Working Man’s Death

Thus the title of Austrian director Michael Glawogger’s epic 2005 documentary about hard manual labour in the 21st century. I just returned from the very last screening of the film in Copenhagen. At least for now. And I do hope that it reappears in cinemas next year. If nowhere else then in the Danish film museum (which is a whole lot less dusty than my mentioning of it might seem to indicate).

Working Man’s Death is monumental. Focusing on five extreme work places across the globe – interestingly 1 in Eastern Europe and 4 in Asia – we follow the daily routines of the workers, mostly on but also off duty. Predictably, conditions are horrifying. Yet this isn’t a film fighting the working man’s cause. Rather, it is a film bemoaning his death. Not as a hero of the masses nor as a victim of the system. If anything, perhaps as a curiosity.

“Is heavy manual labor disappearing or is it just becoming invisible?” Glawogger asks on the movie’s home page. Whatever the answer, it sure is hidden away well off the beaten track that leads off the beaten path. An illegal coal mine deep in the mountains of the Ukraine, a renegade slaughter yard somewhere in Nigeria, a boiling sulphureous volcano in Indonesia, and so on. It almost seems that whereever you would not look excruciating physical work is being done.

An underlying – and perhaps obvious – theme in the film seems to be that the only reason people perform this kind of work is out of necessity. One of the Ukranian coal miners directly states: “I work to survive. No more, no less.” And it made me wonder, how about myself? Would I work if I didn’t have to? Probably not in any money-making sense of the word. Sure, I’d still be here writing, and sure, I’d still be lending a hand when my friends needed me to. But as for getting up on the bike and riding to yet another brainstorming session for yet another commercial project, I’m not so sure.

It’s true I don’t perform “heavy manual labor”, but I do perform heavy mental labour. And it’s true it doesn’t wear me down physically, but it does bide away at my time, and it does distract me from the things in life I value most, such as delving deep into whatever concerns me in my own personal life.

On his latest album Modern Times Bob Dylan sings:

The whole wide world is filled with speculation
The whole wide world which people say is round
They’ll tear your mind away from contemplation
They’ll jump on your misfortune when you’re down

So – if I may take the liberty of saying so – the biggest difference between hard physical and hard non-physical labour in the world today seems to be the status it offers (and, of course, the money as well). The working man hasn’t disappeared, he’s simply changed. The primary goal of work has been removed from bread on the table to status in society. And without exagerration the two things have become equally important. What good is a well-prepared ecological meal if you haven’t got anybody to impress with it?

My greatest fear is my greatest paradox. To me, being a worker is the same as being just another bolt in the wheel of society. However, evolutionary speaking, it would be really hard for me to assert that I’m anything more than a bolt in the wheel of nature. Yet I strive to be something in my own right, and whenever I work I try as much as possible to work for myself. Not out of disdain for my fellow man, but out of respect for myself and the life that I’ve been given – or rather, the life that has been forced upon me.

So let my response to the call of “Workers unite!” be “Workers go hide!”. This is the true implication of Glawogger’s vision. The working man is dead, long live the working man!

Woodcutter’s wisdom

A father and his son left the city, and went to live in the wilderness. They found themselves a cabin high up north by a quiet lake. The days were growing shorter and winter was fast approaching. The boy was sent out to cut firewood, and every day he returned with a cartload. Soon the pile grew almost as big as the cabin, but still his father urged him on. One day his body was so tired and sore that he couldn’t get out of bed. His father gave him a worried look, and told him to take the day off.

Later that day the father crossed the lake to the Indian village at the other side. He asked to be taken to the village elder who offered him a seat by the cosy little fire in his tent. The father knit his brow, and asked the wise old man if he thought it’d be a cold winter this year. Oh yes, the old Indian said, I think it will be a very cold winter. And so the father returned to his son with the sad tidings, and once again the son had to leave the cabin to cut firewood in the forest.

A week or so later, neither father nor son could cut or stack firewood anymore. Their backs hurt, their arms hung limp by their sides, and the look in their eyes seemed dead and empty. Still the father wasn’t sure whether they had gathered enough wood to last them through the winter. Afraid of what he might learn, he nonetheless once again set out to cross the lake, and visit the wise old man in the Indian village.

He arrived just the day after a big party in the village. The old Indian had a bad hangover, and when the father asked him if he still thought that it was gonna be a cold winter, he got the same reply as before. Yes, it was gonna be a cold winter, even colder than he had thought before, yes, perhaps even one of the coldest ever. Distraught and almost about to give up the whole thing, the father once more returned to his son with the depressing news.

The next day both father and son went to the forest, but they couldn’t cut anymore. Instead they just picked up whatever branches they found lying on the ground. At the end of the day they hadn’t really gathered that much, and as the days wore on, they gathered even less, next to nothing, just a few twigs and leaves. It was clear that they couldn’t go on like this, and one day the son told his father that he would join him on one last trip to the Indian village across the lake. And if the village elder still thought that they needed to gather more firewood, they would have to call the cabin quits, and return to their comfortably heated New York apartment.

When they neared the other bank they could make out the wise old Indian sitting cross-legged by the lake, smoking a pipe. The father greeted him with waving arms, sore from cutting and carrying. When they stepped away from the raft, their feet felt heavy and dragging. Please, they implored of the old man, please tell us that the winter isn’t gonna be any colder yet, please.

But the old Indian wouldn’t hear of it. No, he said, no I’m afraid I can’t help you. It is most definitely gonna be the coldest winter I ever laid eyes upon.

How come you be so sure, the father replied almost accusingly.

Isn’t it obvious, the old Indian said, it’s gonna be the coldest winter ever in my life, because never before have I seen white men cut so much wood. But what about you? What do you think?

A new beginning

Now

It’s the end of the line for Runestone. I’ve spent the last year and a half writing plotlines, characters, and backstory for the company’s first title. Seed was intended as a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) focusing on storylines and social interaction rather than monster-bashing and treasure-hunting. And the game actually did launch, and it even had an energetic though small community of players and supporters.

But in the end it just wasn’t good enough. A lot of the story content and story structuring we had in mind for making the game one of its kind was never properly realized. We struggled to the very last, but with the economy spiralling downwards I guess nothing could have prevented this final curtain call.

So, now I’m a free man, as they say. Free to do whatever I chose as long as it doesn’t involve spending any real money. Different projects have cropped up in the back of my head over these last one and a half years, and the time has come to wrestle some of them to see if they will yield to my ambitions and capabilities. Wrestling, however, is going pretty slow at the moment. I’m still dazed at the prospect of going from a full-time job to nothing at all. Especially since it stopped being a prospect, and became naked, relentless reality.

Still, I feel somehow back on track. A run-down yet functioning cottage house is waiting for me in Copenhagen, I’ve already turned down my first job offer, and the Danish storytelling society BestTellers has contacted me with an as yet undisclosed proposal. What I really want to do is of course start typing some words, and have them come together into some kind of a text. Over summer my blog has satisfied some of this need for writing about the world, its inhabitants, and the curious lives they lead. I intend to keep on blogging, but I also intend to take my writing further. To be honest, I can’t really see any other way to go. I’ve travelled, I’ve studied, I’ve worked – but without the writing to tie it all together it just doesn’t seem to add up to anything much.

”How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?” Bob Dylan once asked. What I want to ask is this: How many roads must I walk down before I can justify putting pen to paper? Sometimes I find myself wishing I was a very old man looking back on a long life of toil and trouble, only then to let my cauldron boil and bubble. But the truth probably is that I’ll never get old enough to be certain about anything. As long as the road continues ahead in front of me there will always be one more turn to take, one more experience to be had, before I’ve seen it all. It never stops. And then one day you file for bankruptcy, and it’s all over.

I’m right here, at this particular point in space and time, and this will always be the point from which I observe, from which I write. All I can do is comment on the trip while it lasts. When it’s over, I’m over, and then it picks up again with a new paying customer. As someone just told me the other day French writer and enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq says that ”in the midst of time there is the possiblity of an island”. It sounds cool and promising, but I’m not so sure. At least not in any concrete sense of the term. If there is an island, I’m on it right now, and no matter what I do it’ll keep drifting down the river of time until it ends at the shore, and blends in with the rest of the landscape.

It’s time to start writing. It always was, is, and will be. The time to not start writing doesn’t exist. There is a place and there is a time, and there is no other place and there is no other time. This is it. Let’s do our worst.

Syberberg’s Hitler

In last week’s post I mentioned Syberberg’s Hitler, a film from Germany as an example of political art reaching beyond the confines of both politics and art. I’m not sure if it came across like that, but I’m sure that’s what I meant. At least, that’s what I mean now. And that’s all that matters.

Since then I’ve spent three evenings watching the first three parts of the film. The last part I’m gonna watch tonight. But before I do so I wanna put down some thoughts on what it’s been like so far. Not that I’m expecting a surprise ending – I’ve been through the whole thing a couple of times before – but just to keep my thoughts untainted by the entirety of the work, and instead focus on some of the particulars.

At the end of Part III – after some five hours of patiently trying to map out the psychology of Hitler and his bedfellows – the grand old Führer has finally had it. Come alive as a puppet at the hand of a ventriloquist he takes on the screen, and does a monologue that not even the puppeteer knows how to answer.

Instead of defending his own stance Hitler praises his posterity for fulfilling his own visions of the future. ”Ich grüse die Amerikanen!” he starts out, and then lists all the wonders they and others have performed to his memory. How the Pope received Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in audience, how Palestinian freedom fighter Yassir Arafat carried a gun to the UN building, and how 110 out of 153 member states of the UN violated human rights in 1977 when the film was made.

In the end Hitler also praises the mass of Western populations for not doing anything about their abusive governments and their lack of concern for other countries and people. ”Thor Heyerdahl,” he states, ”couldn’t wash his clothes for 43 out of 56 days on his Kon-Tiki raft – is this what you wanna hold up against my culture?” To Hitler the case is clear. Today’s way of propaganda and natural selection by capitalism is a direct continuation of the Third Reich he imagined for himself when he was democratically voted Chancellor of Germany in 1933.

I’m not really interested in the credibility of such a statement. But I’m interested in the statement as such. Are we really working away from or towards the view of the world as held by Hitler? Or less dramatically put, do we have any idea where we – we as a society and as a culture – are headed, and do we at all spend time thinking about it?

In Denmark the equivalent of Hitler’s NSDAP – or more plainly stated: the Nazi Party – is a young fast-growing party known as the Danish People’s Party. They share characteristics with many other popular right-wing parties throughout Europe, and have often been known to substitute Muslims for Jews in search of a scapegoat and a bogey for their supporters to believe in. And this with such success that they’re presently in parliament, and holds the balance of power in many important governmental issues.

I wonder whether the people who vote for the Danish People’s Party would be horrified or flattered if somehow forced to watch the monologues of Syberberg’s Hitler. Most probably they wouldn’t care because they wouldn’t be able to see the connection. That’s my prejudice anyway. And I would love to be proved wrong.

So if you know anybody dating right-wing populism, and who might be up for some six-seven hours of intense enigmatic cinema, send them this link and my email address jacob@fabularasa.dk. I would love to hear their reply. Now, at least, I have given out the option.

Bablestorm

It’s been quiet in here for a couple of weeks. Hasn’t been out there, though. I sense a connection. Can’t quite establish it. I mean, it hasn’t been that busy out there. Perhaps it was just the whole 9/11 thing that got me. Even though I carefully avoided all the fuss, I knew it was there. Gotta work harder on that solipsism if I’m ever gonna get it right

Well, no matter what the cause of my silence, the levee broke last night. I went with a couple of friends to watch a play called Bablestorm. The interim stage was set in an empty film studio. Sand was strewed on the floor in the shape of a circus ring, and the circle was divided like a cake or a clock with two long black poles radiating from the centre. Props were sparse – mostly musical instruments together with a few suggestive pieces of furniture, and such. In the background a satelitte dish completed the circular theme while showing projections of wavering colors and live footage from the Vietnam war and the Iraq invasion.

The play had been announced as a poetic soap opera concerning the kidnapping of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena in Baghdad in the spring of 2005. Rather a pretentious setup. But I like it that way. At least pretentious people are serious about what they do. Or so they like to believe. And this last thing is usually enough to get my emotions untangled and my brains throbbing.

My first impression was that Bablestorm was a letdown. Bordering somewhere between documentary, office talk, spleen poetry, Mesopotamian mythology, political agitation, and ritualistic hymns it was quite hard to find any kind of leitmotif. Stories were begun but never concluded, songs were sung by a blind guy bumping his way across the stage, and the actors performed as if they were posing for a new world order. And in the centre of it all was the traumatized Italian journalist comfortably slipping into the limbo of madness and ecstasy. Nothing made sense. It was indeed a bablestorm.

When the play finished the audience clapped politely, and quickly left the building. As if everybody knew the actors and were afraid that they might be forced into making a statement about it all. Afterwards a cup of coffee and an attempt at reflection didn’t bring me and my friends much closer to a catharsis. We gave it up, and went home. This wasn’t a night to get drunk and disorderly, and rave about the misfortunes of art.

Sleep, however, didn’t come lightly. I lay on my bed, revolving like the chamber of a gun, a bablestorm slowly rising in my mind. Something bit at my heels, and I didn’t know which way to turn and face it. What was it all about? Why couldn’t I just let it go? The eye of the storm was nowhere to be seen.

A quick analysis stranded me somewhere on the banks of political art. Only, politics kept defying art, and vice versa. It seemed to me that the play was an attempt at reaching behind and beyond both art and politics. All the way back to the phonetics of language that make up both propaganda and poetry. At one point the blind singer had been reciting vowels continually, as if to deprive them of all meaning. Language is sound first and foremost, and everything that follows from there is just post-rationalization. I didn’t buy it, and neither did the rest of the audience whether they saw what I had seen, or not.

Once when I was travelling in Iranian Kurdistan a local painter and sculptor told me that the problem with Western art was that Western artists didn’t believe that there were anymore causes left fighting for. With the problems of their own countries solved in the name of Capitalism with a capital C, they couldn’t bring themselves to truly believe that other people suffered physically in the way that they themselves suffered mentally. As a consequence art became decadent, and the now famous canned shit exhibition the utmost altar of worship. Anyway, that was how he saw things.

I think Bablestorm was an attempt at dismantling the notion of Western art as impotent. The play wanted to fuse political idealism and subversive artistic self-criticism in the hope of creating something that would establish art as a legitimate and influential statement in itself. As noted above, it didn’t succeed very well. In fact, about three-thirty in the morning I ended up considering the failure of the play as the most successful thing about it. Because it had made me wonder. Wonder why art works better in opposition to than in alignment with. And why Danish art has forgotten how to be in opposition. It’s mostly just a big drivelling mess without the ability to even throw a napkin. And then, only to dry the eyes of the artist him- or herself.

To German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen 9/11 was a work of art. To Hitler World War II was as well. At least, that’s what German filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg hints at in his obscure (and hence unacclaimed) masterpiece Hitler, A Film From Germanỵ. To me Bablestorm was as well. A work of art and nothing but. And art in itself doesn’t touch upon the world just because it deals with the world. To think so is both naïve and mysophobic.

I think I’ll call it quits here before I reach a conclusion that the play didn’t, and that I – hopefully only still – don’t know how to reach. Remember, this too has been a bablestorm.

Just another word war

Iranian president Ahmadinejad recently launched his own personal blog. Considering that Iran has one of the fastest growing and most directly oppositional blogging communities in the world, I guess it was about time. It’s probably a wiser move than trying to close down the more than 700.000 Iranian blogs out there.

When last I checked Ahmadinejad’s blog only had one post. Very long and very autobiographical. Almost a genealogical novel. My eyes quickly drifted away from the small font, and found an even smaller opinion poll in the upper left hand corner of the page:

”Do you think that the US and Israeli intention and goal by attacking Lebanon is pulling the trigger for another word war?”

I’m not really into laughing at other people’s mistakes, but something about the tragicomical qualities of this little typo made for an exception. I was still chuckling when I went to bed that night. Meaning is so easily distorted, and at the end of the day a single letter is all it takes to save the world from destruction.

And then again, meaning is such a powerful force with us that it arises even when it’s lost. For what is politics – and especially international politics – but a war of words? The West claims that Iran is enriching uranium to produce weapons of mass destruction, whereas Iran claims that it’s doing so to produce electricity. Who to believe? Who to side with?

When it comes to megalomaniacs like Ahmadinejad and Bush there’s always the risk that word turns to world, and everybody else gets to suffer the consequences. Gunboat diplomacy, I think it’s called. It leaves just about as much room for negotiations as a collapsing building. Or the Cuban Missile Crisis, for that matter.

Back then Khrushchev beat his shoe against the table, and turned away his ships in the eleventh hour. Later exposures have shown that the world came even closer to an all-out nuclear war than previously known. So, yeah, we’ve been a lot further down the road to extinction than we are at present.

Still, I can already feel the laughter tickling the corners of my mouth. Makes me think of a joke I once heard sci-fi writer Kurt Vonnegut crack in an interview. An interstellar space traveller is called up in his ship, and told that there’s bad news for him.

“Did somebody die?” he asks. “My dog? My wife? My daughter?”

“No,” the voice at the other end of the line tells him. “Your whole universe just did.”

Perhaps the world would be a safer place if more people cracked jokes like that. Words heal, worlds don’t.

To throw or not to throw a stone

Last night a friend asked me why I had never thrown a well-sized rock at anyone. Or at anything, for that matter. Didn’t have to be the police. Might just be a shop front, or across the fence to the American Embassy. Anything that would somehow physically manifest my political affiliation.

I didn’t have a ready answer then. And I don’t have one now. But I feel quite certain that I never will throw rocks at anyone or anything. It’s just not my line of argument. I’d feel foolish for sure donning a ski mask and prying loose paving stones. Like a freak in a circus doing whatever it takes to get the spectators cheering.

Instead I’ll just state a few things about myself. Firstly, I grew up in the upper middle classed suburbs north of Copenhagen. My parents weren’t exactly rich, but we sure didn’t lack anything. I remember trying to force my mother into exchanging my winter coat for a board game I’d seen down in the toy store. I simply sat down in front of the game claiming that I wouldn’t move until the deal was done. Fat chance, stupid kid. However, it was my first act of passive resistance, and my mother had to go through the embarrasment of dragging a screaming kid across the floor to get me out of the store.

Politics never were a topic of dinner table conversation in my family. I refused to read newspapers, and when the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was shot all I did was complain that the early morning cartoon show had been cancelled. I purposely avoided watching the news, and any mention of war would sent me running into my room and the safety of building make-belief Lego townships. The world that existed outside of my own was all chaos and confusion, and I didn’t want anything to do with it.

This only changed when I was in my late teens. The outside world became a place of adventure and excitement. I began hitching around Europe, meeting strange people, and having even stranger conversations. My outlook on life was broadened and distorted at the same time. The bubble burst. I became part of the chaos and confusion that I had so far steered clear of. For the first time in my protected existence I didn’t quite know what to do with myself.

Still I didn’t have a political standpoint. Like most young idealists without any sense of reality I insisted upon a world of peace, love, and harmony. Perhaps that was why I chose to take the ferry across from Scotland to Northern Ireland. I wanted to visit the hot spots of the Earth, and show the people living there that alternatives were possible. Pretty damn naïve and arrogant, I have to admit.

What I did discover was that not only were people so tired of the conflict between Protestants and Catholics that it had almost died out, they also seemed more vibrant and full of life than most other people I had met. Was living in a country with violent demonstrations, car bombings, and street riots actually making them thrive? I think it was Orson Welles who said that 30 years of civil war in Italy produced such geniuses as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, while 400 years of peace in Switzerland produced the cuckoo clock.

Now, I still don’t believe in armed conflict, and I sure don’t wanna take part in it. I would rather somebody threw a rock at me than I threw a rock at them. Not because I don’t wanna protect me and mine, but because I wouldn’t know who to throw it at. Should I aim for the immediate enemy, or should I aim for someone higher up the hierarchy? The agitators? The crowd who believed them? The moneymen who backed the men in power? The news media that recorded everything to inform and enrage the public? Yes, the public, should I go for them too? And if so, might I not just start with myself, and knock out my own brains with the rock that I already hold in my hand?

If forced anyhow by circumstances out of my control I would probably just fling it in the general direction of the majority. To even out the scales, I guess. Too much power in one place never seems to work out. Except in art where I always find the individual performance more interesting than the communal. More interesting even than the guided. But that’s another discussion for another day.

To return to the original question I still don’t have a ready answer as to why I never throw rocks at kings’n’things. I can sure feel the urge at times, but in the end it just seems too pointless. I love pulling things apart – at least metaphorically I do – but I prefer to use the parts for building new stuff rather than for throwing away.

Anyway, it’s only in history and fiction that you can tell the good guys from the bad guys. And at this particular point in time and space it seems even the good guys have turned bad. In the words of German director Werner Herzog it’s ”every man for himself, and God against all.”

Anfal offscreen

It’s a twenty minutes walk from the Grand Theatre cinema in central Copenhagen to my girlfriend’s apartment in the hip Vesterbro area. Her apartment isn’t that hip, though. In fact it’s just a small room and a shared kitchen. I’m sitting by her red round table writing this. Staring out at the sun and rain that I left behind a few minutes ago. I don’t know why I’m smoking and drinking coffee. All I wanna do is write.

Offscreen is the third and latest movie by upcoming art director Christoffer Boe. As usual he’s more interested in the media itself than in what he actually does with it. And once again he uses a story of love lost and desperately regained as his central excuse. Only, the novelty has worn off, and his short-comings as a storyteller have become ever clearer. Leaving us with a nonsensical catastrophe of modern cinema.

Let me assure you that there is nothing flattering in my use of the term ”catastrophe”. Offscreen doesn’t have the same epic quality of failure that other titles did. Such as von Stroheim’s Greed that was butchered down from nine hours to one and a half hours, or Michael Cimino’s recently re-released Heaven’s Gate that almost ruined United Artists, and marked the end of an era where certain directors worked outside of the production company’s control.

As far as Offscreen goes I’m sure production costs have been just as cheap as the movie itself. Everything is filmed in everyday surroundings with a handheld digital camera, and apart from lead actor Nicolas Bro who has the misfortune of portraying himself – or at least his public self – the rest of the cast doesn’t get much screentime.

Basically it is a story of the fall and decline of a man whose wife chooses to leave him. And understandably so. In spite of Nicolas Bro’s attempt to add some real life quality to his performance, we’re painfully aware of his acting. His personality comes across as completely one-dimensional, as does his relationship with his wife, and the love story suffers from the banality of high school drama class performances. The gradual disintegration of the central character and the eventual downward slide into madness and murder even more so.

What troubles me is not that Offscreen is such a poorly conceived and realized movie. There are plenty more of its kind out there. But I find it troublesome that it represents the height of Danish experimental cinema today. A home video camera in the hands of a celebrity actor filming himself. Is this really what’s supposed to continue the rich heritage of internationally acclaimed filmmaker Lars von Trier? Is this the follow-up to such masterpieces as The Idiots and Dogville?

If we are to believe the critics, I’m afraid it is. They continue to praise the work of Christoffer Boe in its entirety even though its only claim to fame is the occasional – admitted! – sublime imagery and editing. Perhaps this is due to a lack of competition which then again is due to a lack of interest in innovative thinking and experimentation. A lack which runs like wildfire through a country hailing to cost benefit analyses and the traditions and virtues of half a century ago.

In the years following World War II most afflicted countries were hell-bent on peace. Including Denmark. And we were willing to pay the price. Literally by way of household consumer goods and status symbols. Metaphorically by way of a narrower outlook on the world outside of family, career, and country. The nuclear family, as it came to be termed. How ironic! And how sad that we’re once again opting for it. Even now when globalization is rampant, and the Earth so much smaller than the fields of a backwaters farm.

Walking the distance from the cinema to my girlfriend’s room, I chanced upon a gathering at the City Hall Square. Some hundred or so people were listening to a man declaiming from a small platform in a language I didn’t understand. A couple of handwritten signs in English informed me that it was a demonstration protesting the Anfal genocide in which Saddam Hussein allegedly ordered the killing of almost 200.000 Kurds in less than half a year.

A presumably Kurdish woman in her mid-twenties handed me a leaflet when I walked by. It encouraged the Danish government to put pressure on the Iraqi government to get them to acknowledge and apologize the genocide. It also told me that today is the first day of the trial against Saddam Hussein on this very topic.

Reviewing all of the above I guess I might have spent more words on the Anfal genocide, and less on Christoffer Boe’s puerile Offscreen. But somehow I believe the two things to be connected. And in some intricate chain of events which knows of no innocence, I wouldn’t be surprised to find the movie the cause of the tragedy. A fiction claimed to be reality interlinked with a reality claimed to be fiction.

Whatever the exact nature of the relationship between Offscreen and Anfal, I’m sure that the one needs the other more than they care to admit. Art needs reality to create life. Just as reality needs art to preserve life. Without each other they become meaningless. Like lost lovers clutching memories forever gone.

The kindness of strangers

”Whoever you are, I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers,” Blanche DuBois says as she gives herself over to authority in the final scene of the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire. I watched the 1951 screen adaptation with Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh yesterday. And my heart is still racing.

That famous little line I just quoted made me wonder when first I fully entrusted myself in the hands of strangers. I believe it was in my late teens when I was travelling through Turkey with a friend. We were hitching across the great Anatolian plains on a cold October day. The wind blew clouds of dust from the road to the fields, and the flat landscape was dotted with tiny villages and occasional mosques. Even the atmosphere had a certain colorless quality to it.

When the sun began to set we had been on the road for 10 or 12 hours. Traffic had been light to say the least, and most lifts had been hopelessly short. Something along the lines of sitting on the fenders of tractors going half a mile down the road to the next field. All in all, we hadn’t made more than twenty or thirty miles that day. Too far to turn back, too short to reach the Ihlara valley where we were headed.

That evening we dined with a Turkish family in a one-room house made of clay and straw. A mile or so outside the village an old truck had come to pick up the women after a hard day’s work in the potato fields. We held out our hands to indicate that we were lost, and they pointed us in the direction of the small houses. I remember walking down a narrow track with a big Anatolian shepherd dog watching our every move. Barking and showing off its impressive set of teeth to make sure we didn’t overstep the line to the field.

The village wasn’t even a village. It was just a hamlet, almost ridiculous on the vast plain. The people were poor potato farmers who didn’t know much else than the simple life they led. They had a couple of TVs, but they didn’t get out much. Besides the truck that transported the women to and from the fields, all they had was a less than reliable Trabant from the former DDR. Probably brought back by someone’s cousin or uncle who had gone to Germany to work. Later that night a couple of the men somehow managed to drive it all the way to the guesthouse at the entrance to the Ihlara valley.

Conversation was sparse. Fortunately we knew the names of a few Danish soccer players in Turkish clubs. We would mention them, and then our hosts would repeat the names with voices full of praise, over and over again. A detailed travel map of the Anatolian plains also proved a success. We would point out the route we had come, and they would read out the names of the towns and places we had passed. A joint venture, so to speak.

I was overwhelmed. Never before had it occured to me that you could just walk into a company of complete strangers, hold out your hand, and be treated with such hospitality. They took us in, they put us by their hearth, they gave us the best they had to offer, and then they even drove us through the dark, in their dying wreck of a car, to a destination we would never have been able to reach on our own.

Now, this may sound like the oft repeated romanticism of a first-time traveller. And I guess it is. But that doesn’t make it any less real. The experience was flesh and blood all the way through, and it changed something deep inside me. I learned to believe in the kindness of strangers, and I learned to believe that I would never ever be alone again no matter where I walked on this Earth.

I think everybody has had at least one such experience in their life. Some might have been let down, and some might not have understood. Some might even have forgotten. But the vast majority of men – even those who live Thoreauvian lives of quiet desperation – should be able extract one such experience from their memory, and know that they too once depended on the kindness of strangers.

Tomorrow I head for Copenhagen and a week off work. My plans reach no further than my girlfriend and a casual reunion with old high school friends. Apart from that I intend to just drift around town, or out of it, all as it happens. And should a stranger cross my path I’ll be sure to look her way, and shower some kindness on her. Even if she is a he. Blanche DuBois and the Anatolian plains taught me that.