Until then

I cut off today my Polish moustaches. I’ve been considering it since I returned. They did their work, inspired my look and framed my mouth with Old Polishness, but they do not appear to have improved my language skills particularly, that is to say, magically. And nonverbal communication can only go so far, even to the point of miscommunication, misrepresentation. Last Saturday at the Minnesota State Fair, wearing my moustaches and my Kraków T-shirt, I heard someone from the crowd call out dzień dobry, to which I responded, dzień dobry, but could take it spontaneously no farther, alas, szkoda. (A Polish graduate student in Horticulture.) I have yet, it seems, to have genuinely earned those silver stripes. I feel no less Polish now in their detachment, nor any less committed to the enterprise. Rather, I’ll proceed in my natural-born disguise, the baby-faced Amerykaninem. Until then.

Blue Moon

As a respite from the annual carnage in Długosz’s Roczniki, I turned to Zbigniew Herbert’s collected prose. He wrote informedly and well about the classics, French cathedral architecture, painting and painters, especially of the Renaissance—Piero della Francesca. But for some reason—an ethnic catastrophist streak among Poles?—he recounts a tale of the Inquisition, of Inquisitors getting their just deserts, martyrdom: “Though it is difficult to feel sympathy for an institution called the Inquisition, one has to respect the courage of people who enter unarmed a place known as a hotbed of heresy, in a de facto state of war…. When the door breaks down under the blows of axes, the friars kneel on the floor and begin to sing Salve Regina. The slaughter is full of fury and cruelty. Sources tell us that the broken skull of Guillaume Arnaud was used as a drinking cup by his murderer.” (122) I much prefer to live in an age when the bleached bones of our enemies are not considered suitable for stemware.

On a lighter note, and one having nothing vaguely to do with Polish sensibility, or do I repeat myself, I am happy to report under this August blue moon, the fourth full moon of a season, that Dino’s boat, the Lua, lost on the 17^th of June, drifted a hundred something miles almost due east, been recovered, towed to the west coast of Ireland by “a realy [sic] nice gentleman,” and secured in a shipyard for repairs. He hopes to sail her home to the Azores next summer. May God bless the realy nice.