DEFEAT POINT A Film Storyboard I parte (NARRATIVA) ~ di Sibilla Petlevski - TECLAXXI

NARRATIVA

Sibila Petlevski

An excerpt from

DEFEAT POINT 

A Film Storyboard

PartePrima

 

 

I wanted to call this book Wendigo, after a humanoid creature from folk lore whose breath spreads the stench of decaying corpses and announces the arrival of a monster from behind, before the victim sees it. In terms of scope, it is a short novel that was written quickly, as if it had written itself, a few months before the Ukrainian bloodshed and the threat of World War III, when no one, or at least none of us “ordinary people”, believed that it was possible to make such cannibalistically ruthless and shamelessly big money on the idea of the New War Order. Although written in a hurry, one might say in one breath, this feminist story has been in me for a long time – and like the story of the mythical Medusa - it has been waiting for enough time to pass since the war in Croatia and Bosnia. I thought that things would change for the better, but you wouldn’t believe how many people from ancient times to this day don’t know that Medusa was raped. It would be funny if it weren’t sad! That's why this novel - thrown into scenes like a film storyboard - is actually a black comedy, a white tragedy, or as you like it.

 

 III.

Let us now praise famous men

(Closing credits)

 

As the night progresses, breathing becomes irregular and rapid, and the phases of active eye movement under closed eyelids become longer and longer, and dreams become more and more elaborate: the “stories” are more vivid and emotional, the associations more bizarre, the strangest combinations of observations and images, while the brain visualizes the unknown into scenes composed of fragments of what has already been experienced.

 

“The political activity of free citizens (praxis) begins only after production (poesis) is completed and goes beyond production. Therefore, if value is defined as that for which something is done, poesis has a negative ethical value. Poesis (work) can produce suitable conditions for life, but it must not be confused with these suitable conditions or with life itself. On the other hand, praxis (life itself) is not leisure; since leisure, i.e. freedom from necessity, is only a necessary condition for freedom, but not freedom per se, or what Aristotle called the good life” – said the philosopher and abruptly fell silent.

 

He put his glass down on the table. It was an incredible experience – that cascade of words ending in a brocade-heavy silence and the feeling that nothing spoken was part of the real situation. Almost as if we were not alive.

 

“Are you working on the technique of dreaming?” – he asked, gently patting the volume of my poems with his hand.

 

I was surprised by this question because the topic of the conversation was not lucid dreams – that special feeling of tension that occurs between the logic of wakefulness and the logic of sleep; the magnificent moment when we realize that we are dreaming and think that we have managed to harness the intoxicating freedom of the mind, its ability to use every available opportunity to – by randomly rearranging the kaleidoscope of possibilities – rest from us and our intrusive presence. It seemed that my interlocutor’s intention was to build a pontoon bridge in a flash and enable the meeting of the “philosopher” and the “poet” somewhere halfway between reasoning and action.

 

Perhaps it was even a form of flattery – a way to show that he believed that even in a dream one could rationally explain the relationship between poesis as work – the activity in which a person creates, or imagines creating, something that did not exist before – and the practice of modern man’s life as a historical being who no longer recognizes his own happiness in the well-being of the community, but thinks that everything that is important comes from himself.

 

In any case, I realized two things: first, that I was not dreaming and that the conversation with the philosopher was painfully real, and second, that I did not have any special dreaming technique and therefore could not work on it.

 

“And you? – I asked – “Are you working on it?”

 

I had no doubt that he would answer in the affirmative, so I decided to check on the fly whether the lucidity of the philosophical technique of dreaming could be helpful when a doubt arises in real life:

 

“I will tell you a dream. Of course, it does not occur to me to ask you to interpret it, but perhaps you could help with advice. Namely, there are real facts related to the content of what I dreamed. I am interested in what you would do if you were in my place and how you would specifically act in connection with it.”

 

I first heard about George Little Park when a woman told me that Mike was waiting for me near the children's playground in that park. I could not make out her features well – because we were sitting with a few other people in a room where it suddenly became dark, and we were too lazy to get up and press the light switch. I went out into the street. It was not yet winter, but I was cold. Everything around me seemed closer than usual, so close that I could reach out with my hand to the clouds that were moving quickly. First their beautifully shaped, outlines would appear, and then the wind would pass over them with a broad brush; smearing the colors and stretching the half-erased across the purple sky that was about to sink into darkness. Everything was so big, and yet so close. The spaces were curving and I could, if I wanted, climb into the nautilus of the sky. It was a familiar feeling that let me know that I was on another continent. And how was I going to find the park now? Should I even go to the meeting with Mike? I was overcome by the unease I always felt before meeting war veterans.

 

And yet, I wanted his story. I walked for a long time with my hand in my pocket, crumpling up the piece of paper with the address, and then it fell out somewhere along the way. And how do I find that park? What was it called, exactly – Little George? Yes, Little George. And where were we supposed to meet? By the playground or on the terrace? The woman mentioned the terrace, there was no doubt about that. I asked the newsboy if he knew about Little George Park, and he laughed and said: 

 

“Ma’am, the train station is not far. Maybe you can still buy a ticket to Terrace.”

 

So – when I woke up – I realized that the meeting that the Clan Mother had arranged for me with her great-grandson Mike was in a park named after the white founder of the town of Terrace in British Columbia, Canada. I learned that George was not a little boy, whom I had liked beforehand, but a businessman whose last name was Little.

 

George Little invested his right of way across the Skeena River and bought the land that would later become the town of Terrace. Mr. Little, being a visionary, resold the land to the entrepreneurs of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, which was crucial in determining the location of the railway station. The station, and therefore the first nucleus of the future town development, was built in Terrace, not in Kitsumkalum.

 

“And who was Mike?” – interrupted the philosopher. “Did you know him before?”

 

In my dream I obviously knew who Mike was, but not in reality, and I swear, I had never heard of George Little Park in Terrace before. I was supposed to interview a war veteran and write his life story. I interpreted the meeting place as a restaurant terrace in a neighborhood that was a popular gathering place for children and adults. As soon as I woke up, I typed his location and name into an internet search engine and found a photo of a former ranger, former member of the Army Special Operations Light Infantry, and now an artist making traditional Tlingit and Tsimshian items, including a frog-shaped ceremonial hat. That hat, due to the acquisition of unusual circumstances in the writing of this prose of mine, found itself - perhaps not exactly in the center of the story - but certainly in a privileged place in the construction of the fictional plot, and that a full thirty years after I made the first notes for the novel Defeat Point.

 

Shamanic drummer and woodworker Mike Dangeli was actually called Goothl Ts'imilks, and his original, non-Western name – when he pronounced it in the language of one of the several “First Nations” that were part of his family tradition – came from deep in the throat of the past and the heart of the beaver clan of his ancestors.

 

The philosopher was not surprised by the strange coincidence that brought Mike’s and my identities together in a seemingly poetic, but actually primitive way: through objects that were a pledge of our recognition – a frog-shaped mask, a totem pole that celebrates the suffering of raped and murdered women by the side of a road in northern Canada, a dull red stone sewn into the dress of the legendary Croatian countess Katarina Zrinska. Everything could serve as a pledge of mystical participation – even a piece of cloth like the clean, washed for a new purpose laundry of the murdered women from Vogošće.

 

“And my grandmother told me not to join the military,” Mike says, describing why he left the special forces.

Mike was raised from an early age to be a “Simoget,” the hereditary chief of his clan on sacred territory in the Nass River Valley of British Columbia, about 500 miles north of Vancouver. Many of his ancestors were warriors, and he felt a greater attraction to weapons than to the ceremonial drumming and dancing of “oppression” ceremonies. Ironically, it was the trauma he experienced as a witness to, and perhaps even as a participant in, war crimes that led him back to the path his people’s matriarchal tradition had intended for him: becoming a shamanic artist.

[First published in Croatian: Sibila Petlevski (2023) Točka poraza. Zagreb: Sandorf.  Copyright 2023©Sibila Petlevski. Translated into English by the author. ]

reader’s personal choice for which the author is not responsible. The Taboo Trilogy is dedicated to the brave, who do not agree to live in the time of lies; to people who are not afraid of freedo

SIBILA PETLEVSKI

 BIONOTA

Sibila Petlevski, born on May 11, 1964 in Zagreb, is an award-winning novelist, poet and playwright, librettist, literary translator and editor of literary and scientific publications, researcher in the field of theater and interdisciplinary science, full professor at the University of Zagreb. She has written twenty-five books of different literary and scientific genres, edited eight scientific books, and compiled and translated an anthology of American poetry.

 photo by ©David Gazarov