I followed up on the happenstance meeting with a local celebrity and figure of world literature with several days in a row of conversation. On the 4th of June I sat in conversation with him for almost two hours.
Among the topics covered was his bout with schizophrenia at the onset of puberty and the impact that had on his outlook and on his creative output. The sense of profound alienation from himself and his ego, the sense of unreality of the evident world, of the false, cosmetic surface nature of perceived reality versus his glimpse at another, more real, more complete reality accessible via his fugue state experience left a lasting impact on his output and the conduct of everyday life.
I asked about the turn I had noticed from themes of concrete reality and optimism in the outlook of the musicians of the Yugoslav New Wave towards a preoccupation with abstractions and dreams. He concurred that this was a trend, attributing it variously to the simple coincidence of young artists all being under the influence of the same works and to the politics of the time, corrupted as they were by access to influence and presided over by a “red bourgeoisie” that didn’t allow for any advancement for people not skimming benefits directly from the party’s access to power and money. But his approach, as is probably the case with all compelling artists, was always colored by this profound personal experience.
The strangeness of the sound of my hometown’s name became a topic of conversation. Novi Sad is a little like my hometown, a provincial capital, a second river city in the shadow of an absolute giant with a lazy chip on its shoulder.
As we were parting, he pointed out a window down the street that was his childhood bedroom window, just barely visible from the corner of Železnička St.
The presence of the past, sometimes boldly superimposed on the present, can be overpowering, dreamlike, not unreal but dreamlike, and my travels in Serbia were marked by some invisible effort, mostly out of sight of my conscious mind, of assent to serendipity and the unknown.
The heat had arrived with me in Novi Sad, and my mind wasted under punishing 90+ F temperatures for the entire first week I was there. But again this slowed me down, forced me to engage with what was present, with where I needed to be.