Politeness and dignity

I like my afternoon siesta here because I like my room. The hotel is an old colonial building and the room has what few modern high class hotels have: a high ceiling and a tall window (with shutters). The room also has something difficult to grasp – shape. There is something to these old buildings, something to their proportion, which is so very satisfying. No one knows quite why; when asked, people sometimes mutter “golden section” though when they try to make the calculations, it usually isn’t. We have insufficient intellectual apparatus to understand it, but we do sense it. Modern buildings don’t have that satisfying feel to them. They are indifferent.

And instead of carpet the room has tile.

But my afternoon nap yesterday was interrupted by noise in the courtyard: a Dutch family lunched there, their kids ran around in circles unsupervised and screamed, the adults talked at the top of their voices to work through the noise. The management asked them twice to keep it down, unsuccessfully. I had to close my window and did it rather demonstratively, but my demonstration, though noticed, was ineffective.

When they have finished yelling, they went away, and I reopened the window. Only after some time I noticed the quiet murmur of voices below: five Moroccans, and several small children, sat under my window – eating, drinking, and talking in low voices. Same number of people, kids roughly the same age; yet, they were barely noticeable.

The experience is typical in the entire middle-income third world. Though the Europeans like to talk about that part of the world as less “civilized” – by which they mean that buses belch smoke or land titles are not clear or the plumbing isn’t working – the truth is that when one encounters cases of pure sociopathic rudeness here, they are nearly always – in my experience always – acts of Europeans. Europeans point shoes at people, bare unattractive body parts, speak loudly, throw cigarettes wherever (because “nobody cares”). Thereby they show that they don’t care: a kind of blindness to the existence of others, a lighthearted lack of respect for fellow men. Which the natives perceive as a striking absence of dignity, since lack of respect for others is tantamount to a lack of respect to oneself.

Agatocles claims that the same Westerners would not dare behave in those same ways back home (certainly not throw the cigarette butts), by which he is suggesting, if you think about it, something very dark indeed. I am prepared to be more forgiving in my judgments, even if, in some instances at least – dress code, for example – there certainly is an element of being contrary, or scoring a point (presumably for freedom in dress taken facilely for a matter of women’s rights).

But that’s an aside. My main point was – politeness as subspecies of dignity: “I respect so that I may be respected back”. By giving respect to others one gives himself dignity.

Westerners don’t seem to understand the concept of dignity anymore. I don’t know why. Unlike Hutchinson, I do not want jump to winded (and worthless) explanations. So I say that I don’t know why, even if one explanation at least suggests itself instantly: cutting the head of one’s king is a sin against the divine order of the universe and calls for divine retribution.

Whatever the cause, we have lost dignity – our women don’t know how to be haughty anymore. I can’t help feeling that we have been thereby impoverished and that my years in Asia have helped me recover at least a certain degree of sensitivity for this quality which animates so much of the world outside the West.

And he never loved again

They end old tales with the words “and he never loved again”. The presumption is that the original experience was so good that the hero could simply never hope to match it. The truth is that this is only a presumption and that the opposite is more likely true: that the experience was so bad that the hero never wanted to risk it again.

That Russian is a broken language

The puzzling fact that I simply do not understand Russian political discourse – I mean the sort of stuff ordinary Russians say about politics – was suddenly put in perspective for me by the reading of a Russian historian-scholar (yes) about the Khazar state which, he said, I quote (yes!) had once been “a politico-military octopus sucking out the blood of the Russian state”. (Come to think about it, this sentence is such damnable nonsense that we should name the culprit in order to shame him. Voila: Lev Gomulev).

The statement is sheer nonses: the relationship between the Khazar and the Early Russian state is no more clear (there simply are no documents to say one way or another) than the scholar’s metaphor: after all, octopi are not blood suckers. Surely, the author of the sentence knew it, but didn’t care. In fact, he didn’t care about the patent nonsense of the metaphor at all.

Why?

This statement has suddenly thrown for me into sharp relief similar statements coming from my Russian friends about “mongol-muslim hordes” and such. This is, it turns out, how all Russians speak when they talk of politics, and they speak that way because, I suddenly realized, they do not have what other nations might term political discourse (that is, rational speech about conflict of interests); their political language is no more than an overactive praise/abuse apparatus imported wholesale from the old Soviet/Russian propaganda machine wherein argument was avoided (one could hardly argue for any Soviet/Russian policy?) in favor of naked (and empty) emotional appeals.

And so, for example, “reactionary forces” (itself a meaningless propaganda-smithed verbal nonsensity) were “the beslobbered dwarf of reaction”. That closed the issue; it was not necessary to analyze further why we were all supposed to be against “reactionary forces”, for, after all, who could possibly want to be for “beslobbered dwarves”? Matters stand similarly with blood-sucking octopi.

Now, language is a crucial tool for thought – if you cannot say something and then analyze it for content, then you have no idea what you really think. (I think one can make this claim about Lev Gomulev’s statement about octopi). But language is also extraordinary fragile; it is easily broken. Why, to the extent that most of us use language to emote rather than think, one could suggest that every language is constantly subjected to a kind of process of entropy, a constant slide into chaos of meaninglessness. As great analytical philosophers knew, it takes all of one’s effort to protect our language from falling into the thick fog of nonsense, and to create and maintain the verbal tools necessary for meaningful speech.

By contrast, a sustained effort to break down a language will easily break it down, since it works, as it were, with gravity, downhill, towards natural degeneration and degrengolade. Russian political language has been broken in this way through centuries of battering with propaganda nonsense and no one seems to be trying to fix it.

The truth is that those who use it to spout nonsensical abuse understand what they say no better than I do. Quite literally, the stuff they say means nothing.

That travel does not broaden the mind

The same two Dutch girls do not like Moroccans much, saying that they are all “very tense”. Whatever that means (it means, no doubt something else in Dutch), the reason for it is soon apparent. Asked what places during their 2 and ½ week’s visit they liked best they name Essaouira, Marrakech and the one night spent sleeping in a tent in the desert. They did in other words the standard tourist thing. Back in 1800’s tourists meandered through the Firenze Duomo their Baedekkers in hand according to the complex path laid out by the guidebook. From the guidebook they read out numerous complex facts and by glancing at the objects of their visitation they confirmed their continued existence in their alleged location. Nowadays tourists don’t visit monuments, or rather they hardly do, but they still go through a strict ritual laid out by the guides – from one ersatz “must do” experience to the next. (And they are all as ersatz as the night spent in the desert in a tent: no one in his right mind sleeps in the desert in a tent at night. At night one sleeps under the open sky, looking up at the stars and taking in the cool breeze. The tent is for camping during the day, for hiding from the intense heat of the midday sun, not for stifling one at night when the outdoor is the so much better place to sleep. But tourists don’t know that, do they? It is far easier to sell to them something they already know from home – a night in a tent. (Not too much reality, please, as someone once said: our ability to absorb unfamiliar facts is simply too limited).

But what I wanted to say is not that mass tourism is one great foolery, a species of Disneyland; nor that it spoils the places wherever it goes (by throwing up ugly buildings and cheap trinket shops); but that it spoils the locals. The difference between Marrakech and Rabat is the case in point. Rabat is the capital, with large industry, trade and government employment and relatively few tourist attractions. People here do not live off tourism, but off their proper jobs. Ergo, by and large, they ignore me. No one here, since I arrived here 48 hours ago, has approached me to offer me anything – no woman, no hotel room, no hashish, no camel ride. Er, I take it back, two fellows did in the Kasbah, which is the only tourist destination here and where I will not set foot again; but even they were more tentative and furtive than anything I experienced in Marrakech. Certainly, no one has attempted to brow beat me or blackmail me into anything. In Marrakech of course it is the other way around: there is nothing going in Marrakech other than tourism and every foreigner is free game to be fooled and fleeced and dumped. (The real art lies in doing all this without being noticed, but, as with everything else in life, few attain to real art).

The locals realize that this is very bad; that it corrodes their souls more than it ruins our holidays: after all, who wants to be the sort of man tourism obliges them to become? So they try to compensate through emphasizing their kindness and empathy – humanity if you will – in their dealings with other non-guests (natives). They overcompensate, total strangers become their brothers by the mere dint of being Marrakechi, there is far too much shoulder slapping and hand shaking. That’s not good either: one loses the precious intrapersonal distance without which one cannot be himself. Even worse things happen when a long term visitor begins to cross the line between us and them, when one actually begins to like him, when he is no longer that other species to be fleeced and dumped – one now has to account to his people for this strange fact, and protect him, and the other way around, too. It is a terrible thing, certainly most unprofessional, and one should be on one’s guard, but even the people in the tourism industry are mortal and from time to time simply begin to like someone.

But I am straying. What I wanted to say is that the Dutch girls don’t like Moroccans because all they know is the people in the tourism trade (who are hard to like). They don’t like Thais, either, for much the same reason. In fact, they don’t know either Moroccans or Thais and are in this the perfect illustration of the fact which I have come to understand a long time ago that travel does not broaden the mind in the least. You go out, busily and expensively go around the world, and return home as stupid as you had departed.

Hutchinsonian Babes

The two pretty Dutch girls (though perhaps not as pretty as they themselves think) at my hotel in Rabat are Hutchinsonians. I know this because comparing Thailand and Morocco they claimed, knowing about the subject nothing whatsoever, that the two cultures are surely very different, presumably on account of religion, race and distance. I have heard this erroneous (but strongly felt) opinion frequently before. I suppose they also think that America and Europe are very similar; an opinion I have also frequently heard before, expressed not only by Asians (who usually cannot know better) but also by assorted “Westerners” (who should).

The cultural differences between America and Western Europe are really quite striking. All one needs is willingness to see beyond the claptrap of fashion, movies and lingo to notice that, for example, Americans’ friendships tend to be numerous, shallow, and temporary, while Europeans like to pretend at least that they have a small number of “friends for life” who are more special to them than the rest of their acquaintances; or that Europeans do not have any of the American’s good natured empathy to strangers (“hi!”), but on the contrary tend to think that homo homini lupus; that Americans go to great lengths to create an impression of folksy classlessness while Europeans are quite hierarchical; that Americans are by and large civically minded, while Europeans are not (some more than others); and so forth.

The truth is that, at least as far as I can tell, there are three kinds of societies: America, Europe, and the traditional middle-income third world. What countries in the last group – in which I would include Turkey, Thailand, Taiwan and now Morocco – have in common is a certain conception of the kind of person one should be: decorous, noble, polite, loyal to family and friends, generous, reasonably selfless. There is an overwhelming sense of dignity and decorum here. In Morocco and Thailand the cosmetic aspects of this are different – dress codes are different, Moroccans shake hands while Thais bow, etc. and this confuses my less insightful friends into thinking that the differences run deeper; but these friends simply fail to see that these are but cosmetic aspects, customarily determined and totally arbitrary ways of expressing the same thing that lies at bottom: one’s dignified respect for strangers, which is really one’s dignified respect for oneself.

The truth is that going from Thailand to Morocco is less of a cultural shift than going from France to America. Because, perhaps, going from Thailand to Morocco is going from one traditional society on the cusp of the great change to another, while going from France to America is a visit from the future to the far future of the world (at least the way things seem to be going now).

But my Dutch friends would not know it, would they. Certainly no more than Hutchinson would: they have not had sufficient exposure to know.

Some thoughts concerning babeliciousness

On a train from Marrakech to Rabat I woke up suddenly to find myself surrounded on all sides by three most babelicious things I have had the opportunity to set my eyes on in a long time. They were “modern” Moroccan girls, which meant that they were a) naturally endowed (massive hair, huge eyes, round shoulders, good skin various shades of olive) and b) they were taken care of in a way in which European women rarely take care of themselves these days: hair, mascara, lipstick, nails, bijou – the full monty. (“18 adornments of a lady” was once a popular genre of North Indian miniature painting – and North India is really in a cultural continuum with Morocco; the same aesthetic concepts circulate unimpeded from Atlantic to the Brahmaputra only to fall off the cliff somewhere near Tangier).

Though the monty was heavy, it was not overwhelming: it projected the impression of a precious jewel beautifully set, of a well taken care of treasure; it was rich and clearly noticeable, but not over-rich. It was like a Moroccan meal: perfect to satiation and not a drop of thé du menthe more. Add to that their regal manner – they barely graced me with a disapproving glance (how glad I was the damned dog was not with me to complete the picture of my utter misery) – and their pronouncedly unhighbrow interests – they were reading ladies’ magazines in French, with articles entitled “Ou recharger les batteries?” (i.e. which beach this summer) and “Si nous retombons amoreuse” (what else), and the image was complete: precious, hard to get, but not intellectually tiresome. In short, they were the perfect… babbles. (“Yes, we speak French fluently – and use it to talk trash”).

Perhaps not surprisingly I was seized by a violent desire to marry all three of my neighbors immediately. And closing my eyes (their frosty gazes did not encourage continued examination) I began to reflect on the means necessary to accomplish the task. The most expeditious system appeared to me to become a bandit, or better yet a pirate, build up a following, turn it into a political power base and in time to set up myself as a sheikh in control of some piece of desert (or sea) with a particularly profitable trade route across it. With my wits and stamina and a little capital, perhaps a little help from my friends, this should be easily accomplished within – oh, say, 15-20 years. Then I could have all three of them, plus one more, for wife, and maybe several mistresses on top.

This appeared the only sensible way to proceed since it was immediately clear to me that I could never make up my mind for any one of these girls. For if I should only set myself to the (rather smaller) trouble of getting only one of them (which I might accomplish within months rather than years and rather without much bloodshed); and succeed; then it I would forever be turning my head now this way, now that, at all these other women around me, all these precious babbles, which I did not get, never satisfied with a mere one. And I could not possibly be satisfied with any one of them – there simply did not appear any grounds for choosing any one over any other. And what misery that would be: to have a precious jewel, and yet forever to want more.

(How different the situation on the Marrakech-Rabat train from my life in Venice where I simply cannot imagine a single one woman in the city I could possibly desire to possess – rather then, well, rent. Or maybe I could imagine – just one. The Venetian market is simply not as deep as the Morrocan one. This has an important advantage, actually: it makes choices easy).

Then of course I realized that such a goal – a sheikdom complete with a harem – was a project doomed to failure; for once having accomplished the task – having ensconced say 10 of these babbles in a walled garden – I would of course dedicate myself entirely to its consumption and the government of the sheikhdom would soon fall into neglect, disrepair, and eventually – my enemies hands. Thus I would perhaps have my babbles, so strenuously won, for a mere few months.

There was a Turkish Sultan like that once, who upon enthronement dedicated himself entirely to the strenuous consumption of all the goods offered by his post. He possibly outlived his plan, which could not have been more than a few months, his reign having lasted the surprising duration of a full year. He was a wise man: he chose brief but uninterrupted pleasure over the more subtle, shall we say, pleasures (so as not to say drudgery) of running a government for many dull years. The man bet high – for a few months of joy – and, I can’t help feeling – by getting a full year – won. (Chapeaux to a consummate and successful gambler).

Having let my mind – tortured by the desert, the sun, the heat, and the women, ah the women – wonder in this wasteland long enough, I then pulled myself short. I began to reflect how much luckier I was as a single, unattached man. For as long as I remained uncommitted to any one of these women, or to any particular plan, I was potentially the husband of them all. For, after all, as long as I remain single, who is to say that one day I might not come into possession of every pretty woman in Morocco all at the same time? True, with every passing year the odds of that, long to begin with, become longer and longer, of course, but there always is a chance, however tiny; and the least chance represents some value, is worth some money to someone (as the options market shows everyday). An, surely, an unfulfilled potential in these matters is surely better than any degree of fulfillment (the last being inevitably so disappointing).

And thus I have come to my resolution to cultivate this worth – to paraphrase Wellbeck, “the possibility of a super-harem” – by giving the three pretty girls in my compartment my own frosty and haughty gaze.

Or better yet, none at all. I opened my eyes and buried my gaze in my dog-eared copy of Ibn Battuta; regretting only that it was not some 11th century Koranic commentary. A manuscript, of course; in kufic. Several stories above the reach of their idle brains.

(Here a haughty pout).

Shoes and toothbrushes

I was obliged to spend several days shopping for sports shoes. I was struck by their ugliness; and uniform ugliness, too: there are certain design traits which they all share, a kind of lumpy swelliness emphasized by the use of piece-meal decoration in contrasting colors, intended to look like shards of blown up egg splattered on the broken shell. I said to two ladies, who having been rendered helpless by the appearance of the shoes, stood before the shelf with their shoulders drooping in a dispirited resignation, unable to choose, perhaps unwilling to take any one in hand: "They all look like toothbrushes, don't they?" The ladies agreed emphatically and with a kind of relief at being understood, but we were all wrong: the toothbrushes are now like like sports shoes, not the other way around. God only knows why, but the sad consequence is that I am obliged to brush my teeth with my eyes closed. Otherwise I feel that I am brushing my teeth with a sneaker.

A leaflet advertised one of the shoe designs as having an "aggressive profile". It boggles the mind.

I am a slave and I am proud

On the train back I sat in the dining car. A young, business-dressed woman with a primitive prole face sat behind me and made a succession of loud telephone calls to friends and sundry whose point was to inform them, and everyone else, that she was busy busy busy working hundred hours a week for her firm and clients. (Both words, though old, have a new ring in Polish, having not been used under communism at all; 15 years after communism's break up, they continue to breathe novelty, western-ness, capitalism). Like most people who promote such fact, the woman took pride in it, and perhaps expected everyone else to take in it envy, it being to her mind incontrovertible proof that she is -- irreplaceable. Though perhaps more so on account of her willingness to be so exploited than unique ability to do the work: to me, of course, it was proof of something else: that she didn't know how to organize her work. I felt pity for her: for the hours she was obliged to work, and for her inability to imagine better ways to spend her time, or better causes for pride.

Meanwhile a long long time ago

All day today I remembered an exchange from the Kokinshu:

Poem No. 645

When Narihira visited the province of Ise, he met, in secrecy, the
person who was serving as the High Priestess there. The next morning,
before he was able to find a way to send her a message, this poem was
delivered from the woman:

きみやこし
我や行きけむ
おもほえず
夢かうつつか
ねてかさめてか

(kimi ya koshi
ware ya yukikemu
omooezu
yume ka utsutsu ka
nete ka samete ka)

That is:

Did you come to me?
Did I go to you?
I cannot know.
Was it dream? Reality?
Was I asleep? Was I awake?


To which Narihira replied (Poem No. 646):

かきくらす
心のやみに
迷ひにき
夢うつつとは
世人さだめよ

(kakikurasu
kokoro no yami ni
madoiniki
yume utsutsu to wa
yohito sadame yo)

I wandered, too
in heart-blinding darkness
Was it dream
or reality?
Let others decide

Nete ka, samete ka. I suppose that would be in Polish nie wiem czy na jawie, czy mi sie snilo.

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.