Hop, Skip, and Jump

September 17th 2011

Bucharest, Romania

Christina Hotel

Hold fast onto your dreams

You tell me you want to see your name in one of my stories. I really don’t know why. I am not who you think I am. I do write, yes, but more than likely what I scribble down will be lost or deleted, or dismissed as having possessed little value. So, okay, dearest Alina, consider yourself amongst my lost and found. Hold fast onto your dreams and never betray the fairy tale in your heart which makes you hop, skip, and jump when you serve my breakfast in the morning. And remember, when you fall into quicksand the mistake is to panic and to fight against it. The secret, they say, is to relax as best you can and slowly waddle yourself out. Other times, you will know when, think of the jet pilots who must go full throttle when landing on the flight deck lest they miss the bands and drop into water.

 I have been thinking of Saint Lucia, too, who brings light into the darkness; and of the great white shark which crashes into the Cape fur seal. Tossing it into the air.

 Later that day

 It was not as a tourist that I made the long journey here, to this country riddled with uncertainties which on a map gives you the impression of a gigantic flower. And it was only during the days of my preparation to leave Sydney I discovered that outside Russia, something which I should have remembered from my seminary days, it is in Romania where you will find the most populous Eastern Orthodox community. Excepting for those few days in Brasov [and the train ride through Transylvania], I stayed put in Bucharest. I made the conscious decision to avoid too much sensory input, to keep focused on the reasons for my being here. The important thing providence again proved right. This is where I had to come.  Nil sine numine…

It is the same with where I will go tomorrow. Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov and others like them who have come to English as a second language, have revealed that a foreign place can be like learning to use another tongue. Not only in the rewarding search for nuances in the back streets of small and great cities, but also in the translation of ‘the rivers’ which like the twists and turns in our stories, run through us.

 “…we all have a right to speak, and an obligation/ to pay attention to the slightest whisper.” (John Tranter, Whisper)

 “We must continue to speak: although the language we use/ is like sand, it is desire that whets it, that sometimes/ fuses it into glass.” (David Brooks, True Language)