Bald Truth

Rasa Todosijevic

Only a satiated man can write a good essay on hunger. Those who think that a satiated man cannot discuss depths he has not seen and touched with his own fingers – are wrong. The starved exaggerate. Out of hunger, that lean weasel, they make a monster, a Leviathan.

Regardless of its enormous success and historically proven greatness, hunger is not a competent expert. It is an amateur and a bungler. It acts as the painter of Holy Heart, as a jack-of-all-trades who does not decide, does not choose, does not compare, does not connect on the basis of affinity and does not behave systematically. Hunger is more of an astrologer that an astronomer. This must be taken into account as the justification when demolishing the enrooted opinions on hunger. As any amateur, hunger is enigmatically subjective: holes in education, wide and disordered knowledge are the key to this pled manner – anything and everything. It is an eclectic who disregards time and space. Hunger emphasizes pain, bodily experience of its own presence. Expressionism, accident, bare fervor, unconstructive striving confuses the picture of real state of things.

Spiritual hunger, the hunger for the knowledge of starvation is bullshit, sloppy eclogue. You push your nose into another’s broth and proclaim it the philosophical curiosity, and impetus of reflective gluttony, the primeval wonderment. I’d smack such types upon the head with a fist and let them then wonder in front of their plate, turn Logos around in their own mashed potatoes. Those are pudding existentialists, the drawing room scum. There is no professional starveling. No educated glutton.

There is no chair for the advancement of hunger. Not to speak about immortal starveling, a member of the Academy, even a corresponding member. Where are veterans of hunger? Who has ever erected a monument to the unknown glutton? Who has ever met a man for whom hunger is a profession or a conviction? Who made a career out of his own hunger, made a fortune, acquired prestige, people’s trust, a pile of money or a Senate seat? Van Gogh? Modigliani? Who has ever heard of a hungry king, a queen emaciated form hunger, or at least a starving President of the Republic? No one. Naturally!

Take Wimpy as an example. He is a classical figure: An ancient problem. The glutton is an insignificant, marginal creature, an anti-hero.

Movies are full of starving people. They are mostly extras, small change in mass scenes. Occasionally a bit player appears; a good supporting part – very rarely. The protagonist cannot be eternally hungry. At the beginning he is hungry, very hungry, but at the end he stuffs himself. Count Monte Cristo was starving, hunger tortured him like God tormented Job, but at the end he was amply repaid. Film is an invented thing, light, entertainment, popcorn, celluloid strip, a gesture, an illusion. It is sheer nonsense to make out of a film or a fat novel – a moral landmark, a lighthouse, the national program or a counseling center.

Take for example my suffering, my case: yesterday I gorged myself on raw salmon. Exactly: I gorged myself! Color: bloody peach. The background: a silver tray, muted glimmer of casually maintained silverware. My principle is that silverware must not glisten, shine or glitter like fair-place tin. A bourgeois loves glitter, vulgar glamour, glow of the new. A noble man always prefers dark tones. Rubens. Caravaggio.

With my tiny teeth I crunched toast, letting crumbs fall on the carpet, while soft flesh of noble fish was melting in my mouth. Toast pricks and fish cools. I was drinking wine from long-stemmed glasses: Real wine, not champagne. Champagne is for the French – foamy sweet plonk for the mob. And bottles: blue, green, brown. Like juicy girls. You’re overcome with desire to grab one of these imported beauties and dance ecstatically a passionate tango with her.

I was feeding turkey drumsticks to the cats and, as usually, I loll about, sprawl, get bored and stare at TV. Time passes slowly, it does not hurry, it crawls like a snail, it snoozes. Around 8 pm, in twilight, when the heat has relented a bit, an idiot, a retarded person, began to persuade me from the screen, that all I am just telling you is an ordinary lie. I turn around, glance at the overflowing table, I touch my golden fork, I rub my eyes and think: a cretin, a real true cretin, a person suffering from cretinism. A morose sufferer from ulcer in a tie, gray jacket, sour-hot serious, an overblown potbelly. This guy with conspicuously luxuriant wig was persistently repeating I feed myself badly. He expertly prattled that I am starving, that my teeth are rotting and loose due to starvation, that my face is sallow because of malnutrition, that I collect stale bread and dirty waste from garbage cans, that I am a carrier of diseases, a rag, a contagion, a future sufferer from typhus, and hundred similar scurvy stupidities on that subject. I gape at TV, I stare at that monkeyish bust, I hold my hand on the mouth, and I really do not know what to say. My God, who is this half-man? A nutritionist, a nationalist, a supporter of laissez-faire, a philosopher, a cosmopolite, an intellectual, a paid federalist, a political worm or an idle loudmouth? What will people say? Is this marvelous salmon a fruit of my imagination? Am I a naive victim of my own wayward imagination? Are these bottles, these green bottles full of first class wine, these glittering innocents – an illusion? A play of light and shadow? An invented tableau vivant! Where did I get all this wine? Where did I procure this noble grappa – the immaculate honor of Tuscan hills? I am neither a politician nor a smuggler. I am not a black marketer. I got no one to fawn, to stand at hind legs in from of me and to give me gifts of stolen goods. Are the tears of Jesus a lie? And the sauce? And quail pate? And Jordanian lamb? And Cato’s lobster? The sauce is a mirage? Fish – glue? A Space Odyssey? An illusion, a political frame-up, a Potemkin village, London Zoo? Newspaper and saw-dust spread with mayonnaise? And turkey? What about turkey? Is it also non-existent? It can’t be papier mache, Japanese plastic, Pop Art, Oldenburg, Gestalt. I reach with my hand to tear a roasted wing, and in the place of the turkey, my golden turkey on juicy baked sauerkraut, there stand an old, beaten pot full of yellowish sticky macaroni: Blue color, white polka dots, burnt bottom broken glaze. “Die Milch maht’s”, as famous late Schiller would say! Fiddle-sticks!

No, it’s not true. I know well what is truth and what are political propaganda, deceit, lies, drivel and dirty Balkan tricks.

According to him, it appears even my kitties remained hungry. I will never swallow that story.

However, if all this be so, and it isn’t, why does he wear a wig? If he really cares for truth and not aesthetics, if he is such a truth-lover, why doesn’t he show his big bald head? Why does he hide it? Why doesn’t he show his – so to say – bald truth?