Coccooning

Guess what? Mircea Eliade used to live in the place my conference was. Here's where he stayed.

I stayed in a brand spanking new five star, and I know it was new because they were busily knocking down the old version right next to it. That means I got to look at some construction workers. I love construction workers in Mediterranean countries. Sometimes their skin is just the prettiest colour human skin can be and their muscles ripple. And it's too hot down there for them to get fat. Purr.

Now, this five star. It had deferential staff, as I wrote yesterday; while they weren't obsequious or anything like that, they were very attentive and very respectful to a degree I had really only seen in movies. And the five star was in a beautiful place both the attendees and their wives could enjoy. 95% of the attendees were male and the chairman closing each day's talk would mention 'our wives will join us at such and such a time and then we will be ferried to such and such a staggeringly beautiful location for a top notch dinner' or some such. Lots of jokes were made about shopping, etc., but I'd seen the 'social' programme that had been set up for the wives and it was lovely - tours and tastings and all the rest, oh my . . .

What I mean to say is that everything at this conference was taken care of, and that the experience was one of overwhelming comfort and safety. Reassurance. An atmosphere had been created that didn't allow for discomfort, disrespect, rejection or even marital discord since the wives were kept appropriately busy doing beautiful things. I suppose the safety and reassurance of it all came home to me on the last night at the formal dinner rounding off the conference, when I was on a dance floor full of beautiful women - or women who had invested a great deal in being beautiful - and, well, ugly men (and me, to whom none of the above categories applies). There were some attractive men at the conference but for the most part they didn't go to the formal, or else didn't dance once they were there.

They used the relative safety to pose, you see - lots of the men did. On the last night they flaunted their wives, as they'd been flaunting their BMWs, 39 foot boats, horses, Harleys, and knowledge of Michelin starred restaurants for the last few days. What it came down to in the end, for me, was that this was a group of men who had a safe environment full of deference and respect created for them which allowed them to be judged not by who they were, but by what they had done. I admit it disturbed me, probably because I got a couple of passes made at me which made me feel that these men who were making the passes - much older men than me, and not the George Clooney type of much older man - seemed to really expect me to go for it. And honestly, I was much less rude than usual about turning them down, so the environment of safety of deference and respect even extended over me.

And I know in a broader sense why the insulation disturbs me - that sort of world seems so insulated from reality, so removed from real things like love or disappointment or happiness or mercy or heartbreak or elation - all the most beautiful and staggering emotions that spontaneous life makes us feel and that we all have in common, that make us human. But that sort of insulated world seems to be the reward men get when they become successful and powerful in the normal sense of the words. These are the men, the insulated men, who run our world . . . it doesn't do to forget that . . .

But it's all very confusing to me because it has made me really think about how insulated my own world is, even within the framework of the prosperous West. I've surrounded myself with people who like books and don't like television, people who have the sophistication to analyze celebrity instead of having some bizarre emotional relationship with it, people who try to vote with their brains instead of their insecurities - that's not the real world either and periodically that comes home to me when I go to MSN and everything on the home page is about Britney Spears being fat on national TV, or when I'm in a Portuguese restaurant that had apparently been recommended in a French guide book listening to the asinine Gallic conversation of the people around me, or - you know, in any number of circumstances. We are all so far apart from each other.

Anyways. The morning after the conference, I walked a couple of kilometres down the coast the the Boca do Inferno and stared at the fishies you would see milling around in the clear blue water next to it, and felt pretty damn good in any case. Here is the mouth of hell, and the fishies: