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 | Aleksandra Đorđević | |
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detail from: KRK Art dizajn
A World in Motion
by Aleksandra Đorđević
(translated by Ilija Šaula & Copilot)
When people cross from one world into another, their souls resemble small Nepali deities – Kumari – hovering just above the ground.
They settle on the pillows of those who remain, and for a moment, it seems the storyteller knows what she’s talking about.
Through black holes in the universe, more questions stream:
Who am I?
Where am I going?
Why?
What lies between life and death – a kind of unbridgeable thread keeps urging us to gaze into that imaginary realm of good and evil?
My first loss happened when I was seven years old and missing three teeth.
Grandfather left quietly; at least I wasn’t aware of the noise that surrounded his departure.
I only felt the air shifting through the windows and placed my hand on his chest.
I stared for a long time at his silvery-blue eyelids, searching for proof of his existence.
Around me, the scent of coffee spread like the hands of mourners grieving for a grandmother, for bread, and for the curse of war.
What do you think? I asked in my thoughts, in the space where he still lives, and I know he hears me.
The second time I faced death was when my grandmother passed.
In truth, it came for her the moment grandfather left.
I still feel her in the half-light of the room.
She swells beneath the sheets that cover the relics of their shared life: the TV, the mirror, the photographs.
With the disappearance of the country where they built their future and family values, the essence of their being vanished.
With their departure, a part of me disappeared too.
And now it seems full again, passing like air through places missing a tooth, an answer, a love.
My experience of death then was like observing stars through the thick glass of a telescope.
The grandeur of the scene was too vast for my understanding of the world.
I withdrew behind the glass, clinging to images, the TV, the mirror – tangible anchors of reality.
A membrane separated us.
I believe it thins with time, and that the experience of immediate death is more like that of an astronaut reaching the Moon – somewhat surreal and overwhelmingly intoxicating.
And yet, between him and the new, unexplored territory, there remains a barrier: in the suit, in the air, in perception.
And we? Haven’t we spent all these years trying to approach it, decipher it, conquer it?
Even innocent moments of swaying above the ground feel like excursions from reality, a child’s curiosity reaching toward the sky.
Whether in play, swinging as hard as we can, or in earnest, in a cozy armchair that spins the whole world, we long to be above: the situation, the interlocutor, ourselves.
Because everything below, on Earth, is born of low passions and must not stain the hidden divinity within us.
That’s why the unblemished light of the soul, revealed through the Kumari girls, is protected by carrying them until puberty so they never touch the ground.
The stage of death we’re in doesn’t depend solely on the age of the body, nor on how many times a week we leave behind muddy paths on our bicycles.
Death and freedom do not coexist.
The more we resist gravity, provoking magnetic fields and chemical reactions, the more life dictates the trajectory.
And the most successful end their search in prayer.
I would like to transform my losses into prayer, not as extreme as the monks of the Egyptian monastery Aba Yohannis, carved into the rocks in heavenly heights.
Their devotion is so great that each day they cross a dangerous path to reach this inaccessible sacred place.
But in the feat lies sacrifice.
Let it be proportionate to my possibilities in the moment.
We do not wish to flatter death or God.
The path to God through meditation, mantras, and prayer need not belong solely to monastic life.
If we visited the spaces of loss and hollowness more often, listened to messages from the other side, we would endure partings more easily.
Isn’t every journey inward, toward the self, tangled beyond recognition, a labyrinth?
Thus, the faithful in the Cathedral of Chartres embark on this path both symbolically and literally, moving through the circles drawn beneath the great vault, while Old Testament princes hover around them.
A mind without thought, or non-conceptual awareness, as Buddhist monks might call it, may be the only gate at the crossing between two worlds, the only way for our feet to always be ready for flight.
And when it leads us into a dead end, the storyteller knows what she’s doing.
At the threshold between one world and another, a light flickers in warning:
on that great swing from depths to heights, we will one day greet death.
Whether we animate both spirit and body equally in that game depends on what flows through the places where teeth are missing.
I am accompanied by the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
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