Drzewo i kamień a symboliczna regeneracja życia: Ślady, spacer z powidokiem

Abstract

The sketch by Marek Kazimierz Siwiec is an extensive and inquisitive description of the work Tree and Stone, and a Symbolic Regeneration of Life. Traces; a Walk with an After-Image. According to the author, a unique interdisciplinary enterprise took place, harking back to the motives of tree and stone, the symbols essentially present in culture since its beginnings. The sketch reflects upon the essays and activities of the authors of Traces: Daniel Roland Sobota, Kazimierz Raba, Andrzej Rozwadowski and Łukasz Gruszczyński. Their creativity focuses on the motive of tree and stone, and marks out the pathway toward some deeper senses revealed in the latter. M.K. Siwiec addresses the metaphysical, existential, philosophical cultural, esthetical, artistic, poetical, anthropological and archeological considerations included in the essays. To his mind, the authors undertook a difficult task of showing the existential and cultural bond between the world of trees and stones on the one side and the symbolic and human one on the other. The author attaches a special attention to Kazimierz Raba’s and Łukasz Gruszczyński’s sculpture Boat expressing an extraordinary spiritual journey. A considerable interest of M.K. Siwiec arose from Andrzej Rozwadowski’s essay Ascending a Tree toward Heaven. Siberian Trails. This essay, according to Siwiec, is a unique journey into the depths of the symbolic Siberian beliefs. Some photographs made by the author of the essay are inserted and integrated into a whole. They evoke a hidden symbolic essence, called by Ernst Cassirer “symbolic pregnancy”. M.K. Siwiec claims that the work Traces; a Walk with an After-Image is an effect of the creative reflection on the motives of tree and stone – archetypical for culture, albeit nowadays forgotten so some extent. If read diligently enough, the book brings us closer to what Karl Jaspers called being-in-journey and assessed as the main feature of philosophy. The symbolic thinking, evoked through the refection on Ernst Cassirer’s philosophical output, includes – according to M.K. Siwiec – an affirmation, which is to say: the overcoming of the negative and the rebirth of life.