The Illusion of Life
Author | : Sorin Cerin |
Publisher | : CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform |
Total Pages | : 215 |
Release | : 2016-10-03 |
ISBN-10 | : 9781539303640 |
ISBN-13 | : 1539303640 |
Rating | : 4/5 (640 Downloads) |
Download or read book The Illusion of Life written by Sorin Cerin and published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM AT SORIN CERIN CRITICICISM ABOUT PHILOSOPHICAL POEMS PhD Professor Ștefan Borbély, emphasizes in the Romanian magazine Contemporanul (Contemporary), no. 10, October 2020, on page 5, under the title Gnoses of Sorin Cerin, that: The multitude of phrases written in capital letters (Nobody's World; The Deep Trace of Pain; The Darkness of Loneliness; The Labyrinth of the Absurd, etc.) indicate the existence of a precise conceptual system within the religious-philosophical poetry of Sorin Cerin, which obviously draws its sap from an ethos, of Christian-Gnostic essence, with the remark that, the canonical protagonists of classical Christianity (Jesus, Mary, the Devil, etc.) do not appear in the soteriological discourse of the volume, although the spiritual finality of the approach is beyond any doubt, because the poet constantly invokes, as the final target of his aspiration, Love, the Eye of Dream, of the Perfection or the Path to Absolute, of the Future. The dichotomous regime of the keywords of the volume is also of Christian origin, because within them the Absolute and the Absurd face, as in Manichaeism, for example, the fate of the world is decided by the battle between the Being of the Light and the Prince of the Darkness. I have deliberately mentioned Manichaeism as a possible source of inspiration for the cosmology created by Sorin Cerin, because, like the ancient apocalypse (that is, of the texts-revelation), the poet opposes the dispersion induced by materiality by building his own mythology, very carefully conceptualized. This is what the great masters of early Christianity did, taking over a tradition that came from pre-Christian times, when, caught in the illusions of the versatile, metamorphic worlds (The Prince of Darkness in Manichaeism is also a metamorphic demiurge, able to give Matter the most attractive forms, not to mention the Maya to the Hindus), the scholar built an independent autarchic universe (or myth), which being of spiritual (crystalline) origin, offered him the "temple" necessary for the soteriological exercise. Carefully, then, at every detail of this "temple" (which could be a bamboo grove, a monastery in newer times or even a Book), the scholar purified himself with each pebble he placed on the wall of his edifice, finally covering himself with it as if he were doing it with a halo of light. Sorin Cerin's poetry contributes, through each new verse, through each new poem or collection, to the construction of such an autarchic spiritual system. Therefore, the poet's terminology has a precise intrinsic logic: when he says that any Cathedral of the Absurd is built with matter taken from death, when he writes about the Subconscious Stranger or the Frozen Words floating around us like thorns of ice, the meaning of these phrases must be sought within the mythographic system created by the poet, and not interpreted by extrapolation. Let us try, therefore, to decrypt the symbolic and narrative structure of this myth, in order to understand its meaning. The universe that the poet evokes in his verses is one of the endings of cosmic cycle, being, therefore, one of eschatological origin. There are, in it, "cemeteries of words ," "ruined cathedrals," cluttered dawns, which "crumble," or "broken windows of Heaven," in which "it rains with sharp shards, of moments." We will not find anywhere in the perimeter of this universe, which seems inspired by the ruins suspended in ether, of the Piranesi, no space of compensation or refuge, the ruin and the dispersion being ubiquitous. Thus, the black, hopeless geography of the volume suggests bringing the faith into an extreme state, of maceration (Thomas d'Aquino's acedia, also interpreted as a torpor), a stage of annulment of being, from which start, further, two alternative paths: that of renunciation and death, respectively that of courage and hope, the purpose of extreme dispersion being to suggest that even in the most prejudicial situations, the life of faith has sufficient inner resources for ascension and "rebirth," because no matter how opaque the world around us would be, there are still, in its deep texture, enough "seeds of love", which to we gather them to build a salvation. Sorin Cerin's poetry appears to us, therefore, as one marked by a paradoxical spiritualist optimism, functioning with the logic of an inverted world. The poet constructs, with fervor and syntactic skill, an anti-world (the world of "cemeteries of words", of frozen meanings, the world of "sharp shards" and the Absurd), which, in the end, is meant to test his faith and to turn him to the redemptive horizon of the Absolute. In quantitative terms, the words and images of the volume belong mainly to the dispersed world, to "loss, cold and indifferent forgetfulness", to the Absurd, that is, to an eschatological climate, which the Faith has the call to transcend and correct. The poet goes, however, even further, proposing a cosmology, of the dualistic type, from the category of those used in Gnosis. Let's try to understand it, starting from the poem in the volume, entitled Where we will be forced to stay: We embarked, on the ship of the Vanity, with the name of Happiness, without we knowing, that the ports in which will dock, are those of the Pain and Absurd, followed in the end, by the one called, Death, where we will be forced to stay, forever, separated from the identity of Love, what will be stolen from us, by another Destiny, what will no longer belong to us, for to be carried in the distances, of the Heart of Fire, of the Eternity of the Moment, given somewhere sometime, by your Glances, now lost, among the Flowers of Tears, of the Memories. It is not the only place where Sorin Cerin talks about an aboulic, deceptive destiny, in which humanity was "closed", cloistered against its will. In this case, the "ship of vanity" docks in ports with exclusively negative connotations, but it is not at all certain that the passengers wanted such a "cruise", their destiny carrying them adrift, against their own will, for superior reasons, which they cannot control. In another poem in the volume there is a "God of No One", who made the world (or at least part of it) "without understanding" that it must be composed (and) of love. This "careless" demiurge has operated, from the very beginning on a negative axiological selection, stopping people from reaching the values of the Good directly or hiding the positive ones. The axial term of the whole complex is the Subconscious Stranger, "which - the poet writes - we have been forbidden to know". Consequently, mankind let itself caught in a premeditated cosmic "mistake," which hindered its path to fulfillment, that is, to Love. The Subconscious Stranger appears in several of Sorin Cerin's poems, he having the force of an obsession, with recuperative value. Living in the torn, dispersed universe of "absurd" materiality, the poet does nothing but move away from the Subconscious Stranger, salvation demanding, on the contrary, a path in the opposite direction, towards the recovery of the Subconscious and its putting in harmony with the Absolute. The precondition of "return" (an essential term for Gnosis) represents it, the internalization of Love: the sharing, from its substance, the preparation of transfiguration. Thus, having all the constitutive elements of the poet's personal poetic mythology, we can only reconstruct it. The starting point is, as in Gnosis, the existence of a "Foreign God" (called by the poet, the God of No One), who mispronounced, "carelessly" the Words of Genesis, revealing - without wanting, probably - a world unilaterally abstract, "absurd," in which the human spirit is put to the test. The will does not help them either, as we have seen that it happens with the metaphor of the drifting ship, because the world was created from the beginning wrong, with the normal meanings reversed. The major symbol of the volume expresses, therefore, a metaphysical trap: the human being is caught in an ironic "game", of eschatological type, from which, apparently, he has no way out. But the impasse turns out to be only apparent, because the builder of his own sublime edifice, that is, the poet, has specific, soteriological powers, through which the gate of salvation opens. All these powers are anti-systemic, ie anti-eschatological. Did "God of No One" put wrong words in the world which he created? The poet's purpose is to find the true ones - and to write them, in order to make them accessible and to those around him. Has the world headed, unknowingly, to wandering, dryness, and dispersion ?: the poet's purpose is to find meanings, significations and sources of energy, and to show them and to others, in order to replace the fragmented world with the promise of a beautiful, whole, bright one. Did the forces of matter stand in the way of the Absurd and of opacity? The purpose of the poet - and, implicitly, of man - is to plant Love in souls and to return toward the Absolute. Anyone can operate these essentialized retroversions, because, in the end, poet and man mean, in Sorin Cerin's system of thinking, about the same thing: two qualitatively related hypostases of the religious man, of the One who Believes. PhD Professor Al Cistelecan within the heading Avant la lettre, under the title Between reflection and attitude, appeared in the magazine Familia nr.11-12 November-December 2015, pag.16-18, Al Cistelecan considers about the poetry of meditation, of Sorin Cerin, that: "From what I see, Sorin Cerin is a kind of volcano textually, in continuously, and maximum eruption, with a writing equally frantic, as and, of convictions. In poetry,relies on gusts reflexive and on the sapiential enthusiasm, cultivating, how says alone in the subtitle of the Non-sense of the Existence, from here the poems "of meditation".One approach among all risky - not of today, yesterday, but from always - because he tend to mix where not even is, the work of poetry, making a kind of philosophizing versified, and willy-nilly, all kinds of punishments and morality. Not anymore is case to remind ourselves of the words said by Maiorescu, to Panait Cerna, about "philosophical poetry," because the poet, them knows, and, he very well, and precisely that wants to face: the risk of to work only in idea, and, of to subordinate the imaginative, to the conceptual.Truth be told, it's not for Sorin Cerin, no danger in this sense, for he is in fact a passional, and never reach the serenity and tranquility Apolline of the thought, on the contrary, recites with pathos rather from within a trauma which he tries to a exorcise, and to sublimates, into radical than from inside any peace of thought or a reflexive harmonies.Even what sounds like an idea nude, transcribed often aphoristic, is actually a burst of attitude, a transcript of emotion - not with coldness, but rather with heat (was also remarked, moreover, manner more prophetic of the enunciations).But, how the method, of, the taking off, lyrical, consists in a kind of elevation of everything that comes, up to the dignity of articulating their reflexive (from where the listing, any references to immediately, whether biographical or more than that), the poems by Cerin, undertake steep in the equations big existential and definitive, and they not lose time in, domestic confessions. They attack the Principle of reality, not its accidents. Thus, everything is raised to a dignity problematic, if no and of other nature, and prepared for a processing, densified. Risks of the formula, arise fatal, and here, because is seen immediately the mechanism of to promote the reality to dignity of the lyrism.One of the mechanisms comes from expressionist heritage (without that Sorin Cerin to have something else in common with the expressionists), of the capitalized letter, through which establishes suddenly and unpredictably, or humility radicalized , or panic in front of majesty of the word.Usually the uppercase, baptizes the stratum "conceptual" (even if some concepts are metaphors), signaling the problematic alert.It is true, Sorin Cerin makes excess and wastage, of the uppercase, such that, from a while, they do not more create, any panic, no godliness, because abundance them calms effects of this kind, and spoil them into a sort of grandiloquence.The other mechanism of the elevation in dignity rely on a certain - perhaps assumed, perhaps premeditated - pretentious discourse, on a thickening lexical, and on a deep and serious declamation.It is insinuated - of lest, even establishes - and here is an obvious procedure of imaginative recipe, redundant over tolerant. How is and normal - even inevitable - in a lyrical of reflection what wants to coagulate around certain cores conceptual, the modality immediate of awareness of these nodes conceptual, consists in materializing the abstractions, making them sensual is just their way of to do epiphany lyrical.But at, Sorin Cerin, imaginative mechanics is based on a simple use of the genitive, which materialize the abstractions, (from where endless pictures like "the thorns of the Truth," "chimney sweeps of the Fulfillments," " the brushes of Deceptions" etc. etc.), under, which most often is a button of personification.On the scale of decantation in metaphors we stand, thus, only on the first steps, what produces simultaneously, an effect of candor imaginative (or discoursive), but and one of uniformity.Probable but that this confidence in the primary processes is due to the stake on decanting of the thought, stake which let, in subsidiary, the imaginative action (and on the one symbolized more so) as such. But not how many or what ideas roam, through Sorin Cerin's poems are, however the most relevant, thing (the idea, generally, but and in this particular case, has a degree of indifference, to lyricism).On the contrary, in way somewhat paradoxically, decisive, not only defining, it's the attitude in which they gather, the affect in which coagulates.Beneath the appearance of a speech projected on "thought", Sorin Cerin promotes, in fact, an lyricism (about put to dry) of, emotions existential (not of intimate emotions). The reflexivity of the poems is not, from this perspective, than a kind of penitential attitude, an expression of hierarchies, of violent emotions. Passionate layer is, in reality, the one that shake, and he sees himself in almost all its components, from the ones of blaming, to the ones of piety, or tenderness sublimated (or, on the contrary, becoming sentimentalist again). The poet is, in substance, an exasperated of state of the world and the human condition and starting from here, makes exercises with sarcasm (cruel, at least, as, gush), on account of "consumer society" or on that of the vanity of "Illusions of the Existence". It's a fever of a figures of style that contains a curse, which gives impetus to the lyrics, but which especially highlights discoursive, the exasperation in front of this general degradation. So general, that she comprised and transcendental, for Sorin Cerin is more than irritated by the instrumentalization of the God (and, of the faith) in the world today. Irritation in front of corruption the sacred, reaches climax, in lyrics of maximum, nerve blasphemous ("Wickedness of Devil is called Evil, / while of the God, Good. ", but and others, no less provocative and" infamous " at the address the Godhead); but this does not happen, than because of the intensity and purity of his own faith (Stefan Borbely highlighted the energy of fervor from the poetry of Cerin), from a kind of devotional absolutism. For that not the lyrics, of challenge and blame, do, actually Cerin, on the contrary: lyrics of devotion desperate and passionate, through which him seeks "on Our True God / so different from the one of cathedrals of knee scratched / at the cold walls and inert of the greed of the Illusion of Life ". It is the devotional fever from on, the reverse, of imprecations and sarcasm, but precisely she is the one that contaminates all the poems. From a layer of ideals, squashed, comes out, with verve passionate, the attitudes, of Cerin, attitudes eruptive, no matter how, they would be encoded in a lyrical of reflections. " PhD Professor Elvira Sorohan - An existentialist poet of the 21st Century To fully understand the literary chronicle written by Elvira Sorohan in Convorbiri Literare, “Literary Conversations”, which refers to an article written by Magda Cârneci regarding Trans-poetry, and published in România literară, “Romania literary”, where specified what namely is poetry genuine, brilliant, the great poetry, on which a envies the poets of the last century, Elvira Sorohan, specifies in the chronicle dedicated to the poetry of Cerin, from, Convorbiri Literare, “Literary Conversations”, number 9 (237), pages 25-28, 2015 under the title An existentialist poet of the 21st century, that:Without understanding what is "trans-poetry", which probably is not more poetry, invoking a term coined by Magda Cârneci, I more read, however, poetry today and now I'm trying to say something about one certain.Dissatisfied of "insufficiency of contemporary poetry" in the same article from in România literară, "Literary Romania", reasonably poetess accuses in block, how, that what "delivers" now the creators of poetry, are not than notations of "little feeling", "small despairs" and "small thinking. "Paraphrasing it on Maiorescu, harsh critical of the diminutives cultivated by Alecsandri, you can not say than that poetry resulting from such notation is also low (to the cube, if enumeration stops at three).The cause identified by Magda Cârneci, would be the lack of inspiration, that tension psychical, specific the men of art, an experience spontaneous, what gives birth, uncontrollably, at creation.It is moment inspiring, in the case of poetry, charged of impulses affective, impossible to defeated rationally, an impulse on that it you have or do not it have, and, of, which is responsible the vocation.Simple, this is the problem, you have vocation, you have inspiration. I have not really an opinion formed about poetry of Magda Cârneci, and I can not know, how often inspiration visits her, but if this state is a grace, longer the case to look for recipes for to a induces ?And yet, in the name of the guild, preoccupation the poetess, for the desired state, focuses interrogative: "... the capital question that arises is the following: how do we to have access more often, more controlled and not just by accident, to those states intense, at the despised