WHERE ARE YOU?
Imaginary characters:
Care – hopefully human
Not Belonging – I am a human
Belonging – I became a human, but then ceased to exist as human
Stillness – can it even be a character?
CARE
"Đje Si?" I ask myself in the middle of the living room of the Apartment. In Montenegro this
question means “How have you been?”, while the direct translation of it would be “Where are
you?”. It is possible that one’s location may speak about how he/she is doing. Also the condition
of someone may speak about his/her location. Thanks for asking, I’m in the living room.
There is a white thread hanging from the ceiling. The whole volume of the apartment has been
concentrated around the thread or even clung into it. The fragile thread keeps hanging. In some
sense the apartment is hanging from itself. And it is great that this thread has been given to it. It
is a light, fragile beam of hope. And it doesn’t let the apartment fall down.
"Đje Si?" I ask. I am in the bed room. I touch the wall. Hey Wall, have you ever been touched?
If so, then how? How do we usually touch the Wall? With a hammer and a nail? With an electric
drill? Taping knife? An awl? Wall, you are always supportive and strong. We hang the cross with
Jesus to you. You hold us up, you hold the ceiling above our heads, you keep the floor
together. Can we hug you, oh Wall?
Someone has torn the plaster down from you. It is lying on the floor. Some is still peeling off
from you. And I can see stone or concrete underneath. Is that what you are actually made of?
Is that your true nature? These stone fields, hidden under the plaster, are the actual resources of
walls. Has someone already started mining these resources? What would they do with these
stones? Build a new apartment?
Let’s close our eyes and listen.
Hoarse breathing. Footsteps. The opening and shutting of a door. A hustle. Movement of people.
Quite a bit of mess. Mixed sound clips coming from speakers and mouths. Or from the pieces
of newspaper, stuck on the walls. No, no! My eyes are shut! Now let the Apartment speak.
“My both grandmas had exactly the same type of apartments!” says someone (an architect who
I know). “I have childhood memories from two different places totally mixed up here!”
“Exactly the same design?” I ask.
“Exactly the same! I can tell you stories of every place here!”
“How is it with these closets here?” I ask, pointing towards the closets between corridor and
kitchen.
“Well, up there was a bunch of clothes. And a sewing machine inside of a wooden cage. And
here was food!”
“Like a stock room? Cold inside?”
“Not cold. Just a kitchen closet. Kitchen was quite small.”
“But which room is more suitable for a bedroom. Is it the one to the right from corridor or to the
right from living room?”
“One grandma had her living room here.” (Points to the right from corridor)
“Then you don’t need to invite your guests to your personal space. Maybe that’s why!”
“It is cool to go to a stranger’s place. It is a standard project and all these memories come to
surface!”
Chatter. Doors open and close. Footsteps. Photographing. Door alarm. Knocking. The
Apartment - as it is now - greets us. And we greet the Apartment, grateful for having the space to
hear and to be heard.
NON-BELONGING
"Đje Si?" I ask myself. Everything that used to live and fly for free has left its dried wings here. Sugar bowl is full of sawdust. The walls have shed their skin. Or they have been skinned alive. Rather it was someone who tried to dig through these walls. But the deeper layers of wallpaper are still partly present. The demons from past lives are staring from there. They are surrounded by the dead text of dysfunctional collective memory that means absolutely nothing. If I open my eyes, the gravity arrives. It feels like truckloads of rubble. If I close my eyes, I hear the cries and moaning of the worlds under the wallpaper. These are ghosts from the past lives.
Plaster has been scratched off from the wall. Thick pieces of it rest on the floor. A part of the wall can now breathe. A part of the wall is bleeding. If you feel heaviness while reading this, I advise you to do some hold-and-let-go exercises.
Why all layers are peeled off nowadays, so that only logs or bricks are exposed? It is a subconscious desire to get rid of the burden, to lose weight. It is the effect of pornography, where everything is exposed up to bones and even then it is not enough. It is a strong resistance to Soviet modernism that only piled and covered, smothered, concealed, numbed, filled.
Someone has scratched off the plaster. Maybe with his/her finger nails. I hope he/she used this respirator that is hanging on the window. Maybe he/she grasped everything into his/her lungs that are now heavy as two bags of cement. Gravity – it is two bags of cement that are hanging from the living room ceiling, just with the help of the white fragile thread! Just try to breathe with those lungs!
Someone has been coughing blood. Probably he/she still grasped some plaster powder inside. There is a white pillow with a red stain on an armchair in the living room. There is a table with a book of Perec, lots of aged sugar cubes and a plastic number “34”.
Numbr 34. Is that the number of the Apartment? Or a birthday has been celebrated here? Or death day? The day where all hopes ran short?
The day when you realize that nothing is waiting ahead can trigger a desire to scratch the plaster off the walls with your ten fingernails and turn the whole Apartment into molecules. Like Klaus Kinski, shut inside a bathroom. And to grasp powders into your lungs. And to cling to the past. And to draw lines out of plaster powder and sniff them into your nose. I eat time, I excrete time! The whole Apartment could be sniffed inside, if you happen to be the kind of junkie, who keeps feeding from the breast of the past. The kind that has huge chewing muscles and cemented lungs that can also be testicles as well. So huge that you could sit on them. Organs come in couples. So we have the Apartment and the Shashlyk Bar.
There is an old lung X-ray in the kitchen. Long ago those lungs were unspoiled and pink. There was a lot of air to breathe waiting ahead. All these fresh masses of air, full of hopes, leaking out of these millions of oak leaves on the hill.
Maybe someone was born in this Apartment? Born 34 years old! Pushed the cement out of his/her lungs and scratched “Volya” into it. Freedom! Life! It is the white fragile thread that keeps up these cement bags. We can choose if we cling to these bags or we let go! We’d be like this white fragile thread. We’d breathe! And suddenly we have lungs again, they are pink and virgin, just like in the beginning. And millions of oak leaves on that hill feed us with their fresh oxygen. This is what this life, this freedom is about. Like a swing. If you move, you move. If you don’t, you don’t. If you breathe, you have air. If you don’t, you don’t.
I take a closer look at the pillow. The stain is bright red. Looks like lipstick.
BELONGING
It is the first time when I feel myself as Belonging. It doesn’t mean that I belong somewhere. It means that something belongs to me. And that something is the understanding of my mistake. An authentic experience, a lesson, realization. It is also not the question, whether the stain on the pillow was blood or lipstick. It is about my automatic projection – these bags of cement that I mention already here.
There is the Apartment. I don’t know if it is neutralized or energized. But it may unveil the nature of my psyche. Especially if we see my first notes and further projections. The safest way was to hide myself behind the book of Bohdana and Daria. To pass the Apartment in four different roles. Some of these roles let you do something instinctive, some of these roles let you be legit and please people. What I do by instinct and what I do by self control can be confused by those who observe me. Therefore I openly say that my strongest drive was related to Non-belonging. Still that stain of blood. Still these cemented lungs. Still the heaviness and angst. As I myself have several apartments (no, actually it is still the same as one) that eat me alive. And the easiest self defense is aggression. Which is also the strongest bond with the apartment.
Mistakes domesticate the traveller. When I realize that the pillow has no blood stain on it, the whole system I had set up turned into something like a soaked wallpaper that is peeling off the wall. An annoying old wallpaper that has even more annoying layers under it. And the last layers, which are usually old newspapers, are the hardest to peel off from the wall. You only have to keep watering and scratching them. It is a huge revelation – you can feel the itching of the plaster. But it also triggers emotions that used to find confirmation by the reality but maybe not anymore.
What is Belonging? It cannot be limited to origin or residence. These are trivial issues. Belonging and Not-Belonging are orientations. My core has always leaned towards Not-Belonging. As Nomadland is the extension of ego. Everything that you meet on your way gets integrated with your world or thrown out of it. And I am just about to throw myself out as Belonging. Why? Because it makes me feel like an insect. An undefined insect that is definitely not a ladybug, but rather a cockroach.
STILLNESS
Once I woke up at night in Rakvere, grabbed the recorder and mumbled into it:
A human is the cosmos, a human is infinity and we want to trap ourselves into some tiny illusions that are small as prison cells. The Apartment. There is a lot of cosmos inside the Apartment. It is not a small prison cell, it has lots of cosmos. It doesn’t give you this home and safety, this identity of fixation. I cannot pour it over with a traumatic story. The only thing that comforts me is the installation at the Shashlyk Bar. These are the funerals and remembering, the place for celebration. One has been entitled to build these clay cottages that show how we shape our attachments in the cosmos.
