Jasmin's heart

The Fortress By Meša Selimović

nestosimple@gmail.com (J. C.) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:43:47 PDT

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.”

Feng Shui Robot VIII

nestosimple@gmail.com (J. C.) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 15:30:48 PDT

- 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.

Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens

nestosimple@gmail.com (J. C.) — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:01:50 PDT

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

nestosimple@gmail.com (J. C.) — Sun, 10 May 2009 14:05:07 PDT

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.

Science and Sequestration

nestosimple@gmail.com (J. C.) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:14:24 PDT

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.

Feng Shui Robot IX (A Beautiful Man With No Leg)

nestosimple@gmail.com (J. C.) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:01:28 PDT

Wayan continued with the following monologue:

Here's how it goes. A cerebral story about the woman I'm in love with. She's been spending time with me for weeks, talking about feelings. I'm touching her legs. I'm convinced that what is between us is a beautiful story. And then, suddenly, everything comes to a halt. My car is at the edge of a cliff, there's alcohol in my blood. In the middle of nowhere I'm thinking about this woman, who is leaving me, for some miserable guy who does not love her. In her brain something has switched the other way. She decides to torture me; she erases everything she had for me. Maybe she really is able to erase all that. One day is all it takes. She's been gone three days.I'm thinking about how old I am – 34. I'm thinking about how much money I have – not much. I'm thinking about all the worst possible things – about my cousins the bloodsuckers, who'd trade me for a pack of cigarettes, I'm thinking about my father’s and my uncle’s dogs, always barking and getting on my nerves because I live where I live. I'm remembering a decade that I spent on my own, writing and studying and going to parties. I remember the way I used to imagine the happy life I would have with my ex-wife. I'm thinking about the DNA paternity test that proved my son is my biological son as well. I'm thinking about how I spent three and a half years working for an American cruise line as head waiter in a fancy restaurant and about the rapid promotions I got there. I'm thinking about how those amiable, modest Americans, who genuinely liked me, could never have guessed that the tall, smiling guy serving them had survived the hell of the war and Serbian aggression and seen his granny cut to pieces by an exploding mortar, watched his sister with her leg swollen like the branch of an oak tree.

How far can I really erase the memory of this woman I'm in love with, how far can I really erase the memory of all the things that have hurt me.

I'm thinking how it all began with the disintegration of my new life. A woman, emotionally calculating and cold. One woman. Or more.

I'm driving out of that deep, dark place. I'm looking into the headlights of an oncoming car. We're not travelling at speed, so there's no likelihood of a fatal outcome to all this. I'm stepping on my brakes; the other car comes to a stop in front of me. I'm opening my window and apologizing. He's opening his window too, curious – instead of anger he shows me a smile, I look rather funny to the guy, and he sees something completely human in me.

I'm looking at my son who has an extremely complicated heart condition and is the strongest and tallest among his friends of the same age. Sometimes I believe my son is a superhero, like in the movie Unbreakable or in the thousands of comics I've read. I've brought my son and his plastic car along with me this evening.

Beforehand I had a workout at home, I spent hours kicking at my punchbag to get rid of all the anger stirred up by a woman who's not worthy of me. Now I'm feeling good, my son and I are in town, he is driving around in his plastic car, showing how good he is. Later, I see my friends approaching. I tell them that I'll be off soon; I have to take the kid home because it's soon going to be getting cold and I haven't brought his jacket with me. They're going. It's summer, people are strolling past and the city is alive and bursting with color. The main street is crowded. I see other people, unhappy city folk, in a much worse state than me. I feel uncomfortable when a girl who's always by herself walks past. It's as if her sadness radiates a certain kind of unpleasantness that transmits itself to the people whose paths she crosses. Now I'm feeling good after all. I'm standing next to the ATM machine, watching my son showing off in his plastic car. I see a man who's lost a leg approach the ATM machine, very stylishly dressed. He's looking at me with a piercing gaze. I don't know this man, I've never seen him before, or maybe our paths crossed during the hellish years of the war, perhaps walking down a street full of trenches, past buildings with shell-pocked facades. I feel uncomfortable. No, that’s not really true. I don't feel uncomfortable as he stares at me. His leg is amputated well above the knee. Everything else about him looks much better than it would on me. He's got an ear-ring and a nice tattoo on his arm. I'm standing behind him. He looks at me with eyes whose color I can't recall. I turn to look towards my son, he's here, close by, a two years old rascal with the ability to elicit admiration and smiles from the warm-hearted women passing by. Not every woman is warm-hearted. But then again, I find it interesting to see how people of any age will smile at my son. Everyone, apart from teenagers. Teenagers have a cold, cat-like way of looking. My son is one of those many aspects of reality they're unable to see.

The beautiful man without a leg is stretching his hand towards me in front of the ATM machine. At first, I hesitate. And then I hold out my hand as well. Perhaps I should have recognised him from somewhere. He grasps my hand gently; I look into his eyes and I look at a three-days-old beard. His hand is warm; his grip is tender and strong. We still say nothing. A woman appears behind us, nylon bags on her arms. She's queuing for a machine that nobody is using. She's looking at two men shaking hands and not talking. My hand is stiff and cold, and my handshake is just the sort of handshake I dislike when it's someone else's – limp and lifeless. I brush away that perfectly measured perfectly controlled handshake. I'm running towards my son, not looking back. I grasp hold of the kid with one hand, his plastic car with the other. And we head for home, with confident step.

Hot Sofa Revisited

nestosimple@gmail.com (J. C.) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:28:33 PDT

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 .

When you get up at midnight to write

nestosimple@gmail.com (J. C.) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:42:58 PDT

When you get up at midnight to write it always turns out good – Saul Bellow said something along those lines once. I hope that's the way it'll turn out this time. There's something that I really want to talk about about today. The routine of Bosnian life spiced up with a little passion and desire. I'm sipping a drink that was bought in America , a coffee liqueur, trying for the hundredth time to seduce a woman sitting beside me, on the terrace, or on the balcony of my apartment. I enjoy looking into her eyes, I enjoy the way she enjoys the declarations of affection a man offers her. We've come back from the fairground. My two year old son came with us, my kid from my first marriage. I'm in a coffee bar ordering an espresso, an apple juice for my son and for the women I've been trying to seduce for days and with whom I am spending time together for weeks – one mineral water. The women I'm trying to seduce, and who seduced me a long time ago is getting up from the table. She’s gone to say hello to an older woman, a quite unexceptional-looking older woman. With a smile on her face she is coming back after chatting with her. Soon we're leaving for my place, I am leaving the kid with his grandmother to look after him, and now we're climbing the stairs up to my floor. After a couple of coffee liqueur drinks I'm trying to seduce her again. This game is something we've grown used to - I think it's something that happens with age. The older people get, the more scared they are about expressing their feelings and they try to control them more and more, afraid of the mistakes and misunderstandings of the past.

Now we are back in the city again. It's a beautiful night. We are ordering soft drinks. That's after the two very attractive women walked past. The woman I've been trying to seduce for days is trying to be funny. She's making a joke about the breasts of one of the sexy women walking past, saying she's certain something that soft and warm has got to do me good. She doesn't know, and I'll tell her later, that I'm already familiar with every inch of that woman's body. She worked in a shop where I used to buy my cigarettes and newspaper every morning on the way to work, but she was fired for putting her hand in the till. One morning after a lot of flirting with me she said something just the way they do in the Hollywood movies: I just wanna feel good. Make me feel good.

So I'm making love with the girl from that shop on the road through the ravine. She's fantastic at that sort of thing. Soon I'm finding out more about her. I realize that I used to know her ex-husband, a guy who once used to be good looking and successful but now he's rotting away in a hell of heroin addiction, a guy who gambled away his own marriage, gambled away the two clothes shops he used to own, gambled away his beautiful eight year old daughter. I'm together with that woman a couple more times, and then I begin to realize that she's neglecting his daughter as well, and in spite of the incredible sex we had, that special extra dimension of coldness is something that will turn me off her for ever.

I am talking about all this to the woman with whom I've been spending time together over the last few days and who's now having a soft drink with me. In telling this story I'd like to sound like how a music critic from Zagreb once described the Majke band – I want it to sound like a simple, raw story, a rough translation from some foreign language.

She (the woman I'm trying to seduce) is reminding me about her encounter with the ordinary woman she went over to say hello to earlier, the same woman I'd only ever seen before in passing, an incidental acquaintance of hers. She's telling me that today was a very special day for that woman – the bones of her husband and son have finally been discovered, 15 years after the end of the war, in a newly discovered mass grave. She lives with her other son now, he's all she has left, a guy two meters tall suffering from schizophrenia, the pair of them living together in a small, miserable apartment.

I'm beginning to understand the tragedy of the people we've met this evening, as well as our own tragedies. I know that I'm going to walk her home and that another beautiful night will have been lost. And I know that by tomorrow our game of laughter, joy and uncertainty will already be picking up again where it left off.

Chess Pieces

nestosimple@gmail.com (J. C.) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 14:39:11 PDT

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 avoided

a very complicated and conceived tactic.

My son plays on the side of life.

The Street Samurai

nestosimple@gmail.com (J. C.) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:23:15 PDT

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.

Actually I never forget. Athough people have always considered me someone who does. And that's the worst thing of all, that I am most shameless in exploiting, my ability to forget, as others believe - my fellow samurais included.

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 blossoms in the calm of a still summer afternoon.