Biblical Motifs in Contemporary Macedonian Poetry

Fear – the Main Subject of this Poetry!


The greatest human achievement can be seen as the realisation that celestial bodies have the same structure as the Earth, that there is nothing new in the sky that cannot be explained.


Spectrum analysis has conquered space, brought it down to Earth, among us, and reduced all the past and future to - the present. And immediately afterwards - a new sobering up: Francis Bacon points out that the cosmos cannot be understood by men!


In Macedonia, wherever you look, you see church bells conquer­ing time as a part of Macedonian scenery since the first century A.D. Deep in our minds we still hear the chiming of the bells from the tower of Saint Lydia in Philippi, we recognise the shadows of monks pulling the ropes, rocking the big, heavy bells that leap over centuries and cen­turies.


Thousands of shrines, churches and monasteries show Christ's love for Macedonia; Christ speaks through them. In the monasteries, the se­cret whispers of monks can still be heard, looking for salvation in each line of the Bible. All those sanctuaries, churches, monasteries and church towers still remember the martyrs who used to cross themselves there, calling Christ's name. They remember musicians, and they remember winters, floods, and wars. All those domes and holy symbols in Macedonia make one believe that the whole country is a secret epistle, as yet unread.


These poems reveal that man today is a closed monad! In these poems the poet has turned into a hermetic and hermeneutic secret, which in turn becomes a call in a world of one endless associative paradigm. Kletnikov himself prophesies through the works of the apostles, Rendzhov walks through the Psalter as if through eternity, Blazhe Koneski through the voice of Ecclesiastes points to transience and fear:


One generation passeth away,
and another generation cometh;
but the earth abideth for ever.

(The Book of the Preacher 1:1-6)


Here also, the central theme of most of the poems in this overview is - fear! The fear that destroys the scope of the mythopoeic concept. It is related in an intimate, broken dialogue between the poet and God; he tells God of his dreams, explains his fears, and feels like an apostle him­self, even though not recognised as such. He also openly says that he believes in God, but that he does not want mediators between the two of them. What the poet feels is a modern paradigm of postmodernism, and he does not consider it an anti-religious act. On the contrary, the modern Macedonian poet sees post-modern religion as syncretic, esoteric, occult – a religion freed of dogma. The Macedonian poet, deciding on a biblical motif, remembers Octavio Paz, according to whom, “states col­lapse, churches fall to pieces or petrify, ideologies disperse – only poetry remains.” Why? Octavio Paz sees it this way: poetry does not search for immortality but for – resurrection! Because of this, poetry is a private religion, and the poem – language in motion. When Jesus listens to this, he exclaims: Love each other the way I love you!


FLOAT CANDLELIGHT, WRITE, YOU SINFUL FATHER PETER…


Simultaneously with the translation of religious books from Greek into Old Slavonic, a process started by Cyril and Methodius, carried on by the Ohrid Literary School, and continued into our own time, an authentic, original literature of a particular kind evolved in Macedonia. This included the mediaeval notes and inscriptions, as well as data and records that remained as subsidiary details in the margins of translated church books, on their covers, on the walls of churches and chapels, on tables and dishes, and on frescoes and icons. These are red marks left in the darkness all over the Macedonian land in the course of a whole millennium.


These mediaeval church notes and inscriptions reveal to us not only their value as literary history in Macedonia, but above all, as the sprouts, the first examples of Macedonian literature after Clement.


The mediaeval Macedonian church notes and inscriptions were made at the very beginning of Slavonic literacy. They were written in Macedonian (Old Slavonic), in either of the two alphabets, the Glagolitic or the Cyrillic. Most of them are found in Cyrillic literary documents. In this respect, Macedonian mediaeval manuscripts are among the very first original lit­erary works in Slavonic literature. “It is only natural,” says Dr. Radmila Ugrinovska – Skalovska, “that the language of these notes and inscrip­tions reflects all stages in the development of the Macedonian language that evolved from the Old Church Slavic basis.”


Thus, resisting the winds of history, what remained was the lan­guage of the people with all its lexical richness. The sooty walls of the places of worship remained, bearing dozens of messages – our ancestors’ bitter calls from the distant past.


Who were they and when did they write?


They were monks and priests living their lives in solitude, young boys and old men. All of them, dressed in black, or in something as dark as possible, were virtually the only literate people in Macedonia in those days. They were not educated, but still they were more lettered than the Macedonian peasants who were still using lines and notches and were bound to the land for centuries. They were poor and homeless, icon painters and builders, founders of monasteries, owners of church books, ploughmen and tinsmiths, eremites and healers, unhappy ones and shepherds in love, millers, innkeepers, wheelwrights and packsaddle makers, players and blacksmiths, tailors and tradesmen. Those were our noble, wise, anxious and quiet mothers and sisters, covered with ker­chiefs, sweeping the monasteries’ courtyards and fasting for weeks, whose incorporeal spirits emanated only love and tranquillity. They wrote:

Till noon I was reaping
And then I-wrote…

Because:

Those who want to learn a lot
Should sleep only a little…

And so, throughout the night, the monk and the candlelight were all alone. They were burning down together: the flame whispering to the man; the man whispering something to the flame:

Float candlelight, write, you sinful Father Peter…

And so, in the Macedonian village of ‘Rbeli, today in Albania, a long time ago, back in the 13th century, Father Peter unwittingly wrote probably the first alliteration in Macedonian poetry.


The Poet – Companion Of Time And Of Light, An Ancestor To Himself


What was it that the Macedonian author could see in the Holy Scripture that others could not? What was the magic in his mind’s eye that saw worlds not yet created and perceived the light still not risen? When we discuss the New Testament, we should start with two symbols, the cross and the fish. “It is fascinating,” says Gligor Chemerski. “It’s more of a secret symbolism, a conspiracy of the pass­word, a telegraphic language of the enlightened. Geometry as well as an organic sign of the future. With rhetorical heraldry still roaring outside, the grandiose style of marble and granite, the supreme literacy of the wall – the pictogram and the extravagant fresco, in cave shrines and catacombs, these two symbols are the absolute key to the living cosmogony.”


The inner eye of the word is the same age as God himself and older than the lights and the worlds. It watches over everything, enters plants, lurks in stone caves, devastatingly runs through dreams, preaches the migrations of time. The inner eye of the word has an excellent memory, everything has been constantly moving.


The things we have always listened to by the fire were first recorded in our dreams, and then in the name of life, repeated in our prayers: Come with me, the voice of Jesus called us, leave the dead to the spiritually dead; those who wish to follow me should renounce them­selves!


That was the way in which we overcame the great pogroms and horrors of the Old Testament and reached beyond death itself, beyond Judgement Day. That was the way in which we leaped over black holes of nihilist eschatology to enter regions of hope and salvation. We our­selves preached that the end is worthier than the beginning; forget what is behind you; yearn for that which is still to come. So we came to be­lieve in the time that had not yet come and the light that did not yet exist. We became our own ancestors!


It is the mind’s eye of the poet, the artist, and the author that unerr­ingly senses the direction from which the terrifying and warning voices of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah come. Their voices thunder through the Old Testament, announcing new sufferings and lamentations. They warn of God’s anger, telling us not to sin because Judgement Day is here, close to us: Dies irae, Dies illa. It is the day on which the world will finally disappear. That is why that day will have neither a yesterday nor a tomorrow. That day will not be like any other day. Being beyond time, it will not need any history. Small solace will come from the real­isation that, according to John the Apostle, “Perfect love eliminates fear, and that the one who fears is not perfect in his love” (John 4:18). It means that in our next life we will be judged according to love, accord­ing to how much we loved in this world.


From Orpheus & Jesus – An Overview of Biblical Motifs in Contemporary Poetry selected by Ante Popovski (published by Struga Poetry Evenings 2000)