There is a specific relationship between the poetic subject of Mozetič’s poems and the mythical characters of Narcissus and Orpheus as understood by Marcuse. But, here Orpheus does not attempt to return life to his Eurydice; here Orpheus, facing the banality of the world and the meaninglessness that this banality imposes to any existence, faces the dilemma whether to kill his partners. In one poem, he says: “if only I had a gun, to press it / to his neck and drag him far away, to a dark forest. / I should most probably kill him.” And in another poem: “I thought that now it would be best to slit his throat. / It would be too painful to stay with him. / And then I’d easier dress and leave.” But, although it is not achievable in reality, the murder of the “upside-down” Eurydice (upside-down in relation to death as well – here Orpheus looks for Eurydice’s death in terms of gender, as well), it is fulfilled and endlessly repeated in the imagination of the poetic subject: “Good / that I didn’t lose it and killed you. / The things that they’d publish in the newspapers, and maybe / the sale of my books would improve. There / I killed you slowly, piece by piece, just as I killed / the others, numberless victims of the serial killed inside me.”
The poetic subject in this collection looks at his presence and his past as Narcissus did in his reflection in the water; however, he is not falling in love with his image, not dying because love to himself is impossible, but recognizing other’s beauty, and understanding the powerlessness to be in love with the Other, and wishing his own death because of this knowledge: “(…) I’m / forty-five and I have nobody / to think of him with love. Memories / hurt. I’ve never thought that beauty / can hurt so much. I see faces and my breath / stops. Maybe it’s dramatic time / to take my own life or / get killed by AIDS.”
The need to reject life and the attempt to take one’s own life are accompanied by (or maybe they are a consequence of) the feeling of meaninglessness. Julia Kristeva, when describing this feeling of non-meaning that attacks the melancholic, says: “Because I disappear in the meaning of the others, because I am strange, peripheral to true happiness, I consider my depression supreme, metaphysical lucidity. Sometimes I feel proudly, on the border between life and death, that I am a witness of the non-meaning of Thing, that I discover the absurdity of the relations and the Thing” (Kristeva 1994:10). But do the lives of the others around the poetic subject of “Banalities” really have any meaning, so that he has the feeling that he is destroyed in the meaning of the others? Is really their life blessed with true happiness, to which the poetic subject is strange, and he considers his depression supreme, metaphysical lucidity? And does he proudly feel that he is witness of the non-meaning of the Thing? He is a witness not only of his, but also of the misfortune of others, and especially their powerlessness to see to meaninglessness of their own existence. So, the poetic subject of “Banalities” does not disappear in the meaning of the others, he disappears in their non-meaning. He is not a stranger to true happiness, but it is the escape of the others from the meaninglessness, the escape to even bigger meaninglessness, that they can not see because they refuse to see it, to hear the Other, that stresses and conditions the meaninglessness of his own existence and turns him to death. Therefore, the sperm in “Banalities” has the function of water (as reflection of the untouchable, as call for death) in the Narcissus myth: “Only thousands kilometers from you / I find the courage to admit to myself that then / I fell in love with your sperm, with death / that you carried inside you. I watched it spilled on your / stomach and I dived my face in it. Its smell / that turned into death smell, caused /endless orgasms inside me.”
Speaking of how the melancholic experiences time, Julia Kristeva says: “Time in which we live, which was the time of our discourse, others’ speech, slower or dispersed, makes the melancholic live in a de-centered temporality”(Kristeva 1994: 79). The poetic subject of some of the poems in “Banalities” also lives in a de-centered temporality, in a time that is turned to the pieces of past: “I find myself / sinking into the past more and more, dragged backwards. / I find myself lying in the stable on the hay again, / when neighbors son pushed his hand / between my legs.”
But this turning to past does not fill in the gaps of the presence: on the contrary, it stresses the feeling of meaninglessness and strengthens the Thanatos instinct, and therefore the longing of the poetic subject for the forgetfulness of his own past expressed in the last poem, “Let Me Forget as in Our Grain Field”, which is a short reminiscence of his whole life, panoramic view of the events that hurt the most and were the sweetest (some of them were both at the same time) and the need to forget them: “let me forget, let me forget everything for it touches again / the painful spots and will not leave me alone till I die.”
The need to sense one’s own death and the need to feel death of the wanted/loved body, put in a relation with the verses of his own past (as, for example, in the already mentioned poem “Let Me Forget as in Our Grain Field”) in Mozetič’s poetry can be related to the understanding of body inscriptions of Michel Foucault. According to Foucault, they are determined by power and knowledge, and by their mutual relation. Although the body can be put in relation with his genealogical research, his conclusions that the body is a manifestation of past experiences and it is written by history, according to Foucault, the body is first of all an object, goal and instrument of power. For Foucault, power is a system of mutual relations between bodies and events. Foucault stresses that power does not mean groups of institutions and mechanisms that enable subduing within a social system, nor oppressions, nor any kind of domination of one group to other. He defines the power as a “mobile substrate of relations of power, which, because of their inequality, constantly give birth to conditions of power” (Foucault 1978: 93). From these relations between the events of the past of the poetic subject from the collection “banalities” and his body, Thanatos is created – the pain of the past is turned into a yearning for one’s own disappearance and the disappearance of those that he wants.
Bringing the melancholy (as a matter of fact, the poetic subject of Mozetič always speaks of love between the same gender, and Judith Butler on several occasions labels the homosexuals as “melancholic gender”) and the need of inflicting pain (to himself and also to others) in a specific relation in which one creates the other and vice versa, Brane Mozetič creates powerful poetry. The personal and universal in his verses are in constant interaction, and Eros and Thanatos, as the pleasure and pain, always tend to overcome each other – this is poetry that represents the best of the national literature (Mozetič was awarded the highest poetry award for the collection “Banalities”) and it is also at the top of the contemporary European poetry.
Bibliography:
Butler, Judith: The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1997.
Foucault, Michel: Discipline and Punish. London, 1978.
The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1,2,3. Penguin, London, 2004.
Freud, Sigmund: „S one strane principa zadovoljstva“ i „Ego i Id“. In: Treći Program Radio Beograda, pp. 253332. Beograd, 1984.
Kristeva, Julija: Crno Sunce. Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1994.
Мозетич, Бране. „Баналии“. Блесок, Скопје, 2004.
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