I've decided to become Polish. This will be slightly easier for me than for some because I happen to be almost completely Polish on my mother's side. But only slightly easier. The Polishness of my Polishness never got going. The things that happen to national identities in the American experience happened to my Poles. The Polishness got filtered out over the years, a couple of generations. It is only a name now, a word that points to origins that stopped explaining things. Calling myself Polish explains almost nothing about me.

But I've decided to make it explain something. There are some names associated with this decision. One of them is Czeslaw Milosz, another is Adam Zagajewski. And what about Gombrowicz and more recently Adam Michnik? There is also Ryszard Kapuscinski. There are others; names I'm still discovering and exhuming from the 20th century. In a way, the 20th century is a Polish century. That is if history should sometimes be written by the losers. And probably it sometimes should. Not that Polish hands aren't stained with the blood of others and stigmitized by the same horrors that marked so many during that terrible century just passed. But Polish Letters, the Polish essay, is profoundly marked by that tragic sense of history that defines the Central and Eastern European mindset that watched, mostly helplessly as Nazism handed them off to the Soviets.

The Polish essay is about individual acts of resistance against the eradication of the mind. Sometimes these essays are conservative, sometimes they are grasping for something new. Sometimes they feel profoundly European, like faded scraps of parchment, testaments to a world that was destroyed by the very hands that had built it. Milosz feels that way most of the time, like a character from one of Sebald's novels, like a memory waiting to dissapear. Milosz is a million miles away, talking about his Polishness in ways that don't even completely make sense. And he is so good that he doesn't have to care. He writes:

My work for foreigners has been of a practical, even pedagogic nature--I do not believe in the possibility of communing outside a shared language, a shared history--while my work in Polish has been addressed to readers transcending a specific time and place, otherwise known as 'writing for the Muses'.

But Milosz too was an exile and he had to take his Polish with him. Polish essay writing always has some aspect of exile mentality. The Polish 20th century is about the tenuousness and transmutability of physical space. And it is about the power of mental space in the face of that fragility. Zagajewski writes about Gombrowicz:

And yet, despite all his theories, polemics, and quasi-philosophical and anthropological lectures, it is not in the sphere of ideas that we should seek his greatness, but deeper, in a more elementary realm. Through all of his disputes and debates, Gombrowicz, a restless spirit provoked by time, by modernism and recent history, expresses himself, and speaks—not straightforwardly, which is precisely what is so engaging—about himself, his adventures, his sufferings; about pain and about joy. He is like an Everyman for our time; he is our fellow, tormented not only by sickness, emigration, poverty, and loneliness, but also by ideas.

That is exile writing too. It's tormented but it has found some strength in that condition. The exile in the Polish essay isn't a victim. The Polish essay bitches and moans but then laughs about it. The Polish essay can always draw on totalitarian humor, the blackest and often most painfully humorous of humors.

I think that the exiled fragments of experience that have come down to us from the 20th century in the Polish essay are something to identify with as ruins. In these ruins are the best, if broken, parts of the human mental landscape. That is the kind of Polish I've decided to try and be.
- posted by morgan @ 8:22 PM

 
for alan koenig


America has a way of producing losers, freaks, goofballs, and maniacs who manage, never-the-less, to express truths that otherwise wouldn't get said. Perhaps its an extension of the village idiot phenomenon. It takes a village, no doubt, but it takes a warped and drug-addled mind to tell the village what is really going on.

Hunter S. Thompson was just such a mind. This is to say that he provided a service; a proposition he himself probably would not have cared much about. But he did provide a service. Someone had to express the sense in which things didn't have much sense. Someone had to be able to express insanity and breakdown with clarity and honesty.

And there is another thing that Hunter S. Thompson managed to put his finger on. Freedom. Crazy freedom, but freedom all the same. His brand of freedom was the kind that comes in the back of a broken down truck with a bottle of ether. It was a fuck you kind of freedom. It was the freedom to recognize that things are dumb and getting worse. I don't actually know if things really are dumb and getting worse. But anyone who doesn't recognize that emotion, who hasn't sometimes looked around at the world in pure disgust, is a dangerous moron. Hunter S. Thompson was engaged in a battle to the death with dangerous morons. And half the time he was in revolt against his own mind. He feared the little moron within.

The following lines from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas will always be seared into a happy, if angst ridden, place in my mind:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

These are bold sentences and they are unashamed. They're as American as the road flick or Going West. But they've crossed a line into the dark side. Probably America was always corrupt. Hunter S. Thompson was the first person to take that corruption, meet it head on, and one-up it. He fed off the darkness and the luridness and the lies of American life. He sustained himself with all of that crap. He loved the fact that Nixon made him wretch. Every time Nixon debased himself and the nation with him it made Hunter S. Thompson stronger. He became powerful on American stupidity and meanness. That alone was a small miracle, a tiny, weird and utterly disturbing miracle. Sometimes you wanted America to get worse just so Hunter S. Thompson would get stronger, like a monster feeding off of downed electrical wires. He was able to take in all the wretchedness and transform it into something oddly inspiring. He was able to write:

Work was impossible. The geeks had broken my spirit. They had done too many things wrong. It was never like this for Mencken. He lived like a Prussian gambler--sweating worse than Bryant on some nights and drunker than Judas on others. It was all a dehumanized nightmare . . . and these raddled cretins have the gall to complain about my deadlines.

And in writing like that he won for a moment. But you can't win forever.

I guess he finally shot himself in the brain. His final insult to an absurd rationality that never added up. Probably that was inevitable but it still makes me sad. I would have thought that he had earned some peace. But I think he knew better. I think he did it his way all the way through.
- posted by morgan @ 9:00 PM

 
The Gates are so successful it is unsettling. Certainly Jed Perl at The New Republic has been knocked off kilter. And in being so disconcerted, Mr. Perl makes a couple of pretty amazing points. First, Perl notes of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, "They're dreamers with entrepreneurial gumption. Speaking to a group of volunteers the other day, Jeanne-Claude told them what to say when people asked about the purpose of 'The Gates'. 'It's for nothing', she explained, as if she were some prophetess of art-for-art's-sake'."

Then, a couple of paragraphs later, Perl asserts that, "When all feelings are regarded as aesthetic experiences, art is at risk. What Christo and Jeanne-Claude have brought to New York is their own brand of late-modern philistinism."

This is perhaps the first time that an artist has been accused both of art-for-art's-sake elitism and populist philistinism all in one burst of condemnation. But in his desperation to condemn all things Christo, Jed Perl has put his finger on what is most remarkable about the work.

In a way, I would say that Christo's work has always been about forms of reconciliation. And despite Perl's accusations of philistinism, those reconciliations have run the gamut from historical, to political, to formal, to pop-cultural. When Christo surrounded those Florida islands with pink 'skirts' he finally allowed minimalism's grandiose cousin, earth art, to take a breath and relax. It was as if the grand gestures and the all consuming need to mark nature itself had collapsed into a series of giggles. It was funny to think about islands wearing tutus. But it was smart too. It was a little bit Robert Smithson and a little bit Andy Warhol. Earth art needed that. Especially as it had nowhere else to go. Christo did it with class and humor and the sense of a future.

When he wrapped some pieces of European architecture he showed that he could take his reconciliations a little further. European monuments are so overwrought, overdetermined, he seemed to say. Let's look at them again. And as he made them disappear for a little while underneath his fabric he did just that. Erasing them was a way to make them more present. Obscuring them made them come alive. This was good fun, it was a kind of cultural reinvigoration when he did it with the Pont Neuf. It was actually kind of moving and profound when it came to the Reichstag. If ever a building needed to be given a moment to hide behind the veil and refind itself it was the Reichstag. Here, Christo showed that his reconciliations could delve into history and trauma. I can imagine Sebald gazing upon the wrapped-up Reichstag and appreciating it very much indeed, which is no small praise.

What has Christo done with Central Park? Certainly he has made us look at it again and experience it anew. That alone is a strange thing to scoff at. Hasn't one of the primary achievements of art always been to affect perception and experience and meaning? But the particular manner of that affecting has been artful too. The very fact of placing gates throughout the park is a testament to that. The miracle of Central Park has always been the very fact that you can enter it at all. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Gates reproduce that miracle again and again and again. Each time you pass through a gate it's as if they are yelling out "here it is!", "here it is!", "here it is!", "here it is!", for twenty-three miles or so. It took a deep structural appreciation for the nature of the Central Park experience to realize that this would be the best way to enter into sacred public space.

It is difficult to reflect upon and pay tribute to the secular cathedrals of the modern world without falling into cliche or triteness, or simply to miss the mark. On a crisp, cold day in February 2005 it was a pleasure to feel that New York could understand itself and be understood so well.





- posted by morgan @ 10:51 PM