J.Marcinkevičius and the Lithuanian canon

(By The Galiorka Colleague – apologies if “pigletsgeteducated”, the deliberately humorous name of my casual email, inserts itself somewhere. This is a provisionary text I will keep moulding; but do behold.)

1.

J.Marcinkevičius is the epic poet in the Lithuanian canon (besides S.Nėris as the lyricist) if there any canon can be; the one that demands canon is Š.Birutis, the culture minister. The speech I gave on 25.07.04 […]. Now, both of them are Never-again poets, thus inseparably connected to the modernity’s adventure to actualize scientism into a governmentality, which is what USSR was, and this identity decided it’s history, it’s phases (including the shift from Stalinism to pure Never-again), – as Lithuania disowns it, it disowns historical consciousness itself, and thus Western identitarianism itself, as part of the Western Bildung is to understand USSR, as utopia or as dystopia, but not to annihilatorily reject.. – S.Nėris as a lyricist is though not so much interpenetrating with USSR (as a lyricist and a neo-romantic she cannot meaningfully identify with a system, but only with the war machine), as much interpenetrating is J.Marcinkevičius, who is nothing of what he says he is, as evident in the fact that he is the first Lithuanian writer who depicted sexual sadism (Pūkelis of “20th spring” with the augmented chord of how he became intimate with his wife-to-be, both initiating and dooming his marriage, at the moment when she’s wounded and he is administering medical care and becomes aroused, a scene akin to the one with G.Raubal in “Hitler: Rise of Evil”), and the pattern goes on, because Mindaugas is probably akin to Pūkelis in this aspect, hence the ominous exclamation of his daughter that he didn’t love her deceased mother, which he doesn’t deny; and the scandalous “Pine that laughed” has the protagonist as incestophile, which is probably the insinuation that pushed T.Venclova into life-long hostility. – Except Mindaugas (curiously the most praised), J.Marcinkevičius’ characters are deep, problematic, vivid, and, as illustrated, the author is shockingly good as psychologist: no salivation, no fake impetus to unduly idealize; add to this Brechtian humor, breakings of 4th wall and whatnot; it’s a musical (I even had theory that he prepared this to be put on silver screen). He is an excellent writer, but is there more for the claim that he’s classical besides him being the only one good in his period, in his niche? – One needs to answer what is Classics. Now, Classics is a political project (and as such a lie, but a benevolent one) of 18th century Freemasons, ultimately reducible to the event of Westphalian peace, that stem from Erasmus being jumped-over by Luther, and Erasmus tried to outbalance or even undo the Florentine Renaissance, the ultimate event being the opening of Ghiberti’s doors, which is a (failed) attempt at impossible Church reform to the direction that was semi-seriously publicized by G.Pletho and G.Bruno, the direction being the religion of Immanent Absolute. I postulate a fraction that willed this already in Middle Ages (c. the story about Meister Eckhart: the sun that shines through you shines in Prague too; the leader of it in the Church would be Nicolaus Cusanus. – Against it the Reformation rose, that had 30-year-war erupted, the war really deserves to be called WW1, and Westphalian peace is akin to Yalta: a new world was agreed upon wherein the old ideological tensions are deliberately set aside, discarding the old world symbolic coordinates and deliberately creating a new sensory and cognitive field: after Yalta it’s what’s called the consumerist culture and especially pop music, while after Westphalia it’s what we know as the high culture. Powers that be wanted to give people (and themselves!) something else to think about, and found this opportunity in the form of secular culture. – If everyone is debating Italian vs French opera, a new religious war is not lurking, and same goes about math, physics and whatnot; once that becomes the established public interest, the effect is sudden acceleration of tech, that bursted out in Industrial Revolution, and the jinn is out. – The idea of Classics is part of this process; it’s about giving Europe other identity than the contested Christendom; so instead of Jerusalem Athens are made to shine, and were promulgated as the model of everything, starting with civil virtue and political life; soon entire states, USA in the first place, were larping this instead of the old, more dangerous game. – But what Greece? So the architects of this arrangement had arbitrarily set a period called Classical, at expense of the before and the after of this Greece, discarding Hellenism that is too mystical and too Christian, not appealing to the spirit of Enlightenment rationality precisely because it was the real Greece, as the real Europe was Cosimo and not Erasmus, Cusanus and not Luther, Luther and not Rousseau (the logic of veil of God being a new face of God, compare G.Scholem). Among the originators of the framing the name of W. von Humboldt pops up. – It did work: as much as we self-identify as westerners, we trace our rolemodels to Greece, say to find out how things really are and then say uncomfortable truths (what this blog tries to do) is larping Socrates, and if we quit we would larp Diogenes; – a sufficient illustration of how canon works in real life. Curiously people don’t use Christianity this way, even the believers, – they would think of themselves in Greek rolemodel terms, while the list of apostles they would have undifferentiated, partly due to modern Christian’s ignorance of the tradition that has apostles as vivid characters, say in “Golden legend”, but, then again: they could have Tanakh prophets considerably specified, but they don’t. – This is another example of of how classics work: Bible may as well be an oracular revelation, but Greece is the human revelation, the book of human nature, the “field of mercy” of purified forms of what a human may be. – And that is more or less the ideology of Classical philology; an available text that renders it would be Hegel’s “Philosophy of history”; here it must be emphasized that it’s not Hegel-specific, but a creed of many, most people in that period. – Classical philologists became the tribe, the clan of this canon, and it’s practice served as a model for the Nations’ Spring: every nation that sprang larped Greece, and national literatures were compiled or created in imitation of the Greek canon.

The thesis, that was formulated by F.Nietzsche among many others, is: every rolemodel of a westerner is given in lives of the Greeks, historical or mythical, and the way Greece is rendered for us is such that these rolemodels are given in manifold perfection: greatest (in the sense of: going furthest possible without launching the dialectical shift into it’s own opposite), purest (given without admixture of many other things), most harmonious (and thus intelligible, graspable). To an extent it’s what Greeks themselves fashioned themselves to be: people that sculpted themselves for the gaze of paideia that they valued so much; partly, though, it’s a result of elaborate pedagogy of the masses by18th century Freemasons. It works the way I described nevertheless, and the problem with the list of Š.Birutis, and of other similar attempts, is that in Lithuania nothing works as such rolemodels. What lifestyles one can learn from “The Year” of K.Donelaitis? Exactly, – lifestyle of a butler of the ethnically foreign oppressor (the Europe!), or of varying types of ugly subalterns sabotaging anything social in their own petty ways, and a morale that world is just like that. But to be evil is not a rolemodel.

2.

Here J.Marcinkevičius is majorly different. Problem is that his ideals are thoroughly communist, while Lithuanian state does not want to commemorate Communism as a necessary adventure that has integral part in the national memory, but wants to larp a last judgement day or worse – to send it down the memory hole. Furthermore, there is no one to crosscheck them, because already for a while people graduate from universities and go around adulting without what was once called education, as evident in the fact that Lithuanian poetry is not read at all, and people get surprised when I retell J.Marcinkevičius this way: they know the name and the reputation, and other poets – Baltakis, Maldonis etc. – they don’t know at all; so they won’t miss J.Marcinkevičius, and in case they would acquire an amok for poetry at some point in their lives, they would discover one of the two great cultures, Anglo-Saxon or Russian, depending on their sociopolitical standing and stance, and then stay blindened no longer by darkness, but by light. It’s almost as if I alone know what J.Marcinkevičius was doing, so lets rehearse me.

J.Marcinkevičius as a nationalist poet is the Marcinkevičus of the dramic trilogy, of which “Mindaugas” functioned as an exercise of stretching-forth of imagination to perceive Lithuanian state as possible: as in “Antis” (a band whose title was to be read in the worst kind of conspirological way: it’s anti-S, anti-Soviet, as Verdi graffiti refers to Victor Emanuel etc.); so “Antis” sang: Lithuanian state, try to utter it out, – and so did J.Marcinkevičius, or so much did they hear, a talking point. But what is going on in the drama, besides the said tune? – Mindaugas was efficient in killing off opponents and forming a demesne, he has his favorite toy, a clay map of his conquests, and he has chats with a potter character, a vox populi of down-to-earth wisdom; the wisdom sound more more and more ominous in it’s parallels: the demesne is wide but it does not make sound, while a real piece of poetry resounds; when Mindaugas is killed, the map is shattered to pieces. As a metaphor for Lithuania it will reach crescendo in “Mažvydas”, in the famous finale, where the sound unravels to be the language, the phonetic image of Lithuanian language,: now it sounds, because statehood done by fiat of a powerful individual (Mindaugas) by external violence lacks the vivifying spirit that comes from the people, that, if unified in self-consciousness, becomes the nation; with Mažvydas and the Lithuanian language acquires literacy and Kultur, a state could be too. – In this context the third part “Cathedral”, can be, and was, read as a depressive ending: national soul of Lithuania tried to move a little, but didn’t get chance to be victorious in establishing itself, and remained a rumor, a sound, emblematized by the painful Peach-tree song of the old beggar. – This sequence is considerably Marxist-Leninist, but not exclusively; such discernment of moments within a thing, the form without content, content withou form, content reaching out to acquire form, – it’s Hegelian, with all forerunners of Hegel involved. (I don’t accept the narrative of Lindsey where Hegel is a villain; to me it’s just philosophia perrenis, and if my tone is there as if in expose where I’m insinuating that J.Marcinkevičius has d stuffed his dramas with subliminals, this is due to automatisms of language and maybe internet habits, not a responsible stance.) But the specific nature of the content in this equation is weaved into the composition of “Mindaugas”: it’s a tragedy because of when exactly a plot rises to kill him. The point is that he, a highly unsympathetic person akin to Pūkelis, is successful in his evil, but because of the nature of what he was doing (the Stalinist notion of praxis) he starts to have a revelation, and subsequently acquire soul; he is becoming wise, – and this is where he becomes “unsustainable” and forces of inertia (of reaction!) accumulate to eradicate him; as if T.Lysenko’s wheat were almost delivering, but at that exact moment the bureaucrats in Moscow go impatient on the project. – His wisdom is depicted in the sequence where metrics of the poema is broken and he mumbles in free verses; what he talks about in this trippy monologue as if of a man overwhelmed with thoughts he is not yet capable of thinking (D.Diderot depicts one initiated into his own materialism tripping this way), is the notion of matter as alive and conscious.

Now this is the crucial and title-dictating notion in Marxism-Leninism, i.e. in dialectical materialism. This is why the materialism of Soviets is dialectical, as opposed to vulgar. Vulgar materialism finds all things spiritual correlated to material processes, and jumps to conclusion that spirit does not exist but should be considered epiphenomenon of matter: I think I am a something, but I’m really only my brain, my genes etc., with the corresponding ethical stance that justifies the term “vulgar”, say of A.Tate. – Dialectical materialism though emphasizes that the fact that consciousness exists means that matter can be conscious, and in some way is conscious since it’s lowest level of buildup. Universe is alive and conscious. Soviets are panpsychist. – The founder of the notion is B.Spinoza, the man with whom this reasoning would be publicly associated in our distorted Zeitgeist is G.Deleuze (a contemporary of J.Marcinkevičius), the most famous person who stood for this notion is F.Nietzsche, who is known for everything else he said because reader does not exist anymore, but the one instance where the notion was omniabundant in social life was Soviet Union. Soviets did struggle with the notion, and in schoolbooks they mostly explain it away, but only after introducing the fact that by the formal structure of their reasoning this must be the implication; they treat it the way a physic would treat quantum indeterminacy, it’s fascinating, God only knows if I myself understand it, as I retell it I will perorate against jumping to conclusions, but when the goal is to fascinate with physics, I will, otherwise, encourage overinterpretation; such fascination measure was Soviet art, wherein the notion is omnipresent; and not only art, but the surprisingly open-minded and sane Soviet sex ed has the notion of consciousness of matter, and subsequent pantheist holiness of the world, as justification of all things erotica, and even of sex itself.

3.

This text of mine is a sketch for a more mature work; the purpose is there only to register connections in any shape and style, then quickly upload so that it was accessible to the whole two of the concerned readers, so that I would feel as having worked today, and be rewarded with the above-described feeling of matter conscious of my tampering with it by labor. – So lets conclude. Mindaugas’ hymn to matter, which tragically makes him a pre-Socratic philosopher and then he gets killed exactly when Lithuania could have acquired philosophy it never had, – is fulfilled in “Mažvydas”. This is the sound of Lithuania, now it’s a piece of actual pottery, matter was exalted from it’s excremental form, and alchemically transmuted into a living and sensuous thing; it acquires human heart and face, and appears in the form of Lithuanian nation; this Lithuanian nation is a presence arriving from language, from the celebrated phonetic image, Sanskrit-like, that the prescriptive linguists of Lithuania are so fierce to defend with a deliberate mask of dumb inertia. (A digression: Lithuania is trained to be proud of having a Sanskrit-like language, while Sanskrit Hindus don’t speak, and every guru perorates to not mispronounce things in mantrayana, because one can hurt himself thereby. – This essay illustrates what is at stake: one could not have formulated this in Lithuanian language.) To that phonetic image J.Marcinkevičius gave a harmonious, mature, exalted expression, and also a concept of in what sense it can be centered in the world and “incrustated in the nothingness” – to make it hyperreal, to make it the most important thing in the world, and, in a sense, the only thing that exists, a face of Being itself. – That conceptualization, though, is thoroughly interpenetrated with Soviet philosophy and legitimation mythos of USSR. From that it follows that 1. J.Marcinkevičius duly belongs to Lithuanian canon if that is a something at all possible, and maybe even is the main, the only truly canonical Lithuanian writer, 2. he can be canonized only together with the whole field, the whole layer of culture in the broader sense, of LTSR that was the nation about, and from, which J.Marcinkevičius sings, and the nation that he made into the subject of Lithuanian language as such.

The choice that people like Š.Birutis, and Desovietization commission too, face, is tragic; too tragic in comparison to how little these people are. An effect also foreshadowed by J.Marcinkevičius, as his Mindaugas is basically a moustached beaver of the kind that “back then worked for Lithuania too”.