(Based on “Israelites
and Philistines” by Fan S. Noli)
It
cannot be lived without opponents. One can never live without adversaries.
Life’s infinite arena envisages everyone with the good and the evil. However,
it shall never be forgotten the mere minority of the good.
Vis-à-vis
this artificial dimension you manage to span your vigor and to bitterly
masticate your reverse side: the one that abides alongside and incited you like
latent wound elapsing towards an uttered
havoc.
For
life to continue it is necessitated pure antagonism.
Pseudo-idols:
this is what you trace in the infinite sanctuary.
There
exists an old saying: “God save me from women…I may as well perform a
self-defense from men”. Thus, this old maschilist quote withholds an unyielding
cogitation form and not only in Samson and Dalila’s depicting destinies.
You
can never live without adversaries: may those be meek, tough, small,
hyperbolic, conspicuous or imperceptible, visional or veracious, men or women
and girls…
No
all-around-the-globe gravity will ever exist if somebody does not turn to be an
obstacle along your way. Life, though, is gifted with survival merriment by the
earlier opponent-like principle.
The
will to live is to ascertain the mere beauty in the people who become your
barrier. The aesthetic beauty of life fetches the strength in the dia-immolation
desire. If life would be bereft of opponents, it would, as well, have an even
color: plain, inharmonious and maybe “withered by the self-sacrificing nerve”.
Consequently, the “self-” vision would no longer exist. The obsessed-by-ease
mind would be the only one to house the “cargo” only as a part of existence.
The other part would bask in the lukewarm sunbeams pertaining to the
superficial omnipresent-dawning sun, and bearing pure evidence of non-existence
and slow-witted slumberous decay.
You
can never live without adversaries! It may hereto appear a slightly heavy
claptrap but one must, so, trust the truth even when it badly hurts. Even
though this part of the parentheses is easily perused in Noli’s framework
drama, it does herewith abide an apocalyptical abyss that must be pensively and
undoubtedly entrusted. For just once in a lifetime get prepared and mete to
collide against the best.
Under
this real conjecture inducted by the inexhaustible life source, Penelope has
been reweaving her dream of carefully enshrining the clot thread so hopefully
preserved in her scrimpy heart. Facing the adversaries means suffering and
suffering itself means possessing immortality vesture. It is throughout time
that Noli’s personality becomes magnified within this all-around affable image.
His memorial is engraved even among those who abominated and execrated him,
altogether with his fancies on those black days of the Republican upheaval.
Under this illuminative pathway the adversary truth upholds a faithful and sufficient
position, just to understand that life, nonetheless, is not an uncracked
mirror, not even for them. So, tell me: Are the parties wrong or are they not?
This
is a manner of meditating, starting from your position inside the truth: a
truth which requires to be confided even when you remain its most first-hand,
point-blank scriber.
You
can never understand if you did good or evil? However, you can never understand
if you are prodigal or vindictive even though the feeling of love on the
fatherland’s behalf still remains love above all loves.
Nowadays,
it may all sound ridiculous, but, within its feasible mission, the same
fatherland may even kill on behalf of a civilization which inhumes latent
heroes when the bells of time toll for nothing but oblivion. The quote: “You
can never live without adversaries”, thus, becomes an eventual purpose which
gives you strength of judgment so that life remains free from feculent vapor
frames.
The
truth remains “Daedalian”: may it be for the losers and/or winners.
Though,
in this cavalry, the humanity marches forwards, after its shadow: with or
without trends and rights. Thus, slyness recurs to stand at the mount of the
ones who think they bear the truth within. Does it matter if you are a loser or
a winner? Oftentimes, at our inglorious and monotonous quotidianity battle, the
truth writhes alongside the illuminative and shadowy abysses for a grandeur
self-presentation. By violence vs. vigor, it still remains the most pliable
word from all the others who make clamor on its behalf.
There
can be depicted the humanity “Golgotha”, just over there, to perform the best,
among infidelity and virtue. Our archaic and moderate slyness houses the
indispensability to perform the disposal of our own self as part of
impartiality.
Being
a loser, maybe you feel no need for self-idolization, but surely, if you are a
glorious winner, you feel the necessity for the success trumpet. The epoch of
modesty has surely sunk, at least in those centuries parade. I am the Lord of
my grandeur, and I will always be, in this moment, only now, because the future
is quite uncertain to predict occurrences. I may, therefore, not own a glory
flag. The devious cramp stands cross-legged. Over there, in the human
cross-roads still remains the most indubitable menu which announces a quite
sound visage. The love on truth’s behalf may have to be outspoken, sometimes by
triumph guise, maybe just to innervate to your ancillaries what doesn’t have to
come out public, but which basically bears the cynicism of a marred conscience.
The enduring man emerges the fraud or artifice, while at the indolent’s mirror,
there can never be reflected even the slightest, weakest fiasco spot.
The
voice of life hails towards craggy abysses even at times when pride adulation
harasses you, rupturing inconclusively the nose of existence.
Vis-à-vis
to the world, often more, there manifests itself the truth as a mere hyperbolic
lie, a truth which maybe even hurts. Tons of meek despair which wait to be
totally and informally awoken one day mitigate this traditional ritual. The
glorifying presentation of the victory displays willingly or unwillingly
suspicion shades which nimbles the roots of the truth. The allocation “Pirro’s
like” wears you out and the path of your judgment undergoes a slightly
sensitive mental defeat. An encouraging pathologism wraps the conscience and
subconscience, the dream and the nightmare. The loser and winner’s optics
induces the desire of victory, often more toward infelicitous and miserable
footpaths – without resolutionary vision.
Meanwhile,
just for the purpose of emerging from miscellaneous stagnations, many people
relegate the self counterpoise and their circle with ascendancy colors towards
their own personal interest dimidiating the demotic balance with militants or
even purblind neutrals that do not hereto deviate the pre-allocated devoirs
placed vis-à-vis in certain moments.
In
this confrontation, the artful winners and the lowlife defeated losers demand
their fatherland with desperate squawks; a fatherland which has often more been
insulated, disdained, cheaply-sold and marketed in diverse historic
circumstances. The slyness and the artful non-bigoted people require allocating
their survival equipoise by any price which is so demanded by the small-minded
interests, only for the fate of the moaning fatherland. Nobody can abnegate and
disavow such a truth.
Vis-à-vis
such penurious and non-penurious fates the humankind elicits lessons which are
so particularly disremembered when the necessity of the individual culpability
so pleads. Such refrains dispirit you but they never perish you. Contrariwise,
everyone’s heart Golgotha becomes tougher and stronger and durable and even
much more firm only for ameliating the appearing eidolon. There are hope elements
which hurl fancifully or not and which are then converted to wound embrocation
so smoothly burnished by time in its forgetful oblivion. The Daedalian truth
pyramids its days so dearly, against this level, on the despondent demo’s ridge
bereft of any mental disentanglement. Such ventures, which maybe remain only
imitative trends, are being always displayed to the human life ideals. At
times, it would have been better if these ideals had never existed.
Narcissism still remains a
psychospective key in Noli’s masterpiece “Israelites and Philistines”. There is
a visual display of the samsonian image face-to-face the timely mirror of the
’24.
I
am strong, even tougher and vigorous. I am in love until death to my
fatherland.
For
this ideal sake, there abounds the myth of the utilitarian and successful
leader. The graceful landscape in the timely mirror is displayed quite
significantly. There are drawn, quite at a stroke terrains asperity and
grandeur fright across the solar azure. The infrangibility thirst, thus,
resounds in this good-morning. The narcissism profile implicates muscles and
their strength which do hereto recycle in the ritual dance of the everyday
livelihood.
Samson
truly believes in the portrait which manifests itself in the mirror. Intrepidity
and audacity for him do remain the most sympathetic momentum aureole.
The
best subtitle as for the motivation of this in-front-of-mirror presentation
would be: “I am tough; in a word, I entrust my strength”.
Meantime,
we shall not disremember the historical context of these years. There were
times when uneven citizens and pheasants gathered to Noli’s mission in his
pathway as a prime minister. They all became so, an Albanian landscape under
the valiant figure of the republican militant. The fatherland geographic
dimension displays strength and wisdom. The credibility of Nolsamson figure is
composed by the idyll between life and death of power and by the immense love
for non-fatal triumph. This is testified by the history of the Democratic
Revolution dating on June 1924. Underneath the cassock there remains uniquely
unique the politician’s face. He was not only an ideal far-sighted prime
minister, but also a person who puzzled with self-contained judgment and
maturity elements of the opponent side. Noli propels the days and governs the
hours in his cabinet by being a truly worshipper of his conformist ego, bereft
of demagogy.
One
of the most climacteric moments of the nolian vital life’s serial is marked by
the mirror-by reflection of his tough headman’s profile. Not in the least
power-solicitous but eager towards a just governance and firm ascendancy, thus,
Noli commences his miniature-tiny projected pace. Time will cast in his doormat
tempests and bleakness pace at once; torrential rains and mortal antediluvians
in the governing horizon…but it shall never placate the blaze of love for
rearing the cast-iron national defiant image. And, to the other double-faced
side, there in the timely mirror and altogether within the narcissist frame,
there stands the image of a physically-and-militarily faintly lider.
Contemplating that mirror, Nolsamson bemoans the surrounding human landscape:
unstrung, dreary, malnutritive faces trembling from the progenitive injected
death owing to the total spiritual country’s ravage.
Will
this coterie of valorous Herculeans patronize me in times of good and evil to
enshrine the monocracy? Did Noli perhaps, perform identical self-interrogative
queries …?
Encased
in the eremite Samson’s sleeve, the prime minister felt awry or maybe even
worse when these hidebound portraits manifested in the mirror of when.
* * *
It
was quite long ago absent to this nature the incipience moselle love of the
temerarious and valiant sun, which had parted in a voiced-and-apparent pace
from political arena. The groaning bewail had macadamized crossed-legged in the
human day-night of the 24’.
Whimsical
becomes so, June’s color, apart from the beautifully seasonal and yearly
changing colors of the capital. What an eerie instance when hearing the quote
“The fatherland commences at one’s heart.”
It
converts itself to be more dreadful when there manifests the
grieved-disconsolated cavalier’s figurine in the timely mirror.
Diametrically
dead was Noli’s ego under this frame. His fatherland was lacking puissance and
aegis lustiness and was so vacillating in a nowhere-to-be-found crossroad.
Within this reflex there drizzled as a pure versemonger rain his statement:
“Albania does henceforward have a state; will the Albanians perhaps, become
citizens?”
Quite
astonishingly, there is nobody on the command of this narcissism mirror. Where
is the professionalism? Maybe, for Noli, it stands somewhere, sleeping in any
faraway-contemplative ascendancy drawer. Maybe, the year 2024 will so pass away
and both Albania and Albanians will still remain in the tribulative-threshold
of the historical remembrance.
Haggard,
all-acquainted and slightly infirm Noli’s profile stands in front of a prideful
and lascivious depicted fatherland in the rocky garden of South-East Europe.
There
is no monitoring of hastily feebleness which enlights onwards to a most
endurable force. It becomes so, part of the musive plans which remain pending
in the spurious amphitheatre of time. Vis-à-vis to this virtual pessimism, Noli
secedes the evil and combats on behalf of sweet patriotic savor. Attached to
the reverberant glassy pane remains the misfortune. While the citizens
pertaining to this period scrutinized theirself, they did understand that this
image carved reflections in the mirror of time. The most futile slogan of all
is performing an overall contendance bare of clear strategies. The
lassitude-like Albanian body felt so smoothly unprepared to recontract that
torn-away-and-endurably-extirpated-hand power.
It
is a little astonishingly uncommon and strange; but the sole Albanian citizens
who muse prosperity in their own country remain outside the lider-like mirage.
The interdependence of fates escorts you while reading this drama.
Miscarriage
or success?
On
both hands, we all manifest our lider-like role. Thus, within this framework,
the leader’s existence commands. So, we all are bound to learn that in a
reality bare of leader glaze, the leader requires to perform and conduct quite
the best possible. And when you both fail and have success in the path toward
the accomplishment of your objectives, you are always accompanied by the
close-standing-inter-dependence of fates. It is enough that you be in the right
time and page of your life’s mission. The just place transforms the dream and
attracts the ideal outside the cuirass-armed frame of slavish and hypocrisy.
Fate remains part of fate: in good times and bad times, in happiness and
quietus. At times, luck strokes you fatally or even mirthfully. Within this
vicious circle everyone is embellished by his own role. The inter-dependence of
fates wears the colors of 24’-30’. Piercing becomes so the cavalry while
observing the submission of the glorifying victory. Fancifully or not, the
clock tick follows the best. To the earth light-shadow there are being focused,
in most of the cases, vertiginous eclipses with triumphal hope colors. Life
remains thus, one of the dearest parts of the individual representative
curriculum. By uttering the American slogan: “By not expecting to receive
anything, one should perform the best for his fatherland”, the black-hearted
verily understands that the future remains nonetheless much precious in the
forefathers’ land.
If
you truly believe in a dream, then, do not step backwards. There is a
beyond-normal surmount of Noli’s personality, yet, within this kind of
nostalgia as for conveying the image of hope. There is an initial realization
of the apocalyptical avatar that initiates to get fulfilled as with the fate
crumble that abandons him in the paths of his democratic revolution.
He
is decisive…
Noli
is a truth-believer and as such he remains naïve, thus not woeful. He will
cover his shoulders when his entire race would betray him, like they did once
with Christ…
Under
this emergent fatalism, one surely needs catharsis for self-confession.
Glancing
through this frame-drama, the dream of becoming a life remnant and acquiring so
lullaby colors soars above countries and people who only contemplate
hope-in-pace prosperity. Noli withholds his dream even in his far-far-away
emigration. Nolsamson is a believer in the strength of hope and gives courage
to himself. The time elapse is in requisition of “holocaust” for the mist to
disperse and thus, for the bad grace to burst out. There is felt repentance in
the successful epoch of nolian governance. The never-ending lesson withdrawn
from suffering incurrence is worthwhile. Stepping back and glancing over retro
is quite worthless. It only does wan and perturbs the sight. There is no
sunshine if you turn back time. All at once, the tick deceases and your body is
forbidden to continue its existence. Man fails but sometimes his mission is
embellished even by the so-called success. This interdependence, thus, gives
wings of motivation to a clannish collaboration for unfurling a motto or
mission. Independent of their performing role, everyone is allowed to give the
best for their fatherland. Among sufferings, reality sacrifices barred lessons
which moreoften dig for propriety. Confronting to the general pain, the
individual matter just placates from the patriotic embrocation. The perpetual
dilemma: “Albania became a country; will Albanians, so, become citizens?” finds
the explanation under the precedent reasoning. The cross-road-remained dilemma
has evolved through time in search of more illuminated-aurora accomplishment.
The speculation fails in between two visions: 1st – Vital Noli, June
’24; 2nd – Pulpiteer Noli of nowadays. Within those times what did
occur to the fatherland was decadence and resurrection; just like the third
death-day for exalting immortality. The biblical impenetrable perusal
“Israelites and Philistines” brings an optical illumination of the
specifically-onerous day-nights of the nowadays national politics. The country
is depicted as mutable with inaptitude citizens among apocalyptical dreams. The
image adumbrates from year to year, at the time when fatherland was eyed by the
dissipated expatriates. Life’s defiance is the ulterior human destiny.
Palmistry, tasseography, cartomancy, fortune telling….may as well propel you
toward more perilous alleys. The best sanctuary of a “duplicated” human remains
so the overflowing-with-hope defiance.
Man
acts understandably and at times pretends intangibility. Here within, weaves
the thread of mythological Adriane … in yearly perennial Daedalian labyrinths.
The prognostication on the destiny course remains part of everybody’s image. To
comply or to rummage it is again likewise, because within this visionary image
throngs the ulterior human destiny…for the investment of the best. Within the
flattering and complimentary power of your country, everybody finds what they
deserve.
The
fatherland remains a midus among an umpteen love miduses. The matrix of the
best irradiates pattern levels within the patriotic straightforwardness
geography. Even the most flagitious individual vows on behalf of good luck. The
notions fate and defiance sometimes may close the vision window bearing infra
multitudes that solicit the leader. However, one may always conform to the
survival formulae for encountering other survival paths. They say fate is
predestined but it is also claimed that man can lead his fate. The fatherland
lives and dies under such tracks for becoming better in the big resurrection…
Truth
always suffers.
Within
this emotiveness, there does henceforward exist the fear of strength for being
submitted to punishment or persuasion. There may be a multiple suffering:
superficial or even complete. Does it matter?
It
has to be put an emphasis to the existentialist element. Under this point,
valors and anti-valors lose their physical portrait and mask it by hundreds and
thousands of multitarious shapes. Vis-à-vis Samson – Nol: suffering converts to
an oasis of the Albanian desert. The sufferers are thus portrayed and framed as
oppressed even by the basic self instincts.
“Israelites
and Philistines” – The tragedy has been narrated to the generations throughout
time and it still remains to be read in different ways by them. I will thus try
to approach to the truths which are underlined while perusing.
There
is being depicted the mythical character of Samson. Everything is to be
accomplished by means of persuasion and not power. Consequently, his pride is
so dead to listen to the ancestors’ voice and the country’s meekness.
Further
on, he is both beguiled and seduced by the lascivious and concupiscent Dalila’s
flatteries. In the end, after learning the alas-Samson secret, they emasculate
his delirium…
Bibliography:
NOLI F., Vepra 1. Izraelitë dhe filistinë, Akademia e Shkencave të RPSSH,
Instituti i Gjuhësisë dhe i Letërsisë. Trashëgimi Kulturor i Popullit Shqiptar.
Tiranë, 1987, fq. 127-168.
WELLEK, R., WARREN, A. Theory of Literature, New York, 1956, -275ph.
The Kristeva reader. Blackwell
Publishers, Oxford, UK, 2002, -327ph.