The following is a short description which can go in my resourcebook materials:
The woman was wise, and straightforward.
Two assets which can be rarely seen together if nature does not take the double trouble to develop an emotionally rich person in a strictly uniform environment, and to give chances to the orderly aptitudes of the same person to grope their logical way through a maze.
When the very maze is made up of the plans of the past, plus the doctrines of the future, plus the organization of the present, it must be full-time engaged in self-rearranging its old patches and blocks into a higher resolution piece picture where if a piece cannot be moved, then the substance, the colour, the shape, the thickness, and other specifics can.
The woman was dressed in a double standard whose two aspects were perfect to the dot.
Her trouser suit was black and stylish, made of warm wool, and showing neither creases nor stuck to the surface littering threads and hairs.
She was standing firmly and quietly, as if in front of an audience, the posture of her body showed no effort in sharing her thoughts and ideas. She was being consulted on the problem of compatibility between two lists of dates: one list carried the dates of the photographs of different places, monuments, and sights of the world, and the other carried newspaper home news of accidents, floods, deficiency, redundancy, and soaring prices.
To add to her manly spirit in appearance, her blonde hair was thinning so well that one could spend minutes concentrating on her head to find out where the yellow belonged to a difference in the whims the dye had allowed itself, and where her skin was showing under the rare hairs.
Her nail varnish was of that very red that looks like blue at a distance, and when she waved her hands aside and a bit down, her nails looked like the tips of a very sick of some blood deficiency person. She did not wear much of make up, but it was because she had a pair of imperceptible spectacles on, out of which her nose looked as round and bulky as if it had been left for a better master to finish and had been neglected due to over-scheduling.
The topic discussed, namely, the coherence between the taking of pictures of the world’s orderliness, and the reporting of the worlds troubles, was an engagement that needed someone with both expertise in matters historical, and with feeling for what would be greeted and what would infuriate some group or other. The usual tendency of such advocates of the necessity to have good and bad in everything, and at every historical moment, for all the institutions and agencies, structures, and flows, to be working or preparing to work, that tendency was now leading the woman to ignore the future and speak of the present, and to ignore the future and speak of the past, while the journalist, who had been asked to carry out the conversation on compatibility of events, was tending to ignore the past and divert the talk to the future, and derive from the present to envisage the future.
There are at least four kinds of reporters and journalists. There is the plump diligent student type, who is best in discussing common issues. There is the nervous motley bird who will say more that will hear said, and will divert the attention to the specifics of the conditions and the weather at the very moment when something important is taking place. There is the surviving in all the unpleasant weathers and circumstances young man who will overdo his bravery and get himself a cold, or a reprimand for escaping from a site a minute before the real event, and that after having spent the previous hours in waiting for it to happen. There is the intelligent, spectacled, young woman who will leave the person interviewed to lead the way with an answer to a question implied in the introduction of his proficiency on some current matter, and will modulate her questions to keep company to each new answer.
The interviewer was a fifth type and a match for the politician who is sure he is getting meddled in messing up the world’s affairs, but is happily smiling at the prospective of celebrating the occasion round a table and face-to-face with the reddish topping his salad. The interviewer was intelligent and young, two features almost all interviewed were getting to lose with time, and was doing her utmost to conceal those two facts. The effort showed in her over-politeness that both tried to please and tried to lead. One could say that a poem written by a poet for himself was written for her really:
I am the diamond of crystal
I fit in luxury or mud
Although I will break a little
or bruise you if I’m dropped or dumped
I’m not afraid of poor setting
I can, in my soul, heart-bruised sleep
I need no make-up for my faces
I mirror life, eternal or short-lived
The poet probably had had in mind the fact that time, though one and the same as a category valid for everybody on earth, is different for all altitudes and longitudes, and latitudes, too, following the law of the static pulling the reins of the dynamic, and the dynamic giving motivation to the static to run for its life or fight.
Or the poet had come to the deduction that the world had become so lazy that it was not looking for people for the operating of its jaws, but was designing its restrictions on the existing people’s ambitions and arrogance.
V.P.Toucheva 19.02.2008
