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 about to be published, and I am spending my days reading the comments under the articles on the refugee crisis. All this hatred is twisting my body with despair.
I have three books on the philosophy of death and the effects of terror on contemporary societies with me. I walk the beaches of the Baltic Sea and look for 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 would 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 nothing 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 In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror by Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, along with the thousands of comments of pure, unbridled hate by people who cannot stand the long lines of people roaming through their hometowns in their flight from war.
But I keep looking, and I keep reading, 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 think this is some sort of a test. Even now, as I write this, I can feel a dark slit opening in my mind, trying to engage 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 force of my insight into the ultimate nothingness of all human striving, there is a special string in my heart which, unbothered, keeps plunking with my 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 can clearly understand what it means to lay barbed wire along Kolpa, the river on the southern Slovenian border.
“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. It just so happens that the barbed wire is manufactured in a factory in Riga, Latvia’s capital, and sold to us through Hungarian intermediaries. I am nearby. I could hop on the bus and let them know what I think of this whole affair. Courage fails me.
I miss my friends, so we set up a Friday evening Skype session. One of them is in Berlin, I am in Latvia, two are at home in Ljubljana; we start drinking and we are quickly in shape to critically assess the current state of the world. Right before alcohol tips us into foolishness, the internet begins to flash with terrible news.
It is November, Friday the 13th, 2015. There was an explosion at the friendly exhibition match between Germany and France on a stadium in Paris. Our image of the world endures another horrific blow, one which keeps growing in intensity throughout the evening, as terrorists attack the crowd of concertgoers in 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 bitters do not help. The collapse of the liberal social order – not due to rational, objective assessments of the situation, but because of the emotional and psychological 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, developing new visions for the economy, expressing solidarity with the weakest in the crisis, strengthening the left, and then, seemingly overnight, turned so helpless against the wave of xenophobia and the hysterical demands for authoritarian protection. As if all the energy spent on challenging the disgraced status quo was just setting the terrain for the next autocrat who will promise to calm the anxieties of people facing an uncertain future by brandishing an iron fist.
I walk 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, a strong wind is lashing my eyes with grains of sand and a drizzle of salty water drops. Someone should notify the people who have the most to lose from the collapse of our world that, should they be unable or unwilling to defend a free and open society, we have other options than a revolution from the right.
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 safe harbor of a strong tradition of symbolic forms – however silly the contemporary pragmatist finds them – that allows society to then calmly afford its members same sex marriage, soft drugs, a regulated sex market, and a relaxed attitude towards other cultures and subcultures. It could be that the liberties are a consequence of colonial history and trade contacts with the world, or that they spring from the protestant faith and its insistence on work, which leaves people no time to complain about how others lead their lives.
Whatever it may be, a Kingsday in Amsterdam is a feast. People dress in orange, the color of the royal family, and spend the day dancing in the streets and along the channels to the sounds of electronic music, drunk and high, in good spirits, seemingly happy. This is my second time celebrating a royal’s birthday in Amsterdam, the first time was exactly a decade ago, on the 30th of April 2004, when the Dutch still had a queen. The next day, May 1st, 2004, when I woke up in the Vliegenbos camp with a slight hangover, the Dutch and I were suddenly members of the same community. Overnight, Slovenia has entered the European Union.
Was it too much to expect that Slovenia would learn something from the tolerant societies in the decade of being a part of the EU? 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 them 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.
Under 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, against the interests of the broader community. Some are resolutely sticking with a selective reading of history, with blind spots for all the problems Slovenes experienced in Yugoslavia, thinking that the memory of the heroic struggles of our grandparents will be enough for a successful navigation of the global economy (so far as they are not cynically exploiting them merely to hold onto power), and some are, full of historical and political grievances, almost competing with each other to find a more horrific scenario to dissolve the fabric of society in the present.
“Under 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, against the interests of the broader community.”
So, no, our political elites do not inspire confidence in the future. And yet, we also 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 higher education that, despite internal problems, display a clear commitment of the citizens to the community, and we have an impressive number of confident, ambitious, and successful people in all areas of human activity. We should have no cause to fear the future, and absolutely no reason to entrust our hopes for it to an autocrat.
After the revelry of the coronation, and a few hazy days in the city, my friends and I are on our way back. We left in the early morning, and we are driving towards Strasbourg, where I will jump on the train for Paris and visit Versailles where my cousin is getting married. There are only two of us in the car with a driver’s license, so I am driving to Strasbourg, and he will drive them the rest of the way home. After five hours on the road we are approaching the French border, hoping to cross it near the German town of Kandel. The cars suddenly slow down. There is a police checkpoint in front of us.
“Where are you coming from?” an older German police officer asks me.
I no longer have the energy to lie, even though I suspect it might be useful.
“From Amsterdam.”
“Oh. Get out of the car, please.”
My friend, a lawyer, sighs. I obey.
“Put your hands straight in front of you.”
My hands are shaking.
“Why are your hands shaking?”
“I’ve been driving for five hours, I am tired.”
“Did you drink? Did you smoke?”
“I always drive sober.”
“Pee in this plastic cup, please.”
I raise my brows, look at my friend who seems a bit angry, but does not know enough German law to help me. I am not alone in my misfortune – many drivers are walking into the bushes along the road. As I come back, the officer dips a strip of paper into the cup, and I hold my breath.
“There you go, positive on marijuana.”
“Well, okay, officer, I was in Amsterdam, May 1st and the coronation, I might have done a drag or two and it is still in the system, but I am one hundred percent driving sober.”
We are arguing and there are more and more policemen around us. We agree to call the doctor who will take my blood, which can apparently show whether I am driving under the influence. I agree. The doctor’s name is Dieter, he is about thirty years old, and he understands my problem. First, we do a test of motor skills, so he can write down his expert opinion on my state. We speak in English and I tell him I find it really strange that in one country of the EU you can put something into your body which you are then not allowed to have in your body in another country of the EU.
“Keep a stiff upper lip,” he tells me, and this is my first time hearing this British phrase, “it happens. Everything is going to be all right.”
“I would have to be insane to drive the autobahn while high.”
“I believe you,” he tells me, and this expression of trust completely disarms me. I drop my shoulders and sit down into the police van, where Dieter wraps a plastic band around my arm, takes a needle and pierces my skin.
Watching blood flow into the ampule, I am suddenly awash in a terrifying discomfort. The surface has been punctured, and strange things are flowing out. The illusion of a rational present is dispelled and suddenly I am no longer a tourist on an easy journey through Europe who just happened to have some bad luck with the cops, I am instead a controlled, regulated thing in the grips of a foreign power, an unfree creature moving to the dictate of a machine, I no longer possess my own body, I am lifting my hands under orders, offering my excretions to the uniforms, and now they are even taking my blood – and just to top it all it’s the Germans.
Against my will I think of the horrifying description of the medical examination on a train car during the Second World War in Ljubljana from 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 laid out to me the difference between the surface and what lies beneath.
How little it takes to puncture the everyday, and how heavy reality proves to be, once we lose the shield of complacency. It is easier for me to understand the anxiety of the locals as refugees cross the borders, and it is easier for me to understand why even so many deaths in traffic accidents hardly unsettle us, while a single terrorist attack causes entire societies to lose their minds. Something is considered a normal part of our world, something else is considered an abnormal intrusion from the realms where we have no standing.
But for the same reasons I have even more compassion for someone whose house was destroyed by war. What worse type of an incursion into the everyday can you imagine? What worse reality than one on the run, out in the open, assailed by the sea and the sun, wind and the rain, where in unknown lands people see you as a threat and treat you as some type of thing. And when they tell me to ‘keep a stiff upper lip’, does this mean I should not care about people who are suffering? If I will ever not care about people fleeing war, I will most likely care even less about people who are brought into a state of panic by the rate of change in the world.
“Watching blood flow into the ampule, I am suddenly awash in a terrifying discomfort. The surface has been punctured, and strange things are flowing out.”
We spend the night on a parking lot in the no man’s land between Germany and France. Because my friend with the driver’s license refused to take the test, they took our keys, and I made the hard choice to skip the wedding, not to leave my friends stranded. We are waiting for the friend’s sister and her boyfriend, who took off from Slovenia with the spare key. We are in the heart of Europe. It rains heavily all night.
2017
I remember this with a smile when, almost exactly three years later, I am driving past Kandel towards Brussels to a literary residency at Passa Porta. It is May 1st, the roads are almost empty, there is no sign of internal Schengen border controls. There were a few very young soldiers standing around at the Slovenian-Austrian border, but they looked like more for show. That I noticed their age surprises me – I am growing old. The changing of the guard. In six months, the Austrian elections will be won by Kurz.
I cross the Rheine five minutes past six and give out an enthusiastic shout. The European Union Prize for Literature did put me in a slightly awkward position as an author – ever since receiving it, I have not been as vocal in my defense of the Union as I would have been otherwise. Not just a hysteric, but a neurotic as well. 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.
The political culture of blaming “Brussels” over the calamities of domestic politics – which also brought us Brexit – is misguided; we absolve our politicians of responsibility and ascribe more power to a mythical “Brussels” than the European institutions really have. Watching the current troubles of British politics on the global stage – they are still the world’s fifth largest economy, mind you – we can very well imagine how interested anyone would be in Slovenia in the case of its exit (we could sell our port to a foreign military, oh happy future!).
Our reality is to a much greater degree defined by capital than by politics – and even though during the financial crisis the European institutions placed the demands of the bean counters ahead of the needs of the people, they remain one of the few remaining institutions in the world that have the power to stand up to global corporations. Why would the representatives of mega-capital find them so annoying otherwise? And even if there is a chance that capitalism will in the end succumb to its internal contradictions, would it not be better to build a new future together with the other European nations, and not hold an eternal grudge against their bourgeoisies that enjoyed so much history to develop?
But should capitalism stay with us for the next few decades, Slovenian society can afford to be pragmatic. As the baby boomer generation – the main purveyors of austerity and (especially the Germans) fanatical savers – retires, their broken piggy banks should maintain the living standard of the periphery for another decade or two, at least.
“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 of the European surface. I know how easy it is to puncture it, how many unique fates are hidden underneath, I know the complexity of the history of European nations, and we can be certain that we have not seen the last of the events that will make us question our fundamental ideas and visions on how our world, our societies, our lives are supposed to be.
And the truth is that Brussels, the city where I am headed, is very hot this spring of 2017. Not even a month ago, a few days after the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the British Prime Minister Theresa May notified the European Council of the United Kingdom’s demand to leave the European Union. In a week or so we will see the second round of the elections in France, fought by the coarsely Euroskeptic Marine Le Pen and the liberal newcomer Emmanuel Macron. The world is still reeling after the election of Donald Trump for the President of the United States of America, and he is battling the charges that the Russians helped secure his election, while quite openly threatening all traditional American allies that the USA had made bad deals with them, a charge laid also at NATO, which will host the leaders of the member countries – Trump included – at the alliance summit in Brussels at the end of the month.
I am also under the impression that I might be very hot as well. 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.
This process is still under way while I am in the car, speeding across Europe. My mental state is what I imagine the state of the West to be – a confident surface, thinly spread over the raging of chaos. I am angry that my world keeps throwing its hands up at the complexity and going for the simple and dangerous choices, and I am worried where all this irresponsibility is leading us. If the West should collapse, I will be seated 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.”
I park my car at a family friend’s house and take the train to the city. Right before my stop, I look out the window, where I am greeted by a ten-story mural on the side of an apartment building, depicting a person hung by their feet, disemboweled, with a mutilated head and cut off genitals, drenched in blood. Welcome to Brussels.
mural after The Corpses of the DeWitt Brothers - BONOM
The thin surface of confidence that still manages to convince people I am normal is soon abraded to a stiff upper lip, and in my mind all things begin to sing with meaning. I am living in a beautiful apartment of the Belgian literary superstar David van Reybrouck, who became famous with his magisterial monograph on the sordid history of the Belgian Congo, in the neighborhood Saint-Gilles, a stone’s throw from Molenbeek. There is a stuffed cayman on a shelf. There is a guitar in the guest room. I sleep under the rib of a whale, attached to the wall, and I am thinking about the monomyth, the ancient structure of heroic tales. I have found myself in the belly of the whale. The time of transformation is upon us. I am once again aware I should close my eyes, that I should focus on my own path, ignore the noise of the world at least for a while, but the song is simply too attractive.
It seems to me that my environment is responding to me, that the neighbors communicate with me by placing things on the windowsills, that the precise hour when the neighbor heads out to the balcony for a smoke is somehow important – the song becomes too confusing, so I draw the curtains. The cleaning lady pulls them back apart.
I read everything. I read the license plates, the signs on people’s shirts, the signs on the ashtrays in restaurants, I count how many feet are touching the floor on the subway, I read the graffiti, I observe how people are dressed, I notice that they touch a piece of their clothing whenever they walk through an archway – is this some kind of a signal? Every speck of matter that crosses my way is pointing to another speck of matter, to a memory or a piece of knowledge I possess, to something I have written, and all the while I am under assault by this miserable capitalism, with its demands and signposts screaming at you from the billboards, well aware that all they want is my money, and 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, and if this is all just a mental episode brought on by too much stress and eyes opened too wide, I cannot say I would mind experiencing it again sometime in the future, if I could only get some rest beforehand, and through all of this I am also constantly churning the entire internet and the newspapers in the attempt to understand where this world is going and how to, against all my intuition, glimpse my own role within it.
“Welcome to Brussels.”
The surface is punctured – is perforated – and everyone is lost. But we are lost together and even if fever grips me whenever I lock the apartment doors behind me and head to the street, I refuse to give in. I explore, follow the silent clues that only exist in my head, and I read onwards, through the fog, sun, rain, through the smiles, invitations, green cards, yellow lights and red flags, through the threats and insults, through encouragements and disappointments, through kisses, slaps, and ambivalent shrugs.
I should be writing, but to reinforce the surface, to construct a tale of common sense out of these ruins of energy I am exposed to, would require an inhuman effort, something I cannot muster – I understand why populism works, why it is so attractive to run into the arms of a figure who will shout the world down to a piece of manageable matter for a moment, why people so desperately need the everyday, why we miss traditional hierarchies, clear gender roles, why we cannot do without states and constitutions, why we are so adamant about heritage and sport, why we long for the order of a boss, for the security of a wall …
The real, radical freedom of the individual is almost unbearably difficult. The psychological burden of the state of freedom in contemporary liberal capitalism – where there are no written societal rules beyond the rules of law, but where in the panopticon of society, facilitated by surveillance, capitalist programming, and social media, anything can appear to be a rule, any expression can be designated as a mistake, subject to ridicule and reproach, to punishment or consequence – puts the individual into a paradoxical situation. Any action is allowed; any action will be condemned.
But I cannot stay still. I will not drown under the perforated surface. I cannot currently speak about a world that I would consider good, but I will not listen to the howls of hatred, I will not wish for a world with impenetrable borders between people, I will not add my own voice to the demands for someone big and strong and cruel to quell our fears. I have learned that to fight towards the future, even in the most unusual circumstances, all you need is a stiff upper lip. And a bit of 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?