Milorad Popović: The end of history
| THE END OF HISTORY To the poet Marko Vešović IThere is nothing to oppose our time: humankind has grown so old in the meantime because each idea of change has been transformed in the photographic lenses, in monitors, in supermarkets. Even God, whom we still remember is withered like a dark flower, shadowed as if he has also grown old, grown out of power from subterranean shocks and seismic quakes. Inventing various appliances for the rest, for hygiene, for the real estate commerce, glorifying superiority of the technical mind we believed that we were approaching God: that the light-bearded God is motionless upon crowning ladders. Our Lord has grown old because he turned too much abstraction into reality (it is only in the world of speculation that the eternal presence is possible). When he lost his faculties for turning himself into every organic and inorganic matter - into a grain of sand into ripe and green rye seed into a shell-like coniferous leaf he climbed down the mountain long before sunrise, so that no one could see him weakened, deafened, hard-mouthed. By night he surrounded himself with water-like cobweb which resembled slimy offspring so that no one noticed that the Lord, though with printless foot follows those simple movements freed from gullible exploration and ecstasy. II Since kyrios Sabaoth came down to the valley dry is the riverbed whereon the tree of imagination grows. Those spiral dreams of theologians, Marxists, anarchists dreams of heaven in the sky and earth, of brotherhood, equality became a huge dried-up tree trunk whose twelve signs do not recognize the new order of things. Every idea of change in causal connections in the first and last causes was discarded like a damaged sketch. That hard-headed tree trunk got dry because God was hurrying towards us from the future: when his time began to flow backwards we lost our love for glorious deeds and our inclination towards stories. It was thus that at a single point on the trampled body of myth and history on the dying eyeteeth of that white horned beast the crumpled bush grew the flowerless leaf of post modernity. That thing that nowadays poses like history has by itself undermined the orientation of horizontal, vertical, falling, rising. We can be sure of that nothingness nothinged itself into helpless anger because the flow of memory failed destroyed by an electronic virus or by hyperbolic language of a distracted harlequin. The Berlin wall fell face down in front of everyone's eyes, turning the remnants of antediluvian body into pebbles but Balkan remained in its trench, dismembered in the broken frames of history. In that afternoon (when history leaned its languid elongated trunk upon its own glass mask like a rain-soaked stray dog deprived of vanity, courage, mercy) all the eyes were pointed towards the City: towards vulnerable sides of the river Miljacka into snake-headed pyre that spurted into the sky above the City Hall into grass-grown young souls whose crushed atoms turned around in the dark furiously beating upon the temples of the sniper. III What is, then, the conversation topic of those who have died - de-centurized by the sour fear of the beaten-down by the dense sweat foaming upon the executioners' palms by the dresses wide open by the bones that bend, creak and crackle in the earth's back in the mist of well-hidden hollows, of valleys, of stones. The survivors have forgotten - memory steps back, hurries on and wanes completely but on the other side of night memory is better their shadows remember with gaping mouths for one's death does not belong to anyone else. The living will, under an umbrella, in a half-voice put all the unclean roots into a hood because only on earth souls are lost. Displaced souls are candles' stumps trembling - with no response for every broken vertebra for every cut throat for every pecked-out intestine. What are Srebrenica, Manjača, Markale but dots trampled down between two hills twisted by the dying flesh observed by the eyes of crows and cameras. What does the Old Bridge testify to as a wiped-out eyebrow of a comet a bent-down bough sunk into the Neretva. Our weakened, disguised, merciful Lord over armies, what was he doing while from the unguarded windpipes they called out his name. What was the thing that distracted, blinded, confused the Holy Spirit so that he never turned his eyes never asked: - Why. IV Poet, there is nothing to oppose our time we have seen and said so much so many times in spite of unsoothened duration - in spite of the stones that roll. Seeds of shame rolled down into bodies made from pink terracotta does not spread outside the inner walls of the storehouses for humanitarian aid outside the barbed wire around that metaphysical tunnel on Dobrinja. How to testify about the wars without winners in the gorge of tiny piles of words of snails' shadows with innumerable legs about the armies whose hot eye pupils (blind executioners' swords) were turning into dead lakes about the heroes whose glory sank into the depth of the hollowed sky netted by television signals murmuring, howling, echoing through the epoch embroidered with numbness about the epoch that had cooled and put down the big stars. After all ceremonies look like mockery and those who would speak clearly provoke the mob's laughter and pity like mouthpieces of a traveling circus. You say that you are not a warrior but a fighter and that the soul has always been unable to keep pace with the world: The soul of the departing soldier just like the soul of the one who fell many years after the battle. A fighter is, therefore, a soul while the warrior is the world that with greedy eyes collects the shreds spread over among beings, sounds and objects. Poisoned and bitten-down by each and every doubt that proud and scared fighter's song is a ceremonial anthem of an adolescent vice exiled from the desert a flower in a brook that ran dry during boisterous and poisonous warriors' years or a wisp of flourished mist upon meaty globalist mirror. Podgorica-Sarajevo, September 2002 THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING It is not easy to think freely when you have a wife it is not easy to think freely when you have a homeland it is not easy to think freely when you have friends it is not easy to speak freely when you have a wife it is not easy to speak freely when you have a homeland it is not easy to speak freely when you have friends it is not easy to speak freely on squares, in hospitals, in the army barracks. It is not easy to speak freely when you have everything it is not easy to have everything and speak nothing: it is not easy to anyone except to the Lord over armies - he has no ideas at all. GESTURES Vividness does not exist in this place but it does exist in a woman's gesture and in the nervous twitches of a blond youth battered down to the ground by pacifying batons. Vividness exists in my opponents at the moment when on the paved square accidentally gigantic and light-hearted they looked: now at my face and figure now at my hands - weak as those of an interpreter from Sanskrit. PIERRE KROPOTKIN Not to forget Kropotkin Kafka You despised metaphysical bird what a flame I have planted writing with fingers instead with wax: Rebellion, nothing but rebellion by spoken and written word by dagger, rifle and dynamite. Enduring and merciless is the tree on which the young souls grew: our souls are motionless and stuck to the top deprived of memories that remind of descent. Our deed is unbearably clear our way is not searching for commonplace wit for it has no fears about returns. (What feats were performed by our right hands without surplus that hurries towards the real God!) By a wonder we resist Beasts and angels hidden in our solitary vestibules voicelessly - softly and patiently. The real danger, provocation and abstraction come to us from herds, but also from processions that is why both should be destroyed. A tzar's page: but what an avenger! OUR FEAR What is more precious: friends or truth? The big eyes of truth often resemble big eyes of a woman. Friendship needs lenience but pebbles on the bottom of the river do not need any comfort. The loners are excessively lean with their hands on their backs bended down like willow-boughs or like fragile shapes of earthly paradise. He who wants to catch big fish should not think about the sea's poverty but about big fish. Is truth more useful than friends is the truth what a nation thinks about its origin is the one who was trampled down because of truth - veracious my dear Elpenor? HOW HISTORY WAS MADE It is known for sure that the nations were made when people began using their memory. At first the chiefs were blond, tall, strong in their bodies: then their opponents came - short and sly mocking their will for swiftness and perfection - that was how they became close with people. What could people do but recognize the new chiefs and what could the new chiefs do but recognize the blindness of their predecessors ? and the name they were given they spoke with gratitude while their chiefs began thinking about honour and about the need to acquire an illusion of nobility for their sons. That was how the times of nations came - but what will the nations do when the times of poets come. ENGAGED POETS They bring me the news that my friend fell in a drunken fight with both his arches cut. My friend the engaged poet is quite unable to realize that with his idea of art he cannot change the beliefs of common people and vie with them in cynicism and fist-fighting. I used to protect him in quarrels returning blows, with twofold power then I used to teach him the art of fist-fighting and gymnastics. He became strong and ready like me. Nevertheless, he could not defeat anyone. Not until they ambushed me with heavy, dark batons did I realize why my friend was unable to beat scoundrels by far weaker: the poets like to suffer. Translated by: Zoran Paunović |
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