Farewell Lament
for an Old Family Fridge
before it sank into the Sea
An acoustic sacrament
by Arsenije Jovanovic

[German Translation]

Usually, I hate to tell the stories about my acoustic fantasies but I hope that once you hear this one you would understand more what I mean. Since I feel certain sentimentality for an object, I spent a good part of my life nearby, I find the story could be as important, even more in this case maybe, as is my art work itself.

We are surrounded with countless number of objects all our life. Sorry saying such a banal fact but I have to being so obsessed with the subject. Our first object usually is a nipple and last one most usually is a coffin. Some of them we like, some of them we don't, about most of them we don't even think about unless we feel proud about like the car or some other stupid thing.

I met a poor Macedonian peasant years ago, a very old man at that time. He had a kind of a stool, a funny little wooden chair he was sitting on years and years in his lifetime. Once he was young man, he has made that chair himself. I fell in love with the chair the moment I've seen it and I wanted to buy it right away. I start offering pretty good money for the old man's stool but I was refused. Than, as a probation, I asked how much would cost his cow if I change my mind and want to buy the cow instead of the chair. The old man asked for the cow almost the same amount of money I was offering for his little chair. Of course, I didn't buy the cow but I didn't buy the chair either. From that time I use to think about the objects around me different way discovering that astonishingly often we feel more for some dead thing than for the alive beings around us. I mean the average people, normal people, not fetishists and eccentrics.

There was a fridge in our house. Nothing specific was in the fact except that, from the first day in the house until its last breath, the fridge was permanently working for almost thirty years, day and night. Nearly two generations grew up nearby the diligent faithful object, few of the family members have died, some of them has been born meantime, the parallel life was going on with the life of the fridge.

But, it came the day when the shaky door of the mechanical slave couldn't be closed any more and the fridge became useless overnight although its compressor was still panting and beating and hacking like the agonizing patient. There were no medicaments what could help the old guy and family decided to throw away electric servant to some trash heap.

But there were no trash heap nearby. Our house was situated at the end of the village at the very coast of the sea. At that time, people living close to the water used to have bizarre habitude to throw useless object away into the sea, to send the stuff to the silent bottom. The fridge was embarked and we sailed off from the coast to the deep blue graveyard.

The old guy was sinking incredibly slow, turned over few times before its unreturnable disappearing, air bubbles were dancing goodbye on the surface. That bubbling was its last sounding before the eternal rest in the world of silence.

That was the story about a family fridge, partly authentic partly invented. In order to make some ecological puritans happy, I declare that the sea funeral was the matter of author's fantasy - or even better - that the whole thing has happened hundred years ago when the mankind still didn't care much about the cleanliness of the Globe.

One more thing I want to say. It is not common that abandoned old objects are going away accompanied by marches funebre but in art so much things are possible. The author of the lament and the family accomplice of appropriate funeral used the part of Verdi's "Requiem" as the farewell music for the occasion. Of course, the main music was created by the fridge itself when it was alive, the author did some recordings at the time of its agonizing hours.

The place where the fridge sank into the sea I have marked with a little cross on one my sea charts. The exact position is: ............ Could be that one day I shall dive there in order to pay a visit to the old stuff, to see if some octopus or squid or some other homeless sea inhabitant made his dwelling there - where, once upon a time, behind its door passed through thousands and thousands bottles of milk, wine and bear, millions of eggs, tons of all sorts of meat, so many Mediterranean fishes that a big aquarium could be supplied and so many other things. If the sea animal so gladly and so often populate ship wrecks why wouldn't the late family fridge? That would be its second life, a reincarnation of an object from everyday existence of my family. In the same time, the fridge to whom acoustic story is dedicated, is the story about poor Macedonian old man who decided to spend his last days sitting on a tiny homemade chair.

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