Working towards a meeting point...
with the world that we can see and whose beauty or tragedy or mystery provokes the urge to make it better place for all of us to live...
We all want to be remembered and once we are the part of the long forgotten past...
who would not like to be remembered as the one: 'who gave without limit, share without restraint and love without regret.'
When I wandered around the 'Terchova village' where they still remember the famous outlaw, they once hanged there...their stories overwhelmed me..
...it was sadness in them, yet somehow there are also moments of great joy and laughter as we remembered the common man fighting oppression in his own way...
I stayed in the cottage of not so old storyteller and artist, a wonderful man....
his age, harsh environment and hard upbringing had taken too great a toll on his body there was no possibility of a cure...
...but his mind was full of imaginery of the past and endless creativity...
Once he said to me when I told him I have a lot of ideas for poems, that poems are not made with ideas but with words.
His paintings, similarly are not made with ideas but with colours, or more exactly, for colour is an abstraction...
but with pigments, natural substances he patiently collects from his beautiful surrounding and mix himself everyday....
His pigments have hue, intensity, tonal value and temperature just like the natural surrounding he lives in...
While painting, he talked to me: ' Tone give structure, hue establish chromatic harmonies and tensions...
...the temperature concerns the balance between warm and cool hues.'
Every artist has the some sort of unique and instinctive feel for all these qualities that a musician has for the character and timbre of the sound, product by his particular instrument...
...and poet or storyteller has for his individual characters, environment they live in and feelings they have...for meaning of the words and feeling of the sounds...product by his particular set of ming...
I invited him for a beer and he told me this amazing story about 'The Flying Cyprian' and I realised that I wandered too much, it is time to go back to my roots...
I started to research the well know character from the Slav and Polish history and found the great story written by famous Slovak historian that I have translated for you...
When you wander for a long time, there is a price to pay...when you decide to return to whatever you left behind...
...you seem to have forgotten how to find your way back,
how to recover your own particular point of equilibrium between your artistic vision and reference to the world, that is unique just to you and yet universal for everyone...
With the recent homogenisation of art that is mainly aimed on a global profit hunt...a world of indifference slowly penetrate the art and also our lives...
When I watch some of the recent Hollywood movies that are made for everybody and nobody particular...
I see this sad relevance with the art in general, if the movies cease to have characters and uniqueness to them, the movies stop to be relevant and cease to exist.
In the rush to appeal to all corners of the globe Hollywood is erasing the identity that made its blockbuster movies appealing in the first place.
The cruel commercial paradox here is that the quintessential American art form-the Hollywood movie-is being made to the universal product.
The danger is in the homogenisation of the product.
There is a real prospect that the global blockbuster may eat itself.
The movies that survive are those that manage to transcend any imposed sense of location to deal movingly with universal themes of love, regret and pain that appeals to everyone.
The literature that survives is the one that has ability to transport readers into unfamiliar worlds, peopled by characters who are often out of time and place...
...and yet a character is so well drawn, that we feel a genuine compassion for his plight.
I always keep beside me sentences produced by those who are 'virtuosi in the art of writing'. Language is the art form for them.
'While language is a natural phenomenon, subject to universal rules, individual languages are cultural constructs...
...he views many of the problems of language as evidence of its essentially creative nature.' (The Language Wars: A History by Proper English' by Henry Hitching)
To experience other cultures we need to learn their languages or at least view the unique cultures through the lenses of good translations.
'Translation asserts the possibility of a coherent unified experience of literature in the world's multiplicity of languages.' (Edith Grossman: 'Why translation matters.')
I hope my story of a common man from the past, stumbling back and forth around his Slavic land in growing horror at the atrocities in the name of Catholic religion draw you out of your cultural shell.
I am a mere repeater of an ancient story, constantly wavering between the most ingenuous credulity and the most resolute scepticism...
Cyprian found himself plunged into ' a temporal hurricane of the time' and tried his best to survive, learn from it and grow....
How do you cope with catastrophe, plague and tempest, storm and war, events that kill and maim and ruin the lives of survivors?
PART 1
A boy with a face of an angel,
who wished to fly
and reach the stars
was born
under the 'Red Monastery'
ancient walls.
Wrapped in a bright blue scarf,
the unwanted baby
left there
for wolves
or monks to come.
Monks taught him everything
what was there to know,
they named him Cyprian,
an orphan, with no means,
no one to love
and no one to love him back.
He prayed to God
five times per day
next to his mother's grave
behind the wall
for his unknown father
he prayed even more.
A man with a face of an angel,
and eyes full of murderous deeds,
Cyprian was his name,
travelled through light and dark
in a search of dream...
running from the justice,
fighting for his life
he ended up
not far
from the place
his abandoned son was found...
According to an ancient legend
in a deep forest valley
glued to a sharp stony wall
crumbling old 'Red Monastery'
appeared in a mist
long time ago.
In the beginning
of the 18th century
there lived monks
who forgot about outside world
occupying their days
by prays and hymns
by collecting herbs
and mixing natural medicines
and something else
that was forbidden
by the pope in Rome...
and yet
they felt
the time had come
for latin religious texts
to be understood
by everyone.
Bible was translated
in secrecy
into Slav native language
and suddenly
for the first time
in the history
poor pheasants and commoners
of Austria-Hungarian Empire
who were not allowed
to even own a piece of land
learnt to read and write.
In Anno Domini 1713
it happened this year
that in Terchova village
they hanged a young man
hanged him on his rib,
a feared outlaw
and common people's hero.
Everyone was there
mourning his slow and painful death
seeing him bleeding
from his torn abdomen.
The three brothers came
from a dark place
in a forest
where they lived
after their parents died.
Scavengers,
always fighting to survive,
a pack of human wolves
hunting in the darkest hour
of the night.
Today they killed a boar,
slicing his neck from side to side,
cutting off the meat,
loading on the rough sledge
they made
and selling it off
to the nearest pub.
The greedy publican
laughed into their faces:
“ You hunt in king's forest,
sooner or later,
you will hang for it.”
The publican's daughter
fell in love
with the brother
in the middle
with a long curly hair
and a face of an angel.
“ You should be a monk
and not an outlaw.”
She whispered into his ear,
when they made love.
She never found out
how fulfilled
her prophecy had become.
The eldest of the brothers
was the best hunter
and
loved to drink.
The middle one
knew the names of herbs
that could heal
and
lived for his love.
Her father,
angry
at his daughter's choice,
shouted to her ear:
“How can you love someone,
who is more dead
than alive?”
And he was right.
They will die soon,
all of them,
except one.
The youngest of the brothers
was barely fourteen
wanting nothing more
but to kill his own deer,
to show off
his skills.
And he paid for it,
by loosing both of his arms,
bleeding to death from his torso...
and screaming for his brothers
to come.
And they did,
killing everyone
on their path
in a rage.
Lost in a grief
over his youngest brother's death,
he killed the traitor
by using his hunting axe.
The publican's daughter's
had no power
over her lover
she wiped the blood
pouring from her Father's skull
with the bright blue scarf,
a gift of love turned to nightmare.
'The Witch hunt' was about to start,
two brothers had no chance,
even the wrong religion
meant death sentence
in those times
and they were protestants.
Wandering around
the Europe
up and down
never paid attention
to anyone
who noticed them,
and everyone
in return
turned the blind eye.
They disappeared
into the ever changing
crowd of travellers
for Holy Land.
Lost in narrow streets
of old towns
they killed from time to time
an innocent passerby.
They travelled the roads untravelled,
living in the abandoned caves,
in the died out villages
wiped out of people
by the 'black death'.
They stopped near the sea
icy cold
and turned back to find
their way home
but they found HIM....
In Anno Domini 1718
a Husita
an elite soldier
of the royal regiment
and the head
of the hunting party
killing everything and everyone
on their path
gypsies, protestants
and those
who didn't recognise God
as their only saviour....
He stopped by
in the rundown protestan pub
raping the pregnant woman there
wearing a bright blue scarf
and burning the place down
while holding a parchment
written by the king himself
allowing him to do this
and more...
in the name of Catholic religion.
Two brothers stood there
under the blackened wall,
the only one left
from their well known pub.
Snowflakes falling slowly
on their fair long hair,
dying amber
glistening on their sharp knives.
The Husita stopped in front of them
tall and threatening
on his dark strong horse
showing the king's order
of their hangings.
He laughed loudly
while his hunting party
tied them down.
The younger brother,
thinking of the girl with the bright blue scarf
fought back
and managed to run away.
The older brother
gave up.
They put him in a dungeon
and hanged the next day.
He was there,
on the city's square,
hidden in a cheering crowd,
watching the Husita
skinning his brother
while still alive.
He was alone,
hiding in the tall pines
of his homeland
never following the same road...
He slept little
dreaming about dead ones.
After one year
he forgot
how his brothers looked like,
they stopped chasing him
in his dreams,
he also lost
the ability to feel,
to laugh or to cry,
his stone face
and wild appearance
scared an old wandering Jew,
he met in a forest
and robbed
of everything...
money, food, clothes
even the book he found in his sack...
leaving him desperate
crying out:
“ Kill me, but don't take me that,
it is a treasure, unworthy of someone,
who can not read.”
In the autumn
they started to hunt
him down,
again.
He climbed up the high mountains
following the treacherous paths
to their snowy peaks
hiding in dark caves
where no light ever reached...
On one miserable cold day
at the end of December
in the darkness of the night
hungry and lost
he woke up
from the nightmare
and felt
he is the only one
left
in the whole world.
He left the mountains
ready to be caught.
And they nearly did,
he was shot
and fell into the cold waters
of the rapidly moving creek.
The huge storm raved outside
no one saw him there
collapsing on the steps
with barely enough energy
to rattle the gates
of the Red Monastery.
The oldest monk found him
and gently washed his body
covering it with a paste
from healing herbs
while a little boy named Cyprian
just like him
combed his muddled hair.
When the deep bronze voice
of the Monastery bells
called everyone to pray,
he opened his eyes
for the first time
thinking of Turks
invading his homeland
of a 'black death'
claiming his parents,
of a big fire,
of fear that only enemy can bring...
their voices echoed in his memory
and he felt trapped
again...
Too weak to move
he stared at them
with open suspicion
and hate
scarring off the boy
who hid under the bed,
there he found a sack
and a book in it...
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