NOEMAYA

Babushka, the old youth, has been sitting on a rocking chair for a long time, slightly off the spotlight. Only her Fiorentine skirt was visible under the dimming light. She hasn’t said a word since the stranger, a slender man of ambiguous age and origin, had opened up to her about his recent heartbreak and hopeless prospects.

He resumed his monologue after taking a long drag on his cigarette, “Babushka! I know you are listening. I am not asking for sympathy or even a nod. Yes, a recognition of some kind would be nice, to know that there’s at least a witness to my pain, but I will take your silence too, for at least that’s strong enough to compel me to speak my heart. So listen: yes, she left. I lost a heart, a home. Babushka, I lost a home, a thing to belong to. And what’s worse than homelessness! Not even death! What’s worse than the state of a creature whose essence is to belong but has nothing to belong to, like fish on dry land floundering and gasping for air. That’s the state of a man who has nothing and no one to live for. Oh Babushka! I wish you’d say something, affirm that there’s an end to this, that all things will someday reveal a higher wisdom, that none is in vain. 

Oh, I sought nobility all my life, integrity and truth, and all things praised by the philosophers and wise people and saints! I lived in the image of a writer, a seller of truth, and now I have ended up here without a home and I’m a seller of pans and pots and blenders, and sometimes insurance. Nothing I wrote rose to recognition. My writings became more and more scattered and mundane and slipped further from the truth, and I, that noble lover, I broke hearts and promises and lived a life as despicable as I had never imagined. 

To tell you the truth Babushka, behind all this facade, there was only one thing: the need to be seen, to be recognized, to be relevant. And in your permanent silence, I left this home and became a beggar under the garment of nobility and truth. Between you and I, I don’t know the slightest thing about the truth. I don’t know anything about what it is that I am. All I know is your presence along with your stubborn refusal to say anything, not even the slightest gesture of recognition. Just rocking in your chair and not even showing a face. 

I don’t know how all this happened. I don’t know how this desert took up the appearance of a home and then disappeared again like a mirage, and here I’m left naked and vulnerable like all those dreams. But let me tell you about this recurrent dream Babushka; I call it the quicksand dream: there is this great banquet and feast with high bonfires around which people have gathered and are dancing and singing happily. People are holding hands and being merry and care free, and they’re all brimming with life and joy. And there I am in the middle of all this stuck in a puddle of quicksand and sinking deeper and deeper. I am struggling to push myself out and waving my hands and screaming but no one seems to see or hear me. I’m neck deep into the quicksand and being swallowed by it and yet it seems I’m totally invisible to the environing life and people. And I gasp for one last breath and I sink down under the ground, and that’s when I wake up. I have had this dream so many times. 

Babushka! This dream, the devouring quicksand of time, this is the reality that awaits every life; this is the story of de-generation, my worst fear. And you know what it is, my worst fear?! It is to become irrelevant. To become irrelevant is man’s worst nightmare; it’s worse than death itself. And I tell you this Babushka, that man’s fear of death is really his fear of becoming irrelevant. No man has ever known death, so there cannot be any fear of it; but all men have deeply felt their irrelevance, being unnoticed and abandoned and forgotten. That’s the worst thing for a man, to merely exist without existing for others. And Babushka, you’ve been around to have heard Berkeley’s esse est percipi, that is: to be is to be perceived. 

That’s all that a man wants, to be seen, for unrecognized existence is as good as non-existence. And that’s all I have wanted, to squeeze out of myself the word, possibly gilded and in italics, so that I touch the tree of permanence for once.

Babushka! I failed, and I am beginning to believe that there was no such tree of permanence. This human life, a life built on quicksand that drains all men and women into eternal irrelevance, has indeed done a great job in entertaining the sinking people with amusing tales about heavenly creatures, saviors, underworlds and otherworlds, of cosmos birth and death and aliens and messiahas, of family, of subatomic particles and YouTube reels and podcasts and awards and viral hypnoses. All this so that man stays oblivious to the brute reality of his ever expanding irrelevance as he lives, and that his name with all that he/she ever was will someday and very soon be absolutely vanished. 

And here you sit on your rocking chair, witnessing without a blink this starving man kneeling before you, and yet you’ve always refused him the object of the very desire you planted in him, that is, recognition, an admission of his existence! And what did you do instead? You threw him a bone on that quicksand and watched him eat his heart out to the death of oblivion and irrelevance. 

The seed was planted long ago, the desire to be perceived so deeply rooted that man knows no life outside it. Yet all you’ve given him is distraction.

So Babushka! You see how homelessness has become my inevitable condition! Why have you put all that’s noble and beautiful and precious on quicksand? Why can’t you just nod only once, say something.

The rocking chair creaked once, slow and deliberate, but Babushka did not lift her head or say anything. The man waited, breath held, as if the world itself had paused for her reply. But the silence settled again, heavier than before, and he understood, at last, that this too was her answer.