Tadeusz Sławek
Pro (-) Verb.
To Stanisław Dróżdż In Memoriam

In the deep silence of midday
Sometimes a meager word is spoken.
The fields glimmer constantly
And the sky leaden and wide.

Georg Trakl, The Peasants

        1.

        By way of introduction let me quote two sentences from the essay by Ezra Pound and Ernesto Fenolossa published in 1920. The first one provokes us to consider the relation between poetry and science, whereas the other one raises the question about the way of thinking encountered in poetry. In the tone and grammatical form of speech, knowledge definitely contradicts logic. To put it simple – our cognition of the world has been subject to strict rules of classification aimed to order and group particular objects in separate categories, which has resulted in prioritising the noun over the other parts of speech. The authors of the essay assume, however, that science recognises the world by moving beyond these groups and categories and emphasising the verb form which makes the language more dynamic. On the one hand, there is that inveterate logic of classification, on the other hand – a metamorphic flow of forms, continuous transformation and movement. They correspond with two images of reality, the first of which is static and based on the objects which constitute separate and independent ‘islands’. The other one is dynamic or interactive and not accidentally related to the notion of concreteness. The more concrete and dynamic the interactions of things, the better the poetry. That brings us to the fundamental paradox: poetry as well as science are ‘concrete’ (as they enable us to know the world as a matter of fact) because their objects at first sight are not ‘concrete’ in a colloquial sense of this word, which means that they cannot be given any fixed outline because they are mobile and metamorphic. The existence is then ‘permeable’ which results in the objects flowing beyond their borders. The works by Stanisław Dróżdż constitute a serious promise (object/word promises what enters its area by changing the shape of word/object) and an equally serious warning (you can see always more than what you are looking at).

        2.

        The other sentence shall imply that in order to live reasonably in the world it may be necessary to recognise this ‘permeability’ of the word and object as a striking feature of existence. Contemporary languages are thin and cold as we contribute less and less thinking in using them. On closer consideration, we may draw the following conclusions (a) that language evolves, which means that its present features might not have been observable in the past and (b) that speech and writing are not only signs and signifying tools but also need our thought which processes and modifies them. In the context of the aforequoted statements by Pound and Fenolossa, it is evident that firstly, the thinking that is indispensable for preserving the seriousness of language is poetic (Our ancestors introduced metaphorical layers into language structures and thinking systems). Secondly, the present-day idle dryness of contemporary languages results from a specific ‘training’ imposed on signification: The directness and pace of speaking make us limit the word to the closest range of meaning. Speaking means thinking, a banal conclusion without further expansion: thinking is not about finding an appropriate word for the thought but about a continuous extension and stretching of the word through the work of our mind. In a way the thing is really not to ‘find the word’ for the thought because then thought will finish working thereby making our language poorer. Who only ‘searches for’ and ‘finds the word’ contributes to the process of making our speech ‘thinner’ and ‘colder’. Therefore, the core of thinking is to incessantly move the borders of meaning farther and farther from the word which we usually limit to sail only along the coastline and follow the well-marked routes where the land is always safely visible. Perhaps, it was not a matter of chance that one of the authors of great importance to Stanisław Dróżdż, whose works he gathered in his home archives and showed at the exhibitions, was Ian Hamilton Finlay, a great Scottish concrete poet who used the motifs of ships, sailboats and fishing boats in his poetry.

        3.

        Sailing introduces a dangerous element, especially when it is not a safe cruise around the land. This experience of threat is not unfamiliar to us. While looking at the works by Stanisław Dróżdż we may never be absolutely sure if what we can see is the whole or only a little fragment; whether it is a gigantic ocean liner or the Medusa’s raft. Likewise, while studying the numerical texts we wonder whether what we can see are subsequent parts of one giant number or only pieces left after its disastrous blast. We do not know if the pronouns actually precede any ‘noun’ or if they only indicate its absence. The works by Stanisław Dróżdż are the meditation on the apocalypse which pervades every single existence and, consequently, a reflection over the entities which come to existence out of fragments. The remains of words which we face may be in fact bits and pieces of a wrecked ship or a slurry of a new coast. The person who sails must take into account the risk of shipwrecking. The art by Dróżdż follows the route along the fragile border between the confidence of an experienced navigator skillfully steering the ship and the despair of a sailor who desperately holds to several wooden beams because that is everything which remained from the boat and there is no other hope but in them. Latin poets knew a special word: naufragium which signifies a sea disaster which reveals the power of the element and the bravery of the human being. Petronius says in his Satiricon: si recte calculum ponas, ubique naufragum est – having taken everything into considerations, there are only shipwrecked remains scattered everywhere. However, that is where hope lies: to lose everything in order to start anew. This unusual art is both post- (it may only be a piece) as well as pre-apocalyptical (how intriguing is the outline of something new emerging from these pieces). Between beginning and end. Everything forms the shape of fate, referred to by Massimo Cacciari as ‘European’. According to Cacciari the patron of this is the figure of Odysseus, interpreted as in Dante, as the symbol of an endless journey and a mad flight towards the place deprived of any oîkos, guided by the curiosity of ‘hunting’1.

        4.

        There we are then ‘at the beginning’ or ‘at the end’ of the word. It is better to say ‘at its edge’ or ‘at its shoreline’. It is a particular place. Jacques Derrida attempts to define it as a Platonic chora in the following words (and the topography of being ‘at the edge’ not by chance coincides with the topography of an altitude which produces the effect of a dizzy head, a sense of insecurity, the whirling and flickering of shapes): The mythological dimension of permutation, replacements and displacements is sometimes exposed as it is, while a series of mirror reflections endlessly multiply themselves in this dimension. We do not know why we are sometimes overwhelmed by the feeling of dizziness and on what edges and on the surface of which slope we are standing: whether it is a chaos, a chasm or ‘a chora’2.

        5.

        Therefore it is indispensable to admit that words and objects as well as words as objects are always promised to us. They are promises of an object which even if seems to be a closed, immobile whole, bustles with life which contradicts the forms it has taken so far. Language does not play the role of a stabiliser which closes the object in the outline of its name. Conversely, the names themselves break the promise which they have made. They may be described by the statement used by Michael Davidson apropos of the works of Gertrude Stein – it is a language which weakens the stability it has promised to maintain3. When we look at the works by Dróżdż which feature only one word or at the series of works where the signs have been subject to displacements and form vast sequences, we realise that all of them tell us about a change. The metamorphosis which blows up all the stiff classifications is their power, even if the works have been planned with mathematical precision. Mathematics like language is here only a form of indispensable description. Although the Artist realises that it is necessary to provide the viewer with such a description being the only way of giving his work a physical shape, he simultaneously warns the viewer against this description. I could quote here the words of Wittgenstein, who believes that a description is only an ‘applied’ form like a technical drawing or a projection of a building developed by its constructor: There is something delusive in perceiving description as a verbal image of facts. If we adopt this way of perception we will take into consideration only the paintings which hang on the walls and seem to present what the object really is like, what it looks like. Such paintings appear to be somehow passive4. The texts by Stanisław Dróżdż intended to examine the delusion focused on by Wittgenstein. It means that they made every effort to question ‘the passiveness’ of the word and the image. The observations we have made so far reveal that the demand of ‘in-thinking’ new horizons into words and sending language for increasingly longer and more dangerous journeys averts the threat of ‘deactivating’ words. That consequently raises a question about the usefulness of the word and whether its ‘application’ can be limited only to being an instrument of a simple naming of objects

        6.

        The word must then be ‘active’ and its usefulness should exceed the frames of simple relations. The fragment quoted after Wittgenstein is particularly interesting as it clearly refers to the paintings ‘hanging on the wall’, which directs us to the art by Dróżdż, a poet who ‘exhibits’ his works and ‘hangs’ them on boards. Their version recorded in a classical form, provided it exists at all, has a completely different meaning than in the case of the traditional operation of literature. What is immensely important there is the hand of the artist perceived as the author and the creator. Its movement signs the genuineness of the manuscript and provides it with a personal touch. It is not a coincidence that we use the term ‘style’ while referring to someone’s personality and their handwriting and graphology attempts to find the link between these two spheres. When printed, the hand-written work of the artist etherises and becomes a text for reading in its recipient’s privacy. However, the works by Dróżdż are intended to be hand-works and their concept demands their presentation in their hand-made form, in the form of the painting hanging on the wall, as it was described by Wittgenstein. Even though with time the computer has replaced the typewriter, the materiality of the text exhibited in the public sphere provides it with the character of hand-work. The work such as the well-known między [in-between] which requires our participation and physical entering its space, may be even approached as ‘the body-work’. We face there a piece of art which overwhelms us and which we cannot condense with a typical gesture of the reader simply opening the book and leafing through it and which we cannot master, one which defines the space around us for its elements and regulations known only to itself.

        7.

        Eugen Gomringer, a German poet who himself was a remarkable representative of concrete poetry, was right when in 1956 he said that the attitude of a concretist poet towards life is ‘positive’, however the explanation he provided was rather narrow. He searched for it in ‘synthetic rationalism’ which abandons all affections, sentiments and existential anxieties and inclines towards purely linguistic form, which is deeply rooted in the pragmatics of modern social communication and takes its inspirations in natural sciences and sociology5. Undeniably, the works by Stanisław Dróżdż originate from this source: many of them are complex and eruditely developed permutation compositions based on the studies on logical and grammatical rules. However, this withdrawal of the artist as the subject is not only the result of the applied form of language expression; ‘I’ has been belittled not only because the social exceeds the individual. Doubtlessly, the works by Dróżdż are the form of ‘de-narciss-ized’ poetry. The term was coined by W.H. Auden who applied it in the poem About the House in order to describe poetry as de-narciss-ized. ‘De-narcissation’ is stronger than the Imagism developed by Pound as not only does it turn to the object but also it abandons (unlike its model developed by Pound) the pursuit of even distant correlations of this object with the sensations of the human subject. When Pound writes about the silk fan of a Chinese lady that it has ‘also’ been rejected, this little word ‘also’ instantaneously introduces a deep drama of human solitude and frustrated hopes. Therefore, we will not find in the works by Dróżdż any linear order and even where it appear in the form of a sequence, it aims not to talk about the anxieties of the human heart but rather to expose the mechanisms regulating the course of transformation. The word has been freed from the human dimension indispensable for an instrumental application of language. Pierre Garnier wrote in 1962 that words are not human inventions. We have been endowed with them as we have been endowed with hands and stars. Words are material objects inhabiting the continent of language6. The artist makes any effort in order to create his work, his ‘invention’, which will indicate its non-human sources.

        8.

        However, having said that, we realise that the magic of Klepsydra [The Sandglass] or słowo [the word] is about something completely different. Their Author does not mean to celebrate the very principles of logics, physics or sociological rules of communication; he only uses them to say something more. The core of this ‘more’ can be expressed in the following words: Therefore I suspend in front of you the image of the word, I introduce you inside the system not in order to deliberate over logical puzzles but in order to show the beauty of the world and the objects independent of human beings, freed from human beings and their affections. Dróżdż does not intend to immobilise the object. He would not subscribe to Pound’s description of the poet-imagist’s work as an attempt to create a text which would establish ‘hard, light and clear borders’7. The grammar of objects deviates from the grammar of our human manner of depicting these objects and talking about them. We could quote Father Sylvester Houédard, one of the most recognised English concrete poets, who believes that the concrete text is the celebration of the world’s holiness. The intensity of this conviction resembles the theology of Teilhard de Chardin. Houédard states: concrete poetry […] is a joy springing from the lack of narrow limitations to, a joy in the world as it really is, an honest sight at the honest world […] This is an affirmative and constructive attitude. […]. Concrete poetry is then religious poetry, agnostic poetry […]. A concrete poem places blackness among whiteness and moves in the unlimited space of whiteness of a piece of paper from one to the other constellation. […] It becomes then a negation of the thesis that it is necessary to leave the real of creation in order to find the non-created, that it is indispensable to escape from this world in order to find God […]. The universe is a beautiful concrete poem8. The texts by Dróżdż are not ‘signifying machines’ (although they give such an impression, which is not completely unjustified) but rather hymns sung to the mystery of the world which does not have to be defined by human measures. This mystery is what our sailing, which has already been referred to, is assigned to approach. If we face the works of the Artist with amazement, it happens because they open to us a very distant perspective, where the lands marked by our previously developed maps disappear, whereas confidence is disturbed by the restless trembling of the sea air.

        9.

        In their own way, the works by Stanisław Dróżdż are prayers. This is not only because they are often based on an ardours repetition of one word or figure like in prayers, where the same phrases are repeated in the hope that such an accumulation of energy will find the recipient. That results from our conviction that what we ask for, carried by the dynamics of repetition, will intensify our intention and therefore make the things happen in a desired way. In this kind of prayer, I do not pay any attention to the world, I simply would like to ‘achieve’ what I strive for or even to ‘snatch away’ from the world. However, there is another, more important reason why we refer to the works by the Artist as to prayers. In spite of the precision of their permutation mechanisms, these works perplex us as they do not subdue our will. Seemingly precise signposts do not prevent us from losing our way. On the one hand, it appears what we know what we ask for: that is an expected sense of the word and the meaning which is suitable to us. On the other hand, we must reconcile ourselves to failure and disappointment: the word eludes, the meaning comes in its own right and what we have expected simply does not prove to be true. We can see now that our ambition to ‘deprive’ the world of the clear sense which suits our needs was understandable, however, it was just a temptation. Like in prayer, which does not have to be ‘fulfilled’ in the manner expected or even desired by us, we are simply apprentices in the world without any right to enforce our power over it. Maurice Nédoncelle accurately describes our activity as ‘wandering around while being lost in the prayer’ and defines the fact that our requests are not fulfilled as the drama of the souls that, above all other favours, ask for the cognition of what they really should ask for’9. The work by the Artist is such a prayerful effort for the grace of a wise adoption of the world’s shape, which does not necessarily correspond with our ideas and preferences.

        10.

        What we need, according to Dróżdż, is to see the word as so far we have only seen the effects of its application whereas the word itself has not appeared within sight. The practice of concrete poetry is, in fact, the practice of seeing. It is an attempt to recover from the word-blindness which might have its roots in the famous postulate of ‘cleaning the door of perception’ made by Blake. Let us again quote Garnier: For the one who really sees, words present a miraculous topography. For instance, an OCEAN LINER means the rocks and sea, the peaks of waves and the depths; the moon is not richer in the craters, dry valleys, rhythms and beauty10. Topo-graphy is of particular interest to Dróżdż. That is a difficult challenge as it requires recording (graphy) what escapes any record, what we should enter, participate in, which marks the flow of our lives (the place, the leitmotiv). While writing down the word in this topo-graphical spirit, we achieve three goals: (a) within the horizon of our lives, we introduce the element which does not belong to the human domain: God, something which is simultaneously ‘over’ us and ‘under’ us, on the left and on the right of us, which surrounds us and where we exist (and now ‘writing’ for us is gaining the same significance as for the author of icons which are not ‘painted’ but, in fact, ‘written’). (b) we shift our attention from ourselves towards our environment, we become subject of the de-narcissation referred to by Auden (we are inclined to acknowledge that the text ‘writes itself’ rather than is the production of us as the only authors); c) we appreciate ‘the body’ of the word as I do everything which happens within it, which constitutes its tissue and is the social ‘body’.

        11.

        The text becomes then a form of transition from one meaning to another (none of which can be immobilised or presented in the finite form), from one surface to the next (we face word/object which we are not able to decipher using only ‘our’ power, especially because what we face is ‘silent’ and since it has no voice, it is incapable of answering any of our questions and because what acts in this text is visual but not always visible and in this sense it is not human-like). The text is an inter-text, which means that it is constantly developing and, simultaneously, destructing everything which has been so far developed. The starting point is then convergent with the attitude of e.e. cummings, who also begins with alluding to a silent text: The day of the spoken lyric is past. The poem which has at last taken its place does not sing itself; it builds itself, three dimensionally, gradually, subtly, in the consciousness of the experiencer11. However, that is not what Dróżdż ends up with. Conversely, he opens the space for his works to develop and carry out this development somehow in public and not only in his own consciousness and, what is more important, he lets the object deconstruct itself. Although we find ourselves inside między [in-between], we can be sure that this experience will never materialise in the form of complete word ‘między’ [between] referring to our being: our existential experience cannot be reduced to the preposition ‘between’ which belongs to the realms of the language. Being is not outside speech, conversely, it is in the true core of speech and therefore it must break the promises of precise naming, classifying and ordering things. We are hospitably welcomed by the language but the topography of this hospitality is comparable to the house built of really solid construction rather than of a temporary tent put up on the desert of being. Therefore, the texts by Dróżdż must be kenotic in their character. They are areas from which meaning is constantly withdrawing, giving a free space to another meaning which will not ‘settle down’ there either. This is like the mystic chill of a desert, the only one of its kind, however, on the desert and only there we can encounter God-Guide12. The negative theology of the works by this Artist who, as long as we are allowed to use such a bold and nearly unacceptable statement, stood so close to God, being aware that the only thing which he could do is to head towards Him continuously and unsuccessfully (in the ‘human’ sense of the word ‘success’).

        12.

        The mystery of works by Stanisław Dróżdż seems to be based on the fact that what really ‘exists’ in them and is presented to our perception is simultaneously ’postponed’. Everything is moving towards something which will replace what really ‘exists’ not in a simple act of actual replacement one by another, but in a more complex process of flickering supplementation, flashing and disappearing. Nothing can be reduced here to mechanical and repeatable operations although repetition seems to rule here. That is, however, an apparent power as normal replacement is based on the mechanisms which standardise what can evoke amazement as un-usual and unique, and which can be ‘put into order’ by replacement in a literal way. Nevertheless, if one is replaceable by another, none of these is un-usual. The Artist, however, announces what Aldo Gargani accurately calls ‘a perceptive alarm’ and what is supposed to protect the astonishing against the mechanical-causative assimilation to customary language13. Even if that really happens, if everything is postponed to some ‘post-’ or ‘after’, which means that no ‘post’ can exist, no object, no word becomes fulfilled ‘here and now’, it is always somehow ‘after’ or ‘post-’ something: existing still in something which, by supplementing its existence, becomes something completely different. In this sense we can say that the texts by the Artist ‘resurrect’: they die in order to return to existence but not as the same ones: they die in order to revive in a different form. This is how Olivier Abel summarises the opinions of Paul Ricoeur on resurrection, which was of great philosopher’s interest at the end of his life: Let God do whatever He wants at the moment of my death. I do not require anything, I do not claim any ‘afterwards’. I transfer the obligation of replacing my desire for being and my efforts made during the time of my being on the others who remained alive14. The words and objects which appear in the works by Stanisław Dróżdż are available to us not ‘completely’ and not really ‘here and now’. We experience their materiality being aware that they simultaneously belong to another world which has been transformed and subject to a subsequent permutation. They are here, even though they are infinitely ‘strange’ and unfamiliar.

        13.

        In this common movement, the word and/or the object become a nebula of agitations, no matter how strong the Artist’s attachment to their physical materiality. We could say, using grammatical categories, that the word has been given a verb dimension, which is tantamount to time dimension. The noun does not continue its existence in permanent sturdiness: it only strives for itself but never reaches its destination. Stanisław Dróżdż’s concrete poetry belongs to ‘time rhetoric’, the term borrowed from Paul de Man, introduced by at least the word ‘post-’ which was actually impossible ‘after’ which we referred to herein. The object/the word continuously exceeds itself, negotiates its subsequent form and holds a dialogue with the Other, like Alice created by Lewis Carroll, who after continuous transformations disconcertedly admits to Mr. Caterpillar that she does not know who she really is. Her confession is obviously not understood, as Mr. Caterpillar belongs entirely to the order of transformation and metamorphosis. The intention of the Artist is similar to the objective of deconstructions, namely not to let the word freeze and settle down in the rules imposed by the customary use of language: The stabilising attention which has been so far given to the names/identifying labels has been complemented with the attention focused on the verbs, quotidian practices, theologies and eschatologies15. As it frequently happens, poetry has exceeded philosophical reflection. The works by Dróżdż are pervaded by the same operation of internal spacing and cracking of the name and dispersing through these cracks its so far solid durability which was used by e.e. cummings in his texts. Let us quote a fragment of his poem:

        nonvisibly smi-

        ling through man-

        ufactured harmlessly accurate

        gloom „I

        […]

That is not only the segmentation of ‘smi-ling’ which should attract our attention but also the mechanism of internal spacing as the act of opening the space for metamorphosis. The latter is perfectly epitomised here by the verb manufactured, where man has been subject to the act of defending his mystery from the sound of an unknown verb ufacture

        14.

        The oeuvre by Stanisław Dróżdż is then a promise, which means it is inscribed within a wide horizon of theological thinking where the future appears in the form of prophetic thinking. That is not by any means about prophesying future events or predicting the course of history. The core sense of it is far more serious: that is a question about our capacity to face reality not in order to keep up with it but to ‘overtake’ it and look at it from the point of view which will be never realised in the future. In this meaning, the promise is theological in its character, which Karl Barth described as fulfilment of what we were facing and what we were promised and what we were pledged in advance. It means that our lives are marked by this promise because, according to Barth, we would not know the necessity of existence and law if we were not familiarised with the necessity of promising and if the divine command for life together with all the defeats which are ascribed to it did not make us consider a really better future…16. We should bear in mind this theological dimension of promise while studying the Artist’s works. The word pours there over its banks as it contains more than is covered by its outlines which appear to us. The oeuvre by Stanisław Dróżdż, methodical and rigorously ordered in its character, is a meditation over that ‘more’

        15.

        However, while talking about promise we mean also something else; the word ‘promise’ itself contains a certain ‘more’ which makes us anxious. It implies that we are ‘pro’ something so we should abandon any pretence to annex objects, as what we are destined to is to ‘pursue’ the world. Who is ‘pro’ something must adopt a form of partnership between them and the world, a form of relationship reviving through the consciousness of the distance between me and the thing which I am ‘pro’. We can even refer to a certain profound subordination of the human being to the object which they are ‘pro’. When we say ‘I am walking with you’ we assume not only the simultaneity and even pace of our marching but also our equality, at least during this walk. However, the words ‘I will be with you’ reveal another shade of meaning. In fact, that is you who is going and what I am doing is simply accompanying you not being the main character of this event. We coexist in a certain space ‘after’ and ‘before’ certain affinity or intimacy, while talking about ‘accompanying’ I must fulfil the postulate of a certain gap unavoidably appearing between us. In this free space we are together for this undefined and unnamed moment beyond all the time measures.

        16.

        In the same way I am ‘pro’-word, I do not identify with it but I approach it on a pro term basis. It could be said that in this situation the word moves from the ontic and instrumental level, where a familiar voice of the word is speaking to us, to the ontological level, where the word resounds with an unknown musical voice and only in this sense the term ‘instrument’ can be referred to it. That is when the word as a form of particular anxiety together with its an-archic potential, which reveals itself even in its rigorous ordering, comes to voice. The word becomes less ‘smooth’ and ‘polished’; it stops being only a receptacle for meaning which I place there in order to be stored. Therefore the texts by Stanisław Dróżdż need studying, which means they must be read thoroughly and carefully. In other words, they require from us a certain degree of effort. That is another aspect which reveals their theological dimension. Hans Urs von Balthasar, while considering in his theology the word able to, as he says, ‘freely express spirit’, profoundly analyses the words-vessels which make a contemptible but successful attempt to prevent the human being from making an effort of understanding. According to this philosopher, these purely instrumental words threaten the freedom and personal character of our speech and, consequently, partly release the speaker from the effort required while searching for a word and encourage them to a kind of inertia in the process of spiritual speaking and partly provoke in the listener the impression that what they are listening to is something which has already been known to them because the forms used for presenting this new content have turned out to be familiar to them17.

        17.

        The future is then what it all is about. It is not, however, the future which is but an extension of what is ‘now’, with its entire inevitable inertia and weight of what we already know and what enables us to feel at home in the world. That is a future which respects our order of reality but refuses it the right to define completely the course of our living and all our affairs. The future, which the Artist refers to, means the openness to the unpredictable which inevitably must distort our expectations and established an order of the word. It is crucial then to make the words and their meanings anchor in this future and, consequently, to free them from what we ascribed to and what we expect of them. We will not be wrong if we describe this vision of the word as ‘utopian’. However, that is not the ‘utopia’ which defines a group of established and, as a result, perfectly predictable ways of organising the world. Conversely, the Artist’s intention is to defend the future, which itself is to some extent free, from the mechanical delirium of technology and swarms of legal and administrative regulations meant to provide reality with its final shape unlinked to human experience. He aims to realise this objective through the act of a continuous deferral of the meaning of the word from us, while remaining ‘pro’-thing and ‘pro’-name and simultaneously banning us from both of these. That is the utopia owed to the Artist: the future cannot be defined as something which just ‘is’ (although what we call ‘the future’ is usually repeated only ‘now’), the future ‘progresses’ (which means it is strange and unknown to us as well as indulgent to all our rights, which is exactly why we actually must accept it as the unknown and unfamiliar).

Text published in the exhibition catalogue Stanisław Dróżdż, początekoniec. Pojęciokształty. Poezja konkretna. Prace z lat 1967- 2007 / beginend. Concept-Shapes. Concrete Poetry. Works 1967- 2007, Ośrodek Kultury i Sztuki we Wrocławiu, Agencja Reklamowo-Wydawnicza Fine Grain, Wrocław, 2009.

1 M. Cacciari, L’arcipelago, Adelphi, Milano, 2005, p. 65.

2 J. Derrida, Χώρα/Chora, translated by M. Gołębiewska, Wydawnictwo KR, Warszawa, 1999, p. 61.

3 M. Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997, p. 44.

4 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by B. Wolniewicz, PWN, Warszawa, 1972, p. 144..

5 Quoted [in:] P. Garnier, Spatialisme et poésie concréte, Gallimard, Paris, 1968, p. 30.

6 Ibidem, p. 132.

7 E. Pound, The Selected Letters 1907-1941, Faber and Faber, London, 1982, p. 38.

8 Quoted [in:] P. Garnier, Spatialisme et poésie concréte, op. cit., p. 37.

9 M. Nédenocelle, The Request and the Prayer. Fenomenological Notes, translated by M. Tarnowska, Znak, Kraków, 1995, p. 150.

10 Ibidem, p. 132.

11 Quoted [in:] L. Nyberg, Bodies of Poems. Graphic Poetics in a Historical Perspective, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 2009, p. 71.

12 V. Vitiello, Pustynia, ethos, opuszczenie. Przyczynek do topologii religijności, [The Desert, the Ethos, the Abandonment. The Contribution to Topology of Religiousness], translated by E. Łukaszyk, [in:] J. Derrida, G. Vattimo et al., Religia [Religion]. Wydawnictwo KR, Warszawa, 1999, p. 167.

13 A.G. Gargani, Doznanie religijne jako wydarzenie i interpretacja, [The Religious Experience as Event and Interpretation], translated by E. Łukaszyk, [in:] J. Derrida, G. Vattimo et al., Religia, op. cit., p. 142.

14 P. Ricoeur, Żyć aż do śmierci [To Live Until Your Death], translated by A. Turczyn, Universitas, Kraków, 2008, p. 17.

15 G. Ward, Transcendence and Representation, [in:] R. Schwartz (ed.), Transcendence. Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond, Routledge, New York, 2004, p. 137.

16 K. Barth, Ethics, translated by G. Bromley, T.&T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1978, p. 56.

17 H.U. von Balthasar, Teologika [Theologics], vol. 1 Prawda świata [The Truth of the World], translated by J. Zychowicz, Wydawnictwo WAM, Kraków, 2004, p. 149.