Kim są Polacy?

Though I have yet to actually see the sun in Poland, the avatar for it showed up on my computer desktop this morning, the local weather, pagoda, so I looked out my window and saw blue openings in the clouds—encouraging blues, though soon closed—and a faint wash of sunlight on a chimney. If my body, and more so my mind, were not still so torpid from the time change, I would have rallied my strength to see the real thing, słonce, and gone out into the street. I only made it to the window. Poles, I learn, have an internal watch, wewnętrz zegarek, instead of a clock, and mine doesn’t yet keep Kraków time.

My friend, the good Dr. hab. Monika Banaś, has emerged at last from the grip of flu and bronchitis to more actively sponsor my sloppy experiment in transculturalism. She has discovered that however rudimentary my reading and writing proficiency, my oral comprehension and speaking skills, if existent at all, remain blocked by English language interference—even my rudimentary German interferes—lack of vocabulary, weak memory, and a marked aversion to error—that is, a marked aversion to appearing stupid. My only attempts at everyday exchange, buying bread, post cards, a plate of pierogi, a volume of poetry at the księgarnia—the bookshop, of which, refreshingly, there seems to be one on almost every block around the university—terminate more or less abruptly with a kind of awkward relief on both of our parts. But then there are those conversations that never go wrong because they can’t, in fact, go right, like trying to buy a wash cloth. Poles don’t seem to wash with a cloth, but a lufa, a sponge, or an abrasive mitten of sorts. A wash cloth doesn’t seem to exist as either a concept or a drugstore product, and therefore doesn’t exist as a word in my vocabulary, even if I could remember it, which I couldn’t, though I could remember the German word for “clothing,” kleidung. How helpful was that? Absurdly long miscommunicative story short, I’m washing with a sock, in Polish, skarpetka.

At the księgarnia, though, I found what I thought was the perfect book and book title for my needs, Kim są Polacy? (“Who are [the] Poles?”). And with the perfect cover art: white background, red letters (the national colors) and with the Vitruvian man adorned with the wings of the Polish white eagle. Very smart design, very promising. But an essay by Adam Zagajewski, one of my favorite Polish writers, begins problematically: “Poles don’t know very well how to be Poles. Also, they don’t know, aren’t quite sure, how to be a patriot.” (my translation, p. 44) The implications, thus, for a non-native pledge to the fraternity would suggest that if I don’t know how to become a Pole, I’m not alone in the quandary, though differently positioned. As I read further—I have a long, slow way to go, in the book, I mean—I begin to suspect that the question may be answerable in grammatically different terms from those in which it is posed. As nations and national cultures blend in this global, cosmopolitan flow, the only relevant noun is “human being,” and national identities express not even as adjectives, but as adverbs, modifiers of the process of being, which is to say, living. So perhaps, in the end, I don’t become a Pole, but a human being living Polishly.

 

Ahoy

The Rickmers Shanghai, carrying dangerous goods to Europe, though not as dangerous as she might have been carrying, is now at 49° 38’ N and 5° 08’ W, just south of the western tip of England, due in Antwerp at about 1:00 p.m. EST tomorrow. What might have been. What could yet be.

First Week

These first days in Poland and into my language experiment, I find I’ve settled into the former much better than the latter—which already feels like more of a sinking. Merely living, even in a foreign country, has fewer and simpler demands than the good life, which requires communications broad and deep, but since mere life is temporally and logically prior to the good life, I’m counting my first week’s survival a success. Even as the language bursts from the TV and radio (advertisements, reklamy) and streams and ripples by me on the streets in almost perfect incomprehensibility, I reassure myself, “you just got here.”

My mieszkanie, a word that denotes both the general concept of “residence” and the specific form of “apartment,” recalls my first studio lodgings in graduate school, spare and, well, sparer. With no stove, per se, but a microwave that I just figured out how to operate, partially, and no refrigerator, this space does have two single beds and a functional bathroom. The shower, unfortunately, has both design issues—the fixed showerhead at anything other than minimal water pressure douses the bath mat outside the cramped shower box—and only the most temperamental association with hot water. Hot water there is, and it can be gloriously hot, you just can’t be sure when it will arrive and for how long. Nor does there seem to be any temperature gradation as it switches from hot to freaking cold. Of the conveniences of modern life, a really good shower is, for me, the hallmark of civilization; but unless I master the secrets of this particular fixture, I may be stuck at mere life for the duration.

Because Polish study, Polonistyka, is like any advanced study, the graduate student style seems perfectly appropriate in both shelter and food. So far I subsist on bread, tea, cheese, chocolate, and cup-size packet soup. The bread and cheese are better than my standard fare at home, especially the bread, cyganski (“gypsy”) and góralski (“highlander”), fresh, soft, yeasty, and the former, a little nutty. Of cheeses, I’m partial to oszczypek, quite edible if not pronounceable (actually, it’s not so bad, “osh-CHI-pek”), a kind of sheep’s milk mozzarella. My soup sampling represents a broad range of Polish standards from borowikowa (borowiki mushroom) to barszcz czerwony (borscht from red beets). Not a huge fan of root vegetables per se and particularly those whose liquid color verges on neon fioletowy (“violet”), still I found the cup of barszcz surprisingly not altogether terrible. 

So, for the week, the life Cracovia resembles graduate school—without the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, though on the classical music radio station, klasyczna muzyka, along with Mozart and Strauss, I have heard string renditions of the Beatles and the theme from “Rawhide.” Rock on.

 

 

Sunday

Temporarily housed in the Hostel St. Benedict, I’m settled now into my longer-term digs on Karmelicka Street, named for the Carmelite order and church a few doors down. The Benedictines, the Carmelites, the Trappists (I just finished Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czesław Miłosz, the poet Merton being a fully strived Trappist monk)—a pattern emerges. Catholicism is unavoidable in Poland, and becoming Polish may involve a kind of rebecoming Catholic. Heavens. Miłosz has drily observed that “One never stops being a member of the Catholic Church.” (Native Realm, 89) At any rate, I have been a non-practicing, happily lapsed member for many years, though this past summer I have taken to wearing a couple of saints’ medals around my neck, St. Rita, in honor of my mother, and St. Jude; they are the patron saints of Lost Causes and Hopeless Cases, respectively, that cause and case being my soul. I wear them now less in faith than in a kind of ironic but not unhopeful superstition. On my first Sunday in Poland, with my dear mother in heart and mind, I attended 8:00 a.m. Mass in the basilica on the main square, Kosciól Mariacki. Still jet-lagged, I was up at 4:00 a.m. and had nothing better to do.

Gray, foggy, cold, winter in Kraków has little to recommend to the conventional tourist, but for the unconventional one, the lack of conventional tourists—there are more pigeons on the square at the moment—is a big plus. The pigeons, no great attraction, huddle in dark, sullen masses for warmth, like teenagers, the winds ruffling and parting their feathers. The swifts and sparrows that pinwheel about the Mariacki towers in summer are gone. I, dressed in black, an old crow, strolled around the Planty, the green space surrounding the Market Square, on my way to church. I have wandered these streets before in the morning twilights, once inebriate, though in summer. In winter they are rather indifferent, neither inviting nor repelling. But, from time to time one comes upon a dramatic scene, this, the monument to the glorious battle of Grunwald, when Jagiełło, King of the Poles, defeated the Teutonic Knights in 1410 and rid the kingdom of their hegemony. Strangely, the Knights were a monkish order as well, not given, apparently, to hospitality, good words, and poetry.

 

W Krakowie

“Why should she be in the bowels of a ship ploughing through sullen, turbulent waters going to a foreign continent alone? Why? Why?” (Betsy and the Great World, M.H. Lovelace, p.20)

On my last day in the office, my colleagues sent me off with a packet of “steamer letters” with which to beguile the nausea aboard the Shanghai as it tossed and bobbed and rolled on the swells of a winter Atlantic. We all know how that turned out—to date. I find their inspiration compelling; and a more thoughtful, whimsical, literate, and hopelessly well-intended (“go easy on the vodka”) crew cannot exist in a man’s working life. But having read Letter #1, with the attached chapter of Betsy and the Great World as a sort of framing device, I’ll defer reading further until I am circumstanced on a boat. However tight, the confines of a 350-seat CanadaAir 777 cannot replicate the queasy conditions of a steamer, especially on a voyage of only seven hours. Sea-faring humanizes the traveler, makes a man aware of bodily functions.

It is something godlike to fly. Having winged to Poland now three times previously, and to Europe once before, I find its sublimity undiminished even as flight has become familiar, reliable. Certain details change, of course, the particular lintiness of the clouds, the snowiness of fields below like cracked bathroom tile, almond bark, milky quadrilaterals. This trip, snow began to fall in Toronto as we boarded, and the long, long wings required de-icing with a steam cannon, a first for me. But otherwise, flight, sacramental in its beauties, again uplifted, like a cathedral: the whole body, not just the eyes.

At some point in the night, I flew over the Rickmer’s Shanghai.

Along with Betsy and the Great World, en route to Kraków, I finished, oh so appropriately, Czesław Miłosz’s Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition. A subject and a student of totalitarianisms, Nazi and Communist—among other self-definitions—Miłosz concludes his personal account with the following:

when ambition counsels us to lift ourselves above simple moral rules guarded by the poor of spirit, rather than choose them as our compass needle amid the uncertainties of change, we stifle the only thing that can redeem our follies and mistakes: love. (p. 300)

Good terms on which to end a book and a flight. I’m in Kraków.

Plan B, Part II

There was a problem confirming my original Plan B flight. You don't even want to know, except that there is a reason why the discount ticket broker, the one with the call center in India (whose accent, by the way, I love, even as it makes understanding their confirmation process seem more exotic and strangely reasonable than it probably is) is a discount ticket broker. More than one reader has encouraged me to vent in Therouxvian rant, but I am a Thoreauvian, and realize that in a virtual global village, the people who can actually help you out of the mess are the ones you are currently working with, whether in London or Mumbai. Patience and good temper. And having a couple of strategically placed aunts and uncles, a ciocia and a wujek, as I do, here in Lancaster, aids immensely. Though Aunt Lu, my godmother, failed to insure that I remain a practicing Catholic (Is that their job?), she and Uncle Paul do confirm my faith in individual human beings.

So, I'll arrive in Poland Friday morning, not Friday evening.

Plan B

Life trumps art, or at least the humbler attempts at it. The symmetry of reversing my grandfather’s original immigrant voyage, Antwerp to Philadelphia, has been irreparably altered. Efforts to place me with different lines, on the Rio Madeira and the Independent Accord, have failed. I’ve been told that it’s nothing personal; one captain declined to take winter passengers, the other, to commit on short notice. All very well. The plan now is to fly to Kraków—by Zeppelin! (Just kidding.) I’ll be there Friday evening; complication resolved, theoretically. In June then, I’ll attempt to replicate Aleks’s passage instead of reversing it, which could very much affect the aesthetics of this account—and of my life, who knows? But both art and life are a series of improvisations, unless you are a great artist or a great soul, who bends the world to his will.Or her.

Or Not

So the boat, my boat, left without me.

Comfortably and punctually entrained this Monday morning, thanks to the pre-dawn efforts of His Honor, the Mayor, I rolled toward Philadelphia in confidence of a Tuesday sail. True, not having heard over the weekend as promised from my agents in London the final details of departure, I waxed anxious, sleepless, in fact, that the universe might hap that I miss the boat. However, the Amtrak wifi carried blissful morning news. In the long awaited email, my agents confirmed the Tuesday sail date and passed along contact information for the boarding process. Not long after I greeted these contacts electronically and more or less repeated the good word through various media to concerned parties, I received further and final word that the Rickmers Shanghai had, actually, already sailed. Just like that. Really. A kind of reverse shanghai.

Shanghaied

I'm waiting for the last details from my voyage consultant about my Atlantic departure, slow words on a slow boat. But I am still a patient journeyman. My preferred plan for transit to Philadelphia--best friends, road trip--has fallen through owing to the delay, but I have brothers--a big brother/good son--with a train option from Pittsburgh. Cars, trains, freighters, patience, flexibility, friends, brothers will eventually get you to Poland.

Curious, though, in the email silence with my consultant, I signed onto a global ship position monitoring website. (You can actually do this online. What can't you do online?) On Fleetmon.com, I found my cargo vessel en route to Philadelphia from Virginia Beach. Flagged to the Marshall Islands, the Rickmers Shanghai is 192m x 28m, about two football fields long of seagoing industrial aesthetic, and, I learn, is carrying "dangerous goods." "Dangerous goods" strikes me as something of an oxymoron, but at the same time, aren't all goods dangerous, except in moderation?

Departed

I left the office last night with a bit of melancholy, a strange melancholy, not one of the more routine melancholies of ordinary life, but the strange melancholy of embarking on extraordinary life. And I don’t mean, at least yet, “extraordinary” in the sense of “wonderful,” “splendid,” “astonishing”—that remains to be seen—but merely “outside of the ordinary,” “not usual.” It is the melancholy of leave-taking with the prospect of not coming back—which is highly unlikely—that is to say, I will be back. But more likely, I could return a changed man, decidedly not the I who just bid his friends, colleagues, and loved ones good-bye. If the merely extraordinary proves extraordinary, who actually comes back from that? The guy who left? He was an all right guy, mostly, I liked him well enough. I might miss him.

Oil changed, the car is packed for the first leg of the journey, the domestic.