The search for a form of fusion of words and images

(Dimitrije Popović, ORPHEUX'S SHADOW, Litteris, Zagreb, 2022)

Maurice Blanchot on the trail Mallarmé he tried to examine the gap between two spaces - ordinary and literary language. It is quite clear that for such a thing he lacked the clarification of the excess of the inexpressible in the language. The space in which the essence of literature opens up in understanding does not, therefore, come from language itself. The being from which language utters "truth" in a literary work is shown by what is called fascination:

"Writing means entering into the affirmation of solitude in which fascination threatens. Surrender to the risk of the absence of time where eternal beginnings reign. To pass from I to He so that what happens to me happens to no one and is anonymous as far as I am concerned repeating itself in an infinite dissipation. To write means to leave language to fascination, and through language and in language to remain in touch with the absolute place in which the thing becomes a picture anew, and the picture, instead of an allusion to a figure, becomes an allusion to the non-figurative, instead of a form created from absence, it becomes the formless presence of that absence, an opaque and empty opening over what is when there is no more world, when there is no world yet" (Maurice Blanchot, Literary space).

The image, namely, seems to have some strange advantage, although in the history of metaphysics its "essence" is derived from the non-pictorial. That indefinable place in the modern image of the world is called an object. Beyond the possibility of knowledge lies its secret. Therefore, the image that Blanchot talks about clings to the event of a thing, and language to its shadow. What is it for then Dimitrija Popović Orpheus' shadow, if not the mystery of art and artistic creation in an age that no longer has any direct relationship between poetry and the divine, as was metaphysically established back in the Greeks and medieval Christianity? At the same time, it is necessary to clearly distinguish between mystery and mysticism. The first belongs to the Greek mythic signification of the world, and the second to the Christian understanding according to which God creates ex nihilo. A mystery is the secret of an event that binds heaven and earth, immortals and mortals, and can never be unraveled to man except as, as he would say Miguel Unamuno, in the tragic sense of life. Between the hereafter and the hereafter in the Greeks, however, there is not such a gaping gap as in the monotheistic religion of Christianity, when the epiphany of the world is replaced by the symbolic unfolding of the cultic memory of the sacrifice of the God-man as a sign of the openness of history to the one coming as a savior. The essence of mystery, as in Dionysian festivals and Orphic mysteries, is the revival of the drama of existence in a world that can no longer have meaning without philosophy and art. Poetry is like primordial in that poiesis the decisive meeting place between the human and the divine, because the Word is a mystery, and the image is its secret, collected by the mythical figure of Orpheus - the founder of poetry as a telling of the sacred fate of beauty. It is therefore not by chance in the 20th century Rainer Maria Rilke u Devin's elegies expressed the essential thought of every artistic decadence that beauty is the beginning of the terrible, which the Germans denote by the word Unheimlich. Mysticism, on the other hand, is a completely different experience in which, instead of the unique event of the tragic encounter between the human and the divine, everything is moved into the inner drama of seeing and seeing the saving God, as in telling Joan of Arc, st. John of the Cross i st. Teresa of Avila. Between the event and the victim there remains only a symbolic trace of the existence of what is only an appearance, a fluid sign of the impotence of immortalization in time, that shadowy time in which the mythical Orpheus no longer sings to his beloved Eurydice to bring her back from the depths of the realm of the dead, but is the very figure of Orpheus and he looked at the question of a completely different telling and depiction than what was in the golden age of the reign of myth and religion. Dimitrije Popović in a song Night expresses it as follows.

The invisible body cuts the black horizon.

A line of darkness foreshadows a labyrinth of solitude.

...

Fragments of the monument of the night

They float in a black image of cosmic silence.

His entire lyric of a symbolic visualization of a mysterious event in an attempt to bring the dead back to life is a solemn incantation of this labyrinth of solitude in which modern man resides as an existential case of nomads and exiles of beauty in that black image of cosmic silence. It should always be pointed out that Dimitrije Popović is obsessively linked to the fusion of romanticism and surrealist inspiration in painting and poetry, which resulted in exceptional works of art from Lautreamont do René Chara, for example. What was the program of romanticism, namely the connection of the archaic and the contemporary, the occult and the mysterious in the reversal of the being of the world as in Novalis i Nervous, remains an inspiration for art that strives to return beauty to the deified world of nothingness. What is the author's note of appropriating a long tradition of reviving the spirit of Orphic chants in modernity and in a postmodern context is precisely what the title of the literary theorist's book symbolizes Ihab Hassan Orpheus torn to pieces, it is a constant both in Dimitrije's painting and in his poetry. In the middle, therefore, is a confrontation with the secret of the mystery that goes beyond the limits of the body and its perishability, and in the figure of Orpheus it has its own telling symbolic point of fusion and separation. What is separated tries to unite again. Love for Eurydice, however, is a tragic case of the sudden disappearance of a beloved woman. The descent into Hades is therefore a symbolic search for the unattainable, which no longer resides in the sky, but is deep in the darkness of the terrible. This is why Dimitrije Popović does not paint Orpheus, but sings about his shadows in Hades, about his traces of revealing beauty that opens up a space of pleasure in moving through that fateful labyrinth of solitude.

Let us return again to Blanchot and his consideration of Orpheus' gaze. It seems that from that literary space it is possible to approach Popović's effort to bring the Mysteries of the Word to life as a picture. After all, it is no coincidence that his poetry is a permeation of philosophical speech with the possibilities of the symbolic power of images, because for him the world of painting is exactly what this world is called. gives true reality a higher meaning than the banality and triviality of technically organized survival in modern times. The idea of ​​painting precedes the real image and its uniqueness and individuality, and the mythic-religious spiritual horizon with figures as signifiers of the 'fate' of the historical passage of time imprints its stamp on everything transient and physically fragile. Perhaps this is the reason why his vision of art is formally classical, but in the sign of metamorphosis with a clear clash of the sublime and the banal, pure Platonic forms and Gnostic tainted everyday life imbued with symbols of death and the apocalypse. Blanchot, in fact, also says this:

"When Orpheus descends on Eurydice, art is the power through which the night opens. With the power of art, the night welcomes him, it becomes the welcoming intimacy, harmony and harmony of the first night. But Orpheus came down for Eurydice, for him she is the extreme that art can reach. Under the name that hides it and the veil that covers it, it is an extremely dark place towards which art, longing, death and night seem to be heading. It is the moment in which the essence of the night approaches like a second night. (...) Greek myth states; a work can only be created if the immeasurable experience of depth (which the Greeks considered necessary for the work and in which the experience bears its immensity) is not pursued for its own sake. Depth is not revealed immediately, it is shown only by hiding in the work" (Maurice Blanchot, Literary space).

In the song Orpheus' shadow a striking verse by Dimitri Popović reads:

The constellation fades away in the beauty of ineffable silence.

Orphic chants in the modern world are precisely that inexpressible silence with which poetry opposes the cacophony of voices of this nihilism of the technosphere in which visual fascination with the digital void has become the only authoritative experience of telling. That's why Dimitrije Popović starts from the possibility of creative repetition of life as an artistic event that crystallized in a work freed from excess emotions, experiences, offensive sensibility. And that is why this painting and this poetry is on the path of pure idea as a form that itself appears in a metamorphic state. Although formally it seems that this poetry belongs to his inner psychogram by which the painter, cloaked in the cloak of primordial poetry, enters through a mythical plunge into the heart of darkness directly into his ownness and a measure of intimacy, it is still only an illusion. Like Borges's poetic cosmogony in which ideas and phenomena beyond the epochal time merge, Theocritus' nightingale and Kafka's raven also exist in the same way, so also in the collection Orpheus' shadow we encounter telling as a depiction of what transcends the track in time. In the song Narcissus we read the last verse

Mesmerized by the flash, the character tends to his character.

And indeed, just as in Mannerism painting, which Dimitrije Popović appropriated very early in his creative way and gave it a completely new meaning at the end of the 20th century, so in his poetry the question of imitating the original, its fatal copy and simulacrum is raised again and again. Narcissus is a paradigm of our fascination with our own image in the visual nihilism of the world, but also something else that is so easily forgotten. It is the fatal fate of the desire to perpetuate the beauty that disappeared from the depths of the world with the Orphic chants, and therefore the narcissistic age necessarily requires a loss of meaning and a fall into the technical abyss of simulation. Tragically, Orpheus and Narcissus meet in a strange way in something that connects the essence of art and the dark shadow of self-recognition in this abandoned world.

With his artistic search, Dimitrije Popović is on the path of that merging and disappearance of the world as a staging of events in a picture that still bewitches and seduces, disturbs and awakens joy and delight in the age of absolute disembodiment, that indifferent age of actuality without the last secret of creation and life. The language of his poetry eventually opens up space for the image as in a poem Picture from Orpheus's shadow, which also expresses this, with which this speech in the labyrinth of solitude should end.

The world disappears into the mystery of existence

To confirm with a picture

Your own eternal impermanence.

Dimitrije Popović's poetry is a celebration of the search for a universal form of fusion of words and images, and by choosing a mythical decor with an abundance of surrealist sets of metaphors and symbolic markings of the already artistically existing world, this book elevates its author to the place from which he observes the history of Orpheus's shadow with the eye of sublime experience as his own. own contribution to the transformation of that original chaos into images of lasting beauty.