Eduard Vacek

“I established a magazine called Czech Prison Service and I needed a good editorial committee. Where else could I get it than to invite the former committee of the Czech National Council for the Penal Service? I started publishing a magazine which had an amazing level of quality. After seven years, the Institute for Criminology and Social Prevention conducted an assessment of European magazines for prison service and my magazine was evaluated as the best one. I had a special method. I brought up some topic important to prisons to the group of people who were then to discuss it and I was recording the whole debate. It was like a game of cards, with all of them playing trumps. I recorded it, I wrote it down and I sent it to them again. I always told them: ‘It does not mater at all what is said here, but what the final effect will be.’ This process was repeated there times. Eventually they all started reacting to what the others have said, and a problem cleared up, and only the distilled core of the issue remained and we published it in the Czech Prison Service. All prison directors and the main staff all received a copy of the magazine, and they began following it. At the time when I was still a deputy to the Czech National Council, a wave of resistance against me ensued from the former Stalinists, proponents of the Soviet model. The greatest resistance was in Pilsen-Bory. We conducted a session of the prison committee in the prison in Pilsen-Bory. I invited the whole management and the opponents who were against us. They were all sitting there, gloomy, with stubborn faces, and I asked them to raise their objections and I said that we would try to deal with them. Nobody said a word, and they basically did not have any ground. I knew what those issues were and so I addressed them myself in the second round and the whole prison committee discussed it with them. Then some of them joined in the discussion and we basically broke their resistance. Four or five of the worst places where the director general was not able to put our ideas into practice. Eventually our magazine began to be important for them.”

“When I got to know Jehovah Witnesses, I was obviously interested in it. I thought that all have turned away from me, but these people were selflessly helping me and they did not want anything in return. I thus started talking about it with them and they drew me into their organization. Suddenly, within five months, I was an elder of the congregation. But the literature which they were giving me was more and more weird. I saw things which were almost pataphysic there. In 1969 I fortunately learnt about the series of Albert Marenčin Anals of Pataphysics and this has stuck in my mind. At first I didn’t understand it, but it was immensely attractive to me. And so I came to it again, for the first time, for the second time, and suddenly I was enlightened and I began to understand what pataphysics was. Without a tutor! Suddenly I was a conscious pataphysic, before that I had been and unconscious one, and now I was a conscious one. To be a Jehovah Witness and a conscious pataphysic at the same time is a very strange situation. Alfred Harry, when he explains pataphysics, says: ‘Pataphysics surpass metaphysics, just like metaphysics surpass physics.’ And I was in there. It was a different level of knowing. I was receiving this nonsense for the Jehovah Witnesses and I was supposed to discuss it there as the leader of the group. I read it, and I was tearing up the papers for a while because I was angry at how demagogic it was. I cannot teach it here! But then I thought that I needed to approach it from the opposite side. I started from a position of pataphysics, and so when the group met again - fortunately they were only students from the grammar school and from the music school – I started pointing out the absurdities and I was emphasising them. I saw how they eyes got on fire. They started reacting, because they understood, too, that it was nonsense. What a concert. When somebody from the outside came there for inspection, he would not notice. We seemed to be very diligent students. We got to a state when we cancelled the group of Jehovah Witnesses, and we started Pataphysic Collegium Teplice. It was a kind of strange, but absolutely normal and natural transformation.”