Another very nice aspect of street life: people are very close physically, and even more so when in non mixed. Women often enough hold hands in pairs; more so until their 30s and when age differences are great; I suppose mature women have their hands too full for that; or of course are accompagnied by men more often!

Did I mention people kiss and hold hands, romantically this time, which means more distance actually than the sisterly hand-hugging friends share.

Men will hold each other by their shoulders, or hit each other of course. Actually men will also playfully push around their girlfriends or just girl friends--the latter usually respond; but always with more grace--tomboys are much more salient here.

And of course everyone kisses in public, and more sometimes. Kissing must be a hobby, or else it's hard to believe love can seem everywhere in this world.

Women are very feminine, some even girly, and ue more richly various bodily and behavioural details they've learned to play with, it's a hip-rolling country. While men never stop noticing, and the sexes never stop communicating non-verbally, and occasionally verbally too.

Walkmans plugged into ears will show up sometimes, but just as often people will blare noise from their mp3-cell phones in order to share music with friends, and everyone around. Of course strangers will object and so start verbal jousts, with said musical background usually turned louder.

One aspect of imagination that is disappearing in Romania, is the customization of cars! During the communist era the vast majority of families (well, men) had access to only a handful of car models, mainly the local variants of a 60' Renault we called Dacia. Since everyone had more or less the same car, and standard accessories and colours, many added all kinds of interior decorations: crocheted panel covers, hand sewn seat covers, and various saints and folkloric figures glued inside, oh yes and when I was a kid everybody needed to have one of these chinese animal dolls with bobbing heads, mostly cows. Who knows, maybe women participated to car culture during that era!

Men were the drivers, despite significant equality in the workplace compared to the west; today there are many school cars in the streets, mostly with women learners: besides the culture changes, perhaps their income has risen to allow more people access to cars.

As EU folds Romania in next year, this population will be considered its most religious member. I hear intellectuals are seen again in churches. I'm generally happy about that. Of course mostly because I generally believe that when pulled out of the clenched hands of conservatives, and the grip of those many thirsty for some simple order coming from anywhere above, religious discourse has a wealth of poetry and concepts about the varieties of life experience. The orthodox confession in particular, has an anarchist streak (both libertarian/anachorite and collectivist/cenobite) that often makes me smile--but maybe it's only me, despite, among other pitfalls, the stone faces of apolitical but perceptive athonite monks. Of course the feeling of continuous danger for the faith/nation/etc. combined with the political games of those too close to power (and god) for anyone's good, are promoting the most conservative voices, which deepens the rift between a discourse of well tempered wonder and imagination rooted in living experience, i.e. religion/spirituality, and the current material world, which has generally little time for thinking other possible worlds, paradises or hells, adapted to its times.

It is now fall. Much greyer; rain every morning & drops off everything. Some things match: branches are leafless to let drops hang off every nodule and tip, and in orderly crystal strings refracting everything in their centre, pulling the eye into a quick glass bead game with Nature.

The city needs a good scrubbing, it has not yet benefited from the clean up leading to various commemorations that many EU capitals got. Some things do rinse the eye: the "jeunes filles en fleurs", the wilder varieties, the shiny top tier pimpin' gangsta' cars, the many revamped churches: oases of physical and temporal space in a city as fast as any other. Their small surrounding gardens are also gaps in the typical european "wall of building" urban style. The churches, and sometimes the street crosses signalling accidental deaths or martyrs, are also gaps in discussions or boredom: many, not only of the older generation, make a triple sign of the cross on their chest as they pass every religious monument. There are many churches, you can't really go anywhere in the city without seeing some. And that despite many having been demolished by the communists, some despite the UN world heritage patronage; one of the demolitions started with perhaps two hundred people barricaded inside. The miracle was more modest than expected: as the surviving counterrevolutionaries ran outside from the falling bricks, halos and wings they were not arrested but let to be lost again in the material dialectic world.

Sorry! I messed up the setup for allowing all to comment; now you can all do so.

I'm discussing the finer points of hesychasm as Ibn Arabi would imagine it ... but at a congress about the history of religion it's normal.

'later

One real surprise so far is that it seems I have a particular status for many ppl: I'm not an emigrant but an "escapee". yes technicallly I am a political refugee, but most ppl my age do not know anyone who left during the communist era, while most know ppl who left after. What? And for that they feel they were not part of the generation that "did something" like die in a gulag, become insane whenever needed, kill a goose in a zoo to eat, or fled the country, etc. What? So I feel part of generation, like some kinf of boomer in reverse: I represent instead of the "summer of love" era some kind of "winter of gulag". What? I feel someone has pulled History over my head and now I have to get out of that bag and stop laughing cause there is not much air in that History bag.

{the early posts are at the end... not that it matters much, but since it's not ovvious}

All in all, I feel I've just arrived. I'm just starting to see and hear more so I feel my month is going by pretty fast. Or I suppose I've not slowed down yet mentally to "vacation" or "flaneur" speed.
So I'm going to try to slow down a bit more. Not too hard: trolleys routinely stop and street lights don't always come out at night because of electricity brown-outs; must be because of the litterally tens and tens of big and small casinos with lots and lots of lights! Some have more advertising lights outside than inside! Yes I guess gambling is also modernity.


I hope you'll excuse the brain-dump rhetoric in the above. And I'm sure some passages may not make much sense and need to be unpacked, but ask me more questions if it doesn't make sense; I'm all for dialogue, even Ionesco style :)

group hug!
and one for each too. Email me how you are and I'll try to also have individual dialogues.

until next email
noroc,
cat

But about the new things. The news is: I am having an uncle! It's a relatively new experience: for various reasons, some in my mindset maybe, I don't feel I have a family. But what an uncle I'm having! Well he's another story, he feels like he should be a branch of History studies: non-martial-hoplology comes to mind. It's surprising how fun/alive a depressed and ill individual can feel to others, we really ought to think of old-age as some kind of renewable energy. Renewable 'cause as long as we have humans we'll get old--well techno-ideology wants to take that away but hasn't yet given anything back; anyway.

I can't say I wish that to anyone, but maybe being able to say "I've done most of the things I wanted" has something to do with it; well and you ought to ask what does that mean in the midst of daily factual personal tragedy and repression? This sentence does not do justice to the topic at all. But I guess it's a story for another email, because frankly I'm still living it and I dunno how it will go. Though I also feel some stories, like stories about people and lives, simply have no end, and telling it has to be different each time you think about it.

I can't help but see images from my childhood around: not living the evolution of a place means old and new images don't mix: the same street corner time shifts with each step between looking the same and seeming changed too. It's fun: it's a two-for-one. I took some pictures, it would be fun to show you all, but how do you take pictures of that feeling? I guess you'll see the same dusty streets I see, but you see the dust in regular color and I see it in a rich back&white.

I'm making efforts to meet a new generation; my generation. I wrote some ppl on some web sites and got answers and meeting ppl. It turns out I'm not meeting any guys so far; they are not as numerous online, and did answer and perhaps it's just coincidence that schedules are not working out, and they recommended other gals to me. But anyway I'll meet more people and that's great. Just by itself, and also for hearing voices from today's country; a piece of tomorrow's EU. As you can imagine I love this. Hearing new accents and stories, picking up new expressions or gestures, I love it. Well I'm travelling! and that's just great. I don't think I'll leave Romania, but probably will go outside Bukresh to Iasi--"iashi"--the Moldavian capital and probably one of the prettyest cities in Europe I've never visited.

dear each, cher chacun, caro ognuno,
it turns out internet access is relatively easy to find, but wireless rather not. So I get many dark Internet rooms with smokers, gamers and chatters that are not at all inspiring, and that is why emailing you and such are not ready at (my) hand (and your eyes). It also turns out many romanians have internet at home, and the so called cafes are not that, but mostly places where street kids intersect with the virtual world.

Some of you got my email pointing you here and maybe feel you stepped into a chat whose start you've missed, it's all a bit st(r)eam-of-conciousness; questionable style but the in-discipline of my brain and the feel of the place makes this so natural; sorry, read what you can.

This trip is fun I think, well, I feel I'm travelling. Buk'resh--might as well say it right, with the same verbal shorthand as T'rano--is of course a city looking for modernity. Or rather looking for western modernity. Though this place's rationality is as shallow as any hot blooded consumer's, I am proud to feel the rather modulated modernity of "I think, that I'm a deleusian war machine--therefore I am". This little country who saw many hordes unfurl over its lands(!), feels now it can be the horde, albeit of migrant or zigzaggingly-mobile whitish-collar biznessmen. Of course a whole category of people, most ppl?, will never be "1st class hordemen" because they look like it's 1979 and they carry along with their dusty briefcase a bagful of fish carcasses for soup. Ahh yes soups! yum! Or they sound like gipsies who look like rappers (and the language they use smells of fish carcasses too but I guess it's normal for urban fashion). So the beemers and mercs and SUVs, all pretending they don't have fish carcasses in their briefcases, are speeding through the dust and makes it all more like Rio, except ppl hope it's gonna be Europe. But Europe has already several economic lanes, and the fast one in Romania is already full.

It's silly, it's funny, it's infuriating, it's scary: can't a people who routinely ate tragedy spread on bread while children sing and laugh about hard drinking (yes, really!) and wild dog-packs sleep their beautifully relaxed freedom in parks in the sun, can't these people look for better toys than pin-stripe suits, tanned and shiny smiles, fancy cars, cheap gold, impants, lean yoghurt, etc.? I mean really, half-wild dogs are tail-wagging-buddhas, because it's illegal to hurt them (they've been tagged and neutered though): how lucky to see routinely dogs spread out in the most relaxed poses, or walking very leisurely around... it's a whole other experience from the pampered nervous pets you get in toronto... ok so they can bark and bite now and then; yup don't go in _their_ parks at night, you're stepping on their tails and dreams and they can kill. But the idea of half wild creatures in the city could be so innovative! (yes of course we in toronto have the westnile flu and other wild bacteria). the romantic in me imagines the architectural/urbanistic possibilities.
At the moment I can't help but be pissed that another city from the margins wants to become just like others: the global village wants no idiots so we dress them in armani suits. But no news here.

ok so with that furball out of my throat how am I doing here? well enough. I spend a significant time with the pains of my mom's generation: memory and geriatry compete for their consciousness. In eastern europe, but I think elsewhere too, the muse of memory is a beefy steroid-era athlete, she shoves aside the muse of old-age most of the time when competing for mind-space; of course old people want that. The muse of old age is persistent of course, and will win, hopefully without them knowing.

DSCF0132
Originally uploaded by reallycat.

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Originally uploaded by reallycat.



- Rome airport



Rome! a cappucino and a croissant brings it back. Yum! Memories. Yum!
[ho preso il cappucino col cornetto in un posto dove una volta l'ho preso insieme ad altri sogni. Era buonissimo, e con i ricordi sentivo proprio la soddisfazione di piazzare un pezzo dentro un puzzle: puzzle che a la fine non sara mai finito, ma va bene cosi, come la bellezza delgli antici mosaici, per noi moderni forse piu attreianti cosi incompleti.]

The atmosphere in Rome--even in this airport hall--seems to me always full of a vivacious energy, nervous or impatient perhaps, or exuberant. Never quite happy, but certainly never sad.

atlantic airplane

DSCF0130
Originally uploaded by reallycat.

I'm just crossing a moon ray--I have a pic! airplanes do miracles nowadays. The moon is nearly full so there are millions of shades of gray and gold floating outside the airplane. I'm on top of a mountain of emptiness; and it has the same intoxicating effect as the more solid mountain, the ones full of dirt and space: it's so great to see space, and it's one paradox of enclosed metal capsules flying that they can after all make you feel spacious. Well me anyway.

I'm flying to Rome, and what a hit of saudade. I'm always amazed at the capacity of my mind to create so much energy with a mere thought.
But this thought came served by Carlo Verdone; most of you won't know him: a roman actor often playing "melancomic" characters that trade passionately on the market exchange of human failures and joys. Very italian I think; and romans of course do it louder.

[For those who care: The film was "lezzioni d'amore", nothing to e-mail home about (infatti dirrei che il sceneggiatore e' stato abbastanza pigro): in the script people we knew nothing about flapped in fountains of emotions (oh and lots of voice-off: 2nd hand emotions?!) except of course for Verdone's character: clear and likeable the moment I saw his sweet-n-bitter face. But I'm maybe the only Canadian fan of Verdone so... indulge me.]

Having space around, especially below, always impresses me. Altitude, perspective, makes me feel the fractality of life: there is no straight line, there is no simple limit. The illusion of separation can be obvious despite the intermediary composites, like on beaches: water and land mix freely and subtly and so are clearly apart and together. There is probably a name for feeling this "beach effect" in one's life, when spaces mix inside. It's fun and never boring the same way watching waves or fire is not boring when you get into it.