More than once, Kott [a literary critic]
describes a drunken party taking place after the curfew in Nazi-occupied Warsaw . Kott enters a
room, where he sees two people, Jerzy Andrzejewski (author of Ashes and Diamonds) and Czeslaw
Milosz, on their knees making faces at each other.
They were
making the most horrible faces at one another. They banged their heads on the
floor and then, one, two, three, they raised their heads and made faces.
Private and public faces, innocent and obscene faces, military and civilian
faces, the faces of virgins and pederasts, and great historical faces—Beck [a
German general], Hitler, Stalin. They made the faces of the archetypal father
and king. Perhaps Czeslaw’s last face was Almighty God, after which Jerzy
collapsed on the floor. Who or what were they bowing to? To the prewar years or
to what lay ahead?
Kott was impressed that Milosz found the face Kott had
been looking for in the Thomists and the surrealists, in secular humanism and
Marxism—a face with which to confront a world of nihilism and cruelty, a world
of round-ups and summary executions.
~
Adam Michnik, “Gogol’s Venom: A Study in Lost Illusions,” Partisan
Review 3, 2000
Reading Milosz, one needs
to remember that he had the experience of walking out of a burning city. He had
witnessed the Apocalypse, but what followed was not New Jerusalem and the Peaceful Kingdom ,
but the Cold War, and the Moloch of the Soviet Union swallowing up Milosz’s beloved
Lithuania .
What saved Milosz from
being locked in a kind of literary post-traumatic stress syndrome? I think it was his ability to think in
universal categories, beyond nationalism, beyond contemporary history. In one
his essays, “Tiger,” I was struck by this passage:
I was
convinced that as long as we live, we must lift ourselves over new thresholds
of consciousness, that to aim at higher and higher thresholds is our only
happiness. While living [in Nazi-occupied Poland], I crossed one of those
thresholds – when we finally begin to
become the person we must be, and we are at once inebriated and a little
frightened at the enormous distance yet to be traveled. (Selected
Essays, p. 150, emphasis mine)
It so happens that my
mother, who was extraordinary, also said that she began to become herself
“during the worst of times,” when she joined the Polish Resistance and said
“Yes” when asked if she was willing to die. “That’s when I developed the most,”
she said.
I can’t compare my own
travails on my “long and winding road” to becoming a writer with my mother’s
heroism. But the invocation of the worst of times reminded me that I took my
first stumbling steps during the most miserable years of my life. First steps?
No, that’s not quite accurate. What Milosz describes makes total sense to me:
Early we receive a call,
yet it remains incomprehensible, and only late we discover
how obedient we were.
The river rolls its
waters, as it did long ago, past the church
of St. Jacob , I am there along
with my foolishness, which is shameful, but had I been wiser it would not have
helped.
Now I know foolishness is
necessary in all our designs, so that they are realized, awkwardly and
incompletely.
And this river, together with heaps of garbage on its banks, with the beginning of pollution, flows through my youth, a warning against the long for ideal places on the earth.
Yet, there, on that river, I experienced full happiness, a ravishment beyond any thought or concern, still lasting in my body.
Just like the happiness by the small river of my childhood, in a park whose oaks nad lindens were to be cut down by the will of barbarous conquerors.
And this river, together with heaps of garbage on its banks, with the beginning of pollution, flows through my youth, a warning against the long for ideal places on the earth.
Yet, there, on that river, I experienced full happiness, a ravishment beyond any thought or concern, still lasting in my body.
Just like the happiness by the small river of my childhood, in a park whose oaks nad lindens were to be cut down by the will of barbarous conquerors.
. . . Who will dare to
say: I was called and that’s the reason the Supreme Power protected me from
bullets ripping up the sand close by me, or drawing patterns on the wall above
my head.
From a casual arrest just for elucidating the case, which would end with a journey in a freight car to a place from which the living do not return?
From obeying the order to register, when only the disobedient would survive?
Yes, but what about them, has not every one of them prayed to his God, begging: Save me!
And the sun was rising over camps of torture and even now with their eyes I see it rising.
. . . All of us are called, and each of us meditates on the extravagance of having a separate fate.
From a casual arrest just for elucidating the case, which would end with a journey in a freight car to a place from which the living do not return?
From obeying the order to register, when only the disobedient would survive?
Yes, but what about them, has not every one of them prayed to his God, begging: Save me!
And the sun was rising over camps of torture and even now with their eyes I see it rising.
. . . All of us are called, and each of us meditates on the extravagance of having a separate fate.
. . . If I accomplished
anything, if was only when I, a pious boy, chased after the disguises of the
lost Reality.
After the real presence of divinity in our flesh and blood which are at the same time bread and wine,
After the real presence of divinity in our flesh and blood which are at the same time bread and wine,
Hearing the immense call
of the Particular, despite the earthly law that sentences memory to extinction.
~ Czeslaw Milosz, from “Capri ,” Facing the
River, 1995
*
I caught a couple of
glimpse of my future calling early on, but they didn’t make much sense. In
“Caterpillar of Smoke,” a poem that records my first encounter with unrhymed
modern poetry and the wild excitement I felt reading it, I say
I was fourteen. The
future flashed
as though a careless
angel
opened the wrong door in
time.
I didn’t start writing
until English gave me a distance from words. Polish was too emotionally
charged. In English I could say anything. In fact by the time I turned
eighteen, I knew all the bad words in English, quickly learned during my
immersion in working-class Milwaukee .
A “girl from a good home,” I didn’t know the Polish equivalent for more than
half of them, and still don’t.
In college I started
writing short stories and what might be called “verse.” I don’t want to apply
the word “poems” to those beginner’s attempts at poetry. It was the latter that
brought the verdict, “Maybe the talent isn’t there.” Ignorant of the fact that
even the greatest poets started by writing the most embarrassing drivel, I
translated this to mean that I had absolutely no literary talent, so there was
no point pursuing that path. I went through a severe depression, the worst one
in my life, descending into stupor. But I knew better than to trust psychiatry.
The thought of being at the mercy of an insensitive MD who’d want to treat me
with electric shock kept me on this side of sanity. I settled into chronic
rather than acute depression and began to study psychology.
After no end of storms and
dead ends, I began to become a writer (mainly a poet) in earnest around the age
of 36. This time no one and nothing could stop me (or so I thought), even
though I wasn’t done with anti-mentors, and there were more setbacks ahead.
Still, looking back, my mid-thirties were indeed the time when I crossed the
threshold and began to become the person I had to be.
So much delay, so many
blind alleys . . . Did it have to be so
miserable and chaotic? I know better than to start brooding on that question.
And I find solace in another poem by Milosz:
ONE MORE CONTRADICTION
Did I fulfill what I had
to, here, on earth?
I was a guest in a house
under white clouds
Where rivers flow and
grasses renew themselves.
So what if I were called,
if I was hardly aware.
The next time early I
would search for wisdom,
I would not pretend I
could be just like others:
Only evil and suffering
come from that.
Renouncing, I would choose
the fate of obedience.
I would suppress the
wolf’s eye and greedy throat.
A resident of some
cloister floating in the air
With a view on the cities
glowing below,
Or onto a stream, a bridge
and old cedars,
I would give myself to one
task only
Which then, however, could
not be accomplished.
~ Czeslaw Milosz, Facing the River, 1995
Yes, youth is wasted on
the young, and, worse yet, life is wasted on people (as the protagonist of the
movie “Greenberg” observes). But if not
for all that foolishness and lostness, this embarrassing wasting away with
passion for the wrong men, living in ghost-empty suburbs instead of the soaring
metropolis we dreamed of, or some other Eden – if not for the history of our
stupidity, to quote Milosz again, what would there be to write about?
*
Another sentence in
Milosz’s essay made me stop reading and start thinking: “Through poetry I
wanted to save my childhood” (p. 156). For Milosz, that meant remaining in
opposition to the dull grown-ups around him, entangled in romance, career, and
provincial politics. For me saving my childhood meant preserving a trace of
something as immense as the twilight over the river, in Carpathia, in late June
when the mysterious time between sunset and night seemed to last and last, the
river slowly turning gold, then silver dusking to gray sheen.
I was letting the music of
that lost world transform me, transcribed into another language. I would have
never intentionally chosen this strange path, this serving I didn’t quite know
what, or for what purpose. But this is how Milosz defines maturity: not only as
continually becoming the person you must be, but also as loving service. In
“Love,” part of the extraordinary sequence written during the war, he speaks
about those who arrive at the right detachment from the purely personal:
Then he wants to use
himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.
I certainly didn’t
understand, and when it comes to poetry, I still don’t; I have to restrain
myself from asking the hopeless question, Why me? I wasn’t exactly trying to preserve my childhood. It was
not volitional. It happened. We don’t choose what we write about. At seventeen,
having flown from the Old World to the New, I
was eager to assimilate as quickly as possible, without getting mired in
nostalgia; but nostalgia had other plans. When I resumed reading the essay, I
saw that in the very next sentence Milosz asks, “But what fiery sword protects
the artist?” Protects? The fiery
sword expels the artist from that
“perfection of the life” that Yeats regrets losing in the choice of “perfection
of the work.”
But it doesn't matter; the point is to show things "in the glow of ripeness." But also, of necessity, by how that glow is refracted through the lens of one unique consciousness, that once-per-universe configuration of history, geography, and personality. Making the best of the undeniable determinism of life. We don't choose our mistakes. It's just as arrogant to blame ourselves as it is to take pride in our fleeting accomplishments.
But it doesn't matter; the point is to show things "in the glow of ripeness." But also, of necessity, by how that glow is refracted through the lens of one unique consciousness, that once-per-universe configuration of history, geography, and personality. Making the best of the undeniable determinism of life. We don't choose our mistakes. It's just as arrogant to blame ourselves as it is to take pride in our fleeting accomplishments.
Milosz answers his
question by invoking loyalty to values – the very thing that he was accused by
some of not possessing. “No matter where I turned, there was nowhere where I
felt at home. A taste for ‘ultimate things’ gave direction to my whole life,
although due to various geographical-psychological peculiarities, the Polish Catholic
tonality has not been dominant in this religion of mine” (p. 298). Thank
goodness for that.
globalization everywhere
Not everyone admired
Milosz’s preference for dealing with ultimate concerns and universal values,
far from nationalism or orthodox religion. “Here and everywhere is my
homeland,” he said, claiming all human heritage. Milosz’s contemporary, Zbigniew
Herbert, always an uncompromising anti-communist, a patriot for whom Poland was a
holy ideal, called Milosz “a man without a face, without an identity.” Herbert
was given to extreme statements, possibly a part of his bipolar disorder.
WAS COMMUNISM A NECESSARY EVIL?
But again I am getting away from the subject of Milosz’s essay I mentioned first: a Marxist philosopher, nicknamed “Tiger,” who believed that after the Communist revolution, a humanist revolution would follow; the task of the men of letters was to preserve humanist values during the period of necessary evil.
But again I am getting away from the subject of Milosz’s essay I mentioned first: a Marxist philosopher, nicknamed “Tiger,” who believed that after the Communist revolution, a humanist revolution would follow; the task of the men of letters was to preserve humanist values during the period of necessary evil.
Milosz tries to defend his
Stalinist friend as best he can, saying that Tiger was neither cynical nor
shallow; he just believed in historical necessity. He quotes Tiger’s admiration
for Hypatia, the first noted woman mathematician and head of the Platonist
academy in Alexandria : “Of course Tiger adored
Hypatia, the last pagan philosopher of Alexandria ,
not the dirty, terrifying mob of Christians who tore her apart. And yet, he
said, the future did not belong to Hypatia but to the Christians” (p. 155).
But a “humanist
revolution” is an oxymoron. Humanism can only evolve, slowly, through centuries
of the widening spread of education and debate over ideas. No, we can’t forgive
Tiger for having chortled at the notion that Soviet rifle butts will teach
Poles to “think rationally, without alienation.” We can’t forgive him for
shrugging off the gulags: “although he was splendidly informed about the
millions of people behind barbed wire, he did not want to ‘weaken’; that is, to
imagine the extent of their suffering” (161).
But then, who’d even
remember Tiger (Tadeusz Kroński) if not for this essay? He was indeed on his
way to the “dustbin of history.” He was a Hegelian and saw history as the tool
of World Spirit (Weltgeist), cruel
but always correct (I can’t help but see here the toxic god of “old-time
religion” – and Kroński was on the side of the Christian mob who killed Hypatia
precisely because Christianity was necessary to produce Hegel). And yet he
could say the most amazing things, for instance: “Anyone who crosses himself in
public crucifies Christ. I also cross myself, but only when no one can see me.”
During the war, Kroński, the
mocker of romanticism and patriotic hyperbole, became a catalyst of that
beginning to become the person that Milosz had to be. It is only in the eyes of
some Polish readers that Milosz’s friendship with Kroński is a stain on the
poet’s reputation. What matters is that Milosz still speaks to us with living
words. He is now an acknowledged literary giant of international stature, above
those old quarrels. Above politics. The world forgives those who write well
enough to win the Nobel Prize and, despite a Leftist past and a degree of
cooperation with a Communist dictatorship, become friends with a Pope as
popular as John Paul II. Above all, the world forgives those who do penance for
the rest of their life, striving never to praise death and nothingness, and to
be always on the side of the human.
**
Should poetry be above
politics? But what is politics worth if it’s not about freedom, justice, equal
rights – about allowing people to fulfill their potential, to become what they
can be? (I have softened “must” to “can” because “must” applies to cases of
exceptionally strong vocation.) And what is poetry if not one of the means we
have to keep reminding ourselves of the sacred trust in the fulfillment of a
person’s potential, of being able to cross one threshold after another? Poetry,
with its insistence on the particular that speaks to our essence, with its
ability to pierce through to the emotional level (“an axe for the frozen sea
inside us”) can be of great value in helping us become the person we can/must
be.
Still, typically poetry
and politics don’t mix because political rhetoric ruins poetry (note, for
instance, its disastrous impact on Adrienne Rich). I am forced to say: yes, poetry
must be above politics. But it’s a qualified yes, since I’ve come across some poems
that have greatness in spite of (and in a way because of) being political. The
most recent example is this poem by Margaret Szumowski (who is also the author
of the delightful “into the forest” poem):
the women appear as aurora borealis
One night in the Arctic , the villages saw the “flashing elements
of female souls.” The
women kept indoors, women whose windows
had been painted black,
who dressed in head-to-toe black.
They floated out f their
houses through the cracks to the Arctic
where they could be seen
without the burka.
Luminous beauty. Their long
black hair, slender bodies from so
much weeping, shadows
under their eyes like the dark of the moon.
Look, Mother, with your shadowed eyes.
Soon the aurora of mirth
will appear. First their bodies in the sky.
Brilliant ice maidens!
Then the laughing of the heavens.
Then the laughing of the
women themselves who prefer the cold,
the seals, the walrus, the
ice floes, the dangerous polar bear, to
the death of the heart. My mother prefers death to leaving him.
They are laughing in the
cold, and we villagers are making ice candles.
See us come out on our
dogsleds. Hundreds of ice candles lead the
way to the Yypnik village.
These women, a gift from the gods.
My father saw her as no gift but his.
Look how beautiful they
are. Northern dancers, we call them.
They are not aurora
flowers that open and die in a single hour.
They become aurora snakes
to protect themselves from those men.
Poison him.
The women are gorgeous
feather boas across the night sky.
Everything is called
aurora in honor of the gods.
The aurora of mirth. Hear
these women laughing?
You have never heard them
laugh before.
They fled the harsh
husband who caged them without light.
Mother, you could be all light. It’s not too late
to seep from the
crack he forgot in the east wall.
~ Margaret Szumowski, The Night of the Lunar Eclipse, 2005
Originally the poet may
have been inspired by the Norse myth of the Valkyries. The opposite of
oppressed wives, these are the warrior maidens (“brilliant ice maidens”) who
take the souls of slain heroes to Valhalla .
The flashing of their shields as they ride the skies is supposed to produce the
Northern Lights. What Margaret Szumowski takes from the myth is the joyful
dance of the lights (auroras of mirth), and the power of those feminine spirits
that are seen as a “gift from the gods.”
This is a poem imagining
the escape of all oppressed women, not just the Muslim women forced to dress in
black head to toe, with only a slit for the eyes (one Islamic scholar suggested
that it would be more pious to leave an opening for only one eye). The poem is
strange, surreal, and extremely moving. I can’t read it without feeling my eyes
moisten. The address to “Mother” moves me – it gives the poem its intimacy. But
mainly I feel its power as poetry because it takes me to the Otherworld – that
place in the imagination where we can find refuge, almost no matter how
oppressive the reality.
And yet it’s more than
just some vague “place in the imagination.” This poem makes us imagine sheer
beauty: the undulating lights in the Arctic sky: “Look how beautiful they are.
Northern dancers, we call them.” It’s a summons – mostly doomed, we know that –
to all oppressed women to connect with their strength and beauty. A political
poem, yes, but a poem that does not sacrifice the strangeness and indirectness
of poetry.
And here is a more direct
poem. If we end up crying, that’s fine: it means that unlike those Hegelians
who believed that history was cruel but always right, we have stayed human.
beauty pageant in Sarajevo
The young girls believe
as they parade before my
eyes.
They know I have the power
to recognize beauty.
Lana floating, soft as
spring leaves
in Sarajevo Park ,
Biljana’s legs scarred
by shrapnel, but slim and
curved.
We judges enjoy their
willowy forms.
Low-cut silk over delicate
breasts.
Where did she get the silk? I ask
and her mother smiles.
What clothing does a fashionable woman
require? Is virginity important?
What kind of man could you love?
They hold out their arms
like children
selling flowers from the family
garden.
They hold out their
bodies,
step forward on the
runway,
speechless chorus,
slowly raising a large,
white banner.
DO NOT LET THEM KILL US .
~ Margaret Szumowski
##
Oriana:
PS. Please don't miss John Guzlowski's comment on Milosz's "negative capability" in the official comments section.
##
Darlene:
Oriana:
PS. Please don't miss John Guzlowski's comment on Milosz's "negative capability" in the official comments section.
##
Darlene:
I’m surprised you didn’t
mention Jung and individuation. Isn’t that about finding your true self, “becoming
the person you must be”?
Oriana:
I wanted to mention Jung,
but couldn’t find a way do it gracefully, without superficiality and yet
without heavy theorizing, getting entangled with terms such as the collective
unconscious or the Shadow. Like a good poem, a blog post probably shouldn't
have more than two and a half ideas, and mine tend to have twenty-five or more,
each opening into infinity. Besides, I have never been clear about what Jung
means by the Self. I much prefer the familiar phrase, “finding your true self.”
Of course there is a price
for that. The more you differentiate yourself, the more deeply you pursue your
calling, the less at home you’ll feel at a family gathering, say. But the
rewards are obviously great, even if you end up feeling like an outsider. For
one thing you experience less envy, if any. You get your fulfillment from doing
what you love doing. Recognition is always nice, but you are not pathetically
dependent on it.
Possibly we are out on a metaphysical
limb when we talk about “finding our true
self” or “finding what we were meant
to do.” These are approximations, figures of speech. I don’t think there is
some cosmic decree that says something like, “Jim is meant to be a nature
poet.” I know that New Age dogma says we choose a particular task for this
lifetime just before we incarnate, but immediately after we choose, our memory
is erased, so that we are born clueless and must seek and seek.
I don’t believe that there
is one pre-destined task, the reason we were born, what we came here for. Contrary
to Jung’s “There are no accidents,” I think there are plenty of accidents, for
which we later may find destiny-type reasons. We stumble and bumble and walk in
circles; then, if we are lucky, we discover the path that feels right, that
makes us believe we’ve found our destiny. Then we look back and see even our
catastrophes as necessary steps. Maybe. “There is no truth, only perspectives.”
The important thing is to keep walking – self-actualizing, to bring in Abraham
Maslow, another psychology giant. It’s by self-actualizing that we can be of
greatest service to others.
On the other hand, a lot
of people say, “I just want to enjoy life.” I used to think that was terribly
shallow, but I’ve changed my mind. Where would I be without the palm trees and
Pacific sunsets? Somewhere else, I suppose, but not quite as happy. Not thinking
“paradise” as I drive down a typical California
boulevard. I personally need the kind of work that is its own reward. Others
say “I need to be of use.” Still others: “I need a sense of adventure.” Fortunately
there are many ways to enjoy life; I’ve become quite tolerant toward those who
just go to the park and feed the ducks.
Morgan:
I do love both poems, especially
"The Women Appear as Aurora Borealis." The poems, especially
"Beauty Pageant," remind me of Nafisi's descriptions in Reading
Lolita in Tehran of the women she taught at her home in secret, who
"disrobed" (down to their real, street clothes and real selves).
Scott:
I really enjoyed the Aurora
borealis poem in your last blog. The Arctic
has always held an attraction to me as it's so connected to explorers, whalers
and is the home of my favorite animal, the Narwhal. As you came to consider
yourself a poet relatively late in life, I came to appreciate verse in my
middle age. Though I have dabbled in it, I feel I will always be more a reader
and one who enjoys poetry than an actual poet and that's ok, one must know
one's limitations.
Oriana:
Pardon my limited typing capacity at the moment. Margaret Szumowski has written some wonderful, wonderful poems -- easily lost in the static, so I want to help publicize them. More will be coming in future posts.
Oriana, I'm slowly reading through your essay and as always there is so much to consider. Your talk above of Milosz and Kronski has me thinking. One of the things I like about Milosz is his sense of negative capability in terms of his friends and his ideas and his attitudes toward this and that. He was a writer who must have felt so strong (centered?) within himself that he could entertain people and ideas and actions that might frighten a person less sure of himself. And maybe that’s what his “self” finally was—this openness to people and ideas, the willingness to accept the “this is me” and the “this is not me.”
ReplyDeleteThank you for this brilliant insight: yes, definitely, Milosz had "negative capability." I think his outsider status, which also caused him much suffering, was one of the best things that happened to him in terms of intellectual and artistic development. Having seen so much impermanence, so much perishing, he managed to cultivate enough detachment to see the complexity of things, and thus both what was right and wrong with any particular ideology, and could choose the best aspects and toss the rest like an apple core. Kronski liberated him from what Milosz described as a tendency to "pained lyricism." But he never accepted the gulags as historically necessary, as Kronski did. He was not a moral relativist. His having seen so much evil sometimes pushed him in the direction of Gnosticism -- the Prince of this World seemed to be winning here on earth.
ReplyDeleteBut ultimately Milosz cannot be made to fit any existing category. What he admired in Dostoyevski was POLYPHONY -- something akin to negative capability. By creating compelling characters, Dostoyevski was able to present many voices, many views -- e.g. Ivan Karamazov, the intellectual and atheist, who "returns his ticket" to paradise if it's bought at the price of even one tear of an abused child -- much less a crucified innocent -- and Father Zosima with his gospel of universal kindness and responsibility of all for all. Milosz had the wisdom, the negative capability, that prevented him from being a dogmatic believer in ONE truth. As you suggest, it takes an exceptional self-confidence to be able to see many sides of an issue. In my eyes, Herbert's accusation that Milosz had no "identity" is actually high praise. He was a true thinker and not an ideologue. I read him because he nourishes me with wisdom and reminds of how complex everything is.
Yes, Dostoevsky's Polyphony. I wonder if Milosz knew M.M. Bakhtin's book Rabelais and His World or Bakhtin's work on Dostoevsky and Polyphony. What I like about Bakhtin is his sense of the carnivalesque, the way some of the really great thinkers subvert/overturn prevailing ideas in order to arrive at a new sense of things. Here's a paragraph from an essay I wrote years ago about Bakntin's sense of the carnivalesque and one of Isaac Singer's earliest novel: Satan in Goray.
ReplyDeleteAs presented in his Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin's understanding of the grotesque is much less ominous than Kayser's. The source of Bakhtin's theory is the tradition of folk humour which stems from medieval carnival. He writes that carnival celebrates the "temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order". This liberation produces an overwhelming sense of the "gay relativity" of these truths and this order. During carnival, everything is seen as happily grotesque, susceptible to the "peculiar logic of the inside out, of the 'turnabout', of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings". The purpose of all this is neither negative nor ominous, as Kayser would have it. Rather, the end is a carnivalesque laughter which "revives and renews". Summing up his sense of this revival, Bakhtin says, "This carnival spirit offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things" (34).
In the post, Darlene mentions Jung, and what I know of Jung suggest he would be comfortable with this discussion. His willingness to see our self in terms of the contradictions and oppositions it possesses doesn't seem that far off from what I see Milosz striving for.
ReplyDeleteThanks again. Yes, Milosz probably knew the work you mention -- teaching Dostoyevski was for him an education as well, quite influential.
ReplyDeleteThe carnivalesque -- that's Kronski's mockery as well. Liberating, as long as one doesn't freeze in perpetual irony. Milosz didn't. He dared be completely serious -- and then change his mind.
Jung, definitely. I just didn't see a convenient "inlet." And I probably should have left out the poems -- that's another post. But I was so excited about those two by Margaret. My weakness, I know, trying to include too much. If I were choosing material from the blog for the book, I'd be a lot more selective.
Satan in Goray -- what a fabulous title.