CLASSICS REVISITED
The tireless messenger
RAVI VYAS
GRAHAM GREENE has said somewhere that every country gets accustomed to its own restrictions as part of its own violence. But this "survival kit" leads to a tradition of double-talk as in Poland and Hungary and the former states of the Soviet Union. Circumstances differ, but in Poland it was an inheritance from a long history of invasion, division and political rape by hordes of greater or lesser barbarity, sweeping in from the east and the west.
Tradition of double-talk
Specifically it was an inheritance from a time when straight talk was impossible: the century and a half or more of the Partition of Poland (1793) carved up between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Then the nation's unity was preserved by the use of the Polish language (and the Church). So to write became, willy-nilly, a political act, a gesture of independence. Authors stood in for politicians; instead of factions there were poems and novels. Unlike western Europe where it was taken for granted that there was a fundamental split between poetry and politics because the complexity, tension and precision of modern poetry simply didn't jell with the language of politics, with its vague rhetoric and dependence on clichés, it was the other way around in Poland. Politics and poetry were one.
The result was a national genius for ambiguity. Everything was written in what could be called Aesop's language, which made it impossible even to publish "hickory-dickory dock" without someone interpreting the thing as a parable on the Polish economy, a veiled but barbed comment on production and distribution. In the Polish arts, every statement was loaded, every image more than it seemed.
The Nobel Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) was the master of the two-tone style. Poet, critic, one-time resistance fighter and Professor of Slavic literature at Berkeley, Milosz was a man of immense intellectual influence. In fact, post-war Polish poetry is in large part because of Milosz. His poems come at us bluntly and obliquely at once, with a disconcerting combination of roughness and irony. Often they are allegorical since they were written under totalitarian rule, "on the dark night of history: the first under the Germans, when twenty percent of the population was killed; the second under Stalinists when intellectual life was bureaucratised, censored and policed to a standstill."
No middle ground
When everything is clamped up, the left hand gives and the right hand takes away, what does the poet write about? Milosz's genius is for the very small and the very large — the intensely sensual detail and the bleak interstellar spaces. His eye, at once microscopic and telescopic, has almost no middle ground; it is this particular cast of vision, zeroing-in from the general to the particular (from bodies to ashes to a single man) that identifies a poem as his. Milosz's central themes spring from his memories — the strangeness of human life (where in the blink of an eye absurdity can turn to bravery, or tranquillity to war), exile, sensuality, Platonic idealism and iron disbelief:
Alas, my memory
Does not want to leave me
And in it, live beings
Each with its own pain,
Each with its own dying.
Its own trepidation.
Milosz was a loner because, according to him, the artist literally cannot be one of a collective, a member of any group on earth, not so much because of cultural alienation as because of biological difference. As he says in "Reconciliation" the artist is a "mutation, variation":
The poet: one who constantly thinks of someone else.
...
May be he does not even have any human feelings.
Sense of separation
Where other people can be unselfconscious in a group because of their sense of belonging to them, the poet (and other artist-mutants) is always conscious of separation and observes others from a distance of which he himself is ashamed. Yet this alertness makes him observe the material world from very close quarters, whatever his social distance. It is the differences that Milosz observes that makes his poetry perennial. His attempts at self-definition in "Throughout Our Lands": "If I had to tell what the world is for me/ I would take a hamster or a hedgehog or a mole/ and place him in a theatre seat one evening/ and, bringing my ear close to his humid stout,/ would listen to what he says about the spotlights,/ sounds of the music, and movements of the dance."
It is in his prose that we see most clearly the fantastic and baroque variety of his intellectual range. In his collection of essays he moves with ease from Swedenborg to Robinson Jeffers, from Lithuanian scenery to Meister Eckhart, from the Seven Deadly Sins to Polish Marxism. The variety of interests derives from his Catholic upbringing, his legal and philosophical education, his Marxist period, and his eventual moves from Poland to France to the United States. In his prose he becomes a powerful presence, a personality with obstinate opinions and sardonic asides. Pride, anger, irritability and contempt share his pages with shame, self-loathing, pity and pain. Milosz calls himself in his homage to Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, in Provinces, "a gatherer of visible forms".
Beginning With My Streets closes with Milosz's 1980 Nobel Lecture in which he remarks that the poet's vocation is "to contemplate Being". He describes the poet's dilemma: "How to be above and simultaneously to see the earth in every detail?" He never ceased to wrestle with this impossibility while contending with another difficulty which can be seen in his Collected Poems: "How to permit, along with subterranean fury and icy calm, the simultaneous existence of faith and hope?"
Words that scream
It is painful not to be able to quote the many perfectly realised poems from Provinces and his Collected Poems (1931-87). In one of his last poems, Milosz confronted the possibility of ultimate metaphysical meaninglessness, the absence of a God who could guarantee a final truth and turns to his purpose the ancient figure of an angel or "messenger". If there is no "true meaning", nonetheless,
there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.
Milosz's cries, protests, and screams will reach our posterity for a long time to come.
Books Consulted:
Czeslaw Milosz: Native Realm: A Search for Self Definition; The Captive Mind; Collected Poems (1931-87); Beginning With My Streets: Essays and Recollections; Provinces: Poems, 1987-1991.
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