V E B A H O O D

Into the Greenland Sea, Iceland, 2010 © Velibor Božović

The best literary love scene, or perhaps, the best orgasm description, that can be found in literature:

” I crouched down and, overcome by a sudden panic, looked over the edge. A couple lay down there, in the bottom of the pit, as I thought: a man stretched full length over another body of witch nothing was visible but legs, spread and angled. In the startled moment when that image went through me, which lasted an eternity, it seemed as if the man’s feet twitched like those of one just hanged.”

from The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

I’ve just finished reading an extraordinary little book, a novel Malvina by Mirko Kovač. First published back in 1971, in then socialist Yugoslavia, the novel presents fantastically disillusioned Croat and Serb nationalists and explicit materials of different kinds. There are murders, there is rape, there is tender sex. There is lesbian love. The best of all, it contains photographs, a nice set.

One of these photographs shows us to what amazing lengths men can go when serving to a homeland. As if “Hey, lets pull our pants down, lets pooh in the nature together and be photographed while doing it” is the most natural thing to do.

This novel is about madness, in each one of us, or so it was my impression after finishing it.

This edition was published in 2007 by Croatian publishing house Fraktura. The novel is available in French translation but not in English, as far as I know.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2005 © Velibor Božović

It is snowing outside and it looks just like a perfect poetry day. Here is a poem by Seamus Heaney from his 1966 book Death of a Naturalist:

The Early Purges

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.

Dan Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’,

Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,

Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din

Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout

Of the pump and the water pumped in.

‘Sure, isn’t it better for them now?’ Dan said.

Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced

Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.

Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung

Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains

Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung

Until I forgot them. But the fear came back

When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows

Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens’ necks.

Still, living displaces false sentiments

And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown,

I just shrug, ‘Bloody pups’. It makes sense:

‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town

Where they consider death unnatural,

But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.

Montréal, 2001 © Velibor Božović

Some years ago I stumbled upon an event, here in Montréal; still not sure if it was an art performance or I was early for the exhibition opening and things were still getting finalized, but there was a person working on a large text on the wall. I only stayed for a few minutes and snapped just one photograph.

To this day, I often wonder where the text comes from. Mention Red Army, Berlin and smoking mother in the same paragraph and I become curious. Anyone?

The Radetzky March, Montréal, 2002 © Velibor Božović

“Fate had elected him for a special deed. But he then made sure that later times lost all memory of him.”

from the opening paragraph of The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

Jewish Cemetery, Chisinau, Moldova, 2003 © Velibor Božović

“It was a beautiful sunny day; there was a pleasant whiff of summer abundance in the bright air; birds were deliriously atwitter. We walked down a narrow path into a vault of greenness and quietude, the light diffused by overleafed trees. The path forked and dead-ended and widened; we wandered inward, deeper and deeper. Some of the gravestones were swallowed by the baroque bushes and ivy; some of them were ruins;

…

Some part of my life ended there, among those empty graves; it was then that I started mourning. I can tell you that now, now that there is little but mourning.”

from The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

Jewish Cemetery, Chisinau, Moldova, 2003 © Velibor Božović

Already 6 years have passed since Hemon and I traveled Eastern Europe searching and researching for The Lazarus Project and i still find negatives that I completely overlooked in the first ‘elimination’ round. But Sasha, somehow, kept images in his memory, and, years later, wrote about them.

Chernivtsi, Ukraine 2003 © Velibor Božović

“Among the experiences from which we learn nothing that we didn’t know already, there is to be counted the insight that the reality we consider as all-dominating in truth consists mostly of fictions.” – form The Snows of Yesteryear by Gregor von Rezzori

This Friday we’ll be leaving for our friend’s cottage, the remote, beautiful place in Laurentians; annual 10 days of swimming, sleeping and reading. It is actually two places I’ll be revisiting while there, The Laurentians and Chernivtsi. Later is a town in present day Ukraine, in Bukovina region, which I visited in 2003 while on a research trip for The Lazarus Project with Sasha Hemon.

When embarking on escapes like this, it is crucial which books one brings along. If one makes the right choice it doesn’t matter if it rains or shines. This time I’ll be reading The Snows of Yesteryear by Gregor von Rezzori. The author was born in then called Czernowitz, still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The book is a series of portraits of his family and it contains photographs, which always intrigues me. More importantly, it seems to be written beautifully.

In the introduction to the book John Banville quotes this part where the author talks about his sister who died at young age:

“She is mute but she is there. My life is a wordless dialogue with her, to which she remains unmoved: I monologize in front of her. In the sequence of images in which I experience myself in life, she is included in every situation, as the watermark in the paper bearing a picture.”

Lviv, Ukraine 2003 © Velibor Božović

I photograph 
“…in the hope, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back  and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I  shall find that all moments in time have co-existed simultaneously, in which case none  of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting  to do so at the moment when we think of them…”
W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Click here or on the photo above to see my new website. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Memory One, Montreal 2009 © Velibor Božović

Perhaps it is in books where all moments in time co-exist simultaneously?

Reading W. G. Sebald again… “…in the hope, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments in time have co-existed simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occured but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them…”