Paromita’s Reviews > The Other City > Status Update

...All conversations are fed from the great conversation between those who live within the homeland and what wafts over the border: a murmur, in which the rustle of fabric mingles with the howling and whining of monsters and musical compositions played by an orchestra of exiles for the space of several days.

Departure does not mean breaking off the discourse. In fact true discourse is only possible between those who have left and those who remain. Conversations with members of one’s tribe are always only a tedious echo of one’s own words...

Some stay, some leave. Some spend their whole lives unaware of the music of rustles and whispers that accompany our words, while others are absorbed by the patterns on a carpet or the intoxicating interiors of closets—their families sit for several weeks by the open closet door awaiting their return but then they all forget about them.

Now I knew that the other city can only be entered by someone who leaves in the awareness that the journey he is undertaking has no purpose, because purpose means a place in the fabric of relations that create the home, and that it is not even purposeless, because purposelessness simply complements purpose and belongs to his world.

...Eventually it totally undermined my feeble performance, so that I preferred to fall silent and retreat to a corner of the stage—and yet up to that moment I had been in constant fear of throwing away the script and exiting to the darkness of the wings. I used to exit but would still regard my exit as my last role, the role that would eventually, in some strange way, involve me in the play after all.

I never understood the purpose of the play being performed and the roles of which I was supposed to choose one; sometimes I tried to assume one of them and play it, but I would always rattle off the prescribed part parrot fashion, with distaste and a sense of awkwardness and embarrassment...

I have lived my whole life on the periphery and have been more at home in the world of stains and cracks on old walls than in the world of shapes acknowledged as meaningful and alone important.

To really leave one must leave everything behind and go smiling and empty-handed with no thought of return. Those who depart while counting on returning do not leave home, even if they reach the white cities in the depths of the jungle and repose on the marble of its squares: their journeys remain woven into the tissue of the objectives that create the space of home..

...I had encountered the words and gestures of the inhabitants of the other city, the screeches of its creatures, and the stiff poses of its statues like a hieroglyphic text, whose shapes from time to time have been penetratingly and almost painfully cut through by the incandescent discharge of unifying meaning, but every time it had been extinguished before I managed to grasp it.

I was weary from living on the border: on the border of a homeland, whose events, in which the sap of meaning has dried up, have gradually been changing into a meaningless ritual, and foreign parts whose order constantly eluded me. ..