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When, after several months of work, the last millisecond of "The Unfinished Diary of the Sailing Ship Galiola Nuria" sounded, I did not know how I had started. Was I on the trail of my dreams, or was I listening to old recordings of my voyages from Belgrade across the Danube, the Black Sea, the Marmara, the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic to Rovinj in the north? I sailed to Malta and Sicily, visited a Delphic sanctuary and gazed over the volcanic craters of Vesuvius and Etna. Some of the fifty-plus-year-old tape recordings were not unlike the images-not pictures, sounds-not tones-that flash briefly from some of our shallows in our dreams when we don't expect them, when we can't expect them-as dreams tend to do. Moments of a spent life are revealed to us that the crowded dump of our superficial consciousness could not possibly have divined. As if it were someone else and not us. And it was someone else. We are different every day. If our brain were able (at least mine is) to store, like an album, all the images-sound, all the sound-images (and the connection is far more complex than these two feeble words can express), we could say accurately that each person has hundreds and hundreds of lives. But nature has decided otherwise. We are doomed to spend most of our time in the garbage dump of the present. I began one of my books with these words: "I have three eyes, I see with two, I see with the third. The third eye saw landscapes and scenes to which my two eyes were blind. I could also say that I have two ears, with two I listen, and with one I hear. Well, with the one eye and the one ear I heard and saw what my listeners hear and see, on condition that they also have two eyes and two ears, but only hear and see with one eye and one ear. Hearing and seeing is not the same as hearing and seeing. The magical alchemy of our consciousness combines them into one, into a third. In this third lies the essence of art, if I may speak of this essence, that unreachable deep abyss, that something beyond the reach of our consciousness with roots that remain hidden from us. I cannot dive that deep, so I stay on the surface and stare into the abyss below me and within me. My dive into the "Unfinished Diary of the Sailing Ship Galiola Nuria" ends here. A co-production with R(A)DIO(CUSTICA) of Czech Radio. |
