(“Samočki hotel: Study trip to the hometown”, Samizdat, Podgorica)
At a time when it seems that words don't mean much, that all their potential has been used up, at a time when man is alone in the global terror of attraction and sensation, it is natural to return to the past. To oneself. By remembering. In these labyrinths of solitude, nostalgia and the magical, thought turns out to be an elementary weapon for preserving identity. And through thought, at the next level, the word sprouts - the one that sometimes seems to mean little. And it doesn't mean much to the masses, but it is the poet's most urgent need. It is a support in a world that is much more of a lonely hotel than a global village.
The book opens with quotes Calvin i Adonis which announce the dense network of intertextual relationships that the book builds, but also map the chronotope, the mystical labyrinth in which the Reader and the Poet will move. The universal rule, the terrible secret of Calvin's thought, is questioned and problematized throughout the book. To challenge it, to enable a return, is an existential imperative for the Poet. Adonis, on the other hand, opens up the field of self-analysis, the poet's questioning of himself who is, or could have been – they are an introduction to a soliloquy of rapture, experience and search for the subconscious.
The motif of the native City unexpectedly activates the motif of the stranger, to oneself and to the world: “And how is it that/that we do not exist in other cities,/and from this we are exiled”. This is the question that those who have set out ask themselves. Hence the motif of the Agarjans, the rejected and exiled. An intense intertextual relationship becomes the reference frame for the active relationship of the two I's - the Poet and the Boy, the present and the past, the general and the subjective, the starting point of which should become inner peace, a moment of tranquility and self-discovery. Insight.
The epiphanies of the City shape the Poet. Ignorance of who he is represents the first step on the path to himself. The City is a signal and indicator by which the Self needs to determine where he is, where he is going and how far he is from the goal. In the City, there is a round-the-clock otium-elitism of leisure or the idleness of elitism, and it is as if Dugo is speaking from the following verses. One of those whose spirit is present.
"Every summer
(recently only every summer)
I come here to find myself.
And I can't do it at all."
Goranović uses the motif of rare light coming through half-open windows. Like a painting technique that needs to hide more from the world than to reveal it, the need to hide, "so that they don't see us", activates feelings of fear, mild depression, a focus on the inner self that is still being sought - which creates the impression of autisticity in relation to the external, threatening and foreign. Defining the relationship with the City is a prerequisite for self-knowledge.
The city is alive. It is a mystical creature, sometimes vulnerable, distant, sometimes a ghost and a beast. The city breathes, like a great benevolent giant, opens its pores, receives and releases the world around it. Describing it, the Poet conveys oneiric states, visions and dreams. Metatextual connections on the ideological, symbolic and content levels enable multi-layered meaning; they require knowledge of literary tradition from the reader, but also an active relationship in interpretation.
The City is a beast, a City of entrails, a Kronos devouring its children: “how many are there who are not mentioned”. It is also a prison, a cursed casemate, a terrible courtyard; therefore, real life is outside. Leaving was inevitable in order to see it objectively, which creates an emotional, intense relationship between the City and the Poet, sometimes burdensome, at times terrifying.
The city of N. is a birthplace for foreigners; the native city for the permanently maladjusted and is the place of meeting the boy through a return to the past that alone can bring something. The encounter with the former, but dear, self is a return to the color of early years. Sepia as the color of summer, the color of light in childhood photographs, corresponds to the cover. The haze through which one looks, as through a curtain, is the haze of hot asphalt that prints road stripes in the minds of the Poet, the City and the Boy. All three feel the smell of footsteps and the flicker of breath, the friction of memories that live on. The atmosphere resembles that on the canvases Voj StanićIn those moments, the city has a good spirit, peace, it is quiet, magical in the memories of the innocence of boyhood days.
In self-discovery, the City is not just vanishing Point. He is the origin, the starting point, the initial impulse. At the end of it all, he is also the point of collection of all perspectives, experiences, inhales and exhales, which on his skin leave traces of thousands of faces and souls merged into one, into essence. “It is the place of birth and the beginning of death itself.” Punto di fuga.
The city is experienced through the senses. Smell is the most important, because it is the one that most easily takes us back to the past, to the exact location. Home point updated. But also by step. Hence the revival of the flâneros, imaginary or real, through whose vision the city is formed and changed. Those who accompany the Poet in the poem, shape the City in a mythical experience of the past, but this shaping is, of course, two-way. By step, meaning is conquered, one penetrates the essence of existence. A Baudelairean momentum that conquers the urban core, a modernist depiction of reality, alternating approach and retreat, flirting with the eternal, a seductive dance with the ephemeral in Man, in the City, in scents and vibrations. The relationship with the City is multidimensional, layered, symbolic. The City is a theater of shadows, a stage of pale nameless characters, personified flashes and chronotopes of wandering, searching.
Like a great soul that allows action, the City is a force and a striving. And an absolute. The City does not shrink, it does not sink. Bounded by the shape of a hexagon, it defies the eternal play of the circle. It waits for the One who will list the hexagonal objects. It lives! Is there in the objects SV hides the true essence of the city N? Establishing a vertical connection of the City with the sky, along with the already established relationship with the groundwater on which it lies, forms three levels sky - earth - underground and three times future - present - past. In the combinations of chronotopes that the reader gets by simply connecting spatial levels with time frames, new meanings of the City are revealed. The one who is. Architecture (one of the key motifs for understanding the nature of the City), therefore, imposes a completely new vision. Vukajlović the hexagon rests on Slade's six streets that merge into one point, the center, the punto di fuga - now from a bird's eye view.
This city is a sunny myth, a network of rays that enable the atmosphere of Stanić's paintings. In his map, he hides the light from which, in turn, all his people hide with half-closed windows. From multiple perspectives, one reaches a point that is both the beginning and the end, a boyish dream of the street (perhaps just Bozov from the attic in Ljubljanska), the race for the pallone, the lobbies of reality that transport the Poet from the Present to the Past. It is this lobbies that keep him on the unique path of life, on the mosaic of memories, his own and other people's experiences, which give the City the identity of the City of N.
The Promenade, the line between the year of birth and death, is a seductive play of what you think you have become and what you remember you were. The city and its Promenade are the trajectory of life, perfection in the procession of the Poet and the Boy, the Poet and the City, the Poet and the Sign. The Promenade is a river, a stream, a continuous, all-pervading force of water through which the City “winds”, “seeks somewhere to pour”, which symbolizes transformation, but also adaptability, constant change, overflow, movement and the formation of new forms. This makes it elusive.
Water is a symbol of the transience of time, an element that erases traces of the past and shapes the present. The city has withdrawn from the rivers, even though it lies on them. The flow of water makes Words dry up instantly, ideas merge into one - is that a punto di fuga? And it too, as if becomes impermanent, fluid, because the senses are alive, and the inevitable, perhaps painful flow of water means the flow of strength, youth, transience... Writing is a manifestation of the effort to capture a moment that will inevitably disappear. The city beneath the poem is a symbol of the continuous fluidity of the deeper layers of human existence. The layering of Goranović's poetic images is also reflected in the question: "What if there really is another City beneath us...?" This motif of the hidden city can be interpreted as an invitation to introspective exploration of the collective unconscious in search of answers to very personal questions. Hence the multitude of intertextual connections, enigmatic thought links that take the reader on a journey of study.
Goranović's sfumato, like a play of shadows, remains strong until the end of the book of poetry. Without clear cuts, like silent waters that are composed, creation is the only thing that (survives). And as the word is the guarantor of preserving individuality, so by the end of the book, the poetic identity stands out as the only true, preserved, real one, the one that has survived growing up, questioning, the collisions of the past and the present.
Bonus video:
