Essay/ 15 April 2016

Cities of Births and Memories

The cities of memories are built upon the foundations of our ruined personal longings and dreams

by Nikola Madzirov

"There is a nearby street forbidden to my steps"

Jorge Luis Borges

When I met Adam Zagajewski in Berlin a few years ago, at the east side of the ruined wall of temporary partings and constant doubt, and when I pronounced, in Macedonian, the name of his native city as Lavov, he said that, at that moment, he became richer for one more name of his birthplace. I often question how many birthplaces should one have, in order to be able to escape one’s own death, or to escape the memory of cities where one has lost someone? Many of my close friends mispronounce the name of my city as Strumisa, or Strumika, thus giving me a new birthplace, based solely on the architecture of language and our consciousness. And when that other place is natural, when it is not situated in the houses of the past, then it is immeasurable (Gaston Bachelard). But is anyone able to construct a city with no houses of memories in it, and with no monuments that exist, just because of the tourist maps and the collective historical losses? If we look at photographs from our travels, we'll see that we always stand beside a monumental building or a square of historical significance. The least numerous in our albums are the photos of the houses in which we live, and the spaces where the cities of our own ancestors and inheritors expand, slowly, like local cemeteries which, in the course of time, conquer the nearby hill. The world is big, but inside us it is as deep as the sea, wrote Rilke. We travel through space, through new cities to escape the archaeological sites of our inconstancy. We inhabit the space between the monument and the moment, between the itinerancy and the eternity.

The cities of memories are built upon the foundations of our ruined personal longings and dreams. We can move in and out of them without breaking any agreements for restricted movement, kept in the archives of any two countries at war. Escaping to those invisible cities of certainty, I found a shelter from permanent inner exile, a neat hotel room for a guest who does not understand the language of the country where he has arrived. This emotional nomadism can be the basis for a new architectonic harmony of the limitless spaces. Alain Bosquet moved the coordinates of the tangible by saying that the poet is in the city only to prove that the city itself is located somewhere else. And so, by escaping towards something, not from something, the new cities open themselves, like the doors of a supermarket, abundant in everything except hopes with expired dates.

The city is our new nature, a new forest that does not bear fruit, a polygon of our mythical childhood and a mausoleum of all particular hopes and ambitions. Even today, if I throw down the toys that are still kept in a carton box from a used television set, I could construct a city with all its elements that keep it alive - small "police" cars, traffic lights, train station, a small house with a yard and a dog near the wooden fence. Roland Barthes says that the toy always signifies something, and this something is always closely connected with society and is composed of either myths or the methods of the contemporary life of adults. And the city of adults is predictable and large - just large enough to trigger the children's urge for reconstruction and harmony.

Therefore, I am not sure whether I belong to my birth city that is a manifestation of some geographical constant, or of a cultural variable. When I was a child, by the principle of semiotic reduction, my parents first taught me to pronounce the name of my street and house number, so that if I lost myself in the womb of the city, I would be able to tell people where I live. At that time the name of my city was not important at all. But then, in my first journey outside the city, in my suitcase I placed all local legends and stories that are deeply connected with its presence in the atlases of collective memory. I accepted all undecipherable letters incised in the stones, all successful and unsuccessful tactics of Macedonian emperors, all contours of the Byzantine crosses and all taxes of Ottoman invaders...

Such a city of the past does not ever sleep. Even in the densest darkness, when there is no harvest moon, when there is no reflection of the snow, it is open for new inhabitants who never carry a key with them. It has always been my notion that new cities are born where streetlights begin. I could imagine each measurable space sinking in the dark, even my room, but never the city. Streetlights enabled me to see what was on earth, but never what was in the sky. When all the lights are extinguished at the same time, like candles from a birthday cake, then the center and the ghetto become one. At the end of that light, the streets of longing for new paths begin. I have so many birthplaces; I wish I had as many places to die. 

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AUTHOR

Nikola Madzirov

(poet, essayist, translator) was born in 1973 in R. Macedonia, in the family of war refugees from the Balkan Wars. His book Relocated Stone (2007) was given the East European Hubert Burda poetry award and the most prestigious Macedonian poetry prize Miladinov Brothers at Struga Poetry Evenings. Other awards include the DJS world poetry prize in China, Studentski Zbor award for best debut in Macedonia and Aco Karamanov award for the book Somewhere Nowhere. The contemporary jazz composer and collaborator of Björk and Lou Reed, Oliver Lake, has composed music based on Madzirov's poems. Madzirov was granted several international fellowships: International Writing Program (IWP) at University of Iowa in USA; DAAD and LCB in Berlin or Marguerite Yourcenar in France. German weekly magazine "Der Spiegel" compared him to Tomas Tranströmer, while Pulitzer prize winner Mark Strand wrote: Madzirov's poetry is like discovering a new planet in the solar system of the imagination. His poetry has been translated into forty languages and his book in English, Remnants of Another Age, was published in USA, UK and Australia.

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