It is extremely hot and I spent the majority of my day on the phone with doctors and bureaucracies, so now seems as good a time as any to inaugurate my new icon of Jeff Hartnett from Johnny Eager (1942), characteristically pictured mid-slouch. The man occupies chairs like a human pitch drop; if left sufficiently undisturbed, one imagines, he would pour himself incrementally out of them again. I am in fact not convinced that the floor is not where Jeff is frequently discovered, unless Johnny has sent him to bed first or he's been lucky enough to pass out in the direction of a couch. For slightly different reasons, I can relate.
I realized while summarizing Le Guin's Orsinia to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yhlee—"a small landlocked country in Central-to-Eastern Europe with a Balkan Romance language and a history closely paralleling its neighbors, which means it starts the twentieth century as part of Austria-Hungary and spends most of the rest of it as part of the Eastern Bloc"—that a great many of my feelings about her imaginary country seem to have crossbred with my feelings about the MCU's Sokovia, especially as it's revealed in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021) to have ceased to exist. "Cannibalized by its neighbors before the land was even cleared of rubble. Erased from the map." I thought of Emeric Pressburger, born Pressburger Imre József in Timișoara, which was Temesvár at the time:
I was a schoolboy of sixteen when World War I ended. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed like a chocolate soufflé struck by the icy wind of defeat. The Serbs took the southern part of Hungary, the Romanians got hold of the east, the Czechs the north, even the Austrians took a portion in the west. Our town lay on the shipping canal connecting the river Tisza with the Danube, slap on the new border and we were wondering whether we were going to become Romanians or Serbs, since rumour had it that the triumphant allies had promised our province to both.
If the show had been firing on all cylinders, it would have remembered that even a Baron can be stateless, nothing left of his country but maps out of date and a language he hasn't heard in five years and a monument in what isn't even the ruins of its capital, neat as a golf course, sculpted as socialist realism, you'd never know a city had fallen screaming from the sky. You called it a failed state, but it's where you go to wait for the end of your life, to be tidied away with the rest of this smashed history under the blank gaze of the stone family more whole than yours was left. Failure can still be home. The writers missed a real trick not making one of the Flag Smashers, one of the Blip DPs, Sokovian. Surely, statistically, some of them must have been. Some people call for the abolition of nations, some people wake up one morning to find theirs gone. (The keystone out of your arch.) The globe is filled with the ghosts of countries and most of them don't come back: Spiders Poland is an outlier and should not be counted. As I said tosholio at the time, "GOOD JOB ZEMO GIVING ME SOKOVIAN DIASPORA FEELS."
"Since the story 'Unlocking the Air,' written in 1990, I have had no word from Orsinia," Le Guin wrote in 2012. "I miss hearing from my people there." If she ever did hear from them again, she never published the correspondence; the cycle ends with Orsinia's Revolution of 1989, the first tentative, transitional steps beyond the page of the fairy tale into the future, where she had to let them find their own way with the rest of the changing world. It is not a bad ending, though I always wanted even just one more story from their twenty-first century. I wrote an Orsinian poem that wasn't it. Le Guin said herself, we do not ask what happened after. Perhaps that was what closed the borders. Or she didn't want to see them fracture into post-Soviet war like some of their neighbors, which nationalist politicians they would have elected in the last decade, imaginary countries were never immune from real politics. They could be splendidly stable, an A-1 liberal democracy; their historian is no longer around to receive their communications. But even if they don't write, I hope they are still on the map.
I realized while summarizing Le Guin's Orsinia to
yhlee—"a small landlocked country in Central-to-Eastern Europe with a Balkan Romance language and a history closely paralleling its neighbors, which means it starts the twentieth century as part of Austria-Hungary and spends most of the rest of it as part of the Eastern Bloc"—that a great many of my feelings about her imaginary country seem to have crossbred with my feelings about the MCU's Sokovia, especially as it's revealed in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021) to have ceased to exist. "Cannibalized by its neighbors before the land was even cleared of rubble. Erased from the map." I thought of Emeric Pressburger, born Pressburger Imre József in Timișoara, which was Temesvár at the time:I was a schoolboy of sixteen when World War I ended. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed like a chocolate soufflé struck by the icy wind of defeat. The Serbs took the southern part of Hungary, the Romanians got hold of the east, the Czechs the north, even the Austrians took a portion in the west. Our town lay on the shipping canal connecting the river Tisza with the Danube, slap on the new border and we were wondering whether we were going to become Romanians or Serbs, since rumour had it that the triumphant allies had promised our province to both.
If the show had been firing on all cylinders, it would have remembered that even a Baron can be stateless, nothing left of his country but maps out of date and a language he hasn't heard in five years and a monument in what isn't even the ruins of its capital, neat as a golf course, sculpted as socialist realism, you'd never know a city had fallen screaming from the sky. You called it a failed state, but it's where you go to wait for the end of your life, to be tidied away with the rest of this smashed history under the blank gaze of the stone family more whole than yours was left. Failure can still be home. The writers missed a real trick not making one of the Flag Smashers, one of the Blip DPs, Sokovian. Surely, statistically, some of them must have been. Some people call for the abolition of nations, some people wake up one morning to find theirs gone. (The keystone out of your arch.) The globe is filled with the ghosts of countries and most of them don't come back: Spiders Poland is an outlier and should not be counted. As I said to
sholio at the time, "GOOD JOB ZEMO GIVING ME SOKOVIAN DIASPORA FEELS." "Since the story 'Unlocking the Air,' written in 1990, I have had no word from Orsinia," Le Guin wrote in 2012. "I miss hearing from my people there." If she ever did hear from them again, she never published the correspondence; the cycle ends with Orsinia's Revolution of 1989, the first tentative, transitional steps beyond the page of the fairy tale into the future, where she had to let them find their own way with the rest of the changing world. It is not a bad ending, though I always wanted even just one more story from their twenty-first century. I wrote an Orsinian poem that wasn't it. Le Guin said herself, we do not ask what happened after. Perhaps that was what closed the borders. Or she didn't want to see them fracture into post-Soviet war like some of their neighbors, which nationalist politicians they would have elected in the last decade, imaginary countries were never immune from real politics. They could be splendidly stable, an A-1 liberal democracy; their historian is no longer around to receive their communications. But even if they don't write, I hope they are still on the map.
