PRIMER
1. The law of place can only help us
understand life, not death. Therefore hope and any optimistic illusion is
justified.
2. The Cosmos rests on dualism and draws inner strength from
it. Day and night. Summer and winter. Good and evil. Eternal struggle
yielding no final victory and no final defeat.
3. It is in two orders that history evolves: after a period
when life-blood is sucked out with cotton wool, there follows a period when
life-blood is let by a knife.
4. Plunder is an inevitable component of economic activity in
the stages thus ordered. Economic systems can be better or worse, but no
economic system is efficient per se, unless plunder is built into
it. It is a myth that the rich, civilized West was created by labor only.
5. In the stages thus ordered, the successful protagonists of
relative stability claim that economics solve everything, while demonic
natures mock that claim, preparing, at the change of historical periods, to
plunder what others have earned.
6. There is such a thing as historical relief. Where water
has run, it will run again. Landmarks change, and privileges are
perpetuated. What is important is not to be consistent, and not to pay
taxes, as the crowd pays. Forms change, the essence remains. That is why
the least reconstruction, in the sense of the engagement of labor, is found
in regions with ancient statehood, where privilege has taken deeper root
than in the peripheral provinces of the world's political stage.
7. Recommendation. Because of the law of place,
optimism is a more favorable choice than pessimism. Everything is lost
without the belief that even so humanity can create a wider space for
itself. That would mean an unconditional capitulation of the spirit. The
dualism imbuing the cosmos does not permit it. There is sense in Sisyphus'
labor. Are we sufficiently aware that sometimes we are more impressed by
ruins, by their beauty even, than by the buildings that have survived?
Skopje, March 1851
Jordan Hadzi Konstantinov-Dzinot
A mystifier's confession
This text was written by me one morning in March 1993. I
am grateful to Dzinot, from whom I have borrowed the form used in his
Primer. I decided not to rush its publication, and distributed only a few
copies of it among my friends, with a note under the text: reported by
Blazhe Koneski. I realized that some of them did not immediately see
through the game, for they inquired about the circumstances in which Dzinot
could express himself in such a manner.
Now, when I have decided to publish this "primer," I would
not wish thus to mislead some of the readers too. That is why I thought it
better to add this explanation.
Blazhe Koneski
Translated by Ljubica Arsovska and Margaret Reid
