Happy countries live longer than their people, even the greatest. Yugoslavia was not happy, it was only beautiful and cursed, like Fitzgerald's. That's why the poor woman has been gone for a long time, and her people are still dying in large numbers, and will continue to lag for a long time. Now Arsen Dedić died for her. And with that death, he reduced it to an entire autonomous province, although composed of only one man.
I mention the country of his birth, life, death and eternity at the very beginning because Arsen died this Monday wherever he was and to everyone to whom he was important and dear. Therefore, he did not die only in his native Šibenik and Zagreb (for the rest of his life), because he did not only write and sing in them, but also in Kikinda and Kranj, and Bitola and Mostar, that is, those in those and other human settlements who know what it means when, in an empty house, haunted by some autumn absences, the newspaper is still lying on the table, with some dates in July. And he died, by God, and countless others somewhere in Winnipeg or Topeka, in Duisburg or Malmö, who carried his voice and songs, his Sandra and Milena, with them to their distant new habitats as a precious proof that they are not pumpkins without roots or being. without history, but people who were worthy of a better fate.
This is not an opportunity to write about Arsene's "way to the top", nor, after all, to recapitulate a life path in the manner of a chronicle; in the age of Wikipedia, that effort is in vain, it leads nowhere. We can only, with today's intelligence, wonder how it is possible that Dedic's exceptionalism was not immediately and easily recognized: it is hard to believe, but I guess what he says is true, that House by the sea she was rejected at the Opatija, Zagreb and Belgrade festivals, and then she barely made it to the Split one... And what about that one unrejected songs, does anyone remember them, anywhere? Anyway, Arsen was thirty-one when the LP came out A man like me, with a text by Igor Mandić on the cover, in which Arsen's two-time fellow citizen warned us that we are dealing with an artist, singer, author of the noblest variety, and not just another passing showman; already then, by the end of the sixties, Arsen wrote some of his greatest songs, not because he would not write similar or better songs afterwards, but because that "zero" moment, with that album, had the power of the Announcement as it was, just two years earlier, had Leonard Cohen's first album, or a little earlier, Bob Dylan's. The comparison is not far-fetched - it is the only logical one. The same thing will happen again two years later, when his first book of poems comes out A ship in a bottle. From then on, Dedić's career as a poet and chansonner or singer-songwriter will go forward, separating, intertwining and coming together in a rhythm natural to them, without spasms, as it should be. How will he experience what at what moment grace of formation, in the end, is a secondary matter.
Dylan and Cohen at least had company, they were part of a sprawling scene with a rich history and a thriving present; Arsen, on the other hand, for a long time, for years and decades, was alone in our lives and on our stage, incomparable and irreducible, not only a "genre by itself", but an entire scene by itself, embodied in one man. On one side was "fun music", festival bangers with more or less (non) sense, on the other was rock'n'roll, or at least what rock'n'roll tried to look like, and Arsen fell away from the first one quite quickly (thus began his "real" career) because he was unfit and unadaptable for him - that is, simply too good, gifted, subtle, too much a musician, too much a poet - and he also could not belong, was not of such metal. And so Arsene was actually "our best chansonnier" for a long, long time throughout our lives, and I'm not kidding at all when I say that the fact that he was the only one for a long time did not diminish his title. It's not his fault that it was like that, he would have been the best if there were ten or a hundred more, but he wasn't, except for a few somewhere on the margin; the first significant and really good ones will only appear somewhere deep in the seventies, mostly in Slovenia (Pengov, Brecelj, Jani Kovačič), but by then Arsen will already be a classic.
Dancing on that thin, thin edge between worlds he could not even truly belong to, Arsen Dedić single-handedly created an entire emotional and expressive range without predecessors and noteworthy successors, shaping, articulating, singing everything that we felt existed somewhere inside us and he is looking for his name and his poet, which - certainly not in our language - we could not hear from anyone else. His love lyrics have always been sugar free, which "schlager singers" (logically, no?) will never learn, and his sharp irony, when he reached for "socially critical" reviews, observation of human nature or self-ironic questioning of his own "craft", was deprived of the brutal cynicism that was an almost inevitable companion of the rocker, later punk sensibility.
We have every possible reason to view Arsene through a "geopoetic" prism. Its depth is inestimably important, comparable to nothing we have known Mediterranean, in which there was absolutely nothing para-folkloric, exploitative, parasitizing on two or three wild boars of the southern Weltschmer, but it was urban in the most authentic sense of the word, just like Zagreb, where he lived for a century and achieved everything possible, and much more, was actually the inevitable secret ingredient of arsenicism, its magisterial "constitutive element"; I don't think that anyone who has blacked out and woken up in Zagreb at least three times in their life - and especially the former one, with which he whispers forever in a preserved time capsule the sound of the evening trams - I don't have to draw why it is so... What does it mean? I can't imagine that Arsen would have become (exactly) Arsen at any other latitude and longitude, and yet, there was no banal "Zagrepchanism" in any of his verses or gestures in life and art, no flattery to a strenuous Kleinberger narcissism. On the contrary, he made fun of him, saying that Zagreb and he loved each other secretly, because neither his nor Zagreb's family would like it... That native South and that chosen, Pannonian-Mytho-European North (with which the "Balkan" reverse, of course, begins two meters from the main street, how could it be otherwise...) Arsen sang a little, and created a little, because that's what poets do (and lyricists cry): they shape our worlds, they do not stop at interpreting them. Therefore, with his eleventh thesis, Marx short-sightedly placed his hopes in the wrong profession...
Seen from any side, hasn't Arsen shadowed our intimate geographies? How can it ever rain again when it rains seriously, than like in October on the islands? You don't even have to look into the thin riverbed of the Sava between Siget and Trnje, and you will still be able to recognize the colors green and blue waters of Zagreb. City fathers and senses can run wild as they please, but the Belgrade we love and which is our real cultural heritage and spiritual homeland is the one in which a green bus crashes down a Belgrade slope, because that green-bussed Belgrade was good and the best to everyone, including himself: since those buses were red, people seem to have lost the knowledge of shame. And all this is only from one single song - the one to which, along with Šerbedžija's muttering, there were so many sighs in the girls' and students' dormitories of a vanished world.
There is that thesis, I have heard it many times, how "you have to get to a certain age to understand Arsene". Who cares, so be it, every way to Arsene is good, but this generalization is bullshit. It somehow turns out that Dedić is a poet of middle-aged and depressed gentlemen and ladies, those for whom the past is much richer than the future? I've never understood why that would be, especially if it wasn't already - and it wasn't - with Cohen or, for all I know, Van Morrison. I don't remember exactly when I fell in love with Arsene, because I don't really remember a time when I didn't love him; it must have happened at the age when I stopped being a child, and I stopped with every new good book I read, and with every new record I discovered in my life, which could have been by The Clash, or by Miles Davis, or by Arsene. Well, Arsen and I were fellow citizens at the time, but I wouldn't say it was that important - I was also a fellow citizen with Ljupka Dimitrovska at the time, so nothing... Yes, Arsen is one of the crucially important poets of my youth, even though we seem to have everything shared; yes, when I hear his voice, I am in the most direct possible contact with the continuity of my own life, in which the deficit of continuity has taken too great a toll anyway. I didn't know him personally, and yet, a world without Arsene seems somehow unimaginable to me, it's a world in which you still have to learn to move.
Come to think of it, we met once, if you can call it that. Two or three years ago, we flew from Ljubljana to Podgorica, to the same festival. He was followed by the old and sick Kruno L., and when I passed by their line on the plane, Kruno introduced me, and Arsen looked at me like a hangman and asked me, "Are you also a cultural worker?", so we were laughing a little, so I sat down in my seat... Later, I watched as known and unknown people approached him at the festival without giving him a moment of peace, and how he had had enough, so thoroughly had enough of everything and everyone. I didn't say another word to him, why should I? What did I have to say to him? And he already told me so much.
Arsen Dedić died yesterday, and YouTube went wild all night, Yugoslavia was saying goodbye to its chansonnier, people watched and watched and watched, listened and listened to everything about Arsen and from Arsen and to Arsen and with Arsen, and I watched and listened me too, how could I not? That's how it starts, and then you can't stop...
What is Arsene's "best" song? Everyone has their own, it's impossible to say, he has no less than twenty best songs. Intimate is perhaps the most "mine" Everything you know about me, but I watched it three times last night O, youth, and not his original, but the completely shattering final scenes of the phenomenal, but brutally underrated Karanović film Strawberries in the throat: ex-boyfriends and half-ex-friends gather for an anniversary celebration that slowly turns into a self-exposing shipwreck; dawn slowly over the river, everyone is drunk and tired, defeated and empty, Berček, Dikla and Miki are staring at Nothing that is sneaking up on them, Mira Banjac is crying and smoking, and Lepi Jovica is singing with her orchestra O, youth like a suicidal Hungarian romance, he sings as if it's the last thing he's going to sing, while behind him the bow is strumming and while out there the world begins to collapse, about which, when we saw the film for the first time, we may not have known anything, but we may have suspected. Arsene is nowhere to be seen in that scene, and then again, none of it would have happened without his song. Just like in our lives and after them, in our country and after it. Some way, tight through the fall, the train will take us, the timetable is already made, it's just kept secret, that's all.
For the sailor
No more your cities, no more loyal seas,
and porpoises can't do without your ship—
there are no more ships.
Even the pine bark does not wrinkle, the crowns do not turn green
and the salt does not convulse our faces, and the boil does not drain
resin with teeth on a boy's back. Where are they?
blue manes and mother-of-pearl cars with which
Was Neptune proud at the races? Where is all that?
gold and clear metal fish? No more whips
that they beat against the walls and sails at night; and yours
drunkards were ridiculed in turn. Into the bays
pours late copper, and your mast is gone.
There is still a broken sky and all the wind
driven into the rocks. It's your formal suit
thrown with flags, battles are forgotten,
and your bitter generation sold you out.
Oh, God, do something
Oh, God, do something
and for me.
You turned my blood to water,
water into bad wine,
wine back into the water.
You are the most beautiful words
turned into curse words,
threats and insults.
This little good in itself
I'm saving as much as I can.
Do something for the chops,
poetic oath,
for his traitorous sons,
newly poisoned people.
Let the bed burn
in which it glows and burns.
Give her back her first words
which I uttered in fear.
Let him wake up
in the north and south
and let her face shine
east and west.
You are too busy
dealt with goods.
Let some amazed
watching the train towards Drniš -
like 1946
let do
because I have no one else.
And let me finally fall asleep
the dream of the righteous.
And that's how he'll wake me up
the early cry of the heron
in the rockery.
Language
I read the title of a book
I told her
did you feel it too?
tremor in the area of the tongue
I nisam
this does not bode well
beautiful chimney sweeps
and the chimneys are collapsing
the collapse began
in grammar
everyone is shaken
linguists
linguists
Antaeus separated from Gaea
tongue twisters
language phobes
the tongue behind the teeth was shaken
tongue soup is frozen
Are you ashamed on behalf of those
who are ashamed of their language
don't bite your tongue
tongue cancer
Are you ashamed on behalf of those
who prefer to handle
foreign languages
what will he say to all that
young Esperantists
Are you ashamed on behalf of those
which are hidden in language
who in fear
insist on emphasis
underage TV presenters
in juvenile language
they warn and openly threaten
came the voice
new language - new dogmas
dead languages
then rinse the spork tongue
but also a common language
which you and I will
develop
and save
in the common mouth
the language of love
it is a child's language
Life is the Czech Republic
That when it is said: Life is the sea
the word is too hard
Life is less: a little trick
Life is the Czech Republic
The man is saved, at least he swims out
if he smiles
Trust me: Poland is less
it's more Czech
Heart on the palm, hand on fire
it's a big mistake
there are numerous silent methods
Life is the Czech Republic
Hoe, hook, pitchfork and fiddle
heavy equipment
they will not defend us in that battle
because life is Czech Republic
***
Small nations need
great poets
Small actors waste
big gestures
Little wives need
older wives
Small theaters play
historical dramas
Little people pay
big cars
Small songs require
the loudest voices
Small nations need
only great poets
The vanquished sing
heroic poems a
winners throughout that time
discreetly silent...
Black sheep
I've never been the same
I was not good at similarities
I'm alone in flight
and in the cage
fatal soloist
never in choir
without his house
and without money
I am a white crow
and the black sheep
the ladies are worse
worried about me
wicked fellow
and hearts of darkness
Foreigners
others take the main road
others use the main streets
they know where the place is
I hid my face
and the green light is already on
the restless ones stand at the crossing
I went where it was more difficult
I walked in the frost
I wandered in the woods
I went astray
impassable path
followed the night bird
unknown sea
I went astray
where are the runaways going
tired and tied with a wire
What songs to sing
We will be reasonable
and withhold it,
because this time will not repay us
the love we gave him
from the first tender, post-war years.
We'll change the song,
take your heart in your hands
and it will resist
like the living hand of the water, the hand of the wind,
but we won't give him
because our statements are now ridiculous
to a world that no longer likes it,
and we are with our unreasonable soul
in front of a full and sleepy lover.
We will be wise
and sing songs,
in which we will not reveal anything
from warm years and music.
We will not acknowledge the noise of blood flow,
the general history of kissing in the home on Jurjevska,
map of Šibenik, the beach in December,
your departure; the snow that wipes you away
and the year that underlines you.
We will completely change the dictionary
and put a fist on the crazy mouth
that we don't babble in front of an imagined face
your everyday, simple and too smart.
We will live without giving ourselves away.
long letters,
suicide lead,
on his toes with himself
with a gap between the ribs,
because that would be worthy,
if something has to be done.
Do not humiliate
heart and old head
before the day that fills the street
like icy water of light,
like the north wind.
Don't touch those things anymore;
different songs should be sung.
Mark the loop of fate,
give a sign of existence and composure;
just so much.
No more love songs, my little one,
you will settle for the old ones.
We'll never even try
open the black book of the sea;
we will only draw a line
and be silent under it, be silent until the end.
