Ghost Words and Other Echoes

Controversy

Adina Pelle — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:51:51 GMT

Since the first quill was picked up by the first writer, simultaneously and more or less juxtaposed, the first critical controversy was born. The art of writing and debating go hand in hand and coexist off of each other for better or worse.

Mythology, as well as history, reveals areas of controversy. Adonis was born out of incest. Ajax mounted Cassandra in the temple of the goddess of wisdom, Agamemnon was murdered by an adulterous wife, Helene ran back in Menelaus arms after having caused the disaster of Troy, Artemis, insensitive and frigid, punished those who tried approaching her.

Back in the Roman days, while Ovid initially refined Rome's elite in the "art of love" the controversy he created taught him in exile, the bitter taste of hate and perfidy, cajoling the emperor through hypocritical letters sent to friends, desperately hoping that his words will reach the ears of Augustus and draw forgiveness. It is not hard to imagine how Ovid, looked with distaste at the waters of the Black Sea. Especially in the winter. While blizzards swept over the land, accompanied by the howling wolves, Ovid, most likely was dreaming, with a poisoned heart and crippling sadness, of the parties Rome spoiled him some time ago.

Twenty-five years spent among weird, bearded locals was certainly a long wait, interrupted from time to time, by despair and disappointment as none of the ships sailing in the harbor brought the news he wanted.

And he suffered, I think, more than cold as life continued flawless without him.

As time went by, literary cultures uniquely concentrated messages in time and space: Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Nekrasov, and many others, all within the first rank of human treasures and all, initially at least, focused on the misery of “the people” and the travesties of the social institutions which in return established the controversy, the war of words between writer and the reader.

Everything else starts from here: work, hope, investigations, testing, chances, circumstances, luck, confidence and disappointment...

Every writer or creator of any kind has the ability to exchange views and to see things from multiple angles.I look at it as we can choose from history only what we like, like in a library in which we keep only books that interest us. Our inner thoughts are not required to support any neighborhood we dislike. Perhaps they look like murky marshes formed after rain.

Fantasy and memories

Adina Pelle — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 21:29:22 GMT

Premonition, fatality, pregnant humor, confusion, randomness, expectation, and a few words strung on a sheet of paper always gave me headaches.

Most times, I enjoy writing even though I know, I will never faithfully expose what is in my mind and soul. It's a shame when I cannot write and show the world just who I am. Even if I made a covenant to look, everywhere others saw nothing. If I do not write anything for a couple of minutes and instead I listen to the music beyond peoples conversations, I'll hear some of the crazy familiar voices in an uproar, ignoring my need for silence, or my lost in thought glances over a fast moving landscape of the past.

Fantasy was always the exchange of assumed roles and real identities, but which displaces which?

I worked hard to capture a fantasy world in written stories . Memories, took the center stage and I always looked for the right light shining on them, from the right angle until I identified my core with each and every one of them.

Will I be remembered after I die ?

Adina Pelle — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 02:18:35 GMT

“Be great in act, as you have been in thought.” Shakespeare coined humanity with this sentence. Page after page, he built the theater of life, accounting every single emotion known to man, every triumph and disappointment. He now passed on to immortality but who can forget Shakespeare?

How is my own life impacting the world? Am I leaving a print in the mass consciousness of the world surrounding me? What will happen when I die? Was my life meaningful ?

From a spiritual point of view things look simple.

For Orthodox Christians, original sin is not so much a "stain on the soul", but a condition of the world into which we are conceived and born. We are not conceived maculate, but we become maculate.

In Dostoyevsky, a character believed God had a beard and lived in the sky. Another questioned, in a very analytical way, the very concept of heaven and hell. Dostoyevsky died in 1881, so, about the afterlife, he now knows what we don’t. We read his words and feel his presence now.

Judaism, as it was explained to me over and over, has G-d looking at three areas during the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the so-called Ten Days of Repentance. Rosh Hashanah is the day on which G-d reviews the status of his creation and determines if we merit another year in this world. This was a very scary thought process for me when I was growing. Thinking that my life might be useless. But…..By praying with sincere regret for the past and commitment for the future, a person can erase his or her misdeeds hence improve judgment before it is sealed on Yom Kippur.

"Repentance, Prayer, and Charity can remove the bad decree” is the corner stone of Judaism I grew up with.

The gist of it, as I see it now is to think about your life, reinvent yourself and live a better, more meaningful life each year until you die. Like getting rid of the contents of your pockets before crossing an imaginary river into immortality.

So you think you're clever ?

Adina Pelle — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 23:10:50 GMT

I walk through a very eclectic stretch of Main street America. I live in the suburbs, I have 4 and some years of college education, I concoct liberal plots in my free time, I speak four different languages and overall have a stream of consciousness keeping me alert of all the social changes, challenges accomplishments or injustices.

I think of my intelligence as being above average. What does that mean in the world of fired synapses and logically expressed thoughts? It means I feel smarter than a baked potato and dumber than any quantum physics theory.

I fear stupidity, ignorance, hate and last but not least old age. In the end, I believe the only common denominator is old age and death.

Stupidity for one is easy to ignore. Most of it is a genetic inheritance, so the blame goes easy towards the gene pool, or the creator himself.Depending on one’s mysticism or secular compass stupid is who stupid does.

Ignorance on the other hand, is the genetically altered child of stupidity. That is the equivalent result of cousins getting drunk and procreating. You feel sorry for the result but are equally scared at the potential gene land mine hidden underneath. You step on it, and you are blown into pieces.

I have friends sharing my ideas, making the same jokes and striving towards the same ideals. I also have acquaintances I respect but grossly disagree on the major social issues. I never entered an argument with them because of the above-mentioned respect. My navigating compass is mine but is nowhere near to being the right one. I believe in it, but I would not dream of making anybody follow its coordinates.

As part of the ignorance pattern I mentioned above, certain groups’ views on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are being waved as the only ones I should follow. Why is it that I have to believe in the same god, obey the same dogma and in return forced to question my respectability because I simply do not trust the same blue print of this thing we call life?

My intelligence, my guide through life is intimately tucked away in the folds of my conscience and I do not reveal it to anybody out of respect for all parties involved. The “grand daddy “of my being is only mine in its awesome undeniable power.

Fighting our bodies’ , or sagging parts of our bodies drifting for the floor , senility , blindness and the whole grail of ailments the old age is knownknown for becoming the widespread sagacity. It doesn’t matter anymore who was smarter, since we all end up not remembering the day of the week or the name of the German nurse who gives us a sponge bath every Tuesday morning. Or is it Wednesday?

Who cares anymore, gravity and a strike against any rational thought win in the end.

The Gypsy

Adina Pelle — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:30:00 GMT

This story was just published by Second Wind Publishing in their Crime and Mystery Anthology.

Mystery in the Wind

The Gypsy

There was a winding road down a Valley. The road was undermined by patches of deep wounds left by the torrential rains so frequent in the valley and by the stumps of dead trees rooted skyward like a prayer. There was also a Monastery suspended somewhere between heaven and earth, protected by several mountains like true pyramids guarding a fortress. Down the valley, suddenly, a caravan of nomadic gypsies entered from one end of the road. Wagons with tarpaulin sheltered children and elderly, while young Gypsy girls with bloom red skirts walked haughtily behind the caravan. Amongst them, one gypsy woman would find a crying baby girl in town and nurse her before disappearing in a fog of spells and doomed destinies.

Today as I sit here waiting for the police to arrive, I can finally look beyond your Nôh facemask you wear in front of each man. I stare at your motionless body and thoughtless face with the most pathetic expression in my eyes. Before, I could distinguish you from a thousand women and just for that, alone I hated you.

But with all this, with all the hatred and dirt, I waited for you every night in the same dark bar, in the same chair, at the same table with the same wine in my glass until you eventually came back. When I saw you again, you were dancing with another man. You proved to be the most awful human, a body with no soul.

I wanted you to die. I wanted to see your dead body and mourn you.

I clearly saw beyond the horizon, beyond the reddish autumn sunset. I could see now my burned thoughts left in total standby through the eyes of others gathered around your lifeless body. Alcohol spoke for me in the end.

You lied to me! You ended up being an illusion, an illusion I used as a guiding light but landed as fine sand in the desert of my desires.

My dreams were hardly ever reached, hardly desirable, hardly inspiring to you

People were talking sometimes and I had no doubt they were talking about you. Your pagan being was marked from the beginning. You were doomed to lie and cheat and I should have known your Scarlet red lips were lying.

They say that when you were about three months old you cried so hard it broke your mother’s heart. Nothing soothed your suffering, not the lullabies, nor the gentle rocking. Until one day when a convoy of nomadic gypsies stopped at the edge of the town. In one of the tents was one woman named Orla. Her little baby girl had perished immediately after birth and Orla’s tears never dried since. One quiet night, while everybody was deep asleep, a baby’s cry reached Orla’s ears. Is my little girl I hear crying? She asked herself. She started walking through the village until she heard the baby cry in front of a house: This is my child, she thought, and with quick steps she entered the home, opened the door to a room stopping in front of the cradle where you were fiercely and inconsolably crying.

“Lady, let me breastfeed the child!” the gypsy said to your perplexed mother.

For three days, before sunrise, Orla, the gypsy, was in the house and soon you stopped crying while nursing at the gypsy’s bosom. Her naked breast and face were turned towards the rising sun whispering-words known only to her. Orla, the gypsy woman disappeared without a trace one day but left behind her gypsy spell on you. You were to bring pain and desolation to anybody bold enough to love you.

When I first saw you in the bar, you looked wild and beautiful, lips painted with red lipstick, cheap defilement of any conceivable purity, hair loose, left back framing your face like black smoke; with red nails, unequal, with high heels, too high and uncomfortable. The white shirt with rough collar, the skirt that jumped in my eyes the first time. Disgusting skirt! But you liked it. You looked at me and put your glass down, got up and came closer to me. You hit the dance floor and danced as if no one else was around.

Tears run dry now when I remember that night, as if it lasted a thousand years.

You were incredible. There was silence, a long silence, but I heard your beating heart. I kissed you; I undressed you with slow and feral moves.

You beautiful gypsy!

I felt your thin body, trembling body under my kisses. I can feel your body even now when I close my eyes!

The next day I realized you were just a heap of body pleasures; I realized how miserable you could be. Pathetic and cold. You walked out and left behind only the lipstick stained sheets, your cheap perfume, and pain.

I knew one day I would kill you ... Pulling the trigger was the easiest part. Once my mind became the sheathed villain and once my conscience gave in to it, the plan was simple really.

There’s a criminal in each one of us. Why don’t we release it? Surprisingly not because of our conscience but because of fear. Real criminals win over their fear, a monster bigger than conscience... Was Hitler remorseful of his actions or he was concerned someone might consider him a murderer. ?When the final colors , the ones defining you as a frail human invade and take over your well guarded white purity, you start crying every night lying to yourself in the morning . You should be elsewhere. You look around, who is the master of your life? Who are you in your life?

After me pulling the trigger, you looked at me with surprised eyes, lifted your shoulders in shock, shocked and quizzical at what was happening .Your lips started moving looking for a questioning word but a quaint smile froze on your upper lip instead, trembling and dry.

There are hundreds of ways to die. You can die while your heart still beats and the world continues to spin around you like I died. But you never thought that in the end things would happen this way.

A smiling mask with which you used to hide the anger and betrayal will be the last thing I see. The old clock on the wall stopped for a moment, the whole world froze for a second. Then time began to run again and the wall mirror flew in thousands of glittering pieces, each bearing frozen looks, reflections of me passing through decomposed, crossing the line bordering the absurd as the sirens sounded closer and closer.

Memory

Adina Pelle — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:07:00 GMT

Memory is a strange voice in the back of my mind, with ups and downs, some slow, some abrupt. Sometimes the voice is deafening with painful screams that stab my soul, other times I am barely able to recognize it, weak and feeble as a breath of wind, echoing what passes almost unnoticed from one generation to another and remembered the following years.

Older memories are like Saturn's rings, surrounding a continuous layer, thickening with each memory of every life, flowing forever in history, layer after layer, like a carpet of dead leaves, fallen in late autumn.

I imagine memory as a huge mirror in which can be seen intact faces from the past, present and future.

Every morning I look in the mirror and see all that I fear staring me in the face. I start a new day, obsessed and desperate to see how time went around me.

I sometimes am paralyzed with fear failing any attempt for action. In those strange moments, I almost always go back in the past and start dreaming.

In adolescence, especially on vacations, I always meant to do a lot of things but every time I sat down on the carpet instead and began daydreaming, starting in the morning light, and ending when the last rays of sun covered the room in a bluish hue. When I awoke from my dream state, it looked like nothing around me was recognizable. In those moments, I thought that although the day had passed, the dream was more important than anything I have meant to do.

At some point, I gave up explaining them to others.

Small fragments snatched of a life lived intensely make up the memory. Shining fragments like shards of colored glass, some dark - evil – others like the windows of a church, with nameless angels, some brighter than others.

I look in the mirror now. There have been more than twenty years since I was a dreamy kid. Wrinkles outline my face and like a blind man, I try to convince myself that the mirror image is mine. My fingers with long bones, the eyes, mouth, hair, are all outlined in an unknown and frightening way while my mind refuses to recognize them.

When I was Sylvia Plath age, when she took her final decision it was difficult to look at myself as an old woman but I identified with her. I felt so close to her, her sensibility mysterious and painful. Back then, years felt passing like days, and days like seconds

I feel I survived middle age only through pages written at night when everybody was asleep.

I constantly cheated fatigue with a cup of tea, while the steam above the tea cup formed figures in the pale lamps light living only a brief second, as I wrote the long. awaited page and disappearing completely in the morning light that covered every movement, every atom of life around, taking their dark mist and last thought with which they woke my memory .