FROM A PIECE OF GLASS

29.10.04


It’s time to talk about things less poetic. In some way, I need the lightness of dull random things or of facts that happen just like that, for no special reason. After all, I was back to work and this is not something romantic. I even managed to find the time to argue with a colleague who kept asking me to explain him why I invited him twice instead of getting the line from the number to which he had already called us. I had to disclose for him all the details regarding the telephone in the office inside the room; this machine doesn’t have a transfer button and therefore it was not stupid of me to decide to call back and not transfer the line to my telephone. I write you all that so that you understand what keeps people busy when they have nothing better to do.There’s no room for poetry in this insane reality. And yet I am next to the door and I always get the impression that this will help me escape more easily at the right time (I am reading the text again and I can’t seem to understand why I wrote this phrase). On the pretext of my morning anger (I started screaming without really understanding so), I brought the picture of broken glasses to my mind. It was later when I remembered a sculpture made by Varotsos that I saw recently at an exhibition: A corridor is formed among sharp glasses and lets the length of a distance appear. It’s actually about the distance covered when someone walks on a dangerous pathway. It’s dangerous because it traps those who walk on it. It threatens them like a beast while they walk through its sharp teeth, hoping to escape. Lamps lit hang beyond their heads; they form a second glowing pathway. That’s something at which people can look in order not to lose their orientation, their faith or their optimism. When I looked at that piece from a far distance, I said: ‘Another post-modern stupid thing’. When I read that it was about the struggling of the immigrant or of the man who travels seeking for survival and not because he just chooses to, I started looking for the symbols immediately. As it’s perfectly normal, everybody interprets a work of art as wanted. Someone might not recognize any trace of art in such creations. In my opinion, art is everywhere, precisely because it has to do with presentations and representations most of the times. If some people can’t do art (although they claim the opposite in order to impress), this happens because they are not able to recognize (and thus create and re-create) neither presentations nor representations that comprise (usually) the most common reality. This is the sense that makes me admit that I’ve heard the greatest poems on the street and the sweetest words in quarrels.