Master Henryk Elzenberg

TO HENRYK ELZENBERG ON THE CENTENNIAL OF HIS BIRTH

What would have become of me had I not met you—Master Henryk

whom I address for the first time by your first name

With the reverence and respect due to—Tall Shades
I’d have been a silly boy to the end of my life

Searching

Stifled tacitum ashamed of my own existence
An unknowing boy
The times we lived in were truly a tale told by an idiot

Full of sound and cruelty

Your severe gentleness delicate strength

Taught me to weather the world like a thinking stone

Patient indifferent and tender all at once
You were surrounded by sophists and those who think with a hammer

Dialectical frauds parishioners of nothingness—you looked at them

Through spectacles slightly streaked with tears
With an eye that forgives and shouldn’t forgive
All my life I failed to wring from myself a word of thanksgiving

On your deathbed—I’m told—you waited for the voice of a pupil

Who in the city of fake lights on the Seine

was being finished off by cruel nursemaids
But the Law Tablets Brotherhood—endure
Praise be to your forefathers

To those few who loved you
Praise be to your Books

Slender
Spacious

More lasting than bronze
Praise be to your cradle

Zbigniew Herbert
**
One photograph in the Witkacy exhibit shows a man in a pilot’s cap, inscribed Elzenberg, aviator. This must be Henryk Elzenberg, the philosopher, whose place in literary history is due chiefly to his role as Zbigniew Herbert’s friend and teacher. He wasn’t permitted to teach much in the Stalinist years, but a circle of students, including the young Herbert, surrounded him just the same. He wrote many works studied by specialists; but the greatest of them are his intellectual diaries, which were published under the title The Trouble with Existence in the late 1960s; they’ve lost nothing of their power today. It’s an exceptional book. Elzenberg was influenced by a range of traditions: nineteenth-century historicism, Eastern philosophy, he found masters from Goethe to Gandhi. In The Trouble with Existence, he reveals an encompassing intellect, unprotected by any kind of philosophical armor. Just the opposite: these are the notes of a defenseless man, who spent fifty years scrupulously recording his observations, his doubts, he comments on his rich, wide-ranging readings, reacts to historical events. He engages with the classic questions of the philosophy of culture, but also with dilemmas less frequently encountered in the history of systematic thought. One such problem is the link between poetry and life: Does a person preoccupied by poetry, imagination, inevitably stand at a remove from life?… Elzenberg doesn’t have a clear answer to the question, he struggles with it constantly, coming down on the side of life one time, and defending the imagination the next. During the First World War, he comments that poetry has won in the debate with life, since the drama of war has shown what life can be in its “amplitude, richness, tragedy, splendor.” But this observation comes early on, when the terrors of trench warfare hadn’t yet been disclosed. During the Second World War, while living in hell (since Nazi-occupied Poland was hell), he continues his reading, the patient recording of his thoughts. He never doubted the value of contemplating art, of ideas and literature, and this at a time when other writers and thinkers, stunned by the war’s catastrophes, the Holocaust, spurned the entire history of European culture, choosing nihilism instead—like offended children. He managed to keep his intellectual independence amid brutal historical realities; he continued to comment on his reading as the Battle of Stalingrad raged. He didn’t construct a philosophical system, he didn’t advance a single “central metaphor,” he never entered the pantheon of great philosophers—but he left behind a book whose greatest virtue is its “softness,” its rejection of final conclusions, its ongoing, daily reckoning with the world. In Elzenberg’s diaries, it’s as if each night erased his earlier meditations and opened all his doubts anew—is this the philosopher’s defeat? He started fresh each day, as if he didn’t allow himself to read the earlier entries, as if he had to address the fundamental questions ab ovo. Is this defeat or triumph? Does he simply equivocate, is he incapable of taking a clear-cut position, staking his claim, and energetically defending his territory? I’ll admit, sometimes his endless questing does bother me. At other times, though, I’m convinced that he won a great victory, precisely because he achieved two things: he didn’t find the answers, but he never forgot the questions. (...)

If I could write novels, I might try to write a book about a man who wants to live his life only in brief, intense moments of mystical revelation, while neglecting everything that happens predictably in endlessly repetitive days and weeks, he views those days and weeks as insufferable drudgery, as the dreary cotton wool with which life is stuffed, in which, so my hero would think, things happen only for banal, dramaturgical reasons—since we can’t live exclusively in moments, after all, Darwin would never permit it. The man wouldn’t necessarily have to be a practicing artist, a thinker, he might simply confine himself to intense experiences. He might also make notes, hoping that they would one day lead to his Hauptwerk (Witkacy’s term). His philosophy proves its worth, such as it is, only in times of relative peace, but then war breaks out, ominous SS uniforms appear, or the only slightly less ominous uniforms of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. And our mystic finds himself caught in a trap. He’s being destroyed by the monstrous, primitive machine of modern history, which disdains even the subtler approaches to time measured in days and weeks, not to mention those ecstatic seconds. Henryk Elzenberg, who knew and admired Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, would be a prime candidate for the novel’s hero. In some ways he lived through aphorisms, in aphorisms, and not in the systematic continuity of events. In 1938 he commented in his diary, “War draws closer and closer, it will erupt any day, without warning. We must be mentally prepared. It will reach deeper into life than the last war. It will undermine everything, destroy the ground beneath our feet. It won’t leave us the kind of peace that the earlier war did; you could still fall in love, argue, make up, write articles on philosophy, present them at the Academy, get a fellowship to Vienna and spend weeks on end looking at paintings in galleries and reading books about Rembrandt … For those who’ve staked their cards on thought, on art, this may be the end—literally.” (...)

I don’t know much about Elzenberg’s life under Nazi occupation. I know only that he managed to survive. And I know that he lived in Vilnius then, that he taught secretly, that he got by on temporary jobs, he worked, for example, as the night watchman in a carpentry factory. This struck me as a revelation: the thinker as night watchman, a watchman with a meditative disposition, who likes contemplating the night sky. As Elzenberg himself once remarked, every writer faces a choice: Should he tell the stars about his generation, or tell his generation about the stars?… During his stint as a night watchman, he could talk with the stars at his leisure. He certainly didn’t travel to Vienna, didn’t linger before the paintings of old masters. But he survived. And in spite of all, he didn’t abandon his beloved diary, in which he stubbornly, systematically, perhaps not daily, but regularly, composed his endless letter to us, to coming generations. So he couldn’t actually serve as my novel’s hero—the war didn’t shatter him, Stalinism didn’t crush him.

It might even seem, for all my unwritten novel’s early premises, that his aphoristic way of life permitted his survival, or at least abetted it, that the indispensable drop of nonchalance shaping this man who lived in moments increased his chance of survival in a time of mass repression, tremendous danger … It’s as if someone chasing butterflies had missed a mass arrest by accident or luck, since he’s been following the insects’ chaotic flight, which is nothing like his persecutors’ harsh, monotonous march.

But chance destroyed many other aesthetes and mystics (it can be hard to tell them apart); they blundered, lost in thought, they walked into a roundup, they stopped by a friend’s place, where a trap lay waiting, an SS officer was having a bad day and didn’t like their looks on some Lvov or Warsaw street. And their chance of escape was near zero if they were Jews.

Elzenberg, who came from an assimilated Jewish family, survived the war only to fall prey to the next ideological system; he became a subject of the Soviet empire. Yet even then, in those dark years, he found friends and students, among them the puckish young poet Zbigniew Herbert. Elzenberg wasn’t allowed to teach from 1950 on, thanks to his “incorrigible idealism” (as Wikipedia puts it). He lived to see 1956, though, and the relaxed restrictions on scholarly and intellectual pursuits. He died at the age of eighty, in 1967, having witnessed the success of his greatest publication, the work that gathered and preserved so masterfully the fruits of so many moments of meditation. No, I won’t write a novel about him.

From:

Adam Zagajewski
Slight Exaggeration

Zbigniew Herbert

 Zbigniew Herbert has had an exemplary Central European education. He was born in 1924 in Lwów in eastern Poland, the son of a lawyer and professor of economics whose great-grandfather spoke only English (hence his literary British surname). In September 1939, when Herbert was fifteen, Lwów was swallowed by the Russian whale. Twenty months later, the Germans marched in and Herbert finished high school underground, fighting in the Resistance. At the end of the war he went to university to study both his father’s disciplines: he took a master’s in economics at Kraków, then a master’s in law at Toruń, where he stayed on to study philosophy. In 1950 he moved briefly to Gdańsk, then on to Warsaw where for six years he held down a series of menial, Kafkaesque jobs: in a bank, in a shop, as a clerk in the management office of the peat industry, in the department for retired pensioners of the Teachers’ Cooperative, and in the legal department of the Composers’ Association.

During the Nazi occupation his poems had been published irregularly in underground magazines and they continued to appear more or less in the same unofficial way during the grim Stalinist period after the war. Although he was a precocious poet, he had to wait until Khrushchev’s thaw in 1956, when he was thirty-two, to publish his first book of poems. The second appeared the following year, two large collections representing a decade and a half of work, which established him as the leader of his exceptionally gifted generation. It is typical of his ironic indifference to success that he celebrated this recognition with an apologetic poem dedicated to the desk drawer which in sterner times had been his one true audience; his ‘rebel’s fist stiff in dissent,’ he wrote, had given him a subject and an excuse, and his new liberty to publish what he wants is only responsibility in another guise:

such is freedom one has again

to invent and overthrow gods

He has been inventing and overthrowing gods ever since, a party of one, permanently and warily in opposition. Although he lived abroad from 1965 to 1971, when the conditions in Poland were relatively relaxed, and was abroad again in the late 1970s – in 1979 he was awarded the Petrarch Prize, Germany’s greatest cultural accolade – he returned home immediately after the troubles started in Gdańsk, in 1980, and has stayed there since. His international reputation is now too secure for the authorities to harm him, yet he refuses to accept their embrace. His new collection, Report from the Besieged City, was first published by internees in the Rakowiecka Prison in Warsaw in 1983.

To understand modern Polish poetry it is necessary also to understand something of what the country went through during the Nazi occupation: 6 million killed out of a population of 30 million; dozens of villages destroyed and their inhabitants massacred, in the style of Lidice and Oradour; Warsaw razed and emptied of its million inhabitants, the Nazis boasting that they would turn it into ‘a second Carthage’; Governor General Hans Frank’s infamous Operation AB which aimed at the total elimination of the country’s intelligentsia and succeeded in murdering 3,500. There was an old historical grudge between the Germans and the Poles, and it was settled by twentieth-century totalitarian methods.

All this instilled in the survivors a distaste for rhetoric and artistic pretension that amounted almost to a hatred of poetry itself. Tadeusz Rózewicz, who is three years older than Herbert, looked on art as an offense against human suffering and reduced his poems to a minimalist notation stripped of meter, rhyme, even of metaphor. ‘Modern poetry,’ he wrote, ‘is a struggle for breath.’ Herbert, too, eschews all punctuation and every unearned gesture. ‘He lowers his voice rather than raising it,’ John and Bogdana Carpenter write in the introduction to Report from the Besieged City, ‘the rhythm of his poems sometimes approaching the level of a whisper, or silent thinking.’ Yet despite the lack of punctuation, the argument of his poems is unfailingly lucid and the voice, however low, is clear and precise. This clarity is the core of everything Herbert has written. Despite the historical catastrophes he has lived through, he is a classicist, like Eliot, whom he reveres, and Piero della Francesca, about whom he has written eloquently in his collection of essays, Barbarian in the Garden.

Or perhaps he is a classicist because the continuing Polish catastrophe has placed such curious burdens on its writers. It is a nation that has held itself together for the past two centuries only by a collective effort of will. For 150 years Poland was partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, reemerging between the world wars, then swallowed up again, first by the Germans, then by the Russians. All this puts a special strain on writers, for in an occupied or one-party nation literature takes on the patriotic, educative, and moral burdens normally assumed by the state. It becomes, for instance, a forum for national debate in which political issues are discussed in guise of imaginative writing. Whence the Polish penchant for allegory and what they call ‘Aesopian language.’ Whence, too, the strange phenomenon of the underground presses, during both the Nazi occupation and the present troubles, continuing to print poetry and fiction along with political leaflets. In the Polish context, a poem or story can seem as rousing and urgent as a fighting handbill, and is probably more effective.

One of Herbert’s earliest poems, written when he was in his teens, first appeared in this clandestine way. It is called ‘Two Drops’ and is prefaced by a quotation from the nineteenth-century poet Slowacki – ‘No time to grieve for roses when the forests are burning’ – which the young Herbert, writing at a time when all of Poland was on fire, then proceeded to turn on its head:

The forests were on fire –

they however

wreathed their necks with their hands

like bouquets of roses

People ran to the shelters –

he said his wife had hair

in whose depths one could hide

Covered by one blanket

they whispered shameless words

the litany of those who love

When it got very bad

they leapt into each other’s eyes

and shut them firmly

So firmly they did not feel the flames

when they came up to the eyelashes

To the end they were brave

To the end they were faithful

To the end they were similar

like two drops

stuck at the edge of a face

It is a beautiful poem; given the circumstances in which it was written and the poet’s age at the time, it is extraordinary. The theme is one that Herbert has repeated, in one form or another, throughout his work: that the feeling that can flower between people, however frail, is somehow a match for history, however violent. Most young poets would have been satisfied with that ultimate existential gesture – making love while the bombs fall, as if a kiss could annihilate annihilation. Herbert, however, uses it to affirm less obvious, more abiding virtues: bravery, faithfulness, restraint (grief becomes merely ‘two drops / stuck at the edge of a face’). In the end, the poem is not about a gesture of defiance but about dignity; it is classical in the true Roman sense.

Herbert has never deviated from this passion for virtù. The hero of many of his later poems is Mr. Cogito, a battered descendant of Valéry’s luminously intelligent M. Teste, and also a descendant of Descartes who exists because he thinks about his existence. In other words, Mr. Cogito is a witness whose duty it is to serve truth not art, to think dispassionately about what he has seen, and to speak up for morality, however inappropriate it may seem:

go upright among those who are on their knees

among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live

you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous

in the final account only this is important …

That is from ‘The Envoy of Mr. Cogito,’ Herbert’s stern and moving last testament that ends his 1977 Selected Poems. But independence and courage, like clarity and restraint, have little chance against what he calls ‘the babble of the speaker’s platform the black foam of newspapers.’ The best he can do is elevate plainness into an aesthetic and moral principle. In an early poem, ‘A Knocker,’ he wrote wryly of his style, as though it were a limitation beyond his control:

my imagination

is a piece of board

my sole instrument

is a wooden stick

I strike the board

it answers me

yes–yes

no–no

In the latest collection, ‘Mr. Cogito and the Imagination’ repeats the same theme less hopefully, but as an article of faith:

he wanted to make it

an instrument of compassion

he wanted to understand to the very

end

…

and so to bring the dead back to life

to preserve the covenant

Mr. Cogito’s imagination

has the motion of a pendulum

it crosses with precision

from suffering to suffering

there is no place in it

for the artificial fires of poetry

he would like to remain faithful

to uncertain clarity

Early and late, Herbert has avoided ‘the artificial fires of poetry’ by using irony, that most classical of instruments and the enemy of rhetoric, of inflation, of distortion. But irony is also the weapon of the powerless, as Herbert himself pointed out – ironically, of course – at the end of a prose poem called ‘From Mythology’:

Then came the barbarians. They too

valued highly the little god of irony.

They would crush it under their heels

and add it to their dishes.

For Herbert, irony has always been a two-edged instrument that turns on the poet as readily as on the outside world. But in the earlier poems he used it playfully to rewrite his beloved classical myths in modern, deflationary terms – Arion, for instance, becomes ‘the Grecian Caruso’ – and even, in some of his love poems, as an improbable way of expressing desire without indiscretion:

Inadvertently I passed the border of her teeth and swallowed her agile tongue. It lives inside me now, like a Japanese fish. It brushes against my heart and my diaphragm as if against the walls of an aquarium. It stirs silt from the bottom.

She whom I deprived of a voice stares at me with big eyes and waits for a word.

Yet I do not know which tongue to use when speaking to her – the stolen one or the one which melts in my mouth from an excess of heavy goodness.

This youthful playfulness has seeped away over the years as his confidence in the power of truth and intelligence, as well as of irony, has weakened. The tone of his recent poems is grim, like the situation of his country and of the civilized standards on which his work is based. ‘I avoid any commentary I keep a tight hold on my emotions I write about the facts,’ he says in the title poem of Report from the Besieged City.

‘Then came the barbarians’: when he called his prose collection Barbarian in the Garden he was implying that he himself was the barbarian outsider reacting to the civilized gardens of France, Italy, and ancient Greece. Yet these elegant, meticulous, oddly passionate essays return continually to the theme of vanished cultures and their violent destruction – the Templars, the Albigensians at Montségur, the Greek colonists at Paestum – as though his underlying concern was always the modern barbarians from East and West who have erupted into the precarious culture of his own country.

In the poems, too, the focus constantly shifts backward and forward between past and present. ‘Report from the Besieged City’ is both about Poland after December 1981, when General Jaruzelski declared ‘a state of war,’ and about Poland as it has been through the centuries, a crossroad for invading barbarians:

in the evening I like to wander near the outposts of the City

along the frontier of our uncertain freedom

I look at the swarms of soldiers below their lights

I listen to the noise of drums barbarian shrieks

truly it is inconceivable the City is still defending itself

the siege has lasted a long time the enemies must take turns

nothing unites them except the desire for our extermination

Goths the Tartars Swedes troops of the Emperor regiments of the

Transfiguration

who can count them

the colors of their banners change like the forest on the horizon

from delicate bird’s yellow in spring through green through red to winter’s

black

Invading armies have become so much a condition of Polish life that Herbert describes them as if they were manifestations of nature itself – that is, dispassionately and with an eye for their ‘delicate bird’s yellow’ beauty.

It is this objectivity – the rigorousness with which he avoids the easy outs of self-pity, melodrama, even nostalgia – that preserves the classical spirit in Herbert’s work. Mr. Cogito’s imagination may cross ‘with precision from suffering to suffering,’ but as it does so the precision matters as much as the suffering. Whatever his subject, the steady light of his intelligence imposes on it a kind of serenity of which the classics themselves are part, since they enable him to view the unruly present in the long, cooling perspective of history. What he wrote of his idol, Piero della Francesca, is also true of his own work: ‘Over the battle of shadows, convulsions and tumult, Piero has erected lucidus ordo – an eternal order of light and balance.’

Czeslaw Milosz once wrote that Herbert survived the war and Stalinism because of ‘his personal qualities – good health, toughness, an orderly mind.’ Those qualities have also kept him from being abstract in his classicism, or pedantic, or superior. His poetry is founded on a belief in ordinary human values – love, dignity, intelligence, common decency – as the only true defense against the barbarians. ‘History teaches us that nations and their achievements can be destroyed in an almost total manner,’ he said in an interview quoted by the Carpenters in their introduction to the 1977 Selected Poems. ‘During the war I saw the fire of a library. The same fire was devouring wise and stupid books, good and bad. Then I understood that it is nihilism which menaces culture the most. Nihilism of fire, stupidity, and hatred.’

Herbert has steadily opposed nihilism with neither rhetoric nor anger, but with sanity – wakeful, ironic, evenhanded, intransigent:

The pebble

is a perfect creature

equal to itself

mindful of its limits

filled exactly

with a pebbly meaning

with a scent which does not remind one of anything

does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

its ardour and coldness

are just and full of dignity

I feel a heavy remorse

when I hold it in my hand

and its noble body

is permeated by false warmth

– Pebbles cannot be tamed

to the end they will look at us

with a calm and very clear eye

Herbert is the only contemporary poet I know who can talk about nobility and, more important, sound noble without also sounding false. It is a note that is rare in the arts of any period. The Romans had it, so did Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. But it hasn’t been much in evidence in recent years and perhaps it took someone who has witnessed close-up – ‘with a calm and very clear eye’ – some of the worst horrors of this century to speak out for virtù and endurance without sounding sentimental.

The strengths Herbert praises in his poems – steadfastness and independence, imperviousness to cant, contempt for the bullies – have their corollary in the purity of his style. He has been marvelously served by his translators but perhaps his persistent lucidity has made their task a little easier. All of them remark on how much is lost in translation. Despite that, his poems, even in English, seem to me finer than anything currently being written by any English or American poet.

Al Alvarez 

New York Review of Books, 1985

From: Risky Business 

Letter to scientist

 LETTER

IT WAS ACCIDENTALLY discovered in the 1920s—to be exact, in 1924-in an antique-book shop in Leyden. Three sheets of cream-colored paper of the dimensions 11.5 by 17 centimeters, with traces of humidity, but the handwriting well preserved, the small, clear letters completely readable. An unknown person had pasted the letter onto the inside of the cover of an old, once very popular romance called The Knight with a Swan, published in 1651 by the Amsterdam firm of Cool.

The majority of scholars have written skeptically about this discovery—for example, Isarlo, Gillet, Clark, De Vries, Borrero, and Goldschneider; only a young poet and historian from Utrecht, van der Velde (later stabbed with a dagger in mysterious circumstances not far from Scheveningen), fiercely defended the authenticity of the letter to the end of his life. According to the young scholar, its author was none other than Johannes Vermeer, and its recipient Anton van Leeuwenhoek1, a naturalist whose merits in the field of improving the microscope are well known. The scholar and the artist were both born in the same year, the same day, and spent their entire lives in the same city.

The letter shows no traces of corrections or subsequent interpolations, but it contains two spelling mistakes and changes; obviously it must have been written in a hurry. A few lines have been crossed out so decidedly and energetically that we will never learn what foolish or shameful thoughts were covered forever by the blackness of the ink.

The handwriting with its pointed letters, “v” written like an open eight, a somewhat wavy movement of the pen as if someone was speeding up and then suddenly stopping, reveals a striking similarity if not identity with the only preserved signature of Vermeer in the register of Saint Luke’s Guild in 1662. Chemical analysis of the paper and ink allows us to date the document at the second half of the seventeenth century. Everything indicates, then, that the letter could have been written by Vermeer’s hand, yet we lack irrefutable proofs. We know that technically perfect falsifications have been made.

All those who spoke against the authenticity of the document put forward numerous arguments, but to tell the truth, they are not too convincing. Scholarly prudence and even far-reaching skepticism are undoubtedly praiseworthy virtues. But one could sense something between the lines of the critical remarks that no one clearly stated: the main reservations were caused by the letter’s content. Let us suppose that if Vermeer wrote to his mother-in-law, Maria Tins, asking her to lend him a hundred florins for the baptism of his son, Ignatius, or let us also imagine if he offered one of his paintings to his baker van Buyten as a guarantee against a debt, I believe no one would protest. But when after two and a half centuries the Great Mute speaks with his own voice, and what he says is an intimate confession—a manifesto and a prophecy—we don’t want to accept it because we have a great fear before a revelation, and withhold of consent to a miracle.

Here is the letter:

Undoubtedly You will be surprised I am writing rather than simply dropping by your laboratory before dusk, as so often happens. But I think I do not have enough courage, I do not know how to tell you to your face what you will read in a moment.

I would prefer not to write this letter. I hesitated for a long time, because I really did not want to expose our long friendship to danger. Finally I made up my mind to do it. There are, after all, things more important than what unites us, more important than Leeuwenhoek, more important than Vermeer.

A few days ago you showed me a drop of water under your new microscope. I always thought it was pure like glass, while in reality strange creatures swirl in it like in Bosch’s transparent hell. During this demonstration you watched my consternation intently, and I think with satisfaction. Between us there was silence. Then you said very slowly and deliberately: “Such is water, my dear, such and not otherwise.”

I understood what you wanted to say: that we artists record appearances, the life of shadows and the deceptive surface of the world; we do not have the courage or ability to reach the essence of things. We are craftsmen, so to speak, who work in the matter of illusion, while you and those like you are the masters of truth.

As you know my father owned the tavern Mechelen at the marketplace. An old sailor often came there who had wandered all over the world, from Indochina to Brazil and from Madagascar to the Arctic Ocean. I remember him well. He was always quite tipsy but told splendid stories, and everyone gladly listened to him. He was the attraction of the place, like a big colorful picture or exotic animal. One of his favorite stories was about the Chinese emperor Shi Huang-ti.

This emperor ordered his country to be surrounded by a thick wall, in order to shut out everything that was different. He burned all books so he would not have to listen to the admonishing voice of the past; he forbade cultivation of any of the arts under penalty of death. (Their complete uselessness was blatantly clear when they were compared to such important tasks of state as building a fortress, or cutting off rebels’ heads.) Thus poets, painters, and musicians hid in the mountains and remote monasteries; they led the life of exiles tracked by a pack of informers. On the squares piles of paintings were burned, fans, statues, ornate fabrics, objects of luxury, and all things that could be considered pretty. Men, women, and children all wore the same ash-colored clothes. The emperor declared war even on flowers; he ordered their fields to be buried under stones. A special decree announced that at sunset everyone was to be at home, the windows tightly covered with black curtains because (you know yourself) what incredible pictures can be painted by the wind, clouds, and the light of sunset.

The emperor valued only science. He showered scientists with honors and gold. Every day astronomers would bring news of the discovery of a new or imaginary star. In servile fashion it was given the name of the emperor, and soon the entire firmament teemed with the luminous points of Shi Huang-ti I, Shi Huang-ti II, Shi Huang-ti III, and so on. Mathematicians labored to invent new numerical systems, complicated equations, and unimaginable geometrical figures, knowing only too well their labors were sterile, of no use to anyone. Naturalists promised they would develop a tree whose crown was embedded in the ground and whose roots reached the sky, also a wheat grain as large as a fist.

At last the emperor wished for immortality. Physicians performed cruel experiments on men and animals to discover the secret of the eternal heart, the eternal liver, eternal lungs.

As it often happens with men of action, the emperor desired to change the face of the earth and sky so his name would be inscribed forever in the memory of future generations. He did not understand that the life of an ordinary peasant, shoemaker, or grocer was far more worthy of respect and admiration, while he himself was becoming a bloodless letter, a symbol among countless symbols of madness and violence monotonously repeating themselves.

After all the crimes, all the devastation he caused in human minds and souls, his own death was cruelly banal: he choked on a single grape. To remove him from the surface of the earth, nature did not exert herself to produce a hurricane or deluge.

Probably you will ask: Why do I tell you all this, and what is the connection between the story of the foreign ruler and your drop of water? I will most likely answer you not very clearly or coherently, hoping you will understand the words of a man who is full of forebodings and anxiety.

I am afraid that you and others like you are setting out on a dangerous journey that might bring humanity not only advantages but also great, irreparable harm. Haven’t you noticed that the more the means and tools of observation are perfected, the more distant and elusive become the goals? With each new discovery a new abyss opens. We are more and more lonely in the mysterious void of the universe.

I know that you want to lead men out of the labyrinths of superstition and chance, that you want to give them certain, clear knowledge, which according to you is the only defense against fear and anxiety. But will it really bring us relief if we substitute the word necessity for the word Providence?

Most likely you will reproach me that our art does not solve any of the enigmas of nature. Our task is not to solve enigmas, but to be aware of them, to bow our heads before them and also to prepare the eyes for never-ending delight and wonder. If you absolutely require discoveries, however, I will tell you that I am proud to have succeeded in combining a certain particularly intensive cobalt with a luminous, lemonlike yellow, as well as recording the reflection of southern light that strikes through thick glass onto a gray wall.

The tools we use are indeed primitive: a stick with a bunch of bristles attached to the end, a rectangular board, pigments and oils. These have not changed for centuries, like the human body and nature. If I understand my task, it is to reconcile man with surrounding reality. This is why I and my guild brothers repeat an infinite number of times the sky and clouds, the portraits of men and cities, all these odds and ends of the cosmos, because only there do we feel safe and happy.

Our paths part. I know I will not convince you, and that you will not abandon polishing lenses or erecting your Tower of Babel. But allow us as well to continue our archaic procedure, to tell the world words of reconciliation and to speak of joy from recovered harmony, of the eternal desire for reciprocated love.

The Collected Prose 1948–1998

Zbigniew Herbert (from pocryphas)

The bitter smell of tulips

 …galant tulip will hang down his head like to a virgin newly ravished1…

—ROBERT HERRICK

1

HERE IS A STORY of human folly.

It is not about fire consuming a great city on a river, nor the slaughter of defenseless people. It is not about a vast plain bathed in morning light where armed riders meet other riders to find out which of the two commanders will earn at the end of the day, after a murderous battle, a modest place in history, a monument of bronze, or, with less luck, give his name to an alleyway in some suburb of poverty.

Our drama is modest and with little pathos, far from the famous hemorrhages of history. Because everything began innocently—with a plant, a flower, a tulip (this is hard to imagine) that unleashed collective, uncontrollable passions. Further, for those who have studied the phenomenon the most amazing thing was that this folly shook a sober, hardworking, and parsimonious nation. The question arises: How did it happen that in enlightened Holland and not somewhere else, tulpenwoede—tulipomania—reached such frightening dimensions, shook the foundations of a solid national economy, and drew representatives of all social levels into a gigantic frenzy of gambling?

Some explain it with the proverbial love of the Netherlanders for flowers. An old anecdote recounts that a lady requested an artist to paint a bouquet of rare flowers for her because she could not afford to buy them. This is how a new and so far unknown branch of painting came into being. Let us stress that for this lady, inspirer of a new genre in art, aesthetic motives played a totally secondary role. What she wanted most was a real object: a crown of petals on a green stem. The artist’s work was a mere substitute, a shadow of existing things. Similarly, lovers doomed to separation must be content with the likeness of a beloved face. In the beginning the painting expresses nostalgia for a faraway and unreachable lost reality.

There are other reasons, more prosaic and down-to-earth, that sufficiently explain the peculiar Dutch predilection for flowers. Deprived of luxuriant, exuberant vegetation and disciplined by a rational economy, the country amazed many travelers because they found no humming wheat-fields there. Wheat was imported from abroad. There was little land, its quality often poor, while the price was always exorbitant. Most arable land was devoted to pastures, orchards, and gardens. The nature of the country required an intensive economy of land that was spatially restricted.

Nature also challenges man aesthetically, so it is not difficult to understand that a certain monotony of the Dutch landscape gave rise to dreams of multifarious, colorful, and unusual flora. Possibly the nostalgia for a lost paradise lurked behind it, which medieval painters represented in the form of a rosarium, an orchard, or a flower bed. Eternal greenness speaks to the imagination better than eternal light.

In comparison with the pompous splendor of the gardens of French or English lords, the equivalents in Holland were of course modest. Most often they occupied the space of barely several score square feet. But what a wealth of plants, what conscious composition of colors. A lawn with islands of moss and patches of multicolored flowers, lilac bushes and an apple tree, a pattern imposed on all of it and a network of lilliputian paths strewn with white sand.

Everyone, even a simple artisan, wished to own a flower bed at the back of his house and cultivate roses, irises, lilies, and hyacinths that are more beautiful, more unusual than those in his neighbor’s garden. This adoration of nature, like an echo of the most remote vegetative cults, had all the attributes of enlightened love. Eminent connoisseurs of the world of plants lectured in Leyden and other universities—for instance the Frenchman Lecluse2, called Clusius (more about him later on), who founded the first botanical garden in 1587. Scholars set out with colonists on distant, dangerous expeditions to learn the secrets of exotic nature. The public at large avidly read books devoted to the classification, anatomy, and cultivation of plants. The summa of this rich literature is a fat, three-volume work by Jan van der Meurs3 with the telling title Arboretum Sacrum.

In the Mauritshuis in The Hague there is a canvas, “Bouquet against a Vaulted Window,” by an excellent painter of flowers, Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder4. This painting always fills me with a kind of anxiety, although I realize its cause is not the subject chosen by the painter. For what is more soothing, more idyllic than an arrangement of roses, dahlias, irises, and orchids presented with sophisticated simplicity against a background of sky and a distant mountainous landscape fading into the blue?

Yet the treatment of the subject is striking and somewhat eerie. The flowers in this painting—quiet servants of nature, and helpless givers of delight—flaunt themselves; they are exclusive sovereigns who domineer with an intensity and force never encountered until then. It seems that an important and decisive act of liberation has occurred here. The “quiet servants of nature” abandon their role of ornament: they do not try to be graceful; they don’t languish, but attack the spectator with their proud, one wants to say their self-conscious, individuality. They seem overnatural, insistently present. All of this happens not because they are an expression of violent, internal states of the artist (like Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”), but quite the opposite. The shape, color, and character of the flowers have been reproduced scrupulously, in detail, with the cold impartiality of a botanist and anatomist. The light of the painting, clear and “objective,” means that the artist has abandoned all the charms of chiaroscuro and the painterly hierarchy that plunges some objects in shadow and accentuates others by lighting. The “Bouquet against a Vaulted Window” can be compared to Frans Hals’s collective portraits in which there is no division into persons who are more important or less.

Bosschaert’s painting was made around 1620, shortly before the artist’s death. The events we are about to relate took place several years later. But already in this painting it is possible to notice omens of an approaching storm. For aren’t these emancipated, dominating, rapacious flowers, loudly demanding admiration and praise, a symptom of a peculiar cult? The composition of the painting indicates this. The bouquet is placed on a high window as if on an altar, elevated above the rest of nature. A pagan monstrance of flowers.

In Bosschaert’s painting—auguring nothing good—are a few tulips.

2

It is not at all unlikely that illnesses have their history, and every epoch has its own definite sickness which did not occur in such guise before, and will never again return in the same form.

—TROELS-LUND5THE TULIP IS A gift from the East, like so many other blessed and ominous gifts: religions and superstitions, medicinal and intoxicating herbs, holy books and invasions, epidemics and fruit. Its name comes from Persian and designates a turban. For centuries it was a favorite and honored flower in the gardens of Armenia, Turkey, and Persia. At the sultan’s courts a tulip holiday was celebrated every year. The poets Omar Khayyam and Hafiz sang its praises, it is mentioned in the tales of The Thousand and One Nights; before it traveled to Europe it had a long Oriental career of many years behind it.

Its appearance in the West was the contribution of a diplomat. He was Augier Ghislain de Busbecq6, envoy of the Austrian Hapsburgs at the court of Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople. An educated man and curious about the world (his interesting travel descriptions have been preserved), he dutifully wrote comprehensive diplomatic reports. But it seems he had far greater enthusiasm for collecting Greek manuscripts, ancient inscriptions, and naturalia. In 1554 he sent a transport of tulip bulbs to the Viennese court of the Emperor Francis I. Such was the innocent beginning of the evil.

From this time on the flower’s popularity spread in Europe with surprising speed. Konrad Gesner7, called the German Pliny, gave the first scientific description of the plant in his work De Hortis Germaniae (1561). In the same year guests of the banker family Fugger admired patches of this still rare flower at their gardens in Augsburg. A little later it appears in France, the Netherlands, and England, where John Tradescant8, gardener of Charles I, boasted of cultivating fifty varieties of tulip. For a short period gastronomers tried to make a delicacy out of it for elegant tables: in Germany it was eaten with sugar. In England, on the other hand, it was spiced with oil and vinegar. The infamous conspiracy of pharmacists to make a medicine against flatulence from this plant also luckily came to nothing. The tulip remained itself, the poetry of Nature to which vulgar utilitarianism is foreign.

Thus in the beginning it was a flower of monarchs, of the well-born, the wealthy—very precious, carefully kept in gardens, and inaccessible. Contemporaries invented a soul for it; they said it expressed elegance and refined meditation. Even its infirmity—its lack of smell—was interpreted as the virtue of moderation. One could indeed say that cold beauty has an introverted character. The tulip allows us to admire it but does not awaken violent emotions, desire, jealousy, or erotic fervors. It is a peacock among flowers; at any rate, this is what the courtly “philosophers of gardens” wrote. History proved that they erred.

It is well known that court fashions are contagious; also they are often imitated by the lower classes, and for this they meet a well-deserved divine punishment. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, chroniclers in France observed the first symptoms—let us put it this way—of acute tulip fever. In 1608 a miller parted with his mill for a single bulb of a rarely encountered variety called “Mère brune.” A young groom was supposedly enchanted when his father-in-law gave him a single precious plant as his entire dowry, appropriately called for the occasion “Mariage de ma fille.” Another enthusiast did not hesitate to exchange his flourishing brewery for a bulb, which since that time carries the not very elegant name “Tulipe brasserie.”

One could multiply examples without difficulty to prove that wherever the tulip appeared cases of tulipomania were registered, sometimes more, sometimes less. But only in Holland did it reach the intensity and dimensions of an epidemic.

Its beginnings are unclear and difficult to establish precisely, both in terms of time and of space. With the plague the matter is much simpler: One day a ship from the East puts in at a harbor. Part of the crew has a high fever; some are delirious, and tumors can be seen on their bodies. They go ashore and are put in hospitals, houses, and inns; the first deaths occur, and the number of fatal illnesses rapidly grows. The entire city, the entire region, the entire country is swept by plague. Princes and beggars, saints and freethinkers, criminals and innocent children all die. Since the time of Thucydides this pandemonium of death has been described many times and in detail.

On the other hand, tulipomania is a mental phenomenon, and here the troubles begin. In other words, it is a social psychosis like other psychoses, whether associated with religion, war, revolution, or the economy—for instance, gold fever or the crash of the American stock market in 1929. Despite numerous, striking analogies, it cannot of course be explained in terms of infectious diseases (but what a pity!). We lack instruments that would allow us to measure quantitatively the range of the epidemic, its degree of “infectiousness,” the number with an acute or mild sickness, “the temperature curve” of affected individuals. The only method left is to enter into the spirit of the events, a cautious description that notes both the extreme and characteristic cases.

It is not possible to define exactly when the tulip appeared for the first time in the Netherlands. Most likely it was quite early. We know, for example, that in 1562 a shipment of tulip bulbs was received in the port of Antwerp. But the intensive interest in the flower occurred many years later, most likely reflecting the fashion reigning at the royal courts, especially the French. At the end of the sixteenth century something happened that on the surface seems an unimportant case from police chronicles but in fact was one of the first symptoms of tulipomania on Dutch soil. We have already mentioned Carolus Clusius, professor of botany at the famous university in Leyden (he previously held the rank of Director of the Imperial Gardens in Vienna). This scholar was widely known, at the same time talkative and possibly somewhat vain. At every occasion he talked about the plants he was cultivating, not only to university colleagues but also to chance listeners. Usually he spoke with enthusiasm and unconcealed pride about the tulips, which, he claimed, he would not exchange for any of the world’s treasures. It was an open provocation, which the scholar probably did not realize. One night—let us say moonless—unknown persons forced their way into the university gardens and stole Clusius’s tulips. The thieves must have had considerable scientific qualifications, because their loot was exclusively the precious and truly rare tulip varieties. The embittered botanist stopped studying this plant till the end of his life.

The story recalls the ballad about the sorcerer’s apprentice. A sudden transmutation occurs: the object of patient, scholarly, and therefore disinterested studies is transformed into an object of insane financial transactions. An important question comes to mind here: Why precisely was it the tulip, and not another flower, that liberated the madness?

There were several reasons. We already noted that the tulip was an aristocratic, almost worshipped flower. What a pleasure to possess something that was the pride of monarchs! Aside from snobbish considerations, there were also reasons that might be called purely biological, for the cultivation of a tulip did not involve any large problems or troubles. It was a grateful flower, easy to tame. Everyone who owned even the smallest patch of earth could give himself up to the passion.

In Dutch gardens a certain kind of virus was rife that often caused the petals of the tulip’s crown to take on fantastic shapes with ruffled or pleated edges. It was quickly learned how to draw a profit from this pathology.

Finally, and this is particularly important for our thoughts on the scientific basis of tulipomania, no other flower possessed such a quantity of varieties. People were convinced that this plant had a peculiar property: sooner or later it would produce spontaneously—that is, without man’s participation—new mutations, and new multicolored forms. It was said nature particularly cherished this flower, and endlessly played with it. To speak in a less ornate way, it meant that the buyer of a tulip bulb was in a situation like a man playing a lottery: blind chance could bestow a large fortune on him.

In the first half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch took pride in three things: a powerful and invincible navy, “the sweets of freedom greater than anywhere else,” and—if one may combine important and unimportant matters in a single sentence—at least several hundred varieties of tulips. It seems the dictionary could not keep pace with this wealth of nature. We have simultaneously five kinds of “Miracle,” four “Emeralds,” as many as thirty “Paragons of Perfection” (a semantic abuse of the word). Those endowed with fantasy invented names full of poetry—“Royal Agate,” “Diana,” and “Harlequin”—while those deprived of imagination called their specimens simply “Gaudy,” “Virgin,” or “Yellow-Red.” To cope with the growing task, military ranks were introduced and even history was harnessed, so we have “Admiral van Enckhuysen,” “General van Eyck,” and many others. A certain clever cultivator boldly decided to bid higher, calling his variety “General of Generals.” There is, of course, “King,” “Vice-King,” and “Prince,” as if someone wanted to introduce military and aristocratic order into this multifariousness bordering on chaos.

The huge quantity of tulip varieties that Holland managed to cultivate stirs our admiration and bewilderment, but it contained the seeds of catastrophe as well. If a game uses a small number of cards as a rule it is simple, banal, and quickly ends. However, when the players dispose of let’s say several decks of cards, the field is open to complex combinations, intelligent strategy, a balanced risk, and shrewd methods. The same happened with tulips; one had only to agree which varieties would have the value of an “ace” and which would be counted among “minnows.”

Of course this is a greatly simplified scheme, a first, timid approach to the subject. Ludic elements undoubtedly played a role. But in fact tulipomania was a very complex phenomenon. It seems the most decisive and important aspect of the problem was economic; in other words, the order of the stock market was introduced into the order of nature. The tulip began to lose the properties and charms of a flower: it grew pale, lost its colors and shapes, became an abstraction, a name, a symbol interchangeable with a certain amount of money. Complicated tables existed on which individual varieties were arranged according to the changing market prices like valuable papers or money rates. The hour of the great speculation had struck.

During the entire period of tulipomania, which lasted several years, “Semper Augustus” invariably remained at the top of these price lists, like a sun standing motionless at the zenith. I never personally encountered it. It is vain to look for it in flower shops, which like all our other shops sell standard roses, standard eggs, standard cars. My fault. If I visited botanical gardens as assiduously as museums, the meeting might have occurred. I know this tulip, however, from old, colorful engravings; it is indeed beautiful, thanks to its sophisticated and at the same time simple harmony of colors: petals impeccably white, and with small, fiery, ruby veins running along them, the bottom of the chalice blue like the reflection of a sunny sky. It is an exceptionally nice specimen, but the price reached by “Semper Augustus,” 5,000 florins (the equivalent of a house with a large garden), causes a shiver of anxiety. The dikes of common sense had broken. From now on we will move on the slippery terrain of unhealthy fantasy, feverish desire for profit, insane illusions, and bitter disappointments.

Transactions were often made in kind. These allow us to measure the dimensions of the madness even better. For a bulb of the tulip “Vice-King” (it was worth half the value of “Semper Augustus”), the following was paid in the form of farm products:

2 carts of wheat

4 carts of rye

4 fat oxen

8 fat pigs

12 fat sheep

2 barrels of wine

4 barrels of the foremost beer

1,000 pounds of cheese

A bed, clothes, and a silver chalice were added to this drink, food, and fatness.

In the initial phase of tulipomania, prices went constantly up. As stockbrokers would say, the trend on the “flower stock market” was at first “friendly,” then “lively,” all the way to “very lively,” to pass in the end to a state of euphoria completely uncontrolled by common sense.

A greater and greater gap opened between the real value of the plants sold and the price paid for them. It was paid willingly, with joy, as if expecting the smile of fate. Most of those touched by tulipomania counted on a boom; they were convinced the rising trend would continue forever (don’t they resemble the progressives?), and that a bulb bought today would double its value tomorrow or at the latest the day after tomorrow. If one treats these fantastic speculations seriously and without irony (because “seniority” in history does not entitle one to it), we can see something more profound—for instance, the old myth of humanity about miraculous multiplication.

In earthly categories the matter looked as follows: the sellers took no account at all of the actual possibilities of the buyers, and what is worse the buyers seemed to have entirely lost the instinct of self-preservation. They were no longer aware of their own possibilities. The hectic atmosphere that accompanies large stock operations is universally known, but in the case of tulipomania it was something more serious and more pathological than an “atmosphere.”

The psychological deviations defined as manias possess certain common features. The persons affected by the disease have a tendency to create imaginary, autonomous worlds governed by their own rules. In our case it was like a gigantic flower lottery, and all those who played expected the first prize. The game, however, did not take place on an island especially leased for the purpose, but in a country where the cardinal virtues were caution, moderation, and accountability. A system based on bourgeois calculation could not coexist with a system of financial phantasmagoria. The collison of the world of desires with everyday reality was inevitable, and as is usual in such cases, painful.

It is worthwhile now to ponder in what way, in what places, and in what social framework the speculation in tulip bulbs took place. The answer closest to the truth would be: on the margin of normal economic life, in its dark corners, so to say. Several times we have mentioned the stock market, but this should not be taken literally. There never was and there could not be an official tulip stock market, because this institution assumes openness, admits a limited number of those authorized to take part, and the results of transactions are announced to all who are interested.

On the other hand, we know the wild commerce in tulips caused the authorities to be seriously worried and alarmed. Orders were given to limit and curb, if not eliminate, this dangerous social phenomenon. But these did not help much; strictly speaking their effect was the opposite of what was intended. The elements cannot be calmed by gentle persuasion.

The country lived in fever. Whoever remembers war knows very well that the most fantastic, unverified information is capable of pulling people from the bottom of despair and transporting them to towering heights of optimism, of illusory hopes. A similar thing happened in our case. News of sudden fortunes achieved because of the tulips spread with the speed of lightning. A citizen of Amsterdam who owned a small garden earned 60,000 florins in four months, a wealth not dreamed of by an average merchant even at the end of a laborious life. An Englishman who knew nothing about flowers managed to make five thousand pounds by ingenious speculations. One had to have a stoic character indeed to resist these temptations.

Because the whole procedure was unofficial and even had the character of a forbidden game, it became more attractive for precisely this reason, drawing ever new participants. It was like a period of prohibition when those with only a moderate liking for intoxicants manifest their freedom by excessive consumption of alcohol.

There are of course no statistics that show how many people were touched by tulipomania. But it is possible, even probable, that they numbered in the tens of thousands. What is particularly important, they cannot be assigned to any single, specific social group. Among them were the wealthy and the poor, merchants and weavers, butchers and students, painters and peasants, peat diggers and poets, city clerks and junk dealers, sailors and virtuous widows, persons generally respected and criminals. Even the followers of all twenty or more religious denominations took unanimous part in this race for fortune.

The poor risked most of all—the poor risked everything. When we read that a criminal drawn into the whirlpool of speculations pawned his tools, we realize the full horror of the situation. Preachers thundered from their pulpits against wicked tulipomania, but the malicious maintained that they slipped away to other cities where they could succumb to the sinful craze without unwanted witnesses.

But never mind the pastors. They will always find some excuse at the Last Judgment. What is worse, or frankly disgraceful, is that children were drawn into the action. Success in the game required among other things collecting the greatest possible amount of information—prices, places of transaction, fluctuations of the market. In simple language, to know which tulip bulbs the neighbor hid under his jacket and for how much he sold them in the tavern At the Braying Donkey, all of it had to be found out by a teenager performing the vile function of spy.

Fever, raving, and sleeplessness. Sleeplessness, because many tulip transactions were sealed at night. Active participation in speculating often swallowed up many hours of the day, and could not be combined with other more productive occupations. Those who cultivated tulips lived like misers in a sack of gold. Ingenious systems of alarm bells were installed in gardens to rouse the owner to his feet if an uninvited guest approached his patch.

The epidemic character of tulipomania explains its enormous geographic range. It touched not only the traditional garden districts—for instance the regions of Haarlem, but also Amsterdam, Alkmaar, Hoorn, Enkhuizen, Utrecht, Rotterdam—that is, all the greater conglomerations in Holland. It is precisely there that the number of victims was the highest. The bacillus of tulipomania was everywhere in the air, and threatened everyone. How much easier it is to dispose of a visible enemy: the gates of the city are closed, the brave defenders go out onto the walls…

But after all, something exists that we call the power of reason, and it is an effective weapon (not always) against unbridled irrational powers. We know that Holland was a country of people who liked to read, with wise authors, educated book-sellers, and enlightened publishers. Actual problems would meet a response in print very quickly; this was true not only of serious political and religious disputes. The affair of tulipomania, whose dimensions awoke understandable anxiety, also met with decisive resistance and protests from sober citizens. But the country was liberal; public opinion differentiated. Together with voices of reason, pamphlets appeared that were practical introductions to the principles of tulip speculation, prolegomena to insanity: teach-yourself manuals on how to become a madman.

In all of it there was a method, and even a ritual. One author recommended that if someone succeeded in cultivating an unknown variety of tulip he should act as follows: immediately go to a professional gardener (time presses, because someone else might have managed a similar trick), not alone but accompanied by acquaintances, friends, even persons encountered by chance. The goal was evident: to give the greatest possible publicity to the event. A council took place at the gardener’s, each person present expressing his opinion about the botanical revelation—exactly like high church councils preoccupied with the problems of real and imaginary miracles.

Now a very important step followed. We could call it comparative: the consideration of the new variety side by side with others that were already known. If it showed similarity to some famous “Admiral” but was less beautiful, it should be modestly called “General.” This ritual of baptism was incredibly important. The tulip became a personality, or to speak less grandiloquently and use stock-market terminology, a value admitted into circulation. In the end it was proper to offer a fine wine to all those present, because it was up to them to spread the news about the birth of a new variety, to praise its graces.

Transactions with tulip bulbs would take place in the fumes of beer, gin, and lamb, in restaurants, inns, and taverns. Some of them had rooms specially designated for this purpose; they were a kind of club, or branches of a huge and well-concealed stock market. The fight for each precious variety of tulip must have been fierce. If several buyers competed for it, the one who wanted to outbid others would add to an already excessive price a carriage with a pair of horses.

The entire country was covered by a network of more or less known, secret, or almost open gambling “dens” for tulips. It did not involve any demonic power but the simple rule of every “big game,” every powerful addiction—to draw in and entrap the greatest possible number of people. Because madness cannot be logically justified, it is necessary to have strong statistics in one’s defense. This is what everybody does, or almost everybody, including politicians: to eliminate or substantially decrease the number of those who stand aside, who look on or observe critically and spoil the game. The world of tulipomaniacs strove to become a total world.

How did it happen in practice? A document exists, literary to be sure but trustworthy, which provides precious information about the means of capturing new enthusiasts. A dialogue takes place between two friends. The first, Pieter, is an expert speculator; the second, Jan, plays the role of a novice in this conversation:

PIETER: I like you very much. This is why I want to propose to you this advantageous transaction. I do it without any self-interest, and out of pure friendship.

JAN: I am listening carefully, my dear friend.

PIETER: I have a bulb of the tulip “Harlequin.” It is a very beautiful variety, and in addition much sought after on the market.

JAN: But I never had anything to do with flowers in my whole life. I don’t even have a garden.

PIETER: You don’t understand a thing. Please listen to me; don’t interrupt because who knows, maybe today a great fortune is knocking at your door. Can I go on?

JAN: Yes, yes, of course.

PIETER: Well, the “Harlequin” bulb is worth a hundred florins, and maybe even more. In the name of our unblemished (as I said) friendship, I will let you have it for fifty florins. Still today, without any effort, you can make quite a lot of money.

JAN: This is indeed a splendid proposition. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. Only tell me, please, what am I to do with this “Harlequin”? After all, I will not stand at the street corner…

PIETER: I will tell you the whole secret. But note it down well in your memory. Why are you fidgeting?

JAN: I am listening, only I am a bit dizzy.

PIETER: Do exactly as I say. Go to the inn At the Lion. Ask the innkeeper where the tulip vendors meet. You will enter the room he indicates. Then someone will say in a very thick voice (but don’t you be put off by it): “A stranger has come in.” In answer to that, cluck like a chicken. From that moment on you will be included in the community of vendors.

May God protect Jan’s Calvinist soul! We part with him on the threshold of farce and a step away from tragedy. Darkness covers his future fate. It is not even known whether he managed to cluck in an appropriate and persuasive manner at the decisive moment. On the basis of this tale there is little hope he would become a shark of the tulip stock market. It seems he was assigned the role of victim.

One more detail merits our attention. This introduction to the trade of the tulipomaniacs reminds us of patterns known from other areas. Keeping all proportions in mind, it recalls the ritual of initiation. Of course the Masonic lodges arranged it with greater pomp and better knowledge of esoteric science.

Mania is an elevated state of mind. Those who have not experienced it at least once are the poorer for it. Besides, in certain conditions it brings advantages. An ordinary man who was unknown to anyone—he was neither a poet nor painter nor statesman—recalled with genuine sentiment the times of the tulipomania. His name was Waermondt9; he held office always in the same tavern, and his function was that of broker. Between one transaction and another, “I ate fried meat and fish, chicken and hare, even delicate pâtés. I also drank wine and beer from early morning till three or four at night. I always carried more money away at night than I had at the beginning of the day.” A true Shlarafia10, land of laziness and plenty.

3

“La maladie infectueuse tend à la fois à se perpétuer et, pour assurer cette perpétuité, à se modifier suivant les circonstances11.”

—CHARLES NICOLLE

THE GREATEST INTENSITY OF tulipomania fell during the years 1634 to 1637. The great crash took place in the winter of 1637—the whole imaginary world fell apart. If someone managed to reproduce “the curve of the tulip fever,” it would closely resemble the temperature chart of a patient with a serious infectious disease. The line rises fast, continues for some time on a very high level, and at the end falls rapidly.

A question comes to mind, however: What fate, or implacable logic of events, caused it to happen exactly in the winter of 1637? There are many answers.

Some believe that the victory over the tulip epidemic was the merit of the healthy portion of Dutch society. It created a sanitary belt that blocked the spread of the illness. There were those who actively opposed tulipomania; the opposition must have been quite strong since a number of brochures, magazines, pamphlets, satires, and cartoons from those times—they have been preserved until today—pitilessly make fun of the unfortunate maniacs. In colloquial language they were called “the hooded ones” or madmen; in those times the mentally ill wore hoods drawn over their faces, a peculiar device for “visual” protection of the healthy part of the nation.

Henry Pot12, a painter of collective portraits, religious and genre pictures, represented the mania afflicting his country under a veil of transparent allegory in his work “The Cart of Madmen.” On this cart we recognize Flora holding in her hand three of the most precious varieties of tulip: “Semper Augustus,” “General Bol,” and “Admiral Hoorn.” Behind the patron of nature there are five symbolic figures: Good-for-Nothing, Wealth-Craver, the Drunkard, and two ladies, Vain Hope and Poverty. A huge crowd of people runs after the cart calling, “We too want to sell our tulips.”

A countless number of stories, anecdotes, and jokes show that tulipomania was answered with a decided tulipophobia, an unrelenting hostility to what was, after all, an innocent plant. In fact it deserved neither frantic adoration nor boundless spite, but we are speaking of times rocked by passions. It was said that a professor of Leyden University, Fortius13, not a theologian but a professor of botany, attacked a tulip whenever he saw one, destroying it with his cane. In this unrefined manner he transformed himself from scholar into inquisitor and moralist.

Fortius’s cane did not possess magic power, and even the most vicious pamphlets could not tame the insanity. Some maintain that the mortal blow to tulipomania was dealt by the authorities, with their wise orders and decrees. They realized the situation was serious and could not be looked at passively, because limitless speculation threatens the foundations of a national economy.

A number of institutions, from the florists’ guild all the way up to the Estates General, or parliament, decided to oppose the folly. Instructions and resolutions poured from them, at first hesitant and inefficient but continuing all the way to the drastic decree of the Estates in April 1637, that annulled all speculative agreements and established a maximum value for a tulip bulb. It was 50 florins. “Semper Augustus” was now worth one-hundredth of its recent market price. This happened quickly and unexpectedly, like a palace revolution, like the dethronement of an emperor.

The authorities’ efforts to overcome tulipomania, their concern about the fate and wealth of the citizens, are worthy of praise and of course should be fully appreciated. It seems, however, that the majority of scholars are mistaken when they ascribe to them a decisive role. We know from experience that all bans and prohibitions in cases of acute narcomania bring results that are the opposite of those intended. Ever since Paradise, the fruit that is forbidden is the most desired.

The decision of the Estates General was made late, very late, when the mania was already dying out. It was, therefore, a council gathered at the bed of a patient who was hopelessly ill, or to use an expression taken from the lexicon of tauromachy a coup de grâce. Indeed, nothing could be saved any longer.

In our opinion, tulipomania was killed by its own madness. Proofs supporting the thesis are provided by an analysis of the changing moods of the tulip market. In the period of euphoria the profits of the speculators were huge; however, they were not always expressed in negotiable currency or liquid money, but in credit. The owner of the variety “Semper Augustus” was universally considered to be a wealthy man; consequently he could borrow large amounts, and this is what he did most of the time. The crazy turnover of the market became more and more abstract. What was sold was no longer the bulbs (their value was absolutely arbitrary, further and further removed from reality and common sense), but the names of bulbs. Like shares, they often changed owners ten times a day.

Prices rose. It was expected that they would grow endlessly, because such is the logic of mania. A large number of the wary accumulated “values” in order to throw them on the market at the most propitious moment. It was precisely these cautious ones—as usually happens with greedy people entangled in the nets of gambling—who suffered the most painful defeat. Faith in the bright future of tulipomania broke down already in 1636. The edifice of trust and rampant illusions caved in. The supply of tulips was larger and larger, the demand frightfully diminishing; at the end everyone wanted to sell, but there were no bold risk takers any longer. Henry Pot represented this phase of tulipomania accurately: the desperate cry of the crowd running after Flora’s vehicle becomes quite clear in this context.

Thus the crisis had far outpaced the intervention of the authorities. On the third of January 1637, four months before the decree of the Estates General, an Amsterdam gardener bought a precious tulip bulb for a bargain price of 1,250 florins. At first happy, he soon found that he could not sell it for even half or even one-tenth of his own cost. For a sharp drop had now begun, and the game was not to make money but lose as little as possible. The entire story of this unfortunate affair extends between two poles—a long, desperate assault upon fortune, and a sudden wild panic.

We are parting thus with tulipomania, and it is a separation full of tears, curses, and moans. The statement that it could not have happened otherwise is small consolation for the victims.

What was the outcome? Because everything took place secretly, on the margins—in dark corridors and in the underground of official life—it is difficult to evaluate the dimensions of the catastrophe in measurable terms. But the outcome was without any doubt tragic: thousands of ruined estates, tens of thousands of people without work and, in addition, threatened by trials. Bankruptcy was punished, as a rule, with severe prison sentences. There were legions who had lightheartedly gone into debt. Finally—no statistics account for it—a long list of innocent families deprived of means of existence, children doomed to poverty or public charity, broken careers, destroyed reputations and dignity. The bankrupts did not have many ways out: joining the merchant marine and navy, which required certain qualifications, or begging, which did not require any special talents.

It does not need to be argued that it was an “exclusively” bourgeois tragedy. But the scale of the passions of the flower speculators equaled the scale of a heroic tenor in an opera. The aria of the stockbrokers was loud and trivial, that is evident. If we are to drag this theatrical analogy out by the hair even further, it was played without sword or blood, even without poison. Why on earth, then, does it move the imagination?

Throughout all the periods of tulipomania, not only during its fatal epilogue but during the days of its victorious euphoria, small and great human dramas were occurring. Among the many that memory has preserved we select one, a theme that might be taken straight from Chekhov’s stories.

The union of florists in Haarlem became alarmed by sensational news that gripped everyone with feverish excitement: a poor, unknown shoemaker from The Hague was growing an unusual variety of tulip called “Black Tulip.” It was decided to act immediately—that is, to check the matter on the spot and as far as possible to obtain the specimen. Five gentlemen dressed in black entered the dark cubbyhole of the shoemaker. They began commercial negotiations—very strange negotiations, because the gentlemen from Haarlem were playing the role of benefactors. Supposedly they had come there out of pure philanthropy to help the poor artisan, but at the same time they were unable to conceal how much they cared to possess the “Black Tulip.” The master of last and leather took in the situation, and tried to get the highest price. After much haggling a transaction finally took place: 1,500 florins, not a trifling sum. A moment of happiness for the poor shoemaker.

Now something unexpected happened, something that in drama is called a turning point. The merchants threw down the bulb bought at such a high price and in fury trampled it to a pulp. “You idiot”—they shouted at the stupefied shoepatcher—“we also have a bulb of the ‘Black Tulip.’ Besides us, no one else in the world! No king, no emperor or sultan. If you had asked ten thousand florins for your bulb and a couple of horses on top of it, we would have paid without a word. And remember this. Good fortune won’t smile on you a second time in your entire life, because you are a blockhead.” They left. The shoemaker staggered, dragged himself to his attic, lay down on his bed and, covering himself with his coat, breathed his last breath.

TULIPOMANIA—THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY botanical folly we know—was an episode inscribed on the margin of Great History. We have chosen it not without reason. It should be honestly confessed: we have a strange liking for presenting follies in the sanctuaries of reason, and we also like to study catastrophes against a gentle landscape. There are reasons more important than frivolous personal or aesthetic inclinations, however. For doesn’t the affair we have described remind us of other, more dangerous follies of humanity that consist in the irrational attachment to a single idea, a single symbol, or a single formula for happiness?

This is why we cannot put a large period after the date 1637 and consider the matter definitively closed. It is not reasonable to erase it from memory, or count it among the inconceivable fads of the past. If tulipomania was a kind of psychological epidemic, and this is what we believe, the probability exists—bordering on certainty—that one day it will afflict us again in this or another form.

In some Far Eastern port it is getting ready for the journey.

Zbigniew Herbert

The Collected Prose 1948–1998

I gave my word

 I was very young
and common sense told me
not to give my word
I could easily say
I’ll give it some thought
what’s the big hurry
it’s not a train schedule
I’ll give my word
after graduation
after military service
after I make a home

but time exploded
there was no before
there was no after
in the blinding present
you had to choose
so I gave my word
a word—

a noose round my neck
an ultimate word
in the rare moments
when everything is light
and becomes transparent

I think to myself:
“my word
how I’d like
to take my word back”
it doesn’t last for long
the world’s axis screeches
people pass away
as do landscapes
colored rings of time
but the word I gave
is stuck in my throat


Zbigniew Herbert
Translation: Alissa Valles 

They enroll in courses in falling to their knees

Mr Cogito on uprights attitudes
1
In Utica
the citizens
don’t want to put up a defense
in the city an epidemic broke out
of an instinct of self-preservation
the temple of freedom
has been turned into a flea market
the senate deliberates on how
not to be a senate
the citizens
don’t want to put up a defense
they enroll in accelerated courses
in falling to their knees
passively they wait for the enemy
write servile speeches
bury their gold
they sew new flags
innocent and white
teach children to lie
they’ve opened the gates
through which a column
of sand is now passing
apart from that as usual
commerce and copulation

2
Mr Cogito
would like to rise
to the occasion
that is
look fate
straight in the eye
like Cato the Younger
see Plutarch’s Lives
he does not have a sword
however
or an opportunity
to send his family overseas
so he waits with the others
pacing an insomniac room
despite the Stoics’ advice
he’d like to have a body
of diamond and wings
he watches from the window
as the sun of the Republic
sinks toward the West
not much is left to him
really only
the choice of the attitude
in which he wishes to die
the choice of a gesture
the choice of a last word
so he does not go to bed
to avoid
being throttled in his sleep
he would like to rise
to the occasion fully
fate looks him in the eye
in a place where he once
had a head

Zbigniew Herbert
Translation: Alissa Valles