Dreams of the Fairytale

I was once that dark haired child that danced and sang and lived in a world of fairy stories and make-believe, maybe because my mother told me I looked like snow white and I believed her.

Once upon a time as a queen sits sewing at her window, she pricks her finger on her needle and three drops of blood fall on the snow that had fallen on her ebony window frame. As she looks at the blood on the snow, she says to herself, "Oh, how I wish that I had a daughter that had skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony". Soon after that, the queen gives birth to a baby girl who has skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony. They name her Princess Snow White.

That little girl, who still lives inside me, spent hours telling herself stories, dreaming up castles, princes, mythical creatures and as she grew older that didn’t change- perhaps she no longer dreamt of living in a castle, of meeting Prince Charming or escaping into the waves on a white unicorn but nonetheless, she continued to dream, to ride away into a world of make-believe.

as she rode they thinned out more and more, the beeches and oak-trees and bushes of golden gorse giving place to solitary groups of wind twisted pines, with here and there boulders of grey rock pushing their way through the tussocks of heather. To the cold fresh tang of the frost there was added now the salt tang of the sea.

Sometimes those beautiful stories and enchanted forests would be hacked away by black nightmares of real life and that dark haired child would want to run away, dancing further and further into her imagination, sliding between trees and swimming across glass lakes to a world more beautiful than the one before her, sometimes the dreams would slip away and reveal a world brighter and more brilliant than that she could ever have conjured and she would leave her magical kingdom to follow the track of adventure, to experience sights and sounds and smells of a new kingdom, one that would enrich her own walls of imagination and she would sometimes dance and sing and let the joy she'd carried into her heart overflow into the world.
Sometimes, she'd stop in hertracks, faced by the nightmares of 'real' life, and retreat to her own world where she knew she would always be safe.Grasping hands and fingers would pull and drag at her body, willing her back into their world of horrors and sometimes she could be brave and return to face the demons and fight battles as she had done years ago with dragons and witches.
She longs for a companion, someone to share in the dance, the song, to make love with under a sky full of stars, moons and planets, to melt away into a wash of colours; someone who would not laugh as they lay back and point out pictures in the clouds.
As she grew older, she started working on that mud brick wall between the two realities, a wall that would keep the monsters out of her world and stop her dreams and mythical beasts straying into the nightmare and she musters up courage to hop onto that wall and face the shades of grey ahead.
I say to myself: they are two “me’s”: the dreamer and the observer. They communicate and accept each other. Each one serves a different purpose: one is the sweetness of the dream, the other is the bitterness of life.

The Evil of the 'cause'

"'You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?' She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists ad shouting identical syllables in unison."
Milan Kundera

Whether we chant for revolution or for the continuation of a regime or ideology- nothing encapsulates the destruction of the soul more than that collective madness they so often label a 'cause'

- and so we conquer our fear

"The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

The more indifferent people are to politics, to the interests of others, the more obsessed they become with their own faces. The individualism of our time.

Not being able to fall asleep and not allowing oneself to move: the marital bed.

If high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as such belongs to high culture and not to childish prattle. You remind me of the young men who supported the Nazis or communists not out of cowardice or out of opportunism but out of an excess of intelligence. For nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought… You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers.

In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.

How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when you neither share their suffering nor their joys? When you know that you don’t belong among them?... our century refuses to acknowledge anyone’s right to disagree with the world…All that remains of such a place is the memory, the ideal of a cloister, the dream of a cloister…

Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border has become unrecognizable.

The majority of people lead their existence within a small idyllic circle bounded by their family, their home, and their work... They live in a secure realm somewhere between good and evil. They are sincerely horrified by the sight of a killer. And yet all you have to do is remove them from this peaceful circle and they, too, turn into murderers, without quite knowing how it happened.

The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order. Or to put it the other way around: the desire for order is a virtuous pretext, an excuse for virulent misanthropy.

A long time a go a certain Cynic philosopher proudly paraded around Athens in a moth-eaten coat, hoping that everyone would admire his contempt for convention. When Socrates met him, he said: Through the hole in your coat I see your vanity. Your dirt, too, dear sir, is self-indulgent and your self-indulgence is dirty.

You are always living below the level of true existence, you bitter weed, you anthropomorphized vat of vinegar! You’re full of acid, which bubbles inside you like an alchemist’s brew. Your highest wish is to be able to see all around you the same ugliness as you carry inside yourself. That’s the only way you can feel for a few moments some kind of peace between yourself and the world. That’s because the world, which is beautiful, seems horrible to you, torments you and excludes you.

If the novel is successful, it must necessarily be wiser than its author. This is why many excellent French intellectuals write mediocre novels. They are always more intelligent than their books.

By a certain age, coincidences lose their magic, no longer surprise, become run-of-the-mill.

Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence."
— Milan Kundera

Media Games

This morning, I woke at 4.30am and very foolishly reached habitually for my iPhone so I could check twitter for the latest news before going back to sleep.

I was jerked awake by what I read- helicopters circling Damascus, armed vehicles escorting the President and his family to the airport, the Revolutionary flag being raised over the Syrian State TV building, bloody clashes between loyalists and revolutionaries. It was almost like I had awoken into a nightmare.

In a frenzy of fear and agitation, I trawled the web for some more reliable references to the 'fall of Damascus' but was unable to find anything on any mainstream media site including al-Jazeera.

I continued to follow the increasingly alarming messages on twitter until I judged it a reasonable time to call Damascus and start screeching down the phone....scenarios of my friends and loved ones being strung up, dragged out of their beds an beaten flooded my mind but I knew I was simply scaring myself. N answered my call, sleep very evident in his voice, wondering why I was calling so early and I explained what I had been reading, he laughed and assured me all was well but would call me later when he'd found out more.

When he hung up, I was able to go back to sleep for a while but was still plagued with nightmares.

Later, I switched on al-Jazeera to see reports on what was 'happening' on Damascus- albeit they were not as sensationalist as those reports I'd seen on twitter but disturbing enough to cause family and friends from all over the world to call N to find out if all was well. He later called me and confirmed all was quiet- even in the supposed epicenter of Kafr Souseh.

But that led me to ask: who would be circulating such alarming and utterly untrue reports? What is the aim?

It would seem that the forces of the Arab Spring have employed the use of the media (particularly social media) to promote the cause and also to spread what can only be called propaganda- when Syrians claim that their president is beating a retreat to the airport or Libyans announce that they captured Saif el Islam Gaddafi and family then this represents a kind of propaganda which actually we are not strangers to- take the reports from the front in the 1967 Arab Israeli war which promised the Egyptian people that advances were being made and victory at hand. In Europe one only need look to the first and second world wars to see both the Allies and the Germans used false reporting via radio to boost morale.

Perhaps we are naive to assume that just because we live in a more technologically advanced age, where news can be transmitted instantly and media organizations have set 'standards' that people will report objectively an not use the media for their own purposes.

Unfortunately, due to increased technology and multiplied media resources it is invariably hard for the individual to sift through all the information we are bombarded with minute by minute but it is also hard for media professionals to decide on which 'eyewitness' reports to believe and which to discount- and therein lies the problem.

- and so we conquer our fear

Wake up UN Security Council?

Syrian activists on Twitter are starting a campaign today with the hashtag #WakeUpUNSC. I have been invited, along with others, to create my own tweets with this tag, in an attempt to make this trend worldwide and presumably this is intended to catch the eye of those with influence enough to get the UNSC to wake up.

Now, asides from questioning whether this will actually achieve anything, there is a more important aspect to consider and those are the implications of foreign intervention. This is a sore point, especially in the Middle East, where foreign intervention has led to a reinstatement of de facto colonialism. Iraq represents an extremely valid case in point. The Washington Post estimated the true cost of the war with Iraq to have been $3 trillion, a number which seems inconceivable but when you look at what it has achieved, one can only lament at whether it was worth the human life and suffering that ensued.

Even sanctions on Iraq in the 90s, had disastrous consequences on the development of the country as John Pilger reported:

"The change in 10 years is unparalleled, in my experience," Anupama Rao Singh, Unicef's senior representative in Iraq, told me. "In 1989, the literacy rate was 95%; and 93% of the population had free access to modern health facilities. Parents were fined for failing to send their children to school. The phenomenon of street children or children begging was unheard of. Iraq had reached a stage where the basic indicators we use to measure the overall well-being of human beings, including children, were some of the best in the world. Now it is among the bottom 20%. In 10 years, child mortality has gone from one of the lowest in the world, to the highest."

One could argue that by effectively disabling a country in such a way, this is serving certain interests which seek to render the region completely impotent, starting with those rich in natural resources and finishing with those of strategic importance.

This post is simply a jumble of my own personal thoughts and reactions but I can only end on the fact that inside Syria itself, though, there has been no call for external military intervention – the people are opposed to any foreign meddling. The very thought of being showered from the sky with bombs and watching your home explode around you seems to me the darkest nightmare anyone can envisage so why are those on the outside wishing it on their brothers and sisters within?

Some Thoughts on Marriage

Arab culture may well have failed by not updating it's beliefs and cultural practices to suit the times we live in. One excellent example of this hypothesis is marriage.
In many Arab countries it is deemed better to marry someone from the same family or clan- often a cousin or other indirect relative, this is done under the premise that a family or clan member will have more in common, their upbringing and attitude to life will be more similar and they are guaranteed to be a 'good' person.

But does this thesis stand in a world where pre-marital relations no longer suffer the stigma they one had? Surely living with someone and intimately aquatinting yourself with their habits, ideas and beliefs is more reliable than taking the word of some distant relative that happens to share the same name?

The traditional retort to that is not all religious persuasions support the idea of premarital relations but that too should be put into it's context: before a time of contraception, families needed some way of assuring that the product of those close encounters would not end up unprovided for. And so the institution or legal agreement of marriage took place. One may go further as to day that it harnessed men's carnal urges into a more pragmatic alliance of families and interests- sex on the proviso that you brought something to the family and the girl. Surely we've moved on from that?