Saturday, July 17, 2004

Book review by Diderik Humble jr.



Author and poet Diderik Humble jr. submitted the following as per boook review of Milan Kundera's Igorance. It takes an ignorant...

It is up for consideration by the Utopos Book Review Council, 15 Parlsey Street, Sussex. And I will say this only once: Any notes of queries should be addressed to them.

Editorially,

phatic

***


A Last Sermon for Milan Kundera

Communism didn't collapse, Milan. Regimes self-identifying as state socialist crumbled and dissappeared. In most of the so-called communist bloc. But even that statement can't be generalized, Milan. Belo-Russia still self-identifies as such. What about Cuba? What abut the so-called welfare states, or mixed economies (admittedly crumbling to the pressures of capital interest), those places where reformism managed to crush the revolutionaries? What about North Korea, China? What about the millions of underprivileged that live in my flower pots under the weight of five hundred suns?

What about the dreams of your youth, Milan? Do you remember what team you supported before you resigned to the advice of bookmakers? Do you remember how the blood flowed in your veins, Milan, when you realized that this here world is conjunctive? Do you think, Milan, that you were the only one to make your observations?

Do you feel lonely and abandoned now, Milan, or do you hope for the redemption in a mortal community of cowards? Do you really believe that they will save your memory? Will they remember their own betrayal as they will remember yours?

For there is something to glean from your writing, Milan Kundera.

Betrayal.

Linkage



Sometimes when you stroll the streets of Catmen Town or attend a conference of confederates, you notice a link. It retrieves in you the memory of dismemberment, when your arm was just an arm, and your eyes may have been drifting around it, detached. It may have been your older brother before he was flushed down and left to retention.

Anyway, sometimes you are reminded you are not, in fact, a tourist in this place. You may be wearing your fancy shirt, or you might be waiting for someone. Perhaps you are on your way home from work, the path you've been walking so many times, you've forgotten its pathness. And then all of a sudden you remember that once this path was foreign to you, before it became a part of you, taken for granted like your old cup of Joe.

Some people say it's your personal god, your chi, that is attending to you. Others call it a kind of telepathic energy, insisting, perhaps, on the divisibility of bodies.

They don't know about your older brother, buried in some sewer, returned, purified, to the waters that serve as a source for your morning shower.

"I Sleep With Large Eyes"



Poem by Torgeir Schjerven in translation. Enjoy.

http://home.no.net/torgfje/utopos/images/sleep.jpg