Home » Zacharias Lichter and the germ of subversion in pacified common thought

Zacharias Lichter and the germ of subversion in pacified common thought

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Certain books remain buried for decades waiting to be found. In fact, Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter had never arrived in Italy, a precious text, not published even abroad, in which the Florentine publishing house Spider & Fish came across.
Set in the Iron Guard supremacists and anti-Semites of the 1930s, it first appeared in 1969 in Romania under the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu but was too crazy, too free to be understood and to run into censorship. When, four years later, the regime became more rigid, the author Matei Călinescu, philologist and literary critic, left the country and took refuge in the United States where he was first Visiting Professor and then Professor Emeritus at Indiana University.

Provocation

Calinescu certainly wrote it as a provocation to the context in which he was immersed, but some books and characters have the power of being out of time, and for this reason always, obliquely, fitting. Zacharias Lichter is one of the many incarnations of unique characters similar to him that dot the history of philosophy and literature, as well as history itself, mixing its plans: Socrates, Diogenes, Christ, St. Francis, Baal Shem Tov, Zarathustra, Dionysus . Zacharias Lichter is one of those characters who for years and decades walk the streets and lives of a city, ending up impressing himself in everyone’s memory, a sort of joker or clownish figure who with his way of being in the world and his words it embodies a germ of subversion in the pacified common thought. Mystical and anarchist prophet, independent thinker, always dissident and never partisan. Enemy of any established order and consensus or social pact, Lichter chooses poverty like St. Francis and considers it his work; he prefers to beg – but he also appreciates thieves; argues that almsgiving is a form of asceticism that brings one closer to god and believes that a man unfit for begging is condemned to mediocrity. He dreams of “the overthrow of the capitalist order through the conversion of millions of workers to begging, the establishment of a new, anarchically religious society, in which property, not prohibited by any law, would become an alienation, a reprehensible disease, an object of repulsion and compassion at the same time ”.

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Bible

Of the Bible, the only book and object he possesses, he especially loves Job because he is capable of living in the absurd, like children and partly women – when they do not fit the “system of conventions and stereotypes” claimed by men. He despises medicine, because it does nothing but “fragment life, break it down and, recomposing it, move it away from its mysterious and sacred origins, to the point of falsifying and degrading it”. Instead, he is fascinated by old age, which allows one to just be, and illness for “all its paradoxical value”. He lashes out against the Empire of Stupidity, an empire based on efficiency, comfort and functionality, in which every restlessness and every incursion of spirituality must be “defined, explained, diagnosed” and “practicality” overwhelms the “aspiration to totality”. For this reason, the only person who fears and shuns is Mr. S., the psychiatrist: Mr. S looks for him, full of interest in him, not to know him but to define him and therefore “morally murder him”.

L’“Universal Soldier

In part told by a biographer who perhaps met him one day, in part returned through “his” words and sometimes even poems, Zacharias Lichter unravels both the world in which it is set, and the one in which it is written and thought, as well as that in which we live now, and perhaps the whole of reality. Of this Empire of Stupidity he takes the blame on himself, he considers himself “the individual simultaneous with the whole of history: the guilty one for the outbreak of all wars, the one responsible for all injustices”. He is the “Universal Soldier” of Donovan’s song, all men in one man, Jesus Christ who carries the cross for all. And the guilt to be expiated is the mediocrity, the banality of the evil of the universal soldier, who executes and does not ask, the embodiment of the “practical spirit, fundamental quality of stupidity”. To save us, are madness and the demon of irony: “laughter purifies like a sacred fire but this thing is known only by fools, prophets and saints”. Lichter finds the sublime in the ridiculous, he seeks salvation in this world, and the god whose flame he feels stands among the beggars and fools, old friends, madmen, putrid nights, saints and wandering prophets of whom his poems. An imaginary and words that to hear them today seem deflated, emptied of their symbolic and devoid of magic, but from the mouth of Zacharias Lichter as in the songs of De André or in the Thief and Joker by Bob Dylan (All Along the Watchtower), are still alive, still a powerful germ that enchants and disrupts Like Socrates, Lichter thinks that the truth can only be communicated by word of mouth, which is why he wanders the streets of the city, the only place that belongs to him, and talks to the people . He complains of writing that kills memory and of those who can’t even think without a blank sheet of paper in front of them (and now, fifty years later, we realize that in fact there are those who can no longer think without a screen front). Up to arguing that writing (and even more so the press, and who knows what he would have said about digital), guilty of a great victory of having over being, is an instrument of power and has “enormously accentuated the possibilities of oppression and exploitation “and” made possible the constitution of some great empires “and to affirm that freedom, at this point, is only possible” as an exit from history and as oblivion “. Nothing more current, so it remembers those very same characters, Socrates, Diogenes, Christ, St. Francis, Baal Shem Tov, Zarathustra, Dionysus, the Jester and the Thief and perhaps Bob Dylan himself who are always out of history, always elusive, impromptu , as impromptu is this splendid work that has appeared in the bookstore since July 29 and more than saying “it seems written yesterday”, we can say that it seems written “always”.

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Matei Călinescu, Life and opinions of Zacharias Lichter, translated from Romanian and edited by Bruno Mazzoni, 184 pp., 14 Euro

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