A LETTER TO BRANKO KUKIĆ (DATE UNKNOWN)
During our extensive evening conversations long ago, we often touched on topics which I readily reflect on but rarely talk about, not out of the fear that one of the mischievous walls might hear and report us to the organs of those inquisitive Services, but from my inherent skepticism about the power of speaking, and even about its usefulness. Instead, I have opted to write you a long letter. Only when words are written, when they are purified of the rashness brought out by emotions, inhibitions and complexes, when they are shackled by the rigid discipline of printed lines — only then do they speak out in a refined way. As history has moved forward, the terror of words has become so totalitarian that I have the right to make the claim that words, their clichés and models formed of old, are the ones who govern us, and not vice versa. In these days, which are probably the last ones, it is completely unimportant who does what to whom; only what someone says is taken into account, and that paradoxical situation was created fairly long ago — back when people started talking about God instead of doing what God’s commandments required. Recently, in an edition of Theology which you were so kind to send me, and which is dedicated to the Holy Spirit, I found unambiguous evidence to support the thesis I have proposed. The effort to overcome the split in the Christian world through the ecumenical encounters of Catholic and Orthodox theologians is quite praiseworthy, because that split came about, I am convinced, primarily because of verbalism. Yet, as far as I have managed to discern, those encounters are conversations falling on deaf ears in which, to my surprise, the Catholic theologians have shown a much higher degree of tolerance and inclination toward the mystery than the Orthodox have, even though the latter, educated in the Platonic spirit of the Eastern Church, should be showing less inclination to formalism and blind faith in Patristics, in the authority of saints who were, over a period of time (not through their own fault and not to the detriment of their holiness), placed between people and God, so that some quite profane “saints” could encroach on that interval space later, on that unprepared soil, at a certain historical moment, negating the existence of God. That is why I do not find it strange in the least that the idea of communism was brought into reality precisely in the Orthodox countries which, nolens volens, also dragged their Catholic Slavic brothers into the same round-dance. In my intolerance toward cataphatism of any sort, I go so far and with such arrogance that I am prepared to listen to the theology of one of my contemporaries only if he has been nailed to a cross.
However, that is also a theology. Hence, it is better if I return to the terrain of your specific interest and mine, to literature. I flatter myself that the prose I write is apophatic to the highest possible degree. Being as it is, negating, completely focused on proving the extent to which a man is not a man, it is understandable that it is fairly alien to me. I absolute refuse to disown my books; they are still the best thing I have created in my life. Disowning one’s work is always motivated by the same metaphysical disagreements as suicide is. As Schopenhauer said, suicide is not the pathological absence of the will to live, but the pathological excess of the will to live, to live the absolute fullness of life without God, and that is the justifiable reason why it has been proclaimed as one of the greatest of sins. In my case, the breakup between me and my books was consensual. I do not care about them, but I share my name with them and in return I get a certain amount of income. Readers need books, I need the money, little power and respect that they provide me so that I can physically more easily “walk my path on crutches” (Broch). I do not need readers; they are the friends of those books, not mine; I avoid, whenever possible, all encounters with those who enjoy reading that prose. Being an impassioned member of that same sort that I simultaneously despise and appreciate, I can never establish close contact with another reader, unless he is completely silent about what he has read or speaks only when completely drunk.
The small-minded could accuse me of making literature hackneyed. However, that accusation means nothing to me, nor does any other except the most painful ones, originating in the conscious which, opposed to the psychoanalysts, I believe to be the voice of angels that reprimands us when we overdo it and turns us away from the ways of evil. No man would ever accuse himself, for the simple reason that it is difficult to compose an accusation that is horrible enough to cover the seriousness and quantity of the offenses. Without the courage to hear the voice of that angel and without that obedience, all other words are the rationalization of lawlessness, which is so remarkably seen in the empirical reality of the world. But, to obey the abovementioned voice is redemptive, even though it is not pleasant; in that way, we return to ourselves and to God, becoming the masters and not the slaves of reflection. The vast majority, still, depending on the subconscious and the dark urges that torment them, choose this or that way for speaking, for thinking, accompanied by a certain behavior like lichens on a tree, the entire panoptic of the mask. Still, all those battles for this thing or that, all those engagements and doctrines are just a human construction aimed at liberating a man from an unbearable nightmare — from himself. But that is where the cardinal error slips in. A person who frees himself from reflection is the only one to free himself at all.
I, of course, have not freed myself from reflection and thus I am partially free. That is not just rhetoric. Actually, the awareness of the impossibility of exiting from the magic circle of ideas, premises, and imagination is liberation and the surpassing of that awareness. As long as he is alive, a man is susceptible to constant attacks of spiritual filth and, if the mystics are to be believed, the same thing happens to them for a while even after death. To my way of thinking, not becoming tied down is important, the absence of the affects caused by thinking. In that sense, St. Paul says that “our struggle is not with the body, but with the spirits of darkness.” So, as time goes by, all my thoughts have a very limited duration. Even the speed with which I surpass my own opinions fills me with satisfaction. I was invited, I am recounting this as an example, to participate in a protest meeting against atomic energy and, believing that it was correct to get involved in the cause, I promised the organizers I would come. But I did not go. The night before the meeting, I realized that I do not have anything against atomic energy. That does not mean that I have become a supporter or that I have taken up the position of advocates of nuclear power stations: to change your mind does not mean to change your actions. Here it just meant that I was neither for nor against. How quickly things change in this world. One hundred years ago, the advocates of atomic energy, if there were any, had to be visionaries. A while later they became progressive thinkers and, practically, media stars, while today they are reactionaries and agents of international imperialism. Following that logic, and there is no evidence that it should not be followed, it can be expected that the members of the Green Party will become notorious reactionaries in a hundred years. One of the most repulsive things in history, which is full of disgusting things, is the excitement with which common sense accepts “progress,” against which the next generation is already protesting, completely in vain of course because, as one Buddhist teaching says — it is possible to avoid only a future evil. The evil spirit of Europe is certainly the constant, straining to rid itself of the evil that has passed, that has built itself into the present, so that only the phantoms of evil are persecuted in the past. To speak honestly, Europe has no future because it never had one and because it never cared about it, which is in opposition to Christ’s God-man, his eschatologically oriented mission and the final reality of a future that will not become the past.