reflected for a while when I asked my question about advice for life in a rare moment between stops. But the President’s answer made sense of what we were seeing:
‘I’ve come to believe that one of the most important things is to see people. The person who opens the door for you, the person who pours your coffee. Acknowledge them. Show them respect. The traditional greeting of the Zulu people of South Africa is “Sawubona”. It means “I see you”. I try and do that.’
Never has a person practised more what they preach.
The craziest bit, back at the hotel, after twelve hours in the field, tired, dusty, depleted, when us mere mortals would be up in our rooms ordering room service and hiding, President Clinton is down in the dining room talking to the waiters, joking with the other guests, making an American couple’s honeymoon, accepting an invitation to join a family’s table, sitting with Mum, Dad and two saucer-eyed children. He doesn’t stop. He knows what it means to people to meet a President, or more specifically to meet him. And everyone is made welcome. Everyone is made to feel important. Everyone is seen.
‘ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS IS TO SEE PEOPLE. THE PERSON WHO OPENS THE DOOR FOR YOU, THE PERSON WHO POURS YOUR COFFEE. ACKNOWLEDGE THEM. SHOW THEM RESPECT.’
– Bill Clinton
MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ IS PRESENT
I’M IN DOWNTOWN NEW YORK looking for soup. Specifically chicken noodle soup with prawns, or, I am now wondering, did she say without prawns? I arranged this lunchtime meeting with Marina Abramović, the Serbian-born, internationally revered performance artist, a month ago and we agreed I would bring her favourite soup. I just can’t remember what it is.
To avoid a potential faux pas, I get both. So when I arrive in the Greenwich studio where Marina works, the first order of business is to decide who gets which soup. Personal preferences are to be discarded; she insists on tossing a coin. Fate shall decide.
The fact that I worried she may be upset about which soup she gets both shows my hopeless Britishness and ignores the fact that this is an artist who has flagellated, cut and burnt her naked body for her art in public on many occasions. She is probably not the type to get worried about soup.
In fact, she is a woman who fits no type at all. She is gloriously, gorgeously unique and manages simultaneously to be sincere, saucy (she likes telling dirty Serbian jokes*), free-living, disciplined, reckless and loving, and is about the most interesting and alive human being I have ever met.
In her performance art over the years she has pushed herself to the point where she has lost consciousness, gained scars, spilt blood and risked her life. One of her earlier works, Rhythm 0, involved her lying on a table while people were given access to seventy-two different objects – scissors, a feather, a scalpel, honey, a whip, etc. – and told to use them on her as they saw fit. By the end she’d been stripped naked, had her neck cut, thorns pressed into her stomach and a gun put to her head.
She has recently hit seventy and is more in demand than ever before. MOMA’s 2010 retrospective of her work, ‘The Artist Is Present’, super-charged her international profile. As part of this exhibition, she sat immobile and silent in a chair for over seven hundred hours while thousands of visitors queued, some overnight, to sit opposite her. Marina would hold eye contact with each person, fully present in the moment, reacting to them only if they cried, by her crying too.
She explains that being present, gaining consciousness, is a big theme in her work. She sees cultivating inner-awareness as the best way to disentangle ourselves from the artificial structures of society, so we don’t feel disempowered or helpless. ‘With many people, there is a sense the world is falling apart and it creates a feeling of just giving up. And that inertia is the real danger to society. People have to realise we can create change by changing ourselves.’
This heightened consciousness can only come if we stop thinking and achieve a state of mental emptiness; only then can we receive what Marina calls ‘liquid knowledge – the knowledge that is universal and belongs to everyone’. The mission to help people attain it explains her more recent work, in which she invites her audience to count grains of rice or water droplets, to open the same door over and over again, to ‘create distractions to stop distraction, and rediscover the present so they can then rediscover themselves’.
Given the originality and uncompromising nature of her work, the risks she has taken and the sacrifices she has made, it is unsurprising that her main piece of advice is a rallying cry to commit deeply to whatever it is you feel that you must do.
‘Today 100 per cent is not enough. Give 100 per cent, and then go over this border into what is more than you can do. You have to take the unknown journey to where nobody has ever been, because that is how civilisation moves forwards. 100 per cent is not enough. 150 per cent is just good enough.’
I hugely respect the advice, but I reply that most people may not be prepared to put themselves in harm’s way and in real pain for their passions as she has done. But for this too she has advice. ‘Yes, the pain can be terrible,’ she replies, ‘but if you say to yourself “So what? So Pain, what can you do?” and if you accept pain and are no longer afraid of it, you will cross the gate into the non-pain state.’
Advice I choose to accept rather than put to the test.
* ‘How do Montenegro men masturbate? They put it in the earth and wait for an earthquake’ (Apparently a favourite Serbian joke about how lazy Montenegrin men are. With apologies to all our male Montenegrin readers. Source: Abramović, M.).
‘TODAY 100 PER CENT IS NOT ENOUGH. GIVE 100 PER CENT, AND THEN GO OVER THIS BORDER INTO WHAT IS MORE THAN YOU CAN DO. YOU HAVE TO TAKE THE UNKNOWN JOURNEY TO WHERE NOBODY HAS EVER BEEN, BECAUSE THAT IS HOW CIVILISATION MOVES FORWARDS. 100 PER CENT IS NOT ENOUGH. 150 PER CENT IS JUST GOOD ENOUGH.’
– Marina Abramović
TERRY WAITE, A PATIENT MAN
I’VE JUST HEARD WHAT MUST be one of the most understated sentences a human being could utter. I’m having lunch with Terry Waite in his local cathedral town of Bury St Edmunds. He is telling me about his experience of being held hostage for five years in Lebanon in the late 1980s, after having gone there as the Church of England’s envoy to negotiate the release of existing prisoners. He describes his four years of solitary confinement in a tiny, windowless cell, chained to a wall. He recounts the beatings and mock executions he suffered. He explains how he had to put on a blindfold if a guard came into the cell, so he didn’t see a human face for four years, and how they refused him a pen, paper and books and any communication with the outside world, including his family. He reflects back on it all and says, ‘Yes, it was a bit isolating.’
Terry Waite is the human manifestation of what it means to be humble, to serve and to sacrifice. He put himself in harm’s way in the hope that he could help others. And twenty-five years later he is still working tirelessly to help people who have had family members taken hostage, which says it all.
The craziest thing is that he claims he was mainly doing it for himself. I tell him I know the concept that no charitable
