I Read Poetry
I read poetry, I read works by Lithuanian poets and foreign poets, I read in all the languages that I was able to, and pain bled through me. How can a person be so subtle, how can there be so much nuance in language, so many mysteries, so many forbidden and desired zones, which are sensed only in hints, which one tiptoes around with caution, which charm, attract, frighten? And these secret desires, this longing recalls a spider’s web, which may be beautiful for one person, an ornament decorated with pearls of dewy drops, but for another it could be a deathtrap.
And how simple-minded, how shallow the life of this world is, this social, political, everyday reality with its gossip, hatred, jealousy, accusations, with its never-ending babbling about old rags, about love for oneself and their own organs. I thought at one point that the thinner televisions and the bodies of computers became, the shallower our life became, it’s not even life, it’s the understanding it, the relationship with it, its idea.
Unfortunately, it’s only the mad and the dead that can live in a poetic reality.
The Joy and Woe of Aging
Autumn and the world die weak and beautiful, according to one poet. So that fucking autumn of life has come, I tell my contemporary – here’s old age with its straitjacket-like diapers. I am met with fervent resistance: Nonsense, you’re not old, don’t make things up. Do such protests mean love from someone close, a desire to comfort, or a fear that you have to come face-to-face with time, to admit that you are subject to the unavoidability of temporality? It’s interesting when that time comes when you can legally say, “I’m getting old, I got old” – when you’re seventy? Three hundred?
A German photographer takes me around Vilnius. He takes photos first here, then there. He asks, “Can I touch you?” and I reply, “You can, but not too much.”
Only doctors and morgue workers touch the bodies of old people. And only out of duty, not love.
The photographer likes my wrinkles, he says “make more wrinkles.” I don’t have to make wrinkles anymore, they’re multiplying, reproducing, sprouting, coming out from the folds of time like parasites, like predators on their own. The body’s opportunities lessen, the world gradually moves inward. After all, RenéDescartes had that in mind while saying, “I think, therefore I am.”
I contemplate old age now, while I still can, while I am still capable of recording its features, while I can still see its spies. Otherwise, it will be too late. When you get old, the desire to ramble on goes away. Not for all, but for most. It seems a person’s wisdom and experience would suffice, but the reservoirs of egoism empty out, an egoism which people amazingly confuse with love.
The German photographer asks why I don’t like to be photographed. Posing is one of the worst things you come up against while standing in front of the objective. I don’t like photographers who want me to stand in some particular spot and in some particular way. The thing I like the least is myself, what bothers me is the knowledge that I am posing, because posing is one of man’s most disgusting flaws.
And if we talk about naturalness – be yourself, be natural, enjoy being who you are – that is in general the greatest idiocy and a crime against the humanity of these times because all those people being natural and enjoying being themselves are precisely the biggest fakers, posers, and chameleons. To be yourself means creating the kind of pose, role, character, which is attractive and endearing to others. In other words, a terrifying artificialness presented as an unbelievable naturalness. A person is natural and real only when no one sees him, absolutely no one, when he doesn’t even see himself. It’s best on a dark night – when you’re knocked out. Those few moments he can be natural and real.
In this case, old age has advantages – an aging person gradually breaks loose from artificial images, he doesn’t give a shit how he looks, what others think about him, one can be uncouth and mix up facts, times and realities, it’s not important anymore, how many genders people have, how much money or decency they have, who is famous and worthy of monuments, and who is weak and worth only a slap in the face, there’s just one thing that remains clear – life’s too short to give a shit about such trifles.
I saw some statistics that there are already more people in the world over sixty-five than children who are younger than five. In a few decades, these numbers will double. It seems it’s not global warming that’s an impending catastrophe awaiting humanity in the near future, but aging. We want to live as long as possible, civilization strove to lengthen man’s life, and now there is a billion-strong army of old people shitting their pants, and suffering from dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other kinds of illnesses that tramples on a person’s dignity and independence wandering around the planet (there’s a popular TV series The Walking Dead created about it), and there’s nothing that can be done about it. After all, aging is a joy.
Theater of Memory
I am standing on stage, I am the main character, the play is most likely my life or something similar, and if it’s not life, then it’s about a person, if it’s not a person, then it’s just me, a person, one out of a million, there are people in the auditorium, those, thanks to whom we recognize, understand that we ourselves are people, it’s only from them, through them we find out that we are children, sons, daughters, marriage partners, members of various professions, thinkers, liars, scammers, murderers, and it just so happens that I am selling tickets for the first rows only to the most important, the dearest, the closest, then, but no, unfortunately, I’d like that only those who are affable would sit in the first row, those who clap for me and respect my talent, unfortunately, my memory is the sort that it more remembers the bastards then the saints, which is why, while looking at the auditorium of my memory, at the rows filled with people important to me, I can’t say that it’s only the best and most loved that are sitting in the front rows, it’s the most impactful that are sitting the front rows, those who left the deepest scars on my post-make-up physiognomy.
I am standing on stage, I am the main character, it’s my story, I want, I want something, to be honest, like everyone, I want specific things that perhaps symbolize something abstract and grand, I want food, I want sex, I want power, I want attention, something is stopping me, the system, parents, the neighbors, my egoism and exaggerated belief in myself, my modesty, complexes, and inflated ambitions, something helps me, an exaggerated belief in myself, egoism, the system, parents, the neighbors, I travel through my story, something good happens, something bad happens, until everything finally ends, sooner or later everything ends anyway, and it’s not important for hardly anyone how it ends, even for me, but perhaps the most for me.
The longer this story lasts, the more annoying the question that is raised – do I do all this for myself or for the audience? I, who is standing on stage, even when I am totally alone, when there are no spectators, I am still on stage, I am still repeating a learned text, sometimes an entirely pointless one, an entirely stupid one, I execute movements and make faces, the substance of which was forgotten long ago, and even the people for whom all of this is intended are not there anymore; but each one of us has such an audience, in the auditorium of memory of each person there are people, for whom we want to be important and beautiful, or in whose eyes we feel inadequate and flustered, we want that they wouldn’t be in the audience, but they are, by the way, there are empty seats in this auditorium and we can’t understand at all why they are empty, where that person went and why, we can’t remember at all, who he was, though he was important, at one time he was very important, and the further on it goes, the more the spectators’ faces become blurry, melt, dissipate, and what’s even stranger is that we are standing on stage, we are performers of the main role and also the spectators, we are sitting in someone’s auditorium of memories and we’re not even in the first few rows, not even near the theater bar, but somewhere in the cloakroom, beneath the stairs, beneath time, beneath all my frustration.
That is my theater of memory.
Life is a Photograph
At the beginning it is vivid, clear, you can discern everything, it shines, it’s pleasant to touch.
Afterwards scratches appear, the corners become bent, the paper gets scrunched up and finally tears.
Much later the image becomes hazy, it gets harder and harder to make it out, its contour becomes blurry, and then it fades, and it is replaced by another one, vivid, distinct, with a kind of freshness and light that crackles.
