I have been sitting with the desire to write something readable and engaged for a while and after a few false starts eventually Kurt Vonnegut gave me the right trigger word. Unlocking. The word that freed the flow of thoughts towards a consistent text.
Still, in 2021 consistent text is so old-school, that I feel obliged to mention all the inconsistent ways that led me here.
No surprise, it started with a search in the library. Never have my admiration to people who start (also a test) reading at page one has been so large as it was throughout the first quarter of this year. Exceptionally poor for me in reading, with the physical libraries closed and the digital ones letting me peek only in the first five pages in a book, when I would rather open it anywhere and read anything. I must be a biased, tenacious, old air-head to stick so firmly to such a childish habit, that has, moreover, set me up with books I prefer not to have met.
Anyway, I had hard times finding a good read in the first months in this year and felt deprived from my freedom to choose a book based on random page experience. (The important question here is how come any human, after millennia of civilisation can feel deprived from their freedom for whatever reason beyond his influence.) And I inevitably got creative – shooting long and wide with search words like “bench”, “sulphur”, “leaf”, “pitch” and so on. And to my utter surprise, all these searches landed at WW2 books – with soldiers, in-love couples, kids, forests and whatnot on the cover. I am biased yet another time, having always avoided with religious dedication such books and even subplots (I call them subplots, they are the main plot of course). Without even looking at them. Why? Because I believe in cognitive diversity, and strangely enough everyone is of the same opinion here. There was only one person in my entire life who served a question, instead of echoed opinion in the WW2 themed discussions. “What if the guy with funny moustache had won?” I used to reflect over this one in the minutes of boredom that sneaked in my busy schedule every now and again. The only factual answer I found was in the Nexans cable factory in Hannover, where a tall, handsome gentleman informed me that AH is forbidden by law in Germany when abbreviating or coding or crypting. Interesting what they do with “arterial hypertension”…
The idea of war was commendably resolute to get my attention and I, with my immeasurably large heart, almost unable to say “no”, gave it some. I rolled through my mind the words “all is fair in love and war”. I was rolling it downhill, in ready phrases like “War and Peace”, protesting that war is not the opposite of peace, the same way punishment is not the opposite of crime. Then I was rolling it sideways, noticing that the literal translation in Bulgarian is “everything is allowed in war and love”. This notion resonated with others inhabitants of my mind, about not being allowed to handshake, to go to a pub, to play backgammon with a stranger, to dance, let alone to save a life with mouth-to-mouth breathing.
Everything is allowed in love and war. In pandemic things are not allowed. And here the sideway rolling of the idea went uphill. Wars take lives, so does pandemics. Wars allow for strategic planning, teaming of opposite decision-making patterns in a way that adding one to minus one results in absolute value of two. Like putting a linguist together with mathematicians in the decoding squad for the famous Enigma. War maybe gives people a choice to fight for something or against something else. And they may receive a medal for bravery. Where is the bravery in times of pandemic? Is anyone given the chance to think differently if at all?
I know too little to hold a firm opinion. The only thing I have done to understand the preventive measures is to find an analogy with “The Howling Miller” by Arto Paasalina. It is not a secret that that book made me cry, because I was outraged by the injustice. Hospitalising a healthy person destroys trust in the system. Globally and irreversibly. Everybody knows that an atmosphere of trust is more fruitful than an atmosphere of mistrust. Energy goes into spying, doubting and plotting when trust is gone. When there is trust, one can relax in the notion that things outside her power are taken care of.
Otherwise, there will be chaos.
And in the fight against chaos people usually create even more chaos.
The only way to defeat it is to be curious about it. Because every evil contains in itself the key to its own destruction. One only needs to keep eyes open and mind alert.
As opposed to dormant. Like the sleeping beauty that was locked in that castle, hidden in abundant vegetation. (This transition here is a very cheap way to get back to the topic of unlocking, I will keep it in only because of my admiration to the fact that in this fairy-tale the princess is 100ish years older than the price)
Unlocking is the season after winter and before spring, according to K. Vonnegut in “Palm Sunday”. The months of March and April. Unlocking sounds powerful in the era of lockdowns. When the whole blue planet replicates the same measures to limit the spread of a deadly virus, which is not always deadly.
Everyone should do the same.
It is counterintuitive – can every musician play the same track, can every writer write the same novel… I saw a driver of an empty bus a few days ago. Wearing a face mask. There was no need for this bus and this driver and his mask to be there at that time. Few days later I was walking in a empty office – wearing a facemask – and there was need for me to be there either.
Doing something nobody has any use of. When I could have invested my time to make myself and people around me better. This thought scares the shit out of me.
But let’s get back to the unlocking. Everyone is tired of holders of opinion that are shitting their pants with fear.
Unlocking is the realisation that not everything can be locked.
Water can’t. Instead, it would flow out of the smallest crack, meander its way through the obstacles and round some edges without intention to do so.
You can’t lock sound – be it a scream or a melody, sound has its ways to reaching though and be heard, even when nobody is listening.
Thought shouldn’t be either. There are at least eleven things every one of us can think of and make right now. More than half of them make us and people around us better.
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