The game of the body and eternity

Budva City Theatre symbolically opened its edition this year with the dance performance "The Night Gathers Centuries". There is no more beautiful poetic epithet for one night, nor a more symbolic opening of a cultural event. And according to my humble knowledge of poetry, no more beautiful, some would say love poems, ever written.

However, I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that “The Night Gathers Ages” should not be read only as a love poem. In it, love is only the occasion, but the essential theme is the moment in which a person first senses his own being. Therefore, this Šeегошево A masterpiece is not just a meeting of two people. It is, above all, a meeting of the finite with the infinite. That is precisely why this very night, which probably happened long ago over Perast, is more precious than a century. So, not because it lasts longer, but because in a single moment it contains more truth than an entire human life scattered in everyday life.

Time, for Njegoš, is not a value in itself. It becomes valuable only when it comes into contact with the eternal. Everything else is mere duration, and this is existence! The question inevitably arises whether, for Njegoš, time is just a flow of events or an ontological space in which, in rare moments, a person's being is revealed. Heidegger would say that the truth of being does not occur in chronology, but in the event of discovery. It seems to me that this is precisely why, with Njegoš, one night can become more expensive than an entire century, because it is not about the quantity of time, but about its filling with the presence of truth. And a student of Heidegger's chair, from Ljubotinje, Montenegro, emeritus professor Vlado Vukicevic, with whom I often discussed this topic in the style of a peripatetic, replied curtly in his usual manner: "Well, time doesn't exist, because if it did, we would have a sense of time!"

Here Njegoš achieves what few poets manage to do, which is to free love from the psychological moment and elevate it towards the ontological. To love means to be awakened, that is, to be introduced to the secret of one's own existence. It is as if a person only sees himself for the first time in the eyes of another, not as a person, but as a spark of the infinite, as Njegoš described it.

That is why this song is a kind of initiation. Not an initiation into love, but into something much greater. It is the architecture of the universe and everything visible and invisible. Because every true initiation implies the death of the old worldview. After it, a person remains the same on the outside, but is never the same on the inside. This is the hidden drama of this unique play of the mind with which Rade Tomov rewarded and inspired us through the song “Noć skuplja vijeka”. After that experience, it is no longer possible to return to ordinary life, because the soul has already tasted what transcends time.

Perhaps that is why Njegoš spent his entire life searching for heights. He traveled across Europe, talking with the aristocracy, philosophers, and artists. However, his “grand tour,” or rather his greatest journey, was not geographical, but spiritual. It was a journey from the apparent to the essential. From history to metaphysics. His cosmopolitanism was not a fascination with the world, but the ability to search for the same universal logos in every pocket of the world. That is why he could be simultaneously the bishop and ruler of small Montenegro and a citizen of the infinite cosmos.

His aesthetics are not a celebration of beauty for the sake of enjoyment. For Njegoš, beauty is essential proof that the world is not chaos. It is a trace of the lost chain of unity. When he speaks of the beauty of a woman, he is actually speaking of the beauty of order. Of the harmony that precedes everything that hands can later touch, in fact that extraordinary question Branko Miljkovic which reads: "Will we be able to touch what we say with our hands?!"

His masculinity is not a historical category either, but a metaphysical one. It is not power over others, but power over oneself. A masculinity that knows how to carry strength, to be silent before mystery and wisdom, but also to kneel before beauty. Only such a man can become free, and Njegoš was born with it and he always carried it with him.

That's probably why Igor Kirov, in the play of the body that opened the current Grad teatar, felt that Njegoš could not just be spoken about. In fact, Njegoš is not a poet of movement because he writes about movement, he is a movement because none of his verses stand still and each is directed towards the ascent. Towards that inner vertical through which a person emerges from himself and becomes what he has always suspected he is.

Maybe that's exactly the meaning of the song "Night Gathers Eternity"?! Not to teach us how to love, but how through one night, one discovers one's being and realizes freedom.

(The author is a lecturer at the Faculty of Government and European Studies in Podgorica)