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

Mmm, Kasza

It is required that I think about returning home—to the U.S., not just from Lubień to Kraków, or to my mieszkanie from Sunday Mass and long walks along the Wisła. Work and travel arrangements oblige my paying attention to homecoming. Given new media, I haven’t missed the place, America, “home,” or any of the places in it, after such a brief remove, and I’m absolutely sure that my country has not missed me, aside from a loved one or two who claims to, and they probably wouldn’t lie. So, it would seem, no significant love has been lost in the interim, no damage done. A new boat promises to pick me up in Antwerp and haul me back to the States, via Liverpool, come mid-June. Except for the apparent fickleness of freighters and the possibility of unwanted adventure, I otherwise don’t think too much about the prospect of having to go home. I’ll be back—back and forth, actually.

I have in the last couple of weeks eaten my first grilled, followed by my first fire-roasted, kielbasy, boiled kasza, and my first lody na patyku, (“ice cream on a stick”), which comprised such a large part of my diet on my first trip to Poland in 2002. Kasza particularly has a future with me, a kind of Slavic grits or risotto. Only duck, Kraków style, and galonka have yet to be devoured and reviewed in this column before I pass my second judgment on the Polish menu. I have also smoked my first small bowls of Polishly branded tobacco, Poniatowski, in my bent little number of a Polish pipe. Pipe-smoking is not culturally compulsory here, but when your language skills remain undeveloped, you adopt some affectations to screen the gap, in spite of the health risks, including impotencja, according to my package warning. But I have to say that a solitary midsummer night’s smoke (it was in the high 70s this week) on the Planty has its charms, redolence, and a curious little buzz. How come I was never told about the latter? In these days I have also written my first Polish poem, haiku, in praise of szarlotka, and invented my first Polish word in the process, jabłkowść, (“appleness”). I have seen, heard, and positively identified the rook and the magpie (Eurasian), sroka, which are not native to Minnesota or the U.S. And just yesterday I popped a Polish tag at the thrift store, sklep odzieżowy, for inexpensive, new and used clothing, tanie, nowe, używane. The selection for men, męskie, is not wide, faux American-athletic and Euro-nerd, but the prices are reasonable. I found a pair of shorts, the pattern a little busy, but I had neglected to pack much summer apparel. I’d include a picture, but prefer being seen in these only anonymously. My Polishness increases by the hour, but in the tiniest increments.    

Ufaj ale Sprawdzaj

“Trust but verify” was the only mantra coming out of the Reagan era that I had, and continue to have, any particular reverence for. With these words he insisted upon the need for on-site inspections of Soviet missile sites, but I would suggest that they possess a more general wisdom and have an application to, well, everything, including visiting quasi-professorial banter. This nugget, Ufaj, ale sprawdzaj, rendered in flawless Polish, represented the high point of my lecture to Dr. Banaś’s first-year master’s class. They appreciated the translational effort. My critique, though transparently liberal, was not a wholly ungenerous deconstruction of the Reagan myth delivered in contemporary American English. I tried to counter the impression of “economic miracle” with numbers drawn from Krugman and Stieglitz and true confessions by David Stockman. Little ever trickles down; most gets fracked up. (I should find that passage in Eklezjastesa.) But even as I qualified, and rightly so, the homely, heroic image of the Great Communicator, our Ronnie, I could concoct a case in my own mind for his deserving bronze statues in Poland.

You see, these students’ knowledge of English is infinitely better than my knowledge of Polish, and I wondered aloud whether we had Ronald Reagan to thank for that, as they might otherwise have had to learn Russian in school, as Dr. Banaś had. We liberals—this liberal anyway—like to think that the Soviet Union was at the point of collapsing of its own sclerotic ideological and centralized economic weight, which may have been proximately true as well. But what if that collapse had been delayed or deferred ten years, what if the Politburo had clumsily temporized on a bit longer, what if Putin, or a Putin, had been available instead of Gorbachev? Ten years in the larger historical picture doesn’t mean much—except for those actually living under those conditions for ten more years in central and eastern Europe. What if U.S. military overspending, as the argument goes, actually did pressure the Soviet military to keep pace, a pace its rickety economy simply couldn’t match or sustain, hastening the realization that their system was broken and prompting efforts like glasnost and perestroika. Even if the arms race wasn’t cost effective for us, perhaps it actually made a significant difference to Poles, in their lives, proved their lucky break. What if trickledown really does trickle, though it takes forever and trickles out to the strangest places? Otherwise, I might not have had an audience this week.

I also granted that Reagan reversed the political economic discourse in the United States from one of social welfare progressivism to that of a diminished governmental and deregulated capitalism—whatever the realities. Such a shift in social messaging is no mean feat—at least in the sense of “small, negligible.” That Greed might be Good proved a surprisingly good sell by the late 80s, even to those who couldn’t afford it. Such free(r)-market entrepreneurialism has its appeal to intelligent, well-intended Poles who have lived under Communism and live now under a kind of recovering, cronified capitalism. But already, relatively early on, there are signs of an awareness that the benefits of economic growth might be divinely complicated, à la this Cracovian Banksy. A not so sacred heart.