Andrej Tomažin

ANDREJ TOMAŽIN (1988) is a writer and theorist, based in Ljubljana. He has four books published in Slovenian: two short story collection, a novel and a poetry collection Baselines. His latest is Anonymous Technology, a short story collections. It was nominated for the kritiško sito (critics' sieve) Award presented by the Slovenian Literary Critics’ Association for the best book of the previous year and the novo mesto award for the best short story collection of the previous year. He is also a part of the editorial board of Šum, journal for contemporary art criticism and theory.

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Dedications

I.

For Belkis Ayon

People set themselves to destroy the fascist

forest with their fingers. The short cellulosic fibers of the pines

are aligned with the undulations of securities

in the Chinese stock market. You were

moved when you heard the roots

tremble in the trot of a bullish

trend. The white faces rendered

the global economy’s lengthy cycles. The fingers

began to remind of lengthy willow

branches, submerged in a quick river stream.

The nails, along with the errors of K-waves, gradually

peeled off. Usernames are random and passwords adequately

complicated. The archetypal war of memes doesn’t end

with a bang, but with the gentle breeze of local TEDx

conferences on the necessity of a solution: the necessity

of change on the level of an individual tree.

II.

For Amy Ireland

Artificial island between Helsinki

and Tallinn has no space for a

folk celebration: the mechanized limbs of former

people persistently roll up their sleeves. The deceitful

harvest of squids has pushed many a them

over the fence. They knew it

all began with the Russian occupation of the

Crimea. One base for me, another—also:

but foremost a base. The liberated areas

of the former ice belt on the Arctic Ocean

became the hatcheries of Tesla’s suped-up subterranean machines.

“Davay, nalivay.” “ And the winner gets—access.”

Raise your hand and rotate a few degrees

to the right. Iceberg no more, but the

cloud, a datahaze: the vantage point of winners.

III.

For Sylvia Plath

All great poets lie, she said,

as she stepped through the door of her bedroom.

They lie to people

so that they don’t have to lie to fingers.

It’s difficult to utter the truth of everyone, I

said. She was left hanging in one of the

seasons and the day after filled her lungs with

monoxide. Has your uncle ever

advised you to write like Tomaž Šalamun?

With wine and Camels, try it that way,

that’s how he wrote until he got jazzed

up for politics. An old one, this whore[1].

When you become famous, they disable your

pacemakers through the wireless.

Every death is lied, she said, and

laid her marzipan head inside the stove.

[1] A corruption of politics is in Slovenia (and some other Balkan countries) often described through gendered metaphors like this one: ‘politics is a whore’.

IV.

For Pier Paolo Pasolini

At half past seven, shortly

before dark, I was stopped

in the dangerous part of the

town by a stranger

with Mickey Mouse's ears

and was told that it is possible to read

all books with the aid

of a nightingale’s shadow. That

each of his twists

above the beech tree in

the park is already drawn, that

the distance between

a bird’s silhouette and

the earth has been accurately

measured. Nothing else

but architecture.

V.

For Taja Kramberger

Dogs are dancing to the tune by Kafka's

band. Separated from its source

it's just an aural trace in an empty

room: it's impossible to say it's not a

cave, it's a labyrinth, extended in width,

where sickly flags hang and foothpaths

run into a terrain, full of greasy shafts—extended

enough for the gnarled trunks of the

pears to be crumbling by the

pale humility of pure surface.

Even lines can no longer be erased.

[____]

A parody of one’s own noon:

who will promise to make the solar

economy Keynesian

once more?

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Logistics

I.

To follow Hapag-Lloyd’s

shipments until the containers

on the horizon unite into a long

queue of boxes. The first sprouts

of an artificial world grow

on small islands. Logistics;

solely notation, arrangements.

Before Homer the animals

would arrange themselves in space

freely—with no fences and poles.

It dissolves as it grows and each contact with

air sends it into a weakened state of memory.

The long chains of digital blocks leak

like leaves in a monsoon. I was a space that

noticed the torture of a space. Solely the surface of the

water is familiar now, the sprouts are different now.

II.

There is something dreadful in ceramic

figures: how they as animals in a forest

or police units in the pursuit of

fugitive automobiles arrange themselves along

the slanted shelves. To break them

means absolutely nothing.

Have you heard that one about

the miner from Krasnoyarsk, who

spread along the edges of his

studio apartment almost a ton of

commedie dell’arte figures, until

exactly all of them, from the Pierrots to the

Colombinas, adopted the roles of snitches,

and plunged him into death, even before he managed to,

in inhuman agonies and drenched in the thick

sweat of necessity, shatter all to the last one?

III.

The prevention of uprisings on newly acquired

territories is no longer a matter of military science.

A carbosilicon machine, in which the

force lines of global data centers

that accelerate logistical networkings intersect

with the majesty of the military industrial

complex. Thousands of voices under the rule of

autotune. The more technology is perfected,

the more it resembles incantation. Repetition. More

shots a second. Greater bodily interpretation.

Walter Benjamin says the witchdoctors remain on the surface,

whereas the surgeon enters the body. Benjamin,

later a suicide with a pistol, reached deeper,

knew better. Bezos’s witchdoctor-cum-surgeons, all-in-one,

recognize each other on the street not by their facial features,

but only through their various IP-addresses.

IV.

There was something in it, not having

money, and they hacked through the circuits and descended

a couple millimeters beneath the navel through a

narrow opening with a camera. Before that, they injected

carbon dioxide inside so that the stomach wall

would give way, so that they could see anything, and then

an inch away, led by the boy with a wireless PS controller

with eight buttons, two of which were useless,

they sliced another hole for the scalpel.

Not Machiavelli’s merciless march upon power,

but the consideration and pretinness of the gentle features

of Baldassare Castiglione. “In everything, display

a certain negligence that hides your intentions.”

As they excised the prostate, their father still

lay in a coma: propofol through darknet, tech

protestantism, and finally also dance steps sans people.

V.

Meat, he said, when

asked about reason. The vertebrae,

in which there was no fluid anymore, have

long before crumbled across the battlefields.

But how to understand the new spaces

of death? To interpret the passage, where you

are awaited by IEDs

and single use firearms from

homemade 3D printers,

as inappropriate and impassable?

The Israeli brigade general on an

excursion points with his finger to the tunnels

of Tora Bora: Only in the moment

when you revoke your opponent’s

ability to model your

form, can you fuck them up.

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