KOGAION REVIEW
romanian literary monthly

Mar
23

sorin-cerinThe Coaxialism,book review:
This book represents an audacious contribution to contemporary philosophy. Not a mere synthesis, the volume brings to the fore a original vision concerning the truth (and the illusion), the absolut and the life, into the philosophical conversation of humanity. “What else are we, but a mad dream of an angel, taken up with himself, lost somewhere within the hierarcy of numerology?” (p.5), asks the author, triggering a captivating odyssey, with an opening towards the philosophy of conscience, contextualism and mind philosophy, that is relevant for the critique of the reprezentationalism and postmodernism. Coaxialism is structured in 11 chapters. They may be interpreted in triads. Therefore, the first three chapters could stand as an introduction to the thematic realm of coaxiology. The first chapter is concerned with “The purpose, the hirarchy, the birth of numerology and of the Primordial Factor ONE”, the second chapter treats “The Instinct, the Matrix, the Order and Disorder, the Dogma”, and the third chapter “The State of the fact, the Opened Knowledge and the Closed Knowledge, the Coaxialism and the Coaxiology”. Then, the next triad would be constituted by the interpretation of three aspects related to human exemplarity, via the chapters entitled “The Print and the Karmic Print, the Geniality”, “Love or the individual Conscience of the Human Being” and “Consciousness or the knowledge in Coaxiology”.
>>>>

Mar
20

If we wanted display the history of the Romanian people in the form of a map drawn in relief withmountains, hills, plains, valley, precipes and waters, with rovers and seas, them, Stefan (Stephen) the Great and the Holy and his reign would be the Everest Peak. His entire reign bere the mark of his personality and his activity either political, strategical, cultural, human, moral or religious deserved only superlatives. Never had there been any ruler before this coronation the equak his grandeur, no matter how blessed by God he might have been.
Stephen the Great appeared on the political stage as a result of painful efforts of the Romanian people in order to survive in a very confused and confunsing period: Constantinopoles, the fortress of Christianity had been taken down and the Christians all over Europe and serious resons to werry. The Turks had reached Europe and Kept entering deeply the territories >>>>>>>>

Mar
20

Ion Ghinoiu – He is presently the Scientific Secretary of the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore (Bucharest) and has been at the Institute since 1967. He is also Associate Professor since 1991 at the University of Bucharest where he lectures in Ethnography-Folklore in the department of Sociology and Social Assistance. His Ph.D. was awarded in Geography at the University of Bucharest in 1978. His main fields of interest are customs and feasts, mythology, the ethnology of habitation, ethnographical cartography, and the taxonomy of popular culture. He is widely published in these fields including one hundred scientific studies, The National Atlas of Geography, and Days and Myths: Calendar of the Romanian Peasant 2000. >>>>>

Mar
20

We all should ask ourselves why Avram Iancu has remained so famous, so unique, in the collective memory of the Romanian people and especially of the Romanians from Transylvania. It is true that to a certain degree that his very dynamic style, in a time when the Romanians from Transylvania were forced to be passive he was a very vocal and boisterous symbol of activism. But in the meantime, we should not delude ourselves or try to create myths. He was able to preserve for a limited period of time the liberty of those who depended on him and he was able to repel forces that were superior in number and means to his own. But finally he was defeated, he was publicly humiliated and few of his ideals were fulfilled. In other words if we will analyze only the real facts, trying to judge Avram Iancu in terms belonging to the “real politick,” we will be unable to understand the aura of heroism, almost sanctity that accompany his name and personality. What distinguishes Avram Iancu and makes him almost totally unique in Romanian history (as far as I know only one single Romanian personality could be put in this company and that is Dr. Iuliu Maniu) is the fact that he refused to make moral comprises. He strongly believed that his people were right and have a undeniable right to an existence with dignity and a right to assert their personality. >>>>>>

Mar
20

This chapter draws partly on Dina Iordanova’s 2001 seminal work on Balkan culture, film and the media, “Cinema of Flames”. Her study, together with other similar attempts to cope with, as yet, unacknowledged, unrevealed facts of culture in this area of Europe, is a must today, in the ludicscape of contorted or just delayed truths, or only half-truths, in the grip of a genuinely post-emotional connoisseur, whose task remains that of ludicizing a world and letting in the bitter taste of apocalypticism. The account on Iordanova’s unique contribution to the understanding of the geopolitical perimeter we call the “Balkans’, translates smoothly in my recent work on the the notion of Ludic and a paradigmatic ludicscape as the apogee of a (Ludic) Postmodernism with its regime of excess, and whose expert managing of a certain jocularity was, no doubt, quite beneficial for those for whom, in Bakhtin’s own words, “the rhetorical dispute is a dispute where claiming victory against the opponent, rather than acknowledging the Truth becomes crucial”.

In my thesis on Ludic, I insisted on the mechanism by which a certain, indispensable today (as always) ideological construction of the real is obtained by managing, that which is distorting and eventually annihilating subjectivities destined, otherwise, to serve a genuine dynamic in history; so it is all to do with loss and false pretensions, with unnecessary cynicism, self-inflicted parody and self-denigration in good old Brunian fashion – see Giordano Bruno’s portrait of the Manipulator, required to have immersed and have indulged himself into the shallow waters of temptation, for then, and then only, is the Manipulator in perfect control of its victim. Ludic is, and will remain, the ultimate replacement, agent provocateur, and expert into self-deprivation and ‘stoic’ (sic) (pseudo)resistance. This paper will attempt at relating my theory on ‘Ludic’ with Dina Iordanova’s view on the Balkans..

Many signals have been sent from what Misha Glenny called “The Balkans”, one denomination used through several templates to define a disputed location: “the realm of ruins”.” maze of conspiracy”, “the empire of illusions”, “a house of wars”, “the city of the dead”, “prisons of history”. These are, of course, Glenny’s ironical positionings of the Balkans, suspended somewhere in the nowhere between Europe and Asia, in “the center of some sort of imaginative whirlpool” where “every known superstition in the world is gathered” (Glenny, xxi). This internalized image could be followed into a drastic, this time, although reluctant to

Mar
20

For thousands of years, the legend of great flood has endured in the biblical story of Noah and such Middle Eastern myths as the epic of Gilgamesh. Few scientists believed that such a catastrophic deluge had actually occurred. But these Bible „stories“ for some scientific people appeared to have a real sense. Considering that the religion and science has to work together, two distinguished geophysicists have discovered an event that changed history; a sensational flood 8,600 years ago in what is today the Black Sea.
Not only in the Bible we found stories about the flood but also in the ancient clay tablets excavated from the ruins of biblical Nineveh more than a hundred years ago revealed a much older version of the same flood legend. Archeologists searched the length and breath of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia for evidence of such a flood, to no avail. Then, as earth scientists made new discoveries about the history of rapid climate change, they learned that the Mediterranean Sea had once been a desert and 5,000,000 years ago, the Atlantic Ocean burst through

Mar
20

The town fades away
in the driving mirror –
dogs and birds
abandoning their cartridge box.
It’s misty. Nudes with edelweiss armlets
watch over the varnishing
tank cars have dissolved the bas-reliefs
on the sacred radome.
We sit on the side of the artesian well
ejecting in the air
champagne tachyons,
your beret over your eyes
and long term tins
sharing out to the suspects…
The town is a purgatory,
a sulphur spiral

a large-scale, magic sleep extends its liquid >>>>>>>

Mar
20

The cultural relationships between Eastern and Western Europe in the Middle Ages could also be demonstrated by the Byzantine and Romanian sacred music. In this sense, the descent of the Gregorian music from the Byzantine music makes self evident, by derivation, the connecting bridge between Eastern and Western Christianity, at least since the 6th century till our times. As a matter of fact, without anticipating, the Thracian origin of the Byzantine, Romanian and Gregorian sacred music symbolically express the same spiritual and cultural unity of the Eastern and Western Romanity, as it was in the past and, hopefully, as it might be in the future.

Unfortunately, the Great Schysra of 1054 has also created musical borders, between the Byzantine and Gregorian sacred music, so to say between the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic Christianity. For the time being, theologically speaking, the Byzantine and Gregorian music are strongly validating the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic Church identities. In other words, the sacred music identifies by itself the Church to which it belongs. Probably for that reason, the musical identity of the „Uniate Churches“ is totally invalidated by the Gregorian sacred music, but incontestably validated by the Byzantine sacred music, especially in Romania. Such undisputed musical reality proves that organically, historically and spiritually all these Uniate Churches are belonging to the Eastern Orthodox Churches where they were separated from by political means. Anyway, the musical territories are ethnically and religiously very hard to be conquered. It is almost impossible. They might be irenically harmonized but never destroyed.

The Byzantine sacred music is the traditional and official music of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

It was created during the Apostolical and Patristical ages of the Undivided Universal Church in the Roman Empire. The Byzantine sacred hymnography and music is an organic part of the Holy Tradition and also of the daily Divine Eastern Orthodox worship. The Octoechos of St. John of Damascus (+749) is the fundamental book of the Byzantine music. In his excellent Dictionary of Orthodox Theology, a summary of the beliefs, practices and history of the Eastern Orthodox Church (New York, Philosophical Library 1964, p. 137), George H. Demetrakopoulos of Kalamazoo, Michigan defining the Octoechos said that „it containes the eight odes of the St. John the Damascene. In it are included the services for every day, for eight weeks. These eight tones or odes are used throughout the year beginning with the first, one for every week. When they are all sung, they start all over again/This book is also called the Paraclitiki.“

Mar
20

Preliminary Considerations
Globalization is one of the most debated and hot topics today. The strong reaction people have at World Trade Organization meetings is one indication of that. Another one is the quantity of writing
on the topic. According to internet resources every field of life is affected by globalization. Only Google – to mention just one tool of research – gives 6.560.000 entries for the word.
If globalization would not drastically affect people’s lives there would probably be less interest for it. Because of its implications in human life at all levels, those who are happy with it are quick to praise and preach it, whereas those who are unhappy and skeptical are quick to protest, warn and discourage.

In this presentation I will try to look at this phenomenon not so much from the point of view of its external manifestations that have to do with technology, economics, politics (Americanization for many), but from the point of view of its inner forces, drives, and characteristics. In doing that I will make an appeal to theology and metaphysics that can facilitate a new understanding and interpretation of it. >>>

Mar
20

WITH YOU
I am always with you

hidden within the light of withered eyelids
when the full moon

gets undressed on the threshold

of your overtranslucent window

in your left hand

when the sleeplessness

brings along the first grain of sweat

that you wipe (without success)

onto the rumpled bed sheet

before the volcano of light throws out

its morning

in the rejected thought I am

in the uttered voicelessness

afraid of being given effect,

into the postponing of the hug

until the worlds allure new geneses

I am everywhere

this is why I do not exist.
>>>>>>

Mar
20

Towards the end of the year 2004, I thought of gathering several researches elaborated long time ago and therefore to form a sort of preliminary essay to some possible „elements of apocrypha cultural history“. The purpose of this action was not that of providing a savant bibliography with another title, bibliography that is already representative enough, but rather to show a way of looking at the mystery of survival of some cultures that, in a world that tomorrow might become disgustingly uniform, underlines still the right to variety, to the autochthonous answer, to the specific interrogation. By the nature of my major preoccupations, it was inevitable for me to reveal here „the Romanian case“ but, at the same time, I realized that this might become a model and an example of possible method when studying any culture of „Tiers-Monde“. Therefore, mutatis mutandi, these principles could be understandable and maybe they could help to the establishment of some potential solutions for Bucharest, Montevideo, Tunis or Delhi, meaning wherever the mechanisms presented here are found in various proportions.

The studies that form that small synthesis of cultural history were written and published in Romania between 1984 and 1989, in French, and they describe several „astral hours“ of literature at the Lower Danube (“the proto-Romanians“, „the Isihast Renaissance“ of the century XIV, the era of Brâncoveanu in literature and „the beginning of the prophetic Reconquist”). They represent fragments of a much larger research, but they have a certain autonomy of their own, and an existence of their own. Two of the cases are actually the first attempts (and the only ones at this time) of historiographical synthesis of the „definite period“ and, as a consequence, they have the value of „pioneer work“. The Romanian intellectual shall notice the cases where the conclusions of other savants are continued and to what extent they are developed and sometimes even surpassed. For the foreign savant, such themes certainly represent a strange matter. This potentially astonished attitude is first of all due to the method. In this work I tried to eliminate the „universalistic chronology“ and „the canonic periodization“ established by most of the „histories of various literatures“, (usually the European ones) and used, by extension and most of the times inappropriately, in the cases of all literary histories.

In my opinion, as regarding certain literatures (such as the Italian literature or the French literature), the concatenation of the „Middle Ages, Humanism, Renaissance, Baroque and Mannerism, Classicism. Encyclopedism, Romanticism and Risorgimento“ etc. is recommended because this sequence was actually ascertained with obvious proof in the regional evolution. The „extrapolation“ is not yet a solution because of the fact that, in other regions, including

Mar
20

Lebanon… war, pain and blood!

Today, the earth is crying and the clouds are full of tears
The black fume is carrying with it towards stars too heavy sadness…
The pain is digging so deep in the children’s eyes without fault
Please God, listen to their sighs and give them a little happiness!

The ruins lied everywhere around….just long sighs and screams
Hearing around how to implore the sky to stop this pain…
A lot of blood flowing on asphalt from crushed bodies
Which have gone so soon without the chance to smile again
>>>>>

Mar
20

THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF DACIA / DACOROMANIA, 258 – 268 / 270 A. D., FOUNDED BY REGALIANUS, THE GREAT GRANDSON OF THE HERO-KING DECEBALUS 
Being unable to bear the terrible Romanic-Imperial exploitation, the officials’
abuses, the corruption, etc., starting with Gallienus’ ruling (253 – 268), the Wallachians / Dacoromanians of the Danubian provinces Pannonia, (Trajan) Dacia and Moesia rose in arms in the autumn / winter of the year 257 A. D. Even the governor of Pannonia, Ingenuus, a worthy general and politician, was at the head of the rebels, being himself a native of the rebels by birth. In his Wallachian Dacoromanian residence / “capital”, Sirmium (today Sremska Mitrovica – Jugoslavia), Ingenuus entitled himself emperor of the Wallachians / Dacoromanians of the Danube Valley. In the spring of the year 258 A. D., the emperor Gallienus and his repressive troups promptly started against the rebels (“usurpers”). Among the cavalry commanders who took part in the bloody repression of the rebels, there was also the Dacoromanian Marcus Acilius Aureolus. Ingenuus died in the battle for independence at Mursa (today Osjek). Gallienus showed his unparalled cruelty towards the rebellious Wallachians / Dacoromanians, particularly towards those in Moesia, ordering the death sentence for the rebels’ relatives, too, >>>>>>>>

Mar
20

Ioan Marin Mălinaş presents the researchers in history and critics his tenth book entitled “Dypticon or Patriarchal and Imperial Chronology”, designed to begin a trilogy of the Pentarchy (the system of the five leaders or patriarchs, in the first Christian millennium: Old Rome, Constantinople – New Rome, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem), of the Old Orientals (Assyrians, Copts, Armenians, Syrians, Ethiopians etc.), of the autocephalous and autonomous Primates in the pre and post imperial epoch – 1453 – of the Greek Catholics of all ethnic groups and rites, as well as of the Patriarchs of Latin Rite imposed by the crusaders in Constantinople and Christian Orient.
The work is also the first scientific chronology of World Church History in the Romanian Theological literature, useful both to the Faculties of Theology and to those of arts.

In order to have a better placement of the local hierarchy in the epoch, in the state and ethnic context, the
>>>>Maria Vera Neagu>>>

Mar
20

After his speedy recovery, ensuing from the paralysis that had kept him in bed for a few weeks, Danny still had some trouble moving around. He had been left with a slight blockage of his right hand; even his leg seemed to pull back every time that he tried to walk.
Three years had quietly gone by since the vascular accident, time during which Danny conversed with dr. Dumitru Ionescu. One morning Danny rose a little abruptly in his bed. A slight dizziness forced him to realign himself in the horizontal position. Trying again to rise, in slow motion, the dizziness did not come back.
That evening, Danny called the doctor and told him what happened.
“Do you still take any medicines?” asked the doctor.
“Only about a half of an aspirin. After lunch”.
“Very well. How long has it been since your release from the hospital?”
“Two years and nine months”.
“We had had an agreement for you to come to the two-year check-up. Why did you neglect it?”
“Because I’m… foolish”. >>>>>>>>>

Mar
20

On March 18, 1929 Ovidiu-Filip Vuia was born as the only son to the lawyer and newspaper proprietor Tiberiu Vuia and the governess Veturia Vuia, nee Bixa. The marriage of his parents was dissolved when he was four years old.
In October of 1935 he entered grade school in Arad and in 1939 he changed over to Lyceum, comparable to a comprehensive secondary school, which he graduated from.
He first signed up at the University to study art and historical art, but soon realized that in this course of study with the ruling communist regime he could not be content. It quickly became clear that he would never be able to travel to Italy – his real great love – France or Spain.

He transferred to study medicine with the assumption that politics would not play a role there. He traded places at the University with his friend Ion Piso, who became a world-renowned tenor who also lived in Germany for an extended period of time. That is where the two met again by chance in 1975.
>>>>Rita Vuia >>

Mar
20

Gabriela Pachia’s A Shackled Prisonnière, the author’s first volume of her own poetry, is an impressive and deeply felt examination of the self, the soul and the wider world. Using powerful emotions, and pushing the boundaries of language, Gabriela Pachia provides a complex, intense and brutally honest exposé of herself.
Throughout the volume, the author clearly signals her view of herself as inextricably linked with nature and the earth itself. In ‘Self Portrait’ she makes this plain in the opening lines:

I am the last versatile birch
with smooth white bark
in the park overrun by shrubs.

This is further expanded in ‘The Padlocks of Immortality’ where each teardrop not only represents those close to her, but contains geographical features, ‘hill and valleys’. However, this is not a random part of the earth. Gabriela Pachia’s vision of herself and her family is specific to her home country. This is Romanian earth: >>>>

Mar
20

The Rhin -Danube canal is on the way of becoming again the main trade route of Europe, this time in the absence of ideological blocks, the same way as in the past, after hundreds of years of experience, the Romans have established a zone of cooperation, control, and trade between the Empire and the rest of the world. In the Middle Ages, the migrating peoples, in-heritors of the Roman Empire, have remade the continental imperial struc-tures by changing the old „limes” (border area) from the Rhine to the Da-nube into many borders, which, with time, have created three great regions: Western Europe, Central Europe and Eastern Europe, without changing by this the Danube’s (2860 km) old role. In 1095, the Western Crusaders were heading toward the Holly Land along the Danube. The complicated bor-ders of the feudal period have >>>>

Mar
20

 

dedicated to those
– who have gone and have not returned
– who still remained

– who shall come one day

pilgrimage of secession in pursuit of the midday

in the mirror every cry can rely on the echo
a ray of hope clings to it in pursuit of the midday

remembrances as stiffened wounds roam about the districts

the pilgrimage of secession regenerates silence like a heartbeat

the moment is a particle to cure the make-up

of the lasses stiff a a picture the outline

of the oblivion exhausted by destiny is swelling

it seems to be a whitewashed wall in a
>>>>>>>

Mar
20

I have to specify from the beginning that I don’t know thoroughly the dogmatic texts laying at the basis of Christian teaching. I ventured, however, to write about the subject as a reaction to initiatives and actions which I consider to affect the religion of my forefathers, thus being – ultimately – menaces to our cultural and national identity.
I can’t say I’ve been brought up in a religious spirit, even though elements of Christian teaching and cult were conveyed to me within the family. In school, the so-called education was contrary in essence – like for all the generation that attended public instruction in the communist period. Quite this, maybe, has stimulated inside me the curiosity to know more about the life, deeds and ideas of Jesus and His apostles. I approached them by means of a historical perspective – so with my mind, not with my soul. At the same time, however, as, years passed, I realized that there must be a supreme entity, which should have created the universe and established its laws. From the very beginning seemed frail to me the statement of Engels that matter is infinite in time and space; even science (physics, namely), by recent progresses, contradicts it.

However, all religions (in the first place those widely spread, with which I ought to make connections) have as nodal point the existence of a Creator, care – in general – is also the supreme divinity. Surely that from here to being a Christian it’s
>>>>>>

Mar
20

Mar
20

As soon as I approach to the barrage, I keep on the right and drive the car in a lane surrounded with tall fir-trees, biting a little out of the grass. I`m taking from the luggage rack the little bag with ashes. I`m walking on the bank of the Dâmboviţa. I`m in front of the landing stage. A lot of people, I go up stairs. Some of the people are fishing. I get out in the road. A group of the pioneers are leaving for. I go further. I feel like a malefactor who is paving his way. I`m thinking of you, Emil. I quicken my paces. I must be only with Ion`s desire and with my duty. I go with fear on the bank. The dam is tall, I shouldn`t have the power to throw the little bag directly into water, who knows it should knock against the edges. I`m afraid. And I shouldn`t want to hurt Ion.
My Lord! I see his forehead bleeding, too. I find a place favorable to my intentions. On the dam, more many people, too. I turn the switch to “ON” and I see him in Cornelia`s house, joking: “what beautiful girls come here!” ‘Mother comes by nine’, my friend >>>>>>>>>

Mar
20

88 writers (in addition of folklore collections) from 23 countries with texts in 17 languages (English, Romanian, Bulgarian, Czech, Arabic, French, German, Hungarian, Tamil, Hindi, Indonesian, Hebrew, Italian, Urdu, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish) contributed poetry, essays, letter to the editor, arts, science, philosophy, short drama, short story, distichs, epigrams, aphorisms, translations, paradoxes, and folklore or found literature to the „Fifth International Anthology on Paradoxism“. Paradoxism is an avant-garde movement in literature, arts, science, and every human field, initiated in 1980 by the editor as a protest against totalitarianism. It is based on excessive use of contradictions, antinomies, oxymorons, antitheses, paradoxes in creation.
Contributions for the next international anthologies on paradoxism should be sent to Prof. Florentin Smarandache, University of New Mexico, 200 College Road, Gallup, NM 87301, USA, e-mail: smarand@unm.edu. Books and articles in many languages about paradoxism can be downloaded from the site: www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/a/Paradoxism.htm