Many people sit on couches and power intoxicates them to the extent that they even remember that they are knowledgeable. Don’t get bored, this is an article for them
The seminar needed a new, solemn look, and Sislej Xhafa was waiting for me at the Plunge Club in Pristina. A happy sun was heralding the health and vitality of the day, but we still had our winter coats on and were drinking coffee in the courtyard.
– I thought: I want to make the goddess lying down and resting, he said.
When Sislej talks about art, you obey him. One of the most celebrated Albanian artists in the world was offering his pro bono services for the Jubilee Seminar that was marking its solemn edition, on the fiftieth anniversary of its foundation, offering the look of the poster.
One more month, and one less coat on the body later, a phone call would disturb me while I was relaxing on the weekend at the beach, before the season started yet.
We had completed most of the preparatory work, but the official call from my bosses at the University was about the poster depicting the goddess lying on the pillow, reimagined by Sislej Xhafa and designed by my brother Ylli.
The tone was firm, commanding, and instead of scolding the goddess, he was asking us to change him. I was even offered the services of the Design Department of the University of Pristina. They were people who decide on the Seminar’s budget. He had never reacted in this way before. The goddess, which had become a symbol of the Seminary after the war, in the Seminary of 2000, was sometimes designed by professionals, but sometimes also by various amateurs, either student volunteers or stamp printers at the printing press that receives the University’s tenders. However, there had never been any reprimanding phone calls to the director. Now that the goddess was the original Sislej Xhafa, a work of art of the highest world level, reactions were immediately appearing.
Of course, it wasn’t surprising to me that even well-educated people can’t tell a work of art apart.
What has been called art through the ages has been defined differently by different authors, not only because the opinion about it has changed, but also because what is known as ‘art’ has reinvented and reshaped itself. It is a human activity that functions as universal communication in time and space precisely on the basis of the innovation it offers, and this innovation is expected to create a change in thinking in the human community. These changes cause the activity itself to change. What was considered art in antiquity, what was considered art in the Renaissance, what was considered art in the Enlightenment, what was considered art in Romanticism, and what is considered art today cannot be summed up in the same definition.
As in art, in science, a research work is not good because it is not indisputable, but because its results constitute distinct innovations in relation to the results so far. Being such, they are always disputed by bureaucrats and semi-educated people. The part that was shocking to me was the feeling of the people in power who remember that the armchair also makes them wise.
Miloš Forman, in “Amadeus”, explains this with the classic scene, when the emperor judges the work of Mozart: It is a good work, but there are only too many notes, you have to remove some.
– How to remove them? Does the work have as many marks as it should have?
– Well, remove some.
The emperor is speaking. Dare not obey.
My administrative bosses were considering that the goddess should be removed from the pillow. They were talking. Dare not obey.
In a match between bureaucracy and culture, culture always wins in the long run.
Therefore, my answer was even more blunt and with the melodiousness of Richard Dawkins.
– The goddess remains. And who doesn’t want to cultivate, can go and fart!
Like Dawkins used to say: Science is interesting, and if you don’t agree you can fuck off!
I just adapted it to my context.
Creator scholars never submit to any authority, be it a boss or an emperor.
Albanians and Albanians do not have an emperor. Kosovo does not even have a president. This spring, I had the task of hosting, together with some colleagues from the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosovo, the President of Albania, Bajram Begaj. He probably had some need to talk and we were mostly listening politely, while he was telling us the symbolism of being one. From his armchair, this “we are one”, sounded “I am also your president”. He had found us the people without a president in Kosovo and we had no way to oppose him.
Going out, as I was shaking his hand, I suggested that maybe it would be good to go to Zare this year, in May, since it was the 300th anniversary of the settlement of Albanian men and women there. I have been doing research visits there for about nine years and I had just submitted the book about this community to the press. However, the president knew better than I did.
– No, this year is not the 300th anniversary. I know…, he told me.
The tall counselor folded her arms to avoid looking at her. I tried to explain it to him in vain. He was the president. He knew better.
When I went to Zare in May, everyone remembered that it was the 300th anniversary. Arbêneshi Bozhidar Kallmeta, former minister and mayor of Zara, was opening the ceremony, saying that it is the 300th anniversary. Ncncnc. It could be 299 +1, it could be 301 – 1, but never the 300th anniversary. Do they know or not what the president is saying?
A new word that recently entered English dictionaries is: agnorant – a mixture of ignorant and arrogant together. It suits the bosses of this article.
My bosses and the president had one thing in common with a man in America named Macarthur Wheeler.
He had been a bank robber who in 1995 had entered two different banks with a gun and, without a mask or a care, had looted the money and gone home. When, a few minutes later, the police knocked on his door to arrest him, Macarthur Wheeler was surprised.
– Who betrayed me?
The police were trying to tell him that there was no need for anyone to betray him, because they had seen him on the security cameras of the banks, but Macarthur Wheeler was there waiting for them.
– You couldn’t see me on camera because I had lemon juice on my face and the camera doesn’t catch you when you have lemon on your face.
He was smart enough to believe that painting your face with lemon makes you invisible to the camera, and even more smart enough to take pictures of himself and not know how to capture his face and remember that “hey, the camera doesn’t capture you”. In other words, he had been smart enough to remember that he was wise. David Dunning and Justin Kruger are two researchers who, based on this, have drawn a conclusion called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which states that people with less knowledge or skills in a field often tend to overestimate their skills, precisely because they do not have enough knowledge to understand what they don’t know or how much they don’t know.
My grandmother was not president, but she was a proud matriarch, and in my childhood I had the impression that she enjoyed making decisions and even meddling in everyone’s affairs within the family. It didn’t seem to me that she was educated enough like her children to make joint decisions herself. Once I decided to challenge him by mocking him.
– What did you have to do with being president?
Instead of an answer that I expected for mockery, she gave me a lecture.
– I don’t know. I had begged the most knowledgeable people and then I asked them what they told me, each according to what they know.
Crrak. I closed my mouth. I remembered the lecture.
In other words: Are we electing a president or not?
