New

The only "new" that people eagerly look forward to is the "new year". Most of the new things meet with much more resistance. People shy away from the new, they often perceive any balance as more necessary than change. And, again, with his whole being, man is a being of change. In the act of change, man shows himself as a complete being. The Heraclitean principle is the way the cosmos breathes.

Our holidays, our games and illusions, numbers that confirm the illusion of duration...

Ah, how simple it all was in the narrow imaginary of flourishing socialism... Occasional illustrations represented the New Year's holiday as a kind of shift - where a grumpy old woman (in black) and a beautiful girl (in white, of course) would appear; the two of them personified the outgoing and the new year. But it was as if no one remembered that last year, at this time, the old woman was this young beauty, and that only one year was enough to turn her into what she is now. Age is a miracle.

Interestingly, it seems that a similar matrix remained not only for calendar, but also for political shifts... That is why the AB putschists were once called "young and beautiful". And the last leadership before them overnight became a group of "lambs" and "unpopular/de-nationalized rulers". And for the "young + beautiful" to leave like the ugly old woman from the old illustrations, it didn't take one, but thirty years for the youngest. Another proof of the relativity of time? Or is it a story about something else?

The more recent shifts had a partly similar public response. I'm afraid that this kind of experience of political processes first of all testifies to the infantility of a society. As long as our representations of serious matters are childish (which is not bad in some arts, but fatal in politics), we are far from an orderly and mature society.

The New Year is always an opportunity to settle accounts. What are the balances, personal and joint?

What will you write after the number "2023" in your personal memory register? Has this year heightened your fears or brought you some joys worth remembering.

Perhaps you will remember this year for the police-criminal pandemonium that appeared after the publication of the communication between local police officers and criminals from the format? (And there's the funniest secret agent in the world.) Or will you remember her for that sense of misery and humiliation that a citizen feels when he sees how things really worked? While golden-mouthed politicians (and intellectual servants) told fairy tales and danced with "historical ghosts" (M. Krleza)?

Today, all holidays (or only holidays?) are mostly empty of meaning, and above all appear as a framework for consumerist hysteria.

But all these are just beautiful illusions of the calendar - when we believe that infinity can look like a well-ordered garden, and that numbers can mark what is above all meanings - time itself.

Our days have brought many twilight tones, we live in an age where dark colors belong as naturally as a child's toy. Hellish scenes of killing and destruction come from everywhere. I think of the deceased almost every day Gunther Grass who said that the Third World War began in 2014, although we are not (yet) aware of it.

And it's getting harder to even hope that things will change for the better. Except in holiday plays for children.

The world has become a wild place, there are more fires than firefighters, more arsonists than builders. Then the most important meanings are in the best that we as a species have created - in art.

Therefore, instead of a greeting for the new summer, I will suggest you some verses Vislava Šimborska. It is about the song "Vermer" (transl Biserka Rajcic).

"As long as that woman in the Royal Museum/ in painted silence and concentration/ day after day pours/ milk from a jug into a bowl,/ the world does not deserve/ the end of the world."

Good luck, despite everything!