Biography as a Spiritual Travelogue

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Biography as a Spiritual Travelogue

#1 Wishes, will, desire, ambition in art – I am not sure that any of these win. All of them are subject to wear. Art endures. Its stratification eludes. Any comparison with what we call “normal life” is meaningless. This was written in Latin script, in the archaic Macedonian language, in minute characters, with a graphite pencil. The way in which it was written, the unusual clash of language and script indicating a dual cultural affiliation, the choice of tiny letters exhausting for the eye, and of an ordinary pencil that seems to invite erasure, all these items, seemingly unimportant at first glance, say something about the man who wrote them, about his character and life story. Somewhere between human modesty and artistic self-awareness, Christian serenity and Classical restlessness, hubris in the idea of creatively exceeding human measure, the painter Petlevski – I might add, my father Petlevski – chose a way of life that was by no means easy, but was in the final instance redeeming. He discovered an artistic and existential balance, his own golden section, and he might have said without any qualms: I can be no more nor less than what I am. My painting is my destiny.
#2 He did not write down the thoughts that I record in this text in the form of a diary and they do not show life as a chronological course of events. On the contrary, these lapidary statements conceal a person who had no strong belief in the diachronic sequence of dates. For him history was an independent history of human ideas, an eternal trans-historic human dialogue in which, like in a letter by Webern of 1909, Schoenberg can communicate directly with Plato, Kant can appear beside Kraus and Kokoschka, be answered by Mahler, and listen to his questions. In a cultural salon of this kind, which enriches human spirituality and does not submit to the historical logic of movement from point A to point B, every tradition has its modernity, and every age its Modernism. If the only real admission ticket into that cultural salon is consistency and artistic integrity, then the Modernists who believed, as Petlevski did, in talent had to pay some kind of a price for entering that ideal society which they chose according to their own measure and taste. This price was, of course, paid in the sphere of everyday life, where time cannot be imagined in any other way but as the chronology of normal life.
#4 I have undertaken to place before you the life story of Ordan Petlevski more or less from first hand, but I must warn my readers that I can and want to do this only from the position of a double witness. By this I mean that I will call less on the authority of biological heritage, and more on the natural right of intellectual heritage of the kind that is established in artistic families where several individuals share the same kind of life. A moment came in my personal intellectual development when life with Petlevski ended in the sense of the parent-child relationship, and turned into an interesting polemical but gentle dialogue with Petlevski, free from any kind of expectation and enforcement. This dialogue, to my comfort, has continued even after my father’s death. How to understand the value of what an individual invested in his life, and how to determine parameters for a biography, is a matter of evaluation, I would say of temperament. If we were to reduce a biography only to the description of a journey along the horizontal axis of existence from one event to another, then death, superior to birth or any other experience, would be not only the last stage in an individual’s life but also the highest point of human progress. With some people, remember Proust, hardly anything objective can be found between was born and died. There was no scarcity of events in Petlevski’s life but he had a strong need to reduce them as much as possible. My father slowed down his motion along the line of normal life to the extreme limit, until he reached the imaginary ideal point at which he could sink into a static centre of self-awareness. Only after he had numbed all of his everyday sensations could he release his conscience, his ethical consciousness, without which the artist Petlevski could not understand why to create art. The notes in that black notebook include the following thoughts: What is important for meis the moral code of creation. Several lines lower down he wrote: I think that the creator does not move quickly but climbs by the law of the spiral slowly and persistently. This slowness, or even better, this unhurried activity of my father’s was a way to reach the ideal of an immobile, introspective point, a zero degree of motion. In it a Modernist like himself saw the possible starting point for a spiritual journey upward, a chance to spirally conquer the vertical line, start a new, different kind of adventure. If we want to get close to Ordan Petlevski we will have to believe, at least for a moment, that the stations on his pilgrimage, ethical as much as aesthetic, do not follow the chronology of events but the logic of spiritual development. #5I witnessed the persistent efforts of my father, who was similar to the knight of la Mancha, to experience his biography as a spiritual travelogue. In honour of his Quixotic tenacity in separating the horizontal line of life from the vertical line of the spirit, I will divide this biography into two columns. The first opens a small window into the trans-historical world of the ideas that preoccupied Petlevski (and not only him). The other (the narrower one, as is fitting) will show the course of events in time, and the data of his normal life will be graphically pushed into the margins. In this way I will not cheat either of two different groups of readers – it is unnecessary to say, two different approaches to the world, two different kinds of people.

AuthorSibila Petlevski
2018-08-21T17:23:53+00:00 June 1st, 2000|Categories: Reviews, Gallery, Blesok no. 15|0 Comments