Jasmin's heart

Espresso Pieces

2009-11-01T16:05:00.004+01:00

Horizon

Only me and the man who’s lost both his arms
On the running track today
By the mountain.

On the far side
The sky is clear and blue
Not above us.

Convincing

I tried it believe me
And she did as well.
It’s what everybody does.
It’s perfectly normal.
And really nothing
Can happen to you.

Unless you’re very unlucky
Unless you’re very unlucky

The Same

She was all
Excitement and escape, always hooked up
on the same things in life.
Same cigarettes,
Or regular bouts of giving up.

I never understood all that.

Trouble Studying History

The past
And the way
People understood
Life, love, friendships, sex and god,
How different
And how strange

Strong in the City

It is not easy to be strong in the city,
Not when the sun is shining,
And a terrible accident has taken place,
And blocked the way,
And once you get out seeing all that disarray,
And meet a surreally beautiful woman
And have a little chat with her
In the middle of the day.

Refreshing gene

I have a gene for survival
And I am more than thirty years old
And I am not bold or too grimy
Outside
I am more than thirty years old and I know
Many who did not make it

You cannot deny anybody
Their own taste in god

Not enough

Too many times it looks like
It is not enough to be a man.
In the way it is necessary to be an animal, or plant,
Or dust spread by a warm wind
It’s just not enough
Too many times

Respect for the morning

Respect for the morning
So many talked about that
This way or another
Thoreau for example
I keep on forgetting
That I should pay due respect
To the morning

Sharp Stone

A person walking next to me
Suddenly took a sharp stone from the ground
And in that moment
It seemed that that person's essence
Emanated from that stone
It only seemed that way
For a moment

Idea

If an idea is too far from an emotion
Or to close to it
It turns bitter
How many people loved something or someone in a wrong way
And died because of it
Just as if nothing had happened?
What indifference.

Artists

So many masters never showed you
What they can really do
They showed you just the bits of it
For you to figure out the rest
Leaving the most of it to you

No Power

Reading poetry with a lighter
Has anyone ever tried that
On the balcony with only shadows and starlight?
When we are talking about the poetry of Fernando Pessoa
I start to wonder where are all the Zippos I have lost
During my life

Daylight

2009-10-22T12:52:00.003+02:00

How many are learning a new language for tomorrow
Awaiting a recipe still not prescribed
Or discovered at all?

Maybe this is an abyss for you
And not for me
But whoever you are
You will have to wait
Just like me.

At least I can fool myself into thinking
That I am a poet
(I know how they're revered in, let's say, South America),
And that the sun is breaking through the clouds only because of me
As I drive into this new, unknown city.

Gluons

2009-08-10T11:06:00.003+02:00

There is a firm where I work,
and there are meetings that we have,
every month or so.
And there is a man,
an experienced man, who always has something to say,
and suggest, and of course,
there are us, the rest of us,
never, but I mean never, accepting any of his suggestions.

The first meeting ever at which that man
didn’t ask to speak has just ended. And gluons
that have something to do with a sense of my own mortality
are passing through my hair.

Gasoline

2009-07-29T09:48:00.000+02:00

I have just enough gas to return home, buddy

Just what it takes

This visit is not going to take place

I wanted to come over to your city

to escape for a day

the urge to go for a drive in summer is so powerful

and I have been deprived of my license for a month

unfairly

but somewhere in between, actually one third of the way there

I realised that I'd forgotten my wallet, my license and everything

I will be fine, I have just enough gas to get home

nothing more, nothing less

Overtime

2009-07-25T05:41:00.002+02:00

I've done some hard work in my time,
like Bukowski and Carver, probably.
It wasn't easy being a soldier. I got so bored with the fact that I might die at any time then.
It wasn't easy hauling timber, either,
and not so simple being a construction worker,
and recalling all the work of construction ever done.
It wasn't easy being headwaiter in a luxury restaurant with a fine wine cellar, having to speak in two, three and four different languages, and communicate the information that I believe everyone should possess.
It wasn't so easy being a painter, lover and in reality
Always some kind of someone else.

Always on the run, always on the run.
I know that's been said so often.
But in my case
It's been like remembering you left the kettle boiling on the stove, and you run to get there,
only to discover
that there was no need for panic at all.

Just Notes I

2009-07-24T07:05:00.001+02:00

There will be blood

This one is about blood, and it was originally written with a red pen, because the others simply wouldn’t work.

And here is what is all about.

For twenty years a heavy alcoholic, a neighbor with a funny-looking moustache, has been coming here, to a bar on the opposite corner, a place I sometimes go for a coffee, but not very often.

The alcoholic in question is a living legend in the neighborhood. Everybody knows him, kids and adults and the elderly as well. His miserable house is just around the block.

Once he kissed a little dog’s ass just to make people laugh. Another time he got into a giant truck whose engine was still on, left running by the driver who had gone off to use the toilet of this same bar.

He got behind the wheel of that monster truck and drove it into a house nearby where an old, retired priest used to live. The priest was woken with a terrible shock, and he died just a few days later.

And today, for the first time in 30 years, the alcoholic got a punch in his face. The first time in this neighborhood at any rate. It was another neighbor who was responsible, a guy nobody likes because of his violent temper.

He hit the alcoholic so hard none of us could believe it.

In the same bar. I wasn’t there at the time, I just heard about it. And as I jot down some notes for this piece on my cell phone, the neighbors in the bar are probably thinking I'm texting someone a message.

But I simply want to take a little note about the pain of the alcoholic neighbor with the funny-looking moustache. Pain much greater than the sum of all the years of his miserable and humorous life.

a call or a postcard

2009-07-23T09:13:00.004+02:00

A cousin from Serbia visiting his sister in Bosnia

My neighbour, a seventy years old woman, is complaining: "My brother has come home again, just as he has done for the past three years, and he's been here for a month already. And do you remember?" she says, "Do you remember those four years of hell? He never wrote during those four years of hell. Not a word or a call or a postcard. Not even a fistful of beans sent through the mail. He is going to stay for another two weeks here. And I am already old and cannot take care of everything.

"Do you remember those four years of hell? Not a word from him. While we were suffering."

Every Time

I don't know why but I keep finding that things keep cropping up between us, ways of avoiding the crowd and unnecessary conversations.

And yourself as well.

And I don't know why but every time these evasions occur I find myself bumping into my real love or at least one of my real loves from the past – a woman or a true story.

It doesn’t really matter which.

I keep on finding real love in quite trivial but beautiful things, and I'm not talking about women now, I'm talking about, for example, a two hour-long chat that I had with someone I hardly knew, a waiter in the bar, where I dropped by for a cup of espresso, with a friend. No Tom Waits kind of story to be sure, this waiter was a Serb hero who stayed behind in the city and fought against Milošević. Now I know who this guy really is, he and his daughter, born right at the beginning of the onslaught, this guy who I hardly knew for about twenty years, I know him so much better now.

And this is a true story.

Not Poems But Pieces

2009-07-21T16:08:00.001+02:00

Quiet Place

As with so many other places
around the globe
and in spite of everything
that has changed so much
I have decided that
I will survive in this city
and in spite of its quietness
after all

Living in any city
only means
that there are so many things
that are really none of my business.

Poetry Before the Doors

There is so much poetry
everywhere around
And that’s why it sells so badly

There are too many doors
everywhere around
Too much stumbling
and taking a deep sigh
before the doors

Wild Thyme Mother

2009-07-20T22:25:00.004+02:00

I'm shaken when I see the relationship between a close friend of mine and his mother. She deserted him right when he was born and went to prison for eight years.

When she got out she still didn’t want to have anything to do with him. But now, after a good few years have passed, the two of them are communicating. Somehow. She now sells some good herbs and is devoted to that. She's even picked up some prizes.

Houellebecq once said that no matter what life always breaks your heart. That’s why I bought some wild thyme from my friend’s mother for a really negligible price. I heard they are good for the heart and I want my heart to be strong. For a really laughable price.

Partisan Cemetery

2009-07-19T23:42:00.010+02:00

A tired-out old woman

hides from the heat in the

shade of a partisan cemetery.

Only the cemetery in question

is not a real cemetery.

The sole purpose of this place

is one of courage and memory. But it looks like

a real cemetery, the way they do it

in America. She walks

between slabs on the ground,

with names,

different and strange names,

and yet strangely familiar,

lying there alone on the ground.

Like in America.

A Bike Tyre

2009-07-19T10:03:00.008+02:00

My friend has been out of work

for a long time now

and he has been on his own

for such a long time –

apart from just two friends.

Now every day like clockwork

his bike tyre goes down.

He fixes that damn tyre and

it keeps going down –

every day for a week.

He can't believe it.

I can't believe it.

None of us can believe it.

It doesn't matter

if we believe it.

It’s unbelievable.

He fixes that damn tyre and

it keeps going down –

every day for a week.

The Street Samurai

2009-07-14T01:59:00.003+02:00

I don't feel comfortable in this place. And I prefer not to think about what is truly inevitable. I can tell what is not. My outlook on the world is based on three basic principles, one at least I find myself unable to express in words. I know a few places where I am able to get myself back on track and to find my sense of balance, and I know too that at least one of them is somehow a place of permanent safety, though it lies beyond my reach now.

I am a Street Samurai. And I even traveled to Japan with my best friend in the days of our sonic youth, when our inexperience was the deadliest weapon that any of us possessed. We were both shaken by the last book written by the Great Master.

My friend never acquired experience or skill. That's why, as I watch him disappearing from my sight and fade away, I can still see traces in him of my own invincible naivety, left over from our early days. I am afraid that's a place I no longer inhabit but - and this is something positive - there are still a few places to which I can always return, even if it means swallowing my pride.

Now, at the end of a long and successful career, at ease with all the tools of my trade, what is there left for me now? Am I still searching for something perhaps, hoping in the blink of someone else’s eye to catch a glimpse of my old self? I have followed my chosen path and things are just as they are supposed to be, part of a pattern that was laid down a long time ago, from ancient times.

I've often found myself anxious to pass on all my knowledge to someone else but put off doing so because I'm unable to cope with their inability to concentrate. I've found myself hating that former self I recognised in them from my early days - holding nothing back, always looking for the perfect solution.

It is good to have survived, and with a body still fit enough to satisfy younger women, and from time to time to receive the occasional invitation from various people. I'm not going to deny the fact that in the morning, before I take up position with my sword in front of me, I often forget who this person is that I am, and who I once was, and the greatest source of shame for me nowadays is that that is my fault and mine alone - the same as it is for everybody, of course, if that were any consolation.

I've understood weakness so well and it has never been my master. My style is unique - but that, after all, is the boring truth about all of us. We are familiar with each other and we know what we share, but all we really know about one another is that there is no single reason why it should be us standing here rather than someone else. Of course, I didn't use to think like that, in those days when I was still dangerous as a tiger, but now it's something that I have no choice but to live with.

That's the price I have to pay, being forced to listen to the lies, being forced to listen to the lies. People beside me talk as if nobody ever fought on their behalf. On the opposite side of the street mean-spirited women exchange untruths about my fallen friends. They pray to the Gods that none of us were interested in.

Having to live a lie is the shameless duty of my profession, but at least I am still able sometimes to enjoy the warmth of a woman's company, or the joy of a child as it smiles and wonders.

All these lies about me and my friends and our calling, all these lies, sometimes they weigh so heavily, like tired, late blossoms in the calm of a still summer afternoon.

Chess Pieces

2009-07-12T23:35:00.004+02:00

For the first time in his life

my son has touched the chess pieces.

Eleven of them he put on the window sill,

One black pawn he left beside my bed.

He did all that with

such precision and measure

that I was stunned,

but I already knew

that this wasn’t his first game,

nor even his first opening move.

He has played before, a long time ago,

and, so nonchalantly, he has responded to

a very complicated and well-conceived tactic.

My son plays on the side of life.

Hot Sofa Revisited

2009-06-30T13:51:00.003+02:00

This is revisited and revised version of one of my older post:

I don't know who first came up with it - the idea's been hugely exploited by so many writers and actors, movie makers etc. The question is - what difference would it have made if something in our lives had gone in one direction rather than another. Or to rephrase it – who would you be now if something significant in your life had turned out differently?

What effect would it have had if particular episodes in our lives had had a different outcome? Would anything have significantly changed, and how significantly? And who would you be now, and where, if that had happened?

Steve Buscemi made the movie, a very funny but at the same time depressing film about a guy from a small American town. In an interview he confessed that he was basically portraying himself and the life he would have had if he'd not taken the decision to leave the small town where he was born.

And Paul Auster admitted in an interview he gave that one of the main characters in his renowned novel City of Glass (volume 1 of his New York Trilogy) was constructed on the basis of the circumstances of his own life that suddenly changed the moment when his father died and left him the substantial inheritance that gave Auster the opportunity to became a writer. Without that inheritance Auster's magnificent novels would probably not exist as we know them. Everything that happens involving the character is essentially Auster’s imagined idea of himself and the different road his life would taken without the money that saved him and allowed his talents to develop.

That's just a couple of examples.

I'm not sure why this has come to mind today. The thought came to me, not the other way round. And after all, this is the reason why I'm writing this. I have the experience of surviving a war and living in a city under siege.

Unlike Hilary Clinton I know what it's like to have a real sniper's bullet whistle past your head.

As a 14 year old teenager, one morning I heard the sound of shelling and explosions. That was the start of the war in Bosnia. The Serbian army had laid siege to the city, a siege that was to last almost 4 years.

Who was I back then? I was someone with a collection of comic books, about 1000 of them, my best friend and I were comic strip addicts and bold enough to produce our own strips and publish them in magazines. I played basketball with a local team and dreamed about becoming an NBA player. I painted, too. I was doing really well at school. The world lay at my feet. Some of you might remember the Commodore 64, one of the earliest home computers – I had my own.

Like most of the kids in Bosnia at that time, or Yugoslavia as it was, I was raised in a pretty secular way. In my family there are Bosniaks Croats, Serbs and Bosnians. Coming from a family of such diverse origins was both a blessing and a curse.

I never used to pay any attention to what you might call "medieval issues". However, medieval issues imposed themselves on me and my life back then. Comics disappeared; basketball disappeared, painting as well. People were forced to concentrate simply on survival and nationality and religion became significant issues. The brutality of the Serbian aggression made me aware that reality could be far more terrible than any fiction. Questions I had never thought relevant to me were screaming themselves at me now. The whole world had suddenly shifted and transformed itself into something else. I understood then how such a thing was possible. The world as we know it is a fragile thing and the possibility is always present of everything we take for granted simply turning into dust. And through no wish of our own..

I was talking with a friend the other day and we were reminiscing about those times and a couple of our friends who had been full of talent when they were teenagers. One of them spoke English fluently and even wrote rap songs, with stunning rhymes and rhythm. The other had similar ability. And there were plenty of other ways they demonstrated their unique superiority as kids.

And yet one ended up killing a man in an accident and the other became a junkie. The question we were pondering was this - Was it the war that changed these two individuals so fatally and unfortunately, so that they turned out in a way no-one could ever have imagined? Or conversely, might it have had something to do with their psychological make-up? That's more probable - being caught up in the midst of war can find out your every weakness, or on the other hand, it can bring out the best in you. Either way, it can never offer you the slightest insight into who you were meant to be. You are not allowed even to dare try and collect up the little pieces of mosaic that once made up your soul and have suddenly become fragments of an irreparable broken glass. Even if you somehow discover a piece of that glass, the face you see reflected in it will never be the same, complete. The only thing left will be the blurred image that was swallowed up for ever by the 20th Century.

During the first year after the war, my friend and I used to go down to the Croatian coast to spend a few days there. Two hours drive and we were at the seaside. I met a beautiful girl, and we stayed together for about two years. There was a guy I became friends with as well, a guy who owned a vacation house in that beautiful Croatian city on the coast. He lived in Germany but every summer he would come back to the same gorgeous place to enjoy the sea and have fun in his lovely vacation home, he and his girlfriend. I remember so many pleasant evenings spent there, me and my girlfriend, he and his girlfriend. The house was huge and my friend was kind enough to let me and my girlfriend have a room there, whenever we wanted, in fact he was always wanting us to stay there, every time. My girlfriend lived almost around the corner but she stayed and spent many unforgettable nights with me in that house. For me it was like paradise, because for 4 years I had no opportunity to visit the coast and enjoy the sea and the smell of the pines and the Mediterranean palm trees. I spent four years living the life of the one of the characters in Auster’s novel In the Country of Last Things.

And then suddenly there it all was – I was young, a beautiful woman at my side and a friend inviting us to drink another bottle of wine with him in the summer garden of his house. Like a piranha forced to live a vegetarian existence and suddenly encountering an opportunity to feast- I was grabbing it all.
And all those many evenings spent in my friend’s garden with our girlfriends are now among the sweetest memories of my life.

In the living room of the house was a sofa. That sofa was like so many others, with nice tiny brown straps, with nothing out of the ordinary to distinguish it. It struck me that I hadn't even noticed it was there until the second or third time I happened to be in that room.

- I used to have exactly the same sofa!! – I burst out one night in front of everybody, suddenly interrupting a conversation in full flow. They all turned and looked at me, puzzled. I repeated - I used to have that same sofa! And then I realized how my behavior might appear rather strange to the others.

It wasn't until later that night, when I was alone with my girlfriend, that I explained to her that back at home, in the house destroyed by shelling during the war – exactly the same kind of sofa, the same colour and model, had been the centrepiece of our living room. That sofa had been damaged when much of the rest of the furniture was smashed to pieces during the bombardment. By now my sofa had long since fallen to pieces. Pieces of wood and fabric, rotten and lost, like the pieces of so many of the objects that once made up my world. And now I was looking at it again, that very same sofa, the same as it always had been, unharmed, with my girlfriend and I sitting on it gently touching hands .

Science and Sequestration

2009-06-18T09:23:00.003+02:00

It is an interesting fact how we take for granted so many of the things that surround us every day, without asking ourselves how we come to have those things here with us in the first place. It would certainly be appropriate for the great electronic manufacturing brands to include some relevant wording on the backs of their magic devices. For example the words "Tribute to Galileo" should be on the back of every cell phone. For the simple reason that that is where they all came from. And maybe also every school and university should bear a plaque in a place of honour on the façade acknowledging a debt of gratitude to the Enlightenment-inspired achievements of the French Revolution. Because that's where they all came from too.

Science still makes a lot of people nervous. Too many people are quick to criticise science and then try to hide from any mention of the subject behind a huge yawn, trying to avoid having to talk about something they find boring. And the daily newspapers in Bosnia, the only ones in the region who still see no need to have a science section, are no better.

Science provides us with proof that it is possible to be constantly running away from something that our everyday lives depend on.

It was thanks to the explosions of supernovae - the eruption of massive stars as much as ten times the size of our Sun - that the creation of the heavier elements with increasingly large numbers of protons, the elements that our bodies are made of, became possible. It is almost impossible to imagine anything more inspiring or romantic than the fact, for whose discovery we have the physicists to thank, that we are all children of the stars, as Michio Kaku would have put it, with bodies made from stardust (and at this point let’s not forget David Bowie either, and Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars). The stars from which we are made exploded many billions of years ago, setting in motion the process of fusion of hydrogen atoms that led to the creation of helium and then the heavier chemical elements, creating the substances required to make life.

The gaze into the depths of the Universe that the Hubble Telescope made possible for us has helped us finally understand how small and yet magnificent we are. The notion enshrined in the myths of antiquity that human beings are as old as the Universe probably tells us something about the problems of the ego but not very much about the reality of how things are.

It seems as if only science is capable of teaching people how to be modest and generous at the same time. Maybe generosity isn't the right word, it is hardly adequate to describe the fact that every year the procedure of vaccination saves the lives of 300,000 children in Nigeria and that this is possible thanks to nature’s trick of evolution, put to use in the process of manufacturing vaccines. A British journalist recently informed us that the number of people whose lives have been saved by vaccines is considerably greater than the number of lives lost in all the cataclysmic wars of the 20th century, and so he christened vaccines “weapons of mass salvation”.

It might be an interesting exercise to try spending a few days without any computers, automobiles, cell phones, aspirins or antibiotics, taking a "Walden"-like vacation from all those things. But you and I are not H.D. Thoreau and it is very doubtful whether you or I would be able to last out the experience, not for two years as he did, but even two days, or even two hours.

The issue of knowledge sequestration, a global problem currently affecting the most technologically advanced countries in the world and consequently everybody else as well, is the subject of a stylish analysis by the Nobel Prize-winner and quantum physicist Robert B. Laughlin in his book “The Crime of Reason”. Laughlin tells us that the greatest repository of capital in today's world is scientific knowledge but unfortunately - or perhaps luckily in some cases - there are a variety of mechanisms that prevent us getting access to it.

Knowledge that has economical value is inevitably vulnerable to sequestration aimed at finding a way to exploiting it or using it to make new discoveries – there are enormous sums of money at stake in this game. The central message of Laughlin’s book (which looks at a wide variety of other issues as well) is that in the developed countries of the world a war is being fought, literally, over knowledge. The inevitable conclusion is that it is the creation, control and management of knowledge, along with the discovery of new ideas, that is the key to the planet's survival and prosperity.

The biggest problem we face is how to identify knowledge that is valuable, in the permanent confusion caused by commercial and legal procedures that in the worst cases frustrate and often deny the most noble of human impulses, the desire to learn. This is happening increasingly frequently even when it is contrary to common sense and challenges the human right to learn, which has no absolute existence and is not legislated for or even mentioned by the laws of even the most progressive countries.

Laughlin compares the ferocity of this conflict with other intractable historical disputes that unfortunately were only resolved by resort to extreme measures such as warfare - slavery and the American Civil War, for example - and he also remarks that with the growth of the Internet we face the paradox of having the capacity to conduct the search for valuable knowledge in the same way that we might look for a needle in a haystack. Absurdities like patenting or making legal claims to the laws of nature - gene sequences or specific mathematical algorithms necessary for software engineering - are already a reality.

The Girl with Technicolor eyes (The just-beer interview with Nihad Hasanović)

2009-05-09T22:25:00.005+02:00

Remark: All observations and insights by Nihad Hasanović

Before you have finished your breakfast this morning you will have relied on half the world. Martin Luther King

There is a girl sitting opposite at the table. She's wearing a nice bracelet - the design suggests some oriental origin or pattern. It's the kind I've seen in Turkey, worn by a women selling all kinds of stuff in the Grand Bazaar. Her hair is coiffed in a style like the latest TV commercial trying to persuade women to try out Penelope Cruz’s idea of fashion.

There's music playing in the bar, Mexican music, a woman's voice full of pathos and passion. Just right for an evening like this, with the weather like I imagine it to be in the city of eternal spring I heard about from a lady bartender in Acapulco, during a voyage of exploration conducted in one of the city's thousands of VW Beetle taxis.

From what she said, the city of eternal spring lies somewhere off the road from Acapulco to New Mexico. Pretty vague directions but according to what she told me it's a place where there's always a pleasant breeze and the temperature is a constant 25°C.

I'm drinking a beer produced in Germany. A friend sitting with me comments on that country’s history: “Some Gandhi's statements were incredibly idiotic in some respects. There is no such thing as a good politician. You can judge a politician by the balance between the good things and the bad things they've been responsible for. It's outrageous that he thought and even dared to say that the Jews should all have committed suicide during World War II, in order to pre-empt the Germans slaughtering them. He was lucky that at the time the sun was setting on the power of the British. Try imagining the Germans in India at that point, instead of the British. They'd probably have wiped out the Indians. If there's a single reason why the state of Israel was created there, it's not to be found in the pages of ancient myth. The reason was the Holocaust."

But how we come to be talking about India is because the girl opposite is drinking a cup of Indian tea. I glance at my watch – it's a Citizen, a product of the Japanese people's affinity for technology. Time for one more round. So many countries in a single night, so many people, and they're all around me - in a cup of tea, coming out of the speakers, on my wrist.

We need some kind of world government, my friend is saying. That's what it all points to. The people of the New World, the Americas, are proof that identity is a ragbag of miseries. Religions, nations, myths – it's all fabrication, take it away and what we're left with is simply a human being.

Try explaining to one of those outrageously nationalistic Bosnian Serb politicians that bacteria are close relatives of ours. They're unlikely to agree that all that distinguishes us from primates is a mere sequence of DNA. That not a single piece of paleontological evidence among all the fossils so far discovered has even remotely challenged the theory of evolution.

I'm watching Milorad Dodik speaking on television, the same as always, outrageously exalting his Serb identity. He is talking in my language, physically he looks rather like me, but apparently I'm actually a closer cousin to that primate I've just mentioned, roaming around Tanzania at this moment with his very slightly different DNA sequence – at least that's what Dodik is trying to tell me. I don't pretend to understand a word of all that. I'm not even going to try.

My friend is bringing the evening to a close with an emotional flourish, announcing that: "The world has no future unless we can bring ourselves to accept reality. The reality that science has revealed to us. And the reality that the Enlightenment has told us about, too."

So let's have one more for Valentin Incko, the High Representative in Bosnia. It wouldn't be such a good idea for Office of the High Representative and the international community to leave. That's like having a child and then abandoning them to find out everything for themselves - how to talk, how to drink, how to walk. Someone has to teach them all that. And then maybe later, they'll learn about secularism, evolution and modern physics. Maybe.

Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens

2009-05-04T21:56:00.003+02:00

Feng Shui Robot VIII

2009-04-25T22:43:00.002+02:00

- I don’t believe that I am an atheist. I'm not even sure I know what that means. But I'm ready to admit to being one, publicly, in front of everybody, if it will help at all. When you look around and see what they're all doing, the Pope forbidding condoms in AIDS-stricken African countries, mullahs forbidding vaccines to measles-tormented children, contradicting science and the greatest achievements of the Western world with that medieval nonsense. I think that my case is clear.

Johnny had a numb look on his face. Wayan knew that what he was saying was just empty, meaningless words. The conclusion was inevitable: the body was just a shell.

Wayan recalled the visit to the psychiatric clinic a year ago. Johnny was in town then for the first time in five years. He'd come back and ended up in a mental home.

- It's a schizophrenic response – the doctor explained to Wayan. My impression is, that whatever he's taken has provoked a personality change.

Strangely enough it seemed that while Johnny was living in Germany during the brutal assault on the civilians in his home town, he'd taken whatever it was only once, or at least that was what the doctor had managed to get him to admit.

For an hour already, Wayan had been talking about his own personal concerns, and he knew from Johnny’s numb stare that what he was talking about was making no sense at all, or maybe it was understandable in a weird sort of way, as something unbearable. These were two shells sitting at the table, and the only way they knew one another was through the unreliable, misleading fact of familiar physical features.

The Fortress By Meša Selimović

2009-04-17T15:37:00.004+02:00

Borges once said that literature has a lot to do with exaggerating. I was reminded of this reading an extraordinary novel by the deceased Bosnian writer Mesa Selimovic – The Fortress. And I was also reminded of the fact that only in a work of literature is it possible to derive pleasure from reading about the hardships of someone else’s existence and the insurmountable obstacles of life, setting to one side the fact that what we are discussing is, after all, just a work of fiction. The novel in question is largely concerned with the gloom and extreme cruelty of the 18th century and warfare in Russia, where Bosnian men were sent as soldiers of the Ottoman Empire, and it describes a group of young men who found themselves in the trenches, fighting in someone else’s war, far from home and far from any hope of ever being able to return to being the people they once were, before the terrible experience of being a soldier. After I had read it I found myself wondering how was it possible to enjoy reading a novel that describes the state of numbness induced by the terrible experiences of the principal character, Ahmet Sabo, forced after the suicides and death of his friends in the distant mud of Russian battlefields to confront the loss of his entire family to an epidemic disease. It was possible, because the novel transcends all that.

In spite of the grim, naturalistic atmosphere that pervades the whole novel, reading it took me on an interesting and informative journey. Here is a sentence from it, in my very free and perhaps unforgivably inadequate translation:

“And the only consolation is that people who will come after we are gone will be living in an even more difficult age, and that they will remember our times as the happy ones.”

Concerning The Barbecue and Sundry Disruptions: A Novel By Nihad Hasanović

2009-03-31T22:11:00.007+02:00

Translation

of the back cover text

by Kruno Lokotar

The opening of Nihad Hasanović's first novel Concerning the barbecue and sundry disruptions [O roštilju i raznim smetnjama] leads the reader towards the scene of a May Day barbecue on the banks of the River Una; a very unremarkable setting, masterfully described, that conveys the feel of what life is like at the threshold of your thirties. Nature is in full bloom, the meat tastes good, everyone is drinking, laughing – albeit occasionally to excess. Everything is how it should be and on the surface even the future looks good and the weather is set fine.

Gradually, however, the protagonists, foremost among them Šefik, Selver and Mirela, start to open up and become increasingly more aware of themselves and their deeper feelings thrown into confusion by war and post-war life; they discover fault-lines deep within the psyche that widen out into crevasses. Normality is an ideal they find difficult to engage with; a simple act of medical negligence and a death appear to waken demons already lurking within. It turns out that nothing is resolved, life is an ongoing, toxic process; so, for example, the privations that Selver experienced in the gloomy town of Mrkonjić-Grad during the war have become internalised; Šefik, after many false starts and wrong turnings, is attempting to deal with his pain by taking on a new identity and a new name; and Mirela suffers panic attacks.

The origins of the demonic influence that intrudes upon and comes gradually and imperceptibly to dominate the characters are to be found, above all, in an external political reality shaped by the intimacies of the bedroom and by the past. The only attempt to take concrete, collective, remedial - and apparently therapeutic - action that our heroes make, involving the conversion of the old Museum of the Antifascist People's Liberation Council of Yugoslavia into a modern Museum and Community Centre – an attempt to free themselves from the past and open up a window to the future - ends in ignominious failure.

So Hasanović's story is more than just a psychobiography of his characters, it's also a satirical depiction of the history of ordinary life as lived by individuals in Bosnia and similar places elsewhere – from Mrkonjić-Grad via Sarajevo, Zagreb and the Velebit mountains to a Norwegian village; it's a plunge into, or at least a firm gaze at, currents of intellectual and emotional experience at local and global level - an insight into life, love, war, sex, illness, obsession, repression …

This is not a book to be rushed through, more one to saunter through gently, barefoot, a book to be savoured by all those who prefer slow food to fast food.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BIOGRAPHY

Nihad Hasanović was born in Bihać (north-western Bosnia-Herzegovina) in 1974. His published works include the plays Podigni visoko baklju (Raise high your torch, 1996) and Zaista? (Really?, 2001), the collection of prose Kad su narodi nestali (When people disappear, 2003) and the novel O roštilju i raznim smetnjama (Concerning the barbecue and sundry disruptions, 2008.). He has also published his poetry, essays and translations (from the French, and occasionally English and Spanish) in various literary journals, both paper-based and on-line. He has translated Kenizé Mourad's novel Le jardin de Badalpour, Jean Baudrillard's L'esprit du terrorisme, and Émil Cioran's Les Cahiers de Talamanca. Nihad Hasanović lives and works in Sarajevo.

Feng Shui Robot VII (About a woman)

2009-03-18T17:52:00.002+01:00

Wayan responded with the following passage:

- I heard the story today, a woman getting separated from her husband, and yes, she is pregnant, and hearing all that left me feeling uneasy. The child is going to be the child of divorced parents, nothing new, something like that happens every day, but again this isn't the sort of thing you tend to find out about that easily.

The reason I was struck by the news is that the woman concerned is a woman I know. She used to be my wife. When she was pregnant with our baby son, in her 7^th month of pregnancy, I discovered by pure chance that she wasn't certain who the baby’s father was. We survived two days together after this fact was revealed, the fact that she didn't know. There were no harsh words or fights, just sadness. The atmosphere became difficult, unbearable, so we both agreed that it was best for us to separate for a while, in order to avoid probable fights and the pressure we would be under, we both agreed that it might be for the best.

I remember the days just before I found out about it all. I remember my old self.

She gave the child to me, we divorced. She wasn't too excited about having to look after a baby. It was the easiest divorce ever. After a while she got married again. I never saw the man, the priest, and I've only seen her once since then. But the news is bad again. Her break-up from this guy was pretty stormy, and he practically threw her out of their apartment. People were talking about it. Now she is on her own and pregnant again. I think that tonight I'll give her a call, it's been a long time.

Feng Shui Robot VI

2009-03-16T21:10:00.004+01:00

Johnny’s response to this little story was predictable:

- The guy was obviously punished for what he had done. Some higher force decided that was how it should end up. – he said.

- I am not sure there was any higher force involved. Blind chance, perhaps. I really can't tell. And I think it is connected with the relationship between people. I believe that there is a strong connection between people. Having heard a story that my sister told me, I knew that that sort of connection exists.

It was in the second year of the attack on the city where we lived. Shells were falling all over the place. Civilian victims and casualties all around. We were at our apartment.

My sister is three years younger than me, and she was just 13 at the time. One morning while we were drinking some awful coffee substitute she told me about the dream she had had the night before.

It was about her best friend in elementary school. I knew the girl too – a short girl with the blond hair and always smiling. My sister dreamed that her friend was falling and was talking to her in a strange way.

The day after she had that dream, she found out that her friend, a beautiful girl named as Alma – was dead. A piece of shrapnel had found its way to her heart.

There is no way that she could possibly have had any advance knowledge of that terrible news. Even so, somehow she knew. Alma tried to tell her in her dream.

If I was a bit more, how do they say, religiously inclined or whatever, this would have turned me into a believer in God, firm as a rock. But it didn’t.

Johnny took the conversation in a completely new direction, discussing the issue of wasted time:

- It is so easy to get annoyed by the fact of how much time we're constantly wasting. We're doing it all the time – I ought to be doing this or doing that, instead of what I am doing now, which is nothing.

Al Gore was candidate for US president once. His opponent was, well, I don't think you don't need me to tell you. The reports about global warming and warnings about fundamental changes in the weather aren't just alarming any more – they are catastrophic.

During the Bush era crucial issues relating to this problem were consistently ignored. And all that has led us to where we find ourselves now, it’s not five to twelve any more, it is a quarter past twelve as far as climate change is concerned.

Eight years have been lost avoiding dealing with an issue that makes any other question second rank – as one British journalist has commented.

During the nineteen-nineties communism collapsed. Yugoslavia was a country in southeastern Europe with the prospect of a great future ahead of it, the Yugoslav version of communism was very adaptable, and the country was never part of the Soviet bloc. It was thought that Yugoslavia might be the first ex-communist country to join the European Union. The visionary and progressive prime minister Ante Markovic introduced significant reforms and improvements in the country’s monetary policy, things looked bright, a new age was on the horizon.

But meanwhile in Serbia Slobodan Milosevic was making his first moves towards achieving the goal that he had been a long time preparing – the goal of establishing hegemony over the whole of Yugoslavia. It was to end in a terrible, bloody war, instigated by himself, and instead of advancing into a new era full of hope, the age of Microsoft and Michael Jordan, everything went back to the middle ages of nationalism and religious hatred and savagery. Former Yugoslavia stepped forward into the abyss. Twenty years of a normal, prosperous life were lost. And who knows how many more still lie ahead.

Americans For Bosnia

2009-03-04T20:54:00.004+01:00

I would like to point out a wonderful site called Americans For Bosnia.

In Bosnia, a war was fought between civic nationalism and individual liberty versus ethnic nationalism and collectivism. Bosnia's struggle was, and is, America's struggle. Dedicated to the struggle of all of Bosnia's peoples--Bosniak, Croat, Serb, and others--to find a common heritage and a common identity.

No Commercial Value

2009-02-25T18:11:00.002+01:00

A friend of mine launched a great web site called No Commercial Value. Here is the short explanation about the site:

It is an experiment in curatorial approaches and merging of traditional mediums such as galleries, television and social media sites.

The idea emerged out of a discussion on a cold winter night in Montreal. As both makers and consumers of media, we felt frustrated that much of what we see and create is destined to be forgotten on our shelves and hard drives. In an attempt to address that problem, we decided to create a web platform for the out-of-spotlight media that can challenge, entertain, provoke, and inform. Furthermore, we see nocommercialvalue.org as a showcase for artists, journalists, activists, photographers, social scientists, writers, filmmakers and musicians who want to share their creative perspective on the world we live in.

Dedications

2009-02-22T08:32:00.003+01:00

Here are a couple of my favourite dedications by Borges, believe it or not, I have known them by heart, since years ago.

"I inscribe this book to S.D. - English, innumerable, and an Angel. Also: I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow-the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities."

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart;

I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

Deep in our hearts we keep safe the ties that bind us to certain things, like passages from a book, tunes, melodies, and in my case, an author's dedications. There is a particular kind of mood that once in a while conjures up these memories from the silence of an otherwise ordinary evening. We have all of us found ourselves from time to time falling into the sort of mood that has the capacity to remind us of all those things that we keep stored away in our heart of hearts. For me, it is a collection consisting of a few songs that coul be found below (most of those young people that we see in those clips are all gone now), a couple of inscriptions Borges dedicated to Maria Kodama that I used to help me in seducing the most important women in my life, and something else, something with the power to take me to a place “untouched by time, by joy, by adversities”, something that is impossible to describe in words. Once upon a time Borges came to my assistance with another Maria, and I take pride in the knowledge of how privileged I am to have experienced the companionship of literature in such circumstances. I think that those times are past now, and sometimes it's impossible not to feel that my life has been lived in two very separate compartments, with very little in between to connect them. Perhaps I am just idealising my memories of a few personal experiences, but that's what everyone else does - so why shouldn't I?