First of September, I arrive in a sweltering city. A driver is waiting for me at the airport, he picks me up, barely uttering a word, shooting me only a smile or two, and takes me along broad avenues all the way to the entrance of the Central University Library. Initial confusion, waiting, a few uninformed people, then another smile whirls out of the building and whisks me, hampered by my clunky, heavy suitcase and backpack, past books, up and down stairs, along a corridor, out a side entrance and some metres down a street, back into the building through another side entrance and up the stairs again. With each floor the heat cranks up, the air gets thinner, the bags heavier. We stop on the fourth floor, standing between offices. My companion opens one of the doors, gestures me to step inside, writes down his number, and says his good byes.
Finally I can throw down my luggage. The air in the small hallway is even more suffocating though – to the bathroom! I open the window and look over the narrow yet bright courtyard, where pigeons, currently tucked away around its shady corners, seem to have taken over. While I wait for the water to start running so I can freshen up, I inspect the living room and bedroom. I tear the drenched-through summer clothes off my skin – stark naked I focus on the dark leather sofa in front of me. What a strange object. If I were to sit on it now, I would have trouble ungluing myself again. It is supposed to have 35 degrees outside, inside even more. The air conditioner won’t work; I tear all windows open but the air stands still. Or moves in circles, difficult to differentiate from my own sweat. It blends with the sounds of classical music, which penetrate through the open windows. Back home, I had failed to send off a submission for an open call, now its deadline is looming. I hunker down in the simmering room, “cool it down” somewhat and spend the first day right here, growing bleary-eyed enumerating references; at least the music is soothing.
When it is hot I often have the urge to write. Ink literally oozes out the pen, the phone sticky in my hands, the laptop wheezing. Tactility and the rhythm of a dissolving thought. In such heated circumstances I am trying to edge out enough room for it, offer it enough shade and quietness, so I don’t overheat while my vocabulary simmers. One such space is a hipster coffee place a stone’s throw away from the library, hidden under arcades behind an old church. It is quite charming, certainly comfortable, and serves coffee as expensive, though fortunately better-tasting, as in Vienna. When I turn off the internet connection and force myself to it, lines from unfinished notes are starting to fall into place. About time. I need to finish this new collection quickly, preferably also edit it while here. I am late again. Always again already.
(I will neither finish nor conclude it here. But something will happen to it, something irreversible.)
I simply fell into writing, or rather: I have been doing it since I can remember and it just never left my side, while nothing new, nothing more stable, wanted to stick. Writing is pure instability, never-ending daunting guesswork. But it also keeps me going. So I persist, I get paid to do it, as much as one can get nowadays, and go on the road for it, since the poetry industry prefers to peddle the presence of the poems’ author instead of the poems themselves. It is almost exclusively for poetry that I travel lately. How else to take responsibility for the damage caused? On a carbon footprint website I am advised against counting business flights, as these, it argues, should be chalked up to the footprint of the employer or client. When it is for poetry, I tell myself, it is for work, and for work, I lie to myself, it is OK.
What am I to a random city? I don’t want to intrude, sit down on a corner of the world, and spit out a bundle of pages that supposedly explain it. But strapped into the corset of the residency machinery, I cannot help but feel a certain degree of obligation towards the core idea of residencies: fuel has already been spent, a place to stay provided, and time bought – to be here … I must admit, I do like to travel, as it actualises this inherent, perpetual feeling of mine of never being in my place. But more and more often a question creeps up on me, how come it is me that has the right to travel? What are these flights actually for? What resources am I allowed to use for a poem? “Mobility” they say, “the connective tissue of Europe”. But on the Balkans, from the edges of which I hail, and on the corner of which I currently am, mobility is a monstrous word. I grew up on the border. I know how it feels when someone in uniform points a rifle at you, yelling you shouldn’t be playing around there. Still, I find it hard to imagine how it must feel like for someone, who doesn’t have the privilege to play freely without someone pointing a gun at them at all times.
I get on the bike and launch myself into the city.
