Across the River: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

12. Incompleteness

12. Incompleteness Kameni spavač was already in print when the poet wrote another, separate poem entitled ‘‘Modra rijeka’’ (Blue River), and it met with much the same reception. Indeed, many people felt that it belonged with Kameni spavač and suggested that it be included in it. However, the book with its five sections already formed a whole and there was no room for additions. Its fifth and final section is the poem ‘‘Message ,’’ in which the Sleeper defines himself by denying that his happiness depends on any outward condition or that he depends on any external will or power, so liberating himself from any standpoint as a fixed condition of knowing. He points to the innumerable multitude of forms and incursions such external determination of the self can take and rejects them all, turning to our primal nature instead. The message of Kameni spavač, the Stone Sleeper, is intentionally incomplete, however, as attested by the poet’s indications of incompletion and by the open-ended form of ‘‘Message’’ itself. Readers often speculate about this. It would seem that this incompleteness is the poet’s rejection of the modern notion of finite man, who cuts his self to the cloth of his ideological viewpoint. Incompleteness / 87 There can be no path of discovery of why we are in this world that does not treat the question of heaven. We are the image by which God reveals His inner Self in the external. When we discover our essence, we speak and shape, perform rituals and journeys. In all these we are at peace, knowing, loving, and doing that which is good and beautiful; and Peace, the Known, the Beloved, the Beautiful, and the Good manifest themselves in all things to us, yet abide nowhere. They constantly surge up and sink, come and go, and our efforts to have them at all times raise us from one level of being to another. Wherever we have risen or fallen to, our goal is beyond heaven. All the signs on the outer horizons are like blossoms that grow out of eternity and infinity, constantly emerging from and returning to the frozen wastes. On the brink of the abyss of the uttermost depths, it is of the blossom we ask: Snowflakes are falling ever thicker and blacker like sins In a life that’s nearing its end. So will we still have eyes When the apple tree in the garden puts forth its first white blossom? ‘‘Apple Blossom’’ The question of the blossom, whether it is or is not in the Sleeper’s future, suggests the inescapable antitheses of non-peace and Peace, ignorance and Knowledge, hatred and Love, ugliness and evil as against Beauty and Goodness. We are constantly being tested and tempted by both: it is up to us to embrace peace, knowledge, love, beauty, and goodness as manifestations of the Principle and to see everything that is contrary to them as impossible in relation to the Principle and thus as an illusion or appearance from which we strive to liberate ourselves, as the names of nonexistent things that we or our forebears have concocted out of our imaginations. We began our journey in the perfection of the Garden with the apple tree in its midst, perpetually full of blossom and ripe fruits not to be eaten, and sank to the uttermost depths, to the bottom of the 88 / The Text beyond the Text desert valley, to darkness, sin, and forgetting. We need to die in the depths if we are again to rise to the Garden and find ourselves before the same blossoming apple tree and, awakened, heal our wounds. All of existence is between the purity and tenderness of the blossom and the plenitude of the fruit. Snow reminds us of that original purity of the blossom but is constantly being sullied in the world in which we act out of little knowledge. What befalls snow in the outside world is merely the image of what happens in our inner self, originally so pure but later sullied by sin. Our return to the lost Garden is in turning to the purity of the apple blossom as sign of primal, sanctuarygiving perfection. The Sleeper speaks of a life drawing to an end. He is faced with two possibilities: to return to the waking state, to the snows that become ever deeper and blacker, like sin; or to pass...