I admit that now someone might stop reading. But the circle in which I grew up has not taught me to hang out with such people, who are often referred to as “jackasses,” or “nothing good comes out of him,” or even “an artist, what more should I say.” I am not the one to blame if my life counterparts were not artists, or if my brother always played football, my father watched the news and my mother was always in the role of the innocent housewife, and nobody told me that hanging out with artists is different, and to be different is good. I am familiarizing myself with the culture and its representatives in a way that I haven’t done before, with a beautiful landscape of Austria or with an English-speaker who knows how to scream in the center of the capital.

A reason for all that I wrote are some meetings I had with several artists, who enabled me to understand what kind of individuals they are. And today, for me, if you’re not an artist, you don’t have spiritual cleansing, and if you don’t have spiritual cleansing, you have war within you, but if you don’t have the war, than you’re very good with yourself, and in the end you are an artist. Genc Salihu told me himself, he is the one with whom I had a half an hour coffee one day, and that meeting was stuck in my mind and got me to start writing. It seems that, I recently realized that artists themselves need spiritual cleansing, but the idea itself and the visualization of something that they produce, makes this “cultural flu” more difficult to permeate with infusions and similar things.

The procedure of spiritual cleansing is good. It may be misunderstood and paraphrased as a paradox, but in fact I have a few minutes when I fight with the dirtiness inside. Not wanting to define art itself, which is something that can’t be defined, except in individual instances, I begin to think that a coffee with people from the field of culture and with artists is better than with my gossipy friend or my friend who’s an Inter enthusiast. For example, the artist creates, and my friend doesn’t, the artist goes through the struggle of spiritual cleansing, that is the artistic struggle with himself, and my friend does this through punching others. The artist brings out the anger in his next work, while my friend does this when she sees her ex-boyfriend with another woman.

And when, suddenly, you see that your circle consists of people who until recently you might have even imagined as being strange, you too start getting that good feeling inside, that feeling of being surrounded by books, by that artist who tries to express with language things that language itself cannot express. With him, you feel like drinking even the bitterest coffee, because he created the world where goodness is just a deception, and the struggle with spiritual cleansing is not always un-healthy.

The article was originally written in English.  
Photo Credit: STEFAN ZSAITSITS
 
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