TITU POPESCU: THE AESTHETICS OF PARADOXISM (second edition). Translated from Romanian by P.

Georgelin,
F. Smarandache, and L. Popescu. Rehoboth: American Research Press, 2002, 100 pages. ISBN: 1-931233-53-5

Titu Popescu

Foreword to THE AESTHETICS

OF PARADOXISM
 In the history of thought and creation, the decisive events, the great and significant
moments, the strongly affirmative stages - then the imposition of the optimizing novelties - have
depended on the name and prestige of a personality. Referring to those, we personalize further on.
The examples are extremely numerous, even in our nearest past. When we mention a creation - in
the largest sense of the term - with the name of the personality who illustrates it most extensively
at a given time, we state precisely the specific importance of it; we give it, with other words, the
identity to which we can refer continuously with full knowledge and without causing any
confusion among the receivers. The facts are called with the name of the man who produced
them, and in this way we can compose a parallel onomastic dictionary, in which the work is
included in the persons space, keeping its content. The consecrated proper names evolve through
quickly imposed habits, a large range of increments that announce the essential outline of their
peak production. No space for ambiguity remains when we address to readers or listeners who are
somewhat acquainted with the subject and we use such terms as Aristotelianism, Platonism,
Kantianism, Hegelianism, Proustianism, Eminescianism, Barbianism, etc. We have even the
advantage of a centered communication when we suggest with a sole notion the work as well as
its dominant features, linked with the renown of the concerned author.
There is no doubt that this way of denomination, when practiced a long time, has become
a reflex and now is part of the habits of a correct expression. And neither the semantic
objectification of works by a person nor the inherent axiological sanction disturb anybody.
Personification being inevitable in creation, the history of art can be superposed to the history of
the authors or, at, least gets tangled very strongly with them.
It is precisely the case with the recent literary movement of Paradoxism, conceived in
Romania and affirmed in the United States, which is closely bound to the temperament,
inclination, taste and creative disposition of its initiator and organizer, the poet-mathematician
Florentin Smarandache (paradoxism = smarandachism, in an internal and already notorious
interpretation).
A few years ago, I received at the redaction office of Curentul in Munich a letter sent
from the Istanbul camp for political refugees. A small writing, nervous and legible, expanding on
four pages, had been elaborated with the object to present the young poet, fled from Romania,
who was desirous to make himself known in the advertising and literary life of the Romanians,
but not only theirs, in the Occident. I had learnt there from that he was a teacher of mathematics
native in Oltenia, that he had published in his specialty, but also in literature, that he was alone
and just did not bear solitude. The professional writers know this type of letter. At first Id had a
reflex of restraint, justified by the lack of knowledge in this case. In addition, the profession/
specialty of the sender came to support my mistrust. A mathematician in literature is a rare thing,
because it sounds in us like the highest pretensions to amateurism. Ion Barbu, isnt it?, comes to
you first in your mind and it is enough to discourage the velleities in this field. The information of
valuable scientists on art is not founded usually on a rather confused bovarism.
However, from the script of the refugee in the Sublime Porte came out another
atmosphere and a feeling of another kind of anxiety: it could be felt that it was not a stranger in
literature who wrote. The letter did not insist in terms of desire of publication. It had a very
serious human core and a spiritual quality that attracted attention. You could perceive a taste well
developed or, at least, having entered into the right way, and a state of spiritual alert desirous of
being aware of the events. The signs of surprise increased when I extracted from the bottom of

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the envelop a small book of poetry, in a Lilliputian format, as if it were for use by fable
personages, a paperback book published in fact in Morocco, The author: the same Florentin
Smarandache. But the surprise had to grow on, as the reading went forward, because the poems
constituted only an element of the significant space of the page, the expression tended towards an
autonomy in an universe of signs, in a concentric play reinforced by the disposition of the verses
and the astonishment of the blank spaces. It was the first contact with paradoxism, discovered still
in its incipient and more tempered phase.
Gradually, but enough quickly - the impatience of the letter from Istanbul was absolutely
incontestable -, the poets name took importance in the literary sphere, when he had succeeded in
settling in the city of Phoenix, Arizona. He has triggered off a real campaign of in-forming with
his poetry and his thought concerning poetry, through an extraordinary epistolary effort and
through his works in a general manner, succeeding not only in attracting attention on himself, but
also in being recognized and appreciated for his fatherhood of the original paradoxist conception,
in gaining sympathizers, members, supporters, so that he is included in the most notorious
references in the present literary activity of the world, and notes and comments have been made
on him in the most diverse international media. He is appreciated as a schoolmaster and a writer
with a real talent. He is overwhelming with so many statements of sympathy and appreciation
expressed about his name. From now, a record in the computer would be necessary to put them in
full evidence. I believe that here, in Occident, he is the most popular writer of our generation.
I have noted that he generates an involuntary sympathy. I have been the testimony of
exclamations of delight that came from persons who had not read anything from him but had
heard of him. He has then gained the reputation of being a spiritualist of mistakes. And from him
you accept that insolence and that irritation in regard to the world, because he does it with a
refined intelligence, a superior spirit and a good-heartedness that conquers you. Although it seems
to be said frivolously, Florentin has a gift to become likable. His is gifted for nonchalance and
contrariety, but his play, either it should be the spark in surface or it should put ingeniously the
unorthodox forms in a picture-frame, it is a very grave, serious, deep play, directed towards the
face of the one who follows it. He, the poet, laughs with an eye and weeps with the other. And
precisely this genuineness of duplicity, I intend to put it in evidence through all this essay on
Paradoxism - since Florentin Smarandache, trying my structural weakness for unpredictable curls
of his mind and my tolerant Transylvanian character in front of his southern hurry in stating and
denying, started to bomb me with consistent parcels, that came on until I was about to reach
Paradoxism, almost filling a shelf of my library. Plus his letters, plus writings that have
punctuated the stages of the road.
And it is in this way that the project - not the first anyway, as it can be ascertained from
the biography afterwards - has been conceived to integrate Paradoxism in a larger family of mind
comprising the whole of the artistic modernism, in a theory of creation that could explain the
fields of activity. For this reason, I have focused this essay firmly on the aesthetic domain,
considering that the modern experience of creation draws its validity from broad principles that
govern the life of the artistic phenomena. And then I have come in a natural way to the evaluation
of the paradoxist concrete, of a movement put into action - to its exponential level, the one given
by Smarandache.
I have preferred to debate of ideas about Paradoxism, because it is the surest way to the
clarifications that are inevitable. No priority has been given to the filiations and relationships -
although I have indicated them where it was the case -, but to those aspects that are in a vertical
connection with a norm, a principle, or to the largest irradiance of those that come from an
independent emission. I have added to the suggestions of Smarandaches biography some new

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ones, coming from other sources. Furthermore, I have put as a basis, of course, the capability of
discernment that is presupposed in those who have a familiarity of whatever extent in this
domain.
On account of the spectacular nature of the subject, of the temperamental iconoclasm of
the poet (novelist, dramatist, translator, as it will be seen afterwards), and because of the
preoccupation for the implication of a principle and the consciousness that a knot of aesthetic
contradictions cannot be undone like a Gordian knot, it may be that I will not have been always
clear enough to make myself understood thoroughly. I have taken this risk in order not to deceive
those who, acquainted with this field, have the abilities to draw personnel constructive
conclusions. To speak of Paradoxism, anyway, is not a subject for an editorial office.
Ive not even have any hesitation in granting a special attention to the examination and the
analysis of the booklets, all the activities of Florentin Smarandache, since if we speak about
Paradoxism, we speak of him first of all - precisely the ideas with which I had begun these
introducing lines.
I have recalled the letter arrived at Curentul from Istanbul, which changed for some
time the course and nature of my readings. I must warn the future Smarandaches correspondents
that they should not be disturbed by the unusual label attached on his envelopes: a flight of cranes
floating in a blue sky, stretching their aerodynamic necks towards the desired horizon...It is
nothing else but a mathematicians emblem for him who has this nebulous and remote (as far as I
am concerned) field as a discoverer of a function that wears the poets name: Smarandaches
function.
And there is much to say about it, God have mercy...But what I can say is that the
paradoxist mentor is a kind of notoriety in the science of numbers, where he is also the holder of
an overwhelming biography. Sensational! A simple glance through it gives you a fit of dizziness!
I finished this book in 1995. Till this moment, when I have written the last page (this one
of the foreword), I have not succeeded in shaking hands with its inspirator. I have read him,
corresponded and conversed with him on the telephone, without exceeding the limits of the
formal information connected with the intellectual collaboration. Everything that I have written
has been elaborated and controlled in reference to the reading and without interference of echoes
of other sources. His person is alien to me, his personality is close to me. This is a guarantee of
sincerity of the lines I am writing. I also declare my impossibility to say what he is like to be from
now on. I can only express my hope that the sense of this analysis should correspond, as time
passes, with a complete literary affirmation of the movement and its leader.
One thing more: one has been looking for the tranquillization of Smarandache, for his
moving towards normality, with arguments such as formulae of good sense, of good advises
(La Rochefoucauld used to say that nobody can any longer give real examples of good advises).
Nothing is more opposite and more prejudicial to his (literary) interest! A Smarandache
swallowed up by the self-sufficient common norms, led to the denominator of uniformity and
canonized in banality - that is to say: a real paradox - would be a Smarandache lost, a minus
Smarandache, the ratification of an absence that would have no longer even an excuse for its
inconsistency. There cannot exist a cut off Smarandache after the printing of our preconceptions.
It would be another thing, quite another thing.
Smarandache is either exasperating/ exasperated or he is nothing!