474
PARTISAN
r~.EVIEW
Catholicism and my capacity to pray as an adult, [ would not have
known what to do, [ would have perished ten times over. On the
boundary of prayer, in intense concentration, that is, [ was visited on
rare occasions, at important moments in my life, with a kind of intuitive
clairvoyance when my future would appear to me for an instant.
According to Sartre, whoever postulates that the universe is interested in
his existence, i.e., that his personal existence has a metaphysical founda–
tion, is a swine
(sa/alld).
Thus, we are obliged to accept that our foun–
dation is nothingness, the condition of our absolute freedom. Because [
believed that [ do have a place in the divine plan and prayed for the
ability to fulfill the tasks before me, I was a typical
sa/aI/d.
A knight invisibly commissioned to do battle against liars? In
The
Land of Ulro
there is a gallery of figures, each of whom assigned himself a
place as prophet: Swedenborg, Blake, Dostoevsky, Oscar Milosz. And my
disheartened tolerance: So what if human weakness is so great that we
are unable to achieve anything without pumping ourselves up with faith
in our exceptional importance for mankind?
It is an incontrovertible fact that science and technology transform
man from within, changing his imagination. Why should we shut our
eyes and pretend, rejecting the obvious, that ancient Rome is again in
decline, and this time it's not pagan Rome under the blows of
Christianity, but the Rome of the monotheists' God? Since this, and
nothing else, is the undeclared theme of contemporary poetry in various
languages, obviously this conflict has already crossed the threshold of uni–
versal consciousness. We do not know if those who were the opponents
of the Land of Ulro, who prophesied a new era of reborn Imagination,
were right. Perhaps what will remain will be the one Church of Science
and after transitional hesitations it will return to a fundamentally mecha–
nistic orthodoxy. Or new perspectives will open up that are in no way
similar to the prophecies of those prophets. But a poet who writes in
the language of a country in which the churches are full is not supposed
to think about such things....
October
22, 1987.... As I followed the fortunes of the Russian, Polish,
Czech, and Lithuanian "dissidents" who, beginning in the 1970s, went
into emigration either voluntarily or because they wcre forced out, I felt
somcwhat envious of them. Because I had the hardest time staying afloat.
I was on the very bottom in Paris from 1951 to 1953; Zygmunt Hertz
often had to treat me to cigarettes. The Prix Litteraire Europcen,
Geneva 1953, was the breakthrough that allowed me to bring my family
over from America, but our life - first in Bon on Lake Leman, then in
