By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Tragedy and cruelty, from the least to the greatest. That of which the world is woven; its black, vampire-like cloak. None of that, in fact, can be survived, if you think about it consistently and completely, to the ultimate consequences. But that’s exactly what we usually don’t do. The very fear of that is what makes us, instead of the truth, throw ourselves into the protective net; into a soft, fine spider web of political struggles, tradition, history, ideology, religion.
As soon as they happen, we know exactly the events, the points, where all the seams of all the masks burst, where the armature of our model that supposedly represents the world bursts. We leave that place in the greatest hurry and run to a safe distance, from where the cracks in our cardboard ramparts that pretend invincibility cannot be seen.
The crime in Cetinje is such an event.
We know nothing about reality. Nor about God. Therefore, we define reality the way theologians define God: reality is real = God is God.
The thing is that what we call reality is just, I said, a model of it. Those models are bloodied, trampled; they burn and are submerged. Then we say that the true reality is only that which has the power to destroy our models. But what if there is a force behind that force. And then the force behind it… And what if there is no meta-force, only chaos and entropy? What if the fate of every order is only to be temporary, only to tend towards chaos? We know nothing about it, we are not able to think about it – which, unfortunately, does not prevent us from talking about it.
Nothing in this world can compare to human pain. What? What is comparable to the pain of a mother whose children were shot? In addition to being shot without any reason accessible to human mind? The Cosmos will disappear with less pain than a parent feels at the grave of his/her child.
The difference between me and most happy people is that when I was young, I saw everything I thought I knew about the world and man disappear in the flood of blood and the wild flames of hatred. I watched all the fairy tales about good people and good neighbors disappear. I have seen the greatest atrocities committed by those who were closest to us; how the greatest harm is done to us by those whose love we were absolutely sure of. Imagine talking on the phone with your best man and your best neighbor, to whom you would give blood. Imagine then that they forget to hang up the phone, and you hear what they are saying about you: you hear how much they hate you and how much they are pretending and lying about all the years of your friendship. I had such a calling when I was 17 years old. The name of that call is war. All the models of what I called the world were burned, along with everything I believed in and everything I was taught.
There is nothing in this world less than justice. It is not even there enough to have hope for it. That is why people even moved the hope of justice to the other world: they delegated the job of distributing justice to God and his Last Judgment. What kind of justice can the families of the victims of a crime like the one committed in Cetinje hope for? Even if the killer – in his last act of cowardice – had not escaped the justice, what kind of punishment could bring peace to the bereaved?
They can believe in a God who, later, will settle all accounts, punish the guilty and reward the righteous. They cannot go to the institutions of world justice that will apportion blame and facilitate reconciliation. Both, the good God and their justice, endure in absence and promise. God arrives too late for the living, earthly justice arrives too late for the dead. Both are weakened by the glue that prevents the models of the acceptable world we hold in our hands from leaking through our fingers.
In this world, which is not worth a single mother’s tear, there is no going back: the splitting of tissue is irreversible, the wound is incurable.
Cetinje and Montenegro are bleeding.
And there is no shortage of hands pouring salt into the wound. Many bark. Like a cuttlefish, they release blackness from themselves.
For many, their political projects, ideologies and hatreds are more important than sympathizing with the victims and their families. Hate is even more addictive than heroin: a lot is always a little, more is even less.
How much hatred, Good God, they have poured on Cetinje these days. What sorts of things they have said about the people of Cetinje. I look at that hatred and think: if they could, they would make a lake out of Cetinje, so that it could exist only under water. I look at those waterfalls of hatred and think: no one can stop it. Let them. One way or another, then or now, a man will tell everything about himself. I only regret one thing: that I myself am not from Cetinje. But I’m not: my pain is not of Cetinje, but of Bosnia. That’s why I think I have the right to say this about the pain of Cetinje: let the enemies bark at the stars until dawn, that pain is unique.
Unfortunately, I cannot write anything that will bring even the slightest relief to the grieving families. Nobody can do that. What happened to them cannot be talked about: it is only possible to cry. But can we at least once not say what will make their pain even worse?
Looks like we can’t.
We beat everyone. Except ourselves.
(Columnists’ opinions and views are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
