Dan T. Cristea, In Memoriam
. . . Fabro gentil, ben sai,
Ch’ancor tragico caso è caro oggetto
E speso l’orror va col diletto.
G. B. Marino, „A Guido Reni,” 1620
„. . . dramul de oroare
cu care mi-am răscumpărat de fiecare dată darul„
(. . . the ounce of horror
with which, each time, I used to redeem my gift)
Ioan Es. Pop, „Pe vremea când . . . „
„In 1946, it was estimated that 70%
of 3,135 Ieudeni were starving; 25% were insufficiently fed,
and only 5% had enough to eat throughout the entire year.”
Gail Kligman, Dist. Professor of Cultural Anthropology;
Principal Investigator: University of California, Los Angeles,
The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research,
„Class Warfare and Collectivization in Ieud, Maramureș,”
Contract Number: 816-17g.
Archival and Oral History Field Work commencing in 1978;
report published in 2003.
I
By way of a personal protocol and in view of the fact that precious few Romanian scholars bother to communicate their research of their poets in languages other than Romanian, and in view of the fact that Ioan Es. Pop’s biographical data are plentifully available on the electronic networks in English, I opted, in my present discussion, not to reiterate them.
When I selected the verse Flesh Made of Dreams, from Pop’s Ieudul fără ieșire (Ieud of no exit, 1999) as the title for my bilingual anthology of modern and contemporary Romanian poetry in 2010, I thought it encapsulated brilliantly a summation of an historical, anti-heroic aesthetic comparable to that of the classical Greek tragedians’: their characters, grievously lacking in both freedom and choices, are driven to exile, slavery and suicide. Also, they obstinately refuse to go silent into the cold night of personal erasure as Dylan Thomas might have put it. The tragic characters return us, in their dejection, to the familiar patterns of rational thought’s inability to deal with vindictive gods and the blind spirits of retribution in other human beings. Internalized guilt and generational curses stretch far into the future of helpless individuals as the indurate rule for all that breathes.
It bears repeating with regard to my initial archaic comparison that the Greek city state obliged even its poorest citizens to watch the annual winter-to-early Spring shows of plays like the Oresteia, the Suppliants, or the Seven Against Thebes regardless of the citizens’ living conditions. Heavy doses of stories about incest, parricide, madness and captivity was a city-wide ritual that was believed to benefit the physical environment. By honoring the god Dionysus, the masterful productions were only in part high literary art events. Attending the performances in dance, song and dialogue aroused unambiguous group commiseration with the tribal archetypes being invoked as overseers behind the harvest for that year. While civil wars and murderous sieges raged on, the stagings of those dramatists’ splendid artifacts were really about . . . agriculture.
But while select Ieud peasants were summarily shot, hounded and imprisoned by party „revolutionaries” as enemies of the people back in 1946, a far worse crime was being committed against the time-tested structures of survival and healing among the members of the community. As paranoia set in, whole sets of sensitive bondings in trust and amity were dynamited. Ioan Es. Pop’s despairing life and art, like that of his fellow countrymen’s, couldn’t have been more depressing than what he had found two decades later, during his teaching assignment in Ieud. A village that had been steam-rolled over by Comintern directives for Romania’s volunteered collectivization.
Pop was indeed able to sense the gash in the psyche of the place and the souls of the people. No one went unscathed and no one could escape from Ieud; it had become its close homophone „iad,” Romanian for „hell” and for all Romania.
II
The crushing of all the traditional structures that used to help a population cope with their physical surroundings and with each other probably alerted Mircea Eliade early on to enjoin creative Romanians to keep on writing („Scrieți, băeți, scrieți„) at all costs. It was, perhaps, the best countermeasure against the general paralysis imposed by the calamitous Soviet doctrine of „social engineering.” Writing, therefore, in Ioan Es. Pop’s poems—that could erode the cinder blocks of his seclusion, for instance—in combination with one or two other thematic clusters would deserve, to my mind, a modicum of elucidation in English. The flashes to „Mircea,” e.g., lend a vague mythic reference to the grim apocalypticism of some of Pop’s poems comparable to the American emblem in John Berryman’s „Henry” chronicles of 1967-1972. In Pop’s case Mircea’s vaunted advent may have been none other than Mircea Eliade’s!
Quite probably it is Eliade of the Sacred and the Profane, and of the comparative religion scholarly persona that substantiates and fuels the motif of Pop’s frequent and objectless „pray(er)”. The genealogy of the theme goes back to a long array of modernists like Arghezi’s Psalms, Brecht’s „Hauspostille,” Eugen Ionescu’s „Rugă,” Buzea’s „Rugăciune,” and Dan Laurențiu’s Mountolive to mention but a few. Pop intersperses „prayer” in settings of transition, introduction or ending to introspective strings just as his classic predecessors did. Or whenever his mouthpiece in a particular poem reaches the Sartrean state of Huis clos (end of WWII, 1944), of l’ enfer as other people. The social body is brought to its knees in abjection before gigantically complex systems about to collide and consume each other into the same void they came from.
Wordless prayer, one should add, is part and parcel of the anti-metaphysical modernist legacy of the cosmic timelessness of pointlessness.
In tones reminiscent of a Vergilian poeta vates Pop also warns himself that what might exist on the other side of the cloistering walls that his writing wears out might not be a better place than what he had been trying to break away from. Not only was Romania like the poor tormented Ieud; the world was, and may still be, like Romania.
On the relevant issue of existential entrapment Pop most assuredly walks among the undying greats T. S. Eliot talks about in his „Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). One could go back to Homer’s sentient shades in the 11th Book of the Odyssey; or the benighted and shackled humanity in Plato’s parable of the Cave in the Republic; or the philosophers and unbaptized infants in Dante’s „Limbo” of the Inferno. Marin Sorescu’s 1968 play Iona (Jonah, who, by slashing his way from the stinking belly of a sea-monster discovers he is in the belly of a still larger monster) intimated the unbearable circularity of inexistence during the 1945-1989 Periprava and „Canal” forced labor years of Romania.
Pop’s passing, and playful, allusions to the Ministry of Tourism, to doctor Angela Marinescu, to Ardeal and the precise location of his soul, function not as comic relief but as intensifying foils to the several self-debasing (and expiatory?) personal rituals that tell his readers a poet is able to design a far worse hell-on-earth for himself than any despot can. To the numbing nihilism his contemporaries wallow in Pop longs for a weekly retreat in the filthy back room of a meat store so he could roll in the piles of gore dripping ordure and thus recharge his batteries of kindness towards other people. Sartre’s unbearable „autres,” no doubt. In the place of the blood of the lamb that atones for all of humanities’ sins we, his readers, co-host, with Pop, a Cybele-Mithraic double header that is as revolting as it is redeeming.
A respectable literature in support of the poetic mode of assisted self-debasement stretches back to Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Aldous Huxley‘s autobiographical, 1954, The Doors of Perception—the title is from William Blake’s 1793 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—and Henri Michaux’s 1956 Misérable Miracle all three returning the reader, and Pop, to the record of the (un)happy experience. Pop’s embedding of his defiled flesh („spurcată” is his word) in his meters suggests his readers’ and his own groping for an independent framework of consciousness and all its corollaries; even what it is like to have no will and no emotions of one’s own.
So much for Rimbaud’s „long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens. Toutes les formes d’amour, de souffrance, de folie” between binges of intoxication and prayer. But here is Samuel Beckett’s situationist dither that was blowing all across the nineteen sixties, seventies and eighties in his Malone Meurt, 1951, and Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958. The poetry that has come down to us is no mere testimonial of disaffection; it is a stance that holds no pretensions to higher truths than the poetries of the topical, the personally clinical, and the fugitive.
As a parting gift, and on the basis of a very small corpus of poems, Pop makes sure that his reader does not find himself trapped in his way of thinking as Pop felt trapped in Ieud and in the world. Three very discrete hints use his collections in the process of being read, and through the book’s concrete materiality—i.e., the paper stock; the printer’s ink—to escape from the poems as contents. The first is resorting to the earliest Near Eastern writing convention of words that are not separated by spaces; as in the much expected „Mircea” who, ironically, suprasegmentally „nevershowsup.” His second is to remind the reader of himself and the poet as the bad boys who typically infuriate the world’s literary historians by not dotting their „i’s” or crossing their „t’s;” as in the hackneyed expression of Romania, the locus solus of the Gates of the Orient [sic]
Pop’s third instance of visual composition is the Apollinairian, calligram-like citing of the title of his first collection not horizontally but raindrop-like, tear-like, rolling semi-diagonally down the page. The way out of Ieud of the mind is for the reader’s eyes to trace the unprinted portion of the pulp in his hands all the way to its lowest edge and the beyond.
