can I just have one more

...the rush I was in all day... the ride across the town ...the stupid overlook lack of  deodorant on the back of my neck,  drenched in sweat under the hair. ...my  hate of  ponytails, even in the heat of the summer....


the unknown territory ...  the setting that disabled my usual  instant head to toe careful observation...the me absent-minded that archived the whole thing as a regular event...the surface and on it the things said, nothing more than that...


in rewind,


...the eyes opened slightly more than appropriate, the tongue-breaking name I gave was pronounced back correctly showing the extra effort, the prolonged greeting eye contact coupled with second hand grabbing the handshake,  the positioning straight across even though the seating arrangement was L-shaped, the legs spread open while sitting from the start, the leaning back position almost on elbows while I spoke, focus on my mouth, the straightening up movement forward when it was his turn to speak  that invaded the decency of my  touch distance , the slow head tilt  and fingers across the chin, the touching of the  right earlobe while other people spoke, then the showing of the open palm then the hand rubbing the neck, the press pause smiles that included eyes every time and the final mirroring dance in the looking forward to it segment.

 ...moondance.

...for someone fine tuned in catching the true meaning of the unspoken  I once more managed to pull a total failure in noticing  before it was too late.

 ***

When I flirt, I'm safe. The lines are straight and constant and I can remember and see them well, and the flirting itself is the external safety that subconsciously prevents accidental discharge.


When I don't flirt, thinking that the situation is by itself safe, that I needn't carry at all, prompted by the marvelous night happening around midday,   the dance starts because I've chambered the round unintentionally and automatically released the hammer.




***

why bad men tasted so good

...because the pain you were supposedly too smart to ignore was still not nearly enough to stop you from losing your mind and melting away for a night.

Good girls break their own hearts on purpose.

***


Come back down, come back down-
Come, if you're dumb

Shine on, I can see clearly the light on-
Crashing me into the rocks
You siren sweet-





So tell me true
I'd kill for you
It's sick i know
But after all
By definition of the word

Love is blind
Love is good . . .

bye.

PETRI GYÖRGY: Búcsúzás

Ég veletek, barátaim, vége a dal-
nak. Engem most már vár a ravatal.
Lehettem volna jobb, szorgalmasabb,
de sajnos ennyire futotta csak.
Kár, hogy így van, jó volna élni még,
másrészt, belátom, ennyi is elég,
nincs rá okom – nem elégedetlenkedem:
tartalmas és szép volt az életem.
S mint bársonyon smaragdok, jáspisok,
drága hónapok ékköve ragyog
még káprázó, boldog szemem előtt,
ajándék minden reggel, délelőtt,
kiélvezem a maradék időt,
mint ínyenc a húsos cubákokat
– csontig lerágom végnapjaimat.

 Farewell

Farewell, my friends, let's finish this song-

off. I am now waiting for the hearse. 

I could have been better, more productive 

but, unfortunately, I managed this far only. 

It sucks, would have been good to have lived more 

on the other hand, I realized, this much was enough, 

I have no reason to be - unsatisfied     

I had a rich and beautiful life. 

And like velvet  emeralds, jaspers, 

 precious months like jewels shine

 still bewildered  and  before my happy eyes, 

a gift is every morning, each day before the noon

I devour the remaining time, 

like a gourmet shank bone with meat  on

- the boney sticks of my final days.

( fordította nekem )

ps. Petri wrote a wonderful farewell poem in memory of his good friend Danilo Kis - I only have it in translation into Serbian - " Krhotina pisma ( Debris of a Letter)", if anyone knows where I can find the original -message  through my profile please.. .

Szivaroztam - (I Had a Cigar )

 ...I wish I had but it was someone else.

Andrea Gerak : Szivaroztam ( A Capella ) - listen here


Szivaroztam, megégettem a számat,
Odahaza más öleli a babámat,
Más öleli, másnak ül az ölébe,
Más leánynak kacsingat a szemébe.

Életembe' csak egyszer voltam boldog,
Akkor is a két szememből könny hullott,
Sírtam is én örömömbe', hogy szeret,
Bánatimba', hogy az enyém nem lehet.

***

I had a a cigar and I burned my lips,
There at home, someone else is hugging my baby,
Someone else is hugging him, he sits in someone else's lap,
He is winking at other girl's eyes.

In my life, I have been happy only once,
Even then, a tear was dripping from my two eyes,
I was crying with joy that he loved me,
And with sorrow that he couldn't be mine. 

 

http://www.andreagerak.com

( note: I found a few more verses in another version of this  traditional song - a bit of God and politics added , but still: )

"elmegyek a régi szeretőm után
megkérdezem, szeret-e még igazán"


 I am going on the path of the love from the past,
and  I am asking , will I ever love like that again.

the reddest of reds

travel log.

it rained all the way there and back. i opted for the red summer shoes and art of pretending it was not nearly as cold as it was.

official mission accomplished. the village was awesome and so were the people there. i miss people undistributed by the city concrete madness and houses where people live ,not just habituate.

did I mention the shoes?

the small town we all eventually come from was smaller than ever...same people same stories I just smiled along and looked good in the process....it breaks the heart how nothingy the interim life is over there, the life those same people lived to the hilt once and I watched them then and wanted a life like that...we stood in front of the gigantic portraits of kings and queens and we, the king and the queen of the comebacks, just breezed through the crowd almost floating me in my reddest heels ...we just visited again...

the nice sweetish Italian wine in big glasses is no longer available...the seat at the bar across from everyone else was mine one more time for the onlookers...big chunky men to look at flexing muscles and a good bite out of where do we go from here conversation that went well ...better than expected... we are ok and there's gonna be more room for me in us -  not that I was asking I 've already made plenty of room for myself but the need noticed was a nice reminder why we are still travelling in pair.

...sorrow tastes like sugar in a jar of fruits you bring out to offer to the guests... when it rains like this for days pouring down all the time  and you forget when it started and feel like the outburst of heaven crying  is never going to end...just like the saddest music of morphine.

MONDAY part V

She took the glass and they sat stargazing for a while at sky in general rather than looking for some special guiding mash of gas and light that had travelled across the universe and projected its past to be looked at and admired for the the beauty of something long gone and dead perhaps. Both pretending to be listening to the band too attentively to talk, they were immersed in their own thoughts, with loneliness that needed company to be bearly tolerable and less lonely.

Hope was cataloging the images in her head, changing their order of appearance and trying to make them fit together into a patchworked slide-show she would more easily explain to her friend – the people in the camp, the torched houses and the flashbacks from her own past.


If there was any order in all of this disorder, it was firmly beyond the reach for the time being. 

She wanted to tell him everything she’d lived through since they last saw each other – Amir and how frightening his fear was, how the river tasted like love and how she misses her stupid brother and his idiot ways, but something under the surface of things was preventing her and  she was unable to do this, despite willingness and the best of her attempts.

Instead of pushing the stone up the mountain knowing the disheartening certainty with which it was set to roll back down once more, she decided to sit and listen to the music, let it guide her thoughts and allow the night to figure out how to unload the day that preceeded it on its own.

Things falling into place happens when you stop trying and just hold your breath.

The band made their way through most of the album that had an image of a man with a gun pressed against his temple on the front cover. The collection of songs that were bitter, disappointed and heartless, the music that was stripped down , bared and unrepentant so that the album painted the picture of her unwhited white city and the blood that stained its face.

And hands.

The guitar sounded almost inhumanly sharp, and the newly recruited rhythm section was struggling quite unsuccessfully to dull it a bit down. The trademark synth had nothing of that early emotional warm tone left, it was demised to being only a piano crescending the tragic and desperate attempt to fight the monsters coming out from underneath the beds, making their lives similar to a minefield planted with jacks-in-the-box that popped up imagery of chopped up people and refugees every time the eyes blinked.

- The setlist is gonna be the insanity one.

Sasha liked the older less direct stuff better, and was making a disgusted bitter face, frowning at the very idea obviously.

He reminded her of people for the Oscar Wilde novels, upper class twats that frowned at the worlfd first and then took their first breath upon granting the world the pleasure of their existence on Earth through the compulsory inconvenience of being born.

Like a child eating broccoli and wanting the taste of the chocolate next please .

- Can there really be a different sound now? I mean, it’s not like anyone could sing about the bright future from this tiny speck in the universe right here, this cog on the map that’s disintegrating to tatters because of the curent one-too-many attempt to rewrite it? C’mon what would you sing about ? – she retorted harpishly.

-What the hell is your problem?-she went on. You want poetry you better go elsewhere, we ran out of that yesterday. Oh , wait, no – it was the day before yesterday actually, yesterday we only ran out of bread – she grinned at him and then jumped right back to staring at the night and preventing him from answering.

It was rhetorical venting anyway.

This was the band that sang their songs of the rising tide of anxiety and the war years before this real war had began and people still believed that things would be ok

Warning signs had only been picked up by souls prone to translating feelings into fine art, with the rest of the population irrationaly clinging at the edge of the downward spiral that was about to suck them all in lulled by their denial that bad things could  never ever not in a million years happen here.

The band that played through their war repertoire downstairs was mass consumption material that had attained a cult like following across the old country, best known for that black and white video from a few years back that made you feel uneasy after watching, that instigated emotion unsettled and undeniably scary, starting a chain of thoughts on a subconscious level that made one see the unforeseeable future and in it  what was rolling behind the mountain – the very, very heavy artillery.

-If he could sense the horror of things coming our way back then, how do you think he feels now when all our fears have turned out to be reality? If I had any talent singing – which I don’t but that’s not important – If  I knew how to sing I’d be shouting at the top of my voice exactly the same lines he is.

-There’s no future to look forward to with a smile, there’s no love or loss of it left to reflect and dwell upon, there’s nothing human left in us, we are fuckin’ Zeros in Zeroland and the rabbit that we chased down the hole is a weapons smuggler that is fuckin’ laughing all the way to the bank.

- And I bloody well certain don’t want to listen to someone who is pretending that everything is fine and normal and the way it should be like my mom, I am not listening to anyone who has anything to preach, I will hear of nothing except someone who will climb the soapbox with last remains of his strength and scream that feeling shit hopeless and desperate is a-o-k beacuse this shitfestival going on  is hopeless and that's it.

-Why can’t you see that I need to hear someone say  it out loud -'this is bullshit', all the lies they're telling me about how we are the nation of heavenly origin – just because it is a huge pile of bullshit but no one has the guts to say it here. I need someone to spell it out for me so that I know I am not the one losing my sanity in this madhouse of a country. I need him down there in the dark to sing exactly these songs right now right here right this minute – otherwise there’s no point. Really. There’s no other music I am able to hear. Really.

Her eyes always welled up when she was angry, but she refused to wipe them and just stared stubbornly through the wet mist, listening to him shout more than sing as he joined in the song from the second verse – the song that she remembered had actually made her cry for real the first time she had heard it, because of the unforgiving way in which it worded the chaos around them hitting the nail on the head so hard that that the handle of the hammer breaks and the splinters make the hand holding it bleed.

Her friend and she, he not uttering a sound and she articulating her frustration, they both knew that she was absolutely right.

Knowing how screwed up things are doesn't make  you feel any better, it just makes you feel relieved enough to continue breathing. 

The man with the voice and the guitar sang probably the only kind of song a sane person could sing and assume he would remain sane by the end of it.

You can hear the sound that reminds of a howl coming
From deep in the heart of the woods
Trees are falling one by one by one by one
The wall made of tears dies, it
Dies now
The beast dies.


I forbid you laying the traps of your deceit
I forbid the envious touch of sickness
Becoming all that is left behind
This cannot be
all that is left behind.
...

MONDAY part IV

Sasha started speaking right away, from the very moment she tornadoed through his unlocked apartment door and dived straight into his room, looking all chewed up and spitted out, like he had spent his day again doing absolutely nothing except doing nothing – again, and waiting for her to drop by and save the day. Like she was the life support machine that got pulled out of the socket by the inattentive cleaner when she was not around.

He even had drinks prepared,a bottle of beer and a glass of wine that laid there on the table for hours getting warm and waiting just like him - for her to arrive and the morning shift to plug the extra bloodstream back before he withers altogether.

Hibernating was his way of fighting the reality, his silent protest, and he was lucky to have her being pissed at looking at him wasting away a perfectly viable life and drag his ass out of it on occasion here and there and insist that he bloody graduates some time soon and hopefully snap out of it under the burden of adult responsibilities like maybe a job.

Before he qualifies for a free bus pass.

-So what were you up to today? Did you see who’s rehearsing? They are going to have a concert on Saturday night.... Although that new drummer is not extremely good, I’m glad they’re still alive.

She ignored him and headed straight for her glass because, well, she still needed the cigarettes like crazy to calm down and could use a drink right now.

Processing that last sentence as she walked past her friend, she stopped firmly and gave him that look that said:


Explain or die.

He complied and opened his mouth preparing himself to elaborate, grabbing the beer bottle and opening the door letting her in front of him outside, onto the rooftop porch or whatever that mishap of construction was.

They sat down on he hot pebbled concrete ledge, that no sane human being would consider to be more than a mere hint of a terrace, and listened to the now four people all trying to warm up their instruments at the same time.

Hope touched the floor gently hoping that the tinkle of it moving underneath her would somehow disappear if she was no longer standing.

She sipped the wine and microns of sand rolled down her tongue.

-You know the stories, right?

-What stories ? I know the bass player is out of country and that HE was in Latin America for a while.

-No, not that. The up and down stories with the most addictive ups around.

Drugs.

Yes, she knew the stories carried by the word of mouth across the town.

***

All of the original band members were branded as heavy users, but somehow she had always in the past refused to believe that a poet of such a devotion, that was yet to come up with a song that was not a condensed microcosm of complexity of everythingness was ...well,... a wretched weak fallen wingless angel heroin addict that couldn’t cope with the stress of everyday normality of life.

Sasha was turning to automatic fire now, quoting song titles and lyrics like a pack of dogs chasing out an unfortunately strayed cat from their backyard.

- The thought never crossed my mind…he goes through the city and ends up ’finally weightless, numbed’ and floating... Out – a great song from early days - actually is the junkie jargon for missing a vein when shooting up heroin with a syringe…. cold nails and hands as a reoccurring image in several songs are symptomatic of body temperature and senses losing control... - he went on and on as she listened to the band he was talking about practicing what sounded like one of the more recent songs, without vocals to help her identify the exact one.

The new songs were harsh, the battle axes dug out and put to use rhytmed ones.

Just merely paralleling the life, she thought.

-…And Hunger…-Sasha was not finished yet with giving examples, going after the most elaborate portrayal of how a person in an abstinence crisis feels trying not to give in to the craving, - ’in the circle of an eye and under the skin’…pupils …itching trackmarks…

- Ok, ok …got your point, professor Know-It-All. I could write about junkies and addiction if I wanted to because I can write, you know, and you know that I haven’t even tried marijuana - she deliberately used the official name because, for some reason, those things called drugs were something she never even considered to possibly be used by reasonable people for only no harm done casual fun and, in her view, didn’t deserve informal, warm, affectionate nicknamish jargon vocabulary to be wasted on them as such.

The genes, Sasha teased her once.

’You hillbillies are genetically high on the smell of fresh cow manure and just don’t have the ability to develop a decent taste for anything, not even for the drugs.’

Compared to the impotence of the city users-losers she had a chance to hang around here, those smelly redneck cowboys back in the mountains were her preferred type.

- But he doesn’t look like he’s using now.

- And how would you know that? Sasha was intrigued by the resolute manner of her last sentence.

- I saw him play last night. Through the window. He looks fine.

- And?

Sasha swiftly got the idea what she was talking about, being still a bit amazed himself by the brute quality of that guitar solo that flowed through the air while he was masturbating his brain over the two perfectly symmetrical dimples on her lower back trying to calculate the exact vertebrae that they marked, laying in his bed and picturing her bent down towards the floor long after she had vanished from his room the evening before.

- He ....um…- she lowered her voice and prolonged the vowel with a sigh, as she bought herself time to grab the exact thought and find a way how to word the description of him, godly and godlike, looking and provoking impure but very healthy thoughts, mind you, but stopped herself just in time.

Sasha would have a field day joking about the stupid fan teenage crush she was apparently sporting and her attempt to pretend that well this was not a classic fan-girl uh-oh.

No it wasn’t all in her head – at least she got the talking smiles.

-…well, he looked fine. She downed the glass turning it almost upside down in a single, long gulp, and reached out the hand holding the now empty glass, that stood there between them like the sentence of a hungry little Oliver Twist begging for more lunch.

Sasha did his best to restrain from asking further and ignored the fact that she only lacked in words when she was hiding them, and wondered how much longer before she bumps into that special someone and breaks his heart.

He went back inside to get himself another beer, and pour her some more watered down white wine she liked.

***
Hope was looking into the dark distance where the mountain stood invisible to the eyes but not the heart, and remembered a joke –like story her encyclopedic friend told her once about how it was the holy place where the then still pagan Slavs used to gather for their religious death rituals. Since the Slavs were very good at keeping history and archeology and mankind in  general  in dark about the exact place or nature of their religious practice, Sasha sort of filled out the blank pages with his version of the truth for her amusement.

He was her storyteller and he would feed her stories true and not quite, he himself wondering afterwards where the words came from, perhaps inspired by her contagious rabid imagination and seeping into his mouth.

***

When a prominent member of the tribe died, warrior men would leave the body down in the palm print of two rivers with their women to be washed and prepared for the funeral, and would climb to the top of the Avala mountain at sundown, carrying a virgin girl, not allowing the female feet to break the primal taboo and touch the sacred ground.

When the procession of silent warriors carrying their treasured cargo reached the rounded field that stood in the place of a dead volcano top, they would form a circle holding their torches with the girl laying in the center of it, and wait for the soul of their dead commander to appear in the cold and deadly silence of the midnight.

-And then they would ganbang the sacrificial virgin, because, they believed, that the earth needed to suck in the purest of all, the virgin first time blood, to ensure that the descending dead soul had a safe journey to the whatever was their version of Paradise.

***
Sasha was apparently very fond of this banging the virgin brains out part.

Sex was his favorite pastime in this town. 

Getting laid was almost the only activity beside her that he indulged, with countless girls that he never bothered to call the day after or remember their names for more than the obligatory few hours.

He didn’t even keep the tab on his conquests, they were a mere need resolved successfully by-line.
Hope wondered if the story was true and what happened with the girl when they were all done with her.

No substantiated records of human sacrifices, but the virgin probably never made it down alive. 
 ...
           ***
Sasha was back now, sitting by her side, holding her glass and waiting for the torches in her gazing eyes to die down.

Her imagination, and the force with which she experienced through her senses the images wandering between her mind and open eyes was something he feared would break her apart.

Madness in her eyes in such moments was what  made him wait for her patiently, with religious devotion, every time she was somewhere far away, hypnotized and motionless, still and almost transparent.

The empty body that the wandering soul had shed behind.

***

zero sum days

The art of not talking,
 when mastered,
 is something comparable to the art of an absolute communicator
 – a craft performed by a person so versed in the secrets of the trade of extracting and deploying information intentionally 
without ever giving away even the slightest hint of the underlying fact that 
the act, 
the process that
the other person 
has willingly joined in an attempt to communicate
(under the assumption that 
taking part and doing this is product of their own free will 
and accord)
is being designed, 
planned 
and controlled 
and that each of its stages is invisibly orchestrated and conducted 
by 
the 
communicator-manipulator masterette of puppets,
always playing her game of 
one-sided de-verbalized chess
 with (her)self  and/or 
anyone/everyone  else, 
and that whatever is said or done or uttered or hinted
or not spoken
 is 
something she had 
thought about, 
run the scenario 
and 
adjusted her next move 
and several more to follow
so that the final outcome remains 
the same and unchanged 
– her not talking,
 aware that 
 the other person 
will be leaving the board 
feeling unjustly  that
the breakdown
the silence
the failiure to make her speak
it is somehow their fault.

Sometimes the automated safe mode of not talking is there to guard a secret new and dangerous dent in her armor 
– she is working on cleaning out the basements of her soul and exorcising the clutter demons of her past emotions.

Sometimes the not talking is her way of searching
- for the comfort of her silence that got lost.

Sometimes the playing of the not talking game is what matters to her the most, and the fact that it is zero sum doesn’t count 
-because both sides of her need to experience loss before she moves on.

Sometimes she just lets herself not talk at all. 

Like for days now.

'Rabies'

Novel published in Serbian as "Besnilo", Sveučilišna Naklada Liber, 1983, Zagreb, © Borislav Pekić; English translation © by Bernard Johnson.
 Rabies part 1

"Peste si grande viendra a la grande gousse
Proche secours, est bien loinge les remedes,
Nostradamus

Mrs. Andrea Milliner of Stroud, Gloucestershire, died two months after being bitten by a dog while on holiday in India… Fifteen people have died from rabies in Britain since 1945. Mrs. Milliner's death was the firs for three years.
The Guardian, 9th October, 1981.

PROLOGUE – RHABDOVIRUS

Penetrating into the live cell of a foreign body, the virus substitutes its own for the cell's substance and transforms it into a factory for the production of new viruses. The changes which it brings about in this way in the life medium of the cell are incomparably deeper and more dramatic than man can ever hope to bring about in his own milieu.

The virus is the most perfect being in the cosmos. Its biological organization is nothing less than a machine for producing life in its purest sense. The virus is the summit of natural creative evolution.

The summit of artificial creative evolution is – an intelligent virus. A creation with the form of a man and the nature of a virus, the vitality of a virus and the intelligence of a man.
A symbiosis of a virus, divested of its lack of purpose and of man, freed of his limitation would rule over nature, which both otherwise serve only as refuse.
...

Wherever It passed, worlds would be transformed by cataclysms more terrible than any earthquake that had ever struck the Planet since its very beginnings.

Wherever It passed It would transmit fear, hatred and frenzy to those with the misfortune not to go mad at once from its touch; to those lucky enough to go mad it would transmit some other consciousness whose very nature no one would ever be able to penetrate.

It would once again become what It was created to be, what arrogant man had for some short time disputed: the smallest, yet the most powerful, the most dangerous, the most pitiless living creation in the Universe, incomprehensible to the unity of worlds to which its Neuron belonged. Born to die only when It alone would be left, and when there would be no more death for It to live on.

This time man would not be able to stand against It. Only Aristaeus, the son of Apollo, could have done so, but there was no belief left in the old gods any more.
And so It set off calmly to fulfill its destiny; to annihilate and to die."

the rabid world

"A great composer, asked once what the meaning  of one of his symphonies was, replied: ' While I was creating it, the only ones who knew its purpose were God and I . Now, God only knows.'

It hasn't been that long since I finished writing Rabies, and I think I still know why I have written this book, and why it was written in this particular format.

Let's open the door now, with the story as our key, and enter into the room that holds the true meaning of this novel.

The Heathrow airport, London, is the breakout point of hydrophobia, the canine rabies, caused by a lab strain, or how we like to say it nowadays - the reprogramming of the natural rabies virus, by its clinical outcome the deadliest disease known to human kind, at least until now.
The airport is quarantined away from the world and the war against this rabies virus starts. The unfortunate end is there to prevent London and the rest of the world from catching this disease, and only one creature survives the outbreak ant its aftermath. *

The world is not saved.

If our only task in this and similar lethal outbreak cases was only finding the cure against the disease, then the outcome might have still been a hopeful one. The cure, even if only provisional, is always found. Humanity has so far managed to survive even the cursed Black Death that at its peak wiped away a third of the Europeans.

The battle is not fought against this rabies, such as it is.

The illness causes another kind of rabies in us, the kind under whose shadow we live our lives, the kind of rabies we read, listen and learn about, the kind of it that we have to face in both our lives and our history - the rabies that each and every one of us carries inside.

This other rabies is the trademark disease of our civilization and fight against it is futile.

To win the battle against it, we would have to rewrite our story of the humanity from the very beginning, and change the foundation of our civilization, because the other rabies disease has been a part of the natural process of development of conscious thought in humans, right from the times when first tools were used instead of hands to work (and are likely, soon, to take the place of our minds and souls also).

Victory over our intrinsic rabies is obviously - impossible.

Progress is, because of the disease it carries inside, akin to perfecting of a civilization whose starting point and basic assumptions are wrong. With every new assessment and correction of the mistakes we are just reshaping the troubles.

Since this reshaping is the only thing left to do, in a way, at some level, it must, be a strategy that is good for us.

Hope, if there is any, lies in the odd chance, something that the human mind cannot predict or imagine, in the fact that the only possible salvation of entire human kind is in a twist of fate that we are unable to create or attempt to achieve but must wait for it to happen, because any other defense that we the humans have come up with through conscious efforts is here for us to see, and unfortunately, experience.

In this age of progress and discoveries, in the century of the humanism, we are feeling less and less secure, our fears are growing bigger and bigger, our confusion is getting deeper, and our powerlessness is becoming more and more obvious.

We have reached the point where now, the more we know, or more we think we know, the more we are driven to kill, destroy, to deprive others more efficiently, faster and with even less reasons then back in the days when the Krapina Neanderthal fought for his survival.

Back then the need to kill was justified, it didn’t happen for ideals like today, back then the slavery was product of brute force and not love and admiration like it happens now.

The most frightening thing is not the fact that our wars have, through the lessened degree of sense we put into mass murder – if sense to mass murder is possible at all to be attributed ever – started taking more lives.

The thing that scares the most is the fact that our peace has become manic, irrational, and bloodier than any war.

Rabies is the world the way I see it. The theme of this novel is not the disease, but what we consider to be our healthy state of mind.

‘We are the rabid ones’, one of the characters states,’ they are merely ill ’.

Each character has their own, individual human version of rabies that makes them suffer, long before they fall victim to the canine strain and die.

No, the story is not happy at all, but happy stories are not suitable for those among us who wish to remain hopeful at any cost. Hope matters, but not the one that comes without a price tag, especially if the price tag that is hidden is the cost of us closing our eyes shut when facing the reality of our world.

Only the hope that that knows what it is up against can bring us back to life – any other sort is what keeps us dead inside."

Borislav Pekic, diary entry September 1983, London.**

*spoiler sentence edited out
** 'Rabies’  the novel was first published in 1983 in Serbian

rabies

I had huuuge rabid dogs phobia when I was a child. It came about triggered by a prevention booklet that was stashed away in my parents bedroom, between the folk erotic poetry compilation and a local history journal that had on page 284 picture of the bonfire that my great grandmother and her three daughters were thrown into. Sort of the library of things forbidden, that was hidden in plain sight, guarded only by my parents' thinking that I was too young to attempt reading them at all..

The rabies booklet was typically socialist promotional material and brutally graphic in details. There was a sickening gradation to the images that accompanied it. Each page of text on the left was illustrated with a page of pictures on the opposite side.

It started off with pictures of hands and legs bitten. Then faces, followed by a full page image of someone who had half of their scalp missing and portions of brain that were an open wound.

Then , the description of the disease in dogs: first, a romantic sight of children playing with a stray dog in the street. Then the rabid fox captured, then the process of a dog in a tight cage going through all stages of rabies in 12 pictures on two sides. The picture of a dead dog in the same cage too. And the infested brain dissection slides.


The most harrowing, was what followed.

Images of people.

In cage-like beds too.

Neatly organized images of human beings that were descending into the same lethally rabid madness.

*


That's why years later I had no difficulty learning to love Clive Barker's sense of ornament detail of scenes of horror - the scary parts were never scary at all - imagining them never even came close to what I have already seen.

*

Rabies, the novel, written by Borislav Pekic, is the literary equivalent of that wretched over-diligent health promo I read too young (forbidden books are always there to be rescued and read by eyes unintended, aren't they?).

This magnificent book frightens the reader in a way so overwhelming, that I feel free to suggest restraining yourself from reading it all in one go (it's that gripping), through the night, by the murky lamp light, with your pet dog snoring in your lap - like I did. Your dog might at some point just shuffle in its sleep and you might start screaming your head off.

So, reading in daylight may be a safer option.

As long as you stay away from the crowds.

And do not, under any circumstances, bring it with you to any airport for long haul voyage.

The book is not published in English yet, but by the kindness of the woman blessed to have been at Pekic's side through hell and back - his wife Liljana Pekic, and her devoted holding his ground firmly for four years now on his blog - http://borislavpekic.blogspot.com/ , it has been brought into the light and offered to the world, this perfection in theme and handling of it genre novel,  this one book that managed to chill the inside of my bones far worse than rabies for real had years before..

I wil translate the interview with the author, and you can google  the links  to the novel translation - the author's blog is a bit hard to navigate because of its exuberant content that makes it one of my favorite places in the world - getting lost there is like finding Atlantis of my own every time I visit.

 Gold doesn't grow on trees, but when Pekic is concerned, I am blinded-by-the-quest gold digger.

Go grab the popcorn and buckle up.

Buckle up hard.

Him and Her/The Hunger

This was the seventh day of his trials , his path to enlightenment consisting of seven secret steps, his climbing the sacred ladder of his apprenticeship, his road to becoming soul worthy of his god – the deity he had trouble recalling the name or the image of at the moment in his hunger infested mind that was pounding only one thought with every heartbeat pumping blood into the barely functioning encephalon, now, after it was done shutting down everything else, all of its unnecessary operations.

He was an instinct stumbling through the corridors underneath the city, through a man-made cave that was the buried temple of their religion.

He hadn’t slept, eaten, drank, rested, for days now.

What was left here, was the staggering anthropomorphic horrible state of unconsciousness of senses too beaten to raise to the occasion of registering alerts, of a body that no longer felt anything, of an empty shell of outer epidermal contour and mind in absence that housed once the soul that was gone.

***

He hadn’t drank water, then when he was drowning in it, trying to hold his head above the surface of the flooded cave, filled exactly with the amount right enough to force him to stand stretched to the point where the neck almost snapped itself under the strain, and all he could think of was how he wanted to stop and lay down and rest forever.

He hadn’t laid down to rest, except when he was buried alive and his hands tore the wooden casket tearing themselves instead. He was breathing poison and all he could think of was taking a long unrestricted breath before his brain started numbing down and he was no longer able to think clearly at all.

He hadn’t breathed freely, but was forced to inhale the air that strangled, in the crushing wind that scarred his lungs, then when he was tied to the top branch of the highest tree of the mountain that nursed winds so powerful that they chilled the blood cold and gathered clouds with the whip of its force, closing in on the sun he hoped would break out and shine warmth on him.

He hadn’t rejoiced sunlight, save for the day his eyelids were sewn open and he was tied to a chair that invisible hands moved to follow the burning path all day long, with head fixed in metal contortion keeping him staring at the footsteps of the blinding light until the his eyes bled, and he would sometimes through the haze of madness recall the thought that the cooling darkness was to follow .

He hadn’t healed in darkness that he was thrown into, because being forced to stare open into absolute freezing dark was equally painful and his almost blinded eyes would have cried blood, if there was anything left to cry out. His tortured mind spurted an image of red heat that promised the release but the image no longer had a name because all of his language was gone.

He hadn’t felt his blood warm up when it was boiling from too much heat of the fire that burned itself and burned him and was used to bless the iron that branded his forehead, and the pain was no longer painful because, for him, pain was no more the signal of danger , the sensory impulse, pain no longer hurt . All of his thresholds had been pushed, pushed hard, and then pushed again some more, and then pushed beyond that, until there was no threshold left and the pain was just the smell of the iron burning through meat that was his own.

***

This was the seventh day of his Mithraic trials, and he was no longer the pubescent initiate that walked into the sacred Mitraeum, the temple hidden inside the cave ripped in the underbelly of  Singidunum – neither was he feeling closer to being the enlightened creature he was promised these seven days would make him out to be – he was no longer a human being capable of such appreciation – he was an instinct, and the instinct walked.

He had no concept nor sounds to carry  it  for the hunger in his mind - he had no mind that governed the raged body - but every cell, each tiny nucleus driven building block that humans were made of had only so much strength left in it to transmit one message – the message of the instinct.

The Hunger.

***

Seven days ago he imagined how he would feel on his seventh day of the sacred, secretive and sainted ritual. The future that he envisioned was as real as the present.

***

Tomorrow, he will be cleansed, his mouth and hands washed with honey, tomorrow his head will refuse the wrath, he will be the Mithras and hunt the bull, ride him gloriously to the cave and overcome the exhausted animal and bleed it to death at the altar .

Tomorrow he will stand proud born from his own rock .

Tomorrow the globe will shine in his hand .

Tomorrow the snake and the dog and the scorpion will acknowledge him the master and play their servant parts.

Tomorrow he will clasp with his right hand and he will carry a torch.

Tomorrow he will become The Father, the highest ranking initiate , the special magister sacrorum, the Magus, the sophistes , the high-priest who has been chosen by his fellows, tomorrow he will be all this and he will rule them all.

Tomorrow they will feast and celebrate the Mithras the invincible, the good, the fiery, the light , the one that the gods of the four elements shall in fear honor, the Mithras of the soldiers, the ruler of the cosmos.

Tomorrow they will eat and drink and his will be the seat of honor.

Tomorrow he will do all this.

* **

Seven days ago, his thoughts of tomorrow that will come after today were clear. The tomorrow of the seventh day was as real as he was.

Today, there was nothing. No future to behold , no past to awe, no present to live in and know beyond the instinct.

***

Seven days ago, he thought that today he was going to be an antipatos, one step away from final honor and his magnificent completion.

Today, he was one step away from complete and utter madness, he was right now one gate short of Death and he was nothing except what was only possible to be left after body was tortured so that the soul, the intellect, the knowledge, the conscience, the dogma and the fear was no longer – the instinct to live, to live to kill, to live to kill to eat.

Nothing but, nothing except, nothing else and nothing more than the instinct that he now followed.

The Hunger


***
    .....

hurt

Danilo Kis or Life That Hurts
By Borislav Pekic

   *
In his final hours, visible to those still alive watching, a loyal friend asked Danilo if he was in any pain.

Yes, it hurts, he replied.

What hurts? –the friend asked.

Life hurts, Danilo said.

In this short, simple and content acknowledgment of our defeat, that was presented without hope, but also without despair, uttered without any accusation and still with the contempt typical of a winner, in this only possible and true definition of human perspective, whether we like it or not, was hermetically sealed ,contained and in the mold of the fate preserved, his entire existence.

In this life of Danilo, the life that had outlived its years, like in some indestructible milestone of human history other lives were gathered – the lives of the already born and those yet to be born participants and accomplices of the world he transited, he himself representing a shadow of a possibility that is better than reality, higher in its calling, more noble in its purpose, bearing more gifts in its sacrifices, at peace with the knowledge that to be a shadow of something different, in a harsh and cruel world of our illusion, is taking a risk, comforted by the fact that, in the end , it was the risk worth taking.

Impossible cannot be achieved, but sometimes, the impossible can, and should be, aspired.

We met long time ago, and it seems that we knew each other long before that.

I always had the impression that our paths had crossed in the past, that we were friends once before, that we lived our lives together in some ancient time, and that all of this, the period from the early sixties till late eighties was just a more intimate sequel, to be followed by a third part – longer and  lasting forever.

And when we did meet again, both of us knew, driven by the instinct of a loner , almost an outcast, in other words a foreigner eternally longing for The Home, we knew that we were to remain friends.

We were friends not only joined by the things that brought us together, put perhaps more with the things that were to keep us apart.

What brought us together was our dual, montenegrin-pannonian heritage, always there to deliver its unpredictable harvest; our everlasting forced and even chosen exiles; the burden of being a foreigner that we both suffered carrying – mostly in private, but sometimes even in the public, yet never throwing it away, for it seamed that this burden was the most painful and at the same time most significant component of our fate.

And everything else that we had in common...

A lot of things kept us apart, and by keeping us apart managed to create a bond that ties people closer together and in a more honorable way. We were separated by the misfortune he felt and I merely caught the glimpse of, the faith in art that he so passionately nurtured and I only visited his temple of the believer as a mere guest, the intensity of force of life that I kept cowardly at bay, and he turned into his mission in the world around him that was dead.

Now, nothing stands between us, except a small fragment of time that is not really there, anyway.

*
(translated by me admiring from a distance)

musings from an empty house

do I really miss  Belgrade? 

do I miss the illiterate shouting across the counter 'heyneighborhowcanIhelpyou' that made my skin crawl every time, the skin contaminated with heritage of different communal interaction patterns - where first of all shouting in public, and second of all calling anyone 'neighbor' (your next door neighbors included) never happened?


do I miss being verbally smacked for making the same mistake over and over again - addressing the person above me in position /age/social role with plural V-form and failing to make use of the default first-name-basis protocol that I never felt comfortable with in the first place?

do I miss not being able to find my way from Slavija to Terazije square on foot and crying my guts out over it after a couple of years of living there?

do I miss the streets too high , do I miss the people too loud, do I miss the sound that never ceases, do I miss the creative art of potholes and fucked up afternoon traffic jams?

yes.

I miss the force of life you can smell in the air just being there, in your home being alone but knowing that your odds at having someone drop by unexpected are way better than betting on announced visitor  to ever make it, in the street and its endless rows of overpopulated cafes, in the mismatched rooftops and the way the dawn breaks on them  when you approach the city from across the river, in the faces of people all going someplace, and in me the way I was then.

I smell no spring and it's almost May, the door is bolted, cafes back on Dohány street suck as much as the coffee that they serve, the rooftops are neat and my next door neighbor is made of stone, I rarely venture across the river,  people drag their feet when they walk - even when they are walking real fast, and I am not getting enough sleep these days.

And it's too fuckin' silent. Except for the sirens. Who needs them at 3 AM when  Rákóczi is empty for god's sake?

Belgrade is not Budapest. And 'this' Budapest is most definitely not 'that' Belgrade. 

two capitalized extremes of the cultures that shaped  and got me to be stuck with missing what is not there in each of them.


time to pack.
 (or perhaps time to lay off the Tokaji Furmint, make some tea and  try to go to bed)