Lufthansa

My foray draws to an undistinguished close. We’re at T-minus 10—days, give or take. There is too much to do to make much of an accounting just now. The mother of my children, best friend, and byłą żoną, (“was wife”) has shown up at my rooms and requires some attention. I walk her about. In the process of my revisiting tourist mainstays with her, she, more curious, or at least differently curious, pushes lines of inquiry and social interaction—dining, drinking coffee, thrift shop visitation just for fun, and farmer’s market questing in search of asparagus and strawberries—that make me wonder if the only Poland I might realistically enter at some point in the distant future exists behind the walls of a monastery, one in which the brothers have taken a vow of silence. Thankfully, there are a number to choose from.

The only indication that colloquial Polish has taken any root in my unconscious—where it must reside to make real progress—emerged on my melancholy flights back, cholera, “home.” Flying Lufthansa, when interacting with the flight attendants, I should have been able to use, or even default to, my not very good German, but my natural instinct—since Germany is a foreign country—was to use a foreign language, but the foreign language that came out was my not very good Polish. (The flight attendants, of course, speak much better English than I do anything else.) Even when I tried, consciously, to recall my German, bad Polish blocked most of my efforts. I managed a decent German sentence or two with my seatmate, a Tamil whose German was perfect and whose English was commendable. It can be done it seems. But maybe you have to be a woman.

Mr Cogito Advises

Back in Kraków. En route to Jesse’s funeral, I passed my hours flipping around in Zbigniew Herbert, from Elegy on the Departure and Epilogue to a Storm to Mr Cogito, who, reflecting on suffering, advises that “All attempts to avert/the so-called cup of bitterness—/by mental effort/… let you down.”  So, “drink [the] extract of bitter herbs/but not to the dregs/be careful to leave/a few gulps for the future”. A poet who suffered no shortage of horror, emotional distress, and physical pain, his alter ego, Mr Cogito’s voice is hardly a balm. “You have to consent,” he says, “gently bow your head/not wring your hands/ use suffering mildly with moderation.” Practically, “accept it/but at the same time/isolate it in yourself/and if it is possible/make from the stuff of suffering/a thing or a person/play/with it/of course/play/…with silly tricks/a wan/smile.” I think the operative notion here is “if possible.” We won’t be playing anytime soon. But already we smile wanly. (279)

Tough as his counsel reads, I do prefer it to the social conventions and the moist politesse of communal grieving—grieving from which there is no escape and for which no satisfactory language has been invented. Not even music. Not even silence. As bad as the worst in opening my mouth at all, I trust that the roar of grief in their ears engulfed any words I managed to utter and that only one’s simple presence will be remembered.

Such heartbreak always makes us wonder what we’re doing, why we are here. If home is nowhere other than that place where brothers gather to eat and drink, watch the Bucs and Penguin hockey, and mourn the loss of sons and nephews, what am I doing in Poland? Well, I suppose, we have to gather from somewhere.

Jesse

When I posted yesterday’s photo, I did not realize that the storm was gathering for my family, a beloved brother and his wife, my parents, and their grandson, Jesse and his sister. Jesse took his own life yesterday, a lovely young man, talented, intelligent, in the throes apparently of being and coming out in a world still uncomfortable with, even hostile at times, to its own variety. He could not have chosen better parents, and his friendships seemed to abound. There was no shortage of love. It is the hardest of realities, that sometimes all the love in this imperfect world isn’t enough. Let the tears fall like rain. 

Almost Summer in the City

Storm over Mariacki

Birds of the Planty: Lesson One, The Pigeon

The common pigeon, gołąb, pronounced not unlike “GO-wamp,” has a privileged place here in Kraków. I’ve yet to figure out completely why. At my house in St. Paul, they roost loosely and noisily in my brackets, making themselves all too cozy amidst the anti-pigeon measures. They befoul my air conditioner, chimney, and sidewalk. I don’t encourage them and sometimes disrupt their comfort with a tennis ball.

Here, pigeons receive nurture. The obwarczanek ladies routinely gorge them on old product and from the crumbs and seeds they brush out of the box. (Waste of mek, if you ask me.) And I’m well aware that some people raise them, “their birds,” as a hobby, for racing and homing and who knows what else. Manuals about their care have been written for this audience, no doubt, but I have never seen one in a U.S. bookstore—and I’ve been to a few—nestled away in some obscure, inaccessible corner shelf next to the Historical Essays of Henry Adams. But in Kraków, The Atlas of Pigeons finds a conspicuous place in the main street bookshop window, next to the trendy Cultivate Grapes and one window over from the complete Miłosz.

Atlas of Pigeonry

And they figure sympathetically in Polish poetry. In Zagajewski’s “Exploding Man,” the explosion enveloping the man is just a flock of pigeons at their feeding, prompted to fly off by fear, which in my experience on the Rynek, approaches in the form of three year old boys. But they fly off as “skrzydlatach przyjaciół człowieka” (“winged friends of  [the] man”).

An Implosion of Pigeons

Speculating here, but I wonder if this is relevant…Today was Pentacost Sunday, and First Holy Communion at Kościół Święta Floriana, and during the sermon on the Holy Spirit, I definitely caught the word gołąb, but probably gołąbnica, the diminutive of gołąb, meaning “dove.” In English, the relation between pigeons and doves (they are essentially the same bird family) is linguistically obscured. In Polish, while there may be a size distinction, you’re definitely in the Paraclete family, the emblem of the Holy Spirit, the Emissary of God. That is, pigeons here approach the sacred, which may account for this weird photographic association I have had in my head for at least a month now.

Red-eyed Saints

Peter and Paul's Gate

 

 

 

 

 

Polish Moustache, Revisited: The January Uprising of 1863

There are more moustaches, per capita, in Poland than in the United States, and not only because what would be considered a moustache in the U.S. would be considered two “moustaches” (wąsy, a plural noun) in Poland. That would be cheating, or thesis-mongering at its most academic.  Rather, more precisely, there are, currently, more moustaches per capita among the population of men, middle-aged and older in Poland, than in the U.S. The young, well, what can you do about them, but my generation of lads, while perhaps not up to the snuff of previous generations, absolutely glorious in their facial feathering, seem to be holding their own respectably these days. (For a look at a previous generation, I share this website sent by my cousin, Grzegorz, who was trying to make the case for beards as an expression of Polishness, though he himself, a Polsko-Swede, is clean-shaven, excellent ponytail, though. I simply point out that every bearded or goateed veteran insurrectionist of the January Uprising in this photofile has a moustache as well—except, of course, the two ladies, who aren’t bearded either. Proszę patrz: http://histmag.org/Weterani-powstania-styczniowego-w-II-RP-6794.)

So how do I know? I’ve been watching, attending to the upper lips of my fellow men on the street, and it just seems like, you know, there are more of us here per capita in that demographic. I haven’t counted. I haven’t taken any pictures—that seems a little intrusive to me. But I do protect against confirmation bias by asking myself if my impressionistic take on the question is biased, and most of the time I don't think it is. And then people are always coming up to me on the street and asking for directions. Me. Explain that. Foreigners and Poles! I never get asked for directions in America. Perhaps it’s because I look too Polish. Sadly, neither my language nor my sense of direction is up to the standard of my moustache. If only acculturation were that easy.

Young Cracovians

Young Cracovians in Native Costume

Wisła

I never cared much for swimming as an activity, or diving. I can swim and dive proficiently, well enough to stay alive in the water and not embarrass myself on a one-meter diving board, but the real joy (I suppose, if there is such a thing) of swimming must require rhythmic breathing, at which I do not excel. It requires having rhythm. And diving hurts my head. But I can tread water with anybody, which seems to be an apt parallel for language immersion—for me. After four months here, I can survive. I just don’t get anywhere, except as I drift, and I don’t drift fast. I’m okay with that.


No Swimming

Swimming in the Wisła anyway is banned, or technically, bathing of any sort. Not that anyone would want to. There’s no beach, and it’s a rather murky stream right at the Wawel bend and as far along it as I have walked. Driftwood plys the current, sometimes in floating nests, and snags raise their reptilian heads. Litter and plastic bottles form small, temporary sargassos, then break up. Odd sculptures bask inexplicably in the sun.


Swine Backstroke

But swans still wing along the Wisła’s lengths (okay, they’re sometimes a little on the dingy side) as do sculls, which the swans sometimes seem to mistake as swans and take up after. The Wisła still connects all of Poland, from the Carpathians to the Baltic. And it glitters yet under the sun, a bathing against which there is no proscription, even in your underwear, and regardless of age or beauty. I keep my head up out of the water to see this Wisła.

Happy Marshal's Day

Today marks the anniversary of the death of Józef Piłsudski, the greatest hero of the Second Polish Republic and the owner and proprietor of its most splendid moustache. His words to historians, “I only ask that you not make me out to be a ‘whiner and sentimentalist’,” inspire me neither to whine nor sentimentalize—except to say, to my mother, “Hey, Bob, have a good one.”

Juwenalia

Juwenalia is one of those social reversal rituals in which the unempowered are empowered, within reason, and the powerful take some time off. In Kraków this week, the unempowered are university students, who parade up St. Anne's Street in all manner of costume—no nation, creed, occupation, race, species, or Polish beer brand goes scantily unmisrepresented—and pool about a stage on the Rynek where their spokesperson receives the key to the city until next Friday. Not just the car, the city, for a week. I wanted to yell, “Don’t take it kids, it’s a trap!” But brać is irregular, and I couldn’t remember its imperfect, imperative form (To nie brajcie?) or the affectionate, colloquial term for “kids” or if I should use the vocative, or the word for "trap," pułapka, which I've not had need of until today. I was no help. It’s too late for them. One of their number walked by me in a T-shirt emblazoned “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” Oh, yeah, that'll work.

Smurfs, Santa, Nurse, Leprechaun

Silent Majority



Stage

 

Real Cops, Not Students Convincingly Costumed as Such

My generation, Dr. Banaś and I, attended Novena this evening, where I got to use zmiłuj się nad nami more than once. We devoted a half hour to Our Lady at the Church of the Dominicans, which has a special chapel for academics, older ones.

I almost dreamed in Polish

I almost dreamed in Polish on Wednesday, but I don’t think it counts. It was during a short nap, drzemka krótka, and it didn’t involve the spoken word but the written. Having memorized the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, I’ve been working on The Creed and Mass responses. I read my missal and Zagajewski’s poetry on the banks of the Wisła under the summery noonday sun, pod słoncem. Then I walk along the river and recite to myself before returning to my mieszkanie for a short nap and then work online. And there it was, printed and instantaneously understood in my subconscious mind’s eye, zmiłuj się nad nami, “have mercy on us.” (Hear, hear! But I digress.) Curious that I seem most fluent to myself in those subliminal moments moving in and out of sleep, somewhere just behind the filter of consciousness—and grammatical inhibition. Who knows whether I am, actually, fluent, whether or not my subconscious mind spelled zmiłuj correctly? But I’m getting there, even if, at the moment, I’m most Polish when falling asleep.

Old School

The Collegium Maius, just off the Rynek, is the original site of the oldest university in Poland and one of the oldest in the world. I can’t recall exactly if it’s one of the top twenty or top twenty-five senior universities, but it’s been around awhile and operating continuously for over 600 years. Granted papal license in 1363, chartered in 1364, with instruction commencing in 1367, then re-endowed and rechartered in 1399 as the Jagiełłonian University, this institution has produced its share of eminent faculty and alumni: academics, scientists, historians, artists, a hero-king and a pope. Foremost among them, Copernicus did his undergraduate work here.

The physical confines of the Collegium are now mostly devoted to museum display, though a few of its halls still function at times of high academic ritual. The premises are restored, and few restorations restore so authentically, incorporate the surviving foundations and walls and court details from the medieval period like this one. The corner stones are thought to be original. I took the tour this week, a little self-conscious that I have “lectured” here—well, out in a suburban campus classroom—and have been asked to do so again, to Dr. Banaś’s colleagues, about university culture in the United States. Having lived and worked and done almost all of my thinking and reading in American universities for the last thirty-five years, I can claim some authority on the subject, but when visiting a place like the Collegium Maius, it is phenomenally easy to consider oneself a fraud, or at least a lightweight. Phenomenally. I take comfort in knowing that I’m probably not the only offender, nor likely the biggest, to have slipped obscurely through the passages of the Jagiełłonian over those 600 years.

Original Buttress

Old Stones

Into the courtyard, then up the steps, we enter the Library through the Golden Gate under the clock.

Cloister staircase

Golden Gate to the Library

The tour of the interior did not permit flash photography, so you will have to imagine the sumptuousness. The Romanesque vaults are brick, plastered over, the ceilings painted as if there were a sky overhead, with clouds; the walls are white, abundantly peopled with portrait paintings and busts of university worthies, medieval and recent. And of course, books, two walls of them, under glass, in cases ten feet high, in French. A large table with twenty-five armchairs, which served as the Faculty Senate meeting room until 1964. Imagine sumptuousness here.

 

Into the Common Room ca 1450, where the professors dined under a low, hugely timbered ceiling at a massive U-shaped board, listening to readings from Pismo Święte. An absolutely gorgeous, carved spiral staircase from the Baroque era rises through a hole in the ceiling to where, I’m not quite sure (we didn’t tour the upper level), but my reference book tells me that the staircase was more or less hijacked from a manor house in Gdańsk, after its destruction in 1945.

 

The First and Second Treasury rooms were next on the itinerary. The presence of two treasuries concerns me a bit. I was going to use a quote from a former Jagiełłonian rector, Tomasz Strzępino, as the starting point of a high-minded worry that universities had recently and radically shifted to the practices of market-based institutions (“duh”), as opposed to intellectual value-based institutions. He had observed, in 1432, that “'the purpose of this institution is not to amass wealth'” (The History of the University in Europe, I, 135), and yet, over a rather long period of time, the Jagiełłonian University seems to have done pretty well for itself. Nie ma nic nowego pod słoncem, I suppose, but that would seem to make a vanity of my worries and of lecturing (preaching) in general. I am somewhat relieved to learn that the items in these treasuries, though antiques, silver and gold and narwhal tooth, derive much of their value from their association with Jagiełłonian alumni and the history of the life of the mind: ceremonial chains, a Persian rug with threads of gold and silver, the only surviving drawing by Wit Stwosz, Wisława Szymborska’s Nobel Medal. That is to say, that sumptuousness which accrues naturally and accidentally as a result of learning and academic virtue is not inconsistent with the principle articulated by Rector Strzępino. But if money, always a fact of university life, becomes instead a goal, a primary value, a dominating discourse, then university as I imagine it comes undone.

 

The most interesting rooms, and the most humbling ones for me, are, like the Copernicus Room, filled with period astronomical and astrological instruments, dazzling in the complexity of their craftsmanship, purpose, and operation. Astrolabes, sextants, sundials, mechanical clocks, telescopes, globes and globes of the skies, and Napier’s bones (a calculating instrument by the inventor of logarithms, ca 1617). I confess, I have not numbers nor equations, only words, imprecise, not universal, easily misunderstood—as opposed to simply not understood, like calculus. So much to know that I haven’t even the language for, or the hope of it. But I am asked to speak by a friend and a colleague, and it would be impolite to say “no.”

 

From the Copernicus room, I passed into the great Hall under the “inscription Plus ratio quam vis—let reason rule.”(39) Formerly this now magnificent space was the theologians’ lecture hall, the highest faculty in the medieval university, seating 104 in choirlike rows, with 102 portraits of kings, rectors, bishops, and professors now looking on from the walls. But the theologians are gone. Perhaps the humanists are next. My ideal image of the University, Old School, this hall serves as a museum and ceremonial space.

 

(Almost all the information in this post is drawn from Collegium Maius of the Jagiellonian University: History and guide to the Museum collections, Podlecki and Waltos, Cracow: Karpaty, 2005.)

Praca Kobiety

A holiday week, beginning with May Day, and yesterday being Trzeci Maj, stores and offices have limited hours or been closed altogether, even the 24-hour grocery across the street. But the International Cultural Center advertised that it would be open daily throughout the week, offering this exhibit: Praca Kobiety nigdy się nie kończy (“A woman’s work is never done”). The Polish insistence on the double negative is especially appropriate here. A collection of European prints on the theme, drawn from the late 15^th to the mid-19th century, including works by such major female artists as Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt van Rijn, it documents some of the hard realities and nasty aspersions, as well as a number of more encouraging images of the work life of women. I especially liked the feminine representations of the Seven Liberal Arts and the print of Phyllis riding herd on Aristotle. The exhibit, wystawa, closes in August. If you can’t make it, open your eyes and look around.

Woman at work on a Saturday

Third of May

Today is a national holiday in Poland, Trzeci Maj, a sort of combination Constitution Day and Independence Day, in honor of a constitution that never really went into effect and of the ensuing insurrection that resulted in Poland’s being completely erased from the roll call of states in 1797, a kingdom “’which shall remain suppressed from the present and forever’.” (542) Or until 1918, whichever comes first.

The document, the Constitution of the Third of May, presented a model of Enlightenment thinking—I haven’t read it yet—that was developed over time, then promoted and passed by a clique of idealistic Polish nationalists and intellectuals in a rump Sejm, probably without the benefit of a quorum. Even Karl Marx praised it as a singular, progressive effort, a quite unexpected offering from elements of the socio-economic elite. The patriots convinced their king, Stanisław-August Poniatowski, to sign it, much to the dismay of his former girlfriend, Catherine the Great of Russia, who preferred the Poles to misgovern themselves under the workings of their previous constitution, which tended to encourage chaos. The new constitution prompted another uprising, the military direction of which the great hero Kościuszko undertook, with some early success, defeating a Russian army at Racławice, owing largely to “the brave charge of Kościuszko’s peasant scythe-men.” (Davies, I, 539) When historians mention “peasant scythe-men,” or “the Guild of Slaughterers” in passing, we are reminded that more than ink is spilled in revolutions and attempted revolutions. (Davies, 529-546)

There are flags all over the place today, hanging randomly on every street, flying above the Kościuszko Mound, wafting damply over a tower at Wawel, draping the entrance to the Kościół Mariacki, festooning the Rynek; the colors are even worn as raincoats. I ponder the white half of the Polish flag, a flag which signals a humanity more than merely national: is it the blank page on which we write enlightened constitutions, or is it merely the unused rest of the bandage?

National & University Flags Over the Entrance to the Collegium Novum

Colors at the Blonia, the current greenspace and former drill grounds

Polish Lancers

Polish Lancers on the Blonia

Mickiewicz Monument Donning the Colors

At Mariacki

Over the Entrance to Mariacki