Today marks one month left in Poland.
My one regret is not watching more Netflix.
Friday, May 22, 2015
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
The Sun Won't Set
8 o'clock. Twilight.
How the hell am I going to get 9 months of living into one suitcase?
9 months is enough time to make a baby. If I were in delicate condition on my first jour in Poland, that fetus would be at 8 months. It would have been considered a person in Oklahoma for 7 and a half months. That is 8 months of cold nights, missed trams, fruit that went bad before I ate it. Lost keys in cabs in Warsaw, realizing I'd worn twin holes in my best shoes.
5 months ago, I had been horrified to see the sun setting at 3:30.
It is now 9 o'clock and it's still perfectly light. The daylight has melted admittedly into more neutral tones, leaving the sky pale blue with splashes of orange and a delicate pink the color of powdered pink lemonade. It's almost diabetic. Those precious 5 and a half hours of daylight were not free. Those were the result of working well into the dark teaching writing courses, dreading the wait for the dram in the cold, spending lonely tram rides back to almost the last stop on the route by reading Emily Dickinson, wondering what her opinions might be on American politics and culture.
Would Emily Dickinson watch Orange is the New Black? I made such a mental note to myself once as I stared at the burning yellow lightbulbs bounce clumsily off of an almost- frozen Lake Malta while the street car sat, perfectly snug and motionless while a pileup of trams in front of it brought the tracks to a standstill. By that point, we had gained an additional hour and a half of light in the day.
By March, I had come to accept the turbulence of weather. I still carried around a thick knitted jacket, debating on whether I would take it back with me to the states or leave it in a charity bin. It would be absurdly oversized on most people and would, more practically, make a nice home for a destitute warren of rabbits. However, they will go wanting. It is making the trek with me across the ocean next month back to the United States where it will remain packed and worthless until November (11 months after I first bought it in Munich, when the days had just begun to drastically shorten). However, it was in late March that the days once again began to expand. I thawed from the dark, depressing days of January when I was unable to appreciate much due to homesickness, cold, and a few fleeting hours of sun a day. I spent those mostly indoors where I didn't need the damn jacket anyway.
I think too of the shoes, the brown pleather moccasins. I had purchased them after losing one of my green boating shoes (ironically) to two feet of brown mud on the banks of the Potomac River. Those shoes had been troopers. They survived being chewed on by a dog, months of standing in front of a classroom while I pleaded with students to see the significance of "A Doll's House" (most of them didn't). In the end, I left the river that day with one shoe. The other, as far as I know, is still encased in mud and river-water somewhere in suburban Washington. I bought these brown moccasins which I wore today later that afternoon after being delighted to find something in my size and not made of leather. I noticed they contained a hole in Sarajevo walking back to the car (whose driver had been unwilling to drive down the hill in the snow) from the Olympic ruins. Ski slopes hid in the distance like titanic ghosts (gigantic and ludicrously difficult to see for something so large) behind the dominating fog of falling snow. The terrain was perfectly round, smothered in a solid foot of snow, the slate icon shouted out the words in chemical orange, looking grave-like against the pines and elements, "Sarajevo, 1984." As I took my first picture, I noticed my foot felt wet. It was a total reversal of the day I bought the shoes. The heat of Virginia in May was replaced with Bosnian winter and yet my shoes fared no better. My black sock soaked up the melting ice, chilling my foot instantly. I kept the shoes, wearing them out further on dry days, experiencing the expansion of daylight nestled firmly in their well-worn, broken-in familiarity that can only come from a truly excellent pair of shoes. However, as I glance at them across the room (still illuminated at 9:00 even though I haven't turned on any electric lights in the room), I realize that they have reached the end of their days. They will be disposed of (I sound like Ayn Rand). I'm now of the green shoes (similarly worn-out and comfortable) and how it had been an unwelcome sacrifice to lose them while boating.
I had wanted to berry pick that day.
The rest that remains to be sorted is a collection of papers. Meaningless receipts, post-cards, ticket-stubs from museums, ballets, the opera. Sketches drawn too hastily and disregarded. Letters written to those I love, confessing what I could never imagine confessing, expressing how the thought of them made my stomach ache from recognizing the void brought on by their absence, reeling from the accusation that I was an abandoner, someone who would sooner leave what he loved than face stillness in his life.
These, too, will be disposed of. However, the shoes are a considerably harder loss.
In one month, I have read, there will be six hours of darkness in the span of 24 hours. I will likely both go to sleep and wake up in light. However, the space will grow increasingly empty as I fill suitcases and backpacks with what I will carry back to the states. Fewer shadows will be cast against the walls by pre-mature morning. Such, however, seems to be the progression of things. The days expand.
The sky has turned into a total blueness now.
Sunset approaches.
How the hell am I going to get 9 months of living into one suitcase?
9 months is enough time to make a baby. If I were in delicate condition on my first jour in Poland, that fetus would be at 8 months. It would have been considered a person in Oklahoma for 7 and a half months. That is 8 months of cold nights, missed trams, fruit that went bad before I ate it. Lost keys in cabs in Warsaw, realizing I'd worn twin holes in my best shoes.
5 months ago, I had been horrified to see the sun setting at 3:30.
It is now 9 o'clock and it's still perfectly light. The daylight has melted admittedly into more neutral tones, leaving the sky pale blue with splashes of orange and a delicate pink the color of powdered pink lemonade. It's almost diabetic. Those precious 5 and a half hours of daylight were not free. Those were the result of working well into the dark teaching writing courses, dreading the wait for the dram in the cold, spending lonely tram rides back to almost the last stop on the route by reading Emily Dickinson, wondering what her opinions might be on American politics and culture.
Would Emily Dickinson watch Orange is the New Black? I made such a mental note to myself once as I stared at the burning yellow lightbulbs bounce clumsily off of an almost- frozen Lake Malta while the street car sat, perfectly snug and motionless while a pileup of trams in front of it brought the tracks to a standstill. By that point, we had gained an additional hour and a half of light in the day.
By March, I had come to accept the turbulence of weather. I still carried around a thick knitted jacket, debating on whether I would take it back with me to the states or leave it in a charity bin. It would be absurdly oversized on most people and would, more practically, make a nice home for a destitute warren of rabbits. However, they will go wanting. It is making the trek with me across the ocean next month back to the United States where it will remain packed and worthless until November (11 months after I first bought it in Munich, when the days had just begun to drastically shorten). However, it was in late March that the days once again began to expand. I thawed from the dark, depressing days of January when I was unable to appreciate much due to homesickness, cold, and a few fleeting hours of sun a day. I spent those mostly indoors where I didn't need the damn jacket anyway.
I think too of the shoes, the brown pleather moccasins. I had purchased them after losing one of my green boating shoes (ironically) to two feet of brown mud on the banks of the Potomac River. Those shoes had been troopers. They survived being chewed on by a dog, months of standing in front of a classroom while I pleaded with students to see the significance of "A Doll's House" (most of them didn't). In the end, I left the river that day with one shoe. The other, as far as I know, is still encased in mud and river-water somewhere in suburban Washington. I bought these brown moccasins which I wore today later that afternoon after being delighted to find something in my size and not made of leather. I noticed they contained a hole in Sarajevo walking back to the car (whose driver had been unwilling to drive down the hill in the snow) from the Olympic ruins. Ski slopes hid in the distance like titanic ghosts (gigantic and ludicrously difficult to see for something so large) behind the dominating fog of falling snow. The terrain was perfectly round, smothered in a solid foot of snow, the slate icon shouted out the words in chemical orange, looking grave-like against the pines and elements, "Sarajevo, 1984." As I took my first picture, I noticed my foot felt wet. It was a total reversal of the day I bought the shoes. The heat of Virginia in May was replaced with Bosnian winter and yet my shoes fared no better. My black sock soaked up the melting ice, chilling my foot instantly. I kept the shoes, wearing them out further on dry days, experiencing the expansion of daylight nestled firmly in their well-worn, broken-in familiarity that can only come from a truly excellent pair of shoes. However, as I glance at them across the room (still illuminated at 9:00 even though I haven't turned on any electric lights in the room), I realize that they have reached the end of their days. They will be disposed of (I sound like Ayn Rand). I'm now of the green shoes (similarly worn-out and comfortable) and how it had been an unwelcome sacrifice to lose them while boating.
I had wanted to berry pick that day.
The rest that remains to be sorted is a collection of papers. Meaningless receipts, post-cards, ticket-stubs from museums, ballets, the opera. Sketches drawn too hastily and disregarded. Letters written to those I love, confessing what I could never imagine confessing, expressing how the thought of them made my stomach ache from recognizing the void brought on by their absence, reeling from the accusation that I was an abandoner, someone who would sooner leave what he loved than face stillness in his life.
These, too, will be disposed of. However, the shoes are a considerably harder loss.
In one month, I have read, there will be six hours of darkness in the span of 24 hours. I will likely both go to sleep and wake up in light. However, the space will grow increasingly empty as I fill suitcases and backpacks with what I will carry back to the states. Fewer shadows will be cast against the walls by pre-mature morning. Such, however, seems to be the progression of things. The days expand.
The sky has turned into a total blueness now.
Sunset approaches.
Friday, May 1, 2015
The Night That Goldman Spoke at Union Square
Emma Goldman, July 9th, 1917: It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice which drives the political offender to his act. To condemn him means to be blind to the causes which make him. I can no more do it, nor have I the right to, than the physician who were to condemn the patient for his disease. You and I and all of us who remain indifferent to the crimes of poverty, of war, of human degradation, are equally responsible for the act committed by the political offender. May I therefore be permitted to say, in the words of a great teacher: “He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.” Does that mean advocating violence? You might as well accuse Jesus of advocating prostitution, because He took the part of the prostitute, Mary Magdalene.
Livestream:
11:01am: Exit domicile.
*notices red and white flag fluttering from building*
That's odd. It must be understood that patriotism has taken different forms here. In the United States, the barrage of stars and stripes, the symphony of tasteful primary colors which have become cliche in Americana are common, not to be missed. Americans, by and large, are willing to express their patriotism visually because it is simpler. An act as basic, as common as waving the American flag is, in itself, innately political. Similarly, defacing the flag becomes a rallying cry of the right wing, willing to say (without detecting the irony) that men and women died for that flag. The flag assumes its own identity as something to be paraded and protected like a prize-winning poodle. To help me illustrate this point, please welcome Ms. Edith Bouvier Beale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_0IhqWd6fE
It's nothing uncommon. However, I have seen more flags today than I have in 7 months of living in Poland. It's unsurprising. The third of the month is Constitution Day. Today, however, marks something different: Worker's Day.
On July 9, 1917, Goldman spoke to a jury which sought to imprison her under charges of "inducing persons not to register," citing the quotation above in her argument. A tireless advocate for women, workers, and birth control, Goldman was, in simple terms, a threat. Privately, I believe the US government had good reason to be afraid. Workers had just shot the capitalists in Russia, toppling a dynasty, and were working towards the formation of the USSR. Workers in Manhattan, contrary to popular media, had not always been so content to take money for work. When women seamstresses went on strike, they were beaten by police, attacked by hired prostitutes, and tossed around with little concern. Goldman appeared in a purple dress and, through use of cool rhetoric and common sense, advocated that the principles of Americanism and common decency protected her right to distribute anarchist pamphlets and newspapers to the workers.
The jury disagreed. She would then serve two years in prison alongside Kate O'Hare, a fellow socialist.
11:10
Nothing seems to be open (Workers' Day) and yet I needed soap to do laundry and some olive oil to use to cook dinner. The air has turned cold again. A liquor store stands open, four men smoke cigarettes in the doorway.
December 21, 1919
Goldman sits in the New York Port of Embarkation. She has not been told when or where she is going and reflects privately on the cowardly and secretive nature of the whole affair. She would, she realize, be taken from this land, the melting pot, the land of opportunity for those who did not need it. Her work would end. New speakers would rise from the cesspool of American capitalism to challenge the norms of treatment, to advocate for better pay, better hours, and more humane conditions. Perhaps there was a chill as she walked, step by step, towards Soviet Russia on boat called the Soviet Ark.
She would return later, prior to the war. She would speak favorably of Franklin Roosevelt. Before her death, she would suffer a stroke rendering her incapable of speech. She died silent, capable of hearing, capable of sight, but unable to utter a sound.
The cartoons would say "good riddance."
11:33
I find an open store. A woman stands behind the counter, surrounded by boxes, loaves of bread wrapped in plastic, oranges still packed in crates. She speaks no English and I see no machine that would take credit cards.
I return home empty-handed.
Livestream:
11:01am: Exit domicile.
*notices red and white flag fluttering from building*
That's odd. It must be understood that patriotism has taken different forms here. In the United States, the barrage of stars and stripes, the symphony of tasteful primary colors which have become cliche in Americana are common, not to be missed. Americans, by and large, are willing to express their patriotism visually because it is simpler. An act as basic, as common as waving the American flag is, in itself, innately political. Similarly, defacing the flag becomes a rallying cry of the right wing, willing to say (without detecting the irony) that men and women died for that flag. The flag assumes its own identity as something to be paraded and protected like a prize-winning poodle. To help me illustrate this point, please welcome Ms. Edith Bouvier Beale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_0IhqWd6fE
It's nothing uncommon. However, I have seen more flags today than I have in 7 months of living in Poland. It's unsurprising. The third of the month is Constitution Day. Today, however, marks something different: Worker's Day.
On July 9, 1917, Goldman spoke to a jury which sought to imprison her under charges of "inducing persons not to register," citing the quotation above in her argument. A tireless advocate for women, workers, and birth control, Goldman was, in simple terms, a threat. Privately, I believe the US government had good reason to be afraid. Workers had just shot the capitalists in Russia, toppling a dynasty, and were working towards the formation of the USSR. Workers in Manhattan, contrary to popular media, had not always been so content to take money for work. When women seamstresses went on strike, they were beaten by police, attacked by hired prostitutes, and tossed around with little concern. Goldman appeared in a purple dress and, through use of cool rhetoric and common sense, advocated that the principles of Americanism and common decency protected her right to distribute anarchist pamphlets and newspapers to the workers.
The jury disagreed. She would then serve two years in prison alongside Kate O'Hare, a fellow socialist.
11:10
Nothing seems to be open (Workers' Day) and yet I needed soap to do laundry and some olive oil to use to cook dinner. The air has turned cold again. A liquor store stands open, four men smoke cigarettes in the doorway.
December 21, 1919
Goldman sits in the New York Port of Embarkation. She has not been told when or where she is going and reflects privately on the cowardly and secretive nature of the whole affair. She would, she realize, be taken from this land, the melting pot, the land of opportunity for those who did not need it. Her work would end. New speakers would rise from the cesspool of American capitalism to challenge the norms of treatment, to advocate for better pay, better hours, and more humane conditions. Perhaps there was a chill as she walked, step by step, towards Soviet Russia on boat called the Soviet Ark.
She would return later, prior to the war. She would speak favorably of Franklin Roosevelt. Before her death, she would suffer a stroke rendering her incapable of speech. She died silent, capable of hearing, capable of sight, but unable to utter a sound.
The cartoons would say "good riddance."
11:33
I find an open store. A woman stands behind the counter, surrounded by boxes, loaves of bread wrapped in plastic, oranges still packed in crates. She speaks no English and I see no machine that would take credit cards.
I return home empty-handed.
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Excited and Scared
I’m riding on the train from Newcastle to Edinburgh, having presented research on the impact of Civil War death on popular literature of the time. My nerves have not entirely calmed from the anxiety of academic presentation. You all know what I’m talking about. There is no one to blame but yourself. You signed up, you printed the damn thing, and now it’s just a simple mater of reading it. In the present, however, there is only the lingering dampness of sheer terror at public speaking to a room in which you can see everyone’s face, and a series of visual cliches rolling beside my window. I shall, for lack of anything better to do, relay these images as faithfully as possible.
On either side are rolling green pastures, fields turned, with blood-warm soil churning around with what has been dried and stomped upon. Some are emerald green, dappled with bushes sprouting goldenrod flowers (it seems impossibly cold for these), populated by sheep, wooly, hearty, and exploitable. I think for a moment of Animal Farm. The chorus of ovine simpletons chanting “four legs good, two legs bad” (I recall hearing that “Beasts of England” went to the tune of “Darling Clementine”). I remember wondering in my core when I read that book whether or not they almost deserved it. Did their stupidity warrant Jones? Did it warrant Napoleon? But then I realize it’s all an allegory, a metaphysical speculation. In reality, sheep do not talk, nor learn to read (in a moment of consistency with metaphor). These creatures seem content to walk across green meadows, followed by lively lambs with frost-colored skin who skip with hearty foot and breath salt-air from the sea between bites of clovers.
The moment, I decide, reminds me more of James Harriet (a remnant of the Shook family pilgrimages to Orlando, always accompanied in a vaguely Chaucerian sense by the tales of veterinary science and mayhem that seemed to follow James and Helen Harriet on a day to day basis). In retrospect, I might have preferred The Pardoner’s Tale to Harriet. At any rate, the metaphor was easier.
In the distance, the sky seems to battle between a blue cosmos the shade of an easter egg and colonies of slate-grey. I imagine these titans have produced some rain. There is an animation to them, the lines which seem to absolve them of definite shape are at work.
In front of them, a rainbow has formed, neatly touching from hill to hill as a sea the color of iron splashes against the white sands. A woman walks in a brown coat and high rubber boots, leading a horse, pausing for a moment to catch her breath (or perhaps to look off into the abyss of ocean that separates her from a continent). The water looks deep and cold, with the wind blowing sprays of salt-water off of its crests. It’s the first time I’ve thought of the ocean as poisonous.
I feel very strongly about setting a scene. Is it vital that you see the rows of trees (still naked from a northern winter)? Perhaps not. However, to skip them would be inauthentic, excluding a narrative’s Emerald City (I leave for Ireland in the morning).
I think of the events of the week. One week ago, I was in Berlin, thinking of passover, and all the colors I would dye my hair if I lived there. Two nights ago, I was standing in the vaults of a bridge, hearing of the people who dwelled within them, eating oysters in the dark and tossing their shells without much concern for hygiene. I was told, too, of the amount of money one could get for the body of a healthy male (with no signs of sickness or trauma).
Rocks quarried from an old volcano were insufficient, it was discovered, to keep out water.
We walked, too, through a graveyard dating back to the 1500s. We stand alongside graves topped with acorns, cavernous mausoleums that remained locked without explanation as to what is being kept out or in.
Yesterday at this time, I was underground in a quadrant of the city that had been covered for the sake of progress (an impressive building covers it now). We hear of families visited by doctors clad in leather cloaks and bird-beak masks stuffed with herbs to keep out sickness, a white flag signifying to all who walked by that sickness dwelled within (better than the rumors that the ill were bricked in and left to die without transmitting the disease). We hear the tale of a man who spent the last moments of his life surrounded by a murder of crows, soot-black and unholy, drawing closer with each step he took. We see doors that must remained closed because the wallpaper was saturated with Arsenic (a specialty of the Victorian time). It is, perhaps, most unnerving to walk in places that once hosted life, once were too crowded to move, that now sat empty, entered only by those who are looking for a good scare.
Monday, March 30, 2015
The World You Never Thought to Explore
There are few things quite as wonderful as a guest.
This is a fact as universally acknowledged as more popular assertions perpetuated by Ms. Austen.
After 6 months of dividing life between Poland and America, my dear friend Tory Johnson visited me for a week of fun and games.
I am notoriously awful at playing host. Ask any of the prospective Mercerians from North Hall High School who visited me. They will tell you about my lackluster ability to talk up things that have become common.
Sample dialogue includes:
-"And what is this?"
-"Oh. It's the quad."
-"It's beautiful."
-"Yeah, I guess."
Even now, Poznan has become base camp, ordinary, and unremarkable (to me). It's a beautiful, historical city. However, existing somewhere long enough for the loveliness, the novelty to fade causes an attitude of indifference that one can only have when showing the place s/he lives off to someone who has never been there. I struggle to think of what one must see versus what one could see. There is the gorgeous town square, the Baroque churches, the vast public spaces where the modern and the classical blends against the medieval like patches of earth viewed from an airplane, cafes with sipping chocolate, pierogi... How could it fill a day?
However, the following two days were something of a Jolly Holiday with 76 trombones. It felt wonderful to have someone from the states visit, the excitement of showing them around places that are new to them, seeing spaces as if they were brand new...getting kissed on the head by a stranger probably asking for drug money, and the satisfaction of not totally screwing up someone's time in Poland.
From there we went to Warsaw, staying in the Old Town and walking around the streets that have hosted John Paul II, Chopin, and Marie Curie (the trifecta of must-know Polish historical figures). We enjoyed warm weather. We ate in a restaurant that looked like it had been drawn in sharpie and searched through antiques for pins, medals, and posters. From there, we went to the Jewish Museum, cramming over 1000 years of history into 4 hours. Exhausted, tired, but entirely satisfied, we schlepped our way to Lublin, Mary, spinach tarts, and my first non-undergraduate conference.
The wonderful thing about all of this was that I, too, was able to experience new things in Poland. The delight of learning about a place you'd dismissed as familiar is incomparable, even more so when you are discovering it side-by-side with a devoted old friend.
I mean, who else would quote Disney on top of the Palace of Culture and Science?
This is a fact as universally acknowledged as more popular assertions perpetuated by Ms. Austen.
After 6 months of dividing life between Poland and America, my dear friend Tory Johnson visited me for a week of fun and games.
I am notoriously awful at playing host. Ask any of the prospective Mercerians from North Hall High School who visited me. They will tell you about my lackluster ability to talk up things that have become common.
Sample dialogue includes:
-"And what is this?"
-"Oh. It's the quad."
-"It's beautiful."
-"Yeah, I guess."
Even now, Poznan has become base camp, ordinary, and unremarkable (to me). It's a beautiful, historical city. However, existing somewhere long enough for the loveliness, the novelty to fade causes an attitude of indifference that one can only have when showing the place s/he lives off to someone who has never been there. I struggle to think of what one must see versus what one could see. There is the gorgeous town square, the Baroque churches, the vast public spaces where the modern and the classical blends against the medieval like patches of earth viewed from an airplane, cafes with sipping chocolate, pierogi... How could it fill a day?
However, the following two days were something of a Jolly Holiday with 76 trombones. It felt wonderful to have someone from the states visit, the excitement of showing them around places that are new to them, seeing spaces as if they were brand new...getting kissed on the head by a stranger probably asking for drug money, and the satisfaction of not totally screwing up someone's time in Poland.
From there we went to Warsaw, staying in the Old Town and walking around the streets that have hosted John Paul II, Chopin, and Marie Curie (the trifecta of must-know Polish historical figures). We enjoyed warm weather. We ate in a restaurant that looked like it had been drawn in sharpie and searched through antiques for pins, medals, and posters. From there, we went to the Jewish Museum, cramming over 1000 years of history into 4 hours. Exhausted, tired, but entirely satisfied, we schlepped our way to Lublin, Mary, spinach tarts, and my first non-undergraduate conference.
The wonderful thing about all of this was that I, too, was able to experience new things in Poland. The delight of learning about a place you'd dismissed as familiar is incomparable, even more so when you are discovering it side-by-side with a devoted old friend.
I mean, who else would quote Disney on top of the Palace of Culture and Science?
Every Day a Little Death
Marie Curie
for Danielle
I am, for reasons I do not know, quite anxious to take her picture.
Bitter iron woman, cast in meal, pockets filled, I imagine, with the elements
that would eviscerate her.
She clutches no prizes (though she won a gold medal in gymnasium) and holds
at her side her precious journals, today stowed away, still lethal to the touch.
The statue does not, regrettably, convey the loss of a husband, the loss of a god, or fainting from hunger when she forwent sustenance to sustain her studies.
I had once been told that there exists film of her preparing her meals while conducting
research with highly radioactive materials, her hands still contaminated with uranium. I
imagined the plate and its contents as acid green, chemical and inedible-looking as she
ate, unaware that the would would call her brave, essential enough to preserve in metal and print, dressed in the blue wedding dress that she would wear in her laboratories.
“The greatest woman humanity has ever produced,” she would be called. Tourists would stand in the streets of Warsaw to photograph the vaulted halls where she once lifted her first test-tube.
Indeed, she might think, unknowingly dying slowly with each step she took, that such a distinction is quite a burden.
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Color and Light
Part I
“It just seems so touristy,” she stated, probably unaware that anyone else in the room could understand her.
I wait for the irony to dawn on her. She’s in an amber shop in the Gdansk Old Town and is concerned that the shop is too heavily designed to cater to tourists. However, it doesn’t sink in. “Don’t YOU think it’s a little touristy?” she repeats, waiting for her male companion to agree.
I stand close-by, perhaps drawn by their English, gazing at a rack of immaculate amber rosaries with little silver crucifixes. The weather has just turned warm and the stones remind me of sunlight. I struggle to resist a childish impulse to touch them, to create enough energy to get them clack against each other. Antique and transparent, there is something undeniable in their beauty, a simplicity that I usually feel rosaries lack. Realistically, the amber (if it is real) supersedes the crucifix, the idea of the crucifix, and religion in general. Millions of years of hardening has turned tree resin into this: a piece of jewelry that brings one closer to God by grasping something almost as old, nearly as infinite as prayers dissolve like ringing bells in the cosmos above a chapel.
For a moment, I’m almost fooled.
She does have a point. The shop is overtly designed to cater to those with access to disposable income and poor impulse control. However, I’m baffled to think of who would buy some of these items. From the ceiling hangs an amber chandelier, garish, gauche, and bordello. Beyond bordello. It has all the good taste of some Wild Western Saloon with a promiscuous name like “The Birdcage” or “The Dusty Rose,” the kind of place that ensures everything can be bought with the right amount of money and subtlety. I imagine for a moment trying to bring it back to the states, filling the space in my suitcase for an amber light piece, ghastly but somehow lovely in its unabashed confidence, its whiskey-colored unexpectedness. There would be odd looks from customs agents, shrugs, and laughs on my end as I lugged it back home where it would no doubt hang in a closet that I’d never open again.
Nearby, there are tiffany lamps with panes alternating between mother-of-pearl and amber, illuminated from the inside, filling the room with a burnt-red glow that makes me grateful for the thaw from winter.
The woman finally tires of his silence and walks out the door.
The man looks around, and, although he sees me, slips an amber rosary into his pocket.
He winks and follows her out into the white light of three o’clock.
Part II
I’ve always distrusted churches.
Particularly, I’ve always distrusted opulent churches. The layers of paint, flake gold, and deep caverns stained by colored glass seem subversive, designed to keep people from noticing something quite obvious.
To their credit, size and color are effectively distracting.
I’ve seen churches house everything from fingers of saints (Budapest), the arm of a thief (Prague), and even stone grottos (Washington). None of these surprises were welcome. Decadence and body parts, like size and color, can hide anything if you are clever enough with their placement.
However, this was one church that seemed unwilling to hide a thing.
The building had, I am told, been destroyed in the War (what hadn’t been?). The towers served as chimneys for the fires inside the chapel, melting bricks, and collapsing a ceiling. It seems improbable now. The vaulted arches seem absurdly high, threatening, and difficult to look at. A dull-colored crucifix dominates the sanctuary. The pews are wooden and the walls are ghost-white. The windows are clear, spilling sunshine in erect pools across the room and revealing whatever there is to see. There are, of course, alters, shrines, and presumably monuments to saints, and the departed. An astronomical clock stands in the corner, saints and stars combined in one magnificent piece of machinery.
There’s nothing left to be illuminated and it makes me anxious to leave.
I exit through a side door, overwhelmed by the honesty a building can have when no one bothers to color it in.
“It just seems so touristy,” she stated, probably unaware that anyone else in the room could understand her.
I wait for the irony to dawn on her. She’s in an amber shop in the Gdansk Old Town and is concerned that the shop is too heavily designed to cater to tourists. However, it doesn’t sink in. “Don’t YOU think it’s a little touristy?” she repeats, waiting for her male companion to agree.
I stand close-by, perhaps drawn by their English, gazing at a rack of immaculate amber rosaries with little silver crucifixes. The weather has just turned warm and the stones remind me of sunlight. I struggle to resist a childish impulse to touch them, to create enough energy to get them clack against each other. Antique and transparent, there is something undeniable in their beauty, a simplicity that I usually feel rosaries lack. Realistically, the amber (if it is real) supersedes the crucifix, the idea of the crucifix, and religion in general. Millions of years of hardening has turned tree resin into this: a piece of jewelry that brings one closer to God by grasping something almost as old, nearly as infinite as prayers dissolve like ringing bells in the cosmos above a chapel.
For a moment, I’m almost fooled.
She does have a point. The shop is overtly designed to cater to those with access to disposable income and poor impulse control. However, I’m baffled to think of who would buy some of these items. From the ceiling hangs an amber chandelier, garish, gauche, and bordello. Beyond bordello. It has all the good taste of some Wild Western Saloon with a promiscuous name like “The Birdcage” or “The Dusty Rose,” the kind of place that ensures everything can be bought with the right amount of money and subtlety. I imagine for a moment trying to bring it back to the states, filling the space in my suitcase for an amber light piece, ghastly but somehow lovely in its unabashed confidence, its whiskey-colored unexpectedness. There would be odd looks from customs agents, shrugs, and laughs on my end as I lugged it back home where it would no doubt hang in a closet that I’d never open again.
Nearby, there are tiffany lamps with panes alternating between mother-of-pearl and amber, illuminated from the inside, filling the room with a burnt-red glow that makes me grateful for the thaw from winter.
The woman finally tires of his silence and walks out the door.
The man looks around, and, although he sees me, slips an amber rosary into his pocket.
He winks and follows her out into the white light of three o’clock.
Part II
I’ve always distrusted churches.
Particularly, I’ve always distrusted opulent churches. The layers of paint, flake gold, and deep caverns stained by colored glass seem subversive, designed to keep people from noticing something quite obvious.
To their credit, size and color are effectively distracting.
I’ve seen churches house everything from fingers of saints (Budapest), the arm of a thief (Prague), and even stone grottos (Washington). None of these surprises were welcome. Decadence and body parts, like size and color, can hide anything if you are clever enough with their placement.
However, this was one church that seemed unwilling to hide a thing.
The building had, I am told, been destroyed in the War (what hadn’t been?). The towers served as chimneys for the fires inside the chapel, melting bricks, and collapsing a ceiling. It seems improbable now. The vaulted arches seem absurdly high, threatening, and difficult to look at. A dull-colored crucifix dominates the sanctuary. The pews are wooden and the walls are ghost-white. The windows are clear, spilling sunshine in erect pools across the room and revealing whatever there is to see. There are, of course, alters, shrines, and presumably monuments to saints, and the departed. An astronomical clock stands in the corner, saints and stars combined in one magnificent piece of machinery.
There’s nothing left to be illuminated and it makes me anxious to leave.
I exit through a side door, overwhelmed by the honesty a building can have when no one bothers to color it in.
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