Always, eventually November

Accommodations in steerage secured, yet I’m no closer to Poland. The remains of this year, the days, the moments pass by not swiftly enough, and though now closer in time, I feel myself no closer in spirit, as my language drifts away about equally. Busy with work and lazy without, I don’t study, feeling both anxious and becalmed, anxious because becalmed. Such are the intimations of November, the month of the fallen leaves, listopad.

A colleague of my dear ex-wife, my była żona, (“was wife,” I love that) importuned upon hearing of my travel plans, “Has he ever been on the ocean?” On the Atlantic? In the winter?

No.

Hereinafter the Passenger

As the news of my appointment circulates among family, friends, and my university community, I receive attention, congratulation, good wishes, and one question: Aren’t you excited? No, actually, not that I’m aware. I’ve never been a particularly excitable boy.  And after eight years of remote possibility and over two more of stated intention and increasing likelihood, going to Poland seems the most natural thing in the world. Next step. Not quite as predictable or periodic as the sun coming up, but certainly logical and consequent, maybe casually destined.

This week I’m reading the terms of my contract for carriage aboard cargo vessels, and the reading is much to be preferred to the small print of airline tickets and the user agreements of electronic devices and social networks. It reads of a previous century, maybe two. The passenger is “asked to kindly take note of the following important information” as to “the peculiarities of passage aboard a cargo vessel.” As mentioned in my previous blog entry, the passenger, hereinafter, “the passenger,” must be able-bodied and visibly so with a certificate from a doctor verifying fitness. In “cases of doubt” as to fitness even with a certificate, the passenger may be subject to “a medical examination by the Association of Seafarers.” Who would not want to be examined by the Association of Seafarers and pronounced fit for duty? Who would not want to be enrolled in their company, the men who go down to the sea in ships? Fitness, the contract advises us, is “a matter of principle.” Ancient idea.

Among other ancient ideas, we find obedience and good order: “all passengers shall be subject to the authority and rules of the captain and the officers of the vessel.” Consumers, customers are not a law unto themselves here, and in fact, on a cargo vessel, are pretty much afterthoughts; “the transportation of cargo essentially takes precedence over the interests of passengers.” We seem almost to be paying for the privilege of being considered potential flotsam and jetsam. Rather tonic, refreshing. In the event of any of the following, the carrier may discontinue the passage and disembark the passenger at the nearest port of the carrier’s convenience:

Force majeure, marine, port and river risks or risks related to other navigable waters, actions taken by public or government agencies, epidemics, collisions, shipwrecks, fire, errors in the navigation or control of this or any other vessel, confiscation or seizure of the vessel as part of a legal procedure, sudden or unexpected shortage of fuel, war, hostile actions, civil war, terrorism, piracy, riots, strike or industrial action or any other causes and circumstances outside the control and responsibility of the carrier.

(Talk about covering your aft.)

So, Josh, are you excited yet? Maybe a little.

Transatlanticism

Yesterday I authorized my bank to wire a deposit reserving a cabin on a container ship, Rickmers Shanghai, “or [a] sister vessel,” for my Atlantic passage. Departure from Philadelphia, enchantingly imprecise, is listed as “on about [sic] early January 2013.” Apparently we still sail, rather, by the seat of our pants when once we flew. I emailed as well some personal information to the marine contractor. The form requires that travelers be able-bodied, given that, unlike cruise ships, no doctor is aboard; “Passengers must be able to walk and care for themselves unaided.” Check. They do not transport exiles over the age of 75. Understandable, no problem. Their stipulation that “[h]ealth/accident insurance is mandatory for the duration of the entire freighter voyage” as well as “insurance covering international emergency medical evacuation” reminds one how fragile life can seem on the high seas and how effing expensive it must be to preserve it in extremis. The total cost, thus, of ocean-going one-way amounts to almost double the cost of round-trip airfare, so that tramp-steaming is not for tramps anymore. Freighter travel caters to the more upscale vagabond.

I was charmed to learn that my port of destination will be Antwerp, in Belgium. Initial discussions had me leaving Charleston, North Carolina, and arriving in either Hamburg or Bremerhaven, which is closer, I suppose, to Poland, but much less poetic. You see, when my grandfather emigrated from Europe in 1902, he departed from Antwerp and landed in Philadelphia. Forth and back.

And of course, ironically, the headline from today’s Polskieradio: Kontenerowiec Huelin Renouf zderzył się ze skała u wybrzeży Alderney, jedną z Wysp Normandskich. “The container ship Huelin Renouf collided with a rock near the shore of Alderney, one of the Channel Isles off Normandy.” One's Polish is always just good enough to read headlines like that.

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.