Hot Sofa Revisited

This is revisited and revised version of one of my older post:

I don't know who first came up with it - the idea's been hugely exploited by so many writers and actors, movie makers etc. The question is - what difference would it have made if something in our lives had gone in one direction rather than another. Or to rephrase it – who would you be now if something significant in your life had turned out differently?

What effect would it have had if particular episodes in our lives had had a different outcome? Would anything have significantly changed, and how significantly? And who would you be now, and where, if that had happened?

Steve Buscemi made the movie, a very funny but at the same time depressing film about a guy from a small American town. In an interview he confessed that he was basically portraying himself and the life he would have had if he'd not taken the decision to leave the small town where he was born.

And Paul Auster admitted in an interview he gave that one of the main characters in his renowned novel City of Glass (volume 1 of his New York Trilogy) was constructed on the basis of the circumstances of his own life that suddenly changed the moment when his father died and left him the substantial inheritance that gave Auster the opportunity to became a writer. Without that inheritance Auster's magnificent novels would probably not exist as we know them. Everything that happens involving the character is essentially Auster’s imagined idea of himself and the different road his life would taken without the money that saved him and allowed his talents to develop.

That's just a couple of examples.

I'm not sure why this has come to mind today. The thought came to me, not the other way round. And after all, this is the reason why I'm writing this. I have the experience of surviving a war and living in a city under siege.

Unlike Hilary Clinton I know what it's like to have a real sniper's bullet whistle past your head.

As a 14 year old teenager, one morning I heard the sound of shelling and explosions. That was the start of the war in Bosnia. The Serbian army had laid siege to the city, a siege that was to last almost 4 years.

Who was I back then? I was someone with a collection of comic books, about 1000 of them, my best friend and I were comic strip addicts and bold enough to produce our own strips and publish them in magazines. I played basketball with a local team and dreamed about becoming an NBA player. I painted, too. I was doing really well at school. The world lay at my feet. Some of you might remember the Commodore 64, one of the earliest home computers – I had my own.

Like most of the kids in Bosnia at that time, or Yugoslavia as it was, I was raised in a pretty secular way. In my family there are Bosniaks Croats, Serbs and Bosnians. Coming from a family of such diverse origins was both a blessing and a curse.

I never used to pay any attention to what you might call "medieval issues". However, medieval issues imposed themselves on me and my life back then. Comics disappeared; basketball disappeared, painting as well. People were forced to concentrate simply on survival and nationality and religion became significant issues. The brutality of the Serbian aggression made me aware that reality could be far more terrible than any fiction. Questions I had never thought relevant to me were screaming themselves at me now. The whole world had suddenly shifted and transformed itself into something else. I understood then how such a thing was possible. The world as we know it is a fragile thing and the possibility is always present of everything we take for granted simply turning into dust. And through no wish of our own..

I was talking with a friend the other day and we were reminiscing about those times and a couple of our friends who had been full of talent when they were teenagers. One of them spoke English fluently and even wrote rap songs, with stunning rhymes and rhythm. The other had similar ability. And there were plenty of other ways they demonstrated their unique superiority as kids.

And yet one ended up killing a man in an accident and the other became a junkie. The question we were pondering was this - Was it the war that changed these two individuals so fatally and unfortunately, so that they turned out in a way no-one could ever have imagined? Or conversely, might it have had something to do with their psychological make-up? That's more probable - being caught up in the midst of war can find out your every weakness, or on the other hand, it can bring out the best in you. Either way, it can never offer you the slightest insight into who you were meant to be. You are not allowed even to dare try and collect up the little pieces of mosaic that once made up your soul and have suddenly become fragments of an irreparable broken glass. Even if you somehow discover a piece of that glass, the face you see reflected in it will never be the same, complete. The only thing left will be the blurred image that was swallowed up for ever by the 20th Century.

During the first year after the war, my friend and I used to go down to the Croatian coast to spend a few days there. Two hours drive and we were at the seaside. I met a beautiful girl, and we stayed together for about two years. There was a guy I became friends with as well, a guy who owned a vacation house in that beautiful Croatian city on the coast. He lived in Germany but every summer he would come back to the same gorgeous place to enjoy the sea and have fun in his lovely vacation home, he and his girlfriend. I remember so many pleasant evenings spent there, me and my girlfriend, he and his girlfriend. The house was huge and my friend was kind enough to let me and my girlfriend have a room there, whenever we wanted, in fact he was always wanting us to stay there, every time. My girlfriend lived almost around the corner but she stayed and spent many unforgettable nights with me in that house. For me it was like paradise, because for 4 years I had no opportunity to visit the coast and enjoy the sea and the smell of the pines and the Mediterranean palm trees. I spent four years living the life of the one of the characters in Auster’s novel In the Country of Last Things.

And then suddenly there it all was – I was young, a beautiful woman at my side and a friend inviting us to drink another bottle of wine with him in the summer garden of his house. Like a piranha forced to live a vegetarian existence and suddenly encountering an opportunity to feast- I was grabbing it all.
And all those many evenings spent in my friend’s garden with our girlfriends are now among the sweetest memories of my life.

In the living room of the house was a sofa. That sofa was like so many others, with nice tiny brown straps, with nothing out of the ordinary to distinguish it. It struck me that I hadn't even noticed it was there until the second or third time I happened to be in that room.

- I used to have exactly the same sofa!! – I burst out one night in front of everybody, suddenly interrupting a conversation in full flow. They all turned and looked at me, puzzled. I repeated - I used to have that same sofa! And then I realized how my behavior might appear rather strange to the others.

It wasn't until later that night, when I was alone with my girlfriend, that I explained to her that back at home, in the house destroyed by shelling during the war – exactly the same kind of sofa, the same colour and model, had been the centrepiece of our living room. That sofa had been damaged when much of the rest of the furniture was smashed to pieces during the bombardment. By now my sofa had long since fallen to pieces. Pieces of wood and fabric, rotten and lost, like the pieces of so many of the objects that once made up my world. And now I was looking at it again, that very same sofa, the same as it always had been, unharmed, with my girlfriend and I sitting on it gently touching hands .

Feng Shui Robot IX (A Beautiful Man With No Leg)

Wayan continued with the following monologue:

Here's how it goes. A cerebral story about the woman I'm in love with. She's been spending time with me for weeks, talking about feelings. I'm touching her legs. I'm convinced that what is between us is a beautiful story. And then, suddenly, everything comes to a halt. My car is at the edge of a cliff, there's alcohol in my blood. In the middle of nowhere I'm thinking about this woman, who is leaving me, for some miserable guy who does not love her. In her brain something has switched the other way. She decides to torture me; she erases everything she had for me. Maybe she really is able to erase all that. One day is all it takes. She's been gone three days.I'm thinking about how old I am – 34. I'm thinking about how much money I have – not much. I'm thinking about all the worst possible things – about my cousins the bloodsuckers, who'd trade me for a pack of cigarettes, I'm thinking about my father’s and my uncle’s dogs, always barking and getting on my nerves because I live where I live. I'm remembering a decade that I spent on my own, writing and studying and going to parties. I remember the way I used to imagine the happy life I would have with my ex-wife. I'm thinking about the DNA paternity test that proved my son is my biological son as well. I'm thinking about how I spent three and a half years working for an American cruise line as head waiter in a fancy restaurant and about the rapid promotions I got there. I'm thinking about how those amiable, modest Americans, who genuinely liked me, could never have guessed that the tall, smiling guy serving them had survived the hell of the war and Serbian aggression and seen his granny cut to pieces by an exploding mortar, watched his sister with her leg swollen like the branch of an oak tree.

How far can I really erase the memory of this woman I'm in love with, how far can I really erase the memory of all the things that have hurt me.

I'm thinking how it all began with the disintegration of my new life. A woman, emotionally calculating and cold. One woman. Or more.

I'm driving out of that deep, dark place. I'm looking into the headlights of an oncoming car. We're not travelling at speed, so there's no likelihood of a fatal outcome to all this. I'm stepping on my brakes; the other car comes to a stop in front of me. I'm opening my window and apologizing. He's opening his window too, curious – instead of anger he shows me a smile, I look rather funny to the guy, and he sees something completely human in me.

I'm looking at my son who has an extremely complicated heart condition and is the strongest and tallest among his friends of the same age. Sometimes I believe my son is a superhero, like in the movie Unbreakable or in the thousands of comics I've read. I've brought my son and his plastic car along with me this evening.

Beforehand I had a workout at home, I spent hours kicking at my punchbag to get rid of all the anger stirred up by a woman who's not worthy of me. Now I'm feeling good, my son and I are in town, he is driving around in his plastic car, showing how good he is. Later, I see my friends approaching. I tell them that I'll be off soon; I have to take the kid home because it's soon going to be getting cold and I haven't brought his jacket with me. They're going. It's summer, people are strolling past and the city is alive and bursting with color. The main street is crowded. I see other people, unhappy city folk, in a much worse state than me. I feel uncomfortable when a girl who's always by herself walks past. It's as if her sadness radiates a certain kind of unpleasantness that transmits itself to the people whose paths she crosses. Now I'm feeling good after all. I'm standing next to the ATM machine, watching my son showing off in his plastic car. I see a man who's lost a leg approach the ATM machine, very stylishly dressed. He's looking at me with a piercing gaze. I don't know this man, I've never seen him before, or maybe our paths crossed during the hellish years of the war, perhaps walking down a street full of trenches, past buildings with shell-pocked facades. I feel uncomfortable. No, that’s not really true. I don't feel uncomfortable as he stares at me. His leg is amputated well above the knee. Everything else about him looks much better than it would on me. He's got an ear-ring and a nice tattoo on his arm. I'm standing behind him. He looks at me with eyes whose color I can't recall. I turn to look towards my son, he's here, close by, a two years old rascal with the ability to elicit admiration and smiles from the warm-hearted women passing by. Not every woman is warm-hearted. But then again, I find it interesting to see how people of any age will smile at my son. Everyone, apart from teenagers. Teenagers have a cold, cat-like way of looking. My son is one of those many aspects of reality they're unable to see.

The beautiful man without a leg is stretching his hand towards me in front of the ATM machine. At first, I hesitate. And then I hold out my hand as well. Perhaps I should have recognised him from somewhere. He grasps my hand gently; I look into his eyes and I look at a three-days-old beard. His hand is warm; his grip is tender and strong. We still say nothing. A woman appears behind us, nylon bags on her arms. She's queuing for a machine that nobody is using. She's looking at two men shaking hands and not talking. My hand is stiff and cold, and my handshake is just the sort of handshake I dislike when it's someone else's – limp and lifeless. I brush away that perfectly measured perfectly controlled handshake. I'm running towards my son, not looking back. I grasp hold of the kid with one hand, his plastic car with the other. And we head for home, with confident step.

Science and Sequestration

It is an interesting fact how we take for granted so many of the things that surround us every day, without asking ourselves how we come to have those things here with us in the first place. It would certainly be appropriate for the great electronic manufacturing brands to include some relevant wording on the backs of their magic devices. For example the words "Tribute to Galileo" should be on the back of every cell phone. For the simple reason that that is where they all came from. And maybe also every school and university should bear a plaque in a place of honour on the façade acknowledging a debt of gratitude to the Enlightenment-inspired achievements of the French Revolution. Because that's where they all came from too.

Science still makes a lot of people nervous. Too many people are quick to criticise science and then try to hide from any mention of the subject behind a huge yawn, trying to avoid having to talk about something they find boring. And the daily newspapers in Bosnia, the only ones in the region who still see no need to have a science section, are no better.

Science provides us with proof that it is possible to be constantly running away from something that our everyday lives depend on.

It was thanks to the explosions of supernovae - the eruption of massive stars as much as ten times the size of our Sun - that the creation of the heavier elements with increasingly large numbers of protons, the elements that our bodies are made of, became possible. It is almost impossible to imagine anything more inspiring or romantic than the fact, for whose discovery we have the physicists to thank, that we are all children of the stars, as Michio Kaku would have put it, with bodies made from stardust (and at this point let’s not forget David Bowie either, and Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars). The stars from which we are made exploded many billions of years ago, setting in motion the process of fusion of hydrogen atoms that led to the creation of helium and then the heavier chemical elements, creating the substances required to make life.

The gaze into the depths of the Universe that the Hubble Telescope made possible for us has helped us finally understand how small and yet magnificent we are. The notion enshrined in the myths of antiquity that human beings are as old as the Universe probably tells us something about the problems of the ego but not very much about the reality of how things are.

It seems as if only science is capable of teaching people how to be modest and generous at the same time. Maybe generosity isn't the right word, it is hardly adequate to describe the fact that every year the procedure of vaccination saves the lives of 300,000 children in Nigeria and that this is possible thanks to nature’s trick of evolution, put to use in the process of manufacturing vaccines. A British journalist recently informed us that the number of people whose lives have been saved by vaccines is considerably greater than the number of lives lost in all the cataclysmic wars of the 20th century, and so he christened vaccines “weapons of mass salvation”.

It might be an interesting exercise to try spending a few days without any computers, automobiles, cell phones, aspirins or antibiotics, taking a "Walden"-like vacation from all those things. But you and I are not H.D. Thoreau and it is very doubtful whether you or I would be able to last out the experience, not for two years as he did, but even two days, or even two hours.

The issue of knowledge sequestration, a global problem currently affecting the most technologically advanced countries in the world and consequently everybody else as well, is the subject of a stylish analysis by the Nobel Prize-winner and quantum physicist Robert B. Laughlin in his book “The Crime of Reason”. Laughlin tells us that the greatest repository of capital in today's world is scientific knowledge but unfortunately - or perhaps luckily in some cases - there are a variety of mechanisms that prevent us getting access to it.

Knowledge that has economical value is inevitably vulnerable to sequestration aimed at finding a way to exploiting it or using it to make new discoveries – there are enormous sums of money at stake in this game. The central message of Laughlin’s book (which looks at a wide variety of other issues as well) is that in the developed countries of the world a war is being fought, literally, over knowledge. The inevitable conclusion is that it is the creation, control and management of knowledge, along with the discovery of new ideas, that is the key to the planet's survival and prosperity.

The biggest problem we face is how to identify knowledge that is valuable, in the permanent confusion caused by commercial and legal procedures that in the worst cases frustrate and often deny the most noble of human impulses, the desire to learn. This is happening increasingly frequently even when it is contrary to common sense and challenges the human right to learn, which has no absolute existence and is not legislated for or even mentioned by the laws of even the most progressive countries.

Laughlin compares the ferocity of this conflict with other intractable historical disputes that unfortunately were only resolved by resort to extreme measures such as warfare - slavery and the American Civil War, for example - and he also remarks that with the growth of the Internet we face the paradox of having the capacity to conduct the search for valuable knowledge in the same way that we might look for a needle in a haystack. Absurdities like patenting or making legal claims to the laws of nature - gene sequences or specific mathematical algorithms necessary for software engineering - are already a reality.