September 27 (Day Fifteen)
Our plan in the morning is to take a leisurely stroll to the 10:00 walking tour of Ljubjlana, but we get distracted talking to other Anglophones in the cafeteria, so we have to race to make it. We alternately run and jog to Mestna hisa and, though we arrive ten minutes late, many groups are still milling on the cobblestone. We search by sound for the English one and, highly accented though this version is, we identify it and slide in, not quite unobtrusively. The docent in fact stops her riff to say everyone else has paid, so we can do so when the walk passes the tourist office. Then she returns to her description of the history of Mestna hisa and the baroque eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture before us on Mestini trg.
A middle-aged buxom woman with an alcoholic face, she has the mindless delivery of a worn-out grade-school pedagogue barraging children with long-rehearsed facts that no doubt she considers important, almost sacred, but in which she has lost all interest and attention. Her delivery and pacing are militaristic in their unrelenting bombast and canned recital. She rattles memorized details and incidentals and deposits stories like an egg-laying machine. Also, her presentation is timed precisely, as she knows at what spot we are supposed to be each minute. Thus, she ends many recitations abruptly, even mid-sentence, when the allotted duration is up.
A young lesbian couple in our group takes to mimicking her favorite segues: “And now we continue” or “We go now in continuation.” Her most satirizable moment occurs when we are at a busy street corner and she decides abruptly to bolt while traffic provides a brief gap: “…a beautiful building—and now we cross.” The girls keep repeating it in fake Slavic-accented parody each time we come to a street: “And now we cross.” They likewise enjoy mimicking her habitual opening line at each new spot: “We have come….”
The most surprising thing about the walk is that it is half promotion and advertisements for stores, merchants, souvenir stands, and the like, and only half actual historical tour. Our guide stops at perhaps a dozen stores and touts their pottery, wine, ham, sausages, painted wooden plaques, toys, Slovenian shields, honey, and so on, always with words like, “And should you want to take home a piece of Slovenia, this is the place,” or “Here is a piece of Ljubljana waiting for just you,” or “This shop presents some of the finest Slovenian souvenirs for tourists to buy gifts of friends and family.” The first time this happens I joke to Lindy that she must be getting a kickback from the place, but after the fifth or sixth, I grok that the double-dipping is institutionalized and ingenuous. A favorite sudden remark of hers is a seemingly spontaneous but totally unconvincing interruption of a historical explanation, as we walk along, to observe, as she holds up her hand to halt the group: “Here is a store for you.”
At one point we pass an outdoor dining area where she and a boat skipper pretend to greet each other with far too much surprise and delight. The skipper then proceeds to address the group in Slovenian, and she translates that he is pleased to see a tour of such beautiful people come to visit Slovenia and he wants to offer the whole group a discount if they will come on his boat ride on the Ljubjlanica River at 12:30.
"This is an offer not precedented in all of Slovenian history," she says deadpan.
I believe I have seen this routine before. It is known as the stooge in the audience, or the plant. After that encounter she must have reminded us twenty times over the remainder of the tour, the frequency increasing as we approached its noon close, about the boat ride. She affects a kind of “you all have won the lottery, don’t forget to collect your prize” tone but is not quite shameless enough not to betray a bashful smile every now and then. She then overrides that with a strong plug for the ride and yet another expression of faux astonishment that the captain would give such a discount: “He never does this.”
The other major genre of her tour is her patriotism, reflected by her over-the-top praise of Slovenian artists, architects, scientists, politicians, and poets. This is probably a carryover of communist-era propaganda. Her rhetoric and hyperbole are both off the charts and vapid: “Our great motherland Slovenia is rising like a star”’ and “Slovenia is leading the way for all of humanity, a second Switzerland” [a curious choice of paragon]. Every statue or plaque at which we stop portrays a world-important Slovenian figure of “unparalleled virtue and talent.”
Yes, there is a trace of self-reflection and irony, but only a trace. She may begin a particular conceit by acknowledging, for instance, that Slovenia has only one Nobel Laureate, a chemist, but then, she adds, “We are only a country of two million, and the analysis he invented means that you don’t need two liters of blood, only much less, you get a sample.” The precise nature of the discovery is not very clear, but the general idea gets across. Or she might say, “So you see, we Slovenians are few but are contributing beyond our size.
“Joze Plecnik was the most renowned and demanded architect in Europe for his blend of functionality and aesthetics, and he has built the magnificent structures we see not only here throughout Ljubljana but Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Italy. He was an innovator in his use of concrete, but he gave it dignity and humanity that none since have known. He desires his dear Ljubljana to be a Slovenian Athens. See his art and genius being everywhere. Take the Tromostovje for example,” she concludes, pointing to the Triple Bridge and beginning a discussion of its many aspects.
Her patter, relentless and atonal, the tour tedious, at times exhausting, for she is a walking juke box. Yet it is fulfilling to see so many sites in context, to walk down alleys we would not have explored, to learn a smattering of Eastern European history in the process. Our docent provides intent and direction to a day that would have encompassed another aimless jaunt if we just set out again on our own.
Here are a few items and facts that stand out, in the rough order in which we encountered them:
•The inner courtyard of Town Hall is decorated with historical medallions that synopsize the different phases of Slovenian history. A simple and concise pattern of lines, arcs, and reliefs is cut into the far wall, a kind of glyphic aerial map of the old city. (The surrealistic art exhibition is in an outer courtyard.)
•The lace patterns of Slovenia are so intricate, the most complex in the world, because many of the weavers had miner husbands and were concerned about them working underground. Each imagined gyre through the coal became another whorl in the cloth. Whether this is a legend or has some historical basis, the lace we look at is meticulously and subtly woven in semi-concentric fractals like something from a Mandlebrot set.
•Around our docent's explanation of this weaving in a crafts-shop window, we bump against a large Japanese tour group coming the opposite way on the same narrow sidewalk. The leader of that group and our lady shout at each other in Slovenian, and then she suddenly leads us through them in such a way that we intersect like colliding snowstorms with flakes that won’t touch. The Japanese seem humbler than we are, respectful of the sidewalk and scenery and of our lumbering Western bodies as we mingle briefly. Afterwards, our guide pronounces her two funniest lines of the tour in a row, in fact her only funny ones. The first is probably a staged warning that she works into every tour: “Be careful in the street; we don’t provide insurance.” The second is authentically snippy: “He [meaning the leader of the Japanese tour] gives the orders here; he’s a Serb.”
•We stop before the gigantic Cathedral of St. Nicholas, an eighteenth-century relic that has been elegantly restored in the twentieth. Its religious history is cast on the giant front door in a black bronze that looks like wood. We see the Pope overseeing events of the centuries flowing into one another, chronologically going back in time from top to bottom. The one spot in which the gold of the metal shines through the black is the dance of the dead as they tumble over the line from the living. So much three-dimensional relief on an actual functioning door is unusual and creates a kind of Druidic optical illusion, as though one is looking into another plane of a carved oak.
•Inside the cathedral is an astonishing space: paintings and altars and statues everywhere, probably over a hundred separate works of metal, stone, paint, and glass art; a second stained-glass dome soaring atop the first. In fact, this building has been formally deconsecrtated and converted into an art gallery. The primary sensation of so much gold is like a second, esoteric lighting system—a glow that cannot be attributed to any single source. The shining leaf transforms the space into something almost luminescent, that ineffable quality of gold that makes it the icon of monetary and alchemical systems.
We learn that Bill Clinton and George Bush each toured this cathedral, and Laura Bush either did or said or bought something here. More important, our docent says, pretty much offhandedly as though not really believing it, that deep in the earth under this structure are energetic flows “that are beneficial to the health and fortunes of human beings, so that is why they built the cathedral here.” Of course, we have already been to Damanhur, so sacred geography has a resonance for us. Touching my selfic bracelet from the land of Falco, I half-seriously scan for subtle energy. In any case, she doesn't believe it, but then she doesn't believe much of what she is saying.
•Revisiting the Tromostovje, we get to look again at the statue of Preseren. I see that the muse is actually seated behind the poet, bare-chested with tiny breasts and pointed little nipples; she is looking down from her pedestal as if from a higher dimension, holding a shiny gold olive branch over him as an aura. Miha told us that first night that the nude casting of the muse was a scandal at the time, and our guides now adds that the woman who posed for the statue had to leave the country from shame and died in America. She also mentions that Preseren composed the Slovenian anthem, and that is why an olive branch is included.
•The name Ljubljana, she explains, derives from an old Slovene word for love. I like it a lot, especially as it has taken me a long time to pronounce it with any aplomb. It is Loobe, not Lub—Loob-li-anna, or somewhat as the Italians sometimes spell it: Lubiana.
•This city was the capital of the Illyrian Province of Napoleon’s Empire. The Slovenes embraced the French invasion because it brought a sense of efficiency, artistry, and order.
•The one time that I was moved by our guide, when she clearly spoke more from her heart, was her relating of the events of 5 June 1991—what we think of as the bloodless revolution whereby Slovenia separated from Yugoslavia. It was not entirely bloodless. After the fall of Soviet communism, the meaning of “Yugoslavia” was solely the continued Serbian hegemony over the other provinces in a forced union. When northernmost Slovenia became the first of them to declare its independence, the Serbian army intervened. It was not nearly as bad as what happened in Bosnia or even Macedonia and Croatia. Yet fifty-four Slovenians were killed, including a group of farmers who were “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she laments. The army also smashed all communication facilities, trying to cut Slovenia off from the rest of the world. This day is now commemorated in the spirit of the American Fourth of July.
•Cobblestone streets rise and fall in their own moebius strips, not great for walking on but beautiful to look at.
•Here is a list of Slovenian words I collected during the tour: zmaj, cez cesto, srcek, sveze pecivo, zamrznjen, izdelki, zalog, vpetek, iz, crni, ura, zlatar, s, krznarstvo, vec, dovoljenjem, izolacije, uznanjal, and izhod (exit).
•After the docent concludes the tour inside the lobby of the art museum by directing us to bathrooms downstairs if we “want to refresh,” she takes a very short, hard breath and proclaims, “I am finished.”
We next had an adventurous outing for dinner. Lindy found three possible restaurants in the guidebook and then located them on the map. We set off to the town center at about 19:00, willing to try whichever one we could find first. Unfortunately, we turned right instead of left at Mestni trg and ended up lost but facing a lively establishment called Gostilna Sokol, which was really more of a beer garden than a dining destination. However, despairing of finding any of the selections in the dark, we poked our heads in and were immediately ushered upstairs to what they called a nonsmoking section. This turned out not to be the case, as a thirty-something punk in a group of Englishmen (that looked like football hooligans and dominated the room) lit up. Even his companions objected, but he said, “I don’t object to your eating while I’m smoking, so you don’t object to me smoking”—a conceit he found amusing enough to repeat twice.
As I got up to remark about the gathering smoke to the waiter, a group of other British people came in and, immediately noticing the cigarette, complained. The waiter then directed them to an adjacent room. Still standing, I asked him about a nonsmoking section for us too, and he said that the nonsmoking section was full, whatever that meant, since he had just seated others there. Though we were supposedly in the nonsmoking section and the second English group was in a section in which there actually was no smoking, it turned out that the real nonsmoking section was further back and totally empty. Once I understood that, I pointed out the many available tables to another waiter, and he told me very aggressively that it was all reserved and I should go back to my seat. About this time, Lindy located this present establishment in her Lonely Planet guidebook where it was described as not for the vegetable-lover or faint of heart, specializing in blood sausage, wild boar, and goulash. We immediately bailed, abandoning our mineral water unpaid, and headed up the block to look for Chez Erik. We found it as soon as we recouped our wrong turn.
Serving an elegant French cuisine, described in the book as very expensive, Chez Erik was in a different universe from Gostilna Sokol; it had the look and vibration of a fine restaurant. A jovial waiter at the door seated us at once in a large nonsmoking room next to a table of British, French, and Slovenian diplomats who turned out to be discussing W. Bush all meal, debating “what the real agenda of the Americans is.” They shed no light on it, but the fact that they were baffled and amused themselves for an hour spoke for itself.
Actually Chez Erik was quite reasonably priced, as fish and vegetable appetizers, carrot soup, and cake/crème brulee without an entrée were adequate. Though we were not close to being properly dressed or typical customers, the waiters seemed to consider us one of them and were extra attentive, playful, and inquisitive, wanting to know all the details of what we were doing in Ljubljana. To go from football hooligans to diplomats, from vulgar ornery waiters to charming young men in a space of one block was a bit magical.
After dinner, as we walked back down Stritarjeva ulica approaching the Triple Bridge, we heard music and, as we crossed the Ljubljanica, we saw the source. From a small makeshift stage along the river a young female singer in a red and white peasant dress was performing. We stood in the gathering crowd to listen. She was intoning folk songs in haunting Slavic, bobbing and bowing up and down slowly and rhythmically in place, reaching out with her left arm, then bringing it back to her face and heart (her right held the microphone). She was accompanied by two men, almost boys, one on a guitar, the other on what seemed to be a mandolin with its high glides of sounds.
All of her gestures seemed designed to express deep inner feeling, unrequited passion, mourning, loss, or the quest for something elusive: Love? Homeland? God? The gestures may have been rote and corny, but she embodied them so deeply that their drama was utterly real. Plus, Slavic lamentations within these kinds of melodies— long lilting vowels and rises and falls—sound as dirgelike or elegaic as those of Irish ballads.
This was a transfixing moment for us. The crowd continued to gather behind us, and people were moving in their own ways to the music, old men and women and even teenagers and little kids. It was not even close to modern, but it had a different force of modernity in its purity and sincerity, especially in this land of wars where freedom had come hard—freedom of expression, freedom of connection to the world. She was singing from the Slovenian heartland, the tribe, and you didn’t have to know the words to experience the impact of her mantras or feel privileged to be in this scene on the other side of the world from where you live and have spent most of your days, all through the fifties in fact when this was Yugoslavia.
After three numbers, she retreated to the side and sat with a boy of about nine, probably her son. Then the two musicians engaged in a number of riffs or jigs, issuing notes as rapidly as telegraph keys, up and down scales. They switched to totally different songs, fast trips along the scales, dueling like West Virginia fiddlers in their native reels. The guitar player issued a challenge, and then the mandolin player lowered his head and matched it with higher notes. The crowd applauded and whistled. It had the sound of the harvest, the countryside.
Now the lady singer came back and belted out a rousing Slovenian version of “Those were the days, my friend; we thought they’d never end.” Here the sound of an unknown language recalled for me the logic strings that Noam Chomsky proposed years ago, before he became political, in his generative grammars that connect all languages to a virtual Ur tongue. That is, language itself, not any particular language, in some absolute pre-semantic form expresses the primitive stratum at which mind and spirit come to singular possible neural grid and bursts of meaning for our anatomy and intelligence. The syntactic grids of the different languages from Apache to Zulu are congruent and isomorphic in some basic way. No matter how different they sound and how deviant their origins, they are all the same rough template of raw gibberish and nonsense syllables being molded morphophonemically into information.
And, at that moment in Ljubljana, dialects and intentions and humanities met beyond translation. I didn’t understand the words that were being sung, but I supplied their counterparts, maybe even the right ones from memory, in a kind of archived overtone: We’d sing and dance forever and a day.