The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Petаr Тchouhov is the face of postmodern Bulgarian poetry, contributing to the profundity of its expression and the interplay of light and shade upon it. He has a background in sociology and is the author of eleven books of poetry and three of prose, as well as the writer of many songs. He has played guitar in the Bulgarian rock bands Subdibula, Tutaksi, Stanley, Par Avion Band, as well as in La Text, a group performing poetry and alternative rock. In 2004 he founded the Gologan group for ethno-rock and poetry, joined later by Angela Rodel - a researcher of ethnomusicology at the University of UCLA, California. The group performs musical recitals in galleries and theatres, and has participated in international festivals in Bratislava, Bitola and Naumburg. His collection of haiku poems Safety Pins has been staged as a multi-media spectacle. The poet is a sworn beer drinker, and his face is often lit by the mellow light of the hop fields, shimmering on the pints that he relishes in the pubs of Plovdiv, Sofia and London, and in the bars of New Orleans. With him we have a full colour version of a postmodern troubadour. The songs of the troubadours, singing of Heaven and Hell, inspired Dantе, and Dante on his part is one of Tchouhov’s inspirations, providing the cosmos where the postmodern poet can rearrange old signs and create new meanings.
He has been translated into many languages, and he is the winner of the Basho Museum haiku competition. The list of his literary awards in Bulgaria is so impressive that he might be described as one of the most outstanding voices of contemporary Bulgarian literature; a voice whose rebelliousness and sophistication are in harmony, just as in the motion of the celestial spheres. It would be not illogical for such an extravagant style of expression to engender “lyrical scandals” like the one provoked by his book of poems AДdicted published in 2017. The book won the Ivan Peychev national literary award in the same year, but some of the members of the jury – literary critics – roared with indignation in the media over one of the poems included in the book. The bone of contention was the poem ‘Logical’ which goes like this:
Logical
The shooting range is dark
in Luna Park
the toy rabbit sleeps
its eternal sleep
the toy fox sleeps
by the box of sweets
sleeps too
the bottle of champagne
beside the pyramid
of paper cups
the matchsticks
sleep too
like soldiers
in formation
the hanging walnuts
sleep soundly
though the worms inside them
do not sleep
their jaws are moving,
reciting:
a firing squad
before the firing squad
worms
thus does the simple logic go
The last two lines of this “scandalous” poem are a somewhat inverted citation of one of the most famous couplets in the Bulgarian poetry:
“After the firing squad - the worms
Thus does the simple logic go”
The citation is from the poem ‘Execution’ (or ‘The firing squad’) written by the Bulgarian poet Nicola Vaptsarov - a controversial figure for some, a tragic hero for others and a great poet for most Bulgarians. Vaptsarov wrote the poem on 23.07.1942, a few hours before he was executed by a firing squad.
This poetic invention provoked a spasm of critical indignation in some of the members of the awards committee – reminiscent perhaps of the times of narrow-minded literary dogmas imposed on Bulgarian society by communist ideology; some of the critics even used the word “blasphemous” when speaking about Tchouhov’s poem.
The poetic citation has a literary and a historical intrinsic value, with which Tchouhov plays quite consciously. The quotation from Vaptsarov’s ‘Execution’ is placed in an upside-down context: the tragic, heroic setting is transformed into a commonplace one. Furthermore, what happens before (death) changes place with what happens after (it); the reality of what really happened is challenged. There is bitter irony in all this, and irony accentuates the philosophical importance of historical and literary facts. As for the worms - there will always be worms that nibble at the facts quite literally.
Although the poem ‘Logical’ alludes to events mostly meaningful to Bulgarian cultural memory, Tchouhov creates an image here that is valid for the global postmodern world - a world dominated by something which Mario Vargas Llosa calls “the civilisation of circuses”. Tchouhov‘s poem criticizes that loud and spectacular, circus-like aspect of our time which has nothing in common with the blessed quietness of writing poetry, nor with the quietness of reading it.
How should we read Petar Tchouhov? The contemporary fine arts are often conceptual, and the artists like to provide us – the spectators - with texts or other guidelines supposed to steer us during the process of interpreting a particular art work. The real interplay of interpretation and artefact, however, only begins with such guidelines. Contemporary literature is more reticent in this respect. At the beginning of AДdicted the poet writes: “After all, you are the author, I am only the narrator, the one who is sick of reincarnations, perpetually charged with energy and unable to die.” And in one of his interviews he says :”My writing is an invitation for co-writing.” Is this the key to how we should interpret his texts?
The immortality of the narrator is distinct from ancient Gilgamesh’s longing for eternal life. It is also distinct from the fictional character created by Simone de Beauvoir, who is destined to live eternally surrounded by mortals. For Tchouhov the narrator is a tangle of malaise and vitality, and the narrative - drawn out of this tangle - is like a tread with no beginning or end. It is a bow-string vibrating with the dream of re-capturing the divine nature of the Word, from the time “before the ’Word broke down into words” (one of Tchouhov’s strongest images ). His poetic narrative is encouraged by the hope that by reaching its author/reader it will restore the original divinity of Words. Maybe this is the attitude we must use when reading Petar Tchouhov’s poetry. Or is there a proper place for a “must” at all? Nevertheless, this is the word which the poet uses when inviting us to his poetic world: “You must have a cup to enter here”.
Thus begins the prose fragment which introduces his poetry book AДdicted.
Is this cup the Holy Grail? Are we invited to dine with the Fisher King? Where is this “here” we are invited to enter ? Is it Heaven or is it Hell? And what is the Heaven and the Hell of the postmodern man? This opposition is present, either openly or covertly, everywhere in Petar Tchouhov’s poetry. His poems quote Dante directly or discursively; they quote as well other undertakings about Heaven and Hell in Western civilisation. How does this supernatural pair sound and look nowadays when we already have the artworks signed by the graffiti artist Keith Haring in the 1980s’? Many of his drawings borrow images from Dante, Bosch and Blake. According to Haring, Micky Mouse and not Virgil should be our guide In a Hell whose walls are covered with senseless graffiti like “Crack is Wrack”. Against this background, Tchouhov’s poems sound emotionally composed, even enlightened. “My hell is my fortress” – thus begins one of the poems in the AДdicted collection. Is this hell a shelter or a prison? The poem alludes to the sixth circle of Hell, which, according to Dante, is allotted to the Epicureans. In Tchouhov’s version, however, it is the circle where the words serve their eternal sentences for their sins.
Then i stop somewhere
inside the sixth circle
beside an open grave
and start a name game
or a dame game
because the words are my ladies
….
I invite them to heretical pleasures,
epicurean secrets
that will help them achieve
self-expression
but they are only shadows
If, according to Sartre, “Hell is other people”, then, according to Petar Tchouchov, Hell - it’s the impotent, barren words – they are shadows and banal metaphors that can banalize even Death.
The streams of banal metaphors
do not stop
even at a red light
these are bloodless accidents
the casualties rise
and leave
incapable of being
beautiful corpses.
(the poem ‘Crossroads’)
Hell is also the addictive desire to awaken the capability of words to express themselves, while the addicted man of letters descends
“further down
and further down”.
With these two lines the last poem of the AДdicted collection ends and we find the poet determined to descend further, hopeful, perhaps, that this downward movement will bring him (and us) close to the divine origin of words.
In a bewildered world, lost in its own self-expression, Tchouhov the poet creates dualities of meaning, using signs, metaphors, images, cultural allusions, opening up view-points of deliverance, from where the reader might glimpse even God.
“Where is god
I am always behind you,
but you don’t see me in the mirror”
The duplication of the Cyrilic and the Latin letter “D” in the title - АДdicted - is an example of a poetic duality. (Like a pebble thrown in the semantic lake of a word, this duplication allows the word to break into two meaningful units: AД (Bulg. = Hell) + dicted (from Latin, dicto – compose, dictate, draw up). The Milky Way winding in the sky above the earthly way (the image is from one of his haiku poems) is part of this duality. Trying to track down how a conscious thought transforms into a dream is part of this duality. Exploring the dark and the light sides of love is also a part of it.
Petar Tchouhov’s poetry finds shelter under the wing of a fallen angel, it is enlightened by the immortality of an ephemeral snow angel; it reconciles the oxymorons of the world. It reveries in the past of an austere childhood, the memory of which is fast melting away. It longs for a new beginning where meanings are wholesome, unbroken, undivided – the time when Word is not yet broken into words.
What else could this Beginning be called, but Heaven? Petar Tchouchov does not name it. Heaven is the nameless reverie of the postmodern man imprisoned in the fortress of his Hell.
By Teodora Nikolova / Translated by Hristo Dimitrov / Edited by Tom Phillips
