Her opponent. A young whippersnapper. Slight-looking, quiet, reserved. From Japan, we think. No probs. Who is she anyway?
Soon in, though, things begin to get complicated. It's not going to plan. Not at all. Precise, powerful, tenacious, the opponent is tearing to pieces the megastar. Soon, the unthinkable is looming: our Idol is heading towards defeat.
Things unravel further. Shouting, screaming. Smashing the racket. Crying, complaining, accusing the umpire of severe wrongdoing. Throwing the mother of all tantrums: nothing is too low for our great idol in her bid to get her own way. Sexist, racist, unfair, injustice, equality, what about me?: she is skilled in the buzzwords, the triggers, the buttons to push, in order to gain attention, garner sympathy, get her own way. She has a new one now: mother.
The feminine, all fallen down. The feminine, gone horribly wrong.
And there's the man. Law and order is his game. He runs the balance sheet, knows the rule book by heart. That's his job, and he does it impeccably. Blow by blow, he counts her out. Her rage inflates by the minute. He is man-cool on the outside; inside, he's probably shitting himself.
And there's the crowd. The pawns, the robots, the unthinking mass, the world. She knows how to work them, the machine idiots, and does it magnificently. They are baying for blood.
It's kind-of awful. At the same time, it has its own reality. It's drama to knock the socks off any television soap, theatre to have the ancient Greeks on their feet. Unconscious archetypes let loose, running riot, creating havoc, on the big stage.
What's truly awful, in my view, is the collective. The herd mentality. The pathetic followers with their group think. The fawning commentators, the 'experts', the analysts, all poisoned by the ideological flavour of the day. Wetting their pants at the mere mention of the Great American Idol. There are a few, a paltry few, with the courage and personal integrity to just say it: Big Girl Behaving Badly. Maybe most of them are just too blinkered by their ideologies to actually see it, I don't know. More concerned with appearing right-on than to entertain the notion that maybe it does not befit an international superstar to behave like that, with the whole world watching. Instead, all we get is the collective nightmare. Sexist: yeah! Racist: yeah! Unfair: yeah! Poor little rich girl can't get her own way: yeah, yeah, yeah!
I'm beginning to actually see it, experience it. There are two things. There's real life, direct, naked: sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, sometimes great, sometimes crazy, sometimes just throwing a tantrum. Then there is the overlay. That's how I experience it: as an overlay, or a kind of mesh which places upon the bare bones of direct reality. Neil Kramer used to talk of the Construct, which is another fair description. Or it's like a dream, which envelopes what is real in a blanket of fog, or candy floss. It's what Mary Shutan refers to as the layer of societal and collective conditioning.
It is this overlay which, from the viewpoint of spirit, of soul, of authentic living, of the mystical and magical, does the real harm. It sets up a separation from who we are as unique individuals drinking in the miracle of moment-by-moment existence. Instead, it substitutes collective conditioning, especially in the form of beliefs and ideologies, knee-jerk reactions that feign to tell us what is right and what is wrong; what is acceptable, what is unacceptable. Their aim is, primarily, to delude and deceive; to prevent our self-discovery, if you will.
'Politicising', imposing political agendas on tantrums, is one of their prime strategies. It's the stock-in-trade of the media, whose main aim appears to be the imposition of the overlay on real life. This is why it is so poisonous, so detrimental to making something decent of your own life, and why it is to be shunned as much as possible. It is the poisoned chalice containing the toxic liquid of the collective nightmare. The BBC should come with a 'danger to health' warning, the Telegraph and Guardian with skull and cross bones on the front page. Agents of the collective nightmare, avoid whenever you can.
Meanwhile, in chapter five of Maria Sharapova's autobiography, we find the following: "I do not bitch. I do not throw my racket. I do not threaten the line judge....." Just so, Maria, just so.
Image: Men can do it as well.
