out knowing it, new plastic symbols for the cosmic language of the will. Unknown musicians are transforming the language, and women, bent over the cradle of children, are seeking always more perfect kisses in the creative discontent of their love.
Nothing, however, is subordinate for the creative spirit; things and beings penetrate by their invisible radiations into the hidden places where our work is being born. Our thoughts are colored by the softness of white clouds, by all the flowers of the meadows, by the blood of the roses, and like the grain they are sifted on the glowing sieves of the rays of the sun. The sweet violence of springtides, the touching purity of azures, the secret language of colors, the glory of the waters, mountains, infinities, are constantly at work in our subconsciousness, and nourish in us superhuman longings. The rarest ethereal component, of our every inhalation refreshens the roots of our heart, wearied by the heavy sap of the Earth. Every word which has fallen in to the depths of our soul (and the fall takes years sometimes) inevitably, by a law as old as the beginning of the worlds, is struggling to become flesh. But the road from a new dream to its metamorphosis into a gesture and into the sacrifice of life is difficult and painful, as it is necessary to tract it far from the roads of ages and in the bread we eat there slumbers the sun of the year that passed. But even the trembling, weak and uncertain dream becomes as violent as a cyclone, if flashed at the same time in millions of hearts. The multitudes have moments when it seems that they precipitately fall thousands of years backwards, but they also have gleamings of anxiety, and a warning instinct of danger which lays hidden behind the horizon, when they become more clairvoyant than the seers, and when they are able to decide for justice as terrible and incomprehensible as nature.
Where the life of the people ceases to be creative in the sphere of the beautiful, it is a sign that the people are suffering be yond their strength. The slavery which deprives work of its joy and leaves its captives return into their lairs exhausted, with eyes that have lost their lustre, which lays waste the beauty of women, makes mother hood a thing to be feared, and which transforms the red of the morning into incendiary, works toward the destruction of the species. For beauty in all sphere is born from kisses and the wealth of a free embrace; the slave, who has lost all faith in his liberation has no more strength to see or create beauty. Beauty is a blossom from the surplus of ascending life, a denial of death; it is the road to the mysterious South of the Sun, always aglow, more passionate generations, more spiritual azure, deeper nights, more brilliant stars, of lighter gait, hardly touching the Earth but governing all her laws, the greatest amount of energy with the smallest loss; it is the silent unbelievable certainty, the only certainty to be found on this earth, atremble by all suns, an endless smile which, seen form the Earth, has in its sweet radiance always a certain melancholy, but even then makes us feel the enormous silence of some inexpressible splendor.
WHERE HAVE I HEARD?
Otokar Březina. Translated by Jar. Císař.
The windows of night hast thou opened, O Opener! A mysterious draught has thence blown,
And the wings of my strongest thought it carried from the reach of my sight.
In a vertigo, as if the centuries of whirl of the Earth in the twilight of worlds
Had awakened in my soul, the presence of another life I felt.
From Earth to Earth and from Sun to Sun the silence was falling in ponderous blows,
And in its echo a new silence arose from my depths, a silence different from the silence of Earth:
By the breathing of thousands it seethed, by centuries of kisses, by the overpowering silence of hearts that ceased to throb,
By the flight of all dead and all future wings, by the eternal symphonies of rays of light,
By the melancholy ringing of rains, which, fertile, are falling into the centuries of harvests.
The outcries of dreamings, that are afraid of the morning, and by the mystical converse of fragrances.
Like the storms of the seas that have been, it trembled in the orchestra of lightnings to come,
The last cadences of songs that have died it linked with the beginning of songs still resounding.
