Sad stuff and Tuga

My Croatian aunt is in intensive care. She is my favourite aunt. She was an English teacher when she was younger, so we were always able to talk when my family and I visited Croatia.

There was no language barrier between us, even though when I was really a kid - the toddler sort of size, I mean - my first language actually was Croatian. But I soon forgot it, to my lasting shame, as English culture encroached on the linguistic cocoon my early years brought and meant to me. So the barriers arose - but never with Tuga.

We used to go on holiday to Croatia every two years when I was a kid. There is an island there I would retire to if I could - tomorrow, if you told me I should. I would retire there and never feel I was wasting another day in my life. I would never feel oppressed or fearful. I would never feel out of sorts or out of place. I would breathe and live pure happiness. The air is sweet and pine-ridden out there. The ground is soft with brown needles.

The Romans used it to retreat to healthily. A later empire, the East German Cold War empire of hate, kindly took its poorly children to the island to recover a sense of themselves.

We have a short video collection of 8mm films my father took of us when we were little. There is a wonderful scene in a beautiful place called Rogaska Slatina where the whole family is seated around the lunch table in front of the summer house; yes, and it is summer, too, and we are sitting outside, and in the distance the steam train curves around into the centre of the village below. And the gherkins and the potato salad and the bean salad and the wiener schnitzel and the salami and the green peppers and the big ripe tomatoes ... and all of that all reminds me of what was true in my life and what the messy oppression of that thing we call work, which some falsely argue ennobles us, really has done to me; really has done to my sense of myself.

There are responsibilities I cannot walk away from but there are also truths I have abandoned. And in the meantime, I have lost a decade I could have spent with people like Tuga who I have loved so dearly in my half-baked and incomplete life. I have lost a decade in search of overarching and underlining truths - and, yet, in reality, I have abandoned the truths that would have satisfied me, if only I had managed to understand in time.

There is nothing worth fighting for that does not involve a kindness to others.

Everything else is a deception of the blind.

Tuga will fight every step of the way - with no guarantees or promises. She will fight as she fought to understand both the outright madnesses and simply terrifying insecurities that were the successive Balkan conflicts; as she fought to understand her loved ones and their growing needs; as she fought to bring them up in the post-war world of geopolitical machinations; as she fought to comprehend her childhood under the terror of the Fascists; as she fought to bring beauty to a world that was designed to frighten; as she fought to meet me in all honesty and clarity of mind, a product of a people with an astonishingly complex ability to conceptualise and think through the implications of a wider world.

Now my paradise is beginning to age.

Now that circle of friendship, which my own lifestory has recently denied me the opportunity to revisit, is on the point of crumbling.

And once that process begins, it can only continue.

If I am a democratic socialist, it is not because Tuga wants it. For her generation, socialism is a rapacious, bloody and corrupting beast at the gates.

If I am a democratic socialist, it is not out of ideology. If I am a democratic socialist, it is not out of conviction. If I am a democratic socialist, it is not because I believe. If I am a democratic socialist, it is only because I feel.

And at the end of this strange steam train curving round into the village we call life, only that ability to feel and make love to each other - in that curiously asexual and apolitical sense another generation (perhaps no longer ours) sought out and finely measured - makes us stand out as beings worth treasuring any more.

I've lost a decade in foolish endeavour, in believing that an intellect can overcome a world.

No longer.

For it is an emotion we should get close to and touch, not a neurone.

Democratic socialism, at its best, is a feeling for others writ large and grand across a landscape of political persistence.

A persistence of vision.

Not the detached retina of a virile defeatism, the rightist solution to all human poverty of thought, but - rather - a fond attachment for the foibles and eccentricities that make up the existences of real people.

That is where we should concentrate our efforts.

Tuga is in intensive care and I feel - at this moment - that she is a metaphor for that wider world her people have understood only too clearly.

There will come a time when she will not survive even as the world most surely will.

And that difference - the difference between the world and Tuga, this latter difference I mention - is the difference which means that Tuga, now for me, is the saddest stuff my life has ever been.