The puppet theatre

Contrary to what people usually think, as they torment themselves, a holiday doesn't need cares, but rather freedom from them. And this freedom first and foremost is achieved through a strict isolation from the workday world. By now all peoples have forgotten about the commandment concerning the sabbath and the impenetrable divisions between sabbath and the other six days have been removed. On the other hand, only the frame, the border, and the immaculate edge can reveal the distinctive space of artistic creativity. This space is idle in the evaluation of external space, which is, however, saturated with joy and important meaning and which every working day pulsates with the springs of life.Out of humaneness we do not stone people for breaking the sacred precinct of the sabbath, but out of vapidness we have preferred to replace the stone wall with an uncommitting string rope. On the other hand, we have ceased to see the sun, life has  grown dim and dried up and the world has become poisoned with boredom.

So we all turned up here in this fenced off space and discovered an isolating frame. It ist rue that man needs very little to experience thrilling joy. A few dozen trees and a sturdy high fence, together with a ditch and places to cross it, proved an adequate isolation from all kinds of terrors, the weariness of life, and the countless cares of existence in these difficult times.

The Revolution, the ruin of the year 1922, the poverty and unreliability of life in all its aspects-all this remained on the other side of the fence. And when the sky suddenly cleared and the washed sun, descending into evening, lit up the birch trees, the brightly coloured crowd, and a few beautiful scraps fold fabric that the Efimovs had tenderly brought to the puppet theatre from the trunks of grand-mothers, a living fairytale lit up in the consciousness like a sunbeam. The puppet booth, the puppets and the children surrounding the theatre, everything together was fashioned into a single art form, one that was more than an art form, because apart from the pre-existing intention of the performers there sounded the prophetic voices of the soul, and the mysterious forces of nature crept in. Words, which in other circumstances would probably have gone unnoticed, when spoken in this setting by the puppets acquired an unexpected weight, and the popular sayings really did sound like the condensed wisdom of life. Dolls made of rags, pieces of wood and papier mache came to life as clear as can be and acted independently. They no longer followed the movements of the hand that directed them, but on the contrary they themselves directed the hand, they had their own desires and tastes, and it became perfectly obvious that in a certain setting special forces were acting through them. This performance started out as a game, but later on it grew into the very core of life and verged on either magic or mystery.

Of course, the puppeteers, who bear a crusading responsibility and are carried away by the whirlwind of the action, have no time to think about what is happening, and it would be a hindrance to split themselves in two, in order to compare their puppet consciousness with their usual one. But as the present book shows, even they recognise the puppets as 'wanting' or 'not wanting' this or that, as 'approving' or 'disapproving' the setting in which they have turned up. As for the spectators, or more precisely the co-participants in this puppet ritual, for them its even more patently evident that the puppet theatre is something incomparably greater than the Eflmovs plus the puppets, that in this ritual some third element takes part, and this third is the thing for which theatre itself exists.

Cut off from everyday existence by a fence, together with their choir made up of spectators, the puppeteers raise higher still the potential of mysterious forces acting within them, through a second isolation, their own puppet booth. And finally, in clothing their hand with the persona of the puppet and permitting the reason of their hand to take on an independent face, they liberate it [the reason of the hand] from its subservience to intellectual reason, which conversely becomes a subservient organ of manual [reason]. Thrice removed from the external world by three successive degrees of isolation, the hand becomes a body, a transmitter and organ for the influence of forces other than those that are known in our everyday consciousness. In the puppet theatre there appear the principal devices of imitative magic, which always begins with play, with imitating, with teasing, to make way later for the other forces that have thus been attracted, which accept the challenge and fill the receptacle that has been offered them.

No one, of course, is taken in by the illusion. The puppet theatre has the great virtue of not being illusionistic. But while they are not 'like the real thing' and make no claim to appear so, the puppets do in fact bring to life a new reality Itenters into the space it has liberated and fllls the holiday frame of life.

The choir of spectators is united by the puppet and the choir itself nurtures it, via the puppeteer, with its own profound emotions, which have no place in the everyday world. Most profound and cherished for us is our childhood, which lives in us, but is tightly screened off from us.We have forgotten about it, about this primordial proximity tovall existence, when we still nestled close to the life of nature. We have forgotten it, but it continues to live in us and it declares itself unexpectedly at certain times.

So, American psychology has elucidated well enough that the psychological process of religious conversion is nothing less than a return to childhood, the surfacing of the most profound strata of the personality that have formed during the very early years. 'If you don't convert yourself (ie., do not overturn your personality) and do not become as children (i.e.,not just children in general, but precisely as the children you once were), then you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.'5 Indeed the Kingdomo of Heaven is 'peace and joy through the action of the Holy Spirit'.6 So, the spiritual harmony, which is suddenly revealed in religious conversion, lives in those same layers of the personality that the puppet awakens in us. The puppet theatre is the hearth that is nourished by the childhood submerged within us and which in turn awakens within us the slumbering palace of the childhood fairytale.

Once united in this 'paradise', now we are divided from one another, because this 'paradise' has become hidden from the eye. But through the puppet theatre we see once more this lost Eden, even if only dimly, and so we embark upon an intercourse with one another in what, like a secret, we cherish most, what each of us guards within ourselves - and guards not just from others, but from ourselves too. Shining in the rays of the setting sun, the theatre opens like a window onto an eternally living childhood.

Pavel Florensky
Beyond Vision Essays on the Perception of Art

The desert is a powerful, unique sensorium

 

The desert is a powerful, unique sensorium. Silence and emptiness are the ambiguous descriptions of sounds and landforms. The desert is at once a place of sensory depriva-tion and awesome overload—too little life, too much heat, too little water, too much sky. Its cool shadows offer "thermal delight," and yet the desert evokes the terrors of the inferno. Its distance and scale, the sweep between horizons and the loftiness of stars, its winds and mirages, its hidden life and conspicuous shapes seem at once to dwarf and to emphasize the human figure. Its sensory impact is profoundly stimulat-ing and disturbing, a massive shock to the human limbic sys-tem—the neural basis of emotional response—which seems to demand some logic or interpretation.

Between the senses and the logic is perception—that is, the biopsychological screening devices, filters, combined forces of inherent tendency and individual experience that direct attention and focus possibilities. Thus, what the desert means is preceded by preconscious selection of what is seen and how it is seen. Myriad qualities of the desert beg for interpretation: the firmness of outline; the linearity of horizon and movement; the separateness of things and their static, fixed quality as though made by some absent artisan; the way light and dark, sky and earth, life and death insist on contrast and duality; the ephemerality of creatures and transience of man; the flickering vitality of things distant, such as the planets; things unseen but heard, opposed to the frozen immobility of stone. These are some of the preconscious pointers toward interpretation.

Nature and Madness
Paul Shephard

Delta, the Troubadour

 

(On Gałczyński)

In Central and Eastern Europe, the word “poet” has a somewhat different meaning from that which it has in the West. There a poet does not merely arrange words in beautiful order. Tradition demands that he be a “bard,” that his songs linger on many lips, that he speak in his poems of subjects of interest to all the citizens. Every period of history has understood the poet’s obligations differently. Probably Delta would have been happiest in the days when kings and nobles assured the poet a place at their table in exchange for a song or a jest. Even the dress of former ages would have suited his appearance better than the business suit of our century; and only long hair and a lute in his hand could have created a picture in keeping with his character.

Delta had dark, gypsy coloring, was freckled, not tall, and when he laughed his thick mouth was distorted by a jocular grimace. He brushed his hair back from a high forehead. His head was so disproportionately big for his short body that he looked somehow like a dwarf or jester, as one sees them in court paintings. He wore his neckties in a loose, big knot and otherwise betrayed a penchant for eccentric clothes. Often, those who resort to superficial quirks to identify themselves as members of the artistic clan are second-rate artists. But his “artiness” was part of his over-all act. With every gesture, every intonation of his voice, he played, so to speak, with the world; he accented the differ-

ence between his own rhythm and that of his environment. His rhythm was suggestive. He recited his verse magnificently in huge halls filled with people. He was a good actor; he dominated the audience, and he knew how to key his listeners up to a climax without once letting the mounting tension drop. He imposed his poems slowly, pausing between words; and though he was speaking, he sang. At such times, he was a living rhythmic incantation; he changed, he grew in stature.

No one knows his origins. He altered his biography to fit the needs of the moment. Once his father was a sexton; once, a restaurant owner. At times his family was Czech; at times it had Muscovite connections. The boundaries between fantasy and truth did not exist for him.

How he came by his knowledge of foreign languages was another mystery. It would be hard to imagine him sitting down to a dictionary and a grammar. Yet he cited copiously from Latin, English, French, and German poets. For a short while he studied at the University, where he became famous for writing an essay on a seventeenth-century English poet who never existed. After giving an extensive biography of the poet, the essay went on to a detailed analysis of the circumstances in which his individual works appeared. A charlatan, a hoaxer— this is what he wanted to be then, and always, enjoying himself mightily when his pedantic professor found himself in trouble, overwhelmed by such obvious proof of erudition.

Delta was an inveterate alcoholic, usually in cycles that lasted several days. Alcohol brought him to a state of hallucination marked by actions which rarely occur to other drunkards. In a travel bureau he would order a glass of beer. He would hire a hack, order it to stop at a main intersection and, after delivering a speech to an astonished crowd, he would throw off his coat and phlegmatically relieve him-

self on it. Or he would come to his friends complaining that he had had trouble in finding their homes because, as he said, “his people,” whom he had stationed throughout the city to point him the way, had so disguised themselves that he could not recognize them. Such extravagances indicated that alcohol plunged him into the world of Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe. He became a legendary figure whose latest escapades were the talk of the literary cafes.

Delta’s poetry was an added source of legend. It was unlike anything written in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. No literary school influenced him. He dwelt in the aura of the Italo-Latin civilization whose mark was still deeply graven on our country. The accessories he borrowed from the poetry of the past he then put together in a manner reminiscent of his drunken fantasies. His poetry was a kaleidoscope of chubby baroque angels, magicians carried off through the window by some unknown power (they are retained, at the last moment by a wifely bite on the ear), falconry, astrologists prophesying the end of the world. Interspersed in it were phonograph records playing the music of Bach or Mozart, potatoes in the soil dreaming of the vodka that would be made of them, planets in the shape of young women dressed in blue pants, and folk dances in the suburbs. His poetry was tragic and comic, senseless yet full of sense. This alogical hodgepodge of disparate elements differed from confessedly decadent types of modern poetry in one respect: despite the peculiar assemblage of images it presented, it was not unintelligible. The reader surrendered to its musical charm, swallowed portions of abstraction that annoyed him in other poets, laughed at the sudden twists of the author, in short, unsuspectingly entered a realm ruled by laws unlike those of everyday life.

He published much humorous verse, signing it with a variety of pseudonyms. His inventiveness in

finding subjects seemed inexhaustible. Among other things, he wrote a cycle entitled Little Songs of the Chief of the Office of Graves. He liked to include a fictitious list of his works in each book; I remember such a title as “An Introduction to Cannibalism— stenographed university lectures:    Troilus    Drug

Store, Publisher, out of print.” Because he was popular with the readers, he never lacked offers from publishers and the radio. His pen, which was his sole means of support, could have earned him a good living; but he constantly needed money because he immediately drank up his fees.

When he was sober, no one could have guessed that he was the author of poems that made the public laugh. Taciturn, gloomy, sly, he became animated only at the sight of money. In bargaining, he was inexorable. Once he named a sum, no argument could induce him to make a concession. What was worse, he demanded payment at once, which posed a terrible dilemma for his editors. They wanted his poems; but giving him money involved the risk that he would begin his drinking cycle and forget his commitments. Some editors found a solution: they would give him the money, then refuse to leave him for a single second until he handed them a manuscript. Such transactions often occurred in coffeehouses. The banknote would lie on the table between the two contracting parties. Delta, after fruitless efforts to soften his opponent, would take out his pen, write the poem (which, depending on his mood, might be excellent or mediocre), and picking up his note go off to drink.

Sometimes he landed in a sanatorium for alcoholics. The results of the “cures” were not good. His victories in his battles against the medical profession were widely recounted. In one of the sanatoriums, story has it, his triumph was so absolute that both patients and doctors, equally drunk, held bicycle races through the corridors.

Charlatan, drunkard—and yet he was an outstanding and, despite appearances, tragic poet. He began his literary career in years of economic crisis. Unemployment, universal hopelessness, the growth of Nazism in neighboring Germany all shaped the character of his writing. He was rightly called the “king of nonsense.” Yet readers who were not deceived by his superficial buffoonery saw in his poetry an ominous vision of the end of civilization, of an approaching “iron age,” of catastrophe. He spoke as if everything were lost years before Europe plunged into darkness and cruelty. The dread and beauty of past ages lived again in his work, but there was no hope of rest in them. The concepts and images he used had the consistency of dreams; they chased one another with the speed of a hurtling train. The Madonna who often figured in his poems was not the Madonna of the pious but merely a stylistic ornament. Fascists and Communists killed each other off in his verse with the gory ardor of actors in the Grand Guignol, while he mockingly cried: “O reality! O my sweet mother! For you killing flies is the same kind of bother!” He defined himself exactly when he said: “Braced on my Waterman/ I go off to the abyss/ of eternal doubt.”

The End of the World is his title for a poem in which scholars and politicians, revolutionists, lovers and drunkards, canaries and cats are all swept away in the end by a cosmic catastrophe—to the satisfaction of the author, and the fulfillment of the “vanity of vanities” theme of Ecclesiastes. And all this is described by a pen that is playing. In another of his poems, Folk Fair, there are carrousels, young pairs sitting on the grass, lawns littered with empty bottles, seesaws. Suddenly the sky clouds over, rain begins to fall, and the darkened heavens—in a manner that is a secret of Delta’s art—merge into a sad eclogue by Virgil punctuated by the bark of machine-guns.

His most unusual poem was Solomon's Ball. Why

does King Solomon give a ball? Why is he living in the twentieth century? Perhaps it is not King Solomon after all, simply Solomon? Why do the unemployed enter the ballroom selling butterflies? Who keeps singing Persian songs about Gulistan, the garden of roses? Where do the hordes of policemen come from who suddenly start performing wild dances? It is pointless to pause over such questions. The special logic of the dream does exist, but only such a poet as he can use it freely. “In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo” was T. S. Eliot’s expression for nonsense. Delta raised the conversations that took place at Solomon’s ball one degree higher, into the realm of delirium and “eternal doubt.”

The world as reflected in his poetry was oppressive; yet his poems—and here is one more inner contradiction of this queer man—were free of sadness and despair. On the contrary, they said a vigorous “yes” to life. With every word he praised the world as he saw it, a tangle of absurd pleasures, drives, words, and wars. He loved his phantasmagory. He loved carrousels, dancing gypsies, crowded Sunday excursion boats on the Vistula, his wife to whom he addressed his odes, cats sleeping on parapets, blooming apple trees. He loved enthusiasm and joyousness for their own sake. Whatever he touched changed into a scene of movement, color, and music. Subjects were merely a pretext for him. Like a silkworm, he spun out of himself a fine thread which he wrapped around whatever he encountered. He could compose songs and hymns on any topic.

Never displaying any political inclinations, he had always distributed his mockery evenly over all the groups that were vying for power. That is why his conversion, in 1937, to extreme nationalism was received with some amazement. The editor of an important rightist weekly had long tried to capture him, and at last he succeeded in purchasing him as

the exclusive property of the periodical. The magazine on whose pages his poems now began to appear was violently anti-Semitic. Its large circulation figures resulted from the spread of nationalist convictions in our country, particularly among the youth. The liberal public could hardly believe this new phase of his shenanigans: he lauded the marching “falangists,” prophesied a “night of long knives,” a new St. Bartholomew’s Eve for the Jews, liberals, and the left. Still, it was obviously a fact; such articles and poems did appear, signed by his name and bearing all the traits of his style.

Why did he write them? Racial questions were of supreme indifference to him. He had many Jewish friends, and the very day he published his racist statements, he would come to these friends (naturally he was drunk by then) and, falling on his knees, would declare his love for them and beg their forgiveness. The causes of his union with the right must be sought elsewhere than in his political tastes. Delta, buffoon and troubadour, did not lack professional principles. He respected his poetic trade; but his respect was not for what he wrote about. How and for whom—that was important. He scorned esoteric literary schools that catered to a small cluster of connoisseurs. He ridiculed poets whose words could be understood only by a smattering of intellectuals. Solitary meditations that had no hope of finding readers were not for him. Like troubadours of yore, he longed for a lute and a throng of admirers. It would be hard to find a better example of a writer revolting against the isolation of the intellectual in the twentieth century.

Delta’s hostility toward the Jews had no racial roots; he confined it to Jewish writers who, in general, were particularly given to celebration of literary “values” and “refinements.” It sprang from his battle against, and struggle to escape from, the literary cafes. Besides, as I have said, he was for enthusiasm.

The crowd marched, the crowd brandished canes; this was health, strength, primitiveness, a great popular festival. Where my readers go, there go I; what my readers want, I give them—this is what he confirmed in every poem. As the nationalist “movement” began to take on mass proportions, he moved to keep in stride with the masses. He told with pride of the thousands of young people who knew his verses by heart. His pride was justified. The poets of the sophisticated “avant-garde,” isolated as they were, took pride in their craft; but he beat them even on their own ground. Nor did they dispose over such a range of artistic media as he did. Last of all, we must consider that in order to live he needed a patron, a person who would force him to write, fight his drunkenness and, in short, control and care for him.

The War broke out. He was mobilized as a private. His unit was stationed in eastern Poland, on the borders of the Soviet Union. When the Reds moved to meet the German army, he was captured by the Russians. But along with a number of other disarmed Polish soldiers, Delta was turned over to the Germans. He spent the next five and a half years in a POW camp in the Reich. As a prisoner he was used for various types of work, chiefly agricultural. His qualifications for physical labor were slight. It is hard even to imagine a man less prepared for a mode of life in which the most important and almost unsolvable problem was how to fill one’s stomach. Still, he survived, this strange court dwarf in tatters, wielding a shovel as he recited Horace. Undoubtedly, his fluent knowledge of German came to his assistance. (...)

In 1945 he and his fellow prisoners welcomed the arrival of the British troops. Since they were accompanied by units of the London Polish army, he entered upon a round of encounters, drinking, and song. Having dried up those springs of money and

alcohol, he set out for France. Once again, as in 1939, this was an era of universal wandering. All of Europe was on the road; millions of forced laborers, prisoners, and slaves were returning to their homes; other millions were fleeing or being expelled from their native lands. Delta met large numbers of Poles everywhere. He wrote patriotic and anti-Russian poems that harmonized perfectly with the mood of his audience. He squeezed money out of every variety of emigre committee. His pre-war admirers, rejoicing that he had survived, did everything they could for him.

Gradually, however, his life in Paris and Brussels lost its charm. The possibilities of publishing were small; the public was dispersed over various countries; and there was ever less money. He felt he was becoming an ordinary impoverished exile whose-buffoonery, personal and poetic, passed unnoticed. Gloomy, bitter emigration, a void, and a taste of disaster. Where was the mass of people which could give him back warmth and friendship? It was in his native land. There, too, was his wife, who had lived through the German occupation working as a waitress in Warsaw restaurants. Publications that came from Poland persuaded him that the trend was liberal. The envoys of the Warsaw government assured him that he would be received warmly and that his pre-war rightist sins would be forgotten.

His return to Poland was accomplished with every prescribed scandal. From the moment he left the boat, he was in a state of alcoholic and patriotic euphoria. He sent telegrams to his wife from every railroad station. When at last he showed up in Cracow (where his wife had gone after the fall of Warsaw), in the company of a girl friend he had brought from Brussels, his wife immediately instituted sharp repressive measures and threw out the girl. His wife came of a Georgian emigre family. She was small, thin, and black-haired; she had oriental features, a slightly

humped prominent nose, and fiery black eyes. She liked to wear silver bracelets on her fine wrists. In all, she looked like a Caucasian madonna. Though she was passive and female, she had a good head for business and a gift for keeping her husband in hand.

Delta’s return was convenient for those who directed literature and propaganda. He was a popular poet. That he was known as a rightist only enhanced his value. He was a considerably greater asset to the new regime than many overly zealous leftists.

He had always needed a patron; now he found one who was really munificent, the state. His became a truly golden pen; its every motion—he wrote in big, decorative letters on long scrolls of paper— brought him larger fees than he had ever earned before. Moreover, his verbal enthusiasm, without which he could not live, now rested on a solid foundation. There were no longer “falangists” nor crowds excited against racial minorities; but there was the rebuilding of the country and the placating of national honor through the acquisition of territories in the West which originally belonged to Germany. His poems were always sunny no matter what he wrote about. That was good. Now he filled them with optimistic subject matter, with pictures of reconstruction and of the happy future; and that was even better. Since he had no trouble in finding remunerative outlets, he went wild. Odes, satiric verse, humorous prose, dialogues flowed from his workshop in an unbroken torrent. One magazine gave him a whole column in which, every week, he lodged his “theatrical pieces.” These were short, little scenes from what he called the “smallest theater in the world,” the Green Goose. In no other language have I read such pure absurdity. The heroes of the Green Goose were people, animals, and objects. The readers who attended these weekly performances of his cabaret were a little ashamed of their liking for these oddities, but they pounced on every issue of the magazine.

His activity was the subject of much controversy. Those who wanted to be considered “sure” and those who took their Marxism seriously were indignant. How could one, they asked, permit this clown to run riot as if he were in a Parisian existentialist cafe? He was a petty bourgeois who had gone mad. Why print his poems on the front pages of leading magazines; why allow him to have a career? Everybody remembered his anti-Semitic days, when he threatened his colleagues with a “night of long knives”! Now, no one was so well off as he. Wasn’t this disgraceful?

Experienced members of the Party quieted the outraged puritans, smiling indulgently at their naiveness. Delta was needed and useful at that stage. He had many followers; everything he wrote helped create an atmosphere of patriotism. It was politic to show that even rightists and Catholics had joined forces with the government. The reading public was not as yet ready for serious, sensible literature. At the moment. Delta’s farces best suited its taste. All this was a game, for a time; and then—off with his head.

When Poland was at last obliged to pass from restrained worship of Russia to outright idolatry, he let no one outdo him. He wrote of the heroism of Soviet soldiers, of the gratitude every Pole should feel toward Russia, of Lenin, of Komsomol youth. He adhered to the Communist line in every respect. As an eminent author, he received a Soviet visa and spent some time in Moscow, sending back enthusiastic reports in prose and verse. In one he announced that the magnificence of Moscow was marred by but a single flaw: it was too much like Taormina; people ate just as many oranges there, and he didn’t like oranges.

His correspondence from Moscow drove the puritans crazy. They knew that Moscow was a gloomy and rather forbidding city. His raptures bore

all the traits of derision. They seemed to say: “You want me to sing praises; very well. I’ll sing praises till they come out of your ears.” Still, it was not easy to guess his real intentions. It was impossible to tell whether he was lying or telling the truth. Normal criteria did not apply to him. He moved in a different dimension. Like a prestidigitator, he always pulled the proper number of rabbits out of his hat, and all of them rabbits of the required color. He invariably transformed everything into opera bouffe. Because he constantly used exaggeration as his artistic tool, his opponents could prove nothing against him. He neither mocked nor spoke the truth; he performed tricks, he practiced art for art’s sake.

He was never “serious.” And as we know, this is the basic requirement of socialist realism. After the writers’ congresses at which socialist realism was proclaimed the sole creative method allowed, the partisans of gravity began their action against him, sure now that they could take their revenge. Analyzing his poetry, they proved that the world for him was nothing but a toy to play with. Once, before the War, he had written An Elegy on the Death of a Butterfly Run Over by a Freight Van. Despite its long title, the elegy consisted of four lines which concluded that the thoughtless butterfly richly deserved its fate. Now he found himself under the wheels of the van. The period of austerity and precision was beginning. He could write on every subject, from the Madonna to Lenin and Moscow, just so long as his master demanded his services, yet his poems never lacked spontaneity. They were always exuberant; but we must add that in them the Madonna as well as Lenin and Moscow became something unreal, a kind of theater in the clouds. Now, however, “the struggle against the spontaneity of the creative process” had become the slogan, which meant that it was no longer enough to write on prescribed subjects; one had to write in a prescribed manner.

Delta wanted to serve his lord. In order to exist as a poet he needed a genial, amused seigneur who believed that neither his government nor anything in heaven or on earth deserves to be taken too seriously, that song—half serious, half scoffing—matters more. But such princes have long since ceased to be. The lord who held him in thrall tolerated him for a while not because his songs were pleasing, for song is merely a means to an end. It was when his songs no longer served the desired end that his master knit his brows in anger. Publishers were instructed to print only those of his poems in which he demonstrated that he had reformed. The puritans rubbed their hands in glee. At last they had wrung his neck. They knew that no matter how he tried he could not reform. Deprived of their former exuberance, his poems no longer differed from verse ground out by second-rate rhymesters.

Thus he entered the realm of living shadows. Nothing should be wasted, however, in a socialist economy. Men who have fulfilled their role can find work enough for their capacities. Delta’s existence was assured; a state publishing house commissioned him to do a translation of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Some two years after his fall from grace he has been given another chance. At this writing, all his past sins are being discussed openly in the leading literary weekly. This is a sort of trial, with a favorable verdict prepared in advance. Delta will return to favor once more; but once more, it will be only for a time.

 Czesław Miłosz 

Captive Mind

What those taboos are, I prefer not to reveal ...

 

T A B O O

Taboo, i.e., "not allowed," was the foundation of the feudal system on the islands of Polynesia and consisted in recognizing cer t ain persons (for instance, chiefs and priests) as well as some places and objects as untouchable. Because of Dr. Freud and his successors, we learned to associate the word "taboo" with sex, yet the islanders had no idea that some bodily functions could be forbidden. This became in Hawaii a significant factor in the encounter with the white man's civilization. A young British sailor, Thomas Manby, who found himself in Hawaii in 1791 , describes (with relish) a group of girls on the deck of his ship-they got there in canoes or by swimming and stayed for a few days. When Protestant missionaries appeared in Hon­ olulu, they were particularly severe toward this custom, and there were scandals when ship captains requested entertain­ ment for their crews.

When, in a few dozen years, the taboo, the violation of which was punished by death, gradually disappeared on the Hawaiian Islands, it was equivalent to the end of their civilization, and the (awful) Protestant missionaries confronted a society in a state of utter decay, without any orientation as to how to live. They introduced the notion of sin, and it encompassed not only sex but also dances and games, for which the penalty was Hell.

The history of our civilization is a history of changing taboos. In our century, utopias such as the Soviet state used the taboo to protect themselves, and the gradual disintegration of pro­hibitions was a sign that what had happened to Hawaiian feu­dalism would repeat itself there.

The breaking of barriers in a "permissive society" is limited mainly to sex, not without comic efforts to discover sexual acts drastic enough to boost sales. Freedom seems to be total and thus numerous taboos in other realms are beyond people's awareness.

I boast of being aware of taboos which are binding in the place and time assigned to my life. It is better, I feel, to be aware than to submit unconsciously. Sometimes I have an itch to test how much freedom is allowed, but I stifle this urge for various reasons. What those taboos are, I prefer not to reveal; I would expose myself too much. Other people, in the proper season, which is not the season of my life, will take care of that.

*

B E  L I KE  O T H E R S

Wherever you lived-in the city of Pergamum at the time of the Emperor Hadrian, in Marseilles under Louis XV, or in the New Amsterdam of the colonists-be aware that you should consider yourself lucky if your life followed the pattern of life of your neighbors. If you moved, thought, felt, just as they did; and, just as they, you did what was prescribed for a given moment. If, year after year, duties and rituals became part of you, and you took a wife, brought up children, and could meet peacefully the darkening days of old age.

Think of those who were refused a blessed resemblance to their fellow men. Of those who tried hard to act correctly, so that they would be spoken of no worse than their kin, but who did not succeed in anything, for whom everything would go wrong because of some invisible flaw. And who at last for that un­ deserved affliction would receive the punishment of loneliness, and who did not even try then to hide their fate.

On a bench in a public park, with a paper bag from which the neck of a bottle protrudes, under the bridges of big cities, on sidewalks where the homeless keep their bundles, in a slum street with neon, waiting in front of a bar for the hour of opening, they, a nation of the excluded, whose day begins and ends with the awareness of failure. Think, how great is your luck. You did not even have to notice such as they, even though there were many nearby. Praise mediocrity and rejoice that you did not have to associate yourself with rebels. For, after all, the rebels also were bearers of disagreement with the laws of life, and of exaggerated hope, just like those who were marked in advance to fail.

Quote from the book Road-side Dog

By Czeslaw Milosz

On women and education

Education involves these goals at all levels, from the primary instruction offered to all normal children to the higher education traditionally provided only to the most promising young adults. The shift in the content of education from the primary to the tertiary level can be explained not only by the natural growth of the human mind as it approaches adulthood but also partly in terms of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Human beings’ most basic needs are physiological: food, warmth, sleep, and the like. When these have been satisfied, people go on to seek safety, then relations with their fellow human beings, then esteem and a sense of accomplishment. Once they have satisfied all these needs, they can concern themselves with higher yet more nebulous ambitions such as creativity, reaching one’s full potential, or self-actualization. Maslow’s hierarchy runs from needs that are urgent for all men yet concrete and well-defined, to immaterial and vague goals that are not particularly urgent for most of us most of the time. It is often represented as a pyramid, with a broad base gradually narrowing as one moves toward the upper levels. In healthy societies, the very peak of Maslow’s pyramid is so small that it is possible to name many of the men occupying it: names like Goethe, Pascal, Da Vinci, Leibniz, and Mozart.

Higher education is an elite enterprise concerned mainly with matters fairly high up Maslow’s pyramid, though the men occupied with it are not normally those at the very top. The character and quality of the higher education a nation provides for its young elites says much about it and is one of the best measures of its advancement.

We inhabitants of the West are living through a late phase of our culture, in a society gone flabby from prolonged prosperity. A leading characteristic of such phases is that Maslow’s pyramid becomes top-heavy: too many people are working on self-realization and not enough are growing turnips. Everyone forgets about the necessities of life to focus on luxuries. This results in an evolutionary mismatch. We are adapted to an environment where most people spend most of their time securing basic needs, and relatively little on creativity and trying to reach their full potential. When large numbers of people naturally suited to growing food and providing security are drafted into the world of higher education instead, strange things start to happen there, and the nature of education itself is inevitably and profoundly altered.

How does this process operate? The philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre once drew a contrast between practices and institutions: practices are forms of human activity that provide social benefits, and institutions are human organizations created to foster, protect, and perpetuate such practices. For example, medicine is a practice which combats illness, thus extending and improving human lives. But medical practice would be unable to flourish for long without being embodied in institutions: primarily hospitals, but also including research laboratories, medical schools, etc.

The point at which MacIntyre was driving is that there exist ends or goods proper to practices themselves and ends proper to the institutions established to foster the practices—and these two sets of ends are not identical. They may even conflict. For example, the end pursued by the practice of medicine is the combatting of illness. Hospitals are set up to foster this practice. Yet those in charge of hospitals eventually and almost inevitably start making decisions with a view not so much to the quality of medicine being practiced there as to what is good for the hospital itself. Marble flooring might be installed, e.g., or a public relations campaign staged to increase institutional prestige and attract external funding—but without necessarily contributing anything to the curing of patients.

Many examples could be cited of how what is good for institutions may be given priority over the needs of the practices they were established to foster, but the principle aim of institutions considered as such is usually growth. The bigger the hospital becomes, the more people it can employ and the greater the rewards available to them. Examples of absurdly unjustified institutional growth are easy to find. Here is just one: in 1914, fewer than 4400 men administered the Royal British Navy, the largest in the world; by 1967, over 33,000 men were being paid to administer a Navy that had largely ceased to exist. This did nothing for British Naval power, obviously, but it benefited the administrators themselves.

Education is obviously an important human practice in the sense intended by MacIntyre. The goods or ends it pursues are mainly the three already stated: the acquisition of knowledge, the improvement of the mind, and the transmission of a cultural patrimony. The great European universities were established during the Middle Ages as places where a few men could cultivate rational debate, be trained in canon law, and study the works of Aristotle. The first scholars often literally did not have a roof to protect them from the rain. Gradually, universities acquired better physical endowments, but for centuries academic life remained the preserve of a small minority. In early America one had to demonstrate mastery of Greek and Latin before being admitted to a college. As late as 1910, only six percent of Americans graduated from secondary school, to say nothing of higher studies.

The first seven decades of the twentieth century witnessed reckless, headlong growth in educational institutions. This required drawing in students ever lower down the hierarchy of natural gifts. First attendance and then completion of secondary school became nearly universal. Then, following the Second World War and the GI Bill, tertiary institutions simply exploded. By 1975, 27 percent of men and 22.5 percent of women were earning bachelor’s degrees (up from 7.5 percent and 5 percent respectively on the eve of the war).

Enrollment plateaued soon after because a minimum IQ of about 115 was still considered necessary for a young person to derive much benefit from a college education. But even that weak standard has been eroding in recent years. A recent meta-analysis found that while the average American undergraduate in 1960 had an IQ of 120, the figure has now sunk to 102, equal to that of the average white American. There is no longer anything “higher” about higher education. Obviously, instruction has had to shift accordingly. As the late columnist Joe Sobran famously quipped: “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high schools to teaching Remedial English in college.”

Worthwhile learning has been replaced in part by frivolous classes in basket weaving, but often the new substitutes are worse than any frivolity: the students are indoctrinated in pernicious ideological fixations such as antiracism, feminism, post-colonial theory, etc. A powerful factor favoring this shift is precisely the lower intelligence of undergraduates. The ideological courses are far simpler in content that genuine academic study and almost impossible to do badly in unless a student is reckless enough to dispute the ideas presented. Why should a mediocre student risk his grade point average trying to master formal logic, particle physics, or the history of the Protestant Reformation when he can take oppression studies and get an easy “A”?

The scholarship produced by academics has gone through a similar change. This may have begun in schools of education, where young doctoral candidates have long occupied themselves with such weighty matters as the best way to arrange tables and chairs in an elementary school lunch cafeteria. But the nonsense has spread throughout the humanities and social sciences, and is now threatening STEM education.

Evolutionary psychologist Ed Dutton recently did a short video on a completely unremarkable young female

academic who just received a doctorate from Cambridge University with a dissertation entitled Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose. According to Dutton, the thesis shows how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse, the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates, in structuring our social world. The broad aim is to offer an intersectional and wide-ranging study of olfactory oppression.

Essentially, what the young lady did was read some feminist novels by Virginia Woolf, note all the passages referring to odors, and then fit them into a ready-made interpretive scheme built around the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.

I have not read her dissertation, so it is just possible I am being unfair—although I doubt it. It hardly matters, however, for I only mention this young woman as a convenient example. Whatever the qualities of her work, most academic dissertations are now every bit as pointless and absurd as what I have just described. This particular thesis achieved notoriety only because the author bragged about her accomplishment online and was met with gales of scorn from the general public. Dutton claims that hers is far from the worst dissertation he has heard about. For comparison he mentions Dr. Desiree Odom’s A Multiple Marginalized Intersectional Black Lesbian Leader: A Critical Feminist Autoethnographic Narrative. In plain English, this woman wrote a doctoral thesis on herself.

Some legitimate and worthwhile learning and scholarship still goes on within universities, but it is under threat due to a kind of Gresham’s Law of the intellect whereby bad scholarship drives out good. In sum, the utopian attempt to extend the benefits of higher education to the general public has led to a catastrophic decline in the practice of education itself. And we must bear in mind that the very attempt was only made possible by the unexampled material prosperity of America and other Western nations, i.e., their success at securing the more urgent needs farther down Maslow’s pyramid.

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Continuation

Dutton mentions the probability that our newly minted olfactory racism scholarette has received public funding. Again, the particular case hardly matters—the point is that most young women in the academy benefit from such funding. This means working men have had a portion of their earnings confiscated to allow her to peruse Virgina Woolf novels and grind out empty verbiage about oppression. It is a crying injustice that should not be tolerated one minute longer. Yet in return for such support, the young lady looks down her snout at the men funding her! They are simply not “educated” enough to be worthy of her consideration.

What explains such women’s limitless faith in the objective validity of academic credentials? In part, their own mediocre intelligence and the limits precisely of their education in the authentic sense. Learning and acquired mental acuity are goods difficult to appreciate except by those who already have them in significant measure themselves. It is hard to judge uphill on education because people by definition cannot know what they do not know. Dull and untrained minds cannot have a proper sense of what they are lacking. All they can judge by is externalities—such as academic credentials. Any fool can see a degree hanging on someone’s wall in a way he cannot so easily see the benefit a gifted mind has derived from, for example, extended immersion in the Latin classics. Hence we find women in the tragicomic situation Henderson describes: lonely and miserable even as they reject legions of men on the basis of meaningless credentials. And we are asked to believe they do so because they value education. I feel myself crashing into the limits of the English language’s capacity for expressing contempt.

The relation of the genuine life of the mind to today’s corrupt academy might be illuminated by comparison with the ancient Christian doctrine of the church invisible. Christians believe the church derives from God himself, yet this presents an obvious problem. God is perfect, while the church is made up entirely of imperfect, sinful men (wise theologians admit that ecclesia semper reformanda – “the church is always in need of reform”). The explanation of this apparent paradox is found in the distinction between the church visible and the church invisible. Normally when men refer to the church, they have the everyday, visible church in mind. But this human institution is less important than the true, invisible church responsible for the work of salvation, and whose composition is known to God alone. The invisible church somehow exists within the visible, but is never identical to it. Obviously, the decay of genuine learning within a corrupt academy is analogous to a near-throttling of the invisible church by the visible.

If you give an uneducated (in the proper sense) person an educational credential, he—or more to the point, she—will accept it unquestioningly as a proof of her own real accomplishment. Dutton reports that the young olfactory racism expert weathered the storm of public scorn directed at her successfully. He even quotes her as saying, “I’m fine, I’m quite pleased that I’ve upset these basement-dwelling incels.” It does not occur to her that the incels may only be incels because thousands of academic spinsters like herself are ludicrously deluded as to the value of their own attainments.

In short, the corruption of our educational institutions has produced a status-mirage that women are unable to see through, one which condemns both themselves and men to childlessness—though not necessarily depriving the women of polygynous sex with men above them in the outward status hierarchy.

In addition to the mediocrity of their minds and the modesty of their attainments, women in the academy may have difficulty seeing through the corrupt status hierarchies in which they are enmeshed simply because they are women. As I wrote in a recent essay, the sex generally consists of “impressionable conformists with a powerful need for social approval.” Status hierarchies are produced by men, as Napoleon knew (“Les femmes n’ont pas de rang”). Women rarely consider them critically; they accept them as given, and all their instincts concerning the “attractiveness” of men operate downstream from there. If a society is healthy, its status hierarchy embodies sound values, and female hypergamy functions as a spur to worthwhile male achievement. If a society is sick—we get what we see in Henderson’s article. (...)

So in general, as I said, women accept the authorities and status hierarchies that they find in place. This is probably because authority and status are essentially male concerns. Les femmes n’ont pas de rang—women are never going to tear down corrupt hierarchies for us, nor is it reasonable for men to blame them for being as nature made them. Their sexual instincts will function properly again once we have replaced rotten hierarchies with sound ones in better accord with the nature of things and a proper sense of values. When we do, we shall never again have female olfactory racism scholarettes turning up their noses at hardworking men.

What, Then, Must We Do?

Some years ago I came across an amusing article about a fire breaking out in an office building. What was amusing was the reaction of the female employees. Firemen, as everyone knows, do not enjoy the very highest status within our society, despite the dangerous and life-saving nature of their work. But every dog has its day, and even firemen come into their own when a fire breaks out. Under such circumstances, there is no time for discussion or persuasion. Everyone who knows what’s good for him must do exactly as the firemen direct, including the corporate CEO. You do not give firemen any backtalk while a fire is raging. For a brief moment, they are at the top of the status hierarchy.

Well, these corporate “career girls” were practically swooning. Once out of the building and in safety, they began marveling to one another how manly those guys were. This was virility the likes of which they had never known. It was the first time in their whole lonely, miserable lives that any man had put them in their place, and they were simply beside themselves. It was better than Love’s Sweet Fury.

It would be interesting to know whether any of these women went on the internet afterwards to seek dates with firemen. I doubt it. Most firemen are not terribly “educated,” and often earn less than the ass-sitting female paper-pushers they rescue. Perhaps if women had to spend several post-pubertal years being continually rescued from burning buildings, we could foster a baby-boom. Instead, of course, America’s fire departments are busy replacing firemen with firewomen. (When a large part of Los Angeles recently burned down, it emerged that the three persons in charge of the fire department were all lesbians.) So those rescued women probably went back to their sterile lives as soon as the building reopened. What a pity.

So what can we do? It is tempting to say we must raise the status of young men. But the solution to the problem described in Henderson’s article is surely not for policemen, farmers, and plumbers to get post-doctoral fellowships in feminist theory. If we cannot make female hypergamy function correctly once again by raising the status of men, all that remains is . . . to lower that of women. In effect, this is what briefly occurred in that burning office building. And the women just loved it.

Feminists, like broken clocks giving the right time twice a day, have described how women under “patriarchy” eroticize and derive pleasure from their own oppression, meaning their exclusion from the male status hierarchy. They are correct. The reader who wishes to observe how women might be made happier once men finally work up the gumption to deprive them of status is advised to watch my favorite Italian movie, Swept Away (1974; avoid Madonna’s 2002 remake). It was made by a woman—and could only have been made by a woman. Meanwhile, clueless male traditionalists offer nothing but laments that women are no longer being placed upon sufficiently high pedestals, unaware that their excessively elevated status is now the principal factor in their loneliness and sexual frustration. Watch the movie!

Sex is not simply something that happens in people’s bedrooms. It structures the whole of society. Societies that are badly out of order sexually, as ours is, can expect to experience sexual dysfunction and a potentially catastrophic decline in fertility. Women need men’s love, but to get it they need to respect men. (For men to respect women is also nice, but not as essential—although discussed ad nauseam.) Women have traded love for status, a properly male concern, and they are deeply unhappy. This is because they are not getting the love they need, neither from the men above them in the status hierarchy who can go from hookup to hookup nor, even more obviously, from the lower-status men their inborn instincts virtually compel them to reject. And it does not matter that these men are not actually unworthy of them. For women, all that matters is the outward status hierarchy. (...)

F. Roger Devlin →

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz: A Writer for Today?

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz fascinated my literary generation in the somber thirties and today, many years after his death, he is no less fascinating to the young in Poland. To write about him is to explore the continuity of certain themes that go back to a more cosmopolitan era of Europe on the eve of World War I.

A few biographical data. He was born in Warsaw in 1885 as the only son of an eminent painter and art critic. His childhood and adolescence were spent in the mountain village of Zakopane in southern Poland, then a newly discovered "primitive area" with its rich folklore and fine specimens of peasant wooden architecture. Already fashionable as a center of mountaineering, Zakopane was a meeting place for intellectuals; young Witkiewicz grew up in a refined milieu. Perhaps the contrast between his physical vigor and the mood obligatory in those circles—that of "decadence," of "fin-de-siecle"—is one of the keys to his development as a thinker and as an artist. A student of fine arts in Krakow in 1904-1905, he traveled to Italy, France, Germany, and in 1914 went to Australia through Ceylon and the Malayan archipelago as a secretary to the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. The outbreak of World War I caught him in Australia. As the holder of a Russian passport he had to go back, arrived in St. Petersburg, and without waiting to be drafted, which was unavoidable anyway, volunteered. He fought as an infantry officer in an elite tsarist regiment, was decorated for bravery with the highest Russian distinction (the order of St. Anne) and probably was loved by his soldiers, for at the outbreak of the Revolution they elected him a commissar. We know little, however, of this or of any other wartime incidents. He did not like to talk about them except for a casual remark in a conversation with a friend, for example that counting the minutes before an attack is one of the most dire experiences in the life of man. In 1918 he returned to independent Poland, where he lived mostly in Zakopane and Krakow.

The experience he acquired was of an exceptional scope—in art, in life, in historical situations. His formative years were marked by the ascendancy of the "Young Poland" movement whose great master of ceremonies or witchdoctor was Stanislaw Przybyszewski, formerly a student of psychiatry in Berlin and a highly regarded member of the bohemian groups known as "Young Germany" and "Young Scandinavia." Przybyszewski proclaimed a manifesto in 1899 of the absolute supremacy of art over any other human activity and its complete independence from moral, social, or political considerations. Today his formulas sound curiously pre-Freudian: "in the beginning there was lust"; art is an outflow of the "naked soul" uniting man with the unconscious life of the universe. Hence Przybyszew-ski's preoccupation with satanic forces that revealed the illusory character of "poor, poor consciousness," with medieval witches, sabbaths, hysteria and insanity. But Witkiewicz's plays and essays on drama would be incomprehensible without reference to another leading figure of "Young Poland," Stanislaw Wyspianski, from whom stems the entire modern Polish theater. The staging of his Wedding in Krakow in 1901 was a revolutionary event. Wyspianski broke with "imitation of life" on the stage; he conceived of a theatrical spectacle as a unity of color, movement, and sound, and in his dramas fantastic symbolic creatures appeared on an equal footing with lifelike characters. Using today's language we would say he took the spectators on a "trip," for after each of his plays in verse people used to leave the theater reeling. Parenthetically, let us add that contrary to Przybyszewski he advocated a committed art: drama, not unlike Greek tragedy, in his view should be an instrument for exploring all the problems of a national community and a call to energy—but through a peculiar medium of its own having nothing to do with photographic naturalism.

Shaped by the Polish vanguard currents in literature, in painting, and in the theater, Witkiewicz landed in Russia at the very moment of her creative eruption—a period that remains unsurpassed in the excellence of its achievements. The most incredible "isms" were proliferating. The first purely abstract paintings were simultaneously being done in Germany by the Russian Vassily Kandinsky (1910), in Russia by the Pole Kazi-mierz Malewicz (1913), in Holland by Piet Mondrian (though his canvas of 1911 is still entitled "A Blooming Apple Tree"). Cubism was debated in Moscow and St. Petersburg (a school of poets called themselves "cubofuturists"), and in Moscow Witkiewicz saw the paintings of Picasso, whose exhibition he had already seen in Paris.

Witkiewicz was one of those who by their very behavior give fuel to a personal legend. Perhaps his oddity and humorous eccentricity increased with age, but already as a young man he was puzzling: a huge taciturn beast of prey in an invisible cage, a jester disguising some unavowed potential. He attracted women magnetically. One of them, who remembered him from Zakopane before World War I, related: "He was beautiful like an archangel with those gray-green eyes of his. When he entered a cafe, my knees shook. And I guess all the women felt the same." In Russia, he shared the peculiar way of life led by elite officers (mostly from aristocratic families), divided into encounters with death and crazy pleasures. It was a time not only of alcohol and of sexual orgies but of a fashion for new drugs. Witkiewicz got acquainted with cocaine and tasted peyote. Later on he experimented with the influence of drugs upon his painting and wrote a book on the subject (many years before Aldous Huxley and Michaux), Nicotine, Alcohol, Cocaine, Peyote, Morphine, Ether + Appendix (1932).

The Russian Revolution, as we may guess from his writings, left traumatic traces. Witkiewicz was brought up, let us not forget, on the basic premise of "decadentism"—namely, that Western bourgeois civilization was living out its last decades if not days. The upheaval of the masses in Russia seemed to confirm that view and for Witkiewicz gave it a more tangible shape. He became convinced that universal Comunist revolution was unavoidable. As for himself, he belonged to a world in decline. Revolution would have meant a victory of justice, but he was not primarily interested in "happiness for all," an aim he relegated to the realm of "ethics"; revolution, in his opinion, was but a stage in the general trend toward social conformity and destruction of the individual. This explains his subsequent polemics with Polish Marxists, in which he showed a good knowledge of dialectical materialism.

Upon his return to Poland, Witkiewicz joined a vanguard group of painters and poets in Krakow who called themselves "formists." His book New Forms in Painting and Resulting Misunderstandings (1919), as well as his essays on the theater published in magazines from 1920 on and gathered in a book The Theater (1923), demonstrated the application of his theory of "pure form" to all the arts. But it is time to ask who, after all, was he—painter, creative writer, or theoretician? He painted, but announced to all and sundry that his "atelier" produced portraits at fixed prices and that he himself did not pretend to the title of artist. It is true, though, that not everybody acceded to the honor of posing as his model. His "psychological portraits," mostly of intellectual friends, resemble by their treatment of line and color what we associate today with psychedelic art. He wrote plays, beginning with Cockroaches (when he was eight years old) about cockroaches invading a city; a two-volume edition of his collected plays published in Warsaw in 1962 surpasses in daring "the theater of the absurd." He wrote a few novels, the first in 1910: 622 Downfalls of Bungo or a Demoniac Woman. Two novels of his are major contributions to Polish literature of the years 1918-1939, yet he excluded the novel from the domain of "art." For him the novel was a bastard genre, a catchall, a bag, a device to convey the author's quarrels with his contemporaries. He wrote essays on the theory of painting and of drama. He had, however, only one true passion: philosophy. Let me stress this, for his philosophical concepts underlie everything he attempted to do. His first "metaphysical divagations," as he called them, date from 1904. For many years, between 1917 and 1932, he worked on a rather slim concise treatise to which he attached much importance, Notions and Assertions—Implied by the Notion of Being. A dilettante—though highly esteemed by university scholars such as Professor Tadeusz Kotarbinski, the dean of Polish philosophers—Witkiewicz was better equipped than many professionals. He read fluently in Russian, German, French, and English, not to mention his native tongue.

The state of European and American philosophy, as he observed it, strengthened his historical pessimism. Philosophers, behaving like the fox who pronounced the grapes sour because they were too high, were engaged in explaining away metaphysics as a semantic misunderstanding. Wasn't this a sign foreboding the end of the search for "unattainable absolute truth"? To quote from him: "Throughout the entire struggle with Mystery, veils dropped away one by one and the time has come when we see a naked, hard body, with nothing more to be taken off, invincible in the indifference of a dead statue." The fable of the fox applied not only to the neo-positivists. Witkiewicz raged against Bergson: "intuition" was indeed a meager substitute for striving toward clear cognition. Pragmatism and Marxism fared even worse: They exemplified the approaching era when "ethics will devour metaphysics." Or, to again use his own words: "Every epoch has the philosophy it deserves. In our present phase we deserve nothing better than a drug of the most inferior kind, to lull to sleep the metaphysical anxiety which hinders our transformation into automatic machines."

Trying to salvage whatever survived from the ambitious ontological drives of the past, Witkiewicz elaborated a minimal "system" somewhat akin to Leibniz's monadology. Its analysis does not belong here; I limit myself to a few points. According to Witkiewicz, nothing can be asserted about being except that it predicates "Particular Existences." Every monad embodies what he calls the "Principle of Factual Particular Identity." In man this gives rise to a "Metaphysical Feeling of the Strangeness of Existence," expressed by questions: "Why am I exactly this and not that being? At this point of unlimited space and in this moment of infinite time? In this group of beings, on exactly this planet? Why do I exist, if I could have been without any existence? Why does anything exist at all?"

Mankind looked for answers in religion, then in philosophy. Yet religion was dead and philosophy was dying. Art, which has always been a means of soothing the anxieties provoked by the "Metaphysical Feeling of the Strangeness of Existence," survived. Art in the past functioned, however, in a universe ordered by ontological concepts of religion or of philosophy. Its harmonious forms reflected that serenity which is granted when man has also other means of satisfying his basic craving. Art as the only channel, as a substitute for religion and philosophy, by necessity would change. Its "unity in multiplicity," reflecting the increased sense of identity in its creator, could only be achieved at an increasing cost—namely, a savage intensification of the elements used, lest the harmony become tepid. Here Wit-kiewicz's formulations are not quite clear. He seemed to believe that modern artists, as opposed to their healthy predecessors, became neurotics because of their inability to quench their metaphysical thirst in any other way than through their art. They were condemned to endow it with their neurosis by choosing as their material more and more ugly, jarring, garish images, sounds, lines, and colors. They were the last representatives of a species marked by a metaphysical "insatiability" and threatened by mass ethics in which the craving that constitutes the very dignity of man was already being twisted. Art was moving toward insanity, and the future was not far off when artists would be imprisoned in insane asylums. Mankind would be "happy," but it would know neither religion, nor a philosophy deserving the name, nor art.

However we judge Witkiewicz's pessimism, one thing is certain: his creative work combines a rare vital energy with a conviction that art should select procedures adapted to its final phase. It should achieve "Pure Form." A painting, for instance, should be no more than a set of "oriented tensions" of line and color (he deviated from his principle when making his "psychological portraits," and that is why he dismissed them as merely an income-bringing craft). In his stress upon "purity" he was, of course, no exception in the Europe of his time: even the French Academy of Literature listened, as early as 1925, to Henri Bre-mond's lecture on "pure poetry." Yet of great consequence was Witkiewicz's application of the concept to the theater. If modern painting tended toward a refusal to represent anything, could not drama be conceived as "pure action" without any care for reproduction of reality? While posing the problem, he did not want to go so far:

Though we can imagine a painting composed entirely of abstract forms which, unless we indulge in obvious autosuggestion, would not provoke any associations with objects in the external world, no such a theatrical play can even be thought of, because a pure becoming in time is possible only in the sphere of sounds, and the theater without actions of characters, even most strange and improbable characters, is impossible, since the theater is a composite art and not based upon homogenous elements as are the pure arts: music and painting.

But "deformation" (as in cubist art) is not beyond the playwright's reach: "In painting, a new form, pure and abstract, without a direct religious background, was achieved through a deformation of our vision of the external world, and in a similar manner Pure Form in the theater can be achieved at the price of a deformation of psychology and of action." Since he presents his intentions rather clearly, let me continue quoting him: "What matters is the possibility of freely deforming life or an imaginary world in order to create a totality, the sense of which would be determined by a purely internal, purely scenic construction and not by any exigencies of consequent psychology or action, corresponding to the rules of ordinary life." The date when those sentences were written—around 1920—should be kept in mind. It was in Europe a period of radical experimentation. Witkiewicz explains what a play written according to his recipe would be like:

Thus three persons, dressed in red, enter and bow, we do not know to whom. One of them recites a poem (which should make the impression of something necessary exactly at that moment). A gentle old man enters with a cat he leads on a string. Until now everything has been going on against the background of a black curtain. The curtain is drawn apart and an Italian landscape appears. Organ music is heard. The old man talks to the three persons. He says something which corresponds to the created mood. A glass falls from the table. All of them, suddenly on their knees, are weeping. The old man changes into a furious brute and murders a little girl who just crawled out from the left side. At this, a handsome young man runs in and thanks the old man for that murder, while the persons in red sing and dance. The young man then weeps over the corpse of the little girl saying extremely funny things, and the old man changes again into a tender-hearted character chuckling on the sidelines. The sentences he pronounces are sublime and lofty. The costumes may be of any kind, stylized or fantastic—and music may intervene in various parts. So, you would say, this is a lunatic asylum. Or rather the brain of a madman on stage. Perhaps you are right, but we affirm that by applying this method one can write serious plays and if they are staged in a proper way, it would be possible to create things of extraordinary beauty, they may be dramas, tragedies, farces or grotesques, but always in a style not resembling anything that exists. When leaving the theater, one should have the impression of waking up from a strange dream in which the most trite things have an elusive, deep charm, characteristic of dreams, not comparable to anything.

Yet for Witkiewicz programmatic deformation for its own sake, not justified by the real need for formal unity, was to be categorically condemned. He underlined this: "Our aim is not programmatic nonsense, we are trying rather to enlarge the possibilities of composition by abandoning in art any lifelike logic, by introducing a fantastic psychology and fantastic action, in order to win a complete freedom of formal elements."

In spite of those reservations, it is doubtful whether the recipe is conducive to anything but the monotony of a few devices repeated ad infinitum: once all improbabilities are accepted, no increase in dose could ever stir the spectator. Fortunately, Witkiewicz as a theoretician and as a practitioner are two not quite identical persons. In his thirty or so plays written between 1918 and 1934 he gives free vent to his ferocity, a virtue rarely praised by "pure artists." He becomes a high-school prankster who makes us think of Alfred Jarry more than of any other writer. His characters, through their roars and their mad thrashing around, resemble the abominable Father Ubu with his exclamations "merrrrdrre" and his machine for blowing up brains. Witkiewicz delighted in coining names for his characters appropriate to their behavior. Many are untranslatable puns; some, often a cross-breed of several languages, can give an idea of his buffoonery. Thus we are confronted with Dona Scabrosa Maca-brescu and her teenage daughter Swintusia (Piggy) Macabrescu, with psychiatrist Mieczyslaw Valpurg and attorney general Robert Scurvy (meaning in Polish both scurvy and s.o.b.); with Gottfried Reichsgraf von und zu Berchtoldingen, the Great Master of the Teutonic Order; two hassidim, Haberboaz and Rederhagaz; with Princess Alice of Nevermore; Minna Countess de Barnhelm; Maxim Grigorevich Prince Bublikov-Tmutara-kanskii, a counteradmiral; with Richard III in person, vice-count Wojciech (Adalbert) de Malensac de Troufieres, the naturalist painter Oblivion Grampus. And so on, and so on.

The titles of the plays are often no less promising: Metaphysics of a Two-headed Calf; Gyubal Wahazar or Along the Cliffs of the Absurd, a Non-Euclidean Drama in Four Acts; Mister Price or Tropical Madness; The Ominous Bastard of Vermiston; The Independence of Triangles. On his characters two remarks can be made. All of them, men and women, are oversexed; practically all of them are on the verge of bursting asunder, victims of inexpressible yearning. Sex, since it is intimately connected with the "metaphysical feeling of strangeness of existence," was for Witkiewicz akin to art. Yet no discharges are able to calm down his weird puppets. They are under the pressure of a cosmic reality which they feel is "too much." And since they are not supposed to be "probable" as to the language they speak, they deliver tirades mixing slang and terms of modern philosophy whether they are artists, princes, or peasants.

The composition of his plays may be defined as a parody of psychological drama. Instead of middle-class husbands, wives, and mistresses, we find bizarre mathematicians of genius, artist-misfits, unashamedly lurid women, with the author's obvious predilection for the international set, for aristocrats and proletarians, as well as for meetings between figures taken from different epochs; instead of dialogues in a living room, the ravings move into a dimension of opera-buffa; instead of murders out of jealousy and suicides, sham murders and sham suicides— plenty of corpses, yes, but they soon resurrect and rejoin the conversation.

Witkiewicz's imagination, nourished by the apocalyptic events of war and revolution in Russia, was ill adapted to what prevailed in the literature of Poland after 1918. The country was independent but provincial, confronted with immediate tasks, and the radical vanguard schools of 1918-1920 soon declined or entrenched themselves in little magazines for the elite. Fortunately for him Poland was a theatrical country, with good repertory theaters directed by people who continued the line of Stanislaw Wyspianski. A few plays of Witkiewicz were staged and some reached fifteen, thirty, even forty performances. He obtained the support of intelligent theater critics, and won notoriety as an enfant terrible of Polish letters. Yet it is significant that performances of his plays date from the twenties. After this he was more and more isolated, and the majority of his dramas were neither published nor staged in his lifetime. Because of his language—with its humorous-macabre exuberance, puns, parody of styles—he is difficult to render into other languages. But even had he been translated, what chance would he have had abroad if the "theater of the absurd" conquered Paris and London only some thirty years later? At least in Poland the theater was not as commercialized as in Western Europe and directors, if not the public, understood what he was after.

Today, while considerable "freedom of formal elements" has been attained everywhere, Witkiewicz still fails to fit into any accepted category. He started from other premises than Angst and alienation; not being-in-an-unbearable-situation, but Being as such, was his primary concern. If we assume that Beckett's Ah, les beaux jours is the highest achievement of the theater of the absurd (Francois Mauriac compared it to Aeschylus) the insectlike, weak buzz of its heroine sinking into the sand (symbolizing time) does not recall anything in the plays of Witkiewicz. Curiously enough, a melancholy perception of tran-science is absent from his writings. On the contrary, his characters have to cope with a superabundance of Being as an eternal now.Perhaps more than the insane action, the intellectual contents of his dramas estranged the public. After all, in spite of his theoretical claims, he conveyed his philosophy in them by the very choice of his heroes. A lunatic fringe, the last of a perishing tribe—artists, aristocrats, descendants of rich factory owners— represented an intensification of individuality through delirium and decadence; a kind of "last stand" before universal grayness, historically preordained, swallowed them in. The scene hints more at Russia on the eve of the Revolution than at Poland or any other country, unless one shares (which was not easy at the time) the author's belief in a doomsday awaiting the precarious "normalcy" that was patched together in 1918.

Witkiewicz abandoned writing plays after the twenties, except for one in 1934, the closest to a parable, full of transposed realistic details, a response to the oncoming doomsday which was already announced by the rise of totalitarian dictatorships: The Shoemakers. In my view it is not accidental that in departing from "Pure Form" and injecting the work with "contents" he succeeded so well. As to "contents," to put it shortly there are the shoemakers (social rebels hungry for good living and sex galore) who are destined after the revolution to be playthings of the Super-Worker, a potential bureaucratic operator; and a primordial male-devouring female, Princess Irina, personifying the rotten system which is defended by attorney general Robert Scurvy. The attorney makes an alliance with the "Brave Boys" (a native fascist movement, the last phase of capitalism) and ends his career on all fours chained as a dog (smoking a cigarette). Altogether, though it is no less a lunatic asylum than Witkiewicz's other plays, The Shoemakers follows an anticipated historical logic, which is why it bears the subtitle: "a scientific play with songs."

The two novels by Witkiewicz, Farewell to Autumn (written 1925, published 1927) and Insatiability (1931), are populated with the same kind of personalities as his dramas, often appearing under the same names. They deal with similar problems, though the author is less bound by his search for "Pure Form." As I have said already, he excluded the novel from artistic genres. All of his creative activity, and I hope I am making this clear, was the result of a tension between his aggressiveness and his concept of art as unity in multiplicity, indifferent to the "gut-level" (by which he designated "everyday-life" feelings and emotions). He was more inclined to attack than to whine, and "contents" did explode in The Shoemakers (which reminds one the most of his novels). Once he had decided the novel was a "bag" with freely invented rules, beyond any exigencies of "art," he could pack it with philosophical treatises, digressions, and polemics. His novels are powerful, however, for the very reason that in scorning form he hit upon a specific novelistic form of his own. In this he was probably helped by his readings as an adolescent, by the science fiction of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and other authors. Science fiction, before World War I and immediately after, was undergoing a mutation (not without some contribution brought by the genre of ironic allegories, Anatole France's for instance) into a novel of apprehensive anticipation, a novel of antiutopia. Usually the future was visualized as dominated by machines winning their independence and crushing human beings. To give a few examples: in the twenties appeared Karel Capek's Krakatit; in Poland, futurist Bruno Jasieriski's Legs of Isolda Morgan (1923) and the dialectical stories of Aleksander Wat on the twists and turns of history to come, Lucifer Unemployed (1927). Witkiewicz's antiutopias concentrate upon social mechanization, not upon the negative aspects of technology. His vision is close to that of the Russian writer Eugene Zamyatin, whose We was published in England in 1924, though whether he read Zamyatin has never been ascertained. His Polish sources are obvious and acknowledged by him: most of all, the wild theosophical imagination of Tadeusz Miciriski (killed in 1918 in Russia by a mob which mistook him for a tzarist general) who, shuffling together epochs and countries in his dramas and novels, was in his turn a descendant of Polish romantic historiosophy.

In both novels the action is placed in the future, yet the present—namely the Poland of his day—is easily recognizable as material reshaped, magnified, seasoned with the grotesque; it has been justly said that all the "realistic" fiction of those years could not match Witkiewicz's insights into social and political imbroglios. The names of the characters are construed in his usual prankish way. For instance there is a Polish verb "zipac," to breathe with difficulty; he makes a French verb out of it, "ziper"; concocts a phrase, "je ne zipe qu'a peine"; changes spelling and obtains the name of one of his heroes, Genezyp Kapen. His style is not unlike that of Polish fiction before 1914 with its tendency to the profound and the sublime, especially in love scenes. He pushes the pedal just a bit more, so that the boundary between seriousness and joking is blurred. This serves him particularly well in his erotic passages. As might be expected, for his heroes the sexual act acquires an ontological magnitude comparable only to the act of artistic creation. His women, enamored with their genitalia—spider-females—do not wear ordinary bras and pants: "she took off her metaphysical hyper-panties." Yet because of this overemphasis and ironicgrandeur,the brutality of his sexual duels (there is a fundamental hostility between his males and females) is not naturalistic and would not provide excitement for any shy pornogra-pher. Sex for him equals an experience of the overwhelming, orgiastic monstrosity of existence.Not a brave new world, but the last phase of decay preceding the advent of a brave new world, is the subject of his novels. This renders questionable their classification with the genre that In our century begins with Zamyatin's We and embraces Aldous Huxley's already proverbial Brave New World (1932) as well as George Orwell's 1984 (1948). A particular society drawn from observation and anticipation lurks behind the artistic and pseudo-artistic milieu on which he focuses. Death of religion (sarcastically treated attempts at "neo-Catholicism"), death of philosophy (whole pages of discussion with logical positivists), art going mad (music being the most tenacious, hence his frequent identification with composers)—such are portents of the approaching change of the social system. In Farewell to Autumn it is brought about by two successive revolutions: first bourgeois-democratic (echo of Kerensky in Russia and of the Leninist theory), second of the "Levellers." The last chapters depict a new order in quite Orwellian terms but emphasize universal grayness and shabbiness, not terror. The central figure in the novel, Atanazy Bazakbal—more gifted in sex than in art though he wanted to be an artist—returns home from India at the news of the revolution, is given a small job in one of the state offices, and meditates upon the impotence of the individual to reverse the course of events. While in Zakopane, he decides to escape across the mountains. Witkiewicz was excellent in his descriptions of mountain scenery; the dawn over the summits as seen by Bazakbal, high on cocaine, is treated in a grandiose manner without a bit of mockery. The final pages summarize the author's dilemma throughout his whole career. If what awaits us is an anthill in which it will be forbidden to confess one's metaphysical craving, should not those few who are aware of it launch a warning? Bazakbal, under the influence of cocaine, has a revelation: a warning must be launched and it must be effective. He retraces his steps but is caught by a border patrol and shot as a spy.

In Insatiability, America and most of Europe have participated in counterrevolutionary "crusades" with the result that the "West" is half Communist. Russia has gone in an opposite direction; it has been ruled for a while by White terror. Poland did not join the anti-Bolshevik crusades (echo of 1919-1920 when Pilsudski refused to cooperate with White Russian generals Denikin and Wrangel) and has a native brand of semi-fascism. Europe, however, is threatened by Communist China which has conquered Russia and whose armies are already near the borders of Poland. All hopes turn to the charismatic commander of the army, Kocmoluchowicz (from kocmoluch— sooty face). The imminent danger does not disturb Witkiewicz's milieu too much, except as an oppressive atmosphere of futility and paralysis exacerbating their sexual and metaphysical "insatiability." The reader follows the story of a young man, Genezyp Kapen, opening on the night when he is erotically initiated by a homosexual composer, Putrycydes Tenger, and Princess Irina Vsievolodovna de Ticonderoga. A new element is added to Witkiewicz's normal paraphernalia: a magic pill. If the society in this novel, thanks to the author's extrapolation, brings to one's mind more the Western Europe and America of the sixties than that of the twenties, the role ascribed to chemically induced states of "oneness" with the universe sounds little short of prophetic. No more and no less, he writes a report on LSD. The pill is of Eastern provenance; it has been devised by a Malayan-Chinese ideologist, Murti Bing (and Chinese communism is in fact "Murtibingism"), as a means of pacifying the minds. Those who take the pill, provided by mysterious peddlers, become indifferent to such trifles as wars or changes of political systems. Witkiewicz, as it was already mentioned, experimented with drugs and was not a philistine; yet the pill is for him a signal of the end. Both the chemical compound and the philosophical "drugs" of pragmatism, Marxism, "intuition" —and their growing popularity—show that man is ready to renounce what torments him and makes his true stature, a confrontation with the unmitigated nakedness (one is tempted to say "otherness") of Being.

The plot of Insatiability leads Genezyp Kapen to the immediate surroundings of General Kocmoluchowicz, a magnificent beast relying only upon instinct and his intuition as a leader, and of his lash-wielding mistress Percy Zvierzontkovskaya (zwierzatko in Polish means a little animal; transcribe it a Russian way, add a Russian ending and the outcome is hilarious to anybody familiar with Slavic languages). The general—no brains, only animal vitality—on the eve of a decisive battle with the Chinese has one of his intuitive strokes of understanding: it is of no use to oppose "historical necessity." He surrenders and with all ceremonies due to his rank is beheaded. In the new order under Chinese rule no harm is done to lunatics such as Genezyp Kapen and his friends. Well paid, they participate in a cultural revolution under the auspices of the Ministry of the Mechanization of Culture and develop a perfect schizophrenia, in the clinical sense, too.

Since both his novels wait until their last chapters to carry the action into a new "happy" society (modeled upon what he knew of postrevolutionary Russia), they do not suffer from that certain leanness of psychological design so typical of science fiction and its social satire mutation. Their density and allusiveness relate them to the psychological novel with a contemporary sociopolitical setting, though the pattern is pushed to a caricature. Some critics maintain that through his handling of plots and characters as mere pretexts for a philosophical debate, with the author's direct commentaries and even footnotes, Witkiewicz merely rejuvenated the eighteenth-century techniques. Probably this is true, provided, however, that we see the genealogy of all "fantasy" fiction as specific, different from that of a "realistic" portrayal of a psyche in its conflicts with externally imposed laws and mores.

Many years separate us from Witkiewicz's death. In September 1939 he left Warsaw, then being surrounded by the Nazi armies, for the Eastern provinces. He committed suicide on September 17, at the news of the Soviet army's advance in fulfillment of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. This suicide (he took sleeping pills in a wood, woke up and slashed his wrists with a razor) remains rightly or wrongly blended in the mind of his readers with the tragic ends of both his novels, where the splendor of Polish landscapes in autumn is used as a background.

In postwar Poland, Witkiewicz for a long time was a disquieting case and a taboo. He did not oppose Marxism on political grounds; on the contrary, few Marxist writers or sympathizers could compete with him in his disdainful appraisals of the "free world," and he grasped perhaps even better than they the workings of fascism. Yet Western technology, the mass dementias of the "Brave Boys," and Marxist revolutions were for him the phenomena of an immense twilight, in which he preserved loyalty to a belief in "decadence" shared by European bohemians around 1900. If he was disquieting, it was above all because of his sophistication; a literature able to produce such a writer probably called for more subtle methods of investigation (and direction) than a few vulgarized precepts of "realism." The less one spoke of him, the better. His writings were unhealthy as they prophesied what everybody lived through, especially after 1949: boredom and fear.

The revival of Witkiewicz in Poland after 1956 seems to deny his utter pessimism as to the irreversibility of the historical trend. His plays have never been performed with such a zeal and have never attracted such numerous audiences. They are already a permanent fixture in the repertory of the Polish theater. His theatrical essays are a must for every theater director. One of his novels, Insatiability, has appeared in a new edition (not Farewell to Autumn, as it is too exact an image of Poland after the revolution of the "Levellers"). His philosophy is avoided but his admirers managed to give it attention, profiting from a temporary relaxation of censorship, in a symposium

Stanisiaw Witkiewicz, Man and Creator(Warsaw, 1957). He is an acting force in Polish letters, thus his "hope against hope" is at least in part vindicated. His significance, however, transcends the limits traced by one historical moment and one language. It depends upon the judgment we make about the theme of decadence, so persistent in the history of European civilization since the second half of the nineteenth century. Desperate Jules Laforgue, Spengler, T. S. Eliot in search of "live water" in the wasteland, as well as those playwrights and film makers of today who popularized what they stole from poets—all are relatives of characters in Witkiewicz's plays and novels. As the transformation of social organisms into abstract Molochs gathers momentum, we observe a parallel rebellion against society as a machine nobody can control, with the resulting proliferation of bohemian attitudes of withdrawal.

It is possible Witkiewicz was not dialectical enough and underestimated the resourcefulness of our species, its sly, waterlike flowing around obstacles which are but a solidified, frozen vestige of our creative powers. In all probability we are going through another crisis of the Renaissance man when "the world was out of joint." Yet Witkiewicz was hardly wrong, it seems to me, in his realization that something strange had happened to religion, philosophy, and art, even though their radical mutation did not equal their disappearance.11967

'Witkiewicz's plays have now been translated into several languages, and some have been staged with success in the United States as well. Two collections of his plays appeared in English: The Madman and the Nun and Other Plays, trans, and ed. Daniel C. Gerould and C. S. Durer with a foreword by Jan Kott (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966) and Tropical Madness, four plays trans. Daniel and Eleanor Gerould with introd. by Martin Esslin (New York: Winter House Ltd., 1972). The novel Insatiability, translated by Louis Iribarne, is scheduled to appear forthwith.

Emperor of the Earth

Czeslaw Milosz

 

Mrs Darwin

M R S . D A R W I N

Before Charles Darwin published his work On the Origin of Species in 1859, he had to hear many reproaches from his wife, a deeply religious person, who could not accept his decision to send to the printer so noxious a book.

-Charles-she would say- God has told us that He created man in His image and likeness. He did not say that about the ant, the bird, or the ape, or the dog or the cat. He placed man above everything alive and subjected the earth to his dominion. By what right do you deprive of his dignity a being that has the face of God and is the equal of angels?

Her husband then would answer that if he did not do it, Wal­ lace would, since he had hit upon a similar idea.

-Charles-she replied- we should be aware of our motives. You would not have been so intent on achieving fame as a scientist, if not for your successive failures. I know you do not like to be reminded of that, but had you succeeded in becoming a physician, as you desired, you would have derived enough satisfaction from curing people, instead of trying to satisfy your ambition at any price. And had those years when you studied theology at Cambridge allowed you to become a minister of the Church, your work in a human community would have protected you from adventurism.

-You know very well where you borrowed your theory. You found it in Malthus. A bad man, Charles, cruel and indifferent to the fate of the poor. I don't believe your theory, for your observations were not made with good intent.

Charles Darwin had occasion later to think of her words, though he was at the same time quite certain that his theory of evolution was correct. So much the worse for me and for humans. The theology that can be drawn from it is nothing but that of the devil's chaplain. What good Creator would con­trive such a world, an arena in which, like gladiators, individ­uals and whole species struggle for su rvival? If he watches all that, like some Roman emperor sitting in his special box, I will not pay him tribute. Happy are those who, like Emma, pre­served the image of God as our Father and friend.
**
C H R I S T O P H E R  R O B I N

In April of 1996 the international press carried the news of the death , at age seventy- five, of Christopher Robin Milne, immortalized in a book by his father , A. A. Miln e , Winnie-the-Pooh, as Christopher Robin. I must think suddenly of matters too difficult for a bear of little brain. I have never asked myself what lies beyond the place where we live, I and Rabbit, Piglet and Eeyore, with our friend Christopher Robin. That is, we continued to live here, and nothing changed, and I just ate my little something. Only Christopher Robin left for a moment.

Owl says that immediately beyond our garden Time begins, and that it is an awfully deep well. If you fall in it, you go down and down, very quickly, and no one knows what happens to you next. I was a bit worried about Christopher Robin falling in, but he came back and then I asked him about the well.

"Old bear," he answered. "I was in it and I was falling and I was changing as I fell. My legs became long, I was a big person, I wore trousers down to the ground, I had a gray beard, then I grew old, hunched, and I walked with a cane, and then I died. It was probably just a dream, it was quite unreal. The only real thing was you, old bear, and our shared fun. Now I won't go anywhere, even if I'm called for an afternoon snack."

**

A L A S T O R

It would be an exaggeration to say that the films directed by Alastor are gloomy, yet they are disquieting. They have their fans who appreciate in them precisely the ambiguity of the characters and the use made of symbols. Alastor's case is pe­culiar, as can be guessed not only from his films but also from his quite numerous pronouncements in interviews and articles.
A man of traumas and obsessions, Alastor simply declared that he did not like his films, because they were not positive enough. He would like to make different ones, but till now he did not know how. He confessed that he was a Christian but a sinner, and his personal shortcomings were responsible for what de­ pressed him in his art, though there were also objective reasons for its defects.

To grow up in a pious Anglican family was not enough to preserve one's independence from the pressures of a milieu which did not care much for religion, and Alastor lived like his peers, perhaps differing from them only in his being given to philosophy. At a certain moment, however, he went through a crisis and the faith of his childhood recovered its lost mean­ing. This occurred not under the influence of any preachers but because of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which he read in his adolescence and which worked slowly in him for years. A fairy tale about the struggle between good and evil, it suddenly tore him from his amused tolerance toward illusory standards of human moral judgments and threw him into a meditation on the power of evil in his century. Identifying ourselves with a hero from our adolescent readings, we often pave the way, unaware, for the decisions taken in maturity, and Alastor, like Frodo Baggins in Tolkien, came to feel that he was burdened with a mission to oppose the ominous land of Mordor.

Judging by many signs, Hell was spreading over the world like a drop of ink on blotting paper, and this was happening not only outside but also inside every one of his contemporaries. Alastor observed that dark stain in himself and in moments of soul-searching was ashamed of his life, so similar to that of his friends and acquaintances. Calling a spade a spade, he was a bigamist and an adulterer, which fact could help him in reach­ ing the public, for he certainly was not old-fashioned, yet it was detrimental to his image of himself as a delegate of the forces of good, battling Mordor's dominion.

In his films a murderer is usually surprised that such a thing could happen to him. Me, so good and kind, how could I have done something like that? In such situations it was not difficult to see the director's efforts to cope with his own internal disorder, which he either excluded from moral judgment by spe­cial privilege or, reluctantly, submitted to the exigencies of the Ten Commandments.

What was the meaning of his speaking out against his films? His ideal was simplicity of action combined with the defeat of evil and the triumph of good, of the kind that appeals to chil­dren. Is it not true, he asked, that The Magic Flute is Bergman's best film, and is not this due to the music of Mozart? Yet in his striving toward his ideal of luminosity and simplicity Alas­tor stumbled upon an impassable barrier, as if built into the very technique of the genre he practiced. This astounded and angered him. He even began to suspect that, in a demonic century, works not contaminated by the darkness of Hell are possible as the rarest exceptions only.

Road-side Dog
Czesław Miłosz