On “The Etymology of Forgetfulness” the author, Milan Dekleva, said that a century, where the feeling of endangerment and anxiety were ever increasing, was closing up behind. If we look at the heritage of earlier poets, their yearning for the bizarre, twisted and aberrant seems like a child’s play. No surprise there. The reality has transformed the world into a corporal and metaphysical graveyard, people into refugees who in new, unsympathetic lands had to give up the memories of their homeland, their languages, their rites and dreams. It is no surprise that in the world of seeking refuge, the rule has switched to the artificial worlds we so recklessly embraced with a help of drugs or IT networking. The feelings of endangerment and anxiety induce the need for salvation in humans. The past century offered a whole bunch of Messiahs and bliss-missionaries. Those who were honest were pushed away onto the edges of social consciousness and power, whereas the others, false prophets, eagerly mutilated souls, thoughts and bodies of individuals, tribes and peoples alike. The sense of the ending remains in full force – as well as the salvation game. At the ultimate point it seems almost blasphemous to re-iterate Hölderlin’s cry „What’s the point of poets in pitiful times?“ The times we are living in are no longer pitiful but numbed and deadened. As if a man had been taken over by light-headedness, as if he were lying dizzy on a surgical table. This is not about turning poetry into awakening tools, into gathering people around certain ideas and making them act – not in the least! The poetry itself did not manage to gain „freedom“, not before romanticism, to fancifully create in playful wording its own worlds that, prior to that, were simply non-existent. But what it kept whispering to us – in obscure, elliptical, mysterious, secretive language – we never even gave it a serious thought. Can we do it now after the elation had long abandoned us? (excerpt from the essay On the Thorn and the Rose)