Learning from Bosnia: Approaching Tradition

Epilogue

Epilogue It seems that news about Bosnia has touched everyone. It is hard to say what dominant quality is evoked by the word Bosnia: harshness or clemency, suffering or healing, arrogance or humility. In these dualities of opposing qualities lies the tension between the phenomenon and its name. What will the phenomenon itself and its name, once both are reunited, have to say in some final judgment about all the lies that have been associated with it and attributed to it? What is the truth in which justice can be shown for the humiliated, the displaced, the dead on the Promised Day? The violence that erupted from uncomprehended tensions in that country was to do with interpersonal relations, but it was also more than that. It was violence against the Truth itself. Investigating this violence is therefore linked to the universal question implied by seeing humankind as the full summation of all of creation, or, as the sacred traditions say, in the image of the Creator. They say that in Stolac, an old town in southern Bosnia, a boy asked an aging and revered singer to teach him his skill. But the singer said, ‘‘No one can teach you better than the winds and the water, the birds and the beasts. They will direct you to listening as the most exalted of all skills. Through them, perhaps, you will know Silence. Silence is limited by nothing, but everything that it is not is a symbol of it. Anything I could teach you might distract you from listening. And distancing yourself in this way would lead you away from the peace and tranquillity of mind without which you lose the connection with your 136 / Learning from Bosnia primordial perfection. Violence against God and yourself is nothing other than going astray in that way.’’ The boy accepted this refusal, withdrew, and continued on his way with the teacher’s unexpected lesson. Several years later, the same teacher offered him the lesson he had previously denied him. ‘‘I have already found what I was seeking then,’’ replied the youth. ‘‘I have received it from the Silence and what it has to say about everything. And it was you who directed me to that.’’ The old man then asked him, ‘‘If it was really I, can I also turn you away?’’ ‘‘What was then your ‘I’ to me,’’ replied the youth, ‘‘was soon transformed into the ‘I’ of the Silence . It was spoken by the milk and the wind, by the birds and the scents. Since then reason has showed itself to be a link to Silence, and song as the potential for knowledge to show itself through creation as being, and vice versa. What you said returned to the peace of the eyes and the innerness of the voice. The will is powerless in the face of that.’’ The old man then continued: ‘‘Forgetting is contrary to Certainty, too. If the Plenitude is first, then it cannot be second. But the proclamation of Certainty is impossible without forgetting. The Plenitude is outside and within us, but the proclamation of Certainty is within us only. And there is no forgetting that can wholly vanquish Certainty. When the human condition is at its worst, when oblivion is at its greatest, there remains the seed of remembering. The human orientation toward Plenitude can never be wholly destroyed. Indeed, as humans, we are creatures of forgetting; for this reason, Certainty is wholly other for us. We face Certainty always and everywhere, for humankind is distant, but Certainty is near. And thus it is that in forgetting there is always the seed of remembrance. In everything that has been destroyed, in each of our scattered greetings, in every darkness however dense, there remains the fact that ‘there is no truth but the Truth.’ And there is no moment in which the dispersed is not being gathered together and illuminated in defiance of forgetting. Remembering, then, is the discovery of what was lost. This is none other than the self’s drawing closer to what Is. Remembering is the measure of this. The truth is ever present, and only humankind can be absent.’’ Notwithstanding the plethora of narratives about Bosnia, listening offers itself as a better way. It is the skill of inheritance, of transmission. Our present moment inherits the perfection without which no single moment can be. And this is the meaning of tradition: to inherit and to transmit perfection in the plenitude of its present moment...