Across the River: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

7. The City

7. The City To discover the mystery of the Bosnian Sleeper and reveal it in a discourse that transcends forgetfulness and confusion, the Sleeper reminds us of the House of Peace. Every house in this world is merely a sign of the House of Peace, toward which lead all human roads of return. The djed or grandfather, who is the spiritual elder—good, blessed, and holy—points to the House, recalling why and where it is on our road back to our primal self: Our Grandfathers’ House was built to last In our hearts its strength Was meant to stand Fast. ‘‘House in Milé’’ The House is the place where the covenant between God and man can be renewed. Since God is everywhere, but we are always at risk of forgetting His presence, it is by remembering the heart as the House of God that any place can be made sacred. Forgetting obscures that place and renders it profane. Since renewal is the discovery of the self’s primal center and what is finest in humanity, any place on earth The City / 51 may serve. When the center in the human heart is revealed, it is con- fined by neither space nor time. Hence the awakened form the center of every place in which they may be. They become a door through which the heavens are opened, knowing which, they wait. They attain new life in the knowledge that dying in one state of being means being born in another, that each time they leave one state, they are entering another. This is shown by the door, the narrow passageway that leads by the upright path through the seven heavens. The House was created to show us the door to the Uncreated. Those who possess the door are themselves uncreated in it and so both new and primally perfect. Utter newness is also utter oldness. On that path from the depths to the heights, from earth to heaven, or from body to Spirit, the city is transformed into a Garden. In the end, we return to the original place that which we took at the beginning and thus restore ourselves in rectitude to our primal beauty. The House is the founding principle of the City but not of itself. Revealing the fullness of plenitude against the void, it is a spur of the center in the phenomenal world. As a result, Unity is manifest in the House through the many finite spaces and angles its walls enclose and unify. Its outward diversity is a sign of the inner, unshakable Unity by which it comes into being. The forces that govern what is in the House are temporal, but always connected to the Unalterable Center. In the visible world, these forces are the prophets, the Messengers of the Invisible. Although their principle is Unity, they appear in multiplicity; but even when they appear as material phenomena, they are under spiritual governance . And each city is shaped around the House. When the link between the center and its manifestation in multiplicity is broken, the result is decline and disorder, darkness and disruption . The loss of the link with Unity manifests itself in forgetting and extinction. The task of sacred science and sacred art is to remind us of Unity in multiplicity and restore each particular to Unity as its principle by continual renewal of the covenant between man and God. This renewal has two components: the act of distinguishing the Real from the unreal, and that of focusing on the Real. The first is open to 52 / The Text beyond the Text us all, wherever and whenever we may be; the second is nonindividual and supraindividual, deriving wholly from Intellect and the demands of the pure heart and the knowledge of the inviolable. It is the path God reveals through His chosen one, the Praised, who is the essence of all the prophets and all good people. As the Messenger’s follower, the Exalted, who was raised up, received the teaching from the Messenger himself on this path of Unity, which is always the same whatever the form it appears to take. All human elevation is ascent by the upright path in love toward Unity. Attraction to Unity is expressed and realized only through union. Those who follow the Praised accept nothing but realization of their love in return to the Beloved. There is no state of the self dearer...