Sanja Grozdanić – September 6 – 10, 2023
9/20
‘Occupational hazards’ ‘philistinism’ ‘pessimism’
This recent revolt of my body provoked me to ‘take stock’ of ‘my debts.’ Or rather, my recent, mysterious affliction has forced me to contend with personal records of loss — the latest of which appears to be something like my health.
On my release forms from the hospital in Berlin, the doctor accused me of being a decade-long smoker (despite my insistence that since I was only smoking Vogues now, and “basically only” on weekends, I was, categorically, a non-smoker). Predictably, the doctor had no sense of humour. Here it was now, the years so much more glaring when rendered bureaucratically.
A decade of smoking! Four of those years in Berlin, haunted cradle of European excess, probably I aged a decade. “Everything is constant.”
It is obvious, and even to be expected that the doctor (singular plural) would fixate upon my smoking when diagnosing me with the aftermath of a viral illness: now I am to blame, and he can pity the situation a little bit, depending on how polite or pathetic I present myself, but ultimately no one or nothing else is implicated. I accuse the doctor of being an idiot, in my head and to my friends, to feel a little better.
Humor must remain within reach, otherwise life becomes overwhelming.
So it is: these diary entries are no longer in order, little to hold the absent days together or perhaps more accurately separate them. We watch a Haneke film about bourgeois depravity. The teenage murderer is a remorseless skinhead; his parents cultured, cultivated. I watch a viral clip about how Australian climate policy is undermined by the possibility of buying “carbon credits.” If that seems obvious enough it’s because it is. The hope, or the insistence, is that eventually, it will be someone else who pays.
I keep a log of my heart rate (irregular) until I don’t; what is there to do with all of this information?
I lodge my debt with the Staatsbibliothek.*
Tomorrow, I’ll pay my taxes.
Image courtesy: Sanja Grozdanić
* I lost a borrowed book on one of the 3 trains between Dro and Milan. At an antique market somewhere within that distance, and despite my lack of luggage, Ryan Air onward to Berlin, I bought a jade lamp. The (elderly) woman told me it was her Grandmothers; she was selling it for 10 EU. I don’t know how old that makes it, but I will note that she was selling the heirloom for the church: my savings are neutral. Or, she hated her mother. What’s the market value of 5–7 kilos of jade?
Losing something, then, was to be expected. The library says they’ll invoice me for a new copy and the cost of leather binding. Soon, they’ll find it is out of print, but maybe also no one’s reading about “a new round of primitive accumulation and enclosure” and I’ll catch a break.
9/9
I woke up and forgot where I was. The sounds are (of course) so different: seagulls exist again; the sound of soft waves instead of cars passing.
When I was 2 years old, we lived for some months with my great aunt on a farm about 3 hours north of Belgrade. On the farm, a dog named Laki, two cats I named Jagoda and Oskar. A cow (cows?), chickens, one rooster, a few pigs. My mother noted how clean the pigs kept their barn: how the term “pig sty” was all wrong. All I remember is the rooster’s cock-a-dool-doo.
We went back to the village once, when my aunt was dying. Til then, I had not known how the body resists death. My beloved aunt clutched my hand. It remains one of the irredeemably saddest facts, that we had not seen her until she lay dying. The town by then was totally depopulated.
—
Image courtesy: Sanja Grozdanić
This poem by Celan for/to Rosa Luxemburg references a letter she wrote to Sophie Liebknecht (“O Sonitchka”) Mid December 1917 from Breslau. She describes seeing buffaloes being drawn into the courtyard; “war trophies” from Romania.
“Poor wretch, I am as powerless, as dumb, as yourself; I am at one with you in my pain, my weakness, and my longing.”
Vae victis: woe to the conquered.
—
I watched Kira Muratova’s The Asthenic Syndrome (1989) recently. It is an intensely relevant exploration of the mutability and instability of mass grief and how to live when something (more than that) is over. It is also the only film to be banned during the perestroika.
The film opens with a funeral: the man being buried bears a striking resemblance to Stalin. The protagonist—the woman who is grieving—is incensed by laughter at the funeral.
Repeated depictions of the mistreatment of animals—including an extended scene in which a cat is tormented and another depicting a group of bourgeois women in an abandoned dog pound—are clearly intended to implicate the viewer. Indeed ‘it works’: several people walked out at the dog pound scene; the man infront of me who laughed across various scenes of cruelty and horror, began muttering, indignant. ” Characters are compelled either by compulsive violence or fall into narcoleptic passivity. The dog pound scene is followed by an intertitle that reads, “People don’t like to look at this. They don’t like to think about this. This shouldn’t have a relationship to conversations about good and evil.’
—
What is disturbing about Muratova’s film is the notion or suggestion that there is no repair on the horizon. What allows it to be watchable is, of course, the humour. I’m thinking now to Celan’s poetry and how it never offers language the possibility of redeeming history.
The ‘task’ is to remember (and insist) that things can change. (?)
Its 30 degrees today, we close the curtains and watch Rudarska Opera (2006) Dir. Olek Novkovic. I won’t write about that tomorrow.
9/7
I made a lemon and chick pea soup, I roasted a pumpkin and some potatoes, made a green salad with quick-pickled radishes, then Jelly arrived. We drank a bottle of wine, I smoked half a cigarette. The last time Jelly and I lived togetherwas in London, when we sectioned off half the living room to accommodate 3 in a 2-bedroom apartment on Kingsland Road. With hindsight, it was all utterly provisional.
Swam today, into the distance, deeper than I’ve swam before probably. Having grown up in so-called Australia, I learned to stick to the shallows. Last December, it had been 2.5 pandemic years since I visited. I was struck by the constant presence of the helicopters surveilling suburban beaches, their sirens signalling to get out of the water. Was it possible that such a practice existed between 1995 and 2016, and I never committed it to memory? Upon return it seemed to me a glaring if minor part of a paranoid choreography. Everyone stands on the shoreline waiting for the shark to rear: inevitably it doesn’t.
Celia (1989) by Ann Turner is an excellent film on this pervasive settler colonial horror — examining how the brute violence of the state manifests across ‘daily life’, and how that registers on the perspective of a child (Celia). The young girl understands that law is inherently linked to regulation, seizure & control, and exercises a kind of revolutionary subjecthood. She kills a cop, who is also her uncle. She is avenging the murder of her beloved rabbit, among other indignities. Her hero is her recently deceased Communist grandmother.
*
Inventory of books I took to Switzerland (limited in luggage space and packing while ill):
— ZITHER & Autobiography, Leslie Scalapino
— Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann
— Reading with Claire Lispector, Hélène Cixous
— Yes, I am a Destroyer, Mira Mattar
— The Bow, Mira Mattar
— 3 issues of the LRB I never got around to reading
4 out of 5 books I’ve read already. I packed in pure emotional attachment.
I was thinking recently about Bachmann’s repeated refrain “There is no beautiful book”. It strikes me now as a political position as opposed to pure melancholy. There can be no beautiful book, not yet. It can be read in continuity with her oft-quoted “Fascism is the first element in the relation between a man and a woman.”
I wanted to read Celan today, and had to settle for photos of pages of books on my phone.
I am less inhibited and burdened by the communictional character of the language than others: I am speaking into a vacuum. 1959.
Image courtesy: Sanja Grozdanić
9/6
Weather Reports
“Emotion the accurate sole expression and completely delusory.”
Leslie Scalapino, Zither & Autobiography
Voices levitate in my apartment, tripping me up on problems of perspective. The first Spring that I moved in, two years ago now, a man began screaming. He either lived across or on top of my own 66-sqm. His voice filled my bedroom in particular. I thought that this must be the way sound carries: but it is not only that, it is that the night is quiet, and when all symptoms are at their sharpest.
I thought about looking for the voice, trawling through the building, slipping a note. My phone number, if you need anything? Then we could both be crazy.
I asked a few neighbours. Or, I didn’t, my boyfriend did. On account of his German. Nothing was revealed to us that we didn’t already know. Probably, he was “Eastern European.” Lived alone. Balding.
*
I should say former apartment—I left last week. The man stopped screaming, I hope he got better; I hope that he recovered.
That year everyone was in some kind of breakdown. My other neighbour cut a circular hole in his front door while screaming for his children. In a psychotic break, not everyone reaches for their wood saw, and not everyone can cut so carefully. Five or seven police officers took him away, and he didn’t return for months; when he did, limping. The children visited while he was gone, the door was replaced quickly.
*
Now everything is normal. It was this Spring, on Oberbaum Brücke, that we saw a man arrange a table of coins into a swastika. It must have been late, it was one of the first warm evenings, Elijah and I walked home from a part of the city we avoid generally. I can’t remember what we were doing before, but I’ll never forget that image. Quickly Elijah moved the coins around, broke their shape. The Nazi walked into the subway station, ‘I should have thrown my bottle at him.’ The man sleeping would have been beaten or arrested.
In Eisenhüttenstadt (formerly, Stalinstadt) you see a lot of confederate flags. Who knew there were so many Americans in the old East!
*
I moved out of my apartment. I went to the hospital and was told that I have asthma; no wait, I’m ‘post-viral.’ I still don’t know what this means. The doctors can’t get it together. I know better than to argue with a bloc, but I did. “You have to advocate for your health.” When I accepted this invitation, I thought that I would be in Belgrade, working on a project that makes use of the Yugoslav archives, that would be the narrative. Each day I could write about a new image.
Instead I have these scattered scenes, when I’m trying to think in less generalizations. I know to believe in specificity. Same way I know that ‘the balance shifts’ in such peculiar ways.
Every morning I look out at this lake: tomorrow Jelly will join me.
Image courtesy: Sanja Grozdanić
CLOSE DISTANCE 