KRYTYKA LITERACKA autumn-winter 2019, English edition

ISSN 2084-1124 Nr 3-4•2019

KRYTYKA LITERACKA LITERATURE • ART • PHILOSOPHY

ENGLISH ISSUE Thomas D'Adamo • Otis Kidwell Burger • David Day • Isabella Degen William Heyen • Jeffrey Paul Hoffman • Anna K. J. Issaïeff • Dovid Katz Christian Medard Manteuffel • Erica Mapp • Ludwig von Mises Tomasz Marek Sobieraj • Robin Stout • Anne Weichberger

__________________________________________________________________________________ 20 William Heyen PIETY AND HOME IN WHITMAN AND MIŁOSZ

Krytyka Literacka ISSN 2084-1124 Nr 3-4 (23-24•84-85) 2019

23 Tomasz Marek Sobieraj POEMS

ENGLISH ISSUE № 3 EDITORS: T. M. Sobieraj, David Day ADDRESS: ul. Szkutnicza 1, 93-469 Łódź, Poland E-MAIL: tom.sobier@gmail.com

26 Anna K. J. Issaïeff PHENOMENOLOGY AND AESTHETICS 30 Jeffrey Paul Hoffman POEMS

* KRYTYKA LITERACKA is a non-profit quarterly of literature, the arts, philosophy and public affairs, published independently in Poland since 2009.

The magazine is concerned with both Polish issues and international perspective and open to different points of view.

34 Isabella Degen CHRISTIAN MEDARD MANTEUFFEL— A POET IN THE SHADOW OF POLISH LITERATURE 37 Christian Medard Manteuffel POEMS

*

39 Dovid Katz ANTISEMITISM IN THE SHTETL

Archival issues and library http://chomikuj.pl/KrytykaLiteracka Online reading room http://issuu.com/krytykaliteracka Internet http://www.krytykaliteracka.blogspot.com

46 Ludwig von Mises LAISSEZ FAIRE OR DICTATORSHIP

* * Front cover: Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Instruments of Human Sustenance (Cooking), engraving, 1569, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

CONTENTS 1 Robin Stout GUIDE TO THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK 7 David Day POEMS

F R O M

T H E

E D I T O R S

. . . the different forms of government make laws democratical, aristocratical, tyrannical, with a view to their several interests; and these laws, which are made by them for their own interests, are the justice which they deliver to their subjects, and him who transgresses them they punish as a breaker of the law, and unjust. And that is what I mean when I say that in all states there is the same principle of justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power, the only reasonable conclusion is, that everywhere there is one principle of justice, which is the interest of the stronger.”

—Thrasymachus, ca. 459 – 400 B. C.

10 Erica Mapp POEMS 12 Thomas D’Adamo BACACAY BY WITOLD GOMBROWICZ 14 Otis Kidwell Burger POEMS 16 Anne Weichberger POEMS 18 Thomas D’Adamo BARBARA

A loss of harmony with the surrounding space, the inability to feel at home in the world, so oppressive to an expatriate, a refugee, an immigrant, paradoxically integrates him in contemporary society and makes him, if he is an artist, understood by all. Even more, to express the existential situation of modern man, one must live in exile of some sort.

—Czesław Miłosz, On Exile

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Robin Stout GUIDE TO THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics which give us equations not for abstract figures triangles, spheres and the like, but equations for the human emotions.

—Ezra Pound

R

eaders of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock are implicated in its irony. For critics, the most exigent of readers, are, as a whole, as irresolute in the face of its untold nuances as is Prufrock in his sexual advances. It’s impossible, you see, to say exactly what it means. And, what’s more, the magic lantern, the one that threw the images in patterns on a screen, vanished and left the “air of meaning rather than meaning itself.” [1] How—is the major questions for critics and readers—to read Prufrock with consistency? One critical side sees it as a direct discourse involving Prufrock—the persona—and the reader as the reader is taken on a journey through half-deserted streets, perhaps up staircases to drawing rooms where women come and go, past the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirtsleeves and eventually out upon the beach. [2] Nothing about this point of view and reading is at all unacceptable, but another critical side reads it all differently. Instead of progressive changes of place, this side sees it cyclically, as an interior monologue involving the persona, who’s a stick in the mud at a social gathering. [3] He’s experiencing second thoughts—says this side—about being there at all and can’t say whether to leave the party outright or join in wholeheartedly. This side says, Prufrock has divided himself in two and is addressing himself when he says, “Let us go then, you and I . . .”

Other evidence, they say, shows Prufrock is quite irrational and not at all in touch with the world around him. His conceits (“evening spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table” and “smoke that curls once about the house and falls asleep”) and frequent use of hyperbole (“Do I dare/ Disturb the universe?”) give his credibility away.

Furthermore, Prufrock’s dream imagery at the outset and return to full (narcissistic) consciousness at the very end (“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea . . . Till human voices wake us and we drown”) solidify their contention that “Prufrock” is a cyclical interior monologue, and Prufrock’s guided tour is little more than a figment of his dream life: it’s all the result of Prufrock’s spinning his rhetorical wheels: [4] No! I am not Prince Hamlet (. . . ) Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress (. . .) (. . . ) Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

These two different readings—the linear and the cyclical—contradict one another, and yet they both seem to have a basis in the poem. Critics on either side haven’t clarified the antithesis. It’s as though one party, on ascending a staircase, ignores another party, descending.

A more receptive approach might be gained elsewhere; perhaps in this critical commentary: . . . no other modern verses (like Eliot’s) so invade the mind attracting to themselvesin the months following their ingestion reminiscence, desire, and speculation. Eliot deals in effects, not ideas. [5]

When a poet deals in effects, it’s the reader he affects. Let’s see some effects, and how the reader responds.

“Prufrock” opens with an invitation presumably to the reader (“Let us go then, you and I”).

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It’s an invitation in two senses. Obviously, the reader is invited to read along. What better way for a poem to begin? The reader is also asked to join Prufrock and spend time in his milieu.

Note, however, this invitation is predicated in the future (Let us go then . . . when the evening is spread out against the sky). Its occasion is ahead and waiting to occur.

From this there follows a very literal description of the tour through half-deserted streets and so forth. The reader believes that the tour hasn’t begun because Prufrock reiterates his gambit (let us go) before rounding it out in his own inimitable style (through certain half-deserted streets).

Now although it seems at this point like a description once removed from the eventual trip, the reader also feels dimly transported by the progression of the very words themselves through the streets, the muttering retreats, and so on, along the streets that follow like a tedious argument and lead you to an overwhelming question.

The reader may ask, “Are we on tour, going somewhere? Or are we confabulating and pacing in circles prior to heading off?

But, Prufrock preempts such questions when he states, “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’” So on faith alone from this point the reader follows and crosses a familiar bridge (Let us go) for the third time (and make a visit).

Suddenly, bridging previous doubt, the reader leaps to the room where women come and go . . . clip, clop. In this new setup, more than one change has taken place. There’s a change in the time sense. This place and scene is presented in the present tense, rather than being predicated in the future.

It’s also given in the omniscient, third-person perspective without the filter of the first-person persona.

Passing quickly, the scene in stanza three follows and forms a chain with scenes in stanzas one and two. The weather (“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes”), perhaps a very natural subject of conversation in a social setting, if that is where the remarks are made, is remarked upon. While this weather report is delivered in the third person, consistent with the previous scene, its point of view (window?) conveys a sense of being in two places at once (just as the first scene did but in an entirely different way) as if the report were give by someone both inside and not-yet-in the house.

The reader in a sense is teetering on the edge of these two places—sort of leaning out a window. Yet, something ubiquitous and overpowering is taking place (“The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panes /Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, /Lingered upon the pools . . . Let fall upon its back . . . Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap . . .”).

By the last line of this stanza (“The yellow smoke . . . curled once about the house and fell asleep”), the reader sees an order in the way the first three stanzas are related. In a linear sense they have followed like waves changing place in succession and carried the reader ever closer to their conclusion. (If the reader has felt at times as though he has been to where he was ultimately going and then left again (as if the whole tour were a cycle); perhaps the only thing to say at this point is that even the best of feelings is subjective, and there are only two alternatives: to stick it out or turn back now.).

HOWEVER, temporally speaking time has flowed backwards and retrogressed scene-by-scene from the future, the present to the past.

The reader who has accepted Prufrock’s invitation literally has entered a magic world, a dream world (where “indeed there will be time, there will be time to murder and create /And time for all the works and days of hands . . . Time for you and time for me”): A world where the reader may fathom singing mermaids riding seaward on shoreward travelling waves.

Now, in stanza four, time is the most talked about phenomenon because the reader has reached a sort of transcendence (real or imagined?), and “Prufrock” returns to the first person.

Prufrock recaps the first three stanzas in order to begin again, and the reader’s sense of cycles (real or imagined) is heightened. The future tense dominates this stanza so the first four scenes complete a time cycle. By the next scene in the drawing room, the reader also appears to complete a cycle of place, but it doesn’t matter because the reader still feels above it all.

The reader passes to stanza six to repeated mention of the future, and the illusion of a retrogressive time spiral is put aside. Instead, for the reader and Prufrock, time becomes as

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illimitable as outer space and loses all its proportionate sense (“There will be time, there will be time . . . Time for you and time for me, /And time yet for a hundred indecisions . . . Before the taking of toast and tea”). From this moment on, a kind of timeless rhetoric takes over (“For I have known . . . And I have known . . . Shall I say . . . Should I have . . . And would it have been . . . after all”).

The attentive reader who may from this point ask—“Is this making sense?”—is given to believe that it all does because Prufrock’s most irrefutable statements attend to the present, the reader’s skepticism and the reader’s sense of reality (“Is it perfume from a dress /That makes me so digress? . . . And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully . . . Stretched on the floor beside you and me . . . It is impossible to say just what I mean!”).

This show of attention is finally enough to overcome the open-minded reader’s doubts, and the reader is carried thus along by the force and flow of Prufrock’s speech, finally wanders from the tea party, drifts out upon the beach and there read—“We have lingered”—and feels uneasy with the summary tone of the concluding stanza.

Indeed, this uneasiness may be attributed to the reader’s possible second thoughts about spending so much time (without looking up!) delving into a poem at all.

Again, the last stanza reads: “We have lingered (paying such close attention to a fiction!) (sic!) in the chambers of the sea, /By sea girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown /Till . . .” and— here—time and cause-and-effect become unremitting factors again (when the reader was led to believe the opposite!). The stanza concludes: “. . . human voices wake us and we drown.”

The reader’s faith in Prufrock and singing mermaids riding seaward has led you too far out, until you find yourself expiring at sea’s bottom by sea girls (not mermaids) of seaweed. You have fallen into a trap, at first glance.

If you can’t believe what has happened to you because you’re a good reader, you turn back to the beginning, and not a little like Lazarus come from the dead, you re-read now more carefully, less credulously and determined not to fall in the same trap twice.

Beginning with the invitation again, the revived reader knows not to accept it without scrutiny. What else could it mean? Where are possible clues to its meaning? The reader now looks to the epigraph as a likely passageway to such clues. What is an epigraph for? There, the reader learns that a speaker, Guido, in Hell, is responding to another presence, Dante, poet narrator of The Divine Comedy.

Indeed, in the epigraph, speaker and poet’s (like Prufrock and reader’s) fates are linked together. Guido says: If I thought that my response would be addressed to one who might go back alive, this flame would shake no more, but since no one ever goes back alive out of these depths (if what I hear be true) without fear of infamy I answer you. [6]

The poet (like the reader) is one who must return from the dead. The reader should watch closely and draw some conclusions.

If Guido is responding to the presence before him than perhaps Prufrock is responding to someone with him (and other than the reader), too. If Guido is telling his story to a poet, then perhaps Prufrock is, too. If Guido is a liar, then perhaps Prufrock is not to be taken literally, too.

If the poet has entered another world for the story, then perhaps the reader shouldn’t be surprised by the inscrutable—the “air of meaning,” magic and legerdemain.

Prufrock’s invitation, the reader may now surmise, is to “Prufrock’s” poet. An observation of this kind puts the reader in a position to be more objective in this next reading, but this isn’t objectivity with transcendence. It’s mere isolation to observe the mermaids singing, each to each.

Will they sing to the reader?

Remember the ambiguity now in the first stanza of the first reading (“Are we moving, going somewhere, or are we prattling and pacing in circles prior to setting off?”). Read the stanza again and try to decipher the ambiguity. Isn’t ambiguity the result of finding two different possibilities where only one is expected? Aren’t the poet and Prufrock persona two possible storytellers in a narrative poem where the reader expects only one?

Is it a surprise that if Prufrock is steadfastly relating his story to a poet who in turn is relating

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it to the reader, then the reader should in the first stanza sense two narrative actions occurring at once??? In the short second stanza, is it really Prufrock narrating? It’s not in the first person, and Prufrock always relates everything in the first person.

Isn’t the poet showing himself in the form of the third person and reflecting his subject’s diction, meter and rhyme?

Isn’t this also true in the third stanza at another remove, and not until the fourth stanza that the reader sees Prufrock in all his actuality—a singer of his own song? Doesn’t this repeated passing from first person to third person to first again bring to mind a “fiction within a fiction”? [7] (Is a fiction within a fiction like Narcissus drowned with the pool of his own reflection?). Might this lead to the conclusion that “Prufrock” is a poem within a meta-poem? Is this critic right when he says: “the (artistic structure) seems to transcend the discourse on which it is based; yet is carefully motivated and prepared for by the fictional world from which it springs”? [8] Can the reader be content with such high-mindedness and remove when so much else is so obviously at stake? Isn’t the reader, especially after your first experience, responsible for extrapolating yourself out of this chain of events? *** “Pound defines the image ‘as the projection of sensation and emotion on the screen of the objective.’” [9] Doesn’t Prufrock refer to this poetic process when he says: “That as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen”? Haven’t critics also said that everything (evening, fog) around Prufrock is his screen for projecting his state of mind. [10] Hasn’t the poet constructed a poem that not only “transcend(s) the discourse on which it is based,” but is also necessarily an absolute reflection of that discourse and the persona it encounters? Mustn’t a poetic vision be grounded in the material elements of its image? And which comes first—element or image? Isn’t the material for poet and poetic persona the same and that’s why it’s being bandied back from one to the other? What does the reader suppose Eliot has to say about this?

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. [11]

Isn’t the “objective correlative” a construct involving an artistic framework (poetic structure or what you will) and “the fictional world from which it springs”? Hasn’t the poet really synthesized these two elements[12] in formulating certain feelings and longings? Doesn’t a synthesis include a thesis and antithesis? Can a thesis and antithesis be extrapolated from the text? Isn’t a linear narrative a kind of thesis (or given) in a narrative poem and a cyclical narrative its antithesis? Is this a surprise in a fiction within a fiction? Isn’t the poetic persona a kind of given (or thesis) in the poem and the “you” (poet) an antithesis? Is third person narrative the antithesis of first person? Isn’t the synthesis of a thesis and antithesis the generation of an infinite chain of events? What is the result of this synthesis in “Prufrock”?

Prufrock and poet are antithetical as well as reciprocal—mermaids singing, each to each.

On one hand, Prufrock reflects the poetic process in certain references (“There will be time to murder and create . . . Time for you and time for me /And for a hundred visions and revisions,” and “It is impossible to say just what I mean! /But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen”).

Prufrock reflects the poetic process as well in the processes of his speech: “And indeed there will be time /To wonder, ‘Do I dare? and, ‘Do I dare?’ /Time to turn back and descend the stair /With a bald spot in the middle of my hair /(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!’).”

In this passage Prufrock is actually developing a scene (“They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’”) within a scene. [13] On the other hand, isn’t the process of the poet one of projection (like Prufrock’s) (onto the screen of the objective) and a consequent reflection of poetic vision in images, patterns and

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metaphor? In a sense Prufrock whole narcissistic, neurotic air is a screen for the poet’s vision or magic lantern to shed light.

But, of course, poet and persona are a metaphor as they repeat each other like mirrors set diametrically apart (“There will be time . . . for a hundred visions and revisions . . . In a minute there is time /For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse”).

In this metaphor they promulgate an infinite synthesis of fictions within fictions, visions and revisions, decisions and indecisions. Unlike neurotic repetition, however, this synthesis doesn’t repeat itself without significance. In it much can be seen and foreseen as Prufrock himself indicates: I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter [mirror? R. S.]. . .

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker And in short, I was afraid.

It is fear at the end of this vision that makes Prufrock narcissistic. But how is the remainder of the vision spelled out?

Prufrock, like Guido, hasn’t divine light to see it all, so he sees at the end only doom for himself and his companion. Is it so? Unlike Prufrock, hasn’t the poet survived the telling of the story and extrapolated himself from its vision? Doesn’t the reader correspond with the poet in perusal of the text? Does the reader not resemble then the poet when facing the text? Hasn’t the poet made this resemblance possible in making the text a mirror? Is it not true in the mirror of the text that the reader finally sees the poet beckoning with the words: “Do take a look! But take pause . . . not to lose your head . . . or fall . . . for your own reflection!”

Footnotes 1

Kenner, Hugh, “Prufrock in St. Louis,” Prairie Schooner, 31, Spring, 1957, p. 27.

2

Two critics who develop this reading are: Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in Understanding Poetry, “An Analysis of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” pp 589-96; and Morris Weitz in Philosophy of the Arts, Chap. V, pp. 93-107.

3

Two critics preferring this reading are: Roy P. Basler in Sex, Symbolism, & Psychology in Literature, “Eliot’s Prufrock,” pp 203-222; and Grover Smith in T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning, pp. 6-20.

4

Kenner, ibid., p. 27.

5

ibid., pp. 25-6.

6

ibid., pp. 28-9.

7

Berland, Alwyn, “Some Techniques of Fiction in Poetry,” Essays in Criticism, IV, no. 4, 1954 p. 382.

8

ibid., pp 384-5.

9

Taupin, Rene, “The Classicism of T.S. Eliot,” Symposium, no. 3, Jan. 1932, p. 64.

10 Basler, ibid., and Smith, ibid.

11

Taupin, ibid., p. 64.

12 ibid.

13 Berland, ibid., p. 382.

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Bibliography 1

Basler, Roy P., Sex, Symbolism & Psychology in Literature, “Eliot’s Prufrock,” pp.203-22, Octagon Books, Inc., New York, 1967.

2

Berland, Alwyn, “Some Techniques of Fiction in Poetry,” Essays in Criticism, IV., no. 4, 1954, pp. 32735, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford.

3

Brooks, Cleanth and Warren, R. P., Understanding Poetry, “An Analysis of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’,” pp.589-96, Henry Holt, New York, 1938.

4

Kenner, Hugh, “Prufrock of St. Louis,” Prairie Schooner, 31, Spring, 1957, pp.24-9, University Press, Lincoln, Nebraska.

5

Matthiessen, F. O., The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, Oxford University Press, New York, 1935.

6

Morgan, Roberta and Wohlsetter, Albert, “Observation on ‘Prufrock’,” Harvard Advocate, 125, no. 3, Dec. 1938, pp. 27-30, 33-40, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

7

Smith, Grover, T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning, pp. 6-20, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1956.

8

Taupin, Rene, “The Classicism of T.S. Eliot,” Symposium, no. 3, Jan. 1932, pp. 64-82, Symposium Press, Inc., Concord, New Hampshire.

9

Weitz, Morris, Philosophy of the Arts, Chap. V, pp. 93-107, Russell & Russell, New York, 1964.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Superbia, from The Seven Deadly Sins, engraving, 1558, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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DAVID DAY

Learning the Love of Slaughter from the childhood diary of A. H. circa 1901

Today I killed a caterpillar that crawled out of our garden and onto the terrace.

How such an ugly looking thing could become a butterfly is beyond my understanding.

To satisfy a growing curiosity I picked it up and crushed it to death between my thumb and index finger.

At first I felt nothing but disgust at the glue of its life oosing out between my fingers, But, as I wiped them off on my lederhosen, I suddenly experienced an exquisite emission of joy That I shall definitely seek again.

Rolling Stone Blues Walking backwards out of Cheyenne, with my thumb in the air, hitchhiking to some place I ain't never been, with a belly full of beans, a few bucks in my jeans and not a care in the world.

I didn't know, thirty years later, I would be coming back from there on the other side of the road, hungry and broke, tired and cold, an old rolling stone without a place to call home.

Unanswered Questions And so what that we shall die and rot and be forgotten— is that not the fate of all men?

Is our flight through life more significant 7

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than that of a random moth, entering a lighted room by one window and departing through another into the unknown?

Echoes in the Snow On Cold Mountain I recite my poems to the wind and scribble their echoes in the snow to leave behind for those who follow and might care to stop and listen.

On Cold Mountain There are no clocks or calendars on Cold Mountain but, on this green and golden day, I know that Spring is turning into Summer when I can pick wild ginger for my tea and leeks for my supper.

Evening Shadow Do you recall the yesterdays when today seemed so far away?

Do you remember the voices and faces of those who told you this is how it would be: that youth would pass in a flash of dazzling light an old age would slowly creep in, through the backdoor of your life like an evening shadow?

Advice If you go to the meadow, bring back grass for your bed.

If you go to the forest, bring back wood for your fire.

If you go to the river, bring back fish for your supper.

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If you go to the mountains, bring back stone for your hearth.

If you go to the desert, bring back sand for your altar.

Anonymous, after Raphael Santi, Old Shepard, engraving, ca. 1500, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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ERICA MAPP

After the Rain At the high “C” of the Great Black Hawk there’s theatre.

Tanagers flee and circling pigeons scatter Like sheets of paper in a hurricane . . .

But then they settle. Back to normal again.

The sky has cleared after the early rain; Raindrops still tremble in the bushy heads Of mango trees. Anole lizards feed, As allen friuts ripen to alcohol And keskidees surprise us with their glee.

But when the sun is hidden by a cloud, There is a hush until it reappears, And then a wren trills loudly from the eaves.

How can I praise God's glory to the full And beg the grace to see Him face to face?

The Great Black Hawk is called the Brazilian eagle. It is rather rare in Trinidad and Tobago. Its Latin name is Buteogallus urubitinga.

The local name for the house wren is Cucurachelle. Although it is one of the smallest birds, it exceeds all in praise. Its Latin name is Troglodytes adeon.

Sunset Sunset, and pale billow in the sky Like fairy castles, domes all gilded by The Midas—magic of the setting sun.

And high above the fiery cirrus fly Poised on the wing like a fantastic flight Of firebirds. They glide and touched by light, A fire flares within each flaunted plume.

But with a jeweled hand, the Lady Night Sets free the dusky falcon perched upon Her wrist. And circling slow the Dusky One Descends, then swoops. The breathless earth stands still And in a flash the frightened birds are gone.

Promise I dreamed I found you out Across another continent, My tattered wedding—dress in hand And hopeful mother standing by.

You were aghast

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But beautiful.

Your mother hid From droves of relatives (all mine) Milling about.

Of course, I said “It's all a joke.

Let's call it off.

I'll go away; Just kiss me once.”

Lucas van Leyden, Musicans, engraving, 1524, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Thomas D'Adamo BACACAY BY WITOLD GOMBROWICZ Translated by Bill Johnston

S

omewhere in Dada heaven Witold Gombrowicz is having a good laugh over The Polish Ministry of Culture’s declaring 2004 “The Year of Gombrowicz.” The irony of that honor being bestowed upon one of 20th century literature’s most ardent (and wittiest) foes of culture— especially Polish culture—with a capital C will not be lost on fans, who can only imagine how much mileage the author would’ve gotten out of that particular dog and pony show.

That Gombrowicz’s fiction eludes categorization is something of a commonplace in lit-crit circles. Nowhere is that slipperiness more apparent than in Bacacay, a collection of twelve short pieces now available for the first time in English, thirty-five years after the author’s death.

Characteristically, Gombrowicz claimed to have chosen to name the collection after the Buenos Aires street on which he live until 1957 “for the same reason that a person names his dogs—to distinguish them from others.”

But just as you know a person by the company he keeps, you can begin to draw a bead on Bacacay by locating it among the work of artists with whom Gombrowicz would have felt most at home. A short list of these might include Bruno Schulz, Eugene Ionesco, the Marx Brothers, Terri Gilliam, Joseph Heller, Donald Barthelme, and George Saunders. Obvious differences aside, all of the above share a comedic genius for subverting the tyranny of cultural forms and norms and bidding us revel in the ensuing anarchy—and of course, the exceptional skill required to make what they do look easy.

A further clue to Bacacay can be found in the Gombrowicz’s preface to his novel, Pornographia, in which he writes: “Man, tortured by his mask, fabricates secretly, for his own usage, a sort of ‘subculture’—a world made out of the refuse of a higher world of culture, a domain of trash, immature myth, inadmissible passions . . . a secondary domain of compensation. That is where a certain shameful poetry is born, a certain compromising beauty.”

Written between 1930 and 1936, the first ten stories of Bacacay are, to my mind, the purest expression of Gombrowicz’s lifelong commitment to charting that domain and giving exuberant voice to that compromising beauty. Reading these unforgettable tales of body parts at war with one another (“Philidor’s Child Within”), vegetarian aristocrats high on the taste of human flesh (“Dinner at Countess Pavahoke’s”), crusty old tars who prance around the deck in peacock feathers (“The Events on the Banbury”—try to imagine a cross between Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and a nautical version of the Python’s “The Lumberjac Song”), and a shipwrecked balloonist pursued by amorous lepers (“Adventures”), one gets a good sense of what Sontag meant when she said that great literature is secreted. In those stories, as in “Lawyer Kraykowski’s Dancer,” the story of a terminal epileptic’s maniacal stalking of suave society lawyer, and “Philibert’s Child Within,” the tale of a tennis match that erupts into a melee between upper crust gentlemen who do battle mounted piggyback on their ladies, the reader experiences the giddy sensation of being swept up in the creative act and shares Gombrowicz’s delight on discovering where each new turn in his foray into the absurd has landed him.

Rebellion against the infantilization wrought by the cultural forms by which a person is defined is a persistent theme throughout Gombrowicz’s work. In most cases, that rebellion expresses itself in fetishes or bizarre ritual behaviors, as in “On the Kitchen Steps” which follows the life of an elegant aristocrat who spends his nights bashfully pursuing the most unattractive scullery maids and scrub women he can find and from whom he expects no more than boisterous ridicule. Better yet is the absurdist gem, “Virginity,” the story of a cloistered maiden who is plunged into an existential crisis after being hit by a rock thrown by a derelict who appears atop her garden wall one day. Stunned and a bit turned on by the assault the young woman begins, for the first time in her life, to question her much-vaunted purity and comes to see in it a pernicious

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ignorance both of oneself and the world. Culminating in one of the most unnervingly funny scenes in late-modernist fiction, the story ends with the virgin entreating her horrified fiancé to join her in gnawing on a rotting bone picked out of a garbage heap: “Come on, the bone’s waiting for us, let’s go to that bone! We’ll gnaw it together—do you want to?—together! Me with you, you with me! See, I already have it in my mouth! And now you! Now you!”

Reminiscent of the protagonist in Alberto Moravia’s existentialist masterpiece, The Conformist, the young aristocrat at the center of the poignant “The Memoirs of Stefan Czarniecki,” longs for conventionality the way a prisoner longs for freedom. In his desperation to “wash away the stain of his origins” (his mother is Jewish) he becomes an ultranationalist and war hero, only to have the rug pulled out from under him by the maniacal laughter of a comrade who is horribly ripped apart by an artillery shell. Haunted by the sound that laughter, Stefan returns from the war an embittered nihilist who, wherever he sees “some mysterious emotion, whether it is virtue or family, faith or fatherland, I always have to commit some villainy. This is my mystery, which for my part I impose upon the great enigma of being.”

Bill Johnston’s translation . . .

Andrea Mantegna, Battle of the Sea-Gods (right half), engraving, ca. 1485 – 1488, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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OTIS KIDWELL BURGER

*** Now, after four days absence, I have lost my franchise in this land and Come back to find it changed, The leaves torn off the trees, And my own footsteps alien in the new hollowness.

Dark shuttered houses sit blind on the sunny meadows, Occasional residents sit uneasily on the porches, Like me, come back for a weekend, but already, After a city week, full of winter.

But like leaves, like birds, pausing still On the boughs of summer, We walk idly along a lake too cold for swimming, Touching a life already unfamiliar.

While the wind gathers itself, stripping the high Skies of clouds, hurling itself Against the cold walls at night, We build up the fire, and read newspapers again.

Waiting to pack up our half-unpacked possessions.

Here, in the slow summer days, Nothing changed, but the whisper of grasses, Slow light, idle meals at odd times, The swell and dwindle of moonlight, of rain.

Now, amid our half-unpacked possessions, We wait, between two worlds, for the next sign, Cold wind like the cold noses of hunting dogs Sniffs along our wrists and ankles Until the final shout of wind.

*** On 14th Street, the homeless often sit behind Cardboard signs, unnecessarily advertising their plight.

Jerry tell me he does take refuge in subways, But cops will chase him. And if you sleep, Your pocket will be slit, to slip out your cash.

Nobody considers shelters safe.

A black man with terminal leukemia is waiting For the proper paperwork to give him treatment.

Many street people on 14th sit alone, a few in groups And some with dogs.

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One evening, I came upon a young woman with a sign.

Beside her, a small animal was eating from a bowl.

It had a long, thin tail. A dog?

No. A cat. Farnsworth.

*** Life is full of diversions, Sidebars, back doors, secret stairways One story leads to another, one life blends With many others, and trails lead into obscure Other countries.

When you are old and full of memories The connections and the stories grow more Complicated and bizarre And eventually you will simply vanish Down a backdoor rabbit hole.

*** I am drowning in sleep The night wind is buffeting the house And howling under the eaves And all my past misdeeds are gibbering in dark corners Oh my love, reach out your hand and pull me Into daylight Morning.

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ANNE WEICHBERGER

*** if words could change your life let them do that if words can built relationships let them do that if words can comfort you let them do that if words can hurt don't be brutal if words can harm don't be hateful build bridges with words open hearts with words be here now present and free

back away back away don't turn around just give me space why you ask haven't we been so very close for countless tragic moments you've invaded my quiet mind I forgive you just this once forgiveness is my only hope stand back be gone

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*** Looking outside At grey And river Looking inside To confirm The thundering new Day I have allowed healing To replace Hell By dropping out Forever You've cut The best Class: Life

Marco Dente, The Sacrifice of a Ram, engraving, ca. 1515 – 1527, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Thomas D’Adamo BARBARA

F

or a moment he’d forgotten where and when he was and was sure he’d seen her headed toward him down Third Avenue. Less than a block away, she was, her boyish figure weaving in and out of the lunchtime crowd, hands wedged tightly into the pockets of her faded green cutoffs, trademark red bandanna fluttering around her neck. And just as suddenly as she’d materialized, she was gone, a vivid asymmetry swallowed up by the grim procession of office workers, each one carefully balancing a translucent take-out bag on an upturned palm like a votive offering.

That was fifteen minutes ago, and his heart is still pounding in his chest and in his temples as he sits at a little aluminum cafe table, trying, unsuccessfully, to take in the words on the page in front of him. The crowd has passed on, leaving the sidewalk deserted in all directions, the only animation provided by a green plastic bag describing lazy circles in the middle of the street.

Of course it wasn’t Barbara, he tells himself. Knows it beyond a doubt. She’s been rotting for two years already. More than two. And as he tries to do the math, he flashes on the image of her poor ravaged remains lying in their box. In his mind’s eye he sees clearly the small coffin suspended in earth as rich and brown as wet coffee grounds.

And within that, the diminutive occupant, rigid, her head thrown back in an ecstasy of death, or as if she is straining to make out the dull distant rumble of the gravedigger’s bulldozer passing slowly overhead.

She didn’t deserve that, he whispers to himself. Nobody does. Almost nobody, anyway.

Definitely not to have it done so dirty and so mean. And definitely not at the hands of two complete imbeciles. He realizes the absurdity of what he is telling himself, and he recalls the moment in the movie, Unforgiven, when the near-sighted kid, sick to his stomach over his first kill—a fat guy in a shithouse—looks to Eastwood’s character for reassurance and says, “He only got what was comin’ to him, right?” And Clint fixes the kid with his cold blue eyes and says: “We all get what’s comin’ to us, kid.” . . . We all get what’s got comin’ to us. And he remembers how sick and ashamed they all felt at the time. Sick over the image of her, pocked with cigarette burns and slowly asphyxiating under a mummy’s mask of gaffer’s tape. Ashamed of themselves for the relief they all secretly felt at knowing there’d be no more of the chance encounters they’d grown to dread. Glad to be relieved of the burden of having to witness the ruined skin and bleeding gums, of having to mark the stations of her creeping dementia, and of having to wonder how long it would be before she wound up living on the streets. Relieved of the guilt of knowing that when she did, none of them would lift a finger to help.

Gratefully distracted from his memories by the waitress’s arrival with his order, he takes stock of his surroundings. As the first few sips of espresso sends their tarry, reassuring warmth sliding down his gullet, the sights and sounds of life begin returning all around him.

He sees pale July sunlight streaming through a sickly acacia. He watches a beautiful young woman, too young for him, he guesses, as she stops to let her shiba inu lift its leg against the tree, and he experiences a pleasant frisson as he and the woman exchange broad smiles. He strains to hear what an agitated old man, drawing patterns in the air with his cane, is saying to a gangling, acne-scarred doorman in a uniform two sizes too small for him. He catches the dreamlike scent of ice vapor emanating from the back of a refrigerator truck parked at the curb. As the delivery man passes, straining behind the weight of his overloaded dolly, he spots the tattoo on the man’s bulging bicep: “Semper Fidelis.” Gyrene, he mutters to himself. And he wonders what it would be like, esprit de corps, a fealty born of battle. And for a moment, he imagines himself in uniform, a scared soldier putting up a good front, exchanging high-fives all around before pitching headlong into a firefight—“Semper fi, bro!” . . . And, with a start, he realizes that, with Barbara, that makes three dead-friend sightings in as many weeks. And he wonders if it could be a sign.

A sign, maybe, or maybe a welcoming committee.

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Nicolas Beatrizet, The Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol, engraving, 1548, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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William Heyen PIETY AND HOME IN WHITMAN AND MIŁOSZ

I

n his essay “Religion and Space,” Czesław Miłosz seems almost to lament when he says, “Today I cannot deny that in the background of all my thinking there is the image of the ‘chain of development’—gaseous nebulae condensing into liquids and solid bodies, a molecule of lifebegetting acid, species, civilizations succeeding each other in turn, segment added to segment, on a scale which reduces me to a particle.” He “cannot deny,” though it seems that something in him would like to return to his childhood faith, to Mary and Jesus, to the triune God, and to the firmament set solidly under his feet, heaven above and hell far below him.

But I must not overstate his loss. Despite the new knowledge, the Movement (a key word in Miłosz) of the ages, he has realized that, for him, no matter what, “the sacred exists.” He says he can intuit, in bread on the table or in a rough tree trunk or in a letter opener, depths of being.

Relativity has subverted hierarchies, he argues, so that In his romantic frock coat, standing on a mountaintop, the solitary admirer of his own ego succumbed to panic when faced with his own insignificance beneath the stars. But would that reaction be appropriate now? Movement caused dematerialization and infamous matter, burden of burdens to the faithful, thins into light and whirls into the original “Fiat lux” as in the works of those medieval philosophers who interpreted the creation of the world as the transmutation (transmutatio) of nonphysical, divine light into light which today we would call physical.

Still, if Miłosz has been “freed from an image of space as a solid body and container,” if Movement has revealed a new dimension in which “all events and actions from all times” persist simultaneously, this does not seem to make him any less lonely. His awe is tinged with melancholy, it seems to me. He is that “particle,” and for all his intuitions of the sacred, he lives in the existential well, not knowing how he got there, or what he is supposed to be doing there, or whether or not he can ever get out. He does not want to construct religious hierarchies that would leave him feeling superior to anyone else, but, as he tries to take comfort in the fact that “mine, however, is a piety without a home” and therefore not subject to the deteriorations of our physical home, I feel him painted into his own corner. He has defined poetry as “the passionate pursuit of the real.” He has agreed with Simone Weil that poets can be forgiven everything except proclaiming an inhuman thing, and in his poem “To Robinson Jeffers,” fairly or unfairly to the American poet—Hyatt H. Waggoner says that Jeffers’ “single real theme” is his “desperate effort to teach the heart not to love”—Miłosz concludes: Better to carve suns and moons on the joints of crosses as was done in my district. To birches and firs give feminine names. To implore protection against the mute and treacherous might than to proclaim, as you did, an inhuman thing.

But is he not himself proclaiming an inhuman thing, an unearthly piety the logical outgrowth of which would be for us to shrug our shoulders as we lose the earth to pollution or nuclear holocaust? Miłosz is a noble and enlightened man, one of the luminous spirits of our time. But he has lost his home. Hard as he fought for it, he has been driven from it by the new science, intellectual cellar by cellar and intellectual alley by alley, just as the ghetto fighters of Warsaw he sees so clearly were driven from their city.

And how could he not have been? After the gas vans and Einsatzgruppen and crematoria of our century, it is as though we could not, even if we wanted to, make ourselves believe in an earth and human species that matter to any divine power. How is anything but a homeless piety possible?

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I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know (and almost blush to say it) that my own piety is not homeless. I suppose that I have not yet been tested. My world has never been torn apart as has Miłosz’s Poland; but even if it had been, I suspect that my childhood experiences of Long Island’s ponds, woods, and waters, those hours of wonder and glory, imprinted me so indelibly that the earth, nature, will always be my home, for better or worse. Reading Miłosz, what rises to my memory again and again as contrast is the intellectually almost unbelievably faithful section 44 of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Never before or since, perhaps, has piety had, made, realized such a home: Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me, Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there, I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist, And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.

Long I was hugg’d close—long and long.

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen, For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings, They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

Immense have been the preparations for me, Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me.

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen, For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings, They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me, My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.

For it the nebula cohered to an orb, The long slow strata piled to rest it on, Vast vegetables gave it sustenance, Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.

All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me, Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul

All nature has made his passage a safe one, has conspired to place Walt in his here and now.

He is no accident or accidental particle. He is himself the end of evolution. He is matter that matters, and will always matter. He wrote this before his experiences during the Civil War, but this was his essential faith, and he held to it for the rest of his life. The cradle of creation endlessly rocks us, whatever our transient aberrations as individuals or as a race.

In his late poem of mystical process, “The Abyss,” Theodore Roethke cries out, “Be with me, Whitman, maker of catalogues.” The poet complains that his “inward witness is dismayed” and that his is a “terrible hunger for objects.” What he feels he needs is some assurance that our world is our home and that, as our home, the world is itself, with all its beauty and death, and at the same time vibrates with otherness, with transcendence. As Walt says in the 1855 “Preface,” “The land and sea, the animals fishes and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests mountains and rivers, are not small themes, . . . but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects . . . they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls.” He argues, in fact, that “the poetic quality . . . is the life of these and much else and is in the soul.” When Roethke calls on Whitman, he calls for a return to poetry itself, for our realization of our earthly home as spiritual body. At the end of “The Abyss,” he reaches illumination: “I hear the flowers drinking in their light, I have taken counsel of the crab and the sea-urchin.” He sees “great logs piled like matchsticks” ready to burst into flame.

He has been visited by, infused by, the great poet of the catalog of our universal human home.

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Czesław Miłosz, contemporary of Roethke but perhaps “displaced” from birth, is in this central regard, however, no son of the ecstatic, celebratory poet who claimed the world as fitting residence for his soul. In his “Supplication,” Miłosz prays, “From galactic silence protect us”; and in an interview he says, “What do we have to build a world of our own from—the flutter and twitter of language, lipstick, gauze, and muslin, which are to protect us from the galactic silence.

As always, it is civilization versus the deadness of the universe.” His tone becomes one of ironic musing: “To tell the truth, anyone subject to the laws of earth—meaning the laws of transience, aging, sickness, and death—should curse fate. What else can he do? What is fate—you live a little while, and then suddenly it’s goodbye? Why is it like that? This is the anger of earth. I try to find some other, higher law—in religion, in art. An opposing sphere. Because, after all, I should live forever and always be happy.” Miłosz says that utopia for the poet would be to spend his life in his native city with the woman he loves, to walk to the corner cafe, and to meditate on the word “is”; but something is always in the way: “Either the city burns down or it’s taken by the enemy.” And he is of course right. We die by pogrom, cancer, decrepit old age, perhaps heartbroken and disillusioned. We die of ennui and bad bowels, and we die, it may be, alone. And he is of course at the same time wrong, and has misapprehended, mis-intuited, misread the book of the world that God seems to have placed in the library of nature for Walt. Walt’s inner city did not burn down, even as he suffered during the Civil War, even as his bodily health deteriorated. The enemy, despair, never achieved an impregnable position in him. Was this his nature? Did he earn his cosmic optimism? Did this construct of light and eventual glory exist in him a priori, or did his writing again and again, even after the initial outpouring of what became the 1855 Leaves, help him toward faith? Often, the old Walt tells Horace Traubel in confidence that he has a personal secret. I believe I know what it is—it has to do with the terror of love & sexual energy—but I will not speak it here.

Miłosz says, “You live a little while, and then suddenly it’s goodbye.” He says he spends much time in trance, but somehow we do not sense in him transcendental time, the infinity of the grain of sand or leaf of grass, as we invite our soul to observe. Always in Walt there is the promise of, the realization of, ongoingness within what unendowed eyes may see as the temporal. Or almost always. In two late poems in Good-Bye My Fancy, we may see, first, a slight slippage to a place where, to my mind, he could fall into Miłosz’s ravaged city, followed by the reaffirmation of mystical faith, true to himself. In “Grand Is the Seen,” he calls the soul “More evolutionary, vast, puzzling . . . / More multiform far—more lasting” than “the sky and stars . . . the earth . . . the sea.” This orthodox faith at first seems viable, but it has lost its home, its source; and its abstract piety is subject, it seems to me, to rapid dismemberment. But in the book’s very next breath, in the poem “Unseen Buds,” Walt returns to that central upwelling intuition of indivisibility, returns to other “dumb, beautiful ministers” acknowledged so long before. This time, infinite buds create our present-without-end: Unseen buds, infinite, hidden well, Under the snow and ice, under the darkness, in every square or cubic inch, Germinal, exquisite, in delicate lace, microscopic, uniform, Like babes in wombs, latent, folded, compact, sleeping; Billions of billions, and trillions of trillions of them waiting, (On earth and in the sea—the universe—the stars there in the heavens.)

Urging slowly, surely forward, forming endless, And waiting ever more, forever more behind.

In his essay “On the Effects of the Natural Sciences,” Miłosz discovers in himself “a deeprooted conviction of aloneness, mine and man’s, in the face of limitless space, in motion yet empty, from which no voice reaches down speaking a language I can feel and understand.”

The doctor who was to weigh it dropped Walt’s brain on the floor. I imagine it, now, made of glass, and radiating outward from its burst center, trillions of atoms of material light. Our earth is one. Home for me, for now, at least, is that center.

Essay is a part of a book Yawp: Heyen's Whitman; available via Amazon

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TOMASZ MAREK SOBIERAJ

In the Garden We were picking plums in the garden, climbed high and naked among the branches of an old tree.

The sun was shining, leaves and insects were rustling, obsessed just like us, by the last days of summer.

Our fingers were sometimes meeting on small planets, then we brought order to a green universe with double strength.

We were throwing fruits, sticky with juice, into the bucket; eating some of them right away giving to the mouth of each other the ripest ones.

Sweet drops were running down our chests.

But when satisfied and calm we were lying sleepy on the porch, no voice came out of the trees, nor any motion of leaves could be seen.

The Two on the Hill This is a quite peculiar place.

A gentle hill and a group of trees on it, coherent like knights in battle array.

All around a plain, covered with grasses.

A grey-blue sky, monumental clouds, and all this is motionless, as if held by a strong hand.

It is almost a perfect moment, you would say—an ideal landscape, just like in the paintings by Constable. Maybe only a foreground is missing. But this small imperfection is only apparent, this is a brilliant artistic treatment, because the composition, seen from the other side, includes the river, winding like Meander, which sections wet meadows and bogs with a wide valley.

Thus, when you approach the hill from the south, you go through a landscape of dense clouds and your feet disappear in the grass,

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while walking from the north, you pass by marshes, alders and burdocks, you cross the river, reach the shore —quite steep—there are burrows and dense shrub.

No way, no modest path will lead you now; but you have to admit that the trail is interesting, especially the northern version. Because when you stand on the shore of the river, at the foot of the eminence, amid the tangled branches, you will see the hidden stairs. They lead to the top of the hill, like to the peak of a pyramid lost somewhere in the forests of Yucatán. When you are alone, you will feel this slight anxiety, which always so nicely in mysterious and unknown places squeezes the bowels; but the curiosity will lead you on, up the stone steps. Out of breath, you will stand among the knights of trees mentioned at the beginning—mostly oaks, beeches, some limes, a few bushes; modest flowers lean towards the sun. The branches rub against each other, it sounds like a clash of arms. The cry of birds will spread after a while and the appalling flutter of wings will make you feel a strange chill, even if there is heatwave.

You will go further, through a broad ridge, and after a few steps you will see a tomb. Quite an old one, covered with moss and lichens. Words and dates carved into the stone, that tell more than the story of a blind old man. „Hier ruhen unse . . . Eltern.

Emilie Patzer geb. Zich * 29.6.1847 † 31.5.1926 Gottlieb Patzer * 8.1.1844 † 16.1.1926 Nach überslandenen Leiden Ruft uns Gott zu ewigen Freuden“.

Translated by Erik La Prade

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Giulio Bonasone, Apollo and Leucothea, engraving, ca. 1531 – 1576, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Anna K.J. Issaïeff PHENOMENOLOGY AND AESTHETICS Has the Postmodern era erased the question of the essence of art? Has the introduction of the idea of “art as commodity” ended the trust in aesthetics as a valid philosophical discipline? At the same time, has posthumanism—with its renewed interests in the fundamentals of human existence—reintroduced the focus on aesthetics? What role can phenomenological aesthetics play in the modern investigation not only of art and its perception but also in conjunction with nature/ecology, culture, the aesthetics/ethics axis, human/nonhuman identity, human passions, gender and its perceived aesthetic expectations, classification of arts, aesthetic principles of narrative, etc.

W

hile addressing above issues I will not be referring to commonly known opinions. Nor will I scrutinise general statements and popular trends nowadays. I will neither quote the experts who are commonly associated with the realm of a human activity known as aesthetics.

I am aware how risky my approach is. It is a nonconformist attitude which is truly free.

However, it is a difficult approach. It is hard not only to hold it but also in the way the supporter is perceived. It not an easy feat to constantly defend your views against jealous people—those who are a scourge to themselves and become a scourge to Another Human Being. I do not claim that one should not value one’s life but holding the balance with regard to self-assessment should continually mark any human activity. Honesty is the right word. Self-honesty as well as being honest to Another Human Being. Awareness. Lucidity.

It takes courage to admit: I am not perfect. However, it takes much more courage to claim: I am so persevering, I have so much of an internal drive that no obstacles will obstruct my actions.

I will not give ground until I decide to do it myself.

Therefore, this approach is unexceptionable itself. My actions do not depend on other people but only on me! I hold full responsibility for my actions. Only me. Nobody else. Always.

Even if my attitude—that is a fully authentic self-expression—turns out to be too inconvenient for others who will knowingly strive for annihilating them, they cannot fall prey to these circumstances!

Retaining its core value will be hard but they should by no means doubt for a single moment.

No doubt in being a worthy human being. With all probability, this person has to be aware that they surpass those who try do destroy them. As a result, a person like this becomes subjected to ridicule and shame.

It seems that any bright mind—before being able to voice an opinion—has to face resistance from those who are not a par intellectually (and often morally). Edmund Husserl serves as an example.

Husserl did not have an easy life at the University of Göttingen. He was appointed professor against the faculty’s will which favoured the philosophy historian instead. Wilhelm Dilthey was crucial in his nomination for full professor in Göttingen by the Berlin ministry—it was a personal faculty not formally tied to the department. As a result, Husserl was boycotted for many years. While the ministry planned to appoint him full professor in 1907, the department thought otherwise by claiming he was devoid of talent. He got severely dejected by that fact. Initially, Husserl had to convince the audience to get support during his lectures. There used to be only few students attending his lectures at an initial stage for a few years. Moreover, he was addressing the topics almost unknown to the audience. [http://www.iphils.uj.edu.pl/~m.kuninski/Edmund%20Husserl%20-%20Alicja %20Bochenska.htm, last visit: 08.04.2018]

It is not a coincidence that I started my presentation with a few ethics-based remarks.

The Greek word αίσθητικός (aisthetikos) stands for not only “perceptible” but also “sensitive”.

What is “sensitivity” then? One can be sensitive to a particular colour or a specific sound. What is more, one can be sensitive to a particular shape (form) or a music scale (harmony). Nonetheless, the intellectual and moral sensitivity should be of utmost importance if we consider any type of

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intellectualization of an aesthetic nature. Due to the fact that my attitude does not seem to stand in stark contrast with Immanuel Kant’s approach, let me quote a relevant fragment of his statement: Genius is the talent (or natural gift) which gives the rule to Art. Since talent, as the innate productive faculty of the artist, belongs itself to Nature, we may express the matter thus: Genius is the innate mental disposition (ingenium) through which Nature gives the rule to Art. Whatever may be thought of this definition, whether it is merely arbitrary or whether it is adequate to the concept that we are accustomed to combine with the word genius (…), we can prove already beforehand that (. . .) beautiful arts must necessarily be considered as arts of genius. [Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, § 46]

What do these words mean?

Every individual was given not only life but also endowed with various possibilities available only to that particular individual to fulfil it. It happens so by virtue of the supreme laws of nature which are also fundamental for the fulfilment of the world around us. In view of the foregoing, every human being is morally obliged to develop their skills.

A human being gets stronger morally by fulfilling one’s moral duty through cultivating one’s abilities. There emerges a sense of responsibility for one’s own existence. If one starts feeling responsible for themselves, it will unmistakably lead to the sense of mutuality and responsibility for Another Human Being. Only then is it possible to act righteously, i.e. without cheating Another Human Being.

Righteousness should serve as a basis of every action. However, how can one get insight into what is precisely righteous and how can one discern what is not righteous? In that case, what shall constitute a significator of moral actions? The answer is unambiguous—responsibility.

Nevertheless, is it measurable? If it is doable, how can it be done? Responsibility is measurable only through action. There are various “actions”, however . . . Trivial actions are not the case here, such as following the code of conduct (in other words, conventionalism). I will act specifically because it is the norm, I am supposed to do it, I was brought up this way. No. I will act so that it is truly relevant for me, i.e. a given action has a real value because I act for the sake of a moral value of the action. Being honest with myself is a moral value in that case. Therefore, I am responsible for myself as I am honest with myself. I know there are certain areas of life which I can be better at. If I know I can be better—and I can clearly define the word “better”—I do everything in order to become better. However, I do not impose a specific way of acting on myself.

I act accordingly because I have a moral sense which directs my actions appropriately. Thus, every relevant action clearly results from my moral constitution which itself constitutes my personal identity.

At this point let us focus how the above mentioned refers to the issue of aesthetics per se.

Due to the fact that aesthetics is encompassed by human experience—much as the understanding of the said human experience—it precludes the notion of aesthetics being based on something non-human, i.e. transcendental with regard to a sphere of human experience. Let us address the following issue: if we consider the area of human experience, it seems that it is based on something primordial—a factor which constitutes the area.

If so, how is that possible to ignore a transcendental sphere with relation to a human being?

If we consider the realm of human experience, can we ignore the foundation on which the human experience is based?

From an ontical perspective—absolutely not. Ignoring the ground on which a plant grows makes it impossible to define conditions necessary for its growth, its individual constitution.

However, a growing plant directs itself towards light essential for its growth. A flower does not need to discern the ground and location which is a complementary part of. The flower is.

The flower experiences. The plant does not need to describe its surroundings nor concomitant experiences. The plant probably is an experience itself (here: sensation).

In the case of a human being, the world is a manifestation. The world manifests and this manifestation is the root cause which a human being aspires to understand. A human being strives for the self-understanding in relation to what surrounds them and what manifests itself by

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means of trying to understand the essence of the world. From a general perspective, a human first asks what they see and what manifests itself, then asks how a given object is perceived.

The sequence of questions is not coincidental. It is determined by our natural human orientation.

We have a natural tendency to deem the manifested world as real—in a way which it manifests itself to us. By perceiving a given phenomenon we acknowledge the existence of a given object, the proportions of which are supposed to be defined by the said phenomenon.

Husserl conceptualised this issue by means of the distinction between natural sciences and philosophical sciences.

Therefore: The natural attitude of mind is as yet unconcerned with the critique of cognition. Whether in the act of intuiting or in the act of thinking, in the natural mode of reflection we are turned to the objects as they are given to us each time and as a matter of course, even though they are given in different ways and in different modes of being, according to the source and level of our cognition. [Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, Martinus Nijhoff, 1973, p.13]

By perceiving only the object x, we undergo the phase of a blooming flower. The object x constitutes a complementary part of the world around. At this stage, we do not need to go to the bother to understand this phenomenon. One can even say that the phenomenon x equals the object x at the lowest level of involvement. As a result, we incorporate the phenomenon-object within the boundaries of our awareness while being non distant whatsoever which enables us to create space which in turn conditions the initiation of the cognitive process of a higher level, i.e. the process where higher cognitive structures of a person are activated.

Nevertheless, a human being creates one’s own identity by making an effort which is related to any cognitive activity of a human being vs. the world around. Thus, every person, while being a part of the world that surrounds them, develops one’s own distinctiveness. There are various levels of the said distinctiveness, the most significant of which is the activity of a human mind.

One has to highlight its autonomy when we consider the activity of a human mind. An intellectual autonomy is not associated with the spread of prevailing norms, habits, as well as human actions the approval of which would lead to the development of conventional actions—they would later have to be prescribed by the law and societal rules. In consequence, we get not so much of a permission but rather a prescription with guidelines as to what a human behaviour should be like.

An intellectual self-reliance accounts for an indicator of a subject-oriented attitude towards the world around. For that reason, an intellectual development is of the crucial role for the verification of the phenomena given to us. A dependent person—i.e. somebody devoid of analytic and synthetic skills when faced with incoming information—will always scrape the bottom of the barrel, anything that is commonly known as decent. What it means is that the work of art should be mellow and not thought-provoking. The image cannot be too complex—therefore too demanding for a cognitive perception. While discussing a personal perception set within the scope of aesthetics, we should not slim the phenomenon down only to an act of perceiving it. One should take into consideration that we are dealing with an intentional form. The intentionality of a phenomenon requires the content referring to the phenomenon. Despite the fact that every available phenomenon contains some content, it is not always synonymous with a message intended for a recipient. However, we can speculate on a case where a “message” is perceived as if it was sent by something indefinable. The very something—which should be presented as a real being—enables us to perceive a given phenomenon in order to mediate its existence. As a result, it is important to make a distinction in relation to the realm of the object of cognition in order to be as precise as possible, which will help us discover the right proportions of the object of cognition.

For that reason, Husserl made the following suggestion: (. . .) If we disregard any metaphysical purpose of the critique of cognition and confine ourselves purely to the task of clarifying the essence of cognition and of being an object of cognition, then this will be phenomenology of cognition and of being an object of ognition and will be the first and principal part of

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phenomenology as a whole. [Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, Martinus Nijhoff, 1973, p.18]

One should heed the fact that this distinction should be the first step to continue our discussion.

Aesthetics is strictly connected to a sphere of a human action—such a sphere where a human being is privileged. This realm, which is fully dependent on a person, is governed by slightly different rules of relevance (here: the existence mode of relevant values).

Therefore, we do not perceive the manifestations of a real being but rather an intentional one.

A human being creates its own work by attributing a shape to a form in a particular way.

The whole process takes place according to established rules, i.e. in such a way that an intended image is accessible to another person being a recipient of the said content. It is not so much important if the image is intended to be seen, heard, touched, or is a fusion of these. By defining a specific image, the sender builds a message which also accounts for the content of a created phenomenon. Only another human being can be a recipient of this phenomenon. It results from the fact that all images created by a human being (regardless of the form) are a system of signs which—by being given a proper form—turns out to be a coded message sent to the recipient by the sender. Thus, a phenomenon of this kind needs to be considered as unique as there is no importance to it whatsoever in a non-human realm. What poses as a phenomenon to us is so because we have an ability to interpret a presented content. It happens so by means of a mental analysis and synthesis of an appearance available to us. If we considered an image as a sphere taking over the realm of a human experience, we would only deal with the object x being an element of a real being X. This object would be automatically devoid of any content.

Husserl rightly noticed: (. . .) The ego as a person, as a thing in the world, and the mental life as the mental life of this person, are arranged – no matter even if quite indefinitely- on objective time; they are all transcendent and epistemologically null. [Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, Martinus Nijhoff, 1973, p.34]

We are, however, concerned only with the realm of a human experience and the object contained therein carrying a certain message which generates a specific phenomenon. Just like in the case of a written language—there are various levels of the language of a sign and/or a symbol.

The level of a given language is fully dependent on mental level showcased by the language user.

In terms of aesthetics, the user of a language of signs often becomes an initiator of a visual representation of a prior natural language. As the communication taking place between senderinitiator and addressee-recipient takes place only with the boundaries determined by the human sphere, one should emphasize that aesthetics as such can only be intersubjective. If a given message as a phenomenon is fully dependent on the sender, i.e. who creates the message, the message content will also be dependent on who generates the message. If that is the case, the opposite situation seems to be obvious. The higher the analytic-synthetic level of the addresseerecipient, the more receptive they are with regard to highly abstract messages. A unique sensitivity to a real manifestation of a given person emerges. One should bear in mind that there are actions not related to righteousness towards another person. For example, propagandarelated actions solely aiming at gaining material profit by those resorting to manipulative techniques. As a result, a human being gets degraded a commercial commodity. However, an internally integral recipient will be able to recognize the real value of what is perceived. In other words, the recipient’s awareness is as important as the sender’s awareness because they are inextricable. It clearly brings us to the conclusion that self-development is not only an obligation of authors but also recipients. A mutual openness and an authentic dialogue is only possible when both parties develop mentally.

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JEFFREY PAUL HOFFMAN

ASYNCHRONOUS BLUES I SPEAK WITH YOU KNOWING YOU WILL GET THE MESSAGE LATER WHAT I HAD TO SAY WAS IMPORTANT BUT NOT AT THE MOMENT AT THE MOMENT YOU ARE WALKING DOWN SEVENTH MAX IN YOUR ARMS EMMA BY YOUR SIDE DEBORAH WALKING AHEAD ON A MISSION TO BUY GROCERIES OR A GIFT I TOLD YOU THAT I GOT A HARSH SLAP IN THE FACE FROM LIFE THAT I REELED AND FELL AND WAS BLUE FOR A YEAR THAT I WOULD NOT QUIT . . .

THAT AS I LAY AND PROCESSED THE PAIN AND CONTINUED TO WORK I WAS BROUGHT TO WHERE I AM TODAY, WISER AND RICHER STRONGER AND HEALTHIER . . .

YOU MAY NEED TO KNOW THIS SOMEDAY WHEN A DISCUSSION ARISES WITHIN YOU OF MY WORTH . . .

“A POEMS SLOW BEGINNING” THIS MONTH’S MOON IS REFLECTED OFF THE RIVER; THE AIR IS MOIST FROM THE OCTOBER BREEZE, THE CITY IS IN MOTION ON THIS EVENING . . .

MEANDERING LIKE THE HUDSON, BY MY WINDOW . . .

ENTICING ME WITH MEMORIES OF DARKENED STREETS AND LIGHTS . . . SMELLS AND SOUNDS, INSPIRING AN EXQUISITE DREAM OF YOUTH AND LAUGHTER . . .

WITH EYES OPEN AND HEART OPEN, WITH MUCH TO FEEL AND SAY ABOUT SUCH A NIGHT . . . TO SOMEONE NOT SO FAR AWAY . . .

MY WIFE FLITTERS AROUND THE HOUSE LIKE A HUMMINGBIRD . . . FIXING AND ARRANGING

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ACCORDING TO HER MOOD OR WHIM OR WHIMSY . . .

AND I CANNOT DECIDE WHETHER TO LISTEN AND OBSERVE OR INTERRUPT WITH A STATEMENT OR QUESTION . . .

THE MOON PROGRESSES ACROSS THE SKY . . .

THE STARS SEEMING SMALL. FLICKER AND SPRINKLE THEIR RADIANCE ACROSS THE DARK MEADOW OF THE UNIVERSE . . . TIME PASSES I MAKE MOTION TO EMBRACE HER WITH CONVERSATION A TALK ABOUT DINNER PERHAPS . . .

OR LOST LOVES OR BETTER, BOTH!

RAINY AUTUMN NIGHT JAZZ MOTORCYCLE ENGINES BLARE LIKE TRUMPETS IN THE CITY NIGHT AND THE WHOOSH OF PASSING CARS ARE THE BASSO LIKE SOUNDS OF A SNARE . . .

THE BEAT OF MY HEART IS LIKE A PIANO IN A DREAM . . .

AND FOR ALL THE WOE IN ME I DO NOT CARE . . .

I AM BORN TO THE STRING SOUNDS OF THE FLOWING RIVER . . .

TRIPPING PIZZICATO LIKE, ALONG THE STARS WINK AND SHINE OVER THE GREAT COLISEUM OF THE TALL SHADOW LIKE BUILDINGS AND THE BALMY CHILLY NIGHT AIR IS LIKE A FULL DEEP BREATH TO THIS DYING MAN . . .

THE CITY LIGHTS AND THE HARBOR LIGHTS GLOW LIKE FANTASIES IN A RIFF . . .

ILLUMINATING THE FANTASY PLAYERS . . .

AND THE CURTAIN OF FOG DESCENDING A REMINDER OF OLD DELIGHTS . . .

THE CAR HORNS RESOUNDING IN ME LIKE TOMORROW’S REAWAKENED HOPE . . .

THE TRAFFIC LIGHTS KEEPING SYNCOPATED TIME . . .

AND NOW THE TAUGHT GUITAR OF RAIN HOLDS SWAY. AND MY MOOD IS MAGICALLY SWEPT AWAY . . .

PHOTOGRAPH AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM STANDING BY MY SIDE YOUR OPEN AND INNOCENT AND EXCITED FACE WATCHING THE FRENZIED CROWD NEARBY . . .

WATCHING INTENTLY THE GAUGUIN AS WE WATCHED THEM . . .

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WONDERING WHAT FATES AND DESTINIES WERE REVEALED IN THEIR MYRIAD LIVES FOR THE MOMENT INTERTWINED

SONG FOR MY OLD AGE . . .

I AM ALWAYS GOING TO NEED, 15 MORE MINUTES OF WHAT I’M DOING NO INTERRUPTIONS FROM DOUBT OR DEATH, NO EXCUSES OR APOLOGIES ALLOWED; ONLY HAPPY BREATHS AND HAPPY CIRCUMSTANCE HAPPY THOUGHTS AND FANTASIES LIVED LOUD . . .

I AM ALWAYS GOING TO NEED, ONE LAST BITE OF THIS MY LIFE, NO INTERRUPTIONS FROM ACCIDENTS OR FATE NO DIGRESSIONS PLEASE; ONLY CHARMING VOICES AND PRETTY FACES A LITTLE COMFORT A LITTLE EASE . . .

I AM ALWAYS GOING TO NEED JUST ONE MORE BREATH OF AIR. A TASTE OF FRESH BORN MOUNTAIN AIR, A BOUNTIFUL BREEZE. WITH NO MISGIVINGS OR REMORSE NO SILENT TAKE BACK PLEAS . . .

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William Hogarth, The Adventure of Mambrino’s Helmet (Six Illustrations for Don Quixote), engraving, 1756, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Isabella Degen CHRISTIAN MEDARD MANTEUFFEL—A POET IN THE SHADOW OF POLISH LITERATURE Christian Medard Manteuffel, also known as Krystian Czerwiński, a Polish poet, prose writer and essayist, celebrated last year his 80th birthday and 57th anniversary of his literary work consisting of prose, poetry and essays that build literary bridges on an European scale.

Biography Born on the 28th of May 1938 in Brest Kujawski, Manteuffel made his debut in 1962 in the weekly magazine Pomorze published in Bydgoszcz. In 1968, the first collection of his short stories entitled Stamping the Grey Horses was published. In the 1970’s, until the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, Manteuffel published under the name of Czerwiński in the “second circulation” press, i.e. in underground magazines independent of the Communist censorship.

His texts were printed in Solidarność, Bratniak and Wolne Związki. Czerwiński appeared next to the great names of Czesław Miłosz and Bertolt Brecht in the underground edition of Poetry of Martial Law (Warsaw 1981) as well.

In 1988 he emigrated to Germany due to a heart condition requiring surgery. He acquired the German citizenship while retaining the Polish one. In Germany he published his own works as well as translations from German to Polish under the name of his mother, Manteuffel.

He became a member of the Else-Lasker-Schüler-Gesellschaft e.V., a German literary association, whose objective, as prescribed in its articles, was to help restore European literature from mass destruction by the Nazis after 1933. He also published poems in the almanacs of the Wortundmensch publishing house. His works were included in three collections published in the Bibliothek des deutschsprachigen Gedichtes series.

Initially, he lived in Leningen (Baden) where he wrote poems about the beauty of the Swabian highlands. In 2016 he moved with his family to Frankfurt am Main where he currently lives.

Throughout the years he wrote essays on Polish relations with European culture, presenting eminent figures such as Karl Dedecius and Marcel Reich-Ranicki and emphasising their merits in bringing Polish literature closer to the German readers.

A Poet of Kujawy and Swabia Christian Manteuffel is like a watchmaker looking for the past time, cut out from the past, constantly stumbling between the verses in search of the truth. He is the author of self-reflective, lyrical poems, knowing very well that pain can live in every dream and that life is a breathing process making us far from and then close to the mystery of existence. He is a poet of the myth for whom Poland was and still is a sacrum. He always knew that the fate of life was to take responsibility for his destiny.

His ways of life were often intertwined with crossroads. This exactly is the title of his collection of poems in German Gedichte aus den Scheidewegen (some of the poems were translated into German by his daughter). In Poland in 2011, Manteuffel was recognized by his home town as an artist of the Brest Region (Kujawy), but in Germany he remains associated with Swabia. These parting roads lead him all over again to Germany, his mother's home, and to Poland, his father's country.

In the poems written in Germany Manteuffel describes the process of adaptation to the landscape of Swabia and the Lenningen Valley, which remind him of the most beautiful corners of the Polish Bieszczady Mountains. The slopes covered with beech trees, in winter all leafless, induced a feeling of nostalgia in him; the note of drama is entwined with life's transformations, his poetry tends to be reflective and sensitive to every small detail.

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In the volume entitled The Weak Cornflowers, Comedie Larmoyante, Christian Medard Manteuffel describes the existential burnt-out and internal tearing, a record of reaching a painful self-awareness. These poems are probably the most poignant and deep in his poetry as they tame the end of life and work, the passing away, reaching the finish line. This poet, whose closest places were forests, valleys and meadows, always followed his own paths, trying to leave behind the noise coming from the world. As in a kaleidoscope, events and human faces are repeated, and all becomes a message from a man who wants to leave behind at least a part of his life.

Love—the motif of poetry and life In Manteuffel's poetry we can find a spark of artistry of Cyprian K. Norwid. It is apparent that Norwid has been his master, probably because they share a love for their homeland from the perspective of living abroad.

He begins his poetic book Letters to Kama 1988 by quoting Norwid’s correspondence to Bronisław Z.: “. . . What do I write?—you asked me—here's the letter I'm writing to you. “ In there, Manteuffel pays homage to his muse and wife. The poet reveals to us the eternal mystery of his life, asks the eternal question about the meaning of existence. He finds a meaning in the meeting of two loving people, defining in his poetry what true feelings are for him. The lyrical story documents their love, secret encounters, closeness and reconciliation; then further life, moments of happiness and moments deprived of joy. In these letters the poet creates a beautiful and expressive portrait of love for a woman and an image of their common destinies. Manteuffel's poems are full of melancholy, atmospheric images, silences, unfinished thoughts. Between the poems there are many prose additions that allow the reader to understand the record of these memories.

Letters to Kama—it all began in 1945, when seven-year-old Krystian, waiting for the return of his closest ones, standing by the roadside, spelled the horses in the wagons of war, and at the same time stamped his childhood dreams with his thumb on the other hand. Then not only dreams awaited him, but also other difficulties through the next stages of his life.

A visit to Brest Kujawski in 2001 was like saying goodbye to what had already passed and would not return. It is reflected in the poem Przejazdem w Brześciu, dedicating this work to the composer of his own memories.

Summa poetica The Valley of Fossilia. Polish artists in the landscape of German culture is a collection of essays published in 2013 by the Municipal Public Library in Włocławek. In various cultural contexts and arrangements, Czesław Miłosz, Fryderyk Chopin, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Stanisław Przybyszewski, Tadeusz Kwiatkowski-Cugow, Jerzy Grupiński, Yvan and Claire Goll, Else Lasker-Schüler and others appear. Manteuffel continues to show insightfully, with passion and precision the inseparable links between Polish and European literature. He published his essays, among others, in Polish literary magazines, such as Odra and Krytyka Literacka, Twórczość, Topos or Akant. His works were also published in the Polish press abroad: Przegląd Polski (USA), Zarys (Germany), Recogito (France), Jupiter (Austria), Znad Wilii (Lithuania).

When a poet or writer happily reaches a dignified age, he usually sums up his past years. Then metaphysical, existential and prophetic poetry about the end of one's own life becomes the highest floor we reach. Manteuffel deals with this subject extremely subtly and with great wisdom, which saturated him with life. It is characterized by stoicism, gentleness, reconciliation with fate and unpretentiousness. Just as he once listened with fear to the sounds of his sick heart, so now he listens to the echoes coming to him from the universe. This theme is like a climax, his poems are full of cheerful sadness, insightful, intimate familiarization with his own journey to the other side.

This is defined in the prose and poetry collection Słone chabry, Comedie Larmoyante, 2005.

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(. . .) We are the context of something great and incomprehensible . . . Our lives are poetry. We are here only to raise and move her message to the last word. We are the context, our words float in the context of the dead, demolished, forgotten cultures with all the imperfect responsibility for what is to come next . . .

[We Are the Context (instead of the afterword)]

With these words Christian Medard Manteuffel summarizes his own work, which carries the humanistic message of what is most important, most beautiful, most dramatic and simply human.

Translated by Adam Gałamaga

Hendrick Goltzius, The Agony in the Garden, from The Passion of Christ, engraving, 1597, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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CHRISTIAN MEDARD MANTEUFFEL

“Solidarity” Is a Word To my grandson, Cyprian

. . . the stirring image from the postcard of Gdańsk from 1980, the crosses that man carefully erected from the darkness of his sins and once again brought them up to the light from heaven But on the outskirts of town, from the weeds that cover the ashes and the ruins, a memory of those days snickers insidiously, as a bad dream from your childhood It is the word that fills the light above the city, it casts ephemeral human shadows on the cobblestones of Gdańsk’ streets; they will disappear in the darkness if the word is silenced.

Far away from Gdańsk in January 2019

The Spring of the Iraqi Bride I will cry together with a spring cloud, And maybe you will emerge from the black soil of darkness As the most beautiful spring flower!

—Hafez (Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muhammad Hāfez-e Shīrāzī, A Sad Spring)

. . . grey clouds on the horizon; the spring is not in a rush to arrive in fields and uncover grey lumps of earth. Asylum seekers start their fires of the grey branches of apple trees, frozen over during winter. A cold gust of wind warms itself as it carries a scent of roasted muton in the grey smoke.

The tree’s shadow hides the white last bits of winter, and the buds of Easter are getting white on the flaccid branches of the willow tree; the white veil of the Iraqi bride’s is getting torn by the hawthorn bushes by the spring; a hunch-backed white heron has a trout in its sight. .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

On the banks of the Euphrates Allah changes wedding wine into blood; bitter tulips bloom red in the sands of the desert;

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they sparkle red in the water: —a sharp thorn of the bush, —the red eyes of the fish And a red stone in your engagement ring . . .

Germany, the Swabian Jura, 21.03.2003 (beginning of the war in Iraq) Translated by Lota Rygiel

Albrecht Dürer, Man of Sorrows, engraving, ca. 1500 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Dovid Katz ANTISEMITISM IN THE SHTETL

T

he words “antisemitism in the shtetl” might evoke recollections of Fiddler on the Roof, a touch of family lore “from the old country” way back when, or for those familiar with modern Yiddish literature, a scene from this or that writer.

Baffling as it may sound, however, it a substantial contemporary topic in the study of antisemitism, and, perhaps even more surprisingly, part of a phenomenon with implications for the future, given the vast number of cities, towns and villages in the world with a rich Jewish history but no living Jews, where potent anti-Jewish feeling (as well as pro-Jewish feeling) can be observed.

As noted back in Flashpoint 21, antisemitism in Eastern Europe is very different from its much better known Western and Middle East incarnations. It is a nonviolent movement that often emanates from elites with lavish government budgets at their disposal, who are determined to rewrite Holocaust history in the spirit of the new far-right. Its adherents often despise the remaining, precariously weak and sometimes-shrinking Jewish communities of the region, while heaping unbridled praise and sundry favors upon useful Western and Israeli Jews who may naively be recruited. Major elements of the new Holocaust revisionism, known as Double Genocide, include the posited “equality” of Nazi and Soviet crimes, the glorification of Holocaust collaborators who were also anti-Soviet (in the East, they were virtually all anti-Soviet), and the vilification (and attempted prosecutions) of Holocaust victims (perished and survivors alike) who joined the anti-Nazi partisan resistance in the forests as being “war criminals” for the history books of future generations.

It is both natural and necessary that institutions dedicated to the study and unmasking of antisemitism (and all forms of racism and prejudice against fellow humans) emphasize studies and events that will combat our decade’s two major—and deadly—international purveyors of antisemitism: Islamist jihadism and the (primarily West European) suave far left that vilifies Israel and its supporters to the absurd point of seeking out “good” Jews who are, in its view, sufficiently negative toward Israel. Still, the study of contemporary antisemitism needs to find ways and means of fathoming many of its other, and understudied, manifestations. * Millions of people throughout Eastern Europe live today in a town that was once a shtetl.

The Yiddish word, itself historically a diminutive of shtot (“city”), pluralizes to shtétlakh, but English has nativized the plural to shtetls. A shtetl was not just any old town. True, there are no universally agreed parameters, but we can here safely go with this: an East European town or village with a considerable proportion of Yiddish-speaking Jews in its population, usually for centuries, concentrated around the town center, up until the Holocaust; one with a central square or open market area with one or more churches and synagogues in or near that square or market.

These distinguish it from the smaller dorf or yíshev (“hamlet” or “small village”). Shtetlness is in fact the default for much of East European Yiddish culture, with the hamlet dweller being marked as a yishúvnik or dórfs-yid, and the big-city person attracting the epithet a shtótishe(r).

In the consciousness of many Western Jews with shtetl born-and-raised parents, grandparents and forebears, there was, in many cases, a late twentieth century shift away from feelings of shame at less-than-Long-Island ancestry to a romanticization of a world that was starting to disappear even in memory, along with the last generations of prewar emigrés and Holocaust survivors. Important anthologies of Yiddish fiction in English translation were published over the years by, among others, Irving Howe & Eliezer Greenberg, Hillel Halkin, Eli Katz, Joseph Leftwich, Joachim Neugroschel, and Ruth Wisse. Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog’s Life is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl continues to inform many of the nonfiction studies.

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For around twenty-five years, working closely with dedicated colleagues, I have traveled through hundreds of erstwhile shtetls in Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia (and to a lesser extent, northeastern Poland and eastern Ukraine) looking for The Last of the Mohicans, for a (slowmoving, modest, unfunded) dialectological atlas of the northern (Litvak) areas of Jewish Eastern Europe. But we also heard and recorded the Holocaust-related memories of these last-in-theirshtetl Jews, and often asked the following question: “What would you like to see here a hundred years hence?” Almost invariably, the answer includes the following: A memorial tablet of one kind or another right in the middle of town about the history of the town’s Jews including what happened to them. When we would come back with “What do you think about the big beautiful memorial in the forest at the mass grave site?” the answers were almost always in the spirit of “Sure, very nice, especially for the rich Jews from abroad who come once a year or whenever to get photographed with our glorious politicians, but people from the town and people visiting the town itself will never know about the Jews who lived here, when they came, how many they were, what they gave this town or the world, and exactly how they all at once disappeared from the face of the earth.”

It is not seldom the case that the laser-sharp points made by Holocaust survivors merit the attention even of accomplished scholars and organizational leaders and politicians who nowadays make a lot of hay from Holocaust remembrance events, ceremonies, and medals. * Let us now turn from Jewish survivors’ discourse to antisemitic parlance. Over the same quarter century we have often heard from (friendly, hospitable) folks in former shtetls in Lithuania and Latvia narratives along the lines of: “Look, we have nothing against anybody, but those Jews who were here before the war were communists, they sold our country to Moscow, they participated in the Soviet genocide against our people in 1940, and then, sure, the Nazis, in 1941, found, as they did everywhere, local scum to do their dirty work. But 1940 comes before 1941, right? But look, if the rich Jews from America, Israel, and South Africa and everywhere else want to build a huge monument in the forest and go there every year, sure, why not? The birds certainly like it. Hey, and please, let them start investing here too, but please don’t tell us what to do or say in the center of our own town.”

Alas, many towns in Lithuania, like its larger cities, continue to sport street names, public plaques, school names and museum exhibits honoring the local Holocaust collaborators, or indeed killers, of 1941, on the grounds that they were “anti-Soviet rebels.” Actually, nearly all the East European Holocaust killers were “anti-Soviet.” Contrary to local nationalist misinformation, these locals did not drive out the Soviets, who were in fact fleeing from Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in human history, launched on 22 June 1941. But local museums that make “national heroes” of the nationalists who started butchering their defenseless Jewish neighbors (often starting with young women and old rabbis) before the first German soldiers even got there are capable of fooling naive foreign visitors, even reporters from the New York Times or the San Francisco Examiner. One tireless, patriotic and courageous Lithuanian campaigner, Evaldas Balčiūnas, who does not want to see his beloved country honor murderers, has exposed more and more of the collaborator-honoring public infrastructure. But instead of getting the medal he deserves, whether from his own country or one of the international Jewish organizations, he has been lugged into court here in Vilnius for years on ridiculous charges intended to deter others from speaking up (finally to be found “not guilty” last summer, after years of harassment). There have been many other bold Lithuanian truth tellers, all patriotic citizens, in the quarter century since independence. * But that is only one side of the coin. The other concerns the actual programs for commemorating a former shtetl’s former Jewish community. And, over the years, we’ve seen it all.

In one former shtetl, a foundation set up (with funds from Jewish properties) went ahead and enabled tearing down the old and for generations-beloved town-center synagogue building in

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return for funds for a lavish memorial out in the forest and other projects. All blessed by foreign Jewish big-wigs from South Africa lavishing photo-ops at a posh ceremony where we all got fancy bags with a brick from the demolished prayerhouse to take home as a souvenir (in 2011).

Another former shtetl that finally (in 2015) put up an informational sign up at the site of the former synagogues also left “in peace” the huge swastika-worshipping monument in the town square with no addition of some modern comment. To be sure, it is a pre-Nazi swastika from the 1920s, but given the annihilation of a majority of that same town’s residents “under” that precise symbol, some curatorial comment would be on the sensitive side. Instead, our host from the local government proudly noted that the town’s prewar swastika was prominently cited in the court case that got swastikas legalized in Lithuania back in 2010.

Then there is a former shtetl where in addition to lavish sculptures at the mass grave site, an original monument was in fact erected in the town center. Bizarrely, it is of a girl in her early teens, accompanied by a sign in Lithuanian, English and Yiddish that reads “For Sheduva Jews.”

But which and what Jews, from when and how many, what did they contribute, and at whose hands did they come to disappear from the face of the town all at once?

But there have been towns where deeply dedicated local humanists have managed to break through to the quick. One actually bears a town-center plaque that concisely cites the vintage of the Jewish community, the totality of the number butchered in 1941, and the mention of local collaborators (in a multitude of towns, local volunteer “patriots” from all walks of life constituted the vast majority of the shooting squads). In another town, the truth of the history—including local collaboration—has become part of a sensitive annual remembrance ceremony thanks in no small part to courageous local councilors and educators. * That was all by way of introduction, so to speak, to a recent event that has attracted vastly more than usual media coverage for shtetl commemorations. This time around, a typical Lithuanian shtetl got an atypical commemoration. That shtetl, in northeastern Lithuania, is Malát (in Yiddish; its current official Lithuanian name is Molėtai). Its two thousand Jews were murdered on 29 August 1941. Not a single one was rescued by a righteous local, though there were some rescues in nearby villages by inspirationally brave people. They were murdered, under German Nazi auspices, by several dozen local enthusiastic shooters (in other words, neighbors of the victims with whom they’d lived all their lives) of a wide array of professions, including post office manager, teachers and students (not the “dregs and drunkards of society” proffered by the apologists). The genocide was observed, as usual for such towns, by an SS officer, a German photographer, and an official translator.

Malát’s victims were to have a somewhat “different 21st century fate” from those of thousands of other shtetls in Eastern Europe because of the initiative of two second generation Holocaust survivors who were born in Vilnius after the war. One is Tzvi (Hirsh) Kritzer, a successful soccer player agent in Israel who launched a “think big” project last year (march, rally, monument, exhibition, film, book, an ongoing foundation), focused on the massacre’s 75th anniversary, on 29 August 2016. He avoided the pitfall of speaking “only to the official Jews” here and consulted freely with everyone in town, not least bold Lithuanian historians who have stood up for the truth.

He partnered with another second-gen survivor whom he had known as a boy in postwar Vilnius, the famous master piano educator Leon (Liova or Leybke) Kaplan. Kaplan settled in Washington DC where he founded the Washington Conservatory of Music and was much honored for his work.

He returned to live in his native Vilnius over a decade ago. Both 2016 partners in the memorialization of a parent’s shtetl are on the planet because on 29th August 1941 those parents were not in town. Kritzer’s father Tsódik had already fled to the Soviet Union (the only realistic hope of survival for any Jew in the country); Leon’s mother Hínde was at the time living in Kaunas (Kovno).

This year’s 29th August memorial event was the largest-ever voluntarily attended Holocaust memorial event in the history of modern Lithuania (“voluntarily” is used here in contradistinction to events where government employees or school children are “pressed into service”). The event itself attracted over a thousand people (the most conservative estimate, some estimate more than 41

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double that figure). Most were Lithuanians who came from the capital, Vilnius (historic Vilna).

It seems from onsite interviews that a very high percentage of them was inspired to come by two remarkable, stark, unforgettably right-to-the-gut articles by a famed Lithuanian playwright born in the town, Marius Ivaškevičius (Jews: The Curse of Lithuania, last May; and I am not a Jew, in August, days before the commemoration event). The playwright was himself recruited to the cause, in turn, by the deeply committed and courageous head of the local regional museum, Viktorija Kazlienė, a widely-admired personality for whom seeking, telling and then professionally depicting (via museum science) The Simple Truth is the highest ideal, in stark contrast to so many museum heads in the Baltics and beyond. In other words, the proverbial stars lined up for a team of local and non-local truth tellers, Lithuanians and Jews in blessed partnership, to do this together, with the star power of playwright Ivaškevičius (pronounced ee-vash-KAH-vih-tshus) drawing the critical mass necessary for something to turn into a bona fide national event rather than the type of PR connivance that predominates in the region.

Using modern tools for expressing empathy for individual victims one did not personally know, Lithuanian people carried large posters each with a photograph of an individual victim, and in some cases, of rescuers from different parts of the region who did save a neighbor. Various of the speakers dealt honestly with the identity of the murderers and the place where they came from. But only Leon Kaplan, of all the speakers, dared in his speech to break the taboo on criticizing the multiple memorials for perpetrators in the country: “I do not want to see streets, schools and squares named after those whose bloody hands participated in the mass murder. Just the opposite: I would like to see the names of the local people who saved a neighbor, the Righteous of the Nations, immortalized in the names of streets, schools and squares in our Lithuania.”

At the same time, it is necessary to be frank about the dark forces that came to light during preparations for the event. The state-sponsored “Genocide Center” in Vilnius tried hard to prevent the organizers from citing the correct number of victims, around 2,000, on the large multilingual monument unveiled at the event, insisting on the “politically corrected” number of 700. But Mr. Kaplan fearlessly went right over their heads, up and down the government, to ensure that the antisemitic Genocide Center would on this occasion fail ignominiously. As ever, photo-op famished political figures and ambassadors used the occasion for “Mount Rushmore” style PR photos (hours before any of the participants actually gathered). An array of players, some with great achievements and some not, rushed to take credit for the event, and some of that comes out in some of the hyperbolic accounts to be found in some parts of the media coverage). Politicians who attended included two signatories of the 2008 Prague Declaration, the “constitution” of the far right’s Double Genocide movement in Eastern Europe. Incredibly, the honored guests included a Catholic priest who declares that the perpetrators were also victims, as per the typical apologetics of the local obfuscators, and a national leader of the Lithuanian Evangelical Reformed Church who has yet to even answer any of the calls over the years asking for removal of the steps to his own central Vilnius church which are all made of pilfered Jewish gravestones, some with stubbornly defiant old Jewish letters quite readable (in other words, you have to trample Jewish gravestones to enter the church). Various of the officials in attendance are supporters of plans for a central Vilnius Congress Center in the heart of the old Jewish cemetery, surrounded by remains of many thousands of Vilna Jews whose families purchased their burial plots between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. That wouldn’t be the case if those were Christian graves, as bold Christian theologians have accurately pointed out.

Then there was a most memorable twist in the 2016 story of Malát. Earlier this year, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi-hunter, Efraim Zuroff, working with Lithuanian author and political public relations specialist Ruta Vanagaitė, (they are coauthors of an important book on the Lithuanian Holocaust), exposed plans afoot in today’s Molėtai to go ahead and rename a street in memory of a local priest who rushed enthusiastically to assemble the murder squad of his town’s Jews (the squad of killers included his brother). The episode was reported in a Jerusalem Post article by the intrepid Sam Sokol, who continues to defy the Western media’s curtain of silence over East European Holocaust-collaborator glorification (especially concerning Ukraine).

That priest, Jonas Žvinys, is a relative and namesake of the current mayor of Molėtai, Stasys

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Žvinys. In his own speech at the August 29th event, the mayor spoke appropriately about his town’s murdered Jews. But it seems that nobody had bothered, or is bothering, to hold him to account for failing to utter the one sentence that would matter: “I oppose any and all efforts to name streets for the collaborators and perpetrators of the Holocaust in our town, or any town, even if it is a relative of mine.” (One rumor circulating is that to avoid the “Wrath of the Jews” the Holocaust collaborating priest will be honored in a nearby village, perhaps Dubingiai, until the “time is right” for it to pass unnoticed in Malát / Molėtai itself.) * To return to the future of commemorations of the annihilated shtetl Jewry of Eastern Europe, it is vital that a set of standards be debated to avert the abuse of such commemorations by a variety of players ranging from the sincere and naive to the antisemitic and canny. Our own proposals, rooted in those of Holocaust survivors over the years, are starkly simple: First, that there be a modest information board in the center of town containing the basic information on the origins, history, achievements and numbers of the erstwhile Jewish community and how they came to suddenly disappear, with prominent mention of local participation in the town massacre where that was the case. Second, rapid and voluntary removal of the names of Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators from street-names, monuments, museum exhibits and other publicly funded means of glorifying national heroes. You can’t remotely be sincere about remembering the victims when you honor their killers, too. In the case of the worst genocide in human history, such crocodile tears are supremely offensive. And finally, where a plaque is multilingual, and not just for local people, it should include Yiddish, the language of 100% of the victims. The victims were neither Israelis nor American Jews. These simple tests of sincerity cost vastly less than some of the extravagant monuments at mass grave sites to be found in the forests of Eastern Europe. * Academic antisemitism studies in the region continue to be hampered by powerful politics. First comes the politics of the New Cold War, whereby there is reluctance to criticize anything about our NATO (or pro-NATO) allies, least of all on points of history on which these allies delude themselves into thinking they have a potent weapon against today’s (very real) Putinist threat in the form of “fixing the history” (note the rather curious records of the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office in recent years). In the hands of the neocons and their followers, this tendency reaches its apex. Then there is the painful issue of Israeli policy on which there have been numerous public debates.

Holocaust manipulation is a major issue in East European antisemitism. That has been demonstrated in numerous scholarly works by, among others, Randolph L. Braham, Leonidas Donskis, Jan Gross, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Per Anders Rudling, Michael Shafir, and Efraim Zuroff. The late Robert Wistrich’s 2010 opus, A Lethal Obsession: Antisemitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad includes the important chapter 9, “Lying About the Holocaust.” But the boldest academic analysis of the current European nexus of antisemitism and Holocaust revisionism is to be found in Clemens Heni’s remarkable 2013 work, Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon, which exposes a number of German academic hands in the evolution of the current revisionism.

At the same time, East European governments, determined to pursue ultranationalist inspired Holocaust revisionism in the spirit of the 2008 Prague Declaration, need to demonstrate to the West that they are “fighting antisemitism,” hence an expensive effort to produce conferences and convocations that have come to be known to local Jews as “fake antisemitism conferences.”

After one such conference in Vilnius in 2015, the good-willed sponsors, a grant program from the EEA (comprising Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein) acted with admirable courage and dignity.

Norway’s universally admired ambassador to Lithuania took the time and trouble to convene meetings with various genuinely non-governmental groups to ensure that such a fiasco is not repeated.

Needless to say, the international August 2016 event at Malát (Molėtai) should be the subject of research by academics. It was, in fact, immediately grabbed upon by a paper with an impressive 43

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sounding name, “Two-Speed Memory and Ownership of the Past,” published in Transitions on Line, a notable “eurospeak-east” online journal. The paper heralds the “wide public attention, with representatives of virtually all political parties in attendance” but omits mentioning the plan before the town council to name a street for one of the collaborators in that very town, or indeed, the problem of street names and university lecture halls honoring Holocaust perpetrators across the land. Nor is there any mention of the annual marches on independence day that glorify Holocaust collaborators. Not a word about police and prosecutors’ efforts against citizens who stand up. One of the engines of European Holocaust revisionism, the deeply discredited “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania” (popularly the “red-brown commission”) is lovingly called “the truth commission.” The history of the (now ten year old) state campaign against Holocaust survivors (including permanent defamation in the history record and on the web) is grossly misrepresented as a case of some have being asked to simply serve as “witnesses,” the far right’s excuse-making canard from the outset. In point of fact, the Genocide Center operative who first demanded in 2006, in an antisemitic daily, that the commission’s own member, Holocaust survivor (and former Yad Vashem director) Dr. Yitzhak Arad, be “tried for crimes against Lithuania” (not that he be called as a “witness”) has now been rewarded with full membership of said “truth commission.” Needless to say, this “academic paper” does not bother to mention the paper that Dr. Arad himself published about the commission and the entire topic. When East European nationalist propaganda is disguised as academic research, the scholarly imperative of citing published works that express a contrary opinion falls right off the table.

The paper’s final sentence reads: “In the end, a heightened public interest in the nature and history of collaboration, stimulated by the current Russian threat, may well promote a more complete coming to terms with the role of Lithuanians in the atrocities of both the Soviet and Nazi regimes.” Indeed, conformity with the Baltic straightjacket dictates inclusion of both these “required endings”: First, that today’s (very real) Russian threat must be mixed up with discussions of the history of the Holocaust (and the very need to discuss the Holocaust here on its ground zero). Second, that any studies of collaboration in the murder of around 96% of Lithuania’s Jewish population must come together with studies of collaboration with the Soviet Union, because, so it is implied, all is after all equal and the same, and we are back to the tenets of what is also unmentioned in the article but hovers over it all: the Prague Declaration and its five uses of the word “same” to cover Nazi and Soviet crimes.

As an old Yiddish saying puts it, the whole world is just one big shtetl. Current political winddrifts and some states’ substantial investments in coopting pliant Western and Israeli scholars have made it harder, temporarily, to study East European Holocaust obfuscation, Double Genocide revisionism, and the unique strains of antisemitism observed in the region. All the more reason for seasoned scholars in these fields to rise to the task of the hour.

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Jacopo de’Barbari, The Sacrifice of Priapus, engraving, ca. 1499 – 1501, The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, New York

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Lugwig von Mises LAISSEZ FAIRE OR DICTATORSHIP What the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences says about Laissez Faire For more than a hundred years the maxim laissez faire, laissez passer has been a red rag to harbingers of totalitarian despotism. As these zealots see it, this maxim condenses all the shameful principles of capitalism. To unmask its fallacies is therefore tantamount to exploding the ideological foundations of the system of private ownership of the means of production, and implicitly demonstrating the excellence of its antithesis, viz., communism and socialism.

The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences may fairly be considered as representative of the doctrines taught at American and British universities and colleges. Its nineth volume contains an article “Laissez Faire” from the pen of the Oxford Professor and author of detective stories, G. D. H. Cole. In the five and a quarter pages of his contribution Professor Cole freely indulges in the use of deprecatory epithets. The maxim “cannot stand examination,” it is only prevalent in “popular economics,” it is “theoretically bankrupt,” an “anachronism,” it survives only as a “prejudice,” but “as a doctrine deserving of theoretical respect it is dead.” Resort to these and many other similar opprobrious appellations fails to disguise the fact that Professor Cole's arguments entirely miss the point. Professor Cole is not qualified to deal with the problems involved because he simply does not know what the market economy is and how it works.

The only correct affirmation of his article is the truism that those rejecting laissez faire are Socialists. He is also right in declaring that the refutation of laissez faire is “as prominent in the national idea of Fascism in Italy as in Russian Communism.”

The volume which contains Mr. Cole’s article was published in January, 1933. This explains why he did not include Nazi Germany in the ranks of those nations which have freed themselves from the spell of the sinister maxim. He merely registers with satisfaction that the conception rejecting laissez faire is “at the back of many projects of national planning, which, largely under Russian influence, is now being put forward allover the world.”

Laissez Faire means free market economy Learned historians have bestowed much pains upon the question to whom the origin of the maxim laissez faire, laissez passer is to be attributed. At any rate it is certain that in the second part of the eighteenth century the outstanding French champions of economic freedom—foremost among them Gournay, Quesnay, Turgot and Mirabeau—compressed their program for popular use into this sentence. Their aim was the establishment of the unhampered market economy.

In order to attain this end they advocated the abolition of all statutes preventing the more industrious and more efficient people from outdoing the less industrious and less efficient competitors and restricting the mobility of commodities and of men. It was this that the famous maxim was designed to express.

In occasionally using the words laissez faire, laissez passer, the eighteenth century economists did not intend to baptize their social philosophy the laissezfaire doctrine. They concentrated their efforts upon the elaboration of a new system of social and political ideas which would benefit mankind. They were not eager to organize a faction or party and to find a name for it. It was only later, in the second decade of the nineteenth century, that a term came to signify the total complex of the political philosophy of freedom, viz., liberalism. The new word was borrowed from Spain where it designated the friends of constitutional government and religious freedom. Very soon it was used all over Europe as a label for the endeavors of those who stood for representative government, freedom of thought, of speech and of the press, private ownership of the means of production and free trade.

The liberal program is an indivisible and indissoluble whole, not an arbitrarily assembled

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patchwork of diverse components. Its various parts condition one another. The idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion.

Political freedom is the corollary of economic freedom. It is no accident that the age of capitalism became also the age of government by the people. If individuals are not free to buy and to sell on the market, they turn into virtual slaves dependent on the good graces of the omnipotent government, whatever the wording of the constitution may be.

The fathers of socialism and modern interventionism were fully aware that their own programs were incompatible with the political postulates of liberalism. The main target of their passionate attacks was liberalism as a whole. They did not make a distinction between the political and the economic aspects of liberalism.

But as the years went on, the Socialists and interventionists of the Anglo-Saxon countries discovered that it was a hopeless venture to attack liberalism and the idea of liberty openly.

The prestige of liberal institutions was so overwhelming in the English speaking world, that no party could risk defying them directly. Anti-liberalism’s only chance was to camouflage itself as true and genuine liberalism and to denounce the attitudes of all other parties as a mere counterfeit liberalism.

The continental Socialists had fanatically smeared and disparaged liberalism and progressivism, and contemptuously derogated democracy as “pluto democracy.” Their AngloSaxon imitators, who at first had adopted the same procedure, after a while reversed their semantics and arrogated to themselves the appellations liberal, progressive and democratic.

They began flatly to deny that political freedom is the corollary of economic freedom. They boldly asserted that democratic institutions can work satisfactorily only where the government has full control of all production activities and the individual citizen is bound to obey unconditionally all orders issued by the central planning board. In their eyes all-round regimentation is the only means to make people free, and freedom of the press is best guaranteed by a government monopoly of printing and publishing. They were not plagued by any scruples when they stole the good old name of liberalism and began to call their own tenets and policies liberal. In this country the term “liberalism” is nowadays more often than not used as a synonym for communism.

The semantic innovation which the Socialists and interventionists thus inaugurated left the advocates of freedom without any name. There was no term available to call those who believe that private ownership of the material factors of production is the best, in fact, the only means to make the nation and all its individual citizens as prosperous as possible and to make representative government work. The Socialists and interventionists believe that such people do not deserve any name, but are to be referred to only by such insulting epithets as “economic royalists,” “Wall Street sycophants,” “reactionaries” and so on.

This state of affairs explains why the phrase laissez faire was more and more used to signify the ideas of those who advocate the free market economy as against government planning and regimentation.

The Cairnes’ argument against Laissez Faire Today it is no longer difficult for intelligent men to realize that the alternative is market economy or communism. Production can either be directed by buying and abstention from buying on the part of all people, or it can be directed by the orders of the supreme chief of state. Men must choose between these two systems of society's economic organization. There is no third solution, no middle way.

It is a sad fact that not only politicians and demagogues have failed to see this essential truth, but that even some economists have erred in dealing with the problems involved.

There is no need to dwell upon the unfortunate influence which originated from John Stuart Mill’s confused treatment of government interference with business. It becomes evident from Mill’s Autobiography that his change of mind resulting in what he calls “a greater approximation . . . to a qualified socialism” was motivated by purely personal feelings and affections and not by emotionally undisturbed reasoning. It is certainly one of the tasks of economics to refute

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the errors which deform the disquisitions of so eminent a thinker as Mill. But it is unnecessary to argue against the prepossessions of Mill.

A few years after Mill, another outstanding economist, J. E. Cairnes, dealt with the same problem. As a philosopher and essayist Mill by far supersedes Cairnes. But as an economist Cairnes was not second to Mill, and his contributions to the epistemology of the social sciences are of incomparably greater value and importance than those of Mill. Yet, Cairnes’ analysis of laissez faire does not display that brilliant precision of reasoning which is the distinguishing mark of his other writings.

As Cairnes sees it, the assertion implied in the doctrine of laissez faire is that “the promptings of self-interest will lead individuals, in all that range of their conduct which has to do with their material well-being, spontaneously to follow that course which is most for their own good and for the good of all.” This assertion, he says, “involves the two following assumptions: first, that the interests of human beings are fundamentally the same—that what is most for my interest is also most for the interest of other people; and, secondly, that individuals know their interests in the sense in which they are coincident with the interests of others, and that, in the absence of coercion, they will in this sense follow them. If these two propositions be made out, the policy of laissez faire . . . follows with scientific rigour.”

Cairnes is disposed to accept the first—the major—premise of the syllogism, that the interests of human beings are fundamentally the same. But he rejects the second—the minor—premise.

“Human beings know and follow their interests according to their lights and dispositions; but not necessarily, nor in practice always, in the sense in which the interest of the individual is coincident with that of others and of the whole.”

Let us for the sake of argument accept the way in which Cairnes presents the problem and in which he argues. Human beings are fallible and therefore sometimes fail to learn what their true interests would require them to do. Furthermore, there are “such things in the world as passion, prejudice, custom, esprit de corps, class interest, to draw people aside from the pursuit of their interests in the largest and highest sense.” It is very unfortunate that reality is such. But, we must ask, is there any means available to prevent mankind from being hurt by people's bad judgment and malice? Is it not a non sequitur to assume that one could avoid the disastrous consequences of these human weaknesses by substituting the government's discretion for that of the individual citizens? Are governments endowed with intellectual and moral perfection? Are the rulers not human too, not themselves subject to human frailties and deficiencies?

The theocratic doctrine is consistent in attributing to the head of the government superhuman powers. The French royalists contend that the solemn consecration at Rheims conveys to the King of France, anointed with the sacred oil which a dove from Heaven brought down for the consecration of Clovis, divine dispensation. The legitimate king cannot err and cannot do wrong, and his royal touch miraculously cures scrofula. No less consistent was the late German Professor Werner Sombart in declaring that Fuhrertum is a permanent revelation and that the Fuhrer gets his orders directly from God, the supreme Fuhrer of the Universe. Once you admit these premises, you can no longer raise any objections against planning and socialism. Why tolerate the incompetence of clumsy and ill-intentioned bunglers if you can be made happy and prosperous by the God-sent authority?

But Cairnes is not prepared to accept “the principle of State control, the doctrine of paternal government.” His disquisitions peter out in vague and contradictory talk that leaves the relevant question unanswered. He does not comprehend that it is indispensable to choose between the supremacy of individuals and that of the government. Some agency must determine how the factors of production should be employed and what should be produced. If it is not the consumer, by means of buying and abstention from buying on the market, it must be the government by compulsion.

If one rejects laissez faire on account of man’s fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reasons also reject every kind of government action. Cairnes’ mode of arguing, provided it is not integrated into a theocratic philosophy in the manner of the French royalists or the German Nazis, leads to complete anarchism and nihilism.

One of the distortions to which the self-styled “progressives” resort in smearing laissez faire is

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the statement that consistent application of laissez faire must result in anarchy. There is no need to dwell upon this fallacy. It is more important to stress the fact that Cairnes’ argument against laissez faire, when consistently carried through to its inevitable logical consequences, is essentially anarchistic.

“Conscious planning” versus “automatic forces” As the self-styled “progressives” see things, the alternative is: “automatic forces” or “conscious planning.” It is obvious, they go on saying, that to rely upon automatic processes is sheer stupidity. No reasonable man can seriously recommend doing nothing and letting things go without any interference through purposive action. A plan, by the very fact that it is a display of conscious action, is incomparably superior to the absence of any planning. Laissez faire means: let evils last and do not try to improve the lot of mankind by reasonable action. This is utterly fallacious and deceptive talk. The argument advanced for planning is derived entirely from an inadmissable interpretation of a metaphor. It has no foundation other than the connotations implied in the term “automatic,” which is customarily applied in a metaphorical sense to describe the market process. Automatic, says the Concise Oxford Dictionary, means “unconscious, unintelligent, merely mechanical.” Automatic, says Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, means “not subject to the control of the will . . . performed without active thought and without conscious intention or direction.” What a triumph for the champion of planning to play this trump-card!

The truth is that the choice is not between a dead mechanism and a rigid automatism on the one hand and conscious planning on the other hand. The alternative is not plan or no plan.

The question is: whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself or should the paternal government alone plan for all? The issue is not automatism versus conscious action; it is spontaneous action of each individual versus the exclusive action of the government. It is freedom versus government omnipotence.

Laissez faire does not mean: let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: let individuals choose how they want to cooperate in the social division of labor and let them determine what the entrepreneurs should produce. Planning means: let the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion.

The satisfaction of man's “true” needs Under laissez faire, says the planner, the goods produced are not those which people “really” need, but those goods from the sale of which the highest returns are expected. It is the objective of planning to direct production toward the satisfaction of “true” needs. But who should decide what “true” needs are?

Thus, for instance, Professor Harold Laski, the former chairman of the British Labor Party, determined the objective of planned direction of investment as “the use of the investor’s savings will be in housing rather than in cinemas.” It does not matter whether or not one agrees with the professor's personal view that better houses are more important than moving pictures. The fact is that consumers, by spending part of their money for admission to the movies, have made another choice. If the masses of Great Britain, the same people whose votes swept the Labor Party into power, were to stop patronizing the moving pictures and to spend more for comfortable homes and apartments, profit-seeking business would be forced to invest more in building homes and apartment houses, and less in the production of swanky pictures. What Professor Laski aimed at is to defy the wishes of the consumers and to substitute his own will for theirs. He wanted to do away with the democracy of the market and to establish the absolute rule of a production czar.

He might pretend that he is right from a “higher” point of view, and that as a superman he is called upon to impose his own set of values on the masses of inferior men. But then he should have been frank enough to say so plainly.

All this passionate praise of the super-eminence of government action is merely a poor

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disguise for the individual interventionist’s self-deification. The Great God State is great only because it is expected to do exclusively what the individual advocate of interventionism wants to be achieved. The only true plan is the one of which the individual planner fully approves. All other plans are simply counterfeit. What the author of a book on the benefits of planning has in mind is, of course, always his own plan alone. No planner was ever shrewd enough to consider the possibility that the plan which the government will put into practice could differ from his own plan.

The various planners agree only with regard to their rejection of laissez faire, i.e., the individual’s discretion to choose and to act. They disagree entirely on the choice of the unique plan to be adopted. To every exposure of the manifest and incontestable defects of interventionist policies the champions of interventionism always react in the same way. These faults, they say, were the sins of spurious interventionism; what we are advocating is good interventionism.

And, of course, good interventionism is the professor's own brand only.

“Positive” policies versus “negative” policies In dealing with the ascent of modern statism, socialism and interventionism, one must not neglect the preponderant role played by the pressure groups and lobbies of civil servants and those university graduates who longed for government jobs. Two associations were paramount in Europe’s progress toward “social reform”: the Fabian Society in England and the Verein für Sozialpolitik in Germany. The Fabian Society had in its earlier days a “wholly disproportionate representation of civil servants.” With regard to the Verein für Sozialpolitk, one of its founders and most eminent leaders, Professor Lujo Brentano, admitted that at the beginning it called no other response than from the civil servants.

It is not surprising that the civil service mentality was reflected in the semantic practices of the new factions. Seen from the point of view of the particular group interests of the bureaucrats, every measure that makes the government's payroll swell is progress. Politicians who favor such a measure make a positive contribution to welfare, while those who object are negative. Very soon this linguistic innovation became general. The interventionists, in claiming for themselves the appellation “liberal,” explained that they, of course, were liberals with a positive program as distinguished from the merely negative program of the “orthodox” laissez-faire people.

Thus he who advocates tariffs, censorship, foreign exchange control, price control supports a positive program that will provide jobs for customs officers, censors, and employees of the offices for price control and foreign exchange control. But free traders and advocates of the freedom of the press are bad citizens; they are negative. Laissez faire is the embodiment of negativism, while socialism, in converting all people into government employees, is 100 percent positive. The more a former liberal completes his defection from liberalism and approaches socialism, the more “positive” does he become.

It is hardly necessary to stress that this is all nonsense. Whether an idea is enunciated in an affirmative or in a negative proposition depends entirely on the form which the author chooses to give it. The “negative” proposition, I am against censorship, is identical with the “positive” proposition, I am in favor of everybody's right to publicize his opinions. Laissez faire is not even formally a negative formula; rather it is the contrary of laissez faire that would sound negative.

Essentially, the maxim asks for private ownership of the means of production. This implies, of course, that it rejects socialism. The supporters of laissez faire object to government interference with business not because they “hate” the “state” or because they are committed to a “negative” program. They object to it because it is incompatible with their own positive program, the free market economy.

Conclusion—Laissez faire means: let the individual citizen, the much talked-about common man, choose and act and do not force him to yield to a dictator.

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Giulio Bonasone, The Trojans Pulling the Wooden Horse Into the City, engraving, 1545, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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On Tomasz Marek Sobieraj’s Poetry Tomasz Marek Sobieraj is a genuine poet writing in the magnificent Polish tradition of Nobel laureates as Wisława Szymborska and Czesław Miłosz. With a gifted spirit he investigates what is possible to say about life, now, from the heart of Europe: “After all, history / does not have to repeat itself”, “Now I let myself be seduced / like an insect, / tempted by the aroma of ripe apples.”

Niels Hav

Under the crushing pressure of history, Tomasz Marek Sobieraj has mined these diamond like poems. “A drop of wine on the sheet” he has scattered ashes & the winds have brought back music.

Harry Nudel

The poetic voice powering the poems in this very impressive collection is that of a poet who sees, to quote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, “the dearest freshness deep down things”. One also senses a mind always aware of the mad and uneasy historical shadows below our daily living, the evil period of the Holocaust and other inhuman atrocities.

This is a writer whose sharp intelligence is evident in his matured vision, a writer who observes and controls his use of language in a careful manner. The result is poems that reward the reader with sensuous descriptions and striking lines that stick like burrs in the mind.

Peter Thabit Jones

In his “Boy in the Fog” poet Tomasz Marek Sobieraj, following a young collector who will gather insects, says that the lad’s jar “will become the destiny for some of them, / a train to extermination of small living creatures / gassed with ether and pierced with a pin / in a small Auschwitz of a child’s room.” The poet’s daring here is enormous, his Holocaust reference absurd, of course, but not for the specimens themselves.

And at the center of the poet’s eye is the fog through which we and the boy move, the sun rising, losing “the innocent color of raspberries / to take on the lush eroticism of a ripe orange.” I have been that (perhaps pubescent) boy . . . Then, I had to catch my breath as, in his next poem, Sobieraj, giving no quarter, says that a German couple in their graves (d. 1926, but no matter the date) existed “like grass, an insect, / a bird.” Such is the dimension of the poet’s vision. He says he knows what is within any photograph, “and beyond its edge.” He sometimes turns his head away from death, but feels connected to an IV for metastatic cancer. He pretends to read. And for the poet, resurrection is theatre.

Lionel Trilling, praising Robert Frost, said that only a poet who terrifies us can satisfy us. In the final poem here, “Fourteen Minutes” (the duration of gassings at Kulmhof), Sobieraj returns us to the nadir of all human history. It is as though the boy in the fog has become one of the Sonderkommando who, after a long day’s work of extermination, drinks and laughs and takes snapshots (that photograph image again). What more is there to say? Here, we are in the presence of a master poet who trusts us with his deepest convictions, and for this we must be grateful. We are within him as he translates himself, and are mesmerized.

William Heyen

Tomasz Marek Sobieraj, Fourteen Minutes, translated by Erik La Prade; Cross-Cultural Communications, Merrick, New York, 2019. Available via Amazon.

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Alexander Voet II, The Death of Seneca, engraving, ca. 1655 - 1678, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Bartholomeus Spranger, Minerva and Mercury Arming Perseus, engraving, 1604, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York