Since returning to the United States in June, I have been to Mass
only twice, a memorial service for my nephew and at midnight on Christmas Eve.
I have, however, been reading much Miłosz, a believer and a Catholic
communicant still at his death in 2004, in an effort to understand how so
intellectual and relatively contemporary a person, one with a full appreciation
of the powers of science, can understand and articulate his faith now well into
post modernity, into post catastrophic modernity. Having lost or laid Catholicism
aside many years ago in the aftermath of a simple, family tragedy, I continue
to rummage about from time to time in his (and my father’s) generation in
search of creditable responses to the Big Question. So far, in case you are
wondering, no incontrovertible answers have emerged. And, alas, not many of Miłosz’s
words are encouraging to the prospects of my Catholic soul: “Attendance at
church on Sunday, even if socially motivated, even if for propriety’s sake (as
with the Poles, the Irish, the Italians), may well be viewed by the Almighty,
who is surely endowed with a rich sense of humor, as an act of faith.” (LU, 261)
In his The Land of
Ulro, Miłosz’s “spiritual self-portrait” (back cover copy claim), I had
hoped to find something of a recognizable but curiously reimagined Catholicism
and a clear pathway, a sort of Stations of the Cross for Wayward Boys, forward
to what a restored spirituality and perhaps a revamped Church might look and feel
like. A path to transcendence. The book has proved rather, as its author
“forewarned…[a] bizarre tangle” of William Blake, Oscar Miłosz,
Emanuel Swedenborg, Dostoevsky, and Simone Weil, none of whom I have read at
any length. Interesting enough on many pages, still such efforts end up
reminding me of scholastic debates in the medieval universities about the
number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin. Intricate, ingenious,
arcane, and not a little tiresome. After finishing Ulro though, I watched
Andrzej Wajda’s Katyń.
In Katyń, Wajda, the master Polish
film-maker of Miłosz’s generation, recounts the mass execution in the spring of
1940 of over 20,000 Polish military officers and personnel at the hands of the
Soviet NKVD—their secret police—and upon the orders of Stalin and Beria. The
movie harrows us with overcast and dark and cold and finally blood, and in the
last scenes, of execution, the explosive report of German-made pistols drops uniformed
bodies but singly into mass graves. Wajda knows that while there are dramatic lines
and scenes and stereo sound, there are not real words, images, music, nor human
imagination sufficient to document the Truth of that experience, the whole
truth (what happened to the blond sister arrested in Kraków
for denying the Soviet account blaming the Nazis?), this event that claimed the
life of Wajda’s father. That Katyń might be a powerful artistic,
creative representation, one that inspires memory, which is a good thing, I can
grant—and heartily approve. But I insist that Miłosz and Wajda, we,
are not witness enough. Katyń’s last soldiers are murdered while
reciting the Lord’s Prayer, a reminder of an Other Viewer; and the last image,
of a dead hand still warm with a rosary entwined amongst its fingers being
buried, fades to black with a requiem then silence. As if to say more than film
art, more than human memory, is required.
Because human beings are okay with the daily tasks of
meaning-making, they’re all right, pretty pragmatic; they’re good, sometimes,
maybe even often, very good with the longer-term tasks of meaning-making, with
history and science, art and myth, muddling along in the direction of
civilization. Perhaps, possibly, probably a good argument can be made that the
material conditions of human life are getting better and better everywhere—over
the long term—and that we should focus our efforts on the here and now and the
future, our children’s future. (Who’d really argue against that second proposition?
Some angel busy dancing on a pin, I suppose.) But sometimes, soo more than once, soo all too often, God! we human beings are bad, so bad,
individually and locally and globally, catastrophically bad, catastrophically
BAD. And at such times—and afterward—seriously, you don’t want human beings
fumbling around trying to make ultimate sense of what they’ve just made a
complete effing mess of, trying to make sense of utter human barbarity and senselessness,
you want something Else, the Truth. Lavrenti Beria, a chief of the NKVD, later
admitted—when it served his purposes—that the murders at Katyń
had been a “’great mistake.’” (116) An ironic confession, a self-serving lie,
the lies humans tell about themselves to enable them to live with others (and
themselves), our species whose capacity for self-deception, for “closure”,
approaches perfection. Including Miłosz, including Wajda, and their readers
and viewers. But the dead, especially the murdered, the disappeared, the
suddenly, brutally gone in the middle of night, the relatively innocent borne
off by violence unexpected and unutterable—and those to come who shall perish
in this way—deserve an unimpeachable witness, the company of One That Knows.
This conclusion I reach not as some profession of faith. I
am no evangel. Without a lively intuition of holy things or a deep empathy for my
own generation—which has seemed to me, on the whole, amazingly graced—I arrive
here not as a revelation and not particularly by choice. In A Year of the Hunter, Miłosz
quotes favorably Karol Ludwik Koniński: “’One can also arrive at conviction
by philosophizing, but not by philosophizing systematically; rather, by
following the impulses of imagination, the emotions, custom. The heart points
the way to philosophizing.'” (194) I think my process more like that, and this
post, more like an act of contrition.
