| You think you’re going to experience something, and you may even actually experience it, but then suddenly you realize that you didn’t experience anything, and it doesn’t bother you at all. It doesn’t bother you that you can’t remember anything about what you didn’t experience and what you experienced. It doesn’t (...)
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| | Down Garwolińska to the end, then hang a right onto Makowska along the railroad tracks toward Olszynka. Sometimes all the way to the roundhouse. The street looked like a village road; on hot days it would be lined with guys sitting and drinking. Branches of fruit trees reached over the fences. (...)
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Bolesław MicińskiEssays
There is a particularly Polish cultural phenomenon that has remained out of the spotlight until now, but which deserves attention: the literary essay. By this we generally mean short texts in which ethical, political, and artistic reflections are expressed in a form mindful of their literary, poetic character. These texts are written as monologues, by far the majority of them in the first person, in which a mind's expressions are melded with a suggestive prose that draws the reader in and ensures that the arguments it embodies are more fanciful and dialectical than in a traditional essay.
The philosopher Boleslaw Micinski was one of Jerzy Stempowski's greatest friends; they shared many of the same views on the world as well as an excellent workshop for writing. His untimely death deprived us of his talent, which courses like clear water through the handful of texts that have survived him. Both in terms of his literary style and the nature of his philosophical reflections, Micinski gives the impression of an extremely contemporary writer. "My writing is an attempt to philosophize in forms different from those that have constricted philosophy for the last hundred and fifty years or so."
His crowning achievement is A Portrait of Kant(1941), which is an account (in certain ways similar to De Quincey's) of the last days of the great German philosopher, a time when, due to the philosopher's worsening illness, the castle of Order and Reason, which he had constructed maniacally throughout his whole life, came tumbling down, clearing a space for chaos and darkness. Another of Micinski's celebrated essays is his Journeys to Various Hels" (1937), in which he analyzes a few famous visits to hell conducted through Western literature-from Ulysses, to Aneas, to Robinson Crusoe-in order to create, on the principle of Freud's concept of antithesis, a "shadow line." The essay Thoughts on War (1947), which he wrote in 1941-2, expresses its author's brilliance and non-comformism. "War releases hatred in us, and along with hatred it releases censured emotions, ce qui dans l'homme n'est pas humain. This may be true; but war releases heroism in man. Thus there is value in hating, in suffering, and in struggling, in order to gain respect in one's own eyes. And not only in our own eyes, but in the eyes of those whom we wish to bequeath the value of life with the dignity of a human being - not that of a slave."
Journeys to Various Hells
Psychoanalysis defines children as one-hundred-percent "perverse" and "criminal." They do not know the feeling of love in all its complications. Yet, as St. Augustine hurries to assure us, the feeling of jealousy is not unknown even to infants. The poor, tiny "monsters" are as yet incapable of opening their dirty little souls to those complicated states that are the exclusive privilege, as Mr. Pickwick would say, of a "certain age." For children, love is still a word of mystery (for having some previous experience of a given psychological phenomenon is a prerequisite for understanding it). T h a t i s w h y t h e y o u n g r e a d e r s o f
S i e n k i e w i c z' s T r i l o g yr e l y s o t r u s t i n g l y o n l o v e. The similar charm of the inexhaustible material resources of Lord Glenarvan (The Children of Captain Grant) and the bottomless mental energy of Old Shatterhand (Karol May) are connected with the absolute unreality of their stories and with a systematic psychological simplification. This is the most blatant of fantasy, which rises infinitely above H.G. Wells's vision or the fairy-tale world of the Brothers Grimm. It is a one-of-a-kind, unparalleled p s y c h o l o g i c a l fantasy. The researcher into literary works will find the most interesting deformation of reality in that childish writing that calculates every trivial detail with conscientious precision and draws first-hand knowledge about the world from atlases, weighty geographical tomes, physics textbooks, and so on. We are not in the least astounded by the i n v e n t i o n s of Cyrus Schmit, the engineer who, after landing on his uninhabited Mysterious Island, works with his friends Gedeon Spillet, Pankroff, and Nabb to construct a telegraph, telephone, railroad, and phonograph, as well as producing nitroglycerine, with no other tools than a dog collar and a glass watch face. It is Cyrus the engineer himself who amazes us! We are flabbergasted by his p e r s o n a l i t y. He exhibits not a moment of hesitation, not a fragment of doubt. How does he do it? Even the heroes of Homer were subject to human frailties: In the depths of the sea, Thetis heard the lamenting cries of Achilles. How many tears were shed by brave Ulysses? Not to mention the way that Ajax attacked a flock of sheep in his madness!
It is only the heroes of Verne and May who stand amidst clusters of snakes and bakenbards, monumentally unchanging, self-assured, helpful, and eternally smiling above the abyss of suffering: Lord Glenarvan, Major MacNabb, Paganel, Tom Austin, John Mangles, Captain Nemo, Old Shatterhand, and Winnetou.
These people of the nineteenth century, these dignified bearded men in frock-coats and vice-uniforms, stand head and shoulders above the Homeric demigods. They exist beyond time, like ideas, like abstractions, always u n c h a n g i n g. And this is precisely where the total deformation of reality lies. In "real life," after all, Old Shatterhand ought to get a good licking at least once from the Kurds or the Commanches. At least once, Paganel ought to manage a moment of concentration. Our four-dimensional world, after all, contains no unchanging ideas of "strength," "wealth," "absent-mindedness," "courage," or "goodness" - no more than such ideas exist in the Platonic heaven.
They are invulnerable to suffering as well as to illness. Kara-ben-Nemzi got over the plague (The Caravan of Death) the same way that we get over the sniffles or a light cold. These are people who are impervious to psychological harm, and external events flow off them like the impotent streams of rainwater that flow off the monument to Horace, without leaving any wrinkles behind on his forehead.
Let us examine the story of the passengers on board the Duncan. The earth trembles under their feet in the Cordillera, a flood washes over them on the Pampas, they sink into the depths of the Indian Ocean, and surrounded by bandits in the Australian Outback, they ford the rushing waters of the River Snowy only to fall, after the wreck of the brig Mackarie, into the hands of cannibals - and there, with the enthusiasm of true naturalists, they fall into an involved discussion of that most peculiar New Zealand bird, the kiwi (apterix) and the topography of Waipea Island. That's heroism! Even Lord Glenarvan's valet, Olbinett, possesses all the traits of the mythological demigods. "Breakfast is served," says Olbinett, inviting the weary travelers, who have taken shelter on the rim of an erupting volcano, to leftovers from the fatal banquet of the murdered cannibals. The faithful servant could be excused for breaking down at least once after all that he has been through. But Olbinett is far above the level of the Aeneas who told poor Dido the story off the fall of Troy with horror (animus meminisse horret).
Captain Grant's untiring explorers were unfamiliar with the "nerves" of psychoanalysis, and with tranquilizers. In their untiring organisms, the nervous currents ran unchangingly at the "regulation" speed of 120 meters per second, along lovely white fibers wrapped in a fresh myelinic sheaths.
These are people, but they are also models. They suggest the glass replica of a human being in the anatomical faculty, with his impeccably and transparently marked nervous system, with his blue vagus nerve, with the precisely labeled centers of pain, hunger, delight, and desire. But the glass replica never looked through its glass eyes at a frigate listing in the waves of the Pacific, or at a mighty eucalyptus tree, or at the Southern Cross. All that the glass man has ever seen, once, is a stuffed owl and a squirrel with a wire skeleton. And that is why we people, with our nervous tentacles that clutch around our hearts like the branches of a cruel mistletoe, hold our breath as we trace the peregrinations of the heroes of the Duncan-those unchanging ideals free of all psychological wounds.
Only one - Ayrton - breaks free of the divine framework: he changes. But not for the better. That is consoling reading matter!
The second characteristic of the ideal, aside from its being unchanging, is, as we know, the fact that it is eternal. It takes no more than an examination of the works of the unparalleled Karol May to convince oneself that this attribute, too, is hardly foreign to our heroes.
Faithful Halef - undoubtedly corresponding to Sam Weller - refuses to walk behind the camel bearing the coffin with the remains of his master. In counterdistinction to Pickwick, after all, Old Shatterhand, also known as Kara-ben-Nemzi, leads an existence beyond the realm of time. The small, diligent readers of the stories are well aware of this. That matchless polyglot to whom no offshoot of the Indian languages (Commanche, Shoshona, Sioux, Apache or Iroquois) is foreign and before whom none of the philological complexities of the East holds any mysteries, that peerless authority on history and subtle researcher in the field of comparative religion, that unerring marksman, that "Man of the West" revered by the cowboys, must have spent centuries digesting the assembled resources of his knowledge and experience and laying the foundations of that fame that rolls like an echoing thunderclap from Kurdistan to China to the Cordillera!
We can see him now: on a dromedary camel, with the free-flowing beard of a philologist from a German university, in the vice-uniform of a Royal and Imperial official, he rattles Henry's cutlery and recites a sura from the Koran, bearing the renown of his name to quiet people of good will.
Translated by William Brand
Boleslaw MICINSKI (1911-1943) - Author of philosophical and literary essays.
Polish edition by Spoleczny Instytut Wydawniczy ZNAK
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