Life is Tenuous

Several weeks premature, I was, nine days later, still only 5 lb 1/2 oz, as my young mother's careful accounting showed. Then there was a jump of 1 1/2 oz, and by the 31st I was approaching 6 pounds.

I just found this scrap of almost translucent paper, folded and faded, proof of the tenuousness of early life, and proof that however complicated life grows, including relationships with parents and children, there's a physical, historical family base that undergirds and/or undermines it all.

Sixty years later, I'm trying to stay under 200 pounds, happy with each oz that slips away, still relying on family, still struggling with family, still grateful for family.

Serbo-Croat Novelist Dies

Milorad Pavic, Unorthodox Novelist, Dies at 80

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: December 19, 2009

Milorad Pavic, an internationally prominent Serbian writer whose novels upended the traditional relationship between reader and text, taking the form of dictionaries, crossword puzzles and much else, died on Nov. 30 in Belgrade. He was 80.

Ivo Eterovic/Alfred A. Knopf

Milorad Pavic

Mr. Pavic’s narratives do away with the forced-march, page-after-page strategy to which most readers are accustomed. They are profuse with self-reference, unreliable narration, authorial asides and “Rashomon”-like shifts in point of view. Stories nest within stories like the pieces of a Russian doll.

.................

It's surprising, and always a bit odd, where the years take you. A sabbatical year to work on a book about Freemasonry and the German Novel led me to the German university town of Tübingen, where I met Zarko Radakovic, who became a novelist and translator. The friendship blossomed into joint projects and finally into a couple of books. I have even taught interdisciplinary classes on the crisis in the former Yugoslavia, drawing on things I learned from Zarko and experienced during our travels.

Zarko's work is not adequately described as "postmodern," but it shares some of the traits of recent philosophical movements, including a distrust of straightforward narrative. And now I read that Zarko's fellow countryman Milorad Pavic has died, a novelist who also experimented with literary form.

Just this summer, accompanying Lyn to her family gathering in Breckenridge, Colorado, I found a used-book store and bought a copy of Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars: A lexicon novel." I already had a copy of the novel, translated by Christina Pribicevic-Zoric, but it was the "male" version of the novel. This one was the female version.

A couple of months after buying the book, I wrote to Ms. Pribicevic-Zoric and asked if she would translate Zarko's half of our book "Vampires / A Reasonable Dictionary." She declined, but suggested Alice Copple-Tosic, who has now translated the "Vampires" half of our book into English.

And now Milorad Pavic has died. And I've got a manuscript full of diversions, feints, questions, and a basic anti-narrativity for which I'm dying to find a publisher. We'll die ourselves, soon enough. Our words, our sentences, our collaborations ought to find a more permanent place between book covers.

Zarko's opening, along with mine:

SUMMARY

One summer at the end of the 20^th century, a man in his forties accompanied by a ten-year younger female traveling companion spends a short vacation in the south of a neighboring country. They sleep in a different place every night. They walk through the landscape, wander through city streets, leisurely sit in the gardens of empty houses. They have long meals in half-empty restaurants… One night in a hotel on the seashore, after a late television broadcast of the film Fog, the man calls a friend in his homeland. During the brief conversation, he finds out that seven years after their divorce, his ex-wife has been put into a mental institution…During the night the man talks to his mother on the phone and finds out that another friend has tried to commit suicide and is currently “in a serious state,” “lying” “in a hospital”…On the way home the man runs over a cat and then loses control of the car. When it happens he is listening to Bill Frisell on the radio…Once he gets home the man experiences numerous changes… He “hooks up” with a much younger woman who tries to bite his neck during sex, after which he turns rough…He attends the meetings of a “secret organization”…He does not sleep at night…Walking through town he breaks the window of an apartment where the light is turned on… He decides to change his place of residence... One night he goes to the movies and sees Vampires. It strikes him that this is one of the most important events in his life, which is already quite shaken up. That same evening he makes an important acquaintance; there are exciting adventures; long hours of talking, arguing and fistfights…Absorbed in images from daydreams… Battling with insects… Attacking a gas station … Nocturnal noises in the hotel… Orgies…Pallor… Bleeding gums…The man calls his mother and tells her he is going back to his hometown… After a raid in a restaurant in the center of town, he injects himself with a medicinal serum… He spends some time in a village where ­­­­a pig is slaughtered at a celebration, he comes up against considerable changes… He meets enemies… He meets friends… Long conversations… A battle for details.

................ and mine:

Let this story begin, perhaps, in 1998 in Belgrade among the well-kept ruins of the Kalemegdan fortress that overlooks the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers. A barrel-chested man walks along a path with his two little girls. They lag behind. He shouts at them. They catch up. They turn aside to play among wildflowers. He threatens them. The girls join him momentarily, then disappear among the tall flowers. He roars a command. They return. The youngest girl begins to cry. The older girl takes her hand. The big man steps off the path and rips a bunch of wildflowers from the high grass. He hands them to the crying girl. She stops crying. He shouts again. They walk away, all three of them, holding mismatched hands.

Or let the story begin just after the turn of the century with the younger brother of my friend Christian Gellinek’s grandfather. Otto Gellinek was an Austrian officer, Christian says, a ladies man -- he died of syphilis – and a fencing instructor who liked to show off by walking on his hands. In 1907, disguised as a painter, Gellinek traveled in Bosnia-Herzegovina to sketch fortifications and make notes for a possible war. In 1908, despite Gellinek’s report arguing against a formal annexation, the Austrians invaded the country. Catholic Croats welcomed the invaders, but Muslims and Orthodox Serbs opposed them bitterly. The battle lasted three months and cost the Austrian Army 5,198 casualties. More importantly, it aroused virulent anti-Austrian sentiment among Serbs, manifest most pointedly in the person of the 19-year-old nationalist who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo to set off the First World War.

Translating Peter Handke’s A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia from German into English, I called my old friend and long-time collaborator Žarko Radaković to ask about the phrase: “Do we need a new Gavrilo Princip?”

What kind of principle is this? I asked. Is it a term from business management?

Gavrilo Princip? Žarko laughed. He was the young assassin.

It’s not easy to begin a new story about the old land of the southern Slavs (Yugo = south). After all, what do I know? A foreigner in the country for a few days. A self-styled translator with no command of this language. A potential verbal assassin.

. . . in Shefko’s translation the old man’s words seemed suspicious, smelled of politics and seditious intent. . . . Shefko, who was obviously putting the worst possible construction on the old man’s exalted phrases and who loved to stick his nose into everything and carry tales even when there was nothing in them, and was ever ready to give or to confirm an evil report. (Ivo Andrić, The Bridge Over the Drina)

Caveat lector.

..............

someone ought to want to read this book; and if that's true, someone ought to publish it.

Depression/Coincidence/Travel

Not long after reading the news of Claude Levy-Strauss' death yesterday, I came to a passage in Ryszard Kapusciniski's book "The Soccer War" that reminded me of how ideas coincide (for me, not in a Jungian sense, but rather in that sense that grows out of lots and lots of reading coupled with coincidence):

"In Lagos, when I was ill, I read through Tristes Tropiques. Claude Levi-Srauss has been staying in the Brazilian jungles, carrying out ethnographic research among the Indian tribes. He is running into difficulties and resistance from the Indians; he is discouraged and exhausted.

Above all, he asks himself questions. Why has he come here? With what hopes or what objectives? Is this a normal occupation like any other profession, the only difference being that the office of laboratory is separated from the practitioner's home by a distance of several thousand kilometres? Or does it result from a more radical choice, which implies that the anthropologist is calling into question the system in which he was born and brought up? It was now nearly five years since I had left France and interrupted my university career. . . . . By whom or by what had I been impelled to disrupt the normal course of my existence? . . . Did my decision express a deep-seated incompatibility with my social setting so that, whatever happened, I would inevitably live in a state of ever greater estrangement from it? Through a remarkable paradox, my life of adventure, instead of opening up a new world to me, had the effect rather of bringing me back to the old one, and the world I had been looking for disintegrated in my grasp. . . . Travelling through regions upon which few eyes had gazed, sharing the existence of communities whose poverty was the price -- paid in the first instance by them -- for my being able to go back thousands of years in time, I was no longer fully aware of either world. What came to me were fleeting visions of the french countryside I had cut myself off from, or snatches of music and poetry which were the most conventional expressions of a culture which I must convince myself I had renounced, if I were not to belie the direction I had given to my life.

Kapuscinski writes about his own depression, about depression that befalls him in the tropics: "the depression torments you and you try to free yourself of it. But the requisite strength is not born in a moment. It takes time to accumulate it in sufficient quantity to overcome the depression. You drink beer and wait for that blessed moment. . . . Describe other behaviour from periods of depression. Physiological changes in chronic states: the slumber of cortical cells, the numbness in the fingertips, the loss of sensitivity to colours and the general dulling of vision, the transient loss of hearing. There would be a lot to say."

And, as I experience every year at about this time of severely shortened days, depression isn't only a tropical event. I fight it with exercise and diet and light and, of course I drink beer and wait for that blessed moment. And I'm tormented by the culture I left behind even as I came back, and I'm haunted by the PBS interviewer who asked me about academic freedom at BYU and commented: "Princeton, Vanderbilt, BYU, UVSC -- I've never seen an academic career in such precipitous decline!" And I answered then, and I answer now in the midst of my doubts and sorrows: "Yes, and every step was carefully chosen."

The Tragic Intensity of Europe

What's it like to be a Foreigner? This question was first raised forcefully in my mind by a film I saw in Germany with my friend Zarko Radakovic. It is called "The Foreigner" and was directed by Amos Poe. I've been thinking about it ever since.

One product of that thinking appeared in November of 2008 as Vampiri / Razumni recnik (Vampires / A Reasonable Dictionary), published in Serbian in Belgrade. The first half is Zarko's, the second mine. We write each in his own language. We converse in German. Zarko grew up in Communist Yugoslavia, I in the Mormon West. We were born to be foreigners in each other's world. My name "Scott" even means "vermin" in his language.

And yet, Zarko and I have been friends for almost thirty years. The friendship has made me into a different person than I would have been otherwise. It has changed me, piece by piece, thought by thought, atom by atom, experience by experience, and so have the years.

The photos at the end of our second book contrast starkly with the photos from our first book: Repetions: Travels into the Landscape of a Novel(ist), published in Belgrade in 1994.

And those photos were preceded by an earlier one, taken by Zarko's wife Zorica in their apartment in Tuebingen. We're reading identical copies of Peter Handke's novel Repetition, which was the catalyst for our journey into the novel's landscape -- what is now Slovenia, but at that time still part of Yugoslavia.

Things change, and in those changes we make our lives.

About the time our second book appeared, Zarko also edited a remarkable text in Germany, an edition of Schreibheft: Zeitschrift fuer Literature, a German literary magazine. Along with Austrian writer Peter Handke, Zarko produced a volume of literature from Serbia, translated into German and titled “The Tragic Intensity of Europe.”

This morning I reread some of the stories, several of the essays. I don't read Serbian, so this volume is a precious window into Zarko's world, into the intellectual and artistic universe made up of writers he knows whose world has so radically changed over a decade and a half -- the time between our books, our photos.

Zarko's essay “View from Zemun”

 begins with these lines:

Three decades have passed since I left the Balkans. The place from which I emigrated at the end of the Seventies was called Yugoslavia. Tito was still in power.

Settled in Germany, I immediately began to preserve my Yugoslavian past: driven by “homesickness” and by the almost animal need to return repeatedly – but never for long.

            If I had worries of any kind in the first years of emigration, they usually had to do with the uncertain success of a sports team. Never could I have imagined the destruction that would begin in the early Nineties, for I grew up with the good-natured ignorance that assumed that this country would never fall apart.

Zarko's essay is about the Serbian writer Igor Marojevic, a younger writer who fled the chaos of civil war to live in Barcelona, but returned to Serbia after four years. “Why didn’t you stay in Barcelona?” Zarko asks him. “I was afraid I would forget the language, he said – an answer only a writer can give.”

            Those are the words that remain from the conversation with Igo Marojevic in a dark Belgrade café, smoking cigarettes, drinking black coffee, visualizing with no illusions; in a café with a view in the direction of the Danube and Zemun, the place where Marojevic has lived since returning from emigration, the place I have left, because I remain an emigrant.

Because, Zarko might as well have said, because I have forgotten my language. Because I am not a writer. 

Although that is implied, with all its tragic implications, it's not true. Zarko lives in his language, the language that used to be Serbo-Croatian and that has become Serbian. He writes in it, book after book: Pogled, Knifer, Emigracija, Tuebingen, Ponavljanje, and Vampiri. He translates into it: a dozen important and sometimes big books by Peter Handke. 

And he returns to his country often, although he doesn't stay long. His last visit, with his partner Anne, he explained in a postcard, was for the sake of "Sophie." He meant, of course, his grandaughter. And he meant, I'm certain, for the sake of wisdom, of language, of self.

The Schreibheft issue contains any number of tragically intense stories, stories of emigrants become foreigners. One, by Dragan Aleksic, will have to stand for the rest:

The Heart Full of Rain

When I was a young man, I wrote a book whose hero says at one point: I want to go anywhere, I want to be silent, I don't want anyone to know anything about me. There, far away, I will cry and have only a single wish: to return. 

Twenty years later, at a mature age, as an emigrant to America, driven to windy Ohio, I listen in the evenings to my small sons who, before falling asleep, cry for our old house and our city. Later, sleeping, they smile and speak -- in English.

I am silent, with no connection to my fate.

I feel nothing.

I grieve for no thing.

I call nothing into memory.

I am not like the hero of my first novel.

I do not cry.

I do not want to return.

. . . But my heart is full of rain.

(2007, English translation mine, from the German of Mirjana and Klaus Wittmann)  

Equinoctial Thoughts

It's a little over a week till the autumnal equinox, but the sun is now rising in the notch to the south of the mountain to the east of us, having climbed, since June 21, up and over the mountain from the notch on its northern end, and with the storm blowing in today, the sky is dark and the windchimes busy.

Yesterday, cleaning up a pit I had lined with douglas fir posts left over from building our house, I decided to stand them in a line marking the summer solstice. If you look along the posts in this photo, you can locate the spot on Lake Mountain where the sun quits moving north, stands still for an instant (sol-stice), and then moves south for the winter.

Why does that matter to me? I suppose it matters for the same reason it mattered to everyone who has marked the solstice, whether through standing stones, marks inside rock formations, or whatever means. We are affected by movements of the sun. Short days mean, for me, a return to more depressive moods. I compensate for that, at best, with thoughts of backcountry skiing.

The wind will blow my posts over, balanced on their ends as they are, the seasons will progress as they always have, and I, now in my 60th year, will follow the seasons as long as I can and then follow the posts.

Following up, Comparing dinners

Our dinner tonight was from the Bombay House, leftovers from Friday's party for Integrated Studies faculty and staff. This guy was browsing on oak leaves at the same time. I would have invited him in to sample the IPA I was quaffing, but thought that the invitation might spoil the moment.

Fawning around

Woke up this morning to see quick movements outside. Fawns chasing one another through the oakbrush, bounding, darting, whirling around their more serious mothers. Four does, six fawns. Two fawns left their playmates and headed (literally) into their mother, butting her udder for some liquid breakfast. One of their little friends, whose mother was, perhaps, on a quicker weaning program, nosed around the activity, hoping for a sip too, but of course the doe would have none of that. She started to lead the whole bunch across the street into a denser stand of brush, but was turned back by a woman walking her little black dog and grey goat. (I'm not making this up.) At that point I got this photo (click for a larger view):

A few minutes later, on the other side of the house, Lyn pointed out this buck, browsing through the meadow.

[enhanced just hours later by Don LaVange, using whatever magic he uses]

And finally, on the lower deck, we found proof of the desirability of our full, bushy sweet basil, its leaves almost ready for a fine weekend pesto, but now making at least one of those fawns or does or bucks happy this fine morning.