Marta Moldovan-Cywińska: Absent, suffering

There is a painting by Lucien Freud entitled “Hotel Room”(1954), exposed on the occasion of texts about loneliness and alienation, depicting a woman lying in bed. Her eyes are expressionless, as if the iris is filled with Shadow. Her hairstyle in the style of the declining forties like a fading Hollywood star. With a shaky hand, she tries to swat her left cheek with a machismo. Absent, spurned, suffering, she lies in the hotel's stifled bedclothes waiting... until the man standing over her (what a preternaturally shadowy figure, a Jungian shadow.)

The real one feels wounded by the man she believes she loves and is in fact continually wounded by him. The more intense the “cycle” of wounding ( and sometimes scherzo!), the stronger she feels about him. She is the one who tears his skin, just like that woman in Lucien Freud's painting.

The world of a child is a world of the most difficult questions .Questions that adults usually cannot answer. Too often they try to speak to children in too mature a language, enmeshing the simplest things in the vastness of words as if their mature pride and impressive experience were to gain from it. Once again ( and over time at the slightest opportunity) they forget that they themselves were once children. Well, I myself also, when I look at many adults have the impression that they came into the world in a suit and tie or grandma's handkerchief tied under the chin in a sweeping knot. And children's questions multiply constantly.

They catch up with us on the subway, on the bus, at our desks, over a simmering pot, in the stroller on a walk, in the travel seat.... We try to intellectualize answers, respond with long, intricate sentences, while children expect us to be simple and truthful. We don't realize how quickly they will pick up on our every slightest lie, doubt, attempt at excessive coloring. They want to see in us not only Adults, but Children from whose mouth the first lie or “backyard” concealment has not yet fallen.

Often - overwhelmed - by the number and depth of children's questions, we dismiss them carelessly or answer them (visibly) reluctantly, in haste. Perhaps we replicate the way former adults answered our childhood questions?

Perhaps we replicate the impatient facial expressions of our loved ones who took too little time with us?

Marta Moldovan-Cywińska

Fot. Pixabay