But if the air we breathe is the never-failing historian of the sentiments we have uttered, earth, air, and ocean, are the eternal witnesses of the acts we have done.¹

Not until I found myself abroad did I notice that my fellow countrymen communicate in a kind of half-language, half-swallowing their words and uttering semi-sounds. I experience my native language as an attempt by a linguistic invalid to convey even the simplest thought through gestures, grimaces and intonations. Conversations among my compatriots seem long, exhausting and devoid of content.Instead of talking, they seem to be stroking each other with words, spreading a smooth, sonorous saliva over one another.

But we should resist the temptation to assume that since stories are stories they are, in some sense, unreal or untrue, for this is to suppose that the only real reality, or true truth, is one in which we, as living, experiencing beings, can have no part at all. Telling a story is not like weaving a tapestry to cover up the world, it is rather a way of guiding the attention of listeners or readers into it. A person who can tell is one who is perceptually attuned to picking up information in the environment that others, less skilled in the tasks of perception, might miss, and the teller, in rendering his knowledge explicit, conducts the attention of his audience along the same paths as his own.¹

As part of Košuta Day, the ninth Children’s Festival The microphone is yours was held in Košute. There were 22 children, and the jury, which consisted of Maggie P., Laura D., Katarina D. and Iva Mačina Š., had the difficult task of choosing the best performer. Numerous audience applauded the victory of Josip D. with the song ‘Bili brode moj’, as well as the second-placed Martin Ž. who performed the song ‘Crveni Ferrari’ and the third-placed Lana P. who performed with ‘Kad sve utihne’. The program was led by Ana D. and Ena Mačina Š.¹

Due to the delay in the construction of the playground fence in Barevine, the start of the Košuta indoor football tournament, which was scheduled for June 3, has been postponed for a week and will start on June 10 – the organisers report. Team entries for the tournament are accepted until June 7 at 6pm and the draw of pairs will be on the same day in the evening. So far, 20 teams have applied.The organisers say that during the entire tournament, a box will be placed on the playground in which visitors will be able to put their financial contribution for the ill Siniša Z. A lottery will also be organised on the final day of the tournament, and all proceeds from the lottery and voluntary contributions will be donated to Siniša. The organisers would like to thank numerous sponsors and the city of Trilj and Mayor Š. who supported this tournament and renovated the playground in Barevine for this occasion.

A flowing archive of history, a warehouse of wars and love, of legends and myths. It is a coronary artery nourishing the banks. It holds its internal organs in so that they do not spill over.¹

Seven-thousand citizens, from all over the world — practically every continent, they say — contributed to the rebuilding. A giant, drained phallus, looming over the Danube, intending for its symbolic virility to cast a shadow over its former aggressor. Memory here gets usurped. Put into the service of a meek nationalism, suffocating all and any call for nuance. Where it could mark the futility of all that that chest beating leads to. Of course they will say that’s exactly what it’s designed for. Meanwhile the diaspora continues.

Just outside of town I thought I saw my friend. On a wall, a small photo, framed, black and white. A memorial to him and many others. It was of course not him. But this person in front of me, frozen in time, connected with a memory of someone I knew, frozen in my memory. I hadn’t seen the person I knew in many months but now I think of him whenever I come across this photo of a photo. He doesn’t know about this other less fortunate him. I’ve still yet to talk to him again.

Many people left for Nikšić or Podgorica after the 1979 earthquake. Few returned. The streets are still very quiet.

The effects of the earthquake can still be seen in the fissures in the town’s mineral exoskeleton. The surrounds are steadily reclaiming it all.

People collect idiocies to remember things by because that’s easier for them, there’s no strain – walks, landscapes, smells and touches, there’s no time for that while life flows, or for most people trickles, he realises that now.

People half-wittedly arrange all their life paragraphs on shelves and walls and from time to time cast them an icy smile in passing and say, stay there, wait for me.

When the lights begin to fade, people imagine that they will be together again, they and their derelict past squeezed into small dead objects, that they will touch each other again, tell each other mislaid, withered tales. Some hope. Memories die as soon as they are plucked from their surroundings, they burst, lose colour, lose suppleness, stiffen like corpses. All that remains are shells with translucent edges.

One’s mental archive is locked, it languishes in the dark. The past is riddled with holes, souvenirs can’t help here. Everything must be thrown away. Everything. And perhaps everyone as well.¹

I’m trying to listen before the war. The football field behind me, the road out of town, earth-moving equipment. All powerful actors once. Now they are something else. And will be something else again tomorrow.

Beneath the town lies a necropolis. It has been dated to the seventh century (BC). Gradually it is being exhumed.

Meanwhile the aluminium sheeting on the spomenik is being torn down, piece by piece. Cashed in as scrap. Two forces of memory acting in contrary motion. Rising up/sinking down.

And at the same time things are also moving sideward - borders, goods, people, sounds and language. Names change.

How can we say that the mental traces of past agency, that we inarticulately call memories, are any different? They coalesce, erode and are endlessly recombined. The imprint of bodies in sound is also a form of grain. A grain that migrates, settles, is shaken up (and then not).

We live in a world populated by structures—a complex mixture of geological, biologi­cal, social, and linguistic con­structions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by his­ tory. Immersed as we are in this mixture, we cannot help but interact in a variety of ways with the other historical constructions that surround us, and in these interactions we generate novel combinations, some of which possess emergent properties.

The rocks and mountains that define the most stable and durable traits of our reality would merely represent a local slowing down of this flowing reality. It is almost as if every part of the mineral world could be defined simply by specifying its chemical composition and its speed of flow: very slow for rocks, faster for lava. Similarly, our individual bodies and minds are mere coagulations or decelerations in the flows of biomass, genes, memes, and norms. Here, too, we might be defined both by the materials we are temporarily binding or chain-ing to our organic bodies and cultural minds and by the timescale of the binding opera­tion.¹

And, like R. before his death, I collect crumbs. Scraps of paper, small coins, shreds. My gaze is constantly drawn to the ground, and as soon as I catch sight of anything I get up, stop what I’m doing and pick up those grains, those fragments, those slivers and lay them on my palm.¹

For me L. became a riddle only some ten years later, when a half-truth, long, long unspoken in my family, acquired outlines, when, like wormholes, those penetrations into space and time, into new spaces and a new time, it began to create shortcuts towards a journey, that often dangerous and destructive journey the end of which cannot be seen. But some years later, all that rubbish, all that rot and rubble settled and we began to step over it, softly at first, trying not to disturb the dust, then we collected the shards of that past, all those splinters, we buried all that debris and moved on.¹

The inaudible territory of sound itself. In the process of subtractive rarefaction, a remainder, a peculiar form of non-phenomenological sonority persisting in inaudibility, but not in silence. Infra-aesthetic functionalism and in my mind’s ear. Sounds (historical) are inaudible but feasibly present. We can hear these by thinking of them, just as I can conjure an image (in my mind’s eye) of a picture without seeing it.

It becomes possible to nurture modes of engaged attention for listening is often relating us to the depths above is which may extend the cross bodies and things, persons and places. sound is a medium enabling animate contact that in oscillating and vibrating over and through all types of bodies and things produces complex ecologies of matter and energy, subjects and objects.¹

Since the whole lowland river basin sits on an alluvial cone, and no rock bed exists up to a certain depth, the soil easily conducts groundwater, which emerges on the surface during high water stages. This, accompanied by high rainfall and snowmelt, saturates the soil and may cause extended water logging on the plains, with limited runoff due to the low natural gradient.

The river exhibits extreme dynamics due to its particular geomorphology: a very short, steep fall from the Carpathian mountains suddenly turns into the very flat lowland expanse of the Hungarian Great Plain. The resulting impoundment of high water in the main bed backs water up into the tributaries, threatening the neighbouring floodplain communities.¹

The worst was in Luče, an idyllic village in the Upper Savinja Valley, where the inhabitants encountered centuries-old waters. In nearby Podvolovljek, a large landslide dammed the Lučnica stream and brought several houses and centuries-old farms under water. Since the village was cut off from the world, they had to bring help by helicopter, and among the goods that the villagers needed the most were boots in the first days.

Statistics showed that a total of more than 52,000 hectares of agricultural land were flooded, at least 2,500 kilometres of roads were damaged, 20 kilometres of railways were destroyed, and 96 bridges were destroyed. 1200 landslides were triggered. 190 houses were destroyed and more than 5,000 damaged.

Experts, especially from the hydrological profession, have warned that we will not be able to completely avoid similar catastrophes, but we can reduce them by maintaining natural riverbeds, preventing erosion in torrential hinterlands and shorter regulations in settlements.¹

The priest wrote down everything in a small notebook, which was damaged by fire in 1943 when his family house was destroyed by the occupying Bulgarian army. Tarabić’s best-known prophecy has to do with a series of political events in 19th century Serbia. He predicted a sequence of events spanning a course of decades. This prophecy came to be known in the region as the ‘black prophecy’, and it did play out as predicted.¹

Pop. (1991): 92; (2013): 0

B. on duration: we can no longer think of existence as something able to be broken down into smaller intervals. Our existence is thus embodied. A wave cannot be broken down. We conveniently break down material, box it particularly. But this is not how it behaves. So what is strata? How does it behave? To what does it converse? Do particles travel whilst standing still?

What if we supposed that every sound ever made still exists? That, post-audible, it coalesces on the floor of the forest like silt in a river, like dust on a shelf, maintaining potential all the while. But this coalescing does not see sound absorbed into amorphous, representationless, meaningless magma. Or rather, not only this. It arrives, each particle arrives as a result of past causation. Our sonic geological strata is imprinted with the past. Modern science may not yet offer us the means to hear these inaudibilities, but they cannot deny their potential. Regardless, this is not a forum for deterministic notions of science and non-transcendental forms of empiricism. Rather it is a place for speculation.

Existence is only meaningful through thinking about duration (again B.) and that duration cannot be subdivided like we fallaciously and silently agree to subdivide time, thinking all the while that it is so bound up with space, as K. told us and as we’ve never questioned subsequently). But we must distinguish between the qualitative and the quantitative. I have (following D.’s suggestion) slipped in through the backdoor to create a monster of some mummified but welcoming remains. Some of this B. said and some I wish he’d said. But he had his regard subsumed for a while and bean counters took over. R. argued B. didn’t even understand mathematics. But he knew how to dream and that it is better to peg your bets on something life-affirming and inexact-able than to scrape away at some unattainable truth and go mad in the process.

You can hear the dogs – Tornjak. A local herding breed. Set back from the highway, a series of agricultural sheds. The only structure in the area besides the monument. A dozen Tornjak laze by the entrance. There are no humans. There is a dead dog amongst them. A large, dark corpse crumbling in on itself. This is where those sounds were coming from. At that moment the sheds were a topic of discussion. A proposal to house the 40,000 refugees who had been corralled into the area, hoping to get across the next border. The sheds had been offered up.

What to do with the lives around us, within us? How to classify them? They are and they are not examined lives, monochrome canvases with blots, smudges, freckles scattered over a space made up of shackled time. Examined lives (canvases), criss-crossed with shallow, empty spaces, dappled with little bumps – hillocks – and narrow furrows, cuttings, grooves, many alike, in which slow stagnant waters swirl. Lives with rounded edges, easily catalogued, easily connected, easily nailed onto the shelves of memory. And forgotten there.
Then, those others: lives criss-crossed, entangled, knotted with veins, scars, clefts which continue to breathe under the gravestones
over the little mounds of our being, scabbed-over wounds that still bleed within. Impenetrable lives.

The radio signals from here spread far in every direction dressing the plains in unheard sound, settling on the earth, permeating its sediment.

The changes have gone on everywhere,
except on the river.
Only the age-old water,
with its constant colour
and unhurried, tranquil flow,
gives to the view that consistency
without which its transformation,
however otherwise imposing,
would be to the highest degree suspicious.¹