Pale Freedom
the concluding essay of the collection Pale Freedom (Ljubljana, 2018)
winner of the Marjan Rožanc Best Book of Essays Award
translated and revised by the author
2015
I am in Ventspils, Latvia, on a literary residency. I should be writing, but I have fallen in love too hard. My head is feverish, my collection of short stories is coming out any day now, and I can’t stop obsessively reading the comments under news articles on the refugee crisis. The hatred pouring out of people is steeping my body in despair.
I have brought with me three books on the philosophy of death and the effects of terror on contemporary societies. I walk the beaches of the Baltic Sea and look for pieces of amber, but I do not find any. I am beginning to understand that hatred is the echo of fear and anxiety. People are not inherently evil; they just react aggressively to any event that punctures the shield of a world they understand as their own.
I am far from the world I understand as my own – the Russian border is a few hundred kilometers to the east – and I go for a run every day, but it does little for my wellbeing; it just heightens my awareness, while the sauna wraps my head in fog. I sleep little and eat poorly; I know I should stop reading what I am reading: The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, The Worm at the Core, and After 9/11: The Psychology of Terror, both by Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski, along with thousands of comments of pure, unbridled hate from people in the comfort of their homes who cannot stand the long lines of people fleeing war roaming through their towns.
But I do not look away, and I do not put down the books, even if each paragraph pushes me closer to the edge. Maybe I am, on some level, enjoying the sheer pressure of the experience; maybe I understand this as some sort of a test. Even now, as I write this, I can feel a dark slit opening in my mind, trying to absorb all my attention and drag me back to that unbearable state. Because I passed the test, I can now stare at the opening with a detached, clinical attitude and calmly close it when I grow bored of its nihilistic melody.
I think what saved me back then was the pure selfishness of being in love. Even with my image of the world in free fall, and despite the most powerful insight into the ultimate nothingness of all human striving, a special string in my heart, unbothered, keeps plunking out its lust for life. Even if my mind is constantly boiling and I can barely follow the conversations of the people around me, I remain present. I can pay attention to what is going on, and I clearly understand what the barbed wire laid along the Kolpa river on the southern Slovenian border means.
“By reinforcing our mental barriers with a material expression, by erecting literal deadly barriers around the world in which we feel at home, we attempt to safeguard the place wherein the sting of death is allayed by community, continuity, and legacy.”
This is how a society tries to soothe the anxiety of its members, faced with a rupture in the order of things that threatens to expose them to the terror of mortality. By reinforcing our mental barriers with a material expression, by erecting literal deadly barriers around the world in which we feel at home, we attempt to safeguard the place wherein the sting of death is allayed by community, continuity, and legacy.
It is also a panicked response, borne out of fear, thus by definition dangerous. I vehemently disagree with it: there is no space for barbed wire in any vision of the world in which I would feel safe. The razor wire is manufactured in a factory in Riga, Latvia’s capital, and sold to us through Hungarian intermediaries. I am nearby. I am tempted to go there and give them a piece of my mind. Courage fails me, however.
I miss the company of my friends, so we set up a Friday evening Skype session. One of them is in Berlin, I am in Latvia, and two are at home in Ljubljana; each with our own bottle of alcohol (I brought wormwood bitters from home), we sit in front of our screens and are quickly in shape to critically assess the state of the world. Right before alcohol tips us into pure foolishness, the internet begins to flash with terrible news.
It is November, Friday the 13th, 2015. An explosion has gone off at a friendly football match between Germany and France at a stadium in Paris. Another horrific blow to our image of the world, one which keeps growing in intensity throughout the evening as terrorists then attack the crowd of concertgoers in the Bataclan with automatic weapons. From the perspective of the enemy, the timing is perfect.
With the trauma of the financial crisis just behind us, the humanitarian impulse of our societies has already been thoroughly exhausted by the ordeals of austerity, and the explosion of violence now appeared to prove the most hateful voices right. The scary Other should not be helped. Our focus on human rights is misguided. We should lean into the worst parts of ourselves to protect the best parts of ourselves, even at the risk of losing the best parts of ourselves in the process.
The fever in my head is rising, the sips of wormwood bitters do not help. The collapse of the liberal social order – not due to objective factors, but because of the emotional pressure these events exert on the story that society tells about itself – feels possible.
“We should lean into the worst parts of ourselves to protect the best parts of ourselves, even at the risk of losing the best parts of ourselves in the process.”
And yet I still find it somewhat strange that just a few years ago western societies were loudly protesting the unfairness of the ramshackle, bailed out financial system, honing their knowledge of the economy, expressing loud solidarity with the weakest in the crisis, and strengthening the left, only to suddenly become so helpless against the wave of xenophobia and the urge for authoritarian protection. As if all the energy spent on challenging the disgraced status quo was merely setting the terrain for the next autocrat who will know how to use an iron fist to calm the anxieties of people facing an uncertain future.
I walk along the embankment stacked with dark concrete slabs that defend the port against the wide-open sea. There is a lighthouse in front of me, the sun is high up in the sky, and a strong wind is lashing my eyes with grains of sand and a drizzle of salty water drops. I convince myself that my world is not going to collapse, but something infinitely hollow is churning beneath my lungs. Someone should notify the people who have the most interest in keeping our world turning that, should they be unable, incapable, or unwilling to defend a free and open society, a revolution from the right is not our only option.
2014
A year and a half before visiting Latvia, I am in Amsterdam, where a new king is being crowned. The Netherlands have long been famous for a very liberal, open, and tolerant society, and yet they are a constitutional monarchy with a royal family. Maybe it is precisely the robust tradition of symbolic forms – however silly the contemporary pragmatist finds them – that provides the safe harbor a society needs to calmly afford its members same-sex marriage, soft drugs, a regulated sex work market, and a relaxed attitude towards other cultures (including all subcultures). It could be that these liberties are a consequence of colonial history and trade contacts with the world, or that they spring from the Protestant faith and its work ethic, which leaves people no time to get agitated over cultural differences.
Whatever it may be, King's Day in Amsterdam is lively. People dress in orange, the color of the royal family, and spend the entire day dancing in the streets and along the canals to the sounds of electronic music, tipsy, smiling, and seemingly happy. This is my second time here for this celebration; the first time was exactly a decade ago, when I was still in high school, and the holiday was a Queen's Day. April 30th, 2004. The next day, May 1st, when I woke up slightly hungover in a tent in the Vliegenbos camp, the locals and I were suddenly members of the same community. Overnight, Slovenia had entered the European Union.
Was it truly too much to expect that Slovenia would learn something from tolerant societies during its ten years in the European Union? Slovenians do not enjoy a particularly strong tradition of symbolic forms besides our language, which was, incidentally, formalized by our Protestants (who were then exiled or killed for their troubles) and elevated to its highest forms by our poets and writers (most of whom were left to starve).
We changed so many systems in our history (Holy Roman Empire; Habsburg Empire; Illyrian Provinces; Austro-Hungary; State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs; Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes; Kingdom of Yugoslavia; Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia; and now the Republic of Slovenia), the changes left us with many wounds and little truly universal heritage, while the economic and political transition from socialism to capitalism has caused a lot of ill will and – after securing our objectives by entering the EU and NATO – given us no common project to carry into the future.
In such circumstances, liberalism serves only as an added source of confusion, offering an easy excuse for any political or economic agent to pull things in their own direction, regardless of the interests of the broader community; some resolutely stick to a selective historical memory, with blind spots for all the problems Slovenes experienced in Yugoslavia, counting on the memory of the heroic struggles of our grandfathers to be enough to successfully navigate the global economy (insofar as they are not cynically exploiting them merely to hold onto power), while others, full of historical and political grievances, practically compete to find a more horrific scenario to dissolve the fabric of society in the present.
“In such circumstances, liberalism serves only as an added source of confusion, offering an easy excuse for any political or economic agent to pull things in their own direction, regardless of the interests of the broader community.”
But this is only about our leaders. Otherwise, we have a razor-sharp language capable of fully expressing the world and the human within it; we have a system of public healthcare and public education that, despite internal problems, displays a clear commitment by the citizens to the community (and we will only renounce them when we no longer need that commitment); and we have a whole slew of confident, ambitious, and successful people in all areas of human activity, meaning we have absolutely no reason to fear the future, even if we do not have someone to rule over us with an iron fist.
After successfully completing another visit to Amsterdam with my friends, we are on our way home. We left early in the morning, and we are driving towards Strasbourg, where I will jump on a train for Paris to attend my cousin's wedding in Versailles. Because just two of us in the car have a driver’s license, I am driving the first part, and he will drive them the rest of the way home. After a good five hours on the road, we are almost at our destination, approaching the border near the German town of Kandel. The cars ahead of us suddenly slow down. A police checkpoint.
“Where are you coming from?” an older German police officer asks me. I no longer have the energy to lie to him, even though I somehow suspect it might be useful. “From Amsterdam.” “Ah. Get out of the car, please.” My friend, a lawyer, sighs beside me. I obey. “Put your arms out straight in front of you.” They are shaking. “Why are they shaking?” “I’ve been driving for five hours, I am getting tired.” “Did you drink anything? Smoke anything?” “I drive sober.” “Please urinate into this plastic cup.”
I raise my eyebrows and look at my friend, who looks somewhat angry but doesn't know enough German law to kick up a fuss. I am not alone in my misfortune – quite a few drivers are marching into the bushes along the road. When I return, the officer dips some sort of litmus paper into the cup, and I hold my breath. “There we go, positive for marijuana.” “Well, sir, I was in Amsterdam, May 1st and the king's coronation, I might have taken a drag or two and it is still in my system, but I am one hundred percent driving sober.”
We are arguing, and more and more policemen gather around us. We agree to call a doctor to take my blood, which can apparently show exactly when I smoked. I agree. The doctor’s name is Dieter, he is a good thirty years old, and he understands my problem. First, we do a motor skills test so he can write down his expert opinion on whether I am driving under the influence. We speak in English, and I tell him I find it foolish that in one EU country you can put something into your body that you are then not allowed to have in your body in another EU country. “Keep a stiff upper lip,” he tells me, and this is my first time hearing this British idiom, “it happens. Everything will be all right.” “I would have to be a massive lunatic to drive on the autobahn while high.” “I believe you,” he tells me, and this expression of trust completely disarms me. I drop my shoulders and calmly sit down in the police van, where Dieter wraps a plastic tourniquet around my arm, takes a needle, and pierces my skin.
Watching the blood flow into the ampoule, I am washed over by a terrifying discomfort. The surface has been punctured, and strange things are rushing to the top. The illusion of a rational present recedes, and suddenly I am no longer a tourist on a leisurely stroll through Europe who just had some bad luck with the cops; instead, I am a controlled, regulated thing in the grip of a foreign authority, an unfree creature moving to the dictates of some mechanism. My body is no longer my own; I am moving my hands on command, handing over my excretions, spinning in circles, and standing on one leg – and now they are even taking my blood – and to top it all off, it is the Germans.
Against my will, I think of the horrifying description of the medical examination on a train car in Ljubljana during the Second World War from Lojze Kovačič’s novel Newcomers. The Nazis measuring skulls, counting teeth, carefully inspecting the skin for any signs of racial impurity. History, with all its allusions, is driving me into a state of panic, and even though I do not show it, Dieter’s needle wounded me. I am a hysteric, I know, but the experience clearly showed me the difference between the surface and what hides beneath it.
How little it takes to puncture the universally understood everyday reality, and how heavy reality proves to be once we lose the shield of complacency. I can more easily understand the anxiety of locals when refugees cross their borders, and I can more easily understand why so many deaths in traffic accidents barely move us, while a single terrorist attack makes entire societies lose their minds. Something is commonplace; something else is not.
But by that same logic, I have that much more compassion for someone whose house is destroyed by war – I cannot imagine a harsher intrusion into the everyday, nor a heavier reality than being on the run, out in the open, assaulted by the sea and the sun, the wind and the rain, where people in unknown lands view you merely as a threat or treat you as a thing. And when they tell me to ‘keep a stiff upper lip’, does that mean I should just not care about people who are suffering? If I ever become entirely indifferent to people fleeing war, I will likely be even more indifferent to people who are thrown into a panic by the rapid pace of change in the world.
“Watching the blood flow into the ampoule, I am washed over by a terrifying discomfort. The surface has been punctured, and strange things are rushing to the top.”
We spend the night in a parking lot in the no-man’s-land between Germany and France. Because my friend with the license refused to take the test, they took our key, and out of solidarity with my friends – having caused this mess for them, as I took them on the border route – I forgo my attendance at the wedding in Versailles. We wait for my friend’s sister and her boyfriend, who have set off from Slovenia with the spare key. We are in the heart of Europe. Heavy rain pours down.
2017
I remember this night with a smile when, almost exactly three years later, I am driving past Kandel toward Brussels for a literary residency at Passa Porta. It is May 1st, the roads are almost empty, and there is no sign of any internal Schengen border controls – though there are a few very young soldiers standing at the Austrian border crossing past the Karavanke tunnel, looking as though they are mostly there for show. That I noticed they were young surprises me – I am growing old. The changing of the guard. In six months, Kurz will claim victory in the Austrian elections.
I cross the Rhine exactly five minutes past six pm and let out a joyful shout. The European Union Prize for Literature did admittedly put me in a somewhat awkward position as an author – ever since receiving it, I defend the European Union much less fiercely than I otherwise would, as I do not want to give the impression of being, well, bought off. I am not bought, but I have crisscrossed enough of Europe in my life that I do not entirely understand what alternative to a European perspective Slovenian society is even supposed to have.
The political culture – which also caused Brexit – where people complain about "Brussels" due to the failures of domestic politics, is terrible; we absolve our politicians of responsibility and ascribe more power to a mythical "Brussels" than it actually possesses. If anyone happens to be following the troubles British politics faces on the global stage – and they are still the fifth largest economy in the world – they can imagine just how interesting Slovenia would be to anyone if it left the Union (perhaps only for some foreign military port, but who in their right mind would want something like that).
Our modern reality is defined by capital far more than by politics – and even though the European institutions did not prove to be a good ally to the people during the global financial crisis, in normal times they are the only ones left with the power to bare their teeth at corporations. Why else would they be such a thorn in the side of mega-capital representatives? And even in the event of a widespread rebellion against capitalism: isn't Europe full of working-class people, or do only those nations that once lived in socialism have workers today?
If, however, capitalism plans to stick with us for the next few decades, Slovenian society can comfortably afford a pragmatic view – the German baby-boomer generation, which has saved so much its entire life that Europe sometimes barely breathes, is retiring, and unless they plan to take absolutely everything with them to the grave, things here will remain decent enough for a while longer.
“Despite my reluctance to appear pro something that graced my book with an award, I really do not think that Slovenian society has any alternative to a European perspective.”
This is my narrative about the European surface. We know how easy it is to puncture it, how many unique destinies hide beneath it, how complex the history of European nations is, and we can be certain that we have not seen the last of the blows to the narrative that reassures us everything is perfectly fine.
Because Brussels, the city I am driving into, is damn hot. Just a good month ago, a few days after the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, British Prime Minister Theresa May delivered the United Kingdom’s demand to leave the European Union to the European Council. The second round of elections is brewing in France, where the fiercely Euroskeptic Marine Le Pen and newcomer Emmanuel Macron will clash. The world is still regaining its footing after the election of Donald Trump in the United States of America, who is simultaneously fighting off accusations of Russian help in his election campaign while none too subtly threatening all traditional American allies that the US has struck bad deals with them – including NATO, which will host all member state leaders, Trump included, at its 28th alliance summit in Brussels on May 25th.
And to be honest, I am quite hot myself. Half a year ago, in November, I was visiting New York and due to the dire state of mind in the city got the feeling that Hillary Clinton might not win the election, so I performed a vainglorious artistic action in accordance with my then current understanding of the world. The perceived reaction to it, in tune with the reaction to the actual election result, severely and painstakingly rearranged my understanding.
I am on the road in a psychological state that I imagine mirrors the modern West – a thin surface of self-confidence with screaming chaos underneath. I am angry because my world has once again wished for an iron fist, and I worry where all of this is leading. I know that if the moment has truly come for the West to go to pieces, I will be sitting in the front row.
“I performed a vainglorious artistic action in accordance with my then current understanding of the world. The perceived reaction to it, in tune with the reaction to the actual election result, severely and painstakingly rearranged my understanding.”
When I park my car at the family friends' house and get on the train, I am greeted on the apartment block next to my stop by a massive, full-wall mural of a man hung by his feet, his head and genitals severed, drenched in blood. Welcome to Brussels.
mural after The Corpses of the DeWitt Brothers - BONOM
The thin surface of self-confidence that still manages to make me look normal to others soon wears down to a stiff upper lip, and in my head, everything begins to sing with meaning. I live in a beautiful apartment belonging to the Belgian literary superstar David Van Reybrouck – who shot to fame with his work on the sordid history of the Belgian Congo – in the Saint-Gilles neighborhood, just a stone’s throw from Molenbeek. A stuffed caiman sits on a shelf. There is a guitar in the guest room. I sleep beneath a whale's rib mounted on the wall, thinking about the monomyth, the ancient structure of heroic tales. I have found myself in the belly of the whale; the time for transformation has arrived. I know again that I should close my eyes, that I should focus on my own path and block out the roaring of the world a little, but the song is too alluring.
It feels as though my surroundings are reacting to me, as though the neighbors are communicating with me by placing things on their windowsills, as though the exact time a neighbor steps out to the window to smoke is significant – the song gets too confusing, so I draw the curtains. The cleaning lady pulls them back open.
I read everything. I read license plates, the writing on people's t-shirts, the text on restaurant ashtrays; I count how many feet are on the floor in the subway; I read the graffiti; I observe how people are dressed; I notice that whenever they step through a doorway, they grab a piece of their clothing – is this some kind of signal? Every speck of matter that crosses my path points to another speck of matter, to a memory or piece of knowledge I possess, to something I once wrote, all while I am being bombarded by this sad capitalism where some demand, some direction you must take, screams at you from every billboard and advertising sign, yet I know they only want my money. For the first time, I truly understand poetry; the cursed poets, les poètes maudits, were right – the correspondences of the forest of symbols truly exist. If this really is just a mental episode brought on by too much stress and eyes opened too wide, I must say that I would gladly experience it again once I have finally rested; and while this is happening, I am constantly churning through the internet and newspapers to understand where the world is heading and trying somehow, against all my intuition, to decipher my role in it.
“Welcome to Brussels.”
The surface is perforated, and everyone is lost. But we are lost together, and even though a fever grips me every time I lock the front door behind me and step onto the street, I refuse to yield. I explore, follow the silent clues that exist only in my head, and I keep reading – through the fog, the sun, the rain, through the smiles, the invitations, the green cards, the yellow lights, and the red flags, through the threats and the insults, through the encouragements and the disappointments, through the kisses, the slaps, and the shrugs.
I should be writing, but to fortify the surface, to arrange these ruins of energy displaying themselves to me into a common-sense narrative, would require an inhuman effort I cannot muster. I understand why populism works, why it is so tempting to run into the arms of a figure who puts the world back on track with a loud shout, if only for a moment; why people so desperately need the everyday, why we miss traditional hierarchies and clear gender roles, why we cannot survive without states and constitutions, why we cling so desperately to heritage and sports, why we yearn for the boss's command, why the wall seems so appealing – the true, radical freedom of the individual is unbearably demanding. The psychological burden of the state of freedom in modern liberal capitalism – where there are no written social rules outside the legal order, yet under the panopticon of social networks every mistake is exposed and at least ridiculed, if not punished – forces the individual into a paradoxical paralysis. Every move is permitted; every move will be condemned.
But I will not stay still. I will not drown beneath the cracked surface. At the moment, I do not know how to tell a story about a world I would consider good, but I will not listen to the roaring of hatred, I will not wish for a rigidly delineated world, and I will not lend my voice to the demands for someone to silence our fears. I have learned that even in the most extraordinary conditions, all you need to confront the future is a stiff upper lip. Along with some poetry.
Dear Rimbaud,
my dearest Rambo. Now I know why you fell silent. But I have to wonder – did you ever figure out who punished you for adding meaning to the elements? A is … E is … Was it the priests, defending God? Or was it the merchants, defending time? I is … Maybe it was the warriors, defending sacrifice. Their own and those of others – you puny poet, you think the skin is yours to breach? O is … I shudder to think, but was it … you couldn’t have made such a terrifying enemy, I refuse to believe it. U is … was it even punishment? Or were the wide-open seas a blessing, the ship a four leafed clover, the salt drying on your eyelids while you gazed into the tropical sunset a tribute to your journeys within? What then to make of your gangrenous leg? Was it laziness? Or the envy of your compatriots which has turned Marseille into a razor’s cure for homesickness? I would most like to believe it was your cunning, that you – on starlight’s cue – descended below deck and wrote, wrote, wrote the whole world on (the glorious worldwright that you were) and it was not until the icy mistral, so feeble over your oceans, finally caught up with you that you put your poems in an amphora of clay, sealed it with wax (bee’s or baleen’s – are there bees in the tropics?), and dropped it into the deepest blue of the Indian ocean. Should we wait for the divers to bring you back to us? Or would you love us better if we went diving ourselves?