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The world was lighter than a drop of water when I got into the boat. Silent, white as color spread through my wet body and the echo of a song culminating in my ears from a nearby basement.
Upon my arrival at the small and old port of our town, I decided to swim a bit to get to the boat despite the strong pain in my right hand. I didn’t want to go on the terrace because it bothers me as much as the adjacent half-wrapped wall. There I smell the odors of anguish, wandering and even nothingness. As if they were cursed.
A few hours have passed since a group of dogs attacked us at our home. I was next to my partner sitting quietly in front of the window of the house that overlooks the town cemetery and the eastern beach behind her, and in front of us was a monument that had been completed a few days ago.
I’m sure it turned out that way. But I’d like to admit right from the start that the option to swim across the ship is in keeping with my old habit of striving to get into the world from the background. Nothing is expected in an age in which living is subject to what I call the rules of the boxes: boxes for success, others for failure and others to kill time and accompany the present, the deceptive present that is not known. it tires of its natural inclination to the ghosts of the past.
Kurt Solmson – “Yellow Boat in the Morning” (oil on canvas – 61 x 76.2 x 5.1 cm – 2020)
All my life, which is close to forty, I have tried to distance myself from these worlds as much as possible. Perhaps because I felt from the beginning that it was meaningless. I used to repeat that “there is no life without rebellion”, despite my parallel feelings of futility that have trapped me for many years. As evidence of this contradiction, I longed for a second sentence that I quoted from a phrase by a poet I love: “The art of living is the art of believing faithfully in lies.”
I wrote them down on a piece of paper, which was lost in our ruined house or got wet with seawater when I jumped.
I did not know what my soul was feeling as I leaned towards the corner of the boat during this sunrise looking at my entire city. I don’t know if the absurd triumphed over the rebellion or vice versa when I chose to get on the boat and move it with one hand. But he also wanted to be silent during those moments.
I seek refuge in it from the surrounding emptiness and get as far away as possible from the annoying sounds that spread randomly in our town since the microphones arrived and our collective life began to change and change, and the violence that must have lurked in it escapes. As if everything was ready to exchange the most sociable echoes, with voices coming out of the microphones everywhere. Preacher, ray and shaker.
The first microphone I saw was at our house, in front of the funeral of a relative. I was a child under the age of ten. I stood in the garden of the house, then I walked through the neighborhoods of our neighborhood to the town square, and the sound was solemn. It inhabits every corner, inevitable.
This happened before the collective conversion to the magic of this tool. Before long I saw a lot of people standing or crouching behind the microphones. I witnessed the sounds interfering with each other, as my speakers continued to grow in search of a larger space.
Only the orphan bar singer of our town has been reliving her evenings without a microphone. She says she is away from him due to the “stench that inhabits him over time.” She seems to be right, and I don’t think the microphone users in our town ever thought that way, the effect of their breathing and the residual saliva that accompanies the words that come out of their mouths, even on the things closest to them. .
I chose to work as a language teacher for the middle ages. I once tried to put a microphone in front of me and quickly found him more like an idol that missionaries could worship, not me. I convinced myself that my mission was nothing more than to help students enjoy the new vocabulary and live among themselves. However, this did not take more than 12 years, as everything suddenly collapsed.
My teaching career ended due to a single bullet fired in the classroom. A schoolboy kicked her out of her house with a gun, imitating her father. She didn’t hit me, which is fine, maybe, but she lived on top of the wall, in the image of the most famous preacher in town.
I was imprisoned for a full year because “I was lenient with the procedures for controlling an educational class”!
It was a cruel period, in the middle of which I felt a sense of lack of existence. I realized that hope is boring and often useless.
Perhaps the only ironic thing is to make sure that the prison also has a microphone. I heard it outside, but I never spoke to someone who got out of prison.
It is a matter of pity that the prison director who reads his orders and telegrams morning and evening has been promoted within the structures of the moral police before taking office. His words were as dull and bleak as his world. It’s aspirational and nests in outdated frameworks, but it’s certainly less dangerous than its overseas counterparts.
I also met the owner of the most famous case in the town, which is still pending before the court, which has been pending a decision for ten years.
He was a simple hunter who had turned sixty. Under the circumstances, he was detained for the night on his ship in port, listening to the famous song “I Am Just Sowt”, which had become part of popular memory before these fateful days. He wanted to mock and poke fun at the world around him – he put a microphone in front of the radio and hooked it up to the speakers, making the song resonate throughout the city, displacing the sermons of that night.
An issue that can lead to the adoption of nihilism, which now seems to be, and is, only a hope and a last resort.
When she became friends with us, I thought that meeting my girlfriend on the designated visitation day would be the most beautiful gift I could present to her. No, to demonstrate her ingenuity in sculpting the face of this old man in the sedimentary stone for which our town is famous. Rather, it completes a work of art that I started four years ago.
He wanted his sculpture to perpetuate the conditions of the city. I didn’t want to work on the idea of microphones or portray an agitated listener, for example. He chose to carve the face of a fish in a smooth stone, which would have the eyes and forehead of a man who “underwent all the transformations until his wrinkles became visible in our days,” he says.
I found in this old woman what she wanted, and she told me on some subsequent visits that she is progressing at work in complete secrecy. But I don’t know how the news came out and they applied it to us in our house a few hours after we got out of jail. The door was pushed hard, and we didn’t know how they got between us with their sticks, as we stood in front of the window, with the monument in front of us silently staring at it.
Now that I look back at the years of events, I think only fate brought me to this ship. I slept while reducing some of them and rebuilding others and wept bitterly. I saw faces in front of me, I closed my eyes. I heard screams and sighs, my hands closed over my ears. I smelled scents of fleeting images, sticking two fingers violently up my nose. I felt paralyzed, I ran my hand over the cat, which I found by chance here with me as it lay peacefully among the fishing nets.
When I woke up to the sound of the seagulls and the cat crossing my slim body, I saw nothing but water (and yes, it was “all the color of drowning”). I soon remembered the dream I had: my partner and I were in a boat led by that same fisherman. We sail in water or smoke that I don’t remember, then the scene is turned upside down repeatedly, so that the top of the picture is under it, and so are we and the ship. Meanwhile, the monument stands out, speaking quietly. I don’t remember what he was saying, but I will repeat his words only if I defeat oblivion and come back to me.
* Quoted from the “Correspondent” blog.
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