SYMBOLISM AND METAPHORS OF WATER IN RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE - ČEDO ANTOLIĆ\u27S SONGWRITING OPUS ON THE STANDARD AND KAJKAVIAN

SUMMARY Čedo Antolić, a respected singer-songwriter, born in 1951 in Zagreb, where he died in 2019, moves within the Catholic religious vocabulary, but has a distinctive metaphoric system. He emphasizes the frequent mention of water in various forms - such as a stream, river, sea, rain, drop - and within its typical theme of addressing God, and in that discusses issues of existential importance. The imagery of Čedo Antolić related to water is very rich, and some of its aspects are analyzed here, for example the analogy between water and light, as an attribute of God. The experience of water as a medium of purification is very important, which can be presented either as rain that falls, or as a stream or river that is entered, or as the sea through which one travels. Fruitful metaphor of the river develops as a way of life or the flow of time, which can be identified with a road or street. A number of metaphors thus reach allegory, so that life - like a river or a road - has a beginning, which purity we can try to return to, and it also has its end, as estuary or death, when the poet is meeting God at the end of his journey. God is both present and absent, he is both the goal and the companion; God is the touch of the supernatural in the existence, but existence also seeks to transcend life. Since faith is true elsewhere, and not yet realized in the present life, travel can also be understood as wandering, and water has negative connotations of something that consumes man or moves him away from communion with God. The street, which is actually a river, is at the same time a place of wandering for those who do not know God, as well as a place of prayer for one who knows him; it is both night and day - bright for those who are in that street, dark for those who do not know that path. The street - the river - is also the place where the poet sings, so the themes of water, life, religion and art are intertwined