Tributes to Havel

I had to go to Václavské náměstí today anyway, so I stopped to take a look at all the tributes to Václav Havel that were displayed around the statue of Svatý Václav (the Saint that Havel shared the first name of) at the top of the square.  I overheard one kid ask about why it says svatý Václav above the tributes and if that's because Havel is a saint, so he was rather confused.  The Mum just told him that it's a coincidence that the saint shares his name.   

Two of the famous pictures of Havel with the Rolling Stones:

This one says, "Thank you for everything you did for us":

And on several billboards on the way home, a photo of Havel by Tomki Němec with a quote of Havel's I've referenced before:

,,Naděje není přesvědčení, že něco dopadne dobře, nýbrž jistota, že něco má smysl, lhostejno, jak to dopadne."

["Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."]

The Great Thinkers: Václav Havel, Adam Gopnik, Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog

Ok, so someone is going to find this somewhat sacrilegious, but I have to make my point.  I had a mini-obsession with Kermit the Frog today, or rather more accurately, Jim Henson.  

A friend wrote a post about getting back to New York, in that adamant kind of way, when things have been tough but you're determined to rise above them.  I had to respond with a comment, with one of the quotes from 'The Muppets Take Manhattan'.  Things have gone wrong for Kermit and the show he was trying to sell.  All his friends (and co-actors) have had to leave New York and he sits and thinks it all over.  As he talks it through with himself, he suddenly finds a new determination and he shouts out, 

"You hear me, New York?  We're gonna be on Broadway!  Because, because, I'm not giving up!  I'm still here and I'm stayin'!  You hear that New York? I'm stayin' here.  The frog is stayin'." 

Jim Henson was an optimist, a dreamer, an idealist.  Which is exactly what Václav Havel has been 'accused' of having been when he was in power.  Václav Klaus is now playing this 'let's get real, shall we?' card for all it's worth.  But not with any resolution along the lines of, 'let's knock some things into shape to provide some kind of balance, some justice', but rather by jumping on any convenient bandwagon that presents itself, fair or not.  

There are worse things to have been than an optimist, surely?  If the best you can do is criticise someone for trying and hoping, then there's something wrong.  Yes, I know, you've got to back up that determination with hard work, careful organisation and planning, and sadly, probably also a few considerable changes along the way, but as long as you've got time to think, somewhere to live and enough food to eat, it is worth being an optimist.  It is worth hoping.

A loss of those aforementioned things does prevent progress, admittedly.  Perhaps not permanently, but certainly for the time during which they have been removed, and that should never be ignored.  However, even Adam Gopnik asserts: no-one can live without hope.  I could almost disagree with that, because sometimes you have to simply carry on in a totally hopeless environment, and it does feel like simply existing with no reason to, but that's existing.  Living, really being alive, truly requires hope. 

I miss having that Jim Henson/Václav Havel-like hope and determination, because I now know just how much can be taken away from someone (ill-health, for one thing, negates EVERYTHING else) and how detrimental it is when that happens, but hope feels like home.  I suppose I must be homesick, for a home that I never had but that existed in the underlying message of programmes such as 'Sesame Street' and 'The Muppets'.

Jim Henson created a surrogate home for kids who didn't have one, by means of those programmes.  He didn't try and teach kids or explain to them, he showed them by the most entertaining examples of other characters working together and creating a kind atmosphere, where anyone could belong.  He was insightful and wise in equal measure:

"The attitude you have as a parent is what your kids will learn from more than what you tell them.  They don't remember what you try to teach them.  They remember what you are." 

Sleep on this one, as a reminder of the importance of silliness, which I simply couldn't live without during these testing times:

"Here's some simple advice: Always be yourself.  Never take yourself too seriously.  And beware of advice from experts, pigs and members of Parliament."  [Kermit the Frog]

Resistance is futile

That dread I used to have on Sunday nights before games lessons at school on a Monday has regenerated into the grown-up version.  Dread of the return to work.  The difference with work versus school is that with work, you know that there's no way out.  There's no ultimate deadline in sight.  No concrete guarantee that you won't always have to do this.  And if you want meaning in your life, this is a bitter, razor-sharp pill to swallow.

I haven't found an answer to this perpetual entrapment yet, and I do know that resistance is futile, but I am convinced there has to be some value even in the midst of that futility.  If the only way round this is to keep fighting, keep doing creative things in spite of it all, possibly to the detriment of doing my paid job to the best of my ability, then so be it.  Silliness and purposely flaunting my incompatibility with this system are my only weapons and I shall use them while I still have the strength.  Even though they may ultimately bring about my demise.

Vaclav Havel is quoted as having said: (I wish I had this in the original Czech - can anyone direct me to where it can be found ?)

"The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning '...' the more energetically meaning is sought."

I might also add that the deeper the presence of despair, the more energetically hope is sought.  Indeed, at a time of the most profound sense of being a mere fly caught in a spider's web awaiting my inevitable fate, there is that last desperate trace of hope that fights for supremacy.  I almost wish it weren't there, but it doesn't come from a conviction that things will be fair, that there will be some righting of wrongs in the end, but just that this mustn't be the end of the story.

"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world.  Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good." 

I can only hope beyond hope that it is 'good enough'.