Shifting Fantasy to Imagination

In a world where the promise of life is in depressing contrast with life as it is lived, fantasy reigns as unopposed master of our hopes.

The promise of a job that will make you happy, while paying the rent; the promise of a soul mate, who’ll also be a life partner; the promise of recognition for the things at which you excel; increasingly, the promise of fame, fleeting though we may all, deep down, know it to be. These are the promises that sustain our daily trudge through the day.

The casually handsome man, rubs his perfectly manicured hand across his freshly shaved chin. There is a confident glint in his eye, the cat that got the cream. His beautiful, well toned and sweetly smiling girlfriend kisses him lightly on the lips. The best a man can get.

Attractive, but not abnormally so, the youthful women laugh and pulsate in a spasm of solidarity. One woman stands and walks confidently towards us. The picture behind her blurs into the ether – she is all we see, as the wind blows the long auburn hair. Because you’re worth it.

Sex has always sold. So has success. And confidence. And belonging.

Eat this food and you’ll fall in love. Buy this car and you’ll feel the greatest liberation. Read this magazine and you’ll be part of a community. Buy this watch you and you’ll be successful. Consume this, you will feel better about yourself. It’s what the advertisers have always sold us. They do it very well. And often with a pleasant self-ironic twist.

While the promise of fame through reality television might be somewhat novel, a version of it has always existed – the myth of fame to be found in Hollywood, New York, London – and someone has always profited from it.

Fantasy requires forces beyond our control to align in a particular formation. Sexual fantasies, for example, require the willing participation of another person (or else the breaking of the law), and finding someone who shares ones fantasies, or rather desires the other side of those fantasies, while more greatly facilitated by the internet, is still in the realm of fancy. The fantasy of fame and fortune, while largely achievable with the requisite hard graft, still requires that big break. That great lost beast of a lucky break. While dreams come true for some, on occasion, the fantasy remains nothing more than that for most of us.

Though, the eventual non-fulfilment of fantasy is probably for the best. Fantasies, almost by definition, require the very basis of our existence to shift. They demand an alteration so fundamental to ever really enjoy. Which is why most fantasies, when fulfilled, leave one feeling empty, having lost a measure of hope. We are all too used to celebrities, that most unique species, falling apart before our eyes in self-hate fuelled destruction. The façade crumbles beneath the weight of attention, as there is rarely much to support it.

The hope of fantasy is a false one. It is a spectre, a fault in perception. A sculpture of sand, it is destroyed with little force.

Perhaps more than this, fantasy renders us passive – unable to break out of the stupefying cycle of dreams and dreaming, indulging in our delusions we are left motionless, unseeing of the world around us, unwilling to change anything of it.

There is, however, an alternative. Where fantasy provides a false destination, imagination provides the possibility for real achievement. Where fantasy brings us to an ultimately soulless and empty realisation of ourselves, imagination can fulfil our lives in meaningful and novel ways. Where fantasy leaves us passive, imagination spurs us to act.

It is in imagination that our hope finds structural integrity. To imagine our future is to have it within our grasp. It necessitates that we can understand the possibilities that future presents. Within our comprehension, such potentials are within our power to attain.

Imagination does not require a grandiose hope for the impossible. Rather it seeks to discover how to make the fantastical possible. It is the bridging of the gap between our fantasies and world we inhabit.

Imagination is not the compromise of fantasy, but rather the more solid articulation of hopes, dreams and improbabilities.

If we want to bring positive change to this world, our only weapon of consequence is the clarity and vivacity of our imagination.

Rational, logical building blocks have their place in the creation of a more equal, just or peaceful world, but only in the fulfilment of our imaginations. For if our image of progressively altered society is to be realised, it must exist in this world first. In order to enact a paradigm shift in societal progression towards, say, sustainability or peace, we must be able to imagine a world that prioritises other forms of achievement over the financial, that rewards communal progression rather than personal achievement.

But that world is not on another planet, or with a different six billion odd inhabitants, it is this world, and we must imagine from this stand point first. We must have a foot in our reality – or realities – if we are to envision new ones. But even with this, the primacy of fact becomes a difficult burden to undertake for any who look to a future which might possess new possibilities.

Imagination is the currency of those who work in the creative arts. But it does not belong to them exclusively. Each of us, wherever we are, or who ever we are, has, right now, the power to imagine a life, a world, a society that is a changed and a more perfect articulation of human possibility.

At the intersection between fact, reason and logic on one hand, and fantasy on the other, we find imagination. Surely, a world which values and indulges in imagination in the same manner it does fact, logic, reason and fantasy is already a world half changed, for the better.

- by Neil Keating

Will John Prescott re-shape eating disorders debate?

When I heard the news that John Prescott, the former deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has admitted in his memoirs to suffering from bulimia, I found myself unsurprised. Prescott’s weight has long been the subject of satire, but the more I discover about eating disorders the more convinced I am that serious obesity has less to do with the body than the mind. Why shouldn’t Prescott suffer from an eating disorder? He has all the classic characteristics; he’s an over-achiever, under a lot of pressure and has a serious weight problem. However not being young, thin and female he has challenged our simplistic view of what an eating disorder is and means.

Prescott admits that he doesn’t fulfil the eating disorder stereotype, saying “People normally associate it with young women - anorexic girls, models trying to keep their weight down, or women in stressful situations, like Princess Diana”. It is for this very reason that his revelation is so important. As Diana herself said fifteen years ago in her 1993 eating disorders speech, “many would like to believe that Eating Disorders are merely an expression of female vanity”. To understand eating disorders we must first accept that they aren’t ever just about fitting into a dress, or being like a picture in a magazine, even if some people find these to be triggers that unleash a deeper and more complex self-loathing.

Anorexia, the more famous sister of bulimia and binge eating, has had more press because it is, on a superficial level, easier to understand and, crucially, easier to identify. However, the portrayal of anorexia in the media has only gone further to skew the understanding of eating disorders and their causes. ‘Size zero’ is an unhelpful catchphrase, because it reduces our understanding of anorexia to the level of a fashion dilemma.

As Laurie Penny’s article for the brilliant feminist website The F-Word points out, “Anorexia is a complex psychological disorder, often stemming from deep, long-standing self-esteem issues and triggered by specific personal trauma. […] The ‘size zero’ myth reduces anorexia to a frivolous pique of silly little girls who aren’t clever or mature enough to take proper care of themselves”.

While I commend anything that highlights the prevalence of eating disorders in society, I can’t help but notice that the ‘skinny shock pictures!’ approach of magazines like Heat focus on rich, successful women and portray eating disorders as the reserve of glamorous, airhead females. Whilst spending time in the murky world of pro ana/mia (anorexia/bulimia) chartrooms last year, I learned that for a lot of people eating disorders go hand in hand with personality disorders and/or depression, or are a response to abuse. If you want evidence that eating disorders go beyond a simplistic desire to be thin, just look at an anorexic’s loss of perspective driving them to lose more and more weight, moving to a lower and lower target weight until they reach a point where, even if they desperately want to eat in order to stay alive, their problem has become so intense they are simply unable to consume food. That has nothing to do with fitting into a size eight frock.

Although women do make up the majority, around one in 10 of the UK's 60,000 people reported as suffering from eating disorders are men. The fetishization of women’s bodies is partly responsible for the female focused eating disorder debate, because women’s bodies are seen as up for grabs, sexually and in terms of comment and judgment. On some level the focus on anorexia has been connected with the associations made between glamour, death and violence against women. Could it be that the media culture that brought us the crime scene victims photo shoot on Americas Next Top Model is the same media culture that illustrates the eating disorders debate with pictures of gorgeous emaciated teenagers staring out from sunken eyes that seem to say ‘fuck me, I’m so sexy I’m almost dead’? We are yet to rid our culture of the destructive heroin chic, where ill, thin and dependant are all sexy. Maybe bulimia and over-eating would get greater press coverage if we had an equivalent gluttony glam…

Having found myself increasingly offended by the ‘who ate all the pies’ analysis of bulimia and binge eating, I hope I don’t have to throw my radio out of the window in rage when satirists get their hands on Prescott’s confession. One common mistake is the idea that serious eating disorders have some kind of a weight limit. Many sufferers of bulimia actually gain weight, but still prevails the dangerous myth that to have an eating disorder you must be thin. This perception needs to change if we are ever to help the people who wake up late for work, with swollen faces, burst blood vessels under their eyes, sore throats, chest pain and faster heart rates after a night of binging and vomiting, only to think they don’t have the right to seek help for their problem, because they aren’t underweight.

Many will have heard the joke, ‘I'm half a bulimic – I eat a lot but I don't throw up’ (recently causing controversy when it was bafflingly cracked by the Trade Minister Lord Jones in an after dinner speech), and the bizarre offhand comments people make about wishing they had bulimia so they could eat what ever they desired. John Prescott’s comments in The Times of London are therefore understandable, "I've never confessed it before. Out of shame, I suppose, or embarrassment”. The misconception that bulimia is in some way to do with greed must be dispelled. If someone eats to the point of physical pain, barely tasting the food they are consuming, they are not doing so for pleasure. If somebody engages in this kind of behavior for twenty years without them losing weight, it cannot be misconstrued some kind of stupid quest for attractiveness.

The truth is that very quickly one learns that binging and purging has no purpose; it will not change your body or the way you feel about it. Obviously every sufferer acts with different motivations, but the addictive nature of destructive behaviors makes the bulimic cycle hard to break free from. In a world still so ignorant about a condition that can consume peoples lives, I can only hope John Prescott’s brave decision to go public will finally make us realize that it will take much more than banning size zero models at The London Fashion Week to seriously address the silent eating disorders epidemic.

- by Anna Beecher

Confused Days

The association forms daily

Each yanked towards it, invisibly sewn

A public property no one appreciates

An unseen agreement, manifested

In the oblivious routine of our course

Tattooed by the steps we leave on the ground

It’s what we all have, yet none of us own

The conjoined existence we’ve perfected to slavery

Infinite circles congeal and congest

Impossibly wrapped in a meaningless vine

An all-encompassing stream of sourceless information

Nameless, as collective as the ocean

Ever conscious, never defined

At one single time, the sound of orderly confusion

Of chaos of no-one’s making

Yet everyone’s blame

The soundless decomposition

Of old information

The murderous kiss of time

The seamless script of ill communication

The miniscule classifications of spoken desperation

A collage of couples, singles

And knots too tight to classify

Or be viewed by anyone outside their constriction

In designated anonymity, the asphyxiation

The claustrophobic glee of a motionless stampede

Flattens your lungs

Chokes your eyes

And leaves you hanging, a carcass in twisted momentum

Like a fly, dead, on an endless wall

But which could never move when live

The human connection, constructing its own irrelevance

All customs and logic completely opaque

A food chain of no consumption

Only waste, of words and time

A chart that never stops moving

All the useless vibrations form a straight line

For all these lost years I have charted courses

Made alliances, brokered trade with the heavy tangibility of words

Made maps of paths that succumbed to non-existence

Read people whose language was never mine

My notes made no sense then, their non-meaning drained from them now

The information comes and goes, and plummets through a sieve

As you are left to fall, amongst it all, until the day you leave

- by Halligan Quin

Nailing my lungs to the post

Non-smoking crowd, please forgive me, but smokers are nicer people. Except for fashion world smokers – designer cigarette people are way out of our league. Smokers always gather somewhere, and whether they know each other or not, conversations will be had, cigarettes will be offered and lighters will be lent.

Airports. No one really likes them. Waiting rooms, 6 hour long stop-overs, all-the-same duty free shops, the mystery really isn’t there. So you sit in the waiting room, waiting for your flight. Stare as blank as a goldfish towards whatever screen is, or occasionally fall asleep on those more than uncomfortable chairs. It really is a life of an aquarium. Unless you happen to be a smoker. Oh your fingers and lungs tingle just at the thought of stopping over and being able to smoke. And as you make your way to the smoking lounge at the airport you ponder as to why airplanes can’t have a smoking area. Smoking lounges, I find, can vary immensely from airport. But whether they are cancer-closet-like or ample, chique and comfortable they all have one feature in common. The glass wall. And though some might interpret it as a nice act towards smokers, enabling them to not feel so excluded from the outside world, it actually serves a didactic purpose. Parents from all over the world can stroll along the lounge pointing at jolly smokers and saying: “Sophie, Candice… Do you see those people there? They’re all engaging in a very un-healthy habit. And one day they will be very sick. And might steal your place in a public hospital. These people have black lungs and yellow teeth and nails and bad breath.” But, obviously, what Sophie and Candice see differs largely from what her dad is telling them. What they see is an exciting world, much more exciting than the goldfish world they are stuck in. They see people interacting, laughing, and blowing smoke out like magic dragons. And except for the occasional suit and briefcase introvert everyone seems to be happy, entertained. They walk off, bemused at this alternate, smoky, almost mythical world and follow their parents in pursuing cheap whiskey and Lindt chocolate.

Other than having each other, smokers have also that precious little tobacco stick that can be of most use in many situations. Cigarettes have been told to prevent mosquito bites, provide little but crucial lighting to dark areas thus impeding smokers to walk aimlessly around, minimize stress levels and heal the sense of post-modern world loneliness. Absurd, you say? I beg to differ. Upon making plans with friends one can many times be left to wait alone for a good hour as said friends make themselves fashionably late. No cigarette, you’re left to stand there, looking sad and stupid and feeling abandoned, with nothing more to do than people watch. Cigarette in hand, your confidence is restored, your sense of loneliness and abandonment diminished. You are no longer someone just waiting, you are a person smoking. You are no longer passive, but active. You have a purpose in life, the world will not crumble down over you. You are in control. If Estragon had been holding a cigarette in hand during the first section of Act 1 in Waiting for Godot the play would’ve had a completely different impact. The power of cigarettes is clearly underestimated.

A cigarette can not only change the entire course of an earth-shattering play, it can also make people look smarter. The act of taking the little white stick to the lips, inhaling, holding it in, and then exhaling makes people gain a complexion of insightfulness. It’s as if life was revealed to them in a different way. And their sensorial, chromatic and chronologic perceptions are a whole different thing altogether. Smoking also has an impact of mystery on other people. It is an ambiguous endeavor, especially if accompanied by iconic clothing, such as leather jackets or scarves. It can at the same time make one look absorbed in life and nonchalant. Imagine if there was a Nicotine Addict Barbie. Life as we know it would no longer be.

But as all better-off minority communities, we must be fought and eradicated in the name of alienation, fragile and therefore more easily corrupted labour, selfish individuality, goldfish lifestyles, Sophiesms, Candiceisms and Malibu Barbiecisms. As every day goes by smokers are restricted to smaller and smaller areas, making population density in these places higher than in any corner of São Paulo. Our favorite characters on main-stream TVs, battling against cigarettes, buying nicotine gum and nicotine patches and being encouraged by their friends to quit. Most of the cigarettes that get airtime are found in the mouths of villains and women of dubious professions. No one to identify with, we are unworthy societal types. Not even the market, which is out after every different group, hype and clique – from midget anarcho-punks to blonde samurais – want us. And unlike other minority groups, no one will be by our side to raise our flags and offer a helping hand or a comforting word. We will not despair, however, fuelled by our daily intake of nicotine, sense of community and insightfulness and will ride off into the sunset, hat on a high-held head, cigarette in hand.

- by Mariana R.

A list

Shuffle through the list of names

Faces, drifting away

Relegated long ago from current, now

Drifting in a sea of obscurity

And today the recent remembered,

Wait to join the queue of the forgotten

What memories you have

Locked, in the prison of the self

The mind’s stagnant focus

Capturing them as they were,

As you want them to be

Fractured statues of youth, now

Growing on some distant shore

Free from the eyes that time

Made fierce and cynical

Their absence, apparent

In the little days spent,

Observing the staccato punctuations of clocks

And wishing for reminders that they

Free from your desperate preservation

Have suffered too

Under the corset of age

But life’s vacancies fill

And now you have new faces,

New lists, short-term bonds

That strangle the past and wait

Complacently, to be strangled

Now we sit comfortable, as the present

Gnaws away passings, and faded photographs

Become less tattoos and more memorials,

Silhouettes of moments and spaces, past monuments

Fast becoming new routes to today’s

Arrogant characters and places

But, in vain, layers of triviality

Amassing like fossils, to be later buried

The present’s desperation, to be encapsulated

Perfectly formed, in the otherwise dusty

Museum of memories and mementos,

Embodies itself in friendship pacts

And photographs of fast passing eras

But behind smiles and daily reunion

All are marked with the unhealing scar

Of dormant obscurity, marked to be drowned

Waiting to join the queue of the forgotten

And become a face

In your most prestigious list

- by Halligan Quin

Written with Anger (at Oneself)

You have a duty,
to right wrongs.
You have words to say what may be.
To render just, what you view unjustified.
A quality in a character, a view or description.
But words move people, not mountains.

Meet two mouths willing to move.
Do not waste your words any more.
Who are you really trying to help?
You have a duty to build.
Otherwise don't speak of cracks.

Moan, and the world moans with you. How useful.

- by Dr. Fieldmouse

Between God, Pointy Hats and Ghosts – an analysis on magical realism

“It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight.” – One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Mislabeling is present in all realms of our present world, mostly due to commonly accepted paradigms that seem to permeate through time without the slightest discussion they deserve. Today’s dish? Magical realism. I read lots of what is considered world literature (which is a ridiculous label in the first place because isn’t everything world literature?) and I found that many Latin-American books, African books, and Indian books are labeled or “tagged” (I don’t really get this whole tagging business) under the “magical realism” genre on amazon.com or shelfari.com, not to mention in many classrooms around the European/American world. Words aren’t just bundles of letters that simplify our communication, they have much more power than people realize: they shape the way we see the world, and allow us to take control or attempt to take control of ideas. It’s as if giving something a name makes it somehow tangible, it is no longer something unknown, something to fear. Ultimately magical realism seems like it’s a prettier word for the term “pagan”. And by calling it so the western world could understand and cease to fear this reality. By calling it magical, the premise of it being really real is excluded. The ever-fearing Christians can once again sleep in peace, being assured that there are no such things as ghosts and spirits.

As if Christ resurrected is totally normal and realistic, but a ghost wandering through the house is somehow more farfetched and “magical”. Realism and reality are such perspective based ideas, especially when addressing abstract issues and ideas. But, as usual, one viewpoint must prevail. (A “one ring to rule them all” motif, so to speak). So any book reference to Noah’s Ark and the gazillion animals that magically fit into it, Mary being a virgin (who are we trying to kid?), and the sea splitting open is fine. But healing men, water spirits and foreshadowing isn’t. This is all so 1500s, ships, Jesuits and the whole shebang setting out to colonize and cathequise the natives. Must we still live under this eye-blinding, neck-stifling viewpoint? Is it really necessary? Any post-colonial country has issues with trying to regain its own identity. These places are places full of contradictions and mixes. Places where language is a muddle up somewhere in between the colonizing language and the native language, where religion is a mesh of “pagan” beliefs and Christianity. It isn’t magical realism, it is a very complex and intricate historical process. It seems as though the west has been condemned to Five Hundred Years of Solitude and has therefore been impeded to recognize and accept this whole world out there and its adjacent set of ideas.

To me, magical realism is something along the lines of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, it has nothing to do with tradition (though maybe with some unhealthy overgrown nerdy men cult) and everything to do with magic – wands, pointy hats and even flying brooms. Now, what is categorized under the Magical Realism definition is hardly “magical”, it’s maybe mythical (but isn’t everything?) and very much cultural. It is tradition being passed on through literature. It is characteristic postcolonial catholic-animistic-spiritual amalgam. It is the western world trying to make sense of something they fear and do not understand; trying to gain control over something that perceive as exotic and that offers no rigid structure. The so-called pagan world is much more fluid and organic, less certain but much more exciting. For future reference, perhaps, magical realism should be labeled and tagged and defined as anything written under the influence of magic mushrooms as. And also whatever Tom Cruise says when he goes off on a scientology rant.

by Mariana R.

Bali must fix binding emission targets on a per-capita basis to include all countries fairly

One of the major justifications for the US not signing Kyoto is that the treaty does not contain any legally binding emission reduction targets for China and India, although these countries have become respectively the largest and fourth largest emitter of green house gases. India and China – in return – claim that any path of development that would not harm the climate is too expensive for them; the West has to pay for a historical responsibility that stems from its past emissions, which brought about anthropogenic climate change in the first place. In this way the blame is passed from one nation to the other, and in the meantime all three countries keep on increasing their gross emissions.

One of the factors that brought about this tragic ping-pong game is that throughout the negotiations in Kyoto the Annex 1 countries (the industrialised nations with the highest level of greenhouse gas emissions) were not willing to discuss per-capita emission rights. Kyoto left open the question of how much CO2-equivalent countries ultimately have to reduce in their emissions. With the end of the road of emissions reductions deliberately left in the dark, it was consequently not possible to fix how much low-emitting countries could still increase their emissions. When frequently criticising the Kyoto Protocol for its lack of binding emission targets for developing countries, Western politicians seem to ignore that their unwillingness to fix universal emission targets gave birth to this problem.

To address climate change meaningfully, emission restrictions undoubtedly have to be imposed on all countries, including non-Annex 1 countries like India and China. To achieve this, the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali needs to change its negotiation from one about emission reductions to a rights-based approach of maximum allowable emissions. Using ethical decision making systems such as John Rawls' “Original Position”, it follows that such a right for emissions would need to be defined per-capita. Any system that does not allocate per-capita rights of emissions would mean that there would be humans of different values. The world's climate being a common good, all humans have an equal share in it. This is especially relevant as the capacity to emit is a need to produce many types of goods. To allocate more rights to emit to one person compared to another would mean to judge that one person is given a higher capacity to own goods/use services which emit greenhouse gases. So if the international community allowed Country A higher emission rights per citizen compared to Country B, this would mean to establish in international law that Country A is given the right to a higher capacity for wealth than Country B. Of course countries are different in wealth but by fixing carbon allowances differently also the allowed capacities for wealth creation would be influenced. Such a discrimination would clearly be incompatible with the Original Position and also with the Categorial Imperative or Utilitarianism.

If, however, the conference in Bali decided for clear per-capita rights for emission, greenhouse gas emissions could be restricted for all countries. For current low-emitters this would be advantageous in that they would know where the boundaries lie and develop their industries accordingly to maximise the welfare they can get out of their total amount of emission allowances. And for high-emitters like the UK per-capita rights would give certainty as to what value emissions need to be decreased, thereby giving the chance for a more long-term planning both by politics and business. No matter how much a country emits now, under a per-capita rights based scheme all countries would have incentives to reduce their emissions. Furthermore per-capita emission rights would provide the basis for real international emissions trading. There would be legally binding emission targets also for China and India just like the USA demanded. And – satisfying China and India's common argument that sustainable development would be too costly for them – the cost of this change would be reduced through real participation in one international emissions trading market.

Concluding, through per-capita emission rights the major arguments for inaction of these three top emitters could be resolved and climate change be mitigated both efficiently as ethically if the conference next week in Bali makes the right steps.

- by Dirk Heine

How the West was Won

We break and we break in an incessant flow of thoughts. Crumble by day, crawl back by night and fight the plight of invisible men. We’re often inclined to borrow somebody’s dream till tomorrow and wear looking glass ties. We strike a blow for freedom every now and then. I hate it but I love it. I hate it but I love it. I hate it but I love it. I’m loving it. Now get on your knees and bark like a dog. ABSOLUT NOTHINGNESS. Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL? My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. A point to ponder? Make individuality history! At home we’re all tourists. Concerned but powerless. We don’t cry in public (although occasionally in good movies) but still kiss with saliva. Choose life. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Be excited, be, be excited! We got a winner! Juice by Sara! Juice by Sara! No point mentioning the bats. We are all wired into a survival trip now. Girlfriend in a coma, I know, it’s serious. It brings out idleness. And the importance of being idle. We never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody… or at least some force is tending the light at the end of the tunnel. But we’re sick enough to be totally confident. The deflated life style is our couch. And it’s only three bucks a hit. Or it used to be anyway. Don’t drink all the coke! And don’t leave home without it! Gillette Razor Blades prevent the perpetuation of the species. I cut. You cut. He cuts. In a thousand years, there will be no men and women, just wankers, and that's fine by me. Because I’m worth it. And because my blood can sing. Soothing music. Tomato soup, ten tins of. Mushroom soup, eight tins of, for consumption cold. Ice cream, vanilla, one large tub of. Magnesia, milk of, one bottle. Paracetamol, mouthwash, vitamins. Mineral water, Lucozade, pornography. One mattress. One bucket for urine, one for faeces and one for vomit. One television and one bottle of Valium. Living like this is a full time business. See how they smile like pigs in sty? I hate it but I love it. I hate it but I love it. What if a dawn of doom of a dream bites the universe in two? Doesn’t matter. People with handguns are fun. Almost worth a grin. Keep walking. All the phoneys are doing it. Just do it. Ignorance is strength. Fitter happier. O Grave New World! Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun, Kiss the girls and make them One. Boys at one with girls at peace; Orgy-porgy gives release. Not everything is puddle-wonderful and it’s all a matter of cause and effect. The antidote for civilization still lurks around, watching for pigs on the wing. Apocalypse Now! And trust me, when the moment comes, it will be a Kodak moment.

- Mariana R.

From the underside of the inside

I asked a friend once why she was a socialist and was pretty unimpressed with the answer ‘well my family has always been working class,’ when it wasn’t backed up by an explanation of how this affected her life philosophy. (She was a strange girl who thought re-distributing the wealth was stealing the tips from the counter in Café Nero). However, even though she was just subscribing to a value system to define her identity, since starting work from the underside of the inside of the ‘haves’ I understand why socialism is so much easier to understand from the perspective of the ‘have nots’.

I am a domestic servant. (I also, in some ways, have a very cushy job). I am an aupair. Since July I’ve thought a lot about whether I would ever personally employ someone to do what I do, and by way of answer, my all too passive socialism has reared its head once more.

My objection isn’t to any of the things I have to do, but to needing extra people to help with the simple living of your life, because you have chosen for it to be bigger and better and richer and contain more things that need polishing.

‘Look Anna, I’ve weed on the floor,’ says the six year old I look after.
‘Clean it up then with some toilet paper please’
‘But you’re my aupair’

My fundamental problem is that the children I take care of are growing up used having someone to wait on them.

It was going to the hospital that did it. Last week, a baby was born in the family I work for, and we all wrapped up warm and went off to visit Mum in the private clinic. It was like a hotel; I am not joking. All the patients had private suites, with televisions and balconies. There were fruit baskets in all the waiting areas. All this isn’t too awful, and I know there is always the argument that they earned the money and can do what they want with it, but looking at the kids racing excitedly through the corridors and going to the nurses to ask for ‘yogurt please, and a spoon,’ I realised that this would all seem completely normal to them; that in their six and three year old minds, all babies will be born in hospitals that are not only clean and comfortable but with individual en-suite bathrooms and restaurant quality meals. (And I’m not comparing it with the third world or anything; take my advice and never get ill in Wakefield, the NHS hospital there is like something out of a documentary about how awful hospitals are in the former soviet union).

A few days ago the dad brought home something that I thought was a giant wedding cake, as I spied it from the other end of the room over my game of This Little Piggy. On closer examination I realised it was a giant arrangement of nappies from the hospital, wrapped in ribbons and the kind of cellophane florists use. I thought it was completely ridiculous.

For three weeks I walked through the centre of town every morning to attend my German course at Graz University. Right in the middle, where Elizebethstrasse intersects Merangasse, there is a big fancy glass fronted furniture shop, where big fancy people go to buy big fancy kitchens and chairs. Sure, I’ve been to Ikea and gone in the little pretend houses and thought how nice it would be to have a load of stuff, or moreover how nice it would be to have the kind of life all those possessions would symbolise. People want to express themselves through what they own and people want security, but as I saw the smart couples earnestly discussing whether to have this thousands of euros worth of surfaces and appliances or the other thousands of euros worth of surfaces and appliances. I felt angry.

I wanted to break the windows and scream at them, ‘None of this is important!’
I think it was seeing how serious they were about it all that awakened this dormant rage; They were all so serious in their leather boots (very fashionable right now in Austria) which were also no doubt very expensive.

In the German film The Edukators a group of anarchists break into posh houses but don’t steal anything. They just re-arrange the furniture, putting all the ornamental swans in the fridge for example, and leave the message on the walls ‘Die Fatten Jahre Sind Vorbei’ (The original title of the film; ‘the years of plenty are over’) or ‘Sie haben zu viel Geld’ (‘You have too much money’). I was put in mind of this last Saturday. The children’s 22 year old brother drove us out to a birthday party in the suburbs of Graz. (With him and me in the front of the car in with a three and six year old in the back we probably looked like teenage parents who’d miraculously made good). I was balancing an incredibly heavy cake, the shape of half a globe with the countries drawn in beautiful detail in green icing on a blue icing sea, on my legs and experiencing the familiar ‘how on earth is this my life’ feeling I’ve had repeatedly since stepping into another family’s world four months ago, when we drew up at this massive house. The film started flashing through my mind, and I couldn’t help planning how I would move everything around if I only had the guts to break in.

What I was struck by once again, was the way that the kids all tearing around playing party games (which I had to encourage my charges to join in with because they were so distracted by the miniature car you could drive around in like a real one), would think of this as normal. They were lovely polite children, but looking at the other aupairs hovering round, the housekeeper in the kitchen, and the house covered from top to bottom in white shag-pile, I doubt any of them will ever relate to giving according to one’s ability and receiving according one’s needs . How can you learn to take responsibility for yourself when someone’s job (and in the eyes of a child, someone’s whole reason for existing no doubt) is to do that for you, for your boredom, for your desire for snacks in parts of the house far from the kitchen. When you realize that not everyone has these privileges, which if you have grown up with them must seem like rights, how do you not surmise that you simply must be better and your needs more important?

I don’t resent my job. I can make rounds and rounds of mayonnaise and ketchup on toast and clean diarrhea out of Disney princess knickers with a smile on my face (no honestly), but I worry about what my position in the family is teaching these children.

- Anna Beecher