Now...(To Puslu)

For my cat Puslu who passed away 2 weeks after I posted this...


It is night now. And I am writing in the silence of others. At night one perceives more deeply the immobility of objects. The lamp, the bed, the photographs lying on my desk. I am writing you surrounded by this immobility, the sound of my hand caressing the paper being the only noise breaking the invisible quietness.

There are moments in our lives that contain more than just a moment. Sometimes a whole life, like the moment of becoming butterfly of a larva, or the moment when a whole hi(story) flashes as images passing in front of closing eyes. But sometimes another impression of life, its mysterious structure, its timeless beauty, is contained in a moment, like a mixture of vegetables compressed in a can. At those moments one experiences something rather unusual, even frightening a bit. It is a feeling of unnameable joy, of invisible connection with everything surrounding you, of perfect harmony and peace with life, as it is. Those moments are the moments freed from any shadow of the past or anxiety of the future. Those moments are the moments of the “now”. The “now” that I am writing to you. My “now” that will be past when you will read it and that will reborn under your eyes, in my future, in your “now” of reading it.

“Now” is like an empty chair put in the middle of two mirrors facing each other. For the one who chooses to sit on it, one of the mirrors (the future) reflects the pro-jections while the other (the past) reflects something that one still feels but cannot see. However both of the mirrors reflect the front and the back of the sitter to each other, until infinity. Sometimes the past is in the future. Sometimes the future is in the past. And the sitter is lost in between these reflections, these thoughts of past, future, to the point of forgetting his presence on the chair, the “now” itself. In a way, sitting on the chair of the “now” is a very hard task since the chair and its sitter can be swallowed by the mirrors of time. But the mirrors can only reflect if there is something to be reflected. So the sitter is the only cause and the consequence of the time, of past and future as we used to know it.

But why am I writing you all about the “now”, now? Probably because now is one of those “nows” which creates in you such a strange anxiety that, trying to put it into words is your only hope of appeasing it. Alas, the more you try to verbalize it the more it is difficult to assimilate it into your life. Just try to imagine that you have lost all sense of perception and have to learn a new way of sensing the world. A world where every individual appearance looses its separate meaning and becomes a part of a huge, inexplicable pattern, a pattern that repeats without really repeating. In that world the face of your mother is not your mother anymore but just one of the repeated patterns (one nose, two eyes, one mouth, two ears, one head, two legs...) in different forms. Or, the sound of the night bus passing shamelessly under my window with its animal roarrr, is not the sound of a night bus but is an accumulation of a repeated rhythm, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, the rhythm of every clock’s “tic-tac”, of every footsteps, of every closing and opening of eyebrows, of every door’s “knock-knock” of every hand claps, of every heart beats. Seeing the life as it is, with its bits and pieces, its invisible molecules, is only possible when one feels the “now” with his heart. When one is courageous enough to leave the train of thoughts to jump into the madness.

The darkness of the night is going to fade in few hours to become the brightness tearing my dreams. The world, this wooden puppet child set aside on the chair of the now, will be animated again under the skilful hands of smile-less bus drivers, of baby feeding mothers, of sleepless fruit sellers, of hurried bikers, of money counting bankers, of image-full designers, of careful doctors, of transpiring bakers, of frightening road cleaners, of dreamful writers… of whoever you, who is now sleeping into the quiet darkness of your sheets...wait until you wake-up again. Wait as long as possible in the “now”, breath its joy into your impressions…before you forget it at your morning reflection on the mirror…in order to remember it again at those vibrational moments of seeing the truth in the supernatural…