Dreams

How is it that we all start our lives full of dreams and destroy them one by one. When we are children, we imagine a splendid future. We are certain to be come superheroes, popstars, famous artists or, of course, princesses. Every approaching day seems sunny, colorful, exciting. Then we start going to school. Slowly a massive amount of numbers and letters flood us, leaving no freedom in the way we can combine them. We start to think about how to become a successful and admired personality. A lawyer, doctor or professor. Some of us will achieve it, some of us won´t. At the time we go to university, we start to call the quest for success and earnings our dream and we forget that our profession is not who we are, it is only what we do. After all, what do dreaming and considering law cases or cutting open human bodies in order to heal them have in common? Dreams should let us feel light and invincible. And our life would seem a lot brighter, if we wouldn´t stop to create them as soon as we reach puberty. Often, former dreams become nightmares, when we reach them. The ambitious fifth-grader who wanted to become the best lawyer in the district has achieved what she wanted now. She dreams about loosing her cases every night and wakes up feeling her heart racing and sweating. Dreams turn to goals, we dream of going to the seaside, of buying a wonderful house above the sea, having children, driving the car we like and similar. Why don´t we dare to dream the impossible anymore? Is it because we are too grown-up and are afraid of coming down to earth with a bang after all that dreaming? I think the opposite would happen. The more we dare to dream, the more is possible. And maybe we would be surprised what can be if we would stop to follow the given and "realistic" paths...

Some Images and Associations

Ph.: Katarina Peterke

 I imagine the beginning of the 20th century. The three abandoned chairs are waiting for three ladies in fine gowns and with little hats that just arrived from Paris to sit down and enjoy the view for just a few minutes before they continue their walk around the fortress and probably, after a chatty afternoon, meet their husbands to drive them home in a horse-drawn carriage.

Ph.: Katarina Peterke

A fiest in the Middle Ages. The musicians are playing, there is this uge pig on the table and a really oversized king is the first to take a bite or two. The first drunk jesters are already lying under the table and on the outside very sophisticated ladies bare their rotten teeth when laughing. The cutest guest is, of course, a little dog - white, with brown spots, who eagerly waits for a bite to find his way into his snout.

Ph.: Katarina Peterke

There is something mysterious about this place. Guarded by the tripartite tree, the well seems to tell a silent story, probably a story of grief and sorrow. But it cannot easily be heard.

 

Ph.: Katarina Peterke

Somehow there is always something inspirational about trees. The image of life in spring, they turn to images of loneliness in winter. But for sure they always offer a suitable seating accomodation for birds. And for cats that need to be rescued.

The Eye of the Camera

These days I went for many long walks and I decided to experiment with the camera. And suddenly the world looked different.

Ph.: Katarina Peterke

The eye only waits to discover a scene, a moment, an object, which would look good on a photograph. Earlier I liked to save my impressions in my mind...at least I said so, what do I need the photos for, I will have my memories. Now I must admit, that it was laziness. When I saw something nice, I just thought "oh, the time it will take to take out the camera, to find the ideal position, to take a few pictures just to be sure one of them will turn out as it should - better to observe the scene a bit longer instead". I realize, better later than never, that the camera is a medium between the real world and our mind. If I don´t use the AUTO-mode, I can modify what I see in the way I would like to see it. Well, that´s not a great discovery. But I guess that most of the people just forget that other than AUTO-mode exists. Especially nowadays, when everything must be fast, automatic and as simple as possible. But modifying the images takes just a few seconds of pressing the right buttons and has such a great effect. What I enjoyed most was that I was not taking the pictures that are now so dear to me on a trip, in an exciting, far-away country, but at home, in my beloved city Novi Sad.

Ph.: Katarina Peterke

It is a truth, that we become blind to the beauty that lies in the place we live in. We walk past a beautiful park every day and we just don´t see it anymore. The only thing we see maybe is the garbage thrown behind that bush on the lawn, just a perfect opportunity to get furious about the boorishness of our fellow citizens (something that seems to be an indispensable everyday activity to many). The camera teaches us to rediscover the beauty around us, to use our phantasy to create the perfect light, colour and scenery.

Ph.: Katarina Peterke

And now, with digital photography, you don´t even have to wait until you see the outcome (a huuuuge advantage for impatient people like me). I couldn´t believe what I could make of ordinary images only with the smallest portion of image editing. My pictures suddenly felt like travelling through time and space.

Ph.: Katarina Peterke

The long and the short of it: Long live digital photography!

Ph.: Katarina Peterke

Experiencing Pina

 

Pina (directed by Wim Wenders) - a film that fascinated and moved me. When my friend invited me to watch the movie about Pina Bausch, I expected an ordinary biography about a modern ballet dancer and choreographer. 

Modern dance is not something I can easily identify with. I love the nostalgic, the classical, the romantic. Opera is my world, where I prefer the sceneries that let me live in another century for a few hours. If I want to see today´s tragedies, I certainly don´t go to the opera, I just open a newspaper or watch the news. If I want to see today´s minimalism, I go to an exhibition, where I can admire a plain canvas with one red line and the imaginative title "The red line" - in "La Boheme" I expect a bit more of adornment than a single chair and a watch. 

I see a huge digression emerging, back to my topic, before it´s too late. When it comes to classical ballet, I admire the graceful moves, the fragility of the dancers, and their lightness. Nevertheless, I was always more for the temperamental dances (maybe because me and my stature can cetainly not identify with the tiny ballerina-body). Flamenco, Salsa, Tango, and even the "cool" hiphop-moves - I could watch them for hours. Watching a ballet perfomance, I was wishing for the dancers to open their mouths and sing for the whole three hours. Well, with modern ballet it is different, I agree. But after my first and unsuccessful contact with the classical ballet, I decided that anything with "ballet" in its name just is not for me. I proved to be wrong. 

The beginning of the film, that is, the first choreography shown, is disconcerting, disturbing even, and I didn´t really know what to think about it. The moves are very edgy, the story is about violence, sacrifice, grief and fear. And about a whole group of people plotting against one person, without mercy. The music is powerful and lets the scene go even deeper under your skin. Already in the second scene, I was completely banned and dragged in Pina´s world. It is literally the world, she is creating in her choreographies, the world in all its facets. I was deeply impressed, how powerfully she managed to express every human emotion and to combine it with the elements of nature. Somehow Pina returned to the roots of dancing to achieve that effect. Original forms of dancing were dances of conjuring, rhytmical and simple labour moves and moves expressing joy, hope, grief and desires. And that is exactly what Pina´s choreografies are about. She doesn´t moderate the expression with too rigid guidelines, she leads her dancers more to the competence and self-confidence necessary for a free and artful performance. And her dancers mentioned exactly that, that Pina had the talent to tell them exactly what they needed to free themselves. To make the performances even more powerful and interesting, their setting is mostly a natural one. I will never forget the dance in the water, or another in the sand on the top of a hill and at the brink of the abyss. In other scenes, there are wonderful contrasts, for example a ballerina in ballet shoes in front of an old factory. Through this freedom of expression and natural settings and locations from everyday life, the audience loses track of time and melts with the dancer himself.

The film "Pina", for me, is a highly recommendable masterpiece. Even if it doesn´t contain any biographical detail about Pina herself, it couldn´t create a better impression about her person. She lived for her art. And she was her art.

A Wilde Guess

"The recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses." 

Dear Mr. Wilde, I really am a fan of your always so sharp, witty and truthful thoughts. You made me laugh a billion times. In the case of the mentioned sentence you said, I am not sure if you discovered a hidden truth, or if you just shot a wild guess into the world to observe the reactions of a materialistic society.

Well, let me think about it. I was thinking that we actually get to express our individuality in wearing the clothes we like, being creative in furnishing and decorating our rooms and filling our libraries with beautiful books (some of which we plan to read every summer and never do). We are looking at the passers-by on the street and cannot avoid to make conclusions about their character from their appearance. That woman in the bus at the airport, the one with the brilliant rings, leather coat and long claws of finger nails, she must lead a busy life, love her career and luxury. That man with the glasses, long hair, a long coat and a worn-out leather bag must be an academic on his way to a literature class. We all have our mental images about groups of people and everyone fits into a certain drawer we created in our minds. I don´t like that it is that way, but you just cannot separate a human from his/her belongings. They always tell you something about his/her choices. What you are suggesting, dear Mr. Wilde, is, that everyone would need to have the same or we all should possess nothing, in order to see only the person and the character. I believe that we are not confusing the man with what he possesses, we are just making conclusions about his character based on his or her outward appearance, and sometimes these conclusions might be wrong. A wealthy man might be unhappy, have a warm heart and long for a simple life in a wooden home in the woods. 

And yes, sometimes we do care too much about how much we earn in life, how much of luxury we achieve and how many material goods we can afford. In the end, many of us realize that it was not the material goods that made us happy, it was the moments spent with dear people.

So, after all, I think that humans are not confused with what they possess by others, but they lose themselves in material wishes. And they strive to be as wealthy, as good-looking, to have a house as big and a car as fast as their idol, or maybe even next-door neighbour. And after years of buying and collecting things they didn´t really need (have you already got yourself the new apple peeler?), they realize that they haven´t spent time to find their interests and passions, they don´t know what defines them anymore. And then - what to do but to define oneself through all those splendid things exposed in one´s home and at one´s own body. And at that point, people´s possessions are everything we can see in them. So I guess, after these considerations, I must, again, agree with you. At least in a way. 

Sincerely, Katarina

Duhovi iz prošlosti (nešto malo i na srpskom :))

Duhovi iz prošlosti postoje. Oni neće nikad otići. Stoje u senkama i pokazuju se svaki put kad nam nije dobro. Oni su beg i očaj u jednom. Prate nas. I nikad nas ne napuštaju.

To su duhovi onih koji su možda mogli biti pravi. Duhovi onih koji su nam naneli bol. Duhovi onih koje smo izgubili. Duhovi propuštenih šansi.

Čovek može provesti ceo život u čežnji za tim duhovima. Ali postoji sila koja ih vezuje za senku. Blede. I možda čak i nestaju. Ta sila se oslobađa kada zaista počnemo da volimo. Onda sve ostalo postaje nevažno. Nepobedivi smo. Nepropuštene šanse nisu više nepropuštene šanse nego samo jedan korak ka ljubavi koju smo našli. Rane postaju jedva vidljivi ožiljci. Kao od mačijih kandžica.

Ljubav je jedina prava sreća. U svim svojim oblicima. 

Kao što je rečeno u jednoj pesmi koja mi uvek izmami osmeh: Život je igra napravljena za sve nas. I ljubav je njena nagrada.

Ph: by Katharina Peterke

 

Language Identity

 My next post doesn´t exactly describe a happy moment, it is more about the way I felt about moving to a new country without knowing the language:

And then I realized what language can mean.

It can weave into your identity, modify or model your way of thinking, support your thoughts.

It becomes a part of you, which can be lost like any part of a puzzle.

The homeland of my mother always meant a lot to me. Through her influence I was guided through childhood and youth with the background of Slavic mentality. Sometimes almost in a clash with my father´s principles—rooted in Germanic culture. I remember my attempts to learn Serbian before moving to Novi Sad, and I remember them as not very successful. The rhythm and melody of the Serbian language are completely different to any other European language I had learned until then. The fact that in my earliest childhood, my mother used to talk to me in Serbian, didn´t make it easier. The phrases and words acquired back then subconsciously, had been sorted out by my brain as soon as I started to go to kindergarten, where everyone used my native language, German. Being responded to exclusively in German, my mother gave up her attempts of raising me bilingually, and my ´´Serbian puzzle´´ fell apart.

I decided to put my learning on hold until my move to Novi Sad, the city of my heart. I remember the day I arrived as if it were yesterday, everything was exciting and new and the few ``negative´´ aspects I simply idealized. Unfinished streets seemed just adventurous. Ruined houses added to a certain Mediterranean charm. It was a sunny day—the air already hot at the beginning of April. I remember street signs and advertisements written in Cyrillic passing in front of my eyes. Of course, I couldn´t decipher them, but they seemed beautiful to me, artistic, somehow resembling hieroglyphs.

After my arrival, I was surrounded by that language of my earliest days and I loved it. The rolled `r´ makes it temperamental. Luckily, I didn´t have to replace `r´ with `l´, the not all that discrete trick of German speakers who can´t roll the `r´, for example in Italian opera arias; sounds odd. After a few weeks in the secure environment of friends and family, who all knew English, I had to admit that engaging my musically educated ear would not be enough to acquire a language. A Summer School for Serbian helped me to master the basics of the language in the safe environment of other foreigners. But that was just the basics, my real trial was reality afterwards. I found myself able to lead a minor conversation, but unable to really express my thoughts, not to mention my inability to make humorous comments of any kind. Also, it was almost impossible for me to follow a fast conversation with noise in the background, which is really hard to avoid when going out with friends. At least by then I could read the Cyrillic advertisements on my way home and add some lines on my own. In my head of course, I wouldn´t want to become a foreign criminal.

I guess my temporary despair and helplessness in expressing my thoughts was my share of cultural shock. A pretty mild one, I must admit. But it led me to fully understand the ``one language, one self´´ paradigm, the linguist Michael Erard mentions. According to him, speaker, citizen and self are governed by the same linguistic norms. I felt pretty relieved, when I realized that there is even a scientific explanation for my feeling uncomfortable—the linguistic norms of my self and the citizens around me couldn´t have been more different. But, step by step, I recognized words I had read in the speech of others (a euphoric feeling every time, even if the word in question was only a tiny connection word), I could make up word plays which I had loved so much in my mother tongue (well, that was a whole Ode to Joy playing in my head, with all parts of the orchestra) and I almost didn´t have to lipread anymore in noisy surroundings (and a decent amount of lipreading is pretty common in today´s noisy society anyway). With the acquisition of vocabulary through everyday situations, I started to take on the Serbian way of communicating as well. I began to think in Serbian and to replace the long and complicated German sentence structures with short, straightforward Serbian ones. Herein language mirrors the culture and interaction of the citizens of a country perfectly. I noticed that Germans wrap up their thoughts, they tie a rope of endless multi-clause sentences around them. Serbs, on the contrary, communicate their thoughts directly and straightforwardly in short, clear sentences. And in this way they act as well. There is little hiding, or beating around the bush. Thoughts are communicated. Mostly immediately. Negative and positive. After a while, through the language, I learned the culture. Through the culture I learned the behaviour. And finally, through the behaviour I partly formed a new identity. Partly, of course, I am still what I am. But I am that in a Serbian way.

A few days ago I was at a German barbecue. I felt unbelievably insecure talking in German, my sentences resembled Serbian sentence structure. Somehow I felt as if I was walking on ice with every new thought I wanted to communicate. It has been a few years since I moved to Serbia, but it is nevertheless startling how fast you lose parts of the puzzle, even in your native language. But after all, change probably is the only constant in our lives. And it is just impossible for the brain to keep all the information after every change.

So, I was at this barbecue. Talking on ice. And my conversational partner asked me: ``So, how long have you been studying German for?´´ That was it. I had become completely immersed in, and adopted, Serbian identity.