Slovene Modernism [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 321-336]

SLOVENE MODERNISM
333
only that which is unhoped-for
repressed, uncomfortable, and inexplicable is real.
This evening perhaps you will receive the following
optional, but instructive program:
a scorpion crawls across the lap of a woman,
the neighbor bores himself into the keyhole,
and there on the screen the world goes under,
the chair treads the path toward Japan,
on the bed the saffron blooms,
in the fireplace icebergs bum up,
the children brick up the windows,
in the spider web the cash register rings,
inside the light bulb the mathematical system
collapses,
it tolls twelve o'clock after half past two
and on the wall you read mene tekel ufarsin.
Kocbek's surrealist imagination now takes in broad expanses. On the one
side, he allows himself a playful, "childish," almost fairy tale-like imagination, which liberates things from every weight (Predmeti). But this is not the
old, dependable fairy tale. Rather, it is shot through with inner existential
conscience. On the other hand, even imagination gives itself over to dramatic
reality, to grotesque paradoxes or to the absurd, to the world beyond
beauty. For poetry there is nothing left to gamble away, no wrong card
to play, but there emerge half-horrible, half-ridiculous surrealist portraits
of the mad remnants of a momentous history. The following lines of verse
stand as self-commentary on this poetic activity: "My mind falls apart like
a gypsy's wagon"; or, "absorbed in the game, humanity dies much less
horribly." Even the means of expression is no longer organic or "integral,"
because its main technique is no longer metaphor or symbol, but the paradoxical montage of widely separate semantic units. The enormous "information gaps" between these units, as the author himself calls them, hold the
reader in tense participation. But this time Kocbek sustains neither poetic
play, nor destruction, nor associative montage, but gives them limits and
a goal. His concern for personal "sovereignization," as he calls it, and for
the "mastery of antagonistic forces" never actually stopped and thus he
accepted the Modernist, artistic avant-garde only provisionally. He never
committed himself totally to Surrealist, asyntactic writing. Moreover,
he qualified his poetic or uncanny play by also writing texts that programmatically testify to inner composure and strength, thereby turning his back
to nothingness and dread. He adheres to his stable system of values, which
includes his concern for the national identity of his people.
The next volume of poetry, Zerjavica (1974), shows how Kocbek's lyric
of the '70s again begins to be oriented towards intellectual consolidation,