Poland and East

Stanislaw Barszczak, Cantata from Kashubian land.

My name is Jim, I’m thirteen and I grow up without my father on Sobieszewska Island in northern Poland, in the Vistula River basin, with its branches Vistula Dead and Bold. Maybe you will once wander to the Gdansk Sea Bay. “Mevia Lacha” Reserve, Swibno, Przegalina, Sobieszewko, Sobieszewo village, Gorki Wschodnie, “Ptasi Raj” Reserve, close to it there is Free City of Danzig and Polish Baltic Sea. Eighty years ago, here the Second World War began. These places are a symbol and a perpetual sign for the whole world now. It’s difficult to be befriended with them, because the water is there. I am stuttering and I am called, like no other child in the village, Kashubek. Such is Jim Skowron, an outsider among his peers, the only child of a factory worker from Danzig, a dragonfly collector in a heathland landscape full of myths and legends. At the end of my childhood, I will tell you my story: the desire for an intact language and relations with my mother about. Mom has several pictures, but she is a failed painter. However, she compensates for her failure in art and life, thanks to her cross-love for son Jim. But like the muddy land on the edge of the northern village in which it grows, my tongue is also full of deficiences and cracks. Being unable to talk about chaos and to arrange the social situation in full, I give my voice to my second self, a childhood competitor, he seems to me the closest of all – this is my full Alter ego… But I am already accelerating the course of events. From a certain date I travel extensively around the Earth’s globe. And so I think, we have a modernist government, we have a modernist prime minister, a modernist president, why not be a modernist world. I was as you know on all continents, in Polish Catholic missions first. Finally, I recognize a modern world that is beautiful. That’s why I had to go there eventually. Because there are stories that demand a continuation. Our memory pleads for its rights. As if she wanted to reach the present. So I waded around the world, I felt nothing in this abundance of nothingness, and even imagined my future life in which I am constantly touching something, and it is falling apart. So I thought, I need to get more experience and more, because something new still appears, something that was not there yet; So I take it, I try, I use it pretty much, without my participation, I sometime think, because the consumption has already been assembled at the production stage. China must keep up with America and vice versa, America behind China, of course in technology and economics at least. And after them crowds of others are, also my countrymen from Silesia country, and Małopolska, from Podkarpackie, polish south lands, then ‘the cursed’ people of the land who never had anything, but now finally they will soothe their desires and will consume things day by day, year after year, will be they used instead of fearing death. After traveling, I returned home thousands of times with the same feeling that I am going through a kind of desert and I have to tell stories, I have to bring pictures to avoid going astray to reach my destination. Under the great sky, with these tales that are like faint flames in the night on the plain when the wind blows. Nothing more I could do … But it was yesterday, and ‘the day before yesterday’ – that is, so recently I came home back. The first thought was to take care of my vazka insect, that is in the jar. So immediately I went my room, I took a vazka insect from the jar … Look, the being who was abandoned by the soul of the mother, I deduced this way, is a being that was abandoned by all others, and even by the soul itself, and therefore is not only lonely, but almost damned doomed to remain forever gone, without help or be at home, dumbfounded, so soulless, full of silent rage – and yet ‘filled to the brim with words that scream’. How it is – a vazka insect ‘asks’, she shakes oneself and gives the limbs to a warm towel and finally she bows … Once upon a time, I clapped at the end of the pantomime vazka insect, but now I agree with her ritual, and stares at the trees outside the room window. Tomorrow you will be free forever, I tell her. I would like you to come back under the umbrella to a warm towel, where the world would go back to faithful, old feeling. So let me tell you everything I’ve learned about the life cycle of dragonflies from books and observations on the moor in the last few years. In the rhythm of drumming and dripping rain and in long sentences that would spill out of my mouth, like drops of water from an umbrella, I would drag you into the secret of an insect that lives a long and boring childhood at the bottom of the pond, to the strange and most dangerous moment of his life, when we in the early hours of the morning, she intends to climb on the reed, sheds her old skin, and becomes defenseless against his enemies. The act of metamorphosis may fail if the clumsy wings of a young dragonfly catch on the stalks or leave on the thorn. The first flight attempt, the pristine flight, is clumsy, the insect is a newly discovered snack for birds, because in this manner growing dragonfly, she is called imago, she is completely focused on trying out his new body, which is still little known. But the higher it rises into the air, the more safe and elegant it becomes, and soon it is able to bypass the beaks of birds and fly into the moor, from where, in the last line of its rhodium, from where it comes and to which population belongs … Mom came into the room. Without waiting for her moral words, I asked about something trivial: – Why is gasoline used? – In order the cars could drive, they need food, mother answered. – It’s probably the same with sex, I noticed (read in-sect), because it ‘serves in bed’ … -You did not do a lesson, for a punishment ‘walk to the corner’ … I received a reprimand from her… I my youth I was a child of poverty and I felt like a blind man in this crowd. We uproot ourselves from life close to nature in the whole sense of the word. We want to abandon them, emancipate ourselves from the symbolic weight of the earth. Just as we want to free ourselves from the weight of our bodies. For example, using biotechnology. We turn into clones of civilization, understand. Then I bought books, I tried on books like a woman trying on hats or scarves. The mirror was an imaginary mind of ugly vazka insect from the jar behind the desk … And besides, I admired the ‘smoking events’ from the history of Poland … The Commonwelth by the king Casimir the Great, The Gold Commonwelth of the Noblemen during the king Sigismund the Old era etc. I was worried about the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century, the uprisings, the latest history. But then we were scattered all over the world, I think it’s good, because it’s only in this situation that we’ll see what we’re worth. So I always rode on, trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. That it has no strength for me. That when I touch, something immediately falls into dust. Perhaps because it was meant to endure not for the duration itself, but to persist in spite of … In the future, nothing will be done, maybe only the Mother of God, she is like “the bride of a Bulgarian wrestler (who) will regain her historical corporeality …” I do not feel any superiority. “Sometimes I’m just pissed off, so are the Poles, Germans, like the French, like the pale Dutch like those on the ferry, I just … But they never drew me to the Netherlands, although many think that it should be like that we should go like sheep with longing admiration, watch, or contemplate as part of the common heritage, I just do not feel anything. Once, people made up more and believed in it made up. You could sit down and tell the whole evening about your life or someone else’s life and always had listeners. Today everyone wants to know how it really was because they are scared. You understand? They do not believe in anything and want to know the truth. Namely, who ‘fucked’ them. Wandering around the periphery of the world and the various shops, I could not resist the impression that China, this Leviathan of the world, is going to the moment when, out of pink plastic, rubber and foil, it will be able to produce even our thoughts and our dreams. Indeed, the world is full of details from which stories begin. Albania is tiredness, you can not relax because you are never alone. Even in an air-conditioned, quiet, empty hotel, loneliness is apparent, because it is the thought of her, Albania, her guys, her stench, her primevalness, beauty, her existence and hers. Madness. In Albania, you can not say, now I’m going to think about something else about my childhood. It just will not work. Arriving in Albania, you can only think about it. I walked along the sloping trails, I wandered around the world hoping that the idea and plan would reveal itself in a natural way, that meaning would finally appear, because meaning exists. on a journey farther and farther away, at the end of the continent, just to return, I struggled and ‘cursed’ myself. Then all this was still dreaming I tell you what happened in the world library, you know. And the formula of humanity is a memory plus hope, these are just two human qualities that we protect ourselves from emptiness, I tell you something about the alienation in this world, I’ve always tried to be smarter, that’s my mistake sometimes, forgive me … I wanted to study the uncertainty, the unseen space … East are not lonely, this movement of his inhabitants was fascinating years ago …. Now no. I met a Russian who asked my question about their fear of the authorities : »If they told us, hang around – we would hang up. And we would still ask what color the rope should be in «. As you know, I was an altar boy in a church of the Holy Spirit. Then I will tell you from myself, the Eucharist is able to separate your life from the rest. Through it, we can “get rid of the alienation of life” … And this difference: you see, I get on and off. But my thoughts come back every day. However, these are not memories. What I am reminded of just belongs to my life. Although I get on and off. Because where is the border that separates your life from the rest? In the end, you’re strangers everywhere. You come and go. But Eucharist, Holy Mass, she unites with the world, and you will be saved. Try to stay here in the warmth of spring or summer time… The child was born for love, and now he gives its feeling to everyone. Although the world ends with no boom but rust … As you know, I died very quickly on nicotine, heart and temperament. Once I watched communist comrades on television, zombies like they talked about them. And the same time I sold dead dolls… When we were walking and my mother went to church or visiting the family, I sprinkled the collar of the overcoat with ‘oldspice’. Everyone did that. In the hall, stealthy, uncertain. The whole city of pagans, the whole country of barbaria. Some in fear of others that it will happen. In fear that this eternal straw from shoes will come out. Simulation. Game. Dressing. And I know now, after my journeys to the world, that the rain in some inexplicably released me from responsibility … And I am carrying in the heart various pictures of the world. What is to come is never here, because it wears out somewhere along the way and dies like the glow of a distant lantern. Here the eternal decline is coming, and the children are tired … In the diagonal light of late autumn, the gestures and bodies of the people are the more pronounced. The men stand on the street corners staring at the emptiness of the day, spitting on the pavement and smoking cigarettes, this is the present, in the city of South Poland, in the whole famous inter-island between Black and Baltic. They stand and convert cigarettes in packs and the cigarettes in their pockets.Time comes from a distance and resembles foreign air that someone already breathed, Andrzej Stasiuk noticed that in his book, although he is not my cousin. Everything must be reinvented, because the days can not be lost in the past, filled only with landscape, immobile matter that will finally shake us from its body, broke like all minor incidents, those faces and no longer than one look … Imagine, my homeland was a lost village in my dreams. She lay in Silesia land. This country was a beautiful for the reason of the beauty of a long-dead animal, I think. As I already told you, I went abroad for the first time, by train, because in these conditions my youth was taking place … What did I miss? I had no dreams. I left the house and everything was in place. The whole country. The door opened and it was already beginning. Power and glory of reality. He had boundaries, but the imagination went further. To Moscow, to Berlin, deep into the earth, to its farthest corners, where the cosmos begins. Poland? For this I love this country, that it can go from feudalism to the era of post-consumption, where all desires are fulfilled, but relief never comes … Poles are in fact cheerful people, and worries give them to their deeds. The Cosmos is tuning to life. I had Napoleon’s time in my childhood … A few outstanding personalities, there were heroes, but now even higher figures. In the vivid and capricious flares of fire their body became mobile, the hand was rising, it fell as if the foreman was pushing the heavens against him … Homeland calls home now. Because even if not war or another secession, the next division, another freedom and independence, it’s just time, paranoia of change and insanity that it would be like everywhere. I still remember the wall paintings of the popes above the bed at the Catholic house in Yamousoukro, the Ivory Coast. I have always promised myself that I will return to this story and try to look for its meaning and further sequence … But now, I returned to Zabkowice village, my childhood town, it was square … the village was square, or rather in the shape of a rhombus. A little bit the oldest naivety here, or not at all. In my youth I argued here with the radio and the TV about all the stupid and terrible news that these innocent machines brought. When the programs ended, when the first bars of the lively melody spoke, I was pulling out – because it was easier and scornful – to plug in contacts and switch on one of my records or tapes … “My country got used to banging, to historical fake, blood donation, like a kite of an eye, it looks like massacres, vigils, mourning and funebors. Let them kill us, let them remember. If we can not do anything, we will throw ourselves under the train of history so that it stands still until our blood carcass gets out and Let them burn us in the basements of the city, let the stench fall into the walls of the streets, let them forget us in the sewers, that we rush and rush, and that they then have to drink, drink and drink this dead water. They remembered that they would remember swollen, eaten and dried up so that they would come to them when they tried to forget, as if Jews envied their fire because they were always jealous of everything. edes, Jews of money and that they are so famous because they cleverly let themselves be burned. That’s why I go to Srebrenica to think about everything,” Polish writer A. Stasiuk said. I am saying this one, in the presence of the priests, that they have an idea of ​​what to do next. “Who would we be if we had only one neighbor and, on the other, the sea or the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg? We would be nothing, at most one more boredom of Western democracy, another postmodern republic where the main problem is finding ways of spending free time, transplants organs and immortality /…/ I like fifty places in Germany, but none of them except Lorelei is in my Pascal. There is, for example, the station in Frankfurt am Main on a Sunday morning with bloody shreds of toilet paper on the sidewalk and guys at eight o’clock in pubs with eyes fixed in the ceiling suspended TV./…/ The morning is sleepy and miserable, the brothels are asleep, the porn is sleeping, only those who hung out from hunger and hunger hunger in search of salvation, and there are those guys from the pubs who they get up at dawn and they have to meet because they can not live without each other,” Andrzej Stasiuk said. What else could I tell you. “Lousy and cheerful, we should stick to the company of animals, squat at their side for millennia, breathe in the smell of the stable rather than laboratories, die from diseases, not drugs, revolve around our emptiness and gently fall into it.” I was in Stavanger, Norway. I thought that I could sit there for years, get used to death. I would leave the ferry every day and look for his arrival. The fuzzy, diluted measures of time would bring her closer, they would distract me, and in the end maybe I would gain something like contingent immortality … But already … I am sending you students now, to your homeland … Because you will do it better, what I had make. Beloved, my readers, you have a little inconvenience, a little bit of a story told anew. I think that I could remember everything that happened, remember it again, even harder. “This is the sense of literature to derail you from normal everyday life, to shoot you out into space from this ordinary life, so that you do not get sick, do not listen to your parents, only listen to Martin Eden, but with all respect for parents, offer it is interesting … I know you want good, but I have no intention of fleeing my fate I do not feel tempted to become someone else You know, here everyone is suffering slavery They think they are They are trapped in their own destiny, they are tearing like animals. Fox is said to be able to bite his paw to free himself, and he is the same with us,” Stasiuk had spoken. I have long accepted the world uncritically. Now we want all our dreams to be fulfilled – because this is the case all over the world, we know it well, and finally we belong to this world. The heart of my Europe beats in Czestochowa. Not in Vienna, Budapest or Krakow. My transplants are there. Here, next to my Mother, the Black Lady, I fulfill myself in my own destiny.” If the state were good, the Gypsies people would probably have them too.” And Mother understands each other … I grew up in the richness of Zaglebie country, I made a maturity exam close to the jewels of Szczecin city. “So I was going to the world to find all this, especially the total (fake) international bazaar, where the Moldovans spread all the Transnistria treasures and try to exchange them for the riches of Transcarpathia, the Szabolcs-Szatmár jewels and the inexhaustible goods of the Maramures province. to see all this and hear this Babylonian uproar of Slavic, Finno-Ugric and Roman languages, this eastern variegated tents, tarpaulin and plywood dishes and old buses converted into mobile brothels, I wanted to smell the Gypsy taboos loaded with magnificences that can not be resisted by any woman or man because they came from lands where no one has yet arrived, let alone any of them returned,” you can read it in Stasiuk book. When I try to remember something, everything else reminds me. Romania is coming out of her childhood, Albania is coming out from vacation with grandparents, and now that I am quite adult, I live in an area that resembled the earliest remembered paintings. The next stamps in the passport do not change anything, because you can not stamp stickers that are bigger and more durable than all the boundaries put together. The navy blue abyss of bovine eyes is like a mirror in which we see ourselves as an animated meat, endowed with a certain kind of grace. Our relationship was once stronger, I think. The world has become too big and it takes a bit too long for it to make sense, Mr. Stasiuk noticed … And I will say yes, the stones from the moon are still ‘without glances,’ the contours are very sharp. And only looks of love things and landscapes smooth out, to polish. In these months of vacation, I am going to travel to the Baltic Sea. Polish Sea from the pier in Misdroy, showing the limitedness of the lands to see, it remains the symbol of a human fabric for God. I already know the Polish landscape. And I tell you my stories on Sobieszewska Island, still being there. “The river spills calmly, wide and wildly, the silver and light are rolling from the depths of the earth, from the depths of this country, affected by neurosis, overcome by hysteria.” That is why I am almost always here to look at her melancholic majesty, her peace, her immorality, I imagine that it flows from the earliest abyss, that through a fraction, through a crumb of time, it sweeps this land, and then disappears in the distance, in a time when we will not be here anymore, but we can not learn anything from it. We look at her royal calmness like a calf on a painted gate, like a magpie in a gnat, like a starling in a cage, and it does not reach us that we only got a chip, a shiver of eternity. So, completely recently, they gave information about finding skeletons of human bones in Czestochowa city, during the field works at the cathedral there? We somehow devoured each other and left us with skeletons, leftovers, things that neither hunger nor fire would touch, one would say. On a daily basis, we hear about accidents. All these new cars are a bit against nature. You just light up the lamp and birds. You stand and call as you have coverage. A tow truck arrives. Broken connection between man and machine. “How to order a fish when thousands of others order it too?” I humbly wanted to take part in communion, while being disgusted with the necessity of community. Like some festering appendix in this grand native organism I was licking like a cancer. and then I was going out into a side street, that it would back. But soon the luciferic lucency would lure me back in. Not that I would like to try a plume for five zlotys at once, but I could not take my eyes off the biological, cellular need of the community. After all, nobody talked to anyone here, two in a hand, four in a family, and at the same time they lasted (we were staying?) in a morbid closeness, just like cells, like the guts of the cattle that unconsciously emit some enzymes that kept us in a pile. and I was thinking about my country, especially the nation without feeling it, wanting and not wanting at the same time.” Stasiuk had written. Beloved Readers, gesturing my day at every geographical latitude, you already know. “Saturday evenings are full of phantoms. People are separating themselves and their homesickness, sending their own half-visible images to try all the forbidden things.The boys resemble their own dreams as they walk along the edge of the road and look for the girls who measured the dresses today, but in the mirrors material their costumes became invisible and they looked at their naked bodies /…/ It is the basis of patriotism: that you can leave at any moment and look at the shadow of your homeland from afar, how it rises over the country and stretches like an atomic mushroom. Look at it from a distance and know that it is there, that it will be when you return /…/ All those smells, thickened scents, heavy fumes of earth and things from childhood, from birth, when you first dug in. Grochów, Mazowsze and Podlasie. By the Dujawa Pass, down to the Mediterranean catchment, further from the forested, mossy, to chłego shadow midnight. To look from a distance and see how far it goes. My country. My poor, abandoned country. All countries are abandoned, but mine is the most. I am going south to see it as expressively as in a prophetic dream. From Prešov, from Miskolc, from Budapest, from Belgrade, watch as the gigantic morph of the country rises on the northern horizon. Like Godzilla. In the crown, in a purple coat, in golden high heels. The further away, the bigger and older. An ancient whirling creature. That’s why it goes as far as possible. At the end of the continent, on the edge of the land, on the shore of the waters, to see how the shadow is chasing you. To the Balkans. To the land of death, to remember the innocence of the motherland, to remember her virginity /…/ And dick they will do to me, because I am a Pole who loves freedom. I will be happy with every president who will be around and every president will think what I like. Or I will not think about them at all, because they did not deserve,” Stasiuk said. And now you can see with certainty what is the difference between Mr. Stasiuk and me, that I would like to “participate in life” and Mr Stasiuk, he only look in … Experience all his potential: spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and meet someone who can still release it and not miss it. “People thought that Germany was well-groomed and honest. They paid for eggs and chickens. The nearest ghetto was twenty kilometers west. Treblinka – over thirty, slightly more to the north. The village had a negligible concept of these heralds of modernity.” My God, and beloved Lord of earth and heaven, I know that you are busy, that you have no time to visit hell today, but I think that after but I think that you should speed up my nation to four winds. You should drive him away from you like those of the temple traders. To desert them, to wander like Jews. That they may not seem to have any group access to you that you will collectively consider them and count them all the tribal merits that they imagine, write down and then believe in them. That these are merits before You. Lord, I would set them in your place throughout the world for millennia like the nation of Israel, and it would only turn out how much they are worth. As if they did not have their own Masovia, Kielce, Grunwald, all those November, January and September, smoking with burned meat, it turned out to be so. As if they did not have anything. As if they had no Russian, no German, no justification for the Jew, and no Pope would have had a pagan cult, only for a hundred kilometers of sand, it was clear to them whether they believe or only do national interest. Sand and eternity. That’s what I would do,” so much Mr. Stasiuk writer. Beloved, it’s worth fighting for the same as always, for yourself. “Not to be reformatted, to win, to make money, to buy. Do not get converted into a rat, just find a niche and thanks to it, do not let yourself be trapped in all the garbage that popculture oozes in us, to convert to consumers, crap bats. Peonies and parrots are as usual. We did not take part in the construction of this post-modern reality and we collect the leftovers from her table. We wag our tail when we can buy a new iPhone, as if it was about that freedom. We took ready outfits and behaviors from a cheap supermarket and apologize to some global tribes from television. We immediately went into other people’s shoes. We are not alone. It is difficult to get out. All this talk that the West is a civilization of individualists is fake. We play a few roles, and that’s it. We lose our identity. To travel means to live, and in any case we can live twice, triple, repeatedly, and now even the cosmos is for a wonderful life, and you can never see life better than autumn … know this, he had spoken, spiritually we are in a full ass . Internal life has replaced us with internet and shopping.” Yes, I have no imagination, and therefore I should pack, stuff my little things, my passport, some money, I should go on the road to see how it really is. In the lowlands, the eyes do not rest. I do not mind the center, but the periphery is closer to me. The center of the continent is becoming more and more unified now.Themetropolises are no longer different and soon they can only be recognized on the basis of respectable and dead monuments. a bright coating of modernity: the same hotel chain names, the same adverts, the same ATMs, beer brands, the same parking meters, the same arrangement of shelves in supermarkets and the repertoire in cinemas, I think that soon we will be traveling to the periphery, to the borders of the continent, to the lands where old women sit in handkerchiefs.” I wanted to come back to my own feelings, just like you are returning to your first love, you never succeeded, but I always tried. We have a fool with this freedom today, see Mr. Stasiuk. “It’s free to have these herds of kids enslaved by television and advertising?” Former 18-year-olds in suits studying at business colleges, I always get away from this change, and it’s still coming, and it’s still like it’s been the first time. to get us out of the monotony of days, the only sense of which is to bring us closer to death. We are watching the annual dying, annual burial of the world, to gain the appearance of immortality? … Something I covered and watched as the fog rises how the sun rises, how the splendor of decline, death and autumn develops, the beech red, the yellowing green of birches and the alder birch, which disappear every year without ostentation, under the sky covered with a pearl hull of clouds through which the light from time to time of that side, expressive and sharp as in any other time of the year. Why? They watched the picture fit into the pupil forever and go nervously to the memory, to the heart, to the soul – in what somebody believes. That he would stay, because with time, with the passage of time, with age, he will be as a consolation only as a proof that we existed at all. That is why this autumn in glory and some hyper-realism is displayed to us. Compressed season, intense as before the defeat. With abundance of colors through forests and gardens. Blood, gold, fire. Alchemy. Fruit in orchards and heavy, fleshy pumpkin heads lying in the thousands of fields.” Beloved, I was too big to exist in an ordinary way, and now stands in a mental gap and writes to you what remains after us, truly ash and diamond. I was in Mexico in January 2009, that’s what I was telling you, and then I wrote a book called “A look from my window.” But then there was not a look anymore just looking out of the window of youth. As I said it once, I lived in Nowogrodek my childhood. “Night, night, night, blacksmith bird told a dream endlessly, as long as the life of all people, as if he wanted to confess from everything he saw, what he heard, confess to all good, bad and indifferent things, because life is most likely a variation of sin, which can be forgotten in the day, but the night does not know pity (…) The heart then barely beats, dies, barely shatters blood, and even the smallest drop of light does not dilute the substance thickened with anxiety and you can only wait until the glass covers dark blue paint of the dawn. Only this can be done.” Look, my friends died this night. As if they knew that the best story must have a vague and narcotic beginning. Then on a certain May day, I saw my mother’s grave. So I am older for at least a year, notice this. A grave is needed to know where it is from. It is a pagan desire that there be remains and that there is a place to go to draw strength. Go back to the place where you came from. It is very possible that a man feels his existence only when he feels the touch of an unnamed space that connects us with the earliest time, with all dead, prehistory, when the mind was only separating from the world and not yet aware of its orphanhood. .. I felt then gradually, as the time taken up in human forms so far spilled and returned to its original form. Here, in Zabkowice (once a town, now a district of Dabrowa Gornicza), after the death of friends, time was ubiquitous as the humidity in the air. He made houses and ships, rolled faces and landscapes, glasses in bars and goods in stores. He just burned out, gulped a delicate coating of minutes, hours and days, and took possession of all space, all visible and invisible things, and human thoughts too. The child believes naively in everything. I went to school half past the saddle, and I had no idea that there was communism in the world, although my mother talked about such things at home because what we were all involved in was just life … But she wanted to teach me how to participate. Well, how is it? That with time we are moving away from the place of our own birth and this is to be escape, betrayal, and emigration? And everything we do is an attempt to return? (…) How is it? That the wider we circle, the clearer the center of this circulation and the stronger the attraction? In my case, this center of the world and the feeling was and will remain mother. In childhood, after every distance, I returned very quickly to my mother’s wings … She left now but very close. And I became a father for the new Jim of my Polish land. You imagine, I also remember a sunny day, I told my classmate at school that I was always behind kings and emperors, that now, in this poor time, I miss them especially because democracy does not satisfy the aesthetic or mythological desires and man feels somewhat abandoned in it … In childhood: you left the house and there were only shapes and colors. It was adults who had everything, somehow, not to get lost in life. And this “last” something called the disease one way or the other. The disease changes you, it takes you slowly from the world. You become a bit old, a little child … We will end. I started to drive to the world. Ordinary gray people go, from East to West. Like Attila, Genghis Khan and Tamerlan. I had such thoughts on the Spree in postmodern, glassy luminous spaces. Yes, it always helped to move somewhere else, even in my head. Be on the spot and not be … Burn yourself, ponyslalem once. What did you think about this burning? What? That it’s so nice that nothing stays, only the ghost will float in infinite spaces? That you will not give up your emaciated body for decay, that it will slowly enter the ground? The skeleton would live forever. And he drew his thoughts, animated the memory. After all, we are still wild and we need totems, we need fetishes. Thought must touch something … And Poland is coming. It came grandiose solidarity, now it is rusty, on the TV again as during the revolution in Russia, the women read the announcement about the creation of the Third Polish Republic. “I know that I’m like a hyena, I’ve come all over, I’ve come to ready, I just have to watch out for the warnings about the mines I collect some leftovers I came when no one comes in. Just some officials and a bit of the army This is the last one in my part of the world in times of peace, it always looks the same: it’s sad and it smells a bit, it’s free at last, without fear … With cameras, postcolonial people, but the most tormented, not by strangers, but by themselves and for centuries, now making one-off photos in disposable shoes. And sprinkled with some glittering crap Poland has risen ,” Mr. Stasiuk said. But it seems to me that Poland has been resurrected in an era not for her sake. Will anybody stop at this place to watch the past? In a hundred, in two hundred years. And will the past still exist at all? Will anyone need her to understand anything from her own life? It is possible that only the future will exist. I would not be surprised at all. We will only miss the next one. To what we dream of. Longing with the past will be eradicated. Simply. The brains will change. We will think only of what we buy. What more pleasure we will do. There will be no ghosts, memories, memories and you will have to start again from day to day … I return to my pilgrimage. So I wandered around the globe, hoping that the idea and plan would be revealed naturally. That sense will eventually appear, because meaning exists. That’s why every year I go on a journey farther and farther. At the end of the continent, just to stay back. I suffered and cursed. Reality is full of characters, but you have to be able to read them. And now I think that all this was just dreaming … Thank you for your time, I am now with you, my beloved Readers, in prayer for peace for the whole world.