Tariq Saeedi
In the second part of this series, we said that Magtymguly was an idea whose time had come. The nature prepared him through very tough and panoramic training.
His personal tragedies, the upheaval around him, his extensive travels and education were all part of the way the nature prepared him from the childhood.
In the third part of this series, we quoted from an essay by Adam Laten Willson. His wonderful essay very nicely sums up the multifaceted personality of Magtymguly and his direct relevance to the Turkmenistan of today.
Now, we return to the claim that Magtymguly was an idea whose time had come.
It is the law of the nature that when something is supposed to happen, its idea dawns on several individuals in different parts of the world.
The productive time of the life of Magtymguly was the second half of the eighteenth century. While Magtymguly was busily creating a wealth of poetry that would ultimately propel the Turkmen people into nationhood, something similar was happening in Europe.
Andrea Wulf has documented it in her book ‘Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.’ — We are looking at the excerpted and adapted version that was published at LitHub. The full length book is available from the publishers Alfred A. Knopf.
What we are going to quote here is necessary to underline the points we want to make:
How a Group of Young Writers and Poets Revolutionized 18th-Century Literature
Andrea Wulf on the Origins and Enduring Legacy of German Romanticism
When did we begin to be as self-centered as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we first ask the question, How can I be free? It all began in a quiet university town in Germany in the 1790s, when a group of playwrights, poets, and writers put the self at center stage in their thinking, their writing, and their lives. This brilliant circle included the famous poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis; the visionary philosophers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; the contentious Schlegel brothers, August Wilhelm and Friedrich; and, in a wonderful cameo, Alexander von Humboldt. And at the heart of this group was the formidable Caroline Schlegel, who sparked their dazzling conversations about the self, nature, identity, and freedom.
The French revolutionaries may have changed the political landscape of Europe, but the young Romantics incited a revolution of the mind that transformed our world forever. We are still empowered by their daring leap into the self, and by their radical notions of the creative potential of the individual, the highest aspirations of art and science, the unity of nature, and the true meaning of freedom. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfillment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our responsibilities toward our community and future generations.
They wanted to romanticize the entire world, and this meant perceiving it as an interconnected whole.
This was a revolution of words. Language shaped minds, August Wilhelm Schlegel wrote in a fragment about the French Revolution, and language should therefore be “republicanized through the power of the general will.” If language carried political power, then it had to evolve accordingly.
Pollen and Fragments [some collected works of Novalis and Schlegel] became the foundational texts of a new movement, launching Romanticism on the public stage—it was “our first symphony,” as August Wilhelm Schlegel said. It was here, on the pages of the Athenaeum, that the term “romantic” was coined and first used in print in its new literary and philosophical meaning. The German word romantisch was derived from the French word for “novel”—roman. Romantisch or “romantic” had been used in the sense of romanhaft—“like a novel,” and also as a descriptive term for picturesque landscapes; but it was in the pages of the Athenaeum that it received a new definition. When August Wilhelm had asked his brother to send him his explanation of the word “romantic,” Friedrich had replied that it was impossible before it was two thousand pages long. In the Athenaeum, he managed to summarize it in one, albeit long, fragment that spread over three pages.
Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature; and make poetry lively and sociable, and make life and society poetical; poeticize wit and fill and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good, solid matter for instruction, and animate them with the pulsations of humor…
They wanted to romanticize the entire world, and this meant perceiving it as an interconnected whole. They were talking about the bond between art and life, between the individual and society, between humankind and nature. Just as two elements could create a new chemical compound, so Romantic poetry could weld different disciplines and subjects into something distinctive and new. Novalis explained: “By giving the commonplace a higher meaning, by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticize.”
They pushed the rules that society had imposed on them, so they now pushed the boundaries of philosophy and literature.
Though the meaning of the term “romantic” may have been confusing, it was the unwieldiness of the concept that the group liked; their definition was never meant to be a neat entry in a dictionary. Romantic poetry was unruly, dynamic, alive and forever changing, they believed, and should not be corseted by metric patterns because it was a “living organism.” Its essence was “that it should forever be becoming, never perfected,” Friedrich Schlegel explained. It was inherently incomplete and unfinished. And because it was incomplete, Goethe explained a few years later, it left room for the imagination of the viewer or reader.
At the center of everything was poetry—but not poetry as we understand it today. The friends turned back to the original ancient Greek term poiētikós—“creative” or “productive.” For them, romantic poetry could be anything: a poem, of course, but also a novel, a painting, a building, a piece of music or a scientific experiment. They discussed the concept in great detail. Did this mean that everything could be transformed into poetry? Yes, Friedrich Schlegel believed, as long as it “possesses an invisible spirit.”
Ordinary logic was cold mechanical thinking, Novalis wrote, but imagination was creative and alive. The future world was “rational chaos,” he said, and at the center of it all was the unruly power of the mind to create. The “poet is but the highest degree of thinker,” Novalis explained. This didn’t mean that they turned against science or philosophy—quite the opposite, they wanted to bring together what had been separated for too long. And that could only be done through imagination, and that he had abundantly, Novalis said, because it was the “most prominent feature of my identity.”
* * *
In quoting from the book of Andrea Wulf, we wanted to underline the following points:
- The second half of the eighteenth century was the time when 12 exceptionally talented people, working together, brought the individual to the centre of life and thought.
- They elevated the status of imagination.
- They highlighted the freedom of person and mind as an essential right.
- Above all, they advocated that the everything was connected with everything else – the holistic concept.
* * *
During the same time frame but a continent away, Magtymguly Pyragy was doing the same thing.
We know with certainty that Magtymguly Pyragy was not aware of the ideas of the group of intellectuals in the west and neither did they know anything about Magtymguly Pyragy.
As we said earlier, when the time arrives for an idea to move the world, it descends to the powerful minds in several places. The time had arrived for the supremacy of individuality and freedom, and the acknowledgment that it is an interconnected universe – everything is connected with everything else.
A group of exceptionally talented intellectuals reshaped the entire philosophical landscape of Europe. They demolished the barriers and unclogged the channels, setting the minds free to pursue higher objectives.
Magtymguly Pyragy did the same thing in this part of the world.
The difference is that in Europe there was a closely-knit group who could get feedback from each other, while Magtymguly Pyragy did it singlehandedly, without the feedback from a comparably powerful mind.
In fact, the accomplishments of Magtymguly go far, far beyond that.
He did individually and in isolation what Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Fichte, Schelling, and the Schlegel brothers did together.
In addition, his influence on the Turkmen language and literature is comparable to the impact of Shakespeare on the English language and literature.
And, like da Vinci, we have still not fully mapped the creative wealth Magtymguly left for us.
It is important to underline once again that the hugely gifted people like Magtymguly cannot be compared to each other; neither their person, nor their accomplishments.
When we mention the other great minds in conversation about Magtymguly, we are merely trying to create a context. /// nCa, 24 June 2024 [to be continued]