“Having left your native land, don’t look back, the Erinyes are behind you.” One of the Pythagorean principles, the advice is good but difficult to follow. It is true, the Erinyes are there, behind your back, and their very sight may petrify a mortal. Some say them to be daughters of Earth, others, daughters of Night, in any case they arrive from the depth of the underworld, are winged, and in their hair carry twisting serpents. They are your punishment for your past offenses and you know well that you cannot claim purity whether you are aware of your failings or not. The best protection against the Erinyes would be, indeed, never to look back. And yet it is impossible not to look back, for there, in the land of your ancestors, of your language, of your family, a treasure has been left, more valuable than any riches measured by money, namely, colors, shapes, intonations, details of architecture, everything that shapes one’s childhood. By letting your memory speak you wake up the past and by the same token attract the Erinyes; yet man stripped of memory is hardly human or he represents only a very impoverished humanity. Thus a contradiction appears and you have to learn how to live with it. There is another aspect of exile considered as a specific affliction of the twentieth century The most famous of the exile writers of the past, Dante, after leaving his native Florence, wandered all his life from one city to another but today those cities hardly can mean “abroad” as they are all situated in Italy. Dante died and was buried in Ravenna which today doesn’t seem at all a land distant from his birthplace. Could it happen that with the shrinkage of the planet Earth distances but also differences between particular countries grow smaller and smaller? Perhaps it would be possible to visualize a modern pilgrim’s wanderings as his going from one place to another within one country, whether that country is called Europe, a continent, or the world? If this is not so now, there is a certain latent dynamism inherent in the progress of technology, which pushes in that direction. The twentieth century also brings a quantitative change as befits an era of population explosion. In Dante’s time the number of people leaving the towns and villages where they were born was very small. Now hundreds of thousands, and even millions, migrate, chased from their homes by war, by harsh economic necessities, or political persecution, and an expatriate, for instance a writer, an artist, an intellectual who left his country for his own, so to say, fastidious reasons, motivated as he was not only by fear of starvation or of the police, cannot isolate his fate from the fate of those masses. Their nomadic existence, the slums they often inhabit, the deserts of dirty streets where their children play are, in a way, his own; he feels solidarity with them and he only wonders whether this is not an image, more and more generalized, of the human condition. For life in exile seems no more limited to a transplantation from one country to another. Industrial centers attract people who leave their peaceful but impoverished rural districts, new towns grow where a few decades ago only cattle were grazing, shacks and barracks of slums surround big capitals. When characterizing the indefiniteness and insecurity inherent in exile one notices that practically everything that is said on the subject applies to the new inhabitants of the urban landscape, even if they have not arrived from foreign lands. Alienation becomes a predicament of too many human beings to be considered an affliction of a special category, and the self-pity of an emigre reflecting on that phenomenon is undermined. (…)
(…) an archetypal exclusion from the Garden of Eden repeats itself in our lives, whether Eden be the womb of our mother or the enchanting garden of our early childhood. Centuries of tradition are behind the image of the whole earth as a land of exile, usually presented as a desertic, sterile landscape in which Adam and Eve march, their heads despondently lowered. They were chased from their native realm, their true home where the same rhythm has ruled over their bodies and their surroundings, where no separation and no nostalgia has been known. Looking back, they may see fiery swords guarding the Gates of Paradise. Their nostalgic thinking about a return to the once happy existence is intensified by their awareness of prohibition. And yet they will never completely relinquish the thought of the day when their exile will end. Later, much later on, perhaps that dream will take the shape of a golden city lasting beyond time, of a heavenly Jerusalem.
(Czeslaw Milosz on Josef Koudelka’s “Exiles” – from Americansuburb X)
