"Violence" - A short story

 First posted: 09 April 2011

"What the hell are you doing? Still waiting? What for? Is he supposed to hurt you badly, so that you need a recovery at the hospital? You want your head badly injured by his fury? Are you going to let it happen? Your head pushed against the sharp edge of something laying around? If you were in my shoes, the friend who listened to you crying, begging for an help or, better, if you were in your mom's shoes what do you think you would say? How much angry could you be knowing what's happened? And are you thinking to come back to him? Are you crazy?"
"Yeah, I know but if he does it again, I swear, I'll leave him!" I reply sadly.

"That's not the first time you tell me that!" the cold and serious voice becomes quiter:  "If you don't really want to leave him, he'd better consult a psychologist about this problem and in the meanwhile…don't date him! He's disturbed... unstable... am I wrong or he also scared you more than once placing his feet on the window's balcony, risking to fall down, and threatening you saying he should commit suicide if you were living him!?"

It's not poetic as it may sound. My words too delicate... softer than the true facts. They analyse the facts, they interpret them, perhaps they even judge their sequence but my words could never succeed in describing the sound of a mute cry sprung by a feeling. They are doomed to fail in this vain attempt.

How can I explain the violence? How can I recreate the same atmosphere, made of fear and instinct, which you are forced to inhale during those rabid moments?

A pleasant and quite day had passed by and in the tranquillity of an instant the mists of a primordial anger have risen again... My instinct can perceive that rage asleep inside him, so destructive and resentful: then a sudden sensation rapes me, the dense warmth of boiling blood running into my veins, just like caffeine, a thrill of an hallucinated waking up; a weird pressure is burdening my breast, as if something was spreading an ulcer there; my head knows what's going on: tense and empty and fully aware of what he is going to do; my head is inviting me to throw myself against that person, unable to understand my feelings, that little woman who's accepting my words without listening to.  A passive human being deeply concentrated on herself. I don't exist.
Her innocent eyes on me: it's disgusting. It is upsetting me. Mocking and laughing at me, on my back, that fucking witch!

A mix of feelings inside: I can touch them, they make me afraid. He could react to them. I'm trembling. My muscles are strained to an unbearable level and my breath is congested: he gets up from the chair and he comes near, approaching me.

I had just given him a bad reply without caring about it. I didn't pay attention, made a mistake, a foolish reply, given with no offence, just an excessive tone: "Don't piss me off" I said "come on, let me use my computer quietly, I don't wanna listen to you now!"

Stupid little girl who does not pick her vocabulary with selective and polite manners: I should have guessed the consequences! It was clear enough from my past experiences that he would be furious but I couldn't help pronouncing those single syllables with my fucking mouth. What a silly fault of me!

He's really angry, shouting at, calling me bitch. I knew it. His voice is muffled. I cannot follow what he is saying. Every single cell of my body is trembling. I can feel it: I'm paralysed.

He grabs my arm and he turns it up. Every second his grasp is getting stronger. Am I screaming now? My back is hurting. What is he doing? I cannot understand what is really happening. His hands are grabbing and crushing me, injuring my skin. I can hear my own screeching voice crying for pain. Tears are falling down but I don't feel pain anymore: it's my head, everything is concentrated there. I don't exist anymore. No feelings, nothing. It's like watching me from outside without any clue of what is going on. I can see that girl trying to free herself from his hands using her instinct and her own fear; in her eyes I can read the hope: he'll calm down in a while. I don't know how, I don't know why but he stops, he pushes me outside the house and he closes the door in front of me.

Finally he stopped.
I can breathe again. Now I can feel my tears flowing and my head beating. My skin is burning. The beating of his heart is becoming slower.

I call a friend with my mobile. She can hear me crying:
"Are you fine?" she's worried.
"He did it again. He hit me again. I can't decide what to do. He locked me out. I've got no money. I dunno where to go. It's four o'clock in the morning. What can I do? Please, tell me what should I do!" I am speaking very fast, nearly without a pause.
" Accuse him, call the police. They will provide help and he will be charged with committing violence against you." then she adds: "You can stay at my place"
"I won't accuse him!" I moan. Just finished the sentence and I hear his voice calling me, begging for apologies: "What can I do? Tell me what. I don't know what to do, help me. He's here. He wants to bring me back!"
"No, no and no. You come to my house, immediately. Don't do stupid things, please. Leave him now!" she's worried for me, I can distinguish her concerned tone, she's nervous. She doesn't know what's really happened. She doesn't know that I am the only one to blame if he reacts this way. I'm sure my friend can hear his voice - through the phone line - imploring me to come back; maybe she thinks he's behaving like a cat mewing, in order to get food but he's not: he's really regretting for what he did.

"You did it again. You promised to me... not to do it again. Never!"
"Sorry hun, I didn't want to" he is crying "You know: sometimes you lose control and you say and you do things you really don't mean to. Forgive me, please. Don't leave me, please. I cannot live without you"
"I'm leaving"
"No, please, do not, don't go. Do it and I will die. I'll kill myself, don't do it, I beg you, please love"

There is no threat anymore... he's quite now, I can recollect my calm, everything is over. I can go home with him. Just for tonight, just to prevent him from doing something stupid. He needs my help. He won't hurt himself, if I support him now.
He's sorry, I'm sure of it, more than ever. He's looking at me with those desperate eyes: he needs me, he cannot live without me, I can't leave him, I must help him. He won't hit me anymore, he promised, he realized that he is going to lose me if he does that again. Next time I'll leave him... next time... I love him too much, I cannot live without him.

Nothing happened, nothing will happen.

If you were in my shoes - those of the friend who listened to you crying, begging for an help - or, better, if you were in your mom's shoes what do you think you would say? How much angry could you be knowing what's happened? I'm trying to understand you and what are your feelings: a side of my inner self knows that you're depending on him but the other part is not able to accept it.

I'm that friend who tried to take your place, I'm the person you call when you need help, I'm that girl who's giving you advices you don't follow. I'm that person you'll lose when you decide to come back to him because of the disapproval she feels when thinking of that man and the concern she has got for your safety. All these feelings will be subverted, shaken and wiped out by the final recognition of the fact that you wanted it, you like to be hit because you do not trust yourself, permitting all this situation to go on.

Poem no. 01

Sharp thorns
are twisting into the flesh
inside the unsettled light
of a black tear.

London at night

This is a new picture I took some days ago in the centre of London

London at night no.1 by *anakuklosis on deviantART

Pictures

Perspective of water planes by *anakuklosis on deviantART

I took this picture time ago and it's my favourite one. To watch it better and check all the other photos I posted you can click this link: http://anakuklosis.deviantart.com/

I wish you all an...

I found this on internet and I thought it was funny so I posted it ;)

The fall of immortals

First posted: 24 march 2010

Philosophy is dead and we killed it, apart from some gleam of men appearing here and there (although a missing person) within the decay we are passing through.

Even at the universities, during the lessons, we can feel the burden of this immense loss. We study informations (dates and datas), occasionally, if we’re lucky, we can attend at “teachers-driven” lectures about a doomed attempt to persuade students to accept the tutor’s truth, who is forcing, squeezing and crumbling authors extrapolated from their context. We try to dig into the ground written words pushing them into a self-misunderstanding, disrupting and forcing to reshape themselves and to betray their own author.

Where – I wonder then – has the real question vanished? I’m searching for the man, but where is the man if the question has disappeared? Philosophy is a continuous asking, interrogation, collision, confront beyond the so-defined dogmas, that is beyond the certitudes we build around us due to a personal choice or to find a sort of comfort, but nowadays how many of us are willing to test themselves, experiencing their limits, taking the risk of getting lost along a forest? Although everyone tends to feel the elected, the demiurge of the situation, with arrogance, only few of us understand that it’s not important to know and learn something with an absolutly certainty but it’s more important searching, changing, not being static and having the courage to change our mind.

But how can anyone get surprised by anything in the very present period of time? We believe that the desensitization makes us stronger, but it makes us more schizophrenic than we are: the thrilling of emotions, the one that frees us from all these self-imposed chains made by society that builds cyborgs, is considered as something to remove from ourselves.

We can’t dream anymore: we just schematize everthing, even the feelings. We fall in love with someone by various calculations: as in a schedule, we choose our partner, according to her/his qualities without really thinking about what we’re feeling for that person. We choose our work because of money and according to the easiest way to advance along the career. We watch a movie and, instead of letting ourselves experience it, letting the heart beat following the rhythm of the sounds that floods us, listening to the flow of the film streaming in front of our sight, we ask about the meaning of the plot to understand the moral teachings, that “something” able to fix all the fruition into an interrupted and detached frame, something able to stop the film from provoking our emotions, teaching us to give an interpretation of the worlds where it is moving on (and while I’m writing this, I’m thinking, for example, of a filmmaker like David Lynch).

Art tries to rape us and we stand by impassively: nothing can touches us if it can’t hurt us physically, what an horror! (“The horror… the horror” Kurtz said at the end of the book “Heart of Darkness” by Conrad or, if you don’t know it, in the movie “Apocalypse Now” by Coppola).

We are proud to become like stones, to prove being strong in front of people eyes who, like us, are believing in the power of impassibility without the comprehension that, nowadays, the strongest person is who has got the courage to show his tears, because he frees himself from cages that make people repressed in a mental mechanism holding them in a vise and more and more leading to apparently senseless panic attacks.

We use tricks to withdraw from ourselves and to feel something we are unable to perceive anymore. We’re drugging our senses to feel us omnipotent and, at the same time, to feel that something we lost: but without heart and pain, dreams and tears… Does it make any sense that we try to exist as if we were immortal gods? Suddenly an aporia stifles us.

Some notes about the philosophy on "Parmenides" by Martin Heidegger

First posted: 12 march 2010

“Now, i will explain to you – and you’re supposed to keep listening and receive my speaking –

Which are the paths of knowledge (=the searching for the knowledge),the ones we can think of:

The first that “is”, and it’s impossible to define this “being” as non-existent

- this is the path of persuasion, because he follows the truth –

The second one that “is not” , and it’s a  necessary event that it “is not” (being non-existent).

And I will tell you that the last one is a path where nothing can be learned.

In fact, you could never learn the non –existent( what “is not”),

Being something that cannot be accomplished,

And you could never express it (by meanings) […].

Thus thinking and being is the same”.

(Excerpts by PARMENIDES’ «Fragments»)

It’s not a simple practise to make translations, “faithful, loyal”, mirroring  the original text, without altering or “corrupting” it and, in the meantime, making it suitable for a different time, context, culture, fitting it into a language, completely different than the original one.

In my opinion, the most important thing, while starting a new translation, isn’t  trying to understand the specific meaning of the word (term, idiom, etc.) we are going to translate, but searching for the inner significant concept beyond the mere literal text. So we could easily seize and “capture” the importance of those concepts, considered by a social, cultural, mental, textual point of view, focusing on the “environment” the text itself was composed in.

Let’s analyse the ancient greek word “αληθέια”: we usually translate this term with the correlative, corresponding  form “truth”. But, as the german philosopher Heidegger notices and explains in some of his essays and lessons dedicated to and entitled “Parmenides”  that  we should pay attention, keeping our intellectual efforts rooted over the initial prefix, called “alpha privative”, recalling the authentic etymology of the lemma itself.

In many modern and contemporary translation into different indo-european languages (or other families of languages), some interpreters and scholars neglect the importance of the “alpha privative”, making the text lose its original meaning, depaupering the core of the wisdom.

Heidegger suggested and offered a different type of translation, using the term “Entbergung “, in order to evoke the substantial theoretical background hidden underneath the evident textual reference; we could attempt to link the Heidegger’s translation to the concept and process of  uncovering and disclosing a concealed perennial truth. This effort oriented to the seeking of  “αληθέια” could also be connected to the process of “unveiling”; in fact, the ancient greek word “αληθέια” comes from the verb “λανθάνω”, meaning to hide, to conceal, etc. The “alpha privative” marks the effect of UN-veiling, of DIS-closing, of UN-covering the truth, a pregnant coexistence of obscure veils and shining clearing into forest “wege” (hidden paths).

At this turning point of Heidegger’s argumentation there are four points to underline and consider regarding this greek term:

1. Something “UNveiled” is given (as a precondition): if something “UNveiled” does exist, then there must be something “veiled”, but we are not allowed or supposed to know. Here the “Unveiled” is something to be preserved, as an occult covering of an original truth.

2. Coming back to the “alpha privative“,  we have to notice how the Un-veiling here is meant as an entity that can delete, cover or wipe out what is veiled, Un-disclosing it, or, in a paradox, it could even mean that the veiled doesn’t properly exist, but it’s the correlative side of the metamorphosis of the UN-veiling, that necessitates the veiled content .

3. So it’s originated a conflict, that is present and active in the essence of truth. According to sections of western modern philosophy based upon post-aristotelian rationalism, the annihilation of the veiled content is inconceivable, because the “nihil”, the void are included among the categorizing divisions of the negative topics.

Heavily conditioned by our scientific network of dogmas, we often forget that our western viewpoints are just a way to ponder over subjects . There are different perspectives, such as the eastern wisdom, taught by other philosophies, masters, forms of knowledge. For example, Schopenhauer tried to bring some studies about eastern traditions to the west, enlightening nineteenth century philosophers. He explained that a common human being could reach an ideal condition – called “Nirvana” – revolting against the “Wille”, the omnipresent “Will” that rules the events of human existence and dominates our fates. Through the fighting against this “Wille” we could proceed towards an alternative state of being, symbolized by the “void”. This sort of vacuity is not blamed as a negative condition, according to Schopenhauer tought. (It’s most of the western philosophical tradition that stigmatizes this “Void” as a totally negative degeneration).

The “Un-covering” has nothing to do with the systematic axioms of Hegel’s philosophy. German philosophical “idealism“ has elaborated a scheme to classify their conclusions. We find the triad structured by thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. Other thinkers seem to match their reflections with Descartes’ studies. Here everything is subjected to the strict “law” of the so-called “Cogito ergo sum“. This “Cogito” is the divine self-awareness, so the divine transcendence of God states its perennial, immortal existence by accomplishing the act of thinking itself. Thinking is the logical dogma that justifies the existence of a divine God that declares its own power. This opposition between the mundane and the transcendent, between the augustinian “civitas dei“ and “civitas mundi”, between the perfection of the self proclaming god and the transitory human existence, between the “res cogitans” (god itself) and the “res extensa” (= reality, the world, the existence) is deeply confuted by Heidegger. He disagrees with Descartes about the Subject separated from the Object. The Subject is the “Dasein”, that is the human existing across time and space, and this Subject, when starts to care about an authentical type of existence, should attempt to listen to the “Being” itself, the UN-veiled “αληθέια”. This is the peculiar path an authentic human being should follow.

(“The concept of a self-aware Subjectivity, sure of its «ens» -entity- , doesn’t belong to the spirit of ancient greek philosophy. But it’s surely true that in the modern essence of the «subjectivity of the spirit» – that, if considered in a correct way, has nothing to do with the subjectiveness – is evoked the sound of the changed essence of greek αληθέια“)

4. “No other echoing resembles to the original echoing. The initial beginning is directed only towards the initial beginning. One isn’t the same as the other. And nevertheless both are the Same (Das Selbe), even when they seem to separate one from the other into the unmatchable divergent” (Taken from “Heidegger’s Parmenides”).

Here Heidegger means to refer to Parmenides toughts, quoted in the fragments i transcribed in the incipit. Reading both these philosophers we can notice how they state that, even if the veiled and the UN-veiled are separate and divided, nevertheless they merge and they are interconnected because they can exist only if they share a mutual relation

We all know that the light is opposed to the obscure darkness. They are two opposite poles, two different concepts and experiences. So we distinguish them and we think they are not compatible or specular. But ancient greeks (and most of eastern wisdoms and knowledges) explain that the shining light and the abyssal obscurity shouldn’t be differentiated. The “αληθέια” is a “coincidentia oppositorum”, not a dogma.