From the Sublime to the… Political

Holy Saturday a year later, and I am remembering my Easter week in Sulęczyno with something of the vicarious rapture of the unsaved, of proximity to joy and its nostalgia. All that church, candle light, candle heat, the sizzle of wax and the eruption of incense, and the flinging of holy water with long-tendriled mini-whisk brooms, followed by ritual and incessant feasting. I miss it. Here, home, rereading Proust, I happen across lines such as “Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our true life than the country in which we may happen to be.” [298] Proust reads actually like a Pole, melancholy, graceful, capricious, virtuoso, just as he described Chopin. So, while I’m far away, reading French and Russian novelists, they and the season return me to Poland and the richer reality of memory, our true life.

Swieconka: Easter basket blessed at Mass

I’ve returned as well to the Constitution of this, the Third Republic of Poland, now seventeen years old this month, for extended study. A curious document at first glance, high-minded, loquacious, contradictory, assertive, and yet a little silly in spots, as constitutions and teenagers are wont to be. I note that the U.S. Constitution, which serves as a model of sorts for western democracies, rather crisply delineates Seven Articles. In the Polish Constitution, there are two hundred and forty-three. Now, in all fairness, we’ve added Twenty-Seven Amendments over time, including one abolishing slavery (XIII)—only vaguely alluded to in the main body of the Supreme Document—so it’s not as if the U.S. Constitution got it perfect and spoke to everything it needed to speak to; and no doubt, the world and governance have gotten more complex since 1787, but two hundred and forty-three articles seems like a lot. Especially when more than one of them reads like Article 81: “The rights specified in Article 65, paras. 4 and 5, Article 66, Article 69, Article 71 and Articles 74-76, may be asserted subject to limitations specified by statute.” Not the most elegant of executive prose. There is a story to this Constitution and to each of its articles, I’m sure, and I hope I won’t get to them all, but enough of them to understand the foundations of its contemporary political culture, its basic rules for civic life, which is but occasionally ridiculous—everywhere.

Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Prompted by Miłoszean thoughts—and by interminable winter to get out of my house—I went to Mass this morning, the Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, the previous Seven of which I had remained warmly abed. (So it was an Extraordinary Sunday to me.) To the Cathedral of St. Paul. I do miss my Polish church-going, its regularity, its solemnity and gilded Otherness, its language, both fleetingly familiar and yet largely incomprehensible—the strangeness of the tongue, thus seeming holier than English, more magical. Polish is not liturgical Latin, of course, but foreign-sounding at least, suggestively sacred. The second reading was from 1 Corinthians 4:1-5, passages which coincidentally recalled my previous lesson from Katyń:  “It is the Lord who judges me….who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then every man will receive his commendation from God.” Or condemnation, as the case may be. Thus the powerful, the tyrannical, the brutal, and the murderous ought to be reminded, warned and forewarned.

Behind the altar at St. Paul’s are shrines to the Saints of the Nations, including one to the Slavs, with statues of St. Cyril and Methodius (translators of the Gospels to what became known as Old Church Slavonic) and with windows depicting Stanislaus (Patron Saint of the Poles) and Wenceslaus (Patron Saint of the Czechs). I offered Polish prayers for Ukrayna, peace to the sons and daughters of the formidable Cossacks, whose recent courage, resistance, resilience, and restraint in the streets and in the Maidan in Kiev impress and inspire us distant and mongrel Slavs.

Shrine to Saint Cyril and Methodius
Cathedral Church in St. Paul

And on a pier at the north exit from the passage of the nations hangs a picture of Jesus—above and somewhat inconspicuous, though I remember seeing it a number of years before, puzzling over what I thought was a Latin motto—with the inscription Jezu Ufam Tobie. It’s not Latin, it’s Polish. Who would have guessed? It's a secret waiting for Dan Brown.   

Katyń

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.

1480

So tonight, after eight months and two renewals, I’ve finished Długosz’s Annals. Even this abridgement at times felt interminable, five hundred and fifteen years of one thing after another, actually, the same damn things over and over, occasionally all at the same time, medieval things, mostly fighting, everywhere and between everyone, a thousand truces and never any peace, dynastic intrigue, religious and cultural bigotry resulting in copious bloodshed, every conceivable permutation of the Seven Deadly Sins, the plague, heresy, a dozen Władysławs at least, with an equal number of Bolesławs, and even more Casimirs, and to finish, Jan Długosz himself, a bit actor in his own chronicle, which ends in 1480 on his death bed:  

Though lying in bed, gravely ill, yet am I no little pleased that, after protracted, uninterrupted labour, much thought and deliberation, extensive travel and journeying in search of the chronicles of our own and other lands and in so doing subjecting myself to censure, abuse and rebuff, I have come to the end of this work, which all others have neglected. Gladly would I continue it for the honour of God and the benefit of my Fatherland, but Fate is preventing me, for I strongly suspect that the Cruel Sisters are even now drawing their threads. I have, by the Grace of God, reached an age that not all attain, having lived for sixty-five years. My afternoon being over and I having reached the actual evening and term of life, when I am to enter the kingdom of Eternal Light and enjoy everlasting life with all the saints, I confess, what I admitted long ago, that not absolutely everything I have written has accorded with the truth. Some of the things I have described have been trivial and ephemeral, though amusing, thing[s] that I have taken from the writings of others either on my own initiative or at the suggestion of others, things that I have found in minor works or in other people’s maps, or matters of hearsay, taking as worthy of belief what I have merely been told to be true. I beg those who are better endowed by Minerva and have ready tongues to correct my errors and misconceptions. Should they find what they read, even the whole, confused or amateurish, may they undertake the editing of it, and may they forgive my language and incompetence. With such a wealth and variety of topics, only an angel could explain and verify it all. It is not a gospel or a canonical letter I have been writing, as the holy apostles did, but, as an intellectual exercise, I have described things that are variable and ephemeral. I accept responsibility for verifying them or for failing to do so, should that be what I have done.

….I beg all who read or will read this Chronicle to kneel and say for me, first and last of sinners, one Paternoster and one Hail Mary, so that Our Lord Jesus Christ, son of the Immaculate Virgin, through all his torments borne with strange love for me, for him and every mortal, may deign to free me of eternal and temporal torment and lead me to see His Blessed Trinity, whose is the honour and the glory, now and for ever. Amen. (p. 601)

This I can do and have done, in Polish.

1414

On this date last year, I had just arrived in Poland, slipping down through a winter fog into the damp snowy cold of Małopolska, “Little Poland,” the capital of which is Kraków. A year later I miss everything about Poland—except the damp cold. But since so many of the good things about Poland in winter are a response to the damp cold, a quiet resistance to it, an occasional defiance of it—vodka, tea, grzaniec (“hot, spiced wine”), a peppery barszcz, conversation with family or boon companions in pubs and cafés and cukiernie (“sweet shops”), and szarlotka—perhaps I miss the damp cold, too. The slush on cobbly pavements. The snow falling clumpily from trees. The smell of wet cement, a little salty, a little savory. The typical cold in Minnesota is not the same, but drier, edgier, and its polar vortexicality, not in the least to be preferred. The chill cold dripping down one’s neck on Karmeliczka Street, while hardly pleasant, doesn’t begin to compare for discomfort with the rolling, bitter, avalanche of subzero temperatures and subarctic windchills. BRRR. At the moment, I remember my arrival in winter Poland warmly.

I have been reading Długosz desultorily, intermittently, since coming home and yesterday arrived at the year 1414, exactly 600 years ago. Sometimes such coincidences seem more than coincidental. But I have to say, little noteworthy appears to have happened in 1414. Yes, the plague abated somewhat, but the Teutonic Knights were up to their old bedevilment. While King Władysław defeated them spectacularly at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, he neglected to push his advantage, failing to take their fortress at Małbork and leaving them a stronghold for continuing mischief; the Order appears to be winning the “peace,” duping the King, taking advantage of his diplomatic good nature, and “using gold and bribery as arguments rather than justice” in international forums of arbitration. Władysław concludes a truce “for winter is approaching and dysentery rife among his troops.” He’s still angry with his kinsman and ally, the Grand-duke of Lithuania. Heresy visits Czechoslovakia in the person of Jan Hus. Same old, same old, and without much encouraging to say to readers 600 years hence.

But having now read Jan Długosz himself, and not just read of him, his long and unflinching account of hardship and misfortune in the middle ages, with rare visions of peace and goodness, I have a new appreciation for his name, accomplishment, and the resting place of his bones in the crypt as Na Skałce. 

Uninstructed Ducks

Reading still and underlining often in Długosz, Miłosz, and Herbert, though not so much in Długosz—it’s a library book. What I make of them, and what they make of me—in the direction of Polishness—remains to be seen, but every now and then you come upon a passage that bursts off the page like laughter, a tiny firework, the memory of a wet, moustachy smooch from a rascal aunt long dead. And you want to share it for what it is and make nothing more of it, complete in itself.

Once, a very long time ago, walking down the street in a Polish village, I grew thoughtful at the sight of ducks splashing about in a miserable puddle. I was struck because nearby there was a lovely stream flowing through an alder wood. “Why don’t they go over to the stream?” I asked an old peasant sitting on a bench in front of his hut. He answered: “Bah, if only they knew!”             Miłosz, To Begin Where I Am, p. 245

Birds of the Planty, Lesson Three: the Rook

Rooks, gawrony, nest high in the trees, socially, in clusters, tree-top neighborhoods, “rookeries,” and in Kraków they would drop to the Planty singly and pace, rather warily of humans, in search of food, mostly worms and grubs. Whenever I would approach, however quietly and unobtrusively, or lift my camera in their direction after sitting relatively motionlessly on a park bench, they would lift-off on long, deliberate black wing, not in haste or fear, but with a certain dignity, as if intruded upon, far enough away to render my limited zoom pretty useless. So repeatedly unsuccessful was I in trying to image them digitally, that when I came upon a trio cast in bronze at an art gallery, I thought I might have to settle for that, an image of an image, an image of a brazen image. (How that sculptor worked so fast I cannot imagine.)

But as you can see, they are a not unhandsome bird, a little beaky perhaps, with iconic possibilities. Like their cousin, the magpie, they appear in contemporary Polish poetry, in this case along with their other cousin, the crow, known in Europe as the “carrion crow.”

Crows, rooks gather


Of an evening in the stubble.


The dark company moves


Slowly toward the forest. From the west

Float violet clouds.


Crows, rooks preen


smoothe their Indian feathers.

(Zagajewski, 61, my free, inexpert translation)

The rook and the carrion crow are not native to the United States, though, like the magpie, the carrion crow has a close relative in the North American crow. At any rate, the Corvidae family—crows, rooks, ravens, magpies, jays, jackdaws—among the most intelligent of bird, and even animal species generally, strikes a familial note with me, and not merely for their self-consciousness and tool use. The czarnowron, the “black crow,” or carrion crow, appears on the Borowicz family coat of arms. And while I’m not convinced that my origins are particularly aristocratic—perhaps we’re magpies and jackdaws to the more elite branches of the family—I’m not averse to granting some resemblance. And I’m partial to that blue.