Waving Man

essay by Ovidiu Bufnila

A glance over the world from the point of view of a Science Fiction Writer who assumes that Time is waved to all directions

Motto: The only thing you have really got is what you are and it is on you forever. Mihaela Bufnila

ASSUMPTIONS
If God had died what would be the use of beautiful language and why would “beautiful” exist or function anymore deep down the oceans?

If I multiply and metamorphose into a cloud of spots under the pressure of magnetic fields, will I be able to enlarge my informational surface?

The supreme miracle stands for the way in which an assembly of points realizes it is an assembly of points.

[1]

The Waving Man seems to be the man of all times shaped into the body of contemporary Time. If this is not true, then I may be wrong when reporting myself to reality, and I have no other choice but accepting the generalized and the generalizing fiction according to which I don’t even exist and, thus, I cannot witness myself. This means that, as I am only contents, I couldn’t possibly build my exteriority from where to fully spy myself while plunging into the pleasure of the principle of multiple of one.

The Waving Man seems to be caught between the history jaws, on the verge of being smashed by his own sins, by his own fictions, or by the crowds waving like a roaring ocean, or by revolutions and wars or by impersonal administrative acts or by nature hardships – which is not a proper nature anymore.

As a universal construction, the Waving Man doesn’t seem to be built by addition, the idea of a flowing time is seemingly. The time seems rather waved; the ubiquity gives the impression of the wave that… And look! You can see it before our visible horizon, now up, under the consciousness reflector, then vanished down the ocean full of universes, to the sailor’s anxiety.

[2]

The Waving Man seems to be the man you feel close to you, resembling you, a sailor through the meaningful or meaningless storms, self-sufficient.

Often, the Waving Man ends up by being ridiculous, tragic or anecdotic. It is like, being upset that his predecessors are not sharing his attempts, he punishes them by exterminating them together with him, and this is his way of perceiving the finite. Frequently, the Waving Man, a fragmented creature, cannot understand, cannot comprise all, cannot find out the meaning of things and then, he is expelled from the sailing registrar in one movement. But perhaps he doesn’t even want to; it may be a sign of his way to perceive his own freedom.

He seems to be waving not only because he is neighbor to you, but also because you make common cause with him, in a deep, intimate way. Either you judge him roughly, or you deplore him, or you kill him in a metaphor, in a newspaper article or in a gun fight, or you don’t recognize him or refuse to accept his presence, he won’t die but together with you.

He may be Roman, Inca, or Pigmy, Jacobin or a dead navy gunman, or he may be the first man on the Moon or the charming cave man or the neighbor on your street on number 3, or the president of the contemporary empire or the communist woman leader, he is the Waving Man. You know plenty of things about him or you are on the point of finding it all out, if you like it or not, and he often overwhelms you with sense.

The Waving Man might become your model, your duty or your mission, your pain or your sense. The Waving Man dwells you or he prepares to settle inside you, out of a sudden. And this happens because he is the representation of all human beings who have ever lived on this planet and about whom, you believe or you will be reassured that you know or feel plenty of things, and we might call this your encyclopedia.

[3]

The Waving Man is your link to the world and the worldly whole at the same time; it is your very encyclopedia. As there are no limits, today you resemble the living emperor, the president who has just died and the legendary swordsman who is haunting the cinema and your own imagination, and you are the Godzilla. Maybe it’s not quite like this and then, we may say that borders might really exist. But in your imagination, things are different.

The imagination governs you perversely in time, whereas the Reason makes efforts to claim the guiding role. He is always on guard while the imagination sniffs the horizon clattering, somewhere in the crow’s nest or up, on the mast. The Waving Man looks like a fictional construction, though very useful to us, those for whom the appearance of the ocean full of universes builds a luring temporal continuum. The finite may be just a useful construction for you to become meaningful.

Besides, your existence would be pointless. Or maybe it is you the Waving Man. You are the subject for all grizzly TV news. It is you, the object of questionnaires, you, who fill the common graves of the enclave wars. It is you the one who had been chopped, cursed, smashed, gassed, laid on a pedestal, worshiped, poisoned and courted, pyre burned, expelled and recalled to the secret things along history. Philosophers think that you are expired and primitive, and stupid, uncivilized, that you are the end of history or even Devil.

Maybe you are a declined angel. You went to the bad. You are sinful. You are fragmented. You are like an imperfect construction. You are either a fascist transformed into an anti-fascist by means of a pervert fictional effort, or the rebel of the ‘70s who became a real red-tapist, or a pure communist hidden under the masque of neo-liberalism. But isn’t imperfection your reason to be?

I believe you’re only waving. And this means you are my neighbor that I can physically or metaphorically touch, in my imagination, and that I can understand you, I can know you and I can call you. As a Waving Man, you are the man of all times. I am not your superior and I don’t feel it this way. I think you are just confused and troubled of your own existence in the world. You didn’t burry God. You keep Him inside one of your secret beings. Maybe you don’t even know the being is inside you.

[4]

You are either Napoleon, or Elvis, or Godzilla or Berlioz, or the old beggar lady who wished me good luck last night for giving her a banknote, or Sartre or Eminem or Vangelis or Larry King or Nostradamus or the entire Encyclopedia. It is for you they perverted the cinema art. They looked for the images of Hitler or Tito or Bush or Blair or Dudaev or Putin or Mata Hari’s propaganda, at the sinking of the sense of the terrible Titanic, a film that states the principle of order of the new world that some say malevolently that would state that healthy people are rescued by poor people.

But healthy people lost their mission, the shop girls of the aporia gossip. Healthy people are arrested within the body of the hungry mass as the obsolescent philosopher is arrested by utopias. The obsolescent philosopher waits for the sub-lunar crowds of the mines, where the miners are ready to invade downtown, marching symbolically with a carnation at their buttonhole, and he writes about the expired fragmented being, lustily. But how can the being be expired when it is still sailing towards the final sense?

As, unveiling the haze on our eyes, we might discover that God must build a certain sense changing his looks under the masque of the body of the Waving Man. And if there’s no sense, then it must be his playful manifestation or maybe his reproachful attitude.

Translated by Ioana Bostan