TRAVELS…

 

In the early sixties, living in Paris, just arriving from Tunis, I decided that it was time to grow and to travel all over the world… I was at the time a student in Literature at the university of Nanterre, but not obliged to follow all the courses, just to go to exams from time to time and give to the professors some research about famous authors… I was already very knowledgeable (sorry for the bragging) and had read for more than 10 years (yes since the age of 10) all the giants of literature (French, Italian, English, German, American etc.…).                                    

I must have read thousands of novels, philosophical essays, poems, plays …for example Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, Racine, Moliere, Voltaire, Sartre, Camus, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Faulkner, Hemingway, Malaparte, Malraux, Arrabal, Chekov, Rainer Maria Rilke, Berthold Brecht, Schiller, Goethe, Dante, Moravia. 

So, I thought that it was time to close the books and to see the real world to try to understand the purpose of life, what I really wanted to be, to do, to experiment…Since I had no financial possibilities, I decided to do all my travelling hitchhiking (yes at the time it was possible, today I will not go hitchhiking to Newark from NY city) …                                                                                                                                  

 I spent years doing it for many months a year. I discover most countries of Africa, Madagascar, and the islands in the Indian ocean, most of the countries of Europe including Eastern Europe, many countries in Asia (Nepal, Afghanistan, India, Mongolia, and others…), and the middle east (Egypt, Israel, Jordan, etc.).

I kept incredible memories of these travels and many, many adventures…I will write a blog about my 2 months spent in the SHEY GOMPA monastery in Nepal…

But today I would like to relate 3 experiences, fulfilling and full of last-minute surprises…

Berlin…

 -Bernard! do you want to come to East Berlin with me?

 -Bruno! Of course, you know I love to travel, when?  

 -We could leave next Monday in the morning, take a train, and arrive in East Berlin at the end of the day, do you have a valid passport?                                           

-Yes, I do but you know that I cannot afford to pay for a train and even less for a voyage.                                                                                                                                

-Do not worry I will take care of the expenses.

We were at the university of Nanterre in 1964, and a short adventure would be welcome to forget all the difficult times of my life…

The following Monday we are in the train and the idea of being in Berlin already seems so attractive and full of possible discoveries… We arrived and the crossing from West berlin to East Berlin was easy, we are now walking in the streets when Bruno says:                                                                                                                          

-Bernard, let us stop in this bar and have a drink, ok?

 - Yes sure….

After drinking a German beer, Bruno asks me to wait for him for one hour, he wants to meet somebody not too far from where we are.                                                

 -Yes sure, I will talk to other people...                                                                                

He leaves the bar and I start to talk in French (since I do not speak German) to another man who must be now at his beer number 12…. FUN!!!!!! 

About 2 hours later, I hear screaming in the street and I believe I am hearing the voice of Bruno!!! I go out of the bar, and I see him running like a madman, screaming my name…

-Bernard!!! Bernard!!!! Run, run, follow me we must go back to West Berlin…        

 -Why? Why?

 -Just run with me!

At this moment, I see running behind him, 3 men, and suddenly they are surrounding us and have a knife in their hands…                                                         

 - Bruno, what the F…is happening! I am scared!!!!                                                       

 - Do not worry, I will take care of it…

I see him approaching one man after the other and very fast disarming them with a Karate move, I had no idea he was that type of creature….                                          

-Now Bernard, run with me...  

-I am, I am ….

We start running, but one of the men, catches my coat, holding it, and stab me on the side of my chest (I still have a scar), Bruno runs to him and with a karate move throws him on the floor…

-Bernard run, run, we are not too far from the west side of Berlin… have your passport in your hand, I will see you there.

I did run and run, hiding the blood on my shirt, arrive at the gate of West berlin with my French passport in my hand, and finally sit on a bench on the west side, waiting for him…He arrives an hour later, smiling, looking like he had accomplished something important.

- Bruno, what happened, who were these people, look I have a cut....                           

-Bernard, the cut will be a memory of how much you help the world.                           

- What do you mean...                                                                                                         

 -Ok, here it is, I have been working for the government for a few years and I was sent to East Berlin to give some papers and some instruction to a few men working for us there… I needed somebody to come with me, to look like two students wanting to visit East Berlin… And I asked you...                                                             

- Are you telling me that you are a spy?                                                                             

- A spy is a big word, but…. You have now a great story to tell…

After this adventure with Bruno, I did not hear about him for many years, and then I discovered that he had become the head of the French team working for the United Nations in NY city…I tried to reach him, without success… I went back to Berlin 35 years later for an opera and could not believe what I had lived there…

Argoun Hackman…

One time I decided to go to Turkey, after all I was told that my ancestors were Turkish Jews who went to Tunisia during the Ottoman Empire… And I saw sometimes in the news the name of Uzan In Istanbul.

So, I must go… I took my little bag and started my trip on the roads, two weeks later I took a boat in Brindisi to arrive in Igoumenitsa and then on my way to Istanbul.                                                                                                                             

  I was in Istanbul after a difficult trip (it will be another story), but I was there. Asking the French consulate for help, they were very accommodating to my needs, except for a real lodging...                                                                                               

 So, here I am in a park in Istanbul, and I decided to go have something to drink, found a place, sat, and had a tea... Next to me was a man in his forties, who immediately started to talk to me…He was speaking French and told me that he was teaching at the university in Istanbul. He invited me for lunch, and then told me that he would love to show me Istanbul and all the secret places… I was of course very cautious, but I did not have so many choices…                                      

After an afternoon of discoveries of the hidden Istanbul (another story to be told), he asked me where I was staying, I told him that I had no idea, he invited me to stay with him in his house in the suburbs, the suburb was called Florya…I accepted and here we are in his car driving to Florya…                                                                      

We arrived at his house, a beautiful house, and he showed me my room… I noticed that the walls of his house were all painted with landscapes, lakes, forests and sometimes paintings of himself, all with beautiful colors and details… I asked him who was the painter and he answered that his wife, now dead, did all this…His wife died the year before in an accident, and he was still under the shock of it… He went for hours into details about his life with his defunct wife and the children that he wanted to have but did not…

He added that now he was alone waiting for the next punishment… Late in the evening, he decided that it was time to go to sleep and shake my hands good night.    

I went to my room, and fell asleep almost immediately… I was suddenly awakened by very loud noises… I got up and went where the noises were… I had to walk through debris all over the floor, and I saw Argoun with a pickaxe destroying the walls of his house, choosing the walls with paintings of his wife...                                 

- Argoun what are you doing?                                                                                            

 - My wife betrayed me by dying, I do not want her paintings anymore, they mean death to me… I must destroy them…                                                                               

- But Argoun, you are destroying the entire house.                                                          

– I know what I am doing, leave me alone, I know I am right.

He went on and on, destroying all the walls of the house, I was even afraid that the house could crumble… He stopped after almost 2 hours and went back to his room, inviting me to smoke with him some Shisha … I declined, he looked at me with disdain and disappeared in his room.                                                                               

 It was now morning, I took my bag, and left…I never saw him again...  I stayed in Istanbul another week and learned a lot about different ways of living, but the experience with Argoun was present in my head and will be forever…

Hijo de Dios…Son of God

Spanish and English were the two languages I started to learn very early in my life, in school, university and for my pleasure… I always had an affection and still do for Spain and Spanish people…I decided to travel all over Spain and finally landed in Seville… After many hours of wandering, I stopped in front of a cabaret where they were dancing Flamenco... 

I entered and was immediately overwhelmed by the atmosphere, they were gypsies, dancing, playing guitar, and drinking Manzanilla and Cruzcampo… I sat at a table and watched the incredible dancers while a bunch of tourists was applauding every 10 seconds and clapping. A very old gypsy lady was sitting across the room and was looking at me intensely. I smiled at her, she did not react, and continued to look at me…

After a few minutes, a man brought me a glass of Manzanilla and asked me in French if I spoke Spanish, I answered yes, and he said that la Mama there wanted to talk to me… I went to her… With a gesture, she indicated that I should sit next to her…She asked for my name, my age, where I was from, and if it was my first time here… After 20 minutes of questioning, she got up and disappeared in the back of the room… 

The same guy, named Izan (I am not inventing that), told me that her son disappeared 3 weeks ago, and no news from him…He added that I looked like him so much that it was almost scary, and asked what I was doing in Seville, I answered that I was just travelling here... He said ok and went in the back of the room...

I returned to my table and watched the dancers; it was beautiful and captivating. Time went on, and most of the people were gone, I thought it was time for me to leave, when Izan came back and asked me to stay:

-Now we are going to play and dance for ourselves, not for tourists, la Mama would like you to stay.                                                                                  

 -Thank you, I will stay.

It became a whirlwind of dance and music, I felt so involved and touched …La Mama came back and asked me to sit next to her, she said:                                          

- I want to call you HIJO DE DIOS.                                                                                 

-Yes Mama, please, do as you wish.   

It was now very late in the night, Izan came back and asked me if I wanted to stay there, he said that they had places to sleep in the back, and I would be welcome.

-Hijo de Dios, stay… Added La Mama. 

-I will.

Actually, I stayed there more than a week, helping every night with the tourists, bringing drinks and food to tables, dressed as a gypsy like everybody, under the watch of La Mama, looking at me with affection…Everybody was calling me Hijo de Dios, I had found a new family…

Then one evening, everything stopped, La Mama stood up from her chair, and looked at the entrance door… There was my double, her son, looking incredibly like me or me like him, he ran to his mother and knelt in front of her, she took him in her arms and kissed him…Then she called me and told him:                                          

-This is Hijo de Dios…Hijo de Dios, this is my son, Manuel…

The following day in the morning early, when everybody was still asleep, I left, thinking it is time, all is good now for them…

 

 

 

ACTING…ACTING????? Really?????

 

Recently I was watching a French movie on NETFLIX, and I had the impression that I knew one of the actors…. His face was familiar, he looked older, but I knew that face…  I made some research and found that this actor was one of my friends in the sixties in Paris when I was an actor … So many memories invaded me (yes, I know as always) and came to my mind, many comments I received recently about my present life and the facts that in the past 2 years I have appeared in 8 movies and commercials… Of course, small roles…

_ Bernard you are acting now?

_ Bernard, I did not know that about your life, you can act????

_ Bernard, YOU MAKE ME LAUGH, YOU ALWAYS INVENT NEW THINGS TO CONTINUE TO BE!!!!

 Yes, I am at the end of my life re-living my young age, and yes, I was an actor for more than 20 years…And now, I am returning to my beginning as an artist…My professional debuts as an actor were in the very early sixties after having performed as a student at the university of Nanterre… At the time, I was living very difficult times (you can read my first posting called THE BEGINNING) and I had no idea of how to free my heart, my soul, my ME, to free myself of all these accumulated pains, I was just looking for danger and trying to change my fate by taking risks, by doing something which will show the world that I existed, that I was somebody.

Acting saved me. I was able to deliver my poor soul and find bandages for my pains through acting…I became involved in theater, in movies, in television, and was also part of the lucky ones making money dubbing foreign movies, movies with Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Malcom McDowell...

Yes, acting saved me from a possible dramatic end because I learned very fast that to act is to free yourself… to be totally yourself…

Thanks to acting we can accept who we are and become real … Why? Because we are protected by the character we are portraying and we can let go of all our traumas, all our missteps, all our pains… In everyday life we must act to answer obligations, rules and demands from others…But on stage or in a movie we do not need to act …We can be ourselves and use all our experiences, all our memories to incarnate a character…Yes, of course, some of the techniques are different if it is the stage or a movie, but the basics are the same, LET ME GO INTO DETAILS…

 We need to know what we project to balance our performance and in what direction we need to work…as actors, singers, performers.

A long time ago, in Greece they were celebrating 2 cults,

1)the cult of Apollo                                                                                                            2)the cult of Dionysus

 1) Apollo was the god of beauty and order, a beauty well-orchestrated, the Greek beauty as we know it, the cult was an impressive celebration of parade, defiles, dance, music, always in the same order, always beautiful but always the same and year after year predictable and finally it became boring.

      2)Dionysus was the god of festivity, imagination and creativity and the cult too often degenerated in a bacchanal and an orgy, and pure beauty had very little to do with it, it was always different and always interesting but too often finishing in excess.

 Then somebody had the idea to mix both cults: the beauty and order of Apollo and the creativity and imagination of Dionysus: THE GRAND GREEK TRAGEDY WAS BORN.

 All masterpieces today try to achieve the association of both, the beauty and order of Apollo and the imagination, creativity, and dreams of Dionysus.

I will say that as human beings we have both influences, but one in our personality is largely dominating the other. Our first obligation is to try to understand which god dominates in our personality and then to try to develop the other and achieve perfect balance.

All masterpieces want to achieve a balance but still have strong tendencies; it is for example obvious that the music of Massenet is more Apollonian that Bizet, that Leoncavallo is more Dionysian than Verdi. The Verismo operas are by far the most Dionysiac pieces of the grand repertoire, but always keep in mind that we are talking about masterpieces, so they have both.

The goal I repeat is to know who we are and to work in certain directions to achieve the balance.

If we have a Dionysian tendency and work with a Dionysian attitude, very often our work will be interesting but too unpredictable and often we will be what we call in our language of performers TOO MUCH AND OVERACTING.

If we have an Apollonian tendency and work with an Apollonian attitude, we will be very tamed, very organized, but too often what we call in our language of performers BORING.

 To achieve a BALANCED PERFORMANCE (we all want to believe we are Dionysian, we must deny the fact that being Dionysian is more attractive to our senses). We need the look of others on us and what we project on them as performers to have a real image of who we are.

It is certain that we have some signs in our everyday life.

Are we obsessed with perfection, order, and details? Obsessed with organization, desire to be in control of ourselves and others all the time, have a knowledge of every single details of how to approach this or that, we are APPOLONIANS.

Or are we always looking for something, changing plans all the time, have no real knowledge of time and order, inventing the next step all the time, not in control of our emotions and perpetually in struggle, we are DYONISIANS.

You understand that 2 Dionysian living together cannot achieve a balance and have may be a life full of surprises and creativity, but a perpetual struggle and fighting and FINALLY UNBALANCING AND EXHAUSTING.

You understand that 2 Apollonian living together have a quieter life, well organized well thought off, with security and safety but often it is not fulfilling, and they yawn a lot.

 REMEMBER THAT MOST OF THE TIME WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT WE PROJECT. How many times do we hear: People believe I am this but in reality, I am that… wrong, on stage we are what people perceive of us NOT WHAT WE BELIEVE WE ARE.

 FOR THE DYONISIAN SIDE: We should not be afraid to share emotions, to be vulnerable, to have feelings and ACTING gives us this possibility… We must use our own experiences, our own emotions, THE REAL ONES OF OUR LIFE AND NOT AN IMITATION to become the character…I call that equivalent…For example, if in a scene I must be devastated by the death of a loved one. I must bring back to my mind the memory of a person I loved who died and I must re-live all these moments…If I do not have in my past this experience, what is the most devastating memory I have??? So, let us bring that up…AND EACH MOMENT, EACH action should be nourished with personal memory, we must search constantly in our personal pains, our personal failures, our difficult memories but also our joys, moments of happiness and great pleasures…and re-live them on stage as equivalents for the character we are performing…AND REMEMBER YOU ARE PROTECTED BY THE CHARACTER WE ARE PERFORMING……

 FOR THE APOLLINIAN SIDE: Work more on the structure of the character and ask ourselves many questions (age of my character… family … period, religion, relation between characters, where are we, what time is it...)What should I look like (make up, costume, gestures.…)Work on the text (the exact meaning of each word, the exact situations… punctuation, silence)Read the entire play or libretto or scenario…not only my scenes… what does the music mean.

 ACTING…ACTING????? Really?????

ACTING???? No!!!! Finding a balance in my life…Yes, at the end of a performance, we are very tired, but so relieved, finally I was permitted to let my emotions go…I feel lighter, I feel total, I feel FREE FINALLY.

An actor, an artist, should be delivering to others the human soul and the weakness of being one…all this acquired by life experiences or by acquiring it thru the stories of the ones we know…

Yes, some people have the incredible talent of knowing at birth! They are the lucky ones; the chosen ones and they are a gift.

We must be looking for equivalents in our memory and passed experiences, and if not, we must try to acquire these equivalents by studying; Yes, we must study, Pascal. Shakespeare, Plato, Nietzsche, Joyce, Faulkner, Sartre, Camus, Arrabal, Chekov, Gogol, Pirandello, Beckett, Malaparte, Dante, Ovid, Diderot, AND Mozart, Picasso, da Vinci, The impressionists, Beethoven, Rodin … These names are given as an example, the list should be five hundred or five thousand….

 GOOD WORK TO ALL OF US….

WITH TIME….

We are living difficult times but with time things will fall in place and we will dream again.

Yes, we are living exceedingly difficult times… The pandemic not under control and even expanding dramatically…Vaccination not available for too many of us...The incredible political situation and the terrible consequences on everyday life and the future of the country…A country we  love, where we came full of hopes for a better life than the one experienced in the other countries some of us lived in...

 For many people, a life of tragic events and fighting constantly to be accepted by others, to make their dreams become reality but it seems now that everybody is in the same terribly difficult situation and it is very painful, filling all of us with constant fear…

Yes, time and life go on, the parents of the young ones are wondering how to approach life and what will happen to their children, life in the beginning of adult age is a total mystery, the middle age people are going through a very dramatic period, and the elderly are very sad to finish their life in these conditions.                                                                                                                                                                                                           With time all goes away, yes all goes away ….  How many times in my life I thought I was living the last possible chapter, but I went on…Yes, even during the worst events of our life, we must continue to be, to survive, to think, to love and to create… Even if we are wounded by events, even if our heart does not beat regularly anymore, we must go on and look further and expect the next positive train AND TAKE IT…                  

 With time all goes away, but memories are still with us, the beautiful memories, and the ones we loved: we were looking for them under the rain, we could even recognize them at night in a dark corner in a street, yes with time not everything disappears… Let us remember the ones for whom we would have sold our soul, and for whom we were so worried because they had caught a cold…In the difficult times we cannot erase or forget our passions and the voices of the loved ones telling us: “be careful do not catch a cold, do not come home too late…”Even if we feel exhausted and powerless, betrayed by the lost times we must go on and cherish the beautiful memories…           

And please let us not make a big tragedy of little events in our life, let us not fall in the trap of what is” a la mode “and become part of the social medias. Most of us, these days, are constantly aggressed by others, by people who need to have their names printed on a newspaper or Facebook to feel that they exist… Can we forgive them? Depending on the gravity of the aggression, I will let you decide…

Winter is here now, and dead leaves are cracking on the ground and we wander in the streets by ourselves, alone, among a crowd of faces hidden behind a mask, like an old horror movie… Sitting in an outdoor restaurant place trying to believe that life is back… And we thought that we loved horror movies…

Many days, many nights have passed and we have to believe all the time that it will be the last sinking, and with spring coming, it will be fine… we will be again be permitted to talk about love and our passions, we will be again authorized to walk in the gardens full of flowers, and our distraught hearts will be in peace again…Is it true that lost time does not come back, may be, but another time will come…

With time things fall in place. With time we will dream again… We will go and heat ourselves in the sun again and be totally devoted to make our existence and other people’s life wonderful again…With time we will not fall into despair. Our life these days could look like the life of weaponless soldiers trying to tell the enemy to go away, please go away, go away… and the enemy just smiles full of despise. But new times are waiting for us, and the enemy will disappear in the fog of history, and we will be ourselves again not wearing a yellow star.

 It is not too late to learn how to live a different life, we have to be waiting for peace to come back and let the memories of this nightmarish time fade away in the sun rising of a new day…We must be ready to open the door to a better tomorrow and dismiss the painful memory of today…Generations before us have done it, and it is our duty to do it, to have them as an example of staying strong in front of adversity.                                                                                                                                                                                     

Nothing is given to us, not our strength, not our weakness, not our heart, and sometimes when we believe we can open our arms we are drawing a cross and our life can be a strange and painful negation of who we believe we are, but we have to find again  a shore where we will smile  and have the wind drying our tears and then we will be liberated of these chains…Chains are always breakable, let’s find the courage and the desire to go to the next step and break these chains.

Yes, these days our freedom can be destroyed or wounded, and our freedom cannot anymore find entity, but our freedom has again to take the path of hope, yes, with time we will again be able to love our life and even our loneliness…And we will remember that we were dozens, hundreds, thousands of people shaking and fearful believing that we were humans living a nightmare…                                                                                 But with time we will be able to dominate our fear and we will not be the shadow of a shadow anymore….                                                                                                                    

Too many of us will not arrive to the end of the journey and we will not forget them, they are and will be present in our thoughts and our affection forever… Yes, too many are gone, and the death of friends does not disappear from our memory …Recently, many, too many of my friends are gone and I can see them in my thoughts talking to me, laughing with me, sharing new ways to build a new world. They were part of me, of who I am, who I become and now they are gone forever…                                                    I am wondering: why did they disappear? Was it fate? And I am questioning what is the meaning of fate? What is destiny? 

My father, when confronted with a tragic event in his life was always saying: IT WAS WRITTEN… He left his country at the age of 59 years old, the country where his ancestors were for hundreds of years, arrive in France with nothing and tried to start a new life, his son, my brother died in a car accident at the age of 26, my father heartbroken died a year later…                                                                                          THAT WAS WRITTEN??? Written? BY WHOM?                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Should we accept all this because it is written? Are we capable of going to another chapter after living such tragedy?                                                                                        Let us be realistic, we have no choice, we must go further, we must wait for better times, and WRITTEN OR NOT, we must think about tomorrow but always keeping in us the loss of the ones we loved…. My father and brother died more than 50 years ago, but they are present in me, and often I am talking to them, asking: where are you? What are you doing?

With time all goes away, yes all goes away …. In a few years, we must describe these times with a new peace of mind, finding the courage to accept a new chapter, and almost proud to have been capable to have overcome this painful period of life… So, everybody, you must stay strong, people around you need you. Think about the next sunrise, the next episode of your life, the people you took care of and the ones you will take care of, life goes on, and we need you. With time you will win if you do.

 

AND NOW????

For more than a year we are all in this incomprehensible chaos, is it a dream? No, it is a nightmare! How could we have thought about the horror falling on all of us? And we want to imagine that we will wake up suddenly in another world with no pain and surrounded by loving friends, but it does not happen. I tried first to fight it, without any kind of dissimulation, without being careful, I was impatient and sometimes incredulous, but then knowing that my efforts were useless I decided to submit myself to the times and I tried to find some peace and some acceptation, but it did not work either … I took the decision to think about tomorrow, the future, and the next episode… No real changes….                                                                                                  Many, many days passed without new thoughts and the confirmation that nothing can really attenuate the pains we are suffering…Is all finished for most of us? Can we still hope for the end of the tragedy of this world? Are we just on a foreign planet where we live only painful moments? What have we done to deserve it? Are we all alone looking for peace and comfort and trying to forget?

AND NOW A NEW VIRUS IS THERE WAITING FOR US!!!!

And now what should we do of all the time that our life will be? And for how long? One month? Three months? One year? Eternity? What should we do of all these nights deprived of sleep and these mornings coming back with no changes and haunting us? Still listening to the news trying to bring us possible solutions when we know that we cannot do anything!! Do we really have nothing left?  Will everything become a question mark with a negative possible answer? 

Everything goes on like we do not even exist!!! The world wants us to stop thinking, creating, even being… We should be sitting all day in an armchair and look through the window at the emptiness of our condition…We should accept the nonsense of a new imposed life; we should accept the denial of our existence?                                           We can only talk about the death or the disease of others to prove that we have feelings, that we have a soul, that we are capable to have emotions…  

NO…NO…NO… I REFUSE THIS FATE

I will not go away without having said everything inside me, and I hope that some friends will travel with me, friends who will still be able to smile when looking at a young child or a cloud in the sky…We should not be afraid of dying when we had the opportunity to contemplate life and tender moments of life…Despite injustice and devastation of our heart, despite incredibly hard times, despite cursed times, despite nights with no end looking at terror, we should still believe that life is still worth it and beautiful…

Too many times most people deny the possible death about people they love. And they continue to live the same way, until it is too late, and they stay remorseful and powerless…

Most of us do not know how to show to some people how are important they are in our existence, our being, and when finally, we realize it, it is too late and someone goes without us having said: thank you for being you, thank you for your love, thank you for your friendship, thank you for sharing your knowledge.

Time goes so fast that we wake up and we discover that 3 or 4 weeks have passed, and we have given no news to the dear ones.  How sad, how disappointing of us, how bizarre it is…But the thoughts should stay the same, the feelings too …We should always express to each other our feelings, our joys, our sorrows, our failures and sometimes our disappointments about our life.

 So, I want to wish to everybody everything …everything possible...Everything…they deserve…  Everything they desire… 

 NO...NO...NO…   

We will not accept to be enclosed in the silence of a semi-death, we must have the strength to tame life, we HAVE the desire to be AND WE SHOULD PURSUE a creating knowledge … 

Everybody has good reasons to be who he is, to believe what he wants, to act according to his desires…so, why should we expect anything from others?  Why should we believe that we know more about emotions? 

What we know is more important? No, it is not… 

Should we be waiting for people to have gratitude for what we did for them? No, we should not…

I remember one of my best friend Mark Flint who died a few years ago…He was more than a friend, he was more than our family, he was part of our being. While he was sick and in the hospital for months, I was traveling, I wrote to him almost every day. I sent him my thoughts about life, about the business, about my adventures... The title of my messages was: TO MAKE YOU SMILE

I was calling him MARCUS FLINTUS

 

One day I wrote to him:

My dear Marcus Flintus

These days I am thinking a lot of the past few years and how much time I wasted to fight and struggle for lost causes, causes sometimes useless and even ridiculous. I would love to be born again knowing what I know now, I know you must be thinking the same way, right?

To become Young again KNOWING… Is That what the old Faust desire ?

I am now in the antechamber of knowledge, in the waiting room of wisdom...Too many people look at me like I am a sorcerer, when I am not even a sorcerer’s apprentice. I want to be the big man that everybody reveres, and I am only an imitation of the real ME, an approximation of my intellect…You must be smiling because you must feel very often what I am recalling. How YOU cannot be wise after all these years of creativity and thoughts? Your experience of life and humanity gave you the incredible strength to go through what you are living now. It is true, the beginning of old age gives us time to think but my dear Mark, even at the beginning of our friendship I knew that we had complicity and the same ways of thinking and we could understand each other very fast…Too many people believe that life is what it is…we both do not…we do not believe in fate, we believe that we can change it by living it with a different interpretation, YES MARK, you will be victorious, soon you will be back to life, soon we will again laugh about silly things, soon we will be again talking about music, and singers, and of course about  the ones who do not understand us…Diana will be cooking for you your favorite meal and we will sit on the porch of the house contemplating the beauty of the evening, totally gaga …So continue to be strong, I did not hear you complaining once about anything, you are my hero, you are an example for all of us.. Hurry home, we are waiting for you, we need you…

 Your brother          

 Bernard

That was my last message, he died a few days later…

 

This message to my friend was like an announcement of what we are living these days… AND NOW… The end can be soon and final, but until then Life goes on, so let us continue to be strong, be an example for each other and not be overwhelmed and falling in despair and depression. We must be generous with others, understanding of the ones calling themselves enemies since they also go through HELL. We must take care of the ones around us. Are we still capable of seeing the sky and what it has to offer? Yes, years go by, and we must find answers or elements of answers to continue our path to peace…

                                                                                

Difficult moments always give a meaning to life. Yes, we will be victorious at the end and together we will laugh again about silly things and we will be contemplating the stars in the sky…  Let us be sure to see each other and rebuild the world and life, the present and the future.

 

   

                                                                

 

                                                                 

 

GHOSTS

  

The past few months have been incredibly painful and challenging for all of us, and I believed I had seen everything in my long and strenuous life? The past two years have demonstrated that there is no final pain in our existence something worse can always happen...

 For the past seventy years I always had nightmares and sometimes dreams but these days ghosts of all kind are invading me, ghosts of the past, ghosts of the present, and the future ghosts.    Every night for the past two months, I wake up around 2 am and see walking around in the room an apparition, then it comes closer to my bed and whispers in my ears… It whispers stories, stories that I know very well, or unfamiliar stories, but these days always painful stories…

   APPARITION, WHO ARE YOU???                                                                                                                     

And the answer is always the same even if the apparition looks different…

-I am a ghost!

 Really? a ghost? What is a ghost? Is it the soul of a dead person? An immaterial spirit created usually as a vague, gloomy, and cunning form? wandering among and haunting living persons. The ghost is whispering in my ear:                  

-Tell me, tell me more about your life, I left you when you were still young and full of desires, you wanted to be an actor and then decided to go to the US, tell me, tell me more.....You stay silent?                                                        

The ghost is smiling and adds: 

-Remember you were ready to make the sky explode, and your strength was huge, and you wanted everything and were ready for anything... what happened? You are now waiting for …not even Godot… You have no idea for what you are waiting for... Ah, I see… you are going to complain again about your difficult life? Do you sometimes think about your luck? Do you realize how many of your very good friends died the past 2 years? Every day you hear about the death of somebody you called a friend… so, stop being self-centered, stop bringing up your dramas…… See life, see life, see your luck…       

GO AWAY GHOST

I do not suppose you have to believe in ghosts to know that we are all haunted, yes all of us, by things we can see and feel and guess, even if sometimes we do not realize it. We are all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us. May be before we die, it is our ghosts we see. Ghosts do not really invade us, no they do not, they are with us because we need them, they are part of us...And even dreams are filled with ghosts, the dreams full of desires are chased by ghosts and they disappear in the morning when we wake up to what we believe is real life.

In the morning, I wake up in the city I am living in

, New York...

And these days New York in the morning is painful to look at, sad enough that you want to go back to the nightmare and talk to more ghosts. ..The ghosts will look at the  people who have no idea of who they really are, where they are going, why they are even alive and walk very fast with their phone in front of their face to a place that they know superficially. And the ghosts will say:

-Do not believe in fate, do not believe in destiny, believe that you can change the world…

OH REALLY????  

Every city is a ghost...New York with construction all over, the scaffolding hiding the original structure and sometimes you can guess the creativity of the original, but since too many ghosts have been around imposing new ways of thinking, it looks like nothing... OR may be it was a park before? But in my present state of mind there is not a lot to look at, very little to discover, and it seems that I can only see the surrounding mediocrity, the poverty; the fact that everybody seems to be walking around with no real destination, without knowing who they are and what they want.. and now most of cities live in fear! Fear of others, fear of the unknown, fear of being scared!

GO AWAY GHOST BUT BEFORE TELL ME YOUR NAME  

-MY NAME IS PASSED REALITY

 Another ghost dressed in red approaches me, it is the color of a cherry or of blood… My blood?  He screams in my ear…

-What do you want to look at? You cannot see anything, you became blind to the outside world, only preoccupied by your owns thoughts, and what you believe is the center of the world… YOU, YOU AND AGAIN YOU!!!

The ghost laughing loudly, says …go ahead, talk, talk…make me smile…

GHOST LISTEN TO ME  

 

 -We live in a bizarre world where it seems that the abyss between people is much deeper that it had never been in the past... It seems sometimes that we are living side by side and not in the same world, a multitude of parallel worlds with opposed rules, almost opposed expectations. The accumulated knowledge of superficial matters and the desire to go on fighting for choices concerning only us!!!!

Ghost: Oh, that is impressive, I am honored to be next to you… Ah! Ah! Ah! Go on silly man…

 

-The meaning of truth at the dusk of life is escaping me, this dusk every day darker, thicker, more somber. I am not capable anymore to distinguish what is real or even the meaning of real, I can only see the nonsense of everyday life... I try to hook myself to lost moments who cannot be alive anymore and cannot be found, I feel my creativity fading and losing its face in the pathetic routine of everyday life.... Why do I believe that everything can or should last forever...hours, days, years go without looking the same but are the same...

The ghost is laughing very loudly: -Go on, say more, empty your soul…

 

-And today we look at each other with disdain, with sometimes jealousy, with non-acceptation of their needs, with the refusal of the new freedom in so many aspects of life. Pretending all the time that most people know nothing, have nothing, believe nothing, and are just the product of the internet and social media.

They are only interested in their phone, their silly music, the image they project on others, and the insistence of having everything as fast as possible without really deserving it. BLA, BLA, BLA…

 

 

THE GHOST IS NOW WHISPERING TO ME:  -Are you saying that today there is no culture, no morality, no sense of belonging, no tradition, people refuse the basic way of honor, they think only about money and adventures, only about superficial and easy success.

 

-GO AWAY GHOST BUT BEFORE TELL ME YOUR NAME

 

-MY NAME IS PRESENT REALITY

I open my eyes in the dark room, another long night, full of visions and thoughts…My friends, where are you? Why are you gone? Even if I have not seen you for a long time., I need you, I am full of memories of our adventures together and I still want to share it with you…Come back friends… I am sure we can still share ideas, and dreams, and laughs together, why are you gone…FRIENDS where are you? My lost friends, you will become ghosts inside me, and I will keep you alive and present forever…Yes, my friends, forever…

A huge ghost is now approaching me.

-You are pathetic! What happened? Where are you? How old are you now?

-I am 75, and tired; tired of talking, tired of people, tired of.... life...

- I thought you were a creative man, what happened?

-The creativity can be sometimes the result of Ghosts, and sometimes it is not worth anymore, the dreams are too invaded by ghosts and give a false reality…

Sometimes I am haunted by the ghosts of my own feelings, and too many times it influences my thoughts and my writing, and it is not reality anymore.

-Since when reality was the benchmark of your life and your creativity?

You should be delivering to others the human soul, the passionate feelings, and sometimes the weakness of being you.

 

-Ghost will you help me? Will you come often in my sleepless nights and prompt me about my next duty?

- I will if you promise that you will follow my advice for ways to look at life, to understand that there should be new ways to look at life, and to learn how to take care of all your friends.

- And I will find some peace? And I will be able to take care of the people I cherish? Will you really do that for me?

- I will if you promise.

- Ghost, I promise, I promise… Please tell me your name.

MY NAME IS FUTURE REALITY

 

I wake up smiling and ready