I am a woman of visions.
This isn’t a humble brag — sometimes I’m graced with pleasant and yet detailed reveries, the natural extension of every human’s goddess-given intuition. Other times it’s a nagging fear, come un-dug from the earth of my body.
In 2008, it was the former.
Imagine a junior college cafeteria. Shifting metal chair legs against linoleum. Plastic wrapped sandwiches and Gatorade with chips. I’m 26, late to the game of higher ed, still unconvinced that education wasn’t just for a select few who had the money and privilege to not work full time for four years.
I let my body pool into the plastic chair, post-lunch and I saw another me. Yes, there she was – hair long, but not the most immediate thing cared for. I saw the waves of the Adriatic lap against her ankles, then thighs. A spare boat and her in the cabin. An unmooring after years on dry, stable earth. Men, women, friends, lovers, came and went.
There was clarity. Like the ringing of a bell in a monastery. Unmistakeable. The light and water playing off each other was the most complicated part of the daydream.
It was Croatia.
I knew of the place beyond classroom lessons and maps. I knew it first as the origins of my old world family. Three brothers the story went. One woman they all fought over.
I re-read the memory keeper’s story, the daughter of one of the brothers and know better now. Joseph came to the States in 1909 with Maria. He shot himself in 1925. His brother Anton came, took up with his brother’s wife, then shot himself in 1933. They came from a small village, Kutina. Far from where these visions took place. Lifetimes away.
But back to her. She had everything she wanted and nothing more.
She came and went and was pleased to mostly please herself. Unapologetically wanting a self, self-full.
You have to understand that an earlier version of her had been taught to never be self-full. Indeed, it was better to never mention her universe. Better to darken the clustered and binary stars that took shape in her irises, the onyx wormholes of her pupils. Better to never cry, as if the tears of the ocean weren’t part of her. Better to be a monument to the Great Other rather than claim three-dimensional subjecthood. Someone might get hurt.
So the vision was a prescription. A potentiality.
2015. I had transitioned from community college to Portland State. I saw no difference in the quality of the education I received, but was grateful to get a degree. A degree was rare in my family and conferred a freedom I had yearned for and had missed out on throughout my life. I took a job as a community manager at an internet governance non-profit. The pay was abysmal, but we traveled internationally three times a year, with opportunities to piggy-back off conference trips.
One such trip took us to Abu Dhabi, and with unlimited PTO and a memory of my Croatian vision, I piggybacked off the conference, via Istanbul and a temporary visa to enter their airport. I landed in Zagreb a day after the conference.
Lost luggage. Outfit heavy with the cost of gravity and travel on it. I wandered central Zagreb in search of food and found it in the form of a slice of pizza, with corn on it.
My flat was owned by a middle aged man who would steal away to it as a refuge during his teenage years, and it kept the frittered energy of those days. The granite stairs occluded light, and kept a stale air, so leaving at night or early morning meant grazing my fingertips over the walls till I reached the apartment door deadlock.
Zagreb contained cultural spaces that I felt intimidated by; only because they were not legible in my near memory. I hadn’t encountered spaces that seemed to carry such a kaleidoscope of color, shadow, and art mitigated by an unspoken pathos. Considering Croatia Balkan is a somewhat controversial take, but Balkan is the easiest shorthand for the sort of spirit of the place: like most places it contains multitudes, and a collage of influence, including: Turkish, Roman, Austro-Hungarian.
Zadar, Croatia: The Sea Organ and Its Song
Two days in and the sea called me. I booked a bus ticket to Zadar, the oldest continuous city in Croatia. It was November, but the weather held. Adriatic winds pinned my hair to my skull and I wandered the city alone, mounting the grueling steps up a bell tower to look out at the sea, which curled and lapped toward the coast. I attempted to pet a feral cat who, true to his nature, turned on me. I kicked rocks around the town square and filtered through the archaeological museum.
I arrived in Zadar strategically. I gave myself enough time to wander, then grab dinner. I listened to my waiter’s basketball dreams over a sour cherry strudel as the edges of the sky started to pink. I was waiting for the sun to set.
The sound of Zadar’s sea organ was the sound of the people I come from. I came to Zadar partly for the sea, but also for the sea organ, which contains 35 organ pipes that transform the movement of the sea into a fluttering of the land’s heart. A song. My torso and legs splayed across two of the seven carved steps as the sun glazed down the horizon into the earth’s edge. Seven chords and five tones created a discordant, inky melody.
What a life, what a thing! I had no idea of the comings and goings of my ancestors, and whether or not they made it to the Dalmatian coast. Whether they had gazed upon the same sunset, glinting off the slate gray waves. I was driven mad by the sound of the organ, tears streamed onto my temples, and deltaed into fine baby hairs, ones that my mother once ran her fingers through. The wind wrapped my body like an omen, and it knocked me down against the steps with the fervor of Saint Teresa’s ecstasy. It said: God does indeed live in all things.
Behind the sea organ is an installation, Greeting to the Sun. 300 layers of glass contain photovoltaic solar modules, which eat the sun all day and then, like the bioluminescent creatures of the sea, light up at nightfall. With my face a puzzle of bittersweet tears and mystery, and my body a little achy from the stone steps, I walked back to the wide circle representing the sun. An entire system embedded into the coastal shelf. With the sun, there’s Venus, Mars, and the outer planets, but no moon.
I danced and watched others dance as the sphere lit up. There were no lovers or friends there, but there was the sea. And in that moment I felt the clarity of all who came before me, like a bell, ringing in a monastery.
