An Ordinate Delirium

They say that if you want to accomplish yourself, you must plant a tree, have a child, and write a book.
I don’t remember who said that, some classic for sure. I don’t remember where and when I heard this first, I’ve read it in a book or somebody told me when I was a child, but I never forgot it, nevertheless, although I must have heard it for the first time when I was about 8 or 9 years old. I do remember the age because I recall that the idea of having to have a child terrified me. At the age of 9 the last thing I wanted was to have children. I wasn’t into it not even at 19, let alone at 9 years of age.

Trees I planted, if I add them up, there are enough to make a small forest.
Children I had as well, the second one more to help the first, so they won’t be too lonely in the world.
The book though I did not write, but I started it a little bit every time I wrote a longer letter to someone. My letters always look like a small chapter of something bigger, without an introduction or an end.
Perhaps "the bigger thing" it’s called Life.
To put life into words it’s a pretty simple thing when you have mastered the words. If you are lost for words or they are out of your control, it’s much harder.

The critics talk too much about literary styles not to make one feel uneasy and incompetent when it comes to words – although what else should writing be but a chit-chat with the other, like when one has a cuppa with a friend.
My favorite authors are those that write with ease, with the same spontaneity they use probably when they talk.
Writing has been for me a small passion, as long as I could feel free to express myself without having to take into account the obligation of being extremely pretentious and literary in style.
To put my life or the fiction inspired by it ‘on paper’ so to speak, and be at ease at the same time,I must renounce first to calculating my words; give up on counting my repetitions and abbreviations; forget about poetical license, stylistic embroideries and even the extraction from the subconscious of the exact day or minute when facts happened.
Without having to bother too much about that, the thought comes into words easier, words turn into sentences and phrases more spontaneously and that way the phrase illustrates more easily ideas, memories, personal philosophies, reflections. Even some metaphors can come into existence with more simplicity. Free from the labor and pain of a birth.
I guess in all the above I am describing a storyteller rather than a writer.
To be a storyteller is fine by me. It’s unpretentious and honest. No claims to anything.

The truth is that I do not write for the purpose of giving literary lessons. Not even to myself. Grammar is something the academics should be concerned with and taking care of, I’m just a foreigner and English is not even my second language, but the third.
I have no literary aims; I’m just a chronicler of my own existence, and often my only reader.
I write the way I talk.
There were times when I felt that I had something to say. In public that is. Perhaps because the events I had witnessed and lived are too easily forgotten and what’s left after a while it’s submissive to oblivion. To fight this, I write a letter or a long e-mail to a friend.
It’s a form of self-therapy that helps to preserve mental health and sorts out the good from the bad.
The written word helps with the keeping of thoughts in the right order; it weighs the facts of life and balances them much better than the spoken word, even if you use the same spontaneous style.
Perhaps the script is only an ordinate delirium; a delirium that we all endure although not all of us feel compelled to put it in print.

After the first youth, one might feel the necessity to share some personal experience with the next generation. At least I feel that way, and from my previous trips through memorialistic literature, I have noticed that many had practiced ‘the sport’ ages before me, with an ability and talent far more apt than any attempts of making myself understood by a reader or two.
Bad luck I should say – I am definitely not an inventor of styles.

Having children means amongst other things that you spend your life as a parent trying to protect them against unpleasant outcomes. How else, but sharing with them some of your own ‘baggage’ until you see them rolling their eyes. Apparently, us, the parents, believe that this should be called upbringing; forgetting about the times when our own parents had served us the same cold dish to which we rolled our eyes just the same. Even if in those times we did that only after they had left the room.
That of course was called ‘lecturing’.
It doesn’t seem to me that today the habit has a different name. It does not bother me too much. I still remember quite clearly my teenage years like they were yesterday. This is the reason why we all know that no matter what, everyone learns only from own mistakes, regardless of how much we try to pass on any lessons learned.

Reality is that our own memories play us with an impertinent trepidation: time flies, things change more or less, people forget, only history repeats itself.

When I was 9, the last things I was longing to have in the future, were children. What I wanted then was to become a writer of science–fiction. I was passionate for Imaginary Worlds.
When I was 11, I had a great Maternal Language teacher, one of those extremely understanding ones, which knew how to deal with the shyness and sensibilities of children. A dedicated man.
Very young, fair, skinny, pale, with a suffering expression on his face like he was in pain most of the time, this teacher lived for his profession – as seldom happens. He taught us that as long as we won’t use cliché, recipes and formulae in our writing, whatever we’ll write, should become a small original literary creation.
I took his advice for granted at the time, and even years later, with the blessed naivety of the age.
That age has passed long ago, but some of that naivety still lingers.

Our language teacher used to initiate during his classes ‘The Liar’s Competition’ when we were encouraged to lie about a given happening of some sort as much as we could. It was a good game; it stimulated imagination and humor. We had great fun playing it. That way we could compare how much we could twist our own capabilities of presenting a story in different ways or from different standpoints. The winner always got a lolly or even a chocolate.
This wonderful teacher’s name was S T (pronounced more like Soreen Teatell). He died young, not before becoming one of the most promising writers that part of Nesblandia had. I still have his first book with dedication. ‘To impish Dee’ it says. In some Nesblandian cities, some streets carry his name.

If at the age of 11 I wished to write sci-fi, at 21 I was more into reading than writing, longing badly for books we could not accede to in Communist Nesblandia of those times.
A ferocious censorship of all printed material that entered the country was in place there, even for magazines or tabloids. There were thousands of titles and authors from all over the World that were forbidden. Typewriters were all registered with the Secret Police. Every typewriter in the country, the private ones or those used in institutions had to have a typed sample recorded and filed with the police. This was put in place for anyone who eventually dared to type anything against the communists. Based on that sample, the eventual culprit who typed a personal or general dissent or insubordination, could be easily identified and punished. The same way it is happening in China right now.

We had to learn French and English very well if we wanted to read good books that were illegally introduced in the country at great risk for those who could manage that.
It wasn’t quite like so few years before – in the Seventies we had a lot of translations from the great Universal Literature – although those great names were mostly old classics, from before the Russian Revolution when the Communism was enthroned in Europe. Very few neutral contemporaries – mainly of socialist orientation. ‘Socialist’ in the view of the Communists that is. But even those were censored all the times. In the Eighties though, things went from bad to worse.

One day, a friend I could trust lended me a book called ‘1984’. George Orwell’s book. The year was just right – it was 1984.
Since the end of 1983 this book was on peoples’ whispers; almost like some kind of Nostradamus prediction. I wanted to read it very much, but it wasn’t easy to find someone who could ask someone else to ask God-knows-who to lend it to a friend of a friend of a friend. Everybody was afraid to lend such thing to strangers; even to admit they had such forbidden books. One never knew who the other person could be really – there were plenty of informants everywhere. You could end up in jail for distributing ‘subversive material’. There was no difference according to the law between a paedophile distributing child pornography or a regular person lending blacklisted literature to a friend. Ironically, they were more tolerant eventually towards the paedophile. A regular person could end up in jail even for reading a ‘naughty’ magazine like Playboy.
There made no difference to the Communist Watchdog – they could declare subversive whatever they decided to be subversive – even poetry or travel accounts.
Sometimes some people were only suspected of having ‘subversive interests’ and that simple suspicion led– for example – to their typewriter being confiscated. Just in case their subversive interests turned into printed material talking about freedom or democracy.
While reading Orwell’s book I had a revelation of Uselessness, Unhappiness and Time Irreversibly Lost - revelation more acute than ever before. I felt like a Don Quixote fighting the windmills.
The language Soreen has taught us years before was long dead by then.
The spoken/written language in the Eighties was a wooden, heavy, inflexible one – a stiff language of cliche, pre-approved formulas, communist political correctness, false pride and phoney, sycophantic love for dictatorship.
It included compulsorily in every phrase, book or piece of artwork words like comrades, heroes, heroic peasants, working class, heroic proletarians, Leninism, righteous ideology, glory, victory, bright future, duty towards the party, the Motherland, absolute equality, love for the most dearly beloved sons of the Nation on one side, and imperialism, rotten, globalize, enemy, traitor, spy, exploitation, undermining, danger, sabotage, slavery, pit-hell, capitalism, on the other.
No one was allowed to get around these words. Those who tried were punished by those who were ‘more equal than others’.

In the Eighties, escaping from Communist Nesblandia to the Free World was a complicated matter for most and quite easy goes lucky for a very few. It was a daily occurrence though, and later the myth entered the Nesblandian folklore under the general name of ‘exodus’.
To want to run away leaving absolutely everything behind, one had to be very depressed, very disgusted, very scared or simply very hungry.
My immediate family and I were not hungry, but we were all the other things enlisted above.

An old schoolmate of mine discretely had given us hopes that he knew a way in which we could defect to the West without being caught. But his way was expensive because there was a group of ‘helpers’ involved.
Nothing new under the sun.
In the ‘perfectly egalitarian society’ in which we lived, NOTHING that we were entitled to was free as the Communist Scripture pretentiously called Constitution claimed.