When, as only he could, Aristocles, the three-time Olympic champion, criticized the rule of sophistry, myth-making consciousness and poetic imagination, expelled the poets from the polis that he could base himself in his thoughts, and left it to the rule of the philosopher, the first self-critical a turn in all world cultures, the very student whose teacher would rather poison himself than be exiled from Athens, banishes himself and his poetic youth from his teacher's, philosophical life. Why? Because she has not yet managed to shape herself, let alone the entire polis.
Finally, Plato did not have Gadamer's "tiny" experience with poetry behind him: he was not dragged along by established philosophical-literary problems and concepts, he was not on a "slippery" ground, but exactly where he renounced himself by remembering. When he persecutes poets from the polis of thought, Plato persecutes himself, as the one who "corrupted" the serious polis way of being in his youth. Due to this "corruption", Socrates also gave his head for the truth, in a very different way. Plato's theory of mimesis will establish a poetic distance against Plato, without the desire to understand that, on the other hand, Plato himself, and for philosophy itself, demanded that it had to justify its right to exist again and again. Following Heraclitus, Plato in each dialogue tries to provide a thought "redeem" of his own opinion for all that is objected to in the polis community and that disrupts the concept of the polis.
In the wake of the most successful return to the Greeks and Plato, a spiritual Greek will sing in a way that Plato did not think: the famous and profession of the poet is "the most innocent of all", but not the most righteous. The knot in which Helderlin's innocence and Platonic justice are tied establishes an impassable scale of thinking and singing, which is constantly slipping away from us. Why do we, singing and thinking, constantly try to jump over that border? Helderlin is clear: "That is why man was given the most dangerous of all goods - language... to give evidence of what he, man, is..." Here we meet the latest collection of our Andrije Radulović: innocence, danger, testimony, justice - the circle in which man exists as long as he exists. Actually since "we can hear each other".
Can we hear Andrija Radulović? Who should we hear? What is this inaudible thing that he puts into our clogged ears? It may be unacceptable to Plato, but when everything flows "what lasts, the poets establish", the Poem is! It is no longer a question of whether Pegasus or Jabučilo are the ones who exist in the clouds of poetic mimetic imagination and divine inspiration, they are more essential than everything that is. That's why "Full of merit, still dwells poetically / Man on this earth."
And while Plato condemns the senses that force us to bend a real rod when we lower it halfway into the water, the Poet is precisely interested in the reflection of the letters in the water. The collection Otkup, the poem Otkup searches for its uttered sentence, in which each letter is the tear of the last man who will no longer be able to utter anything, but will only be able to howl like his wolf brothers - the poets. Like a lone wolf. That's why not all his education, which emerges from behind every letter, word, verse, poem (Gorski vijevac, Nastasijević, Rilke, the mentioned Helderlin, Borges, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Brodsky, Akhmatova, Ružević, Herbert, Cavafy, all those who drank per drop of wolf's salt) did not offer what he sucked with his mother's milk. And yet, poetry is not only redemption for the mother. All this is also a ransom for the wolf community without a community, the poet brothers. Even when a loner, he cannot get out of the "Greek Well" without help. The rope that comes down to him from nowhere spins ontologically: Poetry is. After so many poetic millennia and wolves, does it have to be reaffirmed that poetry is? Do only words survive? If that is so, then only poetry can redeem Andrija Radulović, and not only him, only with it can the entire history of humanity be redeemed, a history in which no one can stick his compass and delineate it the way his sense leads his own. non-poetic needs.
That redemption is possible only if it breathes the way the song breathes. And she breathes as her uncle's vineyard cries and sings when growing. Each poetic word is that primal cry of a late-pruned vine, its mourning for us. Only then is it the dew from the first bunch that, when we pick it, will be medicine and wash our lungs. A cloud of Radulović's poetry hangs over that vineyard, and when it hangs, it brightens us and washes away with its shower of words, verses, songs and collections everything that has accumulated in us over time that is not originally ours, that is not a poem.
Poetry is thus a mirror of the two worlds in us, that Between them, the limitless border, the letter that is defined, the word that is given in song for both worlds. Because of this In-between, the Poet introduces his contemporary horizontal into the coordinate system with everything that has been sung and said in the millennial vertical temple of poetry, but even more so with what is unsung and unsaid. This is why Radulović is invited by poetry itself to give us a hint of how a poem is born, what kind of caesarean section it takes for it to enter us. Hence, every song is an insurmountable pain, as a result of which its poet has to save on words, so that each of his sung words is a sculpture that he poetically carves throughout his life. Why? Because every poem is the poet's mortal redemption. If you don't redeem yourself with a poem, the poet is not a poet, the one who has fathers every day. In this redemption, Radulović, with his poetic minimalism, sings to us of those tectonic plates that have broken inside us and that shake our humanity, and we still pretend not to know that the epicenter of the cosmic earthquake is right inside us.
Each of these poems passed through Andrija Radulović's veins, and if it enters our veins, it will be a stent of freedom in ourselves, which only poetry can breathe. And those veins lead from Homer to us. Our farthest ones are closest to us. One drop of their pure, poetic, blood will refresh our entire bloodstream, with the spirit and breath that only poetry breathes. One drop of it, a word, a verse, a stanza, changes not only our current poetic blood picture but also our entire past, redeems humanity and its world as a whole. The blood stream of poetry, its lungs, gives the poet, Andrija Radulović, the right to come to terms with the "fact" that as a poet he is predestined to use his poetry to redeem the man in us from ourselves, and to pay for that redemption with his life. Plato, who does not appear anywhere in this collection, and there are his teacher and student, with that non-appearance pays his judgment about the poets after so long.
With this collection, as with all her predecessors, Andrija Radulović presents herself as a creative cultural worker, as one for whom freedom and opinion are her homeland, without which she cannot sing. When he sings, culture and creativity sing, as well as freedom and opinion.
Bonus video:
