Red lipstick

All things in this life are relative.All things are limited in time and space, and all that we own or we hope to own is either going to vanish, or we're going to lose it, displace it, forget that we ever had it or wanted it so,so badly.This somehow diminishes the very value of things doesn't it? Somehow, all those shiny little trinkets in life, all those glamorous lives we are constantly poisoned with on TV, all of our carnal desires and political horn-bumpings, it is all going to pass, and if you would strip a man of all of those layers of material and information and dirt, what would you have? What would that tiny little man be left with at the end? His dignity and his humanity.Yes,dignity and humanity. Always remember one thing, we are all human after all, and if someone would take everything from you, they can never take away your dignity.

And how true is this? Very true. You see, funny thing how something as feminine and as simple as a red lipstick comes into this very story I'm writing.Once I read about a lady saying that whenever she finds herself feeling unnoticed,or completely without attention, she stops feeling as a lady, and putting on a red lipstick helps her to feel like a woman again. I didn't understand fully at that point how can something like a splash of red lipstick influence a complex psychical situation as feeling left out alone. I mean, we, men, do not use lipstick, and we are successfully going through those situations with or without it (yes,beer helps), so I simply hooked that statement on the "girl-things-I-don't-understand" board.

It was not until I saw a rather disturbing work of art by Banksy (yeah, I know I mention him often but,what can I say I just love his work), that I understood that I was so very wrong. Red lipstick was not just another PMS-induced glitch in the psyche of that fore-mentioned lady. It was a symbol of feeling and being human.Symbol of being alive. Here is the art piece:

When I first saw the art piece I simply did not understand the idea, but then I read the story behind it, and it is one of those incredible reality-check stories that reminds you that you should dig through all those layers of bullshit we pickup during our everyday life and try and find that thread of humanity and dignity we have left in us.The story is an extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was

among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen prisoner camp in 1945:

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

I mean, what can I possibly write after this.All those people were stripped naked from everything they had but even in death they clutched to their humanity and dignity.The two oldest concepts in the world, the two things that we inherited by our very existence.So very often we are blinded by everything around us that we forget who we are, but now and then we have to go back to that something that reminds us we're still human.

For some, that reminder, that escape, might be putting on a red lipstick, for others it's drawing a graffiti on the wall, and for some maybe writing a post on a blog. But whatever it is, stick to it, as at the end our humanity and our dignity are the only two things we truly own.