Scribblings with Green Chalk

Homesickness has caught up with me under the guise of a summer cold. It’s ridiculous: my nose a leaking faucet, I go to sleep early like a baby and the only thing that calms me is reading Herbert and Szymborska in bed. Remembering the old gods, although they’re merely pieces of names and roadside statues, is aspirin for confusion. It could be that the cold is punishment for forgetting Midsummer. In which case I should check with neo-pagan websites what I am to expect next. Perhaps finally toads and snakes falling out of my mouth with every cussword? That would be a very practical solution to my nutrition issues.

What I should have been doing on June 24:

After the dancing, I would have had to jump over that fire for a hypothetical idiot destined to marry me. Then, around midnight, I would have had to take off the lovely wildflower garland, put a candle in it, and let it float to the other shore of a lake (with the hypothetical idiot in mind). The hypothetical idiot would have had to go into the woods in search of the fern flower that blooms only on that particular night. Should my garland sink before reaching the shore and his ass be bitten off by wild pigs, there would be little hope of us finding each other and getting married. The whole ritual would have to be repeated the following year.

As a little girl, I tried not to fall asleep, lest I should dream of my future husband.

It’s quite possible that the celebration as it looked like when I was growing up was a mere aberration of our Slavic ancestors’ rites. But if you can provide the bored wooden statue of Światowid with some entartainment, why not do that? I might drop by later this summer for a picnic with the gods. (Those cycles of nature: I’m packing again to leave in mid-July.)

The small pictures are from the open air museum in Lednogóra, where we used to celebrate Slavic Midsummer back in the 1980s and early 1990s.

I’m in Thesisland. It’s not a particularly interesting country. Most of the time, I feel like I know where I’m heading and then I realize I don’t speak the language. I constantly trip on the cobblestones with which they paved the whole place. I’m looking for the border. Will send a postcard soon. Maybe.

Not the gentlemen in power, not the notoriously underfunded universities, not the rise of fundamentalism, not the intolerance that it brings, not the starve-yourself-salaries and fully European prices, not the despondency of tower-block estates, not the metaphysics of hardship, not the ugliness of unlit city nooks and crannies.

But, god, do I miss the music that speaks about it. And the concerts.

Sitting in my CD player for several weeks now is Hey’s MTV Unplugged. Part of my brain lives in a time-warp, in mid-nineties’ Poland, reading Nosowska’s columns in women’s magazines while heading for another gig. A friend from Szczecin told me that after their debut, just before the band moved to Warsaw, fans would seek out the shop where Nosowska worked and ask her for advice on life and love. It was a shoe shop, or a butcher shop, or something equally evocative.

Musical biography romanticism aside, Nosowska never really accepted the guru role. Fifteen years later (between tracks one and two), she explains that she won’t try emceeing because it would be out of character for her and hence unconvincing. Yet you can’t be disappointed, it’s all there: the melancholy lyrics and the melancholy music.

I have a history of missing Hey shows: at home with a temperature, misinformed, finishing my BA thesis. That last time, when they were playing at the juwenalia, I actually heard them. I was living by the river and the water carried the sound. It was much like pressing your face to the display window of a patisserie, but still a comfort that dreary evening.

It’s my modestly arrogant observation that it’s a great loss not to know this music. I don’t quite understand ‘language barrier’ arguments since the night I caught a cold standing barefoot on a wet lawn, listening to Lithuanian folk chants, transfixed. For the unbelievers, Nosowska and Chylińska singing PJ Harvey’s “Angelene.” (A post in Polish about this video would be limited to the two names followed by ‘wow.’)
 
 

 
 
With this video I’m hoping to deal with the “my idea of the artist” theme by means of an old (I’m told, Chinese) method: an image worth a thousand words. Since the post about the artist with a feline pseudonym still attracts crowds, I hope some visitors think to look here for the dot over the i. This is what I want: brilliant voices and dark coats.

As in: A place one should not go to if one wishes to obtain books. No chance. The downfall of European education is imminent and the root of evil is planted in university libraries. The falcon cannot hear the falconer and the works.

When I was doing my undergrad in the land of milk and honey, I knew that the books either simply weren’t there because the money which the government could have spent on education was channeled into subsidies for farmers, or because the department head had snatched them for his private collection years ago. What puzzles me about German-speaking countries is that when the books actually are there, they tend to be inaccessible to human beings.

Most of the books you will ever need as a student in Europe fall under the category of departmental holdings. ‘Departmental holding’ in library-catalog-speak means that whatever you were looking for is out of bounds. The only person who gets to touch it is the librarian and, if the librarian is in a good mood, the tenured professor. Younger faculty probably need to go through some sort of bloody initiation rites. In short, the departmental library is the possessive librarian’s dream come true. After another hard day of guarding the fount of knowledge from the dirty paws of the unworthy masses, they can freely exclaim “mine, all mine!” and I imagine many of them do. You, as a mere mortal, are allowed to go crying to your mommy.

You might be somewhat comforted to hear that departmental holdings may be looked at briefly in reading rooms. Yet the reading room is a subject of its own.

“It is not accidental that in the torturers’ idiom the room in which the brutality occurs was called the ‘production room’ in the Philippines, the ‘cinema room’ in South Vietnam, and the ‘blue lit stage’ in Chile: built on these repeated acts of display and having as its purpose the production of a fantastic illusion of power, torture is a grotesque piece of compensatory drama,” writes Elaine Scarry. In Europe, we call it the reading room, the public space of discomfort and impossible work conditions in which the student is invited to read and write. Welcome to the reading room.

First, you are made to strip down almost your underwear, because if your sweater is judged too fluffy by the librarian, you will be accused of introducing harmful paper-destroying dampness into the open stacks area. No bags are allowed. If you say you don’t understand why, it just means you’re a thief trying to sneak out a stack of precious first editions in your tiny pocketbook. It doesn’t matter that all books have magnetic strips and that there are alarm gates at the exit. Come in (almost) naked and innocent or leave this holy place forever.

Once you’ve stuffed all your belongings into a locker two floors away (if you were smart enough to bring small change), you can make your way to the reading room. (Turning back at some point to get the library card which you left in the locker.) The library does not take any responsibility for your belongings but you’re fine with that, since you have realized by now that you mean nothing to this glorious institution. Apart from being the source of occasional entertainment for the staff: the sight of you balancing your laptop, notebook, wallet, and pens and trying not to drop any of those while you look for the library card can be mildly hilarious. Especially if you do drop them.

More or less settled in the reading room, you are made acutely aware of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You want at the same time to get the pencil you left in the locker, to drink, and to go to the bathroom. (Did you notice that big sign at the entrance, the one with the water bottle crossed out?) Concentration is impossible, it doesn’t matter that you are allowed to work with the desired book for maybe even a whole hour before the library closes. You can’t focus. Chances are that you will not want to add to the time you’ve already wasted there and will decide not to eat for a month so as to be able to afford a copy of the book. If you can still remember what it was.

In the rare fortunate situation, the book you need is in the main library, in the open stacks, where you can pick it up yourself and take home. Yet the open stacks area or, more accurately, Freihandbereich is not always the idyll it promises to be. With no way to reserve the volume you want from home, you have to run to the shelf (stripped, remember) and pray that no one is using the book in the building at that very moment. What if that nightmare scenario is true? What then?

Well, in that case, not even an eyelid-deforming disease will melt the icecaps on the librarian’s heart. All you can do is come back every day like a romantic idiot and check if the book is on the shelf. Of course you have all the time in the world. After all, it’s Europe and we’re all brimming with sophistication to the point where we don’t mind the blatant ludicrousness of such actions but repeat them with pleasure.

If you were wondering why I did the bulk of my library research in Florida, now you know.

Long, long ago, before the ministry of education was taken over by lunatics who wanted to censor everything, high school kids were allowed to read some meaningful Polish prose. It is a well known fact that when you’ve got acne and a self-perpetuationg existential crisis, nothing cheers you up as much as books on the vacuity of being spiced up with more than a touch of camp. Witold Gombrowicz and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) blew our minds. Even putting them in one sentence makes a paragraph sizzle.

While Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke reassured us that, indeed, all people were fakes, Witkacy showed us how to put feathered hats on party with that idea. On his search for what he called “the pure form,” he shot fountains of brain-twisting puns and neologisms, knitted vulgarisms out of newspaper clips and old wives’ tales. “Eyes a divine blue like buttons on a pair of underpants,” “son-of-a-shriveling-gut”: you can’t help wishing you could cuss like that, with nonchalance and neon glare. Certainly something to twist the censor’s scissors with.

Just like his biography. Witkacy was a child prodigy who was educated by private tutors. An artist’s only son, Witkacy clung to the bohemian enfant terrible act long after he’d grown out of his shorts. In his snazzy villa in Zakopane, he wrote letters announcing to unsuspecting souls that he’d “unfriended” them. And he painted. On vodka, on absynth, on whatever drugs he could find. Knowing that creating under the influence was not a great feat in itself, he turned it into a business. He set up a portrait company with prices differing according to the degree and kind of intoxication. Since not that many were interested in boring “clean” paintings (which were also the cheapest), Witkacy experienced many trips during which he encountered happily disjointed female heads among oranges, artistic vortexes bending space, and his own grimacing face. And this he shared on canvas.

“A woman need not be beautiful,” biographers scribbled down. “She must, however, be interesting.” Troubled as he was–the painting above is the famous “Fałsz kobiety” [A Woman's Falsehood] and not to forget those ambiguous disjointed heads–his female portraits are entrancing. Burning eyes, wild hair, surprising poses, no dolls with empty faces.

It’s not that as a troubled teenager I dreamed of being one of Witkacy’s women. Glossing over the tragic ending, I wanted to be him: hanging out with my genious friend Bronisław Malinowski, making art like a demon, and then ending up in a Swedish novel.

With idiots wanting to butcher up his beautiful crazy fiction, I can only say that the sons-of-a-shriveled-gut can poke their hollow blue-as-underwear-buttons eyes out. Until things improve in Po(e)land, I unfriend the lot.

 
Berlin: I fell in love with it when I was maybe six and angry that the people were speaking a language I didn’t understand. I came back several times, always just to rush through, touristically (not in a Run, Lola, Run! fashion). Why oh why didn’t I spend more time here when I lived a mere four hours of train ride away? To be able to torture myself with the question as I was ambling down Unter den Linden as a damn tourist, probably.

The picture: My grand return to the Zoologischer Garten after many years. I got lost there with my mother when I was little. My mother wasn’t little then, but a great companion for getting lost, nonetheless.

If I were smart I’d have a bunch of them sitting in my drawer–a cunning plan of local patriotism from afar. But I hardly have any pictures of home and no postcards. Somewhere, in the neverland of postal theft, there are some postcards and fridge magnets I had sent to friends who never got them. Here’s a googled pic of what Poznań doesn’t really look like any longer.

 
I was home in March, got back. No postcards.

Long time, no posting. I’ve been wondering how much time it takes for a ‘blog death’ to take effect. Hopefully, more than a few weeks away from the computer. I’ve been traveling and and trying to finish up some important school work, which didn’t leave time–nor any real desire–to keep up with blogging. So I was appreciating other things. Moreover, I was cut off from the internet for much of the time. And since there was no urgent work to be done on state (OK, school) level, I had no regrets.

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I don’t know exactly how it happened that I became obsessed with pictures of trees. It was probably something about my first visit to Ithaca, how the trees looked crusted with snow, how light fell. When I came back in the summer, a friend told me about woman who went to the gorge every day to take a picture of the same tree and trace how it slowly changed with the seasons.

Pictures of trees dominate in my Florida album. It’s been a long time since I lived near a forest, let alone in one, so those mornings in Florida, when I woke up to the sound of branches moving in the breeze and twigs snapping under squirrels’ paws, were more than photo opportunities. Those sounds could only be taken in memory (you can’t record the drowsiness or the morning chill that make them what they are). And the pictures themselves are nowhere near what it really is like. That’s the point in taking them.

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Doro let me have the last piece of her fabulous cherry pie. You are what you eat. I’m cherry pie.

Florida.

I got here at the end of one of the longest days in my life. After a string of trains and planes, beads of heterotopias.

It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. Which always means your world, that is, mine.

*from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Florida.”

Walking madness has set in again, as soon as it stopped being dark and cloudy all the time. I climbed up on the Philosophenweg on my first night in Heidelberg and I went up there several times between my finals to inaugurate the spring. There’s more to it than these pictures from walks with friends (waving to Denise). And it’s all about getting off the path anyway.

(more…)

It’s between neither and nor, absolutes excluded, overbearing sentiment excluded, the call of belonging excluded. I’ve never had that sense of place that would grab me by the throat and fill my eyes with tears at being “home.” I’ve never dreamed of that. But then, I’ve never envied travel writers and National Geographic reporters. Certainly not after reading an account of an expedition to the Amazon where a reporter almost had his ass bitten off by wild pigs. But even earlier, the romanticism failed. I don’t want to return “home” one day, Ulysses-like, with that conviction that all the tiny quests and major errands were a mistake, that Pascal was right about sitting in your own room. And I don’t want to be waking up in unrecognizable beds till the day I die. Could it be that I’m not entirely wrong and that there are places able to keep me for longer but not forever? (Because there’s terror in forever.) A somewhere that feels warm and yet somehow separate, that doesn’t swallow me but isn’t perched to spit me out either.

I can’t pretend that I’m an inveterate traveler and moving expert. There’s a fight going on between my moving every few months and the home that tries to grow over the stuff of everyday life, stuff that accumulates itself unintentionally, from tea strainers to books.

It will be at least two more months before I know where I’m going to be next fall. I’m not enjoying that blankness. And it’s not that I’d like to know everything at once. I would just like to feel that it doesn’t need to be a struggle, that there is a somewhere I can stay, at least temporarily. Maybe there’s nowhere. Still, I’d like to search through nooks and crannies before determining that, buy some time.

Please don’t ask me for an explanation. I got the airplane tickets yesterday. I’m going to Florida at the end of February. We’ll see what questions that brings.

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 saw a cat outside my window this morning. One of the few benefits of a basement apartment is the view of birds on the lawn, clueless rodents, and, yes, an occasional cat. More often, however, you get to see the irresolute legs of someone heading to the supermarket or rubber boots of kids running towards the nearby playground.

Meanwhile, I feel like never leaving the house, only lounging in my pj’s and watching Katharine Hepburn movies.

When I lived in Poznań, someone explained to me why the city wouldn’t close down the old zoo, even though most of the animals had already been moved to the new zoo at lake Malta. Stare zoo, situated near the city center, was acquiring a ghostly quality, partly abandoned, dilapidated.

“They can’t close it down completely. There’s an enormous rat colony living off the zoo waste. If they shut it down, all those rats would flood the city.”

For a long time afterwards, I couldn’t shake the image of rat hordes overtaking the Poznań Old Town, streaming through Św. Marcin, swallowing Zamek. It reminded me of a movie scene I’m not sure I had actually ever seen. For all I know, I could have imagined the whole thing, as I admitted in my comment on Bowleserised’s post on foxes. My sketchy description reads as follows: … a movie scene from a USSR production which, come to think of it, might never have existed, only I dreamed it and convinced myself I saw it on screen. [T]he scene is communist tower blocks reaching high, high into the sky, concrete gray in a desolate landscape and wolves, wolves everywhere, with glowing eyes. And a voice saying that they’ve taken over the city.

Exaggerated, dreamed, romanticized, maybe morbid. Still, the rats are there, unwanted but hungry. Beyond antipathy and acceptance, rats simply exist in the cities as another layer of their population make-up. Tip the balance and they crawl out of hiding.

I didn’t know about the rat quarter under the old zoo before that memorable explanation, but there were plenty of strays where I lived then. My roommates and I helped feed the cats the janitor found in the dumpster until someone complained to the administration. The janitor was forced to give up the cats and leave rat poison in the cellar. Rats again.

In Vienna, a rat spotted one night by the main university building was the only stray I saw. After a couple months it became disconcerting. No surprises, no uncontrolled life. It’s hard for me to imagine that Vienna reached some sort of a higher level of “cityhood” when it became simply uninteresting for undomesticated animals. It seems more likely that only rats survived the effective catching and killing.

Where do you find the life of a city, in what circumstances do you see its contours? When I read Reznikoff’s animal poems, I see the city as a living space in an instant unmade and made up again by the discovery of birds in naked trees, foxes on the park lawn.

So I was wondering about the request for information about fox sightings in Berlin (see link above). Is the man looking for stories that a reader of Reznikoff might appreciate? Does he want to re-imagine the city in the mode of my USSR movie fantasy? Or is he a member of some sort of vigilante fox-hunting group for which fox is the new rat? Let’s get them before they eat us?… I’m too lazy to write to him. In this case ignorance might be bliss.

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.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

My guiding thought for the new year. Or any year.

It might seem like a sign of sad disenchantment to say that people generally aren’t good and kind, but outside of Disney movies that has always been the case.

Some time before Christmas I had an interesting conversation about censorship and “smoothing out” fairy tales. All those cut tongues, cropped toes, missing fingers were taken away from us. And in exchange we got Bambi. Not even close to a real deer. Not like the ones I watched as a child run through the orchard, the ones I’d meet on a walk in the fields near our family house. Where my parents live has become suburbia: Bambi and Desperate Housewives. Neat laundry, controlled scream.

In my deep wintry sleep at my parents’ this Christmas I dreamt of toads and snakes coming out of my mouth, like in the uncensored Grimms’ tales. What doesn’t have to be kind by decree, may still discover its own kindness. Coughing roses doesn’t bring you closer to your truths, while toads and snakes make good company when what you think or say suddenly gets the stamp of vulgar and unacceptable.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, or don’t let the bastards grind you down, as the Wikipedia translation reads. The Handmaid’s Tale was published over twenty years ago. My last angry letter to a newspaper was in response to an interview with Atwood on the occasion of the anniversary. The interview is hardly worth mentioning, the interviewer wasn’t even skillful in concealing that she hadn’t read the book. She got the number of Polish editions wrong, unaware of the first one in the 1980s. The epitome of idiocy was reached with the question “What is the idea behind your writing? As most (sic!) readers, I’m interested in the thoughts underpinning the prose”… more than in the text, she should have added, because I can’t be bothered to read. Because critical insight, no, mere skepticism is too much to ask. We want Bambi, an easy conviction that if not “good” then at least everyone is “OK.” That all the ranting is useless, that apocalyptic visions belong to cold-war sci-fi, that what a woman wrote in Canada over twenty years ago has no connection to where we are heading.

I didn’t reread The Handmaid’s Tale over Christmas. As always during my visits, I tried to catch up with Polish press. The Republic of Gilead was dripping from the pages of weeklies and women’s magazines. Neo-Nazi rightwingers temporarily removed from power but lurking in the shadows. All-powerful clergymen checking the wires on their brainwashing machines, getting government funding for their latest whims. Celebrity women talking drunken nonsense about how they wish they were housewives, locked away with their kids in a space between the kitchen and the church. Single women as the new plague and a theory to put their sexuality in a box labeled “disease.” Feminist politicians laughed out of court for their lack of “dress sense.” A sex scandal victim shamed for not being pregnant with the corrupt politician who abused her but with someone else (in the zany world of prim and proper logic she probably should have been “faithful”)… and the rape jokes, the rape jokes that crop up everywhere… The Republic of Gilead adds bricks to its walls. We can’t be bothered to read, so we don’t know we’re not even original in this madness. And of course, let’s bow our heads and be nice in an eternal Christmas, let’s cough roses and say things are changing for the better.

Toads and snakes are creatures of the margins that remind us that darkness exists. There’s no place for them in the well-lit world of Bambi and newspaper rationalizations of everything. Where all the people are wonderful and our culture is our home, our religion is our law, and our thinking is anathema to the happiness that lies in complicity. I don’t believe any country and any people can be sane if they simply rename their totalitarianism. Is being ruled by a one-sex hierarchy claiming power over souls really any better than living under the boot of a foreign working-men dictatorship? This Christmas we didn’t even have snow to cover it up.

I want toads and snakes, a space for the genuine, so that smiles are not merely painted, but the tension of muscles could be felt under the fingers when you touch someone’s face. Not crowds frogmarched into churches but believers and non-believers and outright heretics safe from clergymen’s home archives’ all-seeing, all-punishing eyes. I don’t want a morality that comes from religious tribunals and our corrupt traditions but from people’s lives. In fact, I don’t want to write about how my visit to the country brought me down. I want toads and snakes, uncensored stories, uncut minds.

Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
Don’l let the bastards in you get you.

Happy new year, everyone.