Closed and open

On the subject of hospitality, two things:

1.

"...For Islet Sarajlic

Convert to my new faith crowd
I offer you what no one has had before
I offer you inclemency and wine
The one who won't have bread will be fed by the light of my sun
People nothing is forbidden in my faith
There is loving and drinking
And looking at the Sun for as long as you want
And this godhead forbids you nothing
Oh obey my call brethren people crowd

The defense of Radovan Karadzic just rested in his trial at the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague; sooner rather than later then, a verdict will be handed down in the case of this accused war criminal,  former president of the Republika Srpdka, and implicated in genocide, massacre, ethnic cleansing the Bosnian war of the nineties.

I remember being shocked by the hard mercilessness of this man, and his military henchman Ratko Mladic, also now in custody, as they bombarded the city of Sarajevo day after day in the name of...oh, they had lots of reasons for the carnage they wreaked. Snipers picked off men and women in the city as they scurried from hiding place to hiding place in their efforts to survive. Children were fair game too.

This first part of a  poem by Karadzic, quoted by Slavoj Zizek in Poetry Magazine, April 3, written I don't know when, translated by I don't know whom, and punctuated I don't know how, reeks of the megalomania. The people, his people, are called to join him in a life of sex (in practice, rape), alcohol (and other intoxicants) and history hero worship that licenses anything they want to do. Many did respond to this call, perhaps not in the poetry, but in the philosophical attitude informing it, and took as their mission the practices of torture, humiliation, burning and destruction, separation and exclusion, the cultivation of death. "This godhead forbids you nothing," he said; just poetry, just words, but in practice a concentrated rejection of hospitality, of the generosity that gives each of us right and room to be..

2.

Compare this with the tall young man I saw today walking into the store holding the hand of old, bent, open-mouthed man. Perhaps a job, perhaps a duty, perhaps a friendship, the gesture smote open what Karadzic sought to close.