ROCK STONE

January 18, 2006 What can be said of Kocbek's previous books of poetry as well as his other work, is also true of the collection Rock Stone; namely that in its formative essence it is first and foremost a testimony enacting a tale of modern subjectivist man, his utopian socio-historical projections, disillusions and tragic existential breakdowns. In Kocbek's testimony there is a constant mixing and blending of what at first view seem to be oppositional, even contradictory elements. Imagination and autobiographical document, fact and metaphor, rational and irrational, intellectual and sentimental, individualistic and religious, image and commentary, philosophical aphorism and lyrical confession, ecstatic eroticism and consequential self-reflection, existential angst and political utopia, faith and scepticism, activist pathos and irony, prescience and realism, paradox and axiom, interchange of definitions and ambivalent metonymy, etc. – all merge into a unitary form of »self-expression«. Quite often this happens within one and the same text, and always in highly original and, to be sure, dramatic fashion. So: »poetry« with its creative play of language, which is an aim in its own right, intertwines with »thinking«, which tries to lead the way. Poetic creativity, a »mystery unto itself«, couples with the intellectual analytical endeavours wanting to establish the truth. A play of imagination in which man is »free for something but not free of something«, as Kocbek writes in his essay on Poetry, and thinking which unquestionably knows its own limitations, as well as of any other human freedom -- that fatal border no living soul can cross. In other words, thinking which knows that truth is ultimately always concealed from man: that »the great mystery upon which everything is contingent« remains, and that it can only be discovered by »deadmen … in their peace and that bareness of spirit which is most stirring«. But the dead are, of course, absolutely »firm in their silence«. So thinking takes on board also the knowledge that »freedom is … a terrible freedom of nothingness.«
The poetical effect of Kocbek's formulations, his open, seemingly unrefined, almost prosaic, yet remarkably densely structured lines (in their use of verbal material, figures of speech and rhythm), arises precisely from this intertwining of various different strands; from a paradoxical juxtapositioning of dichotomies and blending of opposites into a unified discursive framework. Hence, what is foregrounded is not artistry; not the poetic form, but the poet's »perception« of things, in all their unsparing, shocking and disturbing immediacy, as well as – of course – seductive unpredictability. In Kocbek's own words:


A poem is a most effective
overcoming of evil. A rich victim
for an inexpensive urge. A giving away of small
things for a big thing. An expression
of wild but also gentle violence.
This is not taking advantage of wind's force,
but a pious breathing of my death,
which still lives and has not yet come.
It is concealing something undiscovered
and is uncovering something concealed
and unfinished. I know I am both
alive and dead, but I need
no ruse, only an equilibrium of fear
created by innocence and grace.


Poetry therefore testifies to that precarious and mysterious dynamic through which the poet's social engagement and the world's »urge« meet; poetry is the exchange between them. It is an ambiguous exchange: of small things for big ones, but also of riches for inexpensive things. Poetry is an »overcoming of evil«, and yet it is in itself also an »expression of violence«. This violence is both »wild« and »gentle«. Everything that happens in poetry is always »in between«, going in circles, in a perennial, never »finished« interaction between discovering and concealing the world, between its transparentness and its mystery, between man's articulation of things and their chiaroscuro identity. Man reaches into things as things reach into him, but in between there is always a gap impossible to bridge. Poetry, both a testimony to one's social engagement in the world and the world's being, thus requires »innocence and grace«, which according to Kocbek ensure an »equilibrium« in our interaction with things; innocence means openness of one's articulation and one's social engagement, grace means openness of the world. This is an equilibrium of »fear«, for the dynamics between man and his world is uncertain, unpredictable and exhausting. As the lines in the poem Indestructible Matter reveal (from the collection Bride Dressed in Black), or the poem Anything is Possible from this book reveal, this dynamics is invested with »a terrible possibility of any event's occurrence«: it is constantly open to »any possibility from the lightest discovery to the darkest catastrophe«.


Each and every atom of the universe
hides within itself utter destruction,
yet also the most solemn revelation
or something we do not know yet.
No one among us can hold
back or put a stop to anything,
we can do only one thing,
we can open up
and prepare ourselves for an experience
of controlling the greatest effort,
we are too spoiled for good.


Thus all we need and all that we can know is that in this world, in each and every moment, every possibility can be realized, and that man is powerless in the face of these »mysterious goings-on«, albeit nothing can occur without his active involvement. And from the other end: one needs to be in a state of constant readiness, that is to know he has a measure of freedom, upon which his social engagements are based, and which is determined by the »pious breathing … of death«. Poetry testifies to this »readiness«, to exactly this »equilibrium of fear«, this point where innocence and grace meet, the original man's freedom and that »great mystery upon which everything is contingent«. Freedom however is a »terrible freedom of nothingness«, as was already expressed in Kocbek's poem Bride Dressed in Black: »Before conception nothing and after death a corpse…« Still, in a strange – perhaps miraculous or divine – way, »nothing« is ever lost in this world:


Each thing changes
or disappears from view,
but it is only its presence
that changes for us,
sometimes we call it also
absence or non-presence
or hiddenness or mystery.
Even nothingness hides something
which passes on from one age to the next,
and still it never disappears.


This »nothingness« will stay and it will stay hidden – »perhaps for all eternity«, to use the line from Kocbek's last poem in this collection. This »nothingness« is a matter of the »unknown«, »incomprehensible«, »dangerous«, »non-sensical« human speech: hidden or mysterious to human mind and his freedom forever.
* * *

Kocbek's latest poetry (especially the poems from the collection Earth, 1934) emerged from his enraptured solemn marvelling at the processes/goings-on of ancient (rural) nature, at the full and secured human contentment within its solid, earthly confines. In fact, in its core, this poetry was one big hymn to the »invulnerable soul of the world«, the »inexhaustible depths of being«, to that miraculous and timeless »earth«, in which it discovered, at every step, the ineffable live trace of creator's – God's – spirit. »It revealed to me,« Kocbek writes in his essay entitled Three Stages of My Poetics, »that poetical quality is at home in the earth and that it is not only with Him it declares itself«.
In Kocbek's later poetry, however, »earth« as a foundation and a symbolical locale of all human things totters and is thrown off the hinges. It becomes clear that »the earth is no longer on earth«, as though God's hand withdrew. Man's natural position under its wing becomes questionable and unsatisfactory. Poetry begins to speak from a distance. In the ancient, all encompassing and happy/content/fortunate identity between man and world ADD COMMA a crack opens, a fatal distance appears – a dramatic tension. WHAT BECOMES APPARENT IS A difference between man's reality, which is always individual and concrete, specific, unrepeatable and final, and his »natural« environment, which is of course general and enduring, so that it can never be reduced to the size of a given individual CUT PHRASE. Environment – »earth« – is constantly outgrowing us, and it can never encompass and entirely define us in our concrete individuality.
In some way, we always remain chained only to ourselves, hemmed in by our live physicality, which is final and therefore solitary. But we also remain bound with our mind, which is capable of independent thinking, which can and must believe and doubt within its own categories, disregarding the imperatives imposed by our environment, however »natural« they may be. This implies that man also outgrows his locale, and he does that precisely by means of his original and unique individuality. »Earth«, it is revealed cannot in fact be authoritative as something, which exists in itself: as a self-sufficient divine creation to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be subtracted. In truth what is authoritative is only that »surplus« in us that cannot ever be taken away, and in which resides the original constitutive nerve of everything human. This is our special mind and original freedom: a surplus without which we would only be a rigid and passive reflection (reflex) of God-knows-what.
It is thus revealed that everything which exists on »earth« must necessarily be – albeit in a strange and ambivalent manner – a case of our formulations and response to things; thus things outside our gaze are numb, torpid and indifferent in their senseless presence. It is revealed finally that even the ancient »earth« in all her »natural« self-sufficiency would not mean a thing, if it were not illuminated by poet's ecstatic rapture, his marveling at a »ripe«, »timeless« plenitude of all things, and if this earth were not elevated by his hymns.
With this, the cleft in the core of »earth« as an original locale of man's becomes definite. To surpass the difference between the numb, indifferent being of the world and man's thinking, the only thing that can and must give words to any kind of truth or meaning is now simply no longer possible. Man's thinking, which is of course an essential expression of his freedom, incontrovertibly belongs to »earth«, but it belongs to it in a way that simultaneously surpasses it. It is perfectly clear and beyond contention to thinking itself that man can never break away from his original, earthly (divine) environment, just as he can never quite merge with it completely. His thinking is solitary and free, for it is after all only human, and it is precisely by virtue of that that it is also »divine«. Thus it is invincibly bound and at the same time also overwhelmingly free.
The following Kocbek's text relates that with disturbing clarity:


Something forces us
to live in this world,
as though there were no God
as though He slackened
in His terrible power,
withdrew from man
and gave him sinfulness,
without sin we cannot
help God to
humanity, and ourselves
to divinity.


These lines tell us how at one point God's dominion over man »slackened« and we were left with no choice but to live by ourselves, »as though there were no God«, reliant only upon ourselves. Despite the realization that God had left us, Kocbek's lines practically do not speak of man's consequential crisis and solitude, or for instance of our being tragically lost under the empty sky, but they suggest something altogether simpler and far more insightful. They tell us that there is no God and has never been any God outside our human world and outside our human faith. God in Himself is indifferent and rigid, there is no point and sense in Him being up in the skies by Himself, just as a »rock stone« somewhere on earth, on this side, »in the depths of the sky«, to borrow from Kocbek's poem What We Are In Need Of, is indifferent, rigid and meaningless. God's power is »terrible« because it is absolutely open, disputable and virtual. Only man with his »sinfulness«, that is, with his relative and deficient mind, with his freedom and of course his faith, in other words with his humanity, which is at bottom hemmed in with death and nothingness, is capable of responding to God's disputability. Man is the only one who can summon God into his thinking, into the locale of his freedom, and activate His terrible virtual power here on »earth«. Man is the only one who can »humanize« God, that is make Him, or rather fashion Him, to his imagination and his human needs into a real God, into a divinity in the true sense of the word or, as Kocbek writes, to discover »divinity« within himself. God exists in so far as He is human(e); and by the same token man is godlike in so far as he is »sinful«, that is to say human(e). The world can only be human(e), »the universe«, as the poem Hill tells us, is »empty and no one is standing at its end«. The poem There Is No Master Any More, published in the collection Ambers, runs in a similar vein:


In transparent moonlight a gentle view
of the universe unfolds before me,
yet I am distracted: does the eye lack something
or is something wrong with the image.
I turn restlessly and it dawns on me:
the world no longer has its master.


Although the poems were probably written at about the same time, there is a striking difference between them. In the lines from the collection Ambers, the realization that the world is empty implicitly carries a series of fatal consequences: emptiness for man is »empty«, for without »a master« there are no longer any »commandments and prohibitions«, and »no one knows any more what is good and what is evil: customs crumble, death frightens people«, etc. – all of which contributes to the poem being explicitly marked with »fear« and »restlessness«, and even with doubtfulness, since it is not altogether clear where in fact the mistake is: is it in »the image of the world« itself or is it perhaps in our »gentle«, deficient »view« of it? The realization that human matters no longer have »their master« remains of course irrevocable, the text articulates it as a fact against which nothing can be done. In one poem, however, which stayed unpublished in Kocbek's papers, there is no longer any sense of alarm or dismay; all that remains is calm acceptance. »Don't tell anyone«, urges the poem Hill, that »the universe« is in fact »empty« and that »no one is standing at its end« – »rather get your suitcase ready«.
Readiness is all. The world is as it is, man is »caught within himself«, and all he can do is reconcile himself to this, yield to it in acceptance; »teachings on sadness« have revealed to us that there is »no objective truth«, because »in solitude, it has lost its validity«. It »no longer« lords over man and his universe, man is alone and solitary with his freedom and his yearnings, and he is solitary also with »the pious breathing of death« within him. In the words from the poem Destruction and Rebuilding:


All is simultaneously being destroyed
and all is simultaneously being rebuilt.
This realization calms me.


Is this to say that everything is all just a never-ending exchange of »destruction and rebuilding« and that at the end of »the universe« there is nothing but »a terrible freedom of nothingness«, »hiddenness or mystery«? Nothing but a »monument of silence«, of which the text Rock Stone speaks?
* * *

Having said this, I believe I have got ahead of myself in my commentary. I have only meant to stress what unequivocally follows from Kocbek's poetry: namely, the moment the difference between man's original locale (»ancient earth«) and his humanity became apparent, it also became obvious that God cannot be some transcendent, absolute value; his essential questionability emerged, his, so to speak, intentional and merely virtual value. It had to be shown, as I have already said, that God could only belong to the human world, to man's joyous rapture (piety) in the face of the world and all the things laid open to his view as though they were only his and for him. God emerges from marveling at »the presence of things« and from »pious premonition« that in this world there is after all perhaps more world than human gaze can ever encompass or man can determine through his commitment.


There is no other way for me to say it,
but that sacred, sacred, sacred
is mysterious, all that is,
that was and will be
and could be
and that surpasses man.


Or in some other lines of Kocbek's elsewhere in the same book:


To write is to speak with the help of silence,
the silence of speech gives me more than I can
understand, for there would be no silence,
if God had not died,
but when did God die
if I am still living.


The point of God's presence has to do with human speech. But it also has to do with silence – that »silence of speech« that reaches beyond »comprehension« to that »other side« of the world we can neither summon nor encompass with our articulation and social commitment, since it remains and will remain »perhaps for all eternity« hidden and mysterious. The text of Kocbek's poem Ancient Miracle from his collection Bride Dressed in Black describes it as »something« which is:


more than mystery
and more than love,
the deepest essence of things,
something for which there is no word,
which is happy ignorance
and blessed premonition,
something which is constantly
on the other side,
and yet within me.


If God were dead, all would be silence and there would not be any premonition either; silence would truly and without remainder be merely »a pre-image of death«. But since, as Kocbek's poem tells us, »I« am still speaking, God cannot be dead: God always speaks only through me. If my speech, my »pious premonition«, my »happy ignorance«, etc., were not there, God would not be there either.
* * *

And if on the other side of the human world there can be only »incomprehension«, that is to say »pious premonition« or »yearning« or »mystery«, which is in a sense just another human projection, it becomes self-evident, then, that Kocbek's poetry unfolds a taut and focused, and yet at the same time formative, poised and engaging (»pious«) attitude to the world of history, which is after all the original and most authentic human locale. Although man is – in Kocbek's words – »older than history«, outside the historical compass there is not, and cannot be, anything except for what is evident, solid and reliable. History is the horizon which at bottom determines and qualifies every human experience, thought, and of course, also action; history is the formative space of our humanity, as indeed in itself it is nothing but a product of human speech and social engagement, our original – subjective – mind and freedom.
The leading »hero« of Kocbek's poetry is therefore the historical man. Kocbek's post-war collections from Horrors and Pentagram to Bride Dressed in Black speak of the essence and the ultimate achievements of his historical commitment with overpowering lyrical immediacy and even with empirical explicitness (which is connected with the Slovenian national liberation movement, but also with totalitarian voluntarism as well as the tragic self-delusion of the victorious revolutionary comradeship). From these collections, and no less from Kocbek's prose and his memoirs, it becomes evident that man's essential affiliation with history is insuperably ambivalent. Kocbek's poetic testimony tells us that although man as a free subject is the only forger of history, he is also always its prisoner, having no decisive power over it, that is, his own decisions and actions. In as much as he is a hunter, he is also a prey. History rages weirdly by itself; over and over again man's decisions and actions lose their understructure and teleological direction. Liberation turns into catastrophe, »beauty« into »unimaginable horrors«, rapture into hysteria or even crime, »spontaneity« into »doctrine «, love into terror, etc.
And so in the collection Ambers, »history« has been stripped down to a »blind unrest of mankind«, to nothing more and nothing less than a sheer »falling of noisy racket into a bottomless abyss". In the poem Hill from Kocbek's legacy, history is just an aimless »rush«, perennially self-exhausting. It can be succinctly summed up in a single »invisible sentence«:


Nothing is important and nothing is exceptional.
Everything rushes through the seasons
and across borders, through generations
with powerful masts
and across the earth from just heroic bodies.
Be afraid of quick sand and
the fish heaped in the sea,
still the universe is
empty and no one
is standing at its end,
but do not tell this to anyone,
rather get your suitcase ready.


One way or another, the outcome is the same. If by the time of the collection Ambers Kocbek was beginning to grasp the idea that all major human deeds and bloody sacrifices, the inevitable components of history, are »in vain«, (for everything in history »bypasses the sky and bypasses man on earth«, irregardless of how much it blinds and destroys him), then this same idea reappears here, only pronounced more emphatically: »the universe is empty and no one is standing at its end«.
And poetry? – Poetry cannot be anything else but a testimony on a snare, nothing but »teachings on sadness«, to use Kocbek's expression. Poetry therefore »teaches« us that man cannot and should not give up his thinking and his freedom, which are constitutive of his humanity; that he cannot and should not withdraw from the past-future domain of his »history«. He cannot and should not act so as not to be »sinful«. In his essential historical compass he can never act in a way that would not be destructive and that would not make him suffer. As for example the poem Urgent from this collection communicates to us, poetry as a testimony is finally nothing but »an innocently drawn-out scream«; a dark, ambivalent call »from the dreadful distance«, a call from which it is almost impossible to know –


Is it a call for help
or is it an expression of victory
or of a terrible change
in the star system
or a summoning to compulsory
anxiety, as if to say be afraid,
anxiety will do for now
and forget everything else,
things have begun to tremble,
everything is becoming contentious.


The only remaining certainty is that his echoes »rebound off the funny galactic stage« and that somewhere here the border and the fatal edge of man's historicity, wits and freedom lie: »a shriek of terrible mastodons out of man's future«.
Stone Rock perhaps addresses us from some sort of an end of the historical world. It tries to discover, if I may say so, »a pre-historic« human dimension, that – hidden?, forgotten? – core, where, if at all possible, there is a kind of »bare« humanness in its primal, »innocent« reality. Kocbek is a doubter and therefore he knows that:


… the only reality is
the innocence of a child.
Something akin to that is
a deaf-and-dumb blindman.
The mainland drifts, the sky walks
in the air, absolute,
blind freedom, where are
man's clear rights?


Kocbek is a believer, and therefore he knows that man is definitely bound by his actions; that he cannot give up neither his past nor future deeds, nor can he retract them. As a believer he is left with his yearning for that ever-lost innocence which never was, with a plea to lose his memory and to forget:


… I should forget
all doubts and hopes,
dreams, prophecies, all wounds
and mutilations, all moments
wrapped in a flag, all mad
happiness, sober bad luck, all
sins, truths, bold leaps
and enormous laughter. I beg
to forget all skills,
and calm down in gentle threads,
which bind elements and cloth
into a breath of transience. I should forget
all this and also that which means
forgetting the forgetting, for only the loss
of memory reduces man to his
true essence …


As a believer and as a doubter Kocbek knows that man cannot erase anything and that »forgetting the forgetting« is – perhaps? – possible only »at the other side« of that »northern wall«, which is everyone's ultimate »monument of silence«, that »faithful rock«, beyond which everything is »hidden and mysterious«. And so the question of man's »true essence« is left open by Kocbek. There are two variants of the manuscript in his papers. The first one reads: »yearning and vigilance«, and the second: »faith and hope«.
The first belongs to the poet as a doubter, the second to the poet as a believer. Kocbek's poetic testimony reveals to us that poetry is confluence of the two in one and the same.



ON POETRY: AFTERWORD TO BRIDE DRESSED IN BLACK

Poets join in the emotional unrest of their age. The anxiety of our age derives from its weakened spiritual communion, its lack of quiet and its superficial reverence for texts. We not only wish for fewer hermetic works, we hope for that unheard of thing — the creative phrase that will evoke the quintessence of being, to paraphrase Heidegger. If words do not convey this immanence, then the world of human relations must be nihilistic. Even though the modern world has conspired against the most meaningful force of human nature, we must admit that, despite that conspiracy, we know of miracles. Poetry remains the expression of the irrepressible human aspiration to freedom. Mankind is burdened down with knowledge, yet no one can master the universe of information. Fortunately, though, man still has at his disposal the function of the irreal, which is every bit as necessary as the function of the real. Imagination is the oxygen of modern man, the most basic sustenance of human nature. Figures of the imagination are not static or final, they are evasive and restless, perpetually completing and reproducing themselves. It would appear that man, over programmed and manipulated, no longer knows how to play. Play is by its very nature disobedience, resistance, an outgrowing of rules, tradition and violence.
As a creator I am completely independent — there is no force in the world that can control me. Each germ of a poem can give rise to anything, though I never know in advance what will come of my writing. This is my fate and my essence —- to live in and for that. It encompasses a desire for communication, for love, for truth and progress.
Aside from spiritual revelations the most important thing in my life is poetry, the patronness of my creativity and my imagining. Under its guidance it has managed to anticipate, direct and confirm me in my most extreme doubts and decisions. It has given me the power of protest, resistance and revolution in a modern world of contradictions.
To all appearances poetry has lost its value today, but on this earth it is impossible to forget anything. Memory is already digging its bunkers and plotting for the time when imagination will come back to stay. Until then my love will be in mourning. Can you see, she has already put on her funeral dress. But my lovely and faithful) bride has often dressed in black, and for long. © 1977, Ana Jelnikar
From: Edvard Kocbek
Publisher: Le Livre Slovene.
SLO ISSN 0459-6242