Through mist and darkness

In the early 2000s I came to stay in Firenze for two months to study Italian, photography, and a bit of sculpture. It was a magical moment in my life. I felt such deep inspiration that when I closed my eyes, I could sense something inside me changing, waking up.

I was travelling with my friend Zhenya, and once we decided to go to Viareggio, to the sea shore. We wanted to limit our spending, so we took only a small amount of cash and left our bank cards at home. On the way, though, Zhenya insisted on buying a very expensive swimsuit, and after that our finances were barely enough to reach Viareggio.

Upon arrival, we went to a liquor store, and according to my calculations, we had just enough for a bottle of brandy and the return tickets. However, my calculations were wrong: after buying the brandy, we were quite a few euros short for the trip back. We tried offering our services as dishwashers in the station bar, but they didn’t want to deal with illegal workers, since our visas didn’t allow us to work. Then we noticed a shady, retro-looking gambling machine.

Zhenya remembered that his father had given him a piece of paper with a prayer. With our hearts filled with the most sincere aspiration, we read the prayer aloud on the station and went to the machine. I put our remaining coins in and pressed all the buttons without looking. Within seconds, the machine started flashing and beeping, and coins began to drop into the tray — the exact amount we needed to get back to Firenze. We were out of our minds with happiness…

I returned here twenty years later and found Firenze tired — exhausted by endless waves of tourists. The city centre barely has a spot where local life still glimmers. It has all transformed into a strange theatre stage: a stage where an elegantly dressed audience has been invited to step up after a fashionable play, chatting lightly while glancing at the set, at the silent decorations.

All of a sudden, everything looks a bit fake. The magnificent buildings and towers are deprived of their purpose and now serve as décor for people who don’t live here but come to act.

Yet outside the centre, there are still a few areas where the “shock of life”1 is very much present — where messiness and spontaneity are alive, where people live as they can. I realised that one of these places is the very neighbourhood where I used to live and study twenty years ago, near Santa Croce.

I often get sad and slightly toxic when I see places I love turning into theatrical stages for global gentrification. But my heart always softens and warms up when I meet locals who speak of their home with tenderness and love. The people I met here were gentle, caring, and said that Firenze is the best place in the world for them.

Firenze remains in my heart as the place where I once had a revelation — that the world is open before me and that anything is possible.

Grandpa used to pick me up from school and we walked home to Smolenskaya. When we arrived, he immediately started making lunch and would loudly announce every dish: “First course!” he proclaimed, confidently putting a bowl of soup in front of me. Then came the loud “Second course!”—a plate of pea porridge with butter, Grandpa’s favourite dish. His mother, Zinaida Petrovna, my great-grandmother, lunched with us and always asked him to cut her a “tiiiiny piece of bread,” and after she had refused several pieces he cut, he would lose patience and hand her the tiniest crumb. That always made me laugh!

Grandpa did everything briskly, energetically, cheerfully. He didn’t like to fuss around for long, but there was always something mischievous in his manner. Behind his thunderous exclamations came a loud laugh. Grandpa was a great joker.

After lunch, he would let me spend time with him in his workshop—a place absolutely magical for me. Canvases and frames stacked up to the ceiling, a vinyl turntable, records, tapes, notebooks, pens, pencils, chisels, planes, bits of wood—the room was filled with enchantment, mystery, the sense of inventing something extraordinary.

Grandpa was always creating, tinkering, building. Many times I sat on the floor of the workshop, watching him paint, or else repair some device, fine-tune a piece of audio equipment, or even build his own speakers. He would explain to me that his homemade speakers didn’t have three, but four drivers, and that this gave the sound greater depth.

Later, Grandpa would take me into the big room and put on records—The Bremen Town Musicians, Buratino, classical music, as well as singer-songwriters, Soviet and French.

Music filled the house constantly: Grandpa listened to his favourite pieces, but he also recorded programs from Radio Orpheus onto cassette tapes. Each cassette he carefully labeled, placed on the shelves, and catalogued in a big notebook that he kept with great care.

This period of my childhood is inseparably tied to Grandpa, to his magical world. Later, when I was already a student and dropped by his apartment on Smolenskaya, he would ask me about my life and always pose a difficult, slightly embarrassing question: had I found my calling in this life? Now I think that, for him, this was the central question of his own life: free searching, choosing one’s own way. He graduated from Bauman University (an engineering school), but refused to take the government-assigned job and instead joined the Moscow circles of the Sixtiers, painted, and worked as a children’s book illustrator. Grandpa always liked to do things his own way.

And I like to believe I inherited from him that same desire not to do things “the proper way,” but to be playful, mischievous. I love remembering him—his presence, his laughter, our talks about art and about traveling in the Russian North, a journey that, sadly, I never managed to make with him. But studying his works, uncovering new periods and motifs, has become my way of accompanying him on that spiritual journey through Russia—or perhaps, more broadly, on a journey of seeking and discovering one’s own style and spirit.

When I failed to give a clear answer to what my vocation was, he would tell me about art, about his own search. At the time, I wasn’t very good at listening to him. It seemed to me that he kept repeating his mantra about the “line of beauty.” Grandpa would say that in his works, he was searching for that line. Like a wave, its curves echoed the shape of the latin S. In his paintings, it traced the outlines of faces, the bends of trees, the contours of houses and churches.

He drew inspiration from icons, from the Russian North, from leaning wooden houses, from a road stretching far into the distance, from shifting light, silhouettes, dawns and sunsets. His works are filled with these images, filled with music.

I think now I see the line of beauty that Grandpa spoke of—the breath of the wave that brings life to everything around it.

“Mr Hoshino?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not just that I’m dumb. Nakata’s empty inside. I finally understand that. Nakata’s like a library without a single book. It wasn’t always like that. I used to have books inside me. For a long time I couldn’t remember, but now I can. I used to be normal, just like everybody else. But something happened and I ended up like a container with nothing inside.”

The name Garda originates from the Germanic word warda, meaning "place of observation" or "place of safety”.

I cannot remember how I find myself sitting in a boat floating on some strange waters. I have a paddle and that is all I have. I can look in any direction but can see nothing but water. The water is neither still nor restless. It is quietly lapping and stretching to the horizon, merging with white skies. It is impossible to say where the water ends and the sky begins.

I sit there for some time looking into nothingness. Then I take the paddle and start paddling. I think to myself that if I paddle for long enough I should get somewhere or at least start seeing something. I do not know how much time passes, but i cannot see anything but water dissolving in white nothingness. I paddle more. After a while I cannot say if I have been paddling for a long time or just started. It feels the same to me.

An old man, wrapped in some cloak, who happens to sit on the other end of the boat, turns to me and says: “Are you hungry ? Let’s have some fish”. He takes a fish in his thin and bony hand, takes a knife in his other hand and starts cutting the fish. I realise that the idea of eating some raw fish is quite pleasant and I nod to the old man and stretch my hand. He carefully hands me a good slice of the fish, which he takes from its back. It is delicious. I think that I have never eaten anything better than this. I remember how usually, when we prepare a ceviche, we add some coriander, lime, chili, olive oil, a bit of salt and pepper, but now it is just raw fish and it is perfect. I sit there enjoying the fish and looking at the old man. He does not seem to be noticing my curious look and keeps cutting more slices from the fish and putting them in his thin mouth.

“Do you know where we are ?, I ask the old man. He looks around slightly puzzled as though my question never crossed his mind. He does not say anything. “Am I lost ?”, I continue. He looks at me for a while and then says, “Of course you are”. His voice is kind. He is looking at me as though at a very old friend, forgiving him for not recognising his friend after all the years.

“Of course I am”, I repeat his words to myself, “of course I am”… But I cannot make any sense out of it. If I am lost it should probably feel worrying, but I feel as peaceful and relaxed as I never felt in my life. May be only in some dreams – and I remember that I always feel so jealous when I am waking up and saying to myself: “God, how good and normal I felt in this dream…, why on earth can’t I feel like this in real life”. But now, sitting with my paddle on the boat it feels just as though all troubles of the world are totally gone.

“Where shall I go?”, I want to ask the old man, but I cannot see him around anymore. “Hm”, I think, but then just start to gaze into the white nothingness in front of me and all the thoughts leave me. I decide to paddle a bit more. I still cannot not say how much time passed since I realised I am sitting on the boat but then I notice that the water starts to change. The waves become longer and higher and the boat begins to sway. In a moment the boat starts to wobble so strongly that I am finding it hard to keep balance and not fall out. The whiteness around me is tightening and becoming grey. The water seems to have risen in the air and starts turning and turning around me. “A storm…”, I say to myself. I try to paddle through the grey rainstorm but the boat is uncontrollable. “I should reach the storm’s centre”, I say to myself, remembering that at the heart of a storm there should be a spot of total calmness.

I am caught up in the whirls of rain and impenetrable grey walls of water trying to hold to the boat. Up, down, to the sides, all my being is devoted to holding on. “I must reach the centre… or may be the centre will reach me…”, my thoughts become confused. I lay on the bottom of the boat tightly curled, cover my head with my hands and close my eyes. The swaying of the boat, the waves of water covering me one after another, the creaking sounds of the wooden boat, – all sounds and sensations start to form one whole roaring of the storm, that absorbs everything, flooding my consciousness and becoming me. Boat, water, rain, roars, whirls…, I cannot distinguish myself from that anymore, it is all One.

I notice that I am no longer feeling it all but observing from a distance… When I open my eyes, the storm is gone. I rise in the boat and see that everything is still. It reminds me of the northern white nights, where everything is illuminated from within the objects, without any source of light. Have I reached the eye of the storm ? I remember that the central spot inside a storm can reach up to tens of kilometres. But then it becomes of no importance to me. I am looking into the white shimmering light and I cannot not think of anything at all. I notice the bleaks of water here and there, the contours of the boat, but I am no longer wondering about anything. I am not wanting anything at all and that is it.

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Be that as it may, this intuition was further nurtured by our confirmation bias, that was a discovery that our landlord is into ham radio. At night, walking past his windows and thanks to interior lighting we had a glimpse into some of his observable life. Just this one time, on our way back from a divine grocery shopping experience – which we had just once and that sufficed for the whole 3 nights we spent in this city – we saw him through the window, his back to us, sitting on a long desk, surrounded by radio looking devices and gadgets, headphones and antennas.

Expectedly, this gave our imagination an amazing scope. After this revelatory inspiration, we immediately decided in our minds for this man to have an unexpected hobby. Late in the evening he would sit in front of the radio station tuning into the waves of the other aficionados around the world, and exchanging signals with them.

It’s not hard to guess why he would be attracted to this subculture. The whole city is covered with extravagant radio antennas, looking like old crooked trees with wicked branches trying to grasp something. Maybe for this city antennas mean a holy thing, maybe they deliberately protect this mechanism that might look so outdated. Maybe they enjoy the ideas of exchanging signals, ideas of being connected and the mystery of the whole thing.

The amateur radio culture could be the true precursor to different movements for the free and decentralised organisation of information and life in general, like the early internet pirate subculture or the web 3 trends nowadays. And it might be that the cult of radio antennas in Zagreb is somehow linked to the omnipresence of gothic, rock and hard metal vibes. Even the main cathedral is transformed into a huge antenna. The most important symbol of the city became a representation of radio culture.

It’s not only radio antennas but also the blood circulation system of Zagreb – the tram rails – that seem to cover the city like a spider’s web. Flowing in the city’s veins you see young people represent this gothic and metal culture with style. Hair, clothes, tattoos, all details are taken care of with a great deal of attention.

All that makes us feel that Zagreb lives in a rebel analog universe, powered by tram railways and radio waves. Unlike digital world that tries to convey all the infinite riches of reality in 1s and 0s, analog world has all the elegance and mysterious nature of a wave. All that creates space for crazy constructivist buildings, half abandoned towers, theatre academy club restaurants, antique bookshops and muddy parks with ducks and turtles.

I guess these lands took what was best from the imperial times, and mainly this cultural openness and relations with Balkan culture. Local old people speak Pomak here (which is a Bulgarian dialect). A megaphone located on the main railway station, can be heard throughout the whole town, and it announces not only the arrivals and departures of trains but also the arrival of tomatoes and peppers from other neighbourhoods, their price per kilogram and where to buy them.

The surroundings of Pehlivanköy also create this very peaceful and quiet mood, with vast plains, little villages and towns, farms, railways and rivers.

Rivers and railways are both an interesting means of transport. Both represent a fixed way of going somewhere, and both are kind of flowing. This creates a very contemplative feel and a spirit of a distant trip.

Our guide Yalçın took us to visit Alpullu, which is located at a big railway junction. Wikipedia says that the ancient name of the town was probably Alpiya meaning "Shining Water country" – I think it goes very well with the vibe of this little town. It was renamed to Şekerköy ("Sugar village" referring to its sugar factory), but hopefully these industrial times are over and the town regained its name, which probably has greek origins (the greek population calls it “Alepli” (Αλεπλή).

Now Alpullu feels almost abandoned. Railway looks desert, and the sugar factory closed, but it does not look neglected, on the contrary, it’s very nice and quiet, just a bit lost in time.

Music:
Barış Manço. “Dere Boyu Kavaklar”.
Anadol. “Ay Çürüdü”.

I said to myself that If I would start writing something I would probably adopt a similar tone, as it feels so warm and inspiring, so simple and friendly.

I relate a lot to his sense of mysticism, which feels so real and present in the here and now. Some critics that I came across used such words as “fantastic” when talking about his work, but i feel it differently. To me it’s a subtle sense of mystery that is very grounded. It is not about something that is beyond, but it is about spiritual experience that is possible in the immediate reality.

So in the very first story from this collection, “Cream”, a young boy has a strange encounter with an old man, who asks him to imagine a circle with many centres and no circumference. You are not quite sure if the old man is real, but this is exactly how Murakami creates this sense of a mystical experience, he does not give you a key on how to interpret it and he uses a friendly and as-a-matter-of-fact tone.

I was mesmerised by this symbol of a circle with many centres but no circumference. It struck me as something so familiar and warm. Instantly, I remembered Tomas Mann’s Joseph from “Joseph and his brothers”, who felt about himself as the centre of the world, and yet neither would reproach him being insolent or snobbish, everyone was falling in love with him for his kindness. I’d say it is his awareness about him being the centre of the world that separated him from other characters.

I guess for me it is a symbol of our universe where every single part of it is the Centre and every single consciousness is the heart of all creation and there is no end to this sphere. Why should it be a sphere though and not a rectangle ? I actually want to write about it as well, but I will do it later.

I was thinking about all this while driving to the airport and noticed the Turkish flag, graciously floating in the see of traffic.

I am not entirely sure that this visual is well connected to this text, but I guess the Turkish flag is also the centre of the universe and time visibly slowed down around it as it should in proximity of a strong gravitational field.

Music: Lucy Gooch. “Stalagmites & Helectites”.

One good Russian philosopher, Berdyaev, has an interesting passage on our relation to sunlight. He says sun is a symbol of our separation from our initial (or potential) state of being, where we are ourselves the source of light. And this is why, he says, white nights in the North are so powerful and often offer this mystical experience – because everything is illuminated without the visible source of light and that reminds us, or gives a glimpse into the state when light is emanating from each thing, from the inside.

Observing shadows and silhouettes in twilight or deep fog can also be a mystical experience, where objects appear unfinished, constantly changing shape and their symbolism. Somehow the lack of light creates this playful uncertainty that is so reconciling and peaceful. Last time I experienced it in Venice where suddenly I found myself on the Murano island, in a part of the island that was completely desert and the fog was so deep that only silhouettes of buildings, of little bridges were emerging out of the white nothingness. You could only meet with your own self walking uncertainly in such a place.

The world of shadows has this soothing and reconciling effect, because it also has a symbolism that reminds us of a different state of being. It reminds us that we live in the world of illusions. We are the Plato’s cave men, prisoners who only see shadows of real things. Our world is covered by the veils of Maya where things are not what they seem. But why it is soothing and reconciling, one may ask. We have been always trying to find a way out of this prison, trying to lift the veil, unplug and wake up, as explored in many myths.

Living in the world of shadows can be a beautiful and reconciling experience because we just know that we cannot take anything too literally or seriously, or personally, that there is always more to things that it seems. It all comes to how we engage with this world and from this perspective anything can be art. When we engage with life creatively and shift our perceptions, that other state of being can indeed become our reality. We do not even need to wake up, it is all already here.

Music: