1. The law of place can only help us understand life, not death. Therefore hope and any optimistic illusion is justified.
2. The Cosmos rests on dualism and draws inner strength from it. Day and night. Summer and winter. Good and evil. Eternal struggle yielding no final victory and no final defeat.
3. It is in two orders that history evolves: after a period when life-blood is sucked out with cotton wool, there follows a period when life-blood is let by a knife.
4. Plunder is an inevitable component of economic activity in the stages thus ordered. Economic systems can be better or worse, but no economic system is efficient per se, unless plunder is built into it. It is a myth that the rich, civilized West was created by labor only.
5. In the stages thus ordered, the successful protagonists of relative stability claim that economics solve everything, while demonic natures mock that claim, preparing, at the change of historical periods, to plunder what others have earned.
6. There is such a thing as historical relief. Where water has run, it will run again. Landmarks change, and privileges are perpetuated. What is important is not to be consistent, and not to pay taxes, as the crowd pays. Forms change, the essence remains. That is why the least reconstruction, in the sense of the engagement of labor, is found in regions with ancient statehood, where privilege has taken deeper root than in the peripheral provinces of the world’s political stage.
7. Recommendation. Because of the law of place, optimism is a more favorable choice than pessimism. Everything is lost without the belief that even so humanity can create a wider space for itself. That would mean an unconditional capitulation of the spirit. The dualism imbuing the cosmos does not permit it. There is sense in Sisyphus’ labor. Are we sufficiently aware that sometimes we are more impressed by ruins, by their beauty even, than by the buildings that have survived?
Skopje, March 1851
Jordan Hadži Konstantinov-Džinot
A mystifier’s confession
This text was written by me one morning in March 1993. I am grateful to Dzinot, from whom I have borrowed the form used in his Primer. I decided not to rush its publication, and distributed only a few copies of it among my friends, with a note under the text: reported by Blaže Koneski. I realized that some of them did not immediately see through the game, for they inquired about the circumstances in which Dzinot could express himself in such a manner.
Now, when I have decided to publish this “primer,” I would not wish thus to mislead some of the readers too. That is why I thought it better to add this explanation.
Blaže Koneski
Translated by Ljubica Arsovska and Margaret Reid