I Love You, Sweet Creature

/, Literature, Blesok no. 22/I Love You, Sweet Creature

I Love You, Sweet Creature

Young people that desire each other have to accept the complex rituals of meeting, wooing, dating and, most importantly, getting employment. Because it is in this way that civilisation ensures (refreshes) its labour forces for the creation of surplus value from which the employer pays the salaries for the sustenance of the finally begotten family. And this socio-economic code is fed as an additional repressive factor into the biological (evolutional) parameters for the mutation of the dominant and best quality (today ideological) genes of the human race. The consequence is that in April 2001 the people with the most sex-appeal are the corrupt members of the political and economic jet-set and the singers & actors & models that they favour for their entertainment (high-life). Not the way it was in Ancient Greece or India: scientists, philosophers, wisemen and kings superior in spirit, morals – never in unquenchable greed.
What are your roles, reader? What game do you play on the margins of the ordinary social scene: man, astronaut, boy, nun, young man, stewardess, artist, girl, policeman, mother, general, woman, director, mistress, grave-digger, sister, secretary, doctor, teacher, etc? Have you lost your original notion of yourself after the use of such standardised models? Are we people before we are members of nations and cultures? Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks before fat, robbed, ill, unemployed, bald, pimply and badly dressed. Far away from the European Council. Are we people before we are females and males? Is the “Fatal Attraction” (Michael Douglas & Sharon Stone) the true way of eroticism and a struggle between bed partners – instead of support and understanding? Without mercy in their proud hearts, enamoured Gypsies permanently “fly into the sky” (with a blade between their ribs). Without mercy the noblemen of Tsarist Russia condemn Anna Karenina, an adulteress who dared to throw off the hypocrisy of mannerism. Her, a renegade from the male hearty bone who dared to live by her own standards (selfishly – Lav Nikolayevich would say, steeped in Christian morality). So Anna, like Medea and like Fata Avdagina, suffers according to the ancient hubris of pride and passion. And there are no friends to offer her sanctuary. There are no friends for those who rise above the average.
Opposed to the misery, an anonymous citizen of Tuzla wrote I LOVE YOU, SWEET CREATURE and panegyrically announced the existence of erotic rapture untainted by hate. With Arcadian naïveté fit for the authentic Eros, he believes that he will not be rejected, that his love will be requited. His darling is a “sweet creature”, not a witch with a broomstick nor a piece of furniture with a rigid grimace, but a pet of the genuine joy of love. Intoxicated with hedonism, the brave lover did not idealise the “lady of his heart”, he did not turn her into an ideal icon like the Romantic poets. His mermaid is not as sublime as the Christian Madonna, nor does she posses the pagan lasciviousness of Messaline. With urban directness, she is simply sweet – of her own accord. She grew up in the neighbourhood that way and she is presented that way in the semantic poster to the right of the doorway. This joyful ditty and renaissance masquerade (although in form condensed into graffiti) are the first harbingers of spring in Bosnia. A Bosnian spring of love removed from politics and hate.
Why do I believe that the writer of this brilliant inscription is not female? That the hand of some writer-heroine did not inscribe the already cited magic letters. For the strutting blond boy with a haircut like Brad Pitt’s. Unfortunately, the young ladies in Bosnia and fraternal Herzegovina show no such predisposition. To go out in the “small hours” of the night armed with a spray-can and with unwavering determination paint the words so different from every-day common sense. To promote the sexual sector of urban culture. They (in predetermined scenery) still rush in great numbers to the safety of their parents’ home around 10 or 11 pm. This upbringing practice is, unfortunately, stimulated by slave-trade, kidnappings and rapes (but also by deep-rooted conservatism). If it was any different, this essay would not exist. There would be no need for it. Because the devotion to public love would more easily compete with public displays of hatred. Because the virus of disobedience and resistance to generational brain-washing would spread faster. The generational brain-washing is so potent that it can turn hippies & punk-rockers, dancers & rappers, grungers & techno-surfers into frenetic consumers of turbo-folk, pseudo-tradition and chauvinism. The adored creatures of the opposite sex should not suspect that I am blaming them for the unacceptable danger of opportunism. No! The female entity in B&H carries the least amount of guilt for the holocaust we are living. My intention is to initiate a dialogue about friendship. And if I am wrong, let the brave don Quixotesses “attack” me like a windmill whose wings flap in vain.
Theoreticians of the sociology of mass-media and political marketing1F all agree on one point: the conflict between generations is conceived as a phenomenon of the psyche in the family. Collective derivates of the conflicts between the younger and older generations (male and female) on the level of social groups have been imposed later on. The legend about the fall of Uranus where (according to Freud) the titans as sons in the primal horde dethrone the father in order to get to the women (and to power), is manifested in contemporary virtual society through behaviour and style. E.g. the parents resort to adultery and the children take drugs. Or: the adults excuse their spiritual insensitivity with responsibilities imposed by working hours, and the offspring react to this with delinquency. Towards the family. Towards school. The generation gap produces the global decline in authority. Through the legend realised in this way, the violence in the struggle of “everyone against everyone” is transferred into the root of emotional life. Love and friendship are possible only as companions of aggressiveness and as a recess between battles. Not as a natural state. It was only during the time of industrialisation that the phenomenon of free time enabled the youth as a generation to collectively articulate their own interests towards other social groups (adults, authorities, teachers, the army, etc.). Until then, freedom was reserved for a narrow circle of the elite who, also, strictly supervised and educated their young generation. In the 20th century, the young generations reacted to the cold war and the Vietnam syndrome with the sexual revolution, the “velvet” revolution that redefined taboos and roles among the sexes. But shortly after that sexual freedoms were abused in the media and transformed into the pornography market.
The consequence is: after the rebellious 60s, the coming generations benumbed by AIDS, narcotics and the torture of the media in post-industrial states of the West, instead of a revolution, they are realising fabricated fashion and music trends that due to constant repetition of patterns (behavioural sampling) lose out on their power and authenticity. Fashion, design and the disco-industry as segments of the industry of the conscious have a direct interest to produce such a state. This is why we should (not) be surprised that in technologically undeveloped societies where the rule of law and democracy is not at the level of an open society2F, the local elite promotes pseudo-traditionalism (new folk music, surpassed ideological rituals of the ethno-religious concept) in order to become dominant on the territory of its own national “culture”. This local interest zone in countries created out of Tito’s Yugoslavia, for instance, is exposed to uncreative imitating of macro-models copied from the primary industry of the conscious of global (and globalising) centres of power. Thanks to this absence of creativity (and how can one possibly be creative in a chain of surrogates?) the newly established rituals and mythology take on an obscene infantilism of grotesque proportions. The post-modern style of combining everything with everything which is consistent and aesthetically justified in high art3F, is transformed in the products of newly established political and commercial kitsch into a degenerative face of devolution – the Balkans media Frankenstein.
Instant love and jaded friendship in a variety of scenes played infinitely many times, like in a TV-soap, have become the cult feature of interpersonal relationships. An authentic emotion is as valuable (and as rare) as a unicorn or the Mona Lisa or the Star of Africa diamond. People are lost in the litter of exhausted emotions. And it no longer matters who is male and who female, when even those primary roles have been subjected to ideology. It is equally tragic to menstruate and to ejaculate when the final product of the basic biological operations is a political clone. And a clone of directed, targeted hatred at that. Since love is impossible, let’s surrender to the toxic river of tar from the entity furnace – this is the message of the local B&H fascists in their overly expensive shiny suits. In their newest cars. Purchased with the tears of Hope from Pandora’s box.
This is why it is important to know: is love really a matter of identity? In the struggle for a determined ideologically corrupted soul, individuality is the “last oasis” of rebellion, but also the “no man’s land” of conformism. To be programmed to love only the members of your own culture & interest group necessarily leads to political homosexuality. B&H Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks were formed as nations in the 19th and 20th centuries, in the derivatives of history of their own country and in the interactions with neighbouring countries: Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia. Also with: Austria-Hungary and Turkey, with Catholicism, Christian Orthodoxy and Islam, with Europe, Asia, etc. Therefore, the identity of the B&H peoples is complementary both internally and externally with their nearer and farther surroundings, but it is in no way colonially dependent or subjected to its partners in the creation of its own (but also their) cultural profile4F. And it is not natural for nations born out of their homeland B&H to seek identity and sanctuary outside of it. It is even less natural to put up barricades of hate between the intertwined B&H peoples whose culture and particularity are an integral part of their whole multiethnic being. That is why it is important that the author of the here cited and emotionally potent graffiti exalts that he needs a sweet creature, that the meagre monolith of his identity lacks a non-identical quality that is different.
What are we when we love and what are we not? What are the B&H obsessions in post-Dayton love and inter-entity friendship? Which nation is No. 1 on the chart of love? Bosniaks, Serbs or Croats, or others…? Should we prefer marriages within the same nation or the so-called “mixed” marriages? Is it better to get married before a priest in God’s house or to register the love bond before the municipal authorities? Which marriage is the happy one? Are all happy marriages unique and all unhappy ones just copies of the brutal every-day life? The contradictions and (false?) dilemmas read into the ontology of the newly established practice are not a trap in which the “poison of the Bosnian melting-pot is brewing”. On the contrary, I would like to humbly point out that the unity of diversities is the leading evolutional principle in the development of species and a cultural stimulant for the promotion of the harmony that makes the motion of life dynamic. The negativist vision of chaos, suffering and claustrophobia that the Balkans Nazification offers as the all-encompassing point of view is not of natural origin. That emotional restriction – perversion – is a result of the knowledge of the approximation and political marketing in the domain of the constructed view of the world.
But if the human soul resides somewhere near the (patriotic) heart, and the heart is soaked in hatred, what kind of an identity is that? Who does this (national) affiliation belong to? Which nation will admit that animosity towards others is its cultural credo? A useful answer is offered by the contrast between the fascist reality and the graffiti dedicated to the sweet creature, it is offered by the thesis of friendship between primates condemned to love from the moment they were banished from paradise. Because “with toil they will feed off the land”5F, and “to people and tribes (be divided) to meet”6F “in the diversity of languages and colours”7F. Grant us, God, more young men and women (self)confident that their fate is beautiful and good, and not ugly and evil. Young men and women immune to hatred, capable of critically assessing the existential models of the world they inhabit. Just think, my dear textual passer-by, how many generations came and went from this Earth, how many thriving cultures, and we are still debating about the possibility of friendship and setting limits of love in the cordial circle, mine or yours…

Translated by: Ulvija Tanović

#b

1. H. M. Enzensberger, H. Marcuse and others;
2. See the works of K. Popper and George Soros
3. Postmodernist eclecticism from a removed perspective offers associative unity of the superficially apparent discontinuity;
4. I. Andrić, M. Selimović, M. Dizdar, A. Muradbegović, A. Šantić, B. Ćopić and “Hasanaginica” are all openly adopted by the loudest adversaries of the Bosnian and Bosniak identity;
5. Bible, Book of Genesis 3, 17;
6. Koran, XLVIII, 13;
7. Koran, XXX, 22.

AuthorDinko Delić
2018-08-21T17:23:42+00:00 October 1st, 2001|Categories: Essays, Literature, Blesok no. 22|0 Comments