On the morning of the 10th of June, still in Novi Sad, I tried to make notes of what had happened the day before, but a loud American woman with her Serbian husband and poorly behaved kids crowded onto the coffee shop veranda where I was sitting while speaking loudly in English nonstop. She projected her discomfort with silence, her discomfort with making sense of what was going on around her, onto everyone else. How? Simply by displacing any possibility for silence or otherness with her voice. In those few moments before I packed up and left I learned how unhappy she was with the way that her husband would go out and party with visiting Balkan friends back in the States. The passive aggression, the instrumentalized victimhood, now it was the collective problem of anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot.
“I thought it was the people visiting who wanted to stay out! But it turns out it was actually insert husband’s name!” Forced laugh. Repeat.
The day before I had met with my new friend the writer again.
During the preceding weekend there had been a series of literary panels held as part of a literary festival at the book store. The theme was the place of literature in politics. My writer friend was disappointed that the panels never actually got around to addressing the topic. I asked what he thought the role of literature was in today’s political environment, and he answered that there isn’t one. No one cares. You can write anything and the government doesn’t bat an eye. What’s more, no one can keep up with the volume of contemporary literary output there, anyway. There are too many books being published.
I asked whether literature has a role in cultivating the internal life, of activating the capacity for ethics that would allow for people to actually enter political life. He agreed that that this was still an important aspect of literary work, but I suppose he’s right. This isn’t a direct involvement of the artist in the polemos, in the public struggle for the state.
What is it when you have to become a person before you can become a political subject, but before that you have to realize you have not been a person all this goddamned time?
We talked about the feeling of hopelessness of his country’s politics. As I had mentioned earlier, when the opposition eked out a win in early elections the ruling party was able to just go on TV and say that the opposite had happened. He brought up a common complaint: That the people who are in power are supported by external interests, and their corruption is therefore not a threat to them. Corruption seems to be taking this flagrant line pretty much everywhere.
What is evil? In the human context you must first understand what it is to be a person. If you would like for people to be free, capable of making the decisions that most fully express who and what they are without coercion, then evil is that which would rob one of the basic ability to consciously make decisions free of coercion. In our world, locked as we are in spiritual stress positions, maybe the best we can hope for is to do for others when it is not directly in line with our own best interests. To act against fear, to opt out of retaliation or preemptive domination, to have a single thought unmotivated by terror and survival is perhaps the closest we can come in this world to realizing our humanity. And then to live in that thought. That thought is a hologram containing the entire world. You will always have that place to return to. But imagine if we, raised by hungry ghosts, organized around this principle.
My time in Novi Sad was wrapping up. It was time to think about moving back to Belgrade.
I wound up meeting with my writer friend one more time, along with a full and dazzling panoply of local literary and counter-cultural lights. I did no formal research, but the connections I made during my travel, and the books I learned about in conversation, yielded something far richer and meaningful. What a world.
All that was left for me was to worry about packing up all these books, the bottle of rakija, and the pepperoni I had been bequeathed to somehow transport it all back to Dorćol in old Belgrade. Then, after a few days, back home.