Bliss is
when plaster dries
like herbs
and together
we smell
of dampness and breeze

Now that the heat feels more Middle Eastern than Central European, the strips of orange safety mesh around the scaffolding drift so slowly through the motionless air that they remind me of Hassan from my favourite childhood tale, The Thief of Bagdad.

Hassan dreamed endlessly of an oasis of indescribable delights, where there would be nothing but himself, women, heat, and a peculiar kind of orderly disorder.

That is almost exactly what Magnolia has become these days. Only the gender imbalance happens to run in the opposite direction.

I love it!

Not long ago I had a transformative experience with automatic writing. It resulted in a litany that can not be published, yet turned out to be one of the most cathartic things I’ve ever written.

Every sentence begins with the words I LOVE, followed by one of my own qualities. The admirable ones at first. Followed by weaknesses, torments, and perversities. 

Some of those fifty or so sentences read like this:

I love standing out.
I love being different.
I love telling the truth, even when it is unbearable.
But I love just as much making myself smaller and hopping around someone like a little goat. 

And while I am happily hopping around a certain writer - because now, at last, I am allowed to, having decided to love it - he prescribes me a dose of Nabokov's Lolita.

And that is when it happens. I experience an emotional Aleph. 

For several nights I inhabit every side of a human being.

Their tenderness.

Their absurdity.

Their perversity.

Their greatness.

Greatness above all.

And I cry longer and harder than Hassan when Prince Taj El Muluk of Sakar arrives on his flying carpet to fetch him from his oasis of indescribable delights, because Djadur is about to seize Princess Yasmina unless they leave immediately.

And I still cry whenever I look at those walls. Because the plaster is neither dry nor wet. Neither beautiful nor ugly. It is simply level, thank God. And the building is neither a picture-perfect apartment building nor merely excavators and mud.

It is simply a building in the making.

A magnificent one.

Above all.