It is no more according to Plato than according to me, since he and I understand and see it the same way. The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work of his own. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.

Michel de Montaigne

The human race, in short, has had no important thought which it has not written in stone. And why? Because every thought, either philosophical or religious, is interested in perpetuating itself; because the idea which has moved one generation wishes to move others also, and leave a trace. Now, what a precarious immortality is that of the manuscript! How much more solid, durable, unyielding, is a book of stone! In order to destroy the written word, a torch and a Turk are sufficient. To demolish the constructed word, a social revolution, a terrestrial revolution are required. The barbarians passed over the Coliseum; the deluge, perhaps, passed over the Pyramids.
In the fifteenth century everything changes. Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not only more durable and more resisting than architecture, but still more simple and easy. Architecture is dethroned. Gutenberg’s letters of lead are about to supersede Orpheus’ letters of stone. The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, irresistible, indestructible. It is mingled with the air.
Until recently, when thought entered the parallel world of cyber. Initially, nothing seemed much different; pages just sped up flying around for quick convenience. This time, though, they were launched from sites, not books or manuscripts. Since dusters barely altered, what took it on the chin were internals. Holding a kangaroo court in their imaginary nation, to an industry that has read its own obituaries countless times, tribesmen of the new order went for the coup de grâce, their lances high in the vacuum. Before my outdated brain could comprehend this paradigm shift, mediocrity went viral and airborne: people are gathering around quippy bonfires, as dusk turns into darkness and temperatures drop, and human body seeks human warmth.
Although Livy describes it as being tunnelled out beneath Rome, he was writing centuries after the event. From other writings and from the path it takes, it seems more likely that Cloaca Maxima was originally an open drain, formed from streams from three of the neighbouring hills, channelled through the main Forum and then on to the Tiber. The system then remained with not much progress until the 16th century, where in England, Sir John Harington invented a device for Queen Elizabeth (his godmother) that released waste into cesspools. However, many cities had no sewers and relied on nearby rivers or occasional rain to wash away sewage. In some, waste water simply ran down the streets, which had stepping stones to keep pedestrians out of the muck, and eventually drained as runoff into the local watershed. This was enough in early cities with few occupants, but their growth quickly overpolluted streets and became a constant source of disease.
Growing up, I had to use an outer house. In order to get to it, I’d walk through the front yard, commercial yard, and a part of the garden. My roundtrips became an exercise in free thought, which for the naive reason of my youth I envisioned as a barely populated snow-capped mountain peak. Not to mention my imagination being unable to stretch beyond an old medieval craft typical of Central Europe. It is remarkable that the craft has survived, and you can still buy red leceder hearts, honey cookies, necklaces with a cross, little crucifixes and other ornaments – all made of dough.
Sitting above the round hole cut out of thick wood board and polished to perfection by bare bottoms of my ancestors – which for some funny reason reminded me of a misplaced halo, an indispensable content of any sanctity – I couldn’t even grasp the concept of sewage: all I knew was that crap stays where crap drops, petrified like eulogy and unable to spread thin by motion. Those were ‘one shot but you better make it good’ days, and I miss their substance, the gravitas of every drop I made. Come to think of it, what if the gravity itself was more forceful back then, before wearing itself out by entropy and caving in to speed.
One day, while cautiously climbing weathered wooden stairs leading to the attic – an oversized boy with a large, heavy head – I slipped and fell like a tombstone, landing straight on my crown. As soon as I hit the ground fear-frozen – after a brief vision of starry universe followed by session of weeping and whining – what shook me even harder was the sudden insight how quickly speed could evaporate, how deceiving and fragile is its beauty: nymphs’ song to willing ears of wasted sailors.
‘When I invented chaotic inflation theory, I found that the only thing you needed to get a universe like ours started is a hundred-thousandth of a gram of matter,’ Andrei Linde told me in his Russian-accented English when I reached him by phone at Stanford. ‘That’s enough to create a small chunk of vacuum that blows up into the billions and billions of galaxies we see around us. It looks like cheating, but that’s how the inflation theory works — all the matter in the universe gets created from the negative energy of the gravitational field. So, what’s to stop us from creating a universe in a lab? We would be like gods!’ In response, I offered him my thesis that gods must be crazy, since we already invented our cyber universe out of a single milligram of antithought.
Flipping this rusty bronze coin into a shiny banknote, ‘Ten Thousand Cents’ is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase (to charity) are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, ‘crowdsourcing,’ ‘virtual economies,’ and digital reproduction.
In his book ’7000 days in Siberia’, Karlo Štajner – Tito’s komrad since Moscow days in the thirties, when singing L’ Internationale had the same cheerful effect as a sixpack of Löwenbräu today, and Babel was given a villa in the writers’ colony of Peredelkino – who spent 20 years in Soviet gulags between 1936 and 1956, has described Soviet concentration camps as a nightmare even the greatest writer could not portray (sic!). He said Solzhenitsyn had not experienced even a part of what he, Štajner, had in the Soviet gulags. ‘Aleksandr Isayevich was not sent to the distant, cold areas but was imprisoned in camps near Moscow, in the so-called Yellow Home, a camp for internet intellectuals (oops, a typo: interned). Of course, the prisoners there also suffered, they did not enjoy their stay there, but their sufferings cannot be compared with those we experienced in the far north, under inhuman climatic conditions… I mention these examples in connection with Solzhenitsyn because Soviet citizens were not able to notice the changes that had taken place (after World War II), but I noticed them.’
But upon reflection, knowing the new theory of fundamental nature of the universe is just learning more physics. And while intriguing, this is not like proving scepticism to be true. David Chalmers contends that there is still a ‘physical world’ which we interact with; what is different, its fundamental physics is not strings and particles, but bits. Furthermore, learning that there is a creator outside of space and time who allowed our minds to interact with physical world, while obviously of great metaphysical and personal import, it is akin to learning that a particular religious view holds. This would be an earth shattering revelation, but it doesn’t mean we are not situated in the external world we believe we’re in.*

* My only comment to the above story is not mine. It belongs to a Dutch genius who happened to be an artist. Berndnaut Smilde creates clouds using a smoke machine, combined with indoor moisture and dramatic lighting to create an indoor cloud effect and take surreal shots worth Dali.

On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth-century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German monk toward the end of the fourteenth century.

Umberto Eco – The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa)

There are some great movies in Yugoslav cinematography, yet only one masterpiece – Kusturica’s Underground. In the opening scene, two drunk buddies walk the old town Belgrade heavily leaning on each other – actors Lazar Ristovski and my buddy Miki Manojlovic – as Nazis bomb the capital on April 6, 1941. The bells on the Orthodox Cathedral are tolling sideways, while an elephant from the nearby zoo, suddenly freed by the will of Teiwaz, casually walks down the cobblestone street following the zwei kameraden. To celebrate such a unique occurrence as bombing, they decide to visit a local bordel, where they find a buxom lady willing to strip naked so Miki could stick a white rose in her bare ass and watch it wave from one side to the other. And every freakin’ time some idiot labels the charismatic confluence of tectonic happenings that created the final human outcry for freedom, each and every time when new and new moron applies his ‘flower generation’ bumper sticker to the beaches of Goa and Kovalam in Trivandrum, insulting my emotional intelligence en route, I reminisce the antological rose scene from the Underground.
I came to believe the bloody tourists are spreading the disease of nescience; other than Chinese pretenders, who are mostly industrial spies. It all started with Japanese omnipresent smiles, continued with American uncovered yawning mouths, and shifted into fatuous cyber tourism; where I’m the walrus morphed into I’m the virus. I don’t mind blind cameras walking around piazzas: what bothers me is the predictability of their itinerary, the lack of mental aphrodisiac, the visible choker around their necks. Simultaneously, pushing the idea of being the Übermensch, government perpetually domesticates individuals by carrot myths and banana visions, which in return swaps the free spirit for buy-one-get-one-free frenzy.
As I stand this morning in a cashier line of my local Stater Brothers store, hoarding on cheap eggs ($1.49 for 18), a sharp looking black lady in her early thirties, dressed by Calvin Klein, starts pulling her welfare checks one after another. If you’ve ever seen one of those, they have stamped in bold letters across: I HAVE NO DIGNITY, WHATSOEVER, AND I DON’T GIVE A FLYING FUCK WHAT YOU THINK. Exactly that, word by word, I was surprised myself. Have in mind, Desert Hot Springs is one rough area. I go there in my plain white muscle shirt cut out of a plain undershirt, in short pants downsized from khakis. I only refuse to wear slippers, in the last ditch effort to blend in and relieve the pressure of having to wear tie at work – which, by the way, pretty much pays me a minimum wage – and yet keep my sanity in check. And she’s parading her Calvin Klein and her welfare checks in front of my nose, which I can’t even afford to redden with some booze. I’ll go for the Fifth here.
Two days ago a friend of mine at Nissan, Miguel Murgia, an old-fashioned, tough Mexican, mentioned a fella he knew whose house and his tow truck burnt to crisp. The guy was going around whining, and being a repo man, all what he got in response was ‘Fuck you, motherfucker, you got what you deserved, taking our property during the hard times, and doing that with arrogance and attitude!’ I haven’t heard a more cheerful story in a while, and rightfully so. People tend to remember; dumb, filthy, pious, yet they all remember. They might not have an alternative but to be patient, to swallow their outrage, muffle their disgust. Unless they choose to express themselves, and blossom as mental patients, POWs of somebody else’s war.
According to Balzac, in any revolution or social commotion feces are first to hit the surface. Agents provocateurs just can’t wait. They bribe volunteers left and right: warm shower, as we know, killed more intellectuals back in the last century than all the regimes combined, and in the same tradition these days, here comes Yahoo News, or CNN, or you fill the blanks, going after the remnants of your clear mind – mine’s gone lang syne – while making sure that no shit misses the ceiling fan in your living room. So if you suddenly jump out of your lazy boy, ‘What the fuck…!’ you know what the fuck hit you.
The only time Yugoslavia came truly unified was in early June of 1968. I just turned fourteen, was on top of my street fighting skills, when the word came about students being viciously attacked by police in New Belgrade. With no time to waste, me and two buddies of mine, Alex Kovacevic and Johnny Stulic, jumped on the bus heading west. We missed the opening act, when Tito’s Eagle Scouts banned students from entering a folk festival in the middle of the Student City. It turned out to be a bad idea, as scouts learned right away. Students just had enough of communist hypocrisy, Tito and his speeches, living conditions, and then some.
Police we didn’t miss, they were there – those healthy peasants in uniform, ready to take a beating for Marshal and the Party. Eventually we run out of canteen tables, chairs, beer bottles, and without the luxury of having the Latin Quarters’ cobbles, crowd hesitated for a moment: long enough to give cops a tactical opening. I didn’t like the smell of tear gas in the morning, I can tell you that much. Neither I enjoyed the sound of baton missing my skull by an inch. Nine days and barrels of pharisaical diarrhea later, it was all over around the country. The curtain fell where it stood before, and the blood-stained rose was conveniently swept under the red carpet slowly rolling in front of the asylum-white bright future.
I happened to grow up in downtown Belgrade, with hotels a plenty, and goofing around one day I watched a mid-aged, oily slick, foxy looking Turk get off a tour bus. A people’s fella, he turns around until he spots a lady walking down the street, blessed with imposing body curves. He winks at me, the ages of merak drooling down his mouth, ‘Look at that ass, young man. Now, that’s an ass.’ He got me by surprise, ‘But her boobs suck,’ I cried. The Turk made two steps and into my face. He smelled of garlic and cheap tobacco, and five centuries of impaling Serbs and alikes. ‘Now, you listen, young lad, and you listen good: Boobs, that’s a decoration, merely an ornament of materfamilias – ass is the luscious goddess to manhood.’ He walked back to the bus, waved at me, his eyes still shining with merak.
The Turk’s lesson taught me to respect the rose waiving out of woman’s bare ass, as if it’s the only levee standing tall in between us and the oncoming sigh of Uranus. But then again, I come to bury Aphrodite before the looming mudslide takes her away – not to praise her. You watched One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, you know how it ends.

What I’ve felt
What I’ve known
Never shined through in what I’ve shown
Never be
Never see
Won’t see what might have been

Metallica – Unforgiven

Years ago, I read about drinking problem Russians face daily – not much change there – and a sharp looking psychiatrist said something like, one Russian, not a threat, two, could be handled – but when three Russians get together we have a micro society, and there’s nothing doctors can do, government can do, or God himself. I wonder if the good doctor had ever seen the Orthodox Almighty in person – a long beard, those reddish cheeks, purple nose, watery eyes… Do you really think Michelangelo would ever be able to finish the Hand of God in the Cappella Sistina if he had to deal with this guy and his shaky index finger? After painting 12,000 sq ft of the chapel ceiling, you think he’d have enough patience for this addict?
Same with Serbs, for a good reason: it’s one of those disheveled Slavic customs that stretch across the totem post, transcending alcohol abuse and morphing into a wicked monster of new order. Like a vein of gold ore runs this idiosyncrasy deep through the blood vessels and gets delivered to the farthest capillary outpost with the precision of an atomic clock. I’m talking about the tribal trait of drunken manly bewailing.
The first time they tried to force me into military duty, I sold everything saleable, invited all my friends and enemies in a well known glass breaking pub – ‘They don’t consider that an issue,’ said my chief advisor, Papa – and then we started. Hours and hours later, with my enemies long gone and my friends under the table, my old buddy Alex looks at me, his face sticky with tears, ‘Georgie, we forgot the fuckin’ ashtrays!’ He had a point, those were made of glass as well.
Sparkling crystal ashtrays aside, those tears have a long beard: wrapped up in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (act 4, ‘Forest, near Kromy’) and Andrei Rublev’s icons for ambiance and ‘aha effect’ – ending with the Holy Fool staying behind, mourning Russia’s bleak, uncertain fate – this perpetual lament is merely an elephant walk toward the inner soft spot for the times gone and opportunities missed. Quite naturally, irreversibility becomes darling of the day, keeping our beloved past at safe distance, without need – god forbid! – to actually take any action; other than spitting on the sidewalk for good luck.
Slavs carried this peculiarity like a worn out, right arm fallen off wooden saint from the forgotten homeland, a talisman bargained for at some East Trzciniec flea market back in the 6th century, invariably refusing to let it go. By modern standards, the idea of an ‘original home’ is absurd. Even early narratives always speak of origins and beginnings in a manner which presupposes earlier origins and beginnings. But the single point of departure lives on. The widely circulated Times Concise Atlas of World History perpetuates a map showing the Pripet Marshes as the Urheimat of the Slavs; that vast swampy home is ringed with outward-pointing arrows marking Slavic emigration. The silliness of this image does not keep it from being unforgettable.
Wasted, vomiting, you name it, yet our binges were always a dialogue, an exchange of toxins and facts with scant relationship to reality – helping us overcome soliloquies and avoid the cien años de soledad of LSD or heroin, keeping us alive past the age of 27. That’s where our gratitude, if any left, should lie. My first voracious bet was to gulp down half a liter of cheap brandy in five minutes, which I did. Had I done the prodigy by myself, I wouldn’t be writing this. Luckily, I had my compadres take care of me once my reason expired, overruled by my Slavic ego.
A word of caution here: when dealing with Slavic mythology, one cannot be too careful or too critical about the authenticity of sources. One of the best examples of overall confusion and complete misinterpretation is a fake deity of love, Lada, constructed from meaningless exclamations in Slavic wedding songs. Gods such as Koleda and Kupala were ‘invented’ from misinterpreted names of popular folk festivals. Unfortunately, nobody crowned a god from the 1972 Ljubljana Boom Rock Fest – the Yugoslav Woodstock – so we missed a chance to have Sonic Boom as the god of speed. Even more hilarious are deliberate forgeries: faking evidence of ancient mythology became almost a hobby among various social groups, often with the purpose of promoting their political agenda. Statues of ancient Slavic gods were ‘discovered’, inscribed with Germanic runes, folk songs and stories were ‘recorded’ with half of the Slavic pantheon described as picking flowers or merrily dancing around a bonfire.
Never worshipping at the altar of ratiocination, Slavs found their niche by drilling into tribal subconscience in search of the holy antimins; forgetting that one doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. Floating for centuries in a somnambulant ghost ship circled by horizon, the tribe learned to enjoy the feeling. However, as soon as anybody discovers exactly what his meaning is and why he is here, this will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
I owe enough tribal loyalty to throw in another angle here. Living in the past, as debilitating as it is, brings up one edge: you get to be at the first name basis with your gods, your mythical heroes, plebs hanging around for the good measure, and from that precious well you drain the ultimate esoteric enlightenment, your PhD in metaphysics.
There were five of us at The Stables one day, all in early twenties, comparing some lesser gods to the Knights of the Serbian Order – in a herculean push to finally resolve the topic – when Steve Rakovic stood up, pale under the layers of alcohol. I’ve never forgot the hue, a mix of blood and milk, and every time I think of Steve it pops up – the heraldic badge of his essentials. ‘Brothers, we spill our brains and tears after virtually dead individuals. Just the other day, I underwent through a healthy reaction from the myths of my youth; they had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.’
Steve took a sip, staring at each of us with the glare of a haunted psychopath. ‘A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction. All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. I’m giving this speech so it can haunt me from now on, reminding me who I once was. I don’t think I’ll see you guys ever again. I just can’t stand the picture of us fifty years from today splitting the same irrational hairs from our ancestors’ asses – it comes to me at night, calls my name, asking me to take one for the team. Fuck the team! Needless to say, I will always love you, hermanos.’ He walked around the table, gave each one of us a hug and a three-time kiss, and left the beer garden.
Afterwards there was silence. For some reason or other we did not begin that game of poker. We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance.
According to his mother Natalia, Steve picked up few things, told her not to wait for him, and was gone. None of us saw him again. His legend immediately sprung up with the speed of a bamboo stick sprouting from horse manure – everyone had opinion and none had facts.
Our gatherings never tasted the same – time shifted sideways as its levee broke and swept us into awe. Certain topics vanished from the menu, our vigor came overcooked, nobody was there for dessert.
Cheers! with a shot of well aged Faulkner: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’

Driven to the margin of error
Driven to the edge of control
Driven to the margin of terror
Driven to the edge of a deep, dark hole

It’s my turn to drive
But it’s my turn to drive

Rush – Driven

The doctors in a mental institution were thinking of releasing a certain schizophrenic patient. They decided to give him a test under a lie detector. One of the questions they asked him was, ‘Are you Napoleon?’ He replied, ‘No.’ The machine showed that he was lying!
According to Foucault’s Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, in the mid-seventeenth century, in the midst of the age of reason, madness began to be conceived of as unreason and the mad, previously consigned to society’s margins, were now separated from society and confined, along with prostitutes, vagrants, blasphemers, orphans and the like, in newly created institutions all over Europe.
During World War II, Jews, Gypsies, Communists and homosexuals weren’t the only groups designated for liquidation in wartime Europe. Hitler had a long list of people he considered undesirable enough to murder. In accordance with the Furher’s wishes, Nazis had also singled out Poland’s Boy Scouts as a dangerous, criminal organization whose nationalists had to be done away with.
Growing at the rate of eight inches per annum, bamboo is both elucidating and lethal weapon. I wouldn’t get close to anybody waving a six-foot stick like a madman; but that’s a personal preference. On the other hand, just touching bamboo texture is contagious: I can imagine all the faces I’d smash, avec plaisir, once getting the grip of its smooth surface.
A child born today in this world stands much greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university. This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.
‘I am coming,’ he whispered, gazing at the sky. He rushed to the familiar spot near the doorstep. The flower, a dark little patch with folded petals, stood out clearly in the dewy grass. He pulled out the plant, crushed it, squashed it, and clutching it in his hand, returned to his room the way he had come.
Silambam is a bamboo-based Dravidian martial art from Tamil Nadu in south India, but also practiced by the Tamil community of Sri Lanka and Malaysia. In one-on-one combat an expert would just slide his stick to opponents wrist many times during combat. The opponent may not notice this in the heat of battle, until he feels a sudden pain in the wrist and throws the stick by reflex, without knowing what hit him.
Rounding up Scouts and shooting them in the street was common practice when the Germans occupied Poland in 1939, so then 19-year-old Piechowski decided to make a break for it and flee to France. Unfortunately, his flight didn’t last long. He was captured at the Hungarian border, and a few months later, was a prisoner at Auschwitz.
In the meantime, I was a culprit of my bamboo obsession, delusionaly negating any analogy to the martial mastery of kendo. First and foremost, kendo is a safe imitation of sword fighting, thus forgetting the obvious: the very definition of art is not to save lives, it is to excel itself regardless of casualties. In a vicious bamboo fight you are more than welcome to erase your opponent’s personality, as long as you can get to it and as long as it exists – fewer fighters standing, higher the art. When Borges died in Geneva in 1986, there wasn’t a single bamboo fighter in sight.
A delusion, by the way, is a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary. Unlike hallucinations, delusions are always pathological and may arise from distorted ways people have of explaining life to themselves. Folie à deux (or shared psychosis) is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are transmitted from one individual to another. This syndrome is most commonly diagnosed when the two or more individuals live in proximity and may be socially or physically isolated or have little interaction with other people. A perfect picture of two kendo masters fighting for the pedestal of prowess under the influence of ‘Earthquake’ (or Tremblement de Terre), a Toulouse-Lautrec’s coctail invention.
As Piechowski recalled in an interview with the Guardian last year, it was when Eugeniusz Bendera, a car mechanic from Czortków, Ukraine, approached Piechowsky with some alarming news that he, along with fellow Poles Stanislaw Gustaw Jaster and Józef Lempart, was about to be executed. Not wasting time, four men sprang into action. First, they had to get out of the camp’s high security sector, through the gate bearing the now infamous black iron-formed inscription, Arbeit Macht Frei — Work Sets You Free.
In retrospect, this might explain my perennial aversion toward work, since one of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. I’d rather take my bamboo stick and go whistling in the woods than arduously practice kendo. I’d rather arduously practice kendo than study for college credits in the environment where the professor was narcissistic and students were average handicap eyeing lucrative tenures: not willing to let it bleed in the name of Athena.
Bendera, who worked in the camp’s garage, fetched the car, Commandant Rudolf Höss’ Steyr 220. He had picked the fastest car in the camp’s fleet, a powerful Austrian machine reserved for Höss’ quick trips to Berlin, so that they could outrun potential pursuers.
A common bond among writers exists with the sympathy they express for patients in lunatic asylums, a phenomenon reflected by the conflicts between the patients and the state as well as the government and the medical profession. The patient arrives at the asylum, sleep deprived, clothes shredded, agitated, and restrained in a straitjacket. This is not his first occasion to be escorted by the guards and police to the hospital and despite his struggle, he manages to find humor in his predicament: ‘In the name of His Imperial Majesty, the Sovereign Emperor Peter the First, I herewith proclaim an inspection of this Lunatic Asylum!’
‘Wake up, you buggers!’ Piechowski screamed at the young guard in German. ‘Open up or I’ll open you up!’ Terrified, the guard scrambled to raise the barrier, allowing the powerful motor to pass through and drive away.
At the age of 33, in 1888, Garshin committed suicide by jumping from the fifth floor of his apartment building, and died five days later at a Red Cross hospital.The ‘Scarlet Flower’ is rightly considered to be the gem of his creation. This story about a scarlet poppy and the crazed hero who entered into single combat with all the world’s evil is told with real affection and a profound knowledge of the human heart.
It is the second part of Piechowski’s high-pitched shout that does it for me: when the intestines start spilling out in the open, then I should finally as well as graphically determine if I’ve ever had any guts in me. When I was five, then six and seven, every December my father Milan, grandfather Gligor, uncle Bernie, and pere Zeke would drag out a three-hundred-pound hog in the middle of the yard, jump on him and cut his throat; to slice his belly open an hour later, after removing skin hair with a razor and hot water. At that point I’d join and help, wolfing fresh made sausages later in the afternoon. However, it took me years to soothe the imprint of hog’s primal screech, framed by the cloudy winter morning and the cold so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered.

And while I stood there
I saw more than I can tell,
and I understood more than I saw;
for I was seeing in a sacred manner
the shapes of things in the spirit,
and the shape of all shapes as they must
live together like one being.

Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux 1863-1950

I’m looking at the image of a motorcycle lazing in the screaming white Florida sun, somewhere in the vicinity of Tampa Bay, its crisp form wobbling in the heat haze. Just looking at it, beads of sweat are gathering in my eyebrows. Beneath the veil of brine and tears my eyes are blinded; I’m conscious only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull. A shaft of light shoots upward from the chrome and I feel as if a long, thin blade transfixes my forehead. At the same moment, all the sweat that had accumulated in my eyebrows splashes down on my eyelids, covering them with a warm film of moisture. It’s been a year or so since the image arrived to my email, and the keen blade of light is still flashing from its armor.
There’s nobody riding what’s seems to be a Harley, just the beast by itself. I have no idea since when Feri had it, but it was a longtime dream of his. My recent visit to the ‘Black Chrome’ show in Los Angeles exposed an emotionally charged, ragged hole in the history of motorcycling. The discreet mention that Ben Hardy had created the ‘Captain America’ and ‘Billy’ choppers for the movie Easy Rider blew my mind – why didn’t I know this? Why isn’t this part of the folklore surrounding this epochal film? The reasons are myriad, but the effect is the same – this man is nearly invisible on the motorcycle culture radar.
Hopper and Fonda hosted a wrap party for the movie and then realized they had not shot the final campfire scene. Thus, it was shot after the bikes had already been stolen, which is why they are not visible in the background as in the other campfire scenes. The film ends with a shot of the flaming bike in the middle of the deserted road, as the camera ascends to the sky.
Feri took off with the same Florida dream in mind as Wyatt, Billy, and George Hanson; only, he got there. I can see him on the long freight ships he used to work at, the heat scorching his six-foot-five frame for those seven years – year after year, voyage after voyage – with ever changing, delirious equatorial rays of light blasting from all the angles.
The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. It’s also the most deceiving. Or should I say, it could be a different reality altogether, a slice of illusion in between the bleached out memory and the pre-packaged verisimilitude: a whiter shade of pale. Where my flashback sensors failed, Feri revisited a day in the sixth grade when I was forced to knock down a local bully, and an immediate rematch was scheduled in the school’s bathroom. Feri kept the door closed from the inside so the two of us could fight in peace.
Five years ago, tired of driving for the company, he bought his own truck, a white Volvo International, continuing one’s never ending voyage. This time it was the continental forty-eight states, matching the routes I did back in nineties, and closing those rainbow circles opened during our youth in Belgrade. At this junction Feri was already married to his longtime flame Slavica, parted ways with his boat, and having no kids or anchor, they became a modern day gypsies; or just an addendum to a generation long sight of a two-tone VW-Bus roaming freely until the end of time.
Flo-Master inks preserved the fragile lights doomed to evaporate from reminiscence, like that day in New Mexico when my Freightliner dived into a cloud of hail only a quarter mile wide, with blazing sun all around in a full circle, laughing at the tiny human below. The Land of Enchantment varies with every traveller passing through, as it tailors the stage show and its liquid lights to his vision of a paperback heaven.
It was no later than his last visit to our West Hills home back in 2008, when Feri brought up the Omega Point, which, according to Frank Tipler, occurs when the processing capability effectively becomes infinite, as the processors will be able to simulate every possible future before the universe ends – a state also known as ‘Aleph’. Interestingly enough, Tipler claims Aleph to be the mechanism for resurrecting the dead. ‘Which proves my point, George,’ Feri added, ‘that our time is yet to come.’
It’s like the lyrics for Any Color You Like, from Dark Side of the Moon: you stretch your hand and there’s nothing to touch. Staring at the album’s cover yesterday, the diffraction point appeared to me as the crossroads between life and death. After years of research I still don’t know what death is, but the breadth of my ignorance has been widely expanded. It is unmistakably something that takes place among the colors, and one has to leave them alone completely so they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse is the essence: whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity. Death has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet, you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.
At this time when your spirit and body have parted ways, pure reality manifests in subtle, dazzling visions, vividly experienced, naturally frightening and worrisome, shimmering like a mirage on the desert. Do not fear them. Do not be terrified. Do not panic. You now have what is called an ‘instinctual spiritual body’, not a material, flesh and blood body. Thus whatever sounds, lights, and rays may come at you, they cannot harm you. You cannot die. It is enough for you to recognize these experiences as a manifestation of your own mind. Remember your are now in the spiritual between.
Do not be enticed by the soft white light of the gods. Do not be attached to it. Do not long for it. If you cling to it, you will wander into the realm of the gods, and you will continue to cycle through the seven realms of driven existence in the life cycle. It is an obstacle to merging into the infinite oneness, the path of peace and harmony, so do not look upon it. Become devoted to the brilliant penetrating blue light, aim your intense willpower toward it, compadre.*

*Homage to Frank Horvat

Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

William Faulkner

There is an old joke about a drunk searching under a lamp post for his keys. ‘Did you drop them here?’ ‘No, but this is the only place where there’s enough light to look.’ My point is the exact opposite of the usual interpretation. In literature, you have to search under the lamp post, or you’ll never find anything. Even if the keys are somewhere along the road in the gutter, you might find a torch under the lamp post. Then you can search further afield. Instead of keys, I’m on a witch hunt for myself: I’m looking for, the face I had before, I was born. It is impossible to exceed yourself if you don’t know who to outshine.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates uses the maxim ‘know thyself’ as his explanation to Phaedrus for why he has no time for mythology or other far flung topics. Socrates says, ‘But I have no leisure for them at all; and the reason, my friend, is this: I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous, when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things.’
Most of us perform a long, diluted suicide over our lifetime: some chasing fallacy of future, some giving up on any chase. The speed of our thoughts drops as we sink into the quicksand of fainthearted ambitions, or the lack of any. Petrification, we remember, was one of Perseus’s methods of killing his enemies. By means of the eyes in Medusa’s head, he turned them into stones. Of course, to feel that our self is treating us not as a person but as a thing need not itself be frightening – if we are sufficiently sure of our own existence.
As a young apprentice going after anti-psychiatry, that alchemy of human emotions, I met Rose when she was twenty three years of age. Be careful, though, with the verb ‘to meet’, since it doesn’t necessarily exclude non-physical encounters. She felt she was growing insane, as in fact she was. ‘There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are not fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that then they were clam and beautiful. It must be so, for I often hear people talking about them as though they were.’
If we no longer doubt, we become dubious in our own eyes, and can then only opt to lose our vision and see ourselves with the eyes of others. Doubt simultaneously freezes and boils the marrow in our bones, it shakes our bones like dice that are never thrown, it plays a secret and violent organ music through the different calibrations of our arteries, it rumbles ominously and affectionately through our bronchial tubes, bladder and bowel. It is the contradiction of every spermatic contraction and is the invitation and rejection in every vaginal muscular fluctuation. Doubt, in other words, is real if we can find our way back to this sort of reality.
Feeling that I was going rotten and delusional, tired of carrying the never-ending financial drag – one mortgage payment at a time – I walked out of my day job at Valencia Nissan. It was 2004, and Greg Raymer had just won the World Series of Poker. With Eileen’s dichotomical blessings, I joined Party Poker and dived head first into the cyber gaming world. That was the only fun part of the equation.
I did play Five Card Draw for living back in Yugoslavia – quite successfully, if I may add – where everybody cheated on everybody and occasionally pistols were drawn, in the neighborhoods where you better be drunk on the arrival. This time, however, we’re talking a civilized yet grinding milieu where emotions lose to the lack of emotions, where aggressive, robotic creatures gulp emotionally immature humans with raw appetite and tempestuous vengeance; the origin of the latter being mystery to me ever since.
For starters, I didn’t get anywhere; won some qualifiers for bigger and more expensive tourneys only to drop out quickly, playing like – this is where the old wounds begin to bleed – a moron scared shitless, under the staring eyes of my mouse alter ego as well as Eileen’s Bellona wrath. This boiler room provided a handful of picturesque scenes far from Giorgione’s Fête champêtre, ending up with me jumping in the air around the pool and spraying curses like a can of WD-40.
In this new century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the master writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It’s the drowning out of false voices. To contribute, I almost fell into the lousy maintained pool at the house once called ours.
I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from arrogance, and today, 27th of March, 2012, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me. Or was it just a song played by Madness, One Step Beyond?
As I’m trying to eliminate what stock chartists call ‘noise’ and do what James Cameron did the other day deep down at the bottom of Mariana Trench: reach for my despondent intestines – I pull my hand back too fast too often, with my eyes turning into a mucous-green smear of wasabi and my ears twisting in a throe. Says Cameron, ‘It’s really the sense of isolation, more than anything, realizing how tiny you are down in this big, vast, black, unknown and unexplored place.’
On a more personal note, earlier this month Encyclopaedia Britannica announced it will stop publishing print editions of its signature product for the first time in its 244-year history. This closes the page on certain Gutenberg device (for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring the ink. Typically used for texts, the invention and spread of the printing press are widely regarded as the most influential events in the second millennium AD) – as clean, paperless future creeps in to become an ultratech present for someone else, and past suffers from dementia (originally meaning ‘madness’). Fine with me, as long as some of the Britannica’s content gets excavated over time, and my dubious literary mechanics reaches faux celebrity status.*

*In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.
Pliny the Elder (23 AD – 79 AD), Natural History

Interviewer

Where is the best writing in the world being done now?

George Steiner

Eastern Europe and Latin America, I think, almost without doubt. Great writing, great thinking, flourishes under pressure. Thinking is a lonely, cancerous, autistic, mad business: to be able to concentrate deeply, innerly. Very few people know how to think; real focused thinking is about the most difficult thing there is, and it profits enormously from pressure. Asked about Catholic censorship, Joyce said, ‘Thank God for it. I’m an olive; squeeze me.’ Asked why he didn’t leave the dangerous Buenos Aires at the time of the Peronistas to take up a position at Harvard, the smiling, blind Borges said, ‘Censorship is the mother of metaphor.’

From my perch, I often question if the books of a more difficult kind are going to survive this black market of cultural values with its short shelf space, its hype, its slick marketing techniques? Are they going to survive the transformation of the disc, of the Kindle, of the new world of actual access to texts? I can imagine that self-help contents, books about sports or current bloody events will survive abundantly. Guides to museums will do better than museums, baedekers will flourish. I’m not sure that a Proust, a Musil, a Broch, a Faulkner has even the ghost of a chance. This worries me. The abolition of the necessary time! Why the hell is it that you and I and everybody else have no more time for anything, despite all the iPhones and twitters and Wikipedias? We are short of actual time but more importantly of the inner spaces of the undisturbed which people had before us.
A person for whom Plato and Bach and Shakespeare and Wittgenstein are the stuff of his dreams, of his marveling, of his exasperations, of his daily life, of his communication, cannot pretend that he is a populist creature. I prefer the enormous risks. There were indeed errors, there were inaccuracies, because a book that’s worth living with is the act of one voice, the act of a passion, the act of a persona.
De Tocqueville was right when he spoke of a deep inherent egalitarianism in the hopes of the American mind; and that kind of social justice and egalitarianism and decency — underline that with eight red pencils! — is oddly inimical to certain qualities of absolutely first-rate philosophic and perhaps artistic creation. The European press still will have on the front page coverage of a philosophic event or debate or the death of an eminent thinker. There is a density to the atmosphere, a vibrato of ideas. From western Portugal to St. Petersburg, you have cafés, places where you can come in the morning, order a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, spend the day reading the world’s newspapers, playing chess, and writing. The bibliography of magnificent books written in cafés is enormous.
In Belgrade, I used to sit in front of Manjez (The Stables), order a veal soup and a beer, watch time, people happen. How could I not write when two tables down Danilo Kish would lift his glass in front of the light in August, reciting in Yiddish, French; when later the same night I had to literally carry dead drunk Zoran Radmilovic – the most resounding and demiurgic of all Serbian actors – from my cab to his second floor apartment; and by five in the morning I’d drop two liters of milk at 1961 Nobel Laureate in Literature Ivo Andric’s doorstep. It’s 7am, and after having a few myself I’m standing in front a kiosk buying a paper I won’t read, when a familiar voice breaks the silence, ‘Good morning, my brother.’ I turn half way, only to see Miki Manojlovic getting cigarettes.
By one in the afternoon I’m back at Manjez, going over details of my TV appearance with Alex Zikic, a Balkan version of young Charlie Rose, when a teen approaches our table asking for an autograph – Zikic’s, not mine. Alex is laughing, ‘Buddy, you are at the wrong end of the table!’ Unlike Charlie, Alex talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.
Not being a writer inside the environment like this should be a punishable crime, equal to a sober sailor at the pirates’ drinking binge at Tortuga. Even though I miss those days badly, I’m not going medieval on the new generations’ ass: as non-bias as I could humanly be, I regret the lack of mental effort on their behalf, as they go spinning off their wheels through the high tech gadgets and the lack of thought: that burnout smells fake, smoking through every single mirror on its way. It’s not even about the content: I could live, if I have to, with Hegel being replaced by Larry the Cable Guy, but the absence of challenge is what realy kills the generation; swimming comfortably down the stream, you always end up with the Stranglers’ song, Down In The Sewer: People say you shouldn’t stay down here too long, Lose your sense of light and dark, Lose your sense of smell.
When I was sixteen, I would pack a beer, half loaf of bread, smoked sausage, a fresh jalapeno, and walk to the only look alike racetrack Belgrade had. Sitting in the grass, I’d imagine my future car, calculate my possible speed, drive around as fast as I could, flawlessly shifting gears in my brain. Miraculously, I’d win every time. I managed to pass Dieter Quester in his BMW 2002 Alpina with Kompressor, but that was a tight squeeze. I had time inside me, insatiable future, emancipation to shape my life to any extreme desired, which in return equipped me with determination to catapult myself into the stratosphere.
I’m not going to sit here and say the rest was the name of the rose – quite opposite took place: my otherwise generous father for the reason unknown to man tried wiggling out of his promise to buy me a car, and only my mother’s firm backup made him deliver. Once I built my rally car out of the clunker I’ve had, my co-driver wanted to try the monster, only to crash into stone banking. I’d understand if he went all out – what tortured me was his crawling pace and deer in the headlights behavior. When the first rally unwrapped, my Abarth blew the gasket and overheated 300 yards from the start. And so on. I managed to endure all these vicious attacks owing to my inner time accumulated in prior years, as well as the dedication it produced, aka substance.
Have in mind this: lesser people than you will do anything to drag you down, those beyond your reach are on the mission not to let you in. Government is already inside your ass, trying to climb up in your head and spray microchips around. If you are convinced you have a few true friends, think again, this time with glasses. The only friend you have is knowing the fact that you will die. In the interim, be yourself, since this is who you are – an interim.

If you can remember the 60s, you weren’t there.

For someone at the wagging tail of baby boomers, I sure miss the dog. To my petty satisfaction, being born in 1954 makes me the patriarch of Generation Jones, or the second half of the human outbreak. I missed Vietnam by double measure: first, being underaged, secondly, living in Yugoslavia at the time. In 1966, while the brewery was warming up in San Francisco, I was just a dumb kid in Belgrade, beating the drum in my first rock band. The maiden song we played was Bang Bang, by Sonny and Cher. These days when I drive to work via I-10, I pass the sign Sonny Bono Memorial Freeway, since he was the major of Palm Springs. I’ll take this omen as a compliment to my persistence.
Summer of Love exploded in 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival, with Doors, Janis, Jimi, and Dead… taking the history along for a ride. To qualify, you had to pass the acid test in the Haight-Ashbury district first, to get certified, bona fide. I moved to a new school, bought my first drum set, sniffed the fresh environment. Having all you can eat freedom, other than LSD at hand, I didn’t know better but fight bullies, drums, and diffidence toward girls. Once mildly sick and staying at home, I begged my best buddy Nick to ask my queen if she’d go out with me – and the stupid broad said no.
1968 was a riot of a year here in U.S., and a milestone one for me there. Rally London-Sydney stopped briefly in Belgrade, long enough for me, and partially Nick, to get the virus and make it my lifelong sickness. Hopefully they’ll never invent the anti-serum, as long as they keep the EPA dogs on a short leash. I definitely don’t care what they hallucinate about hippies transforming into environmentalists: the bible Papa John wrote and Scott McKenzie sang says none about the fuel efficiency – other than Zippo’s mileage while heating up a spoon.
I can write quasi history as good as anybody alive, even better since I’m the a writer of your choice, and I seldom do that: even though as a writer I’m entitled not only to my opinions but to my facts as well; regardless of what Mr. Moynihan used to preach. You are entitled to close the book and badmouth me afterwards, but all other entitlements are exclusively mine, and mine only.
Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight. Nobody ever comes back from quasi history to tell us how hard was the death of the man, and how sudden and overwhelming his last anguish was. Nobody can say with what thoughts, with what regrets, with what words on his lips he died. But there is something fine in the sudden passing away of his heart, from the extremity of struggle and stress and tremendous uproar – from the vast, unrestful rage of the surface to the profound peace of the depths, sleeping untroubled since the beginning of ages.
They used to run that bloody bus through the streets of Frisco, so freakin’ tourists and the preceding generation could watch the wild life in acid rain, the labor pains and the epiphany of the new world unfolding, while wolfing a hot dog as if there were no tomorrow, as if it were their last supper. There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself. That is, if there’s anything within them other than hot dogs.
Boomers did drift away from their epiphany, minding their personal business, while the likes of Hendrix chose the opposite direction. According to Eric Burdon, ‘I don’t think Jimi committed suicide in the conventional way. He just decided to exit when he wanted to.’ I was talking to Bobby Furgo in Yucca Valley the other day – who toured with Burdon and recorded with Leonard Cohen while playing violin for fifty years – when he suddenly pointed across the scenery: ‘Eric lives just few miles from here, in High Desert.’ I realized once again that I am at the right place at the irrelevant time.
Somewhere along this stormy Monday blues, deep down the chain broke, leaving the anchor stuck in Neptune’s trident. Now, an anchor is never cast, and to take a liberty with technical language is a crime against the clearness, precision, and beauty of perfected speech. An anchor is a forged piece of iron, admirably adapted to its end, and technical language is an instrument wrought into perfection by ages of experience, a flawless thing for its purpose.
The chain itself was a long one, with many a link stretching each other to psychosis, and the search for its lost chord won’t lead us anywhere. Donovan offered a mellow gold yellow link that melted in the quest for Moloch, i. e. shackles for your chain, Timothy Leary… well, you don’t wanna know what good old Tim has to offer. Try asking Alice when she’s ten feet tall, but don’t try it with Grace (Slick), or you might get shot. Try backwardation, a market condition where the price of future contracts is trading below the expected spot price at contract maturity. By the time all the arguments resurface, the flotsam is behind the horizon and beyond recognition. What is left today is the jetsam, vivid memories of a blind man; and a few worn out ‘I was there!’ souvenirs, or even more pathetic ones. Who was there became a derelict, who came back wasn’t there.
It’s cold here with nobody in the room, even though the lights might still be on. After drinking some hot coffee, like an Arctic explorer setting off on a sledge journey towards the North Pole, I go ashore and roll shivering in a tramcar into the very heart of the town, past clean-faced houses, past thousands of brass knockers upon a thousand painted doors glimmering behind rows of trees of the pavement species, leafless, gaunt, seemingly dead forever.
On the bright side of the Moon, and to the other extreme, riding a psychotic horse through the burning stables is quite a trip – as long as you’re not the horse and Hercules agrees to clean the stables post festum.

Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Of all the people I’ve come across during my lifetime no one fits the above concept more accurately than Ranko Rubezić, nicknamed Dutch Schultz for a good reason: other than Ljuba Zemunac, he was the most famed Belgrade’s gangster, and by far the most feared. Other than his beloved hand grenade, a .41 Colt Magnum, and occasionally an Uzi, he had no attachments – not even a silencer. Boorish and unstable, he single-handedly terminated an era of Belgrade’s criminals with style and impish flare. Semi-retired, Dutch gave a break to Austria, Belgum, and Holand, transferring his demons to homeland underground in 1981.
St. Augustine’s confessions include references that describe his old pagan personality of which nothing seemed to remain in his waking state, still must exist since it was revived at night and in his dreams. He wrote, ‘Am I not myself, Oh Lord, My God, and yet there is so much difference betwixt myself and myself within the moment wherein I pass from waking to sleeping or return from sleeping to waking.’
Jean Genet was in prison and he arrived late in the exercise yard for the weekly book exchange; as a result he was forced to take the one book all the other prisoners had rejected. And yet once he’d read the opening pages of Proust he shut the book, wanting to savor every paragraph over as long a period as possible. He said to himself; ‘Now, I’m tranquil, I know I’m going to go from marvel to marvel.’ His reading inspired him to write; he hoped to become the Proust of the underclass.
Two guys I knew quite well throughout the years – first when preparing my rally car in their neighborhood of Konjarnik, then as my fellow taxi drivers – Dragan Popović Nanny and Milovan Vujisić Vuja happened to admire Dutch and enjoy his company; this delusion lasted for two-three years. Once the romance flamed out, leaving only wild memories for daily nutrition, they found the exit locked. Arguing incessantly with the boss and losing the track of time, they didn’t realize that the word is not a representation but a living thing, and it is much less a mnemonic sign of the glorious past than a pictorial translation of their present despair.
Proust, ‘In truth, the person within me who was at this moment enjoying this impression enjoyed in it the qualities which it possessed that were common to both an earlier day and the present moment; and this person came into play only when, by this process of identifying past with present, he could find himself in the only environment in which he could live, that is to say, entirely outside of time.’
Proust’s eternal premise by eliminating time effaces metamorphosis, assuming petite madeleines never to taste differently: where is the nefarious joy of insinuating future, manic intensity of the langoliers behind horizon!? On the other hand, time did accelerate dramatically for the past decades, vortexing beyond recognition thus leaving our obsolete minds aghast.
Seeing my two buddies here and there while driving the cab around town, I couldn’t help but noticing their altered reality: Nanny acted like a cornered tiger, tended to lapse into his childhood stuttering, while Vuja was all fear under the face skin, tense to pain. You could tell the fuse was getting shorter by minute. The present time eventually exploded into future bloodshed: on February 19, 1985, they gunned down Dutch in his car, with bullets galore. The deal was allegedly made with police, yet they both ended up with 15-year term to serve: the bars stood where the detectives’ firm word was just days prior. When I think of them it becomes clear that the punishment preceded the crime, and the public sentence was only a tragic extension of pagan memories they had prior to the murder.
I’m not sure if Nanny or Vuja ever quite grasped what happened that night: around us are pseudo-events to which we adjust with false consciousness adapted to see these as true and real, and even as existing. In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie. Furthermore, humanity is estranged from its authentic possibilities. This basic vision prevents us from taking any unequivocal view of the sanity of common sense, or of the madness of the so-called madman.
I am a specialist, God help me and St. Augustine, in events of inner space and time, in experiences called thoughts, images, reveries, dreams, visions, hallucinations, dreams of memories, memories of dreams, memories of visions, dreams of hallucinations – yet I’ve never executed a murder or lived with its consequences, so I’m missing the adrenalin juices that transpose water into wine. I miss Nanny’s black Fiat 132 with beige cloth seats, as well as Vuja uncorking an unwarranted tidal wave of verbal sewage that would nearly drown his interlocutor, offering a useful blueprint for his future prison psychiatrist. I simply miss the guys.
Officially, Nanny was named Dutch’s executioner. That is never a good companion in the city which just turned from fair and proud street fighters to cowards carrying guns and roses without smell. Recently, I surfed through the anthology of who was who in Belgrade’s circles throughout the years, surprised to learn how many of them I either knew or met courtesy of our mutual friends. Voja Govedarica, nicknamed Cruiser Warship, made all the way to Hollywood, became Stallone’s bodyguard, even played in a few movies, like Rambo III and Lionheart. Now he walks his poodle up and down Santa Monica neighborhood. Buddy Stone (where Stone is the moniker) threatened me with his gang, and once I verbally flipped him the middle digit of my fist, he backed away. Later, we both played drums at our high school’s rock concert exchanging the gear. Alex Alfa Romeo, a week after ending the seven-year-term came straight to my apartment to brag about driving a stolen Fiat (desperate, he couldn’t wait for an Alfa) 70 mph down the crowded boulevard with crosswalks every few meters. Citaković, Yugoslav heavyweight wrestling champ, tough guys’ Gaius Maecenas, and I talked philosophy on occasion when I’d give him a lift to feed his cats. Still vivid in my memory lays the photograph where Cita stands like a pillar in the sand of the river Sava, Ljuba Zemunac erected straight on his shoulders, and a guy I didn’t know on Ljuba’s – their arms crossed.
‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,’ my namesake Santayana used to say. I see my past as the present-in-progress, since it made the man I’m going to be: its lard-smeared face is radiating rancid odor of the colors I’d never be able to visualize.*

*Vuja tried to escape from jail few years later, braking his leg in the process. Nanny got out on parole, only to be shot by automatic weapon in July of 1995 while walking with his girlfriend in the broad daylight. As for Ranko Rubezić, hopefully God will remember to bless his heathen soul.

Ich werde euch die Richtung zeigen
Nach Afrika kommt Santa Claus
und vor Paris steht Micky Maus

Rammstein – Amerika

Thomas Hobbes in the dedication of his work De Cive (1651): ‘To speak impartially, both sayings are very true; That Man to Man is a kind of God; and that Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe. The first is true, if we compare Citizens amongst themselves; and the second, if we compare Cities.’ Hobbes’s observation in turn echoes a line from Plautus claiming that man is inherently selfish.
Sometime in late 70s I spent a month or so in Paris. Ich stayed with my buddy Ivo Lakov, his father being a Bulgarian attaché there, presumably cultural, who managed the Paris transfer from Belgrade to arrange a kidney transplant for his son. If I’m not mistaken, which I probably am, the apartment was located in the 14ème arrondissement. On a few occasions younger guys from the embassy would stop by, get hammered, and share their spy stories. Since I was a member of the original Slavic tribe, my presence didn’t bother them.
Smoking Gitanes sans filtre all day long placed me from the get-go in the comfortable company of one Django Reinhardt, Albert Camus, or Luis Buñuel, as well as Jim Morrison, and Alain Delon; having for once something in common with the luminaries of this caliber. Talking about Delon, I’m glad it stops there, since each and every one of his four Serb buddies and ‘bodyguards’ ended up tortured and murdered. All they achieved was to prove Delon, Mickey Rooney, even one Georges Pompidou cuckolds, and have fun in the process. Marković scandal shook French affairs for a decade, until the false testimony of the fifth Serb, Borivoje Ackov, cleared Delon and his ‘godfather’ François Marcantoni of any wrongdoing. Interestingly enough, the crown witness Ackov committed suicide before finishing his memoirs in 1992.
On the brighter note, Bruno Šulak, nicknamed Légionnaire, and Steve Jovanović casually walked into the Cartier store on La Croisette in Cannes, dressed like pastime tennis players and with rackets under their arms, only to walk out few minutes later with stones worth seven million dollars; leisurely taking one of the side streets toward Rue d’Antibes. They were never caught for this, yet Sulak became ‘the French enemy number one’. The last time he was jailed, in 1984, Steve rented a chopper at Bordeaux–Mérignac Airport in a desperate attempt to pull his buddy out of the prison yard, but gendarmes weren’t blind, and shot him dead. Sulak died a year later, under the questionable circumstances.
Far from this madding crowd, my favorite hangout in Paris is Notre Dame Cathedral, where the bells tolled in June of 1389 when Serbs were believed to had won the Battle of Kosovo (being outnumbered by Turks ten to one, to say the least). As Jean de Jandun wrote in 1323, ‘In fact I believe that this church offers the carefully discerning such cause for admiration that its inspection can scarcely sate the soul’. And if I might add, it was the most powerful lesson in humility I’ve experienced to date, after inhaling those nine centuries condensed in a nutshell. What a secular time machine within the walls of this Gothic pride!
Ivo was a good friend of mine. We were at the identical ‘wave length’, shared the same tools for researching human enigma. Had a soft sense of humor, mellow appearance, with quite a firm intellectual integrity underneath. Twice a week he’d go for a kidney dialysis, allowing me reflective time in the City of Light. Still in my teens, all I could achieve was to track down the spirit of Lucien de Rubemprés in the facades of Monmartre, or picture Balzac bargain hunting all over town. Walking in the vicinity of Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, I had better luck with Remarque, since we shared passion for race cars, chess, and camaraderie in first place, featuring quasi philosophy mixed with wistful emotions. What a quintessential delight to watch Ravic and Boris Morosov sipping calvados in front of Fouquet’s, observing time crawling into distance of Bois de Boulogne.
Sure, Paris was a esthetically cleaner space back then. No Pyramide du Louvre flipping its 70 foot all glass finger in the face of Hugo’s Paris, ‘climb this, hunchback!’ No McDonald’s in sight, so we could enjoy our inexpensive bistro lunch with a glass of wine. No Mickey Mouse fun, only Moulin Rouge and its can-can dance. The damage inflicted in the meantime is the least about the looks of Paris, fascinating as ever. Label me old fashioned, who I am, but it is beyond my pitiful imagination to draw even a sketch of good ol’ Proust jumping off the line like John Force heading to the free buffet, or Ravic and Joan Madou holding hands during the Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast.
Times do change, that much I understand, but the spirit of ‘that’ Paris requires deep mental changes in direction of turning free spirits into consuming amateurs, dressing up the potential artists to look exactly like your newly divorced uncle on his first date: sloppy, pitiful, and ridiculous. If you somehow disagree, you can definitely laser blast this.
According to The Who, the real artist ain’t got no distractions, can’t hear those buzzers and bells, don’t see lights a flashin’, plays by sense of smell. And that’s the most accurate portrait of an artist as a young man I’ve ever encountered.
But I digress.
It took another band for me to revisit Paris (Ten Years After). Already married, two kids, driving a taxi cab all day long, my collar getting bluer and sweater. I traded my Fiat 128 with hundred thousand miles (my son’s godfather Milan Radonić, the best Peugeot mechanic in Yugoslavia by any measure, and I turned the odometer back to about 25K – nice, low mileage car) for a Peugeot 505 with almost gone gas engine, planning to install a diesel one. According to my fellow cabbies, who knew it all, you just cross the border to Austria, and junk yards with used engines everywhere. Bob Milovanović, a good friend from my racing days, Yugoslav and Balkan rally champ, joined our adventure.
We crossed to Austria – nothing, a small country. Crossed to Germany, much larger country – nothing other than Mercedes engines. Oops! Paris here we come.
Ivo turned every paper upside down until he found a junk yard in the outskirts of Paris. It was July, and rain wouldn’t stop. We undug the right merchandise, a gorgeous naturally aspirated 2300ccm diesel engine, and went on dismantling it in order to fit in the trunk. Soaked to the bones, tired, we presented one discomfortable scene. ‘Anybody for a hot chicken soup?’, Ivo offered. Poor guy, this was getting to him hard. ‘Are you a chef, or something?’, we started to make fun of him, ‘with a portable kitchen’. Sure enough, he showed up two minutes later, chicken soup steaming from vending machine’s paper cups.
That was the last time I saw my long time buddy Ivo Lakov. I lost his address, he never wrote, and I have no idea if he received that kidney transplant necessary for him to live much longer.
Which takes care of Plautus’ claim up there.