Sunday, 23. April 2017, 23:03 - 00:00, Ö1

[ DEUTSCH ]

KUNSTRADIO - RADIOKUNST





“Farewell Prayer for One Galiola”
and
“The Prophecy of the Village of Kremna” von Arsenije Jovanovic
by Arsenije Jovanovic


1) “Farewell Prayer for one Galiola”

sound PLAY

a little more…
one more drop
close the opening in your skull
so that mercilessly passing springs would end
in the slimy chunk of night
so that the infinite fields would end
those sideless planes without gravity
so that all fires behind you go out
and burn the last shrieks of birds on fire
full of tight consciousness and a forced joy
so that a stillborn and mute morning would appear
with eyes wide open and paddles broken
as a crucified heretic waiting without remorse …

… in the sea shells
in the sludge
in the flakes of phosphorous creatures moving weightlessly
in the dying shriek of the bird
deep under sand and stone
from a frightened little creature of purple and chalk
under so many thrown and accidentally dropped things
all over you
in every crystal of a broken and scattered sun
travelling, travelling, travelling …

***

“Galiola is the lighthouse at North of Adriatic on a small desert rocky island, far from the mainland, with no inhabitants except thousands of seagulls and lizards, where from time to time I used to spend a day or a night, sometimes longer, often all by myself, years and years while I was sailing around with my boat also named ”Galiola”. As the time went on, this little island and the lighthouse tower became less and less real, both became more my fiction and my obsession rather than the real thing and started to be a metaphor for all my travels and voyages, the name and an icon on nautical chart more than a real thing. So I am not able any more to explain exactly what Galiola is after all.
To be precise, it is not the word I like anyway. I always enjoyed reading nautical charts and old pilot books, admiring the names of islands and headlands, trying to understand how these beautiful names were created in deep past, more sublime sometimes than the name we are giving to our own children. In the piece ‘Farewell Prayer for one Galiola’ a choir sings these names like a prayer. A dreamy story dedicated to the little island and its lighthouse, a tall thin tower like the stem of the flower looking to the sky.”


2) “The Prophecy of the Village of Kremna”

sound PLAY

“A long time ago in a dream, someone was telling me, in an incomprehensible language, about prophetic events which would influence my fate.
Bearing in mind that neither the aforementioned prophecy, nor prophecies in general, interested me, I wondered how this one had travelled and meandered, seeping into my consciousness, given I had never been – nor am now – bothered about the subject.
A dream bereft of events and a story, an arbitrary stream of consciousness with flickering images, which became and disappeared, blended into one another and metamorphosed like frames in experimental films.
One who dreams cannot confidently claim what he has seen or heard in a dream, so I will not claim anything confidently either.
One of the powers of dreaming is that it forces us to forget even in the first moments of waking or shortly thereafter. The particularities of the dream, even the most interesting ones, disappear in an instant by the power of a mighty hidden magic. Immediately after waking, in the murky whirl of consciousness, when the memories of dreaming withdraw into the abysses and sink into them faster than objects disappearing in the chasm of water or air, I tried to memorise that silence and the occasional humming.
From an acoustic point of view, that was interesting to me – the silence of dreaming, different to that which we call silence.
Like Gregor Samsa, I began taking in reality, recognising objects in the room, myself in bed, scrawling on a piece of paper with the pointless aim to leave a drawn trace of a dream before it disappeared and stop the twisted frames from the movie of consciousness, which were alternating at an immeasurable speed.
The images of a dream flow too fast for a woken mind because the laws of physics and gravity do not apply to the mechanism of dreams, surpassing even the speed of light, so we are unable to connect them to our daily lives and so-called awakened consciousness as the borders and differences between the dream state and the wakefulness state are flickering and undefinable.
I had not thought of the dream for a long time until I found myself on a deserted hill, somewhere on the border between Macedonia and Albania, when returning from a shoot. Along the road I saw a row of old, dried out poles connected with telephone cables. I recalled my childhood, for as children we used to listen to the buzzing of the telephone poles.
Those who have not experienced this can hardly imagine that old wooden poles may seem as musical instruments – the music of poles! In the silence of the night, on the bare hill, the poles buzzed strangely, although the word 'buzzing' is too rough to describe that sound, music performed by and unseen player.
A dreamlike reality which has stepped into dreams. A concert on a bare hill in the middle of the night. We were on our feet and awake, but that which we were hearing and recording did not differ from dreams. Telephone cables – strings on a huge harp - whose end was being lost beyond the horizon under a starry sky, were transferring pulsating quivers onto the pole trunks and the dry wood transformed those quivers into bewitching sounds.
In that moment I remembered my dream, that silence and occasional humming. We abandoned the bare hill with the feeling that we had taken a buried treasure from it. Later, using the recordings of the sounds of poles from the bare hill, with faded memories of images from the old dream, I reshaped them into musical impulses which seem like a daydream.”