Here we have a process which is just the opposite of abstraction and animation of space and time: We could say that here Kosovel – wittingly or unwittingly –problematises hypnos, the subconscious dreams: He sees this subconscious, surreal reality; he materialises it, moving through it, opening white doors, walking on soft carpets. In the next poem as well – which Ocvirk included among surrealist poems – called Naše oči (Our Eyes) we may be far from surrealist dreams, but are very close to the fantastic attempt at understanding the world and man’s place in it:
Our eyes were flooded
by burning lava.
And the grey dust
of concrete towers
seared our lips.
Like burning trees
we swayed
into the new day.
Three very much specific, physically possible, yet fantastic images, designed to illustrate the fervour of the subject, eschatologically infatuated by the “new day,” by the future: Our eyes were flooded by blazing lava; our lips were seared by the dust of concrete towers; like blazing, burning trees we swayed into the new day.
Although it seems that surrealism is at work in Kosovel’s poetry, it turns out that we are in fact dealing with the fantastic: An attempt to explain the world, its structure, its enigma, with the help of the poet’s own system, a system of light. It is not the poet’s attempt to bring on hypnotic dreams in the reader, to present to him automatic dreams, the subconscious, but rather, to explain the word, its miraculousness, its fantastic aspects.
It seems that we can already speak of the SYSTEM OF LIGHT in Kosovel’s poetry. In Kosovel’ poetry, light is a transformational force, interconnecting all cosmic phenomena in time and space.
As we know, Kosovel did not write many love poems. And yet in these as well, rather marginal poems in Kosovel’s view, we recognise the magical meaning of light. The imagery of the Karst nature, replete with brightness, fire and sunshine, tends to wax romantic; in these poems love begins to shine instead of natural light: “when this brightness wanes, and darkness falls upon the mountains, in my soul your visage brightly shines, speaking to my soul.” (Večerni oblaki, Evening Clouds) But this is a new topic, which we have broached at this point, but should be dealt with more thoroughly in another study.
A series of motherhood poems is intertwined with the Karst and Karst luminosity in an even more interesting way. If She, the sweetheart, is natural and fleeting and thus the same as light, the mother – which also sprang from light, or is light itself – is in fact a supernatural being and a symbol of the hereafter. Kosovel’s mother is a mother waiting:
Stranger, do you see the light burning in the window?
My mother waits for me but I do not come,
all is quiet in the night, the field is dark,
now I would go there, kneel before her.
Mother waiting
The light in mother’s window almost has the power of a magical, siren voice, beckoning the poet to return (to his home, his haven, to the Karst). The mother is waiting, calling him back, while the poet is searching, returning and singing about his return to his mother:
“I’m coming back, mother, coming back, mother,
to remain at home forever!
I see you, mother
“Like a golden fire burns
the window of your room facing the evening,
Oh, mother
We know that Kosovel wrote several thousand poems and at least one tenth of them sing about death: We may say that Kosovel is obsessed with the subject of death. And this theme has crept into the theme of mother the childbearer, the lifegiver. The theme of death springs from the theme of mother/life. Our poet adopts many different, contradictory attitudes towards death: He anticipates it as his own physical end (in his poem Slutnja, Premonition), and even calls to it, wishing he could “stop bleeding, oh, to be able do die!” (Oh, how long before evening falls), or tries to resist it and conquer its inevitability, as in the poem, O, saj ni smrti (Oh, There is No Death). Some poems about death belong to the religious register: Death should be salvation and deliverance, even redemption, the path to eternity, to God, to the Eternal Truth (Truden, ubit, Dead Tired). Then there are poems where death is an inspiration to persist (Borba, Struggle) and poems singing about the collective death of Europe as a symbol of Western, egoistical civilisation (Iz tečajev, Unhinged).
Light in all its nuances is the first significant focus of Kosovel’s poetry, but death appears to us as yet another such nexus determining all other categories of life. But before we take a definite stand on the theme of death as one of Kosovel’s central themes, we must again recall “birth” and mother, the childbearer. Within the same theme of death, those verses which thematise the relation, death – birth, are of key significance. Let us take a look, for example, at the poem, Pot do človeka, (The Path to Man): The poem reads like a recapitulation, a chronological survey of the various concepts of death: “Death kissed me on the cheek,/ I was as cold as death,/ I did not dream, or wait for justice / or consolation in the luxury of dreams.” The next stage was the recognition “that the Great West is burning out,” which brought on the poet’s “hopelessness.” The turning away from this everyday, deeply human understanding of death is rendered in the poem as a supernatural and, indeed, fantastic shift:
And it came as a new force,
like the sound of pigeons over the fields,
as if suddenly was awakened
the dead, sleeping power of the heart.
And yet! The change is not total, consistent, true, real, but rather, it is an “as if” change! Awakened in the poet are feelings in complete opposition to death: laughter, enchantment, kind-heartedness, ecstatic delight.
The experience and recognition of death brought Man into the poet’s heart; Man was born and the poet now sings his birth. Just as the entire situation is an as-if situation (how many times he repeated this modal structure, “as if!”), that man is also imaginary, part of the poet’s inner world, born from his words, dwelling in his heart.