(Fifty minutes chapter 1)
Hippies
Ok. I’m going to sit down
and write what happened. It might be a good way to pass the time, though Irene
Ursum says she’s not going to read it because she hasn’t got a head for reading
and also because she already knows everything. It’s only a trick, she pretends
to let me do what I please and in this way I’ll do just what she
wants. She’s very clever. She always thinks of everything.
My name is Deeru Piotr. I couldn’t
say how many times I’ve searched in a map or a guide for the situation of the
street in the Serengeti where I was born. I remember the Welwiltschia,
that feeds on mist and manages to keep healthy for two thousand years with only
two leaves. And the bush of the sweet desert’s melon, the nara, a banquet for
the jackals, which resists hundreds of years. I remember the storms and the
rain that made the earth sound like a giant drumskin. I remember the armadillo,
which sleeps almost all day, and is able to dream for six hours. Humans (and
pigs) dream scarcely two hours.
I remember the aromas and
the colours, I was born in a gnus herd and I remember seeing all those adult
legs around me lots of times. In the sceneries where my dreams are filmed
are always the gnus but also the Bagdad palaces from
the Arabian Nights, quite strange.
The little gnus liked to
play and compete but I had troubles competing with the others. Mainly because I
was a bear. The only bear in the herd.
How is it possible? A bear
among the Serengeti gnus? But then, how I am to know? Some kind of joke. I
suppose. God (who is mythic and a great joker also, some say his real name is
Silence) likes to do this kind of things to delight the little children and
upset the grown ups. Or maybe he just wants to create some confusion. I really
don’t know.
I think one is a bear the
same way one is a elephant or a musician. Roundly, not reasonably. There are
things like that, which haven’t an explicable or logical cause. It doesn’t
matter if it’s a hazard question or it was planned before hand.
But no one looked like me,
“I am one and they are all of them” I
said to myself. And that kept me thinking deeply.
I was completely out of
place, the same as many of you. Thus I thought when I was a child that I was
surely the most deformed being of my time. You, probably, are not what you seem
either.
I spent a lot of time
thinking of nothing, just staring at the trees and the stars. There was a raven
(Antonius) that must have always been with me, because he is present in every
remembrance. He was a bit cross-eyed and that made him look like a mad bird a
little. But he was very awake and acute. The raven showed me the vast
cartography of the spirit where I could wander every time I was alone.
Exiled in the spirit the
most magnificent jungles are produced, and one believes he’s flying in the divinity’s
shadow.
So it seems to me that I
lived many adventures when I was a child, I starred some biblical chapter and
also the Mahabharata and every tale about animals in every mythology of the
world. It surprises me when they think these are audacities from my
imagination. No, no, let them make up
things. I’m telling everything as I remember it, no tricks. Every detail is authentic
even if it may seem weird.
But yes, maybe you’re
right, and to make you see everything as I could see it then, I need to borrow
your imagination too. Just to produce some special effects. Because we have not
the budget for this. This is a low profile production.
So, imagine a flame that
appears suddenly from these pages you’re reading. You see the paper darkening
suddenly and then the flame rises and then you would just throw this quite
frightened. That would be perfect, so, yes, we will use your imagination.
Try to reproduce in your
head Africa with all its animals, Bagdad, the many-columned Iram, two hundred
trees fallen after a storm, the desert in Lybia, Nineveh, the Monkey King
palace, St. Antonius temptations, a bombed city where nothing’s left but ruins
and cracks where the spy monkeys hide, a blue tile at the bottom of a swimming
pool in Bel Air, a weeping flock of cranes, all the unemployed labourers of
Brest-Litovsk, Louis Armstrong when he was eleven years old in Perdido Street,
the oribis (small antelopes), St. Mark place in Venice invaded by the
fluttering doves, a giant cruise ship moving and not realizing the immensity
that’s beneath, the Bengali vultures staring from the New Delhi temples, all
the sleeping dogs on earth, the awkward marabous walking with scrupulous steps
among the waste heaps of Nairobi, every shop in Gonstinyi Dvor, a sparkle you
see reflected in the bell of a horn in the dark pit of the orchestra, a child
crouching among the chicken under the rain, a dentist plate in a street in
Wagenheim, the volcanos, the ants, the great night, etc. (What? Is the world
very big? Don’t make me laugh, your head, much more powerful, could contain the
whole world without a great effort. Sometimes, in a fleeting vision, I caught
sight of an entire, plethoric world.)
Imagine the animals as they
appear in Jiri Trnka films. Because we weren’t toys, but we weren’t completely
real. To produce this figures and stages
in your head you’ll need too some unimaginable objects, ageless, never dreamed,
violent, broken, unusable, old and sometimes wicked and incomprehensible,
asylum souvenirs, the museum of a wild child. I couldn’t conceive any other way
you could represent the night of the nights, or the dreams, or the mythology
that a child’s imagination can produce. I couldn’t give any other reference.
Often only the music has a similar effect.
When I was a child,
whenever I listened to music, it seemed to me that I was receiving messages
destined to me, which I only could decipher.
I lived quite naturally
what they call the Occult, what everyone mysteriously feels but no one is able
to explain. To me, everything was full of signs, without any effort my
intuition discovered them everywhere.
The birds, the fishes and
the worms, innocent and therefore wise, seemed too to posses some key. I wanted
to feel the insects dialogue under the branches. And I remember sometimes getting
near to the ground to listen to the worms engine of sound digging deeply
underground.
But how much you need to dig
to reach heaven?
Pluto, stars and echoes of
the sky! I was a caravan wandering across the night sky. Sometimes, suddenly it
seemed to me that the whole world was inside me. It’s a sensation that’s hard
to explain.
Anything sounds false but
this secret, this treasure. I’m not kidding, surely you can experiment such a
thing.
Then a moment seems a whole
lifetime, every answer comes before you even ask.
It isn’t easy.
It isn’t hard.
It is.
I never spoke of these
things. It was always such an intimate thing that I didn’t want to analyze it.
But I lived surrounded by
miracles. I grew accustomed to the immense light of these depths.
Each and every one of my
days I didn’t have but to breathe deeply and wonder at the things I saw. I
never had any fear, weren’t the world and the night going to follow me wherever
I would go? I felt so lucky! Don’t you remember what a surprise it was to be
alive?
One night I dreamed I was
watching from the St. Basil domes the course of a river. I saw the dark waters
running and followed them until the head of a crocodile appeared in my dream.
The crocodile got out of the water walking upright like a man, and that sent a
shiver through my spine.
The dream changed suddenly
and next I was with some people sheltering from the furious rain under the roof
of an old garage. Everybody was listening to two drunken men who offered a
conference about this mythic animal which name I couldn’t recall when I woke
up.
One day I told my parents
that when I grew up I wanted to be a musician. They told me it had to be one or
the other. Also, concerning talent, the
common belief is that it is a gift which some posses while some others don’t,
as the song says
While
some may reach for the stars
Others
will end behind bars
Implied in that belief is
the conviction that most of us don’t.
Naturally, someone comes
when you’re a child and breaks the spell. I wanted to be a jazz drummer? Some
adult will come to tell you things like “you’ll never make it”, “music doesn’t
lead anywhere”. The threat of that message keeps echoing in your head for years
and years. Maybe it wasn’t the first thing a child needs to know. Music is
forbidden as long as you hear the echoes, and we’re confined to the maximum
security prison of homework.
Music is still magical,
maybe even more since it becomes something secret, clandestine.
My father used to say music
was for hippies, surely what he
meant was drug addicts, but automatically I began to like the word.
Hippies,
bulls, come out to grass
It’s
you who reigns over the land
You
have the world in the palm of your hand
While
I live in the sun, how good I was born!
One
day, my drum loud you’ll hear
A
song even dumbs will sing
When
trees see me they turn envious green
Bold
as the sun!
Bow?
Never! To none!
Tell
us your song to the earth
When
young you were too a holy bird
One
the Egypt Airlines couldn’t match
Bulls,
hippies, look up!
And
take up to the sky