Between Fire and Sleep

In the title poem of this remarkable volume by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, the author takes us to an Italian town (Montepulciano in Tuscany) where, among the usual splendors of such places (the dusk “erasing the outlines of medieval houses,” “olive trees on little hills,” “stained-glass windows like butterfly wings”), he suddenly confesses his belief that the world given to our senses may not be all there is, that all this,

and any journey, any kind of trip,

are only mysticism for beginners,

the elementary course, prelude

to a test that’s been

postponed.

The phrase “mysticism for beginners,” however, comes from the cover of a book spotted by the poet in the lap of a German tourist, possibly another New Age guide to higher spiritual awareness. The contrast between the serious, straightforward declaration of a mystical premise and the ironic, trivialized context in which the word “mysticism” appears points to the central question of Zagajewski’s poetry: Can metaphysical inquiry still be a legitimate concern of poetry in a culture in which ideas of mystery and mysticism are most likely associated with “The X-Files” or “The Celestine Prophecy”? Or, to reverse the question: Can serious poetry survive without mystery and ecstasy; can it be sustained by irony alone, which the poet calls, in “Long Afternoons,” “the gaze / that sees but doesn’t penetrate?”

Zagajewski, known to American readers from two earlier books of poetry (“Tremor” and “Canvas”), as well as two books of essays (“Solidarity, Solitude” and “Two Cities”), may seem an unlikely candidate to raise such questions. Born in 1945, the year of the Communist takeover in Poland, he belongs to what will always be known as the “Solidarity generation,” that particular breed of tough, down-to-earth dreamers and pragmatic romantics who made ironic defiance their weapon of choice against totalitarian, ideological rant. In the ‘70s, he belonged to a small but vocal group of young writers who practiced literature that exposed the paradoxes and incongruities of “socialism” in an increasingly restless Poland. One of his early essays, “The Unrepresented World,” which called for a new version of “critical realism,” was even adopted as the group’s manifesto.

Yet Zagajewski soon parted ways--poetically, not politically--with most of his colleagues. As he explained later, cultural struggle against a collectivist idea tends to impose a rigidity of its own. “To be a Pole,” he writes in one of his essays, “to participate in the work of Polish literature, is practically the same as becoming a member of a religious order with very strict rules. . . . Anyone who has an idea offers it to the others, immediately wants to change it into law or obligation--as if fearing his own te^te-a-te^te with originality.” The best defense against collectivism, said the poet, was creative individualism and meditative solitude rather then forced solidarity and subservience to “the cause.”

In the early ‘80s, Zagajewski, by that time living in Paris, responded to the imposition of martial law in Poland with the long poem “Ode to Plurality” contained in the volume “Tremor.” It is a paean to the pure ecstasy of life, the abundance of ideas, “a wild run of poetry,” “the shock of love,” “the changing delight of seasons,” “the pleasure of hearing” and “the pleasure of seeing,” the inexhaustible memory of civilizations and the “singular soul” that stands “before / this abundance. Two eyes, two hands, / ten inventive fingers, and / only one ego, the wedge of an orange, / the youngest of sisters.” Although, characteristically, the poem does not mention any of the events that must have absorbed every Pole at that time--the crushing of the Solidarity movement, the apparent crushing of the dreams of the poet’s own generation--one can clearly hear mighty laughter at a certain general who tried to plug the river of history with a couple of tanks and squads of riot police.

“Ode to Plurality” expresses a barely verbalized mystical longing that would mark Zagajewski’s later poetry. In that particular poem, this longing takes the form of a rather cryptic and paradoxical image of “one of the colder stars” to whose power one wishes to give oneself yet is “mocking it / sometimes because it is slimy and cool / like a frog in a pond.”

In “Mysticism for Beginners,” there are many similar litanies of sounds, sights, seemingly unconnected scenes and events, in which an almost childlike enchantment with life’s multiplicity mixes with a longing to reach beyond the horizon of ordinary human experience. Sometimes plurality provides a lyrical framework for a simple emotion, as in the beautiful, nostalgic love poem “For M.” In other cases, it serves as a tool to recapture past experiences, as in the poem “From Memory,” in which a stream of remembered details transports the poet to the Silesian town of his childhood, still scarred by war “like a German student’s cheek.” In “Elegy,” within the space of 35 verses, the poet manages to reconstruct the whole monochrome, stillborn physical reality of Communist life (“houses small / as Tartar ponies,” “Soviet gods with swollen eyelids,” “sour smell of gas, sweet smell of tedium”) and its moral climate (“endless winters, / in which there dwelled, as if in ancient lindens, / sparrows and knives and friendship and leaves of treason”), and then bid it farewell with a firm, conciliatory handshake (“but we lived there, and not as strangers”).

Occasionally the richness becomes a thicket, an obstacle on the journey. In “The Three Kings,” the Magi come late for the Epiphany, and one of them, like a tardy employee, blurts out a litany of excuses (“Spring meadows detained us, cowslips, / the glances of country maidens”). There is also a constant mixing of “grief, despair, delight and pride” in the endless transformations of things as in “The Blackbird,” in which the bird, clearly identified with the poet himself, sings “a gentle, jazzy tune” of farewell to a “funeral cortege” of life that appears “the same each evening, there, on the horizon’s thread.”

More than a passing word of praise is due to Clare Cavanagh, who has rendered Zagajewski’s difficult language in taut, limpid English. She has already distinguished herself as co-translator, with Stanislaw Baranczak, of two other important books: “Spoiling Cannibals’ Fun” (1991), an anthology of Polish poetry from the last decades of Communism; and “View With a Grain of Sand” (1995) by Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska. She is a true asset to Polish poetry in America.

Plurality, in Zagajewski’s poetry, can be exhilarating but also depressing: a road to ecstasy and an unfortunate distraction. Most of the poems in this volume seem to portray a state of foiled rapture or a journey that stops short of its goal. A trip into the past fails to recapture essential memories: A wanderer in “September” is unable to find the house of the Czech poet Vladimir Holan and the famous baroque churches of Prague appear to him as only “deluxe health clubs for athletic saints.” Scraps of voices that follow the poet in “Out Walking” are drowned by the din of the city and never return. In the end, there is the ambiguous triumph of life that is mere repetition and accumulation of experience.

Only sometimes the cavalcade slows down, and plurality is replaced by a heightened experience of one particular moment that seems to expand into a small, self-contained, though fragile universe. In the beautiful short poem “That’s Sicily,” the “three-cornered island” glimpsed during a night sea journey evokes in an instant an intensely sensual delight (“the huge leaves / of hills swayed like a giant’s dreams”), the whole history of the world and a quiet contemplation of death. In “On Swimming,” a lonely swimmer converses with the sea while

Little village churches

hold a fabric of silence so fine

and old that even a breath

could tear it.

There are many such moments of sensual and cerebral ecstasy in Zagajewski’s poems, but even they leave a residue of unfulfilled longing, a feeling that something very important has once again eluded our perceptions. Even the most exhilarating experiences in Zagajewski’s verse are subdued and introspective. In “Moment,” the poet seems to suspend his own elation to make a melancholy comment:

This moment, mortal as you or I,

was full of boundless, senseless,

silly joy, as if it knew

something we didn’t.

The tension resulting from this elusiveness of ecstasy is more intellectual than emotional or spiritual. Only rarely does it result in moments of unmistakably religious disquiet, as in the poem “Tierra del Fuego,” in which the poet turns directly to the “Nameless, unseen, silent” God, asking Him to:

open the boxes full of song,

open the blood that pulses in aortas

of animals and stones,

light lanterns in black gardens.

For the most part, however, the poetic persona speaking in Zagajewski’s verse seems to be in no great hurry to graduate beyond the “elementary course” of mystical initiation. He prefers to listen to the world, contemplate his “double-headed doubt” and bask in the light of small things, occasionally even mocking his own dreams. At the end, he is willing to concede, in “Cicadas,” that:

We exist between the elements,

between fire and sleep.

Pain chases

or outstrips us.

Zagajewski is clearly a very modern mystic, one who realizes that the mystical pursuit is essentially a contradictory one: Endless postponing of the “test,” as the title poem suggests, is often a part of the course. It is his mixture of skepticism and passion that makes him one of the most interesting poets of his generation writing in any language.

Zagajewski speaks also to those of us who are not at all mystically inclined, showing that poetry not resigned to irony, but in which ecstasy and irony are more or less equal contenders, is capable of great unity of mind and feeling, the “sensuous apprehension of thought” that T.S. Eliot praised in his essay on the English Metaphysicals as the true measure of poetic achievement.