Bedtime Fables

Walking past a park on one of my not so bright mornings, a glance at one of the cypresses, whose impressive upright detachment radiated an air of warmth, brought the melody of the fables that lulled me to sleep every night when me was a wee ladsdei. One of me care-takers (or the other, coz they’d either take turns or act in unison on that demanding mission called put the wee ladsdei to sleep) would assume the voices of the characters and of the connective narrative tissue alike in order to distract my fast running fantasy fueled by the intake of daily adventures. The fable the cypress reminded me of (or it was the same story night in, night out) is the one about a bunch of kids living in the city suburbs. The run-down outskirts of the metropolis were covered with an irreparably grey veil exhausted from the contaminated lungs of the urbane giant. The slums these kids were forced to call homes were more reminiscent of the psyche of a person suffering from a severe, decade-long depression than of a monument to an architect’s expertise. Dawns were murky there. Noons dim-lit. Evenings darker than the tomb of a serial killer. There was no midnight. When the next day started one would know only by the sound of the alarm, bringing another 24-hours long misery run.

On one of such mornings, on their way to school, before they diverted from the route, the kids were walking in usual silence. That was not one. Because there was a brooding buzz over their heads…buzz of swarmed remnants of sleepless nights. Sleepless because somebody’s neighbor was more drunk than on any other day, because somebody’s fist punched the wife’s face more vehemently than on other nights, because somebody was too sick to wait for the next day to come, mild fever grew into a burning hurricane ravishing the damaged liver, eating up the decomposing blood vessels…the skin beyond irritable…bloodshot eyes popping out at a slightest touch of the hostile, cold air…the brain like a beehive about to explode and send the outburst of germs to spread throughout the world smearing every corner of the universe with the signature infectious jelly called wretchedness.

Sleepless nights bore humming mornings. School is an unreachable destination on such days. And they are all the same. So diversion and routine are being confusedly practiced in aimless attempts to just be somewhere between what should be waking up and going to bed. Aimless wandering along the faceless concrete surfaces. No site to occupy imagination. No sun to rupture the cement curtain above. No smile to break the spell of cyclic lives. Only perpetual lightless noon. On the way to and from school. That was not one. And a gang of idle-paced kids whose steps bridge the vapidous space between the doorstep of the dormitory called home and the vurtual school. Noone can distinguish steps from one another. There is no way to tell the difference between the way this leg walks and that leg making a step on the endless journey through the city of indistinguishable days and nights.

Only the subtonic layers of the lingering buzz feature different registers. Those impalpable areas speak in different keys. Or, more precisely, can speak in different keys, should the thoughts be capable of creating signature tone. Typically, that’s unlikely. All the buzz was just that. And, yet there was a frequency striking the air differently. I remember that frequency from my care-taker’s engaging performance. It is of the approximately following content: “The essence of technology is nothing technical. But could it be something playful? Could it be a way, not of instrumentalzing nature, but of producing a new relation to it, as a totality?” Well, but who is the character that utters these words…is an enigma to me.