TAKING A TUMBLE FROM THE HEAVENS

 Both of us, my Saturday night friend and I whipped out our phones and captured the scene. The horizon was a smouldering red and the crescent moon and Venus hung like jewels in the evening sky. In a few minutes, the night rustled up a wind and the celestial bodies slipped behind a blanket of darkness. We got one fleeting glance of brilliance and then it was gone from our sight. But behind the clouds, the timeless journey of Selene continued, the lunar goddess, attired in her mercurial robe driving her silver chariot across the heavens. She is the embodiment of woman, waxing and waning, a powerful symbol of the cycle of birth, death and rebirth. The other player is Venus or the goddess Aphrodite …alluring and sensual, the seductress, the object of passion and desire. That was how the wisdom of mythology spun out women.

However, in the glaring light of our modern age, in man’s race to unveil the secrets of the universe, we’ve been disrobed of our celestial splendour. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, saw no powerful Selene in a chariot drawn by white stallions, ready to charge across the sky. What he saw was a barren land, pitted with craters. I love the myth but alas it has been reduced to ashes. What about the goddess of love, depicted in Botticelli’s The Birth Of Venus…arising from the ocean, nude and ethereal, suggestive of powerful passions…the ultimate symbol of feminine sensuality? Well, the bottom has been knocked out of that one as well…no more appeal to the imagination… just buxom beauties with pouty lips…the rising stars of Instagram.

Legends aside, what about this present global village of ours, where men and women supposedly stand shoulder to shoulder? There’s so much talk of political correctness and yet our global culture is a culture of name calling…of playground psychology…if I can’t win, I’ll jeer and sneer and bad mouth you. A strong woman of sturdy convictions, the stuff that mothers are made of…pushing for change and improvement in our society, is lauded and showered with praise…only…if she is seen to toe the line. But what fate awaits her if she crunches on a few male toes? She is called a…COW…reduced to a cud chewing bovine of low intellect, top heavy and good only for filling the stomachs of bawling babies. Call a man the male equivalent…a BULL… and it’s a term of high praise…a fuming creature, pawing the ground, ready to charge and take on the world. Even in the world of finance when the economy is on the rise, the market is termed as bullish or a bull market.

Then, there’s the ubiquitous female dog, a BITCH…an umbrella term for all types of women. If she’s shrewd and competitive, giving the male folk a run for their money, they’d exchange sneering glances and say…` What a bitch!’… If women, in positions of power, sit among men and give informed opinions or constructive criticism, there would be snide remarks behind their backs… …`Bitching away as usual.’… And what if women play the other card and nod their heads in agreement or smile in disagreement, without any facial twitches? They would be looked upon with suspicion and small groups of men would lean towards each other and mutter…`Yep, all smiles, but there’s a bitch in there somewhere.’… So the bottom line is that you can’t really win. There’s no calling a man a `dog’. It doesn’t mean anything. The only thing that comes to my mind is the Everly Brothers’ hit song Bird Dog. Johnny kisses the teacher and gets to sit next to someone else’s heart throb, croons a love song to her and tries to steal her away…`He’s a bird dog.’ It just gets our brawny species to smile indulgently at this little playboy who is just starting out…and who knows…may one day be immortalised as a Don Juan.

In Greece, other animals have come into play. When a woman is feisty and all drive, they douse her fiery spirit by calling her a…KATCHIKA …GOAT…impetuous, wilful and capable of kicking over her own pail of milk. The further down the animal kingdom, the better. Call a woman a … KOTA …HEN…and she’s no more than a dowdy clucking gossipy creature who should go home and sit on her clutch of eggs. But a COCKEREL…WOW!… He’s arrogant, strutting and virile in all his colourful plumage.

So we took a tumble from the heavens and are now personifications of animals. A Korean proverb paints a much worse picture…`Woman was born three days earlier than the devil.’ So what is it they fear about us? Perhaps, that left unchecked we’ll unleash ourselves upon the world and there’s no reining us in? But name calling won’t help, so what is to be done? Nature which replicates itself in all creatures, big and small, hairy and feathery, may offer a solution to our men folk.

 Late afternoon last week, I was looking out into the garden and saw this bird picking at a pot of geraniums on the low stone wall. It was a female blackbird, a little worn out with a grey beak and a tattered looking tail. Then I heard a sharp whistling. There, under the tangerine tree, looking up at her and whistling and warbling was her mate. His feathers were all preened to a shiny ebony black and he was piping through a bright yellow bill. She stopped picking, turned around sharply and launched into a tirade of… what appeared to be… shrill chittering bird abuse. You don’t need a lot of imagination to interpret this. …` It’s not enough that I suffered all the birth pangs, got all sweaty and flustered sitting on those eggs for days on end and NOW… I’m supposed to bring the bacon home as well, to feed those forever hungry babies, shrieking their lungs out. And YOU, what do you do? You go off with your mates and sing from treetops!’

He fluffed out his wings, in a show of bravado and responded in sharp short tutting sounds, building up a case for himself and trying to shut her up. But she came back with a couple of waspish stings, fast and lethal which reduced him to what seemed like apologetic peeping sounds…` And don’t bother to come back!’…she screeched. She then plucked out something squirming on the pot and flew off in a huff. A proper shrew, you’d say. Mr Blackbird hopped on a flower trough and looked up at his missus as she fluttered past. He stood there with his wings drooping, looking quite forlorn. What was he to do?…He could peck around for food…but not yet. Ah yes! He brightened up a little. He knew what to do. He knew how to tame the shrew. He would fly up into the orange tree next to their home and break out into a melodious song, taking it all the way up to a falsetto…a song that only his missus would understand. That would soften her heart. Then when dusk fell, he would fly back to the nest, but on the way, he would stop to pick up dinner, tug out a long juicy worm from one of our enormous flower pots. By the time he tiptoed into their little nest, the babies would be asleep and the missus sitting quietly, hushed by his song of love. They would then sit down to a quiet dinner in the twilight, pulling on either end of the worm…their differences put aside till the morrow.

Maybe it’s just the nature of how things are… ` A MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.’

Cheers!