Srečko Kosovel: The Poet and I

1.

In Slovenia, the country where I have lived for the last ten years, every border seems to be only a fraction of an inch away. The villages and fields and barns, the houses and stone chimneys and narrow footpaths that occupy these fractions of inches, in Slovenia and elsewhere in Europe and the world, often strike outsiders as negligible and unimportant. They almost never possess the mighty eminence or cultural distinction of capital cities that are usually more centrally located. To passersby, border regions often appear shabby and unglamorous, as afterthoughts or accidents. They are viewed with the same mild disdain as almost any human settlement that, though not a destination point, happens to be situated alongside a thoroughfare. What a pity, a traveler might think speeding along the road toward one border or another, that they ran this highway right through the apple orchard below that lovely farmstead. But neither the thought nor the traveler will linger longer than a second or two.

The many who pass through the generally unremarkable areas straddling national borders rarely pause to consider how many ounces of blood have been absorbed by the unremarkable land, how many tears have been shed for every inch lost, every life laid down. For these fractions of inches are, in fact, far from negligible. They are immensely important for the simple reason that all borders are immensely important. As loath as we might be to admit it, borders place us and define who we are. They define our love and our convictions, our faith and our history. Borders may be real and geographical or exist only in our imagination; they may lie on the hard soil of the earth or in the soft folds of our minds. Some borders are easily transgressed with no identification papers at all. Others, though we possess a valid passport, make us tremble with the significance of the passing. For the ultimate border, we need not a passport but a death certificate, though it has never been suggested that the guards on this last frontier are bureaucratic sticklers. Sooner or later, they let everyone through. People move across borders all the time. They do so more and more in this day and age, often with no intention of returning from whence they came.

It happens less frequently, but borders also move across people. Like great birds of prey, they glide silently over the landscape, momentarily blotting out the sun and casting the villages and fields and pathways below in shadow. Grasped in the hooked beaks of these mighty birds is not the limp and bleeding corpse of a small animal, but a slender dark thread: the ink-black line on a map. The flight plans of the birds are usually charted by dark-suited men with serious faces who sit around green felt tables in distant capital cities and negotiate the settlement of war and other territorial disputes. Mercifully, the birds' itineraries are generally quite abbreviated: a mile or two in one direction or another, a minor modification in the pastel shapes of nations, nothing more dramatic than a fraction of an inch here or there. But inevitably some people are left stranded on the wrong side of the shifting line, abandoned in the wrong pastel color.

It cannot be avoided, the dark-suited men grumble. Unlike the abstract beauty of the map, the situation on the ground is messy. During less violent and confusing times, people had intermingled with one another, had moved from one village to another in search of fertile land, a fertile wife, a bustling market square, crisp sea air. But at this specific instant in time, as their fates are being determined from afar, the people inhabiting the houses in the villages do not move; they cross no border. It instead crosses over them and one morning, they get out of bed, switch on the radio or read the newspaper and discover that they have woken up in the wrong place. They are speaking the wrong language across the breakfast table to one another. Their anxious words are now uttered in the language of the dispossessed, the minority. They have been cast off from their brethren and set adrift.

And so a wound is inflicted. Betrayal takes up residence in hitherto unsullied hearts. Resentment infects young minds, welcomed into the void left behind by the sudden departure of confidence in a justly ordered world. The dark-suited men around the distant tables had placed their hope and faith – insofar as notions such as hope and faith entered their bargains and calculations in the first place – in the fact that wounds do eventually heal and scars fade. Good sense and the rational pursuit of peaceful activities will ultimately triumph over bitter dreams of reconquest and revenge. And to be fair, there have been cases when such a wound in the land has been forgotten and the scar marking the villagers' hearts has become the subject of nostalgia rather than rage. Regrettably, however, it seems to be more often the case that both the memory of the original wound and the scar itself remain a vivid scarlet, diverting and inhibiting life's civilizing impulses. The new lines and colors on the map do not convince the villagers on the ground. Nor do they convince their children or their children's children. Such wounds, it seems, are not confined to the territory of mere skin, such scars not limited to the borders of a single life.   

For some time now, my thoughts have been returning – almost obsessively – to the story of a life that transpired in just such a region. For some reason, I am drawn to a place where that great bird of prey, black filament gripped in its beak, has been unusually restless. I am drawn to a destiny that has fallen under the bird's shadow not once but several times. Perhaps this obsession of mine is merely the most common form of tribute: attraction to the unknown. For the contours of my own life and land have been free from this particular form of darkness, the darkness of dispossession. In any case, the story has now come to assume a double life. It exists both in the realm of historical truth and in my own imagination. I find myself bumping up again and again against the same central scene. It attracts and repels me in equal measure. In the end, it seems that I am fascinated by precisely that which must remain forever foreign and unreachable to me. Like a border, the story is invitation and barrier. It lures me like a door left ajar, drawing me in from the safe convictions and history of the continent of my birth, which is America, and shedding a shaft of light on the more treacherous experience of the rest of the world. It lures me with the promise of understanding and empathy. Yet when I push open the door and enter the country behind it, the light goes out. I hit a wall. I can no longer see.