"This is the song of the circle. Remember it and take it to the people, Let them learn it and find their place in it, which has been there since the beginning of time, ..." — Radek Stepanek
An epic composition by poet and environmentalist Radek Štěpánek Remember the wren In a sense, it completes his previous efforts in the field of environmental poetry, to the establishment of which he significantly contributed with his work on the Czech literary scene. Radek, originally from the countryside, moved in nature since childhood and fascination with its life and its transformations quite naturally became the basic features of his poetic work. From this point of view, Radek Štěpánek is a true natural lyricist, as evidenced by his first collection of natural miniatures from his native region Court Creek (2010), but also a beautiful collection with a Jeffersian touch Pag lace (2013), dedicated to the waters of the Adriatic Sea and one of its islands.
It was on the island of Pag that he began to notice the irreversible destruction of nature, which he included in his collection. Here are the men. (2018) and in the poetic triptych Erosion (2018), Thaw (2019) and Whirlwind (2021) led to a deeper reflection on global ecological problems. In these appealing and often painful reflections on the ecological crisis, he comes to terms with the transformation of the world by man, with the merciless disappearance of its forms and species, and asks what man is and what his place is in this dizzyingly changing world. Is it possible to preserve the natural cyclical course of nature and unite the human with the natural? Even though he comes to terms with the possibility that humanity may completely disappear from the face of the Earth in the process of evolution, he still does not stop believing in it. He believes in hope, he believes in love, and also in the possibility of poetry to protect what we love, and it seems also in its power to contribute to the desired transformation of our human story, which could lead us to a renewed sense of belonging to a more than human world.
The seeds of a new story that Radek would later portray in his poem Remember the wren (2022), emerge in the final love poems of the collection Great intercourse (2020), which he dedicated to his wife Tereza Bínová. Love, poetry and nature seem to merge in them, and “I” and “you” grow into a universal “we”. The author addresses his wife as an ark, as a place of salvation and birth: “You are a home for animals and plants, the life that will fill the empty earth grows from you from its beginning.” Here, the “embrace” goes beyond the dimension of a personal love relationship and shapes what is in the poem Remember the wren the poet calls "big circle": love as a great embrace of all living things, arising from the awareness that we are part of a larger body of interconnected life that we must care for together.
Epic poem Remember the wren is a mythical initiation into this new story. An archetypal woman and man embark together on a journey of transformation that takes them far from people, far beyond the growing cities. They are gradually addressed by individual elements or their embodied representatives – earth (tortoise), fire (thunder), water and wind (wren) – and initiated into the awareness of the vitality and interconnectedness of all existence. The essential world of nature or the source of life itself sings to woman and man songof the circle – which is the song of the heart itself – to remember their original unity with it. But first they must open themselves to deep listening and address the non-human world, to ask it. They are urgently told: "... your voice is powerful / and even those who cannot hear you can hear it./ … Even those who cannot see you can see you. / They can be your allies, / if you ask them to. /… But you will remain alone and without help, / if you want to stay"albeit alone and without help." For us modern people, it is a challenge to cross the Rubicon, a challenge to open ourselves to a reciprocal relationship with the world, "which makes us companions in the world, participating in conversation with intelligence in a universe full of beings." (Charles Eisenstein).
The voice of an epic song Remember the wren is truly prophetic and reminiscent of the diction of ancient founding myths; it calls us to transform our relationship to the world and our declining civilization. With this poem, Radek Štěpánek ranks among the impressive narrators of the "new story", which is today carried by such thinkers as Thomas Berry, Charles Eisenstein and David Abram.
George Zemanek
Radek Stepanek, Remember the wren. Published by the PILGRIM association – The Wandering University of Nature in 2022. Graphic design: Tomáš Gardelka; illustrations: Tereza Bínová.