In literature this kind of postmodern pose had already seen its days, but it has not so far managed to even peek into the matters of the world. And even though artistic ideas have always been ahead of reality, the time to find the answers to global problems elsewhere than in the theories of battles between religions and civilization is running out. What if we took the time to listen to the people on whose backs the great stories themselves crumbled? More than a few had managed to unravel from their experience a world of human language.
And this is not the language of poetry and art, even though the Balkan experience shows that this language breaks through the most easily. If we are to know what really helps man survive, we must listen to everyday stories. And it’s not enough to just acknowledge them. To understand what they mean, they must be discussed. And if we comprehend how we managed to survive, we shall also comprehend what it was that we survived and what had caused us to suffer.
There’s no avoiding the pathetic note here, and there’s no need to. As opposed to the mainly downputting meaning of this word in English, the Slovene word for “pathetic” – “patetika” – also bears the meanings of strong emotion, wisdom and moral distinction (the English word pathetic is nominally translated into Slovene as “beda”, spiritual or economical poverty). A deed similar in its pathos to the decay of Yugoslavia is Jesenin’s suicide. He wrote his last love poem with the blood dripping from his cut-open veins.
The question whether or not to derive meaning from death is a most delicate one. All the violent cosmogonies do it. By including death into a (savior) story of faith, ideology, nation …, they prescribe a meaning to it. And most people accept this with relief, as the burden of absurdity of death is a heavy one to bear. But in this way, really, a life is deprived of individual sense, it is stolen, manipulated toward unworthy causes of the cosmocrats producing these stories. The master-of-all-masters in doing this, was Plato, having founded his state on the death of Socrates. Two radically opposed examples are these of Jan Palach and Gandhi, who did not let their deaths be consumed by any of the forceful legitimating discourses, but used them to radically affirm life: an individual and self-owning life, a life free of comsocracies enforced by others.
The Balkan experience of which we speak can only truly divulge itself to us if we are capable of carrying the burden of thousands of senseless deaths. From this experience, one can gain wisdom – another word that presents the clear blue of the planet in noble tones in Slovene (modro – blue, modrost – wisdom) and in sad ones in English – but only if one faces one’s own part in the stories that have caused these deaths. This task being the hardest. The more that our actions fit in with the stories that have claimed lives, the heavier is the burden of admitting their absurdity, as even the notion of a single senseless death is almost unbearable. This is also why it is unreasonable to expect the generations that have soiled their hands in blood to remove the coat of armor with which they protect themselves from guilt, and look upon their actions without explanatory circumstances. Such a view is terrible indeed; very few can bear it. And vet it demands no exceptional character trait. This trait can only be the consequence of such an insight, brought about by a tangle of circumstance. When faced with defeat the planners, helpers and mercenaries of the bloody escapades are sometimes made to come to terms with this insight in the solitary confinement of a jail cell, and even some winners face it for no apparent reason. The relatives of the victims, however, are forced into seeing it in the moment of loss. Since they usually have nobody to share their loss with, they scurry to the safe haven of stories of martyrdom.
Over the past few years, Apokalipsa has collected the intimate words of those who suspect or know that such safety robs man of humanity. These revelations have a great worth as they did not fall for the trickery of cosmocratic stories but are still collected and arranged into a bouquet. Although it is not probable that they should bring about a prevailing understanding, they carry sensibility, experience and an answer to the blind alley in which the world has found itself. Their fusion is the only possible answer to the fission brought about by the scientific understanding of the world.
Thus, with the thought of the inability of Slavic languages to form a coherent answer to their subjugated position in relation to the western world (the name Slav is derived from the Latin word for slave) we reach the core of the problem. And we are not talking about a panslavic wish comparable to the goals of Arabic countries to unite and resist Israel as the western world’s Arabic outpost. Nor are we discussing forming a Slavic world interpretation to match our conquering idols. As mentioned, such attempts had always dissolved into tyranny and intolerance. We must again stress the fact that the traumatic experience shared by the Balkan nations (even non-Slavs) is not a matter of language. Yet – through it – an opportunity for a different perspective is offered, and for this the difference between language and (hermeneutical) speech must be understood.
The Balkan texts collected by Apokalipsa do not offer explanations from our perspectives. And yet they all veer toward what Hanah Arendt meant when she said that the only weapon against violence is understanding the events, that took place or were caused by us. In short – we must understand what helped the people who would not bow to forceful explanations of the world, or those who realized the horrors of co-producing such a world to survive. Only then may we be able to answer the first question of this text. For now, let us answer a question with a question: What if the rest of Europe evaded the last war of the 20th century because they were able to contemplate their past actions and did not look elsewhere to place their guilt?
Their own comprehensions, derived from a tradition of conquering are probably hindering them in their search for a path out of the unenviable position they have let the world to come to. But this does not mean that they are not looking. And if they are searching within their own Dorian mirror image, that is the Balkans, it means that they are gazing upon themselves. The time has come to listen to the answer that we had overlooked so many times on purpose. The answer is not that of the winner and bears no single meaning.
Translated by: Jure Novak