20 October 2006. Copenhagen

Dušan has asked me to keep a travel diary during my stay in Belgrade. And yet I only write poetry. No diaries. No essays. No letters to the editor. Still, the idea intrigues me.(One must pay attention to what approaches from the periphery and sometimes give it its due.)

The whole area of the Balkans is to me a mystery. It is a place I have never been. What lies beneath its surface? Why is it so important? For it must be important. I think: what impulse wants so much to emerge? What is it? I am reading Steiner’s The Karma of Untruthfulness and I put it down to pick up something by Andrei Bely, brave, gentle, feverish Andrei Bely. And I remember a poem I wrote during the war in the Balkans called Cobalt Blue.

I sense the Balkans with its diversity is a place where fruitful impulses can work like seeds, creating a bridge of warmth between central Europe and what lies towards the east. I try to imagine what impulses these might be.

Today the places and cultures “in-between”, (let us call them the mercurial ones) are the ones under attack, all those who have, either consciously or unconsciously, the gift of mediation. And what happens to each of these when they no longer are allowed to perform that role but instead become isolated? What change then takes place?

I think of Belgrade and imagine a warm heart. I see dark currents too. And places of illumination. I would like to find the places of inspiration and life. I see a river, cafés, imagine wonderful conversations. Will I be disappointed? I imagine I will emerge from a station and walk up an incline to a hotel, past shops, people, people. I will rest. The wedding guest is on his way.

22 October 2006. Airplane.

The “gyro” (I imagine this as the plane’s organ of balance) has been replaced and so we are delayed. My friend and I speak of the year 869, that time when some ecclesiastical gathering simply decreed that man did not consist of body, soul, and spirit, but only of the body and the soul, thus committing the only sin the Christ says is unforgivable, the sin against the spirit. Why? Because spirit means man’s thinking and if you take away his freedom to think you take away the bridge to the world beyond the physical senses. (Don’t worry, a dark voice says, we will do your thinking for you). In other words, you kill his organ to the spiritual world (thinking IS already beyond the senses). We speak also of the Great Schism, of Serbian poets, of Tesla. And we notice a snaking river of blinding light below us.

I look down. It is as though some ancient forest were trying to reassemble itself again.

My friend and I sit in the same row. Each of us has his own window.

Shadows of the clouds stain the land with their ink.

After hours of blue, clouds suddenly obscure our world as we touch the rim of Belgrade.

Then something strange takes place. The shadow of the plane appears within a rainbow circle. And then there is suddenly blue again.

Arriving in Belgrade my first impression, having met no one yet…warmth, human warmth. I don’t know why but I have such an intense feeling that this is so. True the weather is warm but the quality I sense in the air itself has nothing to do with the weather. What I imagined in Copenhagen turns out to be right. I check myself to see if what I had previously imagined might have somehow colored my initial impressions. There are ways to do this. No, I have had an authentic experience of human warmth during my first minutes in Serbia there is no doubt about it. And it is a warmth of soul that is simply -- in the air.

23 October 2006. A small village outside of Belgrade. Morning.

I stand by a field that contains one tree. There is a yellow butterfly. I say to the spirits of the field, “do you know how man came to be here?” I feel they are curious. No, they can’t figure it out.

Every house here is a garden of eden. Flowers, fruits, vegetable gardens. The woods by the road here are fringed with rubbish. I suppose the woods are considered as something very remote. For one throws things away only in the remotest of places.

The sky seems lower than the sky of Denmark. A veil has been drawn over the dome, like skeins drawn over a crib. Dream-like, the clouds do not move. I think of a child reaching for something, his mother, the light. The white light filling the gauze above his reaching hand. There is a silence, but as we know there are a thousand silences, each with its own color. What is the quality of precisely this silence? If I live into this silence what will I find? Perhaps the silence of the opposing field is of another quality. I stand on the road dividing two fields.

To live into the ambience of a place is to approach a being, perhaps many beings. For what we call ambience is merely the garb of something living.

The demonstrative question hides a reticence. The reticence of the soul, a soul that knows things, but only in a dream-like way.

This is not the time of monasteries. Yet this may be a place where monasteries might exist.

There is an aimlessness here. The aimlessness of waiting. The aimlessness of someone who is dimly aware that his is an important task. Yet that task lies somewhere in the future. So all one can do is to wait, nourish the soul, fortify oneself. Wait.

There is a dog here who fetches only rocks.

I have been to a wedding on my very first day. Surely this is significant? I have learned to dance the Kolo, I have spoken to a boy who has not lost his sense of wonder—as many a child in the West has—whose eyes still grow large with something like reverence, when my friend speaks of devoting his life to finding words. I speak with this family who, without the slightest hesitation, has welcomed a foreign poet into their home. Odysseus was never so well attended. They come originally from another area but have been forced to find a new home. I am shown a brown photograph of a man standing in a river. This is where I come from, the old man says to me. Perhaps home is where a person comes from. Perhaps not. Tomorrow they will do something to his eyes. Let us pray that the operation will bring more sight to this kind soul. What is home? Dušan asks me. An impossible question. But then, I once said I only write poetry. I try to think, yes what is home. I go through a process of filtering out thoughts. A process of deepening until the final most true appears: Home is where you are loved, I think. It can be anywhere. Home is to stand in the stream of your origins. Home is a condition, within yourself, of repose. A place one’s tree can bear fruit. Home is the sacred grove, a river. Two trees in a garden, knowledge and life. And beauty (the third tree).Home is where both your shadow and your strivings are accepted. One can also ask: What does it mean to live in exile? What does it mean to wed? To be a wedding guest? A wedding guest who dances and because he feels love is, for a moment at least, at home. Home is where you share a common secret with those around you. This question, what is home, is a question that opens up a multiplicity of responses, since there is never one answer. It is like a zodiac reflecting aspects of a being. Home is a condition of perfect empathy, a meeting, a blending, the sound of mmm. Home is a wedding. Yes, home is a kind of wedding, that’s it.

Belgrade 24 October 2006. Evening.

Belgrade. A reading at the house of a poet described to me as “a Serbian romantic” of the nineteenth century.

The room is formed as a kind of L, and is thus split into two rooms really. This causes some confusion because it is difficult for the reader to chose to whom he would address his words. There has been an obvious attempt to solve this dilemma by creating a raised platform between the two wings upon which a desk has been placed so that the rooms are thus diagonally straddled. Each room is filled with back-less benches which gives the place a slightly ascetic feel. But as I say the person who sits at the desk must decide how to deal with the problem of whether to include the audience in the first room or, the audience in the second room. Or both. Some of the poets sit at the desk when they read, others stand and others sit on a corner of the desk. It seems to me that few try to include the entire audience but choose to address the main room where most people seem to be sitting. Thus the smaller room, the other link of the L, becomes a kind of feeder to the larger room and is mostly populated by the writers themselves.

I listen to each poet, each writer, without understanding a word of the language. Still, I try to live into each poet to feel what is present there: irony, pain, intellectualisation, provocation, wilful energy, authenticity. All of these qualities are present, depending on who reads.

The audience is warm, attentive, receptive, exasperated or refreshed. Let my evaluation be silent. I am a blind man listening intently, trying to discern the colors of each person who reads.

I read my poems, Twine, Apocalypse and The Maiden is Young. The poems have been carefully chosen for the occasion. I know these people have an understanding of the shadow, the double (Twine) and also of how great catastrophes reveal to us our own mirrors. And I sense something of the future soul of a young maiden growing into something she can barely discern. She is standing in the slanting light, cupping a butterfly in her hand, opening a door to release it. She could have killed the wingéd thing without giving it the slightest thought. But she doesn’t.

24 October 2006

In the Tesla Museum. Tesla is a fearsome figure just look at his eyes. The inventor who imagined vast armies being destroyed by electrical blasts. In his house of veneration one finds some relics of his life. He apparently never shook hands and always wore white gloves as a form of protection. They are encased in glass along with a top hat and two canes. The perfect implements of a magician. One passes these and enters a dark room where a metal globe seems to be floating in the darkness. It is in fact on a kind of stand. His ashes are hermetically sealed within the globe.

We stand before some contraption that eludes my simple understanding along with a group of young students (they can be nothing else). Someone flicks on the switch. Crackling sounds and splintering lightning strikes another globe as we hold our swords aloft. These are in fact electrical lighting tubes and become dimly illuminated by the electricity in the air. Can this be healthy, I think. It is as though we are participating in a vast caricature of St. George or the Archangel Michael, whose task, it is said, is to be the guardian of human thinking and thus redeem the dragon. But in this ritual of the crackling globes and fluorescent tubes we are in the very depths of the dragon itself.

25 October 2006

It is my last day and I speak to a salesgirl who hands me a pair of gloves with starry butterflies. They will someday form the threshold to a woman’s soft wrists. I imagine that woman and how she will smile.

I have been in Belgrade for three days and scarcely saw its rivers. But I saw much and I listened as a poet will listen. And I remember music I could not easily withstand and invisible streams of various colors with shadings of dark and light. There is still the mystery of a fragrance I noticed first in the countryside, then later in Belgrade, something subtle and sweet. I still do not know what it was.