TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Three Texts

something weak and minimal that was escaping the great flood. A thin stream of drainage water next to the river of life. Only the books that I was reading back then, during the long afternoons, could lower my eyes from the spectacle of air and light and guide them inside the words of Proust, Dostoevsky, Rilke, Pessoa, Eliot, and the other great oaks below which I stopped to spy on the world. I would hardly ever reread my notebook pages, would turn them along with the day gone by, with the sense, however, that something had remained, that I could go back and see again those moments unfolding before my eyes like a home movie. All of a sudden, towards the last years of high school, that thin stream of water that had followed my life disappeared. Sucked up by the earth. Drained by that marvelous and unpredictable beast of existence. The thin streamof water came backwhen I foundmyself stranded during my university years. An upside-down compass had guided me toward the end. Turning back, I found the water again and recognized a lost sequence of my childhood and the silence that had enveloped it. I again started speaking through writing. With a feeling that I had never experienced: that of finding a truth guarded by words, both protected from time and released with its charge of emotions by reading. The poems that would make up my first book, Mala kruna , were born. At that time I was burned by the necessity of bringing what I wanted to say to words: I knew exactly what it was, I lacked a language, I was searching for it desperately, with an obsessive uncertainty that induced me to formulate lines of verse that were almost marked, indeed etched, onmy bodywith the constant feeling of a landslide, a collapse that could overwhelm everything. I had initially written my first texts on childhood in a form close to versified stories. Then I sacrificed 133