets her mind weave cultural memories, sometimes blurred. She’s an artist after all. Or was an artist. While she was ‘still looking’ she made the greatest museums and galleries of the now empty world her home, burning frames of famous paintings to keep warm in winters. She now lives somewhere on a beach, looking at ‘her’ sunsets. And thinking of things she might have read on dustcovers or in footnotes. Anecdotal stuff about painters, composers or philosophers. Also asking strange questions – the kind one sometimes hears in philosophy classes. Maybe in art classes too – I wouldn’t know.

One is reminded of Whitman’s poem ‘On the beach at night’. Maybe for the obvious reason that its title became in part the title of an extinction novel – that I haven’t read – but that was made into a TV mini-series that I saw once. (The poem at least is beautiful.)

The writing of Wittgenstein’s Mistress has something of Wittgenstein’s own style. Or so it seemed to me. Perhaps it’s only the suggestion of the title, but I guess I am not mistaken to point to its dryness and occasional blow of an almost silent metaphor. One that still lets out a fully recognizable feeling of desperation.

Going through tedious and shaky art genealogies is not everyone’s piece of pie. Your narrative instinct might be frustrated. So it should, I think. If you like the fragments below, you may even take this as a recommendation.

‘Although what I am really still thinking about is how you could actually see Wittgenstein thinking, that way.

Even if thinking is what philosophers obviously do, on the other hand.

So quite possibly the lot of them were like that. Possibly every single philosopher from all the way back to Zeno used to walk around letting people see that they were thinking.

Possibly they even did this when they did not have a single thing more on their minds than the most inconsequential perplexities, as a matter of fact.

Not that inconsequential perplexities cannot now and again become the fundamental mood of existence too, of course.

Still, all I am suggesting is that quite possibly the only thing that Wittgenstein himself had on his mind when people believed he was thinking so hard may very well have been a seagull.

This would be the seagull which had come to his window each morning to be fed, that I am speaking about. One time when he lived near Galway Bay, in Ireland.

Possibly I have not mentioned that Wittgenstein had a pet seagull which came to his window each morning to be fed.

Or that he ever lived in Ireland.’ [p.174]

[Once Kate wrote letters to many famous people to ask for suggestions about naming her cat.]

‘What with only one of the people to whom I had sent the letters ever taking the trouble to return the postcard in either case.

This having been Martin Heidegger.

And who in fact spoke quite impressive English after all.

Even making use of the subjunctive, as it happened.

Although when I say spoke, I should really be saying wrote, of course.

What I should wish to suggest as a name for your dog is the splendid classical name of Argos from the Odyssey by Homer, having been what was written in English on the postcard from Martin Heidegger.

For some period I was fairly annoyed with Martin Heidegger.

Well.

Even if I did finally come to realize that doubtless philosophers had more important items on their minds than names for other people’s pets.

Ach, here I sit with such important items as Dasein on my mind, surely being what Martin Heidegger must have said to himself, and there is that person in America requesting a name for her foolish animal.’ [p.215]

‘Would it have made any sense whatsoever if I had said that the woman in my novel would have one day actually gotten more accustomed to a world without any people in it than she ever could have gotten to a world without such things as The Descent from the Cross, by Rogier van der Weyden, by the way?

Or without the Iliad? Or Antonio Vivaldi?

I was just asking, really.

As a matter of fact it was at least seven or eight weeks ago, when I asked that.

It now being early November, at a guess.

Let me think.

Yes.

Or in any event the first snow has been and gone, at least.

Even if it was not a remarkably heavy snow, actually.

Still, on the morning after it fell, the trees were writing a strange calligraphy against the whiteness.

For that matter the sky was white, too, and the dunes were hidden, and the beach was white all the way down to the water’s edge.

So that almost everything I was able to see, then, was like that old lost nine-foot canvas of mine, with its opaque four coats of gesso.

Making it almost as if one could have newly painted the entire world one’s self, and in any manner one wished.’ [p.233]

This almost final paragraph was my favorite. November coincidences on this blog, Kate remembers dustcover biographies. ‘Presumably - the back cover of the book notes – she is mad.’

We are not free if external pressures succeed in curbing our actions and thoughts against their ‘natural’ course. But we are also not free if the pressure grows from the inside – if its birthplace is one’s own mind. Should we assimilate the two cases? Is being locked up for one’s political views, in the sense we might want when we talk about freedom, like collapsing under painful withdrawal symptoms?

It doesn’t seem so. There is an intuitive picture that might locate the difference. There are always external limits to what we can do – they’re set by the environment, by social conventions, by available resources and ‘affordances’ etc. These constraints leave more or less space for out acts. There is a sense in which they ‘take hold’ of the individual – but the pressure is on her or him as a whole. Internal conflict has a paralyzing effect – the question of an action space being factually open doesn’t even arise. There is a local breaking up of the mind being closed by every decision – by the killing off of the alternatives. But while the decision is pending, and especially if there is serious or chronic failure in decision making, the individual seems divided [literally] against herself. It becomes increasingly hard to say what it might be for that person to be free.  

In his discussion of the weakness of the will [‘How is Weakness of the Will Possible?’], Davidson mentions two competing pictures that one may borrow from the history of philosophy. There’s the quarreling duet of Reason and Passion, and the trio of Reason, Passion, and Will. The Will being a sort of judicial power. ‘This second image – Davidson tells us – is […] superior to the first, absurd as we may find both.’ [HWWP p.35]. Freedom, one is often told, comes with the taming of Passion or, in a Kantian rendering of the second picture, with a rationally motivated Will. One wonders if any of this is helpful.

The superiority of the second metaphor, Davidson says, comes exactly from its being somewhat helpful in answering the puzzle that troubles him: how is weakness of the will possible? This is a puzzle since we seem to deal with an inconsistent triad in this case: (P1) an agent acting intentionally will do x rather than y when he prefers x to y, and both x and y are believed to be open to him; (P2) an agent that judges doing x to be better than doing y, prefers x-ing to y-ing; (P3) there are actions such that: they are performed intentionally, and the agent believes that there are alternatives that she judges to be better.

P3 says that there are incontinent actions, i.e. that weakness of the will/akrasia is possible. Do we want to give up P1, P2, or both then? We might, but we would run against strong intuitions about the ‘standard’ explanation of action [‘the problem will survive new wording’ - p.24]. P2 might seem especially vulnerable, but Davidson tells us that ‘it is harder to believe there is not a natural reading that makes it true’ [p.27]. Davidson proposes to find a way of showing that P1-3 are not inconsistent.

It is the harder cases of weakness of the will that pose a problem. These are the cases where rationality survives, but somehow goes wrong. They are not cases of abandoning oneself to blind passion, or of falling victim to compulsions. There are such cases, sure [‘We are dying’ to be ‘amateur psychologists’ p.28]. ‘But we ourselves show a certain weakness as philosophers if we do not go on to ask: […] Does it never happen that I have an unclouded, unwavering judgment that my action is not for the best, all things considered, and yet where the action I do perform has no hint of compulsion or of the compulsive?’ [p.29] Davidson also quotes Austin on the same page: ‘We often succumb to temptation with calm and even with finesse.’  

Akrasia is an instance of irrationality, and an action can be deemed irrational only against a background of rationality. Here one finds the Davidsonian solution to the puzzle. When one acts against one’s best judgment, one does act for a reason. The incontinent action is explained by its being embedded in a standard explanatory pattern. There is an unconditional judgment that underlies the action: the agent wants to do the action and believes she can; thus she has a reason and forms an intention to act.

There is however the conditional judgment, that, all things considered, another action would be best. What the agent fails to do is to reason from this conditional form of judgment to an unconditional form that would control action. As Alfred Mele explains [in the Ludwig 2003 anthology, p.77], the agent fails to form an intention to act on his better judgment.

Though the agent has a reason for action in such cases, she has no reason not to act on the better judgment. That is why the action is irrational, though backed by some reason. The action is still explained by its being caused by the agent’s reasons, so the general framework favored by Davidson survives. And there is no inconsistency, since a conditional judgment cannot collide with an unconditional one – intentional action is ‘directly geared’ only on the last kind. This is what Davidson says in the end of the paper:

‘We perceive a creature as rational in so far as we are able to view his movements as part of a rational pattern comprising also thoughts, desires, emotions, and volitions. […] Through faulty inference, incomplete evidence, lack of diligence, or flagging sympathy, we often fail to detect a pattern that is there. But in the case of incontinence, the attempt to read reason into behavior is necessarily subject to a degree of frustration.

What is special in incontinence is that the actor cannot understand himself: he recognizes, in his own intentional behavior, something essentially surd. [p.42]’

The puzzle is revisited in a later paper – ‘Paradoxes of Irrationality’ [1982; HWWP dates from 1970]. This is a clearer text, less dense in a sense, but with a larger scope. A first version was read in ’78 at a meeting of the British Psychoanalytical Association. Here, Davidson wants to save some Freudian intuitions from philosophical criticism. Akrasia is discussed again as a paradigm of irrationality. In no way what follows does justice to this article.

Davidson hinted in HWWP to Plato and Medea, but now their names are associated with principles: the principle that one would always act in the light of the greater good in the first case, and, in the second case, the principle that one would succumb to passion – conceived as some kind of alien force. The core of Plato’s principle should survive, we are told – in the sense mentioned above: the agent has a reason for incontinent action. This also connects with Davison’s principle of charity in interpretation.

There are further difficulties that the solution discussed in HWWP did not touch on. In what sense can we say that the agent has a reason for her incontinent action? If there is some weighting of reasons for different courses of action, and if there is a judgment that favors a particular action, how can a reason for the incontinent action survive as a reason? That is, can we still refer to it under this mental description? It is a cause for action, but is it a reason?

It must be, if it is to give a basic explanation of that intentional action. Davidson’s solution here is to return to Freud and to say that the mind is in some way partitioned. Irrationality provides an occasion to observe the political geography of the mind: ‘The breakdown of reason relations defines the boundary of a subdivision.’ [p.185]

One last problem to think about. Charity – the principle that we should assign the maximum possible degree of rationality to agents that we try to understand – collides with the idea that the mind is partitioned into sectors that can each have a structure of reasons that trigger intentional actions. A partitioned mind makes room for inconsistency, while charity is meant to reduce inconsistency to a minimum.

‘It is a matter of degree’, we are told. ‘We have no trouble understanding small perturbations against a background with which we are largely in sympathy, but large deviations from reality or consistency begin to undermine our ability to describe and explain what is going on in mental terms.’ [p. 184]. Earlier Davidson notes that the assumption of similarity is essential for interpretive success: ‘the strategy is to assume that the person to be understood is much like ourselves. That is perforce the opening strategy, from which we deviate as the evidence piles up.’ This is significant – since the province of difference is set at the periphery of the interpretive landscape. If we are to make sense of what we and others do – including here coming to terms with irrationality – we must allow for it and for large inter-personal differences only at the margins – in the ‘matters of detail’. Such are the limits of charity. ‘The underlying paradox of irrationality, from which no theory can entirely escape, is this: if we explain it too well, we turn it into a concealed form of rationality; while if we assign incoherence too glibly, we merely compromise our ability to diagnose irrationality by withdrawing the background of rationality needed to justify any diagnosis at all.’ [p.184]

The concluding words of the paper remind us that a Freudian picture – that of a divided mind, not one made up of autonomous, clear-cut homunculi, but one with overlapping nets of reasons and intentions – explain at the same time irrationality and the fact that we can change intentionally, even for the better. Irrationality, we were told at the very beginning of the paper, ‘is a failure within the house of reason’ [p. 169]. One can see why Davidson is saying that, and one can equally share his hope about the possibility of character change.

We might at times grow tired of our desires and needs, we might want to free ourselves from within, from the inside. We might want to stop being incontinent, or might simply want to be better people. We would thus have reasons to change. We would then act against our previous reasons to act. Against, in a sense, ourselves. Our older, weaker selves. Looking from there the reasons might seem brute force or miracle.

‘The agent has reasons for changing his own habits and character, but those reasons come from a domain of values necessarily extrinsic to the contents of the views or values to undergo change. The cause of the change, if it comes, can therefore not be a reason for what it causes. A theory that could not explain irrationality would be one that also could not explain our salutary efforts, and occasional successes, at self-criticism and self-improvement.’ [p. 187]

The boy in the photo seems to be saying: ‘weakness of the will, me?’. He is wrong, I know - having already been him.

NYC melange

* şi ceva din sunetul de atunci

14 noiembrie 2001

Azi, sumar, jurnal de bord.

Azi am trecut pânză prin pânză,

ancoră prin ancoră,

m-am abordat, scufundat,

deşi, dacă m-ai fi vazut

coborând scările şi apoi

orbecăind pe 3rd avenue,

n-ai fi crezut o vorbă.

Ai scăpat momentul însă,

m-ai lăsat nevăzut între

semafoare, aşa că nu prea ai

ce spune. Mergi – scrie cu verde.

Merg – nescris cu nimic. Prin ape

verzi fără dorul

de a le despărţi.

Am vazut un singur spectacol al lui Dan Puric - si mi-a placut foarte mult. Era acum cativa ani. In noaptea asta Dan Puric este invitatul lui Robert Turcescu la 100%. Iar discursul sau este 100% legionar. Mitul elitei, Dumnezeu si neamul [popor VS populatie...], proorocirea revolutiei spirituale iminente, numele de rigoare - Nae Ionescu & Co, mitologia epocii de aur interbelice, Occidentul care si-a pierdut fibra crestina - ceea ce este exclus in cazul nostru etc.

Un moment care m-a infuriat: Turcescu aminteste ca ar fi vrut sa faca o emisiune pe tema scoaterii evolutiei din manualele de biologie; inca un prilej pentru delirul misticoid al lui Puric. Invatamantul crestin [?] ar fi optiunea naturala - desi biserica ar trebui sa fie mai putin brutala in aceasta tranzitie de la invatamantul ateist din trecut. Puric nu se abtine sa vorbeasca de evolutie ca de o bagatela care ii este accesibila - s-ar fi demonstrat stiintific involutia unei specii de pesti, ca sa nu mai spunem ca multimea de ‘neica-nimeni’ este rezultatul involutiei unora care vor fi fost initial oameni. Etc.

Domnul Puric danseaza pe o sarma politica, si, dupa referintele bogate pe care le ofera, nu poate fi acuzat ca o face din ignoranta. Este, asadar, cu atat mai vinovat. Discursul legionar nu este un anacronism inocent. Este ilegitim si jignitor, pentru ca nu poate si nu trebuie dezlegat de masacre, atentate politice si executii ‘eroice’. Dincolo de tonul faustic al domnului Puric, ideile care compun acest discurs sunt o dovada de handicap intelectual. Perioada interbelica a avut o concluzie ideologica: regimul national-legionar. Exaltarea oarecum explicabila din anii 20-30 este de nescuzat acum, dupa aceasta concluzie.

Este ridicol ca de la ‘inaltimea’ unei astfel de pozitii domnul Puric si-a permis sa vorbeasca de memorie. Este la fel de ridicol sa te plasezi de unul singur intr-o elita intelectuala si sa condamni impostura atunci cand simulezi familiaritatea cu domenii de care habar nu ai [e.g. educatie, embriologie, genetica, oncologie].

Mai ales azi, nu as vrea sa las vreun loc aici pentru a interpreta ce spun ca un atac impotriva religiei sau discursului religios. Aroganta insa nu este o virtute crestina (sau de orice alt fel). Iar deturnarea mesajului unei mari religii intr-o caricatura cu antecedente grave este condamnabila.

Orhan Pamuk was in the spotlight today at the Romanian Atheneum in Bucharest. The event was organized by the Curtea Veche publishing house under the usual heading author-meets-critics-and-readers. Emil Hurezeanu, Dragos Bucurenci, Tudor Octavian and others took the stage, with more public figures- notably Norman Manea - in the front rows.

One question that came from an orientalist [I don't remember the name, of course] was the trigger for the most interesting part of the discussion [a matter of personal taste, surely]. The question concerned the use of the body and of perspective in Pamuk’s novels [I haven't read any yet - just bits of Istanbul; My Name is Red is also on my list]. The suggestion was that there is a constant atempt to ‘penetrate’ another body, to take up that perspective from the inside. Sometimes, the idea went, this seems to be a metaphor of West getting into East, or the other way around.

It was obvious that the question touched on something - Pamuk thought it was very good. What he said about perspective was, I think, beautiful and true. One wants to write about the world, but then one finds oneslef giving voice to one’s inner demons. Or one want to turn oneself inside out, one wants to exorcise the inner demons by letting them speak in the open. And then one finds oneself talking about the world. We are fundamentally similar. This coming together of the two polar points of view seems to show just that.

I wonder if here is the source of great literature. Digging up the hidden, the wonderful, the shameful, the obvious - and letting us recognize ourselves into them. The story has its music, its rhythm [there was a question about translation and Pamuk insisted on saving the music of his writing], but it is not the exotic that makes it our story. It is not only the perfumes of the Ottoman remains that makes one story magic, but maybe the universality of nostalgia - what we cannot help but feel as we watch generations and their traces evaporating. As we watch worlds dying away - our worlds; and worlds that we are brought to by story tellers.

There were a few other good questions. Dragos Bucurenci asked about nationalism, for obvious reasons. Well, the papers will write about that. There was another point - more interesting - made by DB. Pamuk had a digital camera with him - and was using it [yes, from the stage]. He said he takes 20-30 photos every day - and has done so for the last few years - as a kind of diary, or help for his photographic memory. Also, as a celebration of being alive, of seeing colors. Darkness precedes - and darkness follows us. There’s so much to enjoy while we’re here. This little thing, I learned again today, is hard to keep in mind. Thus precious.

S-a stins. Odihneasca-se in pace. [art. Cotidianul]

Monica Lovinescu is no longer with us.

…something like this ‘page’ might have been possible. And I’m tempted to say: but it isn’t, so it’s not.

Let’s begin in Bucharest, somewhere on Carol I Blvd. Four parallel lines of paralized cars. Close to the Armenian Church seeds with airy wings rain from the trees. We pass each other, less than one meter away, we’re all absent minded. I spend something like 5 minutes passing by a Mercedes E - the driver doesn’t seem interested in bringing the cigarette back to his mouth. It burns out as his hand hangs outside. Once in while the seeds form a vortex and start to climb the cars.

I’m not exactly a stranger here - but what am I then? I don’t seem able or willing to re-connect to the life of this city, whatever that means. I drive from place to place, I carry some clothes and some books from place to place. And that’s it. I find myself in parks and bookstores, looking at the same traumatized buildings of the old city, some kind of guilty tourist, taking photos. There’s little to be nostalgic about. Perhaps there’s even less left once that little gets behind me. Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t.

It is as if we had more lives within this one and only life. And there was one such life with sunrises from the #41 tram, and crapy apartments, and 5 films in a row, and inflationary hope. A poor man’s version of middle-earth.

How would the page end? With the sun going down while kids play ball in the garden of the Atheneum. With the winged seeds following me in parks and on the sidewalks. With the open road under the rain, going up north to Brasov. With the full moon - stronger than the nonexistent headlights of my car - and the mist hovering over the forest, with the lights and smell of the big refineries at 3 AM as we get back, because, as in Natural Born Killers, ‘there is no escape in here’.

There’s the wait. In the traffic at noon. In the mountains after midnight. Nothing happens.