in praise of a poet of tortured beauty

8/4/2019 In Praise of a Poet of Tortured Beauty

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In Praise of a Poet of Tortured Beauty

Romel Regalado Bagares 1

The magazine Books and Culture tells us that the New Yorker s special

issue on 9/11 carried on the back page his poem, Try to Praise Our Mutilated World , and many people clipped the poem and posted it onrefrigerator doors, sent it to grieving friends, read it in public gatherings,even quoted it in sermons.

In the interview with B&C (August/September 2002 issue), the Polish poet,Adam Zagajewski, explains that he wrote the poem long before theghastly events at the World Trade Center took place; yet for many, itspoke of a way to cope with tragedy, of a world, which, though hideouslyimperfect, still offers us visions of hope: Try to praise the mutilatedworld./ Remember June's long days,/ and wild strawberries, drops of wine,the dew./ The nettles that methodically overgrow/ the abandonedhomesteads of exiles./ You must praise the mutilated world./ You watchedthe stylish yachts and ships;/ one of them had a long trip ahead of it,/while salty oblivion awaited others./ You've seen the refugees headingnowhere,/ you've heard the executioners sing joyfully./ You should praisethe mutilated world./ Remember the moments when we were together/ ina white room and the curtain fluttered./ Return in thought to the concertwhere music flared./ You gathered acorns in the park in autumn/ andleaves eddied over the earth's scars./ Praise the mutilated world/ and thegrey feather a thrush lost,/ and the gentle light that strays and vanishes/and returns. (Translated by Renata Gorczynski).

The poet, who grew up in the ruins of postwar Poland, says the poemembodies the experience of someone who tries to live and write, onethat is very rich and encompasses the register of ecstasy, of joy, indeed,of one, who, because he has accepted that the world we live in iswounded, finds reasons in the mundane details of the everyday to rejoiceamidst its pains and sorrows.

I find more of the musicality of this optimism in his book Another Beauty (2000), which is a memoir that details his growth in his persona as a poetas well as a citizen. The title is taken from a poem from his first evercollection of poetry published in English, Tremor (1985), and in this work, Ireadily see the dedicated predilection to acknowledge that beauty, yes,salvation, even if temporal, is found in recognition that relationships andcommunity matter: We find comfort only in/ another beauty, in others/music, in the poetry of others./ Salvation lies with others,/ though solitudemay taste like/ opium. Other people arent hell/ if you glimpse them atdawn, when/ their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams./ This is why I pause:which word/ to use, you or he. Each he/ betrays some you, but/calmconversations bides its time/ in others poems. (translated by ClareCavanagh).

1 A lawyer, Mr. Bagares serves as Executive Director of the Center for International Law (CenterLaw),a non-profit dedicated to the promotion of the Rule of Law in the Philippines and in Asia through

international law. Before that, he worked for eight years writing news and investigative pieces for TheStar . He may be reached at [email protected]

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mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]


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To me, this is, really, a hyperbole for community where one comes faceto face with the realization that the self, by itself, does not really amountto much outside his or her recognition of the beauty that the Otherradiates. It is as well a call to the discipline of humility, for when weacknowledge that we are, by ourselves, inherently incomplete, we see theintrinsic worth of the lives of the Other; this insight, to me, is a theologicalwonder.

This appreciation for the Other is glimpsed in his recollection of a fellowdissident who fought with him against the communist dictatorship inPoland, Adam Michnik (an interesting study of character, as you can readhere, and the founding editor of Polands largest daily newspaper, theGazeta Wyborcza ):

I first met (him) in Warsaw in 1973. I had already gotten to knowmany intellectuals in the opposition. Almost all of them spoke sottovoce, not exactly in a whisper, but in carefully modulated tones.Their caution was rational and justified; we all lived beneath theenormous roof of the secret police, our conscience had beenrationalized, microphones might be hidden in the lamps, in theflowerpots that held seemingly innocent plants, in the wallsthemselves. Wed all head of stories about bugs concealed inchandeliers, in the tables and sofas. I knew people who kept their hands over their lips even at home, and who transmitted important information only on scraps of paper, which were then destroyed.Intellectuals fell into two camps, the conformists and the resisters,but even these resisted cautiously. Adam didnt belong to thiscategory. He couldnt be placed in any standard, psychological or sociological bracket. He didnt keep his voice down, he was loud and witty, he radiated courage and joie de vivre. He wasnt a poet,he didnt write poems. But he recited them: he knew scores of

poems by heart, Milosz, Herbert, Slonimski. This wasnt the mainthing, though; all it takes is a good memory to quote poems.Something else was important. Adam was then, I think, one of thefew happy people in Poland (and perhaps, in all of Eastern Europe).

I dont mean the kind of private happiness that consists of finding anice, pretty wife and an interesting, well-paid job, the happinessthat comes from the consciousness that you are a healthy, decent,

and useful individual. I have in mind the much rarer form of happiness that arises when you locate your true vocation with

pinpoint precision, when you find the perfect outlet for your talents,not in the private, domestic sphere, but in the larger human polis.

The mystery of Adams calling lay in its paradoxical nature. Adamdrew upon his own anarchic needs and dreams whenever heconfronted so boldly, with panache and glee the secret police,the Party, corrupt and well-fed prosecutors, dim-witted ministers.He was a joyous anarchist, tossing down his challenge to the vast apparatus of power. He wasnt your typical anarchist, though; hestood for good and honorable things, he sided with right and justice(as they ought to be, not as they were).

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A person like Adam whod happened to live on the other side of theIron Curtain, in an orderly bourgeois society, would no doubt haveturned to dark and evil gods. He would have read and recognized De Sade and the other spiteful, downcast, bitter masters whoveturned against the world. He would have praised doubtful powers,made his pact with Satan. In this world, though, Adam realized that hed been given an extraordinary opportunity. He could be bothgood and furious at once, both negative and decent, critical and honest, maniacal and just. He could be a subversive, an anarchist, arevolutionary, and at the same time, a conservative defending basichuman decency and order; the order in which we lived had squelched the ordinary, imperfect human world.

I came to know other dissidents later, but only a few shared Adams peculiarity, the mad joy he experienced being an upright anarchist,a reasonable revolutionary who had reconciled fire and water, the

passion for destruction and the desire to build. What luck, to find in

this world a calling both contradictory and genuine, impossible and actual, that fits ones life like a suit cut by the finest tailor!

(Incidentally, theres an interview with Michnik in the Spring 2004 issue of Dissent Magazine, where we read that the man has now become an ardentsupporter of the US-led war in Iraq).

But I like Zagajewksis definition of happiness, which you find when youlocate your true vocation with pinpoint precision, when you find theperfect outlet for your talents, not in the private, domestic sphere, but in

the larger human polis. Much of the paralysis affecting many of us todayprecisely arises from this failure to locate with pinpoint precision whatwe are in this world for, though it can well be said that the deepestdiscontentment happens when we know what we are here for, but areunable to do anything about it.

Zagajewski, like his compatriot and literary model Czeslaw Milosz, belongsto a generation of Eastern European writers who clung on perilously tofaith in the Transcendent in the face of a Marxist Police State. Perhaps, itsthe fact that Zagajewski comes from a country devoutly Catholic, where,as in East Germany, the church offered space for voices of dissent thatdrew strength from the deep mysteries of faith. In his book Another Beauty (2000), I read of the city of his obsession, where he studiedphilosophy as a young man, Krakow, a city he knows by heart despite allthese years, a city cluttered with the massive clod of churches andconvents, broad and heavy like aging peasant women gathering on a rainyautumn day.

Here he writes of his agnostic uncle, who many years ago, regularlyentertained in his home a young priest by the name of Karol Wojtyla todebate with him on the intricacies of belief, or the lack of it, in God.Zagajewskis uncle in old age would return to the folds of faith.

He wryly remarks of this as a victory for the young priest, who would laterbecome Pope John Paul II, the first Pole, and the first non-Italian in a long,

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long time, to ascend to the throne of the Roman Pontiff a fact that hiscountrymen relished no end, and celebrated with much fanfare and thePope who, more than any other figure, helped bring down communism inhis country, and without whom trade unionist Lech Walesas Solidarity movement could not have taken off ground.

And here, he writes of his dislike for the nihilists, for Nietzsche, most of all,whom he calls that splendid saboteur: As I read the bitter, ironic,modern writers, I ask myself: Why do we keep turning back to Nietzsche?Theres not doubt that they are Nietzsches offspring; theyre entranced by that great stylist, that splendid saboteur. And I ask myself: Apart fromanxiety, apart from ironic, inspired sorrow, what have they got on their side? Since only a child would argue that on the one hand we have

profound, witty, mocking geniuses, and on the other, relentless routine,mediocrity, the quotidian with its gray suits and dull poets, the drearinessof the orthodoxy and parliaments, the monotony of academic painters,clergymen with professionally pitched voices, churches, offices, banks, the

international corporations that fund obedient professors who sing the praises of virtue, the family, and the balanced check-book. No, thesituation is far more complex. On this side, too, you find despair in searchof fire, clarity, affirmation, despair seeking expression and finding it, if at all, only at great cost. But after all, this isnt a speech-and-debatecompetition!

Here, the poet writes of his love for music, which, he says, shares thiscommon ground with poetry: poetry itself. Music, for him, is a poeticlanguage that excites the emotion as well as the imagination: Music putsforth form and rhythm, it builds its airy structures on a substance asdelicate as breath, as time.

Which is why as a student in Krakow, he was an ardent habitu of theconcerts conducted by the citys many music schools. (As a collector of vinyl records myself , I can identify with his pleasure at findingphonograph records being sold for a song in bargain music shops!).

In Another Beauty , Zagajewski too, writes of his countless ruminations intothe world of learning, yes of books, as a wide-eyed student enamored witha city with a long history, his favorite refuge being Krakows JagiellonianLibrary where he spent countless hours reading two sets of books: thefirst, of those meant to please his professors, the second, of those meantfor him. The first type consisted of textbooks, the second, of poems,stories, essays.

Inside that library, he says, he would meet the modern masters, peoplewho not only did not believe in God, but had forsaken everything nobleand lofty; yet he also discovered in the books of the old library peoplewho managed to combine in some astonishing fashion deep,unostentatious faith with a powerful sense of humor and anunacknowledged love of good that was active and practical.

He found in them the powerful truth that he himself wasnt alone in those

old churches; and not all the other visitors belonged to the ranks of careless tourists using their cameras instead of their heads. It was

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certainly a consolation for him to have found intellectual giants with whomhe can discuss the mysteries, the things that cant be talked about.

Yet being young, and consumed with the passion of youth, he somehowset these things aside for an urgent activism. (In fact, once, he allowed

himself to be hired by the Communist Party to lecture to factory workerson the finer aspects of atheistic Marxism; he made a bad job out of it anddidnt last long). But in the end, the confession comes that as an adult, hewould rediscover what he said was his earlier responsiveness to religion.In that same library he found the works of Milosz, most of which had beenbanned by the State.

Milosz, too, would write of his slow but sure recovery of faith; though hemight not be classed by the devout among the Poles as a practicingRoman Catholic, he had come, after an intense personal struggle with thecollapse of the ideologies of his youth, to the inescapable conclusion thatthe only thing that really gave meaning to the human phenomenon is theidea of the Transcendent; in short, God. (When the poet died, Pope JohnPaul II, who had become close to him in his later years, would write a shortnote to fellow Poles who had questioned Miloszs catholicity to assurethem that yes, he died in the embrace of the church of his birth).

I especially like Miloszs ruminations on the French philosopher SimoneWeil, an enigmatic figure in the annals of 20 th century thinkers for herconversion from atheism to unorthodox Roman Catholic mysticism.

It seems to me that in the days of the Cold War, intellectuals in the West,because of the freedom from pain and want they enjoy in their capitalist

milieu, and perhaps, because of a profound ennui arising from a pointlessmaterial comfort, can afford to live in the theater of the absurd they haveconstructed for themselves and their followers; their poor cousins in theEast, however in the dark realities of the

Marxist Police States that have engulfed their countries can only findhope and strength to go on with life and struggle in the faith of theirforebears. I remember reading how Harvey Cox (yes, the theologian whomade a name for himself in the 60s with his book The Secular City ), wasserving as a youth minister in Germany at the time when the country wasbeing partitioned between the liberal democratic West and the communistEast.

Cox spoke of having repeatedly smuggled volumes of the Protestanttheologian Karl Barths Church Dogmatics into contacts in the East, at atime when the reigning theological rock stars in the so-called Free Worldwere the Death of God theologians.

When asked why he chose the hefty but by then anachronistic works of the neo-orthodox theologian over those of the existentialists whoproclaimed, after Nietzsche, that God is dead, he replied to the effect thatit really was a choice between hope and hopelessness. He wanted to givethe Christians in East Germany something solid to stand on; it was simply

cruel and pointless to give them something that would only sink them

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deeper into despair. (The more fundamentalist of the lot, of course, wouldstill fault Cox: why not smuggle the Bible instead?)

Of course, for todays postmoderns, Coxs logic makes a lot of sense, evenin the absence of belief in the metaphysical worth of the claims of faith

(whether or not God exists or that He offers real hope does not matter, aslong as people find their lives cloaked with a new sense of purpose andmeaning in these very assertions of faith). That, perhaps, is what someonelike Rudolf Bultmann would call a Myth that must be De-Mythologized.

(On my first visit to Berlin, I and a Dutch friend spent a whole day tracingwhat remained of the old wall; on reaching the East Side Gallery near theriver Spree, now covered with colorful graffiti, I mused about Coxsseemingly foolhardy attempt to break through the walls of atheism of theEast German State of his younger days and realized that certainly, it wasnot all for naught).

But back to Zagajewski, for whom the quest for the (Divine) Transcendentis much like the sublime pursuit of poetry, which, he says, a poet rarelyattains, if at all; One can even imagine a poet who experiences thesublime and demand a high style to express it, he writes, but preciselybecause this is a rare event that requires patient waiting, in daily life hebecomes one of poetrys ironic prosecutors. The poet believes it is thepossibility of impossibility the experience of the bliss of the sublime that brings him back to the experience of the reality of the painful world;and where does it leave him, then, once the force of gravity pulls himback?

Here, to an essentially existentialist confession of the continuing yetseemingly unattainable struggle of life: To wake and fall asleep, drowseoff and waken, to pass through seasons of doubt, melancholy dark as lead,indifference, boredom, and then the spells of vitality, clarity, hard andhappy work, contentment, gaiety, to remember and forget and recollectagain, that an eternal fire burns beside us, a God with an unknown name,whom we will never reach. Still, he struggles with hope, with the poetryof hope anchored on the tortured beauty around us his God of anunknown name perhaps though to the orthodox and evangelical, it maysound like an empty one (or to C.S. Lewis, yet another evocation of thatweight of glory only a better world beyond the present reality couldoffer). -30-

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