Krzysztof Czyżewski MEKASPOET
You can hardly draw a borderline between Jonas Mekas and poetry. It probably ceased to exist already when as a boy he used to graze cows in the fields around Semeniškiai, the place that was meant to become part of the new Lithuania in the aftermath of World War I. It was not yet there on the map when he was running away from his past, leaving behind the black hole torn by war and European totalitarianisms. It was not yet there when he was returning to his childhood while learning to live in New York, with Bolex camera in hand, in constant search for a new.
Separation of life from poetry meant, in his case, being cut off from reality, and eventually exile–incomparably more dangerous than being expelled from one's native country, being a stateless wanderer, émigré or human loneliness in a metropolis. It meant getting out of the mouth of Leviathan who could cling to reality. Having experienced Hell, he bit into life, was born again to remain faithful to the poet inside.
Jonas Mekas does not compose poems, he does not set them on paper. He neither invents nor encloses words in refined formal structures. He is a poet, not a creator of poetry.
He could subscribe to Marina Tsvetaeva’s statement: “Do not be afraid of the notebook with crossed out parts, not of a blank page, but be afraid of your own and wilful page.”
Visitors to Jonas Mekas’s room at the Anthology Film Archives will find a piece of paper on the wall with a quote from Cezanne: “Chatter about art is useless”. He is as economical in his words as in his life – he would not allow it to slip through his fingers. Before he utters a word, he’s overwhelmed by silence. Living poetry means recovering words to silence.
Pinned there on the wall, are also Gertrude Stein’s words: “I am I because my dog knows me”. The poet seeks cognition and expression for himself, extrapolating himself into the space of otherness which knows him differently, thus leading him to the true self.
Also there, you will find another slip with a quote from Bosho: “A poet needs to discipline himself every day”. This maxim was used by Czesław Miłosz, not only in relation to his own life writing, but also to his readings of the Idylls of Semeniškiai as the work of "…a visionary who lifts the most earthly details of reality to a higher level of intensity…".
Mekaspoet inhabits the space between word and silence, the otherness determines his identity, while he himself, thanks to attention practised in daily discipline, goes beyond the horizons marked by arbitrariness and lazy earthliness.
In an interview with Jérôme Sans, he admitted that he does not really make films, he just films: “When I film something, I don’t film it because I want to create something. I do it because I want to capture the essence there, in front of me”. However, the poet was there before the filmer was born. The camera is but an extension of the eye and all other senses of the poet.
In the centre of Jonasa Makes’ life stands He-Who-Watches. His is the axis mundi around which deposited are words and images. He is just like America from the Eighth Reminiscence - it immerses itself in everything that reality brings, into human fate, possession by memory and the depths of the past; “one drowning pull to wear memories down,/ tear away at longings, times past, as it goes dragging /clear up into itself, to its core....”
He-Who-Watches makes Jonas Mekas’ poetry. The writer comes too late. Only before the act of writing, in an eternal moment, words are able to return to the core itself, to the edge of silence, as in the Fourth Picture:
It's just
this image
just this
river
-willow
a bird
swings
just this
burning
sun
in the lips
of a stream
He-Who-Watches reaches beyond memory and beyond himself. He is always farther away than the past and always closer to the other within himself. Eternally homeless, he finds his home in every moment of infatuation, in each detail of reality, if he manages to reach eternity hidden in it. He is stronger than those who never leave home – “they hate all other places”.
He-Who-Watches is accompanied by the Wanderer. He left his home a long time ago, maybe with the first book he read. Since then, he has constantly been crossing thresholds. The most, probably, during the war, in 1944, when together with his brother Adolfas they boarded a train to Vienna, overtaken on its route by the Germans who sent them to a labour camp near Hamburg. He returns to Lithuania, and from Manhattan he returns to Brooklyn.
He is wiser than Ulysses with his experience - the loss of Ithaca is final. Real life is experienced by those who resists the sweet voices calling us “Home to which, I know, all roads have been erased”. Like a dog, he can get to like many places and get attached to each. However, you cannot put down your roots in each of them. The Wanderer carries inside the wounds of the healed scars from the places he was forced to leave, he may betray.
One expelled from his nest must push on. “We felt the pull of distance”. This comes from the First Reminiscence, very Hölderlinesque in spirit. It contains the matrix of the Wanderer's route: from Flensburg to the Neckar Valley, from the North to the South, from the deadly darkness to the life-giving luminosity. The Wanderer travels from Hell, through the once proud and now shattered Center of Europe, knows killings, starvation and degradation of man... Ruins tie his feet, pain and trauma of memory stop him at railway stations that “gave off a lingering stench of death and smoke”. Lonely and miserable, he is a witness to the “deep hollows staring back black death”.
The Wanderer saves the poet. He lays to sleep in bomb craters, hungry and conscious of the human condition, unable, yet, to overlook that fact that we lay, “surviving witnesses under the first flowers of spring”. He wanders on, southbound. The only answer to the questions of home and homeland - as in the Eighth Reminiscence - is the act of seeing which domesticated the world around: “Horizons and towns, bridges on rivers, / salt-marshes up north, windmills, / and wide-ranging autumn fields”. And again: “So we pushed on”.Where to? Always South, there where there is life again:
Now here we were months later, after all that death,
eyeing orchard slopes, trees,
and villas that hugged the hillsides
not believing any of it yet…
In the Reminiscences, the Wanderer leads the poet through the ruins of the post-war Europe. This journey, however, may take place in the loneliness of New York or in the depression of inner life, and the South may be an empty room window, a letter to friends or a dance with a camera during a family feast. Always, however, the Wanderer helps the poet see, positions the Beholder.
He-Who-Watches is one who left home, carrying inside the experience of the Wanderer. He has never left him, so he did not stay in places of death, in the nostalgia of escape and alienation. He stopped only at the places the Wanderer led him to, in the clearance of seeing, where poetry is born.
Mekaspoet meets us always at dawn, in daylight, our faces turned southwards. Whatever happened the night before, when the memory and the sleepless nightmare returned, when it really hurt and the wounds of consciousness opened, is checked by the poet in everyday self-discipline, purified with the power of life and subjected to spiritual transgression. Sometimes, he invites on a journey of transformation alone, as it happens in the cycle of poems In the Woods, but most often we meet him lost in gazing, as in this photograph from 1948, where he sits leaning against a tree in the fields near Flensburg.
In the afterword to There is No Ithaca, Vyt Bakaitis recalls a fragment of the interview conducted during his return to Lithuania, in which Jonas Mekas precisely defined the place where in the autumn of 1947 for the first time since his exile, he was overcome by a sense of grief he later transformed into the Idylls of Semeniškiai: “Not far from the camp was a small woods and a scrawny stretch of meadow with a trickle-stream. So I’d sit there beside the stream, look at the barracks, the woods, the meadow, and dream of Semeniškiai”.
Such a stream, Jonas Mekas will happen to find later at various latitudes, where distance, silence and neighbourhood of otherness will position He-Who-Watches. Life-giving images will appear then before him, like that of aunt Kastune from the Tenth Idyll. How does it happen that they make the poet while rescuing the exile? After all, life is not an idyll, it usually squanders these pictures, it overlooks them, displaces or simply just does not keep them.
An image emerges from the memory: “I remember her well, our aunt Kastune...”. Well means not only precisely, but also reaching deeper than the gloomy and destructive layer of the past. The image emerges from the past perfect the eternal land of childhood continues, breeding goodness.
Aunt Kastune is far away, separated by space and time, she remains embedded in the reality purified by distance. “Distance is the soul of beauty”. It is no coincidence that Miłosz cited this sentence by Simone Weil in the introduction to the American edition of the Idylls. “Our immediate concerns” – he wrote – “which were blinding us to the grace of ordinary things disappear and a look backward reveals them in their every minutes detail”.
Images come to the poet not like an ordinary movie, in a continuum of time and space, but as if freeze-framed, shot after shot, with a space between to allow the spread of light, breath, healing of the wounds between man and nature, between man and objects, man and his neighbour or man and a reminiscence of the bygone. Here words have time.
The poet is a guardian of the things between, of what is ethereal, indeterminate, and non-literal, incompatible with the "I" itself. It's enough to use too strong a justification, techne’s overambitious sharpness, professionally drawn design or an arrangement of lighting, and during the transgression of the act of seeing into the message of speech, its luminous essentiality will be erased. The act of seeing is understood here as experiencing with all your senses, including the sense of remembering. Word does not follow seeing, it is its immanent part.
The poet returns to aunt Kastune in the ritual of celebrating the crumbs of life along the paths of a deeply intimate relationship, aware that in the world dominated by a Big Number, he chooses to turn to what is small and interpersonal. He discovers fragility as the permanent material of things eternal. Words are exposed to the challenge of irrelevance and thus imprint an indelible mark on the path.
“…we were giving everything to our Kastune”. Not only peas collected in handfuls. In this space of interpersonal communion there are no limits to hospitality, there is no way to share some things and keep others to yourself. Everything is a gift and man gives another man all that he owns. The luminosity of the space between does not come solely form brushing the earth with a heavenly wing, but also from the ethos of human coexistence on the earth. Here, love does not romanticize or lament, it does not shed words, but extends itself silently and infinitely.
The poet finds aunt Kastune not by himself, nor during a nostalgic solitary journey. He always finds her with someone at his side, always in plural, within the circle of the family rites: “…the whole family together after chores, / with aunt Kastune there we used to sit / out under the lindens, in a circle around her… “ It is surprising how rarely the singular appears in the Idylls. He-Who-Watches on his own will wither, he understands that the distance that pulls him is reachable only for one who does not lose the sight of the other, one in a relationship with the others in the circle.
Aunt Kastune’s going away is inevitable, like a change of the seasons. So it was in the childhood. For an exile, it is inevitable like the loss of home. He remains "…with so much to ask her…"; not only in the Idylls, but in everything that he creates. Questions will remain open. The poet, like aunt Kastune, will not give answers, he belongs to the silence of existence and will always return there.
All that Mekaspoet can do is to return to reality. “You don’t know how much strength I need to continue running” says Ulysess from the I Had Nowhere To Go diaries to Penelope/Lilly. The meaning of the author of the Pictures lies not in answering, but in immersing us in life. “Everything else” - he said in his conversation with Jérôme Sans - “seemed senseless, escapist, unreal”.
“ ‘Yes, Ulysses’, said Lilly”.
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