Building materials

On a rather empty winter afternoon, I went for a walk with my dad in the city centre. The route was quite unusual for us as we normally headed for the woods. This time we visited a Sunday town free from the hustle and bustle, during the general Covid lockdown. When we stopped at one of the main city bridges that I used to cross every day, to get a view of my workplace, I pointed my finger at the still flow of the river, the mist, the silence. ‘How beautiful,’ I said to him, but received no reply. When I turned to my pensive father, I noticed that he was looking away, intently observing something. I looked around. ‘Of course, what else could he be watching’, I muttered to myself as I saw what he was focusing on. Dad was admiring a construction site. ‘I’ll just go and see who the foreman is’, he said, and in the next moment he was already studying the building’s interior, the pipes and other organs of the house, the concrete, the machinery, the levers and ropes forcing their way out like the tubes during an open-heart surgery. He, too, was looking at his life, the past of a builder whose activity had come to a halt due to the force of the circumstances. ‘It’s going to be a nice renovation’, he concluded after the round, before we moved on. This snippet of life taught me a lot about beauty.

I remember from my early childhood that my father’s greatest wish was to finish his own house. He spent his whole life building other people’s houses so that one day he could build his own. He laid the foundations of his house in his native town, where he spent his childhood and early youth. We all believed in his plan, even if it was very slow to materialise. We hoped his wish would come true and he would return home one day. His wish resonated in my mind as I read Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. For Bachelard, his house was his refuge, his own bit of the world. In the house, the author says, there is the memory of the first home, the hope of a future home, and a sense of safety. It is not only made up of geometry, but of our imagination, our ability to evoke memories and dream in it. Sometimes, when I found my father caught between hopes and disappointing reality, I wondered, like Georgi Gospodinov, whether this home he was looking for was not just childhood from which we all had been banished forever, and to which, in fact, it was never possible to return.

This thought also occurred to me during our lockdown walk, when I was working on the idea for my first book, which progressed at the same slow pace, standing still like the outside world and my father’s construction. He had a habit of asking me now and then how the writing was going, even though he had never read my texts. ‘It’s pure torture’, I replied, half-jokingly, at which he just waved his hand. ‘You have to keep at it’, he said calmly, and I was never sure whether he was trying to encourage me or had nothing else to say. ‘Soon the house will be finished’, I replied. We walked the rest of the way home in silence.

When I’m really struggling to write, I remember Rilke’s wisdom from Letters to a Young Poet: ‘Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer.’ And then I give up and start reading others, which has helped me discover poets such as Louise Glück, Wisława Szymborska, Veronika Dintinjana, Ana Pepelnik, Vitomirka Trebovac, Marija Andrijašević and many others. But at the same time my notes start to swell with all sorts of trifles and trivialities, which I write down with no particular intention in mind, but certainly not out of fear that I might not be a proper poet, nope. But actually in poetry, as in life, I search for moments like this: a street smelling of baklava, a two-year-old S. who takes my face between her tiny hands and laughingly says ‘you are a hamster’; the Catalan grandfather who walks through the flea market with a gilded mirror in the shape of the sun in one hand and a bag full of artichokes in the other; the museum guards who, instead of supervising the visitors, open the front door wide and bathe in the sun... That’s why it’s sometimes funny and strange to me when some people feel uncomfortable when they find out that I write poetry. The range of their reactions is wide: ‘Oh that so nice, do you write in verse like Prešeren? [insert a highly regarded national poet of your choice]; when will you start writing prose, perhaps a novel is next; I mean, poetry is fine, but it’s not for me, it’s so difficult; I rarely understand any of it.’

The last sentence takes me by surprise over and over again. Perhaps such statements are the sad abandoned construction pits of the school system, the transmission of the belief that poetry is a skeletal museum artefact neatly packaged in complicated verse structures. Perhaps this is the result of learning stylistic figures like mathematical formulae without first confronting what gave rise to a text and the feeling it evokes in us as a result, a memory of a particular life situation, a person or simply a moment, an emotion we ourselves were unable to express. Perhaps it’s a matter of learning to look at plans and project sketches rather than at a space that can be transformed into many things, as Bachelard says, including a sunlit living room, a grandmother’s porch or an inner courtyard from a trip that stayed in our mind. In fact, we often don’t even need to read a poem to know what poetry is. It concerns each one of us, it rises above poems, cycles or books, it is found when we turn away from what someone is persistently pointing a finger at (like I did at the river and mist during that lockdown walk with my father), and we notice a sight that only our eyes can see. Everyone thinks fondly of a construction site of their own. And every good poem, in its own mysterious way, speaks of it.

Tarkovsky, in his book Sculpting in Time, reflected on this topic in his own way. I still remember the evening at the Slovenian Cinematheque long ago when I saw his film Stalker for the first time. After the screening, I felt like I feel when I read one of those poems that somehow move me, unexpectedly and deeply. Not long after that, I borrowed Tarkovsky’s collection of essays and, while reading it, wrote down in a notebook a thought about poetry in which I recognised a related experience of the poetic. When he writes about poetry, he doesn’t mean the genre, but an awareness of the world, a particular relationship with reality. He argues that poetry is a sort of philosophy that guides one through life. In this way, the artist can transcend the limits of coherent logic and convey the profound complexity and truth of the incredible linkages and hidden phenomena of life.

And in life, moments and sensations of that kind don’t necessarily come from where we’d expect them to come. My father, who had been building constantly since he knew what the word work meant, once stopped the renovation of an old house because of a bird’s nest in the basement. One day I received a text with a low-resolution picture of a bunch of twigs and wondered why he was taking a picture of a tiny twig stack in low light. My mother later explained the situation to me, though she couldn’t understand why he hadn’t simply moved the nest somewhere else and got on with his work. But for my father there was no debate, he didn’t knock down the wall on which the bird was now at home for at least a year. Instead, every time he went to the house he checked, with childish joy, whether the nest was still there. What drove him to do so none of us ever understood, but there was nevertheless something undeniably poetic about his decision, perhaps because he stopped the construction of his dream home to save the home of a bird. So, when someone tells me that poetry is too complex to understand, I reply that I have found most of the poetry in my life outside of books, and all literature has to do is put it into words. Beauty can find one of its homes in poetry, just as my father’s bird found its home in his unfinished basement.

Along with Tarkovsky, Rilke, Gospodinov and Blanchard, I have included my father in my diary, where for many years I have been recording thoughts, descriptions, puns, quotes, off-the-cuff ideas, bits of boredom, images, fragments. I like to believe that it is a treasury of my poetic memory, which Milan Kundera wrote about in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book which has greatly shaped not only my view of writing, but also my view of the world. Kundera wrote: ‘The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.’ As I look back through them, I recognise in many of the fragments potential poems that sometimes materialise, while others remain in the realm of mystery as poetry that only I will be able to interpret, until they fade into time. When I go through my notes, I can define them as one thing and one thing only: they are my own construction material.

These notes, for example, were the source of my poems in which my father appears, and they are one of the cornerstones of my poetry collection Vejo po vejo (a pun that could be translated as Branch by Branch or They know, they say), a title which, perhaps, even that bird of my father’s may have thought of when she was stacking twigs. Once the foundation was laid, I continued writing. Eventually, after opening my poetry-collection-Word-document for I don’t know which time, I realised that I am mostly writing about the same things: family, movements, details, proximity and home.

Firstly, I thought this was not a good sign – why am I obsessing about the same things? After I gave it a thought, I decided to follow the established narrative and let the poems grow from there, just as we go on in life from our childhood to which we cannot return though it remains our true home. What followed was a lot of puns, experimenting with structure, linking the poems using various devices that the reader may or may not notice. I was surprised by how much fun I had writing, how I found meaning in imagining endings, surprises and twists, how I loved digging through my diary, my notebooks and my memory to come up with images, to seek the silent and the mysterious in them. And that was when I realised I had found my own construction site.

I understood that my father’s work had become his life when I understood how much it meant to him, how much meaning he found in buildings, concrete, plans and imagining walls, windows, walls. My poetry collection was published before he had finished his house, once again he put some other home before his own. His building allowed me to educate myself and choose my own life path, it allowed me to choose beauty in my life. And I keep building.