TITU POPESCU THE AESTHETICS OF PARADOXISM (second edition) American Research Press Rehoboth 2002 Titu Popescu THE AESTHETICS OF PARADOXISM (second edition) Translated from Romanian by P. Georgelin, F. Smarandache, and L. Popescu American Research Press Rehoboth 2002 2 This book can be ordered in microfilm format from: Bell and Howell Co. (University of Microfilm International) 300 N. Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346, USA Tel.: 1-800-521-0600 http://www.umi.com/bod/ (Books on Demand) Copyright 2002 by American Research Press Rehoboth, Box 141 NM 87322, USA E-mail: [email protected] http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/ ISBN: 1-931233-53-5 Standard Address Number 297-5092 Printed in the United States of America 3 Foreword In the history of thought and creation, the decisive events, the great and significant moments, the strongly affirmative stages - then the imposition of the optimizing novelties - have depended on the name and prestige of a personality. Referring to those, we personalize further on. The examples are extremely numerous, even in our nearest past. When we mention a creation - in the largest sense of the term - with the name of the personality who illustrates it most extensively at a given time, we state precisely the specific importance of it; we give it, with other words, the identity to which we can refer continuously with full knowledge and without causing any confusion among the receivers. The facts are called with the name of the man who produced them, and in this way we can compose a parallel onomastic dictionary, in which the work is included in the person’s space, keeping its content. The consecrated proper names evolve through quickly imposed habits, a large range of increments that announce the essential outline of their peak production. No space for ambiguity remains when we address to readers or listeners who are somewhat acquainted with the subject and we use such terms as Aristotelianism, Platonism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, Proustianism, Eminescianism, Barbianism, etc. We have even the advantage of a centered communication when we suggest with a sole notion the work as well as its dominant features, linked with the renown of the concerned author. There is no doubt that this way of denomination, when practiced a long time, has become a reflex and now is part of the habits of a correct expression. And neither the semantic objectification of works by a person nor the inherent axiological sanction disturb anybody. Personification being inevitable in creation, the history of art can be superposed to the history of the authors or, at, least gets tangled very strongly with them. It is precisely the case with the recent literary movement of Paradoxism, conceived in Romania and affirmed in the United States, which is closely bound to the temperament, inclination, taste and creative disposition of its initiator and organizer, the poet-mathematician Florentin Smarandache (paradoxism = smarandachism, in an “internal” and already notorious interpretation). A few years ago, I received at the redaction office of “Curentul” in Munich a letter sent from the Istanbul camp for political refugees. A small writing, nervous and legible, expanding on four pages, had been elaborated with the object to present the young poet, fled from Romania, who was desirous to make himself known in the advertising and literary life of the Romanians, but not only theirs, in the Occident. I had learnt there from that he was a teacher of mathematics native in Oltenia, that he had published in his specialty, but also in literature, that he was alone and just did not bear solitude. The professional writers know this type of letter. At first I’d had a reflex of restraint, justified by the lack of knowledge in this case. In addition, the profession/ specialty of the sender came to support my mistrust. A mathematician in literature is a rare thing, because it sounds in us like the highest pretensions to amateurism. Ion Barbu, isn’t it?, comes to you first in your mind and it is enough to discourage the velleities in this field. The information of valuable scientists on art is not founded usually on a rather confused bovarism. However, from the script of the refugee in the Sublime Porte came out another atmosphere and a feeling of another kind of anxiety: it could be felt that it was not a stranger in literature who wrote. The letter did not insist in terms of desire of publication. It had a very serious human core and a spiritual quality that attracted attention. You could perceive a taste well developed or, at least, having entered into the right way, and a state of spiritual alert desirous of being aware of the events. The signs of surprise increased when I extracted from the bottom of 4 the envelop a small book of poetry, in a Lilliputian format, as if it were for use by fable personages, a paperback book published in fact in Morocco, The author: the same Florentin Smarandache. But the surprise had to grow on, as the reading went forward, because the poems constituted only an element of the significant space of the page, the expression tended towards an autonomy in an universe of signs, in a concentric play reinforced by the disposition of the verses and the astonishment of the blank spaces. It was the first contact with paradoxism, discovered still in its incipient and more tempered phase. Gradually, but enough quickly - the impatience of the letter from Istanbul was absolutely incontestable -, the poet’s name took importance in the literary sphere, when he had succeeded in settling in the city of Phoenix, Arizona. He has triggered off a real campaign of in-forming with his poetry and his thought concerning poetry, through an extraordinary epistolary effort and through his works in a general manner, succeeding not only in attracting attention on himself, but also in being recognized and appreciated for his fatherhood of the original paradoxist conception, in gaining sympathizers, members, supporters, so that he is included in the most notorious references in the present literary activity of the world, and notes and comments have been made on him in the most diverse international media. He is appreciated as a schoolmaster and a writer with a real talent. He is overwhelming with so many statements of sympathy and appreciation expressed about his name. From now, a record in the computer would be necessary to put them in full evidence. I believe that here, in Occident, he is the most popular writer of our generation. I have noted that he generates an involuntary sympathy. I have been the testimony of exclamations of delight that came from persons who had not read anything from him but had heard of him. He has then gained the reputation of being a spiritualist of mistakes. And from him you accept that insolence and that irritation in regard to the world, because he does it with a refined intelligence, a superior spirit and a good-heartedness that conquers you. Although it seems to be said frivolously, Florentin has a gift to become likable. His is gifted for nonchalance and contrariety, but his play, either it should be the spark in surface or it should put ingeniously the unorthodox forms in a picture-frame, it is a very grave, serious, deep play, directed towards the face of the one who follows it. He, the poet, laughs with an eye and weeps with the other. And precisely this genuineness of duplicity, I intend to put it in evidence through all this essay on Paradoxism - since Florentin Smarandache, trying my structural weakness for unpredictable curls of his mind and my tolerant Transylvanian character in front of his southern hurry in stating and denying, started to bomb me with consistent parcels, that came on until I was about to reach Paradoxism, almost filling a shelf of my library. Plus his letters, plus writings that have punctuated the stages of the road. And it is in this way that the project - not the first anyway, as it can be ascertained from the biography afterwards - has been conceived to integrate Paradoxism in a larger family of mind comprising the whole of the artistic modernism, in a theory of creation that could explain the fields of activity. For this reason, I have focused this essay firmly on the aesthetic domain, considering that the modern experience of creation draws its validity from broad principles that govern the life of the artistic phenomena. And then I have come in a natural way to the evaluation of the paradoxist concrete, of a movement put into action - to its exponential level, the one given by Smarandache. I have preferred to debate of ideas about Paradoxism, because it is the surest way to the clarifications that are inevitable. No priority has been given to the filiations and relationships - although I have indicated them where it was the case -, but to those aspects that are in a vertical connection with a norm, a principle, or to the largest irradiance of those that come from an independent emission. I have added to the suggestions of Smarandache’s biography some new 5 ones, coming from other sources. Furthermore, I have put as a basis, of course, the capability of discernment that is presupposed in those who have a familiarity of whatever extent in this domain. On account of the spectacular nature of the subject, of the temperamental iconoclasm of the poet (novelist, dramatist, translator, as it will be seen afterwards), and because of the preoccupation for the implication of a principle and the consciousness that a knot of aesthetic contradictions cannot be undone like a Gordian knot, it may be that I will not have been always clear enough to make myself understood thoroughly.