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    MARTIN ZELMENIS

    Meditations for Some Dying Fire
    (1998)

    It is (it is, I know it!) a common feeling - nearly everyone has experienced it to a certain degree - that the very basic reality of his/her life is playing hide-and-seek with him/her, and there is no sure way at all to witness and feel - and experience it, fully to take part in it - our real life is always somewhere else. It's always warm and sunny in some place we are not.

    Well, while freedom in general has been resident here in the Baltics for a few years already it's easy to observe there are two kinds of freedom simultaneously: freedom to create something and freedom not to create anything at all. It seems obvious only the first one bears fruit. (Who needs such fruit? It's another pressing question.) Most unfortunately creation has got some pressing demands of its own. No matter how great the artist, he/she is no God, and always has got to have materials to create from, spiritual, intellectual, accidental - you name the adjective. I have not discovered this - it was Susan Sontag who stated that photography was a language, and any language may be used for lots of different purposes. (In novels as well as in poems, in prescriptions, captions, cookbooks and so on...) And when someone has taught himself/ herself some tricks of the trade, has mastered the language to some extent, it is possible for such persons to start the same in a different capacity. It's sad to see former friends and colleagues swapping their artistic integrity for the fast buck. Photography - at least picture-making - is a widespread language, and probably the only one that is spoken, even if one at times doesn't comprehend what he/she is saying. What may one think hearing a former artist saying in his work: Sorry, folks, but nowadays I can make art no more, I can make only money? But then - is art always Art, and does it need such a bulk of followers?

    I am no specialist in the works and importance of William Blake as I've always had serious reservations to indulge in studying his works, no matter how highly esteemed he is. No matter how little do I know of him there is an idea of his worth touching upon - he's stated somewhere something like the World of Imagination was the World of Eternity. If I have got this right the saying means it is enough to succumb to fantasies in order to live in our real world - a world that is really debased in comparison with the all-embracing imaginations and fantasies of other worlds that exist only in our minds. It is kind of ridiculous: he, Blake lived in a world that was less beknownst to its very inhabitants, and still he yearned to understand, to feel some kind of highly probable Eternity, and not the real world. Well, in those dark and distant times the world of humans could still be fooled into imagining this very same Eternity in order not to live their lives in a world that poured only miseries over them (no videos, no discos, no high-speed car-crashes to the poor bastards! In their wildest dreams they could not even imagine anything of the kind). Well, nowadays one can see much, if not all of the real misery in the world on TV - and in what way does our art offer anything better than this very same cheap imagination, those same incomplete and even methodically incompetent fantasies, and an opportunity not face the real world, but only some ersatz that even doesn't care to mask itself properly in order to hint and pass on as some higher understanding of our being, of the human condition. (But art has nothing to do with it! And philosophy too! And so there is no way for the common man to get a fuller insight into his real condition, he is left knee-deep in his own misery.) And - how funny! - seeing this real misery (it's ours! It's ours!) doesn't make it much more real for us, the beholders. Currently every religious movement and interest-group has got its artists (not to mention gays and lesbians). Everybody's got a bunch of his/her material interests, and sometimes even spiritual interests, while in general view it seems the time for anything more-or-less universal has happily passed in favour of very funny and very cute marginalisations. Probably that tells why people in general expect less and less of art - and the whole field is left just for art-freaks alone? Art is more a group thing nowadays than it has ever been here. Lots of things swarm around us. Seeing suffering on TV happily doesn't induce suffering in anybody. What a cute little planet we have got: it is Our Mother Earth where we have learned to contemplate any far-away sufferings, disasters as well as happiness while munching popcorn in front of the TV set, and at the same time to feel spiritually and mentally involved in everything but ourselves. Sort of disjointment.

    A marriage counsellor stated that in order to make things happen again in one's family one must change oneself first, and only then he/she may expect his/her partner to make the change (in attitude, habits, sex - you just name it!) he/she wishes so devoutly and the lack of which has spoiled much of the once suspected marital bliss. So it will do nothing good to your marriage at all if you feel it necessary or preferable to imagine and only mentally support (the word is imagine) all the good things as if they were happening in your household already, and to do nothing really substantial and basic in this field at all. Art might once have done (or tried to do) something good to the world, but somehow it seems to have got lost in the middle of itself somewhere - and all the people who might be influenced by this said art got lost along with it. Where are they nowadays? Mending their marriages that are in shambles?

    Remembrance is an act of imagination: and, if my word isn't enough, believe at least in this, please: it's been proved scientifically. We that come from the former Eastern bloc feel rather like antiquities, with values and ways of thought long lost in the more prosperous parts of the world. A definite portion of feeling ashamed is involved in this position, too. Are we some relicts from ancient past, embodiments of history or what? Relicts, busy to prove to everybody else, to ourselves that we are just like the rest of the civilised world? Well, sure - we are. Walking on two legs and wearing smart ties amply proves it. We are and at the same time we are not. And this makes the whole situation rather awkward. Imagination plays a bad trick both on the East and the West. Just like the perception of reality (some might call it misery of reality) can't be communicated directly to anyone; you get reality only through other senses, as hearing and even seeing is often not enough, just in the same way art allows you not to feel anything - if your imagination has got the wrong wavelength. One may say somehow it always misses the point. How can we be like the rest of the world with our dissimilar former everyday experiences, with pretences to be someone else, make art like all the other world does and adopt it's ways. Wishful thinking called imagination kills real freedom of the spirit, and rather unfortunately this is a luxury we can't afford. It's foolish to pretend and think that freedom has come to our world for ever and it is bound to put everything in order without our own direct personal involvement.

    If we, the East-Europeans, are still going strong it is mainly not for our imagination, but for our experience that's still not sorted out properly. It would be wise for anyone not forget that both Hitler and Stalin were two large-scale dreamers responsible for a big part of all those indents and bullet-marks made in the world's consciousness - and they ought to be regarded as such. Poor civilised world, we, the East-Europeans may exclaim, what great experience it has missed - not being included in the grey and-not-so-grey zone of Russian influence! It would have much less to imagine if it's experiences were up to the mark! If art can't at least try to show some way back to reality of its beholder, better there be no art at all, for those historical fantasists very much like both of the aforementioned, the great imaginators of our day are just waiting for their turn to come into light, and empty fantasies of an ideal array of the world, applicable by wish and executable by some kind of supposed order are their breeding-ground.

    I have not discovered this - it was Susan Sontag who stated that photography was a language, and any language may be used for lots of different purposes. If no-one interferes, photography basically represents objects as found in real life, doesn't it? And photography - at least picture-making - is a very common language, used very widely, and one has to point out it is probably the only language spoken by persons at times not comprehending fully what they are or might be saying. Definitely it is a bonus! One is offered a treat - a possibility to create sub-consciously and without any personal involvement at all. Recently I had a relaxed chat in a merry-going company, and one of the artists in it casually remarked that realism has currently long been in fashion; I completely agreed with him, and on my part I just added that realism has risen to favour thanks to the fact it has always been used as a substitute for reality. The regular artistic imagination, the lauded freedom to imagine in its most popular form - as I have understood this fellow Blake and mistrusted his meta-physical approach on the spot just for the commonness and superficiality of it - just once more thus stood out as one of the main stumbling-blocks in the way to grasp reality more fully.

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