Środy

This week’s The New Yorker magazine highlighted the recent publication of Witold Gombrowicz’s “complete” Diary by Yale. I returned to the diary, Volume I anyway, to survey my underlinings. Considering the expenditure of pencil, I must agree that he’s a very worthwhile read—leaving me two more volumes, or the new collection, to purchase.

Unintentionally exiled to Argentina at the outset of World War II, Gombrowicz  would seem to represent something of the reverse of my intentions, the unbecoming polakiem: he wanted to move beyond a native Polishness that he found provincial, conventional, self-satisfied, and at the same time, insecure and defensive vis-à-vis the world and "higher" national cultures. I like very much what he had to say, though the post-Polish Polishness he advocated demands more ambition and strenuousness of purpose, more greatness than I can muster for my lesser task. Still, I can learn a great deal from him and take some encouragement from his reflections. For example:

Wednesday

Wind and spindles of clouds crowding the peaks from the south. A lone chicken pecks away on the lawn. . . .

To be a concrete man. To be an individual. Not to strive to transform the whole world. To live in the world, changing only as much as possible from within the reach of my nature. To become real in harmony with my needs, my individual needs.

I do not want to say that collective and abstract thought, that Humanity as such, are not important. Yet a certain balance must be restored. The most modern direction of thought is one that will rediscover the individual man. (I, 90)

On another Wednesday, he wrote:

I know well what sort of Polish culture I would like to have in the future. The only question is: am I not spreading a program that is only my personal need on an entire people. This is it: the weakness of today’s Pole results from his being too monolithic, and too one-sided; therefore, all effort should be aimed at enriching him by one more pole, at completing him with another Pole, an absolutely, radically different Pole. (I, 109)

It would be presumptuous to presume that that other Pole might be an American, but for me, the pole of Polishness might be absolutely, radically different from my Americanness, this Joshness. (I seem to find him particularly enlightening on Wednesdays in 1954.)

W Lecie

In the summertime, this unusually and uncomfortably warm summertime, I attend but messily to my project and without much energy. Books, papers, flipflops, bedclothes, drinking containers, and a plumbing fixture lie ascatter on my study floor, in the only coolable room in my house. My desk supports an even more various micro-chaos. Amidst the miscellany, I scan the headlines of PolskieRadio almost daily and read of storms (burze) and massacres (masakry, i.e. Syria, Colorado), make wordlists two or three times a week from my pocket dictionary, and hoist Leszek Kołakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism into my lap for serious reading and intellection and almost immediate drowsiness. I blame the heat, not the prose.

Kołakowski was arguably the foremost Polish philosopher and intellectual historian of the post-war period, recently deceased (d. 2009). And while I’ve never been mistaken for a marxian—by a Marxist, at any rate—or truckled much with the cultural theories derived from it, that tradition is not without insight, value, and interest. But more importantly, Kołakowski represents a great generation of Polish hearts and minds—Wotyła, Miłosz, Szymborska, Górecki—that is recently passed away, as well as their particular record of Polishness. They consider and mark Polish culture at the rebeginnings of the Polish state (1919), a state that had the misfortune of time and place to re-enter the world at the end of the world and at the epicenter of its destruction. As Polishness emerged from the rubble and emerges now from the ruinous concrete grays of the Soviet system, it seems freer to become itself, but will likely become much more like the cosmopolitan, the global us. Just as the Marxists and marxians warned. Not perhaps the most terrible fate, but neither is that the Poland, or Polands, I’m most interested in. Yet, one must always abide where one is, or hopes to be, while visiting the past.

My request for a recess appointment and six months in Poland has been submitted. I await the final word of the not unsympathetic, but bureaucratic powers-that-be. 

Polskieradio

I took my Polish books on vacation with the best intentions, packed neatly in a squarish black duffel, about the size of a standard concrete block, and about as weighty. I unzipped it once to remove Norman Davies’s Europe, which itself, alone, at 1136 pages of text, and another 250 of notes, appendices, and maps, accounted for much of the structural integrity of that parcel of wishful thinking. Though Davies is the foremost English (Welsh, actually) historian of Poland, and though Poland is understandably and geographically central to his compendious survey, and though reading European history thereby contextualizes Poland and Polish history, I’m feeling lazy and undisciplined so far this summer. And my Polish fades in the sunshine and the heat. It’s 102°F here today, 38.8°C. Grammar puddles, vocabulary evaporates, rippling.

In languorous resistance, I’ve taken to reading the news, wiadomości, from the website Polskieradio, the headlines anyway, nagłówki. Parsing the headlines provides a not overly tedious grammar refresher and a gentle spur to adding vocabulary: I look up and write out 20 words a day (I know! but it’s hot.). Though I’ve noticed it before, I’m beginning to ponder the suffix –karz, which denotes professional activity: lekarz (“doctor”), piłkarz (“soccer player”), bramkarz (“goalie”), piosenkarz (“singer”), dziennikarz (“journalist”), koszykarz (“basketball player,” or “basket-maker”). –Karz or –arz is not the only suffix with this function; there is –ysta or –ista, as in dentysta and tenisista (“tennis player”), but I was wondering if there were a related word karz, meaning “a person who,” or karzać, a verb, “to engage in.” No such word appears to exist. The closest is karzeł, which means “dwarf.” I’m guessing there’s no connection.