Across the River: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

4. Man

4. Man Viewed formally, Mak Dizdar’s poetry is post-traditional, but as an artistic revelation it is imbued with perennial wisdom as spoken within the enduring Bosnian tradition. This is why the newly awakened sleepers’ voices cannot be understood outside of traditional wisdom. Kameni spavač contains poems that relate in various ways to the waking, dreams, and death of the people associated with the stećci— their owners, the stonemasons who shaped them, and their scribes. However different the voices on either side of these texts, it is through them that the Poet as speaker and writer spans the centuries, establishing cold, passive stoniness as their source. All speech testifies to silence, just as the dead text reveals the living writer. Dizdar’s discourse is of his now, but remains part of the oral transmission that reaches him from the distant past. There is no denying that Dizdar is part of the powerful current of the oral tradition in his country’s and people’s oral tradition. Their approach to listening, speaking, writing, and reading is informed by recitation, of which listening and speaking are the key components.1 His text is governed by recitation, which traverses generations in the form of song.2 Dizdar acknowledged this link with folk heritage: ‘‘I do not hide the fact that 30 / The Text beyond the Text I prefer to learn by listening to [folk poetry] than to the products of some new ‘isms.’’’3 The poet’s ‘‘listening’’ is apparently his way of connecting with the treasure-house of language. The center of the self, which is to say Intellect, Spirit, or Heart, is what gives language its indestructible order. Dizdar’s poetic revelation descends from a higher level of the self to be passed on from one generation to the next, from one waking state to another, one sleep to another, one death to another. Waking, sleep, and death enter the speech and writing of the Sleeper, who affirms: for once I was the same as ye and as I am so shall ye be.4 ‘‘A Text on a Watershed 2’’ A given happening either takes place now or we know its traces from the past. To whatever degree Dizdar was aware of the remnants of the forms of speech his poetic pronouncements were handed down to him in, it was the now that governed his listening, speaking, and writing. This sequence—listening, speaking, and writing— corresponds to death, sleep, and waking. Every instance of coming into life is a manifestation of the Living. To return to the Living is to die in all things but Him. What we ordinary mortals take to be waking, in which our will seems to our inner self to be independent and sufficient , is just the dream latent in illusion. When we fall asleep, our inner self is no longer in the illusion of the waking state; it is in the reality of sleep, without free will or delusion. We rise or awake from the false waking state of nonsleep into sleep itself, when our inner self is no longer dependent on the illusion of power and is thus free in its relationship with the Invisible. We sleep through this life and awaken when we die.5 Our ascent is thus from illusion toward Reality on our return path to Peace as our first home. This is the faith of Jesus, Son of Mary, who says: ‘‘Though I bear record of myself, yet my record is true: for I know whence I came, and whither I go.’’6 Following this knowledge, the Sleeper says: Man / 31 I was no fisher no carpenter no splasher of water although I ate not of the limewood cross I baptised not with water My hope is a finger in a pillar of light My light lieth in that hope With this faith I keep my faith This faith which hath no name ‘‘Madderfield’’ The faith of the Bosnian krstjani was contested by all the other churches.7 Dizdar posits this opposition as the relationship between the Unsleeping Watchman, on the one hand, and the Sleeper and his dreams, on the other. Thus is the order of the manifestation of Being, in the descent from Essence and Unity toward multiplicity, affirmed or confirmed. Sleep is accorded a higher level than waking. The Sleeper’s message to the unsleeping who persist...