A Defense of Ardor Page 15
From the road, you can also see the white mountains above Carrara, what’s left of the marble from the famous quarries of antiquity. We see these same white mountains later, while we’re swimming; they adorn the horizon like fake tropical glaciers, partly screened from time to time by a rippling curtain of heat. In Bocca di Magra there are far fewer vacationers than along the smoother shores; Bocca’s coastline is rocky and the devotees of all-day tanning at the beach (which is something like the summertime equivalent to hours spent staring at the television screen) undoubtably revolt at the thought of a rocky bed along this stony shore.
Bocca di Magra (the mouth of the river Magra, which flows down from the nearest mountains, the Apennines) is a historical spot in a different sense. Mary McCarthy vacationed here. The Polish reader of Czeslaw Milosz’s work will also remember this town. Nicola Chiaromonte used to come here, as did Hannah Arendt. These venerable shades bathed here, in this same warm, velvety, deep green water. Mr. Milosz, who has nothing of the shade about him, still recalls perfectly the charm of those bygone vacations, the motorboat trips to Punta Bianca (motorboats still transport eager fugitives from the smooth beaches) and swimming in the ocean.
You can also reach Punta Bianca by way of a steep path, pausing to rest on the roof of the German bunker that adorns even this picturesque promontory. It’s apparently difficult to dispose of Hitler’s bunkers; built, like our Soviet housing blocks, of reinforced concrete, they resist time’s incursions. Unfortunately, ugliness sometimes dreams of eternity too. Who knows, maybe a thousand years from now, fathers will smilingly point them out to their children (in which case the goal of building a thousand-year Reich of sorts will be—ironically—fulfilled). Let’s hope they won’t be confused with the traces of ancient Greece and Rome.
But maybe Bocca di Magra has simply fallen out of fashion? It’s a fairly substantive doubt, linked as it is with the tricky problem of vacationing multitudes. How do you survive a European vacation in July or August, when half the continent, in consort with an army of bold Dutchmen towing their trailers along every highway, finds itself in motion? What’s more, we ourselves, for all our aristocratic pretenses, also form part of this horde. What is to be done? There’s no easy answer to the question so beloved of the Russian radical intelligentsia. To avoid the beaten track may be the only solution. Sometimes it’s simple; in Prague you need only detour slightly from the main tourist trail to find yourself on an empty street. Sometimes it’s more difficult; Lucca is small and holds almost no sidetracks or margins.
We sidestepped the main track once by visiting a new museum in seaside La Spezia. The museum, the Museo Amedeo Lia, opened in December of 1996. A successful engineer, Mr. Lia himself provided the funding. Since it’s not yet in the popular guidebooks by means of which tourists (us included, I won’t hide it) hop across Europe like blind men with canes, it was virtually empty. The museum occupies a meticulously restored Franciscan monastery and is ultramodern, even air-conditioned, which isn’t always the case in Italy. But its real distinction lies in its marvelously displayed exhibits, particularly the old paintings, which are placed on large light gray boards. Many museums have a fatal proclivity for cramming early paintings into a tiny space, apparently guided by the principle that since these artists weren’t yet familiar with individualist pride they should be displayed in large squadrons. The pictures here avoid that fate.
I don’t know of any other museum that provides such splendid conditions for studying the paintings of the trecento and quattrocento. The two large halls in which they’re grouped give the impression of an endless holiday; even the museum guards are cheerful, not bored in the least. This attests to the gallery’s success. Every painting draws our attention and the light backdrop permits us to do justice to the miraculous, fresh colors.
The engineer Amedeo Lia is a very elderly gentleman today, we discover from a text in the museum; he had, and still has, excellent taste. A number of early paintings are fixed in our memory, Lippo di Benivieni’s Descent from the Cross, Paolo di Giovanni Fei’s Annunciation, and several others. Of the later work, we’ll perhaps single out chiefly Pontormo’s marvelous Self-Portrait (with a question mark attached—is it really him?), painted, it would seem, at the same time as van Gogh’s self-portraits: the gaze of a young artist which contains both fear and aplomb, not an uncommon combination.
One work stands out among the sculptures, the exceptional fifteenth-century head by Francesco Laurana. It’s sculpted in clay; two cracks running across the forehead make it look like a skull. It’s not a skull, though, but a head with a kind, intelligent face and closed eyes. Francesco Laurana’s head looks fragile somehow, as though it has been traveling alone somewhere in space. Marble heads are different, they share their material’s majesty; this clay shell, on the other hand, holds both life and death (and sleep), like each of us.
Our vacation was scarred by news of Zbigniew Herbert’s death. By chance, we learned of it in Italy, in his favorite country (let’s turn for a moment to the anthem’s words, “from the Polish land to Italy…”). The Swedish translator Anders Bodegard called us with the news from Stockholm (he’d visited us a few days earlier in Lucca). As a high school student in Gliwice I read Barbarian in the Garden; at the time, in my Silesian high school, it was difficult for me to believe in the splendors of Siena and Tuscany, which seemed more exotic than Martian canals. Now I no longer doubted …
Herbert’s poems and essays taught us many things, not just courage and intelligence but also how to look at paintings and ancient towns. It’s also true, of course, that what was greatest in them eludes such utilitarian formulations. What does the phrase “taught us” mean, since the essence of his poetry and essays was something completely disinterested, great joy, great sorrow, at times mourning, shivers of rapture, the need for fidelity, the praise of wisdom. He had perfect pitch. I imagined him sometimes in the white apron of a conservator of antiquities, standing, pen and brush in hand, with a worried face and a playful smile in a vast sunlit hall filled with statues, trees, and people. What he conserved, though, was not works of art but the world as such. Obviously, he was not a conservative; this category doesn’t exist in great poetry. He was a splendid magician; the stones of Siena still miss him.
10 Should We Visit Sacred Places?
There’s no point in visiting mythological sites, I thought. It’s not worth traveling to cities whose weight in our memory is as ponderous as a bronze monument. We shouldn’t do it simply because we won’t be able to cope with the experience, the intense emotion. Lvov has been for many years the single real place, the single image of the world for my father, who was born and raised there. He systematically refuses all opportunities to visit, though. I was born in Lvov, but left before really seeing it. Recently, however, I returned from a trip to Ukraine and showed my father my freshly developed photos; he instantly recognized and identified every street, every alley, virtually every building—after fifty-six years!
Like a thriving tailor’s shop, our spiritual life relies on hiring a fair number of assistants, cutters, and seamstresses, whose tasks are not simply separate but mutually contradictory. The calm, perhaps slightly melancholy helpers maintain myths in a state of virginal purity, shielding them from scholars’ eyes. The others, busy skeptics, wield their enormous scissors as they endlessly revise and shamelessly criticize the same myths.
The invitation sent out by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, the foundation that organized an international conference in Lvov in 2001, apparently fell into the hands of this second type—not the guardians of myth but its opponents—who must have rubbed their palms in glee, repeating, “Yes, of course, let him go, maybe that will finally cure his love for this obscure little city on the outskirts of Europe.”
We arrived in Lvov late at night, in the atmosphere of unreal coziness created by every comfortable bus, a fortress of warm security and sleepiness, a mobile monument of civilization from which the representatives of a better world peer out at an imp
erfect reality. This impression was reinforced by the hideous post-communist apartment blocks that took hazy shape outside the window, the same kind of building that rises everywhere from Kamchatka to Lipski, menhirs adorning the Soviet empire’s ruins—but these were somehow sadder. (A technically, if not philosophically, improved edition of these structures can also be seen everywhere from Leipzig to Lisbon.)
For all that, sometime before eight on Thursday the twenty-fourth of May, I opened the curtains of my hotel room on the sixth floor overlooking the deep green Jesuit Garden where one of my nineteenth-century cousins, a lawyer and poet, caught such a bad cold that he died soon after of pneumonia and ever since has been reduced to an elegant shadow in an oil portrait. And I was greeted by a dazzling view of a beautiful city, bright gold in the sharp sunlight. My little flock of inner mockers fell silent, their scissors frozen. For all three days of my stay in Lvov the sun was absolute master of the sky. I saw before me a calm, golden city which I viewed from a double elevation; the Jesuit Garden itself ascends a hill, and the six floors of my hotel rose on top of this (the hotel was new, built sometime in the eighties). I saw church spires in the distance—I could make out the cathedral tower, the Dominican church’s green cupola, and the town hall tower, and I guessed where the Bernardines’ ornate façade must be. I knew where the main square was, I imagined the theater, hidden in the lower levels of this early morning jungle, I picked out the hill of the High Castle, shutting out the view like a movie screen—and further, to the right, still framed by the city woods, was Kajzerwald, the district in which rose the little house bought by my grandfather in the twenties, the house where I was born.
I had before me a city that was both absolutely foreign and completely familiar, forgotten, forsaken, surrendered, mourned, bullet-ridden, but still truly existing, vividly and persuasively illuminated, solid, living, a city in which I could immediately make out the most important churches, whose general topography held no secrets for me, spread wide in the flatlands, tucked between hills, serene, stately. You shouldn’t visit mythic places, there’s no way to see them, catch them, seize them. They’re easy to recognize, but what then? What’s to be done? After a long moment, I capitulated and reached for my Japanese camera in order to eternalize the city’s astonishing, early morning performance. I took a picture that I view unmoved today, that retains almost nothing, the May gleam has lost its glory, the towers can scarcely be seen, only the trees’ leaves flaunt their easy universalism and a television transmitter tower juts through the morning mist.
Fortunately I didn’t have to decide anything, I could save my questions and indecisions for later. The first day was devoted entirely to learned political and economic disquisitions: the problem of the present-day Ukrainian-Polish border was discussed with an eye to Poland’s future membership in the European Union. I admired the knowledge and eloquence of my colleagues, who remembered the dates of every pogrom, uprising, and international conference; this may sound glib, but I mean it. I also liked the passion with which they addressed the question of the future. I listened with great sympathy to the local participants, who openly spoke of the troubles of present-day Ukrainian life and looked with hope and envy to their western neighbor, Poland. They were also critical of Poland, particularly the participants representing Poland’s Ukrainian minority. I compromised myself, though, when I was unexpectedly called upon to respond. (I was supposed to summarize the evolution of Polish historians’ attitudes toward the Ukrainian problem in the 1970s and 1980s!) I let everyone down completely, thus confirming the negative opinion that reasonable people everywhere have entertained toward poets for the last three thousand years or so.
The next day, after having aired their pessimistic predictions on Ukraine’s future and the possibility of her membership in the European Union, the other conference guests packed their bags and headed back to Germany and Poland chiefly, or perhaps they sped off to the next international conference on Europe’s urgent worries. But I had just begun my pilgrim’s project, with its hazy prerogatives and obligations. I found myself, after all, in what was for me the most extraordinary spot on earth, in my city, which wasn’t mine, about which I knew next to nothing, in a foreign city, about which I knew a good deal, which was finally just a bit mine. It was as if the beautiful definition docta ignorantia had abandoned the books’ pages to become a living wound on Europe’s green map. But what was I supposed to do? How does a pilgrim from such a strange sect behave? There are, after all, no guidebooks for ignorant people born in Lvov. There are no instructions for people like me, who spent only four months in Lvov and know nothing—a Japanese camera can’t capture time past, a prewar city map says nothing of the present.
Propelled by a sense of obligation, the next morning I set out for the art gallery directly across from the former Ossolineum and looked at dozens of French and Italian paintings, darkened canvases hanging on long-unpainted walls. It was clear that the museum had no money—like a number of Polish museums. I also saw a fair amount of Polish painting from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
By going to the art gallery, I was acting just as I would in an Italian or French town: like a tourist. I felt the whole time, though, that this wasn’t the proper way to behave in this town.
Someone who respects myth and remembrance, as I did in Lvov, is plunged into something like a narcissistic reverie. He thus seeks out dark and empty places, museum halls or shady parks. He feels ill at ease, though, on streets radiant with May sunshine, especially when viewing the Ukrainian crowds filling the bright streets. This crowd, sometimes young and carefree, other times old and careworn, poor, sometimes dressed in peasant, not urban, fashion, shatters the reveries, disrupts the speculations. A sui generis situation: to be in a city that is, in Mandelstam’s phrase, “familiar to tears, to the veins, to the child’s swollen glands,” on the one hand, but filled with entirely different, foreign crowds. Not even different from those I knew, since I can’t claim to have known Lvov’s prewar crowds, but different from Krakow’s or Warsaw’s or even Gliwice’s crowds. Plunged into dreams, I walked along the street, drowning in the brilliant sun. I checked street names on the prewar city map my father sent me, without taking the new, Ukrainian onomastics too seriously. German tourists must stroll through Gdansk or Wroclaw the same way, absorbed in dreams, ignoring the present-day city. Young Israelis or Jewish Americans must likewise walk the streets of Krakow’s Jewish district, Kazimierz, seeking traces of the prewar life, sunk in reverie. We’re like ghosts, impatiently driving the present, the new life, away. Since the new life in old cities strikes us as imperfect, accidental, provisional, and finally superfluous.
In some sense all these dreamers seeking the past—to whom I belonged for the three days I spent walking Lvov’s streets and parks—are the ideal conservatives, they replicate perfectly conservatives’ impotence. They search for something that doesn’t exist, something that may never have existed, insofar as they beautify the urban crowd whose chimera they chase. They seek better, more beautiful times, and even if some obliging shaman agreed to resurrect what they desire for five minutes, that is, life before the disaster, the crowds, the clouds, the window displays, the shrubs before the disaster, they would still cry out in dismay, “Oh no, that’s not it, it was far more marvelous before!”
My magician—a different, wiser magician—turned up in the person of Andrij Pawlyszyn, a young Ukrainian, an editor of the journal Ji, well known in Lvov, with perfect Polish and a good working knowledge of Polish literature. He offered to show me the city and did in fact spend half a day walking through Lvov with me. He picked a roundabout route leading through Lyczakow and the High Castle to the neighborhood of the main square. On Akademicka (that’s the prewar street name, but he also knew the old names) he pointed out the spot where the local philosophers used to gather in the café Szkocka. A moment later we passed a group of young people speaking Russian. Andrij said these must be the students from the Polish school who always chat i
n Russian on the street. His knowledge helped me return to earth. We saw the building at 55 Lyczakowska Street where Zbigniew Herbert had lived. Andrij told me about the efforts to have a plaque put up. We also went down Piaskowa Street—a few steps from Lyczakowska—to see the house that had once belonged to my grandfather. If I’d been on my own, I would have been happy just to look at the lattice, the wicket, the rusty doorknob and the tree in the garden. I might not even have remembered that the property visible from the street in fact belonged to someone else, and that my old family home stood hidden behind the front building. I would, in other words, have committed an error typical of those ghosts who stroll through new cities following the directions in an old guidebook, ghosts so ethereal that they sometimes go into raptures over the wrong address. But Andrij suggested that we visit the old house; he rang the doorbell and explained through the intercom who we were and what we were doing. After a long pause an elderly lady, suspicious at first but then very friendly, let us into the garden and then the house itself.
Thus I saw for the first time the legendary family house from within; it was occupied now by the old lady and her dermatologist son. And all this was thanks to my guide. (I had been in Lvov once before, when I was a student, but I hadn’t dared then to knock at the door of my ex-home.)