Pan Steve

More than one of my readers, that is to say, two of my readers (40% of my known readership) have expressed a preference for more postings and a lighter touch. I don’t take all readers seriously, but these two I do because one is beautiful and the other my oldest friend. Beauty and friendship are among the most serious of recommendations.


But at the same time, one has to be true to oneself and to the subject of one’s blog, in this case, Polishness. As Professor Polakiewicz has reminded us on more than one occasion in only three classes to date, the Poles are an exceedingly “polite” people. The language, like many languages, has two forms of the singular pronoun “you,” a formal you-form and a familiar you-form. In Polish, the formal you form, pan (masculine) and pani (feminine), would seem to dominate social discourse. Our instructor’s mother, for example, and her best friend of many decades, who love one another like sisters, still address one another as pani.

A small thing, you might think, but this social practice has wider implications. It suggests that Poles exhibit reserve, circumspection, formalities. No one would mistake Polish culture for Mediterranean, Caribbean, or Oceanic. It is not, at least immediately, warm. Neither is it cold, but emanates rather a decorous lukewarmth. Poles are Old School, or at least, Polakiewicz is Old School. Even after many years teaching in this country, he wears a jacket and tie. Though jacketless, I’m in the habit of wearing a button-down Oxford and cravat, a habit deriving, perhaps, from some residual ethno-genetic or epigenetic aversion to the public casual. Never a T- or polo shirt at work for me. So that the freedom and informality that normally and rightfully characterizes a typical blog might not quite fit this one. Or perhaps, this social distance and seriousness are historical, generational accidents. I suppose we’ll see. Panie Stefanie, I’ll keep you posted.

First Class

I took my seat in class as a student for the first time in twenty years: Beginning Polish. And so it has begun, in earnest. Not the oldest of his classmates, BorOvich, Josh (spelled phonetically Dzos in Polish) entered and sited himself in the second row, extreme right, by the door. I felt neither trepidation nor comfort, and the natural excitement of learning only came with time, as the instructor divulged tidbits about the Slavic language family. Russian is the most musical, owing to its separating all consonantal sounds with vowels; words never grind to an unpronounceable (or visual) halt against the twisted wire of barbarous consonant clusters like chrz, szcz, prz, scdz, and trz—or fail to start at all. Not true of Polish. Interestingly, Serbo-Croatian is essentially the same language spoken, but it is written in a Cyrillic and a Roman script respectively, demarcating the religious lines, Greek Orthodox (Serb) and Catholic (Croat), that divide the population of speakers. After the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the bloody “cleansing” of Balkan ethnicities, Serbian and Croatian present politically as separate languages (roll eyes here; yet another people, like the English and Americans, separated by a common language). Kasubian, a tongue with Pomeranian influences, aspires to the status of a separate language and not a mere dialect of Polish. Linguists, including our instructor, are not unsympathetic to their claims, which must ultimately be decided by the United Nations. As for Polish, our instructor notes, it is simply one of the more difficult of foreign languages for English speakers.

Among the difficulties—pretty much true of all Slavic languages—is that Polish is highly inflected; it distinguishes seven grammatical cases, whereas English and German manage to get by with three or four: nominative, accusative/dative, and genitive, that is, a subject form (“I”), an object form, direct and indirect in English (“me”), and a possessive form (“my”). The Poles, like other Slavs and the ancient Romans, add three more: a vocative, an instrumental, and a locative. When I signed up, I was aware that Polish was more or less doubly inflective, and could consequently, unlike English and German, have a highly variable sentence word order. (As well as having “different words for everything,” as Steve Martin has so perspicuously observed of French.) But on that first day, we were introduced as well to pronunciation “rules” about the voicing and devoicing of consonants, depending on the vowel sound that follows or its position in the word. The letter “b,” for example, often sounds as an English “b,” but in the presence of other letters is devoiced to sound like an English “p.” Now, Polish has a letter “p” that sounds like the English letter “p,” so why not write the sound with a single letter? It doesn’t seem to make any sense. Who made these “rules,” by the way, and were they vodka-influenced? When our instructor alluded to verb aspect, which we will take up later, my head began to spin.

There are very good reasons, of course, for the bewildering complexity and the seeming irrationalities of all languages (think “knight,” “night,” and “ignite” in English; “there,” “their,” and “they’re”). At least, those reasons seem good and natural and obvious (but unconsciously so) for speakers viewing the language from within. To those on the outside learning it, they’re, well, crazy, okay, maybe not crazy, but weird, or, well, you know, kinda arbitrary. Which they are, at one level; all language derives from an absolutely arbitrary but conventionally agreed upon association between signs (sounds/written words) and things. We agree upon them in time, and we agree upon the changes over time. Language, like life and love, perhaps, is history—a metaphor I’ve been pondering.

A new language is like a new love, fresh, compelling, demanding, complex, and seemingly impossible, especially to a man over fifty. A knowledge of linguistics, like the knowledge of women and love generally, helps, but not nearly enough. A knowledge of other foreign languages, like the experience of other lovers, helps as well, some, but anyone who has ever applied an amorous principle, practice, or trick extramurally can attest to its potential for disaster. The rule for devoicing consonants in Polish proceeds from right to left, in Russian, from left to right (or vice versa, let me double check.) Every language then, like every woman, has an experience of its own, and a logic and coherence deriving exclusively from the interactions of the lives of its speakers in their world. Understanding, mastery require patience, attention, commitment, time, and work, maybe a lifetime thereof, or the rest of a lifetime.

unAmerican

A resolve to become Polish suggests some dissatisfaction with America, being American. After fifty years of having been, I must cop to a certain, even a radical, discontent. A distinct and elemental and unyielding exasperation, though not, in the end, a disabling one. I like my country well enough. It has its moments and special places. But America has always loomed too large and just too much generally for me to love with any kind of intimacy or enthusiasm. I myself am not large, and while I have been known to contradict myself, I do not contain multitudes. The exuberant, the omniveros, the generous Walt Whitman sang a patriotism far too expansive for me. I prefer the paean of a more central American, that of Jose Emilio Pacheco, a Mexican.


I do not love my country. Its abstract splendor
is beyond my grasp.
But (and I know it sounds bad) I would give my life
for ten places in it, for certain people,
seaports, pinewoods, castles,
a rundown city, gray, grotesque,
various figures from its history,
mountains
(and three or four rivers).

Which is not to say that I hate my country or regret my being and having been an American, I don’t. Rather, one comes to understand that the fullness of life, the fullness of being human, perhaps even a full understanding of being American, may require more than a single national experience. (How many such fullness may require, I do not know, only that I have to get started.) Something about small countries attracts me, the limitedness of non-superpowers, of subject states, underdogs, lost causes, even of the defeated, and this style of patriotism, which Pacheco slyly names “High Treason.”