We are obsessed with solutions. Ever since we are very little, we are taught to reject the hopeless tasks. There is nothing so distressing as a solution-free problem. There is nothing so intimidating as an ambiguous signal we get from a life situation, from a friend, or from a stranger. We want our life events to be legitimate, solvable, predictable, controllable, structured and, if experienced in public, politically correct. Those who failed to come up with a solution for their own problems are labeled as “unprofessional”, “inferior”, “sick”, or, even worse, “irrational”. Moreover, it is abnormal to set a hopeless task. The – often painful – awareness of having a non-practicable plan is, according to modern (clinical) thinking, close to either paranoia or to severe anxiety. However, we no longer like to talk about separating the real from the illusive, we are hypocrite enough for only talking about feasible and non-feasible plans. The more evident the lack of solution for a certain problem, the less likely for that problem to appear on “healthy”, “reasonable”, “successful” persons’s agenda.
None of Ingmar Bergman’s characters ever found a solution. None of them had a “master-idea”. Some of them survived by mistake. Some others, by will. Some died or got mad of exactly the same causes. Or for the same reasons. They moved through a medium of intentions, suppositions, illusions and needs without having the slightest sense of direction. They had no civic consciousness. They promoted nothing and nobody except themselves and their solution-free problems. The hopeless Elisabeth Vogler is the last honest woman known by modernity. And Anna’s irrational passion is the last passion to be experienced by a modern human. Bergman, at his turn, is the last reliable director who suggested warm, distinct, non-viable solutions.

As I grow old, the years start to come and go like trains. Chronology loses its meaning. Today it’s 1998, tomorrow is ’78, next week is 2008. The music I listen to, the people I talk to, the books I read, the streets I walk, the emails I write have blurred my sense of time and, all of a sudden, I don’t know anymore how my personal history works. One day I start everything from scratch, next day I have to handle a thick, long, pitiful past. Each week has its own direction and philosophy. And my father’s first guitar, bought in 1967, has been out of tune all day long; a brand new 40-year old guitar, without those female names scratched on its wood, with visible fret markers and intact tuning pegs might wait for me tomorrow morning in the next train to…

We are not immune to most of the wrong, wicked, dangerous, or sinful incidents around us. Not infrequently, on the contrary. Imaginarily or literally, we choose to inhale them. Many of us, the “good conscience” – people, have an impressive adherence to situations and facts that could prove us weak, base, oppressed, or inane. Out of such abominable occurrences, we sometimes get a masochistic social feeling; and, probably more often, we get a good deal of (highly secret!) social approval.

Reciprocity. One no longer knows what it means. Love, hate, pity, joy became personal affairs that put a world between us. We don’t share, we don’t wait, we take or we give, and then we move on without creating any warm, secure space for an answer. We produce feelings that no one will ever consume. Better said, we secrete emotions that we immediately wipe away like grease or sweat.

Modern (Western) women are awfully overrated. Their deeds, their roles, their daily existence, their rhetoric, their sensibility suddenly gained a transcendent value. The trick of the always unfulfilled emancipation, the on-going process of conquering the world needs funds, political activism, street protests, Cosmo-philosophy, and men’s full understanding. I’ve heard women talking about men as if they’d be nobody’s doing nothing’s. I’ve heard men talking about women as if they’d be the most feared forces of the Universe, the ones that simultaneously provide and qualify; the only living creatures that can still afford to talk loud in a restaurant.

PS: And a hardcore, priceless cliché: Bod Dylan’s performance of “Just Like A Woman” in the already mentioned Concert for Bangla Desh from August 1971. And let’s add a controversial side note signed by Beatles: “Happiness Is A Warm Gun”.

We make funny, touching confusions between spiritual things and practical things.
We became so genuinely skillful! Look at us, we manage to talk about money, music, love, food, God, limousines, will, lust, immortality and malls in one, just one single simple sentence. Of course, a suspicion of fraud glides above us all; which, again, we genuinely ignore. How to successfully mix up left and right, up and down, pure and impure is the best damned thing we ever learnt.
…and so we go on making love for a limo seat.

PS.: Nick Lowe’s “The Beast In Me” should suit us all. And T Rex’s “Misty Mist”. Marc Bolan’s lyrics and singing make me think of all those eternal, stone-like things we always thought them ephemeral and frail.

[THIS POST HAS BEEN RECENTLY REWRITTEN].

Time’s here to screw us, not to serve us. Funny enough, we always seem to beg for more. And the more we get, the more we get used with not using it. There are piles of unused hours behind us, and piles of new, expecting ones ahead us. As we age, we become more and more unhandy in dealing with our spare hours. When our clumsiness in managing time will reach a worrying degree, Death will yawn, then will sigh, and then will chat us up.

PS: I got George Harrison’s The Concert for Bangladesh from by beloved friend Thomas. Dylan’s performance brought out the best in me. I became manageable and sentimental. And I smiled. And I had no regrets. A truly infrequent event.