I have established several practices for the New Year to make it a more mindful, culturally enriched and satisfying year than the plague year of 2020, now buried in an urn of oblivion. I have begun a bullet journal to record habits, moods, and experiences, and in which to write the plans and dreams of my intentional self. I wake and stretch in a salute to the sun, which was sadly concealed behind grey clouds of drizzle this summer morning. I begin the day with my day journal, into which I write thoughts disconnected from the grind of government and politics, and prompted by recording a significant event on this day in history; on this day, 3 January 1521, it was Martin Luther being excommunicated by Pope Leo X, who was born Giovanni di Lorenzo de Medici and who would die in December of that same year. I have begun a reading journal, and each morning I read a page or two of poetry, chosen at random from the collections on my shelf, to start the day and to fire the imagination.
On New Year’s Day I read, to start not just the morning but the year, Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, “Birthday.” It begins with the mood and the thought perfectly in accord with the new grounded curiosity that I want to practise:
“So much world all at once – how it rustles and bustles!
Her poem reminded me of all the joy and playfulness we can enjoy despite the melancholy awareness of our fleeting presence in a super-abundant world.
I am just passing through, it’s a five-minute stop
I won’t catch what’s distant; what’s too close I’ll mix up.
We reach for profound thoughts amidst this cornucopia of words, events, objects and worlds, and yet know we can never quite exceed the perfect precision of the thing itself.
While trying to plumb what the void’s inner sense is
I’m bound to pass by all these poppies and pansies.
What a loss when you think how much effort was spent
perfecting this petal, this pistil, this scent
for the one-time appearance which is all they’re allowed
so aloofly precise and so fragilely proud.
Flowers are the symbol of poetry, and of the evanescence of our minds, so powerful, so beautiful, so temporary. These cuttings return me to the occasion of another renewal in July 2016, when I turned to this writing to walk through the fires and emerge reborn. And, back then, I took time with the great Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, whose playful, wry spirit may cast a spell on my future year, and I wrote this post that I am reposting today.
Taking Time with Szymborska (published 12 July 2016)
One of the pleasures of disconnecting, if only for a few months, from the real world, and from its rush and press, the deadlines and overloads, its grinding work and gasping wishes, is to take the time to enjoy poetry again, both as a writer and a reader. The other night, with no obligations attached any more to the things I read, I took up the last collection of Wislawa Szymborska’s poems, as translated from Polish to English, Map: collected and last poems (Houghton, 2015).
I learnt of Szymborska when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, and have long cherished the collection published on the heels of that fame, View with a grain of sand (Harcourt, 1995). She wrote with an unsentimental irony and a witty enjoyment of inverted perspectives. Just how does a grain of sand view the world from its place on a window sill, which only we, not the grain, see as a window, see as a view?
And she reflects often on the past, with a deep appreciation of the terrors of the world – after all she was a survivor of East European socialism – and a fetching lightness of touch. So in “The Letters of the Dead,” she writes:
We read the letters of the dead like helpless gods,
but gods nonetheless, since we know the dates that follow.
We know which debts will never be repaid
Which widows will remarry with the corpse still warm
Poor dead, blindfolded dead
gullible, fallible, pathetically prudent.
And then at the end of this poem:
Everything the dead has predicted has turned out completely different.
Or a little bit different – which is to say, completely different.
The most fervent of them gaze confidingly into our eyes:
their calculations tell them that they’ll find perfection there.
For me Szymborska is one of those East European writers, like Milosz, Havel, Zbigniew Herbert, who represent a life of writing outside the whirligig of celebrity, consumption and false fame. Writing made against an often hostile world, and more courageous and authentic for that. Although in her early writing career she adopted the values and propaganda of the socialist party, she broke with the party from the mid-1960s, and then later in her career, if that is really the right word, contributed to samizdat publications as part of the dissident movement. Turning away from commercially modified productivity and socially sanctioned words, these writers present to me an alternative path. This near invisible blog is part of a new samizdat movement, in which culture may bloom from the outside truly, distinctly and originally, and abstain from becoming just another branded product.
Her opus, they say, is less than 350 poems. Asked why she did not publish more poems, she said she had a trash can at home. Her wit is exceptional, and her imagined worlds undying and yet knowing of their artifice. So let us conclude with the ending of “The Joy of Writing” from her 1967 collection, No End of Fun, which was reproduced in the feature on Szymborska with her Nobel Prize.
They forget that what’s here isn’t life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof’s full stop.Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.
