Impressive poem!
Is there a special reason why exactly 5 new doors?
My guesses are:
* The heart puzzle piece connects (to) 5 other pieces.
* "heart" / "inima" both have 5 letters :)
which are both hints to what the "most important piece" is.

BTW which came first -- the poem or the image?

Hm, you are not the first one to say that. There is nothing special about that number; I was just trying to make it clear that the deeper you are in the rabbit hole, the more you understand that the depth of the hole is beyond your level of understanding.

It could have been "two doors behind a door" - but that would not make it so complex, in terms of doors :-) or "there are N^2 doors behind N doors" (but I already get plenty of accusations for being too tech-centric :-)


However, I am not right if I say "it's just five", there must be something that happened to me in the past, which biased me towards this number. A couple of years ago I've read "The DaVinci code", there is an excerpt about pentagrams, that 5 represents perfection. There were also a few notes about phi - the golden ratio, and how the diagonals in a pentagon intersect themselves, creating lines that have that ratio - therefore the pentagon and all the penta- stuff is perfect :-)

Phi is 1.618, here is some reading material - the golden ratio.

Also, if you measure the length of your arm, and then the length from elbow to the end of the palm, then compute the ratio - the closer you are to 1.618 the more perfect you are :-)

DaVinci's Vitruvian man was designed with the golden ratio in mind.


As you can see, I can find many points to backup the use of 'five' in the poem. Honestly, I didn't have this phi-golden-ratio-1.618 thing in mind while I was writing the poem, but since I became pretty interested in this when I first learned about it - I'm sure the facts were stored somewhere in my memory, and have altered my behaviour. I still have the copybooks with the sketches and calculations me and my colleagues did, to verify how 'perfect' a pentagon really is. We got empirical evidence (by drawing a nice pentagon and then measuring lengths), and also rational evidence - someone did some calculus with sines and cosines and other stuff... it was fun :-) The next day I brought a length measuring tool, and we've checked our 'degrees of perfection'. The funny thing is that my ratio was 1.61, but I know that the figures aren't accurate... and we weren't really using the most hi-end equipment developed by mankind :-)

Still, it was fun, and it was an entertaining social activity.


The image came after the poem.


p.s. in the context of explaining things in a poem, I think I can find many "post-release explanations", as it happened in this case: Help me help myself.

This is probably very close to backronyms, i.e. "do first, explain later" :-)

I've read The Da Vinci Code too ;)
The pentagram crossed my mind, but I didn't want to bring up that subject because
(1) some people regard it as satanic symbolism (although Dan Brown pleads against it);
(2) in our context, it is also a soviet symbol.
But since it means nothing but perfection in this case, I'm ok with it :)

When a poem is written just for the rhyme (cuvinte goale / ce din coada au sa sune), the "post-release" explanations usually don't make much sense. This poem, on the other hand, seems to have followed the thought -> rhyme path and not the other way around.

How much time has passed between the initial idea and this final version? Does it usually take you minutes or weeks to write poems?

#1 and #2 are good points. But still, a symbol is just a piece of graphic, with some meaning attached to it - the meaning is defined by us. History knows many cases in which the 'value' of a symbol has evolved throughout time, at first being something positive, then something negative, etc. People, especially those with good persuasion skills, use symbols in their plans, altering the their meaning in order to make it more suitable for another "dominate the universe" schema. As an example, look at PPCD's logo; I'm not expressing my political views here, I just think their logo is very lame. They combined many symbols (Stefan cel Mare, a heart, the EU stars, the blue color, the orange color), trying to catch N rabbits in one move, so now they have a "frankenlogo", which is neither emotional, nor patriotic, nor European, nor orange - they have minimized the value of each of those symbols. Now I can't wear orange because I'll be labeled "ppcdist" or "Moldcell fan" or "Orange fan".. the world is crazy :-) In the past orange would probably mean that I am Dutch ;-)

A symbol is just a
#define star communism
somewhere in our mind, we can easily change that if we really want to. There's a psyche-hacker hiding in every person (see discussion for the previously posted poem - Logical drug).


I wrote most of the poem the night the power outage has occurred (not that long ago); and I think the image was drawn either on the same night, or the day after. And then, after a week or two I wrote the last part. I knew what it will contain, because the image sort of expressed that.

The actual writing process is rather quick, but the time to think things over is pretty long; as I think about what to write when I go to bed, or as I cross a street, etc. In other words, the ideas took time to be generated. Giving them a form is a quick process - but it cannot exist without the long planning phase.
And finally, all the things that happened to me and made me who I am, and 'pushed' me towards this - they took many years. I hope that answers the question :-)

eu inca cred ca poezia era mai reusita in romana.