Chier

Dans une lettre à sa tante, Élisabeth-Charlotte de Bavière, surnommée « La Palatine », se plaint des conditions sanitaires des palais français (link).

"Vous êtes bien heureuse d’aller chier quand vous voulez ; chiez donc tout votre chien de soûl. Nous n’en sommes pas de même ici, où je suis obligée de garder mon étron pour le soir ; il n’y a point de frottoir aux maisons du côté de la forêt. J’ai le malheur d’en habiter une, et par conséquent le chagrin d’aller chier dehors, ce qui me fâche, parce que j’aime chier à mon aise, et je ne chie pas à mon aise quand mon cul ne porte sur rien. Item, tout le monde nous voit chier ; il y passe des hommes, des femmes, des filles, des garçons, des abbés et des Suisses. Vous voyez par là que nul plaisir sans peine, et que, si on ne chiait point, je serais à Fontainebleau comme le poisson dans l’eau. 

Il est très chagrinant que mes plaisirs soient traversés par des étrons. Je voudrais que celui qui a le premier inventé de chier ne pût chier, lui et toute sa race, qu’à coups de bâton! Comment, mordi ! qu’il faille qu’on ne puisse vivre sans chier ? Soyez à table avec la meilleure compagnie du monde ; qu’il vous prenne envie de chier, il faut aller chier. Soyez avec une jolie fille ou femme qui vous plaise ; qu’il vous prenne envie de chier, il faut aller chier ou crever. Ah ! maudit chier ! Je ne sache point de plus vilaine chose que de chier. Voyez passer une jolie personne, bien mignonne, bien propre ; vous vous récriez : « Ah ! que cela serait joli si cela ne chiait pas ! » 

Je le pardonne à des crocheteurs, à des soldats aux gardes, à des porteurs de chaise et à des gens de ce calibre-là. Mais les empereurs chient, les impératrices chient, les rois chient, les reines chient, le pape chie, les cardinaux chient, les princes chient, les archevêques et les évêques chient, les généraux d’ordre chient, les curés et les vicaires chient. Avouez donc que le monde est rempli de vilaines gens ! Car enfin, on chie en l’air, on chie sur la terre, on chie dans la mer. Tout l’univers est rempli de chieurs, et les rues de Fontainebleau de merde, principalement de la merde de Suisse, car ils font des étrons gros comme vous, Madame." (deslettres.fr)

Clipa lungă cât un cub de gheață

„Deocamdată, prefer să mă țin departe de postări și să îmi repet versurile lui Frank O’Hara: «E plăcut să te poți baza pe ceva/ simplu și real/ cum e să-ți fie dor de cineva». Da, încă mă mai bazez pe ceva simplu și real. 

Abia aștept să închei textul ăsta, să mă duc la fereastră și să mă uit în zare, «bând această strălucire numită whisky», cum zice Roberto Bolaño, gândindu-mă la cineva drag, gândindu-mă cu intensitate, măcar atât cât va rezista cubul de gheață din pahar. În loc de urgența de a posta ceva, prefer să rezist cât mai mult în aerul tare al amintirilor sau al realității din câmpul vizual.”
_____________
*fragment din textul lui Marin Mălaicu-Hondrari, publicat de Dilema Veche, nr. 768/8-14 noiembrie 2018.

Regăsire

M.V. Llosa (am rătăcit sursa fragmentului - un interviu sau Caietele lui Don Rigoberto) 

„Am reușit întotdeauna să-mi mențin față de ce făceam de luni până vineri, de la opt la șase seara, o ironie suficientă pentru a disprețui această activitate și a mă disprețui că o făceam, astfel încât orele rămase să mă poată despăgubi și mântui, să mă echilibreze și să mă umanizeze (ceea ce, în cazul meu, înseamnă întotdeauna să mă separ de cireadă sau de turmă).”

Cerere la bloc

Buna Seara,

Am si eu nevoie de un sfat. Am problme cu administratorul de cind m-am mutat in bloc si in seara asta mi-a venit cu o scrisoare scrisa de asociatia de locatari, care e formata din prietenii dinsului, anume vecinul de sus si cel de jos cu care de altfel, am numai probleme si cu ei. Al de sus bate mereu, tot face cite ceva, mobila am inteles, al de jos bate in teava mereu, chipurile il deranjeaza copilul meu de un an jumate..nici nu pot sa merg in casa mea. Am inteles ca administratorul de fapt, nu are licenta, sau aprobare, nu stiu in fine ce studii si aprobari le trebuie pt. a fi administratori. Dar as vrea sa stiu in acest caz, ce as putea sa fac eu pt. a-l reclama sa i se rezilieze aceasta pozitie pe care o ocupa fara acte in regula. Si unde verifica daca intr-adevar are sau nu licenta respectiva.
(...)Totodata, sotul meu e de nationalitate indiana si are carte de rezidenta, inregistrata tot la adresa parintilor. As vrea sa stiu si eu ce legislatie exista in domeniu si ce penalitati am putea suferi si eu si sotul meu (cu statut diferit) daca nu vom respecta acest termen, sau daca nu vom face nici o mutatie sau flotant.(...) Va rog mult de tot sa ma ajutati, sa-mi spuneti ce rau poate reiesi din toata treaba asta. Multumesc foarte mult pt. timpul D-vs.

(avocat.net)

De unde observăm că, pe lângă grija legitimă de a fi actele în regulă, „reclamanta” nu s-ar da în lături nici de la a se răzbuna un pic pe administrator, căutându-l la licență. Ar putea trece drept un act civic, dacă nu ar ocupa poziție prioritară în scrisoarea de mai sus. Faptul că are soț care nu este cetățean român, nerezident, trece la capitolul „Altele”.

Nu mai dezvolt aici faptul că am și eu nevoie de un sfat... Tu și mai cine?

Timbuktu

A.O.Scott (cronicar de film la NYT):

"When you try to restrict the movies people can see, the music they can play or the opinions they can express — in the name of whatever theological or secular ideal you claim to represent — you may or may not become a monster. That you will make a fool of yourself is, in contrast, a moral certainty (...) 

How could the bad guys be anything other than human? Their folly lies in the belief that they can transcend that condition and terrorize their fellow Muslims into holiness. They may be sincere in their devotion to their God and his prophet, but they are still jerks. “Timbuktu” is an act of resistance and revenge because it asserts the power of secularism not as an ideology but rather as a stubborn fact of life."

Despre inabilitatea de a fi singur

An affinity for solitude is comparable only to one’s affinity for certain other people. And yet one’s first experience of solitude, like one’s first experience of the other, is fraught with danger… The absence of the visible and the absence of the object; and the risk, as in dreams, that innermost thoughts will come to light. For this reason, perhaps, it is the phobia relating to solitude that for some people persists throughout life.
[...]
It is the infant waiting too long for his mother that is traveling toward death because, unattended, he is in the solitary confinement of his body. Solitude is a journey, a potentially fatal journey, for an infant in the absence of sufficient maternal care. But it is worth remembering that the infant in the dark, the infant by himself, is not only waiting for the mother. Sleep, for example, is not exclusively a state of anticipation. It is, of course, difficult to conceive in psychoanalytic terms of an absence that is not, in some way, anticipatory. 

Through desire the child discovers his solitude, and through solitude his desire. He depends upon a reliable but ultimately elusive object that can appease but never finally satisfy him.
[...]

Adam Phillips (psihanalist) - On Risk and Solitude

De ce-i "mărităm" pe singuratici?

Sper să nu am probleme juridice că preiau integral textul de mai jos - Why are couples so mean to single people?, de pe BBC News Magazine, dar nu m-aş putea abţine, articolul fiind de-a dreptul irezistibil, putând fi lesne situat alături (dacă nu de un studiu, atunci) de orice eseu al unui psiholog de renume. Genială e, de departe, ideea că: single people might be the most reviled sexual minority today. Înţelepciune melancolică, ferită de defetism, umor cinic, zis britanic, curajul pe alocuri halucinant al unor opinii anti-mainstream. Cineva ar putea jura că nu i s-a întâmplat, în "calitate" de single, să fi fost subtil, dar insistent, cu o perseverenţă satanică,  întrebat(ă) de prieteni, mătuşi, fine, necunoscuţi abia cunoscuţi, de ce nu e cuplat(ă), de ce nu-şi găseşte şi el/ea - cu subliniere apăsată pe şi - un/o partener(ă)? Mira-m-aş...



***

In a world that celebrates romance and finding The One, people can be rather rude to single people, writes James Friel.

No-one is supposed to be single. In the course of my life, I have loved and lost and sometimes won, and always strangers have been kind. But I have, it appears, been set on a life of single blessedness.

And I haven't minded. Or rather, I realise, I haven't minded enough. But now I kind of do. Take dinner parties. There comes a moment, and that question: "Why don't you have a partner?" It is usually asked by one of a couple, with always a swivel of the eye to his or her other half, so really two people are asking this question.

And I struggle to answer: "I have never found the right person... I am a sad and sorry manchild... I am incapable of love... I am a deviant, and prefer giraffes.

Any answer will fail to satisfy. The questioner expects no happy answer. I am only covering up my bone-deep, life-corroding loneliness. The questioners know this, and the insight they believe it affords comforts them. They are safe.



James Friel's latest novel is The Posthumous Affair.

They look down from the high castle of coupledom, protected from such a fate. But if I were to ask: "Why have you settled for him? Why are you stuck with her? Were you so afraid of being alone?" such questions would be thought rude, intrusive.



Last week a friend of mine went on a date. A foolish thing to do. The man she met had been married three times and had a child by each wife. An example of emotional continence I'm sure you'll agree. And he asked my friend, single and childless, why she had failed at life. It was a shortish date. Failed at life?

Single people can also feel this way about other single people, and about themselves. You see, no one is supposed to be single. If we are, we must account for our deficiencies. A recent book claims on its cover that single people might be the most reviled sexual minority today. But it's not just today.

Take the word "spinster". It is withering and unkind. The word, of course, is innocent, but its connotations are unhappy, dismissive and disrespectful.

A few years back, in an age of Bridget Jones-type heroines, the novelist Carol Clewlow wondered about a female reader of her own generation, a woman who had long decided not to twin her destiny with another's. She wrote a novel about this single state. About spinsters. She called it Spinsta.

She delivered Spinsta to her agent, who was delighted, as were her publishers. A campaign was initiated. Various columnists and celebrities were to be asked to consider and celebrate this word, but then another word came back from the booksellers.

That word was "no". They would not stock and no one would pick up a book with such an ugly word as its title. The novel was retitled Not Married, Not Bothered.

When I speak of this subject with women, the conversation, the anecdotes, are plentiful, wry and amusing. With other men, gay or straight, the talk is more wistful, hesitant, inconclusive, and even a little pained. Legal now, the gay man must also account for not having a partner. We even agitate for marriage. To be recognised as couples not just by the law - which is right - but by God, which is redundant. But couples rely on such iron definitions, need them.

Someone might take them to be single, and no one is supposed to be single. And yet I am. Carol Clewlow described me as a male spinster. I admit I was a little bothered until she added "like George Clooney". Cool, I thought. I could go with that. But Google "male spinster" and there is much bother at the term. Top of the search list is an unreasonably popular piece from London's Evening Standard.

Can a man be a spinster?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, the word spinster was first used in the 14th Century to describe a woman (or, rarely, a man) "who practises spinning as a regular occupation".

However, by the 1600s, it was used less in the context of drawing out thread from wool or flax and more often to describe "the proper legal designation of one still unmarried" - along with that other less-than complimentary phrase of "old maid".

The male equivalent was a bachelor. The online Collins dictionary says this was probably derived from the 13th Century Old French "bacheler", meaning a youth. It was used in Britain for a young knight who served under the banner of another. While both terms assumed a legal status to describe those who were unmarried, the Registrar General of England and Wales dropped the terms as official labels in 2005.

It reads: "A male spinster is an unmarried man over the age of 35, a moniker that implies at best these men have 'issues' and at worst are sociopaths. One fears for these men, just as society has traditionally feared for the single women. They cannot see how lonely they will be." How kind this fear sounds. No-one is supposed to be single. To be single must mean to be lonely but far lonelier are those who fear being alone.

Namely, the "I" who is incomplete without a "you". The "me" who is without substance or purpose unless rhymed with a "we". Those tyrannised by the need, the obligation, to go about this world in pairs.

In order to argue for the single person, it seems one must criticise the couple; the culture that coerces us into coupledom, the religions, the familial pressures, the pop songs, the movies, the game shows, the gossip, the unavoidable, inescapable pressure to conjoin, to love.

Freud has it that we become ill if we do not love, and songs tell us we must succumb to a love that - bonding us - will devastate us too. I am nothing, nothing, nothing, if I don't have you. How kind is such a love? Isn't it a little punitive?

Laura Kipnis, in Against Love, has a chapter called Domestic Gulag, and the prison rules a couple must follow:

You can't leave the house without saying where you are going.

You can't not say what time you will return.

You can't leave the bathroom door open - it's offensive.

You can't leave the bathroom door closed.

You can't have secrets.

Nine and half pages later, Kipnis concludes: "The specifics don't matter. What matters is the operative word, can't. Thus is love obtained."

Recent views on single life

According to Michael Cobb, whose book Single is referenced in Slate.com: "The contemporary individual is not lonely, just single - but this is not culturally recognized." Meanwhile, Shanghai Daily looks ahead to Chinese Singles Day and finds 38-year-old Christine Liu enjoying the life of a "left-over lady - good looking, with good pay and good taste". The Huffington Post finds the author Lindsley Lowell - a wife of two years - refusing to join the "Smug Married Club". And the Daily Telegraph found the number of Britons aged 45 to 64 living alone had increased by more than 50% since 1990.

And Michael Cobb reminds us in a book called Single that Plato defined love as our name for the pursuit of the whole, our desire to be made complete. But Plato has Aristophanes remind us that this pursuit - this need to be completed, this quest for coupledom - is a punishment.

Perhaps single people secretly wish to reclaim an original state of being, somehow sense that we do not need to be completed by another, somehow sense that we are able to complete ourselves. The single person might just be too self-possessed.

Perhaps we are too honest to be coupled. Perhaps we cannot tell another person: "I love only you. And I will love you forever."

It's quite difficult to tell someone the more truthful: "I love you, you know, for now." Sorry. The single person might just be too self-possessed.

Personally, I don't wish to make satiric judgements against the couple because such judgements - patronising, dismissive and even fearful - are what I resent when asked to explain why I persist in being single.

I want to describe myself more positively and not against some grain that abrades both me and anyone else who believes and lives differently.

My favourite character in literature is the difficult, unclubbable Lucy Snowe from Charlotte Bronte's Villette. At the conclusion of her slippery and singular tale, she manages in her lone voice to define herself as wife, widow and spinster all at once and so none of these at all but - simply, complicatedly - her own marvellous, darkly brave and tricksy self.

 

Dickens' Miss Havisham - compelled by an unrealisable conception of love?

And I would rescue, too, that martyr, the maligned Miss Havisham. Because I don't believe the single person has a sceptical or reductive notion of love but suspect, rather, that they might be compelled by an even higher, almost unrealisable, conception of it.

In the world through which we move, increasingly, we do not expect our relationships to endure. Increasingly, our relative affluence and advances in new technology allow us to live comfortably alone..

Increasingly, this is what we seem to be doing: we are choosing to live alone. We need stories not about how to become couples. They are legion. We need stories about how to be single, and how to be kept amazed and awake by a joy of our own manufacture.

Although I was born single, I never considered that this would continue to be my fate.

Guest post: Dani Tudor

Colecția primăvară-gară

Priveam lung, mi se păruse că recunosc pe cineva, deşi cei mai apropiaţi sau cei pe care încă îi mai salut nu au ce căuta la ora aia, pe vremea aia, în gară. Înainte însă de a-mi revedea de drum cu jumătate din privirea încă rămasă în acea direcţie văd doi-trei libidinoşi, proletari de meserie, holbîndu-se la rîndul lor cam în aceeaşi direcţie. Mai apuc să zăresc în faţa lor, pentru cîteva secunde, o jună, promoteriţă după mers şi vestimentaţie, şi studentă după bagaje şi fard, avînd în stînga ei (cel mai probabil) o contabilă, cel puţin după zîmbetu-i oficial şi încă îngheţat în pofida unei canicule vide de autobuz.

C.S./2012

La rîndul ei, privirea-mi rămăsese îngheţată, de data asta în întregime, în aceeaşi direcție, dar parcă doar pentru a uita pentru cîteva momente de cele 43 de grade la soare. […] Tot timpul am găsit şi voi găsi infinit mai sexy o gleznă atent născută unui picior interminabil înfipt în nişte cizme ‘militare’, un şold de forma privirii cu care-l şlefuieşti unui cur ţuguiat-împăiat, un genunchi şi o claviculă pe jumătate dezvelite de o rochiţă tropicală cu flori şi păsări unor coapse ‘bunoace’, respectiv unor sîni (obsceni de) mari, chiar şi medii, înghesuiţi întru-un tricou simplu şi monocolor.