In/Half (excerpt)

excerpt from the novel In/Half, published in Slovenian in 2013 by Cankarjeva, translated by Jason Blake

Dear Zoia,

I fear the world is not turning in the right direction. Each and every one of us bears part of the blame, because we haven’t dared break away from the ballast of a dictated existence. I hope I’m not too old for that. I’d like to see us all come together.

I’m thirty-five years old. I was born one sinister September 11th, you will probably know which year. I grew up in a very strange world, which I began to regard as very strange only after I became a little more familiar with the world as it used to be. Maybe that’s just a projection. Maybe the world has always been very strange and our particular brand of strangeness is just a variation on this very dishonest world. But I don’t know. The counter-culture of the Sixties grips me. The techno-craze of the Nineties grips me. The third millennium horrifies me. And I think that we’re the ones to blame, because they’ve convinced us that the world is made up of masses of people we have no influence over. Only after you look around a bit do you see that there aren’t any masses of people. That we are only me, and you, and you, and you, and you… That the mass we’re constantly addressing when explaining the world just doesn’t exist. That in the chasms between us there aren’t thousands of choked-out voices exerting their will, but only a gaping hole in whose place there should be a genuine, warm, human relationship, but the phantasm of the crowd banished it. Each has his own life, they told us. But if I give someone my hand, we get to know each other, and the world is different.

I spent almost fifteen years at the bottom of the corporate ladder, overlooked, ignored in the hierarchy of solemn things. It rubs away at your soul, being caught up day after day in the same intrigue. But I had a job, and with the job came everything that the modern world intends for you. I had a girlfriend. We were in a relationship for eight years and it took us two text messages to break up. Things just mellowed out, I’d say. I had a few people who were less than friends and more than acquaintances. Someone you could compare yourself to, to have an approximate idea where you stand. When I left my job I was totally insufficient for the operations of envy, so they forgot about me in a week. Take Mike, for example. For ten years we played squash every Thursday and for ten years I listened to his misogynistic blustering. If I called him now, he would say who’s there?, and when I’d tell him he would repeat, who? I never asked my girlfriend to marry me because I was convinced she’d say no. Maybe I had bad luck. Maybe I should have hung around with different people. But everything is so concocted, made up. This has to be overcome, somehow. I’m not smart enough to say how it all came about – maybe this is to blame: the cultural production of individualism which constantly nourished a semi-divine sense of a public ego, a false one, of course. Or is it the global system’s terrorist tactics that are to blame? They’ve turned public contact into an important thing, swaying between thinking of an undiscriminating, tolerant attitude as dangerous or, worse, distasteful. Or is it something else, something completely different, that’s to blame? In any case, I’m sure that there are many of us who expect more from life. We have to spread our arms. Closing ourselves into the mold of bourgeois relational form leaves us lonely, weak, worthless and at the same time firmly convinced of the illusion of control over our own existence. The system is wily and vile, our confidence is a grim joke.

That’s why we should come together. I don’t want to propagate power, as if, together, we could destroy and/or establish and/or change the world. I would just like to see who, today, is alive and present.

I hope I haven’t gone on for too long. I would like to ask you to read your poetry at Poetrylitics, an end-of-summer festival. I’m not going to make any money, and I’m not looking for any benefits from this. My motives are honest and pure. If you come, a lot of those people whose lives your poetry has changed will come. There are many of us, each of us lonely and stuck with our own shattered fate. I know you like your solitude, but I’m asking you because there are a lot of us who can’t, who mustn’t, who don’t want to afford it any more.

Unite us? I’ll tell you more if/when you respond.

With great hope, with warmest greetings, in great anticipation of an answer,

another part of the carious cuttle,

forever yours,

Max Adorcuse

(Vaclav Smech)