"100 and two" - "in between" being and nothingness 0

Elvina Baužaitė
www.kamane.lt, 2015-04-28

In brief: On the last page of the book "100 and two" it is stated that the author perceives the published works as a new creative phase. It is a starting point of something else, the line, separating past and future, being and nothingness. It is interesting to observe the emergence of new, to be, to participate in the transformations, because poetry, after all, is a language of being, so let's try to listen and hear what do K. Navakas poems are saying.

The play of these categories, being in between is 100 and two poems leitmotiv, harmoniously linking and uniting a hundred and two works, which (yet or already) do not have a name only a number that indicates its place in the book and when it was created. The form of the words also shows change, thus it would be most accurately described in the words of the poet: modification of a sonnet.

Mirror is the image which is used to divide reality into here and beyond in the "second" poem. Two worlds, and which one of those is real - the one that does not change every day, or the one behind the glowing window that has contours, colors and shapes? That is how the poet is beading today's reality, where everything is reflections and images - the play of kaleidoscopic images. The being itself disappears in it, becomes invisible, and it is seen again when artificially created, alleged prove of identity is refused. Which truly lies beyond the appearance, although not reflected.

K. Navakas speaks not only of the virtual of reality, with his works he multiplies worlds or witnesses their abundance as reality. In the "sixteenth" (poem) writer ponders a book as a puzzle, its need, "We should re-write all the books / to swap the words to rearrange / them so that the books would be no longer understood" (p. 28). It is the mediation of the being of today's literature, which flusters around the paper book and electronic, virtual cyber texts read on a screen, whose main idea is the survival of the book - how? Paper book in today's consumerist culture is ephemeral,  one-off, thus, it has to become incomprehensible and multidimensional, allowing and requiring to repeat the reading over and over again.

Personal experience of the writer, perception, more or less dependent on the existing discourses in the culture, unfolds on the "fourth", "Plants are Portuguese. Animals are / French. Metals are Germans and / minerals are Scandinavians. What we do / are Jewish. Our passions Spanish / our silence Icelanders" (p. 16). That is how playfully being and domesticity is explained through the perspective of ethnicity, at the same time separating the substantiality of nations.


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