Across the River: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

Prologue

Prologue It is important for people in this day and age to know how they differ from their ancestors. To most of us, the principal difference is that we now have access to machines and computers, to travel and communications , and to skills and building techniques that were not available in the past. This change has banished neither death nor the question of the meaning of the world and of human existence within it and may well be less significant than the majority thinks it. The meaning of life and of human life in particular cannot be considered without taking the Principle into consideration. Do so and the difference between our distant ancestors and their descendants reduces to our relative degree of concern for or detachment from this question of the Principle. It does appear that people in the past were more concerned with the Principle of the world’s and our existence than with what concerns us today. For them, neither question nor answer is conceivable without reference to the Principle—which is both in the world and beyond it. The Principle can exist without anything else, but nothing else can without it. The Principle is the name of that which is prior in existence as a whole and in all individual existing things. Just as the reality of all 108 / Across Water: A Message on Realization things lies in this firstness, the Principle is also their finality. That which is first is also innermost and outermost, so that there is nothing more inner or more outer than it. Knowledge of things is possible, only to the extent it connects them with the Principle. The world and human being are two facets in the manifestation of the Principle. By knowing the world, we know ourselves. But neither we nor the world are the Principle. It is our reality and that of the world. All things in existence, whether in the world or within the self, stand with the Principle as their own first principle. But that which is wholly first must also be wholly last. The reality of all things is thus in their connotation or representation of the Principle. Things attain reality by connection with the Principle, participating in constantly repeated creation. If things lack connection with the Principle, they lack reality. This lack is the condition of human consciousness that has been blanked out and deformed and, as a result, detached from its original capacity to know the meaning of all things. Being both in and facing the world, we experience the horror of history and the joy of redemption through our connection with the Principle. The horror of history manifests itself in conceptions of things that are unconnected with the Principle and so have no meaning . The joy of redemption lies in discovering the many ways always present in the self and the world of ascending to the Principle, of loving It as insufficiently known but entirely knowable. In this love, all we desire is union with the Beloved. This is why the world and the self, things and deeds, are of value to us only if related with the Beloved. There is a boundary in existence accessible to sensory perception and reflection. Within it, lies the quantifiable world; beyond it, a world we can reject or accept as higher, a world of which everything is a sign. This world and its higher level, beyond the boundaries set by analogical knowledge, both proclaim Unity.1 Both the sensory and the suprasensory world speak of Unity. Every world contains speech in which we may find or discover the Speaker. All things in existence are connected with the Speaker through speech. Humankind and all things in existence are bound by the meanings accorded them by the Speaker, meanings that can be discovered Prologue / 109 by acknowledging the indebtedness of all things and that debt as a perpetual quest for and discovery of the Speaker. But we are shaped by the Principle and our affiliation to a people and language, a region and an age. Each of us gives and receives, though we have nothing we have not received. Everything we give is but something received passed on. Exclude the Principle and these perceptions lose all clarity. Examine this claim with regard to language and it is evident that we receive our language by means of our affiliations—our relations with...