THE GARDENER AND THE FLOWER

There have been great thinkers, throughout human history, whose names have been objectively recognized and honored by all civilized humanity. But their glory is not immanently objectivized in the mere sound of their names. Their greatest worth is preciously subjective, and rests in their connectivity with our privately attuned, innermost thoughts and associations.

Incidentally, this is the reason why I have four whole sections devoted to my direct affinities with thoughts of such great thinkers, and my dedication of one of these sections to a single thinker, Nietzsche, shows the particular multiplicity of sparks produced in the skies over my own world by the strikes of his genius.

Sometimes the effect of these strikes is demonstrably out of Nietzsche’s own context, but it does not matter, as long as those sparks keep flying. The following example is characteristic of such an ambiguity and an out-of-context association, and, as the reader might see, the effect is most noteworthy. Indeed, human mind works in mysterious ways!

There is a powerful, and at the same time delightfully ambiguous adage in Nietzsche’s Jenseits: “In man, creature and creator are united.” (Jenseits 225) I know full well what Nietzsche has in mind here: Do not offend man by your pity. Your pity is caused by looking at him as a miserable creature, which of course he is. But man is not merely a creature, he is also a creator, and as such, he transcends pity, and becomes an object of respect and admiration!

But there is much more to the unity of creature and creator in man, than what such explanation brings out. There may be a certain disconnect between man as God’s creature and as a creator in his own right, but my mind’s eye is caught by the mystical relationship between man the creator and his own creation. And here is the most intriguing question coming out of it: How, indeed, is man, as creator, united with his creation; and does such unity exist at all?

Incidentally, or may be not at all incidentally, how uncannily familiar, in this connection, sounds the poem of the brilliant Russian poet Osip Emilievich Mandelstam about “the gardener and the flower,” mystically united. The translation from Russian into English is mine. (I have made many such translations in my life, just for the love of it.)---

I’m both the gardener and the flower grown;

In the world’s desert I am not alone!

There is an amazing reprise here of the creature-creator theme, but in a very different key from Nietzsche’s, coupled with a painfully-optimistic (if I am allowed to coin such an epithet) overcoming of the tragedy of loneliness by self-affirmation, which surely would have been very much to Nietzsche’s liking. I wonder if Mandelstam here has, in some way, been influenced by Nietzsche, or whether this is his own private path to the mystical unity of creator with his creature.

This profound and philosophically fertile theme, which I meet in an embryonic form in Mandelstam’s poem, has been given an in-depth development in my unfinished novella Champagne about an artist who attempts to escape from the gloomy reality of life into the happy world of his imaginary creatures. Indeed, he does create a safe haven for himself, but then his untamed creativity starts running amok, and there goes the safe haven!

…This is what happens when the ‘gardener’s flower’ was not adopted from a friendly local nursery, but has grown straight out of his gut, flesh, blood, and brain…