Quite a Love Story

''Given the nature of the human couple, the love of man and woman ...is inferior to that which can exist between man and dog. ...the question that plagues human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short... The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no... scenes.''
                    Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.                                                                   

Given that it is Valentine's season and The Oscar fever is underway, I thought that I would write about my personal response to Phantom Thread (one of the strongest entries for this year's Academy Awards) since it is being marketed as an unusual love story-- not the usual kitschy stuff that gets you teared up, but a dark, subversive, almost cynical stab into the heart of romantic desire-- which it is. Whether you have stomach for that kind of dark and morbid romance, is a different issue altogether.

Set in the self-involved coutoure  world of Post-war London, the plot revolves around the  celebrity fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day Lewis) and his muse/ model/ servant-girl Alma (Vicky Krieps).
 Woodcock is a middle-aged, ruthless and neurotically narcissistic artist who utilises  his lovers/ muses and chucks them off like used tissues when their function is past the emotional expiration date. His assistant/ soulmate/ business partner, his sister Cyril (Leslie Manville) is the one who does all the dirty job of disposal of the girls-on -their-way-out for him. Together, they form an intense, and almost incestuous dyad that is seemingly indestructible. Women just pass through, as temporary objects of  Woodcock's lust, without in any way threatening their self-contained world that is rigidly predictable and sterile.
How Alma, the shy and submissive country waitress, the most unusual suspect, disrupts this bond and breaks through Woodcock's resistance against romantic intimacy is a startling revelation.

 While discussing this film, critics are generally eloquent about the Pygmalion- like function of the artist and his active masculine gaze in relation with his passive, feminine muse as a playground for his fantasies of creative omnipotence. It forms a large part of the complexity, true, but is only a part of it.
''You have no breasts'', he declares bluntly while measuring Alma, who cringes at its mention in front of a coolly spiteful Cyril, ''but I could give you some, if I choose to'' he surmises with cold arrogance.

Reynolds Woodcock is a consummate artist indeed; and like all artists, is a nightmare to be around. Moody, difficult, self-obsessed and avoidant, he is also an expert seducer of women and, yes, a speed freak at the steering wheel of his suave sedan.  He is vain, self conscious and a snob: 'chic' is a word he despises; the person who coined it, he feels, should be taken out for 'public spanking'.

He is aggressive, dominant and Godlike with his female clients, the society ladies who surrender to his mastery and charisma like limp-legged Eves: exposed, passive and totally under his command; they are anxious to impress him because he repairs the flaws that God left behind. He is a man who makes women--young, old, ugly-- look beautiful. The fitting sessions are especially long, ritualistic and fraught with sexual tension: as a man taking charge of the female body, touching them in their most intimate parts with a cool professional disengagement, he looks divinely powerful and it makes the frisson all the more palpable.

Alma, by contrast, is feminine, demure and her supreme virtue is that she can endlessly 'stand' while he sits, day-in, day-out, inspecting her critically, with equal measures of admiration and dismissal. The power equation is evident by the number of occasions he is seen seated and she standing in front of him--open, undressed, spectated.
                                           

 The way he keeps dressing and undressing her is also responsible for making her look infantilized: and indeed, he is a much older, parental, cynical and dominant lover, hovering on the brink of dotage. But there is one crucial problem: he has an unresolved Oedipal issue; he has an obsessive 'mother complex'. His dead mother, who keeps haunting his dreams, is the third angle of all his love affairs that inhibits their romantic fruition. The sister is only an extension of that maternal incest-fantasy.

Food, a typically maternal object that involves nourishment and pleasure, becomes a metaphor for adult sexuality, its acceptance and rejection an oral signal of love and/or the lack of it. This is the chink in the armour of  Woodcock's cynical emotional resistance: and Alma knows it.

After a virulent episode of food poisoning  (out of spurned and frustrated love, a vindictive Alma feeds Woodcock poison mushrooms) through which she nurses him back to health, like a mother looking after an ailing child, and during which he hallucinates the dead mother and refuses professional medical intervention quite stubbornly and without explanation,  he proposes marriage to her. We are confused ; we can't quite figure out what happened to cause such a romantic epiphany.

At the heart of their dark and disintegrating marriage, lies the most subversive discourse on desire that I have ever seen in mainstream Hollywood cinema. While Alma pitches her passive aggressive resistance to counter his indifferent superiority--she eats grossly, makes maximum noise at the breakfast table, flirts with other men; in short does everything to put him off that she knows would unfailingly do so--we stay pretty much unsurprised. This is what was expected of such an unequal marriage after all. The girl was practically his servant, standing in line in her calico uniform, with his seamstresses most of the time. They are both consumed by unhappiness, locked in a stalemate of hatred and hostility.

 As their marriage continues to deteriorate inexorably, heading towards its inevitable collapse, Alma plucks poison mushrooms from the backyard again and cooks a seemingly sumptuous hell's broth with steely equanimity. We are to helplessly watch the poor old husband eat the toxic food--or is it toxic love of the vampish wife?--when he sensually swallows the food, giving her a knowing, complicit smile and says, with infinite passion, ''now kiss me my girl before I'm sick''. An astoundingly unruffled and  smiling Alma declares, ''I want you on your back... tender, helpless, open.'' And this, for me is a rare moment of triumph: content-wise and stylistically.

He knew.
He knew all along. And chose to play into her hands, participating in this near-fatal role-play; putting his own life on the line. He too, with Alma, was pushing the limits of their morbid love. But why?
He is a person whose existence is entrenched in habit, so much so, that a surprise romantic dinner oppresses him like an 'ambush', for which he crucifies Alma and expresses his intention to break up with her. So why does he, so uncharacteristically, indulge in such a wild and dangerous erotic game?


 He does, because with each episode of sickness, he  experiences a temporary regression into infantile passivity, surrendering to the maternal love and care of Alma. Alma becomes the absent mother during that brief interval, giving his lifelong Oedipal crisis a logical resolution. The absent object of desire is momentarily reclaimed that fills the hole of Woodcock's longing and makes him whole again, albeit for a while.

Like a BDSM role reversal, Alma, the timid and shy muse assumes unlimited power and control over the dominant male artist with a narcissistic ego, who is only happy and relieved to let go,even though for a moment, in the sinister privacy of their shared fantasy, their morbid sado-masochistic dependency.
It is in this radical moment of erotic role reversal that they rewrite the aesthetic paradigm of the male artist and the female muse. It is not accidental that she is called 'Alma', the immediate association being 'mater', together, literally meaning, the 'kind/nourishing mother'

As Woodcock lies foetally curled on her lap, abjectly at her mercy, a glowing and dreamy Alma confesses to the doctor that she would feel happy to meet him in the blessed afterlife, in case he were to die during one of these scenarios. She is proud to proclaim that she would continue to love him through all the possible afterlives to come.
Delusional? Demented? Criminal? Or is it superhuman romantic idealism?

That seduction and sexual love is propelled by a dark dynamic of power and control and a compelling need to appropriate and possess the romantic other, is no news to the readers of Alexander Sacher Masoch. Even discourses within popular culture ratify this unflattering psychosexual reality-- such as through songs, Harlequin romances,and blockbusting movie plots. It is mainly a cynical acknowledgement of the fallen nature of human sexuality.

What Phantom Thread does is that it opens a space for romantic idealism, of sublime beauty within the larger and mostly cynical context of  morbid co-dependency. It demands us to be non-judgemental while we look at the unconventional and rather pathological attachment of Woodcock and Alma with horrified fascination. We realize that the best love-stories are the ones in which the contours of each others' fantasies fit perfectly.
Did I say 'fit'?
That is perhaps the reason why the most furiously incompatible types often make the most bafflingly successful couples. Outer success has nothing to do with the repulsive beauty of this rich tapestry of erotic diversity, the phantom thread that weaves it is Desire.

The Radiant Depth Unfolded: Rumi

  ''My story gets told in various ways: a romance, a dirty joke, a war, a vacancy''.

''The minute i heard my first love story, i started looking for you...lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They are in each other all along.''  Jalaluddin Rumi                                                                                                       

   My blog is named after one of Rumi's mystical ideas, Sudden Wholeness: it denotes a state of being, a phase of awareness in which the seeker/ lover glimpses an unexpected organization and purpose underlying the chaos of external phenomena; it is the discovery of a silent harmony in the cacophony of experience. I was fascinated by the idea. I decided whenever I write something original, I would use this idea in one way or another.

  Like most  non-Muslim readers of Rumi, my entry-point to Rumi was Coleman Barks' exquisite translations. Like the lay audience, the uninitiated, I too was drawn to Rumi through Sufi humanism and its exalted ideals of tolerance, peace and universal love. Like most of Bark's Western audience, I too discovered Rumi at a turbulent time of my life, trying to look for ways to silence my inner turmoil.

   Due to its effortless conflation of the erotic and the ascetic, its seamless blending of the carnal and the divine, its welding of the flesh and the spirit, on the discursive level, Sufi arcana and Rumi are an endless resource to popular culture. From Bollywood cinema to Hindi rock music, there is no end to Rumi's influence.
It is this half-cooked, pedestrian understanding and  appropriation of a discipline that is arcane and highly structured-- practised within a hierarchic teacher- student tradition-- that has been responsible for its cultural abuse. A serious philosophical order, today, is flippantly associated with mutinous boy-meets-girl romance in Bollywood cinema that sets its bar far lower than the enlightened climax that Shams and Rumi aspired for.

Subcontinental  Islamic scholars, such as Sadia Dehlvi, feel deeply offended by such vulgarization of Sufism. She sees it as a problem, the way Sufism stands expunged of its theological element and is divested of its academic gravitas. She holds the reductionist Western approach to Rumi responsible for inhibiting a deep dialogue between mainstream Islam and the non Islamic audience of Sufi.

And perhaps that is the whole point of the West's enduring fascination with a religious mystic poet from Medieval Persia: he needs no Quoranic annotations, no academic rigour to be explained. Whoever has loved and lost anywhere in the world will understand Rumi. In a world where institutional religions are losing relevance more than ever, Rumi's lyrical philosophy addresses the modern condition more effectively without getting involved in the scholastic debates.

  To me, Rumi, the poet, is what justifies his continued relevance in today's world than Rumi, the commentator on sacred texts. 'Sohbet', the central idea of Rumi's mystic practice, his metaphysical dialogues with Shams, is an inexhaustibly mysterious form of philosophical discourse that blurs the contours of the identities of the participants.The ' You' and 'I' are the lover and the beloved, the master and the student, God and the seeker,  the persona and the anima of the same person, sometimes it is the inner self schizophrenically split against itself, into the sentient and spiritual halves:
     
You said, ''Who's at the door?
I said, ''Your slave''

You said,'' what do you want?''
I  said, ''to see you and bow''

''How long will you wait?''
''Until you call''...

''What do you want from me?''
''Grace''

''Where can you live safely?''
''In surrender''

''What is this giving up?''
''A peace that saves us''

''How do you walk there?''
''In perfection''.

The beauty of this ontological exploration is the radical interchangeability of the self and the other.''We are the mirror as well as the face in it. ...We are pain and what cures the pain, both''. It is difficult to determine who the lover is and who the beloved, between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz; it is not easy to know the precise nature of their engagement either, Shams is somewhere between an inspiring friend and a wise master who actively seeks out his true disciple. Together they create a philosophy based on profound interpersonal sharing, that attempts to answer one of the deepest anxieties of life: how to come to terms with loss?

  Obviously, their unconventional intimacy did not go down well with the religious establishment of the land. Rumi's professional commitment as a teacher of the holy texts was being adversely affected too. Like a responsible lover, Shams leaves Rumi for Damascus, plunging him headfirst into the bottomless pit of despair. This is the traumatic turning point that transforms Rumi from an ordinary religious scholar to a sublime interpreter of the mysteries of existence. His master/ lover Shams did not discourage Rumi's knowledge of Islam's theology and scholastic arguments but inspired him to travel beyond them. Faced with the howling absence of the person who gave his life its purpose, Rumi is forced to confront the dark core of separation, and discover healing in creative art:

'' We know separation so well because we have tasted the union...the pushing away pulls you in.''

 They unite one more time after this, when Shams returns from his self-imposed exile in Damascus, and they greet each other by falling at each others' feet, blurring the status of each one within the romantic as well as the hierarchical / master-student relationship.

picture courtesy: https://onbeing.org/programs/fatemeh-keshavarz-the-ecstatic-faith-of-rumi/

After Shams is brutally murdered by Rumi's family in 1248, Rumi's wanderings begin, in Damascus, his personal pilgrimage steeped in the association of Shams, with an unquiet, gutted soul that denies him oblivion and closure. His lacerated lyrics hang like a jewel in the ghastly night of endless absence of his companion, as the separation this time,is veritably, final.
His tortured quest for the meanings of life, love, and death; his self-wounding pursuit of the purpose of existence; his impossible quest for a lover on the other side of inexorable physical annihilation ultimately precipitate a spiritual breakthrough where he realizes :

''Why should I seek? I am the same as He. His essence speaks through me.
I have been looking for myself''.
This is an instance of consummate union, a total surrender of the self to the beloved other, the complete annihilation through which the self is renewed. Fana--or the death of the self in love. This may remind us of a return to the state of Platonic wholeness and plenitude, before the cracks of living separate the soul from its original companion.

This is also a state of blessed blankness, a nonbeing, a void paradoxically loaded with spiritual wealth:
''I used to be respectable and chaste and stable, ... I saw you and became empty.... 
To praise is to praise how one surrenders to this emptiness.''

What we can see here is an extraordinarily effective management of separation anxiety as well as of a traumatised ego; by integrating the object of affection into the self, Rumi's therapeutic philosophy gives way to a stronger and more stable ego that is dialectically evolved. The fusion of the ego with the object of its desire--without denying its legitimate role in the transaction-- seems to be an extremely successful strategy to counter the debilitating effects of separation from its object, through death, distance or the unfortunate demise of affection. The fracture that opens up due to the frustration of desire, and which is at the root of almost every form of neurosis and anxiety, is assuaged by this  mechanism that helps us accept the randomness of experience,without resentment.

Rumi's poetry is pervaded by an obsessive recurrence of images: the intense longing for an absent lover, glimpses of the distant face, torrid fantasies of union, and visions of an ecstatic surrender. While it is not impossible to discover resonances of the ancient Middle Eastern tradition of erotic poetry, such as The Songs of Solomon ( no artist can create in a vacuum of influence) what stands out in Rumi's art  is a harmonious resolution of the oppositional tension that is at the heart of every act of intercourse: sexual, romantic and spiritual; with a human lover, and/or  a divine other. The other, that by definition, resides outside the frontiers of the self, is made to invade the barriers of  the self until it is incorporated in it and dissolves completely in the self in an ecstatic (ex+ stasis= lit. outside existence) union whereby the individual identity of each is erased.

''...dissolve me if this is the time. Do it gently, with a touch of hand, or a look. 
...Or do it suddenly like an execution.
You keep me away with your arm but the keeping away is pulling me in.''

It is easy to understand the seduction of  such an orgasmic healing, such a calming, restorative philosophy in today's world, when the political climate is divisive due to toxic egos, when there is increasing personal alienation between individuals, when relationships are fragile and more than ever divested of emotional seriousness, and when break-ups, deaths and separations hurt exactly as badly as they did in Rumi's time.

This is coping mechanism adorned with the finest aesthetic beauty, it is the anxious and terrified soul's fortification against the ravages of Time and mutability, in the wisdom rising out of an empirical appreciation of  tragedy. It is enduringly relevant because it answers a modern, complex and deeply existential quest. It is the miracle of salvaging the self through the erasure of the ego; we don't have to look for this miracle outside ourselves. The love we search for, has been there in us all along.

She asks ''do you love me, or yourself more? Really, tell me the absolute truth.''
He says, ''there's nothing left of me. I'm like a ruby held up to the sun. It is a stone but has no resistance to the sun's light.''*

When we render ourselves open to the Light we make ourselves more precious, more dazzlingly beautiful.

*All translations, of Rumi's texts, are by Coleman Barks.

He Was Not But One Hour Mine

''I grow old...I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind?
...and walk upon the beach?
I have seen the mermaids singing each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.''
                                     T.S Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock


  One of the defining traits of middle age is an acute and inescapable awareness of loss that seems to be wired into experience. Its autumnal tone is unexcitable and calm: it has lost the violent optimism of youth and is at peace with its fatalistic acceptance that life would not give another chance.Every evening is a dire reminder of another petal fallen off the dazzling, but wilting, flower of youth. Every morning, a tortured search in front of the mirror for another new grey, another line added to the deepening crow's feet. Every sudden phone call, the news of another ageing, ailing relative passing away, someone we should have visited long ago but couldn't quite manage.

  The beauty of youth is in its wasteful abundance: we make mistakes, lose jobs, break off with lovers, neglect friendships, forget birthdays when we are young. We know we are never far away from a second chance,life bursts with such a pressing immediacy, such an overwhelming vehemence that everything else must wait till we sort out life. Middle age is the dawning awareness that we have exhausted our reserve of second chances. Life, from this point on, is a series of finalities.

  Mid-life crisis is consciousness' meltdown in the face of such a traumatic, inexorable given: youth, with all its abundance and intoxication seems like a betrayal from this lonely apex. Depression and suicide are at one end of the spectrum of reaction to this unmitigated eventuality,while chronic cynicism, overspending, and one night stands lie at the other, less extreme end. They are the soul's insane, and essentially futile, attempts to reassert control over something that is outside the ambit of human power.

And yet, there is another, more meaningful, more beneficial way of doing the same thing.Most triumphant art is born in this place of infernal darkness: they are aesthetically organised responses to  the writer/ artist's terrified recognition of this truth. Rabindranath Tagore's frenzied translation of the 'Gitanjali' poems (resulting in his winning the Nobel Prize for literature, 1913) was a middle-aged man's answer to the gaping, numbing futility at the core of life, often driving him suicidal by his own admission, in one of his letters to his oldest son.  Having lost his five children and wife to death, in a quick succession, this is how the mystic from the East reacts:

'' I must launch out my boat--I must. The languid hours pass by on the shore.... .
Dost thou not feel the thrills passing through the air with the notes of  the faraway song... from the other shore?'' Gitanjali, 42.

Mellowed by this profound knowledge of letting go, middle-aged love is less arrogant,more abject and more philosophical. Unlike in the first flush of youth when love is at the very first sight and its demise is at the very first slight, love, if it at all happens at this age, is rather with a philosophical construct, than with a person. That's why it is so difficult to let go of someone at this age, especially when you know that it is this one person who stands between you and the barren shore of dotage and death. The one writer in English language who celebrates this brand of love with enduring success is William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's sonnets are a fraught monologue of the modern soul confronting death without the consolation of Medieval Christianity, trying to find  immortality in romantic love instead.

  In 1596, Shakespeare was 32 (the quite appropriate age to experience the onset of midlife crisis in the sixteenth century) when he lost his 11 year old son, a memento mori that was to exert a powerful influence on his creative life. His sonnets, written over the span of the next 8 years, is a theatre of love, loss, youth and its passing in the face of the ominous antagonist, Death. The stage is the bereaved soul of the poet, where he obsessively keeps re-enacting these themes, these anxieties with the help of his two other dramatis personae--his boy -muse,the Young Man(YM) and his Dark Lady (DL). The essence of this abject, slavish, cringing and often most self-abasing love is quite heartbreakingly contained in his critically celebrated Sonnet 64:

    ''Ruin has taught me thus to ruminate/  That Time will come and take my love away.
      This thought is as death which can not choose/ But weep to have that which it fears to lose.''

This sad and terrifying picture of mutability is inspired in a man in his thirties by a seventeen year old kid.In keeping with his youthful good looks, this boy-lover is most notoriously disloyal, the poems are permeated by a profoundly mature awareness of his profligacy. And yet what exactly is it that keeps the celebrity playwright of the Elizabethan popular theatre latched on to the callous and ruthless boy so poignantly, with such inextinguishable affection and forgiveness?
The break-up sonnets (ie when the boy has absolutely had it and is breaking off) 87-90, almost viscerally ooze with tears and blood. One can not but think, what is it, really, that inspires such fierce, suicidal loyalty, especially when one knows one's lover is false?

     ''When thou shalt be disposed to set me light/ And place me in the eye of scorn,
      Upon thy side, against myself, I'll fight/  And prove thee virtuous, though thou art forsworn'' (88)

One of the provocative theories, suggested by Michael Wood, is that Shakespeare's most severe separation anxiety, in response to the possibility of his parting with the Young Man has its roots in his parental grief: the boy-lover is a transmutation of the dead son, adolescent and now, lost.''For his love is absolute, intense, overwhelming in the way that a parent feels for a child'' (Michael Wood). That makes Shakespeare's romantic intensity and sexual jealousy infinitely more challenging to read, taking us almost, to the edge of political incorrectness but read in this light of fatherly grief, his romantic loss assumes a devastatingly tragic tone, so unspeakable that is defies the limits of ordinary articulation:
            ''Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter: / In sleep a king; but waking no such matter.'' (87).
A more modern and readily relateable example would be Eric Clapton's 'Tears in Heaven':

''Would you hold my hand
   If I saw you in heaven?
  Would you help me stand
   If I saw you in heaven?
...Beyond the door there's peace I'm sure
    And I know there'll be no more tears in heaven.''

Without knowing the backstory of Clapton's son's death inspiring such a beautiful lyric of loss, one would underestimate the depth of grief packed into the poetry. As romantic lyric-- which it is entirely possible to be interpreted-- it is quite ordinary, indeed, bordering on the sentimental, but as a grieving father's vision of a dead child it is exquisitely, and most achingly sublime. And this is also a grown man's psychological response to loss that is irreparable.

An ordinary, lesser person would retreat into psychotic disintegration under similar circumstances, pretty much like the Mother in Laars Von Trier's Antichrist, whose infant falls to death from an upstairs window while she is engaged in sex in the shower. Chances are, that the parents' sanity would get eroded by survivor's guilt, as it surely must have been in Clapton's case as well, but the gifted artist that he is, he turns this moment of severe emotional rupture around, into an occasion of aesthetic inspiration with the help of the oldest psychological defense, deployed by creative individuals everywhere: sublimation.

After a certain age, every act of artistic creation is essentially an act of exorcism: a solitary, anguished effort to drive away the demons of loss, mortality and irreconcilable separations that torment every thinking individual who knows that he is growing old; every line written on the page, every stroke of the brush on the canvas, every note composed on the instrument is the howl of the ageing soul being slowly dragged away to the dreadful destination.

Art, in this situation, becomes a means as well as an end in itself; the repeated assaults of death, loss and separation have taught us that there is no eternal, permanent core that guarantees stability against the systemic unpredictability and mutability of adult life. Michael,the classical violinist who is Vikram Seth's protagonist from his excruciatingly cathartic novel, An Equal Music, contemplates the nature of his coping with the loss of the woman he lost and found and lost again in his middle age, in clearly aesthetic terms. This is what he concludes during the final concert in which his beloved performs with the divine perfection of a deaf Beethoven:
''Music, such music is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough , it is to be blessed enough to live from day to day and to hear such music...''. Art, then, gives the order and symmetry, the beauty and permanence that the chaos of living denies. Art stays, while life slips through the clenched fingers desperately trying to hold on to old certainties.

Writers, artists, musicians descend into the darkest well of loss, the inferno of distance and death, and find reprieve, if not redemption, to make our own loss of youth and beauty, our own progress to extinction a little less alone, a little more bearable--so that, their art offers a purpose, a meaning to the senseless entropy at the heart of creation, and therein, art writes a divine comedy on the pages of the grim tragedy that  existence is. They encourage us to celebrate the brief hour of love, of life,through their art and experience, that wrests immortality out of  our all too human transience.
   

There Is No Spoon

' Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. ...try to realize the truth.
         Neo: What truth?
  Spoon boy:There's no spoon.'
                                       Matrix, 1999.

In 1981 Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher of the Post-modern experience, introduced his revolutionary thesis of 'Simulacra and Simulation' to an awestruck community of  academics who were still coming to terms with the emergence of an aesthetic and a way of life that was fragmentary, synthetic, subjective and vulnerable to skeptical deconstruction, revealing at its centre a hole, a lack of objective truth that had sanctified knowledge since the great revolution of ideas, known as the Enlightenment.
 He proposed an epistemological model to explain the relation between symbols and society and the limits imposed on the human mind's ability to access 'truth', by the historical evolution of that critical relationship. He also shows us, in the process, how the Enlightenment  paradigm,

                                   God= Light= Reason/ Truth } Logos


is radically and irreversibly altered. Baudrillard characterizes experience in the mediatized, virtualized, post-capitalistic reality as governed by an infinite sequence of images that endlessly refer back to each other for meaning, with no objective truth to reveal at the end of the process.

  In 1999, the fiendishly creative Wachowskis introduced a popular-cinematic spin to this hardcore academic idea, and got it cross-fertilized with the emerging discourses of software programming and A.I. The resulting text is a hybrid of science fiction and cultural critique-- the cult cyberpunk classic,  Matrix.
  The whole idea of inhabiting a simulated reality where consciousness is controlled by the 'hyperreal', may have been pretty darkly futuristic, the stuff of millennial dystopia in 1999,  but in less than twenty years of its release, it isn't anymore. As the debate rages over the ethicality of autonomous weapons in warfare,  the future looks increasingly inclement  where full robotization of military conflicts can be a lot sooner than we may expect. Mark  Zuckerberg, the poster-boy of prodigiac innovation, is a well-known critic of this kind of dehumanization of  the scientific imagination.

We live, pretty much like in Baudrillard's Third, or even Fourth Order Simulation where reality is constructed by signs and images for us, but these signs represent no original truth. ''The simulacrum (copy) is never that which conceals the truth-- it is the truth which conceals that there is none. [Only] the simulacrum is true.'' The images, the discourses, the meanings that compete for legitimacy all day, non stop, on television, internet, social media, in print, advertising, and cinema construct realities that are so shifting, so provisional, so ideologically motivated, and ultimately so self-reflexive that they have to deliberately blur the contours of a truth that exceeds, and exists outside, their purpose and existence. Like the hyperreal currency 'Bitcoin', these images create values for us that are finally, empty; non- existent.

'Post-truth'  and 'Alternative Facts' are the new symbolic tools by which power is asserted and maintained. But it is a world of signifiers without a referent. A stream of representation without the 'real' that validates the enterprise. Let's say, we see a city in Iraq or Ukraine being bombed, on the internet or on television; we know that pictures don't lie, right? So we are lulled into a ready and unquestioning credulity, without asking who shows us the images. Does it matter? We know that pictures don't lie.So if the pictures are true, the accompanying commentary, or information must be authentic too. At least, the presumption seems to be that there is an effort to unearth the 'truth' behind the incident. But depending on who controls representation, the interpretation of the image assumes a 180 degree flexibility; there is no objective, universal ideal of truth anymore--existing outside the symbols of power-- that says: 'killing humans for ideology  isn't ethically feasible, and that whatever happens, human life is inviolable.'

Till the end of World War II there was no such skepticism or relativist confusion surrounding the accountability and morality of war. If the bombing of Pearl Harbor was unethical, so was Hiroshima, and there was a fairly unambiguous boundary of responsibility. No one in their right mind would even suggest, ''well, you know, with a little bit of tweaking of the image and the information you disseminate, and if you do influence the opinion of a fairly large number of people, you can actually make the world believe that Hiroshima did not happen! Or even if it did, let's say it's India that did it.' Today, after the death of truth, this is exactly what is possible and is done.
During the First Gulf War of 1989, we, for the first time, felt the power of images to shape the outcome of a military conflict. It was the first major technologically enabled war,engaging a western superpower after the World War II, that was televised for the world to view as a spectacle. Whoever had the power over representation and semiotics of war, we knew, would win it. We knew that the U.S would finally have the edge since the American images of precision bombing of the Iraqi territory were breathtakingly efficient.
Ironically, within the space of  a decade, the enemy hijacked this weapon and started disseminating propaganda images across the virtual world setting the Western notion of liberal democracy--an enduring legacy of the French Revolution and Enlightenment--on fire. It harvested its recruits from among the unemployed/ socially alienated white/ coloured youth in ways that was beyond the inkling of the most sophisticated surveillance machinery.
The result was 9/11. Again, an image indelibly burned in the memory of a global population. And this too created a semiotic mythology of its own, becoming a potent visual ammunition for both  the liberal West and radical Islam. The melting, falling Twin Towers, going up in flames that were infernal... whose image is it? What does is mean?
The wrath of  fundamentalist Islam?
The apocalyptic resurgence of secular democracy?
The liberal West rising from the ashes of  spectacular, extra-territorial terror?
The collapse of capitalistic arrogance, consumerist decadence?
The slaughter of the innocent?
The fulfillment of the prophecy of the Second Coming?
No single, definitive discourse can close the endless chain of semiotic significations any more, devoid of all intrinsic value, this play of incessant interpretations is impossible to arrest because there is no truth outside the system that would close the interpretation and give it its ultimate meaning.
Only the ones who control representation know this...that there is no truth. There is no spoon.
Every election that is virtually rigged, every social media clip that mobilizes your polarized anger against a cultural/ racial/ religious Other, is a confirmation of this 'Virtual Irreality' (Pater Sparrow), this hyperreal existence without Truth. We are so irreversibly plugged into the programme that we can not recognize its contrived nature.
This is the new way that power tries to neutralize dissent; keeps skepticism at bay and contains dissidence: by manufacturing realities at its convenience. Every person in authority knows and understands the efficacy of this tool.
The Fascist propaganda was but a trial run of this massive, pervasive and inescapable epistemic manipulation.
So where does the control end? Is there no way to break on through to the other side? Is there no refuge--the 'Zion'--of awareness and resistance? Is there no way to subvert the control that engulfs experience, sucking the air of truth out of it?
There is. And the answer lies in the old fashioned word, 'choice', made fashionable by the Existentialists, such as Sartre and his legendary girlfriend.
Choice is the only weapon of consciousness against the random anarchy of experience. This option is as old as the first martyr to reason and truth that humanity knew: Socrates.
When a cynical and coldblooded Agent Smith, poised on world dominance, exasperatedly  asks his adversary  Neo, about his resistance, the power of choice becomes apparent:
'Why Mr. Anderson? Why, why? Why.. get up? Why keep fighting?... Is it freedom? ...Truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be love?...Illusions...Vagaries of perception... Why do you persist?' A pallid, broken -down and Christic Neo replies with a cool resolve, 'because I choose to' which confuses the cyberdevil as he can not make sense of  the human consciousness justifying its meaning and purpose through choice.

Jean Paul Sartre and his legendary girlfriend Beauvoir were ardent proponents of Existential Choice, in their writing as well as in their lives lived most unconventionally as ethical experiments.

So the next time authority tries to bully you, overwhelm you, armtwist you into submission and consent, just go along, play along, give in...but never forget to wink at the surveillance camera before you do; give your oppressor a once-over before you nod; look through them before you capitulate; curl your lips in disdain as you say 'yes'.  They will falter without knowing why.
They'll know that you know.
You know that there is no spoon.

Art Under Attack

''Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.''-- Joseph Anton,  Salman Rushdie, 2012.
   
    As I write my blog today, the world slowly recovers from yet another cynical assault on the innocent: the attack on the Manchester concert. This has become a terror-trend of sorts--to detonate murderous hatred on gigs most popularly frequented by the (religiously/ politically disaffected) white western youth. Apart from massive concerts being soft targets of terror, where there is a huge gathering of crowd, out to have fun ( hence, relaxed, with their guards down, unlike when you are at a sensitive airport, plus the huge attendance maximizes the potential for damage and casualty ) these centres of modern urban entertainment serve as a symbolic locale for the display of spectacular violence.
 
     What Rushdie refers to as 'stories' are the very first, rudimentary attempts of mankind to find a realm of meaning outside his immediate, fleshly existence. This is the root of primordial art, and also the birth of wisdom and philosophy; of science, of progress, of the cure for the deadliest diseases to discover the alchemy of immortality. When the first, pre-lingistic hunting-gathering tribe, assembled in the evening around the communal bon-fire, recounted the story of the chase and capture of the beasts they brought for dinner, through the etched graphic narratives on the cave-wall, it was humanity's defining quest for power and glory that would set him apart from the animals he had to overpower,  in order to ensure his own survival and sustenance. This is the beginning of  'the story' that set every thing else into motion, including religion itself.

       In these troubled times, it is important to understand this deeply ambiguous relation between religion and art, and art's most problematic involvement in religious politics almost everywhere in the secular world. Today, when the grip of organized religion is rapidly loosening in the liberal west, art has increasingly come to replace it as a new source of meaning, coherence and legitimacy; the artists are our new 'gurus' who help us unravel and interpret the complexities of  a globalized, technocratic and atomized world, an unprecedented world, since the middle ages. These are the New Worlds that have opened up as a consequence of digital revolution, and in the dawn of this technological Renaissance, humanity stands on the brink of the old world again, in awe with itself .

    And this is where the insecurities of organized religion is revealed. Just as it came into conflict with the new discourse of progress that challenged its stability in the early modern world--i.e science, the lives of Galileo and Bruno are illustrative of this mortal abrasion--in a post -Renaissance culture, it has to define itself against the new, legitimizing force of art; now more than ever, when art has decoupled itself from its old master, religion, and is an alternative meta-narrative, displacing that of religion. As a meta-narrative it gives life its meaning and organizing principle: e.g rock music becomes the new religion of the secular youth.

  As a result of Reformation, Enlightenment and Capitalism in the last few centuries, we saw the fragmentation of traditional societies everywhere and the rise of the radically lonely individual, stripped of the certitudes of collective existence. Religion is the representative of that old, communal collectivity, where as art speaks for the solitary individual, the marginalized individual, the anxious, neurotic man of Edvard Munch, terrified to confront the core of his own insignificance and mortality. Religion was originally meant to be a cure for this condition, but over the years of crisis of its legitimacy, it has given rise to a few neuroses of its own; namely, the rage-filled, fundamentalist terror world-wide.

The Sceam,1893, Edvard Munch: Man Staring at His Own Nothingness
http://theartist.me/collection/oil-painting/der-schrei-der-natur-the-scream-of-nature/

   The rivalry between religion and art is essentially a conflict of principles: art is intensely individualistic, hence, subversive, perpetually undermining the inherited values and  moralities of the community where as religion, its antithetical, conservative force tries to preserve and uphold them to guarantee the perpetuation of the old status quo.  Art, as a consequence, is unpredictable, provocative, and being so, it is revolutionary; artists, everywhere the eccentric, outspoken and alienated representatives of individual conscience, against the homogenizing pressures of  religion and state.

Religion, as the bastion of  conservatism, hardly tolerates dissent, individual quirk or non- conformism, which are fertilizing ingredients for art. Religion coaxes us to 'fit in', art encourages us to 'drop out' , so that it can inspire us to look for new ways of integration and social coherence.
Artists are essentially irreligious. They are spiritual instead: the way Rumi is spiritual, or for that matter, Dylan, Lennon, or Kurosawa is; Tagore, Shakespeare or the Romantics are; Beethoven is spiritual where as Bach religious. These troubled, alienated and amoral individuals--some of whom had stirred up the most infamous personal scandals in their times-- are the prophets of modern man's anguished condition which religion can hardly fathom with its outmoded and simplifying tools. And, the more it fails in its task of giving the baffling, new world the explanation it impatiently asks for, the angrier and more frustrated it grows with the world, unleashing waves of punitive violence upon it.

        And still, religion remains the anodyne of the herd in most parts of the world; with its high, wide road straight and clearly visible from its beginning to the end, it demands a lot less, internally, out of its follower, because it is a set of externally imposed rules that are rigid, formalistic and uniform. Salvation is more or less guaranteed if you stick to the tenets. For some, it could be staying away from certain kinds of meats; for others, praying for so many times a day.
 The spiritual road, on the contrary, winding, narrow and filled with tortuous bends and turns, can throw you off course altogether. It is an internal, subjective process--evolving, growing, sometimes dialectically--within each individual. There is no promise of redemption on this road; personal enlightenment, if you are tenacious and lucky, is the most that might come to you. Art is the flickering torch that illuminates this treacherous trajectory, at rare, blessed moments. Religion as a system is so self-sufficient that it does not need anything other than itself. Naturally, it reacts with intolerance when individuals or groups ignore its magnificent power and defect to the other side, seduced by the enemy's beauty.

           So every time a rock stadium is bombed in England or France, a Charlie Hebdo office is ripped by cynical violence, a Salman Rushdie or M.F Hussain has to live in self-imposed exile to escape assassination attempts at home, theatre screens are burned to stall the release of films that the religious establishment disapproves of, when the media forums are ablaze with debate over responsibility, it would be judicious to remember the root of the crisis in the field of dicourse, rather than practice; it would be foolish to see them as failures of intelligence and security, of governance and political appeasement in general, because the assault is symbolic, just as the warfare itself is more symbolic than literal.
         Socrates drank poison to defend the legitimacy of his personal conviction, refusing to compromise with the dominant power that attempted to neutralize the firepower of his radical thinking. That legacy gave us the Renaissance and eventually, Modernity, a couple of millennia later.

 We are not heroes, true, but we too are humans, not very far from Socrates' all too human rebellion against ignorance and compromise. Not surrendering to insane violence is important.


     
 

Art for Life's Sake

'' April is the cruellest month, breeding 
Lilacs out of the dead land''
                              T.S Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922

   In view of the global headlines, dominating the media over the first seven days of the month, one couldn't agree more with the most influential poetic text of the last century: April 2017 indeed has turned out to be the cruellest month in the chronicle of global violence in recent times. The underground train explosion in Moscow left us sick in the stomach, and hot on its heels came the early morning horror of the deadly gas attack in Syria.
Numbed to the centre of our consciousness, we saw children choked stiff to death, like twisted wax dolls, foaming in their mouths. A young father, holding his dead twins in both his arms, delicately, as if they were fragile toys, was seen posing in front of a cell phone camera, with the cold composure of the temporarily insane, giving his cousin purposeful instructions, '' film it, film it! We need to show it to the world''.
  Eliot wrote The Wasteland  as his response to the dystopic reality of inter- war Europe. The pervasive political trauma and anxiety, compounded with the young poet's personal neurosis, gave birth to the most terrifyingly accurate prophecy of the imminent inferno that included everything from the blitzkrieg to Hiroshima, with the fall of Paris, Vienna and the apparently unending siege of  the major urban centres of Europe in between. Those are the cherished symbols of Western history and heritage since the Middle Ages--carrying the scars of the Crusades, the living monuments of the Humanism of the Renaissance and Enlightenment-- that were ransacked by the modern-day Vandals of Nazi affiliation:

  ''Falling towers
  Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria
  Vienna, London
   Unreal''

That is two millennia of knowledge, civilization and human achievement razed to nothingness by Fascist aggression. Like a terrified Aeneas on the run, Eliot flees the burning shores of Europe to seek  reparation to the damages, caused by Western imperialist violence, in the ancient spirituality of the Upanishadas, in its enduring message of peace, compassion and generosity. The coda of The Wasteland is a random series of neurotic visions of a disintegrating reality that is finally salvaged by the incantatory chanting of 'Shantih'.

The cultural history of Inter-war  Europe is filled with such powerful and influential interpretations of a reality that defeats the human capacity to imagine evil. Take Picasso's Guernica  for instance. In June 1937, Picasso finished painting the Modernist classic in response to another April tragedy: the bombing of the Spanish city of Guernica during the civil war. It was his anguished creativity reacting to George Steer's eyewitness account of the incident. So instead of sipping his morning coffee with a heavy heart and feeling paralysed by helpless rage, he chose to make it the subject of his next painting: a composition in monochrome that arrests the moment of the collapse of  a city to immortalize it in the collective consciousness of the twentieth century, as a metaphor for the crumbling of the values of civilization and humanity itself.

Guernica: The civilization in the throes of death


Art is important in times of savage destruction because it stands for what is uniquely and indestructibly human; it affirms the values of civilization against the brute force of animal aggression; it is an antithesis of barbarism that evinces the highest standards of beauty and order that humanity is capable of. It is a statement of resistance against chaos.

So whether it is Yeates' personal vision of apocalypse, in a world rapidly descending down the spiral of anarchy and the advent of the monstrous Anti- Christ ('The Second Coming',1919) or the collective resistance of Dada to the bourgeois ideals of conventional rationality, nationalism and capitalist wealth-creation, through their revolutionary aesthetics of cultivated irrationality, nonsense and a radically revised perception of reality as an anti-war/ anti-bourgeois protest, or even Chaplin's ironic critique of political dictatorship and celebration of universal brotherhood and people's power in The Great Dictator, (1940),  the first four decades of the last century has been devoted to a radical, intense and  deeply anguished understanding of the absurd reality around,as if, 'Twenty centuries of stony sleep' that was 'vexed to a nightmare' had woken up the best minds of the time to the pain of a fatal cramp and their art was their desperate, anguished cry.

This is no longer true. Unlike the artistic visionaries of inter- war Europe, who interpreted the last breath of a dying world-order through their brazen art, we see no such aesthetic effort today when the world is teetering on the brink of another geopolitical crisis of equal gravitas, when there is every indication of a tectonic shift in the post-Cold war balance of power.

Carnage, genocide, hijacks, refugees, terror-attacks, ethnic conflicts are so normal these days that it would take another Bertolt Brecht, with his new age Alienation Effect to sensitize the world to the true depths of its evil. These are forms of violence inconceivable even for the most daring of the Modernist avant garde minds. Today we see art standing powerless  and mute in the face of the gruesomeness of experience.

Perhaps no art is capable of capturing the true horrors of the technologically enabled disasters of Hiroshima, 9/11 or Syria. Just as no poetry was possible after Auschwitz, no Wilfred Owen, or Isaac Rosenberg could have captured the sheer horror of concentration camps-- after all, how to romanticize the dismembered bodies of the victims in a post-Holocaust wasteland?--the absolute dehumanization of techno-warfare has exhausted all romantic possibilities of war where there are no more honour- codes, no more rules of engagement.
Where is the poetry in the poison mushroom above Hiroshima where human flesh simply evaporated under the heat of nuclear fission? In the toxic, radioactive air infusing death in the bones of the unborn generations ? In the bodies hurling themselves out of the eightieth floor windows to escape the inferno of a melting World Trade Center, in the undying hope to live? In the bodies of children, stiff with rigor mortis, who never woke up from their fateful sleep in an obscure town in Syria? Children of a lesser god, were they?

And yet, it is to art that we turn to, when we have survived the worst of disasters, even after a part of our soul is dead and torn away. When life gives up hope to make sense of  the bottomless pit of suffering around us, it is art that offers meaning; sounds sentimental, doesn't it?
Zohra band, an all girl ensemble from the war-torn Afghanistan performed in front of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, on 20 January, 2017. A group of 30 something musicians--girls aged between 13 and 30--performed Beethoven's 9th Symphony, an invincible anthem of universal solidarity and peace. It wasn't easy, doing it in Afghanistan, where the radical Islamic sects denounce performing music in public, especially by women. Under the Taliban regime, music was banned altogether. Even the band members had to defy social censure and death threats to continue rehearsals in Kabul.

Negin Khapalwak, the quiet figure of resistance and triumph

  Demurely dressed, her face covered in a veil, Negin Khapalwak, the first woman conductor of Afghanistan, with her baton, becomes a figure of protest and things beyond: she and her girls show us a way to survive the worst, to resist death through art, making it a statement of human idealism against the irredeemable reality of catastrophe which too, is man-made. Art, in this context, transcends its aesthetic function and becomes  a moral act. An act coterminous with life itself in its race against death.
We are waiting for our deliverance. Still. 

Power over Themselves

This might be a good opportunity to pause and think.
About what?
Well, in the middle of the mayhem of discounted shopping, happy hours at the poshest pub in town, the endless run of romantic comedies on daytime television, a lethal overdose of Jennifer Aniston and Amy Adams, it is hard to forget that another of the so-called 'Day's is around the corner: Women's Day.
Everywhere the media is abuzz with discussions centred on women's safety, women's rights, women's health, with multinational corporations exerting subtle pressure on our dads, husbands, sons and lovers to be nice to us, women, this once-a-year at least. In other words, every one seems to be cashing in on the immense commercial opportunity such a well timed egalitarianism might open up. The image that it constructs, of the modern woman, in the process, happens to be totally silly and vacuous as a consequence.
A woman comes off as a creature who has to be endlessly protected, monitored, and infantilized by the state and society in order for her to survive in this adverse world. Mary Wollstonecraft, the great grandmother of sexual revolution in the west, lamented precisely this sorry state of affairs back in the 1790s in her A Vindication of the Rights of Women. the more things change, the more they remain the same, don't they?

Mary Wollstonecraft: the Great Grandmother of Modern Western Feminism
Picture Courtesy: http://www.feministsforlife.org/herstory/marywollstonecraft/

                           

What all this commercially fuelled effort to prioritize woman-centric products and services does, in a self-defeating way, is to construct an inescapable and insurmountable matrix of what Betty Friedan called 'the feminine mystique'--the trappings of femininity that help perpetuate its passive and intellectually bankrupt stereotype. Interestingly, the liberated woman, downing a drink or two with her girl gang is just another extension of that safe stereotype. It poses no real threat to the patriarchal status quo. It is like  a child's mimicry of an adult activity while the grown ups indulgently look on, at least until the child turns violent and starts damaging property.
And what happens when the child gets out of hand?  Genuine subversion of conventional morality, a radical reorganization of the status quo: revolution, in short.
Try to remember what the suffragists did at the beginning of the last century and the scale of public outcry it provoked. Think about the media hostility that was unleashed on the Second Wave activists who were simply asking for the right to be recognized as equals in every sphere of individual and collective existence. Nothing wrong with that demand, right?
In  recent past, we still remember the Riot Grrrls  manifesto with its extreme aesthetics; it is a different matter that the movement failed and fizzled out within a decade,and even on purely aesthetic grounds it was never particularly promising, still a failed revolution does not become politically irrelevant and pointless, just because it failed.


What is common to all these feminist initiatives is a determination to forcibly appropriate the means of power: political, economic, social and cultural. Practical and discursive.
They were just trying to lay claim to what is inalienably theirs: their own bodies and minds. And dominant power never tolerates such disobedience, such genuinely subversive agenda undertaken by  the governed class. It would arrest and force-feed a suffragette on hunger strike; it would shoot down an activist who tries to introduce literacy among the young girls in a remote tribal province, and more subtly but equally insidiously, shout 'slut' or 'dyke' in the face of a feminist punk rocker or try to stall the release of a film made by a woman director because it dares to go where the angels fear to tread: female fantasy and sexuality. The official reason cited for the decision is that the film is 'lady-oriented' which can harm the moral health of an 'incredible' nation.
'Lady oriented'? Is it an apologetic euphemism for a murkier 'woman-centric'?( Let's not even go as far as gynocentric)  The way the embarrassed Victorians whispered about 'the lady parts'?
Patriarchy has always remained scared of the power of fantasy. A woman's imagination is the true terrorist, the marauding mercenary that detonates the deadliest of the explosives to raze its most complexly constructed facades to the ground. And it is the most imaginatively gifted among us-- the woman artist-- who undertakes this task: to enunciate the collective fantasy of femininity to live in a freer world where the barriers and boundaries restricting us have been conquered. The Virginia Woolfs, The Sylvia Plaths, The Amrita Shergils, the Lady Gagas are doing just that.
In her famous 1975 essay Laura Mulvey ('Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema') pointed out that the default subject-position in popular culture is inevitably gendered male, and the gaze every time is essentially a male gaze that interprets the cinematic experience in commercial cinema. This subjectivity is shaped by patterns of desire that are socially constructed and phallic. It renders the woman into a passive  object that becomes a playground for its phallic fantasies. This, I think, is true of the entire history of  western culture itself where the female is a fragmented male, a castrated male. Impotent, in the most profound sense of the term. Eve, after all, is carved out of the rib of Adam. She is secondary and derivative in status. Passive and silent, in an ideal world. Randomly look at  three celebrated art-works post Renaissance: Titian's Venus of Urbino, Da vinci's Mona Lisa, Picasso's Les Damoiselles Avignon. The woman = a passive subject; the male = the active artist with agency. Isn't the equation water tight?

Subject Picasso, Object Women
courtesy: https://www.moma.org/explore/conservation/demoiselles/

 Changing this paradigm involves a 180° turning around of the perspective, which is not easy. The female avant-garde is a lone crusader, a frontier- explorer who breaks new aesthetic grounds to make hitherto uncharted areas of consciousness habitable for her sisters and daughters. Sometimes, she knows that she is destined to be defeated: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath had to live with the stigma of insanity for being 'different'; Kathleen Hannah had to regularly endure verbal violence form sexist hooligans among her audience during performances, Wollstonecraft had to go to the edge of suicide to know that a woman must pay the price for being fiercely original in a deeply reactionary society.

And yet, how difficult is it to understand a woman's soul? The unfortunate mystification surrounding it is ancient and trans-cultural. Just break on through to the other side. It is simple and beautiful: the mind of a woman who is creative and free. That is what makes a woman beautiful-- her independence and imagination. Her intellectual and emotional adventures: as mothers, daughters, lovers, or artists. As thinking humans.Without it, her jewels are futile. Do not get us diamonds or exotic holidays for Women's Day. Just listen to us. Understand us. Gift us your empathy and respect, because as Molly Neuman said, we are not anti-boy, we are just pro-girl.