1          Soul Bound

1.2        Taking Control

1.2.2      An Awakening Epiphany

1.2.2.29   The nature of the human mind

Meditation Grove, The Burrow

She found herself walking along a narrow track through the matted green leaves and delicate blue flowers carpeting a bluebell wood, that twisted between stately cedar trees as it headed slowly uphill. The floral aroma had other things mixed in; fruity earthy tones from verbena and frankincense; spicy woody tones from cedar and sandalwood; something else, maybe mallow or cocklebur? She breathed deeply as she trudged along, appreciating the rich perfume and slowing her steps.

Ahead she could hear a deep thudding beat from where the trees spread further apart as the individual trees became taller and wider. A minute later she stood at the edge of a wide space. It wasn’t precisely a glade because in the centre was a tree so large that no other could survive between its spreading branches. To either side of the central giant, near the edges of the clearing, were the remains of two lesser giants who had finally succumbed; still upright, but dead; each hollow trunk twice as wide as Kafana was tall. Next to them both were a pair of twisted muscular figures who were beating on the trunks with iron-bound clubs. She mentally nicknamed them “Gog” and “Magog”.

A wide cushion had been left underneath the central tree that looked soft and inviting. She laid down the sword in her hand and strolled over to it. There was only one path back the way she’d come, but ahead of her on the other side of the clearing there were several paths leading onwards up the slope. Presumably some, but not all of them, would eventually lead to the snow covered peak she could occasionally see through a gap in the branches that were swaying in the breeze. This looked like a natural place to sit and think. So she did.

Life had been kinder to her than most. She had health, most of her youth, and even looks that were not entirely ugly. She had supportive friends, and a family who had loved her and taught her. In her time she’d had the opportunity to earn respect through using a skill she was good at and loved using, and had even received a measure of wealth and fame, though that had faded until this last week. She’d made the most of her opportunities, travelled the world, and when her career as a singer had ended, she’d managed to retain her freedom and dignity, establishing a home for herself in her native Bosnia.

Until this week, if someone had asked her, she’d have said she was doing fine. A bit tired, a bit worried for the future, but more or less content with her lot. The past was something she’d preferred not to think too much about. She’d kept her head down and her horizons small. If women were oppressed, if police were corrupt, if politicians lied and businessmen stole, well… that was just the way things were, wasn’t it?

But it hadn’t always been like this. Not this bad. Back at UCL people had still had hope, rather than a sense of inevitable further decline. She just hadn’t realised. Like a frog in a pot being brought to the boil, the long term trend had been slow enough she’d been able to fool herself that it was just a matter of short term fluctuations. Until this week. Until she’d been brought face to face with people who remembered what she’d been like, expected her to still be like that, needed her to still be like that.

And she felt inadequate. Because of those needs she was facing demands upon her time, demands upon her safety, demands upon her emotions, demands upon her to make decisions and take responsibility for issues so large the thought of making mistakes petrified her. Too many people were relying upon her for too much. Running away to hide wasn’t a good option and neither was surrendering all responsibility to become the pawn of others.

What she needed were good boundaries. A realistic appraisal of what she could do, what she had the strength to do and what she was willing to do. And then to let others know which things she wasn’t going to take on, and to hold that line in the face of their needs and opinions.

Know thyself.

She knew, mostly, what things she was good and bad at. Her efforts at writing poetry or lyrics, for example, had always been embarrassingly terrible. And the limits of her strength would become clear even if she tried to ignore them, Olga’s opinion not withstanding. She never again wanted to find herself as mentally drained as she had been when emotionlessly walking across the plaza towards the crater she’d left in it. Given her in-game power levels, it just wasn’t responsible behaviour, allowing her decision-making to devolve to the point where everything looked like a nail because only a hammer was simple enough to use with a numbed brain.

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No, she needed to think about who she was for one main purpose. She needed a better sense of what she was willing to do. The physical, psychological and priestly views of personal identity wouldn’t help with that. She needed a narrative, a sense of herself in relation to others. What mattered to her? What was she truly willing to risk her energy, sanity and safety in pursuit of? And what wasn’t essential, just things she did from habit?

Wellington had asked her what she wanted; not just wanted for herself, but wanted for the world. Was there any cause she was so convinced of, that she’d be willing to risk the trust and lives of others? That she’d be willing to kill for, or see her allies kill for on her behalf?

She felt the beat of the drum trees resonating through her body, and her mind slipping into a trance, her brain being directly altered by the room. She went with it, feeling the last of her conscious thoughts stilling to silence; her mind became a void, empty, awaiting something. A memory.

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2020s, Bosnia

Her parents didn’t talk about the war much. As a young child, she’d known they’d lived in Sarajevo during the three years it had been under siege by the forces of the war criminal Radovan Karadzic, but little more. Every child knew about the siege. The craters left by mortar fire had afterwards been filled in with crimson resin, leaving marks in the streets that tourists mistook for decorative roses until they learned the ugly truth.

But then, when she was 12 years old, her uncle Hrvoje had died. He wasn’t really her uncle. He lived in Canada, but every year or two he’d stay with them for a week when musical performances took him their way, and he’d sit with her father Dzevad late into the night. She’d wanted to go to the funeral and, after much arguing, Dzevad had agreed.

A war correspondent, Ed Vulliamy, read out a passage from a book he’d written, and at first Nadine was puzzled as to why.

SPOILER: The following awe inspiring description of the best of human nature also contains violence

I went to Joseph Haydn’s String Trio Op 8 No 6 in the city’s blacked-out National Theatre. This was part of a Summer in the Chamber series of lunchtime concerts – the kind of thing the citizens organised and attended not so as to belittle what was happening but to remind themselves they were still alive. The programme that day had been intended for the Sarajevo String Quartet, but they had been reduced to a trio after the second violinist, Momir Vlačić, was killed by a mortar shell that hit a flight of steps behind the Conservatoire as he arrived for rehearsal.

The two movements in the key of C Minor – which Mozart and Beethoven would later associate with struggle and intensity – were written as a piano trio, transposed this afternoon for violin, viola and cello. Outside the theatre, another brutal day: five civilians, one of them a child, were killed as mortars, one aimed at the main hospital, pounded the city. But here behind the blackened windows, a mesmerised audience gathered around some residual hearth of defiant civilisation.

Until at one point during the lilting andante, one mortar crashed so close it caused a shudder that made the walls shake sufficiently to knock the viola player’s music stand over, felling his score. An awkward silence descended over the 150 listeners. The trio stopped, unsure how to proceed – how to answer this outrageous interruption? Then the first violinist, Dzevad Sabanagić, made a simple split-second – but in its way momentous – decision: he waited for the stand and score to be picked up and reconstituted, raised his bow, then called the number of the rudely interrupted bar.

The trio played on

Hang on. That was her father?

Then a stark woman stood up, and started talking about how Dzevad, Hrvoje Tisler and herself had made a decision. They would not fight with guns, but neither would they let fear push them into being less than human. Instead they would play on, wherever they were invited, wherever a reminder of humanity was needed. Over the 1425 days of the siege they put on more than 200 concerts. In broken schools and in broken hospitals; at the front lines and among the ruins of ‘sniper alley’. They played at the outdoor tap where militia had sent mortars down upon civilians queuing for drinking water and they carried on playing even after another member of their group was killed.

When she got home, she’d looked it up. Sure enough, there was a picture, and there was her father playing the violin amidst a crumbled building. She’d confronted him, demanding to know why he hadn’t told her, why he’d done it. He’d shrugged, and then given her a soft answer.

Dzevad: “It was something I could do. I couldn’t do nothing, and still be me.”