Pan Szlachta

The Polish nobleman was a curious fur-bearing and saber-wielding creature of history and mythology. I ran into one today on the market square, unusual at this time of the millennium. The race pretty much died out in the 16^th and 17^th  century, at the latest. His image, though, will live indefinitely, if not forever, because the man had some style. But his figure and reputation are mixed, both the soul of the Golden Age and the Noble Democracy—patriotic, martial, and reasonably well-cultured—as well as an almost perfect parody of that soul—a boorish, self-interested, nay-sayer—for the century prior to Poland’s, and his, extinction. Mine proved an agreeable fellow on the whole, abundant of life and brotherhood and information, and snappily well-dressed, though I did briefly feel his steel at my throat. I attribute it to jealousy of my superior moustache. They could be touchy about such things.

In Heaven, Swearing

Sometimes at night, after working online, sitting six hours in a chair (but only six, and I do get up to make cups of tea from time to time), I’ll sit in bed translating a poem or a prayer and swear—in English, though I’ve learned the appropriate Polish and produce it fluently enough, I’m told. I swear because my brain is so slow, because my short-term memory and my long-term memory are about equally non-functional these days. How can you forget a word you’ve just looked up?! I’m like that guy in Memento, brain-injured, living in a world of sticky-note reminders, only mine are vocabulary, stuck to the pages of my books, which you would think I would have gotten into my brain by now, like słownictwo, “vocabulary,” which I have, though I just misspelled it. See. And I swear because my dictionaries, my Langenschiedt’s pocket and my big Kościuszko, are broken and defective. The binding of my Langenschiedt’s has released pages 759 to 771 from mandatory service, from ustać,”stop, cease” to zagnieździć się, “nestle, get a footing.” You cannot imagine how many words crucial to the understanding of whatever it is I happen to be reading just happen to fall between ustać and zagnieździć się. It’s uncanny how important the letter W is to understanding the Polish world. I’m holding on to the loose pages, but they’re usually across the room, and trying to keep them in order is itself an infuriating task. So I turn to Kościuszko, perfectly rich in W. But Kościuszko is bulky, “140,000 headwords, 400,000 meanings,” and my eyes are not what they used to be, and just as I get accustomed to hoisting Kościuszko into my lap—I’m guessing eight pounds—I’m reminded of its shortcomings, intermittently unprinted pages in S and T. I bought it online from one of those discount remainder-sellers. Now, between Langenscheidt and Kościuszko, I’ve got the language pretty much covered—except when the poets, damn them, cholera, invent words—but I have to remember to keep them both at hand. So there I am, in bed, in Poland, surrounded by books, with a cup of tea on the night stand, that is to say, “in Heaven,” w niebie, swearing.

First Herbert

Of the three greatest Polish poets of the post-war, Zbigniew Herbert is probably the least well known, though among other poets and congnoscenti, of which I am neither, his reputation has always been high. I got his Collected Poems this weekend, obviously in English, along with Zagajewski’s Wiersze wybrane. My first impressions of the former.

He’s tough, ironic, sardonic, hard-headed, hard-boiled, unsentimental to the point of cynicism, though never quite cynical, at last though, probably, a pessimist. He doesn’t edify well. In “The Wolf and the Lamb” he warns “dear children. The wolf ate the little lamb, then licked his lips. Don’t follow after the wolf, dear children. Don’t sacrifice yourselves for a moral.” Or his “Hen,”

The hen is the best example of what living constantly with humans leads to. She has completely lost the lightness and grace of a bird. Her tail sticks up over her protruding rump like a too large hat in bad taste. Her rare moments of ecstasy, when she stands on one leg and glues up her round eyes with filmy eyelids, are stunningly disgusting. And in addition, that parody of song, throat-slashed supplications over a thing unutterably comic: a round, white, maculated egg.

The hen brings to mind certain poets.

He obviously—how can you not?—likes lambs, children, poetry and some poets, perhaps even, though more secretly, hens, but you’d almost never know that from his use of them. Everything, good and evil, gets immersed in the universal solvent of his intelligence.

And yet, I infer that he sides with the good. Like one of those gunslingers, who you don’t know if he’s going to show up at the show down. And he does, not because of any special regard for the Good, at least in the abstract, but because resisting evil has become something of a habit, from early youth, neither good nor bad, like smoking.

A Walk with No Name

I have been in Kraków now six weeks and three times before this one, but until yesterday, I had never knowingly been in Podgórze, originally a suburb across the river before it was incorporated into the city to make metropolitan Kraków about a hundred years ago. In my Cracow Guide, no mention is made in the index, and only one faint reference on one of the maps, so that you have to get lost to find it, or wander in, at which, I am very good. It was a long walk, gray and nameless. But not without beauties.

Kościół Świéta Józefa, “St. Joseph’s,” was a bit of a surprise up close, though you can see the central spire from a distance, which drew me across the river in the first place. Actually, I had noticed it from the heights of the Zwierzyniec earlier in the week. On a sunny day, even a partly cloudy one, the entry grounds and the facade might have had the charm of a fairy tale, an effect that they did not have in the mist and murk of yesterday afternoon, so that while it did not positively charm, it still surprised. In a good way. Podgórze, you see, presents a bit roughly, grittily; not infrequent spots of dereliction, asymmetry, inaccessibility, hidden and uninviting accesses under construction whose completion you wonder about, and, little traffic, human or automotive, for a Saturday afternoon. Were they all in Kraków, shopping? On one side of the street you have a handsome early 1900s' church and seminary; on the other, a ruin in the making. I hope that was a ruin in the making, and not somebody’s domicile. But if it were, the inhabitants would interest me, or the previous inhabitants—not enough for me to knock on the door, of course—but, whatever Podgórze lacks, comparatively to Kraków, in beauties, it has its proportional weight in truth, gritty though it may be. Every place does. And while we need beauty to help us bear the grittiness, it is the truth, ultimately, that we have to bear.

Wawel Hill and St. Stanislaw from Podgorze

Przedwiośnie

A fine few days this week in the early, in the coming, spring, as such days are known here. Having returned my sociology chapters to Dr. Banaś, I felt the need to walk in the glorious sun—around which Mikołaj Kopernik proved the earth to revolve in 1543. That very same sun, a little older. At 59°F, it was a nice day in the solar system, ładny dzień.

I decided upon a long saunter, one that I’ve made before on previous trips, a couple miles to the kopiec Kościuszki, the Kosciuszko Mound, a large…you’ll see. Since I’ve not been talking the talk as ardently as I should, I’ll walk the walk, this particular one, which is known as the Zwierzyniec, named after the 12^th century village, though I don’t know how the town acquired its name originally, which could derive from zwierzać się or zwierzenie, “to open one’s heart, unburden” and “confession,” or zwierzę/ zwierzyna,”animal or fauna.” The town supported a convent in those days, and the Norbertine cloister is just across the street now. But in the 12^th century, there were probably animals here, too, even wildish ones, so it’s a tough etymological call. I’m going with the animals.

To proceed: Through my building portal out into the sun, around the corner and down the street, I stopped for a little bread ring, obwarzanek, poppy seed—which should be the national seed, if you ask me—then a mile or so to the Zwierzyniec. On the way, I stopped along the Wisła for a not undramatic shot of Wawel Hill.

The entry to the Zwierzyniec  is long and steep at times with pretty landmark churches on the opening stretch. Taken at a distance because the gates were barred, my pictures of them don’t amount to much, so I won’t burden the viewer. More interesting to me was the street sign for the way leading up to the Kosciusko Mound, the Aleja Jerzego Waszyngtona, the “Alley of George Washington,” Kosciuszko’s one-time commanding officer. Then the cemetery, which had three funerals scheduled for the week, one in progress, which I discreetly avoided. It’s small, handsome, tight (no turf) and rather busy, it seems, for a cemetery, but Poles attend to cemeteries more dutifully than we do to cemeteries at home, and commune more frequently, formally, even lavishly in flowers with their dead. Yet, with a becoming reserve. Poland, and older cultures generally, are more elegiac, probably because they have a lot more to mourn the passage of. The monuments themselves bear further individual study, when I get the chance, one particular stone grieving the tragic loss of a son in Warsaw, “the only and best,” just 20, in 1964. I cherish that theme of lost sons.

 The Kosciuszko Mound is a monument to the life of possibly Poland’s greatest national hero and favorite son—though ultimately a failed one—and rises at the top of the walk. It’s a curious and ironic piece of civic landscape and architecture, but a telling one, too, first of the valor, enlightenment, and independence of the man and his embodiment of the spirit of Poland; shortly thereafter, of imperial subjugation, and now, of a kind of pragmatic awkwardness. At a time when Poland did not exist as a country but had been partitioned out to three empires—Prussian, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian—the “free city of Cracow” raised the Mound on the heights of the Zwierzyniec in the early 1820s. Originally, there was no architecture, only landscape. In 1846, Polish nobles, emulating Kosciuszko’s efforts to resuscitate the homeland, rose in insurrection against two of the three empires, and like Kosciuszko, predictably, failed. The Austro-Hungarian Empire subsequently asserted control over Kraków and after 1850 built a fortress that completely encircled the Mound and subdued the city—as if to imprison and obscure the hero. Today, the Mound and the fortress stand in marked ideological and aesthetic contradiction: national freedom vs. imperial order, while the walls block views and sightlines of the earthwork. And yet, under a sun like this one, it’s not a bad spot, a must-see tourist destination at the end of an early spring walk.

I will share my final impression. On the walk down, a different route from the Zwierzyniec, through an upscale neighborhood above the Błonia, the great city greenspace, I saw the following sign, a sort of “beware of the dog” sign, I guess, though zły is translated as “evil, wicked, bad.”

Animals have the last word sometimes. Or their owners.  

Nie ma problemu

I know, I know, I know. I should be out in the Polish-speaking world, and not with the books. I should be out in a bar mellifluously conversing with my companions in drink or in a restaurant, ordering the duck, and trying to pick up a waitress who is entirely too young for me. But I could never talk that particular talk even in English, and I have taken on some academic responsibilities that require my immediate attention. Dr. hab. Banaś has enlisted me to copy-edit a collection of sociological essays (that will be published in English) on migration and multiculturalism in Europe; she has also invited me to lecture on multiculturalism in the United States in her master’s level seminar, a topic on which I have no particular expertise. Of course, in the spirit of international intellectual cooperation, I have agreed. As the subject of my dissertation once observed, “There is nothing quite so stimulating as having to lecture tomorrow on a period of history you hadn’t heard of until this afternoon.” Wing it.

Laborious as I find academic, especially social scientific, prose, the text I’ve been reading and editing has proven useful on a number of points relevant to the greater task of my becoming Polish. I’ll get to those shortly. But first, this sentence:

The extent of the relevance of any political ideology is arguably prone to appear in a cyclical configuration, with periods of regarding the ideology as a potentially useful explanatory resource, alternating with outbursts of popularity positing it as the most accurate explanation of an on-going state of affairs, if not the ultimate interpretation of a social reality as such.

Now, this passage must read better in Belorussian, and to its credit, the methodology and the data of the study strike me as sound and perhaps even original, its conclusions interesting. Whatever difficulties I’m experiencing are probably less the result of the peculiar linguistics of west Slavonic tribes and more the peculiar linguistics of that inscrutably verbose tribe of sociologists. This passage, actually relatively scrutable, is merely verbose. I’ll suggest, “Ideologies influence the social mind variously, from providing a potentially useful interpretation of reality to an all but definitive explanation.” (And even that might go without saying.) My dear sociologists, if you use enough words, you are bound to say something of value and interest eventually, but most of us will have stopped listening long before.

What I have learned, eventually, is that ¾ of the world’s nations consider national identity as essentially “inborn.” Poland is among those nations; the United States is not. For modern Poles, Polishness is essential, congenital, experiential, lived, and essentially, lived in Poland and nowhere else: it is existentially thick. Even Polish-speakers outside of Poland who were born into families of Polish origin, speaking the language and practicing its customs from childhood in a family setting but geographically elsewhere, former Soviet republics, for example, even after their spending years in school here in Poland, report either not feeling “Polish” or as “Polish” as they had hoped and expected to feel and/or not being accepted as “Polish” by Poles. At first glance, such findings would seem to be discouraging to someone embarked upon Polishness at an advanced age, especially someone with what appears to be deficient second-language acquisition apparatus. Not a problem, as I have learned to say in Polish, nie ma problemu. And here is why.

Polishness, polskość, is not static. There is no once, then, now and forever, Pole or Polishness. It morphs and metamorphs, slowly perhaps, even glacially at times, or quickly at others. It’s a moving target, whose movements are ultimately unpredictable. Who knows where I will be and where Poles will be in fifteen years on this question? We may be in the same kawiarnia. And even as it looks impossible to me now, Poles historically seem to have some fascination, some lingering national attraction to impossibility. So, I will continue to stroll in the general direction of the impossible and see what happens.

Time and Stone

Saturday night, on walkabout, we passed Kościół Święta Andrzeja, the Church of St. Andrew, and Dr. Banaś pointed out the projectile/gun ports in the wall at levels that would seem not the most effective (behind the van). In those days, churches served as fortifications as well as holy places, and Jan Długosz reported that St. Andrew’s “was the only church to resist the Tartar invasion of 1241.” (78) Of course, time has built up the surface surrounding the church, which explains the seeming misplacement of these defensive vents, buries the church  in the dust of the every day, and so now one descends stone steps to enter what was once at street-level—over nine hundred years ago.

I don’t know whether any of these stones are in more or less the same place they were in 1241, or in 1079, when the foundation was laid. (Ten seventy effing nine.) The stones that are piled here in Romanesque fashion seem old enough, rough, rude, weathered, war-scarred, the repairs motley enough to imagine invaders killed under the walls and souls saved within. But only the stones remain bearing the stories as only stones can. Mutely, abandoned anchors of what happened. No, nothing is permanent, and yet, some things are more permanent than others. Hardness and quiet.