HOW THE WEATHER IS MADE
(Jaromír Typlt in a loose conversation with Zdeněk Košek’s notes)
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I held the theory that the sun’s rays, reflected from the Earth’s surface, warmed the lower layers of the atmosphere, with the warm air subsequently rising into the upper reaches of the atmosphere – this is nothing new; it has been known in meteorology as long as the field as existed as a scientific field – but my “PERSONAL REALITY” had gone so far that I believed that fauna and PEOPLE SHAPE THE WEATHER through their behavior, their activities, and above all through their reproductive abilities, i.e., through the act of procreation… I thought that the clouds were a living organism and that the rainfall is an orgasm within the meaning as we know it. I was convinced that if man is 70% water, then he “has the right”, when he dies, to “partake” of the events in the clouds. It is like this; not immediately, but through a physical and chemical process. I thought that the more people die, the more rainfall (i.e., hydrometeors) there is (are) – and that I was an “organizational worker” of this entire process…
(green notebook, 20. 2. 1994)
…this means that water, cB, st etc. [!!! SYMBOLS: VENUS, MARS, CIRCLE, PLUS, CIRCLE!!!]… knows how to respect even man; it must believe; it must…man and water, are in symbiosis, for instance I, CUMULONIMBUSGIGANTUS to the -1990 and a little spider… perhaps water would —à we would be more reasonable, if man was more reasonable
(yellow notepad, 19. 10. 1990)
A giant cumulonimbus to the power of one thousand nine hundred and ninety, imbued with intelligence and will – a storm cloud resembling a mountain range floating in the sky – except the exponent is negative, i.e., decreasing. The larger it is, the more it is decreasing. The “little spider”: a man named Zdeněk Košek, living the life of one of thousands of inhabitants of the north Bohemian town of Ústí nad Labem in the year 1990.
This mental leap must be kept constantly in sight; if not, there probably would be no sense in going on.
The leap from the immense to the trivial. From the invisible to the boundless. And back. And again. A leap directly into a human SELF that has experienced its absolute irrelevance – so absolute that it is almost inconceivable, for it has begun to see things from the perspective of something unimaginably large and powerful.
After such a leap, the SELF usually splits in two and changes of its own accord into a crushing, exaggerated, unbearable disproportion.
I felt like a thousand stars collapsing in on themselves by their own gravity. I literally shriveled and crumbled into myself… I was maybe a billion people. Such a “billionfurcation” it was. Not just a bifurcation. Ten human lives…
(diary, 13. 1. 1995)
Košek’s skies – the painted ones – are an amassing of tension. Sometimes they are almost horrifying, heavy, dark, congested, crystallizing or caustic… At other times, the sky breaks through into the realm earthly matters, which in and of itself resemble whirlwind sweeping away all in their path. Elsewhere, by contrast, there is the calm of a purely amateur landscape.
Soot-covered Ústí deserves the world’s attention. Everything, nearly everything of my landscape relates to leaves, the northern slopes of Kočkov, the hydro-meteorological institute, panel-built high-rises – in which I spent a significant number of hours, days, months, years, minutes, and seconds of my life. The WINTER LANDSCAPE in a green half-hopeful color with beautiful clouds. Vincent believed that I will be born, that I will paint and break through. That I will be a follower, a successor to the throne of a passionate, sensitive, fervid painter. That I will show that everything is related to everything else, that nothing is by chance. That a simple man will live, work, love, and decide about everything. That a simple potato-eater or gardener doesn’t always have to be a Comic or a KOŠEK. Coal, time, ASH, PEOPLE, RED, RAVENS, BLACKBIRDS, KESTRELS – TIME.
(diary, 13. 1. 1995)
Ravens, blackbirds, kestrels… It is perhaps a suspicious idea, but let us follow it for a while – what if the next possible version of this biographical SELF living its civic existence in Ústí nad Labem’s Skřivánek housing estate under the name Zdeněk Košek is the biography of an augur?
Among the Etruscans and in ancient Rome, an augur was an uncommonly esteemed person without whose word no battle, assembly, or business could be commenced. The art of their auspicium rested in the ability to read the signs found in the flight of birds.
It means nothing today, but at the time, bird divination was a reality. People were born with varying levels of a predisposition for this calling, with varying levels of acuity for heavenly phenomena, sometimes with an extraordinary talent and sometimes without none at all. In many cases, it was a fundamental criterion for their success in society.
And so, in another era, this increased interest in bird behavior and its various possible meanings, which eventually led Zdeněk Košek into psychiatric care, may in fact have been considered a gift of great value.
… WHEN THE SPARROW-HERO saw – in brief, understood – that I HAD UNDERSTOOD… he flew ca. 5 – 7 meters from the sign, about 20 – 25o from the axis of the sign to “LONDON”…
(yellow notepad, 19. 10. 1990)
Hundreds or rather thousands of such records – now that says something about the passion with which Košek had to work his way up in a field for which there had once existed exact rules, regulations, teachers, and social respect.
Today we no longer know into how many sections and according to what axes to divide the heavens, which directions to consider propitious and which unpropitious, how to identify warnings and where to find heavenly assistance… But a person can be born with exceptional talent even at a time when it doesn’t have the least meaning for him. What must it be like to be born an actor in a culture that condemns the theater, or a portraitist in a place where depicting the human body and its likeness is strictly forbidden?
Abilities sometimes assert themselves to the detriment of the person who has them.
In 1988, in July, when I looked out the window – it was hot, sunny, a clear sky – and I LITERALLY felt the energy evaporating from my brain; I was attacked by swallows, they literally pecked at my head. That had never happened to me in my life. And then again in 1990–1992. Once, my head was attacked by passer domesticus – a house sparrow. During those years, it often happened that I would take the elevator down to the lobby, open the door, and there were ten or twenty sparrows at the door. The kestrels would fly above me. Birds of prey have excellent eyesight. That’s a known fact. In 1990–1992, I considered birds to be more intelligent than man because of “their” orientation in time and space. I even greeted them, bowed down, communicated with them. Birds have wings and can fly. People can’t. They don’t have hands for writing or painting, and yet they can use their beaks to “BUILD” a nest, a home for themselves and their young.
For me, 1991 was a year of following songbirds and birds of prey – from the windows of my flat and also from outside the building and elsewhere in town. I thought that the birds knew about me, that they followed me and welcomed me, that they were showing me their young. The kestrels were the police, and so on and so on. I considered birds to be a “link” between the sky and the earth… Of course, they contributed to the weather. I observed television antennas on the house across the street, where kestrels, magpies and other birds would gather. Pigeons sat on the windowsills and the roof – and on the balconies. I drew diagrams on the kitchen window that I felt allowed me to communicate with the birds.
The birds “knew” what I was writing at home, what I was doing there… One time, I was watching a kestrel on the building across the street, and I thought: “You’re sitting on the metal roof and you don’t even know that I’m watching you. You don’t even notice me!” Just then, “tina” (tinontuluc) FALCO took flight and headed for the window – and just before the window on which I had drawn those patters, it “made” a zig-zag in order to fly over the building.
In the spring of 1992, I became “normal”. I don’t follow the birds as much anymore, and they haven’t pecked at my head, my brain. Very interesting…
(green notebook, 4. 5. 1994, and elsewhere)
Of course, the important thing is that even soothsaying and other occult sciences have precise rules for what to look at and what to ignore, what not to pay attention to and not to record, and what to ascribe meaning to… Every such tradition provides its adepts a certain level of support to keep them from becoming lost in a world where there are so many signs that it is impossible to find one’s way.
For Man is incapable of perceiving and deciphering everything at once.
Zdeněk Košek could have been not only an excellent apprentice augur but possibly also one of those priests who read signs from lightning. His notebooks are literally overflowing with it. What could be easier for him – considering his perceptiveness – than to interpret, based on the type of lighting, its color, direction and place of impact, which god has sent the lighting bolt and for what purpose?
After all, Zdeněk Košek has read heavenly signs not only in the shapes of the clouds or the flight of birds, but also in the sound of airplanes and the contrails in their wake.
At a certain moment it was impossible to take lightly the fact that the color that appeared in the northeast on a cloud illuminated by the sun was the same as the color of the car parked in front of a building of a particular house number, and that a short while later it matched the color of the jacket worn by one of the children passing by.
Colors, numbers, words, sentences. I have watched every sign, every person. I have evaluated the colors of their clothing. My head was like a beehive, a propeller, a carousel; my perceptiveness, my sensitivity to sound, smell, sight, taste was so intense that it literally made my “head spin”, erased my mind; “all” that took place went through the folds of my brain. My mind felt like a radar – especially in the “RADIO” year, 1988 (RA for “radio”), and then in the active year, the year of the revolution, 1989 (AK for “aktive”). I literally felt an immense emergence of energy “FROM OUT OF THE HEAD” in the form of rays, waves, elementary particles. Everything I thought of, calculated, “ground up”, explored – “thought up” – came back to me in the form of information from other people, because people meet and talk – babble, in fact – because they read the papers, look for information on television and with their eyes and ears, listen to music and the news on the radio. I literally saw everything, knew everything, had it in my brain… I personally listened to almost no radio, watched no television, read no newspapers… I said to myself: “Why is it telling me this? After all, I know it, or am I expecting it?!” I said to myself: “Why is it telling me this? After all, it’s logical, predictable!?”
And because for me information was no objective, I was egocentrically confirmed in my conviction that my mind was a kind of radar. That I “thought” of something and that the information then came back to me from someone else. I thought that SOMEONE was catching my thoughts with some kind of machine and then telling people what to say when they met me. For instance, I spent all night writing down my “contexts”, my thoughts and considerations. Then I went out into the streets, and what do you know? The things that happened were things that I already had in my head. I was always “MYSTERIOUSLY” ahead in time. By maybe a day or two, or an hour. Now I know that it was as much as five “years” or “WINTERS”. I don’t know what the future will “LOOK LIKE”…
This wasn’t just information from people’s mouths. For instance, “SOMETIMES” (until 1990, except for my time in the hospital) I would buy the newspaper, scan it with my eyes, and “I knew all that” would go through my head. Only completely “UNKNOWN” news caught my interest. It wasn’t just newspapers. People created something, produced it, wrote it, painted it. “This, too, was my ‘FAULT’.” That, more or less, was my thinking. But life is simply motion, dynamics, WEATHER/TIME. I had an enormous urge to “redo” the world. My body was a mere grain in the “clouds” of elementary “particles” of people. But my mind, my mind was a billion people. I thought I was the mind of the Earth.
(green notebook, 4. 5. 1994 and elsewhere)
Here is the world as science and rationalist philosophy do not want to know it. A world in which everything that exists has a story to tell. A world that is literally overflowing with meaning. A world that is confusing, uncontrollable and unstoppable, because each of these stories is constantly growing, expanding and concatenating, proliferating in all directions.
Zdeněk Košek is by far not the only person who has been unable to remain at a safe distance, but who sacrificed himself almost to the point of self-destruction in order to transmit stories that we cannot even hope to decipher, for there is no place to begin…
But in Košek, this incommunicable world has found a unique interpreter, for Košek has found a way of condensing this complicated chain of stories into self-contained units that transcend the lower limits of comprehensibility, thus making them visible to our field of vision. Most of the time, we miss the details, but the sum of all the movements captured on these maps results in something more than just information. A human mind is revealed to us, a mind that is trying to map its activities in real time It is hard not to feel amazed at such a spectacle…
What is more, Košek proceeded with immense certainty, undoubtedly because, among other things, he had a long history of living with maps and within them – thanks to which, even when caught in the strongest maelstrom of associations, he never lost a certain “scientific” sense for clarity and labelling.
In the end, if a meteorological map provides an image of a moment, a diagram of events at a particular time and in a particular place, Košek has truly done nothing worse that merely expand its scope…
In 1981, I used information on rainfall in the Ústí nad Labem region to create my own rainfall map using ink, pastels, and brightly colored markers. At first, these activities had no artistic purpose. Guided by my intuition and passion, I spewed forth my works… Today, at a significantly later date, I present these maps from my first meteorological period.
My second period of creating cosmic and meteorological paintings dates to around 1990–92. I created something more than 2,500 of these, of which I threw 500 into the trash in a psychotic state – today I know that it was a mistake.
(artist’s exhibition note, 1999)
It wasn’t just “thoughts”, records of thoughts, my knowledge, records of how I combined all those things, but also records of the sounds outside the window – the noise of cars, people talking, dogs barking, cats meowing, firecrackers and munitions being set off by “adventure-seekers”, the blowing of the wind, the wind slamming into the window, the wailing of the wind, the sounds echoing through the core of my flat, through its pipes: twanging, banging, water flowing, hissing, knocking, slamming; I could hear inflated, bloated, wooden, metal TONES… That is how good my hearing and perception were. The silence of solitude gave me a sense of uniqueness, independence, exceptionality, but also the feeling of being removed from people, from normal life. And because I had reached the VERY edge of the “UNIVERSE” (it’s recorded somewhere in my paintings), I thought that the CORE OF MY FLAT was the core of the SUN, my son PŘEMYSL. And I captured the sound of the events at the core.
It sounds almost inconceivable today, but my paintings truly depict facts. In 1990–1992, and especially in 1991, I almost incessantly watched the clock and recorded everything in my diagrams. During the day, I watched the birds, writing down and drawing their names, where they were flying from, where they were flying to, their manner of flight. I didn’t make up anything. And because I “soared”, I drew the earth’s surface in numbers and letters, with the birds “beneath me”, the clouds beneath me, the planets beneath me, the stars beneath me, star clusters, nebulas, galaxies. All of it beneath me… For instance when I was writing into a tiny 10 x 7 cm notepad, I felt as if I could see terribly well, I was writing in such teeny-tiny writing… I remember once sitting in a restaurant, drawing the events around me into a tiny NOTEPAD, and I would frequently run outside to see what was going on; the PEOPLE NEXT TO ME couldn’t understand how I could write such tiny letters, symbols, etc….. I felt as if my eyes were terrible HIGH UP, that I was watching everything from an enormous distance somewhere at the very end of the universe or universes… Today I find it difficult to describe it or to write down comprehensibly – comprehensible for a “NORMAL” mortal – the things that were going on in my mind. I feel that today the things I HAD in my head from 1990 to January 1992 will suffice me until the end of my LIFE… I was so ATTENTIVE towards everything, SENSITIVE towards everything, that I noticed EVERY LITTLE THING, people’s every movement, every little fly, every flash of light. I wrote down the time and the event. Today I wonder at how could have survived it, especially 1991. But I know that my writing and drawing of diagrams saved my life. I noticed and ventilated, using any form of drawing. For me, there was no such thing as a mistake… I was of the opinion that everything that a person does has meaning. Life is meaning… It is interesting that in 1990 and 1992, and especially in 1991, I understood everyone, everything they said, how they expressed themselves, but almost nobody understood me, with just a few exceptions…
(green notebook, 6. 5. 1994)
One thing Košek can barely stand is linearity. When he was creating his diagrams, he couldn’t accept reading or writing or even thinking in just one direction. The surface of the paper thus came to life beneath his hands. It became an active membrane that guided all the pouring, flowing, and combining of words. Even changes in pressure on the pencil had their meaning.
Although Košek tried to give some of his observations the form of a “coherent text” and persisted in the established order or writing from left to right and top to bottom, he literally changed the row of text into a frontline. He preserve external aesthetics (after all, he had spent years working as a typesetter), but it is all zig-zags, breaks, inversions, offsets, loops, tension: the words turn around and fall apart, are combined with numbers, or are transformed into astronomical and chemical symbols; acronyms become a part of compounds, letters change size and jump from the upper or lower margins of the row, often within a single word; everywhere, there are arrows, dots, underlines, strikethroughs, circling, parentheses alternating with brackets…
At first glance, it is a text full of tension. It is difficult to concentrate on it in order to read it as a whole. It is literally boundless, one long span of thoughts and memories and observations and associations… It has no end. Strangely enough, the sense of monotony is stronger the more distinctive the rhythm of the individual places:
…and the sparrows are “whispering” it amongst themselves – this isn’t a comparison of PLANE, PLANÁ NAD LUŽNICÍ — LIBEREC à LUS… LUSATIAN MOUNTAINS, FOUNTAINS, FOUNT… COUNT… the sparrows know all about me, it is clear, a fact and a FEAT, NO BEAT, but the rhythm of time, and that is also a BEAT – FEAT = F antenna, letter… and the birds know it ………… they simply know how to read and I won’t convince anyone …. AROUND half past 1 on Wednesday, 8-year-old Mirek got angry when I said that sparrows know how to read… I was HOLDING a BROCHURE in my hand – “THE CZECH MAFIA” – from the BLACKBIRD series … black-and-WHITE COVER…
(yellow notepad, probably 19. 10. 1990)
Each word is an impulse. Each observation, idea, interrelationship, and even joke contains the fear, if not terror (can this be emphasized enough?) of what it means. Whether it can rouse, open eyes and minds, and finally get other people’s minds working enough to be capable of following what is going on. What all is going on.
Under this pressure, words begin to swell. The distance from their regular meaning to a meaning in quotation marks is never far. What is more, various figurative or shifted meanings come into play as well: terminology, translations into neighboring languages, and so on. Words are related to one another lightning-fast, on the basis of similar sounds or real and folk etymology, but also on the basis of the number of letters. It is enough to say “mouth” and already you’ve said “south”, a cardinal direction with an inexhaustible number of associations, whereas the solitary letter “o” recalls the chemical symbol for oxygen and – through the atmosphere and breathing – anything on Earth.
According to Košek, the Czech language thus helps people communicate only because they persistently fail to hear it.
BEGINNING – END. REAR END – BEGINNER. It sounds like a joke, but Czech is a magician.
(green notebook, 6. 5. 1994)
And elsewhere, following another successful word operation, Košek writes:
This works throughout the world, and I get the sense that the Czechs as a nation will do well ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE.
(green notebook, 1994)
But this is a direct challenge to do so! How to resist when you are given a supply of words for naming almost everything in the world, and those words can be kept at the ready using some two or three dozen letters?
This temptation is even stronger with numbers, which can be combined to produce truly anything. This is especially true when the rules of mathematics can be freely crossed with those of magical numerology to make use of visual and aural forms: one sounds like won, an upside-down six is a nine, an upside-down two a seven. Depending on context, the number seven can also evoke the name of the seventh planet, the seventh element of the periodic table or the name of a person born in the seventh month…
When Košek invokes mythology instead of meteorology, analyzing words from Hebrew and Sanskrit, his “interconnected series” find themselves in close affinity with Kabbalistic literature. By accelerating various etymological, aural and numerical combinations, he achieves mysterious solutions whose aim is to shine a light on the creation of the world. The basic principle is nearly the same, except that, compared to series such as “Adonis, At-ys, As-ar, AD-onai, Adad, daddy, father” or “air, aer, avir, AR, aor, oar”, the details of Košek’s life simply don’t evoke the right level of mystery:
ST, CT à center, particle, core, co re, red, rest, press, push, tush, tchantos, tos, sot, set, sto, tas, das, thus this does the fly,
(white notepad, 20. 9. 1990)
Košek’s ability to create short combinations of words like “Ginger ginseng”, “burley barley”, “paralytic apocalyptic Popocatepetl”, “chimney Comenius comet” or “the end of thee, and?” has been called a peculiar kind of poetry. It would certainly have been appreciated by, say, James Joyce, who dedicated his most important work, Finnegan’s Wake (written in 1922–39), to just this kind of limitless etymological game making use of 40 languages, the names of all the world’s rivers, all manner of citations, and a pure sense of humor.
Today, an entire scientific discipline exists to decipher this book. And this is Košek’s dream. The mere thought of the entire expansive nature of his writings fills him with a sense of helplessness. After all, not even the various little pieces of paper, photographs or documents inserted into the individual pages are without meaning in that place… Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Can all this even be preserved? Organized? Read? Explained?
Not only is it a lot of letters, symbols, colors, dots, lines, commas, vectors etc. etc., but they are created almost within a sphere – the idea of a 360-degree circle or a hexagon with 720 degrees is amazing enough, but a sphere? How many degrees does it have? If it was just a so-called geometric abstraction, but it is letters on practically all sides – from the front, from the rear, upside down. Take, for instance, Arabic writing, Hebrew letters, Chinese or Japanese symbols – how many such symbols exist in my writings? What if people will be like this in 100, 200 or 1,000 years – if they survive on this blue planet…?
(green notebook, 20. 2. 1994)
I used up a lot of energy, and didn’t even consider food to be important. I lost weight. During my time of “being cured” – better said, treated – I was barely able to “think”, I just ate and slept; in other words, the main thing was my basic needs except sex. Today – two years later – I am amazed that I was even capable of putting together my diagrams, symbols, letters, and fields of color. I was of the opinion that man clings tight to communicating by language, and all along the mystery of communication is somewhere completely different, a different kind of energy. I know that everything is strongly related to what we call sense, whose climax is the orgasm, genital arousal – i.e., sex…
I “created” my records in the common rooms, outside on the benches – and mainly at home, and mainly in the kitchen. I called it a cave or my “kitchen of the weather”, as the poles are called, which is why I called “küche” like that…
What PERCENTAGE figure could be used to describe the brain’s level of performance? I didn’t manage to write down everything that threw itself at me with such hypersensitivity, and so I kept making new diagrams. I could sense the entire universe or a thousand universes of space-time, a tangible phenomenon. I wanted to hold on to “someone” during this fall into the depths of contexts, into a black hole…
I was an extremist or a madman… Was there any meaning to having lived through this period? Will it repeat itself? How will I be “artistically” active in the coming years? I felt as if I was “at my peak” — HIGH UP… Would it be worth it to paint selected “diagrams” on a larger canvas… Could I manage it on my own? From my current state, I view my records as a wonder of the world, and if I wasn’t familiar with my two-year trip, looking at the diagrams I might ask: “How could that have been created by one person, by one mind?” Today, when I am more or less back to normal, I realize that I am a being of flesh and bone – a person ruled by the laws of nature, the laws of chemistry, physics, mathematics, the law of the conservation of energy and matter, the law of gravity, the law of “instincts” and CONTEXTUAL LAW. I am a person capable of setting his mind into motion, but also an individual capable of forgetting… Of course, if you turn on your brain without using your “mouth” or hands, you might end up thinking (and too much) – but the others don’t know it because you are incapable of using your body to share with them your so-called thoughts.
(green notebook 20. 2. 1994, diary 13. 1. 1995 and elsewhere)
So the final word goes to psychiatry? Within the context of its exhausting nature, it must all seem insignificant, if not tedious. After all, its practitioners hear of revolutionary discoveries, relationships, communication, revelations, and persecution every single day – to the point that it almost looks like their main task is to disregard it all. To listen attentively, provide treatment and provide a human touch, yes. And yet – a fundamental disregard for all interpretations of the word that are presented to them.
Psychiatrists thus play the role of being a kind of shield for science.
After all, it does make sense that we cannot pay attention to everything. To see an event in every shape of the clouds, in every turn of a bird’s head, in every license plate of a passing car, in every reflection.
Art – maybe yes. Art can sometimes remind us that “soot-covered Ústí deserves the world’s attention”. It can set aside a few moments in our lives when everything is truly speaking.
Even science has such moments. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss devoted an entire chapter of his famous book Tristes Tropiques (1955) to an exhaustive description of the changes in the sky during one sunset. “Would I be able to relive those feverish moments when, notebook in hand, I jotted down second by second the expressions which would perhaps enable me to fix these evanescent and ever-renewed forms?” It is an eminently Košek-like captivation, one followed by the statement that “the operations of consciousness can also be read in these fluffy constellations.”
Given the chance, more than one scientist will elaborate on the overlooked mysteries of being – when the daily research work has been put aside and the resting mind radiates calmness and conciliation.
Because of these mysteries, other minds throw themselves into such frenzied activity that they end up losing touch with the others. And that even though they often want to merely point out what everybody somehow knows anyway. But if they want to prove it, they are lost.
CALVUS, CAPILLATUS – BALD, BARE, HIRSUTE. Who will prove that CLOUDS are not living organisms? Who will prove that a cloud formation (CYCLONE) up to 1,000 km wide or a mini-cyclone CUMULONIMBUS 1 KM WIDE but up to 15 km tall is a non-thinking “phenomenon”? When there is a strong wind, you cannot go against it but must submit to it, just as you have to go around a hill or river if you can’t climb over the hill or swim across the river… Even clouds respond to uneven terrain through their “community” of drops. It is a never-ending event, a constant reaction, an ongoing rapid movement. In 15 minutes, 16, 20, 30 minutes, a CLOUD rises to enormous heights and creates an “event” – a storm. This involves pressure, temperature, dew point, the configuration of the terrain… People, too, have pressure, temperature, and a “dew point”. But time and space – transitory, unimaginable… When a storm cloud exhausts the energy it acquired from the Sun and “2” (through steam), it dies and disintegrates. It may take 30 minutes, 2 hours, 12 hours, a week… A person may live 5, 10, 50, 80, or even 130 years. The community of man, society, groupings, associations function similarly – some “evaporate”, others are born and die right away, others are born and live longer. A life of 1 hour, 24 hours, a week or 100 years. Where is the difference?
(green notebook, 4. 5. 1994)
When it comes down to it, each of us merely persists in his foolishness with the hope once expressed by William Blake – that if we are thorough in our foolishness, we will one day achieve wisdom.
Man does not receive reason, he must let it come… by his own will!!! Life expects things from us – not the other way around.
Autumn 2001, first reprinted in Zdeněk Košek: Jak se dělá počasí (Liberec 2001, ed. Jaromír Typlt)
Translated by Stephan von Pohl.
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The citations and references related to the following publications:
D. Ž. Bor: Abeceda stvoření. Praha 1993. //// Michel Butor: Nástin prahu vnímatelnosti pro Finnegana. Světová literatura 15, 1970, no. 2, pp. 160–165. //// James Gleick: Chaos: Making a New Science. New York 1988. (Butterfly effect on pp. 9–32). //// Claude Lévi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques. Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New York 1992. (pp. 61–69). //// Jacques Mercanton: Hodiny s Jamesem Joycem. Světová literatura 15, 1970, no. 2, pp. 147–159.