Pan Twardowski

Kraków, among a number of other civic identities, is a university town, long a place of culture and learning. The Jagiełłonian University, founded in 1364 by Kazimierz III (The Great), the last of the Piast dynasty, and then  re-endowed by the first of the Jagiełłons at the turn of that century, was the first university in Poland and remains—according to my sources—the pre-eminent one in the country, though the University of Warsaw, I suspect, would beg to differ. The list of distinguished alumni is long and illustrious, including Copernicus, Jan Kochanowski, the first of a very long line of extraordinary Polish poets, and Jan III Sobieski, the Savior of Europe and, reputedly, a pretty compelling letter writer. The academic, the intellectual enterprise, truly a form of heroism here, is regularly cast in bronze, not perhaps on every block, but you needn’t walk far to find a statue, bust, relief, or plaque. Attached herewith are but a few monuments to the life of the mind: to medieval students, a Renaissance astronomer (Copernicus), and a modern medical light and university rector (Józef Dietl).
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The most notorious and interesting possible alumnus—or possibly alumni—is Dr. Faust/Faustus, yes that Faust, who sold his soul to the Devil, depending on whom you read, in exchange for the knowledge of advanced magic, universal techné, or transcendental wisdom. (And we, these days, complain about the cost of tuition.) At any rate, Faust, or the person(s) who prefigured Faust, is alleged to have studied here in Kraków, though I haven’t discovered the Jagiełłonians talking him up anywhere. Here he is identified as Pan Twardowski, a 16^th-century nobleman from the local countryside whose natural sense of inquiry, corrupted by Satan, leads to a life in the city, an urban life of questionable romance, ambition, wealth, power, and disaster—with,  mercifully, deliverance from his bargain by divine intervention (Mary, Mother of God). While in transit to Hell, he’s saved, released, falling from Satan’s clutches onto the moon, into a kind of eternal lunar limbo. The man in the moon is, thus, a Pole. (See lower right, notice moustache.) 

Scholars like to conflate source material, but I prefer to imagine that Faust and Twardowski were actually two different people, two dangerously willing students of the ultimate—how many more were there back in those days—who might actually have met on the streets of Kraków, at the southeast corner of the rynek, where my guidebook says Pan Twardowski took rooms. Imagine the conversation, the comparison of notes. Two doors up is a bookstore with shelves and shelves of books on Poland in Polish by Poles. I was there this week, sighing. My project is not anywhere close to universal knowledge, but if Satan actually showed up to seal a deal, I’d seriously consider it—and, given the state of my soul, think I was getting the better end of the deal. I might even settle for a grasp of the grammar and full vocabulary. But then, if Satan actually showed up, his presence would imply a more conventional Otherworld than I’ve been wont to suppose. Requiring the re-evaluation, then, of an under-valued soul, or its prospects. You think about these things when you're wandering about in Kraków. Later, on that particular walk, I found myself in the Carmelite brothers’ church on my own home street, Karmelicka, lighting a candle and dropping a złoty—two actually, one for myself and one for a fellow scholar-vagabond—into the box of the St. Jude’s altar. A cheaper, slower, less hazardous form of miracle-making.

Below is a picture of the Master's digs. The elevated statue on the corner is not Pan Jan T, but an Italian saint; Twardowski's dubious methods are not memorialized in stone or bronze. Here also is a link to a movie, 1936,  http://www.veoh.com/watch/v17368023MR8CKpPZ, a nice version of his quest for knowledge. It’s in Polish, but like so many things in life, though we don’t have the language, we can watch and get the gist of the story.

 

Papierż

In a largely Catholic country, when the Pope resigns, there’s a lot of talk, most of which I cannot follow here yet, sadly, but the resignation of Benedict XVI brings to mind his predecessor, Jan Pawel II, who will always be close to the hearts, minds, and souls of his flock in Poland. He’s a saint here, and I say that, as I say and write few things, absolutely without irony or irreverence or qualification. Insofar as that word, that status, has any meaning whatsoever in human life, John Paul II was a saint.

I remember, it had to be 1979, one of my literature professors was bemoaning the lack of genuine heroes in our age, of accomplished people with unsullied reputations, and he asked any of us to name someone—politician, movie star, athlete, artist, writer—worthy of unequivocal admiration. I said, rather off-handedly, because I didn’t really pay that much attention to either popular culture or the Vatican, “What about the Pope?” My professor deflated slightly, as if my answer were both surprising, annoying even, and a little unfair, like, “well, of course the Pope.” Then I said, “no, I don’t mean the Pope as Pope, I mean the guy himself. I mean, I hear he was a writer, an artist, an intellectual, you know, kind of a Renaissance guy.” I couldn’t remember his name exactly, Karol Wotyła, and certainly wouldn’t have been able to pronounce it correctly even if I had known how to spell it (Vo-TEE-wa). And this was before, I think, the assassination attempt, and before he became the Pope and the saint we’ve come to understand him to have been. (Over the years I would come to doubt his infallibility on any number of points, and I read he wasn’t a particularly able administrator, but I never found reason to doubt his faith or his integrity as a thinking, feeling human being.)

My authorities, Polish writers, among them Miłosz and Andrzej Stasiuk, confirm that my early, uneducated guess, was about as right as I’ve ever guessed on any exam question, ever. Miłosz’s poem, “Ode for the Eightieth Birthday of Pope John Paul II,” fairly rings, peals in affirmation, “Your portrait in our homes every day remind[s] us/How much one man can accomplish and how sainthood works.” (710) Pretty unequivocal. And this last month, on the Planty surrounding the town square, a photographic exhibit of the Pope’s last years, particularly his visits to Poland, almost haunts the heart of this city. The words from Stasiuk’s Fado perfectly describe the impact of this collection, on me anyway:

In this idiotic world where old age has become outlawed, where sickness and weakness border on the criminal, where anyone who lacks the strength to produce and consume becomes an outcast, where failure and destitution are acceptable only in television reports from distant lands, he had the courage to die with millions watching; he had the courage to show his wasted body, his face constricted with suffering, his dragging feet, his death throes. This was his last lesson at a time when he could no longer speak. (140)

He showed us how to die. I was talking about him with Monika and wondering aloud how he could have been so powerful, so effective a presence. She stopped me and said, “Josh, he was an actor.”

An act none of us could have followed. Peace be with you, Benedict.

St. Rita

Church attendance this week has taken me to St. Katherine’s, Sw. Katarzyna, Friday evening actually, for Devotions to St. Rita, the patroness of difficult and hopeless cases: Polish language acquisition and the state of my soul, respectively. As I wear her medal, and she has my mother’s name, and as Katherine was my grandmother’s name and is my daughter’s middle name, if any miracles are going to happen, they’re going to happen here. The place was packed. I mean, this was a Friday evening after work. Snow had been falling most of the afternoon, slowly but enslickeningly.  I arrived fifteen minutes before the service—Mass, basically, with a sprinkly benediction of the congregation and the flowers they had purchased at the entrance—was scheduled to begin, and there was not a seat to be had. (No shortage of difficulty and hopelessness in this crowd, apparently.) It was standing room only in a side aisle, the altar completely out of site. We latecomers were shoulder to shoulder, bark w bark, like rowdies at a soccer game, though, of course, much less rowdy with lots of old Catholic ladies—though, I suppose, they could surprise you. I could see the statue of St. Rita and the golden letters of her name. From the vaults a hundred feet up into the darkness, a chandelier hung, painted a matte gold, and as I listened to the service, I watched it very slowly rotate, like a little solar system, but only a tenth or a twelfth of a rotation, before reversing itself. No statues raised their hands just for me. And though I was picking up words from the service and even from the sermon, especially the word słowo, which means “word,” I wasn’t suddenly, miraculously understanding everything, hearing in tongues. That would have been great. That would have made me a believer. But it was just words, a phrase or two, gdzieniegdzie, “here and there.”

The picture below I took on a previous trip. The altar is currently behind a screen, being renovated; the statue of St. Rita uplifts the hopeless from the right. The church itself stands basically next door to Na Skałce, such that on almost every block in this city you have a religious structure equivalent to a noteworthy cathedral at home in the States. My guidebook informs me the Sw. Katarzyna was raised by King Kazimierz The Great in “penance for murdering Father Marcin Baryczka in 1349,” (drowned in the Wisła for having delivered to the king a notice of his excommunication from the priest’s bishops, Cracow, 124). Not a historically safe neighborhood for the frocked, and yet they train here in numbers and mill about in robes and heavy brown cloaks.

 

Progress Report

A month into this particular experiment, the immersion experience, I’m reasonably sure of two things. First, I’m not going to achieve the levels of language proficiency that I had hoped or imagined a person might. Another person, a different person, actually might have, a more outgoing, a more social, and a more intense person, organized, focused, directed. A rare combination of intense and chatty, an anthropologist, a participant observer. I’m more of a wanderer and an outsider looking in, from a distance, a serendipitous, impressionist observer. Vodka and bars have been recommended to alleviate this condition. Research supports that recommendation, alcohol lowering the social barriers of inhibition as well as oiling the linguistic skids and suppressing other language interference. Drink can, as well, be personally transformative, no question. And I’m fond of vodka, but it tends to lower not only my inhibitions but me as well, physically, to the floor, at least whenever I’ve drunk in Poland or with Poles. (The floor, I might add, particularly if a cool one, tile, is precisely where you want to be on those occasions—not least for spin reduction.) The bar strategy, alas, conflicts with my online work schedule, unless I reset my internal watch, now on Kraków time, but then I’d be working hung over, probably not a good practice.

The other thing I know is that the first thing I know doesn’t matter any more. Walking on the Planty one evening with Monika, I, we ran into a friend of hers, an Irishman, businessman, bar owner and operator, walking his dog. I mentioned, in English, that I was in Poland for six months—to work on my Polish. “You’ll need more than six months,” was his response. I’d need to work here, years, open up a bar and have it be really successful then have the landlords raise your rent through the roof and have to relocate and start the whole process over again. The point being, though he didn’t realize that he was making it to my readers, is that it’s impossible to make real headway in this language in six months (even after two years in the classroom) and the other point being, which he really did not know he was making, was that the place for a serendipitous learner to learn not so much what he needs to know, but how he needs to know about Poland… is in Poland. On my first browse in a Polish bookstore I find Kim są Polacy, the essential short conversation on modern Polishness. You’d never find this book in an American bookstore, of course, and probably couldn’t find it on Amazon unless you were looking specifically for it, which is not serendipitous, is it? On my second browse in a different bookstore I find Wielka Encyklopedia Staro-Polska, “The Great Encyclopedia of Old Poland.” Bought it, two for two. And in the opening note to his gracious readers, I read “W żadnym razie nie jest dziełem naukowym: to gawęda.” (My reading seems to be improving, by the way.) Which is to say, “In no case is this a scholarly work: it’s a story.” A gawęda is a Polish prose form, a loose, conversational account in a personal voice with frequent digression, and while this particular gawęda is heavily footnoted, the point is taken. Serendipity would seem a typical Polish habit of mind, though the closest word they seem to have for it is przypadkość, “casualness, randomness.” Becoming Polish then would seem to be not only a destination, a distant final expression, but a distinctive process for becoming so, deferred, oblique, and penultimately uncertain.

Which brings to mind that lovely poem by Adam Zagajewski, coming out of the Communist experience, but equally applicable to western, rationalistic, capitalist bureaucracies of any sort and their current rage for accountancy.

Plans, Reports

                                    First there are plans

then reports

This is the language

we know how to communicate in

Everything must be foreseen

Everything must be

confirmed later

What really happens

doesn’t attract anyone’s attention

                        (Spoiling Cannibals’ Fun, 1991, p. 154)

Mundek

This week, I have been taking care of Dr. Banaś’s cat, Mundek. They have cats in Poland. Which has gotten me to thinking, is Mundek a Polish cat? He’s not a Polish breed of cat. I know that there are Polish dog breeds, horse breeds, sheep breeds, chicken breeds, and rabbit breeds, from which one could argue national identity, but I don’t know if there is a cat breed that has originated here; or if there is one, whether Mundek is of that breed. Whether polskość is bred in his blood. Probably not, he just looks like a regular cat, a universal cat. What, if anything, makes him different from the American cats I’ve superintended in my life? Oh, yes: he plays soccer.

Metamorfoza

With the help of an online translator, I have managed to render Adam Zagajewski’s essay, Metamorfoza, into reasonable, readable English—for the most part. Useful as a translator can be, it is not, strictly speaking, a “translator,” but more of a translational tool or aid; so if you go to these sites expecting anything like a pristine fair copy, you don’t truly understand the ridiculously complex—impossible actually—task of converting one language into another. In linguistics, social sciences, the arts and humanities, E never equals mc². There’s always a remainder, it’s usually irrational, and sometimes the most important part of the answer.

In response to the question, “Who are Poles?” Zagajewski speaks to today’s Poles, post-Communist era, or post post-Communist era Poles. He argues that the previous generation of Polish intellectuals—which included the great poets Miłosz, Szymborska, and Herbert, among many other artists and intellectuals, now passing away—represents a higher achievement of Polishness, polskość, than even the great Romantic generations of  the 19^th century—Mickiewicz, Chopin, Siękiewicz. While both generations, in my mind, preserved and advocated a Polishness that made the reinvention of a Polish state possible in the 1920s and in the post-Communist 1990s, respectively, Zagajewski particularly credits this latter restoration with a broader, a more universalist perspective, less “Polsko-centryczną”—“Polish-centered.” (54) And, I think, a more secular one. Thinking of themselves in western or European or in universal terms in earlier times, Poles accorded themselves the status of defender of Christianity, savior, and even messiah. (They were not alone, of course, in wishful self-regard. I’ve studied American exceptionalism at length.) Such self-appointed roles can improve a nation’s self-esteem, even give it a mission, I grant, but it betrays a certain cultural insecurity as well, and Zagajewski will have none of that. Cultural insecurity betrays a second-rate culture, along with a number of lingering traits from earlier forms of polskość, such as anti-Semitism.

The metamorphosed Pole of whom Zagajewski speaks with moderate optimism appeals to me as a more achievable, if less dashing, Polish identity than any prior form—19^th century gentleman exile, Golden Age szlachta, eternal peasant, mythic Sarmatian—in part, because after fifty American years, I’m already Polishly de-centered. As much as my intellect looks elsewhere, here, to Poland, for perspective and points of triangulation, I can never be Polishly ethnocentric. And those old centricities are now eccentricities; I’ll eagerly visit them, but now concede that I likely won’t be able to long inhabit them. As Zagajewski has written elsewhere, “we always seek what’s gone for good.” (Another Beauty, 10)  But, of course.

Na Skałce

I attended service today at St. Stanisław’s, also known as Na Skałce, “On the Rock,” one of the more notorious sites in Polish ecclesiastico-political history. Here, or somewhere in the vicinity of this church, it is thought that Stanisław of Szczepanów, then Bishop of Kraków, was killed at the behest of the king, Bolesław II, also known as Śmiały, “the Bold”—though you might call him “the Impetuous,” given the outcome. The story, of course, because it took place in 1079, is sketchy and our sympathies can vary. Davies likens Stanisław to Thomas à Becket, the English Archbishop of Canterbury (Richard Burton in the movie), who was killed by his erstwhile friend and patron, Henry II (Peter O’Toole in the movie) for asserting the rights and privileges of the Church against the power and privileges of the throne. (Because the Bishop of Kraków’s assassination preceded the Archbishop of Canterbury’s by a century, Becket should probably be considered the English Stanisław, but Szczepanów is not as crisp a movie title. Good flick, though.) At any rate, Stanisław had “repeatedly denounced the oppressions of King Bolesław II and…fomented a baronial rebellion against him.” (Davies, I, 70) So, it seems, Bolesław was not without a case, but in those days, rulers didn’t entertain a lot of options or exercise a great deal of restraint. Stanisław was promptly killed and allegedly quartered, a gruesome and rather supremely counterproductive act of political theater, a finger of the bishop finding its way into the parish font whose waters thereby acquired miraculous healing powers. Outrage turned public opinion against Śmiały, and he was driven from Wawel Castle, never to return, even as a corpse. He’s one of the few early Polish kings not encrypted there. Stanisław, on the other hand, became a saint, the patron saint of Poland; his bones were collected and deposited in a silver coffin which constitutes the feature reliquary of the royal cathedral on Wawel Hill. From the Rock to the Hill, and ecclesiastico-political immortality.

 

The church itself, “On the Rock” is not, of course, the physical building that Stanisław presided within as Bishop of Kraków. Large and handsome now, what I attended is an 18^th-century Baroque superstructure, marble and lavish gilt trim, built on or over the original, probably three or four times over in succeeding styles. Stanisław was not Baroque, more primitively probably just Roque, such that the space he occupied, celebrated mass in, was more likely where or near the Crypt is today. (The Rock itself as Church.) And the Crypt, in and on the Rock, is famous as the final resting place for some of Poland’s greatest cultural heroes: Jan Długosz, the medieval historian/chronicler (whose work I have yet to find in translation); Stanisław Wyspiański , the modernist literary lion who died young, at 38; and now Czesław Miłosz, the poet, essayist, and Nobel Laureate. I’ve been reading much Miłosz lately, one of the most accomplished minds of the 20^th century and active even into the 21^st. What particularly fascinates me about Miłosz is how a man, essentially of secular mind, who had experienced in first-hand ways the most trying events of the 20^th century, a man who appears to have read everything important in the most sympathetic and critical of spirits, whose mind, or one comparable, I would love to have—if I weren’t so lazy and didn’t have to suffer much to get it—how this man managed to remain a believer.

He wrote once that “Polish Catholicism, despite its having profoundly penetrated the Polish mind…has remained above all an attachment to the liturgy” (Native Realm, 83). Something about the habit of going to church and hearing its word sustained a Pole in belief, a habit which I’m returning to in “hope”—might be too strong a word—that it might reveal something about religion and Polishness. But Miłosz himself was not a believer out of habit and ritual, though he could appreciate its trappings:

I am fond of sumptuous garments and disguises

Even if there is no truth in the painted Jesus.

 

Sometimes believing, sometimes not believing,

With others like myself I unite in worship.

                                      (“Consciousness,” 432)

 Like all of us, he looked for “visible signs,” bid them, small, secret, personal miracles:

                                    Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church
                                    Lift its hand, only once, just once, for me.
                                                                            (“Veni Creator, 223)

They did not come, of course, and in their absence, he seems to approve of “Helene’s Religion,” who recites “the Our Father, the Credo and Hail Mary/against [her] abominable unbelief.” Because Helene’s inspiration appears to be not the Word or words—of which this poet is wisely skeptical—and not mere instinct, but a silent, intuitive, mystical logic in response to physical life and human experience. 

But in this world there is too much ugliness and horror.

So there must be, somewhere, goodness and truth.

And that means somewhere God must be.
                                                                 (652)

 

 

Your Man in Kraków

Life updates: I no longer wash with a sock. Polish dish rags, I find, make much better wash cloths than they do dish rags. As dish rags, they don’t really absorb the water so much as smear it about the surface of the glassware, or the counter top, distributing the moisture over a wider surface area so as to facilitate evaporation rather than absorbing it directly and hanging on a rack later to dry. (Poles also air dry their laundry, which I have now done once. It works as it must have worked in the olden days.) Folded into quarters, these yellow synthetic wipes are about the right size, thickness, softness, and latherability, and while not a wash cloth, they’re definitely an improvement over a sock. Similarly successfully, the shower challenge has been met. I can now confidently locate, with the shower joystick, the precise angle, pitch and yaw at which hot water and civilization can be sustained.

About an earlier visit to Poland, I wrote disparagingly, or at least not graciously, of its food in general and its bread in particular. I hereby correct myself on the latter, feasting daily and variously on “good Krakow bread.” (Zagajewski, Another Beauty, 91) Cyganski, góralski, staropolski, bieszczadski, galicyjski, słoneczniki—a different style not for every day of the week, but almost for every day of the month, or at least every day of  the fortnight. And while Poles reportedly complained about a recent rise in price, a loaf that can feed a man for two days costs about a dollar American. I take it unsliced, so that I can cut it and into it myself, with a bread knife I bought instead of the wash cloth, in thick slabs, thick as a book, thick as my new missal, and smelling divine of yeast and seed and rye. In the U.S. you make a special trip for bread like this; here, there’s a bakery, a piekarnia, on almost every block, sometimes two, though, I guess I made a special trip. As for the food in general, I’m not yet convinced. I took my first plate of bigos this week, a “hunter’s stew” of sauerkraut and various meats, which I can’t fault for taste or heartiness, but you know why it’s a hunter’s stew: it’s something you will want to have eaten out of doors.

The snow fell all day today. Hot water, bread, beauty make for the good life in Poland.

 

Ojcze Nasz

While out and about on Thursday, beneath that understated but very real sun, I picked up a missal at the bookstore behind Mariacki. Actually, the shop sells all manner of religious, that is to say, Catholic equipage, including vestments for the priesthood—which were a shade pricy for me just now. But the little missal, Jezus, Maryja, Józef, was perfect, black, compact, a solid little pocket catechism at only 15 zł. I can remember thinking, in my solemn pre-altarboyhood, how wonderfully portable everything essential to your salvation could be, especially if the edition had a zipper pocket in the front plastic cover for a rosary or a scapular. Like a smartphone, but for your soul.

My first church experiences here, at Mariacki and at St. Peter and Paul’s, have been like my profane experiences in Polish life, familiar enough, but at the same time, linguistically almost perfectly unintelligible. I catch isolated words, maybe a prepositional phrase or two, an idiomatic formula here and there, but mostly I’m mute, and more importantly, in times of doubt, fearful that I’m ever really going to catch on—so many words, with infinite combinations, such sublime and punctilious grammar, and so goddamn fast. What’s a sinner to do?

I’ve memorized the Lord’s Prayer, Modlitwa Pańska. It’s taken an afternoon to figure out its movement, the technicalities of the grammar, the archaisms, and the particular word choices. Curious that neither the English nor the Polish bids for the forgiveness of “sins”: the English chooses quaintly for “trespass,” while the Polish opts for “faults” or collectively, “guilt,” (wina/y). And it will be some time before I can recite the Polish, if ever, with the automaticity that I can the English, sunk even as I am now in apostasy. But putting the prayer to memory has inspired effort, focused my mind on a task, and in its provisional achievement, encouraged me that such off-beat, seemingly arcane and infinitesimal exercises may be the best way forward, perhaps my only way. I’ve seen advertisements for language-learning that promise proficiency in 10 days—second language learning as faith healing, instant karma. And I know the scholastic method and its various disciplines, its various orders. Neither is my way, which I’d characterize as stubbornly, idiosyncratically leisurely. And if the Polish I learn in my own way, out of poetry and children’s prayerbooks, is not the Polish of the morning chat shows, Pytania na Śniadania, (“Questions for Breakfast”), is that such a bad thing? If I spoke Polish the way Rooster Cogburn speaks English in True Grit (Coen Brothers’ edition), that would be kind of cool, kind of Polish the way I want to be, charmingly alien, antique, though I admit, it’s no way to run a country or a modern economy or probably even a church.     

Photographic Evidence

Though of course it can be doctored, I’m presenting photographic evidence that a winter sun does shine in Kraków. Exhibit A: Town Hall Tower—see that buttery brightness, high on the left shoulder. Exhibit B : Wawel Cathedral—notice, shadows! and the unusual brightness of the gilded dome of the Zygmunt Chapel, under which lie the remains of the Jagiełłonian dynasty. Exhibit C: normally inky green, almost black, what is the source of that bright path reflecting off the River Wisła? Exhibit D: observe the whiteness, the białoność, of that quartet of swans in diamond formation flying low over the river, otherwise unremarkable.

 

 

For almost two weeks, under low gray skies, in fog and wet white flurries, and the constant sifting of winter flour, I’ve hastily visited my old city haunts and run my daily errands. The cold, though hardly frigid by Minnesota standards, would drip down my neck and collect in the toes of my half boots, keeping me otherwise indoors with the dictionary. But Thursday, the sun dawned and endured through the afternoon, not blazingly or blindingly, but incandescently and warmly enough, to bring me more leisurely into the streets. Kraków, and Poland generally, has an elegiac quality—loss, displacement is big here. But that sense of loss doesn’t seem to succumb to despair. The sun has shone often enough in winter, long enough and warmly enough to sustain a city for a thousand years.