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.
