The impudent gait of Time treads on the Living Creature. It draws him even more impudently and more atrociously through space where it leaves traces of itself, of transience sprouting deep in its essence, and also of eternity, at which its walking ends if it can end at all.
And all of a sudden, a gigantic step into the sumptuous feast of destruction – death. And opposite to it – only a little creature of the exhilarating coincidence who crumbles like an old rock from the breaking of the sea waves, and without a pinch of hope in despair sinks into the sea depth. He finds his place far at the bottom, where he crouches in an escape from the gigantic dimensions of omnipotence embodied in the enigmatic sea vilayet, which is simultaneously life and death, existence and an apocalyptic wasteland.
Man pulls up the strings and out of his unknown roots commences to knit a personal nucleus. He conceives a world of his own as a sole perfection in the non-perfect face and shape of the deepness where he is thrown away. He perishes in despondency and gives up to his condemned position of being a faithful subject of order and of the constant regularities for the sake of his and the common “good”. He wedges himself in an iron armour lacking a speck of will for joining every single drop of his power and for making a vanquishment over nothingness, for starting a knightly struggle against the sketched grim scheme. He discloses the eyes in front of reality, which in his view secretes only bitterness, threats, mystery and alienation, so he cowers in his imagined circle.
The roaming from himself to himself is too lengthy; hence the grown protective crust cracks. There rises an impulse for quest for new, until then undreamed-of paths because only innumerous footsteps of the futile wanderings have engraved on the own paths. The transforming living force suddenly gushes forth from its hottest wellsprings in order to shatter the breakers that have hung over the little man. At the beginning of the circle, if there is such a beginning, starts a new beginning, but in the opposite direction, so as to lay pallor on the “nice” order and to unmask it as the greatest disorder. After all, does it matter whether we will convert it into a ruin? At least we can sway its foundations, if not for any other reason then for proving that we are not the only ones with a fragile nature. Perhaps we will remain the defeated party in the mutual skirmish, but the challenge itself will appease the sea surface and will steal a handful of its interminable potential so that the white sailboats of joy and bliss could set out on a sail.
The bright half of this seemingly elemental existing will resurrect from the ashes. Life will proudly display its title called Value, which we award to it and to ourselves as well. Miraculous indeed, how a miserable Nothing as if by magic transfigures into a great Something.
(Inspired by Vasko Popa’s poetry)
Translated by: the author