Toward a Deep Culture: A practitioner’s reflections
The one real, invisible bridge...
Words overheard in conversation with inhabitants of Mostar. They were being asked about the Old Bridge, the work of Hajrudin the builder, destroyed in 1993 during the war. They said it had been rebuilt; the opening was a huge media event. So many journalists and officials came from abroad that there was no room for the locals , so they watched the ceremony on TV.
Yes, that physical bridge, included on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites, has been reconstructed. It was done with the expert financial and technical support of international organisations. However, that one real, invisible bridge has still not been rebuilt.
So said the Mostarians. By which they meant that it was not only the bridge between the precipitous banks of the Neretva River that had been severed, but above all the one between people.
This act was an act of violence against the connective tissue of the Mostar community, tearing apart families and neighbours, economic and spiritual links, a shared memory and shared childhoods.
The bridge traced a deadly line of division between Croatians, Muslims, Serbians, Jews, Roma…
It traced it with a hand befuddled with fear while donning a mask of hatred, which would later become indivisible from the face.
It traced it not between different peoples, as specialists of national identity once used to do, but on the living organism of the human being.
It made a hero of the persecutor of the other, pushing interpersonal solidarity aside into the realm of taboo, with a touch of betrayal.
A person moved to help another, an instinct recognised till then as human and normal, found themselves gagged and began to be ashamed of their weakness.
The law of hospitality was trampled into the ground, counting on the younger generation’s never learning of its existence.
Everything held in common became something alien.
A person by the name of Dobry (The Good One)—whose likeness, hand raised towards the sun, can be found on stone ‘stećci’ scattered throughout all of Bosnia and Herzegovina and has for hundreds of years been beaten into bronze by the hammers of smiths from the kujundžiluk quarter—was drowned in the Neretva.
The history written after the destruction of the Old Bridge immortalizes in its annals and on its monuments the names of those who died on various sides of the front, but only the name of Dobry has been forgotten, and there is no country that would recognize him as its own.
2.
We will build a bridge across the Mediterranean...
This was the proposal that emerged in Utrecht at a meeting of politicians, social activists and leaders of organisations concerned with counteracting xenophobia and overcoming the immigration crisis in Europe.
The ‘Political Beauty’ Organisation presented a video showing a prototype of such a bridge. According to the structure’s initiators, it would be an achievement of European civilization, utilising its financial and engineering potential. The cost: 230 billion euros. The anticipated date of the historic cutting of the ribbon: 2030.
This project will be appreciated by anyone who is aware of the European Union’s scandalous failure to establish a humanitarian corridor between Northern Africa and Europe, the consequent profit of billions by traders in human merchandise, and the costs reaching billions borne by the EU to cover security, controls, prosecution, monitoring, rescue, and treatment.
No one is in a position to calculate the cost of the human trauma that is the price of crossing from South to North, paid for not only with loss of life by those who fail, but also in the loss of dignity, health and faith in the human person on the part of those who ‘succeed.’ The costs of this trauma burden the new arrivals first and foremost, but are also quickly felt by their new neighbours.
Above all, the bridge would be raised over one of the biggest mass graves of the contemporary world:the depths of the Mediterranean Sea, giving – not necessarily false – hope that the numbers of victims might be reduced.
The construction of the proposed Mediterranean Bridge, like every other bridge raised thanks to economic and technological capabilities, would not change the fact that those using it would cross bearing invisible broken bridges and would become citizens of social organisms still suffering from the loss of ‘connective tissue.’
Are we prepared to take on such a challenge?
One could speculate endlessly whether contemporary Europe is sufficiently mature to invest in the building of ‘invisible bridges’ to a similar extent as it invests in material ones.
But perhaps it is worth turning the question round and imagining a situation in which the organisations and civic initiatives taking part in meetings like Utrecht receive funds for this purpose on the scale of those destined for the Mediterranean Bridge: are we ready to use them wisely?
This is a question about competence, skills and tools as much as it is about philosophy and a vision for the future, or perhaps even about a bold utopia for the time that lies ahead of us.
3.
...and even if there is no other shore
they will walk that aerial bridge all the same.
— Czesław Miłosz
What sort of culture is needed to re/build the only real bridges—the invisible ones?
We already know that this appeal will not be fulfilled by festival culture based on one-off events, or by activity in social or spiritual spheres that veers away from organic inter-human relations immersed in long-standing practices and remain limited to short-term projects, susceptible to the pressures of the media and mass-market.
The escapism of the beneficiaries of social prosperity and the cult of individual freedom is not enough to hammer out ecological solidarity and the art of coexistence with the Other.
The multi-kulti world is sunk in crisis, because the freedom to cultivate discrete identities and pride in the wealth of diversity does not translate into an ethos of community that takes responsibility for the whole.
An invisible bridge cannot be built by those who are convinced that they are on the right or better side, or who see their help to others as a means of assimilation. Consequently, any collaboration will be based on the latter’s awareness and acceptance of the former’s assistance so they can fully join the giver.
Nor will a bridge be built by those who resist the truth that even the most legitimate and trustworthy defence of one’s own rights, identity and orientation carries within itself the threat of a fortress mentality.
A bridge begins where a person crosses his own threshold.
An invisible bridge is not raised as a ready and closed construction. Nor can it be imported from the outside world because its building blocks comprise matter originating in the milieu in which it is formed.
An invisible bridge constitutes a process broken down into small steps, micro-actions, chains of inter-human activity, communion with nature and co-existence with animals, the art of bonding, expanding knowledge of the network of links and correspondences in the world. In turn, the bridge is created by culture; its etymology extends to the notion of organic work and cultivating orworking the raw material of life (Latin cultivare).
The bridge belongs to culture because it requires strength to raise itself above the ground, to free itself from life’s material necessities and the physical force of weight, to go further than a solid towering construction on the banks of a river—to liberate an arc of bonding.
The only way to hoist oneself above the earth is through the depths, beneath the surface of the world of phenomena and the powers ruling them.
Crossing the threshold of what is one’s own runs not along a horizontal line, but into the depths. The culture of building an invisible bridge is a deep culture.
4.
Go into the depths.
Go into the depths. It isn’t far. Do not think it is achievable only for the chosen ones. It’s here, right under yours and everyone’s heart. From the heart into the depths.
Go into the depths. Towards the other. There is no other way for those crossing the threshold of what is their own. Overcome the border which will endlessly mark out for you what is familiar, possessed, named, understood, dear, tamed, built—everything achieved. Your journey does not end with any of these.
Go into the depths. Into the unknown and open. Without ready-made scenarios and clear-cut horizons.
Go into the depths. Towards people. You will make efforts to free yourself from them, you will defend your freedom in solitude, you will search for your own voice and an individual path. Until you perceive that you are running away, that you are reaching the border and—desiring to go further—you will return to people.
Go into the depths. In the footsteps of nature and animals. On the surface of things, they are losing against the human being, but that changes as soon as you leave the shore. They are in tune with the invisible.
Go into the depths. Towards your own You. There is a twin in the universe from whom you were decoupled. We were born of separation. Your life is a dream of loss and forgetting. In creating, you long for scarring.
Go into the depths. Do not leave the shadows. Those who leave the sun for the shade preserve their strength for distant journeys and value neighbourly coexistence.
Go into the depths. Towards interdependence. In isolation, the field of your independence becomes barren. You won’t take a step further unless you rediscover yourself as a link along a chain of communicating vessels. We are free only insofar as our freedom is shared by those with whom we coexist.
Go into the depths. Upwards. Rise above yourself and let others be better than they are. You will not go a step further into the depths if you remain what you are already, if you stigmatise others because of what they are, what they have done, where and how they have lived. There is a culture which throws our shadows against the wall, but that’s not enough. Aim further. Beauty is created by a culture that liberates people from the wall against which someone has stood them.
Go into the depths. Towards co-creation. An artist is someone who discovers genius within. Art is also the discovery of genius within others. Doesn’t everyone possess it? Isn’t Simone Weil right when she writes to her brother: ‘One cannot be amazed by a work of art without considering oneself somehow also its creator and, in a sense, becoming it’? If we dedicated more time and attention to collective works, perhaps beauty would not have to be bought through the suffering of others and alienation.
Go into the depths. Towards the future. We will remain faithful to tradition if we think more about continuation than commemoration. We will not get far on illusions about the possibility of going back, reconstructing, or recreating as a remedy for alienation or uprooting. Let us not pretend that no knowledge exists of the road we’ve travelled, and let us not erase the consciousness formed by modernity. If a return is destined for us, it will only happen along a wheel, and sharpening our clarity of vision with regard to every step ahead is decisive.
Go into the depths. Towards anti-nature. We live subject to blind will and necessity, which shuts us within a loop of contingency, suffering and nonsense. Helpless in the face of natural forces, we are at the service of a mind called to serve that will and necessity. Our genius can oppose this, since it is ‘mind, which has betrayed its calling’ (Schopenhauer). It can be roused within us only by a culture liberating the sphere of transgression towards anti-nature.
Go. Towards a deep culture. It’s close to hand, along paths to the other, into the unknown and the open, turned always towards people, on the track of nature and creatures, towards your own You. It is there where self-knowledge lies; it does not leave the shadows, it finds freedom in interdependence, it connects the aspiration upwards with co-creation, fidelity to tradition with overcoming it in the name of the vision of what lies ahead of us. It finds genius in every being, because no one is free of the desire to reject serving captivity.
Photo by Aneta Stabinska
Krzysztof Czyżewski is a practitioner of ideas, writer, philosopher, culture animator, theatre director, editor and translator. President of the Borderland Foundation, director of the Centre “Borderland of Arts, Cultures and Nations” in Sejny, Poland, initiator of the International Center for Dialog in Krasnogruda at the Polish-Lithuanian border. Teacher and lecturer, and a visiting professor at the University of Bologna and Rutgers University. Among his books of poetry and essays published in English are: The Path of the Borderland, Trust & Identity: A Handbook of Dialogue, Miłosz – Dialog – Borderland, A Small Center of the World, Firewords: Tiny Poems, Toward Xenopoli, Visions from the Borderland, and Practicing Utopia.