|
At
the boundary of time by Marcelijus Martinaitis
We had been reminded of it every day: there were only months, weeks, then days left … The Earth was quaking, the sun was dimming, volcanoes were erupting, planes were falling, as well as governments … These and other dreadful omens were sent by the approaching zero time. Clairvoyants multiplied, religious sects began to fidget, hurried preparations for the overturn of time were started by entertainment centres, maternity hospitals, and thieves; since great quantities of inflammable materials and explosives had been accumulated, bandages for only that night were being prepared. The tallest Christmas tree in the world was promised – the illuminated TV transmission tower in Vilnius … But we had to take a more cheerful approach. What could go wrong at midnight, when the government, the President’s Office and the parliament were not working, when no laws could be passed or amended, when no state property was being sold to private owners, and the banks were closed? In fact, it was just an annual zero moment, a split second, a break, into which we would fall dizzily, losing our past, and all its problems, and still be free to meet the future.
The magic effect of the years, the calculation of time, the three zeros are like three empty barrels, attached to the third millennium by the figure two. But actually we will come to it only in 2001, after elections, after the decline of some political figures and parties, through the remnants of the budget, through a book famine, through the unemployment of artists and cultural workers, seeing children illiterate, lice, returning to Lithuanian villages after several decades, disdained old people, luxurious cars of state officials, only one of which would be enough to publish more than ten important authors’ books, which would all live longer than the whole of the statesman’s life, ever more dangerous to the nation. The rise of our own arrogant, anticultural caste, hatched in the warm nests of power, is ever more daring and menacing. A zero time for culture and creativity? It sounds even stranger after the recently celebrated ten years of the restored statehood of our country. Where are those creators and artists now who were writing and speaking so publicly at the beginning of the national revival? How did they disappear so quickly? These are zero questions. They lose their importance if we take a slightly different look at the great chronological cycles. The end of the second millennium was the happiest period in Lithuanian history. The true Lithuanian state was restored, with its own institutions, culture and currency; it became a member of the world community, and started to count its proper historical time, which had been flowing in a rather different way since 1009. But our nation was frequently excluded from the stream of historical time, and whole centuries were cut out and hidden. One of the most remarkable efforts of recent times was to make an inventory of our own history, to tie together its loose ends that were torn apart, and to fill in the empty spaces. During the first millennium, Lithuania seemed not to have its own time. We could not even tell if it was counted and how, and what were the thoughts associated with it. Lithuania was the last country to introduce European time, and that is the reason why we are always late. Writing was late, as well as books, art and technology; but never wars, plague and occupations. Even our history found its vernacular only in the first half of the 19th century, expressed orally and by the pen of Daukantas. We try to find the names of gods and princes in records, extant in other languages; they did not speak Lithuanian there either. We have not finished the discovery of Lithuania in the enormous millennial involute. That is the basis of our Lithuanian Utopia: we are still looking for our future in the past, and we have let somebody else have the future, carelessly giving it away as a present or as private property … But still, when we cross the border of years and liberate ourselves from everyday worries, we are more than ever thoughtful about time, which manifests itself as an omnipresent, generating, rising, mortifying power, independent of man and taking everything to a state of non-existence. It flows through stone and metal, through the highest walls, paintings and poems. From what spring does it gush? Is it spreading or shrinking? Is it not God, His invisible, but omnipresent and everlasting, intangible, inexorable and inexplicable will, inaccessible to any measurement and subject to nobody? However, millennia have passed since man resorted to rituals, magic, gods, religion, and finally culture and art, trying to regulate time, to control its rhythms, to accelerate or slow it down, and sometimes to turn it around. Like the inhuman effort of the ancient Egyptians to stop time, to shut it up in gigantic pyramids, to exert influence over its flow, through buildings, letters on rocks, eternal fire kindled by our forefathers. They felt empowered through their rites, offerings and recitations. To turn time around, to roll it into a ball, to let it never slip from their tribe, and thus it meant an eternal, endless return.
We have inherited the belief from our forefathers that time is informative, because our fate is already predetermined in its signs, figures and rhythms, as are future events; they can be experienced, seen, and felt while crossing the borders of years and eras, celebrating the calendar festivals. It is then that time opens, that we sink through its cracks and clefts to primal images, in which irrevocable judgements, concerning the future and the supreme will, are inscribed. In that cyclical, mythical time there are many playbacks, which in their totality operate as screens, as information systems. Our nation has been living according to this cyclical, utopian, agricultural time, rolled up into a ball, according to its calendar, for ages, managing to do everything not from the first day of one month to another, but from Christmas to Shrovetide, from Shrovetide to Easter, from Easter to Whitsun, from Whitsun to St John’s Day, and so on, every year … The awakening, regulating and criminal code of time, conceived by Nature and God, operated as an imperative requirement to observe order in life, in work, in holidays, in dying, and even after death. Time was experienced as not homogenous, flowing in fibres, in segments, which all had to be tied together during the great festivals, to keep the great rhythms in order. All the major Lithuanian writers try to express this experience. Their characters, when they are preparing for some action, start by entering the stream of time, by seeing their place more precisely in it, in its particular segment, and look for indications and signs in Nature. The idea of time acting through Nature, taken from the ancient Baltic world outlook, folklore and agrarian rites, was this primal creative framework which can still be detected today in the work of contemporary writers of prose and poetry. People who live by different rhythms may find it naive, but without it one loses the feeling of a cosy existence in time, of its eternal cycle. Today we live according to another sort of time, that of culture and creative work, which enables us to transcend the limits of our biological age, to continue our existence by recreating past images, by meeting people who lived, created and thought many years ago. Culture and artistic creation concentrate time, press it into a page, a poem, a picture or a symbol, or compress it in stone or metal. A perception of art makes time flow backwards, and that is the way nations start to remember about themselves, to become self-aware. The state is superfluous if its economy, institutions, resources, money and defence structures are not directed towards the main, ultimate goal, which is the creation of culture, and if it serves only biological survival. States emerge as cultural phenomena, and they disappear with the loss of their cultural memory and inability to create. Our state institutions, dominated by technocratic reasoning, are projecting Lithuania as an uninteresting country, consuming “according to European standards”, which means accepting the waste products of other cultures. When I ask myself, what will happen in 2000, the answer is – nothing. The time of creativity does not recognise zeros. Translated by ANTANAS DANIELIUS
|
