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.
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?
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.
