Marcin Świetlicki, "April 1, Wągrowiec, Poland"

Hi all --

You want to read Eve Ewing's "Everything is Wrestling." There's a lot of serious talk about how our political dynamics are fundamentally pro-wrestling–this is Josephine Riesman's specialty–and Ewing's take is very necessary. You want to hear about a vernacular which unites those with working-class backgrounds; wrestlers after WWII pretending to be German and doing Nazi salutes to the crowd; scholars seeing one of the purer morality plays in the ring; how wrestling in other cultures is immersed in sacred ritual.

In other news, the wind in West Texas is annoying. I'm tasting sand all the time. So I am very grateful for the library, Starbucks, and the bookstore, as they constitute places where the air doesn't taste like the ground and I don't hear my air conditioner through my headphones. A major goal of mine this summer is to document what I read. Being at the library and the bookstore makes that goal intuitive, and I hope you have similar graces in your life, minus the choking-on-sand part.

Once again, if you're helping out Marfa Public Radio, please do let me know. We desperately need reliable information in West Texas and they are very much under attack. And if there are any causes you would like to band together to support, I'm happy to hear about them. I would love to form a small group which gives back and publicizes worthy causes every so often.

There's too much happening in the news, but two things which have slipped under the radar because of the overwhelm. The assault on healthcare is in full swing, with Congress treating Medicaid like it is a handout. Fewer federal dollars for healthcare is fewer dollars for all of us. Nursing homes and pregnant mothers depend on Medicaid. If there are no payments, we lose doctors, nurses, and facilities. Also, some in the current regime are profiting greatly while prices soar for the rest of us. The Attorney General (!) had Trump media stock (!!) which she sold for over a million dollars (!!!) the day tariffs were declared.

Without further ado, let's read some poetry.

Marcin Świetlicki, "April 1, Wągrowiec, Poland"

Świetlicki grabs you, spins you around, and throws you into a dark, remote place. There's too much nature in "April 1, Wągrowiec, Poland." Too much of an alien, deadly world. And you might believe, because of that, this is a poem you should read when you're in the mood for horror. The first lines, "Woken up. At once entangled / in the business of the lake," could open a Friday the 13th movie.

April 1, Wągrowiec, Poland 
Marcin Świetlicki (trans. Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese)

Woken up. At once entangled
in the business of the lake. A few hours before
dawn. Most probably. And the lake already
lives, breathes, sends off the swans
to eye him: a shadow
in the darkness seeking the path
to the human terminal. Awake. At a loss.
First shoots of grass take off from the dark ground.
Blindly. What for? Without himself, without time.
Time has grown so spatial that it is
invisible. Lost in the darkness.
Woken up. What for? If only he still had
the watch he was given for his First Communion,
if, at a suitable moment, he’d become a scout
and had a compass, if he knew how to rightly
use the compass

– he wouldn’t be here.

I believe this poem is of immediate relevance, but we have to consider our own attitudes first. As of this writing, Tesla stock is nearly back to $400 a share. That is to say, Tesla is close to a valuation of $1 trillion even though no one is buying Teslas and people are actively trying to sell theirs. The market is fake and our well-being is largely built on a sham. You can extend this critique to much of the economy, even though the consequences of collapse are very real. It's not just employment at stake; think about how this "economy" is critical to recognition or opportunities of almost any sort. And people are defiant about this. They will not admit it's fake. No, we get to hear plenty say that owning a home is simply a matter of willpower even though there's a housing shortage. We also get to hear that homelessness is not a crisis, that each individual could get a job and that would fix it. A number have told me the homeless choose to be that way, with the implication that whatever they suffer isn't real.

I look at "April 1, Wągrowiec, Poland" as featuring a homeless man. "Woken up," he has no business but "the business of the lake," and it is frightening. Świetlicki places him there a "few hours before dawn," in a darkness you can only wait to leave. The lake is alive, staring at him. It "sends off the swans / to eye him." This is a brutal scene to imagine. He is "[w]ithout himself, without time." Full of regrets, thinking back to First Communion, thinking that maybe something he could have done differently in childhood would save him.

All the same, I know those who would dismiss this pain. They'd say he's not dodging bombs or a death squad. We haven't been told he's emaciated or needs a limb amputated. I don't think it is really worth responding to someone who will say anything to feel like they're right. I do think it is worth dwelling on some choice lines in the translation about human life and meaning.

Świetlicki tells us the swans see him as "a shadow / in the darkness seeking the path / to the human terminal." It's a gorgeous, tough line about the end of life and life's end. I don't need to comment further about the mental state of this broken man. I do need to outline how this is a dark criticism of Aristotle's "rational animal." For Aristotle, your human nature entails an end, and the end of humanity is something like this: you pursue happiness by means of the virtues you contemplate and make habitual. Well, here's someone lost by a lake, unable to know time or direction. The natural world confronts him with hostility. How is it possible to grow or even be in this situation? One would need recourse to Aristotle's other declarations that we are social/political/talking animals, but our cult of individualism treats that as optional.

I'd like to conclude by looking a little closer at Świetlicki's lines on darkness, blindness, and time. They hone in on how harrowing it is to be without the possibility of meaning:

...Awake. At a loss.
First shoots of grass take off from the dark ground.
Blindly. What for? Without himself, without time.
Time has grown so spatial that it is
invisible.

It's that last idea I can't get out of my head. "Time has grown so spatial that it is / invisible." The feeling of being swallowed by the darkness, by the alien nature all around, in part because you don't have a watch. I've been thinking recently that I check my phone too much, obsessively looking at the time. And for me, that's a nervous habit. But what if I couldn't track time at all? What if I lacked a watch or anything like it? There are prerequisites to meaning in life, to discovering your own value, and it is terrifying to have to find out what they are.