Across the River: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

5. Heaven

5. Heaven Man is like a barrier between two seas, the supraindividual world of the archetypes and the world of phenomena, or a bridge between them, and so himself has two sides. The first is not contingent on individuality or on language, while the second takes on particular individuality and a particular language. The fact that the former is not contingent on the latter does not mean that the reverse holds true. Whatsoever has form and shape is fully contingent on the Invisible. This barrier or bridge is everywhere to be seen in the multiplicity of names and forms, but never so as to betray its primal, constituent essence. Earth and heaven are the signs of this division. In the world of human individuality, their analogues are body and Spirit. Just as all things in existence, all the signs on the outer horizons, are arrayed between earth and heaven, so, too, the possibilities of the human self are ranked between body and Spirit. The realization of our humanity calls for metaphysical insight into and becoming one with all levels of Being. This inexhaustible differentiation of the One in multiplicity speaks of the cause and purpose of creation and thus of our journey, our discovery of primal perfection through the signs on the outer horizons and in the self. Whatsoever is in the heavens, is on earth, or between them is inseparable from the self, a permanent reminder of the 36 / The Text beyond the Text primal perfection of the center of our humanity, as the origin and refuge of all roads. Whenever we cleave to any of the manifestations of this differentiation or of our position as bridge—a prophet, for instance—as if it were the One and Only, we attribute to the sign more than it is, causing a rift between outer and inner worlds. The result is that we lose our orientation from earth toward heaven or from body toward Spirit. Ignorant of Unity, we wander aimlessly in multiplicity. Even if we know of the path ‘‘that comes/From left/Or/Right’’ and leads ‘‘north/ Or/South,’’ the path ‘‘Between earth’s roots where darkness has congealed ,’’ or ‘‘from measureless heights,’’ even with this knowledge, we remain ignorant of the mysterious Self, which reveals itself only after we have attained the source that abides beyond all spatial horizons . The Sleeper affirms this knowledge of the roads by which he came to where he is, and wonders: Now here I am Now here I am Without myself Bitter How can I go back To whence I sprang? ‘‘A Text about a Spring’’ This question of self-knowing finds expression at all times and in every language. The starting point is the encounter with stone, with its dead surfaces, of which the Sleeper says: We need to become not stone and eyes straight to walk unwavering through this stone city’s stone gate. ‘‘Rain’’ Stone is concentrated passivity and coldness, which receives the imprint of our feeling for the metaphysical and cosmological horizons . All that it receives draws closer to death as the other face of the human ‘‘now.’’ To become not stone and walk through the stone city’s Heaven / 37 stone gate is to recall or rediscover the center of the self, to return from exile. The rituals of bowing in prayer and the gyration of the round dance remind us of this discovery of the center of the self as Spirit, of our eternal homeland, and of the teachings that encompass waking, sleep, and death alike. Turning away from fear toward the Sacred Temple, the center of the mystery of the self, begins with the knowledge that every phenomenon is a round dance or revolution around the truth of creation. The southern Slav traditional kolo or round dance, which, like the whirling of the dervishes, represents the revolution of all manifest forms around their unique, extratemporal, extraspatial center, is another aspect of this. By dancing the round or by whirling, the dancer may attain various degrees in the realization of individual existence and discover Spirit as his uncreated and uncreatable center. Three degrees are crucial on this path leading toward the center: first, becoming one with the central state to which the individual being belongs in the conjunction of the formal and supraformal grounds of manifestation; second, becoming one with the center of all manifest states, formal and supraformal, where they are immersed...