Progress Report

A month into this particular experiment, the immersion experience, I’m reasonably sure of two things. First, I’m not going to achieve the levels of language proficiency that I had hoped or imagined a person might. Another person, a different person, actually might have, a more outgoing, a more social, and a more intense person, organized, focused, directed. A rare combination of intense and chatty, an anthropologist, a participant observer. I’m more of a wanderer and an outsider looking in, from a distance, a serendipitous, impressionist observer. Vodka and bars have been recommended to alleviate this condition. Research supports that recommendation, alcohol lowering the social barriers of inhibition as well as oiling the linguistic skids and suppressing other language interference. Drink can, as well, be personally transformative, no question. And I’m fond of vodka, but it tends to lower not only my inhibitions but me as well, physically, to the floor, at least whenever I’ve drunk in Poland or with Poles. (The floor, I might add, particularly if a cool one, tile, is precisely where you want to be on those occasions—not least for spin reduction.) The bar strategy, alas, conflicts with my online work schedule, unless I reset my internal watch, now on Kraków time, but then I’d be working hung over, probably not a good practice.

The other thing I know is that the first thing I know doesn’t matter any more. Walking on the Planty one evening with Monika, I, we ran into a friend of hers, an Irishman, businessman, bar owner and operator, walking his dog. I mentioned, in English, that I was in Poland for six months—to work on my Polish. “You’ll need more than six months,” was his response. I’d need to work here, years, open up a bar and have it be really successful then have the landlords raise your rent through the roof and have to relocate and start the whole process over again. The point being, though he didn’t realize that he was making it to my readers, is that it’s impossible to make real headway in this language in six months (even after two years in the classroom) and the other point being, which he really did not know he was making, was that the place for a serendipitous learner to learn not so much what he needs to know, but how he needs to know about Poland… is in Poland. On my first browse in a Polish bookstore I find Kim są Polacy, the essential short conversation on modern Polishness. You’d never find this book in an American bookstore, of course, and probably couldn’t find it on Amazon unless you were looking specifically for it, which is not serendipitous, is it? On my second browse in a different bookstore I find Wielka Encyklopedia Staro-Polska, “The Great Encyclopedia of Old Poland.” Bought it, two for two. And in the opening note to his gracious readers, I read “W żadnym razie nie jest dziełem naukowym: to gawęda.” (My reading seems to be improving, by the way.) Which is to say, “In no case is this a scholarly work: it’s a story.” A gawęda is a Polish prose form, a loose, conversational account in a personal voice with frequent digression, and while this particular gawęda is heavily footnoted, the point is taken. Serendipity would seem a typical Polish habit of mind, though the closest word they seem to have for it is przypadkość, “casualness, randomness.” Becoming Polish then would seem to be not only a destination, a distant final expression, but a distinctive process for becoming so, deferred, oblique, and penultimately uncertain.

Which brings to mind that lovely poem by Adam Zagajewski, coming out of the Communist experience, but equally applicable to western, rationalistic, capitalist bureaucracies of any sort and their current rage for accountancy.

Plans, Reports

                                    First there are plans

then reports

This is the language

we know how to communicate in

Everything must be foreseen

Everything must be

confirmed later

What really happens

doesn’t attract anyone’s attention

                        (Spoiling Cannibals’ Fun, 1991, p. 154)