Meanwhile in the east

A friend wrote with frustration:

I came back on XXX Rd in a taxi and while looking out noticed how all the shops on the street were totally fake and ugly and sold absolute junk. What is "Fashion Bakery"? Do the bakers bake in cool shades? Starbucks advertises disgusting-looking soft drinks. Who drinks that? And all the ugly, flimsy, ill-sewn clothes... And people don't know how dissatisfying living like this could be. They think it's great, that CM is advanced and developed. What is development these days? Shoddy buildings with tiny rooms built with thin walls and low ceilings, fitted with ugly steel & glass furniture that cost more than my teak beauties; and all fixtures and lighting break down every 3 months. And they think it's ok as long as they can go out to Starbucks and pay 120B for pink drink with lots of whipped cream. It's mind-boggling, isn't it?

How giants begat dwarves

The book of Genesis tells us that at some point fallen angels knew mortal women and begat a race of giants.

In Poland, a race of giants, begat a nation of dwarves.

Our great ancestors from XV-XVII centuries were great politicians and men of state -- interested as they were in

• both fairness and effectiveness of the laws of the state
• guaranteeing personal liberties and finding the balance between them and the general need for the existence of some sort of a state
• the checks and balances between the king and the parliament
• the proper way to raise, pay for and control the army (which was always under civilian control in the Commonwealth of Both Nations)
• the proper balance in the relations between nobility and cities, and between different nations within the state (the state was pretty corporatist, a feudal inheritance)
• proper procedures for the judiciary in order to guarantee its independence
• proper methods of making and vetting laws (a law must not only be made, but it must also fit in with the preexisting law, which may be customary, or Roman, or canonic)
• public education necessary to lift the desolate from extreme poverty
• promoting trade
• curbing the power of the Catholic church without actually persecuting it (Sigismund III, who had the right of censorship, refused to censor an Anabaptist tract stating in his rescript on the matter: "I shall not allow it that in this Republic, like in some Spain, free men may not be able to read freely what they freely choose", etc.)
• etc.

In other words, these men were interested in the sort of stuff that normal nations do and should care about. Reading documents from 1620's strikes one: how modern, enlightened, why, how Anglo-Saxon these men were with their well-balanced combination of interest in propriety, effectiveness, and -- personal interest. (They never forgot for a moment, that politics is also a debate about who gets what and did not attempt to brand it as immoral).

But all modern Polish politicians do now is squabble over "moral issues", such as whether X cooperated with the secret police in 1972 and whether Y is not putting his business interests ahead of national security and whether Z (opposed to American rockets) is not in fact a Russian agent and a traitor, and whom to honor and whom to damn (by naming streets after them), etc. while the simplest problems -- such as paying us for property seized by the state after 1945 and still remaining in the hands of this very same state -- go unaddressed because "the state is poor" (and of course remains so precisely because it does not move to solve these problems).

You see, occupied nations struggling for independence, do not have politicians, they have activists; and they do not have laws, they have "moral damnation" ("public opinion" whatever you call it) for all who don't toe the nationalist line.

And they of course turn to extreme positions (since these are easiest to manifest).

And -- to religious fundamentalism.

Poland was not particularly Catholic (or anti-semitic or anti-anything, actually; in fact the Parliament had at one point Protestant Majority in the 1500's); it was not, I say, particularly Catholic until 1760's when the Bar Confederacy -- in fact, out first national insurrection against Russia -- was raised (as an act of desperation) in the name of The Virgin.

It is always so, hopeless cases, like that of Chechnia, require divine help and go about it by selling their souls to the devil.

We have been sold to the devil and we are still in his hell. Polish politicians still prefer to play activists, talk about morals rather than laws, and they especially love to pose prettily with the flag. Must a generation pass before things become normal here? Will they ever become normal?

*

Marshall Pilsudski once explaining his youthful fling with socialism (he had been a ranking member of the PPS) said: "I got off the tram named 'Socialism' at the stop named 'Independence'". Is it perhaps time for Poles to get off the tram named "Independence" at a stop called "Personal Liberty".

I'm no longer targetted

Besides, Wprost has gone to the dogs since I last used to read it (1994). It now has pages and pages of printed television – disjointed visual material interspersed with sound bites; this is supposed to be witty; but the impression is – I am sorry to say – shallow and retarded.

Some theorists of culture see in it a breakdown of civilization; and that “we” as a group are getting worse. They are wrong. We are not getting worse – certainly, I am not. Instead, Wprost is changing its target audience. It isn’t that “we” have changed. It’s that “we” have been replaced.

The self-preservation instinct

One has proposed to me a match with a pretty girl. Not exactly “girl”, actually: a divorcee, even if still young, whose first marriage ended in spectacular failure when her husband, a recovering drug addict whom she had met as her patient in a hospital, turned out resistant to treatment after all. In short, she had fallen in love and decided to sacrifice herself in hope of effecting thereby her lover’s cure and transformation. How very noble, and how foolishly self-destructive, and therefore – ill. He was ill, of course – drug addiction is a form of illness; but so was she – the kind of mercy upon others which flirts with self-destruction is also an illness. “Nothing for me, oh lord” is held up of course as a expression of moral superiority; but the truth is that the outcome of the famous prayer in Gethsemane –“may not mine but your will happen” – is crucifixion. It is also a morally simplistic attitude: if all human life deserves respect, then so does our own; we disrespect it when we fail to give it its due. The real moral challenge is a much more difficult one than that proposed by the Gethsemane prayer: to give unto others their due without compromising that which is due to us.

But why would lack of sufficient self-preservation instinct be sufficient cause to reject a proposed match outright? Well, if the husband and the wife are one soul and one body; then, as a result, wives prepared to sacrifice themselves invariably end up sacrificing their husbands, too. In any case, people inclined to sacrifice themselves are rarely happy as a result; and unhappy people render their partners unhappy. Their unhappiness is a burden to them and all theirs alike.

Can't read it

My struggle with Polish written texts continues: articles in Wprost have whole paragraphs in them which I simply do not understand. Some I do not understand because I do not understand the context – “the what has gone before”. Stories in American newspapers address this issue by summarizing the what has gone before in paragraph two; but Polish press articles summarize nothing, every reader is supposed to be au courant all the time, which, of course, as a foreigner I am not. But the lack of background isn’t the only problem: some paragraphs, even those introducing entirely new material, are completely intransparent; or their relationship to the surrounding text isn’t clear (why is this here, the reader asks himself); and, invariably, the whole article is disorganized: different paragraphs, disjointed facts are just thrown together without any effort at any apparent order. Such articles make the impression of being raw material, the writer’s notes to himself before he begins to write the final draft. Good, one wants to say, impressive research, now – write it up for Chrissake!

OECD conducts annually studies of literacy – by giving people typical texts to read and seeing how well they understand them; Poles regularly place poorly in this test, below Romania and Turkey, and, disconcertingly to Poles who think themselves educated, far below Americans. Poles dismiss this result: can’t possibly be true, they say, we are not stupid! But the methodology is solid and the results the same, year in and year out. Perhaps because Poles don’t know how to read; but -- in my opinion far more likely -- because the writers of the texts (which the Polish subjects are ordered to read and understand) don’t know how to write.

What is Polish for Strunk and White?

Dostoevsky as a litmus test

My third, and definitely the last, attempt at reading Dostoevsky, in the guise of “Brothers Karamazov”, ended in a dramatic separation: with all my might, I flung the book out the window into the marsh outside. The book had revolted me. It had begun to resemble a piece of stinking, putrefying carcass lying in my hands – and all to close to my face. The item that overfilled the cup of misery was the figure of Smerdyakov (the name means “Stinker” and as a Slav I am unable to forget the fact and am reminded of it every time I read or hear the name). He is a primitive nihilist, epileptic, son of a mentally deranged homeless woman (who’d probably been raped by Karamazov père in an act of “refined perversion”) and born by her in the outhouse. His repulsive figure thus drawn, he is then used by Dostoevsky to pronounce profound (and disgusting) philosophical views.

My reaction was, of course, an act precipitated by my oversensitive sense of self preservation: there are certain things from which I flee: mental illness, sexual perversion, cultural primitivism, nihilist philosophy, uncouth language, dirt, noise. My attitude to these things, one of outright and complete rejection, is not subject to rational argument: to paraphrase Nietzsche, one does not refute disease, one rejects it.

I have since found that flinging Dostoevsky out the window has a venerable tradition: many have done it before me. (The one about whom I learned it most recently was Witkacy). I thus, it turns out, belong to a certain secret society, whose members do not even know each other, but whose litmus test is our reaction to some things, Dostoevsky among them. Though perhaps we recognize each other on chance meeting; we are, after all, examples of rude mental health. It is rude because it is – ruthless. It is – the self-preservation instinct: normally it lies dormant and unseen, but when something revolting in our environment – that is something threatening to our health – manifests itself, the instinct swings into action – and attacks. Or, as the case may be, flings.

(9/11: Borges also belonged to the secret society).

Do not teach them ethics, please

The Polish concordat with the Vatican allows for catechism instruction in state schools; children are allowed to opt out – and two in thirty do, a surprisingly high and impressive statistic of independent-mindedness. But thereby they are missing something, thought a mother of one of them, and sued the state demanding that a substitute subject be taught to her child. The state lost, the subject is ethics, and the state is about to make it mandatory for those who do not attend religion. An unfortunate outcome, if you ask me: first, it makes ethics a punishment for not attending catechism; which is neither fair to the irreligious children, who should not be punished, nor to ethics, which should not be a punishment; but, second, and worse, it frees the religious from attending ethics instruction. The pretense is that catechism is ethics, which the religious like to say, but without a shred of credibility. For, after all, what is ethical about the biblical code of conduct: “though shalt have no other gods before me”, “one does not cast pearls before swine”, “the head of the man is Jesus, but the head of a woman is the man”? The truth is that proper ethics instruction, by teaching children how to think independently about their moral choices, would undermine catechism, whose point is mindless submission to The Lord (and his earthly representatives); and therefore the reason why the church prefers that ethics not to be taught to the religious is – to protect the ethical shenanigans of the church from independent evaluation and the severe criticism which must invariably follow. If you ask the church, the religious ought not to be ethical. God forbid.

Herbert's Siena

Herbert is said to be a great poet. I cannot say. (Herbert wrote the new poetry, the sort which doesn’t seem quite so poetical as conceptual, and I seem somehow impervious to concepts). But I can say something interesting (I think) about this cultural trilogy (on Holland, Italy, and Greece respectively): the volumes on Holland and Greece read well to me; but his volume on Italy seems shallow, woefully insufficient. The reason why is this: in Siena, in which Herbert spent 3 days, I have spent a month; in Rome where he was a week, I have lived four months. My interests were very much like his, my intensity of research as intense as his. The result: I know more about Italy than Herbert ever could write. What he writes – bores me (and sometimes irritates me with its shallowness). But I know nothing about Holland or Greece; so however little Herbert had written about them, however shallow, however guidebook and tourist office in scope, I cannot know; and even that little is interesting to me, to me who knows nothing.

The people who discuss Herbert’s essay on Siena on the Sunday literary program, and the various callers in, all think the essay is great; none of them has been to Siena longer than Herbert; most have not been there at all. From which evidence it follows that the horizon of our knowledge, by its very existence, has a distorting effect on our perception of quality. The stuff we don’t know, seems surprising, fresh, and breathtaking, however in fact trivial; the stuff we do know – however obscure – is just old hat.

That writing clearly comes from thinking clearly

The Polish books I came here to read are all turning out a disappointment. Matywiecki’s book about Tuwim – I was excited to hear about it, it being one Polish Jewish poet writing about another – turns out not to be a personal document; nor to feature much in terms of a psychological insight about being a poet or a Jew in Poland; and to focus instead on much postmodern and otherwise newfangled literary criticism mumbo-jumbo, things like “poets body” and “disembodied words” with much quoting of Barthes and Cioran. If I did not understand those writers, I understand Matywiecki even less. (Did I say Poles did not seem to have their own ideas?)

The point of Legutko’s “Essay on the Polish Soul”, a philosophico-political essay by a noted philosopher and politician, has something to do with what it really means to be a nation and a patriot, but the point is not made; perhaps it lies hidden under the chaotically disorganized and apparently rumbling, pointless text; but if the point is hidden, then it is hidden very well, for I cannot find it. Even if large parts of the book are pleasing to the ear, they are a cloud of confusion gas for the mind. One finishes more confused than he began. A bad sign for Polish politics and Polish philosophy.

Kurczab-Redlichowa’s book on Russia (actually it has two parts, one on Russia the other on the Chechen war) expresses enlightened sentiments with which it is hard not to sympathize (a dirge for the lost hopes of Russian democracy, for the suffering Chechen nation). But it too is presented in the already familiar, chaotic and disorganized fashion which seems to typify Polish books. Facts are presented in a manner which guarantees confusion among readers; and are so liberally interspersed with rhetorical exclamation points as to throw unnecessary doubt on the factual nature of the report.

Marta Wyka’s memoir about her academic-literary family and career contains touching language, and pretty pictures of the house of the professors in Krakow, and old Zakopane, and so forth. (My favorite story is how Bronislaw Malinowski was asked, in 1915, to give up his rooms in Zakopane after he had gifted his landlady, a very starched 19^th century lady, his book on “The Sex life of the Primitive Peoples”). But the book is also impossibly disorganized; perhaps the intention was to create a dream-like state; or reproduce the sort of talk one hears in social gatherings; but the rumbling nature of the text, the story shifting from topic to topic several times within a single paragraph, makes following it nearly impossible. Pleasant, yes, but it could have been a lot more pleasant if one were not so completely confused reading it.

Sroda’s wonderfully titled book on his travels in the Caucasus, one gets the feeling, was made into a literary experiment because the author had managed to gather too little material on his three short trips to the region to make a good travel book. The literary experiment largely fails; it has good parts, even excellent parts, but the overall impression is the same as of the last four books: a shapeless assembly of different ideas hung together for no apparent reason.

Perhaps this disorder is a symptom of something, of the chaotic disorganization in the Polish mind in general? One of the things which irritate Poles in American universities is the American university’s insistence to teach its students how to write a paper. (“Open the paragraph with a statement. Develop with statements supporting the statement. Close with a repetition of the paragraph”). Poles are irritated by it because they are convinced they know how to think and therefore how to write. But they don’t.

Internet fauna: Evil Dwarves

Every online discussion board sooner or later acquires, or develops, its Evil Dwarf. An Evil Dwarf is someone who becomes very heavily into it; who sits in it all the time – practically – comments all the time, takes on the duties of the host, welcoming people, being the first to answer any questions, etc. Gradually, as the Evil Dwarf begins to identify himself with the list, his relationship to it develops into a form of domination: he begins to dictate topics to be discussed, chide those who do not follow his guidelines, and resorts to all sorts of underhand practices to acquire and support his domination, from jeering to abuse to deception to fabrication. As time goes on, the Evil Dwarf becomes convinced that the list is him and that he is omniscient, error-free, and omnipotent and all the list members are there by his sufferance to be instructed and guided by him. (For which they should of course be eternally grateful).

In one thing the Evil Dwarf is usually right: the list sooner or later does become him as those unwilling to play by his rules simply leave. And thus the Evil Dwarf, who always wins, wins a pyrrhic victory. He is now King Ubu: a King of a Kingdom with just one subject in it, himself. Having waged a war of scorched earth, he inherits the earth he has scorched and now he has to live in it – alone. I have seen several lists killed that way by Evil Dwarves, most famously perhaps the aesthetics list which was killed by Derek Allen.

Why do Evil Dwarves do it? Probably because in their real life they are miserable failures; to be somebody on a discussion board offers them a chance to be somebody for once. (How else would they have all that time to put into their presence on the list).

Which is also why others let them win: most people do have lives which matter to them more; for them the list is just a small part of their interests. So when faced by an Evil Dwarf, they either give in, or walk away. Usually walk away.

Long live King Ubu.

Spare a thought for the Jewish middle class of Israel

Spare a thought for the East European middle class Jews who founded the state of Israel. They undertook this heroic effort in order finally to have a normal state of their own in which to live a normal life; a normal life unmessed with by nonsensical ideologies which claim to be more important than life; ideologies which demand that life be submitted to higher causes – God, empire, whatnot.

Instead, these refugees from ideology now increasingly find themselves in a state run by a combination of religious freaks (the settlers) and nationalist Imperialists (chiefly, Russians). The curse of ideology – religious, nationalist, racist, imperialist – has followed the founders of the state all the way to Palestine. One can’t escape from these evil dwarves of the mind, these monstrous perversions, these sick nightmares – it turns out – even across the sea and to another continent.

Emigrants' patriotism

The Russian pride in empire comes down to this: “we” have beaten the crap out of “them”. This, of course, is the chief reason for Putin’s popularity in Russia: under his rule Russia is kicking again, in this case Chechnia. Never mind that the war isn’t quite a success; the main thing is – Russians are kicking butt again and this makes Russians feel good.

Russian emigrants to Israel import this attitude and adapt it to the local circumstances. They trade “Russia” for “Israel” and “Chechnia” for “Palestinians” and are Israel’s hardest of the hard lines.

(The other hardest hard line are the settlers, who are religious freaks and think God commands them to displace Palestinians; yet their hard line, as odious as it is, may seem somehow positive by comparison with the Russian Jews’: they at least stand for something. By comparison, Russian Israelis’ hard line appears largely negative: the point is not to build anything in place of Palestinian land; the point is just to kick A).

It is a curious thing, by the way – don’t you think? – how a fierce Russian nationalist becomes a fierce Israeli nationalist. Seen from outside, such an exchange may seem to be an act of treason – the new Israeli nationalist abandons his Russian nationalism, he abandons his Mother Russia. One would expect that such an act – and abandonment of one’s national identity – might lead to some kind of reflection on the illusory and arbitrary nature of all nationality. But not so. In fact, most commonly, the immigrant becomes an even fiercer nationalist of his new nation; as if in expiation for the act of treason he feels he has committed, he determines to be even more blindly loyal to his new state. He determines that he will never betray again.

This last is not a Russian problem, but a universal one. My parents – neither Russians nor Jews – are first generation Americans, and noisily, emphatically, tiresomely “patriotic”.

But the Russians' Empire is not theirs

In one of his letters to his wife written during world war two, Pasternak wrote: “It is impossible to express how much I want Russia to be victorious. I have no other desire. But can I possibly desire the victory of stupidity and of eternal banality and lies?” The remark may have been literary – read in one way, Pasternak might appear to intend here a criticism of the Russian literary establishment rather than the Politbureau; but then maybe not? On the other hand, his desire for Russia’s victory may also be not all it appears: his letters, like those of most others, were read by the secret police; this made it customary to make assurances of one’s loyalty to Stalin and of one’s patriotism in private letters.

Whatever the truth of this quote, it captures the central problem of the Russian soul: Russians have an empire to which they are intensely attached and intensely loyal; and an empire which they also intensely hate because it enslaves them. This split personality – or shall we call it two-facedness – goes back centuries: in 1820’s Pushkin quarreled with Mickiewicz over it. Pushkin would criticize the Russian regime when in the company of other Russians; but when talking to foreigners (Mickiewicz was a Russian subject, but not ethnically Russian, which made him a foreigner in Pushkin’s eyes), he would immediately jump to the regime’s defense – with the sort of vehemence which betrayed a deeply felt shame at his own duplicity.

I suppose Russians see logic in this combination of mutually exclusive attitudes – hate it but love it – though just how perverse it is illustrates the case of a Russian Jew I once knew in the US. His family had been refusniks – they had asked for the right to emigrate; they were immediately subjected to economic hardships and persecution; a condition in which they lived for several years until they were finally granted the exit visa. Yet, ensconced in America, where no one persecuted him anymore, over a glass of vodka, Sasha would wax lyrical at the memory of the glorious footage, played over and over again on Russian TV when he was a tender youth, of the first U2 American spy shot down by the Soviets.

The perversity of the situation did not occur to him but struck me: Sasha was wallowing in the glory of a successful shooting down of a plane – in itself a sick cause for pleasure, if you ask me; but, what’s worse, he was glorying in the shooting down of a plane by the very Soviets who had persecuted him. An American citizen by then, Sasha was still taking pride in the Soviet Empire; “his” Empire.

And of course this is the Russian pride: it is “their” empire, even though it does them no good at all and even though they have no say in its management. Most normal people would not consider such an empire as “theirs”. But then if Russians were to admit to themselves that their empire isn’t really theirs, what would they have left? A low standard of living, poor health care, low life expectancy, alcoholism, drug resistant tuberculosis?

Golems

There is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne about a scarecrow made by a witch. She made him from some rags, brambles, sticks and a punctured, empty pumpkin; and she brought him to life by sticking a lit pipe in his mouth – like Rabbi Judah Loew the Maharal of Prague brought to life the Golem by sticking a piece of paper with the word “life” inscribed upon it.

Hawthorne's scarecrow then went into town where, by combination of culture, manners, and conversational skills he became a society success; and won the hand of a pretty daughter of an influential man. (I may be off on some details; it has been some time since I read the story). Now, all would have been fine if only the scarecrow had not chanced to look at himself in the mirror. Instantly he saw through the deception which swathed him (and disguised him) like the fine smoke of his life-giving pipe.

*

Now, I wonder, what is that story meant to say? Is it the tiresome (and stupid), but popular in America and ever more so in Europe, message that culture, manners, and conversation are merely a deception and that what really matters is what is inside, which usually, in the case of those cultured and mannered is something ugly for why else would one want to hide it? Or is it just a pean in praise of good old life-giving American tobacco?

In any case, the story is patently false: the moment of self recognition (which happens to the crow when he looks in the mirror) practically never happens to us in real life. No one is more fooled by our deceptions than we are ourselves. It is a fact well known to psychologists that our friends and acquaintances know us better than we do.

But there is a kernel of truth here: the fact is that there is no one inside, underneath that tobacco-like cloud of deception; and that we are indeed nothing but scarecrows surrounded (and beautified) by culture, manners and conversation.

(Keep on smoking).

That a busy life is a stupid life

In his “Projekt Handlu Kabardynskimi Konmi” (The Proposal to Trade in Kabardine Horses), a largely overrated book in my honest opinion (an attempt to make a work of literature out of a travel book because there wasn’t enough material to write a travel book), its author, Sroda writes one accurate observation which I know from personal experience. Sroda lives in a small town in the North-east, population 7,000, (I know the town well, I nearly bought a lumberyard there once), and he reports that arriving in Warsaw always confuses him: there are too many stimuli. He means stimuli not like a drug addict – as a good thing – yeah, man, I can feel it – but like a typical country bumpkin, as distractions: buses, lights, sirens, hoardings, policemen, neon signs, beggars -- unwelcome things rudely demanding his attention. Too much information for the poor brain to process. One becomes exhausted, one has no time to look at anything in depth. Not like life in the sticks, where one can spend an afternoon contemplating a tree.

I remember well an observation, perhaps the most important observation, which I made on my last trip to Tokyo: that everyone was so busy, and so exhausted with their million daily stimuli and so busy with their million daily tasks, that he became, quite literally stupid, unable to think straight about his life and its priorities. One simply did not have enough free time, and when he did, one fell asleep with exhaustion. There is a price to pay for a busy life: a busy life just can’t help being -- a stupid life.

I am not my name

I have changed my name. When I advised a few friends of the impending change, their responses were twofold. Some thought it was a bad idea – an unnatural act, a subversion of who I am, a new-fangled Americanism, and advised against it. Others were more forgiving. “It is ok”, they said somewhat condescendingly, “to reinvent oneself”. I could almost hear their inner sigh. Both groups betrayed the same deeply held assumption that we are somehow our names.

But our name, the way it is these days fashioned, is either a result of accident (the name of the family in which we happen to be born) or – like our first name – of the decisions of others, a decision made without much reference to who we actually are. My parents named me something when I was only several days old; unlike the name of an Iroquois warrior who might have been named, say, Deerslayer – or Standwithfist – to commemorate some heroic event, my name had nothing to do with me, my traits, or my achievements. As a matter of fact, for my first name I was given a name which was not even the name of someone else – like my grandfather, say, or a famous hero – a person whom they might have wished me to emulate. Rather, my parents selected a name which was fashionable at the time. There were several boys by the same name in every class of every school which I attended later. In naming me thus, my parents have shown minimum interest in my identity.

Thus, my friends, in imagining that my name is somehow bound up with my identity are simply confused. Of course, this is a more general failing of the human mind: to mistake names for things. (This happens all the time, of course, for example when we talk at length about nonsense abstract concepts like “beauty; or when we imagine that there really is such a thing as a butterfly). (There isn’t such a thing as beauty; and there isn’t such a thing as a butterfly. Both words are merely metaphors for a certain way of thinking and perceiving the universe. They describe the contents of our minds, not objects in the universe).

Those of my friends who graciously did permit reinvention, were of course mistaken in thinking that I was thereby moving from identity A to identity B. But they were also mistaken in thinking that I was reinventing something. The process of growing up, of maturation, is a process of invention. Of course, it is also a process of discovery (in which we learn all those things which we can not alter about ourselves); but in the main, it is a process of invention. We say to ourselves: I shall henceforth be this kind of person; I shall from now on stop being that kind of person. This is not reinvention; this is, as it were, chipping away at the stone to reveal the statue inside, which thereby gradually emerges before our eyes. It is a matter of approaching asymptotically that which we will become in the end. That is, if we live long enough to see the work complete.

Actually, I don’t know whether this is what everyone does; or whether this is how anyone else thinks about it; but I know this is what I do and how I think about myself. And because I treat the task with a great deal of seriousness, I think I am getting results. With every passing day, I seem to myself to be more and more myself.

But the change of name was not part of the process. My name is entirely external to me. It is something in my passport; like the passport number; I am not RC5683492 anymore than I am my name. My friends, who call me all sorts of things – “dawg”, “dude”, “man” (when I am lucky, I might add), and who in fact call me anything but my name – know this.

I am not my name. I can’t imagine why anyone would think otherwise.

The problem with conceptual art is the weakness of the concepts

In commenting on modern works of art it is common to say, meaning thereby praise, that “it makes you think”. Back in the old days – before Romanticism created the notion that an artists might have something to say (rather than to please through exercise of skill) – works of art used to be praised for their beauty; or their technical expertise; or both.

By and large, modern works do not satisfy either one of these requirements. In part this is because modern artists do not have much in terms of technical skill with which they could dazzle; but in part also because the idea of aesthetic pleasure has been condemned (as presumably beautist, that is immoral); and sob-ordinated to the requirement of strong intellectual content in art.

So all there is – is the idea of intellectual content.

But precisely therein lies the problem: just what intellectual content?

A recent modern opera, said a critic, was about/ meditation on the ideas of repetition, recording and playback. And maybe it was, but I did not see anything particularly compelling in these ideas. I suppose there will always be people fascinated by certain facts, such as that music can be recorded and played back; or that small objects can but put in boxes and then shut; or that one could then put the small boxes inside bigger boxes, and so forth; or that a one can spin a spin-top and then let go; and what it – oh – all means, but I personally do not find any of these ideas terribly interesting. Really, I mean, what? After all, for pleasure I read 1) chess problems, 2) philosophical analysis, 3) mathematical proofs, 4) financial statements of insurance companies, and 5) models of the human cognitive system. In other words, problems of some complexity (not to mention relevance). As a result, to my mind, puzzlements over implications of recording and repetition (whatever that means) are simply too damn primitive to have any chance of catching my attention.

Now I hear on the radio that a famous (of course Western) performance artist performed some action this afternoon here in Warsaw, whose point, said a critic, was the physicality of the body. I don’t know about you, but I found this problem not much of a problem, either. The body is physical and I am quite alright with that.

And music can be recorded and played back. I can’t imagine that anything new and interesting can be said on the topic.

And this is the real problem with the romantic program (of the artist as an intellectual guide of humanity): few (if any) artists are actually possessed of the necessary intellectual wherewithal to say anything at all remotely interesting.

The aforementioned opera, by the way, as an object of pleasure, was a complete and utter disaster. Not just intellectually disappointing, but also ugly into the bargain. Really. Please. Enough of this nonsense already. If you don’t have anything interesting to say, don’t try so hard. Talk about the weather or something.

And why not? It’ll be as irrelevant, but at least it will not be pretentious.

Parent/child relationship

There appears to persist a universal conviction – East and West – that the parent child relationship represents value in and of itself, like gold, or ivory, or purple. It is your mother, for Christ’s sake, people say.

I am puzzled by the extraordinary vitality of this idea. To me the parent-child relationship is like any other: good and worthwhile if it is loving, respectful and pleasant; and thoroughly undesirable if it is abusive, disrespectful and unpleasant. Undesirable, destructive, hurtful relationships are best broken off; and once broken off there is little reason for them to be reestablished.

I suppose nationality is the same way. I was once, in Berlin in 1988, asked why I do not strike up conversation with a group of fellow students in my language school, fellow students who were of my nationality. “They are your people”, I was told. But of course they weren’t. I had never met any of them. I did not recognize as pleasant their manners, or way of dressing, or speaking. To me, as human beings, they were not just complete strangers, but in fact worse than just strangers – the particular group was repulsive.

And as with countrymen, so with mothers: one isn’t always lucky in the matter of the place where Fate has thrown him. But there is nothing to be gained by sticking with the dictates of one’s misfortune.

Schizophrenia and the President of Poland

Yesterday, at the bus stop, an older man suddenly turned to me and said: “Please, sir, kindly do stand a little further away.” And when I turned to him my puzzled face, he added: “Because you are carrying that radiation device.” Schizophrenia: a case of patently mis-wired brains.

But how does it really differ from the nonsense the President of the Republic spouts? The stuff he says is also patent nonsense; why is that not immediately apparent? Is it because his condition is fairly common and those with the same condition relate to his words? Is it like a population of calculators in which a substantial portion are mis-wired to return “five” whenever asked to give “two times two”. When one of them says “five” some scream “nonsense!” and some “the very thing!” But when a lonely calculator, more severely retarded than others, says “nine” they all shrug their shoulders and say: “poor man”.

Essay on the Polish soul

In an essay entitled “O duszy polskiej” (“On the Polish soul”), writes a noted Krakow philosopher: Poland is a country without qualities. This phrase – “without qualities” –perhaps the one Musil had in mind when he titled his opus major (connotations of expressions are surprisingly similar between German, especially Austrian German, and Polish, making Austrian German an honorary Slavic tongue, or perhaps Polish an honorary Germanic one) – the phrase – “nijaki” – is much stronger in Polish, or German, than it is in English. Polska jest krajem nijakim really means that the country has no flavor, it is dull, indifferent, run of the mill, devoid of any distinguishing characteristics, boring.

I am reminded of all those people in Asia puzzled and trying to search their brains for Poland. Sweden, they say, well, it’s Vikings; and Spain – bullfights; France is wine and cheese; Italy – Michelangelo. But Poland? What is Poland like? On their part it is of course pure ignorance and not to be marveled at; the interesting thing here is my own response: asked by my Asian friends to say something about Poland, I am confused: I don’t know what to say? Really, what is there to be said about Poland? What is special about Poland?

The author’s argument is that the country has been transformed so thoroughly by world war two, losing half its territory in the east and gaining another half in the west; having its population swirled around so that people from Lwow now lived next to people from Wilno and Pinsk and were obliged to give up their local patois in favor of the official tongue which was the only thing they had in common with their neighbors; often living in cities built by Germans to an architectural style completely new to them (so as not to say, foreign); and, anyway, most of its cities damaged beyond repair and rebuilt, like Warsaw, on another foreign – Stalinist – model.

The author’s intent here is vaguely Hutchinsonian and Hegelian (how else): that there are features of a civilization which define it (Patois? Architecture? Er – is the author really thinking this – Boden? -- as in Blut und Boden?) and their erasure erases the civilization, causes confusion, a sense of emptiness and loss.

Like all of Hegel and all of Hutchinson, it’s basicly nonsense. But the essay’s author does make one valid point.

Stalinist architecture – and more generally, communist one – was pronounced “functional”. This was of course a myth, for in truth it was anything but, as anyone trying to get around Warsaw today finds. In fact, the only part of its program which Stalinist functionalism did manage to fulfill was conscious avoidance of any gesture in the direction of man’s aesthetic needs (function was supposed to take care of that). As a result, Polish cities are relentlessly ugly. Before the war, the author says, the country was poor, but not ugly; now it’s ugly ug.

It is.

And just as the beauty of our environment has healing power; calms the raging beast; feeds the heart otherwise distressed by everything else; so its ugliness makes miserable every otherwise entitled to be happy man. Look at these people on the bus: it can’t be that they are all as miserable as they seem, but the ugliness of the city makes them so.

Anglosaxon's freedom

Basia says: I don’t understand it, you were raised here, your parents raised you, they formed you in some way. She means – how is it possible that I do not conform? A good question, since everyone else seems to conform not just without opposition, but without the slightest notion that one might not conform.

I was perhaps 18 or 19 and struggling with the concept of not conforming, when, at an Anglo-Saxon philosophy group I attended the subject of good and evil was proposed (with the usual and boring but immediate slide into utilitarianism: “is what is good for me also good for others?” Er, really, who cares?).

After the company had a few attempts at the subject, I was ceased by an uncontrollable laughter. The Anglos looked at me with puzzlement, and I finally managed to cough an explanation through my tears: how comfortable, how lucky you all are to be able to think such lofty thoughts. If you are Polish, or Serb, or anything East European, you do not have the liberty to think such thoughts. What is good and what is bad has already been decided for you. What is good is your nation, what is bad are its enemies. Nonviolence is not an option; universal humanitarian rights are not an option; personal liberties are not an option. How I envy you.

They didn’t understand. Now I no longer understand it, either. But I still remember.

All they know

I walk around and look at the people in the street, the life they live. The only concept for life they know is work and wages, work and wages, the immortal cycle of labor assigned and tasks performed to boss’s satisfaction. Last year, in Tatra, I explained my reasons for coming – couldn’t get a flight, ended up with an extra week in the country, didn’t want to be in the city. Nice accident to have, commented a man, but will they give you the days off? It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about. He was my age, but he was still a slave of his job. He had a teenage daughter who worshipped him; she will grow up like him, a little cog in the machine. God knows, she won’t learn from him that there are other ways to live.

What they know is not worth knowing

A thoroughly uninformed nation, Poles have TV, radio, newspapers and magazines, and are avid consumers of them all, but, like Indians – and Italians – they know nothing of the outside world, and surprisingly little of their own. What they do know, the result of painstakingly collected state education, isn’t knowledge, it’s doctrine. It chiefly consists of a set of biases: the heroism of the nation, the perfidy of our neighbors, the importance of loyalty to the motherland, kontusz and saber, the great emigration (always heartsick to return), the greatness of Chopin. The reverence for Chopin is as fake – instructed and memorized – as everything else: at this Sunday concert in Lazienki (it was unusually awful) the audience’s reactions to the music show total ignorance of the quality, techniques, and tradition of performance, but the ignorance is bathed in a saccharine worshipfulness, a certain way of being worshipful, itself learned, no doubt, at Sunday church. These are the sources of knowledge here: school, church, and advertising. Little wonder then that what they do know, isn’t worth knowing.

Sell Polish banks

It’s damned expensive in Warsaw; the currency has risen 30% against the Euro within 12 months, driven by high interest rates and the stock market; housing prices have doubled since 2004 and are comparable to Paris, also in part at least the work of hot money; but salaries are lousy. Starting salaries range from 600 Euros to 2,000 euros a month: a joke relative to the prices. People do their best to keep up; they even try to dress well, but the shoes give them away: the best dressed seem unable to afford any half decent foot-ware.

Much of the consumption seems driven by rapid credit expansion. One can’t throw a rock anywhere in Centrum, the city center, without hitting a bank, a credit bureau, or a pawnshop. Up to 10,000 Euros without documentation, they promise. (At 24% annual interest, but that goes unspelled-out). Great business, right? Wrong. 24% interest rates aren’t good business for anyone: they stress the borrower, and a stressed borrower isn’t good for the lender because, sooner or later, he fails to pay. It simply isn’t a sustainable business model.

They also promise – yes, they do – “mortgages up to 100% value of the house”. And one would have thought this sort of nonsense ended last summer with the crash in the US.

How can it not end in tears?

Meanwhile, the stock market has tanked. Everyone seems to think that it has tanked a lot, but they are mistaken. After the recent declines, Polish banks sell at 2.5 times book.

Sell them.

Intellectually bankrupt

Poland is like every other third world country today: intellectually bankrupt. It has no original ideas of its own. It’s economic policies are western; but its opposition – whether it be the gender based movements, or the health food freaks, or the yoga practitioners are also copying the west. Yoga is an especially revealing case: it isn’t Indian yoga, it is a Californian yoga; the very same, which regurgitated in America, is being fed back to the Indian middle classes who now gather in force to hear American rather than Indian gurus expand the yoga-lite, Calif-version. (After all, what can an Indian guru possibly say that is worth hearing: he does not even own a blackberry!)

Everyone is complaining about globalization – in Poland, in India – but even the opposition to globalization – the arguments used, the forms of opposition proposed, why, the very nature of the complaint – is globalized; it emanates from the same centers, from California, New York, Paris. There is no original thought here, in the third world at all, at any level.

Which is why it will remain third world for the foreseeable future: until it learns to think again.

An organizing circuit

Basia is also inclined to believe in conspiracy theories – that someone up above controls everything to minute degree. She’s also inclined to see her life as an unfolding plan from above. She isn’t religious – she has an aversion to the church, the only religious alternative in today’s Poland – but this plan unfolding in her life is presumably not by The Illuminati or the Trilateral Commission, but by some mysterious magical spiritual (“higher”, she would say) power. One could say, therefore, that while she’s not religious, she is a believer.

Basia’s life is going well; in her case the desire to see secret agency in her life stems not from failure; but from a wiring problem. This is the kind of brain she inherited: she sees causality everywhere; she can’t believe in random effects at all. There isn’t much she can do about it. Or anyone. Argument simply does not work.

If you feel that you have no control over your life...

It all makes sense, of course.

Kazik is a nationalist, full of anger and feelings of having been cheated – the nation betrayed, etc.; keeps talking about nebulous “them” who plot everything, engineering events the way they come to pass; things like selling state industries to foreigners for pennies on the dollar; which is, of course, bad.

Zdzis’ talk is a lot more “western”. He speaks out against the church and the nationalists, wants to know how the government spends his money and why, and doesn’t care about settling of scores or minorities. He does not espy dangerous cliques who manage things from behind the scenes to his disadvantage but objects to subsidizing failing Polish industries with his own money. What do I care that they are Poles?, he asks. They can’t make it? Well, too bad. No one will bail me out, if I go belly up. Why should I bail them?

The reason for the difference between the two men is economic: Zdzis does not espy a shadowy clique plotting against him, or the nation, because he is successful. His business is doing well and his life style is more than comfortable. He does not feel threatened; he does not need to deal with feelings of failure.

With Kazik it is of course the opposite. The worse we do, the stronger the temptation to blame shadowy, nefarious doings of others.

A poet talking to a philosopher

Listening to three Polish poets trade poems on PR2, I am mind-boggled. They exchange comments such as that “reality is perceived more by eyes than by ears”, and that “poetry is like breathing in (experiencing something) and then breathing out (talking about it)”.

I listen with my jaws agape: both the momentous significance of these observations (yes, and the sun also rises, usually in the East); and the aesthetic pleasure of the poems they trade – completely and utterly escape me.

Yet, I am not unmusical – just because I find nothing special to Wagner does not mean I do not enjoy – intensely – Mozart, or Mondonville, or Monteverdi, or – indeed – Ligeti (yes!). Nor am I unpoetic – this very morning I writhed with pleasure reading the Piotr Kochanowski translation of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata from 1618. (“Widzicie roza, co wpol wychylona” etc.) (Rhyme, melody, alliteration, original and surprising sentence order, surprising metaphors which nevertheless are not hermetically obscure, varying sentence structure within a more or less constant, but – and this is also an important point – not entirely, meter).

Nor are the three poets idiots: two out of the three I have known, and followed, for years as brilliant, insightful, immensely well-read and eloquent conversationalists about new books (“Magazyn literacki”). Their discussions of Esterhazy, Pamuk, and Hartwig have impressed me immensely; as well as their own form of this very underwhelmedness (“this is so predictable, so overwrought”, said one about a book only last Saturday); yet this is the very underwhelmedness which now I experience while listening to their own poetry.

My central thought here is that, clearly, I am missing something. I am missing something so utterly, that it can only be explained one way: I must be missing the integrated circuit for this stuff. Mildly clever ideas – unless they are really, really clever – just don’t seem to stimulate me. Especially if they are no expressed beautifully. Mildly clever ideas are just not pretty in and of themselves. Concepts, to me, are simply not aesthetic enough to please.

*

"A poet speaking to a philosopher" is a title of a new book just out in recent weeks in Warsaw. I have not read it yet, but thinking about the title has suggested to me a comment on this post (written several days ago): that today's poetry has become a species of a reflection on life; it is perhaps sincere, but if the poet has not been taught to think rigorously, then the results are bound to be embarassing.

The mysterious mystery of the Far East is a lying lie

They have here an occasional program about the Far East. Today was one on Oriental (meaning North Asian) gardens. The explication by a distinguished-sounding professor (granted, in his defense, of architecture, not Oriental Studies) involved much feng-shui and Daoist mumbo jumbo. (By which I mean not Daoism, or feng-shui, or their influence on Chinese garden ideas, but the venerable professor's interpretation of just what the influence was). And, while listening, I realized yet again how effective the Asian strategy of choosing to be inscrutable (“you will never understand the Japanese psyche”) is. Asians manufacture it to hide things by which they are embarrassed; Europeans buy it because it fits with Hegel’s ideas about mutual incomprehensibility of East and West: it excuses us for not giving a damn. "They are completely different."

It’s of course all stuff and nonsense. A Polish saying captures this rather well: “When you don’t know what the matter is, the matter is money”. Understanding what is going on does not require any particularly deep knowledge: just basic understanding how the human psyche works. And it works the same everywhere in the world.

*

Several days ago Kazik asked me whether oriental languages were like Hebrew: that is, whether any given text contained all sorts of meanings, some veiled, some hidden, some hermetic.

But this only shows his lack of understanding of how Hebrew actually works. Modern Hebrew is clear and effective in getting ideas across. Few statements pose any problems at interpretation. What puzzles Hebrologists today (and has for centuries, if not millennia) are texts which are several thousand years old – The Holy Writ as it is usually referred to. And it puzzles us because a) we simply do not understand the vocabulary; and b) have insufficient knowledge of the context (such as historical and economic realities of the day) of the kind which might allow us to make accurate guesses about the intended meaning of texts we’re trying to unravel. In this sense, of course, classical Chinese and ancient Japanese are just like Hebrew: we do not understand them, and have only a poor grasp of the context in which these texts were written.

So, they puzzle us.

But just because they appear puzzling and mysterious to us today does not mean that they were written with such intention; that they were in any way puzzling or mysterious to their contemporaries.

Of course, Asian speakers often intentionally choose to be vague (so as not to betray ugly realities, such as that they want to be paid, for example); but this is not too difficult to unravel. Feng shui and Daoism aren’t really of much use here. If anything, they only serve to muddle the waters.

The greatest philosopher who has ever lived

Marx, of course. Even in this country, which has suffered so much from Marxism Leninism, and where everyone, constantly and everyday, spits on the memory of the commie system.

Oh? I ask. What is so great about Marx? Surely, not his economic theories? Well, no, they say, but, hey, how about "existence determines consciousness"?

That was Hegel, of course, not Marx.

Confusion in this, as in everything else.

Warsaw

This is an enormous city; and, as if it had been struck by a neutron bomb, it is half empty. 2 million people on a territory larger than Paris (with 5 million). This is because, having been completely leveled by the Germans, it was rebuilt to a Stalinist, Russian, megalomaniac plan. Huge roads, as wide as Piazza San Marco is long, stand here for ordinary streets, planned big because the future was meant to be brilliant and tanks were intended to parade here six abreast. Commuting takes forever, and costs a fortune; walking from one building to the next, or across the street, takes forever, and challenges anyone who is not in top form.

Something else is Russian, too. The titanesque gigantism and shocking ugliness of public monuments. One of the worst must be Starzynski, in Plac Bankowy, though the enormous Slowacki across the Imperial-dimensioned Square, isn’t much better. In front of St Florians, in Praga, I saw yesterday ever so briefly before averting my gaze, there stands something that blinds the eye, some woman or another rushing in a gale of billowing bronze. And of course the monument they put up to the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising, the ugliest, most shocking thing I have ever seen. And because this eye-horror was put up in good cause, there is no chance, ever, not a snowflake’s in hell, that it will be taken down.

I avoid the intersection altogether.

Poland, Poles like to say, is completely unlike Russia. Except the capital, of course, which is quite like it.