A Defense of Ardor Page 16

  I then understood the importance of such a guide—intelligent and well versed in the various new layers of reality without discounting the past. A guide who saves us from misty mysticism.

  Yes, I thought sitting in the airplane, we should visit mythic places, even if it means sorrow and hard moments. We should visit mythic places because they are the axis, the pole of our life, jutting into frosty ether. We must visit them, but only if accompanied by a sober, trustworthy guide.

  At the little Lvov airport four sandstone socialist realist sculptures bade me farewell—a soldier, a peasant woman, a pilot, and a worker. They stood at attention in the bright May sun like heroes of a forgotten Greek epic.

  11 Intellectual Krakow

  The structure of many European (and North American) cities is governed by a mysterious law, which I have discovered and which may one day bear my name. Districts on the east side of town are generally proletariat in character, while western districts are bourgeois and comparatively intellectual. Just take a look at maps of London, Paris, Berlin, to name but a few metropolises. Aren’t I right? The same pattern turns up time and again. In London we have, as everyone knows, the East and West Ends. In Paris, the wealthy sixteenth district is on the west, while the humbler twelfth and twentieth districts lie eastward. The western suburbs are likewise safer and more prosperous than their eastern counterparts. West Berlin was the wealthy part of town long before the wall went up. This law also holds for Warsaw.

  I’ve spoken with knowledgeable geographers and sociologists who’ve been unable to explain this phenomenon. Does this peculiarity of city planning perhaps reflect the medieval principle of building churches along an east-west axis?

  Krakow—a far smaller town than the behemoths I’ve mentioned—is subject to the same principle. The bourgeoisie and intellectuals have long since divided the territory west of the Market Square between them. Under communist rule this region grew grayer and became the kind of district that traditional guidebooks would be hard pressed to define. For Krakow’s inhabitants, who don’t require guidebooks, the answer was and remains simply “the intellectual district.”

  West of Market Square: that is, up Szewska Street past the Planty Gardens to Karmelicka Street and then Krolewska, and then along both sides of this axis, up to Wola Justowska. The intellectuals’ apartments hid, and still hide, along both sides of Karmelicka Street in the quiet buildings on the side streets. The editor Jerzy Turowicz, who ran the Catholic newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny wisely and courageously for over fifty years, lived here until his death. The novelist and essayist Hanna Malewska lived here. Andrzej Kijowski was born here. The philosopher Roman Ingarden lived a bit further down. As did the historian Henryk Wereszycki. The composer Wladyslaw Zelenski lived here before then. And there were many others. And who didn’t live in the Writers’ House on Krupnicza Street at one time or another? That’s where the painter and writer Stanislaw Wyspianski was born as well. The splendid painters Jozef Mehoffer and Wojciech Weiss also lived on Krupnicza. The Rostworowski family lived nearby on Salwator.

  Exceptions do occur: the president of Polish poetry, and Polish intellectuals, Czeslaw Milosz lives not far from Market Square, but on the southeast side. The poet Ryszard Krynicki and his wife, the publisher Krystyna Krynicka, live even further off, across the Vistula River in Podgorze.

  But let’s get back to the western territories: all these remarkable sites were left in ruins, or at least an advanced state of neglect, following the Nazi and Stalinist years.

  This is why, seen with a cold, objective eye, these homes and streets don’t seem to conceal any mystery. When my friend the American poet Edward Hirsch came to Krakow in the fall of 1996 to interview Wislawa Szymborska for The New York Times Magazine—she’d just received the Nobel Prize—he called the area she lived in then (on Chocimska Street) “proletarian and nondescript.”

  Nondescript. I was outraged and objected: I tried to explain that he hadn’t discerned the streets’ latent nobility, the delicate gleam of certain windows, the charm of their small parks, the possibilities contained by certain courtyards.

  I realized then that someone like myself who loves Krakow and has known it for years must perfect a complex system of perceptions. In other words, I understood that I saw the possibilities, the potentialities, the unfulfilled entelechies of this district, I sensed what it might become under more favorable conditions. I knew how many truly great artists had lived here (Wislawa Szymborska’s neighbors for many years included the writer Kornel Filipowicz and the director Tadeusz Kantor; the director Krystian Lupa apparently still lives somewhere nearby). And I had mentally mixed their talents with the houses’ unprepossessing plaster. I also knew the district’s past, I was familiar with its history and could imagine its bygone charms. At the same time few of its homes could match such expectations today. Even the famous “professors’” house at the corner of Slowacki Boulevard and Lobzowska Street, where university employees once lived—it was nicknamed the “coffin” due to its black ceramic façade—now blended into its banal surroundings.

  My American friend had seen only what really existed; a run-down district with lopsided sidewalks, streets full of potholes, buildings needing new plaster with drunks huddled in their doorways. Whereas I saw neighborhoods that had given birth to books, paintings, plays, and performances. I also sometimes knew, or imagined with the help of books and the tales of older cousins, what these buildings and gardens had once been, and what they had held. But a new arrival from another, sober, empirical world could perceive only shabby, tired objects.

  The venerable, medieval, Renaissance, or baroque Krakow is a different matter: the massive forms of churches and palaces don’t need desperate feats of imagination, they’re clearly defined against the sky’s backdrop both day and evening, as the sun slowly descends. But the intellectual district demands a different approach. Only visitors from other ex-communist countries can truly understand this, since they’ve witnessed the same process—the fading of cities. They still remember that certain cities, or perhaps just certain districts, can best be caught by way of sympathetic imagination, aided by a rudimentary knowledge of history: such spots escape the camera’s objective eye.

  Later I thought that perhaps my mistake, my optimistic vision of the district and my reaction to my American friend’s incomprehension, might be something more than an accidental optical or psychological phenomenon.

  Perhaps we view not only certain districts but even our country as such too leniently, expanding reality through reverie, enhancing a sometimes dreary external world by means of introspection.

  Perhaps that’s why we have poetry.

  12 Gray Paris

  Paris, photographed through thousands of lenses (Japanese tourists experiencing a moment of mechanized eternity on every bridge), consumed daily by the greedy gazes of the photographic devices deployed by tourists from various continents, has not ceased to exist … It lives on, endlessly resisting the onslaught of gazes. There’s the lighthearted Paris of song, the Paris of romantic snapshots: the stairs of Montmartre, the setting sun’s rays on the Pont Neuf, the autumn leaves in the Luxembourg Garden, the frivolous Paris of films. But there’s also another Paris.

  All who’ve come to this city by way of Europe’s (or America’s) provinces remember the first album of Parisian photos we viewed at a friend’s or flipped through with a mixture of rapture and disdain while visiting some aunt or uncle: rooftops on the Ile Saint-Louis, the church of Saint-Germain (the Romanesque style blended in this name with recollections of some Gothic Juliette Greco), a gentle wave on the gray Seine.

  We leafed through this album with a touch of scorn, since the longing to visit this mythical city was mixed with a vivid sense that these photographs, intended precisely for us provincials, were in fact classic tourist kitsch. I don’t know why, but autumn always prevailed in those delicate, pastel pictures, as if the albums’ editors knew that November’s sweet warmth best captures France’s capital.
<
br />   The best-known city in Europe … So well known that newcomers from other countries, nourished on movies, postcards, and those autumnal albums above which rises a slim, anorexic Eiffel Tower, scarcely feel any surprise: we know it, we know this place, they cry. We know that tower, the Parisian rooftops, the clipped boughs of the plane trees, the little trapezoidal squares on which two Paulownia trees grow. We know the café gardens and the little homes nestled up against Haussmann’s showy structures. We know the metro line where, on wintry afternoons, you can stare directly into strangers’ apartments—and the imperial façades of Napoleonic edifices.

  To photograph Paris—after all this! After painters, sketchers, photographers, after memoirists and writers! After Walter Benjamin and Paul Léautaud! Is it possible?

  Apparently so. You just have to try—and to possess a “point of view,” not talent and a good camera alone.

  I have before me the photographs of Bogdan Konopka, depicting a Paris I know well. At first glance, though, I can’t seem to get my bearings—I don’t know these houses, these courtyards, I don’t know this derelict railway or this park sprinkled with snow. Where is the Place de la Concorde, the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where’s my favorite bookshop, where’s the garden of the Palais Royal with its young lindens? They’re not here, I see only anemic little streets, flimsy houses, unprepossessing stairwells. Above all, I don’t find the splendid Parisian light, the refulgence with which the oceanic Atlantic climate repays Paris for the rain, the towering cumuli, the cold and damp it provides all winter, spring and fall. Bogdan Konopka’s photographs show a faded city; paradoxically they too have something autumnal about them, like the more conventional albums I’ve mentioned. Here, though, the mute, matte still lifes of streets take the place of golden leaves and subtle shadows: this is actual, aggravating November.

  I can perfectly imagine the outrage of Paris’s admirers, be they French or foreign. Where’s the light? Where the Pont des Arts? I can hear the angry voices: this photographer’s driven by malice. He’s come from some small, dark country, maybe even a small, dark town in a small, dark country, and wants to strip Paris of its majestic light, its bright sandstone columns, its freshly scrubbed Panthéon, its beautiful broad streets, the new pyramid in the Louvre’s courtyard, its splendid museums.

  Does the perpetrator of these photographs thus require a defense? And what shape might this plaidoyer take?

  I see several lines of potential defense. First, the counsel for the defense might appeal to the dominant aesthetic of today’s photography, its muted mood, as well as the distinctive “turpism”—that is, an infatuation with “ugliness” in both subject matter and its formal presentation—that seems to typify the work of contemporary art photographers. And certainly the chief motive is resistance to commercial photography: photography’s beauty has been hijacked, abducted by the cunning craftsmen of the camera, fashion photographers, the creators of the covers for popular women’s magazines. They don’t lack for beauty: every page of Elle or Vogue proudly displays lovely photographs of lovely girls, lovely homes, lovely spring meadows above which lovely birds glide.

  The counsel for the defense might take into consideration the age’s aesthetics. And this wouldn’t be to the detriment of Konopka’s work. Acknowledging the norms of his own historical moment doesn’t discredit him in the least.

  But the defense must go further. It must prove that something else is at stake here. Bogdan Konopka does this remarkable city a service by showing us another Paris, the Paris of courtyards and gray stairwells, the Paris of gloomy afternoons. By evoking the secret fraternity of all cities, beautiful and ugly, he liberates Paris from the isolation into which it has been thrust by its own eminence, its unique status among the European capitals. Since how can one live a normal life, die a normal death in a Paris shown only from its finest, most glittering angle, displayed only in its most “imperial,” elegant, ministerial light?

  Anyone who’s ever driven across the Czech Republic, Poland, or eastern Germany has no doubt seen boundlessly sad, gray towns and cities. Clearly Paris shares nothing in common with them, it’s totally different—and yet, Konopka tells us in his photographs’ calm voice, take a closer look at certain Parisian neighborhoods, streets, courtyards. And you’ll perceive in them, as in an ancient mosaic, fragments of Mikolow and Pilsen, chips of Myslenice and East Berlin. This won’t be lèse-majesté, it’s not attempted assassination; no, it’s rather an effort to find what the great metropolis shares with a modest town on Europe’s peripheries. It’s an attempt to cast a bridge between the meek, the mundane, and imperial glory.

  While looking at these photographs, I also noticed that there’s not a single scrap of the Paris erected by Baron Haussmann’s titanic efforts. (I should confess that this Paris annoys me at times with its bourgeois regularity, the solidity of the buildings designed to house the Notary, the Physician, the Engineer, the Lawyer, the Pharmacist and the Dentist.) We’re dealing here with the pre- and post-Haussmann Paris, a city still containing traces of organic medieval construction (as in the surviving islets of old Paris) as well as modernity’s chaos.

  Finally—as Konopka’s defense lawyer might conclude—the grayness of this Paris may reflect a certain disillusionment that is difficult, even shameful, to express, the disillusionment so well described by Czeslaw Milosz. Of course people are still enchanted by what is truly enchanting, and they still go on pilgrimage to Paris. But they also sense a certain lack. The city still exists, of course, it stands, washed by André Malraux, enhanced by new museums and monumental structures, but the great light of intellect that once reigned here, that drew young writers and artists from throughout the world—Jerzy Stempowski speaks mournfully of a Central Laboratory that has closed up shop—has dimmed, faded, and even the eyes of cameras accustomed to registering other parameters, more physical in nature, can’t help noticing. Bogdan Konopka took pictures of Paris, not its myth.

  13 Young Poets, Please Read Everything

  I sense at least one danger here. By discussing ways of reading, or simply sketching a portrait of a “good reader,” I may inadvertently give the impression that I am myself a perfect reader. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m a chaotic reader, and the holes in my education are more breathtaking than the Swiss Alps. My remarks should thus be seen as belonging to the realm of dreams, a kind of a personal utopia, rather than as describing one of my very small platoon of virtues.

  Reading chaotically! Some time ago I unpacked the suitcase from my summer vacation. Let’s take a look at the books I took with me to Switzerland, near Lake Geneva. I probably should have brought Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Byron, Madame de Staël, Juliusz Slowacki, Adam Mickiewicz, Gibbon, and Nabokov, since all of these are linked with this renowned lake in one way or another. But none of them actually made the trip with me. I see on my study’s floor instead Jacob Burckhardt’s The Greeks and Greek Civilization (yes, in English translation, I picked it up in a Houston half-price bookstore); a selection of Emerson’s essays, Baudelaire’s poetry in French, Stefan George’s poems in Polish translation, Hans Jonas’s classic book on Gnosticism (in German), some of Zbigniew Herbert’s poems, and the volume of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s voluminous Collected Works (Gesammelte Werke) containing his remarkable essays. Some of these books belong to various Parisian libraries. This suggests that I’m a rather neurotic reader who often shuns an owner’s responsibilities in favor of library books, as if reading books that don’t belong to me grants me some additional measure of freedom (libraries—the only venue in which the socialist project has succeeded).

  But why do I read? Do I really need to answer this question? It seems to me that poets read for all kinds of reasons, some of which are quite straightforward and don’t differ from the motives of any other mortal. But our reading takes place chiefly beneath two signs: the sign of memory and the sign of ecstasy. We read for memory (for knowledge, education) because we are curious about what our many precursors produced before our o
wn minds were opened. This is what we call tradition—or history.

  We also read for ecstasy. Why? Just because. Because books contain not only wisdom and well-ordered information but also a kind of energy that comes close to dance and shamanistic drunkenness. This is especially true of (some) poetry. Because we ourselves experience those strange moments when we are driven by a force that demands strict obedience and sometimes, though not always, leaves behind black spots on paper the way a fire leaves ashes (noircir le papier, as the French call the noble act of writing). And once you’ve undergone a moment of ecstatic writing, you start acting like a drug addict who always craves more. You’d do anything for more of it; and reading doesn’t seem like an excessive sacrifice.

  The books I read—if any such confession is required or desired—fall into these two categories, books of memory and of ecstasy. You can’t read an ecstatic book late at night: insomnia ensues. You read history before falling asleep, and save Rimbaud for noon. The relationship between memory and ecstasy is rich, paradoxical, and engaging. Sometimes ecstasy grows from memory, and then spreads like a forest fire—an old sonnet seized by a greedy eye may ignite the spark of a new poem. But memory and ecstasy do not always overlap. Sometimes a sea of indifference divides them.

  There are scholars whose memory is astonishingly vast and yet they produce very little. Sometimes in the library you catch sight of an old man wearing a bow tie, bent beneath the weight of years, and you think: That person knows everything. And some of these elderly readers in thick glasses do indeed know a great deal (though perhaps not that little old man you glimpsed the other day). But this is leagues apart from creativity. At the other end of the spectrum we have the teenagers getting high on hip-hop, but we don’t expect to reap a rich artistic harvest from this particular passion.