* * *

A child approaches three books on the shelf in the apartment.
The little one says:
“I am afraid of these two.” (Borges’ black-covered volumes)
“And this one, the white one...” (Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man)
“I am not afraid of it.”

Further south than Holland

... that's where I need all new licenses to be granted
to those who want to set up a new business,
just in order to start a proven one.

(The aim is to be the first, among the entrepreneurs here,
and this is a serious proposal.)


Anyone from the strong market is invited.
Me and my land lie further south then Holland
and are free

like Holland.

Haiku

Green park at rest
My haiku flies, formed
by city noise.

Batch

Nihad Hasanović nihadhasanovic.com
The Art of Struggle, The Truth About Lies

A Country

In the evening,

as the gold and dark rain falls,

some are hungry,

and some are starting to feast.

for some freedom,

for some the beast.

Notes

Here are just notes that may turn out into something one day, or not. 

Until it hurts

Until it hurts, that’s the price of honesty, to say when or where to stop. It really takes bravery and certain philosophies, like aikido, for example, are encouraging it – for your own sake.

US&Bosnia Apatride

I have experience of California and the US, that’s what I know the best from what you may call “abroad experience.” It’s also in my name, because my last name is Caus. All the other places I had been to they were just a brief visits. Disregarding the fact that these brief visits include dozens of countries. 

And to say anything, or to explain how it is in my view and according to what I know, I would say that what Bosnia and the US have in common is that both are the countries of permanent problems, and they both have similar kinds of freedoms; that I value a lot.
In both countries people were always cursing their governments, really freely and openly, in spite of all. And for sure I would not like to live in a country where is impossible to criticize, where another point of view may cost you your life, and, I would not even mention what else.
“Relax man, maybe something better it’s already on its way,” that’s what one Jamaican friend told me in San Diego, years ago.

Confusing knowledge

If anyone knows about a book on females, their real role and how they have been treated throughout the history – for sure I would like to read it. To clear up and fill in the gaps in my own confused knowledge.

Too Much

    Too much of the too-big, and mostly empty stuff

    like the war, nations, religions, life, death etc.

    I had to swallow,

    so I decided to devote myself to small things:

    I started blogging (on the blogspot)

    barely noticed by anyone.

Capable


    If you’re capable of lying about


    those things


    that doesn’t mean


    I never lied about them.


    That doesn’t have to mean anything, really.


    It’s nothing at all.




  

House in the Hills

Anyone who ever owned
any kind of house in the hills,
knows what it is like to have the illusion
that everything is calm,
that everything is cool.
And what it feels like to pass
by the old witch’s house
and wonder if she is still alive,
that old witch you loved
only because she talked to you
once or twice,
and asked for an aspirin.

And you start to feel sorry
for any house
at any fucked-up crossroad.

Running

A song needs bones, a spine, windpipe, lungs and rib-cage; and you need preparation to develop structure. For once in my life I felt perfectly coordinated and it was like flying. I was running for years and playing basketball only to experience a few moments of elation – elevation, of that moment. Trying to achieve the resemblance.To reconcile myself, but only with my legs, not with where I am going to.

Late in the night

It’s late, already too late,
For things to be as they have should been.
The first illusion was the irresistible one,
The second one is saying
That the first one never existed;
it’s lost like the candles from Kavafis’ poem.

Rants

Approaching the truth

A book by Carl Sagan that I read  some decades ago, about cosmology and the survival of the planet, contained a particular passage I remember, a down-to-earth observation about the economy.  While reaching for the stars, Sagan was always ready to make comparisons that brought us back to basic earthly preoccupations.

One passage in the book referred to the price of oil. Sagan observed how the turbulent market for black gold has the potential to turn the whole world upside down, as economists were suggesting and Sagan himself insisted. His speculations proved correct, as we now know.

In the course of devouring a whole host of popular science books, considering cosmological questions about the origins of the universe and the diverse theories of how it come into being, and reflecting on interesting facts like, for example, how everything in the universe spins –planets, galaxies, stars - but not the universe itself, I came to realise that it is somehow by immersing oneself in the current of different conjectures and theories advanced by the physicists that one comes close to an understanding of the truth. The truth about the importance of being attentive.

Image Problem

More than once, in my readings of books by leading Anglo-Saxon intellectuals and writers of popular scientific literature, like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, and their illustrious predecessor Carl Sagan, I have been saddened to come across the word “balkanization”.  It has turned up in a variety of reference works and articles as well. Depending on the context, the word signified  something that could be summed up as a combination of religious and nationalistic literalism, intellectual infancy and metaphysical chauvinism, reinforced by a thick-skinned resistance to the contemporary re-examination of ancient misconceptions.  Saddened, I say, because I happen to come from the part of the world to which this lovely word refers. In all the various contexts in which the word was used, it had a much wider significance than the one offered by the Oxford English Dictionary: Balkanize, v. divide (a region or body) into smaller mutually hostile states or groups., Balkanization, n.

It is hard not to agree that there is far more grandeur and poetry in Cicero’s reason, or Descartes’s light, or the scientific facts and speculations of our own time, than there is in any of the world’s great dogmas of religious, nationalistic and market fundamentalism.

Carl Sagan once said something to the effect that science convinced us that everything that is not obvious, everything that is magical, gigantic, is scientific. After experiencing the bleak reality of life in the post-war Balkans I feel entitled to lay claim to a degree of expertise in the science of demonstrating how everything infused with prejudice, the marriage of political and religious manipulation is wretched, degrading and banal. And in hoping that no-one will ever again have need of this kind of expertise.