Chapter 11 Chapter 4 The Poet is on the Run

There comes a time in every poet's life when he breaks free from his mother and starts running away. Not so long ago he was walking obediently, his sister Isabel Vitaly in front, he and his brother Frederick in the rear, and his mother like a military commander in the rear.This is how she paraded her children through the streets of Charleville year after year. When he was sixteen, he broke free from her grasp for the first time.The police caught him in Paris.His teacher, Izmombad, and Izmombad's sisters (yes, the same women who caught lice in his hair) took him in for a few weeks.Then his mother came and led him back, slapped him, and in their cold embrace, put her arms around him again.

But Arthur Rimbaud continued to flee, again and again, with a collar firmly around his neck, writing poetry as he fled. The year was 1870, and the cannonade of the Franco-Prussian War echoed in Charleville, a situation especially conducive to escape; His small body with misshapen thighs was dressed in hussar costume.Eighteen-year-old Lermontov has become a soldier, fleeing his grandmother and her tiresome love.He exchanges the pen that reveals people's souls for the pistol that opens the door to the world.For if we send a bullet into another man's chest, it is as if we have entered that chest ourselves, and the other man's heart—is the world.

Jaromil had been running since he broke free from his mother's arms, and his escape was also followed by the echo of battle.It is not the rumbling of guns, but the roar of political upheaval.In times like these, a soldier is mere decoration, and the real battle lies elsewhere.Jaromil had been diligently attending the political science department.He has stopped writing poetry. Revolution and youth are closely united.What does a revolution promise to adults?For some it brings stigma, for others it brings benefits.But even this benefit is problematic, since it affects only the poor half of life, and besides its benefits, it requires erratic, exhausting activities, and upheavals from established habits .

The situation of the youth is much better: they are free from the burden of sin, and the revolution can accept all young people.The vicissitudes of revolutionary times are good for the youth, because it is the world of their fathers that is challenged.How exciting it is to have just entered the age of maturity when the barriers of the adult world come crashing down! In the initial period after 1948, Communist Party professors were only a minority in Czech universities.Therefore, if the revolution was to secure its influence in academia, it had to give power to the students.Jaromil took an active part in the activities of the Youth Council, and during the university exams he acted as an invigilator for this organization.He submitted a report to the political committee on the professors' examination methods and their political views, and it turned out that the professors were actually being tested, not the students.

However, when Jaromil reported to the committee, he was also severely examined.He had to answer questions from serious and enthusiastic young Party members, and he hoped to find words that would satisfy them: compromise is a crime when the education of young people is at stake, teachers with stale views are outdated, The future will be entirely new, or it won't be the future at all.Teachers who change their views overnight are not to be trusted; the future will be pure, or it will be shameful. If Jaromil has become an enthusiastic worker who can influence the fate of adults, can we still insist that he is running away?Doesn't he seem to have reached the finish line?

not at all. When he was only six years old, his mother had already put him in the position of being one year younger than his classmates.He is still one year younger.When he was reporting on a professor's bourgeois attitudes, his mind was not on the subject.Rather, he was eagerly looking into the eyes of the young men who were listening to him, seeing his own image.Just as he examines his smile and his hair in the bathroom mirror, so he examines the strength and manliness of his words from the eyes of his listeners. He was always surrounded by a wall of mirrors and couldn't see the other side.

Maturity is indivisible; it is either whole or not at all.In any area of ​​life, as long as Jaromil remains a child, his proctoring of exams and reporting to his professors will remain a means of escape. He went on running, but he couldn't get rid of her, he ate breakfast and dinner with her, and said good night and good morning.Every morning, she would give him a shopping bag.Maman didn't care that this mundane symbol of the family was ill-suited to the overseer of the professor's mind, and she sent him to the market every day to buy things. And lo and behold: he's gone, down the same street we saw him walking at the beginning of the previous chapter, when he saw a charming woman coming towards him, and he blushed.Years passed, and Jaromil still blushed, and he was afraid of meeting her eyes when there was a girl in white in the shop his mother sent him to.

He liked the girl very much, and the poor girl had to sit eight hours a day in the cage-like teller's cubicle.Her gentle countenance, that slow movement, her confinement—it was all so mysteriously familiar to him, so fitting, so preordained.In fact, he understood why he felt this way: the girl looked like Magda, the maid whose fiancé had been shot by the Germans.Magda—"a sullen and charming face." And this teller's cubicle was like the bathtub he'd seen her bathing in. He sat hunched over his desk, worrying about his final exam.Now he is afraid of the exams in college just like he was in middle school, because he is used to showing his mother an excellent report card, and he doesn't want to let her down.

Outside the air filled with echoes of revolutionary songs, and at such moments a gigantic figure with a hammer loomed outside the window, his small room seemed unbearably cramped and stuffy. Five years after the Great Russian Revolution, he was condemned to stare at a textbook and tremble with fear of an exam.What a fate! Finally he pushed his textbook aside (it was late at night) and brooded over his half-written poem.He was writing about a proletarian named Jane who wanted to kill his dream of a good life by making it come true.With a hammer in one hand and his lover in the other, surrounded by a large number of comrades, he strode into the revolution.

That timid law student (yes, of course, it was Issie Volker) saw the table covered with blood, a lot of blood, because of a strangled dream The wounds are horrific. But he was not afraid; he knew that a real man is never afraid of blood. The store closed at six and he looked around the opposite corner, knowing that the cashier always left a little after six, but he also knew that she was always accompanied by a young saleswoman from the same store. The teller's friend was not at all beautiful; in fact, Jaromil thought her almost ugly.The two girls are polar opposites: the teller has black hair, the other has red hair; the teller is buxom, the other is thin; One is familiar, the other repulsive.

He watched several times, hoping that one night the two girls would separate and he could speak to the dark-haired girl.However, this never happened.Once he followed them; they crossed several streets and entered an apartment house; he walked up and down the building for about an hour, but neither of them came out. Mrs. Walker came to visit him from home and listened to her recite poetry.She was content: her son was still hers.Neither the other woman nor the mad world could take him from her.Rather, it is woman and the world that are enclosed in this magical center of poetry, a circle that she herself summons around her son, a realm over which she secretly reigns. He was reciting a poem he had written in memory of her mother, his dear grandmother: I will go to war my dear grandma For the glory of this glorious world... Mrs. Volker's heart is at peace.Let her son go to battle, with a hammer in one hand, and his lover in the other.It doesn't hurt.After all, let the world see him with a hammer in his world, which includes her, grandma, the family kitchen, and all the virtues she has instilled in him.She knew very well that parading before the world was a very different thing from entering it. The poet is also aware of this distinction.Only he knows how depressing it is to be a prisoner in the house of poetry. Only a true poet knows how much he longs not to be a poet, to leave a house full of mirrors surrounded by deafening silence. A fugitive from the realm of dreams I'll find my peace in the crowd Turn my song into a curse. But when Frantisek Haras wrote these lines, he was not among the crowds in the street; the room in which he was working was silent. In fact, he was not a fugitive from the realm of dreams at all.On the contrary, the peoples he was describing were the domain of his dreams. Nor has he been able to turn his song into a curse; rather, his curse keeps turning into song. Isn't there a way out of this house of mirrors? however i hold yourself put my heels step on my own vocal Verdimir Mayakovsky wrote.Jaromil understood him.The language of poetry now seemed to him like the fine netting in his mother's wardrobe.He hasn't written poetry for months.He didn't want to write at all.He is running away.He went to the market when his mother asked him to do the shopping, but he kept locking his desk drawer.He has taken reproductions of modern paintings from the walls of his room. What did he put on it?A picture of Karl Marx? No.He posted a picture of his father.Here is a photo from 1938, during the unfortunate mobilization, and his father is wearing an officer's uniform. Jaromil loved the picture, he barely knew the man, and the man was fading from his memory.He misses the football player, the soldier, the prisoner.He misses this man very much. The philosophy lecture hall was packed.Several poets are sitting on a podium.A bushy-haired youth, in the blue shirt that was in fashion in those days for members of the Youth Association, was speaking: "Poetry played an important role in the revolutionary period unparalleled in any period; poetry acted as the voice of the revolution, which in turn liberated poetry from solitude; poets now know that people, especially young people, are listening He; for young people, poetry and revolution are exactly the same thing." Then the first poet stood up and recited a poem about a girl who disowns her lover because the young man who was working the lathe next to her was lazy and didn't meet his production quota.Not wanting to lose his girl, the young man set to work with enthusiasm, and soon the red star of the hero of socialist labor was nailed to his lathe.The rest of the poets followed suit, reciting poems, praising peace, Lenin, Stalin, martyrs in the anti-fascist struggle, and workers who overachieved. Young people are ignorant of all the great powers of youth.But now the silver-haired poet who stands up to read knows it. He proclaims in a melodious voice that those who walk with a young society are young, and this young society is socialism; those who move forward with the future are young, and he never looks backward. According to the white-haired poet, youth is not the name of a specific period of life, but a value beyond any specific age.This thought, expressed in appropriate verse, succeeds in a double purpose: flattering the young listener, and magically erasing the poet's wrinkles, making him an equal of the young man and woman, (for he clearly shows that he is a pioneer who marches hand in hand with the future). Jaromil was sitting in the audience, watching the poets with interest, although he felt like a man from another shore, that is, he no longer belonged to one of them.He listened to their work with the same detachment he listened to the professors when he was about to report to the committee.Jaromil paid special attention to the famous poet who was rising from his chair at the moment (the applause for the silver-haired poet's hymn had died down).Yes, the man who is striding up to the podium is the same poet who received a box of twenty telephone receivers. My dear master, we are now in love; I am seventeen: as they say, the age of hope and fantasy... If I send these poems... it is because I love all poets, all good The high dance school poet.When you read these poems, please don't be too sneering.Dear master, if you are so kind as to make my poems published, I shall be ecstatic!I'm unknown; what does that matter?Poets are brothers.These verses firmly believe.love, hope.That's everything.dear master.Reach out to me and lift me up; I'm young.give me a hand... He was lying; he was only fifteen years and seven months old.Even this was before he had run away from his mother for the first time, from Charleville.But the letter would linger in his head like a prayer of shame, like a document of his feeble dependence.He wants revenge on his dear master, on that bald old fool Bonville!After only one year he will laugh at all his poems, all those precious hyacinths and lilies that fill them; he will send a mocking letter, like a slap in the face. But at this moment, the dear master who is reciting poetry from the podium knows nothing of the hatred that lurks and awaits him.The poem he recites describes a Russian town destroyed by the Fascists and rising from the ashes.The poem is full of bizarre, surreal scenes; the breasts of Soviet girls float across the streets like colorful balloons; a petroleum lamp falls from the sky, illuminating white towns, and helicopters descend like so many angels landed on the roof. Fascinated by the personal charm of the famous poet, the audience burst into applause.But among this mindless audience there is a thoughtful few who know that a revolutionary audience cannot wait like a submissive supplicant for a gift from a pulpit.Instead, it is poetry's beggars these days, begging to be admitted into the socialist paradise.But the young revolutionaries guarding the gates of this paradise must be vigilant: the future must be entirely new, or it will not be a future at all; the future must be pure and infinite, or it will be utterly shameful. "What kind of nonsense is he trying to sell us?" Jaromil yelled, and the others quickly joined in. "Is he trying to connect socialism with surrealism? Is he trying to match horses with cats, yesterday with tomorrow?" The famous poet understood what was happening before him, but he was too proud to give in.From an early age he was used to shocking the bourgeoisie and insisting on his views in the face of an audience that opposed him.His face flushed.As the last poem, he chose a poem different from his original plan.The poem is full of wild imagery and indulgent erotic fantasies.Immediately after he finished his recitation, whistles and shouts arose. The students whistled derisively at the old scholar.He had come here because he liked them; in their angry defiance he had glimpsed his own youth.He felt that his love gave him the right to tell them what was in his heart.It was the spring of 1968, in Paris.what!The students could not see any youth behind his wrinkled face, and the old scholar watched in amazement as those he loved laughed at him. The famous poet raised his hand to silence the uproar.Then he started yelling at the students, a bunch of Puritan governesses, dogmatic clergymen, stupid policemen, who were protesting his poems because they hated freedom from the bottom of their hearts. The old scholar listened in silence to the whistles and boos.As a young man, he recalled, he also enjoyed booing and whistling, surrounded by a gang of his mates.But the gang split long ago, and now he stands here alone. The famous poet declared that it is the duty of poetry to defend liberty, and that even a metaphor is worth fighting for.He declared that he would insist on matching horses with cats, modern art with socialism, and if it were a quixotic enterprise, he would be quite willing to be a quixotic one, because socialism is happiness. And the age of freedom, he refused to recognize any other type of socialism. The old scholar looked at the noisy young people around him, and it occurred to him that among all the audience, he was the only one who had the privilege of freedom, because he was old.It is only when a man reaches old age that he ceases to care what his peers, the public, or the future think.He is alone with the approaching death, which has no ears and needs no flattery.When faced with death, a person can say and do as he pleases. They whistled and demanded the floor to refute him.After a while, Jaromil also stood up.His eyes were full of anger, and the crowd was right behind him.Only revolution is modern, he said, and the decadent eroticism and obscure imagery of Surrealist art is junk that has nothing to do with the people. "What is the real modernity?" he challenged the famous poet. "Is it your obscure lines, or us who are building a new world?" There is nothing absolutely modern." His words were met with thunderous applause. The applause was still ringing in the old man's ears as he left the podium and walked along the cloisters of the University of Paris.An inscription on the wall reads: Be a Realist - Nothing is Impossible.Then there is another one: Human liberation must be complete, otherwise it is meaningless.Another one: never regret. Large classrooms had stools piled against the walls; brushes and paint were strewn about the floor.Several students from the political science department were busy brushing May Day slogans on paper flags.Jaromil, the writer and editor of the slogan, was supervising the work, checking his notebook from time to time. But what's the matter?Did we get the date wrong?The slogan he was dictating was exactly the same as the old scholar had just read on the wall of the rebellious University of Paris.No, we are not mistaken.The slogans that Jaromil was dictating to his colleagues were precisely the same ones that French students would graffiti on the walls of the University of Nanterre at the University of Paris some twenty years later. Dreams are reality, one of the banners declared.Another banner reads: Be a Realist - Nothing is Impossible.The other side: we decide on permanent happiness.The other side: the abolition of churches. (Jaromil is especially proud of this slogan. A few short words negate two thousand years of history.) Another side: don't give freedom to the enemies of freedom!And: Power to the imagination!And: Let the half-hearted perish!And make revolutions in politics, family, love! His colleagues were drawing the letters, and Jaromil walked haughtily among them like a generalissimo of words.He was glad that people needed him, that his verbal talents had finally found a use.Poetry is dead, he knows (art is dead, says a wall at the University of Paris), but it dies to rise from the grave as a slogan on a banner, as a slogan on a city wall ( Poetry is on the street, written on a wall in the Odeon). "Have you read the paper? The first page lists a hundred slogans for May Day, which were put forward by the Central Committee's propaganda apparatus. Don't you have one that suits you?" A pudgy young man from the district committee was confronting Jaromil.He introduced himself as the chairman of the Higher Education May 1st Committee. "Dreams are reality—well, that's the crudest kind of idealism! Abolish churches—I'm all for you, comrade, but that's currently in conflict with the party's religious policy. Let the half-hearted perish—from Since when have we had the power to threaten people with death? Power to the imagination - that's what we need! Revolution in love - can you please tell me what this means? You Do you want free love as opposed to bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as opposed to bourgeois fornication?" Jaromil states that a revolution must change every aspect of society, including the family of love, or it would not be a revolution. "True," admitted the dumpy young man, "but it would be much better to write: Long live socialism! Long live the socialist family! You see, that slogan is straight out of a newspaper. You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble." Live elsewhere, French students wrote on the walls of the University of Paris.Yes, he knows that very well.That's why he's leaving London for Ireland, where the people are rebelling.His name was Percy Shelley, he was twenty years old, and he carried hundreds of leaflets and manifestos as a passport that would guarantee him entry into real life. Because the real life is elsewhere.The students were lifting cobblestones, overturning cars, building barricades; their entrance into the world was noisy and spectacular, illuminated by flames, illuminated by explosions of tear gas, and life was much harder for Rimbaud, who Dreaming of the barricades of the Paris Commune, but unable to leave Charleville.But in 1968, thousands of Rimbauds built their own barricades.They stood behind barricades, refusing to make any compromise with the temporary masters of the world.Human liberation must be complete, otherwise it is meaningless. A mile away, on the other side of the Seine, the present owners of the world went about their normal lives, seeing the commotion in the Latin Quarter as something far away.Dreams are reality, the students write on the walls, but the reverse seems to be true: their reality (barricades, overturned cars, red flags) is a dream. But it's never clear whether reality is a dream or the dream is a reality.The students who gathered at the university with the red flag flying over their heads came here happily, but at the same time they knew in their hearts what kind of trouble they would encounter if they stayed at home. The Czech students of 1949 marked an interesting transition in which dreams were no longer just dreams.Their joy is still voluntary, but at the same time it is already forced. The students marched along the street, Jaromil walked beside them; he was responsible for the slogans on the banners and the speeches of his companions; this time he did not invent controversial epigrams, but merely copied a few slogans proposed by the central propaganda agency .He led everyone to shout slogans, just like a corporal shouting steps in the army, and his companions shouted rhythmically after him. The parade has already passed the reviewing stand on Wenceslaus Square, and young people in blue shirts are singing and dancing with an improvised band.Everything was cheerful and free, and people who were strangers just now joined in with sincere comradeship.But Percy Shelley was not happy, Percy was lonely. He had been in Dublin for several weeks, distributed leaflets, and the police knew him well, but he had not made a single Irish friend.Life always seems to be elsewhere. If only there was at least one barricade to climb, and the sound of gunfire!It seemed to Jaromil that the festive parades seemed to be mere pale imitations of the great revolutionary demonstrations, they had no real meaning and quickly disappeared. He thought of the girl imprisoned in the teller's cage, and a feeling of sadness welled up in him; he imagined a heroic feat: smashing the shop window with a hammer, pushing the frightened customers aside, opening the teller's cage, In front of the stunned eyes of the onlookers, take the liberated brunette away. He imagined them walking arm in arm through the crowded streets, lost in love, hugging each other tightly.The dance that revolves around them is not just a dance, but a march towards the barricades, the years are 1848, 1870 and 1945, the scenes are Paris, Warsaw, Budapest, Prague and Vienna, the participants are the same group Man, forever jumping from barricade to barricade, he takes his lovers by the hand and dances with them... When he saw him, he could still feel the warmth of her hand on his hand.He is coming towards him.He is tall and well-groomed.A young woman walked briskly beside him.She wasn't wearing a blue shirt like most of the girls dancing in the street.She is as elegant as a fashion model. The burly man glanced absently at the crowd, nodding in all directions.When he was only a few steps away from Jaromil, their eyes met for a moment, Jaromil panicked for a moment, and like everyone who recognizes and pays attention to famous people, he also bowed his head.The man returned his gesture with a casual glance (as we do when we greet someone we don't know), and his companion's head moved slightly and vaguely. Ah, this woman is so beautiful!She was by no means a fantasy, she was so real, and in the light of her real body, the girl in the cashier's cubicle (bathtub) gradually became a shadow and disappeared from Jaromil's side. Jaromil stood on the sidewalk, humiliated and alone, staring at the receding couple with hatred.Yes, it was he, his dear master, who received the package of twenty telephone receivers. As night fell on the city, Jaromil longed to meet her. Several times, he followed a woman whose back reminded him of her back.There's something exciting about pretending to be chasing a woman who disappears into the crowd.So he decided to take a walk in front of the apartment house he had seen her go into.It seems unlikely that he'll meet her again there, but as long as his mother isn't asleep, he doesn't want to go home (only at night, when his mother is asleep and his father's picture comes to life, can he endure his home.) He walked up and down this lonely, lonely street, where the May Day flags and lilacs seemed to leave no trace.The lights in the apartment windows came on one by one.The windows on the ground floor were also lit up, and Jaromil saw a familiar girl's face. No, not his dark-haired cashier, but her friend, the skinny red-haired girl.She was walking up to the window to draw down the curtains. Jaromil could hardly contain his disappointment.He realized that the girl had seen him.He blushed, as he did when the sad, pretty maid looked up from the tub at the bathroom door: He runs away. May 2nd, at six o'clock in the evening.The salesgirls flooded the street, and the unexpected happened: the red-haired girl came out alone. He tried to hide behind a corner, but it was too late.She saw him and ran towards him. "You know, sir, it's impolite to peep in other people's windows at night!" He blushed, trying to talk away the embarrassment of last night.He worried that the redhead's presence would ruin his chances of meeting the brunette.But the red-haired girl was very talkative and had no intention of letting Jaromil go.She even invited him to walk her back to the apartment house (it was far more polite, she said, to walk a young lady home than to peep at her through a window). Jaromil kept staring at the shop door in despair. "Where's your girlfriend?" he finally asked. "You're late. She's gone." They walked together to the girl's house, and Jaromil learned that the two girls were from the countryside, had found work in a shop, and lived in the same house.But the brunette had left Prague because she was getting married. When they pulled up in front of the apartment, the girl said, "Won't you come in and sit for a while?" Jaromil walked into her room in surprise and confusion.Somehow, they started hugging, kissing, and in the blink of an eye they were sitting on a bed with a plush coverlet. It's all so quick and easy!Before he had time to think about the difficult, decisively practical task before him, she had put her hand between his thighs.He was ecstatic, because his body responded exactly as a young man should. "You're good, you're good," she kept whispering in his ear, and he lay beside her, deep in his pillow, delighted. "How many women have you had before me?" He shrugged and smiled mysteriously. "You don't want to say?" "Guess." "I think somewhere between five and ten," she ventured. He was filled with joyful pride; it seemed to him that he had just been making love not only to her, but to five or ten other girls as well.Not only did she free him from his virginity, but she also made him feel like a "very capable and experienced" man. He smiled at her gratefully, her nakedness filling him with passion.How could he be so blind in the past that he thought she was ugly?She has a pair of real, irreproachable breasts on her bosom and a real, irreproachable tuft of hair on her underbelly! "You're prettier naked than with clothes on," he said, continuing to compliment her on her allure. "Have you liked me for a long time?" she asked. "Oh yes, you know." "Yes, I know. I noticed that you came to the store a lot. Then you were always waiting for me on the street outside." "Yes." "You're afraid to take any offense at me because I'm never alone. But I know we'll be together someday. Because I like you too." He looked at her, letting her last words echo in his mind.Yes, that's exactly what happened.When he was tormented by solitude, when he threw himself desperately into meetings and marches, when he ran and ran, all the while, his manhood had been prepared for him.This modest room with peeling walls had been silently waiting for him, and this room and this ordinary woman, whose body finally created a physical connection between him and the crowd. The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution—the more I make revolution, the more I want to make love, declares a slogan at the University of Paris.Jaromil stabbed the red-haired girl a second time.Maturity has to be total, otherwise there is no maturity at all.He made love to her long and joyfully. Percy Shelley, with the face of a girl like Jaromil, who looked younger than his age, ran through the streets of Dublin, and kept on running, because he knew that life was elsewhere.Rimbaud also kept running - to Stuttgart to Milan, to Marseille, to Aden, to Harar, and back to Marseille, but by this time, he had only one leg.It is difficult to run on one leg. He slid off her.As he lay sprawled beside her, weary and content, it occurred to him that he was resting not after two bouts of love, but after a long run.