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In Martin Langer’s verse there is a conspicuous element of going beyond himself. It is as if, in his poems, he is reviving that which has, up to a point, been lost in the blind alleys of scepticism and doubt in modern art: faith in the written and transmitted word that does not allow the creative individual ever quite to die. While many modern poets and other artists wrestle with the problems of defining the meaning of work and protecting it, in an artistically secularized milieu, from the onslaught of the outside world, which usually leads to the narrow confines of out-of-the-way corners with limited scope for communication, Langer works with the word like a mediaeval monk, ever surprised and fascinated by it, ever fighting his way through it to a sense of spiritual joy and fulfilment. In his first collection, Palác schizofreniků (The Palace of Schizophrenics), the poet is still coming to terms with the extremity of a world derailed and driven mad, the world of those who enclose themselves hermetically in their work as in a glass tower and who appear to ordinary eyes confused, impractical, even undesirable. Langer’s journey leads from a quasi-biblical chaos to revelation and a shaping of what is revealed into words, although – as in the Bible – the poet’s tidings are clad first in mundanity and even a kind of animality, presaging and preceding an unearthly spirituality, the usual outcome of detachment and the process of sanctification. The very title of his second book of verse, Animální evangelium (Animal Gospel), hints that it creates an intellectual arc between the physical and the spiritual, temporality and eternity, and that on these apparently inanimate, tendentious and philosophical territories battle is to be joined, the immediate result of which is a decision in favour of the single, with the long-term consequence of the rejection of the multiple, the variable, the labyrinthine. A turning-point in the poet’s inner, uncompleted struggle comes with the composite collection Já nezemřu zcela (I Won’t Die Completely), which is full of authorial antitheses of which the most conspicuous dispute, or dualism, is a record of the age-old disputation between spiritual asceticism and inspired hedonism, but also between immersion in the water-course of art and a trip along the banks of that river, which are arid and without artefacts. One of the book’s dominant sections carries the motto ‘renounce art and luxury’. In it, the poet, using the words of the Chinese philosopher and sage Lao-Tse, enjoins us to cast all former values into the dust, forget about them, and paint on the walls of an ‘imperial palace’ a landscape of our own as the only one, created newly and for the first time, into which we can, nay must, enter and hide. Painters must have ‘their eyes gouged out’, their paints and the rules of painting nullified, and only after this purging, this catharsis, will ‘natural vision’ be restored as the faculty for seeing the world without prejudice and the patina of culture. In other sections of the book Langer, before withdrawing to a kind of hermitage or cloister, is still doing battle with fits of melancholy and aspirations to the magic of the outer world, but now the verse is imbued with quiet monastic meditation and concentration; God strolls in an Eden of earthlings. Langer’s next work, Průsmyky (Mountain Passes) is characterized by the Baroque quality of ‘wolf-mountains’, beings that are landscapes, and of cemeteries and mausoleums, from which the concepts of a specific home and the poet’s integration in human society are disappearing. Here the poem inclines more to prayer, adoration, while remaining interwoven with the profane world of the unpoetic, the urgency of fleeting moments whose attraction leads on to the temptations that are experienced by every saint in the wilderness and to yield to which would be so beautiful. On the one hand, the polarity of these poems is created by an imagination bordering on the hectic, the creation – in the spirit of Hegel – of a second nature; on the other, we have a devastating anthropomorphization that, in the spirit of oriental philosophies, leads Langer the ascetic perhaps not quite to total nirvana and renunciation of the world, but into a profound seclusion where solitude is filled with soliloquy or silence: ‘I think not of woman / Nor of man / As naked I clamber hand over hand / Among the branches of a giant chestnut tree / Here there is no fear / That someone might see me / Nor fear / That I will fall with my crazed body / This is the only thing that has bewitched me / Like van Gogh I force the tree / Into orgiastic speech.’ In Langer’s latest volume of verse, Pití octa (Drinking the Vinegar), his internalized, inspired, if somewhat eclectic monasticism is brought logically from flights of the imagination to an almost Poundian discipline. These texts, more than poems, are starting to loosen up, but also to abound with quotations; to some lines the author adds explanations, additions and footnotes entirely in the manner of Ezra Pound. Here the poet has temporarily abandoned the cloistered life, silence or the road leading to it, but he retains abstraction as a weapon, a shield against superficiality. And he is also left with a faith in ‘natural vision’, like the faith of hermits who believe that at the end of being they will after all be vouchsafed a glimpse of the cloudy pillar or burning bush as the figurative voice of God.

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 E-mail: langermartin@seznam.cz

Deutsch Martin LANGER, Deutsch.doc

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