TOGETHER / SKUPA
P O S T S C R I P T ( B E F O R E R E A D I N G )
ESSAY? Nowhere intellectual knowledge and act, except in true religion / dîn /, which unites faith / Îmân and its assurance with submission / Islâm, are not so intimately together like in the philosophical and literary form - essay. It seems that it was precisely the French linguistic version of that name for the attempt to evaluate a work, an act. . . , has given the universal meaning. Which will, henceforth, from that, therefore, French (civilized) derivative rather than from Latin (courtly) root differ in other languages only by the local-linguistic transcriptions?
In an essay, word is about unilateral attempt, which by its very nature, unites both the one who tries to evaluate and the very subject of his evaluation. That is to say, the one who measures and the measured, at the same time. But here's how my linguistic lust unruly spreads further across Latin vocabulary looking for the natural environment of both, Latin original of our term in question, and its French upgrading. Here I am in a flash with the verb exaggere: emphasise, praise, even celebrate, but also with the verb exagito, harass, disturb, hunt.
God forbid! This author prefers to search around the neighbourhood of the noun, essay, as it fully grown and emancipated, over the centuries sounds so similarly in all our languages. Here I am with its first Latin (and not just tonal) neighbourhood, the verb esse, to be (which being, as we know, helps a number of other actions to be performed, or, perhaps, that we, linguistically, express them). But to be wholly sincere: to me is especially on my heart the first neighbour of that being in general, the verb essurio, which means to be hungry, starve, and most of all, its third meaning - to perish for something.
Because it is entirely perishing alike, my decades of passionate dealing with essay, in which philosophical and literary form there has settled so well, what is most familiar to us, and again from French, as engagement. And it suddenly occurred to me: essays in this collection have themselves chosen a joint title - TOGETHER.
Perhaps a philosopher, author, artist, engaged intellectual. . . in none other form feels so complete and so well integrated as in essay. Seemingly an non-binding attempt of the weighing some one's (spiritual) weight, but with respect to which I bear witness here by my life and my word which articulates it, that all the essays collected here, as well as two proto-essays, were being written and printed in the time of the most serious tests. In a fragment of Eternity between one thousand nine hundred seventy four and two thousand eighth, in which pit of Time, there fitted by both, contents and meaning, almost an entire lifetime. And almost a century doom.
Seemingly, essays in this collection originated from different pens, since they are published under the names Melika Salihbegović & Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi. One should take my word, that it is actually the same authoress, who was once, by political-police-media engagement 1 "In the name of the people", bestowed different identities.
But a careful reader will not miss the same inks colouring them; same common matrix; the plate of the same spirituality wherefrom they were being printed in the crucial times, in which the Authoress remained (in her deepest ethical and spiritual "Be!" One and The same. Despite of the anonymity into which she has been pushed, to this fifteenth published book in spite of, by the same, ancient, evil will, which still today, despotic and disguised, is roaming around.
But "The truth has (since long) come, and The lie has (since long) disappeared." The faithful reader will recognise, as I said, the same woof; the same bed of the watercourse, which only seemingly, so, at least suggests the Contents in this book, flows backwards. Because more recent essays are mainly at its beginning, and the older somewhere by the end. But the front and the back cover of the book that unite them into one (witnessing the same course of life and writing), are not the source or confluence, but the shores of the same river, which nowhere pours out of its bad. Except for sfumato, produced by its rapids, forming, together with the spirit of The writer and of the future readers, a constantly opening circle of being, doing and appraisal, the form which is only one able to perfectly bring together our lives and our works - in a whole.
There's here some anxiety too: that contemporary intellectual and artist, although never in the history louder, deprives oneself of the experience of a genuine engagement. Which, if sincere, always pays a high price for itself (paying not in advance its security at the company of the political opportunism). For that very reason all the splendour of its fruit shines only in the lap of the rare. To these enlightenments belong also some from among the authors of this book, Iqbal and Klee primarily, for whose company your authoress longs for her entire life.
