Let Putin kiss wet slippery fish
Dubravka Ugrešić
I cannot recall when I last saw a more pornographic image. The picture is a close-up of Putin holding a fish and kissing it. It was taken during the president's visit to a fish farm in the village of Ikryanoe, near Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea. He is kissing a sturgeon, the fish that produces the finest caviar. The eye of the fish, visible just below Putin's nostrils, is, it seems, warmer and more tender than Putin's own. Several moments later, he put the sturgeon back into the water, to the applause of the assembled locals and employees.
Putin, like the great masters of self-image management, is here killing several semantic birds with one stone. The sturgeon is a long fish with a pointy head. With the gesture of an experienced porn star, fixing the observer with his chill gaze, Putin is sending an indirect kiss to the gay population: the long, slippery sturgeon in his hands could be a penis, and Putin is kissing the organ at its sensitive tip.
But there is another, strictly heterosexual, interpretation. In the slang of many Slavic languages the word "fish" means woman, or, rather, the female sexual organ. This metaphoric sequence starts from the male assumption that the female sexual organ "smells like a fish". Fearless Putin embraces the smelly fish (though his sensible woollen gloves suggest the fish-kisser prefers safe sex).
The president is also sending the kiss to the subconscious mind of the Russian people, who know their fairy-tales. The main hero of "By the Pike's Wish" is stupid, ugly, lazy Emelya, a fisherman who amasses wealth, a kingdom and a beautiful princess because he releases a pike he had caught. The pike is his powerful helper. All Emelya has to say is: "By the pike's wish, at my command..." and things are resolved instantaneously in his favour. Putin, therefore, is suggesting to his people that they should stay where they are and place their trust in a higher order, because they can be pulled out of deep shit only by the will of God – or fish. Putin himself, like Emelya, is a lucky fellow, and the fish's favourite. One way or the other, the kingdom is his.
Many and varied holy fathers have had their picture taken wearing purple berets, tiaras, turbans and fezzes – more penis symbols – clearly signalling an ancient potent fraternity (God, after all, is male). So why, then, wouldn't Putin send a similar love message to his most ardent macho fans, the many Russian neo-Nazi gangs? If hundreds of tons of paper and millions of dollars were spent some eight years back when the Clinton-Lewinsky national lottery spun, and if all of America was caught up in measuring the diameter of the stain from Clinton's sperm on Monica's dress, then why shouldn't Putin publicly kiss a slippery, wet fish? If Mikhail Gorbachov can advertise Pizza Hut and Louis Vuitton (photographed by Annie Liebowitz, no less), why shouldn't Putin have a snap taken with an impressive Caspian sturgeon?
But I am not interested in Putin, or the fish, but in hunger, the hunger for the limelight. What has provoked this massive yearning? Some twenty years ago, expectations called for the opposite behaviour. It was once thought unseemly to speak of yourself, tell the public about your private life, to cosy up to people you don't know, and show undue interest in the private lives of others – all that was considered vulgar and a sign of bad upbringing. How did it happen that what used to be vulgar has become an essential part of daily life?
When I first went to Moscow many years ago, my Russian friends held to an unwritten rule: the less you said about yourself, the thinner the police files would be. Why is everyone now rushing to fill their files? Why do we treat the former bogeyman of the totalitarian system, Big Brother, like a household pet? Isn't there anyone left in this world who suffers from healthy paranoia?
Foreigners who live in Holland often repeat a complaint that the Dutch hardly ever invite them over. They say this is due to the Protestant culture of privacy; one of the most fundamental values. This may be so, but all you could care to know about the Dutch is right there on their front doors. All a foreigner has to do is stroll through a suburban neighbourhood, and on the front doors he will see an array of photographs of the residents, displays of their vacations, genre scenes with the kids, children's drawings, verses penned by the poetically inspired, announcements about newborns or a death in the family...
The media induce the hunger in millions of ordinary mortals. It is all-consuming and on the rise. The gullible millions do not have the kind of access to the main headlines that Paris Hilton and Putin have, but they have found their own media to propel them out of anonymity: mobile phones, blogs, websites, internet forums, television programmes in which they perform as the "gladiators" of our time. Then there's the street as the medium: in Amsterdam everyone knows about the guy who streaks through the city, buck naked on roller skates from time to time. Outsiders on the outskirts sit on their motor scooters with the muffler stripped and roar around the quiet neighbourhoods through the night just to let it be known they exist.
The paradox is, the more we eat, the hungrier we are. The more opportunities we have to inscribe our name on the map of the world, the greater the fear of disappearing. The more traces we leave behind us, the faster these traces are erased. The more books we publish, the quicker they are forgotten; the more movies we watch, the less able we are to remember what they were called.
An American university started a project of buying up the archives of famous writers who write in English. Some young writers have sold their archives to the university in advance. Whence the panicked fear of disappearing, when not only are we living longer, but our possibilities of leaving proof of our existence are incomparably greater?
All our ancestors left behind were a few photographs, usually family pictures. We record absolutely everything today: our inception, life in the womb, emergence from the womb, games, growth, every minute, every month, every year, the operations, excursions, sexual acts, pulling of teeth, concerts – absolutely everything. Even when we don't do all the recording ourselves, there are many services at work recording our biographies: somewhere our every purchase of an airplane ticket is on file, our dinners, the shoes we bought, the times we went to the doctor... And when we record and re-record everything, when we write everything down, when our archives are full even before we are born, there is a great risk that we all, along with earth itself, will pop like a vast, bulging plastic bag. After each of us will remain a heap of photographs, cell phones, video recordings, movies, digital recordings, bills... Perhaps, protruding from that rubbish heap, will be a photograph of a stranger with a chill gaze kissing a fish. But until that global blast happens, let us satisfy our hunger, let us seek the limelight, let nothing stop us in this, for we only live inasmuch as others know of us.
On the same day the picture of Putin kissing the fish appeared in the press, The Lancet published alarming findings from a research project conducted by the World Health Organization. It turns out, apparently, that one third of mankind suffers from some form of mental illness. And of that horrifying number, two thirds will have no treatment. What possible connection could there be between Putin and the world's mental health? The answer lies in the lack of equilibrium. While thirty per cent of mankind is truly maddened by starvation, poverty, war and disease, the rest of us are rapidly losing the plot.