Mask

Too soon we hoped that the masks would become just one detail in the kaleidoscope of memories of the global narrative of the pandemic.

Masks are coming back. One could almost say - to the big door. And not only these medical, bright and airy ones. We see more and more masked people, but who are not afraid of corona. Something else is bothering them. These helmets-masks, dark visors worn by the modernly equipped Montenegrin police were definitely created to scare people, I guess that's the "aesthetics of deterrence", to make them think that they are dealing with a machine and not a man. When a man wishes or believes that he is a machine, it never goes well for other people, non-machines. Sometimes these police officers look like characters from some dystopian comic book from the seventies. So monstrous. But, remember, it is also - a mask.

By the way, the mask from the comics made it to the movies - you might remember Jim Carrey's bravado from the best days. How does such a mask, I don't mean the one of Jim Carrey, but of the Montenegrin policemen, affect the one who wears it. Does he believe that he is someone else so disguised? And what does he do if he believes that he is someone else. Does that other person have different views on life, the world, work...

They say that compared to last year, Budva has twice as many presidents, and twenty times fewer tourists. Happy city.

People disguise themselves in all kinds of ways - it used to be sung that life is a masquerade. And it's probably one of those phrases whose overuse, exploitation, doesn't take away from the truth.

How many times do you experience the face of your neighbor as a naked mask, every day? For such people, this medical and emergency medicine comes as a mask on top of a mask. It is not easy to navigate there.

On the street, in the supermarket, you don't see half of people's faces, you may pass by someone close to you without even registering it, and you have to be careful with that. Montenegrins are sensitive to "reporting", it could turn out to be a problem...

The essential question is, always: how different we are when we put on the mask. As much as we want and agree to be different.

Again, there are visible and invisible masks. Whenever I think of Margaret Thatcher's face, I'm sure it is.

The spirit of carnival, a powerful social valve, is a key legacy of the Middle Ages and the fear that inspired frightened people. Therapy that has proven to be very effective, at least in the long run. Putting on a mask meant suspending morality, because then, it's not me, it's someone else. And it seems that back then, in those dark middle ages, it was sometimes healing to be someone else.

Think of the masks from James Ensor's paintings that were fused to the faces: a perfect portrait of the self-satisfied petty bourgeoisie.

"My face is my mask", reads a verse that I occasionally remember, when I encounter the peculiar everyday masking. Including the mask of directionality, one of the most dangerous, actually.

Perhaps this is how the personality cult should be understood: when one face becomes the mask of the whole society. Is that familiar to you?

And some people wear a good part of their lives - the mask of a representative... "Raise your hand", naked masks, but it doesn't always look like that. Sometimes, though, it's painfully obvious. A detail from the vote in the Montenegrin parliament made everyone laugh - which is commendable in the dreary days of the epidemic and frequent street riots.

Not knowing, obviously, what they are voting on, the members of the ruling party vote for the opposition bill. The proposal passes, in the shortest possible time, but then the voice of the first man of this kind of parliament is heard, uttering the decisive, key sentence: "Let there be no dilemma". Unconsciously, he very precisely communicated the political ideal of the elite to which he belongs: a society in which there are no dilemmas. In which everyone knows, without a dilemma, what they should do... And, so that there would be no dilemma, they voted again - and the law did not pass.

Locks, as the Italians would say.

And even the old Montenegrins would be sure that they had ground them perfectly. No dilemma.