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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Walcząc z zatruciem kawą (niestety) i porządkując ostatnie sprawy przed świąteczną wycieczką do domu, słucham Kultu. Za moimi plecami stoi otwarta walizka, jeszcze pusta. Bez zmian: nadal nienawidzę pakowania; jutro będę spontanicznie wrzucać ubrania i prezenty. Kazik powinien napisać piosenkę o torturach pakowania. W wielu innych sprawach trafił idealnie w moje odczucia. Słucham Polski i przypomina mi się, jacy w liceum byliśmy wspaniale zblazowani, ale jak mimo wszystko pragnęliśmy zmian. Te pociągi i ponure perony… przypomina mi się noc, którą z Jakubem spędziliśmy na dworcu w Zielonej Górze; jego spontaniczny krwotok z szyi bez żadnych śladów, groźni bezdomni, jak czytaliśmy Autostopem przez galaktykę, żeby nie zasnąć. Trudno uwierzyć, że to było prawie pięć lat temu. Podejrzewam, iż jest to tak naprawdę do powtórzenia, z krwotokiem włącznie. Tylko że znaleźliśmy się w tak odległych miejscach, nie tylko geograficznie, że osób, które mogłyby to powtórzyc już nie ma.
 
 

 
 

Te pociągi! Te dworce!

jeśli się nie mylę, tak zaczynał swoje listy do przyjaciół Zbigniew Herbert. Podoba mi się, więc kradnę. Moje kochane Zwierzątka, chyba nic z tego nie wyjdzie… z mojego pisania tutaj po polsku. Myślałam na początku, że będę przeplatać, ale nigdy się na to nie składa.

Nie mówię “nigdy”, ale nie chcę obiecywać. Myślę, że ci, którzy mnie dobrze znają, rozumieją lub zrozumieją, o co mi chodzi. Moja czteroletnia wojna z polonistką w liceum sprawiła, że uciekłam od pisania po polsku. Studia w obcym języku też mnie do tego nie zbliżyły. Nie oznacza to jednak jakiejś bolesnej alienacji od języka ani kultury, mimo że chwilowo nie mieszkam w kraju. Nadal lubię polski jazz, poezję, Kazika, humor Grzegorza Halamy, filmy Barei i Poznań. Ale jeśli chodzi o pisanie, postanowiłam na razie pójść kawałek drogą Conrada. (Nie, nie zaciągnęłam się na statek i nie planuję napisać alternatywnej wersji Lorda Jima.) Zobaczymy, co z tego wyjdzie.

Proszę, piszcie, niekoniecznie na temat. Prawdę mówiąc, bardzo cieszą mnie komentarze po polsku, szczególnie gdy mają to szczególne, nieprzetłumaczalne poczucie humoru.

Życzę Wam smacznego Św. Marcina, moje Zwierzątka.

I don’t think I have a temperature anymore, but I still feel weak and my nose is still like a leaking tap. Ergo, I still have a cold. However, this is what I did today: I spent an hour waiting in the wind and rain for a package from my mother. Because my mother had the romantic idea to pass the package through someone traveling to Heidelberg. So I almost froze to death waiting for it at the station and when I finally got it, I saw my tram driving off (it’s Sunday, they go every hundred years). I dragged the package home in the rain… and went to sleep without opening it.

Several hours later I opened it and found — apart from the things I asked for — a neatly tied parcel with… what should I call them?… St. Martin’s croissants(?). Rogale marcińskie, which is the Polish name of this delicacy, is probably the most wonderful thing about the region I come from. It’s St. Martin’s today, which means everyone in Poznań and its environs, is eating rogale…

(Image: mniammniam.pl)

It’s also a delicious beginning of the second year of my emigrant life, which — in spite of the scarcity of rogale — has been good for me so far. And rogale have definitely been worth the epic quest. Ask any poznaniak, they’ll tell you.

PS: It’s also Independence Day in Po(e)land. My chance to wave a flag, if I had one.

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.