Ales Razanau “shamanized” a poetic trance

Poems, contrast to philosophic categories, is an unconscious phenomenon, since poems merely don’t have any categories. But who prevents one from searching meanings in poetry?

The monologue of a legendary Belarusan poet and translator Ales Razanau, which took place within the frames of the “Main question” series of the Flying University, is impossible to fit in the traditional format of a lecture. The master called it “getting the grasp of a poem”.

“The poem has something that is voiced, but also has something that was revealed and wasn’t revealed,” – started Ales Razanau.

First, the speaker cited the work “My garden is knee-deep in snow” by poet Ales Pismiankou, written a year before the author died.

After that the most mysterious action started: the analysis of the poem’s spectrum to the lyrical "notes from the winter garden", which are not yet the system, although there is system in them; and it has become not only the absorption, but also extra-interpretation and extra-absorption. It became the search for hidden meanings of the poem in rhyme and rhythm, in coincidences and differences, theses and antitheses. Each line and even every word is being converted into a separate thought. There were so many of those, who are fond of searching for meanings, that the hall of the Belarusian Union of Designers, which hosted the meeting, has hardly accommodated everyone. “EuroBelarus” Information Service also joined them.

A winter garden. The two – he and she – which way will they take? In what order? Where do they go and where do they come from? What garden is around them, what lives in it? What seizes it, what sounds is it filled with? Whom does this garden belong to and there is mine in this garden? What is this very garden? It conceals the way-out. The far and the close, symmetry and asymmetry, which manifest what was hidden. Lost, abandoned by all senses, the garden becomes a meeting place. Rowan-tree and snowball tree, winter garden, footprints, and a celebration that the travelers will have to enter, then get something, and get rid of it. And here the essence is revealed – that we have male and female in the lost garden, and who is who in the biblical story.

Ales Razanau’s reflections on such seemingly simple poem resulted in a philosophical quest for ways and relations, internal and external, weaved into thousand meanings. This is the story of nature, and language is the material for creating it. After all, according to Razanau, "what is paid attention to gets the proper weight, and it is given to something that had the weight initially ... and in the poem, if it is true, there is an unknown quantity; the poem follows from the relation between the known and the unknown."

However, at the same time "We do not possess knowledge, we enter it; and by opening ourselves to it, we open it."

Why do we listen attentively to these meanings? Because all this – the snow, the footprints, the garden – is about life and direction, about the known and the unknown, the reflection of relations and place, about the past, the present, and the future, about ourselves...

The lecturer analyzed each word into many meanings and nuances, and in each of these meanings – is a new main question, the answer to which can be found in the sense of the next word, and with it – the new question... However, is it actually worth look for these answers? According to Ales Razanau, "no one has to intervene and to order anything, no one has to draw any conclusions: a poem is essential by pronouncing itself..." And by the way, "the poem will be uttered first; the poet must be silent."

Philosopher Ihar Babkou aptly remarked, "Ales Razanau has the academic degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the European Humanities University, but I would have awarded him with a degree of a great shaman of Belarusian thinking; an Alchemist of meaning and poetry. "

Some of the participants came with collections of poems by Razanau, read out certain passages, commented, asked questions, thanked for having been able to understand themselves with the help of Razanau’s poetry. However, not all those present appeared prepared for entry into the maze of poetical thinking. For example, one of the questions that came after the lecture, wondered whether the author realized that he would end up in such analytics? We can find the answer to this question in one of the definitions of Ales Razanau’s poem: whatever he is, he will always remain completely unexplainable.

As Iryna Dubianetskaja, Bible scholar, theologian, and philosopher noted, “poetry, to which philosophy is a comment”.

The lecturer explained that “the poetry is at the border of a principally different thinking, which hasn’t acquired its tools yet. But if it wants to fit in all-known canons, it gets lost”.