By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
The most valuable thing in human life are illusions. When they disappear, our ability to enjoy life disappears. Probably the most important of all illusions is that our destiny is singular in any way: that our suffering is unique. As we should know, it’s possible to enjoy your own misfortune. But that possibility disappears irrevocably when you realize that millions before you suffered just like you, for the same reason you suffer. Our suffering has no “higher” meaning. It doesn’t redeem. It’s not an excuse for anything.
In Ridley Scott’s movie, poorly translated as ‘Istrebljivac’ (eng. Blade Runner), there’s a scene in which a replicant – played by Ruger Hauer – dies on, I think, the roof of a building. On his deathbed, he utters:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-rays shimmer in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. It’s time to die.”
The replicant dies just like any other human being: with self-pity and the idea that what he experienced in space was extraordinary. As I said, he died like a human being.
The idea of progress worthy of sacrifice is another illusion.
When he was a child, my father used to go to Velika Plaza (eng. Long Beach) by a bullock cart. First, he had to walk to the place where the bridge at Port Milena is located today. Back then, there was only a wooden scaffolding there – you had to use it to get to the other side. It wasn’t ruled by Charon. After that, they would get into bullock carts with giant wheels and plod along the muddy road for hours. It was almost an all-day trip. They didn’t go swimming there. Just to stay with godfathers and friends for a few days. They went there to hunt.
Children born after World War II were often hungry. Father used to hunt blackbirds under Bijela Gora, in an olive grove. He hunted them with a slingshot, he was so skilled with it. To the boy, the downed birds looked like they were sleeping. Sometimes he wept as he looked at the beautiful, dead creatures that fell like coins into his outstretched palm. He saw no wounds on their little bodies, no blood. That would make him feel relieved. When he got back home, his mother would make risotto loaded with the blackbird.
He was hunting ducks on Long Beach. In winter, the swamp would freeze. It was good for hunting. A duck on ice is slow. It’s hard for her to take off. She needs a run, but it’s difficult for her to do it. Clumsy legs betray her. Like in silent movies, my father used to tell me. A duck on ice is like Olio, he said, fat and clumsy. Before he gets the momentum he needs to take off, he falls several times. That was enough for the boy, who would have wrapped his broken shoes with a cloth so he could run on the ice, to reach her in time and kill her with a stick. Sometimes the duck would take off, father said, so that he could hit it with a stick the way baseball players hit a ball.
Hungry children, both then and now, have no time for environmental issues.
For my father today, Long Beach is a trauma. The realization of every one of his darkest childhood fears. We all live in the hell of our own ancestors. What we call progress was the vision of hell for those before us. The only possible progress is progress deeper into hell.
He’s never told me but I assume that the surviving hungry post-war children would like to beat drugged hipsters who pay 100 euro a day for a deck chair with the sticks, just like they used to beat ducks.
Long Beach will never be a synonym of wilderness and a promise of freedom, never again will there be hope that the escape is possible.
No running, no hiding. The world is just a wallpaper, a background for selfies. Come to Ulcinj’s Long Beach, a faithful copy of the Californian coast where freaks with bizarre fates from the Pinchon’s text are walking along. Wait for the end of a summer day in one of the beach bars where surfers and other cool city boys and girls gather. A moment before the sun will disappear into the sea, young people leave their cocktails made of vodka, beer and smoothies and, like an army of replicants activated by pressing a button, approach the sea to record their muscles and tits, exposed in front of the most famous kitsch background in the universe. Then, while staring at the phones they used to upload the videos of their egos blocking the setting sun, they walk slowly on the still warm sand back to their tables and continue their stupid conversations, right where they left off when the moment for the perfect selfie came.
Then, and only then, you have the feeling that, despite everything, you’re finally alone and invisible in a beach bar abandoned for a moment by beings who fear anonymity more than death.
It wasn’t like that. I remember that, too: Long Beach you go to because you need solitude. Or you just go to throw a hook and spend the night in absolute silence in a shack on the sand owned by the Masanovic family, until it was torn down by the current tenant of the beach.
Can you understand: your progress is a hell for me. People today are worried about being accused of being against progress. It’s like being ashamed to say you’re against cancer – which is the most progressive thing in nature. Capitalism is the socio-economic version of cancer. Continuous progress, until the death of the host.
The Arabs have a proverb that goes something like this: the worst that can happen will happen – nothing will happen. That’s not my fear: I’m against progress. I’m not even for the present, as it’s also a bastard of progress. I’m in favor of the past. Actually: I’m not. Every past is also just a collection of broken promises of one’s own past – the tragic future of another time. The main advantage of the past over the future is that it passed.
My utopia is in the past. By definition, the place/time of utopia is the future. One dreams of utopia. My generation remembers it. Our utopia has already happened. We have seen both its realization and its end. We have seen how what is born as a utopia dies as a dystopia.
As for me – all the progress in this world: take it, it’s all yours. And I don’t need change.
As for me – no self-pity that is so undignified, so kitsch.
Yeah: I saw how night fell noiselessly on the Altar of the Motherland and the Roman Colosseum. From the coast of Calabria I watched Sicily burn in the wild flames of the setting sun. I saw Naples and did not die. I saw Finnish swamps and Norwegian forests. I walked on a frozen river in Umea. I walked out of the Globe theater dejected after an all-night torture with Ukrainian Macbeth and crossed the disgusting, muddy Thames. I wandered the Yorkshire hills and got lost in Paris. In Brussels, I stood on the stage holding the award in my hands while the Dutch princess applauded from the front row. I wandered aimlessly in Vienna, I wandered aimlessly in Pest, which I remembered when, an hour before my flight to Podgorica, I woke up in a cafe on the roof of the Istanbul airport. I understood too late that the pain others inflicted on you is not worth mentioning: what will haunt you until the end so that you won’t die in peace is the pain you inflicted on others.
Yeah, so what?
(The opinions and views of our columnists don’t necessarily reflect the opinions or views of the CdM news team)
