Across the River: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

9. The House

9. The House In his Word on earth, the Sleeper speaks of Milé, that Bosnian place whose name may mean milost (mercy) or mir (peace). Whenever we find ourselves facing beauty, it appears to us first as peace and mercy. In this encounter, we first relax and then tense in an impulse toward what has appeared in beauty and mercy. Both beauty and mercy continually reveal themselves to us, just as they continually vanish. We wish to return to them and to have them as our strength, but are they that nature of ours of which the things of this world are there to remind us? The Sleeper says: Our Grandfathers’ House was built to last In our hearts its strength Was meant to stand Fast. ‘‘House in Milé’’ The house is our grandfathers’ because virtue is in the human heart. When the heart is made manifest in the whole of humanity, then the house is lit by goodness and beauty, wisdom and clemency. 66 / The Text beyond the Text Though we are constantly being tried by pain, we never lack the guiding light of the pillar of the sun or the Light of the Praised. This presence of the light always leaves open to us the ladder of ascent to the primal plenitude. The Praised is the guide on that ascending path but never in any world outside the entirety of the self: the ascent is within the self. Beauty and mercy in the things of this world remind us of the ascending path: Beauty has something pacifying and dilating in it, something consoling and liberating, because it communicates a substance of truth, of evidence, and of certitude, and it does so in concrete and existential mode; thus it is like a mirror of our transpersonal and eternally blissful essence. It is essentially an objective factor which we may or may not see or may or may not understand but which like all objective reality, or like truth, possesses its own intrinsic quality; thus it exists before man and independently of him.1 The meaning of the ‘‘House in Milé’’ lies in its making Illumination known through the testimony that there is no self but the Self, through beauty and goodness. Only thus can the house be open: For welcome guests and passers-by And all whose hearts are Grand. For all good people beneath the sky And all who live in Bosnia’s land. ‘‘House in Milé’’ As soon as our inner self ceases to testify that there is no self but the Self, it enters one of its states—and it makes no difference whether in so doing it is an outer or inner image it takes for its god—and the House is closed, and as the Sleeper says: The House / 67 It will neither be mine nor thine Nor our Grandfathers’ House any more. ‘‘House in Milé’’ The openness of the self which reflects the testimony that there is no self but the Self turns us from the world toward the Principle. This is why all those who belong to this world hate those who see through it, as Jesus, Son of Mary, tells his disciples: These things I command you, that ye love one another. If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also.2 Hatred is congealed fear; and fear is the response of the whole being to the unknown. We are all unknown to each other; there is no one who is not bound to say, faced with the other: ‘‘I know myself better than you do, and my Lord knows me better than I.’’3 This means that everyone is a potential source of knowledge to every other person . If this is denied, the self becomes closed; and as it does so, it accepts that impossibility that we may be linked with Unity through a reminder in the outer horizons and in the self. The closure of the self appears as...