Across the River: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

Epilogue

Epilogue The invisible and higher appears through the earth, the heavens, and all that is in them as the visible and lower. So it is with man, whose entire inner self is split into an invisible and a visible side. Existence as a whole is our external image, while we in turn reflect the external world. Both are revelations structured so as to embrace the sequence from highest to lowest. This array is, in fact, the duality of visibleinvisible , earth-heaven, and body-Spirit. Every duality manifests Unity as its principle. We gain knowledge from external sources, from our parents and those who have spoken to us, from our teachers, and from books. This knowledge is transmitted to us, and as a result, diverse and often mutually contradictory forms and items of knowledge have come to us. Faced with their insuperable discord, we may opt for one of the images offered us by this learned knowledge or abandon ourselves to the rule of a multiplicity of knowledges with no order. There are three crucial components of knowledge in every traditional teaching—Unity, prophecy, and return. Unity is the beginning and end of the world and its governing principle. Prophets speak in their own language and time but invariably point to Unity as the primal and sanctuary-giving determination of the visible and the 102 / The Text beyond the Text invisible. According to them, we come from and return to Unity, which alone is worthy of our service. The purpose of this service is to return to Unity and realize ourselves in perfection. There is no human condition such that these elements of tradition can be lost. They are always within us, and all the horizons of the heavens and earth, with all that is in them, merely remind us of that. The key human question is: Can we know what is crucial for our survival and happiness merely by gathering the tidings that come to us from outside? Unity is the principle of all multiplicity in the world and in man. If we are to discover and realize ourselves, we need to see all things on the outer horizons and within our own selves as the manifestation of that Unity. This is our path to the knowledge in which our testimony that there is no self but the Self will reveal itself as the Self, without differentiation into being and knowledge. Just as Unity is eternally above all multiplicity, so are its signs in all things, but arrayed in a descending and ascending order. These signs are always present on the outer horizons and in the self, but we read them differently from moment to moment. Prophets remind us of the principle of Unity and its crucial significance for us. If we accept, as God reveals to us through the Praised, that there are no more prophets , that does not mean that our relationship with Unity as the center of our inner self, is annulled or impeded. Our freedom would be meaningless if there were not always also present a revulsion against that center or Unity, whose perfect Life, Will, Power, Knowledge, Speech, Hearing, and Sight can never be annulled. A prophet does not become one by his own will or merit. Although he is on a quest, it is only with his patient endurance and acquiescence , dedication and self-abnegation that the truth manifests itself through life, will, power, knowledge, speech, hearing, and sight. His prophesying is not the result of an apprenticeship in spontaneity. What he is manifests itself as a gift or debt of which he is conscious, as he is of his responsibility for it. When it is not so, when prophecy is the result of having been tutored and of an intent of which the source is a Epilogue / 103 certain state of the self, it is false prophecy, usually showing itself as obscurity or madness, conjuring and trickery, sermonizing and poetry. If prophecy, as a means of reminding people from without of Spirit at their center and Intellect as the treasury of all that is on the outer horizons and within the self, has come to an end in history, it must be whole and entire in every individual self. Dizdar’s poetry would seem to suggest this. Faced with the cold and enduring passivity of the tombstones as tangible, solidified reality and the simple forms enclosed on the...