The Fall Into Time

“My time, my twentieth century”--says Lithuanian-born Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in this new, eccentric book of prose--”weighs on me as a host of voices and the faces of people whom I once knew, or heard about, and now they no longer exist.” In “Milosz’s ABC’s” those voices are allowed to spill out (in alphabetical order!) in a series of mini-essays, vignettes, portraits of people famous and humble and little philosophical parables. This loose structure is meant to suggest, as the author explains in an entry called “Biographies,” that the immense, infinitely varied heap of experiences, impressions and thoughts that makes an individual life can be molded into a unified whole only in the most arbitrary and artificial way.

The form of a lexicon, which flaunts this arbitrariness right in front of the reader’s eyes (one finds “Camus,” for example, alongside “Capitalism” and “Carmel”) may be more honest than a conventional narrative. Alphabetization creates a democracy among words, which guarantees equal rights to a sundry crowd made up, to mention just a few, of “Admiration,” “Automobile,” “Blasphemy,” “Cruelty,” “Gold,” “Hatred,” “Los Angeles” “Money,” “Obligations” and “Truth.” Only in a book that purports to be Milosz’s private encyclopedia can people like Balzac, Camus and Rimbaud associate with Count Maurycy Prozor (who was at once a Polish aristocrat, a French writer and a Lithuanian patriot); Chaim Grade, a little-known Yiddish writer whom Milosz considers superior to Isaac Bashevis Singer; and Tomasz Zan, a prominent 19th-century Freemason and a friend of the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz. The form chosen by Milosz allows him to treat us to things delightfully obscure and unpronounceable, like his entries on Szetejnie, Ginejty and Peiksva (hamlets near the poet’s place of birth) and Krasnogruda, the capital of mysterious Jadzwings (a proto-Baltic tribe which disappeared in the Middle Ages). And yet those odd fragments compose themselves not only into a chronicle of an era but also into a self-portrait of the author and the story of his life, which brought him from the eastern borderlands of Europe to the western rim of America.

Diderot worked with many others to create his famous encyclopedia, not presuming to know everything himself. And although it may seem that Milosz is claiming just that for himself, he is merely drawing upon the varied experiences of his 89 years to create this idiosyncratic book. Born in 1911 in a Lithuanian manor on the outskirts of the former Polish empire, he traveled in his early childhood with his father, a railroad builder, through Siberia. He spent his youth in Wilno, now the capital of Lithuania, and, during World War II, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. After the war, he worked for a while in Polish diplomacy, serving in Paris, New York and Washington. In 1951 he broke with Poland’s Communist government and remained in France, where he witnessed ideological contortions of the French intellectuals unable for a long time to liberate themselves from the influence of Marxist dogma. After a decade of poverty and isolation in Europe, he arrived in Berkeley, where he took a position as professor of Slavic languages. His students included several well-known American Slavicists and translators, such as Richard Lourie, Bogdana Carpenter, Catherine Leach and Louis Iribarne. In Berkeley, Milosz also befriended the poet Robert Hass, who became the co-translator of his poems, and Arthur Quinn, a historian from California.

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In America, Milosz remained stubbornly faithful to the Polish language. Though he lectured in English, he never felt tempted to write in English, unlike his countrymen Joseph Conrad and Jerzy Kosinski or the Russians, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1980, the year of the Solidarity uprising, and nine years later witnessed the fall of communism in his native lands. In Poland, his fame almost matches that of Pope John Paul II. A volume of his new poetry, “This,” just appeared in Krakow, and his books sell in numbers otherwise unheard of for poetry and serious essays.

A life like that can produce a sense of vertigo. In “Milosz’s ABC’s” the author confesses to a “fear of being broken down into my constituent parts, fear of losing my center, my spiritual home.” And yet the book shows not one but several centers around which this fascinating life seems to revolve. Its geographical center is certainly “the City,” as Milosz calls the Wilno of his youth--a provincial capital in the outer limits of Europe, which at various times in history was the hub of Polish Romanticism, East European Masonic activities, the Lithuanian national revival and Yiddish culture. This crossroad of political and national destinies had in Milosz’s times a radiance that was “difficult to explain rationally, a certain magic that makes people fall in love with this city as if it were a living being.” It was also an incubator of important artistic and intellectual movements whose most gifted sons and daughters had been dispersed throughout the world but maintained a powerful bond despite their ideological or national divisions.

Apart from Wilno and Lithuania, the only place that seems to similarly absorb Milosz is America, especially California, although his relation to it is very different from the simple sentiment he feels for the place of his birth. Writing about Berkeley, the place of his longest residence, the poet says: “The view of the Bay, the islands, and the skyscraper city seen from the Berkeley hills is spectacular, but lunar. Like the quintessence of American spaces and the alienation of man. I came here to endure, but not to like it.” And yet, he admits, “whether I wanted this to happen or not, the landscapes of California have merged with the landscapes of Lithuania.”

It is clear that despite the four decades that he spent here, America is for the Polish poet still something of an irritant and a source of moral ambivalence. On one hand, he clearly enjoys its energy and can take almost childlike delight in all the attributes of success and celebrity it bestowed on him after his Nobel Prize. In an entry called “American visa” he reminisces on the problems he once had with obtaining the coveted stamp in his passport and then writes triumphantly about a dinner at Ronald Reagan’s White House: “Beside me was the famous architect, I.M. Pei, who designed the Louvre pyramid in Paris, and the best-selling author James Michener. My immediate neighbor at the dinner table was Frank Sinatra, Reagan’s personal friend.” At the same time he cannot forget that while America can be the best place on Earth for those who have success, it is probably the worst for those who are less lucky. “[T]he thought of their grueling labor and unfulfilled hope,” he writes, “of the gigantic prison system in which the unneeded are kept, taught me to look skeptically at its decorations--those well-kept houses amidst suburbs’ greenery.”

Yet it is this internally conflicted, ambivalent America that won the Cold War and now, says the poet, “with the help of mass media is imposing its model on the entire planet.” Obviously, Milosz does not regret the demise of communism, but he seems uncertain about who, or what, has really won. Was the fall of Marxist historical materialism merely a vindication of the individualist-consumerist variant of materialism? Milosz is reluctant to accept this verdict and believes that the historic victory of the West should be an occasion for self-examination and not of triumphalism: “The Cold War, that conflict between democratic America and gloomy Eastern totalism, deprived many people of their freedom of judgment and even of clear-sightedness, since a lack of enthusiasm for America could be perceived as an inclination toward the Communist side.” Because we are no longer so constricted, he says, it is perhaps time to revisit the fundamental questions of freedom, dignity and human solidarity.

Apart from the Lithuania of his youth, and the America of his maturity, the only domain where Milosz feels at home is the transnational and trans-temporal community of letters. It may come as a surprise that thinkers and mystics occupy much higher places in his hierarchy than poets. Readers of Milosz’s essays, especially “Emperor of the Earth” and “The Land of Ulro,” will recognize his peculiar fascination with the teachings of the Swedish scientist and spiritualist Emanuel Swedenborg (here discussed under “Angelic Sexuality”), his interest in Buddhism (in “Buddhism,” “Mindfulness” and “Suzuki”), his proclivity for Manichean heresies and his life-long contentious involvement with Dostoevsky--as a messianic thinker rather than as a novelist. In his “ABC’s,” Milosz devotes an interesting little essay to Arthur Schopenhauer, an early prophet of modern pessimism. The poet praises him for his caveats against excessive trust in abstract knowledge and against the temptation to “understand history,” which produced in his opinion totalistic philosophical systems and dangerous social utopias. Milosz also values a glimmer of hope at the heart of Schopenhauer’s pessimism: The philosopher, who claimed that the essence of nature (including human nature) is a blind, unconscious and amoral Will (as opposed to a thinking and just being called God), also believed that the human mind can sometimes emancipate itself from the Will’s slavery and become “unfaithful to its destiny.”

Whenever Milosz talks about poets, he is interested in them primarily as certain spiritual phenomena or philosophical dilemmas, showing through the texture of their work. He praises Whitman for being a poet of “wounds and protest” and not only of a positive, democratic impulse: “The ‘divine literatus’ has conquered the distance between the ‘I’ and the crowd, had devoured religions and philosophies, so that instead of contradictions, mortality and immortality both fit into his poetry, a leaf of grass and eternity, above all he spoke as one of many, as equal among equals.” Another of Milosz’s American heroes, Robinson Jeffers, is interesting as a worshiper of “inhuman” nature, whose “scientific,” essentially materialistic worldview assumed an almost mystical, pantheistic quality. Kenneth Rexroth, who was Milosz’s literary patron and a friend when the Polish poet came to California and who is lauded here as “a splendid poet and a splendid translator of Chinese and Japanese poetry,” is also described as a “revolutionary activist, a Communist, anarchist, pacifist, mystic, pious communicant of the Anglican Church, a Roman Catholic on his deathbed and, in fact, a Buddhist.” No European poet, says Milosz with visible envy, could possibly embrace as many contradictions. Robert Frost is recalled “not with admiration but rather with amazement” because of his “enormous deceptiveness,” which allowed this forbidding, unhappy and complex man to hide behind a mask of “a rube, a New England farmer, writing in a simple language” and achieve immense success as someone entirely different than himself.

Milosz is clearly attracted, intellectually at least, to people of divided selves, mixed backgrounds and dramatic late-life transformations. During his years in America he befriended Denise Levertov, whose father, a rabbi, converted to Christianity and became an Anglican priest. Levertov grew up as an agnostic and an activist in radical movements of the ‘60s. Toward the end of her life, however, she became--in Milosz’s words--”the one and only fine woman poet of orthodox religious poetry of her time.” Milosz translated some of Levertov’s late poems into Polish and published them in a Polish Catholic weekly in Krakow. She was already very ill at that time, and her last letter to Milosz reached Krakow at the same time as the news of her death.

Religious or metaphysical awareness is for Milosz an almost indispensable element of poetic seriousness. What he means by “religious,” however, has less to do with faith and striving for certainty than with human disagreement (inborn and instinctive, in his view) with the image of the world presented by modern science and also with the horror we experience while looking at the slaughterhouse of human history. Poetry resembles religion because, like religion, it is an effort of human imagination to find a better, more benevolent home. It is less an effort to find “truth,” which may be hidden from us forever, than to find a set of images and notions that would allow reaching some kind of truce with the visible world. In a passage titled “Anus mundi,” Milosz remembers that, despite the unthinkable horrors he witnessed in wartime Warsaw, he deliberately resisted an impulse to reduce his writing to registers of accusations against reality. Instead, he wrote a sequence of idyllic poems, “The World.” “Gentle verses in the midst of horror,” he says, “declare themselves for life; they are the body’s rebellion against its destruction. They are carmina, or incantations, deployed in order that the horror should disappear for a moment and harmony emerge--the harmony of civilization or, what amounts to the same thing, of childish peace. They comfort us, giving us to understand that what takes place in anus mundi is transitory, and that harmony is enduring. . . .” And then, as an afterthought, he adds: “ . . . which is not at all a certainty.” In modern times, the poetic pursuit can no longer be a simple escape. We cannot deny our knowledge, nor can we bury our skepticism. But Milosz believes that the task of a poet is not to unmask reality and reveal its intolerable nakedness but to show that “there is something supernatural” about the human mind, about its continuous wrestling with the mystery of its own pain.

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Under the entry “Adam and Eve,” Milosz sums up his own lifelong obsession with the puzzle of evil and its role in the universe. For the Polish poet, unde malum (“why and whence evil?”) is a more fundamental metaphysical question than the problem of the “first cause.” As a self-declared Manichean, he believes that evil exists--that it is not merely an absence of good but an independent active force which has shown its face during the Holocaust and other horrors of the 20th century. The reality of such evil must call into question the image of an omnipotent and infinitely benevolent God formed within the Judeo-Christian tradition. But the existence of evil and our response to it evoke for Milosz yet another, perhaps more interesting, paradox. If one accepts the materialistic thesis that Man is wholly and exclusively a part of the natural world, why does He perceive evil at all?

Universal suffering and death are surely inalienable and necessary attributes of nature. Why then do we seem unable, despite the efforts of stoic philosophers, to reconcile ourselves with the fact; why our nagging sensation that all was supposed to be different or that we do not really belong in that place? This question is, of course, at the heart of all theologies, and it may even be the main cause of all religious thinking. But Milosz points out that it is also a question that most religions answer in a rather ambiguous and evasive way. He contemplates the biblical myth of the Fall and the Cardinal Sin and finds it incomprehensible. What really transpired in the Garden of Eden? What was the secret that God wanted to keep from our ancestors as a price for paradisiacal existence? Why did their transgression result not only in their own punishment but also in the apparent degradation of the entire God-created nature? Theologians, philosophers and mystics have wrestled with these issues for millenniums. Milosz quotes the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, who found it hard to imagine that such a baffling story could have been dreamed up by an illiterate desert tribe. And yet, says the Polish poet, this myth is probably the earliest and the fullest expression of our estrangement from the natural world, which in his view opens at least a possibility that something in us belongs, or wants to belong, to some other order of things. “We experience our transitoriness and morality as an act of violence perpetrated against us,” says Milosz. “Only Paradise is authentic; the world is inauthentic, and only temporary. That is why the story of the Fall speaks to us so emotionally, as if summoning an old truth from our slumbering memory.”

Still, this “inauthentic” and often horrifying world remains for Milosz a realm of infinite fascination. He believes it was given to us, or happened to us, as a challenge to our intelligence and moral sense. In “Curiosity” he writes: “The world is so organized that it is endlessly interesting; there is no limit to the discovery of ever newer layers and strata. It is like a journey through a maze which is pulsating, changing, growing as one moves through it. We make this journey by ourselves, but also as participants in the common undertaking of all humanity, with its myths, religions, philosophies, art, and the perfection of science.”

This curiosity and wonderment are evident also in “Milosz’s ABC’s.” The book captures what is perhaps most characteristic and attractive in Milosz’s entire literary output. His writing can be simultaneously a protest against the disappearance of people, objects and images from the physical world and a celebration of time’s unstoppable forward movement. At the end of his “ABC’s,” the author says that “we are all woven out of time,” as is our speech, our art and our whole civilization. There is something wondrous, sad, comical and possibly even grand in our noisy passage within the “inconceivable ‘now’ “--something that deserves the effort and the pain of the journey. Few writers in our time can rival Milosz’s ability to render justice to the strange spectacle of the world. We should be grateful for the wisdom of his extraordinary life.