I am grateful to readers who email me and tell me how my books have touched them, influenced them. And yet, somewhere in my head is the knowledge that everything, all memories, all influences - are fleeting. For one, at best two generations, no one will read my books or think about me. Most certainly no one will remember me as a real being. Not to be aware of this, not to accept the impermanence of existence, is to live in delusion...
The brilliant Irvin Jalom, the most famous psychotherapist from the end of the last and the beginning of this millennium, based this reflection on a quote from his favorite writer, Milan Kundera: What terrifies us most about death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past. The act of forgetting is a form of death that is constantly present in life...
I am also grateful to the readers, who write to me regularly, more often via WhatsApp and Viber than by e-mail, I have already mentioned and quoted one, the best of all, my genius friend, similar to that of Elena Ferrante, who always calls during the breaks of numerous chemotherapy treatments, as well as recently, before entering the room to receive the toxins that attack the problematic cells:
To check myself before they put a needle in me and attach a bottle. Excellent column.
It was after the opening of Eldina Hrapovića street in Pljevlja, where Mandić and Vraneš gave new momentum to collective amnesia. That is, the painting of the recent past. In the meantime, Pljevlja got two more streets named after young men who fell in shameful campaigns and insane wars in which Serbia and Montenegro, Vučić, Mandić and Vraneš never took part:
All our wars have been fratricidal. We know all the battles by heart, against all the invaders, because to be honest, there weren't too many of them, so it's not difficult to remember them. Everything else is fratricide, with the fact that we killed each other with more zeal than the invaders. We were more cruel to the Janissaries than to the Turks, to domestic traitors, Trotskyists, kulaks, wealthy and educated people, who did not bleed their hands, but to the Italians and Germans. To be precise, I am thinking of people beaten with sledgehammers and dumped in various dog cemeteries during "left turns", as well as all those killed after the end of the Second World War, who were not judged and whose fate is unknown, including the Ibe people.
In the last war, we showed who we are and what we are, not only by our participation... The Štrpci and the deportation of refugees are a bigger shame than anything else... That's why I am a Sioux by nationality...
I don't think we are worse than others. We are small and poor, so we didn't have the courage and capacity to wage wars of conquest and make a living on other peoples and civilizations, like the rest of the white race. All the hatred, anger, frustrations, malice and sadism, we directed and direct at each other. The white race seems to be prone to crime, not to say genocide. Because, wherever and whenever she fought, she carried out terror on the conquered population. Perhaps the best example is small, now peaceful Belgium. When they caught fire, they carried out genocide over 77 times the size of the Congo and killed 10 million people... I would like someone to do research on the topic of which nation has never committed genocide in history...
I love being Sioux.
Well, my digression went too far, but I have myself to blame. You inspire me.
When I wrote on the following Tuesday about the party configuration before the elections in Budva, she was recovering from her last therapy, who knows which order, but neither there nor here she gives up, she sends another comment. She is resigned to the political elite, she does not agree with me that communism has fallen:
Having concluded that I have been stateless since I was born in this country, I look at events on the political scene with a cold head, disinterestedly, with growing contempt and animosity towards political participants.
I only disagree with you on one point. I don't think communism has fallen, nor will it soon.
I claim that a married couple, worker martyrs, in Montenegro, who educated a child while weaning, cannot see that educated child (an excellent student) start working in a state or local government body, if someone from the closest family, is not a member of a party. Anything. It was always traded. The prosecutor's office, the police and the judiciary were and will always be the punching fist of the government. We know how the Constitutional Court was elected, etc... Absolute politicization and privatization of the judiciary and the police is the only thing that all political actors have persisted in and will always, without exception...
The Viber software somehow arranged the rest of the text so that it visually looked like a verse, and when I read it carefully, I realized that the content turned out to be good poetry:
As for Budva...
For Jakov, without a party or a country, it is wisest to be neutral.
He entered the political race for president by chance.
Twice I
half alive
I went to vote for him.
The man is after the historical political result,
admirable
after less than a year,
since the election,
reduced the support to the aunt,
wife's godfather,
Evrosimus
and Radojka...
I did not remember the names of the others.
UDBA played with Ura before the parliamentary elections.
Rodić drew everything for them
at Peter's,
but they don't show up….
(You know I like Dritan, because he's crazy
like electricity.
I like him
and when he rushes).
...There will be a big fight between former Front members... Democrats, they should kiss each other if they don't lose a few percent.
I don't have an estimate for PES.
And then, is there anyone more invited than her to say how civilizationally we have regressed in the DPS/DF over the years that have been eaten by locusts. This is why our students are last in the PISA tests and women are among the first to suffer from breast cancer, which is also taking on epidemiological proportions:
As for the future parliamentary elections, someone whose focus will be people will win the elections. Watching TV and reading the media, I get the impression that politicians, criminals, NGOs, the police and the prosecutor's office live in Montenegro. The rest are marginalized. They don't exist.
They are not part of the small Montenegrin "circle of two", although they represent the absolute majority in the country and withstand the previously listed pests and parasites.
In this country, out of the entire generation of the high school of Economics in PG, sixteen of them went on a graduation excursion.
Montenegro has the first mortality rate in Europe from breast cancer, among other things, because our protocols are old. While in the EU (Germany and France) EC protocol is used (for 15 days), we apply AC protocols for 21 days.
I am also now being treated abroad. I am receiving therapy that is also available in Montenegro, but it has not yet entered the valid protocols! I'm lucky, because seven people are working for the costs of my treatment, not counting the help of relatives and friends... I tendered the beech wood, borrowed money...
Two of my acquaintances did not have those opportunities. One of them was a mother of two small children...
Saint Paul, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, says: And if I have faith, so that I can move mountains,
and I have no love,
I'm nothing...
In other words, doing good to people, especially when they are suffering, is the least we can do. I realized that the Tuesday column is as important to my genius friend as chemotherapy. Forget about the illness for a moment, and he gets inspiration to describe our reality much more vividly than I do, so that when I sometimes think of skipping, because what haven't I already written and who haven't I told everything already, then I think of HER...
Writing as therapy. And writing as a way to at least save something from oblivion. Because everything we don't write down didn't even happen.
Bonus video:
