Taking notes inside a Bucharest MacDonalds

15 August 2011

Bucharest, Romania

I cut myself shaving this morning when I saw you in the mirror looking back at me; “you yourself are indeed another small world with the sun, moon and stars within you” (Origen); I thought he was a one-winged angel but he was carrying the shopping bag from the inside of his large coat; a deaf Beethoven composing the Appasionata; next to me a big woman has ordered her fourth burger and looks happily content like the Buddha in Bangkok; a young girl is sweeping the floors of broken dreams and timeworn drafts; a bearded old man with a broken ladder has skipped in to tell some stories; the suspicious manager with the gold teeth is keeping an eye on me; the fine-looking woman from across the road has walked off with a fallen angel who missed his train; people should reply to letters within a fortnight at most; George Orwell always replied to his letters even when he was dying; Leo Tolstoi was not an admirer of Shakespeare; a young fellow with a bald patch and a large nose is scratching his armpit in search of answers; I should have ordered the large Coke instead of this cheap beer; my feet hurt from all the running and the taking off; I love Valerie’s photo of Les sprouting up through the trunk of a great tree; a simple stone can fire the imagination with the same force as The Kneeling Nun of New Mexico; despite the heat the forecast for tomorrow is heavy rain followed by possible shipwrecks; more heavy sweeping of the floors and great loss of forensic evidence; Sylvia Plath’s cry for help; outside a little boy in a yellow shirt wishes he was a helicopter; Thomas Merton where are you on Saint Lucy’s Day; “sing us a song you’re the piano man, sing us a song tonight” (Billy Joel); notes inégales; what did Lazarus and the daughter of Jairus see; the woman with the one leg has pulled out a large map of the city from her silver purse; remember to ask how to get to Brasov; two old men pleased with the “special deal” are slapping each other on the shoulder and pointing to a place neither wants to go; I am now fifty years and a couple of days old; August 15th the Dormition of the Holy Mother; thank you my dearest Katina; a group of Gypsies are dancing on the street pointing to Ursa Major; we are made of the stuff of stars; one line can save a life more than a great book of a thousand pages; I wonder how many times Mircea Eliade walked up and down this street going about his eternal return; “Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy upon me the sinner”; at what point do we lose our capacity to know God; not random behaviour but yes a “fine tuning” of the universe; Francisco Goya the same as Caravaggio directly onto the canvas; CCTV is everywhere like a second skin which it will soon become; intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance; government denial; laser designators, multi-position mechanisms, skybox satellites; masters of spin, rumour mongers, buyers and sellers of corpses; “Dial F for Frankenstein” (Arthur C. Clarke); Google has actually re-invented the Trojan Horse; there is more to Samsung than you think; Lycett’s Dylan Thomas is another very good read; I cannot get this tune out of my head… I think it’s from the Electric Light Orchestra; OCD is one nightmare after another; Nicholas Tesla is so terribly underrated; a couple of weather wizards have dropped in; really glad to have read Tchaikovsky’s letters; nutcrackers and wooden dolls; you are punishing me, please reply to me; hot white glass slowly stretched; taxis on Bulevardul Banu Manta line the streets like a hive of bees; it all comes down to salvation; Okanokumo, clouds on the hill; maybe I will get some ice cream with caramel sauce; the dogs of Bucharest are in search of their long dead masters; “when you are old and grey and full of sleep and nodding by the fire” (W.B.Yeats); deep down we are all scared that we will be found out; how did Primo Levi really die; progress nowadays has to do with economics and I am sitting in one of its citadels; Augustine’s birds are too sharp this afternoon; I should probably delete this page; Art is no longer the point of beauty; the great gift of comprehension; algorithms will one day choose who amongst us will live or die; I wish that little girl with the green shoes would stop picking at her nose; freedom begins with forgiveness; the Divine Liturgy lifted my spirits today; The Brothers Karamazov dealt atheistic idealism a heavy blow; we are all condemned because one child has died of hunger; hours are sometimes even more precious than love; compassion is the most wonderful of all words; racism is the root of all evil; maybe I should have changed rooms last week; ice particles shape-shift under the sunlight to cause an avalanche; like the hair of an angel which falls to earth; I want to die a good man; Oh, Lord! So many letters I never should have written; Michael Faraday one of humankind's best; beautiful flowers splashed in white; without coal our world would be plunged into darkness; who are the ringmasters; Nero and every other tyrant obsessed with popularity aka “Likes”; the Apocalypse has hurt my mind yet it has not robbed me of hope; “666” I have seen it and it is a merciless thing; Nostradamus relishes playing hind n’ seek with big children; Big Brother is growing enormously fat; be warned Kafka understood ICT; the ghosts in the machine will not need to rest and they will convince us they are not there; please God, please merciful Father, keep the black dog away; sturm und drang; “I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence” (Robert Frost); let me be absent from the next to last holocaust; the bones of monks; the fragrant oils of the ossuary; often the real drama is at the back of the pack; the shadow belongs to the thing from which it drops; like prophetic dreams which are not conditional to knowledge; no, I am sorry Ghenadie, I cannot do that; the rhinophores and gills of the nembrotha cristata; the Moab desert in Utah was once home to fish; on Naxos midget elephants have been trapped in stone; and then like John Steinbeck “gradually I write one page and then another”; I will go now and make sure to look for a short-cut; an impossibility like a little book on Chinese motifs.