Across the River: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

11. I and You

11. I and You The Stone Sleeper’s poetic discourse begins by delineating the relationship between ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘you’’ in which the former corresponds to interiority and defence, and the latter to exteriority and attack. The ‘‘I’’ resists this exterior, threatening ‘‘you,’’ as darkness and evil and as forgetting, rejection, and repulsion. This resistance of the I-self to the you-self is neither sermonizing nor a campaign by one against the other; the discourse of the I-self to the you-self is self-defence on the journey to self-discovery. The I-self does not name its faith on that journey, for it knows how pitifully limited is all its knowledge. Hence any name given it by the you-self is unacceptable to the I-self. If the self is to know itself, its constant stance is that it does not know and that it can come to know what it does not know only by loving the known. Whenever the self claims to know, it shuts itself off from the stance from which it expresses its knowledge and thus remains split into the dualities of knower/known, self/world, and man/God. Nothing in that which is oriented toward the self can be either certain or reliable. If it does not recall the human center as the House of Truth, it is a freak, which threatens but never fulfills. There can be no peace in the world if there is none within us. It is not contingent on any condition of the world. Peace either is or is not within us. Herein 80 / The Text beyond the Text lie all the questions and all the answers that concern us, as Jesus says: ‘‘For whosoever will save his self shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his self for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own self?’’1 We may be oriented toward the world and become aware of what is in it, build our image of it, and act in it. All this exteriority extends over many levels, which we attain through our senses—taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight. The horizons of the outside world may be near to us or distant, but they are the order bestowed on us. We may aspire to peace but can never impose our peace on the world. In taking the measure of our involvement in the world, we inevitably come to the question of our inner self as a ‘‘place’’ in which peace may be received or from which it may be given. Does our existence depend on peace in the outside world? Can we have peace despite what lies on the horizons of the outside world? In testifying to Unity, the self realizes itself, uniting Being, Consciousness , and Beatitude. One of the expressions of this testimony is that there is no self but the Self or no peace but Peace. In each of its states, the self is the image or sign of the Self. It has nothing of its own, for all that is in that image is given by the Self. If we take that image for the Self, we lose everything that has been given us. In acknowledging our debt to the Self, we deny that we have anything of our own and give everything that seems to be ours so as to testify to the Self as Reality. At the start of his discourse the Sleeper opposes the knowledge and action of others who hold rigid views. He affirms that his knowledge is but little and that he is on the path from duality to Unity, in which the knower and the Known are one. This means that he is speaking from the path on which Peace can be found, albeit only in the testimony that there is no self but the Self. Speaking from that ascending path, the Sleeper is a mendicant: no humility is sufficient in the face of Unity in which he seeks realization . But others proffer or impose on him their knowledge as certain, even though his foothold is absolutely unsure and contingent. He says about this: I and You / 81 You’ve decreed me not to be cost what may You surge You charge towards me With cries of grief and joy Cleansing and destroying Everything in Your...