Current Moods and Suffocations

Current Moods and Suffocations

On Thought-Cages and the terrible state of affairs.

Written in English.

I can feel this tightness in my chest. This is all so terribly wrong. But it’s all been wrong for a long time. In fact, I don’t know that it’s ever been right before, definitely not, but that state of perpetuity does not condone the wrong in the least.

As we are all watching the world unfurl its limbs tentatively after ducking down in the face of Covid-19, we can see it stretching in worryingly asymmetric ways. Although all have taken an unexpected hit to the gut, some countries, some people seem to be much better equipped to recover - some seem to almost carry on where they left off before this epidemic constricted daily life, commerce and our personal dreams.

Other people, other countries are left economically crippled in its wake, and with poor leaders to guide them, we can see the world rip apart even more. Certainly, almost no-one on this planet is completely unaffected by this Corona virus.

 I feel a tugging worry that even the reality I used to know in my native South Africa, the place many of my family members and friends still call a home, is gliding away. My two worlds are being separated even more; a phone call with my mother sometimes leaves me saddened by the prospect of our worlds drifting apart even further, if only in the physical spaces we inhabit. Of course, engaging with another’s reality is uniquely enriching too, but it means we have fundamentally different concerns in our daily lives. 

And this feeling cements the choice I have made four years ago to forge my own path in Germany for now. Perhaps to continue in our family’s peculiar pendulum legacy of switching continents every few decades: one generation, born in South Africa, moves to Europe, the next, born in Europe, moves back to South Africa. Perhaps we are each looking for the mythical country passed on to us in the stories of our parents and grandparents; be it fairy tale castles in dark enchanted forests, or vast horizons on the open savanna and sunsets behind naked desert dunes. There is a sense of charged wilderness to both, but of course, the mythical country is an oscillating Fata Morgana of our inherited memories.

How do we even begin to fight this wrongness around us, amplified by our current crisis? It’s such a crippling question, a paralysing one, too large a mountain to climb. It’s a mountain of greed: When our own reality – inflated by social pressures and responsibilities - is more real than someone else’s reality, constructs like status, lifestyle, luxury and a false sense of grandeur can be more important than another’s life. It’s a mountain of pain, of jealousy, disdain for human rights and disrespect  for another’s dignity, it’s a mountain built from fear of never being good enough and of losing all, with veins of suffering seeping through its rocks like underground rivers. It’s a mountain with air so thin that it’s becoming quite difficult to breathe.

But this IS life, it’s never been different, just the types of injustices were different over time. Perhaps it’s all about a choice we make even as we and the world around us collaborate to shape our own personalities: Do we take, or do we give, primarily? Are we asking the question “what can the world offer me?”, or rather, “what can I offer the world?”?

Maybe it is our calling, as humans, to struggle against all that feels wrong, to answer the pain of the world not with anger, but with kindness and compassion, with the poetry of everyday small actions.

While this mountain feels so toweringly high, the immensity of it taking my breath away sometimes, I honestly believe I can climb a fair bit of it by noticing the small things along the path. While I kneel over a wild flower here, admire a perfectly curled infant fern over there, stop to gather small pebbles of kindness and slithers of shared stories, memories to pin into my personal herbarium, I never notice the steepness of the path I am conquering.

 In my dreams, as I turn to look back, I see thousands of lived-life-fragments behind me - those most precious treasures of all. And as I look around me, I can see brothers and sisters, climbing, climbing on a thousand different paths up the mountain, climbing on, despite the fact that the precipice is tucked away in the clouds, out of sight.

Thoughts on Disappointment

When your way is blocked, suddenly, and you find yourself in a puddle of broken expectations. Photograph by Nora Kovats. Corridor flanking the courtyard at Hildesheim’s oldest cathedral.

So this year’s international trade fair in Munich, including all its special shows like Handwerk & Design and the SCHMUCK and TALENTE competitions, has been cancelled due to the corona virus threat. I’ve dreamed about showing my work at Handwerk & Design for years.

 This year, I had forged my own opportunity to exhibit there by gathering a group of fellow artists from Berlin, envisioning and then organizing a group show that would have been more than just individual artists next to each other: it would have been a curated exhibition integrating eight different unique visual languages. For me, this was an ambitious project, one that has kept me increasingly busy since November, with the past six weeks becoming an organizational marathon. It was so wonderful to see this group of artists come together and give their time freely, discuss the most divergent ideas and reach conclusions and compromises, build tiny scale cardboard models of our display, render the display in 3D, then build the entire thing from scratch, even sawing the wood into pieces ourselves. Then, five days ago, this vision crumpled into sawdust as I received the news that the entire fair had been cancelled.

 I wasn’t entire unprepared, of course not, with other trade fairs and large gatherings being cancelled all over Europe. But the disappointment was acute and real and painful, even though, honestly, the entire project might have been a failure even if the fair had not been cancelled.

 So I’ve been thinking about disappointment all week. What exactly is this disappointment thing? How can we define it? It’s painful, yes, it has a lot to do with expectations that could not be met, but it’s not anger, it’s not really shame or guilt either. It’s sort of a hollow feeling, a space that would have held something glorious and sparkling and hopeful, and that is now empty. It’s a little paralysing, a melancholy type of inertia. It’s a vacuum that can now be filled - often with a squadron of negative emotions chasing each other into the ditch: frustration, self-flagellation, a crumbling self-esteem, disillusionment, bitterness and resentment.

The best place to observe your disappointment will always be nature. Going for long, aimless walks to fill empty spaces inside with simple grains of gratitude, watching nature grow and die and flower and crumble. Somewhere in Brandenburg. Photograph by Nora Kovats.

 I keep asking myself how we ought to deal with disappointment? And what’s the point of it? Typically, I tend to react to disappointment with denial; I justify to myself that the disappointing event wasn’t really that important, I charge on with a new mission, never looking back, in a crazy storm of self-preservation. While that’s a great survival mechanism that has served me well in the past, I am not entirely convinced anymore that it is useful in the long run. I feel this process of extricating yourself from disappointment has a lesson to teach that I haven’t been ready to learn yet. It seems that I should sit with this disappointment for a few days, examine it, experience and articulate what it feels like before the void gets filled either with angry frustration or manufactured hope.

 While it can feel like a curse, disappointment is in essence a resilience-building tool. It is a really vital part of our lives. To clarify, by that I don’t mean a tool to cultivate the ability to ignore disappointment, to readjust with superhuman speed and bounce back like a jack-in-the-box. Rather, what I mean is the capability to hold this disappointment, to embrace it, taste it, and then gingerly starting to re-fill the void with those first slithers of gold and dream dust. And bit by bit, you rebuild your vision, you make it better and stronger this time, the walls are more solid, the glue holding everything together is tougher because there’s a foundation cemented by the possibility of failure, and there’s a type of wisdom underneath that is heavier but also more real than your lighter, younger self’s view of life.

 Disappointment is the supreme editor of our life plans. It’s a builder of strength and mutual empathy. Those cyclical ups and downs of hope and expectation, shattered by disappointment, and rebuilt again, are a kind of energy generator, an engine keeping us in motion, our feet on the ground and our head in the clouds.

Spaces to Fill. 2019. Watercolour & ink painting on Hahnemühle watercolour paper.