So what if consciousness doesn’t want to remain sober?
I happen to write poems. Sometimes I even let someone reading them. Yet I do not know whether it is right. Often, after a careful reading, the reader — my victim — suddenly turns into a predator and attacks in perhaps the cruelest way I could imagine. He asks the same accursed question as always: How did this poem come to be? In terms of what sparked it off or what inspired me to take the plunge. In turn, blush like beetroot, I start stammering and feel extremely foolish. I should know! But well — I don’t know. I have no idea — it just came out. And when I reflect — after some time — all I can think of is: that the poetry is a spurt, something elusive and, hard to say, inexplicable. It is a journey into the unknown, it constantly asks questions and very rarely hears answers. So to be a poet means no more than to wander and ask for directions. This always leads me to one answer — history as a story to tell. Or rather a tale contained by certain time and space. History: Small, great, ordinary and stately, ours, common but sometimes very intimate. It attracts me, awakens my hunger. I see it as the fruition of art — a taste of old and new societies. The smell of the element, arranged in a procession of numerous daredevils, dreamers, soothsayers, prophets, madmen with a vision, which does not suit either the past or the present. Such people are always imprinted onto the imagination with the stigma of a time that was meant to come, but got delayed and never came, yet we keep waiting for it.
For centuries, writers and poets have been portraying this enchanting procession in their imagination, and their curiosity is not so much about the portraits of the main characters of the events as about the idealized figures growing out of their spirit, like the father imagined by a young boy. By the way, isn’t it interesting — or more emphatically surprising — how childhood memories shape the life and identity of an adult?
Frankly, I had failed to acknowledge the power that lies dormant in a child. It seemed to me that a person, like a snake, when entering adulthood, sheds the skin of childhood and, dressed in a new cloak, with a bold leap enters the world of maturity. I suspected that at a certain age we separate ourselves from the past with a wall, and whatever belonged to it now seems to function as a flickering memory, as if it were us, but not quite us. Now I know that I have been wrong. The older we grow, the stronger the voice of the child within us. This is how our world is arranged, it grows old together with everything that is in it and what inhabits it. “panta rhei kai ouden menei” — as Heraclitus of Ephesus would say… And yet not entirely. Everything passes and everything ends except memory — recollections. No, we never cease to be children, neither do we cut ourselves off from childhood — yes, sometimes we try to drown it out, but it still plays in us, or rather the living memory of it does. More and more often I catch myself that I don’t remember details from a few days or months ago, but back in my childhood, I recall everything, almost every day, people, their faces, words — as if time had stopped. It’s as if human memory, up to a certain age, recorded a set of important experiences on some indestructible carrier. Delightfully, all this exists in us until the very end. What a consolation for a man who still has another forty sad years ahead of him… Oh yes — the memory of youth is a balm for the experienced soul, a cure for the disease that sooner or later affects everyone — old age. I would give everything to gather as many details as possible in my memory while my youth is still around. If only to pass the twilight of life more tolerably. Youthful memories build us as people, shape our outlook on life and, above all, influence the quality of our existence. In general, such a rule governs our lives. Maybe not in all particular cases, but the average majority submits to it without unnecessary resistance.
Authors also give way to a similar norm, and their creation, namely literature and poetry, always refer to reality to a greater or lesser degree. It is true that they deform and mold it in their own fashion, but in each case, there is a tiny “grain of truth” in it. Precisely on this level, the literary world is intertwined with the real one. The blood that was spilled on the pages of a novel often dewed the real grass, the idea that drives the novel protagonists to break their necks usually originated in the minds of real people. The world of fantasy has its cradle in the condition of real existence. Fear dwelling in individuals, emanating from the stanzas of poetry, from the lines of fictionalized occurrences, finds an outlet in the dichotomy of everyday life. The uncertainty that all of us, without exception, would like to avoid, lurks right next to us, slumbering dormant on the shelves, among the volumes we reach for from time to time.
And what for? Is it just to discover doubts and peer into the eternal sentence of experiencing them? To release the pain felt every day anew, piling up in the soul like grains of sand thrown by the wind on the ridge of coastal dunes? How can one explain its ever-recurring wraith and its rapid, sudden, tangibility? What has man done, since, perpetually, against his will, and despite the guidance of common sense, he is obliged to pay for humanity with the price of awareness of his own history? Which is only meaningful if we keep a sober perspective on the past.
So what if consciousness does not want to remain sober and doesn’t submit to the objectification of the unity between entities and thoughts within space and time. For this oneness results from the historical character of truth. But such a conception by no means falls within the customary attitude towards the laws of forming reality we usually indulge in. We do not want to conceive truth as a living and tangible organism. Rather, we treat it as a clump of plastic mass, ready to be shaped at any given moment; we work it like clay is worked into a bell mould. The result is a terrible confusion of spirit, for without truth one cannot discern either the historical or the temporal perspective, and one gets lost in space and time. The lack of such a perspective manifests itself especially in the tendency to suppress the mystery of existence, which results in the renunciation of the universal qualities of human character in favor of emphasizing the spiritual distinctiveness of one marked society. So we treat everything that belongs to the realm of time as an inferior reality. In this sense, time is not a creative element to us, we are only familiar with cycles, periodic repetitions of the past. We read history with our hearts and not our minds, we chase the ghosts of the past in the hope that one day we will herd them into our enclosure and imprison them in it forever. In Europe, it is rare for anyone to objectivize history, we are rather dealing here with the eternal subjectivization of this phenomenon. Who here does not know the proverb ‘history goes round and round’? Oh, how we wish it would turn once, and that it would stop at the most convenient moment possible. In a normal world, laws yield to facts, but not with us. Here we first make up laws and then ascribe facts to them. Our understanding of history is limited to the final result, which becomes the driving force behind the blindly turning wheel of history. The goal itself is progress at any price, reality re-formed in its most perfect form. We see it as a means to make our dreams come true, a tool for us, like a trowel in the hands of a bricklayer. And like him, we build our house with carefully selected scraps of history, and everything that doesn’t fit, doesn’t look right, we throw away on the dustbin — on the heap of ignored events. I would call it an escape, a way out, a blindfold, something that helps us bear the awareness that we are not in control of our own fate, that it is guided by providence, by the power of the Logos we cannot prove with rational arguments. It is necessary to experience this force, to “search in the dark”, to “touch” this reality with one’s life, and to deal with it throughout the course of history.
Providence is a typical source of inspiration. We consider it from the perspective of the midpoint, we want to grasp both ends of it at once, we keep moving forward — into the future — we keep casting our glances backward. In this wonderful journey of ours, we hope to reach our destination, which is not the future but the past. We enchant ourselves in a circle of dreams about the returning days of power and faith. There is, however, a prophetic fear that eventually we ought to accept along with the verdicts of history and the God who makes it. We cast our mind on providence from the level of the consumer, eternally placing ourselves in its care. However, there is no real humility in this trust. Faith in her judgments is accompanied by a nervous conjuring up of the future as a new paradise of social equality, a new Arcadia. Only that in the modern culture of words and our tradition, humanity, and therefore society, do not fit into the suit of abstract of joint identity created by one’s imagination every time the idea is put forward. Today, only organized social forms are able and capable of using the state and its apparatus to achieve the desired benefits. And there is no other way than through planned social action. Unfortunately, when we look at the current course of events, we see that if people group together in a structure, it is not to raise a higher form out of it, but with the intention of forcing the rest to submit to their will. In our pandemic reality, there is an eternal “war of fasting against carnival”, a battle of conscience versus reason, of the general interest opposed to the interest of the “party”. These two conflicting social tendencies define the character and spirit of today’s European element. We are at once a society of renewal and retrogressive reaction. On the one hand, we are moving in the sphere of moral revolution, on the other, we are trying to prevent its “Eaglets” from stepping on the barricades of nihilism laid down by our hands. Ultimately, we are deepening the chaos of the abominable everyday life, we are strengthening the reign of anarchy upon our own request, we are falling into a state of mental stupor, temporary amnesia, such as those who suffer from split ego. We suffer from the disease of bipolar morality, where on one side exist I and my self-esteem and on the other all the rest and their misdeeds. Whenever we look at ourselves, something of the bored nihilist awakens within us, craving nothing but holy graces. When, on the other hand, we look with burning indignation at the entire nameless rest, we face an urgent need to condemn evil, and the demon of moral renewal — the Kirkegardian idealist — awakens inside ourselves.
Kierkegaard witnessed the tragic dawn of the liberal state, awakening to life amid the ashen tumults of the “Spring of Nations”. Shocked by the predatory, almost animalistic character of the struggles for a new face of Europe he lived in, he brought into existence two thoughts of two kinds of hostility. The first raises its head when: indifference is the cause of fights or hatred between strangers. The second smiles at us while we think that: it lies in the desire for friendship and fellowship. Such hatred is further coated by agitating emotions that expect, or perhaps even demand, unity. The first category of enmity derives its very existence from indifference, it springs from the icy heart aided by streams of non-recognition. The priority submission of this hatred is to remove the stranger once and for all. As the tyrants say: “For the ‘stranger’ completely fails to attract the attention of his adversary; he merely replaces the path that leads him towards his goal. This hubristic attempt to reject the human community is best illustrated by the murderous nature of the mercenary soldier, who for money and privilege is ready to carry out even the most heinous of atrocities. He despises ideology, all the more so, he does not look for excuses: after all, he only sells’ his craft. The ambassador of the second type is a fighter — a lover of ideas, enchanted by the desire to repair the world and convinced of the universality of ideology, to which he entrusted his own heart. Our good old Europe is full of both, but it seems that the majority is on the moderate side, that is, among the lovers of ideas. Reflecting on Kirkegaard’s reasons, one might involuntarily bring it to bear on the longing for the “Final Struggle”. A similar hatred appears to us as a result of a felt defilement at times when we too often use the catechesis of human brotherhood. It also arises, seemingly, from the dying certainty that we are condemned to each other. Riddled with the shrapnel of impotence when it comes to the realization of dreams, or soothed by nihilism, we often act against the incisive whispers of anterior intuition. Whenever we hear about our own weakness, we immediately revive in our minds a passionate desire to show, those who doubted it, the strength and power that lie dormant in us. Even when this demonstration could be the proverbial “nail to the coffin”. Thus we are held hostage by our complexes and overgrown egos. This excess of form over content leads indirectly to Hegel, or more precisely to his concept of cunning reason: “This may be called the cunning of reason, that it sets the passions to work for itself, while whatever comes into existence, as a result, suffers losses and sacrifices. […] The idea pays the tribute of existence and insignificance not at its own expense, but the expense of the passions of individuals.”1
It takes us back to the tipping point, right back to the individual, a person, to the self, and to the narrative of which we are the building blocks. That is me! It’s not enough to think it has to be said out loud — I! Who, then? No… I won’t answer. Perhaps it is better, simpler, and safer not knowing. Besides, is it really necessary? What would a poem be without a question mark, without an ellipsis, lacking a note of hesitation — uncertainty? Poetry is like a warehouse of historical curiosities in which we keep rarely used words, just in case, and poets are the laborers who use these words as raw material. The problem is that they work in a kind of dark-eye manner since with such material they can never be sure and it’s difficult to predict what might fall out of the conveyor belt. That’s what I believe — things with poetry are like with life, you have to struggle through it before you even talk about it, you must read a poem — sometimes many times — and therein lies the salutary advantage of poetry over reality, for you live once, while you can read poetry endlessly.
The writer’s weapon is language and the questions he asks with its aid. In this sense, his work is nothing more than an attempt to awaken minds, reconstruct shattered consciences, and reactivate life. Writing is, was, and always will be a difficult activity and due to that fact, it has its place somewhere on the sidelines, on the periphery of reality. Those who write always remain, unlike the rest. By being creative — as if by their very nature — they become different, living on the edge. Such a life arouses curiosity, attracts like a magnet. Not everyone, of course, but it is enough for the discerning, the fascinated. So if there is something genuinely attractive in it (and I believe there is), it would be a missing trace, a rupture, a pause, an understatement. Therein lies the power of literature — its salutary defiance.
1Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel — Lecture in the Philosophy of History.
