BLACK HOLES ON BLACK WALLS

I. Down to the end

I was in Niš, Yugoslavia when I heard President Clinton address the nation in the wake of Columbine. There was a heightened sense of attention in me as my wife waited our first daughter in the hospital. A father I would become and every source of information was worth the effort to comprehend. Not every would find use in me, but I wasn’t passing anything along.

NATO planes drop cluster bombs and break the sound barrier just to put you off nerve. Clinton tells our children to look for nonviolent conflict resolution as the electricity goes off and ten million people stand around and talk about when the electricity will return and who has a gas stove to cook us coffee.

American pilots fly over Nis our best and brightest. Told to go kill and not to ask too many questions. My daughter leaves the hospital and cluster bombs arrive. A pair of anonymous Americans and not one miss, but the market square as well. There are legs on the news. These well engineered blue canisters still waiting to kill along your path home. You don’t really see body parts on the screen, they consume you. And you move on.

Why couldn’t one pilot refuse? As a son of the American Revolution I guess I took it a little more personal than most. Those born there understood from how far away he had come. Maybe there were women pilots, they didn’t seem to be.

I worked at the center for nonviolent conflict resolution. I had learned a trade 3 years in Bosnia. Clinton is like the white man from South Africa who tells you that nonviolent conflict resolution brought them peace. Only Hollywood has more violence than Africa. When a bully is perceived as rational: wrong causes are attributed. Diversity and struggle down to the end.

II. Should the state provide

The world is full of fissures and creases…the jet as it was such a natural design. There is no contradiction. Are women equal Socrates? I sit in my junior level class and listen to a brief overview of justice. Hamurabi through Moses to Plato down through Muhammad past St. Augustine least we forget Jerome. The man is hot and dry, the women is cold and wet. So was theirs to reason.

Every day the lottery we have each played: to be born to have or born to have not. Born to search or born to receive. I such came to breath in Euclid, Ohio. Born male to work for my dollar; Two years later my sister to work for her seventy-five cents. There is no contradiction…everyone is wrong in a way that creates your illusions. Someone once told me, in Amsterdam, you just contradicted every philosopher. Had anyone else my concern?

There was no theory of my life. I speak to you much later. In my junior level class where we each wait to earn our dollar…the women seem unconcerned with their seventy-five cents. Why does it bother me?

There is one thing. That first worldview I held. Not the one I remember, but what they said of me. The rest of my life was a process of unlearning what my soul clearly told me. Then I read the story in the census 2000: For every male dollar earned the female worker can expect seventy-five cents. On average, you say, things are much better for women. I only ask: What was it that needed to be fixed and how was everything so and still broken?

You live history and learn History…if nothing understand this; you will find no fear speaking what it is you have come to believe. For to any of their theories of everything you are relevant. The state to assure this fact as right would find peace in the course of affairs. It is Star-Trek science with ancient social structures. Forty years forward the contradiction revealed; it was ignorance and the generations so surreal.

III. The most natural of thing

Perhaps there are different rules at different times. Perhaps children cannot be charged as adults. What ever your point…there are more topics than your words when you understand that life is taking you and precious time you still have.

I had lost you my audience. Who it is I am writing to. Words cross the abyss. Much is farther than we know. We here upon our island of this sun. Much has been and resolved with what we have imagined. A keystroke from revolution so secure in our form.

There’s a time when the sun rides on the back of the waves
There’s a time when the sun builds its island in the sun
There’s a time when the ocean is all that you see

It’s how she left me standing that I could see

THE GIRL OVER THE RIVER DRINA

You can't change the Balkans. It's plastic that changes. What humans make changes. What God makes lives. Culture is always stable politics never were. Lying about culture by not talking about what was done is what America was based upon aside from a few Nobel ideals. Working as a volunteer here for two years she asked me if I wanted to go back to America. Of course I do. No one is at home there. I can live in my family, but we make no communities together in policies of division. I've found the Balkans home. Go Home. Don't listen understand. These ramblings I must put on paper for this community grows tired of hearing things it knows. In the Balkans they all know why they can't and growing tired and soon they must. I say to NATO and to the Humanitarian movement...come to the table. And hear a short story about eight people who had nothing to do but live together seven days and share an understanding that never needed words but here they
are.
The west has technology and lacks community
The east has lost its technology, but never community
Who has the greater challenge to overcome??
Sarajevo without reasons and some leaping in the night that was there, but another story. Sunday eight am a walk in the snow a taxi drive my second in two years. The bus station. To get on a bus Bosnian people must have food. You don't buy it along the way you bring and run out. Edin and I as volunteers in the Balkans where going because someone asked us to a seminar in Slovenija. Edo had always been a volunteer in the Balkans I only started, but for two years. Getting on the bus for Ljubiana I thought I had a story to tell. I had lived in Zenica had loved had learned, but all I had was a small understanding to be open and a large need to put importance on things that were not. We rode to Zenica this brown in my eye. I was traveling all the places I had known to Travnik. The conversation around me never stops. At first I was identified as a Slovenian heading home. I left this misunderstanding and only listened and watched those around. To my left a Croatian who knew Bosnia home. To the right behind two from Sarajevo that knew Germany better, were home with Bosnia. Behind a wrestling fan young not in school for four years, but had been all around lost in a conversation with the Balkans. Ten hours to Bihać, three for ten kilometers. Snow on the Srbska republik nothing moves there. They never stopped talking the war, the price of Cevap CiCi in Busovaci, all the stories flowing. When I first came here I only heard the rhythm of language. It all sounded important. In my English rhythm was only found in importance. Now understanding there was more rhythm in nothing in life. A woman to my right only listened and watched I watched her eyes. I studied them in a fourteen hour orgasm of understanding of living. My enjoyment rolled they never stopped. Complete annoyance to complete enjoyment. A year ago I worked very hard to understand. For annoyance and enjoyment I worked very hard. Here it began to roll. In Bihac I was identified and the questions came not looking for answers. Why did you come to Bosnia? Why didn't America stop this war? I came to Bosnia for a bed to sleep in. A place where the question was always why never what. That was the reason I stayed. Bosnians were not supposed to survive. America had sold them to a new world order incomplete. Strength of presence was stability. We had won the cold war by being colder and lasting longer standing on our lines. We crossed the border it was nice to see. Crossing in Croatian land there was always blue policemen. The first international Bosnian border I had reached was green. Sixteen hours and Ljubiana. I watched their eyes head down the road as us eight from Bosnia stood in the streets at midnight. A kombi bus for us three more hours. Martin Slovene greeted us as we continued on. I sat with Slavica sweetly and spoke in English everything I knew about in English that I do. "Do you speak Bosnian?"
"1 do, but I can't right now."
"1 don't like to speak English," I didn't know what she meant. I knew she understood English. We stopped for fuel. And we bought things they had in Bosnia only with new packages and together as a group for the first time. I knew Dorthee or we had met and Edin, we all knew at least another, but this was the first time we all met.
The garbage can had a smilee face, "Everything's happy in Slovenija." It looked a lot like America only cleaner. We in a circle and then go. Zlatko from Banovici. Slaven from Tuzla. Ameldin from Gorazde. Dennis from Cleveland. Edin from Gomji Vakuf. Sanela from Tuzla. Dorthee from Switzerland. We arrived in two rooms in the mountains. A better hotel than I had ever stayed in. Better then they had in Bosnia. Three in the morning in two rooms. Sarajevo Sunday 8am. Our rooms Monday 3am. We had arrived and talked about our work. We had the same ideas. We talked about Srebenica we had the same feelings. The five of us and a bottle of Stock 1884. There were four beds and conversation in rhythm. And then a five am boom. We were all asleep. We were all home. And the morning 9am. We were together with the energy that comes from being together. Around one table all others were certain that we had been together 100 years. I did not know that then, but I find it hard to express closed eyes alone. The time line is lost. I didn't think these thoughts in all those thens, but forever in my life now. The dead in Columbus I fell back in emptiness and all I had was my name and a dance, but I only visited community. Seminar and randomness. One two three four. When we counted it was easy to see. There’s a natural rhythm broken by closed eyes. Most sang out with purpose or only chance. Some refused and they were of no interest to me and we finished a day of randomness. Most thought the day was over. There was a schedule of enjoyment and there was none for Monday, but a guitar and time to be together. Martin and Usor went for Stock 1884 and some beer. There was no place to stay prepared, we all searched and many who had expected an end joined in. On the second floor lobby and the couches gathered near. Bosnians the guitar and the Balkans.
Seven more days drained all of us. We worked every day. The last day everyone spoke like old friends. We eight barely moved. The bus ride from Sarajevo was longer than the time we spent sleeping that week. We all prepared to leave returning to seven republics. The Serbians left at 4:30 am. They had places to go. The five of the republics had plans. Us eight from Bosnia had just realized we needed a way back home. This came as no surprise and with great delight to the other republics. There is a Bosnian identity. We headed in the right direction. Bus to Ljubijana. We clustered in the station still apart from the whole. What Edo described as the modern jail. Train to Zagreb. We’d figure out something from there. Reminded me of those Andric Bosnians arriving to take the train to Sarajevo from Vise Grad. They arrived when they could and assumed there would be a train leaving at sometime. Urbanization taught many the schedules, but in Bosnia sometimes it is just important that you are going in the right direction. To reach my wife years later. I traveled to Vise Grad and was refused a visa twice. Slept the night and hitchhiked to “Pale”. A Bus from Zenica that never stopped there picked me up. Even better I was going to have to go around anyways. Six days from Sarajevo to Nis. Bosnia put me in the right direction.

SCATTERED LIKE LOST WORDS

Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I don’t remember. Sometimes I have no idea. How was it that I lived that way? I left the last time alone for Sarajevo March 22, 1999. It seems like I am always going to Bosnia. I have a story to tell you. This indefinable you. I start here, as there is nowhere else. I have no idea what I shall write. Is it my story? Is it there story? Is it their story? This debit I owe. This task I undertake. How to write a dream atop an Athol on? So patient as if it never needed to be done. I remember this night five years ago in Zenica more than I did then alone in a strange and far off land. I had arrived in Bosnia in April and in my three months I hadn’t learned too much language, but I think I got my points across. It was the satellite receiver the head of mission couldn’t figure out anyways that got me started. The month MTV Europe was no longer free and Srebrenica was so ethnically cleansed. The war was almost over or so it had to be after so many years. Sarajevo was still closed and the communal koan of peace, the street car beat, was silent. How could it be imagined, who conceived who knew this Srebrenica to come? It was the only time I spent in Bosnia and understood fully I was not Bosnian. I was not from here. I had arrived to bare witness the end. We were all there from every nation on earth and they for the most part had been no where else. I processed Srebrenica as yet one case in point that the international peace mission, which I was apart jaron, was just what Helen Keller described as the “Tragic Apology for wrong conditions.” I was a volunteer and it was different for me. I had come for a bed. That is my story. They had survived for the end. That is their story, but as I watched their faces on that day five years ago, I didn’t see anyone. Everything could be worse…no one is prepared for that, and so I continue this journey tonight following the path which I have followed to exhaustion. How will it come out of me? It came out of them slowly as I watched the months roll by. So shall this from me. I keep in mind two things, the words of a man my uncle crossed the Atlantic with so long ago:
“Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”
And that peace finally did arrive and the street cars sing Sarajevo peace today.