What seems important is precisely the realisation that the poet is the creator of new life, which is an “as if”, quasi-real life. As early as January 1923, Kosovel writes (in his letter to Fanica Obida): “You see, I believe that, despite the existence of the physical and spiritual worlds, we must delete both and believe in a third one, which is the harmony of the two (underlined by M.M.) The desire to build a new, special, completely different world than the material one, but which is nevertheless built also from the existing one, excited Kosovel at a very early stage. Even when he opted for the “new world,” for the new poetics, he continued to emphasise: only from the ruins of the old can the new emerge. Kosovel did not – like most of the avantgardists of the time – blindly believe that literature and even the world begins with our arrival: “Gentlemen, everything that today zenithism, expressionism, claim as their own, was known by every art of every age and era, because it is the very mission of art to introduce into the human society a new life. Art has always been the counterweight to the mechanical, utilitarian, egoistical society, always, not only today,” he wrote in his Diary of April-May 1925.
What grows from ruins becomes new life. Death, as described by Kosovel, is the death in the name of the new, dying in the name of birth. Although this process is not always successful. Death does not necessarily beget new life; only peace, eternal silence may remain. Kosovel certainly essentially differs not only from Slovene but also other avant-garde poets of the 1920s in that he does not try to elevate the spirit of the new and in doing so supplant and humiliate the existing material world and deny reason and science in the name of emotional, ecstatic and imaginative experiences. He is merely aware of the powerful, essential difference and discrepancy between the opposing categories, as well as between the imaginary (“as if”) image of man, such as we build in our hearts, and the brutal external world of capital, compromises, false democracy, crime… Thus we can understand why that clarity and brightness, of which he writes in the summer of 1925, when he accepted nervousness as the consequence of the simultaneous action of different, conflicting ideas and images, did not last very long. As early as December of the same year, he wrote (to Fanica Obida): “Only now do I understand that a person can be a stranger to himself. I used to find solace in literature; today it is no longer so. I do not know what is happening to me and why. I only know that I am torn apart and that nothing can be done about this terrible grey pain in me. I only know that I would have to scream, scream to my heart’s content, that I would have to break loose from that grey heap of ashes which is stifling, strangling and killing me. That grey heap of abstraction which torments my nerves to the limit and beckons me towards the simple, the fresh and the original. There are a hundred conflicts that a person should conquer, but he remains torn apart and without willpower.
All optimism, all will to work, all energy, all of it is artificial, born of the thirst for justice, of the thirst for our own deliverance, of the thirst to create a new world for ourselves, But our life is sad and we do not entirely believe in deliverance either. We struggle because we would like to live, but we do not live.”
The world built by Kosovel for himself – rich, integrated, and repeatedly interconnected, yet ethereal and alive only in the poet’s soul, heart and spirit –quickly disappears! An eternal searcher, traveller and pilgrim, Kosovel is always on the go (how often he sings of roads and railways, train stations, trains and cars!). Just as he “elevated” the material life into the hereafter, so he dematerialised travel; it is true that he often travelled to the Karst and left again, thus describing his actual journeys. But a happy Kosovel’s traveller is only the abstract, imaginary traveller, a traveller described as such, as an occurrence:
Tired mountains sleep
amid the quiet rustling of forests,
who thinks of you, traveller,
when you are coming home?
Bright is your shadow,
white are your hands,
giving, giving, giving
soothing flowers to the suffering heart.
Nigh time arabesque
The further away he is and the more he resembles a shadow, the closer and stronger is the consolation he brings. When the traveller stops in “warm and clear days,” the poet warns him immediately: “traveller, why are you stopping in this bright, clear air.” ( Topli in jasni, Warm and Clear). The traveller is not destined to live “warm and clear days,” wholesome and happy moments, but rather, he must eternally search for some uncertain, imaginary regions.
The world imagined, built and “originated” by Kosovel is exceedingly complicated: He binds the past with the present in a poetic or imaginative way, yet he defines this entity, this world of his, in mathematical terms: an integral.
Translated by: Marjan Golobič