Eduard Vacek

“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.”

“Firstly, I needed to come to terms with the history of my ancestors who were all communists. Unfortunately I cannot meet them, because all of them died, so I am not able to tell them that they were all wrong. And so at least I tried to rectify what they have unknowingly caused by having started it. Not that they have actively participated in something evil, but due to ignorance, out of faith and illusions they started that process. The worst people eventually got to power, people who were never supposed to be there. Those original idealists would have never agreed with their assuming power. Throughout my entire life, I was personally experiencing the discrediting of the idea of socialism and communism. Basically, this happens to every idealistic thought which appears. It happened to Christianity as well. This process constantly repeats itself. It is a composition of frustration: an element of expectations, disappointment and being pissed off. This cutting edge still keeps going forward, nothing is fulfilled, nothing is put into practice, because it is replaced by something else, something new. I needed to come to terms with this wave. The fact that my great-grandfather who was a senator for Social Democratic Party, had accepted the idea of communism, had devaluated the idea of social democracy to me. My other relatives were already the bearers of ideas, the elements of it. It came to me and I have finished with it. I had difficult discussions, at first with my father, later with my other relatives as well, and I found out that those people would not let have themselves get persuaded. I needed to tackle the problem actively. To diminish the strength and space of this evil which assumed an ideological role. That was my inner motivation.”