The road cuts the valleys, mountains, forests. It brings closer, it takes away, it feeds, contributes to the progress, it's the place of fatal accidents. Roads. It tears the green and taints it of gray. It makes possible crossing rivers, frontiers, physical and psychological limits. Anyway, it's possible to write lines and lines of descriptions about it.
A big fish for a small aquarium. It tired, it resigned, it changed. It got, it moved. A fish from Aquarius in January in Rio de Janeiro. New fishes, new sharks, new crustaceans. The water had a different temperature. Getting food was different. The new aquarium, even pretty, was intangible.
Sardine with caviar price. An aquarium full of leaks and out of order things. Little domestic aquariums and of the little of these, many with Oceanarium prices. The warm water didn't please the cold water fish. The fish was no longer with its beloved fishes.
Pursuing a goal is overcoming an almost mental barrier. Opportunities don't fall from the sky, but they are more likely to appear when you work for it. Things aren't as simple as it seems, but they aren't that complicated as well. If winning is a reason to be proud, why quitting is a reason to be ashamed?
Every thing have their time to happen. Difficulties are a necessary bad thing for us to learn to give value to our accomplishments. If you're not prepared for something, dare to face it. If you fall, raise and try again. If a bone is broken, plaster it; it will get better sooner or later.
Disconnected? Apparently, but roads, fishes and difficulties are just metaphors to speak of our search for a goal that sometimes aren't ready for us, sometimes we aren't prepared for them. Some birds born with wings but don't fly. Some have wings, but too short to fly. And others don't have wings, but they create, develop and fly anyway.
The road brings back home, friends, family, life. The wide green that has no end is an invitation to jump off the window and live in that isolated and beautiful world. A river, a train line, the Sun setting and filling the horizon of red and orange. The night comes and in total darkness, stars shine and even the smaller ones can be seen. The Moon illuminates the forest around the road suspended meters of height, it is as if as we fly down over the trees.
Sleeping is not possible. An annoying sound inside the ears, the sensation of swinging is constant, just like a whole afternoon spent in the waters of a shaking sea. Atlantic in the right of yours. Black mountains start appearing. Just like the houses, buildings, the people, the accent. Arriving home. The cloud that engulfs you cozily.
[Rio de Janeiro means “river of January” in free translation]
The king didn't want an odalisque to supply him with everything he was missing.
The king looked at his kingdom from the window of his castle, a masterpiece of the modern architecture. He felt a kind of emptiness inside his chest and that luxury and comfort was just a lie, a getaway. The more he liked richness, he wasn't pleased to see his wonderful castle surrounded by poverty and ignorance. He didn't want social justice because he didn't want his culture to be discovered and admired by the stupids that didn't understand a thing of it. He wanted the world to be full of people like him, but as it wasn't, the emptiness feeling was a constant in his life.
Throwing his brain through the window , burning the knowledge, living surrounded by odalisques and female assistants that used to reduce themselves to a mere sexual object didn't help. It was just a temporary sedative. It was like using drugs and after seeing the ugliness of the world when the effect was gone, he wanted to drug himself more, but he knew that drugging was just an illusion.
He wanted to shorten his disturbing thoughts to a 140 characters tweet or even less. It was as if he wrote in the air, as if he spoke and the more the people try to understand him, they couldn't. The more you read, listen, absorb and study any kind of experience, you will only comprehend it when you live it.
He was tired. Tired of speaking and nobody listening. Tired of people once stupid that now are specialized critics from important things to banal things. Tired of the exaggerated bliss to disguise an emptiness. Tired of being surrounded by idiots that he thought they deserved his respect and, after the traditional vanishing, he noticed that he lost his time with asshole ones.
The king didn't want an odalisque to supply him with everything he was missing. He had already lived the time he thought a woman could fill up his emptiness. He just wanted to meet people that thought like him. Perhaps it would fade a little his loneliness feeling.
The clichezist farmer sold the seeds to the naive peasant. He told him that for the seeds to germinate, to grow and to provide the food, he was supposed to bury the seeds, to water, to take care, just it. So he could sit on the bench, Claudia, he had just to wait the plant to develop.
It wasn't what happened. The peasant followed the clichezist farmer's advices but the seeds didn't develop even with all his efforts. Nothing of the plant growing, nothing of fruits, nothing of food. The peasant fell died on the ground and his body was devoured by the vultures. Dry seeds were planted in the infertile soil in a desert somewhere in Algeria.
Don't call me “sweetheart”! I'm not your sweetheart! Because a sweetheart we don't snub, we don't throw through the window, we don't despise. I'm your bad, your poison.
Wise words, Anita. Hello, I am the philosopher that died in the last episode. You may be thinking: but how is it possible for a philosopher that died to be writing something if he's dead and the dead people can't write? Was his death a lie? Is this letter being psychographed by Chico Xavier but, how is it possible if he's dead too? Then I ask you: what's the death? Have you ever died to know how it is? Why don't you die then? So later you can tell us how it is!
Anyway, I'll be here to comment Sakineh's history, just an ordinary odalisque of an ordinary harem of an ordinary country. Pay close attention to her history, her wishes, her needs, her daydreams and try to understand this disturbed soul that disturbed the most undisturbed of the men, the most comprehensive and spiritually closed of the psychologists. Here it starts her letter...
Morocco, January 2012
I would put here the full date but I'm so crazy in Allah that I don't know anymore which day is today, where I am and who I am. Why do the days have to change each morning when midnight starts? Why can't it be always May 31, February 7 or July 14? Why? Why so many whys? Why wasn't I born stupid, insensitive, blind, deaf and mute? Why can't I be just a bitch like the other women in here? Because if this way I was born, perhaps it wouldn't ache so much as it does.
When in Lebanon I still lived, with my Barbies wearing black burqas, I played. And dreamed. Years passed and reality stepped on my dreams and on my happiness conception. Getting married, having children, taking care of the home, teaching my daughter how to dance to hypnotize the men and having a camel on the garage. However, it wasn't just a dream of mine, but of many odalisques.
I don't know what capitalism means. Yes, I'm stupid, hate me for that. Once I've heard of “supply and demand law” and I discovered that, in love, it's similar. In my mother's time, when a man said he would call, he really would call. According to Sakineh's Dictionary of the Modern Odalisque, it means that he won't call, but as you are stupid, you'll wait the life to pass and the telephone to ring. He doesn't call you and you cry.
Today the odalisques themselves are hunting for the men that can have until four women if very rich he is. And we have to humiliate ourselves learning sensual dances, cooking, washing, taking care of the kids, dying our hairs and they don't even notice anything! Odalisques cheat one another, they hate themselves.
Men: I hate them. They should born with a plate on their forehead saying what they want. They lie to gain you and lie one more time do discard you. They are loving and romantic to gain you, and cold and heartless to discard you. I hate when they vanish. I hate when they don't call me back. I hate when they don't answer the phone. I hate when they compare me to other women saying they were better than me. I hate the speech “let's be only friends”. I hate when they look to the odalisques with visible eyes in the public market. I hate when they discover my dreams and vulnerabilities, when they make me happy and special, and later they leave me and I have to rebuild myself all alone once more.
No lies: say what you want! Don't apologize, I won't, I don't want forgive you! Yes, I'm crazy! Yes, I'm not a civilized woman. Because the pain you caused me hurts only on me, not on you. You don't know how it feels, you have no feelings to understand.
The odalisque had fallen in love with the king, with the desire. Not with herself. She consumed cocaine from Bolivia to stop the pain and danced while listening to Coldplay. Dancing was her shelter.
[This post was written with the partnership of Juliamaris de Oliveira].
The neighbors of the apartment below complained of the noise and hit the roof with their Scoth-Brite brooms.
The young and handsome king was looking at himself into the mirror. He looked to the interior of his pupil through the reflexion and some of his memories were relieved unintentionally. His kingdom wasn't socially fair, but what would it be fair? Where are the moral rules? He didn't follow rules, his father didn't follow rules, nobody followed rules. They were the rules, they wrote their own. Desirous for power, they cheated one another, killed one another and imposed innocents to fight for the defense of their exclusively personal interests.
Truth doesn't exist, justice doesn't exist, right and wrong doesn't exist. What exists are conceptions developed by men that wanted to turn out to be as absolute truths their ideas, obviously satisfying their personal wishes as well but with a more wide vision (or something to look like this). Anyway, the policy of promoting ignorance in the kingdom was successful. Any policy that requires the veto of all the people always will be successful.
Kings, princes, dukes and the royalty in general created rules to defend their personal interests while the people was starving and dying due pests. Nobody complained, it was the destiny. The divine choose determined a destiny that couldn't be changed. We weren't in the Middle Age anymore but in contemporaneous days. The medieval thinking resisted to the centuries and it's still believed as a divine choice. The royalty luxury is supported by the bottom of the capitalist pyramid and their people without access to the truly truth, without access to knowledge and totally manipulable, either for the money or the fear of the divine anger.
“Dreams are for the dreamers because dreaming a dream is dreaming of a impossible dream. Dreaming is keeping illusions alive. Not dreaming is living a known or unknown unhappy reality. There isn't a mid-term between dreaming and not dreaming in our society of Shiites and Sunnis. Dreaming is expecting that, with the power of the pray, a wish can be fulfilled and, as it doesn't happen, many blame God for their failure. Not dreaming is only surviving: is living the life thinking of the great beyond doing all the things wishing only a egoistic salvation? I sought the mid-term and I felt alone. My knowledge only brought me loneliness. Humankind is despicable, detestable, stingy and coward.”
These were the last words of a philosopher that hit his body against the wall and rolled on the floor until his death, in a long and suffering attempt of suicide that almost failed. The neighbors of the apartment below complained of the noise and hit the roof with their Scoth-Brite brooms. They also complained of the spots and blood that were exuding from the light bulbs, they complained of the bad smell from the body in decomposition of the misanthropic philosopher and finally complained of the police that was on a strike and, because of that, refused to take the already rotten and stinky body that lied on the same place for over three weeks.
The suicide didn't touch a little the philosopher's neighbors. Obviously, his death was criticized by the religious and it was a theme for their terror policy: “The one who commits suicide, it means, the one that takes his own life, it's not a good person; either is crazy of the head or sick of the foot. And they go straight to the hell to burn eternally on the eternal flame while they are lashed by the Devil. Is it what you want, bros? Hana Macantarava Suya!”
His neighbors were disgusting people, selfish, hypocrites. They were an example of the negligence of the king to educational and social justice. They were an example of manipulation. They were examples of people that didn't dream and that accepted misery as their fate.
Xucuncia was a woman that worked from Sunday to Sunday, 10 hours per day. Her routine was resumed to working, taking care of the impolite kids and bearing her husband, Cloriswald, that belch and farted frequently. In spite of that, she used to love the life of Queen of Home. She married Cloriswald because he was a honest, hard-worker man but she was pregnant and needed to join the little goods they had. She used to consider herself as a happy woman, but actually, she wasn't, however, due to her susceptibility to manipulation and the lack of self-critique she couldn't realize the truth. She was also very insecure and used to forbid Cloriswald of going out to play soccer with his co-workers on Sundays.
Cloriswald, Xucuncia's husband, had a humble job and used to say he worked overtime to her when, in fact, he was at the bar. His life was empty and his wife was suffocating him. He cursed the day he got married because all the money he earned, was destined to the house bills. His short periods of happiness were resumed to the soccer games with his co-workers and the goings to Blue Nightspot where he used to maintain promiscuous sexual relations with transgenders. He would die years later to the weaknesses caused by the AIDS disease and he would transmit the HIV virus to Xucuncia.
Cassius was another neighbor of the philosopher. He was a well-known homosexual but, nevertheless, he was desired by the women of the building that he used to snub them. As he was handsome and sexy, he also snubbed all the gay guys in the nightclubs. His relationships used not to last more than three weeks, but he used to be always stuck with someone. However, the years passed, his beauty faded away and his breast felt down. He reached the age of 40 all alone and died alone due to a cancer in his rectum, syphilis on his eyes and other STDs.
Then the king stopped looking inside his pupils on the mirror. The philosopher's neighbors, these were his people, but not his reality. They were gears that helped all the system to go ahead.
