After-words by Prof. Bojana Stojanović Pantović in: Sofija Grandakovska, The Burning Sun (2009)
…. AND BEFORE THE WORLD, LOVE WAS….
In her first published collection of poetry The Eighth Day (2005), some kind of a modern lyric mythological-poetic epic or poem, Sofija Grandakovsa (1973) marks the coordinates of her poetic galaxy that, like an un-extinguished secret fl ame, shines forth in her latest manuscript The Burning Sun.
Can that poetic stance on oneself and the world, as well as a distinctive emotional intelligence, be designated as a discourse of prayer without labeling it as inherently dogmatically religious or traditionally confessional? Yes, undoubtedly, if it presupposes a type of a modern religious imagination, that adopts the discourse of prayer as its semiotic framework for understanding one special, more intimate form of communication with the principle of sacredness, that is, the numinous. By virtue of the exploration of its perfection in the spheres it has been perennially conveyed in various historical periods and in the ruins of mythical remembrances, through its vigorous resurrection at the times of one’s own and other people’s living, through inheritance and anticipation, through vision and oblivion – ultimately, through the recording of these traces in the seismograph of one’s soul, one’s own auto-bio-graphy, as the poetess claims herself in Why Poetry?
And that is why the starting point of the poetical discourse of this remarkable poetess features the hagio-poetical glorification of the world at one special moment that, according to T.S. Eliot is forever now, and that fractures layers of the past, the turbulent but transient present, and the awaited future. And all you ever wanted to be. Thus, prayer is a fluid, elusive self-discourse addressed to someone else, whoever it might be – a beloved person, father, mother, ancestors, a birth-town, a familiar landscape, a fi gure of a saint, and finally, the very Divine instance of the eternal and never attainable love. God, as a constant invocation, listening to, gauging one’s own splitting, anxiety, but, also a faith in self-fulfillment. The lyrical voice is powerfully erotized and appears as a drifting, nomadic ‘I’, some sort of illumination that casts light on the text, the palimpsest, from the inside. It is set in a non-specified temporal space, yet can at any moment be ascertained as a unique existential presence in a historical, a mythical, as well as a metaphysical sense. The contemporary discourse is a mode of lyrical invocation there where one would expect to find a sober veritable description or a rational paraphrase of a read piece of literature, inter-textual, or cultorological references.
In the poetry of Sofija Grandakovska, though firmly embedded in the aspiration towards unity, that is not the case. The cycles of her poetry are arbitrary and loosely connected through recurring motifs and musical cadences; the musicality and melodiousness of the long verses (see in particular the first two introductory poems Standing Before the World and Aboard a White Ship), coupled with syntactical repetition (parallelism) evoke the Biblical verses.
However, here formal monotony and uniformity are absent because short forms consisting of several lines, fragments, and miniatures alternate with longer poems of more poetical momentum. Thus they remind that their comprehensiveness is merely a symbolical indicator of a thorough inter-permeation of meanings. They don’t emerge out of darkness but rather out of the flame of memory; not out of nothing, but out of the pre-existential ideas of goodness, grace, beauty, truth, and love. Out of some primordial absolute that the poetess still feels dwells in the space of her own soul. Like a great revival of the Romantic universal ideas sparked through the procedure of the spiritualization of matter, abstraction of the material essence of the world into spiritual entities at the time when they were exposed to the chaste look. Can words restore that fullness of things, that first flush of elements – water, fire, the burning sun, transparent air - walking on the path that is a mystery in itself, for via it we transpose ourselves into infinity?
Will, then, the poets, as Hoelderlin held, continue to gaze at the skies in which gods are absent and wait for the moment of their return? Will the contemporary man, like Prometheus, succeed in redeeming from the void that lump of light that is sacredness? Or will we all together, and the entire universe, be exposed to that ‘metaphysical coldness’ that harbors the greatest secrets, sealed and dumb. Poetry shares with its readers the secret of the world, but only when the poetess through her loneliness and alertness secludes from the world in order to imbue it into herself more thoroughly and intensely, to embrace her poetical I-ness. When the religion of the heart amounts to self-awareness and understanding oneself and the other, oneself-in-the-other, when it reaches the love of infinity, that is life, just like death.
Therefore, the poetess keeps returning to the initial, tormenting situation – what to write about and how? Because what she feels is a readiness to endure the explosion of the language, like before one’s birth, usually ends in something entirely different, maybe less important, however, not a bit less necessary and painful:
I was dividing myself in a great sorrow
When an old age was dying in me forever.
It hurt a lot
And it burned a lot
And it cried a lot
because that was the only way it could leave me
To make room for a new meeting
With the truth.
-By Myself -
Because as the chasm between the appearance and reality, the former and the present, the illusion and the truth, grows wider – it enhances the poet’s memory of the moment when we all believed that the lie and its appeal can be and are truthful. Thus the passage of time is auto-reflexive, at the same time creating one more pronounced reservation towards the previous condition of happiness and fullness. The new position sets in through inavoidable suffering, through a reconstruction of the walked path. Only thus it is possible to »make room for a new meeting / with the truth«. And in order to have it all recorded, before the meeting with the paper, the senses pulsate somehwere between a breath and the energy of things, trying to impress the shape of this relationship through words. All the passion tinged with the easiness of addressing the Other transforms into anxious stammering, feeling in the dark, the process of lava cooling before an earthquake strikes, before the vessel of Odyssey sets out into the Great Sea. Whereupon the senses go numb, fade away, leaving the traces of their exposure to the reader, the receiver of the message in a bottle.
Standing face to face, you and I
Like two burned suns
Each of us with her and his own sunrise
You always from the East
I from the inside
From within my burned Sun –
Am giving birth to you again.
-The Burning Sun: Birth
As if the poetess herself is the metaphor for the overall creation, a creative potential and a force of destruction, a constant within a change - the one invisible, internal - that becomes visible through the prayer-like tone of the poem. Sofi ja Grandakovska doubts the contemporary world of functions and systems of pragmatic relationships, wherein every thing and individual have their mechanical, practical, virtual value. The reality of a spiritual manipulation is manifested through masks, through a hide-and-seek game, truth and lie – on whose contradictions – as Kafka wrote, rests this world. Her poetic output is a testimony to love that has existed before us, before and after the world. And it constitutes this world even when we are not aware of it. The constant passing of light through pure matter, the annulment of the historical time for the sake of the mythical, eternal truths. Grandakovska does not only treat stereotypical situations; rather, in the archetypal variations, she imprints her own existential experience of self-sacrifice, fear and hope, nostalgia and oblivion, misgiving and vulnerability. Then, when logos and eros conjoin in one point, in that ultimate, final moment of wholeness. And this is harder to grasp than infinity and space.
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