Vasile Baghiu's "Chimerical" Blog: May 2007

Thursday, May 31, 2007

double life

Yesterday evening, with my wife in the middle of the crowd attempting the rock concert in our little town, I felt I was a bit lighter - how to say? - younger. I am not old yet, but sometimes I let myself carried away by the wave of time. I danced and sang with all the people there, while a poem in my head was requiring its rights from me. My problem… My double life… I am here, but I am not… Probably that was why Iuliana asked me if I really enjoyed the moment. She knows so well to see any change on my face. “It’s all right”, I said among the dozens of decibels. Honestly, I could not wait to reach home and see what was going on with that line that did not let me alone at all. Her joy and the crowd’s refrained me though from leaving. The weather was fine, just some clouds threatening us above, but the air had something very optimistic in it. Our children were somewhere else in the crowd, with their colleagues. Everything was all right. I have always tried to learn by myself to enjoy simple things by using a supplementary will, but I saw at those moments I still had to learn it. Writing and living… How to make it one and the same? I know the answer, but I am afraid to speak about it…

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Why reading?

Today I told to some school teenagers in our town’s library what the main reasons to read books nowadays were in my view. Among the ones somehow scholastic, it was a certain one in which they seemed to be very interested: if they do not read, their sensitivity is at serious risk to decrease and that that way they could enter their own love relationships a bit handicapped. That was the highest level of my "dissertation", I felt. Otherwise, I am afraid I was a bit boring, not only because they looked like tired, but mainly because my effort and worries seemed without any object, not knowing exactly why. Later, back to my pages, I began feeling better. Yes, keep on writing, Vasile!

A Poem

Life

Life is neither so philosophic nor complicated
but you cannot speak about it.

My father, who knew the Soviet Gulag,
had generally good opinions of life.

I also have good thoughts
and so does my wife.

As for our children, they
avoid the subject,
and we prefer to leave them in peace like that.

I remembered life yesterday in the plane,
but immediately forgot it,
especially after a glass of red Pic Saint-Loup,
the stewardess’s smile attached.

London, the muddy Thames,
Big-Ben,
Parliament,
and all the other known buildings
below displayed their splendor
through my eyes - an Eastern European who
has lived half of his life in communism
and the other part in neo-communism.

Life makes me think of life;
death also gives me a way
to think more about it.

I am in a place where
if I could catch the most appropriate note
I would know then
to play brilliantly the score,
and be able, in consequence,
for more enjoying life.

About Me

I am a writer living in Romania, born on December 5, 1965. Since some years ago I have been writing in my native Romanian poems, prose, essays, literary critique, articles on health, social and political issues. All along this time I have published a few books in my countries, which have been well-received. Since about 2003 I have been trying to learn English by myself in the attempt to write my poems in this language too. I still make mistakes, of course, but I am determined to continue the adventure. Some of my works have already been enclosed in magazines and anthologies in the USA, the UK, New Zeeland, Canada. Other works have appeared in translation in publications in different European countries. I have traveled in Europe due to a few “writers-in-residence” grants. I work in the health promotion domain, as I have a qualification in nursing, a BS in psychology, being now enrolled in a Master's degree course in psychological and educational counselling. All these things would be little without my wife, my children, my whole family and my friends. They remind me time to time what life’s meaning really is.

just a few words on my poetical manifesto called "chimerism"

During the last years of the communism in my country, I “invented” in my poems a world with places that I had never visited before, such as Rome or Rio de Janeiro. I simply begun to “pretend” I was free to travel like a Western citizen and to write consequently. The results were many poems about the world, which could not be publish at that restricted time. That would have happened later, when I wrote and published, along the poems, a few theoretical texts that had their echo in the Romanian literary circles. As a transnational poetic theory, “chimerism” includes four elements: traveling, transfiguration, disease and science. They are mixed all together in a poetical substance which tries to expand over the cultural, historical and geographical borders. There is almost in all of my poems a character that “travels” everywhere and behaves like an universal citizen. His name is Himerus Alter, and he “borrowed” my voice pretending in some poems that he really wrote everything I have written. He sometimes "visits" the sanatorium (in which I really lived and worked once as a nurse) and reflects upon disease, science, life and his proper condition as a human being.

Vasile Baghiu's "Chimerical" Blog