“A strong, hard, uncomfortable book with everything – maxims, style, vocabulary – before a hair’s breadth”, – writer Danutė Kalinauskaitė authoritatively describes “Požemių pūkus”.
The book is like a concert
Both as a poet and as an essayist, G. Norvilas has his own stylistics, character, approach to language, which, according to the author himself, is an instrument for knowing the world. As is characteristic of the author, each of his books is not a “set of texts” in the primitive sense, but conceptual, strung together and organized in such a way that (it) takes place as a separate concert. G. Norvil’s style is characterized by an open, metaphorical, poetic, ironic tone of speech. The author’s worldview unfolds in the essay, and at the same time, the signs of the times (childhood in the Soviet era, teenage years, wild capitalism, etc.).
Poet, essayist Rolandas Rastauskas: “I wouldn’t be too surprised to find this book in a (survival) backpack next to bivouac equipment, a Bush hat and a Storm lighter.”
The bestiary is the most conceptual
The most conceptual in this book is the “Bestiary” section, in which the image, ie, the horseradish roots dug out of the ground photographed by the author, is equally part of the text. Horseradish become separate characters in the book, they fuse the entire fabric of the book.
Gytis Norvilas: “When I started digging and photographing them, I just thought they were aesthetic, beautiful, similar to animals, birds, living things. That’s how they turned into characters. Then I realized that they are asking for texts, worthy of stories, worthy of living, worthy of feathering. I liked that fic. It should also be said that the bestiary genre is old and has deep traditions. In this sense, as a form, it is nothing new. All those stories are essentially biographical, only condensed, somewhat infused with magical realism.”
The creative work of Deimantė Rybakovienė, the artist of this book, is exceptional and wonderful.
Hunger for the reader’s self-satisfaction gland
In the latest book of essays, bestiary, artifacts, G. Norvilas, according to D. Kalinauskaitė, pokes the reader’s self-satisfaction gland like a needle. “Peel the stones and potatoes of the dungeons from his soul.” With a Norville dictatorship. Has “Dungeon Birds”.“ and stone hardness, and horseradish bitterness, and irony, but first of all self-irony, and existential anxiety, although the further he goes to the poet, the more “just a general brain failure”. (…) Thus, it is said that blood does not pulse in his veins, but “liquid clay or peat, black sand”, D. Kalinauskaitė observes.
For the author of the book “Underground Birds”, beauty is above all underground, emanating from the earth, and the author himself is close to the earth. “One autumn, while digging horseradish, I made sure of it again. The earth is full of the most amazing creatures of the language. The most amazing thing is that they are independent more than anything else: free to branch, penetrate, wriggle, dance, chase, spread, hug, cuddle. Free and (because) spicy? maybe Mummified, sculpted, asleep. Their plasticity fascinates me, especially since it is hidden, although rather hidden. (…) I dug up, washed their bodies, watched, photographed, documented and they started to tell, wanted to be heard, named. Such are the underground birds, facts and artifacts”, writes G. Norvilas.
Publisher’s photo/Illustration of “Dungeon Birds”.
Poet, essayist, publicist Gytis Norvilas – author of 5 books of poetry and a book for children, laureate of Jaunoj jotvingi (2002), Jotvingių (2017), Bronis Savukyns (2022) prizes, long-time editor-in-chief of the cultural magazine “Literatūra ir menas”. The author’s poetry collections “Išlydžių zonos” (2012) and “Grimzdimas” (2017) were declared the most creative books of the year by the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, and were also included in the top five poetry selections of the campaign “Book of the Year”.
We suggest you read the essay “Blind in the Labyrinth” from the new book.
“Blind in the Labyrinth”
Duzhenas
Nothing is scarier than dreaming about broken glasses. Worst nightmare so far. I won’t go too far and say that I have broken, broken or otherwise mutilated the living end of my glasses, collecting all the victims (frames, glasses, legs) from the myopic battlefield would create a bucket full of heaps. The biggest records, of course, were achieved in childhood and adolescence. Once in three consecutive days, I have sent three copies of glasses to the kingdom of the blind. Most of the time, he was hurt by balls, in fights. From life’s blows, so to speak…
Thick panes of glass looked to the sides like fragments of bombs, ran away like dogs from a loose leash or broken from chains. The biggest shock, and as I think about it now, rather absurd laughter, was caused by the friends’ gestures of infinite sympathy – when the glass broke, they instinctively collected the shards and put them in a handful for me. As if I could make a new world out of them, a clear image. I’m blind without my glasses, they almost had to take me home.
Labyrinth
As the number of diopters increased and the fundus of the eyes clouded, under which childhood crawled and squirmed, I found myself in the Kaunas eye clinic, where it is hoped to highlight the colors of the world, to prevent (!) the fog that was shining from the light flowing into the pits of my eyes. I told my friends that they would put frog eyes on me and when I came back I would play football without any brakes, I would also stand in the goal.
Bearing in mind the existing domestic and verbal discrimination and intolerance of bespectacled people (“bespectacled monkey”, “professor”, “ochakarik”, “vodolaz”, etc.), the bespectacled paradise opened up after being in the clinic. You can imagine, a group of twenty spectacled men with sunken, crossed, crooked, cross-eyed, squinted, injured eyes. There we even gathered some seven ãkli (lat. Chrysops) elite strike squad. It bites blindly painfully. The uniforms are, as usual, oversized government pajamas. Bespectacled samurai, and the samurai path usually led to tunnels that wound under all the clinics, connecting all the departments. To the labyrinth. The Way of the Samurai is a labyrinth.
We used to wait for the weekends with trepidation, like a holiday or a hunt with hounds. Then the tunnels would empty, not a single white-blooded doctor would remain in the labyrinth. The tunnels were filled with silence, mystery, horror. We used to slide around aimlessly in them (which was fine with me). We had to get lost once, otherwise we didn’t get out at the central entrance. We didn’t risk going back through the tunnels.
Someone had a brilliant idea – to return by taxi… The yellow “Volga” was driven by 5 samurai wearing pajamas and glasses. To your blind section. So much for that and driving, half a kilometer, but then for us eight-year-olds, decades, it was a long journey through the dunes. You grow as you run through the maze. Getting out of it is irrelevant and not the goal. We avoided only the branch leading to the Oncology Department. We did not know what “oncology” meant, but we understood that something very serious. It was a guarded room to enter.
In the days between weekends, samurai improved, sharpened their vision, and performed procedures. We were tired beyond measure: through the glasses in the iron frames, as if we were UFOnauts, we stared at the altar – a sight-testing board with cut-out balls, letters or animals, at the saving third line from the bottom. We knew (at least we thought so) what kind of glasses were stolen when a friend put them in, so he could have become a squint. Eventually, that mass took hold. I preferred to roll my eyes and strengthen my eye muscles. Of course, we all wanted to go from short-sighted to clairvoyant.
What is another question. For a moment I realized that I could see perfectly, I had clairvoyance, my third eye opened. Willy-nilly, I learned the whole table (balls with clippings) by heart. But I quickly developed reasonable suspicions. Smiling, the nurse turned the board on its side, and the gift of clairvoyance left me. And it’s always like that, but look, you’re catching the world by the dreadlocks, someone takes it and turns that “board” on its side.
In the evenings, we sat on the windowsills and looked at the lights of “night” Kaunas, that is, we used to sway while missing our fathers and mothers. And now that longing for “something” – throbbing, pressing, suffocating, even sick – won’t let go, and it’s just a confirmation that I’m still in a labyrinth, but it’s not clear (and it doesn’t matter) at which point. Longing and the labyrinth are inseparable absorptions, wheels on the same axis. And it’s good if they are balanced… Once tears of longing were diluted by fireworks, as it turned out later, at the Sports Hall. Zalgiris beat CSKA and became USSR champions. It was 1985.
Fear and sports career
I had to give up athletics because of those glasses – and I already thought I would jump higher and higher. I liked jumping. I will dance very high. Very much. Like Sergej Bubka, only without the bitterness. I’d even earned ripped boots two sizes bigger (worn with woolen socks and stuffed with newspapers) with screw-on with smilesrecruited to Panevėžys sports school. I was threatened – I will still run, dance, my retina will be missing, and I realized that the images of the fundus of the eyes – fish through the holes will forever swim to better spawners.
True, before that I tried to reach the heights of football. It was successful. I went to talk to the coach (to be accepted), of course, leaving my glasses by the stadium fence. Accepted. Unfortunately, the dream of playing in the “Statybe” of my hometown Jonava was quickly dashed, because during training (as I mentioned, my glasses were lying against the fence) I could not distinguish the bouncing ball from a bird or a cloud. The sparrows were less of a problem, it was immediately clear that only a tennis ball could be like that. And I was a football player.
In Apakima
Another summer, when I was sitting and calmly working on the teats of a mentally unstable but very nice cow (her previous owners used to beat her), she used her tail to knock the glasses out of the glasses frames, they fell into the water bottle, and plunged into the safe white foam of fresh milk. I looked half-blind with empty frames of glasses at the cow’s udder, as soft as death, at the horizon of the meadow opening through the stomach. This is how the cards fell, that since childhood I got used to farming and the land, which means I learned to die, to die.
After all, we don’t do anything else, we just measure the earth trenches, the earth jacket. What could be a better salvation than to turn into fertilizer, black soil, acid humus for some rhododendron or rowan? Blindness is the grace of God… Eyes are the mirrors of the soul… So many spiritual changes have been said about the eyes. The manipulation of blindness in literature seems pretentious and unnatural to me. Starting with “Blindness” by E. Canetti, ending with “Blindness” by J. Saramago. Boring books. (By the way, the translator of the latter translated into Lithuanian, apparently, blindfolded or blindfolded.)
And when my grandmother, every time I took her to the holy and otherwise miraculous image of the Mother of God in the Krekenava Church, insisted that I pray, ask that my eyes stop failing and be corrected, I would only look at the shiny crowns of that image and think that it would be enough to at least make my glasses break less often . That would be enough for me. I felt guilty about my parents’ thinning wallet. And the eyes? What about the eyes? All gods and saints are mute. This is the essence of their work. If he “spoke”, he would lose all his powers, halos and privileges.
And I was blind in a yellow Hungarian “Ikarus” (symbolic?) bus smelling of burning oil, traveling from Kėdainiai to Jonava. I was a teenager. My eyes just got dark and it lasted forever (maybe due to suspected anemia?). At first I was filled with horror, panic, and then I was able to accept it. And put on your feathers, all-seeing angels, I will not see it. Neither the sun nor the bright future of Lithuania. My biggest fear was that the final stop would not take long and I would have to get off. And how to get out?
How can I explain that I can’t see, that I’ve only been on the bus for a while and I’ve just gone blind. Funny, right? It was like a death, a small death. And now it seems – death should smell of burning grease, rubber. After all that eternity, however, the picture began to emerge. It shone like a photo in the developer, like the whole world at dawn: slowly, viscously, but hopefully. I saw it again. I saw the fallen landscape of the fields of early spring, scattered with corpses of snow, familiar to the eye.
#book #essays #Gytis #Norvilas #Underground #birds #sharpness #horseradish #hardness #stone #Culture
2024-08-26 14:33:10
