in print

For a long time, maybe forever, i have had the feeling of being completely unable to control my own life or destiny. I often wondered if this was some perverted left over of my calvinist inheritance or a twisted version of post soviet fatalism.
This feeling of being unable to control my life has led to the feeling of watching my actions from above, as though watching a television show or a film. sometimes it seems i am not even a particpant in the naneh-show, but just a helpless observor sitting in the audiance. This feeling was strongest the day i woke up in a serbian hospital an operation. Prior to the surgury, i hadnt had enough time to think about serious or logical stuff. Instead i had worried over what language i would speak when i woke up from the anesthetic the doctors were at that moment preparing. My forms all stated i was a pure blooded russian, and orthodox sister of the serbian nation. The doctors had made numerous comments on my fake ethnicity as they wheeled me into the operating theatre. they all seemed very excited to have a representative of mother russia in their provincial hospital, and tried to put me to ease with the little russian they could remember from school. “tovarishice pacijentka, ja sam vrach, u vas sechas budet operacija!” the surgen announced. Needless to say, i shouldnt have been so preoccupied with language. I was conscious long before i could speak. My brain came out of the anesthetic first. I remember hearing all the noises around me before i could open my eyes. I could hear my ukrainian roomate ira asking if i was dying, i can remember the doctors, jasmina talking, everything. But it took me forever to open my eyes, they just seemed to be glued together. Even once they opened, it took another minute to find my voice. So i had plenty of time to formulate a coherent sentance in serbian. Finnally, all my vital organs coordinated enough for me to tell jasmina that i thought i had mistakenly fallen into a film. she laughed nervously.
This was an extreme case, but the feeling has persisted. It has been rendered only stronger by the representations of myself in others work. A particularly disturbing version appeared was my biography written by marko in partial furfillment of an MA class he took on biography writing. I hardly recognised myself. Or i did, but it was a strange sensation.
So the latest work to present a view of me from the outside is a book which has just come out. And i am in it. I got my copy expressed to me from athens this afternoon. And there i am in black and white print, a character in a book, or in someone else’s life. It is an incredible feeling. The book is brilliantly written, so much so that the first time i looked at the page number, i was already close to 100. and the details are so lovingly recounted that i adore reading even the scenes that feature me in not terribly flatering situations (like taking a piss in a sunflower field in full view of a bus load of people) even jasmina from my film-hospital experience is there, depicted as vivedly as i remember her. So my confusion is perpetuated by another literary representation. Do i exist as on these pages? But there are parts of me i dont recognise, yet the scenes are all fixed in my brain in more-or-less the same way as the author writes of them. So perhaps bakhtin is correct? Only others can see us and give us our character? It is all very confusing....