I've been always asking myself how a human thought changes course.
You prepare a coffee, you then decide, depending on your age, whether you want the light to fall from above, or shine on the newspaper directly; you pick some breakfast leftovers for company, and you withdraw into reading the paper's Sunday Edition. You think you’ve got a grip on the situation, but as is the case with so many points of view, there is always a setback.
Thoughts get reversed, same as convictions, and especially certainties.
Couldn’t be otherwise as you allow so many persons, by page flipping with a thumb and a forefinger, to be unleashed into the room first, and then enter the databases of your brain.
One by one, pages and columns transport you to some other region, to Libya and Gaddafi, to Hugo Chavez’s cancer situation, to the rescue operation of a suicidal youth. You fast forward through the news to eventually reach what is also known as a person's leisure waste of time.
The Theater.
As it happens, at the start of a new season, front-page news in ARTS & LETTERS are dominated by stories like "arguably, the last theatrical season didn’t go that bad after all - summer tours didn’t quite work out" as expected, especially... and new prospects per current estimates, entertainment this year will be largely affected by the factor of touring, co-productions ... and assessments about how this year’s plays have been scheduled for minimal role distribution, a few new ones, and some reprises.
And then, you arrive at the visual arts section.
A Memorial Exhibition at the Wallraf Richartz in Cologne to commemorate 150 years since its inauguration. A great painting by Gustave Courbet dominates the article; of a lady who seems to be enjoying her coffee at the balcony, overlooking a forest. Research has shown that the artist originally painted a gentleman as well, who was supposedly drinking coffee with the lady. Something had happened however, and Courbet made the gentleman disappear; he turned him into part of the forest, we never found out why. Nor could he possibly imagine that almost 153 years later this very fact would be revealed to our curious eyesight with the help of technology.
It was at this point that the newspaper lost interest, and where the "allowing many to escape by the page-flipping with a thumb and a forefinger" indeed occurred.
The right to secrecy was their code. Ever since I told him, he was relieved. He spent hours at her canteen drinking coffee and his ouzo, staring at her, admiring her, watching her movements carefully. He never acknowledged his passion though.
When I mentioned to him about the setting that became far too obvious, he admitted his infatuation. His indulgence of sharing morning coffee, and midday ouzo with her. Only that much had he been asking of her existence. That wee-little made his black eyes shine and withdraw sideways, while he was talking to me about the canteen lady. His face blushed of passion, shame and feelings of guilt.
When I saw the red in his face, I spoke about the right to secrecy. His tiny little innocent secret.
To subsist inside a secret plan. To own the right to propose to himself different roles, whereas life in turn imposes its own challenging roles, each time you sip your coffee alone, and you share your ouzo light-headedness with others, subsisting too in their own secrets.
When living with secrets, you maintain the necessary distance, while glances cross each other in the park, and the air that you breath carries with it the scent molecules of the other person’s body.
Let her think whatever she wants to. In our conversations he was flowing in and out of her life, he used to build story plots. Her at the leading role, him too. An undefined setting. Unspecified daydreams. He's been leaving season flowers behind, on the bench, humbly; he used to boost on his own her canteen consumption. He lived just to see her casually throw her hair sideways, touch the coins, and her smile that accompanied her handing back of the change.
The right to secrecy encouraged him. He intensified the time he spent with her. The time that he looked at her, the time that he quietly sipped coffee next to her. Each time I met him, we exchanged glances that eased his guilt, and protected his secret. The secret that made the room appear picturesque with three to four canteen chairs, an unattractive fridge - the fridge with soft drinks, a little transistor radio, the calendar, and the icon of the Merciful Virgin on the wall.
It wasn’t exactly Courbet’s forest, but there as well, very much like the other gentleman, he also lifted his cup to drink from.
Then, different epochs came along, and gentlemen are erased either by the artist, following orders by a lady, or the lady’s husband, or by somebody else’s mandate, somebody more obscure and repellant.
Secrets and rights prepare their plans, and life prepares its own.
Who takes part in a plan is only defined by a secret.
Things are subtracted and augmented, and this is becoming news. However, one fact is truthfully genuine. That is what occurs in people's glances as they scan the face of a beloved before they slowly stare with compromise the other way, into the woods, the horizon, to a passer by, and into the passage of time that swallows secrets and rights.
In the empty space of a museum and a canteen audiences will stand by in front of those gentlemen, who distantly seem to be drinking coffee with ladies, and wonder if they ever existed indeed.
They will hastily pass by, uttering questions and comments in a few statements, and they will seek their own rights in secrecy as a confirmation that they ever existed. However, the exhibition, the insert continued, enjoyed hefty attendance because of that riddle. Precisely on Sundays. Sunday Edition inserts contribute to the success of news dissemination about an event