croatian pavilion at the 60TH
international art exhibition
la biennale di venezia
vlatka horvat
by the means at hand
april 20
november 24
2024
croatian pavilion at the 60TH
international art exhibition
la biennale di venezia
vlatka horvat
by the means at hand
Alice Notley said “No one lives in a country,” so I said take the chairs, take the books, take the house. I was leaving America. Everyone came over then—took my lamps, my thrift store coats, drove off in my old car. The house plants that went away were taller than men. The country I was leaving had never been real. It was a Hollywood movie and/or an eternal war. Everything is violence and everything else is money and this is what we all had always known and said to each other. That we live is not an endorsement of life’s arena. We were there by necessity and law and the bonds of love and yet another twisted plot devised by the author otherwise known as fate.
We made altars to forgetfulness. We forgot where we put the altars. We put poppies on the altars. The poppies forgot themselves. Their petals fell off, then their seeds.
Goodbye, I waved, at the airport, to nothing in particular, like everyone who tries to leave forever.
In the file labeled “But what was my country?” the first sentence was “where we wanted for carrier pigeons, telepathy, messages beamed to each other in every form of light.”
It isn’t just love that teaches the pain of the fiction of the nation. This place I was from wasn’t so much a country as the opposite of Oz, a stand-in for rural misery. It (Kansas) was a sorry state of things or it was Kafka’s Nature Theatre of Oklahoma – an unfinished text of the sight unseen. Amerika, or, another euphemism for nowhere. “Kansas! Kansas!” wrote Ginsberg, “Shuddering at last!”.
For years I engaged in a personal project of sitting cross-legged on a sofa trying to hold an aerial concept of empire’s internal ravages. I’d close my eyes and pretend to float over it, encompassing home in a warm and viscous light. I’d illuminate the gas stations, the gun stores, the graveyards. The bullet holes were aglow with my wishful thinking. So were the neighbors.
Then I went away and they went away with my garden shovels and spice jars. Take it, take it, is all I said. Here is a bed for your daughter. Here is a bike for your cousin. Take, too, the horizontal grins and eagerness, the fatal borders, the dazzling hustle of the dispossessed. Every vote is a vote for war. I was always a discontented child there, unwilling or incapable of acting like a citizen. “On my American plains,” Blake wrote in his Prophecy, “I feel the struggling afflictions / endur’d by roots that writhe their arms…”
My hands had memorized clingfilm, aerosol sprays, doll hair, soda cans, plastics. I’d hung around the libraries, growing inexorably alien. I’d written poems with the words “geography is not weeping.” But there was geography again, totally sad, its details forbidding cosmopolitanism. Mountains make claims for cool aridity. The plains ask difficult questions about grandeur. The coasts make their plea with salty air. Places only exist in particular.
No one lives in a country, but everyone lives in a texture. So we touch the moss and spy on the color of the estuary. To do so isn’t so much taking up with another country as trying to evade the idea altogether. The nation is an inhospitable surface. Borders are the scars that war leaves on the earth. Logistics is mostly people, like my friend who drove me to the airport to witness my abstract farewell. We move, and we move things with us, and although I had grown suspicious of self-congratulatory softness, we needed the softness of these handovers so that we might endure. And though I had also grown suspicious of endurance’s valorization, to endure was required by all positive propositions of existence.
In the particular, the estuary is a solemn blue, the daylight turns to gloaming. A single smoker stands in shame and solitude on the cobbled street. I am always looking out of a high up window onto a city where no one knows me. My old friends send me photos of my old jars filled with new grain.
I can’t even imagine what it was like when anyone believed in the old future. In its place is the next place over, not time.
There is so much we cannot carry. The pang of missing a place is like a light bulb flickering. It should not mean much, only the death of that light.
Maybe a life could be like fluid poured from one cup to the other, as indifferent to country as wine to the stemware, as water is to shore. I was already only half-embodied and amnesiac. To move me should have been like moving a faint idea or a ghost.
I left. Then the wars came back, come back again. They don’t go away for anyone, only fade in and out of the spectacle. They are never not in some way American. They were my first memories and will probably be my last and in between it is never not 1990 with the desert beige tanks rolling on trains through the train tracks in my family’s backyard. Most of what I see when I close my eyes is the world’s gray ruin, or America, in abstract, always posing that question. How to leave what cannot be left.
Anne Boyer is a critically-acclaimed poet and essayist whose work explores embodiment, truth, beauty, ephemerality, and history. Her works include The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), Garments Against Women (Penguin, 2019), and A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018). Her books have been translated into over a dozen languages, and her honors include a Pulitzer Prize, the Windham-Cambell prize in nonfiction, the inaugural Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a Whiting Award in both poetry and non-fiction. Originally from the United States, she moved to Edinburgh in 2023. She now teaches poetry and poetics at the University of St. Andrews.