Written by Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Summer has arrived, they say.
I don’t think summer arrives, it’s rather falls on the world. Just like the snow is falling in Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’ – “upon all the living and the dead”. It deadens what’s still alive, and what has already died, it pushes it deeper into oblivion. And in the summer, a man is too lazy to move his hand holding a glass of cold water, let alone dig through memories. The world flashes and somehow fades away. Summer is proof that things don’t reveal under light, they rather get hidden. If anyone ever saw something – it was in the dark, among shadows and noises that don’t announce, but threaten. The summer light doesn’t sharpen, but enlarges objects, so the world looks like a watercolour on which a restless child has just spilled milk.
And our lives seem to dissolve, as if they’re being drained, dripping from today into tomorrow. Summer is the time of the year when a person’s life leans with its full weight on a wobbly table.
Sleeping at night is torturous, interrupted like the breathing of an old smoker. The morning finds us in wet sheets – as if someone suddenly wrapped us in the placenta again and brought us back to the beginning of the agony. In summer, the new day dawns not as a promise, but as a retribution. Yes – we’ll have to do it again, all over again.
Summer is not the time for big political stories. Who organizes large protests in the summer? During summer, even the calls for resistance fall silent. If the government intends to make a scandal – summer is the ideal time for that. Each of us, we’ve learned, has certain civic duties – but is it necessary to fulfil them during summer?
Instead of overthrowing governments, people go to the beaches in the summer. People’s sexuality blossoms. Which is strange at first, like: bro, it’s too hot for breathing, let alone for gymnastics. All research says people have the most sex during wartime. People, it turns out, go crazy when bombs fall on them or when there’s a threat of a heart attack due to heat. They’re called eros and thanatos. To paraphrase Njegos: eros cannot exist without thanatos.
A friend sent me a drawing of a fat old man at the beach on Viber, uttering a sentence that sums up my view of the world: it’s better to feel embarrassed at the beach for seven days than suffer in the gym for a whole year. Let them tell you what they want, but you should know: if consumed correctly, getting older is liberating. All those things a man is ready to sacrifice and do when he’s young, when he’s on the market and wants to sell himself as well as possible: from his body to what’s left from his brain, the whole enormous effort to be liked and accepted, under the burden of which young people stumble, turns out to be comical and foolish once you realize you’ve grown sick of everything you longed for in your youth.
That’s why in the summer I like going to Dolcinium beach with my buddy. There, human specimens who’ve spent the entire year in the gym and at plastic surgeon’s lounge on sunbeds that cost as much per day as four bottles of Institut rakija (eng. brandy) and a crate of Niksicko beer. So my buddy and I show up – the only two belly-bearers there – hand the kids a paddle board, send them off into the sea after giving them a brief yet vivid explanation of why it’s important not to drown, and head straight to the bar for drinks. I’ve never felt unwanted there. On the contrary: everyone there feels prettier when standing next to us, and people appreciate that feeling. Everyone looks like mannequins there, only I completely failed at it. People look at me and tell themselves: all our effort, all the money we spent, all the renunciation – it wasn’t in vain. If I didn’t do it, I would end up like this man here. One would say a man like me at the beach full of hipsters must feel like a pig in Tehran. I don’t. I have nothing they want, they have nothing I want: only under those conditions – the complete absence of desire, that is, the absence of the need for any further communication – true freedom occurs.
F**k it. As a friend of mine once said: it’s my way of understanding punk.
(The opinions and views of our columnists aren’t necessarily the opinions or views of the CdM news team)
