This love that I feel,
Is It the love from you
Or is it your sparkling beauty
that reflects all the love I have
for you right back to me ?

from:
My African Quenn by Mkanya Anele

When I saw these two blue wildebeests,
all I thought was,
how lucky am I?
but wasn’t it my appreciation that made the moment
special?

Mavlana Rumi said:

The beauty you see in me
is only a reflection of you.

Let’s be wild and blue together,
you and I,
the world and I.

please visit my new page on travel writing: wanderwarbler.com

The Stone I become

I do not grow or nurture

The stone, I become

the stone

I mask spring´s mouth

I do not cry or irritate others

The rock, I become

The rock

That troubles the peaceful pond

I do not laugh

Nor do I want others to laugh

The stone, I become

The stone that shatters the mirror.

 

(THE STONE I BECOME by Nasrin Ranibar Irani)

 

 

Walking with Proust: On Desire

I like to sneak into windows. I like to imagine the people who live there. I wonder who they are, and the people they love, and what books they read, what dreams they have. Instantly I am filled with a desire to be there, in this one illuminated room, wishing this one room so distant and unapproachable would be my room, my books, my beautiful life.

But then, I love looking out of windows. I love to fling them open and stick my head out into the cool summer night breeze, wishing I would be walking down in the street, hopping on the uneven paving stones, waiting  and wanting for the next unexpected thing to happen.

My friend Marcel says that wanting is the be all and end all, and that satisfaction is only a distraction, a decoy, the objects of our desire will inevitably fail us. The desire to make your dreams come true is a fatal misunderstanding, he says, for reality is unbearably disappointing. We need to remain in the state of wanting to find something we really want and find a way of not doing it.

I am on my annual summer holiday in Southern France and of course my friend Marcel is Marcel Proust, he who accomplished the impossible: He finished a novel about not finishing a novel (but wanting to finish it). And it is not only a hefty tome, but it is still – a hundred years after being published – a huge success, claimed to be a milestone of French, what am I saying, of European literature! A la Recherche du Temps Perdu – In Search Of Lost Time. But who has actually finished reading it? I guess a whole lot of people wanted to read it, though.

That desire trumps consumption goes for love, too, Marcel says to me as we meander through the historic center of the town. You have to find someone you really want – and never get them, unless you want to get over them, then you should have them. For desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade. He says.

But Marcel, I say, it hurts to love from the distance! We need to get our heart´s wish fulfilled, we need to get our share of Tender Loving Care!

But Meshell, he says, we only want to possess people, in order to kill our desire for them, exactly because it is so painful.

So at least you admit that desire is painful, I say, but quenching the thirst is worse?

Because we dwell, we flourish in the anticipation! Marcel exclaims, throwing both his arms into the dark blue air. Knowing people is how we wean ourselves from them, he says and looks me into my eyes. Then he disappears into a dark, narrow lane.

Adieu, I call into the lonely night, for he is gone and I am all by myself.

Funny, I wonder as I keep going through the warm night, that he who did not want to get to know people had to lend his name to the famous “Questionnaire de Proust”, a questionary to get to know a person from the inside out. He did not invent it, but famously filled it out at the age of 19, in 1899. The questions range from “what is your greatest fear?” to “what is your favorite color?” I understand this game was daring and a novelty at the last turn of a century. (It was originally called Confessions) But, come on, we, in the age of Facebook and Instagram, we know way too much about our friends already that we still care for them to fill out a questionnaire. Most of all, because they filled it out already and shared it, and most of them got a lot of likes, too. How glad we are that we know them on facebook, and not in our real lives, where we wake up ourselves, our real selves. So is Marcel right? We do not long to meet them, know them, touch them, no matter how well their selfies went down, because they are (literally) laying bare in front of us?

It´s not that we don´t care about these people, our so called friends. It´s that we know that they are lying. They don´t feel out the questionnaire truthfully – they only want to make us believe that they are perfect, or creative, so original, so daring and clever and smart. And – intended or not – make us feel bad.

It´s easy on facebook.  Marcel, in 1890, or some other year (apparently he completed the questionnaire more than once), gave the following answer to the question:

What would you like to be? – Myself, the way the people I adore see me.

Marcel! I cry out, guess what! Today people are googling you! They are writing your biography, they want to know the real you, the sickly and love sick you, the lonesome writer, who died early.

Yes, my friend Marcel has passed away long time ago, in 1922, at 50 years old, from pneumonia. In the questionnaire, he also answered this question:

Comment j’aimerais mourir:      Meilleur – et aimé.

How would you like to die?        Better – and loved

 

 

 

 

 

Blind Fear

So today I read in the Washington´s Post wonkblog that the reason for Donald Trump´s success lies within his subtle evocation of death in his “speeches”. He employs a simple equation: Mexicans/blacks/gays/feminists = threat to the life you know = death. For a learned European like me this is little news. People vote fascists for exclusively one reason: fear. Check your history books. All that fascists need to create is a profound sense of danger and whoop! –here they go, democratically elected. The refugees in the EU are heaven sent, right wing soars all across Europe! Any war, any terrorist attack – the answer to the right wing´s prayers!  Enters some boisterous alpha male to take care of the problem, preferably with the promise of a leveraged wall and semiautomatic rifle – hasta la vista, baby! – and the people can go back to sweating bumps into their sofas while exercising their thumbs on the remote control.

However, this goes to those apologists who claim economic reasons for people voting radical right: right wing and fascist parties score highest in regions where there is little or no immigration, meaning no economic threat to the so called autochtone population. The more urgent question therefore is this one: why do people buy the fascist merchandise, the conjured threat, in the first place? Why do people perceive the altering and diversification of their society, to which equal rights to minorities would doubtlessly lead, as a personal denigration, a personal death? How little self-esteem, how little education and personality must a person have to place so much importance on nationality, the gender, the color of the skin? Is is private TV and tabloid press, the selective virtual reality of the internet that has turned people into stupid, greedy monsters who thrive on the misery, on the discrimination of the weaker to find some satisfaction in life?

What people really should be afraid of is not Mexicans, refugees, gays or feminists. It is themselves. History has shown us where nationalism and fascism lead. Why don´t they see it coming again, now, in 2016? Why are they blind to the real threat? Why eighty years after Adolf Hitler who caused the holocaust and WWII and who was democratically elected into power is Donald Trump a realistic contender to being the mightiest man on Earth? Why twenty years after the end of the utterly senseless but blood thirsty Balkan war is nationalism on the rise all across Europe again?

Last week I traveled to Sarajevo, the multi-cultural capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. From 1993-1995 the city that has always stood for the peaceful co-existence of different cultures was under siege by Serbian Nationalists. (Just as a side note: it was Serbian Nationalists who shot the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1915, thereby unleashing WWI and causing the death of millions.) Hundreds of thousands of innocent people of different faiths and nationalities, muslims, christians and jews alike, died during the two year siege. There are still bullet-holes in the buildings facades, there is still blood in the streets.

When has fascism ever led to prosperity, when has nationalism ever created jobs? Why do people  vote for their own death? They are blinded in their fear. Blindfolded.

sources: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/27/this-might-be-the-darkest-theory-yet-about-why-donald-trump-keeps-winning/

Death is the Thing with Feathers: Spring in Vienna

No better place to spend the Easter holidays than in Vienna: Vienna, a flourishing city in the heart Europe has been elected the world´s most livable city seven times in a row by Mercer research. The perfect place to celebrate the rites of spring, of life, of awakening and resurrection. Especially since – as it is so vividly narrated in the New Testament – before one gets to be reborn, one has to die. A comparable obsession with death cannot be found anywhere in the world than in catholic Vienna. Death is not simply a matter of ineluctability: It is its ultimately and only goal, the only one worthy of ambition and passion. The Viennese are not defeated or humiliated by death, the Viennese are vindicated. Life is nothing to look forward to, but to reminisce. Or, as the Austrian cabaret performer Karl Farkas put it:

 “We Viennese look with confidence into our past!”

It does not come as a surprise that an important number of people have chosen Vienna as the most die-able city, too: Franz Schubert, who composed “Death and the Maiden” only a 15 minute walk from where Mozart, native of the glorious city of Salzburg, had left his Requiem unfinished, which he tellingly wrote for his own death, and only a 10 minute walk from where Beethoven, native of the pragmatic city of Bonn, spent the last years of his life, from 22-57, in constant physical demise which started at the age of 30 – when he settled in Vienna. Music historians call this period of Beethoven´s life the “heroic years” – referring to his compositional style. In Vienna of course it is commonly understood as his heroic march towards deafness and – death. While the music historians are still puzzle over the “immortal lover”, to who Beethoven directed his love letter from the sick-bed, the Viennese smile inwardly and look to the grey sky. (For the sun is a rare guest in the city, does not even show up for Easter holidays…)

Ultimately Godfather and the angels in heaven are the only friends worth having in Vienna and Death the only lover. Freud, who later set up his office a mere 3 minute walk from Beethoven called Death the aim of all life. And while Freud, a learned and trained Viennese himself, considered life an act of heroism, for life happens in the face of Death, he found himself and his fellow Viennese filled with a sense of admiration for anyone who actually has died, like someone who has accomplished a very difficult task. Ironically Freud did not get to die in Vienna himself. He was not catholic. He died in his London exile in 1939.

“In Berlin, things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna, they are hopeless but not serious; ” the writer and publicist Karl Kraus, a native of Bohemia who died in Vienna in 1936, purportedly said. He was right to some extent. The Viennese, their eyes eternally turned heavenwards  took nothing earthly too seriously. Yet, in all earnestness the Nazis and their death-defying concept of German Übermensch took over the city – and denied Death in Vienna to many, among them Vienna´s most creative and intelligent heads. Millions vanished in concentration camps all over Europe, the more fortunate made it to overseas.

Vienna has never recovered from this dark period and now – in Freudian denial – dwells in the glorious past, in the Belle Epoque, where Egon Klimt painted women in real gold, the Strauß brothers fiddled their Waltzes to whirling couples in tight embrace, and the venerated empress Elizabeth, Sisi, could whisper sweet words to her immortal lover:

„Je voudrais que mon âme s’envolât vers le ciel par une toute petite ouverture de mon coeur“.

(I wish my soul could fly to the sky through a little opening in my heart).

Her wish was fulfilled: She died the next day, September 10^th 1898, from a knife attack, but – so the proud Viennese lore goes – only because her body had been weakened from anorexia, the death wish that she nursed all her life. Tragically her Death did not take place in Vienna either, but in Geneva.

Death in Vienna, the wish to die at home and in peace was never granted to all, so when it happened it must have felt like a wish fulfilled. Until the day one met death in the cobbled streets of Vienna one could only hope.

You got your passion, you got your pride
But don’t you know that only fools are satisfied?
Dream on, but don’t imagine they’ll all come true

When will you realize… Vienna waits for you?

Billy Joel, Vienna

The Fall Guys: on Austerity and Solidarity

Robin Hood was an outlaw, a criminal, who robbed the rich to the noble end of giving to the poor. Redistribution, one would say nowadays. The peasants of medieval England had to shoulder a heavy burden. They had to pay taxes to three different entities: the king, whose wars and crusades they had to finance, the church , and their landlords, who they had to pay rent for land and machinery like mills and in the end deliver their bounty and their brides for the right of the first night. People were enserfed, or working poor, as one would say nowadays. With a taxation system as inhuman as this, Robin Hood was less robbing the rich as taking back what was stolen from the poor.

As the system of taxation improved slowly over the years, the redistributive transformation began. When Elizabethan England was enlightened the Poor Law was introduced, which obliged the gentry to help the less fortunate. In 1842 the first income tax (peace time tax) was installed, a flat rate at 3% on incomes above 150.- pound a year, by 1908 the old-age pension was introduced, funded by taxing the 12,000 richest Britons. By this time, the need for Robin Hood had vanished, and so had he. Taxes on wealth on the contrary stayed, grew in size and number and were used for other purposes than supporting the poor as well.

The idea that the richest should be taxed hardest was best exploited in the USA, one reason being that the USA tried to distance themselves from the unfair Old World Order. And right they did. The middle of the 20^th century was a period of unprecedented and later unequaled growth. In the golden age of prosperity, as it is commonly called, the richest were taxed at 81% income tax. Thomas Picketty, the highly acclaimed economist writes: “Without taxes society has no common destiny, and collective action is impossible.” Taxes do not only distribute income fairly, but unite the people. Nobody can live without the state – rich people can buy cars, but cannot buy the streets. They can pay tuition fees but not the whole educational system. And so on.

Since then however income taxes have decreased – for the rich. The highest tax rate in the US is 39.6%, in the UK the richest pay 35%, while the poorest are taxed an incredible 37.5%. Prosperity is not to detected in either country. What has happened? What went wrong?

What happened was that a massive savings bubble burst, and a housing bubble, and a banking bubble, and a financial crisis took place. And while banks and bankers were bailed out money was squeezed out of the community, the middle class, the poor, everyone had to stand in for the bankers. For the banking sector, so it was argued, is vital for the wealth of a country. But how could a corresponding legislation – austerity as it is called – pass? How could parliaments vote for such an outrageous injustice like austerity for the poor, but not the rich? This is were Robin Hood comes back into the game.

The real problem, so we were told, is not the bankers and managers, their bonus system and fees, the low income tax which helps the rich the hoard their money and park it in over sea tax havens. The problem is that the welfare system was too expensive. They are sucking us dry, those lazy bastards, those unemployed, immigrant, disabled freeloaders, they rob us, us upright hardworking people! And in a strategically ingenious move the inherited millionairs, the Trumps and Starbucks of this world, the hard-partying pulled the hardworking bakers and tailors, plumbers, mechanics and secretaries on their side. “We hard working people are being robbed of our hard earned money!” They holler. “But we, I am your Robin Hood, I will get back to you what really belongs to you and what has been stolen from your children´s plates!” And so the poor hard working people were flattered that the glamorous inherited billionaires called them equals and would even stand up for them. Health, education, social security, energy, water, transport and housing are not vital to the country, it was decided, and were privatized. Prices for commodities sky rocketed. That was how austerity was introduced and the welfare system cut. Snip snip snip, gone. Now everyone was on their own and the race began. And what a race! As Thomas Piketty pointed out: “If you don´t start sitting on a pile of cash you will never ever close the gap to those who are, no matter how hard you work.” It´s the economy, stupid, and the rest is history.

The hard working people took other hard working people for their enemies for they were stealing their jobs, or so they were made believe. Redundancy. Unemployment. Crisis. Hate. Violence. And all the while the money is drained out of the state and safely parked in Luxemburg and the Isle of Wright.

Why are people so short-sighted, so easy to betray and mislead? Is it because they are exhausted from working enserfed in the capital system? Because they lost all hopes in governments that were supposed to protect them and look after them with their own tax money? Because they realized they were the fall guys as those politicians that had steered them safely through the prosperous second half of the 20^th century had turned into greedy and corrupt gluttons? Or is it the general lack of solidarity in a generation pampered by history, greedy, lazy and ignorant to the fact that the past seventy years were an extraordinary time of peace, democracy and prosperity, an exception in a cruel world that will never come back? At least the next Robin Hood will fight for the poor again.

Please also read or listen to James Meek in the London Review of Books:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n04/james-meek/robin-hood-in-a-time-of-austerity

 

 

 

The Wealth of Nations and the size of hands

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. (Adam Smith – The Wealth of Nations)

Donald Trump is one among many. But he surely is the most ridiculous and simultaneously most dangerous of all the radical populist demagogues on the rise these days. Why are the world´s wealthiest countries leaning towards an extremism and hate that the Western World has not witnessed since the fall of the Third Reich? Why do considerable parts of the populations of USA (9th richest), Germany (18th), Austria (16th), France (25th ), Denmark (21st) and others fall for catchy phrases that are beyond any economic, political or moral logic but full of hatred and agitation, singling out, stigmatizing and threatening basically everyone who is not part of the majority, who is not white, male, Christian, straight, and – ignorant… Trump and his European equivalents conjure up threats, kindle panic and hysteria and openly call for violence, thereby turning the victims of real tragedies (wars, prosecution, rape, discrimination) into imaginary threats. Why do people fall for hate mongers, wherein lies their benefit?

Men of no more than ordinary discernment never rate any person higher than he appears to rate himself. (Adam Smith – The theory of Moral Sentiments)

Adam Smith, the influential economist, thought that most people assume that the wealthy and powerful just have great talent. Maybe why by his followers – trumpers I will call them from now on, alluding to the French verb se tromper, to err – Trump has obviously never been vetted. In denial of the fact that all Trump ever did was LOSE MONEY (which for a billionaire born into neoliberal times is quite an achievement, actually) they fall for his macho behavior, the sparkling towers and wives. They flock around the dominant baboon in religious subordination. His baboon gestures are impressive – on a primal level. For Smith the admiration for the rich however was “the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments,” fueling the vanity of the rich and the unmerited shame of the poor: Misleading both into believing that the rich are above the laws, and thereby dissuading the poor from taking up arms against them.

Trumpers are relatively rich (when compared to third world countries) but consider themselves poor, feeling robbed by the even poorer . Yet they are poor when compared to the richest 5 percent of their own countries. Due to circumstance, due to personal shortcomings – this feeling of poverty, failure is perceived as humiliating – a loss of personal dignity. While their infatuation with and veneration of the rich prevents them from seeing inequality and unfairness of Neoliberalism – thank you tabloid press – solace and self-respect are found in people worse off than themselves: Minorities. Immigrants. Women. Lgbt. Disabled. Or rather in people they think should be worse off than themselves: They consider themselves victims of the tyranny of political correctness, they feel  robbed of their white male privilege. All they want from the baboon is to bellow out their hate and rage, avenge them, reinstall a world where minorities are suppressed again, women shown their place and position. They do not want him to make them any richer or better off – and consequently Trump does not offer any strategies to that end. They only want him to make other people more miserable than themselves.

So all this lack of personal ambition of all the trumpers and right wing followers around the world bundles up into one hateful movement of misanthropy with the single desire to harm and hurt without economic gain. That´s not what Adam Smith had in mind.

In his work “The Wealth of Nations” Adam Smith coined the expression of the invisible hand. Thereby he meant that an invisible hand channels all the individual undertakings and ambitions, the personal investment of money, time and energy of the individual into one synergetic effect, one common outcome and goal: the wealthy nation. Adam Smith did not see the need for state control because he understood that while they are better off, the rich realize that they depend on the community as much as the poor do. Solidarity explained through economic advantage.

Adam Smith was wrong after all. People are not as smart as he thought. The rich are sucking the rest of the world dry like insatiable leech and seem to have corrupted people´s mind to a higher degree than purely economic. The invisible hand does not exist. It is either the state,  laws and regulations, or intelligence and all of them failed. And the size of hands is important.

Heaven is a Wish Denied (Life according to Emily Dickinson)

Heaven is what I cannot reach!
The apple on the tree,
Provided it do hopeless hang,
That ‘heaven’ is, to me.

For Emily Dickinson Heaven was an apple she could not reach, a forbidden fruit. The whole definition of Heaven, it seems, lies in the word HOPELESS. If she could have reached it, would she still have wanted it, or would it have merely become Earth, undesirable?

“I always fall in love with people I cannot have.” K said to me, and I did not hear it for the first time then. What is it about humans that hopelessness is their only fuel, inspiration, motivation? Why can´t we love what we can reach?

The forbidden fruit – the apple – which in the bible of course was a pomegranate – stands for the desires of the flesh as well as knowledge, the knowledge of Good and Evil. In the Genesis, God forbids his creatures Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge lest they be expelled from Paradise, the Garden of Eden, and be inflicted by shame and in Eve´s case also pain and servitude to man. The Old Testament and therefore the three big religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam teach us not to quench our thirst for knowledge and satisfy our desires. Paradise is a place of unfulfilled wishes.

Emily Dickinson famously secluded herself from the world. She spent her life in solitude in her father´s house, a recluse without visitors or friends, her letters and her poetry (the majority of which were only posthumously discovered) her only manifestation as a person – a life lived through letters. Why didn´t she go out?

A Charm invests a face
Imperfectly beheld—
The Lady dare not lift her Veil
For fear it be dispelled—

Yes, every strip-teasing Burlesque artist read their bible: attraction lies in the selective hiding and revealing: the naked truth, the hairy skin, creased or cellulite ridden, the sagging belly and bald head rarely live up to the promise of the garment. Paradise was before the Revelation! Most religious traditions forbid idolatry, representation and imagery of their God in order to preserve the magic and divinity of same. What disenchantment! Imagine God like thy neighbor! The one you see in sweatpants walking his dog, or the one with a head of curlers lugging out the trash…

I dwell in possibilities…

She, the poet, said… Still, was Emily Dickinson happy, home alone? Are people happy not to have, to reach out and grasp thin air, knowing that the famous apple, after thousands of years will be shriveled and stale, and better they dream it than be it? No! Of course they are not, they suffer, they complain, they pray! But still they don´t go out and try – God forbid! They do what God wanted them to do, sit in in fear and darkness, year after year, life after life, thinking that this, this fear and the darkness is life.

THE INEVITABLE.

While I was fearing it, it came,
But came with less of fear,
Because that fearing it so long
Had almost made it dear.
There is a fitting a dismay,
A fitting a despair.
‘Tis harder knowing it is due,
Than knowing it is here.
The trying on the utmost,
The morning it is new,
Is terribler than wearing it
A whole existence through.

Still Dickinson, the smart and sharp poet remained hidden as the majority of her work. Did she think so little of this world that she preferred to stay within the realms of her writing and kept the door of her cage closed from within?

´Hope’ is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

Look

To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman´s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. From her earliest childhood on she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

This is what the English Art Historian John Berger says in his book “Ways of Seeing”. In this analysis he speaks of European tradition of female representation in arts and popular culture. In our culture women are objectified, by others – but most cruelly by themselves, relying and depending on their appearance.

A woman´s denial to please, her lack of beauty can never be outweighed by intelligence, success or talent – proved again, most notably and recently so at this year´s Oscar celebration: The majority of the present Hollywood celebrities – men and women alike – refused to applaud the Oscar winning Costume designer Jenny Beavan on grounds of her refusal to please. Beavan – while obviously an expert in fashion and design – chose a leather jacket instead of the customary revealing evening gown which makes her fellow female Oscar con- and attenders look like participants in a beauty pageant.

Women are far from equality, and that goes from India through Saudi Arabia to Europe to the United States and the Americas. It is only the degree of subtlety that varies.

The years I spent in Argentina were greatly marked by my doubts of my own femininity. I arrived a sportive and admittedly boyish young woman. When I left my lips were red, my lashes luscious; my arms were thin but my earrings massive. The changes had happened gradually and I myself had been unaware of how much every other woman had turned into someone I compared myself to: a competitor. Taller- thinner- better looking. But by which standard, on whose scale?

The Judgement of Paris was another theme with the same inwritten idea of a man or men looking at naked women, but with the added element of judgement. Paris awards an apple to the woman he finds most beautiful. Thus beauty becomes competitive. Today the judgement of Paris has become the beauty pageant. Those who are not judged beautiful are not beautiful. Those who are, are given the prize, which is to be owned by the judge – that is to say, be available for him.
(John Berger, Ways of Seeing)

Years later I spent some time in Iran – and despite my anxiety towards the mores police and the notorious oppression of women, I had a strange feeling of liberation through the total absence of nudity and display of female flesh in the streets – there were no over sexed advertisements, no catcalls, no whistling: what a simple scarf can do…

I found myself thinking about high heels. High heels were painful, and, for me at least, expensive, because they made walking more difficult and I ended up taking more taxis. Yet there were many times when I wore heels to work-related events in New York, specifically because I felt it made people treat me with more consideration. Why, then, would I refuse to wear a head scarf, which brought a similar benefit of social acceptance, without the disadvantage of impeding my ability to stand or walk?
(Elif Batuman, in The New Yorker, about her stay in Eastern Turkey)

So we find ourselves either in a world where a woman needs to hide her looks because it can´t be expected of a man to control his sexual drive, or in a world where a woman has to emphasize her beauty and most importantly sexual desirability to be respected? Which one is better? None, I say, because they are both just two variations of the same male dominance and therefore the male point of view, the male gaze and the objectification of women.

What varies, though, with the level of subtlety, is the level of physical oppression. While in Saudi Arabia women do get stoned, women in in the West are discriminated, glass-ceilinged, or in its mildest firm, the case of costume designer Beavan, simply shunned. Yet none of these levels is acceptable. None.

Stand up, all victims of oppression
For the tyrants fear your might
Don’t cling so hard to your possessions
For you have nothing, if you have no rights
Eugène Potter, The Internationale

The Internationale. the workers´anthem, was written by a member of the Parisian commune, a radical socialist and revolutionary government that ruled Paris for two months before it was brutally overthrown by the regular French army in 1871. In times of the Industrial Revolution, in times of poverty and oppression, in times of Oliver Twist and Charles Dickens, the Internationale called for the workers, in fact for all the victims of oppression, to stand up and unite – for strength lies in numbers.

Yet women don´t unite, or only reluctantly so. There seems to be a dramatic lack in solidarity. Because women from the far ends of the world don´t recognize each other´s struggles, fail to identify as the victims of the same oppression because it comes as divers? Because they fail to recognize the one oppressor to unite against? Who is woman´s tyrant, though? Who is this Man?

Women´s fight for her rights cannot be fought on barricades and blazing fires. For while sometimes women´s oppressors are indeed their husbands, fathers, uncles, bosses or male co-workers, or just some anonymous stranger in a dark street or the infinite internet, it really is the system. Patriarchy, which, like a viral disease, has afflicted men and women alike – and which, like any other disease, is the harder to detect, diagnose and cure the milder, the more subtle it appears. A system programed into women, who after thousands of years of oppression and assimilation seem to see in another women first the competitor, and only then – if ever – a fellow victim of oppression.

While the burka has become a synonym for female oppression, there are in the first, the Western World women who claim not to be discriminated against, not shunned nor oppressed. Working women in high heels on eternal diets, forty year-olds aspiring to pass for thirty, boob jobs, nose jobs, gym-maniacs on Uppers and Botox. Seriously, there might be women who have the financial, economic and social independence to not care how they are being looked at, regarded, judged. There might be. It might even be you, my estimated reader. Yet the majority of women is oppressed, stoned, discriminated, shunned or even only cat-called and there is reason to unite.

Deny the male gaze.
Don´t cover up.
Open your eyes.
Look.

A better world, a bitter world

 

How many times have I smashed my wings against the wall –
still I am not tired of flying.
Imagine a different world, where I don´t feel lost in the middle of this craziness.
And I can sing new songs, and new flames embrace my heart.
What green rose grows inside of me! Breathe and smell the beautiful world!
Hold me, come with me, to where the sun sets…
The beautiful world, who has ever lived in it?
This bitter world, how many times did it bite me?
The world I dreamed of as a child, where we would not die, and I would grow up, big, beautiful and safe.

This beautiful poem is really a song. It´s called “The beautiful world”, or in its original version “lu munnu bellu”, and was composed by the marvelous Sicilian brothers Fratelli Mancuso. How have I always loved it, how has it given me hope, and confidence and – belief.

A belief not in anyone to come and rescue me, no prince, no saint, no goddess – no: faith and trust that even in dire straits my will, I, will always be strong enough to make it to a new, a better tomorrow. To spread my wings, rise and shine.

Ambition. But how many setbacks, how much headwind can I, can one take? When is the moment to admit failure and that it was a foolish idea in the first place?

“I wish I could ask the future whether I should give up or keep trying. Then again, what if trying, even in the face of certain failure, feels as good as accomplishing? What if it´s even better?”

the American writer Sarah Mancuso writes. It´s a fascinating dilemma – for we sense that there is a riddling truth to it, we know it for the emptiness we felt every time we reached our destinations, scored the points, for au lieu of our ambitions, there was – nothing. A void. A vast nothingness.

Desire. What if trying really feels better than accomplishing?

“Desiring lasts a long time, demands and requests go on to infinity; fulfillment is short and is meted out sparingly. But even the final satisfaction itself is only apparent; the wish fulfilled at once makes place for a new one.”

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said. What is life without a goal? And isn´t it true for so many who shy away from finishing a novel they write, a painting they paint or a house they build, because once the last stroke is done – life will be over, or love?

It ends, is forgotten, expired
Easy as those other times. As bitter as those left for the other side.
It´s the temptation
It´s the thirst
If you drink it, it´s done, finished, gone!
Next time it will not feel the same, the taste will not be quenching the thirst.
Don´t satisfy the thirst, live with the dryness, the pain, to the end of the end.
Live with the temptation, Hold on to the dream
Don´t let it end, don´t let it fade away
Let this one person, This one only
To live and let live in eternity
Don´t kiss this one.

The Persian poet Leva Zand wrote. How sad – the only eternal love is the unfulfilled?

But what if the desire is the desire to just live, not to starve, not to be prosecuted, hung, shot, bombed or raped? Not to lose yourself in the middle of all this craziness?

Will. But how many have drowned on their way to a better tomorrow, a better world off the shores of Lampedusa or Lesbos? What did they believe in as they embarked on their overloaded dinghies, stripped all of their possessions, their homelands, families and roots, of everything but their faith? Ill-fated faith…

How I wish that their desires had been fulfilled! How I wish that they would not have died, drowned, but had made it safely to the Northern shores… How I wish they had had wings to fly over the Mediterranean Sea in full faith of their own strength and powers, or at least buy a ticket Damascus-Berlin or Ankara-Vienna at € 120.- (instead of paying their human traffickers 10,000.-). But then of course this is not possible, it is against European law.

The first world– the place where only those desires get fulfilled that won´t make anyone happy: the desire to a new flat screen TV, a new car, a new dress (made in Bangladesh). The desire to a better world – will not be fulfilled.

Welcome to a bitter world.