Vít Obrtel: About the Pitcher, the Swallow, and the Cloud

“Who knows whether this life is actually death and death is not life?”

It was between two dreams, in a moment of tense wakefulness that comes after the first period of shadows, as I pondered the strange sentences of the dark teaching of Master Krištof. The parable of dreaming broke with the touch of a gloomy passion from the mountains of reason emerging from darkness. And immediately, grinding doubts were born and spread through the delicate coils of a small brain.
The bottle-green of the room - the room was under water, for everything breathed in the safety of sleep - Time freely walked, a melancholic young man with a deeply tender face blind from birth. We two watched alone among thousands of severed heads stripped of will and laws of mechanics, resting in the nest of dead hours. They were rigid faces that yet intensely lived in the embrace of miracles somewhere beyond the walls of rooms, and whose unprepared attack bent the celestial vault just as lightly as death itself. In the atmosphere of this physically immovable, yet too real oppression, I reflected long and awkwardly. Time, abandoned by all, listened to the erratic whirl of thoughts.
The world is a large jug. Its outer walls are blue and yellow, the interior is multicolored. Every day a swallow flies from the edge of radiant mists and drops a little cloud into the jug's interior. The cloud resonates in the motionless dimness and the yellow and blue walls with small tremors. The diamond snake on which the jug rests trembles as well. And every day the swallow drops a little cloud, and every day the diamond snake trembles. Until the moment of fullness arrives, the snake will sting the swallow. Then the upper darkness will merge with the lower darkness. But the snake will die.
These sentences of a little-known author tortured me with their multiplicity of interpretations, each seeming irrefutably correct as a sequence of logical conclusions. Yet I searched in vain for the error that necessarily sneaked into the accuracy of the equation, like a wandering bird in a murky surface. I felt a dull fatigue from the turned-away hope of nervous groping on the shores of fires, while thousands of faces, flowing in thousands of festively adorned barges, weighed down my eyelids with such a load of melancholy that my thoughts, transformed into blue and yellow jugs, autonomously filled with clouds of dreams. In the green dusk, Time’s face dissolved like a grain of salt in a glass of water.
Approaching the square carefully swept clean, like it used to be on the Feast of the Body of Christ, under the archway pinned by the milestones of lips to the lawns of gardens, great sunlight gloriously shone upon the azure armor. The transparent air quivered with the chirping of insects and the flags of watercress among the roses. Nature, full of colors and nests, waved in celebration, so sweet in the time of my childhood. And a heady stream filled me with the harvest of vineyards as I crossed midnight of the lunar ballad.
There was the freshness of a morning full of dew and the thumping of bare feet, there was the ringing of a bell inviting all hungry children from pastures and schools to lunch, there was the calm of the evening when we merged with the whisper of the elongated valleys, and there was the night full of stars and sounds and magic. There were the muffled drums of autumn rains and the enchanting eye of the well under the forest, there was snow of Christmas and light of Mary’s moon, there were heroic adventures and sweet poems, Renaissance compositions and figurines of the Wallachian Nativity, there was everything beautiful I had ever seen and everything good I had ever desired.
Up to the edge of the blue hat, the square blossomed with bird cherries, rosemary, and lilies. From the flood of branches, thirsty windows drank sparks of honeyed bees. It was a feast — and it is good to put on festive clothes when we rejoice, as I rejoiced and the faces of the swirling crowd did. Concurrently, I sensed with mathematical precision that it was a feast without end like a line or love. This awareness did not awaken the fear of boredom but culminated in the song of grapes and the sharply rising desire to be eternally part of all that festive bustle among the white wings of doves of the whole world.
Wherever I looked, I breathed the beauty and truth of the images of Leonardo or the dialogues of Plato, the otherworldly nobility of the fugues of the famous contrapuntist or the loveliness of the wedding at Cana of Galilee. I was pierced by a bright atmosphere into which everything submerged and which emerged from everything. I heard the trembling of colors and fumbled symbols of numbers, I saw the sounds of Orpheus’s lyre and tasted the scent of mystical doctrine. Perception according to the order of the world was replaced by direct observation.
Around me lived all the necessary things of my life, but more beautiful, all good desires and memories, all friends and enemies freed from malice, final definitions and laws, everything I revered and loved. I understood that I was walking through a realm of concepts, a being unbound by senses and matter, I understood that I rejoiced in the paradise of pure knowledge.
But it was already time to wake up, for the morning of silver sickles and children’s buzzing was calling to my room Time, the melancholic friend of wakefulness.
Yet I already knew that conscious life is merely an impressionistic painting of a dream, whose plot unfolds uninterruptedly in the dawn, somewhere above the seven spheres of our inner being in the land of radiant mists where mortal Time will never find the way of the diamond snake. Until the day of days fills, the unfortunate son of the earth will kill the swallow of the message, but he himself will perish in the abyss of the world. The endless dream will merge with the dreams of nights and the dreams of poets’ silence.