The Mind of a Narcissist
Titanic Waltz
By Sam Vaknin
It was as surrealistic as they get: a Viennese Ball in a
decaying Balkan city. Organized by the nation of former Nazis and current
Nazi sympathizers in a land of former communist thieves turned capitalist
robbers. It was held in a newly opened hotel, a gleaming temple of kitsch
and tackiness, an abode of golden brass and polished mirrors amidst urban
waste and uncollected mounds of festering trash. Hundreds of middle-aged,
burly diplomats and locals, all in ill-fitting smoking jackets, the women
wearing sweaty, smeared make-up. A grotesque medley of decadence, a glimpse
of zombie Habsburg schmaltz, the foreigners' deluded way of pretending
they are in Europe, an outlet for smug Balkan swaggering braggarts.
Outside, fly-infested children, beggars extending ulcerated
soiled hands in silent plea. Others peddled rusted razor blades and leaking
batteries to passers-by. Young men smiled rotting teeth in the smoking
humidity of dingy coffee houses. The middle-aged, bent, sparkless eyes,
consumed by unemployment and disease, a confluence of wrinkled toothlessness
and dwindling hair. The women grey and flabby, wise, weary eyes in penumbral
sockets. They glided, huddled, fending off the windy chill that ricocheted
from cracking, mouldy walls. Dark clouds weighed on denuded trees in littered
boulevards.
Inside, the orchestra cast notes at heated chandeliers.
Elastic TV cameramen engaged in public pantomime of angles and photo-opportunities.
Scarlet cheeked singers hurled their arias at the wooden eurythmics of
the hop. Flushed waiters in perspiring attires held trays of bubbling
champagne aloft. Men in skewed bow ties smiled genteelly at each other,
leading the women in gauche steps across the wide arena. The lights were
bright, the atmosphere excited.
Not far from there, children were dying for want of medicine
or excess drugs. Needled hookers solicited the haunted streets. Rat packs
erupted from fermented rubbish, ignored by men and women poking through
the piles. A red, polluted moon irradiated drunkards in tattered, puky
heaps near black Mercedes in ostentatious parking.
The light -- the darkness. The sybaritic fest -- the dying
populace. The glitter and decrepitude. The haves and those who have not.
The growing abyss between the leaders and the led, the elite and the masses
-- the masses soon to turn mob. A writing on the crumbling walls, the
distant thunder of reality denied, of social justice spurned. As ministers
and mobsters (one and the same) cruise potholed streets in flashy cars,
as mink-clad mistresses expose indecently bejewelled necks in fancy restaurants,
as former politicians throw hedonistic parties in sumptuous villas and
marry their offspring in Roman style -- so do they seal their fate, so
do they pronounce their verdict.
It had its faults, but communism did guarantee a modicum
of common misery. Society was never polarized and theft was a national
pursuit. The spoils were shared, and so was the inane bureaucracy, the
paranoia and the fear, the xenophobia, the immobility, the stilted speech.
All had the same disintegrating residence, suffered the same maltreatment,
enjoyed the same dilapidated services. The schools, the clinics, the gulag
were all accessible in equal measure. These were societies maintained
by zealous envy and lack of privacy and private property. There was no
middle class, there were no classes, only nomenklatura to which one could
belong at will.
And no middle class emerged in the capitalist upheaval that
followed the spastic death of socialism. Malignant profiteering followed
malignant abstinence. The social fabric torn, trust -- meagre as it were
-- was utterly eradicated. A jungle ruled, in which all forms of human
animal prevailed: the venal politician, the mafiosi, the Arkans of this
world, the drug dealer and weapons smuggler, the petty thief and pimp,
the whore. The haves had more, the luckless have-nots shipwrecked on an
isle of destitution. The former lived with abandon, the latter abandoned
life. A yawning, lava spewing gap, a pit without bottom, a biblical damnation.
They who have nothing to lose shall lose what all others
have.
Previous
Entries from The Mind of a Narcissist:
How I "Became" a
Narcissist
In Search of
a Family
Why Do I Write
Poetry?
Skopje
- Where Time Stood Still
Portrait
of the Narcissist as a Young Man
I Cannot
Forgive
My
Woman and I
The Music of
My Emotions
A Great
Admiration
Ghost in the Machine
No One Counts
to Ten
The Disappearance
of the Witnesses
Being There