September 26 (Day Fourteen)
This day held a nip of fall in it, a sharp transition from Italy’s Indian summer. Hotel Park’s free communal breakfast was mobbed with a mixture of young and elder-hostel people, bringing back college-cafeteria memories, though the fare of eggs and ham was more for Lindy than me. I toted my bran flakes, dried apricots, and a jar of honey-sweetened lemon marmalade, items that I was still carrying from Lucca and Siena, while the Park provided me with some watermelon slices and a hard roll to spread the jam on.
After the meal we retraced Miha’s route from the night before, into the center of town past the statue of Preseren and the three bridges. The area was full of bike-riders of all ages: students, old people, women dressed to the nines for work. Bikes are a fully integrated mode of transport here, as there are more of them than cars, and they require greater alertness than cars as they go flying past pedestrians much closer to them and with far less regard for the peril, the liabilities being less cataclysmic.
We spend a couple of hours wandering around the downtown of the old section. The urban landscape is distinctive, yet elusive. What gives it its unique quality? Looking down a street, any street of the many that run semi-parallel more or less, you see long flat vistas of colored fronts of buildings flowing smoothly together, one into the other with highly designed faces and vistas of windows. The colors are subtle and change, often dramatically, from façade to façade: darker and lighter shades of a kind of pink yellow, tan brown, tan ochre, also peach, dark mauve, light mauve, plum, bluish gray, greenish gray, aqua lime, off-white. The whole reality is tastefully and gently tinted and worn. It is regal and old.
Flowery sculpture borders the stone around so many of the windows, and each floor of the same apartment house or commercial structure has a different sculptural colophon or decorative theme, those of the same emblem going in horizontal rows from window to window. The buildings also have friezes, medallions, statues built into their outer walls, colored tiles and mosaic patterns near their roofs, and statues sitting atop them somewhat like in Trieste. The mosaic patterns are like little labyrinths, some almost cartoonlike.
Roofs are red or reddish orange, and many are very steeply pitched, some more than others. The most sharply pitched v’s could hardly have much of an attic inside. These latter, almost vertical, make near caricatures of their houses. Many of the less slanted roofs have varying warp to the point of seeming a moebius surface. The roofs of quite a number are graced with multiple and complex turrets and cupolas, their designs so intricate that turrets are sheathed inside turrets inside other turrets, each with its own distinctive style of ornamentation. Some are actual square clock towers with gold leaf. A number of them have weathervanes and intricate grillwork on top, some of it in bright gold.
One moment from an arbitrary angle Ljubljana looks like a giant mediaeval village, and the next from a different angle it looks like a neo-baroque city. With the appearance sometimes of a town of small castles, it resembles pictures of Vienna and German Switzerland, but it also feels like France and, in a different way, like Prague and parts of Berlin. The chief characteristic of the architecture is its decoratively individual character from building to building with a startling variety of levels, layers, and shapes that cohere in a distinctive and unified motif. Even a few decrepit, crumbling buildings have intricate ornamentation. On the whole the architecture is more varied and complex, yet, for the most part, less ornate and majestic than Trieste.
Language is a major part of the vibration of Ljubljana. I recognize the sound of Slovenian and also other heavier Slavic tongues, perhaps Serb, Russian, Slovakian, Czech. There is a lot of English, including pop music in the air. I also hear occasional German, Italian, French, and maybe Portuguese. The Slavic alphabet soup pasted on the landscape gives it a particularly fantastic quality for someone speaking a more Western tongue. Bizarre letter combinations and impossible words cover objects near and far and charge the ordinary world with the sense of a myth or dream—also like a hypothetical Eastern European country in a lost seventies episode of Mission: Impossible! The fictional Slobovia and the real Slovenia oscillate within the same reality. For a short stretch I scribble a list of some of the more striking words and letter combinations: “z” standing alone as a whole word, zrno, zborrnica, Stritarjeva ulica (a street we pass), a word beginning “drz,” obutev, vrvana, zelesniska, trgovina, iriski, huala za, zisto.
Spellcheck should go hide somewhere. This is the land of the Grimm Brothers, the Muffin Man, Humpty-Dumpty.
We acquire some Slovenian currency with our bankcard because it is needed for many circumstances instead of euros. After I press the button for English, the “fast cash” option yields a single 5000 tollar note. I have no idea how much this is, so we go immediately into tourist information on the corner. It is worth about $31 U.S., so it is not as frightening a withdrawal as it seems.
It is ironical that the currency name is so close to ours—like a dialect joke or an intentional parody of the word "dollar"—and at the same time so out of scale that it is almost toy money. On January 1, 2007, Slovenia will go entirely onto the euro, and Irena says that this conversion will reduce the standard of living by 40%.
It does seem an amazing fact of economics, that a mere change in an artificial symbol representing value can affect not only the relative scale of things entering and leaving the polity—imports and exports—as one would concede and expect but the cost of goods being sold from person to person within a region. Somehow the same local egg from the same farm becomes a whole lot more expensive for the neighbor. This impending conversion puts the tollar on about the level of Damanhur currency; its usefulness and security are tied to a provincial situation.
A huge farmer’s market along the Ljubljanica, the Trznica, consists of roughly twenty dense rows of stands. We wander amid wonderful fruits and vegetables—tomatoes, eggplants, greens, potatoes, honey, and many varieties of grapes and mushrooms. I choose an old farmer with only a few crops for sale and pick a bunch of carrots. Unlike most Ljubljanans he does not speak English, so I have a hard time figuring out the degree to which his vegetables are organic or not. I think he finally communicates that they are clean with sweeps of his hands and shakes of his head. I hand him the 5000 tollar note, which he considers ridiculous. It is embarrassing to me too. Then he takes a long look at the coins in my hand, searches through the bills in his wallet, frowns, then smiles, selects a euro from my palm, and throws in a second bunch of carrots.
Of all the varieties of grapes, I go for a basket of concords back at the beginning of the market because they are the only ones that wasps are crawling over. I mean “crawling,” because this woman’s stand looks like a hive. All her grapes have squads of wasps on their surface, and each whole basket is an airport of wasps arriving and departing. When I pick up one, she puts it on the scale and then shakes it many times so that the visitors vacate in a swift trail. Standing at a safe distance, Lindy is still worried that I have bought us trouble, but I am convinced this grower knows how to read the riot act to her guests when the hour of commerce comes. I try to barter for less than a full container, as each basket is double-size by American standards and contains more unrefrigeratable grapes than we will ever be able to consume without digestive disaster before they start attracting lesser insects to our room, but she shakes her head “no” because, it turns out, a basket is only one euro anyway. I leave the market weighted down with carrots and grapes, as I will be now for the remainder of the morning.
We go looking for Town Hall, Mestna Hisa Ali Rotovz, on the map, because, although we are too late for today’s advertised walking tour of Ljubljana from there, we plan to try tomorrow and want to pin down the correct spot in advance. We can’t seem to find the fifteenth-century building where it supposed to be, so we go into a church that seems open. Guards at the door ignore us, and there is apparently no fee.
Oddly modern rather than religious art hangs inside, and this includes an exhibit of surrealism by someone named Miro Preston: canvasses with anomalous objects resembling Yves Tanguy or Remedios Varro but denser and less figurative. These giant colorful artifacts are hung not indoors but on the rough stone walls of a courtyard where you wouldn’t ordinarily see formal art.
As we leave, Lindy asks one of the guards where City Hall is, and he points to the building we were just inside.
Tired of trekking around, we sit on the City Hall steps. There is an interesting pattern in front, a design of light and dark cobblestones making a geometric, almost Byzantine motif of curved triangles, diamonds, and squares. What care, to lay down an ordinary street, brick by irregular brick! Such a different sense of time and space. When an urban landscape is this consciously aesthetic, it usually elicits a civilized, responsible universe of social life.
While we are resting, French and Japanese tourist groups arrive simultaneously, and pictures are snapped of the Mestna Hisa with us on its stoop while the docents speak different tongues; then they move on in separate directions. Tomorrow we will be on one of these trajectories, but in English.
We go back to Presernov trg, the central square across the river, where a small train, a mode of transport at about the level of a golf cart pulling a child’s toy, hauls people uphill to Ljubljanski Grad, the Ljubljana Castle. Overlooking the city from a steep hill, this mediaeval relic has been rebuilt many times and, though originally the military basis of the town and erected as protection for the region, in the last century it has been both a prison and actual cheap living quarters for families before its final residents were resettled and the structure was restored as a museum and tourist site. Ljubljanski Grad is considered a can’t-miss destination and, since we prefer riding to walking now, even on this silly little tram, we figure we will check the castle off our list.
The long-haired, unshaven conductor behaves like an out-of-work Shakespearian actor or failed poet who hates his job big-time. I imagine him at a bar afterwards, cursing that fucking little wagon of a train he is sentenced to operate. He is dragging a last smoke out of butt as we pay him with Slovenian currency, a wonder the ember isn't singeing his hand, there is so little of it. Taking out a fat pouch, he easily breaks the 5000 bill into 1000’s and 100’s, waves us aboard. En route while winding uphill, we get a canned tour of the city from a tape. The conductor says nothing, working a new cigarette and talking on his cell. Because of traffic, the tape is soon unsynchronized from the scenery and describes sites well before we get to them, then switches to irritating ads.
As we gain height, we see that the original old town is a mere concentrated area around and out from the Triple Bridge, and there is a much bigger span of Soviet-era institutional architecture surrounding it, combining with the center city to make an urban area of some size, all contained within a ring of hills and mountains. The Yugoslavian buildings are massive and dreary; they retain faint tints: pale tan, pale green, pale blue, pale pink, faded lemon.
We tourists are unceremoniously let off outside Ljubljanski Grad and must make our way from there. It is not even obvious whether one has to pay to enter or not, but there is no toll-taker or other impediment, so we wander inside with the rest of our group. The structure, so charming when viewed at a distance from the city, is kind of ordinary, even ugly inside. The Lonely Planet guidebook says that it has been ruined by many generations of reconstruction, particularly some bad sixties architecture heavy on the concrete. Most of the tourists get themselves out on a ledge between parapets and view the city from above. Ljubljana sits in the valley, glittering, breathing, letting off irregular metallic sounds like a giant organism.
The castle becomes tedious in about twenty minutes of tourism (it actually would cost us about twenty dollars to take the elevator to the very top turret), so we sit outside waiting for the train. It turns out to be forty minutes late in returning. A warm autumn breeze blows blizzards of leaves off the trees. We stand in their descent, so thick that they whisper against our skin, engendering a wondrous sensation of climate. I have never experienced such a dense fall of leaves and certainly not one that tickles.
I am now suddenly so sleepy that I recline on the jagged stones of one of the ruins, so serrated it is as if it is specifically designed for not lying on. Yet slumber descends so rapidly and drowsily that I fall into and out of trances and strange landscapes. Vivid mediaeval scenes flare up and fade against stray moments from my life. It is almost a lucid dream, a lucid trance, as I know I am dozing, yet at same time, I cannot resist the suction of images and fall of leaves. I am able to tell myself in some sort of detached internal voice-over that I might be tuned to subtle energy from the stones themselves, transmitted into my cells through a blunt acupuncture, but this sounds also like whimsical dream logic. The artifact becomes a cluster of subtle time capsules, each containing fragments of memory of older times within its atomically oscillating fields. Maybe my somnolence struck at just their vibration or is generated by them, and they broadcast former landscapes of their world and times.
I lie there enchanted by this state. Then the wind blows another plethora of leaves dizzily out of the sky, and I am lured back into the world. While I consider the paraphysical proposition with mild commitment, at the same time I assume it is pure vagrant imagination.
We walk around the castle, visit its parks, look at graffiti-covered statues of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century peasant uprisings, sit on various benches and walls. Finally the train arrives, and we are carted back to the Triple Bridge very hungry. It is almost 14:00.
Wandering among various squares, we do not find a suitable restaurant that is not too noisy or smoky. Then we cross a different bridge, come back along the Ljubljanica on Petkovskovo nabrezje, and find ourselves approaching same outdoor dining terrace validated by Miha and Irena the previous night, Zlata Ribica. Seating ourselves, we even get the same handsome young waiter.
The major drama at lunch is provided by the pigeons. They are so aggressive that they are landing on tables and actually taking morsels from people’s plates. The food is an irresistible magnet, and these birds have no fear. They have to be continually chased away, and that in itself is causing a commotion. A German guy at a nearby table, after a pigeon lands on his arm to peck at his meal, gets so upset that he starts shooing all birds indiscriminately, as though for revenge, regardless of whether they are close to him or on the other side of the dining area, so disturbed creatures keep flying our way. After a while there are so many under our table where I dropped a tiny piece of bread, now long gone, that Lindy gets involved in waving them off and knocks her beer bottle onto the stone. Broken glass now lies among the birds.
Eventually the waiters settle matters down and clean up, and we order the kind of thing you would in Slovenia: stuffed cabbage rolls and a rump steak from a local small farm. I challenge you to find something more organic or vegetarian on the menu.
Miha meets us downstairs at 19:00 and we set out on foot for the Writers’ Guild where I am to present. As we traipse along, he is inspired to prepare me for the evening by talking about a variety of Slovenian issues. He describes what he calls “the crossroads of modern Slovenian history when Tito broke with Stalin in 1948.” Tito wanted no part of Soviet colonialism, but then he shot down an American plane to make clear he was not going to be under Western domination either. By those acts he defined post-War nonalignment and set the direction of Yugoslavian life for decades to come.
Slovenian writers are a naturally obedient and cautious lot, Miha explains, and the Writers’ Guild is a bastion of conservative Slovenian culture. It will be interesting to see who shows up. He imagines that a few people will only pay attention to the words “American” and “publisher” and fantasize their own books being translated—something, he adds, that almost never happens in reality for Slovenian authors, who are stuck in their private time warp.
When asked by Lindy about his relationship with the Guild, Miha is candid, “I don’t have one. They don’t regard me.” He reiterates that the Guild is devoted to Slovenian purity and tradition, to honoring the past. Writing in Western pop genres and getting translated into English disqualify him from the club, and perhaps, he thinks, he is looked upon with disdain or disapproval. He elaborates on this point by discussing the relationship between Christian guilt and Slovenian relativism here: One of Slovenia’s most significant writers, Ivan Cankar, claimed that thinking about murdering a man and actually murdering him were the same thing, morally equivalent. This kind of apolitical elitism, Miha proposes, arising in part from the Biblical notion that to sin in the mind is just as bad as to do the thing, leads to fascism and a kind of fashionable smugness and insularity. He will have no part of that vestigial philosophy and wants instead to introduce a distinction between thought and action in his work, so he engages an active imagination of darkness and evil. He also wants to make a bridge from classical Slovenian sensibility into more global aesthetics because, after all, he is a screenwriter, working sometimes in English, trying to create cinema for international markets.
While waiting to cross a street, we talk about Dusan Makavejev, the once-prominent Yugoslavian—though not Slovenian—film-maker of the 1960s, director of WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Montenegro. He has become totally irrelevant now, Miha says, and is not referenced at all; yet, he adds, "in a 1960s guide to film in English, he occupies more space than Hitchcock."
The Writers’ Guild is in a traditional old building, a walk of maybe half a mile from the center of the old town, a pleasant journey across the darkening evening. Our destination turns out to be across the street from the American Embassy, which is a small multi-turreted castle lit like Christmas tree.
We enter the building to find the room locked, so we sit on a ledge in the stairwell for twenty minutes, continuing to talk, until the young woman from the Guild arrives with a key.
I converse at length with a poet and critic who writes his name out for me (with email address) as Robert Simonisek. He has the look of a handsome European boy poet, Cocteau’s Cegeste (who is struck by a motorcycle at the opening of Orpheus), but he also seems a bit the priggish lit crit, here to judge, to test his analytical mettle, as well as to listen to me. In fact, he says so. He is openly ambivalent even about having showed up, confessing he was headed for a beer and then remembered about the reading and decided he might check it out and see if he wanted to stay.
“We can offer you water,” Miha announces, holding up one of the bottles on the table.
“Pour,” Robert says.
As he and I chat, we locate the work of William Carlos Williams as a meeting-place and, on the basis of shared poetic taste, he says he is now comfortable staying.
Miha doesn’t start the reading right away, waiting about twenty minutes after the appointed hour of 20:00 to see if we will get more of an audience but, even after the delay, there are only three people besides Lindy, Miha, me, and Irena (who arrived soon after us by bike). During my actual reading two latecomers will walk in. Except for the last man, who is older than the rest and dressed in a double-breasted suit (more about him later), the audience is young kids, college age or so, two boys and two girls.
Miha chooses the seminar table instead of next door’s formal reading space with podium and chairs. The audience sits around the table, me and Miha at its head. I have selected eight and a half pages of recent writing from the summer, wanting to present something fresh and alive for me rather than published pieces. My selections include a variety of ecological, political, and spiritual/metaphysical themes from a book that I will eventually call The Bardo of Waking Life.
Miha surprises me by framing the reading in interview form. He holds up a copy of Out of Babylon, sent to him by Roger and Eda, and he asks me to talk about my family and origins as a writer.
It is hard getting started. I feel as though I cannot sail along in my usual English because it will be too fast to be understood, but the moment I slow down, I fall out of rhythm and start to stumble. It is as though I am talking to children, very deliberately and artificially. I hear the echo of my thoughts in my voice. It is like speaking through molasses. I try to regain a normal pace, but I never quite get it, so am briefer and more pedantic in answering than I intended to be.
Next Miha holds up On the Integration of Nature, a recent book that I am carrying with me; in fact I brought it on the trip solely for the purpose of reading from it in Ljubljana and then giving it to my host. He remarks how different it is from Out of Babylon and asks me to explain the relationship between the two and also to cover the matter of why I write about baseball and sports. The question is tough to negotiate in this situation: Out of Babylon is pure memoir and was written almost fifteen years ago; Integration has memoir in it but draws from science, Buddhist epistemology, politics, science fiction, and the like, and it was written just last year. Meanwhile my baseball prose is like memoir but also in the spirit of a jive sports journalist.
Taking into account my audience, I labor through a rather linear and literary answer, more or less based on the notion that I am a writer and I take on what topics have interest and meaning for me. Pointing to Integration, Miha asks me to read something from it. Because I decided not to read from it tonight in favor of newer work, I am caught off-guard and stumped as to which sections to select on the spur of the moment. There is so much that I could read; yet I seem to find a reason to reject each piece I consider: too long, references they won’t follow, too similar to stuff I want to read from new work, Lindy has already heard it too many times, etc. My indecision makes the segue awkward, as I am having trouble figuring this out and also keeping contact with the audience. Finally, spur of the moment, I choose a couple of lyrical descriptions: the first very brief: the Milky Way as it might fit concisely on the haunch of a skunk; and the second: a longer exegesis concerning tidepools in Maine, comets, and complexity theory.
It is not reassuring that, before starting the second piece, I ask if people know the word “tidepool,” and no one does—so I explain it with a lot of gratuitous gestures to show how the sea comes up on the rocks and leaves behind these little reservoirs of water. I feel foolish doing this, as though I am enacting a poetic affectation typical of a reading. I hate the way I must sound.
As I read, I am again struggling with an echo of myself, part of my mind scanning for what the audience will be able to follow in English, ruing what will probably elude them. The tidepool piece is usually one of my favorites, but this time to my ear it comes off hollow and turgid, over-intellectual. I can’t wait to get through it and on to something they can better understand. There is just too much language, too many detours from the main theme— which is the random creation of enduring objects in a chaotic universe. I am amazed, as I labor through the sentences, how fragile language is. This cherished piece of mine quickly unravels when the listeners don’t even know the word “tidepool.” The literary quality of the language is engendered by striking metaphors linking small objects at the scale of tidepools to cosmic ones, and making the links at many levels at once. Yet those distinctions I carefully imbedded in moments of inspiration become only ephemeral sounds in ranges of partial denotation. When those are lost, the beauty and poetry evaporate too, like the tidepool creatures themselves, and I am left with the rhythms, but I am not a rock singer or Dylan; I can’t pull it through on melody and beat alone.
As I question in my mind (while reading aloud) the audience’s capacity to understand my words, the writing loses its magic and delicacy for me. In fact, I stop at a convenient point two paragraphs short of the end, admit I am going to break off before finishing, and then, before Miha can ask another question, seize the initiative, and introduce a piece about advertising, a short narrative depicting a series of events in my childhood, a transition from my boyhood when I fell for hyped-up ads and believed in the magic of their products to the discovery in my adolescence of real tarot cards and the power of visualization.
The piece is centered around Zest Soap, a brand from the fifties. As I try to set the story up before reading the piece, “zest” turns out to be another word that no one in the audience knows, so about five minutes are spent laboriously creating a context for “zest.” I define it as excitement, passionate enthusiasm. Then Lindy takes a crack at it—exuberant fun, joy of life. Then some of the audience suggest other possible meanings.
Even after all that, I feel as though we have missed some connotation crucial to my piece, so I come back to the word and expound on the notion that zest is not a particularly good thing, even though the literal meaning is super positive. Zest is usually something artificial and deceitful, a superficial advertising conceit, more a word to sell a commodity by than a feeling to experience authentically. It even has a competitive edge to it. A person with zest is a person on the go, on the make, trying to show how much fun they are having, sort of self-delusional. This word play is actually more engaging and interesting than reading from my work.
The crux of the piece is to demonstrate how, in childhood, I was fooled into believing that the mysteries I intuited in Zest Soap ads really were released by bathing with this brand (as opposed to other soaps) when they were really fake images from pop commercial culture. For years I imagined that a soap was responsible for certain epiphanies. Years later, after I understood the sociology of advertising and had abandoned such beliefs, I wrote a paper for high-school English on subliminal messages in ads and debunked them. Later, though, I regained the power of icons through studying occult symbols, and I developed a more mature understanding of the workings of the imagination. I came to understand the true profundity was in myself, not the soap. All of us have feelings that need to be probed in order to become who we are, but the capitalist culture attempts to market and subvert them before we can internalize their meanings and claim their energy as our own. That is a rough, tedious “plot outline” of a much goofier short-story-like piece.
During the latter part of my reading about Zest and tarot cards, the afore-mentioned older man in the suit walks in and takes a seat. He is slight, dark, sparkly-eyed, partly bald, Hungarian-looking. I am sure, with no intro or context, he will not understand what I am reading, but the moment I finish he jumps up in delight and declares that of course the power of sacred images must be upheld; then he urges me to read more at once. Miha interrupts, querying me again about the great variety of subjects on which I write, perhaps for the newcomer’s benefit.
I now have some energy. I respond by saying that it is not so much different subjects that I write about as writing itself as a process of focusing attention, of changing one’s inner being by translating intuitions and feelings into focused meditations through the oddly fluctuating relationship between meanings and sounds of words; it is a practice, I add, much like yoga or meditation.
Miha next asks me about the role of science in my work, and I say that I am simultaneously embracing scientific method and critiquing and digging under it. I propose that science is the modern language of nihilism, that science in its most orthodox form is the means by which humanity has divorced itself from its divine core and convinced itself of its own relativism and meaninglessness—but also science is a clue to what we are in the universe, how God and nature, karma and thermodynamics have made us, and thus it is a glimpse of how we can get back to our essence. As the measure by which we have bound our imaginations, it is the means by which we can unbind them. It is the labyrinth in which we have become hopelessly lost, so it is the labyrinth through which we will find our way out. Unless you deal with science, I say, you cannot break into the twentieth—and now the twenty-first—century’s dialogue with itself.
I briefly describe each of the three main topics on which I wrote books for mainstream publishers in the 1970s and 1980s: medicine/healing, astronomy/cosmology, and embryology. I explain how I later rewrote and enlarged all of these books and reissued them myself. The new arrival then asks me to elaborate on embryology. I explain that it is a unique way of understanding the relationship between life and consciousness. It is the link between holographic cellular organizations and Darwinian algorithms underlying them. I then offer the possibility that the universe is structured in two separate overlapping principles of generative motion and development. The first is circumscribed by the laws of physics and comprises primarily heat, gravity, and entropy. The second is matrixed by evolving cell activity and embryological development and determines how the innate intelligence of matter shapes itself into, first, agency, then, mind, culture, and symbol.
I continue by reminding everyone that science, of course, claims that embryology is subsidiary to thermodynamics, a subset of it, as Darwinian logic proceeds from matter and heat effects, to life by arguing the advent of information from binary processes sorting and storing random codes.
My counterargument is that a fundamental embryogenic module is imbedded from the get-go in atoms and molecules at a far deeper and more differential level than electrons, quarks, or quantum effects, and that its dynamic morphology emerges autonomously through matter, organizing itself into the shapes and meanings it already contains within it, ultimately expressing worlds that are intrinsic to it. Thus embryology not only is a study of the syntax of creatures getting bodies but is the map of esoteric meaning in the cosmos at large. Organisms are literally the universe writing itself on its own body, and the embryological event is the sacred dance that the universe reels off in order to pull meanings out of its core and express them in organic forms, in actual living species.I
later learn that the late-arriving gentleman is Vladimir Gajsek, the author of the longest novel in the Slovenian language, a recent Joyce-like epic that has never been translated. Its English title would be Icarus’ Feather. When Mr. Gajsek gets the book for me to view from the Guild Library after the reading, I see that it is truly the size of a dictionary. “I also drew the art,” he proclaims proudly, pointing to the cover.
During my elucidation of science and meaning, however, all I gather is that Gajsek is apparently on my wavelength, and before long he and I are discussing alchemy, anthroposophy, and Damanhur. It is not clear whether he is a spiritualist himself or merely a stylistic adventurer for whom metaphysical notions provide surrealist patina for his fiction, as for instance they do for Borges. He may have explored these occult systems and metaphysical ideas, for instance, because they help provide an inner geography of his writing, or he may be an actual hermetic practitioner. He is certainly smart in discussing them, much smarter than anyone else there.
Miha asks me out of the blue if I believe in God, and I say, “Well, not that God, but I have a piece I was going to read anyway. I wrote it a month ago.” I want to get back into reading anyway before we end up in a free-for-all. The piece closes with these lines:
"If God were not perfectly camouflaged from us in her thousand veils, each as subtle and opaque as the next, then this trance would end and this world would no longer exist. God must hide from us to keep the world going, the enchantment real. His disguise is foolproof, and we are the fools kept in the dream. If he were not disguised, the whole game would be up.
"Who would live, who would stay here if he could see God through the hole in reality? Everyone would say, 'Oh, you’re God. Well, I’m out of here.' It would be a joke, or worse, a bad play.
"Yet, ironically, that same camouflaged figure is us and we cannot, no matter how good an act we put on, hide from ourselves. This is one of the least publicized aspects of human existence. We may deceive others, even royally, hook, line, and sinker, but we always know who we are. Even a sociopath’s true nature is disclosed to him, elude it though he tries through his charm, through trying to charm himself. He can conceal the internal dialogue, but it is always there, nudging at him. He too is part of the God that can’t be seen—but that’s the way it works: all paradox, no certainty, lifetime after lifetime, no memory, an inexorable karmic universe of the vastest dimensions and depth, of which we are the creator, across whose desert we now convoy."
Mr. Gajsek is enthusiastic and claps, though Lindy immediately comments, “I would worry reading such a thing in a Catholic country. We might be struck by lightning.”
“Lindy,” I protest, “this is a socialist country before it’s a Christian country—and it’s not Catholic.”
Miha agrees, “We are most recently refugees from Tito’s enlightened communism. To all appearances we are quite secular.”
Then one of the girls adds, “I think an atheist would be more upset by the piece than a Catholic. A Catholic would say: 'He’s misguided, but at least he believes.'”
Her name is Veronica; she’s a poet who’s also pre-med. She came to the Writers’ Guild quite prepared for our event, having read about Lindy’s and my old magazine Io on the Internet and also having explored Lindy’s personal website. During a half hour of informal camaraderie after the reading, she and Lindy will strike up a promising friendship.
I then move on to some pieces about Bush as I promised at the outset. Their introduction bringa chuckling and applause I begin by admitting that I know he’s an easy target, “as we say, the broad side of a barn because you can’t miss it. But as one poet in the States remarked to me, we have to keep bearing witness. That is our responsibility. t doesn’t matter if it’s obvious. Bearing witness itself is an essential act with its own unassailable power. Failing to bear witness tacitly says that it doesn’t count; it is not important. If everyone simply bears witness, things will eventually have to change."
The first piece begins:
"Odd as this seems, Bush has made Saddam look like a genius. The sociopathic Iraqi dictator kept peace in the streets and Iran at bay, the two things we most need now."
It ends:
"Saddam was a beast who just hacked and blasted and bombed away. W. is a corporate killer who does it with an insolent command and euphemisms like ‘shock and awe.’ They have mastered equally the shutting off of compassion or concern for other flesh, though W. sort of knows how to mask his arrogance with insincere sound bites referencing freedom and religiosity. Both believe that their kind of people (Baath loyalists/wealthy conservative Republicans) are the only ones whose lives are worth valuing. Everyone else is a potential mercenary, enemy, customer, or sorry: collateral damage.
"Yes, Saddam did his job with stark brutality, but at least the electricity ran in Baghdad and people could buy groceries and enjoy their dinner."
This is well received by the entire audience, as Miha comments, “You better be careful. The American embassy is across the street.” Everyone laughs.
My reading of the second political piece, however, takes an unexpected turn after I interrupt myself to acknowledge that some of my ideas have roots in, guess who, the popular Slovenian writer Slavoj Zizek. Immediately Mr. Gajsek begins shouting, “Zizek is a fascist. Zizek is a fascist. He supported Mussolini. He admires Stalin.”
Veronica interrupts: “No, you are falling for the bait. Zizek is a performer. He simply tries to provoke.”
“He is a fascist,” screams Gajsek, his face contorted. “Do you know how many died in Mussolini’s concentration camps? This is not funny. You think it is a joke? Zizek is a big joke to you, all right. It is not a joke at all. You’ll see if the fascists get power again. Zizek will be there, giving the execution orders, and you will not be laughing when people start dying again.”
This is all proclaimed so suddenly and with such passion and rage that it stops the show.
All I can say is “Wow, that’s a detour I didn’t expect. But really isn’t Zizek is just an intentional provocateur?”
That sets Gajsek off again. I interrupt him this time by saying I want to finish the piece.
After the dramatic interlude, what I read turns out to be more powerful than I expected, even to me, and it brings the reading to a cathartic end. Only when people applaud and stand up and Gajsek continues cheering after the others have stopped do I realize that I have ended and couldn’t have done it better (and also that I nor only do not understand the subtleties of politics in this room), vut clearly I will not be reading any more pieces tonight. Here is how I closed my small Ljubljana Writers' Guild reading:
"The suicide bomber has established that there is another angle on this whole affair; the world is not solely markets and products. While jihadists are hurling explosives at the West, most of all they are hurling another meaning, another interpretation of day and night. Life is not life, and death is not death to them. They are demanding that the West wake up and see where this whole planet, us and them both, sits in the greater zodiac. It is not about shareholders or job security; it is about the raw crocodile phenomenology of existence, as absolute in a Gaza refugee camp as at a Texas barbecue. The Sun and Moon don’t play favorites and, even if they did, the stars surely don’t. This whole thing is gambit of destiny not privilege—stone and dust and water, not commodity markets and bank accounts.
"As is so often the case, our enemy is the only teacher motivated to teach us what we need to know."
Afterwards, as noted, we stand around talking, gradually moving out of the room onto the staircase. This is when Gajsek brings in his mammoth novel to show me. Robert and Veronica promise they will visit us in the U.S. The young woman with the key to the room, the representative of the Guild, brings me a stack of books by Slovenian authors translated under her organization’s sponsorship into various languages, and she invites me to select the ones I want. With Miha’s help I pick three in English, two of which are anthologies.
As Miha leads us upstairs to the restaurant on the top of the building, Lindy remains in the street visiting with Robert and Veronica.
Before she rejoins us, Miha and I bumble back into the matter of recent contention, Mr. Zizek. It originates this time from Miha’s musing aloud about Gajsek. He has heard about him for a long time but never met him till tonight. He wonders about the roots of his outburst, as he is too young to have any direct experience of World War II, and he is not Jewish.
I blunder into trying to dismiss the criticism of Zizek again by presuming it is just words. “It is not just words,” Miha snaps.
“But I mean he is using words to shake up ideas, and he is interesting because, in his quasi-Freudian analysis, he brings things up from the cultural and political unconscious and poses conventional global dilemmas and conflicts in new ways with unforeseen twists.”
“Yes," Miha acknowledges, "in that regard Zizek is brilliant, but he is also a fascist, and that is what I am talking about, his fascism, not his brilliance.”
He then talks about three Romanian writers, one of whom is Mircea Elliade, the esoteric religious philosopher and symbolic archaeologist whose work I have read in translation; another of whom is named Emil Cioran; and the third of whom I forget, but he is the real villain of this tale. Then he mentions Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian Jewish author in the middle of this group that was slowly turning fascist, who ultimately died in a concentration camp when his friends ignored him and distanced themselves from him.
I start to comment idly on this, but Miha cuts me off with agitation and an edge of emerging rage. I see him differently now: the ferocity, the conviction, frustrated somewhat by our language barrier: “Let me finish, please. After the war, Elliade [and the third man] said, ‘Oh, we didn’t mean any of it. That was just words. It was just ideas. It was an intellectual discussion. We didn’t mean any harm.’ But they didn’t lose their lives for those words. Other people did. They were not just words for them.”
I get it and tell Miha so, but he is still stewing. This stuff counts for him. I grew up pampered in the States, encouraged to think of everything as a realm of ideas. I am a bit of a lazy relativist like Mr. Cankar or Elliade. In fact, I am repeating their mistake. I am forgetting that the ball is in play, always in play. The world is real.
That is a difference between Slovenians and Americans. They just got through a revolution and war of independence. Concentration camps are local history here.
Upstairs turns out to be a formal and exclusive club, the most expensive restaurant in Ljubljana, Miha says. The waiter presents a menu verbally in English but then says that we can order whatever we want and they will make it if they have the ingredients. He brings some very good bread and olive oil and then some garlic bread too.
Bear is an item on the menu and Miha teases Irena that he will order it. She says she will not permit it and goes on about how sad it is that France and Germany are importing Slovenian bear meat, killing poor Slovenian bears, because they have killed all their own.
Midway through the meal, in a context created by another discussion, Lindy and I bring up our trip to Mexico, and I recall the moment of hearing Tom Petty sing “Free Falling” while sitting in a cab passing through slums and abject poverty in Mexico City, a condition that stretched for miles in all directions, quietly terrified about being awash in an ocean of alien culture, separated from the law of the jungle by the thinnest shell, my fate not really in my own hands, the driver a teenager who didn’t understand the words to the song he had tuned to for our shared entertainment on his cigarette-pack-sized portable hanging from the mirror. Miha knows the song and the condition and thinks it is the right soundtrack for the situation.
Irena looks at Miha with a smile and remarks that he has a Mexican connection and should tell us. Lindy and I want to hear about it. It turns out to be very complicated. A screenplay on which he is presently working in English has a Mexican theme, and a Mexican cinema company found it on his website and has recently gotten interested in distributing it in North America.
The plot involves a period of time in Yugoslavia in the 1950s when Tito had cut the country off from both Soviet and American influences. There was no cinema except Mexican, so Mexican films had become all the rage. However they had a different effect in Serbia and Croatia than in Slovenia. The Serbs and Croats threw themselves into Mexican culture: wore imitation Mexican hats, cultivated bandito mustaches, and organized very bad mariachi bands. The Slovenes looked down on this and parodied the Serbian and Croatian Mexican genres with their own camp Mexican styles and intentionally ridiculous mariachi bands. One part of Yugoslavia was imitating Mexican culture guilelessly; the other part was imitating their imitation as farce. “After all,” Miha says, “please remember, we are in the Balkans."
Against this comedic backdrop, the screenwriter poses a tragedy: the story of a soldier in charge of executing dissidents in one of Tito’s prisons who decides he cannot execute one more man. That mutiny will require his own death sentence, but he doesn’t care. He just can’t do it anymore.
His superior sends him on a mission that allows him an escape. He must go to a dissident village that is piling up weapons. I forget the precise nature of his mission or the turn of the plot here, but the point is: now he is a traitor for his failure to execute orders but, if he goes to the village and converts them, he can only be a hero. He either will be killed by the villagers and die a martyr, or he will succeed against impossible odds and be celebrated for his accomplishment.
It is against the backdrop of the soldier’s mission that the mariachi-band culture operates in the village. Again, I do not remember the exact context. “I believe,” Miha concludes, “that the best work is serious and tragic against a background of human farce and irony. Humor provides a context for tragedy.”
Lindy and I both agree that it would make a great American movie. “The world is ready for dueling mariachi bands in Tito’s Yugoslavia,” I say. “It could initiate a whole new genre using two cultures that people are really curious about.” We both promise to try to pass the script around among contacts in the U.S. when we get back. (You can see the trailer for this on YouTube by searching under Miha's name or the mariachi topic and Yugoslavia. It is still available:
At the end of the meal, Miha is our benefactor again. Since I did the reading, he says he will pay for the lavish meal. Earlier Lindy and I had talked at length between us about how we would take all future tabs when with Miha and Irena but, in this circumstance of the reading, I am inclined to let the matter go, as I sense it would be an insult to the hosts to pay for an honorary meal after my own reading. Lindy, however, is going through her own thought process on this and is ambivalent about what to do. She starts to reach for the check.
Miha is running on high energy now and, I think, a bit pissed at our casual American carelessness, our failure of precision, our indecisive lameness before Slavic grandness. “Don’t pretend,” he says to her. “Don’t even begin to pretend.”
It is an out-of-nowhere devastating cross-cultural critique. It could be taken as harsh, but it is actually the height of generosity, a growl of the Slovenian bear he didn’t order.
“It’s the Balkans,” Irena explains, pushing away Miha’s card and putting down her own in its place. “In the Balkans Miha always pays.”