Sunday, September 9, 2012

An attempt at review, on the thought-provoking nature of:

Encounter, Milan Kundera.  Harper Perennial Paperback edition, New York, 2011
The Idyll, the Daughter of Horror
(Marek Bienczyk: Tworki)

He is writing about a book, a book about a place called Tworki, 'a large psychiatric hospital,' 'toward the end of World War II.'   Kundera finds the young people depicted:

     ...modest, shy, awkward, with a naive thirst for morality and for goodness; they live their 'virginal loves,' whose jealousies and disappointments never turn into hatred, in that strange atmosphere of obstinate gentleness.

A pithy and striking passage, a comment on our times that leapt out at this reader (reminding him of the essential--or existential--condition his own book is set in.)  Kundera seems to capture a light that falls upon our own times, as we sort of wait around for what happens next, (and possibly missing the chance to do anything of note.)

Kundera's commentary, speaking personally, as a writer, captures that ever-present sadness, that sort of low-level depression that never leaves but also is never dramatic and palpable enough, never so locatable as to require 'professional treatment,' its promptings for spiritual conversion and insight pointed but similarly intangible.   Maybe this is the beauty of certain Shakespearean moments, never hitting you over the head, always existing in a kind of ambiguous situation, 'signifying nothing,' as when Hamlet mutters 'nothing is but thinking makes it so.'  Of course.  Plays' jobs are to prolong such agony.  Is there ever resolution?

And so we go on living.

To the highest mind, say, that of Buddha, that 'unsatisfactory' nature of things is exactly it.  We don't need to necessarily translate that bit of wisdom as 'suffering,' in a direct dramatic sense (though we probably are in that state too, anyway), but just that low level everyday 'what am I doing, and even asking that is not leading me to anything remotely satisfactory, what is the point of all this?'  Such a condition simply means that the sufferer is on the right track, at least in accordance with the inner logic.

I suppose we can only resolve the matter in asking for a certain recognition of such traits and expressions of that which Kundera, reading, describes above.  An understanding, sympathetic, of such 'madness.'  Is that how the world works?  Probably not, but, can we say, I wonder, that this is, at least some times, who we are?  Or, to ask it another way, where would that get us?  Do we then simply wish to go back to sleep and dream a little more until more worldly duties call upon us?  (Would that the Nazi had been so afflicted.)

Is it not a bit painful to look back on those times of youthful naivety and chaste relationship...  Why do those now seem like such utter catastrophic failures of living, haunting us in their own way?

And yet, how strangely wonderful would it be, if you could capture some of that virginal hidden kindness, like capturing a still of a helpful yoga pose's energy, or the Da Vinci diagram of the man, the human being with his arms outstretched, not sadness, not regret, but beauty?  Or, in sobriety, something akin to the strange other worldly logic of Jesus that we normal humans find ourselves occasionally good at, remarkably enough...

Anyway, to not operate with a bulldozer's sweep in such rare and delicate territory, sensitively, is a task for writer and critic today.






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