presence of their teachers and supervisors, they also had to speak it among themselves), they began to read and write intensively. And even though it existed from early on, a clearly visible selection was now conceived: those who proved to be among the best were chosen to study various fields of scholarship and to enter them quickly, broadly and profoundly. Then they were immediately tested on the things they had learned and sorted into groups according to ability. One thing was common and clear to all of them; that their training was subjugated to the one and the same goal – that they were all to serve one master and him alone. Within that framework they were fit into various positions, but those were only nuances in relation to the unifying submissiveness and to the resulting blind and united fealty.
The Imam of Edirne converted them to Islam in a ritual, a humble and highly simplified ceremony. They were also circumcised. Only then were they able to attain true religious and spiritual knowledge, along with vigorous and varied military training. Before long the breadth and length of their combat exercises was completely matched by the time spent in lectures on Islam, in the study of the Holy Qur’an and in their community prayers. Bajica felt like they were making a super-man of him, capable and competent for all sorts of exploits of the body, mind and soul. He did not waste his strength on resistance; it was clear to him that through opposition he would not manage to ward off the inevitable. In that way, he at least had the comfort (or the illusion) that he was participating in the decision making process of his acceptance, without knowing if it was it forced or voluntary?
It was as if he was thinking in Turkish, but dreaming Serbian. Thus translating himself from one language into the other and vice-versa, it seemed that he was preparing his very essence to be the eternal guardian of the boundary between dreams and reality. Maintaining his balance on such a sharp edge, as time went by, it began to remind him of the skill of the tightrope walker at the bazaar. As the height increased, the danger of the fall grew as well, and of its consequences, but the profit from his possible success also rose. Actually these contradictions were the essence of his present, and also future – and therefore entire – life, were they not? The choice was completely limited: he could allow the mainstream to carry him, or he could attempt to step out of it while yet knowing that there was no salvation in it; giving up would not send him home. He would only be forced into the worst possible life conditions as a common slave, all opportunities for change removed, much less for advancement or success. By obeying others’ decisions about his life, he ensured for himself some kind of possibility that, somewhere in the future he would take over responsibility for decisions about that same life. His life.
The time of wars made in the territory of my former homeland has passed, hopefully, never to return. But not enough time has passed to wash away the consequences. One of them, naive only at first glance, consists of a new and persistent phenomenon of the vulgar exchange of quality for quantity, for example – turning literature into mathematics. Let me explain. Since the transition period of society among the uneducated is also taken as the attempt to express everything in numbers, then as a by-product of ‘the establishment of primary capital’ as it is called by those who rob the people and the government, it shows up as the need to give everything a rank. Of course, ranking is done – with numbers. For the money addicts, the only measures of value are (and always were) numbers. So, top-lists of everything existing have been made. Whatever subject you chose, you could express it in terms of the comparison of its ranking to whatever else you might have chosen.
Even in publishing and literature, numbers of all kinds began to show up: even numbers that expressed the numbers of copies of a printed book and the number of editions for a particular title. Such totals have always been around but, while they are quite important for publishing, they were never decisive, unchallengeable or divine. They were simply there, as a normal part of a whole make-up of various elements, including numbers as well, that constitutes a book and its life.
However, these other numbers that appeared after the fact in the transition, were excessive: for example, the number that marks the place a book took on the top-list of the most popular, most sold, most read, most modern and so forth... On the surface, winning a place through the democratic method. But, this was an illusion. The feeling is irresistible: the transition is being constructed through the use of numbers, by the theft of places.
And the measurements went on and on: how many weeks a book was on the top-list, how many editions as a hardcover, as a paperback, as re-bound, in gold-leaf covers, absurd covers, ending in covering the eyes of the reader. And then, which place it held the week before, for how many weeks, how many votes it received, and if the voting was done electronically – how many ‘hits’ there had been on the voting website. Then the comparisons: all of the data about a book translated from a foreign language compared with the numbers in other countries. Then, the whole thing one more time.
There are also hidden numbers that never reach the public: agreements, binding contracts, the deadline for a writer to hand in her or his manuscript, how many pages she or he can or must write (not more, not less), percentages of possible profits in all possible situations for every party in the contract, and that means more than just the writer and publisher. Even what will happen in unforeseen circumstances is foreseen.
Non-fulfilment of the binding elements of such contracts can also be expressed in numbers: from punitive points to percentage losses. This kind of mathematics is even stronger than death. Seventy years after the author’s death, the calculation remains the same: everything continues to be calculated, added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. It is fortunate that books outlive their authors, but the calculations never give up: they follow the author into the other world and do not allow him to rescind his rights. That post-mortem portion of time is called happy mathematics.
The arguments have still not come to a head – for and against this marriage and all like it, between literature and mathematics. The reason is simple, though it is not visible. Namely, in the transition, intellectuals lost their social and also cultural significance, which caught them off guard, then confused them, degraded them and pretty well marginalised them. To all of that change of status of their former significance was also added a new and cruel poverty. In such a pre-depressive state, some of the people in the world of literature and publishing became morally and materially corruptible. Popularly, they were called ‘mathematicians’.
Yet, perhaps all of that would not have been so tragic had it not also caused a change in certain features and parts of their character. In combi -nation with the question of nation, ethnic belonging, language issues, newfound independence and so on, the intellectual ultimately arrived at the problem of identity. And when it arrived at that point, the destruction and construction, construction and destruction started. Of identity. And of everything else.
Martial arts could also be a mask for many of the other things they were subjected to: in what appeared to be a simple and quite cruel school of physical confrontation, they learned many spiritual skills. For example, in order to accept courage as part of his character, he first had to interpret cowardice; it was only after he had mastered that consciously that he could begin learning how to liberate himself of it. Then he could dare to call that new state of mind part of his personality.
Generally speaking, the crucial moment of the entire training was this very understanding between body and soul. Once he realised the connection, he was able to establish values much more easily and quickly. It was a natural consequence. The interrelationship of cowardice and courage, for example, resulted in the understanding of subordination and super-ordination. Fear retreated in the face of challenge, yet their teachers then raised them to a higher phase of penetrating the psychological barrier: they claimed that fear could also produce courage. And that it might be even more fierce than usual! They went so far as to enter those processes and prove the veracity of such teaching by their own examples.
These
