First impressions of Sicily when coming from Russia

You arrive in Palermo and the first thing you notice on the road are the huge billboards with close-up faces of people in sunglasses or those popular stylised ensemble shots (above). Everyone absolutely implaccable. Then there is a chaos of white and cement-coloured houses clinging to the hillsides. The town slopes peacefully onto a bay and there are areas with street colour and life that I remember in many places in Europe when I was young but have since mysteriously disappeared. Mobile fish sellers in tiny vans on street corners. Street stalls that double up as restaurants etc.  People are always rather elegant and there seems to be a secret know-how in the social DNA of how to make everything light and a pleasure.

But there’s a darker side – the dream. It affects a significant proportion of the population who, dressed in impossible dark clothes, achieve a look that seems copied in every detail from billboards and glossy scented magazines. Like someone preparing a speech or storing up jokes for later use – it's as if it had been practiced and practiced before being brought into the open. 

The look unravels itself before the eyes of the spectators and they gradually take in the breathtaking detail and application that lies behind it. They absorb the subtle ways in which aggression has been formalised by an almost turned-up collar and how ruggedness and disenchantment have been aestheticised to the point of seeming grandiose through the elaborate stitching on a vast fragrant black leather jacket. This might be accessorised with a belt that hangs with exquisitely studied insouciance – making passing references to Marlon Brando, Marlene Dietrich, Sid Vicious, with a nod to Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen. Then only a James Dean-like sultriness can possibly do – too many words could distort this tableau.

There are policemen and security guards who look like they have the most intimate, almost mystical relationship with their mirrors. The dream looms over their heads and the lifestyle that comes with it always seems somehow tantalisingly within reach. It's not a simple question of buying stuff or copying stuff, but a far deeper process. The look is not merely a set of things but a stance, an approach to life, a way of refracting the surroundings, of holding one’s self and finally of just being that will provoke such admiration in others that once you have it, you can glide through the world suspended in adulation – building on it every day until you reach the point where everything you do has an unmatchable authority and releases from others not just grudging assent but open-hearted gratitude.

Everyone smiles with warm soft eyes that seem to hold few other anxieties.

World map by seconds of US TV news coverage, feb 2007

What matters because it's known to matter = what is real ? In many senses yes, surely? There's an expression to describe this: "consensus reality" which people are using now. At least I think so because I read it in the Huffington Post.

Ok, the image above represents network news only and not citizen journalism, blogs and everything else that's emergent now. But it nonetheless represents the norm in the sense that one person communicating with another in America probably has to use this kind of world view as a reference point. This is the common ground as it were - and it's not pretty...

Let's put it to the vote!

I saw this call for a debate on a website and it reminded me of the English love of concensus, which inspired a little skit...

In the voice of comedian John Fortune:

"Well of course all three were dreadful. But we still haven't worked out which one was worse, so its important we should have a debate to clear that up. Once we've got that done, we can move on and get on with other stuff. So the best way, I think, to settle this is to have a range of experts stand up and argue whichever position they feel most strongly about. We'll then let the audience decide who's argued their point more convincingly by having a show of hands at the end. Whoever gets the most votes - wins. And then we'll know. 

But it'll be no easy contest. Of course Hitler is the classic one and in many ways you can't get worse than that. But we now know that Stalin killed far more people and was around for a lot longer, so I'd say there'll be alot of people backing him over Hitler for the top spot. But then you'll get those who'll be wanting to put Mao up there because really, he was a very nasty piece of work and the Chinese aren't properly owning up to it. 

In any case it's not really about who's worse than the other, because they were all completely rotten, but it's important not to forget that. Certainly if you were to take all 3 and put them on one side and then take, say, us and put us on the other side, then there'd really be no contest. Of course we're not perfect, nobody ever said that. But it's important to remember that fundamentally, we're pretty fair and decent and alot of people are forgetting that these days. So its good to have these debates because they do remind us that when it comes to feeling good about ourselves we really have no more reliable, more solid and more unshakeable partners than Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Especially Hitler, without whom we would certainly never have Won the War. 

I mean, after both Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein kind of fizzled out, we know that these chaps can really be counted on in our hour of need. Of course there's the fact that they've been dead a while, but that doesn't mean we can't keep them alive for a little longer. Anyway, after that we can find out who was the greatest leader of the 20th century, Churchill or Thatcher, or tackle the thorny issue of who was responsible for the collapse of British naval power after World War 2."

Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story

This one is from a Ted talk and many will probably have seen it already and yes, I did kind of find it inspiring, so here it is.

"When we reject the single story, when we realise there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise."

The consequences of the single story to my mind are capital flight, a condescending outlook towards one's own culture and traditions, a reluctance to believe and invest in these, (food yes, dress, on occasion, the rest, please) - and an inclination to shop at Harrods.

The enduring image

Cottage in Northern Iran

Our mind works with images. Images today are the primary means of understanding the world. Text, or even speech seem mediated, subjective and drawn out. The impact of an image is immediate. We feel free to draw the conclusions we want and easily forget the photographer and photo editor are no less selective than the author.  A photograph can provoke a sense of familiarity and intimacy with the subject matter that only personal experience can contend with. As Susan Sontag remarked “Photography makes us feel the world is more available than it really is.”

Photography is dangerously beholden to the external attributes of its subject matter. In comparison, other visual arts (even film) and text seem so much freer to convey the spectrum of human experience without being anchored to a given time or place. This is why a special trust is accorded to photography which will, for its part, tend to rest again and again on the surface of things...

Yet we feel we have penetrated beyond that. It's true we have developed a tremendous skill in decoding, drawing conslusions from what we see "in" the photo. We can often date, place, understand the purpose and symbolism, classify the genre and gage the impact on others.

But decoding is not penetrating and suggesting isn't saying. Outside the poetics of mood and the suggestiveness of symbols, there's something distinctly slippery and seductive about photography. It is more photography that penetrates us than the other way round. Our resistance has gradually been worn down and we have given photographs the authority to act as a substitute for real experience.

For the instant emotional kick, the power of dislocation to another bright set of possibilities, nothing can beat it.

Our impression of a place we have not focused much attention on but just know of vaguely can often be no more than the sum of the photographs we have seen of it. If we’ve seen just a few photos or a certain type of photo – these will carry enormous weight in forming our outlook. One or two extra photos can tip the balance and create an entirely new one. When I try to examine carefully what my impression is of say Laos, South Korea or any place I know relatively little about, its alarming to sense how artificial it is.

It seems the frail rims of our knowledge are cluttered with such fanciful borrowed imagery, little photographic placeholders marking the existence of uncharted territory that is often accepted as the territory itself!

At their best images are a kind of interface, a way of managing our most visceral, emotional understanding of the world, otherwise they are a screen, that conceals reality whilst posing far too convincingly as a representation of it.

We live in 2 principal modes today, active mode and spectator mode and spend for too much of our time in the latter, interested in the surface of things or interacting with reality with a complacency fashioned by the spactator mode. This means a passive, expectant, entitled disposition. Engagement is optional and there's a cool, contextualised, category-filled way of perceiving things, that shrinks from the violence of uniqueness.

The special trust accorded to photography combined with its pervasiveness has a cumulative effect, that of upholding a fear of the world. Clearly the excellent war reporters and those who document catastrophes cannot be blamed for the invasion of their images on our consciousness. But the mass of images creates a pyramid-like hierarchy of place. Surveying the world from our mind's eye - as we move away from the familiar big city apexes of 'civilisation' - the world according to images gets nastier, hungrier, more dishevelled and disaster prone and we feel grateful for the comfort and security of our sofa. The avowed purpose of images to bring the world closer is reversed, and the final result is back to the old chestnut: US and THEM. I wonder how much these reporters, seeing the result, feel any sense of responsibility for reinforcing a polarised view of a world that doesn't exist and have a desire to correct this somehow. As we move, hopefully, into a new era of personal responsibility, this may happen.

Images have as much distorted the world as they have revealed it to us. So the cure for the distortions of perception created by images is - more images! One can start to see a scenario where new generations of images correct the harm done by the previous generation and so on ad infinitum. As people begin to think more strategically about the consequences of their actions and appreciate the interconnectedness of things, image producers and publishers too might follow suit. I wonder also what people do to keep a corner of the mind free from the image's enduring power to validate or co-opt personal experience.

We need Russia!

The negative view of Russia is partly a product of the universality we have given Western culture, which leads to the conclusion that other cultures are aberrations or somehow handicapped by a faulty inner structure that may be remedied providing they take steps to resemble ours.

From this angle of view Russia seems like a grey version of Western Europe. A struggling, hobbling, left handed copy that only has itself to blame for its ills. Due to a lack of democracy, accountable institutions and the sloth of its demoralised people it stumbles around, cowered by terrible weather and a merciless corrupt state. Only through convincingly adopting Western institutions, know-how and organisation, can they ever be saved.

Amongst those most guilty of proliferating this viewpoint are journalists, who spend so much time together and with other expatriates, that they manage to live in an environment almost uncontaminated by the mindset of the country they are reporting about. The host country's perspective is handily contained in little epigrams and phrases that match the prejudices of their readers and the politics of their management. The voices of local people that echo the mindset with which the journalists arrive are employed to lend additional support to their own. The approach is predetermined and unlikely to suffer any modification.

The journalist's mindset will measure everything against Europe and America, the Norm, the place from where all civilized standards emerge. (And they do too. Wouldn't it be good if other parts of the world started to be more assertive about their own take on civilized standards - which they keep below the radar - instead of kow towing to those of others and waiting for HSBC to come along and do it for them.)

As readers, we will always tend to give journalists the benefit of the doubt from lack of other sources of information - unless they happen to dealing with a subject we have specialised knowledge of.

Russia is used by them as a "convenient other". The old habit of arranging facts about Russia to ultimately point to a negative conclusion is a generalised reflex. The state is bad, the people are to be pitied, they are huddled and defiant.

It has an important cathartic effect. At the mere mention of Russia, our own view of ourselves undergoes a sudden transformation: we see ourselves as rational, inventive, fair minded, democratic and a source of light and inspiration for the rest of the world. Next to Russia, the old hag Europe realises she’s “ultimately” a shining princess, and smiles modestly. It’s too good to be true! We need Russia!

Angles of view

At the heart of many misconceptions there often lies a semantic problem. Imagine if the United Kingdom was called "England" – and it contained not only England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but 80 further territories, many with distinct cultures, races, climates and modes of life, all connected in one landmass, across a surface area 100 times greater. Then you start to get a sense of the scale of the semantic problem!

Russia is a vast continent disguised by semantics as a mere country. Its size is hard for anyone to really grasp. But it's often seen to compensate for this by being relatively easy to conceptualise in terms of its variety. Even people in Moscow and St. Petersburg often think that outside the capitals there are no more than endless meaningless variations of essentially the same layout.

As with every country, the "story" - the one that is commonly told to everyone - floats over it like a haze. Certainly the story today appears to be one of sameness rather than variety. The official version of life (much like everywhere) is quite different to the way life really is. There seems to be no unified way of making sense of the change that's going on or any representation of the dozens of different native nationalities and languages, cultures, foods, religions etc. Russia is certainly one of the least understood places on earth and very rarely looked at with any degree of objectivity. This is primarily through a tremendous lack of information that begins in Russia itself. In a way this would not matter so much were it not for the fact that many people in Russia seem to have grown to believe the story told about them from abroad.

Here is a summary in my mind of these views of Russia: There's the 'lay of the land' - reminiscent of Saul Steinberg’s famous “view from 9th Avenue” (above). In this case stately Europe disappears into a grey haze roughly at the level where the Ukraine starts, (where a mental iron curtain seems to have drawn itself up), with a brief flash of gold domes and architectural frivolity at the level of Moscow and St Petersburg before losing itself again in endless steppe, despair, repetition and meaninglessness up to the Pacific ocean.

Its history is also seen from a similar vantage point: a grotesque procession of despots, the eternally suffering Russian populace as their plaything. The continual swell of hubris on a scale unknown anywhere else. A place where grandiose efforts to emulate Western ways and to advance technologically have simply laid bare a fundamental barbarism and disregard for human life or dignity. In the cannon of Western literature on the subject of Russia some very talented authors have paid particular attention to these aspects with the consequence of belittling much else about the country.

There's the politically aware view where the Russian government and particularly its leader, loom so large as to become of the same size and importance as 12% of the Earth's surface. Whatever happens in the latter is immediately tempered by indignation about the former. It has almost become a generalised emotional habit in the West to denigrate Russia's achievements with some acerbic, suspicious contextualisation. Question: What do people think about when they think of Egypt? Do they cleave away at their consciences and think of Hosni Mubarak? I don't think so. They tend to think about its climate, history and people and Mubarak is fairly small in comparison, if not invisible. People who think of America in terms only of it's head of state and his coterie generally realise they're being unfair on the country and its inhabitants. One really needs to question how it is that we've developed such reflexes when looking at Russia, such that at the mere mention of it, the state, like some large raptor, swings down and obscures the view of almost everything else.

The problem is not so much that too much is heard about the Russian state, it is rather that far too little is known about Russia itself. There might be more efforts not specifically to paint a positive portrait of Russia or gloss anything over but simply to provide a greater balance of information by focusing away from what is already known and examining things of equal importance that are less known.