FRACTAL INTUITION IN RECURRING FORM

by PATRIZIA DUGHERO

“Freedom is a breath. But the whole world breathes, not just humans. Plants and animals breathe.

There is rhythm (which is breath)… The tides are a breath… the imperceptible and mysterious roll of life.”

Anna Maria Ortese , Celestial Body, 1991

I met Tanja Badalič as a program manager During the CROSS-CULTURE project, the innovative festival “Meeting of Cultures: Nature Without Borders,” focusing on various cultural areas, especially ecologically oriented literature, which presents authors from the past and present, focusing on the Goriška region. For years, I have been trying, with limited success, to read and, if possible, curate the works of Italian eco-poets. It seems that the movement since the 1980s hasn’t had a lasting impact, even though one of the most vibrant and incisive lines of the women’s movement has been the intersection of feminist and ecological perspectives. After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 40 years ago, many people immediately took the floor, wanting to, and knowingly, see in this single “accident” an exemplary manifestation of a socioeconomic logic and a development model they did not recognize. They immediately identified with that “awareness of limits” that had emerged with regard to resources, beyond the Promethean myths and the “crude anthropocentrism” of Cartesian memory.

When I came across Tanja’s poems, I immediately understood that I was dealing with a special coherence and sensitivity. Environmentalism is in the details, as the author maintains, and helps us understand life in general, the relationships between so-called living and non-living nature. I immediately thought that for a vision of the architecture of the Gorizia region, we would have original and promising material for a work in progress, to unite our visions, in a creative and design-led way. As for old Gorizia, I’ve always thought the challenge lay in the regeneration of the buildings, so incredibly immersed—or rather, emerging—from the greenery. Therefore, it would be desirable to create a workshop, an exemplary metapolitical practice, and a regeneration of the concept of the “utopian city.” A model that Tanja Badalič believes isn’t entirely sufficient, as it would first require radicalizing “the awareness that we are not alone in the world.” The need to leave other creatures not only their habitat, but also and above all freedom and peace, with a sober reflection on what we truly need, can only be achieved in an immersive and total way, and it is the principle that drives every artistic gesture of the poet. Most of her writing is based on theories of critical animalism and ecocriticism, to which, she argues, creativity and imagination must be added. By shifting from scientific writing to literary and poetic writing, she felt she would reach more people, because not all improvements are positive, not all contribute to the well-being of people, the natural environment, and coexistence. A great, slow shift in the minds of the masses is needed to break out of conformity. And a lot of effort, I might add, agreeing with her, who holds a PhD in Comparative Studies of Ideas and Cultures, focusing on a branch of literary studies that examines the relationship between humans, the environment, and animals in literature, with a particular interest in works by women. She lives and works in Osek, in the Vipava Valley. She has published several illustrated books: Jazburček in njegovo zeleno poslanstvo; Lisjaček Pituralko v rajskem sadovnjaku, with a calligraphic enrichment on some pages; Zajčev prostor, on recycled paper; Sledi mesečine, from now on also publishing under the surname of the maternal grandmother, Volk; the collection of poems for children V mojem svetu, set to music by Miran Rustja, accompanied by a CD; two collections of poems for adults: Dog rose And Razraščanja. In my hands I have two splendid illustrated books, which Tanja Badalič Volk told me about while I was leafing through them, Is it bad for you? and Srečece, muc s pristriženim ušeskom. Her illustrations are made with mixed techniques and “resonating with fairy-tale decorations” seems to be another of the author’s aspirations, intent on preserving the cultural heritage of the place, including the material one.

“We must find a way to coexist in the two cities and their surroundings without destroying the architecture of the other coexisting entities.” It may seem like a simple message, but it is revolutionary if followed by institutional action. When Tanja highlights that other living and non-living beings also have their own architecture that intertwines with ours, which in turn interferes with the natural environment, cluttering it, she offers us a certain theory of urban sociology, in which we can glimpse the merging of deep ecology/ deep ecology and lawscape : “is it the fox that crosses the human asphalt road with its paths or is it we humans who cross their paths/their architecture with our asphalt?”

We thus approach the choice of the four poems proposed here, about trees and water. From the first, Lipa , I learn that the majestic tree in the square, in the center of Osek, is a symbol of the axis mundi, also a clear artistic-architectural reference. ‘Os’, ‘axis’ in Slovenian, gives the town its name, not the etymological one, but the one anchored in handed down tradition. The trunk of the linden tree is hollow, with a large hole; the poem is an incitement to dig beneath the mighty tree to measure the distance from the absolute center, representing a micro-utopia. As in the second poem, Pravi kostanjI perceive a poetics of detail, which takes me back to Raymond Carver in the rhythmic attention to restless details towards the expectation, which is epiphanically glossed. “Since plants and animals express themselves in different ways, you just need to know how to see,” says Tanja, for example, observing the animals and plants in the Vipava River. , as in the poem Navadna krvenka: “ the fragments of the shells of the unio that the water continually recomposes in random aggregations”. It is part of the poems about water set to music and performed at the Cross-Culture Festival, which immediately struck me through Jasmin Franza’s translations. It seemed to me at first sight yes arranged as a naturalistic, yet ontological, diptych, in which the plant element of the titles becomes a symbolic threshold for an experience of immersion, metamorphosis, and memory. I was struck by the writing’s meticulous attention to the river landscape, which opens onto an archaic, almost cosmological dimension. Not a simple song of nature, but a meditation on the material continuity between the human and the nonhuman. In Loosestrife The lyrical subject crosses the river accompanied by an otter, a liminal figure, an amphibious animal that embodies the transition between surface and depth. The ego entrusts itself to the landscape and with the verb “let’s slide” immediately establishes a fluid, collective, and non-hierarchical movement, in which the water becomes medium cognitive. The nominal density is notable, but not decorative, and produces an effect of reality that anchors experience, ensuring that concreteness is continually transcended, while the river becomes a provisional ordering principle. The image of disappearance stages a poetics of the dissolution of the self/subject that becomes matter among matters. Memory, extinction, form, and movement appear differently in Navadni netresk : no longer to settle into the flow, but to descend “ into a cave of memory”, as a psychic depth and a reference to a karst cavity, a biological matrix in which the final verses introduce an ethical fracture. The dominant motif, “ a fairy tale in which the animals disappeared”, looms with the risk of extinction. The saving gesture – picking up a drowning bee – is minimal but decisive. It is returned to flight and physical contact, “ I felt his wings soaked ”, is a point of passage between vulnerability and recovery; without sentimentality, the “ tiny slags of rain” that filter into the palm transform into lines, spirals, rings. It becomes a poetics of recurring form, almost a fractal intuition in a grammar that unites micro and macrocosm culminating in the ” constellations / of the animal zodiac ” and in the tides of “ unknown seas ” from which the traces of the first steps of life emerge.

From this awareness, he seems to tell us, we must start again for every detailed urban and extra-urban planning. Because, with Laura Conti, we are convinced that ” At night, our city, forever deserted / comes to life again. // There the trees live on in a sleepless memory… ”