A sound that remembers the ocean - the universe

In his A messy biography Arsenije Arsa Jovanović, speaking about his association with Vlad Petrić, writes: "It is easier to write about enemies than about friends." It's not easy about friends either, my Aresnius, I would add. Writing this text a few days after my friend, captain and adventurer, artist and fighter, interpreter of the sea's infinity and reader of the secret signs of the mystical illuminations of art - Arsa Jovanović - sailed across the heavenly sea, finally to cross that sea too, it just remained undiscovered for him, I am tormented by a completely different temptation of the context of memory. Namely, with such texts it would be appropriate to include life at least in those basic premises important for ordinary human memory. Unfortunately, at the beginning, I have to immediately admit my great friendly sadness and no less friendly, certainly sincere, inability to at least formally "comprehend" Arsa's life, to separate important things and suppress unimportant ones. Because everything in his life was important and everything took up the space of his thoughts, taking over his almost childlike nature, because he never stopped being a curious child, unadulterated and naive in his honesty with which he always discovers the world. After all, how else to explain the marvelous melodic expanses that he created and which amazed the world, and above all Terrence Malick, who used Arsa's music in his films. In which sphere of interpretation and evaluation should we put his TV movie Oppenheimer, filmed fifty years before the "sensationalist" rediscovery of the life and works of this "devil's apprentice". Arca's version is better, I responsibly assert, and I can only imagine what he would have made if he had the means and capabilities of a Hollywood production. And maybe he already achieved all that when he wanted to, and continued with his pilgrimage to Serbian monasteries or world seas, creating unique shows that even now, especially then, were real little avant-garde masterpieces of visual and sound art. His priorities were tied to infinity and not to the small finitudes of deceptive world fame. What could people give him more than what this eternal mariner had already taken (and was constantly taking) from the sea. Perhaps this text could have started with the words: "Call me Ishmail", as the novel begins Moby Dick Herman Melville, although I'm not sure which role I would give to Arcee, the biblical Captain Ahab or the mythic embodiment of the freedom metaphor of the white whale. Maybe both at the same time, but I'm sure that the wise maxim applies to Arsa's life and artistic creativity: "The intellectual is Moby Dick, everything else is the sea." How else can we explain his thoughts from Autobiographies, written in the "ocean of space" (Arsa's phrase): "I experience the ship as a being...", "The winds are the choreographers of the ships...", or as one devotee of water, Ćamil Sijarić, says: "A drop of water and everything in it, the tree and the sky and me." Billions of drops surrounded Arsa's sea abyss, and in them he saw everything as well as Camil, but also much, much more.

When I read our long-term correspondence, the already mentioned and omnipresent inability to cover everything in one text gained intensity in a topography and toponymy that was only clear to him. We would start by talking about his series "The Time of Frescoes", which has just been remastered and rerun on RTS 3, and continue with the melodic meanings and synesthetic branches of his last composition "Orison", a prayer compiled from many world religions, then comment on what Terence Malick thinks about it in his letter, and then, quite unexpectedly, he would send me an email from a friend from Kharkiv who writes about life in war-torn Ukraine. One would say "nothing to do with anything", two perfect interlocutors talk about whatever comes to their mind, but then you realize (actually I do, and he already knew it all) that everything is very much related to each other, because every experience presented discursively has multiple dimensions. The primary one is certainly memoir, and then it goes spatial, so that the sound unites all aspects of the emotional existence of the experience in the coordinates of totality. So there are no coincidences, these are all tracks and corridors that Captain Arsa writes in his secret nautical maps, you just need to be open enough to follow them. That's why he "shuffled" his autobiography, not to destroy the linearity of the narration, but to open up space for meanings.

I collaborated with him as an editor on two books; Temple renovation - records of the establishment of the Bitef Theater i Kosančić's wreath 19, about the painter's house on Kosančićevo venc, i.e. about its inhabitants, whose monologues and dialogues, playful polyphony of marvelous individuality, were recorded by the diligent Arsa on tapes, and then poured out on paper as a completely different kind of memory, revived in a different record "so that the magic would not disappear, so that the image would not be stiffened and impoverished by the misuse of words...", as he wrote about his thoughts in the days when avant-garde theater and festival were created in Belgrade. I did not edit the last book, although I was in correspondence with Ars in all stages of its creation (including the previous one, which was withdrawn). Falconing him when he falters and curbing his raptures when he goes too far. Both are completely relative statements in his case, I use them here only to make clear to the reader that endless arc from ecstatic to melancholic, typical of all artists. Especially for those who are born that way, they do not become artists as they never cease to last in some new form in some other or other inspiration. Just like Arsa Jovanović who inspired and ennobled many, some will admit it publicly and most will not, I admit it.