Category: creative writing

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PARIS: Grotesque

 

When Victor Hugo wrote the Hunchback of Notre-Dame in 1830, he did so with the purpose of reminding his contemporaries of the importance of preserving Gothic Architecture.


 

“Notre-Dame de Paris”, the Gothic cathedral on the Ile de la Cité in Paris, was the novel’s real main protagonist. After the French Revolution of 1791 much of the cathedral’s religious imagery was damaged or destroyed.

 
Built around 1200, the cathedral featured on its façade a myriad of grotesques, of chimeas and gargouilles: monsters, creatures of hellish phantasies that, not unlike a comic strip, served to educate the illiterate population, illustrate the creatures of the Bible and of folkloristic lore, and instill fear of God and the Devil.

 
“The book will kill the building!” The arrival of the printing press and the aera of Enlightment however rendered the grotesques superfluous. Writers, Hugo complained, drove architects into oblivion. He believed that buildings were like books, recordings of history – until the arrival of the printing press. The foremost ideas of every generation would no longer be written on the same material. The stone book, so solid and lasting, would give way to the paper book.


 

Ironically, his novel, thanks to the printing press, became a bestseller. Doubly ironically, its popularity led to a revival of Gothic architecture. Renovations at Notre-Dame were undertaken, to which the cathedral’s current appearance is owed.

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PARIS: La Petite Mort at Père Lachaise


Victor Noir was a hero. A journalist writing for “Le Marsaillaise”, a newspaper critical of the reign of Napoleon III, he dueled with “Le Prince Imperial” Bonaparte. The prince, loyal to Napoleon III, had insulted the journalists of another magazine, with whom young Victor, only 22, felt solidary.

At 14:00 on January 10th 1870, a single shot was fired.

Victor Noir collapsed, dead.

History avenged Victor. While Le Prince Imperial Bonaparte perished seven years later in the Zulu wars in far-away South Africa, Victor’s burial at the Père Lachaise cemetery was attended by 100,000 people. His tombstone, sculpted by master Jules Dalou, is a bronze replica of Victor’s dead body as it lies stretched out peacefully: his high hat next to him, a pink dahlia in his hand, his crotch bulging in the manner of a true hero.

Victor Noir quickly turned into a sex symbol, a posthumous Casanova. Women who kiss his bronze lips, or rub his crotch, nose or feet will have their sex life spiced up, or so the lore goes. And it shows – in the past 140 years, his bronze crotch, nose and feet have been polished shiny – to the extent that in 2004 his grave was fenced off to prevent further damage. One is left to wonder: is the sex-life of Parisians so depressing that they have to take to rubbing or even straddling a bronze statue, or is it extra exciting because they are doing exactly that?

The fence has been taken down in the meantime – supposedly following protests of the female half of the population of Paris. Nothing should stand in the way to a blissful sex life!

“What if all this is not true, but every time someone rubs his crotch, Victor has an orgasm?” K says to me as we pay our respect at his grave.

“Then he went to heaven.” I say, rubbing his crotch, just to be on the safe side.

Victor, the grand hero, has died La Petite Mort.

La Petite Mort, the little death, was a term used to describe the brief state of loss of consciousness before the word orgasm was invented. There is however another bronze sculpture at the cemetery of Père Lachaise, which eternalizes the passed-away not in a state of peaceful sleep, but in this moment between joy and pain, where feelings are so intense that time is suspended: eternity.

The cemetery of Père Lachaise was opened on 21 May 1804 under Napoleon I and under the premise that “every citizen has the right to be buried regardless of race or religion”. And so, in this vast cemetery, where the graves of so many celebrities are found, there are little innocent angels next to Victor Noir, and fallen soldiers, and grieving virgins and mothers, and even a chair.

There is a heaven for all of us.

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Sarajevo Roses

25 years ago, on April 5th 1992, 24 year old Suada Dilberovic, a Muslim student at the faculty of Medicine, participated in a peace rally in Sarajevo. Up to 100 000 people of all Yugoslavian ethnic groups had gathered for this march, held in response to repeated attacks of Serbian paramilitary groups on multi-ethnical Bosnia and Hercegovina. As the marchers crossed the bridge over the Miljacka river, they were ambushed by Serbian snipers. Suada and her 34-year old catholic compatriot Olga Sucic were shot and killed: the first casualties of the siege of Sarajevo.

By the end of April 1992, the Serbian Army had encircled Sarajevo, positioning their tanks on the mountain tops surrounding the city, where a mere eight years before the Olympic winter games had been held. The Olympic bob sleighs and the ski jumping hills turned into killing fields from where mortars and artillery were fired. Machine guns aimed at bedroom windows and at the living rooms of the city below.

13,954 people died. The siege only ended on February 29 1996, a mere forty years after the horrors of WWII and the holocaust, and the world said: “Never again!” again.

25 years after the siege of Sarajevo, the scars are still visible. Some shrapnel grates were not repaired, but colored red, as a reminder, a memorial, a warning of what nationalism, war and hate do to people. They are called “Sarajevo roses”.

Visiting Sarajevo is not a fun holiday in the sun. It is an encounter with history and culture, impressive, thought-arousing, and captivating. Visiting Sarajevo means learning of history and human nature. And of the human capacity to overcome and reconcile: In 2007, Suada was awarded a posthumous Doctor of Medicine by the University of Sarajevo.

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Sarajevo Blues: So beautiful it hurts

 

Sarajevo is a scarred city.  There are craters from mortar attacks in the streets, and bullet holes in the facades of residential buildings. There are cemeteries at every corner it seems, most are Muslim, some Jewish, some are Orthodox, some Catholic, for faith could not stop bullets, neither during the Siege of Sarajevo 1992-1994, nor during WWII, nor WWI, which began in Sarajevo in 1914.

Sevdah is the traditional music of Bosnia, stemming from the time of the Ottoman Empire. The name Sevdah comes from the Arab word for melancholy, Sawda: Sad poems telling stories of love forbidden or lost, of grief and loss, of heart ache and pain, traditionally sung by women in the Arabic modal systems of Hijaz, as are the muezzin’s calls for prayers.

“Sevdah will be sung after any war,” Zaim Imamovic said, before he died in 1994 at the age of 74. He was to Sevdah music what Carlos Gardel is to Tango. Everybody in Sarajevo knows the words of the Sevdalinkas, the songs, and they cry as they sing, as they dance.

 

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On Birding

I have always felt attracted to birds from a purely philosophical perspective: After reading the ancient Persian Sufi epic The Conference Of The Birds by Farid Uddin Attar, the idea that birds were creatures of high spirituality was planted in my mind – and left to sprout in secrecy. The first time I felt excitement watching a bird was when I almost stumbled over a hoopoe, the flamboyant leader of the Conference, in a public park in Dubai. I was instantly mesmerized by its beauty, the intricacy of its plumage and elegant elusiveness.

In the years since this first hoopoe sighting, my passion for birds grew and I would not content myself with the chance-encounter anymore, but was prepared to venture further into nature and solitude, invest in binoculars and photo-equipment, in long distance migration and bird books. I grew into a full a full-fledged birder.

Most of my friends take birding for the epitome of my eccentricity. To them birder sounds about as exciting as stampcollector. But they don’t have the slightest idea about birds: Birds aren’t beautiful things one collects in a photo album, a quaint old-fashioned romanticism.  Birds are wild, untamed creatures, and some of them are outright dangerous.

In 1932, for example, Australia, armed to their teeth with machine guns, went to war against the belligerent indigenous population of the Emus. Hostilities went on for a month until the Australians yielded defeat. The Great Emu War of 1932 was won by the Emus.

Or, a birding trip might easily lead into disaster, as happened to me a couple of months ago, when in search for hoopoes in the African Savanna, my jeep got stuck and I found myself tracking by foot through big 5 country, facing buffaloes and elephants, who were only scared away by the firing of a gun. Buffalo or Emu, who’s the bigger badass now?

All things taken into consideration, the b-word might soon sound as hot as free rock climbing.

There are many noble things to be said about birding: it sharpens eyesight, when staring motionless into verdant nature for hours on end, and hearing, when listening for the tweet-tweet-tweet, hooh-hooh, che-che-che-che, the rattling and the hissing. It turns upright citizens into valient ecological activists when the habitat of birds is endangered. And it teaches patience and humility, when the one bird one had set out to watch simply never shows up. Or no bird at all shows up.

But most importantly, birding makes people treasure the moment. In this world of instant gratification, of phony vanity and virtual reality, the sighting of a creature of pure and honest beauty is nothing less than a blessing.

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The Puszta: How Vast This World

How vast this world in which we move,
And thou, how small thou art, my dove!
But if thou didst belong to me,
The world I would not take for thee.

Thou art the sun, but I the night,
Full of deep gloom, deprived of light.
But should our hearts together meet,
A glorious dawn my life would greet.

Ah! look not on me, close thine eyes,
My soul beneath thy glances dies;
Yet, since thou can’st not love me, dear,
Let my bereft soul perish here.

In the poems of the Hungarian poet Petöfi Sandor, the immense flatness of the great Eastern European Steppe, the Puszta, is a place of breathing, of grandeur, beauty and freedom. A place both humbling and inspiring, instilling patriotic pride and devotion, but, at the same time, passionate love.

Petöfi wrote love poems to his wife Julia, rendering his love inseparable from his love for the steppe. He dedicated his life to the Magyar struggle for independence from the Austrian Empire, both in word and deed: he composed the National song and joined the Hungarian Revolutionary Army. He vanished on the battlefield at only 26.

 

I’ll be a tree, if you are its flower
Or a flower, if you are the dew
I’ll be the dew, if you are the sunbeam
Only to be united with you.

My little girl, if you are the heaven
I shall be a star above on high.
My little girl, if you are hell-fire,
To unite us, damned I shall die.

Petöfi’s body was never found. Some Hungarians believe that he resurrected, like a Messiah. Some say, that he never died, that he is only asleep, somewhere in the endless planes of the Puszta.

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Vienna: Cherubs

By daylight, walking through the center of Vienna feels like a journey into the glorious past of an empire: the palaces with their cheerful rococo facades, playgrounds for the little cherubs, cute little creatures, half angels, half cupids.


But wait for night fall, when the streetlights are turned off, and only the illuminated windows cast shadows on the deserted streets.

The cherubs are still playing in the dark, innocent.

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VIENNA: FIRE IN THE PALACE OF JUSTICE

90 years ago, in 1927, the Palace Of Justice, seat of the Supreme Court, was set on fire. Rightwing supporters of the Front Fighters’ Union, which counted later war criminal Adolf Eichmann among its members, clashed with members of the Schutzbund, the paramilitary organization of the social democratic party. The day before, a district court had unjustly acquitted members of the Front Fighters’ Union from shooting and killing two innocent bystanders, a 40 year old and a 8 year old, in another confrontation with the Schutzbund.

These were the days of the Civil War, which led the young Republic of Austria into its demise: Austria was swallowed by fascism, integrated into Hitler’s Third Reich and buried under ashes in the WWII.

84 people vanished in the fire. 60 millions in WWII and the holocaust.

In 2017 the Palace of Justice sparkles with gold again. Trust in law and justice seems undisturbed.
The eyes of Justitia are blind as she sits enthroned, holding on to her sword, and clutching a book.
What book is she reading, blindly?

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Istanbul: Lesson in Sufism

He serves tea. As he balances the tray with the bulbous tea glasses, he spills the tea. His left leg is shorter, arched like a sickle, so when he walks he sways like a boat on choppy sea. I notice his crooked left leg only now. His grey suit is a few sizes too big, crumpled, and wrinkles around his ankles. It looks even older than himself. Threadbare at the elbows and knees, it shrouds his body rather than dresses it. It blurs the details of his physique. As he sets the tray on the table in front of me, I smell tobacco and terpentine, and the dusty scent of old age. His hair is grey, his face wrinkled, his moustache white. But his lopsided smile is boyish, his blue eyes are fresh, sparkling almost. I cannot remember how to say “Thank you” in Turkish. So I bow and mumble “Moteshakkaram”.  I speak a little Persian and hope that people in Istanbul, or at least he, Avni, will understand me.

He takes a seat next to me on a shaky chair. It’s a jumbled ensemble of a table and three chairs. Maybe these are valuable antiques, were they restored. But they are splintered and skew like Avni’s leg, and spotted with colors from his atelier, his painter’s workshop in steep, cobbled Siraselviler Street. The sun is baking the city, but here, in front of Avni’s open workshop door, it’s shady and cool. A soft breeze tousles his hair as I feel strands of my hair lift off my head and dance in the air.

I gaze through the open door inside at the painting I want to buy. It’s just a tiny canvas, hardly bigger than a the tray he had carried the tea with, suspended high up on the wall. It is dwarfed by the big frames hanging next to it, or leaning against the wall below. The little painting could be just a coral white stain on an ocean-blue backdrop. Or it could be the shape of a dancing Dervish.

“Mavlana. “ Avni says.

“Mavlana!” I repeat and put my hand on my chest. Mavlana, the whirling Sufi poet. “I love.” Avni must have understood the word “love”, for he nods his head enthusiastically and starts reciting. I don’t understand Turkish, but it must be a poem by Rumi, the Master, Mavlana, as the Turkish call him.

It’s a rhythmic singsong that reflects the mountainous streets of Istanbul, this dizzying web of narrow lanes, uphill, downhill, jammed with cars and buses, crowded with bearded men, high heeled women, and children, with cats and dogs, and filled with laughter and calls for prayer, and with the scents of cumin, of Shisha, and of cat piss. I do not understand the words as Avni proclaims the poem, lifting his arms as if dancing in trance, as if painting on an imaginary canvas, but my heart is filled with peace, enriched. I don’t understand the words, but I understand Avni.  And as I look into his wild blue eyes, strangely, I know he understands me.

 

 

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ROOMS WITHOUT A VIEW

 

On this side of Johannesburg, the streets are lined with giant trees, chestnuts, oaks and jacarandas, that shelter from the late summer showers. Instead, their leaves and petals rain down on to the asphalt.

In the silence of Houghton and Saxon Wold, the streets are lined with walls that hide the villas and palaces behind, crowned with electric wire. Their sliding gates, made from steal or iron, open like mouths to swallow the shiny BMWs and Jaguars, and close right behind, affording but a glimpse of the meticulous lawns inside, the pools, the children’s swings and bicycles.

Tall and insurmountable, they barricade the view on those who wander outside, in silence: The domestics in white shirts and blue aprons, and the men from security who sit and wait outside, 24/7.

 

Tendani Mukololi lives on the other side of Johannesburg, in the crowded, squatted Vodacom-tower, without electricity or garbage collection. But every day for the past twelve years he has been sitting in his little hut in Houghton, guarding, surveilling, protecting what he cannot see.

“Aren’t you afraid of me? I am a black man!” He asks, as I stop to for a chat.

“No,” I answer. “You are from security.”