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moderndayruth

~ Tarot inspired essays and more

moderndayruth

Category Archives: Magical Realism

A Lucid Nightmare

19 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by moderndayruth in Coming of Age / Bildungsroman, Magical Realism, Photography

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Bari, Florence, Naples, New York City, Ponte Vecchio, Romance, Rome, Via Nazionale

In my dream, it was always the four us, my parents, grandmother and I. We were moving from one country to another, leaving everything familiar behind. I was changing schools, uniforms, friends, languages. In the beginning of the dream, I was growing roots, towards its middle I learned that when the roots are cut – it hurts. So I stopped growing roots. I started behaving  like a stranger who’s only temporarily there, in my own dreaming. Towards the end of the dream, I had became a perpetual stranger, a recidivist foreigner, an all time nomad;  a wanderer, a traveler, someone who’s just around for a short while, and not even that long.

I met some people, in that dream, they asked: how long are you staying?  They knew we would part sooner or later, we knew it too. I knew all of it was temporary – the dream, my home, my friends, the languages that took me so long to learn, I knew that I would leave it all behind, soon.

I woke up in Florence one morning and looked at Ponte Vecchio through my bedroom’s window. I was in time to grab my morning espresso and rush across the bridge towards the Market of the Piglet and and the building where my language school was.

Florence is the city best situated for the heartbroken and for those fatally ill of general nostalgia. There is something in that city that predisposes you to sigh into the breeze above Arno. The city is so beautiful, so marvelous – that many faint, some suffer from ephemeral heart conditions and some are struck by the city’s charm to the point of developing temporal insanity. It’s called The Syndrome of Florence.

If you are profoundly sad or dreamy for a prolonged period of time, Florence is the place to be. Rome, with its bright colors, open squares and flashy fountains would only drain you, the sad you, the dreamy you. Naples would cry so hard, that you would end up comforting the good old romantic. Florence is the city for you, the noble lady would pick up your dark mood, but it would be beyond her poise to acknowledge it with anything more than a merely noticeable nod. A noble lady of that age – albeit you wouldn’t dare asking the lady about it – would certainly know what a heartache is, even if a general one. She would understand your mourning over the country you lost, the dream that you couldn’t wake up from and your language that went extinct. Maybe the city would hint on the stories it knew – of the mistress of a king who was the love of his life – albeit he never made her the Queen, of  secretive mystics and painters who drank heavily, of alchemists ever seeking the elixir, of shrewd merchants  and  entertaining con-artists, of street musicians and fishermen who knew many tales and of market sellers who knew it all… For suffering and wisdom are universal, the pain is equal, it does not discriminate, it goes after each and every one of us all the same, since ever and until our very end.

Rome’s exuberance would tire you if you are sad, or dreamy, Naples’ sun shines too bright when your thoughts are dark or foggy; the noble Florence with its cobbled alleys – for cobble isn’t the same everywhere – the posh sound ch which its dwellers pronounce as if whistling –  they say it’s done so to diverse from the rest (an alien, they say,  will out himself by merely pronouncing the ordinary k instead), the pizza crust with its particular Florentine taste, clubs underground of which tourists are unaware and drag queens in Via Nazionale, friendly drag queens who will tell you Florentine secrets at the local hairdresser’s – that’s what you need when you are waking up from a nightmare, or still feel ephemerally dreamy.

In my class all were foreigners, like I was, and even the teacher was from somewhere else – she felt equally alien as we did, albeit Florence is the best city to be an alien, given that you have to be one. The talk of the city is that some were born in Florence, of parents who were also born in the city – but those people you will never meet; they must have their own hidden ways for transportation, their own schools and their own hairdressers, because your path will never cross any of theirs. All the people you will meet will be aliens, like yourself. Some would have come for a month, some – for two; many would stay just couple of weeks, or even less – and only few will stay for as long as nine months.

To get to my country, you need to wake up from dreaming, leave Florence behind, head south – all the way down, to the ancient city of Bari, you need to embark on the ship and cross the Adriatic Sea. The journey lasts one night, in the morning you shall awake in the Black Mountains. The climate is very different here, albeit it is Mediterranean too. As soon as you step down from the ship in the port of the city of Bar, what you will feel is that the time passes slower.

In Florence, the time runs, together with its hurrying tourists, in Naples – the time gets drunk on the abundant sunlight, and it sings the songs of the sea and romantic love; in the Black Mountains the time has nowhere special to go, and it slows down to the point where it feels as if it almost stopped. The magnificent olive trees, spellbound long ago, don’t go anywhere – they are always there, and it seems that even the people who live in houses made of stone, under the olive trees – never hurry, and maybe even never move.

Nobody is an alien here, all were born here, of parents who were born here as well. The rocks of the Black Mountains haven’t heard neither of mistresses to the kings, nor of street musicians and broken hearts. The rocks have other stories to tell, of battles and knights, dreams of victories and nightmares of betrayals, those stories I was told when I arrived from Florence, having realized that I wasn’t dreaming.

L.R.S.

due thank to Daily Prompt: Nightmares for inspiration

Church of St. George, Podgorica, Montenegro

Church of St. George, Podgorica, Montenegro

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The Death of the Painter

24 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by moderndayruth in Magical Realism, Photography

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

art, Podgorica, Visual Arts

The best way to avoid boring reality of Podgorica is to spend the time on the rooftop of the building where Miro lives. The magic of the terrace surpasses by far its physical limitations – the former spreads above the offices of Omniauto, stretches across the entire Spaniard cicrcuse and reaches all the way down to the suburbs. The  monumental, metaphisical building with time adopted the qualities of the people who spend long, hot summers there. Up here, the climat is very different, it’s fresh and breezy even when down there the city is melting on over hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The terrace is capricious like Bibi, strong and determined like Miro, from Ivo she got joy de vivre, she longs for the occult after me…
We really have to watch out whom we let up here, the terrace can sometimes get cranky and downright mean if we let in someone who doesn’t belong here.  Once it swollowed the pizza delivery boy… and spitted him out at the sea-shore, thirty miles away from the city!
Some people are always here, some – only occasionaly, some visit only once…
Misses Anka, Miro’s mother, with a halo of ash-blond hair, wearing embrodiered white dress and fine leather sandals, is always here – even when she is at work; her patients at the hospital usually don’t realise that this lady is being at two places at the same time.
My close friend Bibi sometimes decides we should miss her even more than we do usually and, moving the clouds with her hips, she walks away, heading to her studio in Toloshe, which is not all that far away. She has to come back when people on Spaniard Circus are covered in plaster that fell off the terrace which mourns her absence.
Cvjetko Lainović is always here, with us. That night when he died he promissed he will stay forever here, under this whitness which he personally painted in the very night he died. Even the proverbially suspicious terrace trusts him on this one because she knows that sky above her is the whitest sky of all… At down, when the white sky is cut with little purple veins, Cvetko covers his eyes with white butterflies, this way he protects the whitness of his vision even during these momenets when the night gives birth to the day.

Copyright© 2008 Lena Ruth Stefanovic, All Rights Reserved

Cvetko Lainovic, oil on canvas

Cvetko Lainovic, nude drawings

The story is from my second book ‘Io Triumpe’ (OKF, Cetinje, 2008.) Genius Montenegrin minimalist Cvetko Lainovic, worldwide known for his “white paintings”, towards the end of his life did series of interviews with Miro Minic, the owner of the capricious roof terrace, a famed journalist and a friend of mine.

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The Hierophant

23 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by moderndayruth in Magical Realism

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Egypt, Goddess, Himalayas, Hindu, Maha Shivaratri, Parvati, Religion and Spirituality, Shiva

 Rabbi Jehuda Löw, the Golem of Prague's creator

The rustling of silken empress’ dress snapped me out of zealous evening prayers. She was walking arm in arm with the pope – the latter was an implication of their intimacy, which had become the talk of the town; closely behind them two devoted followers with shaved heads were treading.

They were surprised that i was reading evening prayers at dawn – they were heading to greet Goddess Nut who was giving birth to mighty Amon Ra in the morning sky above Egypt.

I got it that we were caught in different time zones.

Three-eyed Shiva and sensual Parvati danced, gripped in the eternal hug of life and death, as if they were at some bare Himalayan cliff and not beside the warm stove in my kitchen.

Buddha-traveler, who was sitting at the window stool, threw over his worn out cloth bundle from one shoulder to another and bursted out laughing.

Dignified holy mother from the eastern wall silenced him with a look so that baby Jesus in her arms wouldn’t be awaken from the sleep.

In the darkened thelogical room of his library, Rabbi Judah Loew, The Maharal of Prague, span the wooden globe and gave a meaningful look to Golem.

In Montenegro, the sun has sat.

short story from collection ‘Io Triumpe’, published by OKF, Cetinje (2008)

Copyright©2008 Lena Ruth Stefanovic, All Rights Reserved

 the photograph of Rabbi Loew statue in Prague is free of copyright, source – German wiki

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A dream about canals in Amsterdam, in which the water was murky.

21 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by moderndayruth in Magical Realism

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Amsterdam, Anne Frank House, Canal, Jerusalem, Netherlands, North Holland, Red-light district, Siberia

Early summer, in June: it’s the time of the counting of Omer, and those Jews who continue zealously to observe the ancient traditions don’t shave; that’s how it should be, they say.

Baruch scratches at his beard as he thoughtfully studies the map of Amsterdam: to get from the central train station to the old synagogue, he needs to walk along the side of the canal for a while. He sets off with a series of landmarks in mind by which to make his way, cutting up the city’s throng with his black boots. He needs to leave behind the post office, the Christian Orthodox Church and the flea market – which seems out of place and disarrayed situated across the street from the church – offering to the passerby its charms and abundance of cheap kitsch. He then needed to cross a busy roundabout and, after passing the Jewish museum to the right and the tram stop to the left – he would show up exactly where he was impatiently expected.

They were supposed to wait for him at the airport, but something has happened. Dressed like a 19th century Polish landowner in a long black overcoat he has had to take the underground, to the surprise of his sojourners, a couple of local junkies and an illegal immigrant. Baruch avoided raising his head, he didn’t want his eyes to accidentally meet with the eyes of the people he travelled with, thus making an opening for their destinies to intertwine; he, the chosen one, didn’t have anything in common with them.

Baruch, chosen once upon a time to be “Or la goyim”, light unto the nations, and his sojourners from the underground – were different in their diet, in the way they established friendships and ran business – it could be said they were as different as the earth from the sky.

Truth is, Baruch didn’t exactly engage in business, aside from the utterly demanding deal his ancestors made with the Almighty, the other side in this oldest of the joint ventures. Since then to nowadays, very little has changed for Baruch and his people – he lived in Jerusalem, near the Kothel, got up at dawn to join the minyan and spent hours per day in prayer – his schedule was agreed upon long time ago and Baruch stuck to it firmly.

The need for our man in Amsterdam occurred quite unexpectedly and Baruch was told to embark on the journey – why it was he who was selected he didn’t know – but he was supposed to represent the community over there in the foreign land. The Light works in mysterious ways and Baruch didn’t question the choice made by the rav – he started packing; the preparations included saying the additional blessings that he knew would ensure him safe travel, a meaningful stay and prompt return back home.

Olyechka stands semi-naked in the glass window facing the canal; her long eight-hour shift has just started. Some would maybe dispute the legitimacy of prostitution as a profession, but Olyechka has been keeping the books accurately – keeping the track of the rent, the payments and similar, she was paying her taxes and from the point of view of the city administration she was a regular taxpayer; personally, she didn’t care about anything else.

Yesterday, she was lucky; some English tourist paid her hundred and fifty Euros to tape her while she was kneeling in front of his unzipped pants. Olyecka presumed he would upload this video of ephemeral vice online, but she didn’t care – her native village was in the isolated depths of the Russian countryside.

Baruch never thought there was such a quarter where everything, even love, is on sale – and that inexpensively. What he felt when his eyes met with Olyechka’s, when he sank in the depth of her blue eyes, was like a strong dizziness. He felt the long established centre of his equilibrium shatter, shaken by some dark force and pushed down the abyss of an overpowering excitement of a kind he had never tasted before.

Olyechka gazed at the cumbersome man in the black kaftan – the clothes he wore reminded her of the family pictures long hidden from the world, for fear of being expelled to Siberia, even further into the depths from where the family already lived. She felt something like shame and covered her bare breast.

That night, in her rented room, Olyechka will cry, weeping into the plumage of her feather pillow.

I don’t know why I happened to be there, in Amsterdam, where someone else’s dreams interlaced with the dreams from which I hadn’t yet awoken. Walking by the canals, I accidentally stepped on a shadow of an untold story: having pierced it with my heel, I became an unwilling witness of an unlived love. Lop-sided facades of nearby houses wrinkled in the murky mirror of the canal; a sensual semi-naked woman, standing in the window of a public house, shifted her weight from one leg to another. A hunched man, dressed as a Polish landowner from the end of nineteen century, hurried her way and the clutter of his steps broke the calm of dust.

Having arrived at the ephemeral roundabout in between dreams and reality, from the very intersection of this and some other actuality, the gothic facades began energetically dancing as I watched them: a Montenegrin national dance, prancing themselves and climbing each other’s shoulders yelling “Oyah!”

There, where there never were bridges, ad hoc an old bridge grew between two worlds and it pranced like a playful, purebred Vranac. Baruch, with a freshly shaved beard and Olyechka, her head covered with a black scarf, ran to the right and hid in Rembrandt’s house, beside the diamond factory…

Skilfully handling the rudder, the demonic ram’s headed boatman, who transports unbelievers to their eternal house, turned left; and some former me, from some former dimension in between dreams and reality, waved to the renegade lovers while holding tightly in my hand a white tissue soaked in blood.

from my third book “Devil, an unauthorized biography”, published by OKF, Cetinje ©2011 All Rights Reserved

translated to English by Steve Mangan

 note: the photograph is of the Sephardic Synagogue – one of the many i took while in Amsterdam

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The Devil is in the Tails

07 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by moderndayruth in Magical Realism

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Devil, God, Pope, Religion & Spirituality, Roman, Satan, Sigmund Freud, Tarot

 
I shuffled the cards – with time i became quite proficient at it, like a croupier with years of experience, who mixes the cards with a practiced hand, flipping them and ripping them from one hand to another. I pulled two cards and laid them down – face up…
The Pope and the Devil, what a pair! The latter is familiar to me, i see him as my own sparring partner,  a personal trainer if you will, an opponent  i chose to train my will power and physical endurance; but the role of the Pope in my life is not clear.I am looking at the cards, the stocky Pope in luxurious robes lounges comfortably on his throne,  two priests with shaved heads are kneeling before him, the Pope’s left hand is hovering over them, the index and middle fingers extended while the others are pointing downwards –  this is a sign of blessing, I guess, but it reminds me of children’s play of shadows – the fingers are placed the same way as on child’s hands  when he wants to cast the devil on the wall;
the Pope’s head seems to be weighted down by the golden crown above which  the Roman numeral five is impressed – number five is the number of the Pope in a tarot deck- and it looks like a naughty child has put up rabbit ears at the moment when the picture was taken, but so that the Pope doesn’t notice it.In his left hand, significantly larger than the right, the Pope is holding a crosier, a symbol of his sacred power, and on the left forearm, quite heretically, he has a tattoo of a Greek cross, while his gaze is directed to the left, at the devil.
 Unlike the Pope, who is looking away,  the Devil looks at me straight in the eye while standing on his throne – i reckon he is standing because he is bored of being seated – the Pope is eventually replaced by another, but Satan has been on his throne since the beginning of time, without fear of being replaced (although they say that there were pretenders to the devil’s throne), he sat long enough and had decided, for a change, to stand for some time;
two naked followers are chained to it and all three are wearing little hats decorated with plumes, the Devil has wings and is holding a sword in his left hand, while his right hand is waving in greeting –  Devil’s business.
The Devil’s number is fifteen, the engraving consists of Roman ten and a slanting five – identical to the Pope’s ; the Roman ten, without five, is the number of another card – the Wheel of Fortune, which some claim represents God’s will, but it did not come out in this reading.
I think of two priests who knelt before the pope, one of them has something that looks like  bishop’s hat slung over his shoulder, his arms are outstretched in surrender; i wonder how strong his faith is and what is it based on, is there anything personal in it, a personal experience and opinion, or he blindly believes the man hovering over him, the one whom he believes to be God’s representative on earth?
The manner in which the bishop, with his back to us, is hunched over the Pope’s skirts (Pope  himself continues to look away) leads me to the thought that Sigmund Freud – who described human religious drive as pure sublimation of sexual libido – was perhaps not so far from the truth…
an excerpt from my novelette “Teshuva” (Katedrala, 2010);
Copyright © 2010  Lena Ruth Stefanovic
All Rights Reserved
TAROT KOAN by genius Enrique Enriquez  – the wizard of Tarot of Marseilles and professor of the language of the birds  http://tarology.wordpress.com/
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Tarot inspired short story from my second book – “Io Triumpe”

27 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by moderndayruth in Magical Realism

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Abraham, art, Belgrade, Black Country, Black-and-white, Emily Carding, Lena Ruth Stefanovic, microfiction, Minor Arcana, Montenegrin, Montenegro, Photographers, Photography, Podgorica, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Rota Fortunae, Serbia, Short Story, Tarot, Tarot of Black Mountain, Wheel of Fortune

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The Wheel of Fortune

Emily Carding’s Tarot of Black Mountain

I was in love with a city, better to say I loved a city – maybe because I was born in it, maybe because it was white – who knows. I met many other cities, some bigger cities, some preattier cities, i met some more mysterious cities – but the white citi was my city. In the White city myself I was white, almost transparent.

Suddenly, my city began loosing it ’s genuine, virgin whitenes and started becoming somehow grayish.

I still loved it, equally as i loved it while it was completely white, though i noticed that myself i developed some dirty white nuances of the gray color. My nails turned into pail gray, my skin began resembling the dark grey color of the feather, which tuckled in by the southern wind stayed on the paved road that once upon a time was white, as a reminder of a big bird who turned gray and flew to the East. The whites of my eyes became dark gray and they were hardly seen, only my hair was still absolutely white. When i noticed the first gray hair in my absolutely white hair, i new that the trickster time won’t wait for me and that i should take off on the journey.

I went to the East, where long time ago sons of Abraham were heading carriyng the gifts. Unfortunately, in the East they didn’t remeber Abraham’s sons. It seemed to me sometimes that for a moment i spotted a precious part of those most valuable, long lost gifts, but usually it would turn out to be just a piece of glass that time has polished.

From the East i returned to the Black Country from where my ancestors long time ago had left for the White City. I believed the Black Country to be totally black and i was amazed when,  unexpectedly, i met there a white spot. The white spot was almost as surprised as i was, she was exhausted by the long awaiting of such a short encounter. During the darkest hour, she colored me into raven-black.

According to the memories of others at that very moment i stopped fearing because the black and white me in that moment was gone, the former-me was replaced by a virgin spot that very slowly, but unstoppably began transforming into a big white circle.

Author’s Note: in ex-Yugoslav languages –Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian – the name of my country, Crna Gora, literally means Black Mountain, while

the capital of Serbia, Beograd literally is the White City from my childhood and from this story…

Copyright © 2008  Lena Ruth Stefanovic
All Rights Reserved

Emily Carding created the magnificent Tarot of Black Mountain, which was published with the book – collection of Tarot inspired short stories “Io Triumpe” published by OKF, Cetinje 2008.

Tarot of Black MountainCopyright © 2008 EmilyCarding All Rights Reserved

image posted with permission

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