Ostatnie Dobre Słowo

A Vice Demigod (this is not a redundancy) in the university’s central office of Human Resources, Patti, has granted my request for a RECESS (Reduced Employment Costs thru Employee Salary Savings) appointment, providing that oh so necessary bureaucratic “last good word.” It’s officially so ON! baby.

Busy with work, I’ve had time only to attend to the extracurricular activities around becoming Polish. True, I have refinished Miłosz’s New and Collected Poems (1931-2001) and dipped into Kołokowski, as time permits, but only in translation, as the intellectually lazy do. The good word comes none too soon.

Small News

Submit, resubmit, resubmit one last time, then patiently await the final word. Such is work and life and work life under bureaucracy, even relatively efficient and benevolent bureaucratic institutions. While I await the final word on my recess appointment, anticipating a good one, I have begun travel planning and arranging residency. I had hoped to stay in my cousin’s newly purchased flat in Piasek, the “Sand” neighborhood in Kraków, next to Nowy Świat, the “New World,” but his real estate agent has already sublet it for the period of my stay. Efficient fellow. We’ll find something else, no worries. My cousin invites me to contact this agent, a lawyer whose last name is Cygan, the Polish word for “gypsy.” A lawyer and a gypsy, he speaks no English, so I will have to email him in my halted and halting Polish. Writing to a gypsy lawyer in a difficult language—no worries.

As for travel, I’m trying to book Atlantic passage on a boat, a container ship, a kind of homage to my grandfather’s comings and goings, though, of course, my living conditions and experience will be epochally different from his. But I do imagine that being out of the sight of land for whole days and nights at a time, an entire week and more, on vast seas both sunny and sunless, under measureless starry night skies, a guy, a fifty-plus year old man, might feel something of the restless energy of an eighteen year old immigrant or the ambitious hope of a forty year old family man returning to Poland to live his dream. I, virulently unromantic, am not uncurious about you people. 

Old Dog

One problem with reading and rereading Czesław Miłosz is that I am prompted to write poetry. (The problem comes in not being a poet.) Something about his verse—the detached voice, the subject matters and the rhythm, the rhythm of the translation, anyway—triggers imitation, a kind of call-and-response, a Slavic dozens in which one is doomed to a worsting. And so, here it is.

Invitation to an Old Dog

At eighty-seven, Czesław Miłosz was writing

poetry, Roadside Dog, “Piesek przydrożny.”

At eighty-seven, my father watches Fox.

(I refuse to call it “News,” “Fox Lies” then.)

And he dozes, thankfully, before the big screen.

Rancor and unreason are a tiring business,

lucrative, though, it seems to howlers and yippers.

Sleep, Old Dog, the Bucs’ll be on in an hour.

Retired now for a quarter of a century,

you would seem to have done nothing.

Watch the world through that perverse window,

eat sweets, complain about your body’s demise…

(And grouse that medical science doesn’t understand it. “You’re eighty-seven, you’re an old man!”)

As if its demise had nothing to do

with sitting all day in front of the TV,

(Recall how you taunted your children for that very habit)

absorbing the poisonous rays like Madame Curie.

Yes, I guess, you’ve golfed religiously,

taken skins from your fellow old men—in quarters,

a couple of bucks a week over the years adds up.

And from me, damn you, that is something.

Too, you have bestowed upon your second son

a mission to revisit the evenings of our forefathers

in the dim and far-off past, in a difficult language.

No small gift, thank you for that.

And, yes, you have written your memoirs, which have their moments,

but only up to, not even up to, when you met the mother of your many children.

And not a word about losing your son. Not a word.

There is yet to write. Miłosz lived to ninety-three.

Białowieża

Little new to report on the process of my BecomingP, though what there is to report does encourage me even in my summer lassitude. A cousin, David, one of the provocateurs of the family’s reconnection to the old country, has closed on an apartment in Kraków, within walking distance of the market square, the rynek. Sweet, słodki. He has offered quarters therein if my recess request is approved. A meeting on that request, slightly, bureaucratically delayed, as bureaucracies are wont to do, will take place Monday, the 13^th. It will then be submitted to the Dean.

A colleague has returned from a trip to Poland, bearing gifts: soup mix, a refrigerator magnet, and photos, hundreds of photos. I peruse the ones particularly of Białowieża Puszcza, the considerable remains of the primeval forest that once covered most of northern Europe. Białowieża, (biały “white” and wieża “tower”) refers to a hunting lodge, legendarily built and apparently painted white, by Władysław Jagiełło in the early 15^th century, the first Polish king (he was Lithuanian) of the Jagiełło dynasty. Puszcza means “forest primeval” and echoes pustka, pustelna, pustelnik, pustkowie, pustoszyć, pusty, pustynia, words for “solitude,” “hermitage,” “hermit,” “desert/wilderness,” “devastate/lay waste,” “empty/hollow,” and “waste.” These images appeal particularly, sublimely and subliminally, to a Borowicz (bór “forest” and owicz “son of”). Poles are the people of the fields, of the pola or pol, but before the fields were the ancient oaks, five hundred years old and more, the deep woods, the fens, the swamps, and their denizens. Vestiges of those ancient beings reside still in these photos, though concealed, “see, there!” and recall our origins, all of our origins, and our youths.

 (Photos courtesy of Maggie Kubak)

Miłosz has a few lines in “Rivers Grow Small” that conjure our change of perception of our past owing to aging, but of the changelessness and universality of our initial perception.

The forest near the village of Halina once was for me primeval,

smelling of the last but recently killed bear,

though a ploughed field was visible through the pines. (198)

We all lived in Eden once—and Poland still has one, an original.

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.