Scribblings with Green Chalk

Heidelberg has an astounding concentration of physicians per square kilometer, with no shortage of ophthalmologists. Most of them were on vacation yesterday.

I understand that it was a stupid choice on my part to get stye just before the long weekend, when everyone should be having fun in the sun and seeing the world without distortions. If I had had any doubts about it, the annoyed tone of the receptionist at the university clinic made it blindingly clear to me.

I used to naively believe that it was Communism that turned people in petty power positions into condescending bastards. I should thank that lady for the cultural lesson: it’s petty power that makes you a petty official.

Eventually, I found a workaholic doctor who saw me even though I came some two minutes before his lunch break. I learned that apart from the infection I have more or less perfect vision. My left eye (the good one) can fly planes and solve 3D puzzles, the right one (attacked by stye aka Gerstenkorn aka jęczmień) can fly planes too, but slower, I suppose. He prescribed me some magic ointment and told me to nap a lot, because it works most effectively during sleep.

The monster seed from space hasn’t started sprouting yet, apparently, in spite of my worst fears. However, I’m strongly motivated to nap through the next two weeks: if it doesn’t go away by itself, it will have to be cut open. I’m also contemplating wearing shades everywhere, including indoors, because I don’t deal too well with constant questions. I don’t have any wheaty* answers.

*cross-linguistic attempt at a pun: cf. Polish and German names for the inflammation

Thanks to the Original Fedora Kid, who is being lazy about starting a blog of his own.

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Yesterday’s quite high up in the ongoing “worst day of my life” competition. I spent half the day pushing away the specter of a close person’s body lying in a ditch. The other half I spent pushing away the desire to strangle that very same person. There is no humorous punchline. My home phone died in the middle of an important conversation whose aim was to clarify what had happened. I ran out of money on my cell phone and the cashier at the supermarket was giggling amused that the till at which you can put money on your phone was closed and it was already 9 pm anyway. The phonecard machine at B-platz was out of order. I drifted towards the movie theater where I saw Juno with friends; not feeling better, but the movie was great and subtitled on that one and only chosen night and the ticket cheaper than a sea of vodka. Meanwhile, the eye infection I sensed I was getting was steadily getting worse. Reading hurts, writing hurts. Lying down with a chamomile compress doesn’t. If I don’t go blind, I will post something later.

… is not coming. One part of my brain keeps sending false messages to the other that since the outline is ready and there’s a messy pile of notes sitting on my desk, the work has already been done. Since that is not true, word after word slowly trickles into my draft, too lazy to stand straight.

My tastebuds are incapacitated. An eating disorder in my teens and later ulceritis have turned my relationship with food into something of a marriage of convenience. I tend to compliment dishes with “interesting,” as if suddenly drained of adjectives. I am grateful for good food, but I lack culinary imagination. I have fleeting food obsessions but no true love ensues.

I wish I could write seductively about peanut butter. Nothing makes you appreciate good peanut butter more than bad peanut butter. I felt like Rapunzel’s mother, asking a friend to get me real, serious organic peanut butter from the US army grocery store uncanny shopping land. I could not deny my intense real-peanut-butter hunger, even though I could not write an ode to peanut butter nor a lament for the bad peanut butter I had in the past months. As a birthday gift, my friend gave me two big jars of crunchy and creamy. I’d never have guessed it would turn out to be such a marvelous gift. I went for a birthday week with peanut butter toast, peanut butter toast with my mother’s jam, and, of course, apples with peanut butter, and peanut butter without company.

Magically, the sun’s declared a temporary cessation of hostilities. In hope of catching some natural vitamin D, I took a long walk yesterday with a curious pause (thanks to my friend and the passport I forgot to leave at home) in uncanny shopping land where I binged on American women’s magazines, coffee, and a brownie. Caught the last sun rays on the way home and had apples with peanut butter before sleep. The life.

I took a peek at Jonathan Carroll’s blog today.

Carroll is one of those authors to enjoy astounding popularity in most unlikely places. Not many of his compatriots are aware of him… but he’s a bit of a cult author in Poland. His debut novel, The Land of Laughs was the novel of the beginning of the nineties — first printed as a serial in the legendary magazine Fantastyka, then it went through several book editions, was nonchallantly mentioned on various TV shows, and read by everyone who wanted to be someone, it seemed.

I first read The Land of Laughs when I was 15. I then read almost everything he published until I got tired with the recurrent themes — collecting fountain pens, suspension between Vienna and Connecticut, talking animals, interestingly flawed women and the sensual feel of the back of their heads when caressed by the protagonist…

I find myself returning now and then to two of his novels, the debut and Bones of the Moon and to his short stories, especially the ones collected in The Panic Hand (or rather: Upiorna dłoń, because the stories might have been published in a different form in English). Bits of God captured in a woman’s casual pencil drafts, dogs that can smell evil, fashion for a dying man. Themes I like in the way I like pieces of chocolate slowly melting on the tongue. not to be dead sophisticated but tickled on my imagination gray cells.

Like one of the reviewers on Carroll’s official website, I wish he had written the children’s stories from the Land of Laughs. The language blows me away every time:

The Land of Laughs was lit by eyes that saw the lights that no one’s seen.

The plates hated the silver, who in turn hated the glasses. They sang cruel songs to each other. Ping. Clank. Tink. This kind of meanness three times a day.

The voice of Salt loved Krang too. When it was with her, it always whispered.

I’m touched:

In the preface to the Polish edition of A Child Across the Sky (Dziecko na niebie), Carroll writes that he feels fulfilled as a writer when he thinks that a person in Wrocław is sitting on the tram going home after work and enjoying one of his books.

On his blog, in the entry “CarrollBlog 1.6,” he quotes Magdalena Samozwaniec, a largely forgotten Polish writer. Warm laughter. Thanks.

He could not resist a city called Boat so far inland.

I remember reading a few years ago about Lynch’s visit to Łódź and how he took thousands of photos of old tenement houses and abandoned factory buildings. Film journalists held their breath, hoping the images would yield inspiration that would yield a movie. It seemed like everything was in place, just the story missing — Łódź, the home of Polish film industry with a partly unremembered past, seemed perched in expectation. The city’s name is feminine; a woman in trouble, a boat pulled ridiculously far inland. Of course it exists beyond and apart from personification. The buildings from the photographs have new tenants or waste away quietly. No one knows the names of their pre-war Jewish landlords anymore. Anecdotes of old days at the film school hang in the air, half-repeated. And both the quotidian and the solemn mar the delicate process of making things up. If all is too obvious and too serious, there can be no story. Think of the human eye and its blind spot. If you take too much for granted, your blind spot expands.

Does the ability to see lie in undoing habits of thought and sight? I wouldn’t want to put this forward as some kind of grand rule, I think it depends on what you want to see. I was not interested in guessing the names of particular streets. In fact, I’ve never been to Łódź. I wanted to see images of the place pared to what Lynch found useful. I wanted glimpses that could diminish my blind spot.

(Image from Dream Videophile)

The reason why we fear and revere dream logic is its ability to make things visible through series of improbable juxtapositions. My homemade dream method consisted not only in having David Lynch show me Łódź. I saw INLAND EMPIRE in Vienna, till the last moment not sure whether to expect German dubbing (luckily, the movie was subtitled). How strange the opening dialogue must have sounded to the majority of the audience. The white letters faded into the black and white picture, so it must have been difficult to follow. A piece of exotica. Or a piece of home. If you allow it to be both, it becomes a tightly sewn lining to the California scenes. Not a backdrop nor an alternative dimension. For what could be more bizarre than that which is so familiar you cease to notice it? As the emotions of the character she is playing sift into Nikki Grace’s consciousness, the now of the Polish girl watching Rabbits collapses into pre-war Łódź. The desolate Californian suburbia winds up in a Polish street in the middle of winter.

I am not trying to crack any kind of code, only saying that the unfamiliar always has its inverse: there is someone to whom it is domesticated. When I saw Leon Niemczyk in one of the scenes, a chill went up my spine. I’m afraid that for everyone in my generation he will always remain Golarz Filip from Akademia Pana Kleksa, the enchanting and terrifying children’s movie that seized our imagination. It comes in here, that cold and unlikely fright, whether anyone told Lynch about it or not. There’s Cyrk Zalewski, which I saw at least twice before I was big enough to disapprove of the circus. The question rozumiesz?, repeated several times, seems ironically turned towards itself. It means “do you understand?” but it marks the failure to communicate. It is funny to think that the first word I knew for understanding is meant here as opaque noise. And even when the noise is heard and comprehended it means little. You may know Polish but how can you locate the referents of the deictic terms? Where is “here”? When is “now”? Who is the “he” that did something to the “you”?

These are just glimpses, and for many viewers they will never exist as part of the movie. I looked at several reviews — American and Polish — curious about what others have identified as meaningful, what they dismissed, and what their blind spots blotted out. Common to most of the reviews was a thirst for coherence and a focus on what to their authors was the more immediate context. American reviewers placed the inland empire in California, as their sense of direction told them, and mentioned the Polish scenes and actors fleetingly. Someone identified the neighbor who visits Nikki Grace in one of the first scenes as a Russian. I don’t know why — perhaps on the assumption that all Slavic people are Russian “by default,” unless specified otherwise. Polish reviews were sparse and I did not find the insights I counted on. The three hours strain the attention span and allow for picking and choosing. I’d be interested to see what others pull out for close inspection, setting aside cries for logic.