by Igor Ursenco
a. Divina
Comedia in Three Scenes
Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be
proved by means of the sense of hearing. The
natural and the genuine are two essentially different phenomena, even
if their rustic symbolism is most often devoured by existential
ignorants like some dissociated gastronomic menu, with a pedantry
worthy of a better cause. Whoever understands this existential secret
is fully saved. And salvation comes even with the risk that the great
miracle had happened precisely in the Bedroom, to the detriment of
the Bathroom or the Kitchen – a risk, nonetheless, anything but
fully digested by stomachs famished for lack of knowledge. Like
prolonged spasms of the body, the cold appetizers, the broth, and the
desert stalk one another, push and shove in their fight for
supremacy: short lived anticipations for the heated Inferno, the
inevitable Purgatory or the Heaven over feeding only the realm of
pure religiosity.
First of all, it is the Bedroom that takes shape.
Almost every time the sleeping room announces all the others that
shall follow in one’s complex life!
The Inferno brings along all its permitted follies or all the
presupposed happiness at the very beginning of life. The Bedroom is
the space of external innocence, an absolute sign of weakness and
impotence. It stands for a time of vulnerability of the soul, left
unshielded: it is an opportunity that all who have nothing left to
lose hurry to seize and exploit. At least in this life.
It is there that all love declarations and intentions left in their
initial, virtual state are consumed.
It is there that anything but necessary wars are declared, and fake
peace treatises are made.
It is there that you receive and offer gratitude in return, as well
as theatrical blows. And even those below the belt.
It is there that sex smells like an unexpectedly blossomed acacia
during an early Spring night: and all lasts until the cleaning of
dirty laundry in public.
After that comes the inevitable daily Bath. In other words, what is
next is the Purgatory with its greatest pagan crimes which would have
been committed by
Dante, had he not been Christianized in due time.
Dante, had he not been Christianized in due time.
The Bathroom is where you clean off your first traces of sex and the
last betrayals of the previous night; both of them are equally
uncomfortable and, most of all, immune to cleansing by means of
chemical powders. There you wash your face, with daily frequency or
with contempt. At times you might even wash your thoughts or your
socks. Yet all that you wash is just as much subjected to decay.
It is the only place where you may allow yourself
to dive deep, overhead, in your own recognisable shit, even if you
forcedly wash your teeth or wallow in your own curdled blood, not
having to give count to anyone. nThe only
problem is that you must find the vessels specific for each use.
At last, The Kitchen comes, naturally enough, as closure to the
entire daily cortège.
The Kitchen is the blessed Heaven where to you leave for good, yet
with your humours incurably modified.
In comparison to Petrarch’s love sonnets, heaven
is the highest space in the intimacy of
which you may save yourself from the vigorous neck of philosophical
treatises signed by the same author: De
remediis utriusque fortunae, that being
‘on the remedies of any potential fate,’ De
sui ipsius et multorum aliorum ignoratia or
‘on the self ignorance and many other’ and, lastly, De
vera sapientia, in other words, ‘on
true wisdom.’
b. Human Comedy in One Act
From the comfortable bedroom, flirtatiously
painted in nuances of fiery red meant to facilitate your exhaustive
readings, you enter the bathroom, directly at the Balzacian age of
Eugénie Grandet, and exit there bearing all the symptoms of pure
bovarism,
early impregnated on your smooth, hydrated face. In other word, you
are marked off with that vehement declining to accept reality, plus
the incapacity of clearly distinguishing whether – in the mirable
Faustian moment – you are happier, or happier in a different manner
than you could be at another re-reading of your life. To this, we add
the denial doubled by the elementary technical knowledge of railroads
caught on from Anna Karenina, too early for the just part of the day
and, especially, for the emotive epoch in the voracious fields of
which you have lost yourself.
Yet what importance may details have as long as the mechanic at CFR
has no programmed spear halt in the slippery path of the forget metal
rails? Flaubert, as well as Tolstoy, despite their impeccable
Parisian French, could not deny – not even for a moment without
burdening their conscience – that their heroines are the very ‘pure
male man’ of their own personal masculine conscience, it too pure
only until the acceding to other mental spaces, slattern and
frivolous like a church captive in the heart of the New Year’s Eve.
Much sooner than you might have thought possible,
you come out of a bathroom heated in a short while,
hands cleansed, thoughts cleared. And this is because you felt in
your belly the kicks of your interior being, which would rather call
you by your name taken oven from your unknown Father. You already
know that another room must follow, familiar and strange at the same
time, like the belly of a blue whale, flesh untouched by cyanides.
From all the pieces of furniture available to sight, it is not
difficult to see that it is precisely the kitchen: cupboards
incorporated in the vibrant wall, multifunctional capacious drawers,
cutlery and glasses with silver filigree, all hung on the invisible
skeleton of the whale. Then, anywhere you might look, transparent
sharp harpoons lie close at your hand. They, their gilded and
enticing handle, lie placed exactly at the level of your arm. In that
very moment, thousands of thoughts, chaotically caught in the melted
lard of morning, cover you with their fine larch. The yeast of
chronic tiredness begins to wrinkle the joys that are to follow that
day, in so much that the defenders of Greenpeace could die of the
toxicity of their own spite, which spite must be ecological!
You come close to the small table, entirely made
of massive wood. You poor a little out of a
transparent bottle, more than half full with 25-year old liquor. Its
contents is murky from place to place, cloggy like gore. Yet as you
withdraw in shock the goblet from your mouth you immediately convince
yourself that the blood is sweet like natural honey, in so much that
you are not surprised to hear coming from its obscure gustative
structure a threatening bee hum. Only the gods’ nectar might have a
similar taste. And, perchance, Prometheus’s liver! And yet, the
world’s love is there exposed, in all its promising nudity, on the
thin blade of a kitchen knife, or on the worn rails on which the
train moves, awaited for with a shiver ennobled by Anna Karenina’s
presence, the fast train that, since birth, wallows in the conscience
of all women. Now you realize that innocence is the only tamed man; a
moment from now you shall say that this must be the first and last
thought to follow you without punishment.
Meanwhile, that intangible part of you, only just contoured, and yet
which you are fully submissive to, tries to irreversibly replace you.
You know not whether it be greater or more profound than you have
been accustomed to consider yourself, or to be considered by those
around you, yet which represents you as a species: familiar and yet
foreign. Precisely this species is provoking you (actually, it is
‘opening to itself’) unsuspected senses and images, drawn by the
smell of death, even now cuddled in your stomach ulcer that you have
gained during college, only just now finished. The dark butterflies,
with their wings threaded at the margins, have rested since forever.
Not really, they have been there for even longer, they have settled
there earlier even. They seem to occupy a space as wide as a street
in the old town centre, awaiting that the famished larvae chew
through the virtual barks of trees and the last leaf of the blossomed
acacia! Now you may thread on a liquid surface of terror, which is
only now opening a barely perceptible path in space.
You are free to run.
Run wherever and on any side of the promise now lying as a
borderline, with the geography of life priggishly mapped and set for
prolonged preservation on the long-lived natural wooden shelves. From
everywhere the unmistakeable traces and smudges of natural life
emerge. Around you, you find dishes waiting to be cleaned, some never
yet used, big cups of tea or coffee pots with chipped rims, and tea
spoons engraved with the letters of a strange alphabet. Some of them
still keep, in obscure hiding places, inaccessible to sensory organs,
entire pieces of unconsumed light dating back to your first birth.
You shall never know should any other follow...
Yet too much time has already gone by.
It is more than some protective space, tolerable for a decision this
important.
And in front of you... In front of you lies an all too familiar
object so as to recognize its inborn honour. It is the very knife
blunted by the flesh of so many vegetables, minutely washed and
sacrificed as a daily divine offering, directly on the vegetal
trencher or on the industrial oven: to such an extent that it has
lost all ability to negotiate with the life of he who is holding it
in his perspired hand...
You need only so little...
You are in need of so little to cross over, to go definitely on the
natural side of the light...
A little more, and the darken blade of the knife shall brusquely emit
a heavy vibration, yet even since not suspiciously melancholic, so as
not to betray its true character hidden behind it, and, most of all,
its lively conscience, too burdened by details for its criminal
mission.