Who is Who

By: Josif Papagjoni

Moikom Zeqo, one of my best friends in life, with whom I felt proud, passed away this morning. My friend Ferid Hudhri gave me the news. I was worried that during the pandemic we had let him drink a coffee, the three of us, like always. We would drink it at Pandeli Koçi's house. Then we left it for later, because it was like impossible. When I return from Saranda, we will have a coffee for fun, the three of us, with Ferid, I told him. And, they didn't drink coffee... A big heart went out. A great friend died, whose presence honored us all. One of the nation's rare minds is gone. An inaccessible scholar. A writer, creator, poet, researcher, archaeologist, mythologist, historian, where knowledge walked between his fingers. There was so much kindness in his soul. Tireless at work, writing until the last moment of his life. Perhaps the only one in our space as Albanians with an extraordinary publishing output, over 100 books, where knowledge, knowledge, and various arguments were included. I have also written a monograph book about him, "Who is Who", which we had allowed to be reprinted with some relevant additions. In his memory, I am bringing back only something from this book...

Who is Who

1.

- I'm tired, - says the man in front of me, as we both sip some wine in our casks, - I no longer have the same rhythm, nor the satisfaction.

- Is that why you write essays in newspapers every two or three days, sometimes one and sometimes two pages? - I tease him - you have done 70 books so far, how many more will you do?

And I feel how the summer heat has crept into the shapeless and aimless recesses of my brain. I know that this venting of the man in front of me is nothing more than an alcove of despair opened somewhere deep in his consciousness, where the sly eye of the absurd opens up and the excess of philosophizing begins to mock you, this scum of our sect of "book eaters" .

- I can't stay without writing, I've got a disease, fever, cholera, - he answers slowly to my innocent friend. And he makes a redemptive gesture like an actor, runs his fingers through his hair, smiles and adds like a joke:

- Even when I close my eyes, believe me, I feel like I'm going to write. Ore, the anxiety of writing is like that corrupting tail of the devil upon the earth. Why didn't I write this, and that, and the other? Well, I finished Lazgush, but I can't finish Buzuku, nor Skenderbeu...

- You finished "Miscellaneo 12"... You summarized all the poetry in 12 thick volumes.

- Oh, I have a lot of poetry. I wrote other…

- Don't be a maniac.

- No, I'm not a maniac, but I can't stay without writing... without publishing... I'm not calm... When I write, I feel like I calm down. I am myself. I live. Yes, yes, I live... You know yourself, that you are critical... Eh, I need to talk to someone, do you understand? He is not, but I see him. And I argue, I lose... Have you noticed that I have conceived some of the books in dialogue form?

- Of those, "When Mona Lisa spoke" is the most beautiful for me.

- Why don't you like "Onufri"? Aaaaaaa... I have said wise things there. "Onufri's red", it is said everywhere. But why red and not gold? It's not just the color, you know? Color as presence. It is beyond her. It is the light that comes from above. The light of the mind. Onufri was a thinker. Look carefully. Everything comes from above. Because he was like a Christ who moved on color and light, he made those words for those who look at him... for those who understand him and know how to talk to him. I talk to him. I want to talk. I like dialogue because through dialogue the dialectic of critical judgment is given. And how can you explain the light and color of Onufri? He was light and color itself, everywhere, in every portrait. His painting is like a silent bliss, filled with peace, with the eye hidden behind a palimpsest...

Moikomi talked and talked. We had fled from Onufri, we had gone somewhere in the Poradec ranges.

- I have all those ideas in my head. Poradec was misunderstood...

– Misunderstood?

- It is not just the greatest Albanian lyricist. It is godly. I become a "fir", he says. Bah! What a beautiful figure, huh? The miracle! I become "fir"...

- Are you talking about Lazgush or about yourself?

– For yourself, of course... Ore, did you read Saramago's last novel? What about Koech?... The Nobel this year was won by Pamuk, a great Turkish writer... Oh my god, what a giant book that is "I am red". How beautifully it collides civilizations, art, religion!…

And the man seems to forget, leaves our Lazgush with its beautiful landscapes, leaves the great letters of the century and returns to the cup of his own poison. I drink that cup again…

- Phew!... Did you understand? Blejku died yesterday... I wrote an essay about him...

It has a broad, dark face, with a somewhat thick skin, as if baked by sea salt, but well nourished and firmly attached to the flesh. What catches your eye are the bags heavy from reading, previously bruised, as if with clotted blood, now a dark brown color, almost black. Many have wandered those eyes through the hordes of letters full of peaks, ridges, lumps, pits, necks, twists and turns! That soft part of the flesh under the eyes, as if pulled and released, reconciles with the bone above the cheekbones and seems to sleep peacefully there. Or take a nap. Or... Above the dirty black eyes and eyelids, a forehead opens, which seems to grow with the almost triangular skull, giving it (as anthropologists say) the necessary volume to hold a body mass, certainly above normal. The trapezoidal model, where the wide forehead and the skull open above, closing down with the chin slightly protruding, rounded, as if pushed forward and compressed, seems to prove a strong will to work, perseverance, endless neps for realization with any conditions of certain goals. This is, more or less, the portrait of the man I am talking to, with whom we now drink a little wine and nibble on plates of fat and delicious fish: he his favorite sea bass, roasted in the oven, I my fried mullet hard…

- My head is a mess... - the man continues to vent. - I want to capture something, even to design a new book or I don't know what, but I can't... Damn it, images, figures, characters, ideas come and go; sink down, break, forget, disappear. I want to catch them, hold them, but as much as the morning dream is held by the flood of light and noises, I hold them as well. They die in my mind, in my hands. I was in a bad mood. I'm a mess, you understand: neither down nor up. I am unemployed. I can't concentrate. I put three things on paper, thirty more come to me. And I burst out of anger that, all of them, in vain, just run away, run away, like those frightened birds. Wasted time…

...Years pass. Eye bags seem to get bigger with age. It has been a while since he left Durrës and came to Tirana. He bought a house in the block of tall and new buildings near the Court of Tirana. Downstairs, on the first floor, there is a cafe. In the morning he finds him there, surrounded by a group of friends of letters and art. Moikomi is like that Queen Bee, accompanied by a swarm of other bees. It is not difficult to notice in their faces respect, sympathy, even adoration. It's a kind of idol, a kind of fetish, that the power of the mind makes it so, in vain...

- Bah!... I can't stay without work, like this! This is stupid - he was almost angry with himself. - Don't laugh! I'm serious. If you want to kill the other, leave him without a job!

- You are at work. Even now. Writes, publishes. Are the books you published not work?

– You know what I mean.

- You will leave the position of director of the National Museum one day...

- Unless they throw me on the street, eh? This offends me.

- You don't have the tail of the dog. Let those who took you away shake it and shake it. You are a writer, researcher...

And I hit him lightly on the shoulders.

- Don't be upset, what's up?! Come on, have fun!

He twirls the glass of syvarur wine. Grief has frozen over his fingers.

- Eh, what do you do, my friend, - I continue to play the role of comforter, - when there is no work, the brain finds work by itself.

- Eh... a strange land of the writer's brain, pollinate and sprout, like those dragon's teeth, all kinds of monsters, crazy ideas, fantasy and broken imagination. You catch them in time, time catches you.

- Time is not captured.

- Time leaves you... - he vents.

- Except for you, he will never leave you...

- Do you know what I think? Thank goodness writing was invented.

- Writing is a kind of delirium, but a "sweet" delirium, but! - I add.

- You can better call it "situation", - as if the man comes alive, - a strange, inexplicable situation. If you ask me what exactly I wrote yesterday, how I wrote it, no - no, I remember almost nothing. That's why I say it's a condition. Then you start to record, because everything thrown away requires the "police" of thought, the fairness of reason, in short the coldness, clarity and precision of science. This has happened to me with many books, but especially with "Florimont". Eh, what are you doing?!... As Sandër Prosi says in that movie: this desolate mill grinds!...

And the man taps his head with the tip of his finger, doing the image of our well-known actor, whom he greatly admired. Then he suddenly adds:

- I will die soon, believe me!

- After the death of Omer Khajam, extinguished on the red liquid...- I can't hold back my laughter, making his sadness null. And clink glasses.

And we strain the red juice anew. And we forget. And we talk about literature. For the arts. For aesthetics. For philosophy. For big names. Not semiotics like that, not structuralists like that. Not Baudelaire, not Rimbaud; not Barti, not Sosyri; not Bakhtin, not Nietzsche; next to Krocja and Borghesi, next to Malarmeja and Majakovski, next to Bllejku and Koehlo, next to Koech, Saramago, Grimbergu and Gombrixhi; and Santayana and Whitman, and Proust and Joyce, and Kadareja and Qosja, and Driteroi and Fatos; no - yes the word like this and the image like this, no - yes the metonymy there and the metaphor here. And context, subtext, metatext… And sign, signified, signifier… Denotation, connotation… And rhetoric, poetics, semiotics… and… and… and…

Oh my god, so many words!

- Cheers, my friend!

Boredom was defeated. Her army, full of a cup of poison, and the iron gates of the castle, had been broken by literature... This "old witch", who wounds and hurts man, seemed to be afraid of this man's passion. Passion for the art of speech. A passion that never died. That's why she was lost somewhere... Somewhere, as you invented this word formation Kadare. Or everywhere? Edges of infinity were both.

2.

Here... the black hair with bleached tired threads, the rough hair of the beard that grew black on the skin, as if they agreed with his "fate" and personality. Completely humbled at the tables of friends, on the contrary, in books and newspapers his face, as one of the tireless sowers of the Albanian cultural press, as if he wanted to be removed "differently". A strange "republican" hat on my head, because it reminded me of Salvador Dali's obsessions and extravagances. That hat was measured to compete with his media "poster". To create an "icon". In a photograph taken in front of Ernest Hemingway's house museum in Baltimore, USA, and in another one that he always puts out on the pages of newspapers, my character can also look like a bearded ascetic, or a pilgrim, or a monk, or a shaman, a grotesque leader, a traveling painter, a village teacher with enough money in his pocket for a Turkish coffee, even like a beggar, like a retired soldier, I don't know what the hell else, but a traveler of course, a adventurer, a Johnnie Walker. The paradigm of this John Walker brother seems to pluck him from this time and from this world (with its hum, noise, dust and mess) and throws him somewhere far away, into the world and other times, where order is broken because there is no order. . Yes, this man is a wanderer of thought, of fantasy, of ideas, of all kinds of conjectures, in the realms of bookish conceptions and delusions. It is a Kalkant of the word and its hidden meanings. A brain-sponge, that just sucks and sucks in the endless sea of ​​knowledge, with a memory that inspires envy. A pilgrim, running towards Mecca to give voice to the cosmic mystery. A pilgrim, who walks and walks barefoot (like Rembrandt's "Prodigal Son"), between the hail and the hail, in the penitent return to the Father, where the messianic words of art are uttered and come, especially those of poetry. And the river of metaphors.

Time (timeless) on books like an Augustine, sometimes accepted and sometimes expelled, more and more, the more "old" he gets, he likes to roam in the gardens of aesthetics, essay writing, mythology, history, archeology, painting, ethnoculture, theology, astrology, necessarily also philosophy. His word has both salt and sugar. It both nourishes and sweetens you. Science sleeps in the same bed with literature, as the accuracy of fact with adventure and fantasy, as the rigor and stubbornness of scientific research with the tenderness, affection and caress of poetry, as the chemical spectral "analyses" that come from resurrected archaeological objects with the dead "whispers" of myths, just like the warm matter of life that comes from travels and reports from journalists with the traps and dialectics of "xanxar" thought. The author is a kind of paradigm of the Giant of Rhodes: one foot on an island, the other on the opposite island, while below them, with barns full, sail the ships that bring knowledge from archeology, history, culture, art, Albanian literature (and that world). In his love for them there is neither "flirting", nor "incest", nor "Sodom and Gomorrah", because it is all the same syncretic and unique, unchanging, individual being, with the same body. It can neither be called "literarized" science, nor "didascalized" (epistemological) literature. He is a writer-scholar or a scholar-writer, something in between (because there is no in between).

This man's name is Moikom Zeqo.

- Cheers!

But the sadness from his eyes does not go away. Bacchus' stun juice was powerless over the boredom and melancholy that old Hamlet had brought through the muggles, this eternal stirring of dilemma.

- I'm bored...

He had the right to be full of boredom. They had fired him. No tact. The rude ones. As we Albanians do. And no one had offered him a place.

And the man offen again…

- With these thugs, Albania is not made!

3.

I hesitate to write about his creativity, convinced that many things will slip through my fingers like water. Water cannot be contained. Water moves. Water changes. It is never the same. For example, the water of a river flow. But also water in the ocean. I want to think of his creativity for a moment like the changing water of the river: cheerful, rushing and running unstoppable, that turns and turns on similar things and, thanks to metaphors and symbols, spiritualizes them. But, saora, this water is also like that dark and wild whirlpool, which grabs you and knocks you here and there, confusing you. "Come, let's follow!", she invites you... the vortex. And as you escape them, you reach a point somewhere, on a shore or a rock. "I caught you!", as if you want to say to the river flowing under your feet, but you are wrong. Somewhere further on, your river has split and flowed, and you?!... Eh, you are left behind again... And how can it be easily written for 80 books?

The water metaphor tears me up because Moikom Zeqo was a swimmer in his youth. A competitive swimmer in the "croll" style with the swimming team of the "Lokomotiva" team of Durrës, in the mid and late 60s. Since then I've known the stocky but muscular guy, because I was also from a coastal city: Saranda. Swimming championships were organized there and Moikom's name was stuck in my head as a swimmer. We were the same age. Swimming was his passion. Love to dive deep. And then, from those depths, bring to light amphorae and all kinds of relics from the dead and silent world of the Illyrian centuries, like an underwater archaeologist. But traveling was also his passion. Trips with a motorcycle "Java", cross and cross, where you had friends, people, poets, archaeological ruins, literary gatherings, old churches, life juice.

Ah, I almost forgot! Then he was not called Moikom, but Molotov. As was often the case with our parents, many of us, children of the 40s and 50s, grew up with the adoration of the country of the Soviets and their orthodox communism, even the names of leaders such as Zhdanov, Vladimir, Lenin, Molotov, Ulyanov, Kirov, Leonid, Nikita, let alone an endless bunch related to the "nomenclature" of poetry or love such as Masha, Ljuba, Sasha, Sonja, Milla, Nadjezhda, Pobjeda, Zamira, Dusha; or of literature such as Pushkin, Yesenin, Fadayev, Maksim, to end with lists of fighters such as Chapayev, Budjon, Taras, Matrazov, Vollodja, etc., etc. After the break with the Soviet Union, many changed the exported names, at least adopted them. Although my father gave me the name Josif, definitely for Josif Visarionovic Dzhugazhvili, otherwise known as Stalin, its biblical root prevailed and remained Josif, the name of the father of Jesus Christ, the wise carpenter with 9 children. The name of Moikomi also has a story of change or adoption. This history, in literary circles, is shown as follows:

The great Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, who at that time worked as an editor of the newspaper "Drita" in the League of Writers and Artists, when Moikom Zequa started publishing cycles of poems in the pages of the literary press of the late 60s, in one of these cycles Karadeja decided on his own to change his name from Molotov to Moikom. So the Russian party establishment made an "albanization", or "poetization" of a long word. Or maybe an "Americanization" (taking into account, the word goes, the intriguing name that came from the novel "The Last of the Mohicans"). This is history, or anecdote. But what does it matter, even if Moikomi does not accept its anecdotal and folkloristic dimension, acquired over time. The beautiful fact, for me and everyone else, is that he was baptized not by a priest or a priest, nor by any commissar or party secretary, much less by the civil registry clerk with the list of Illyrian-Albanian names that he brought forward , but by a writer. And precisely from the genius writer of our nation, Ismail Kadare. Wasn't this a blessing?! The years showed, as well as anger, that he was indeed a blessing.

The name Moikom is quite special. He gained dimension, grew through books, becoming today one of the most knowledgeable people who promotes the national intellectual energy, far and beyond Albania; a name, which only runs away to capture time, to fertilize thoughts in various fields and fields, to create images and play with them. His mind wanders and plays sometimes in the poetry of poetry, sometimes in scientific tracings and monographic studies, sometimes in the ranks of redeemed prose and sometimes in spiritualist sessions of aesthetic and philological meditation, to further ponder the mysteries and mythological approaches of the Pelasgian Mughals, the Illyrian period and the national history, especially the medieval one, comparing these with the Balkan, European and wider vectors. Like that cunning hunter, who knows the place and the type of prey, Moikomi wanders through the jungle of facts, among difficult monopathies, to give the required semantics to the spiritual losers, in the most fragile but also the most indomitable part of the being. our national: art, culture, literature. Not only in my estimation, but today Moikom Zeqo is a "mountain" in the range of Albanian letters, it's just that jealousies or narrow-mindedness don't want to accept his deserved quota. In Albanian knowledge and essays, apart from Rexhep Qoseje, Alfred Uçi and Ismail Kadareje, it is difficult for others to come close to the height reached by him. Is not, perhaps, this a panegyric exaltation of mine? Not at all, no! I say that tomorrow I will not call these words flighty, but measured, even delayed...

His last books have a pure messianic spirit. They are sums of knowledge that not every mind can freeze and dry. They have exploded the provincial and suburban shell, where the cradle of a bunch of old or young Adham-uts is usually rocked. As luck would have it, freedom would come, and with it the redeemed blossoming of Moikomi's talent. It is a talent that without this gifted freedom could die. And indeed, death was approaching from the barren literature, stuck in the middle of "patriotic" slogans. This is a castrated energy, wasted through the dithyrambs and atrocities of grotesque tribes. Maybe, once, inevitable, but not today, in the time of information and online technologies. The writer's culture is catapulted all over the fields of knowledge that the world has inhabited, it breathes among them, it is pollinated, it is reincarnated, trying to become part of it. As you read his books in one breath, you also feel proud of such levels, from where you really learn; proud of such strong-willed, hard-working, learned, modern, encyclopedic people, at the same time filled with chastity, modesty and goodness; proud of our literary discourse, of essays, of criticism, of philology in general. It's not easy for these people. They are born like that, but time also makes them. God has given them grace, a little bit of his intelligence. On the contrary, the "False Gods" become envious of their knowledge. I have in mind here a published conversation between Moikom Zeqos and one of these "False Gods", Enver Hoxha, about the Illyrian origin of the Albanians (through archaeological data), where the erudition of the former encouraged the greed of the latter, but this modified as an "advice" from the leader.