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1.OBELISKS

2. MEANING AND ETERNITY

3. I DREAM THE DREAMS OF SHEPHERDS

12. THE MOON REMEMBERS THE ASTRONAUTS

ON POETRY

As a poet I write about a variety of subjects but, for my part, the heart of poetry is the poetry of the heart. Love as the most significant journey of life and its final destination. We come to this world through love, to love and to be loved. I also believe that the greatest force in the universe is not nuclear energy, electromagnetism, or gravitation, but the towering power of love, because love is a redeeming force. The key to the amelioration of the human condition lies neither in the development of new weapons, nor in the conquest of space, but in meaningful interpersonal and family relations, in the elevation of women and in nurturing families, in the respectful, tender and caring education of children. It is through the grace of love that human salvation and even immortality itself become possible.

Poetry is commonly defined as an art form in which lofty thought and feeling are expressed in elevated discourse. Shakespeare’s Theseus in A Midsummer Night says: “as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and name.”

Stylistically the poems presented here feature disparate styles. Pieces such as You Are a Whispering Forest and Weeds and Hyacinths belong to the class of sonnets. Obelisks, on the other hand, lacks rhyming schemes and metrical feet. Nevertheless, through the use of artistic devices like the symmetrical structure of stanzas, repetition and contrast of words, the composition moves beyond the ordinary domain of prose.

Poetry is a comprehensive term that transcends the formal schemes of the craft. Thus, free verse and other modalities of experimental work don’t employ traditional poetic devices but still may depend on certain natural speech rhythms, ornate language, images and metaphors. The works presented to you here consist of both formal poetry and experimental verse.

Traditional stanzas, rhyming lines alternate here with free composition, visual patterns, hybrid constellations of letters and images rise as concrete poems. In my vision, the blending of disparate genres, the creation of composite art forms, the blurring of the boundaries between text and picture is a creative act that bridges literature and the visual arts. It mediates between poetry and painting.

The satirical verse Postmodern Light, which is presented here, was previously published in Views to Muse, an anthology of 1996 from New York, edited by Judith Grant. It also appeared in Ignazio Corsaro’s journal Lo Straniero in Italy and in Symmetry 2000, an interdisciplinary book edited by I. Hargittai and T.C. Laurent, published in London (Portland Press, 2002).

The term Postmodernism is a misnomer. Every generation lives in the eternal present, and every age perceives its time as modern. We cannot transcend time. Yet the concept of Postmodernism implies that somehow we have progressed beyond the now into the future, which is not true. Instead of calling our time the Postmodern Cycle, we could better describe it as the Information Era, or the Electronic Epoch, or the Space Age, or the Period of Globalization.

If the ironic spirit of mystification, aesthetic shock and anarchy reflect the irrational response to the crisis and disintegration of high culture in Europe during the First World War, than Dada was an early Postmodern literary and artistic movement. But scholars delay the birth of Postmodernism and suggest that it started after the Second World War.

In the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory (1993) Linda Hutcheon says that “Postmodernism is a period label generally given to cultural forms since the 1960s”. She and others attribute to Postmodernism an assortment of eclectic styles characterized by reflexivity, irony and the substitution of highbrow intellectual experience for an undemanding and superficial culture. Regardless of the designation of Postmodernism, we live indeed in an artificial electronic environment in which fragmentary sensations, porous nostalgia, disposable simulacra, jumbled images and messages on billboards, television, video, radio, computers and cellular phones overwhelm us.

It seems that the clearest description of Postmodernism comes from architecture. In The Language of Postmodern Architecture (1975), Charles Jencks discusses the rise of an eclectic, hybrid architectural style that evolved in the aftermath of the Second World War, which he identifies as Postmodern. It emerged in the 1960s in reaction to the austere, rational and grey International Modern Style, replacing it with vernacular elements, colourful traditional ornaments and animated properties that often deliberately are designed to produce comic effects.

Yet the notion of Postmodernism invests the world with specific qualities that obtain the ontological status of universals. It is an invented syndrome populated by abstract attributes such as reflexivity, irony, fragmentation, nostalgia, and eclecticism, which appear to be inseparable from the tissue of the term, growing on it like pears on the tree. But regardless whether these abstract universals really exist outside of the mind or are nothing but words (as the Nominalists would say), they can be also associated, as already mentioned above, with other period designations than Postmodernism, such as the Information Age or the Period of Late Capitalism and Globalization.

Since I believe in the constructive, life-serving mission of art and science, I reject the intrinsic Nihilism of Postmodernism, the liberation of aesthetics from ethics. Despite the fact that Post-modernism is not a monolithic bloc, numerous artists within the movement subscribe to the culture of morbidity and death, incorporating into their oeuvre sadistic acts, pornographic violence, blood rituals and sacrificial dismemberment. Postmodern shock artists produce Sodomizing machines, perform castration ceremonies and show cannibalization of newborn babies. In 1969 the ritual happenings of the Viennese Actionist artists led to the death of one of their members, the 28 year old Rudolf Schwartzkogler.

I dissociate myself from these pathological expressions of art, from the culture of death, morbidity, wickedness and cynicism. I believe that we can celebrate or debase life by choice. Life is a precious gift, even though that it is often a hard, difficult and hazardous journey. Twenty five centuries ago Aristotle already observed that the aim of art is to advance and honour the good. This is as valid today as it was then. In my vision the creative power of art can play a significant role in ameliorating the human condition, in making this planet a habitable and welcoming environment for ourselves and for future generations. Without concern, responsibility, care, compassion and love we cannot survive.

Although Postmodernism concerns itself with the investigation of various abstract universals, truth is not necessarily one of them. This represents a break up with the historical continuity of the search for verisimilitude. Similarly to Plato, philosophers through the ages held that truth is correspondence and coherence, the consistent agreement between statement and fact. Wittgenstein compared the relationship between truth and reality to the accord between a picture and what it represents. In the trial of Jesus, Pontius Pilate posed the question: What is truth? Jesus did not answer. His silence is an absolute echo, the perfect reflection of itself.

Under the influence of such modern philosophers as Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault, Sartre and Derrida, the Postmodernists claim that no objective truths exist and there are no absolutes. Derrida’s Theory of Deconstruction plays a salient role in the Postmodernist attack on reason, truth and meaning. Deconstructionists maintain that a text is just marks on paper and the intentions of its author are irrelevant. They claim that the text assumes significance only in the reader’s mind who constructs the meaning independently of the author’s message. This leads to the conclusion that all knowledge is relative, truth is always subjective and meaningful human communication is impossible.

The development of Quantum Physics, Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy, Gödel’s mathematical Incompleteness Theorem and the rise of Chaos Theory have contributed to the Postmodern vision of reality as a subjective experience. Mind you, science is the most powerful instrument that we have to investigate the objective foundations of the universe. However, in the Postmodernist view, science does not discover the foundations of nature but embeds them in contextual knowledge as a social construct.

This outlook has created a great deal of confusion. Stanley Fish makes a very important clarification in this regard in an article published in The New York Times of May 21, 1996. We have to bear in mind, he says, that it is not the physical world itself that is socially constructed but, rather the concepts, theories, paradigms and methods used by science to research and describe reality.

While the Postmodernists hit the nail on the head in pointing out the science is a social construct, the claim that science is not asymptotic does not hold water. Science does make progress. Rather than refuting Newton, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity incorporates and complements it. The landing of astronauts on the moon became possible because Newtonian physics quite accurately describes the solar system. And it also provides evidence that meaningful communication is possible.

In spite of advocating the tenet that everything is relative, Postmodernism adheres to the idea that no society can claim superiority over another and that all cultures are equal in value. Although in various respects this posture can promote racial tolerance and sounds politically correct, it also represents a hypocritical disposition and a counter-productive frame of mind. History does not suggest that societies are equal. All to the contrary, it demonstrates that people around the globe are not on the same level of social, economic, political, and cultural development. The human sacrifices of the Aztecs, the burning of widows in India, the honour killings, the ongoing genocide or the slavery practiced in parts of the world evidently refute the myth that all cultures are equal in value.

Theorists and critics have classified a whole slew of poets, writers and artists as Postmodern more or less on the basis of the period in which they flourished. In various respects Postmodernism looks like a Procrustean bed into which ideas are put forcibly to fit a preconceived scheme. It is like Robert Rauschenberg’s telegram: “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so”.

My Poems have been published in various forms, including literary journals and anthologies such as Poetry Canada and Selection from 20th Century Visual Poetry, a volume edited by Z. Kovacs and L.L. Simon.

Collaboration with Clifford Pickover led to the publication of my oeuvre in a number of his books. Among these reproduced here are Einstein, a frontispiece in Pickover’s Strange Brains and Genius (New York: Plenum, 1998) and a longer version of The Mystery of Time published in Time: A Traveler’s Guide (Oxford University Press, 1998).

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