A splitting headache, or the effects of revolution on the brain

The title of this post comes from a bad joke. My high school history professor, one Mr. Vance Allred, an ex-polygamist teller of long tales and bad puns, one of my life inspirations and the first to truly interest me intellectually, used to tell it. The joke involved Comrade Leon Trotsky, who, one day, while in exile in Mexico, woke up with a 'splitting headache.'

Ha.

You see, Trotsky was stabbed in the head with an icepick by one of Stalin's henchmen. Hence the pun.

Lately, though, I've been thinking there is more to it than that. I think dear Mr. Allred hit on a profound truth. He encapsulated the fate of old revolutionaries. They all end with a 'splitting headache.'

That comes across strongly in Marquez' General in His Labyrinth. Bolivar seems, if nothing else, split--from his past, his companions, his own vision of himself. There's something inherent in the revolutionary process that creates division. Well, not something--everything. The effect hits the mind the strongest. One cannot revolutionize one's way of life, let alone the life of the surrounding society, without the mind feeling some disconnect, some struggle, loss, and division.

Trotsky himself laid this out, as others did before him. He called art a hammer, something that would shape the minds of the people into a form fitting their new lives; a hammer which, at the same time, would smash the bonds to the old. He should have seen it coming, I guess, that when he became part of the old, someone would take a hammer to him as well.

I felt this splitting headache myself, only a few nights ago. It came upon quickly, though preceded, in hindsight, with weeks of warning signs. A general anxiety which had been latently eating away at my guts and heart lept one afternoon straight to the left hemisphere of my brain. It sat there, gnawing away, sinking its teeth into the soft tissue in a slow but steady rhythm. His bits sent feelings of mounting hopelessness and despair into my soul just as they sent searing jolts of pain into my body. This lasted for hours as I sat, agonizing in the back of my class, slowly losing touch with everything. I stumbled to the train, blabbered to an officer, melted in the corner and fit in with the bums and psychopaths. I cried and wailed for him to stop but he kept on going, filling my head with his munchings and negative energies. I blindly drove home and managed to scream at my family before collapsing on my bed into a painkiller-aided slumber. As I slipped into sleep, I felt for a brief moment the pain stop. It was one of the most glorious moments of my life.

Little did I know the pain had stopped, but my anxiety monster remained. The next few evenings I would return home to collapse at 8, my energies sapped by this awful beast who took everything and left me only with despair and a looming insanity. I cried, finally, broke down and cried and wailed while watching the Jazz play, then went to bed again.

When I woke up I felt that he was gone. I didn't know why, just like I didn't know why he came. Then Mr. Allred's joke came to me.

I should have seen it coming too, I guess. I was becoming an old revolutionary. The monster came to rip a split in my brain just as my life was splitting below my feet. I was about to graduate. I was about to leave the country. Most importantly, I was about to leave Salt Lake, Utah, my childhood home, my parents, my society, friends, pillow, and cereal bowl, for the last time. Previously, my revolutions were always circular, with my Sandy home as the beginning and end. This time, I knew, I won't be coming back. I'm leaving here for Poland on May 7, and when I return it will be as a guest on vacation before starting my new life in Seattle.

This is my first true revolution, not in the old sense of a full circle but in the new one of a radical break. Its a revolution Ive been trying to make for years but never succeeded. Now I will. No wonder my head had to crack.

Why'd the pain leave, then? I guess it fused itself back together, or maybe the fracture seemed less severe, when I realized something. I hadn't escaped the cycle of circular revolutions. I hadn't entered into a true splitting revolution at all, because in truth there is no such thing. I can't believe I never realized it before: the contradiction I thought I had found, between the revolution as break and the revolution as circle, it just plain doesn't exist. Revolutions are spirals. They work not in two dimensions but three. When things abruptly change, they go into a spin which thrusts them to one extreme and then back towards the original position--but they never reach it. Circumstances return only to a newly formed version of what they were, perhaps the same on the X and Y axes but shot forward to a brand new Z, a new point as violently different from the old, despite its appearances, as from the wished-for new. As these spiraling loops continue, they get larger, more erratic. Eventually, you realize that even the X and the Y have changed. The spiral is spinning on a new axis. Things keep changing and staying the same but with a whole new point of reference.

I guess for me this point of reference has become Poland. I thought I was going back to something in January but I guess in the long run that was a beginning. It wasn't the beginning, but it was a beginning. Like any good beginning, you know it because you start there and you end up there too. My life will certainly keep on spinning after I leave it again, perhaps it will find a different beginning. Perhaps it might even flick back to the old one.

The only thing for sure is that it won't stay the same. Things will change and split.

I just hope that in the future I can avoid the headache.

My labyrinth

I can identify with Bolivar.

Hmm... or maybe not.

I too have wandered in a labyrinth of despair. I too have looked at past conquests through the sadness of nostalgia. I too have seen my glory days pass me by and my dreams explode.

But not really.

Maybe I just have a headache and a tendency for exaggeration. My peaks were never too high and my lows really aren't even low.

In general, Im doing pretty good.

It just doesnt always feel that way.

On the Origins of this Phenomenon in America we call Cheerfullness, and others call Hypocrisy

How are you doing?

It seems like such an innocuous question, but how one answers it speaks volumes.

The American, for example-- "How are you doing?" "I'm fine, great, never been better. I don't have a problem in the world, no-sir-eee"

The Pole-- "How are you doing (Jak się masz?)" "Oh, well, ok, but you know lately I just can't seem to do anything, I've been so tired. Plus at work I've been having all sorts of difficulties, and my son just got a rabid case of the measles, so that's been keeping me busy. My foot hurts and I have a headache, do you know anything that helps that? In general, I'm pretty miserable, I guess, but I can't complain, just got to keep on going."

As an American, this response bugs me to no end. That's because, when an American answers the question, "How do you do," this is what he is really saying:

"Well, my wife may have just died, my cat's got herpes, my oldest son is a terrorist, and Im suffering from severe diarrhea, but I'm not going to mention that. The grease of our social interactions is a shared facade of prosperity and happiness. Mentioning my problems would place me in the realm of the socially deviant. You don't want to deal with that; in fact you can't--you, and I, have no life precedent for actually delving into someone's feelings. We reserve that for our spouses and deathbeds; before or with anyone else 'Fine' is all we want to know and hear. You don't want the answer to the question. Well, you do, but to the real question you asked, not the literal one, the real question being: Hello, acquaintance, I acknowledge your existence and wish to establish cordial relations. Please respond by indicating that you are on the same social page as I and we can commence to do business."

How did we develop this infinitely useful and wholly honorable social code? I think it dates back to the revolution and before. I think it comes from a nation conceived in prosperity, and dedicated to the prospect of doing good business. I think it comes from a mindset which priveleges the individual and his inalienable right to be left alone above all else. Sharing emotions opens one up to unlawful outside interference in sovereign internal matters.

Poles, on the other hand, revolted differently and grew from different waters. Theirs is a tale of romanticism and martyrdom, suffering and comraderie in the face of hardship. Everyone knows your not ok and there is no use pretending. The only thing to do is to help each other out and wait till better times.

General Anxiety

104 pages later and its finally done. My senior thesis, the product of my sweat and blood for almost 8 months. That which stole my time, energy and money.

Yet instead of pride I feel more like Uranus, seeing his children born hundred-headed monsters and banishing them to the underworld. So many compromises go into something like that; when I look at it that's all I see, a million little failures, a thousand sentences that aren't quite right, a hundred ideas that aren't fully developed.

With it though goes my excuse. My excuse for not doing more with my life, my excuse for not facing my problems, for ignoring my other school work. My big excuse for burying myself in some project of questionable worth, only to not have to see the light of day. My big fat excuse.

Now Im filled with an unceasing sentiment of general anxiety. My heart races and my head hurts; concentration is difficult. I run around all day worried about getting things done and in the end accomplish nothing.

But still, its done. And that feels good.

Revolutionary Words

"Oto co działa-- Polska Ludowa"

What kind of words are needed to create a revolution?

In some cases-- noble words. Such is the case with Adams and Madison, Jefferson and Washington. Their words reek of ancient dignity and high sentiment. They breathe the rarified atmosphere of ancient citations. They do not move so much as freeze, and create a structure as durable as the Pantheon.

In other cases-- fiery words. Here it is Thomas Paine, forging intricate daggers from classical tropes and loaded images, and striking the flaming points into the hearts of his readers. Here it is Simon Bolivar, inspiring his troops with rousing voice in life and--in death--filling the air with voodoo incantations and passionate screams.

At times-- treacherous words. These are the words of propaganda, the words that lie. Thus spoke Stalin, glorifying the common man while taking away his bread and life. Thus spoke every poster proclaiming peace through the sword, and love through hate. Thus speaks Chavez, proclaiming a new utopia while changing nothing.

Big words and little words. Words that explode. What kind does it take? It takes all kinds--except silent ones.

Changements

A common science fiction motif is the space voyager, who after centuries in a cryogenic state arrives on a distant planet unchanged, feeling as though mere minutes have passed. He then procedes, this voyager, to start star blasting and energy raying the place up with nary a change of clothing.

In my experience, our bodies aren't that stupid. Time, apparently, penetrates deeper than I ever thought. Even my most primitive instincts, as it turns out, are hand-wringing little clock watchers who dissemble into chaotic rebellion the second you mess things up a bit. The effects of crossing over half a dozen time zones and a few thousand miles? Two weeks of alternating 72 hour days and 17 hour nights. Flash Gordon would spend his time with the Voltrons jumping between mania and a coma.

Our bodies reject other changes as well, that our minds hardly register. Take a bed, for instance. I think that a bed is a bed, provided it is moderately soft and covered in some heat-retention device. My body (or is it my soul?) however hardly finds the cold empty folds of my childhood sheets a substitute for warm nighttime lips and soft embraces. It knows something is missing, and stubbornly rebels.

Countries work the same way, on one level. Fifty years of communism couldn't stop the Poles from being Catholic, nor could hundreds of years of imperialism turn the Mexicans into Anglos or Spaniards. Johnston's Army almost made Utah normal but something still resists.

Or take families. Three years of separation, harsh words and burned bridges, can't erase fundamental bonds. You feel it as basketball games fall together so easily and jokes seize everyone together in a shared folly that expresses all the pent up exhaustion, anger, forgiveness, despair, and relief in a rush of energy.

Call it inertia. It seems to be.

Coming Home

Revolution, in its earliest sense, means to travel a complete circle, to end up where one begins. And so it goes with my Polish revolution. Except the circle warped into a spiral which returned me spatially to the same point while in another dimension I had moved miles away.

The knot in my stomach which gripped my mind with anxiety when I left Salt Lake returned, for a while, as I said goodbye to Agata in Warsaw and started my journey home. Perhaps it was the association with airports. Perhaps it was the deep-seated subconscious stress at returning to a place abandoned so hastily, so messily. I search for such a hidden cause because on the surface, rationally, I feel calm. I am not diving into the unknown, not launching off onto an adventure which will mark the rest of my life. I am merely entering a hiatus on that adventure, a break full of frustrating relaxation and welcome time to work.

On the plane from Warsaw to London I read a Polish magazine, Polityka. It commerates the 50 year anniversary of the EU; Poland is leaping for joy at their membership in this club. I feel impressed at my ability to read it, and contrast this joy with the struggling through basic grammar books which marked my arrival journey. However ever latent guilt tweaks my conscience as I realize how far I am from mastery of this which should be my speciality. This guilt returns full bore when I try to order my meal with the flight attendant in Polish, meeting only her total incomprehension. I shirk back into my corner and thumb more diligently through the dictionary.

On the plane from London to Chicago I while away the sleepless hours playing with my personal video screen. My mind is blank and emotions numb; sure signs of subteranean trouble which I ignore and wipe away with 3 movies, 2 cocktails, and a glass of wine.

In Chicago my bags are late and my flight delayed. A combination which works to my advantage and means I catch the plane. Meanwhile I pass the time chatting with an Irishman, come to tour the southwest. He takes pictures and sells them, an art dealer of sorts. I like him, though he is racist, and he gives me his card. On the plane there is some horrible movie which I ignore as I try to finally get some sleep. My eyes close as the plane lands and I am back.

A homecoming to my parents is always an anti-climactic affair. They seem happy to see me but nobody knows what to say. We fall into a defensive sort of ordinariness which feels comfortable and wrong at the same time.

We get home, and the 900 pound gorilla is not there. I know it must be dealt with soon. I wait for him to get home, but fall asleep. I see him briefly in the morning. My brother. Its been years.

Warsaw, the city that survived its own death and purgatory

The sun shone brightly that day. Unusual, for Warsaw. It shone almost vehemently, a little too strong, as if making up for all those days when it hid behind the clouds. I jumped out of my seat to the bench across from me as to avoid the sun as our train pulled underground for the approach to Warsaw Central Station. A knot of nervous sadness combined with a lack of sleep and the sun to give me a horrible headache. At least it wasn't snowing. I can't stand the snow.

Warsaw Central Station is surrounded by one of those complex knots of transportation which fill modern cities unlucky enough to have been influenced by urban planners. I'm immediately overwhelmed by a mass of people walking in all directions enclosed by a triple layer of highways, trams, and bridges. I shield my eyes and walk around dumbly as Agata hunts down our bus. I'm always worthless on trips; my head always gets light and fuzzy, and my decision making ability slows to a snail's pace. Agata acts quickly but needs advice; I can never provide it fast enough, and when I do it is totally par hasard, the same as asking a magic 8-ball. We find the bus nevertheless and are off to the archives.

Stalin's Palace of Culture looms over us. The bus takes off around it. I stare. It's much nicer than I thought it would be. Imposing and hideous, true, but likable. I like it. It has character. It bleeds a history, an unusual, colorful one. Its absurdity seems to mask the sorrows of that history in a comic exageration. I wish we had more time to see it. I can't help but compare it to the unusual structure which dominates the center of Salt Lake City. Both were constructed after the dictates of a thorough and idiosyncratic ideology. Both represent ideals and allegory in a way not seen in most modern buildings. Both represent feats of engineering defying limitations of time and place. I like them and am disgusted by them in similar ways, for similar reasons.

The film studio bugs me; pretention is in the air. I nearly break down from an intellectual existential crisis but Agata helps me through it and we get some stuff done. We're off at 3 to find our host, who works in the Department of the Treasury. We break for tea at his house then set off to tour the town before dark.

I had read much about Warsaw, how it was completely destroyed, how they painstakingly rebuilt it, the historic sections exact reproductions based on old postcards and fading photographs, the rest proud manifestations of social realistic aesthetics. I had heard of how hideous it is, how its the ugliest capital in Europe.

Maybe something's wrong with me. I liked it. I loved it. The old town was lovely, charming; it feels somehow off, admittedly--perhaps its just the cognition of its recreation, perhaps its the overly-clean condition of the buildings supposed to be hundreds of years old. But rather than a threatening, agressive sort of oddness, the sort of vampiric hunt for your wallet sensation which oozes out of the recreated towns in the US such as Williamsburg or Jamestown, I felt something else entirely. I felt a sort of admiration that they rebuilt it; a snobbish laugh at the nostalgia which prompted it but a respect for an honest desire to recreate what was so painfully destroyed. It seemed honestly fake enough that I could respect it; the motivations plain enough that I could understand them.

I grew slightly frustrated with American towns. The traditional excuses for the empty, inhuman, glorified freeways and shopping malls which are most Western US downtowns rang suddenly quite hollow. Lack of history was no excuse; here was a town which started from zero in 1945 and managed to make itself, if not perfect, at least lively, interesting, and liveable. Economic considerations seem the reverse of what I believed; it was not lack of money which destroyed our downtowns, but the excess thereof, and the excessive greed in its pursuit, which destroyed all the small shops and sidewalk entertainers and made everyone move into isolated three story mansions miles away from each other.

Zapatistas

Is there space for revolution in a post-communist world?

Yes and no.

No, because the name of revolution has been so tainted by communism that its associations with show trials, purges, famines, and destruction cannot be easily shaken. No, because no viable alternative to the current globalistic-capitalist world system exists; any revolution that seeks to ignore these powerful forces is doomed to failure, and any revolution that seeks to topple them finds itself floundering for an enunciated alternative after the loss of the ready-made answers of communism. No, because, Venezuela aside, there is no longer any world powers available to support revolutions in weaker countries.

Yes, and perhaps even more room. For now aspiring revolutionaries don’t have to turn to Moscow for support, with all the sacrifices inherent therein. For now they are free to create and imagine a new, democratic vision of social justice free from the horrors of Stalin. For now those who oppose capitalism don’t have to defend communism, a hopeless cause.

The Zapatistas, the band of peasants who armed themselves and revolted in southern Mexico in 1994, formed a model of this new kind of revolution. Reading about them, I am struck by how honest and almost primitive their goals are, the grassiest of roots, coming from their own needs and a pragmatic look at the situation, rather than any systematized ideology. Yet they manage, by linking their struggle to the historic fight of the Indians with white conquerors to lend their movement the weight of history and the international applicability to gain worldwide support. They see themselves as emblems of the anti-colonialists everywhere. The propose a new system of equity of gender, race, and class; a new democracy even for the poor.

The fact that they did not, ultimately, succeed, is troubling. The fact that they have had few succesors is even more so. Of all the revolutions taking place in the world today, none follow the model of the armed peasant women who captured the city hall in Chiapas. Most revolutionaries who call themselves anti-colonialist today represent a strain of Islamist fascism. They are fueled not by an honest reaction to their situation, but by a nihilistic hate fueled by a virulently destructive ideology. Revolutionaries in the Orient tend towards a neo-Maoism that amounts to little more than gangsterism. South American revolutionaries either are facades for drug cartels or the hypocritic work of rich oil states which combine populistic rhetoric with self-aggrandizement and a continuation of the globalist status quo.

What space is there left for revolution after communism? Not much. As I walk down the endless rows of revolutionary workers concrete boxes, of hideous statues of the revolutionary proletariat, of the dregs and dust of 55 years of ‘revolutionary’ government here in Lodz, I can’t help but ask if that’s not a good thing. The status quo creates vast inequalities in wealth, ignores the basics of social justice, and ravishes the environment. It must be changed. But not overthrown. To overthrow such a system would leave a gap which could be filled only by another set of five-year plans and smiling textile workers. Reform has replaced revolution as the battle cry for those who want change. Let’s harness the vast forces for the improvement of mankind unleashed by the revolutions that succeeded, the industrial and capitalist ones, and let’s make them fair, just, and concerned. This will require change, but not permanent revolution, no Robespierrian terror, no dictatorship of the revolutionaries.

And, in the end, it might just be possible.

Collective

What is the proper relationship between the collective and the individual? I ponder on an empty stomach, prompted by Che’s speech to the medical students of Cuba I just read. The question seems to have two sides, just as I flip my eggs twice and pour a double heaping of pepper upon them.

First, I suppose, as I boil another pot of tea, there is the macro level way to look at it. Here the balancing act is difficult; if the individual is too highly valued above the collective, anarchy reigns, the rule of the stronger prevails, and I wouldn’t be able to get any lemon for my tea. However, if the collective is deemed the greatest good, then one falls into the trap which enveloped the worst regimes of the twentieth century, where individual lives were seen to count for nothing and mass murder on a colossal scale was easily justified. That would be even less pleasant than the toast I just burnt. Between those two options lie a slew of others. As the collective is most often embodied by the government in our days of democracy, the balancing act takes the form of mundane arguments over taxation rates and the regulation of private enterprise.

Then, I say, as I settle down to an after-breakfast cookie, there is the micro level. This is the level I examine every time the pressures of living in society, of having to conform my existence to the rituals, expectations, and mindsets of other people, makes me want to dash it all and exile myself to a hermetic lifestyle. There is joy in society, surely, but at what cost? The accompanying question to this is, I believe, as I flip on the TV and hunt for CNN, how should we frame our relation to society? Should we use society, the collective force of others, for our own personal growth and enhancement? Or should the priority be to use our powers for the growth of the collective? The second seems to have the force of conventional morality on its side, but flies in the face of how most of us make decisions on a daily basis—even helping others is usually done with an eye on its effects on the individual, rarely only on the good of the collective. The collective is such an abstract thing that it is hard to imagine the kind of fulfillment people need in order to function coming from a strict devotion to it.

That fulfillment comes more easily from bacon.

Waiting for news from Graduate school

Dreams have a strange way of dying. They don’t just slip away gently, pass away leaving no sign of departure. They tend to explode, or, more accurately, implode, fall in on themselves as their contradictions and impossibilities are exposed and the withering termites of reality eat way at their girders. Death comes to them quickly and, often, unexpectedly, yet the process itself takes time, time as each carefully laid plank of a plan snaps and falls in turn, time as the rubble settles and the dust clears. What is revealed after this time is a loss but not a hole; if dreams were to explode, to violently disappear in a blast of sound and fury and leave nothing in their stead, it would perhaps be easier to replace them, to fill their gap. Instead, dreams leave a heaping pile of debris which must be painstakingly cleared, a tangled coil of connections and dead cords which must be snapped from the remaining elements of a life, before any new structure can be erected in their place.

That is not the worst, however. Worse than a dream that dies is a dream which is threatened. A dream whose weakness and shoddy foundation become exposed just as strong winds spring up. You begin to hate the dream for its weakness, to want to tear it down before the winds have a chance, and to build something better, stronger in its place before the storm even ends, but at the same time you can’t do it, you can’t abandon the dream while it still looks as if it might make it through, even though you now see its weaknesses its sheer presence and resilient possibility scream out against its abandonment.

Environment

I can’t help but read Che’s diaries with a great deal of envy. His adventures, in their scale and import, as well as his descriptions of them, filled with color and humor and that delicious Latin penchant for the poetic, far outclass anything of my own. Che talks of being a ‘creature of his environment’ at the time he wrote his diaries. I can see that he’s right, but not, or maybe not only, in the sense that he meant, as an idealist non-proletariat. His writing exudes the bustle and quirk of Latin America, of years spent shaped by sun and the necessary shaping of communal and personal character around the necessity of overcoming material obstacles. I can see, too, how his shift to become a revolutionary was shaped by his environment, how accidentally shooting dogs in his sleep, struggling with a dying motorcycle, and battling the million unmotivated hassles from authorities could provide enough absurdity and frustration to lead one down that path that leads from ideals to the material dialectic.

What in my environment has shaped me, I can’t help but wonder? To what can I contribute my languid prose, my confused bourgeois mentality, my journeys based more around incompetence and anti-climax than heroism or adventure? The mountains of Utah, the feral desert of Escalante, the raging rivers of Washington, these were the backdrops of my childhood, and do they not seem fitting instigators of manly decisiveness? Wallace Stegner found sufficient inspiration at the University of Utah for his tremendous works, whereas I have found a strange mix of near-successes and mitigated failures, friendships gained but easily lost, loneliness and enlightenment, comraderie and intellectual stupor. My European days would seem less promising, first Lille, that armpit of France home to conservative-Communism and eternal rains, and Lodz, a factory town without factories filled with decaying capitalist palaces and post-communist commercial wastelands. Yet in fact I liked both of those places fairly well and felt that I prospered or didn’t prosper in them at least as much as I did in my time nestled in the foothills of the Rockies at the U.

Where are my journeys leading me? I can easily trace my intellectual history as it played out against my physical environment, going from a naïve conservative idealism in the sheltered crèche of high school to the radical post-modernist nihilism of my first exposure to University life, to a practical but degenerate syndicalism in Lille to my current skeptical and undogmatic liberalism in Lodz. Yet such a tracing gives it a coherence which belies the haphazard and effervescent nature of each of these transformations. Even so, it seems but little to indicate a direction or hint at a final goal, except an early onset of the ‘sell-out’ abandonment of all ideas usually found after middle age and children have sapped the energy.

But, as I contemplate the next jump in my life as a We, I’m beginning to feel another mind shift brewing. I don’t think it will offer any more definitive answers than the others, but it promises to offer more hope, and for that I’m excited

Bikes

One Wednesday morning in June, when unemployment and adolescent depression led me to spend my days alone in the house, pouring through thick tomes of philosophy and history, I went for a bike ride. I hopped on my old mountain bike, like most of my possessions not really mine but appropriated from a brother who had had a job, who had bought his own things, but who moved out and left them in my grasp, and headed up the mountain. The gears creaked and snapped the whole way, the brakes squeaked, and I envisioned myself soon enjoying a long walk home, as is often the end result of my bike trips, eternally ill-fated. Filled with a peculiar blend of self-destructive energy, I pushed my way up the windy, steep curves of Dimple Dell Drive, following the canyon. I stopped in front of a house I recognized, from one other summer night, in the happier days of high school, when while driving in my friends Taurus (nicknamed “Pinckley”) we were greeted by the ghostly specter of a group of teenage girls, flitting across the road in their underwear, mermaids before the eyes of hungry sailors. I dismounted my bike, took a big sip from my water bottle, and promptly puked the remains of my oatmeal into the bushes.

I finally made it up the hill, to my destination, the Bell Canyon Trail parking lot on the top of Wasatch Drive. Despite my shaking legs I decided to climb to the lake, about a mile and a half up ridiculously steep trail. Memories, though, made the journey easy; memories of a thousand past adventures at this our favorite stomping grounds with friends and family, of dreams built and jokes made while marching the same path not alone but surrounded by those friends around whom I built my consciousness, of the ecstasy of a fleeting glimpse of swimsuit clad buttocks on whatever girl we conned into joining us, of the intoxicating wildness of being a group of teenagers roaming in a pack, into the wild, free from supervision, of a time when possibilities seemed endless and joy the only reason for being.

The river at the trail’s end was pouring into the lake at a steady rate, no longer at the flood stages of early spring but not yet dried up by August drought. I collapsed amongst a heap of rocks that serve as the dock for this unofficial recreation area, propped up against a sign with dogs, fish, swimming suits crossed out in futile prohibition. I relaxed in the summer sun and half-slept, filled with a wonderful exhaustion of muscles pushed to their limits. Seeing no one around, I removed all my clothes, and enjoyed the sun on my naked body. I put one toe in the ice cold water, feeling that tingling rush of exhilaration, then plunged in completely. I swam out into the lake. Swimming in cold water is one of the purest types of pleasure; it feels wholesome, baptismal, free yet chaste. I swam to a pole 15 feet away from shore which is supposed to indicate the lakes elevation and grabbed on, resting as I bobbed up and down. My limbs, which at first ached from the pain of the change of temperature, settled into a strange tingle, then went completely numb. I pushed off and headed back to shallower water, where I established myself amongst some rocks and enjoyed my cold bath some more. The sky was clear blue and the sun bright with a young heat not yet the scorching onslaught of afternoon; the perfect calm of mid-morning. I longed for its heat and got out of the water. I lay down on a large flat rock facing the sun, cold and wet until its rays penetrated my cocoon of hypothermia and gradually warmed me up. I lay there, dozing, spread-eagle, my body offered up to the nature which surrounded me, cared for me, washed away my fears and exhaustion and replaced them with tranquility, when a young mother hauling a small child on her back crested the trail in the direction I was facing.

Earlier this week, we got Agata’s old bike out of storage. This was part of our offensive to cheer me up, as she had grown tired of my existential moping and we thought some physical exercise might jolt me out of this slump. I bought a dorky little hand pump for 10 zlotys and a patch repair kit, knowing my luck with tires, and quickly became excited about taking the thing out for a test run. Simultaneously, the beautiful early spring weather we had been enjoying turned to a real Polish March, full of rain and fury, signifying cold. I decided to postpone my biking adventures but the next morning I awoke with a strong desire which couldn’t be forestalled by the brewing clouds. I ran around in my usual pre-exercise morning ritual of searching for my long unused exercise clothing, taking 10 times longer than I thought and in the end forgetting the most important things, the pump and tire kit. I finally made it out the door and down the elevator and out of the building, followed, at least in the nervous subconscious of a foreigner forever breaking unknown rules, by the disapproving stares of those I passed. As soon as I was out of the building I realized that I had forgotten the pump and the tires were in desperate need of inflating; but as it had taken such effort to leave the apartment and I was sure the front desk manager was going to yell at me in Polish at any minute for some infraction of public decency, I decided to ride on anyways.

Polish Manhattan, like the real one, is chalk full of people, so riding on its sidewalks is a difficult endeavor. Polish drivers, however, seem almost vindictive in their desire to squash anything so foolish as to venture into the road, so the sidewalks seemed the best place for riding, despite the fact that I had to navigate through crowds of hunched-over babcias with shopping carts and outraged expressions. After several wrong turns and circling around the intersection twice, I finally found the bike path which Agata had described to me as leading to a park. I took off on it, excited to finally be able to get some speed and not put off by the squeal the brakes were making nor the first drops of rain. I rode down the path a mile or so before it ended, but as a fairly empty sidewalk took up where it left off I continued none the less.

Ginsberg’s cry of ‘moloch’ filled my brain. My sidewalk had on one side a 6 lane freeway which would have made Robert Moses proud and seemed right out of the surbuban wastelands I thought I left behind me when I boarded the plane for Europe. On the other side lay a vast track of identical apartment blocks, Communist-era tenement houses built on the same concrete-box pattern of architecture, spiced up with some socialist-kitsch light brown line painting or the faded outlines of large murals advertising the state department stores or even Lida, where, if one had American dollars, one could buy rare products from the West, such as oranges or Barbies. I made my way down the uneven and potholed sidewalk, splashed by giant puddles and an increasing rain, in shock at the sight of the sheer number of dwellings. They seemed almost vulgar in their placing, in their multitude, in their utter lack of character, these housing tracts which stretched as far as the eye can see. I attempted some quick calculations to see what the population of my field of vision was at the moment; never before had I literally seen hundreds of thousands of people’s homes without even having to turn my head.

Caught in this state of wonder, I hit a large bump, which rocked me back on my seat. A large crack signaled that my seat was not quite ready to meet my ass with such abruptness. I managed to wrench the seat back into the normal position but immediately found that as soon as I placed any pressure on it it fell back down again. I decided this was probably a good time to turn around, so I abandoned the idea of seeing the park and drove 5 miles back home in the rain standing on my pedals poised above a seat bent backward whose tip was perfectly positioned to give me an unwanted anal probing should any sudden jolt knock me off my balance.

Errant Arendt

Professor Arendt places great emphasis on the ‘natural wealth’ of America. Its presence before the Revolution allowed for a prosperity and equality unheard of in the Old World, and thus laid the cornerstones of the success of the American revolution—its lack of social upheaval. The ‘social question’ needn’t ever be raised; no screaming crowd of enragés or sans-cullottes demanded radical reforms; the goals of fraternité and egalité were pre-existing conditions, leaving the founders only the task of establishing liberty. After the revolution, it was this natural wealth which allowed the American style of unbridled capitalism to work; according to Arendt, the only place in the world where it has done so without creating widespread misery and inequality.

A lovely idea. It seems to be the descendant of good old-fashioned American exceptionalism, of the most messianic kind, wherein America, uniquely blessed by God among nations, becomes a city on the hill destined to shine forth enlightenment to all other nations. It has the lovely property of reducing the whole of American history to one natural pre-existing condition, for which no one can take credit or be blamed, and about which nothing can be done.

It also has the interesting convenience of completely ignoring the over one third of the American population which was, at the time of the Revolution and for 87 years afterward, enslaved. A country where millions lived in utter depravity hardly seems like a land of utter equality to me. Arendt acknowledges this, justifying the exclusion of the slaves from her analysis because they were likewise excluded from the founders’ and the European intellectuals’ analysis. This is not exactly true—from Edmund Burke to Thomas Jefferson, many of the leading intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic not only acknowledged but wrote extensively on slavery in America. It is true, however, that on the whole these intellectuals conceived of America as a land of equality and opportunity for white people, and viewed that as a positive well worth any negatives from slavery.

However, this last does not amount to a wholesale bypassing of the issue of slavery; instead, it raises slavery to the chief element of American prosperity, the flip side of American equality. Thirty years of studies since Arendt have acknowledged this, have written (I’m thinking here of the works of Toni Morrison, Winthrop Jordan, Davis Byron Davis, etc) about how American freedom and equality, both its conceptualization and its actual existence, could never have existed without its constituting other, slavery.

Perhaps we can forgive Arendt for ignoring this issue. She was certainly not the only one at the time to do so. But does anything remain of her ‘natural wealth’ thesis?

In the end, not much. If she was talking about natural resources, its true that the lands which constitute present day America nicely outfitted for industrial and agricultural ventures. But Europe is not exactly a stagnant wasteland in that regard. If her comparison is more about the more favorable ratio of people to resources in uncrowded America than in overpopulated Europe, then her point is more valid, but many other countries in the Americas—Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, among others—are comparably full of natural resources and, in the 18^th century, comparably uncrowded in comparison with the Old World, but not comparatively wealthy. The United States did have a more orderly and streamlined system for the exploitation of its resources, but that seems more the result of governance rather than the cause for the revolution which created this government.

The fact remains, however, that the American Revolution was never hijacked by the wretched masses, as was the French. This fundamental difference between the two remains, though not as rigidly as Arendt describes—the Whiskey Rebellion in the Constitution’s aftermath is but one example of the deep regional and social divisions between segments of the new society. Partly, this was due to the lack of enormous masses of miserable peasants. But mostly, it was because the American misery had been cordoned off to a specific section of the population, branded as distinctly other and controlled through and institutionalized system of violence and exploitation. The American founders could ignore the destabilizing demands of the hungry stomachs because these stomachs had had their tongues cut off. That is the true story of our successful revolution.

Library

The searing glass tower loomed like a monolith, threatening to overwhelm the scurrying fur blobs crossing the pockmarked street. I stood before it open-mouthed, pulling my scarf around me and attempting to decipher the Polish on the paper signs taped to the door. Arrows seemed to be everywhere, pointing in opposite directions. I took a deep breath and a brave step and walked forward. The automatic doors opened. A large police officer turned. Shouting in Polish. Hostile hand gestures. I steppe back and walked away.

20 meters further on, I found the real entrance. Another police officer eyed me over suspiciously but said nothing. I walked in and found myself in a sparkling clean lobby with a large desk labeled "Informacja" and a glass elevator. I am tempted to see if the information desk speaks English but am too timid for interpersonal contact after my run in with the guard. I instead walk around pretending to read the signs. I get the impression the books are upstairs and step into the elevator.

I browsed langorously through the shelves labeled "Historia," excited at the many books which, if I had only access to them two months ago, would have formed the backbone of my research, and negated the need for a thousand roundabout evasions. A sharply dressed young woman taps me on the shoulder, and begins speaking in rapid Polish. I understand a little but not much; luckily, that is a sentiment I know how to express. I was only half-way through my elaborate apology for being a stupid foreigner when she interupted me with perfect, Irish-accented English. "Oh, I'm sorry. No worries, do you want to use the Internet? No? Ok, well enjoy yourself then."

Across the hall, I spy Thomas Jefferson. Startled, I investigate. He's sitting in the "American Corner," the most disgustingly patriotic office I have ever seen. Two computers and shelf after shelf of American magazines, documentaries about the Founding Fathers, and large print guides to the National Parks. I address myself to a young secretary reading "The Guide to the Library of Congress Numbering System." I ask her, in English, if I can drop off one of my flyers here, thinking perhaps people interested enough in America to visit this place would be willing to pay to talk to one in the living flesh. She agrees, but informs me that it would be even better to leave one with the main information desk.

I do not go there directly, but stop to check out a room labelled "Czytelnia Głowna." Head reading room, I roughly translate, sounds fun. I take three steps in until a fat and officious-looking fellow sitting by the entrance rises and stares at me. I ignore him, and continue to look around nonchalantly, until he grunts and asks, "Słucham?," literally, "I'm listening?" I stutter out something like "I just-- like-- look and-- reading. Books. I look for?" He is not impressed. His response was quick and incomprehensible, but something in the tone signalled that I should start walking out. I caught that my coat was bothering him; I guess he doesnt like khaki, or maybe, like most Polish people I talk to, he is sure I am going to die of some illness for not wearing a fur lined trench coat reaching my ankles, and feels obligated to scold me for this gross oversight. At any rate, I leave.

Two weeks later I came back. This time, with Agata. She guides me through the elaborate dance of deposing my coat at the coat check, negotiating for a locker key and taking only a single pen and paper with me. Then we must bounce between a series of secretaries to get me a library card, for which they need to see my passport, birth certificate, and hernial scars in addition to a photo of my parents and a pint of blood. Now, I have a right to look at (but not to borrow) that vast majority of the libraries books which are not left willy-nilly on shelves where people can access them but safely secured behinds a series of locked rooms guarded by hordes of red tape and surely librarians, ensuring the precious information will be shared with only the dedicated few. She even deflects the ire of the fat guard, convincing him to let us both in on one card. I few hours later they finally bring me my books, and I can spend the afternoon hurriedly reading them and copying down salient facts by hand, as I can see no photocopier I would be free to use without having to deal with one of the Nurse Ratchetts.

Navigating modern institutions is a Kafkaesque experience, no matter where one has the misfortune of making the attempt. However, imagine how much all the horrors of the Trial are compounded, when the unfortunate victim has to navigate a hostile labyrinth through the fog of being a foreigner with limited grap of the language and culture.

Orange Revolution

Notes on Painting an apartement in Manhattan, Poland.

The black stains covering the plaster walls just became giant Rorshark tests as the spongs spread hot sudsy water all over them. My suburban Utah idea of the first step of painting a room had already met failure.

The paint was a gift from Grandpa. Well, not exactly. He had had some identical paint, left over from painting our kitchen, which he wanted to give us, but he had already loaned it out to his friend. His friend, however, had already ruined it in an unfortunate incident. But, not wanting to offend Grandpa, we procured identical paint to the kind he wished to give us, with him none the wiser.

The color was supposed to be orange. Agata likes oranges, even though she didn't have any oranges until she was eight, and the wall came down, a fact of constant amazement and guilt for me. Instead, the color was pastel salmon of a sickening hue. Pigment was needed, three doses, and two coats of paint, before orange we had.

Meanwhile we had to whitewash the soiled radiator, paint over the poorly-fit doors and plug up the huge gaps through which the cold winter wind blew like a hot knife through bacon fat. Cords were assembled, and our lumbering stegosaurus of a television was jimmy-rigged to life. Hideous, lurking black furniture was scrubbed and covered with bright cloth from second-hand shops. Slowly a room emerged where once was only darkness and filth.

The housewarming parties still haven't ceased. The guests come endlessely, never coordinating to be more than one at a time. Each brings flowers or wine and stays for coffee or tea for five or six hours. Each comments on the room, how they like it, at first, then the long list of improvements we still need to make. They all hate the table. We like it, just to spite them.

Curtains, a donated giant orange rug, and some plastic tablecloths later, and my first decorating experience is complete. A People's Rebulic mass housing dwelling unit has been converted into a chic twentysomething think pad. Little research has been accomplished.

Science

Recent discoveries:

1. Bleach is a toxic substance with many household uses.
2. Gloves area household substance with many anti-toxic uses.
3. Printer ink cartridges are located in the back aisle of Media Markt, near the cords.
4. Imitation brands are always cheaper than the real thing.
5. Printer ink refill kits cost much less than printer ink cartridges.
6. Stupidity is in the hands of the fumbler.
7. Directions printed simultaneously in 15 different languages are not to be trusted.
8. The Internet is full of ideas but few solutions.
9. Died finger tips give one a sexy, deranged writer air.
10. Soap, vinegar, windex, and paint thinner will not remove printer ink from one's hands.
11. Bleach will get anything off one's hands except the smell of bleach, which will linger for days and give the taste of swimming pool to anything one eats.

Revolving

One of the key tendencies of Revolutions as identified by Hannah Arendt is their tendency to ‘devour’ their predecessors. The Ancien Regime is vilified before its dust settles and the old leaders are tossed out with or without their heads.

In the US, however, as Arendt identifies, that didn’t happen. Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton—all were elites and ruled before, during, and after the Revolution; democracy, constitutions, private property—all were values well instilled in the common man as well in 1770 as 1790. It was a paradoxically conservative revolution, which had innovation thrust upon it and its ambitions enlarged by happenstance.

The Polish Revolution straddled the line between these two models. Solidarity came, and the communists went, but they didn’t go far, and Solidarity soon had gone as well. Everyone did their best to forget the PRL as soon as it left; as happened across all of Communist Europe, the statues came down, the holidays changed, the textbooks were updated (excluding anything that happened after 1945), and generally people tried to get on with their business forgetting what had happened. Now, however, the PRL is back, and with a vengeance, either glamourized as fuzzy nostalgia and repackaged as marketable kitsch for the sentimental and ironically hip, or demonized by populists, Catholics, and discontents. The last remnants of PRL collaborators and oppressors are being rooted out and harangued while every ounce of its popular culture is being rebroadcast and examined.

Whether you can call 1989 and its surroundings a revolution on the scale of 1776 or 1789 is an open question. Maybe only its ensuite will tell.

All I know, is I need to go watch some old newsreels.

Who killed the Jews?

Jews once formed a major thread in the cultural tapestry that was Łódź. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the streets of this booming industrial town would have been peppered with Hasidic sidecurls, the sound of Yiddish, and the cries of Jewish merchants. From one third to one half of the city's population would have been Jewish, joining the Germans, Russians, and Poles who flocked to this 'Promised Land' of work in factories and breakneck capitalism.

Today, only the Poles are left. The Germans, kicked out after World War I, come back again during World War II, and kicked out with gusto again thereafter, have left nothing but bad memories, ill will, and the name "Litzmannstadt." The Russians, shown the door as well after World War I, also came back during the Second World War, this time at the end, as the winners, and stayed around more or less until 1989. Their first visit left a beautiful orthodox cathedral to remember it; the second, endless concrete housing tracts and neglected gargantuan sculptures of sickle-wielding proletarians.

And the Jews? Indeed, what about the Jews? They left only a cemetary, piles of hair, shoes, teeth, ashes, and a fortune in property and businesses snatched up by those who ordered, executed, or watched their destruction.

Killed. By whom? The Germans, of course. No one denies that. But just the Germans?

Everyone could have done more. The Allies, perhaps, could have done a thousand little things, to stop the murder earlier, to save a few lives. Perhaps even to prevent it all, though less likely. The Soviets, surely, never should have agreed to splice Poland up with the Germans, should have tried more and earlier to save the Jews. France, the Netherlands, and all the other occupied nations, not only could have done more, but could have done less collaborating, could have less willfully rounded up their own Jews, could have killed less themselves.

But the Poles? What could they have done?

No one likes to blame a victim. The Poles, for the last 250 years, have been exactly that most of the time, victims of whoever was stronger and more willful. During World War II, they suffered, were singled out by Hitler to be a race of slaves, less than human, denied all rights of self-government, education, adequate food. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were killed, millions more beaten, raped, robbed, repeatedly, everyone forced to go hungry, to submit, to lose chances.

But the Jews were killed. All of them, or thereabouts. Most, on Polish soil. Many, in isolated death camps. But not all; others, as is becoming increasingly clear, were shot down, or clubbed, strangled, drowned, starved to death, in their own homes, sometimes, even, by their own neighbors.

The extent of this is debatable; most Poles didnt kill any Jews, some might have under strong compulsion, many must have died for refusing. Many Poles risked their lives to save them. But many more did less than they could have, less than they easily should have. Still others did much more horror than humanly comprehensible.

I know cowardice, as I have seen it in myself. I know racism, as I have seen it in my own country. I don't know hunger, or chaos, or what it feels like to have an armed man walk into my house, point a gun at my head, and start controlling my life.

I guess Im trying to say, blame is a hard game to play. If the American South had been occupied by some foreign force urging the destruction of all blacks, or, closer to home, if Utah had been occupied by some odd foreign force urging the destruction of all non-Mormons, what would my cocitizens have done? I think we would have been lucky to escape with having perpertrated only the very worst anyone dare accuse the Poles of. I think we would have had little chance of the least of the heroism one can recount of them.

But, still. The Jews were killed. More of them were killed in Poland than anywhere else. More of them came from Poland than anywhere else. A massive butchery, a genocide, a horror on an unprecendented scale, took place. It had to have a place, agents, victims. The victims- 90 percent Jews. The agents- 90 percent Germans. The place?

What is Poland without the Jews? For one thousand years, the society inhabiting this flat plain in the heart of Europe was marked by their presence. Polish culture, unique, wonderful, charming in its own right, was formed, always existed in conjuncion, opposition to Jewish culture. If the Jews were to have just dissapeared one day, been scuttled off to a resort in the Catskills, left without so much as saying goodbye, the hole left in Polish society would have been tremendous. But they didnt just leave. They were brutally murdered, and not far away, but right in the very spot where so many of them had lived for so long.

An outside observer, largely ignorant of both cultures and histories, I cannot begin to say what effects that has had. From my readings, it appears the Poles can't either, as it is a topic they have chosen to ignore. Some say, it made them only hate the departed even more. Others, downplay the loss, emphasize the independence of each culture, honor the tragedy but insist both sides have moved on, continued their independent developements.

Perhaps theyre right.

But it still seems odd to me, that here in Łódź, home to 300 000 Jews in 1939, the only traces of Judeaism left, are the Stars of David graffitied all over any neglected surface as the ultimate insult to an opposing football team.

‘French is Trendy’ Part 2: More linguistic ponderings

Tuesday started on the wrong foot, and kept hobbling from there.

We woke up to the sound of a cell phone ringing, chiming the same tone as the clock tower on the University of Utah campus. Thus I was groggily trying to figure out if I was late for class as Agata answered and spoke in rapid Polish, “Na pewno, nic nie szkodzi, ocywiście. Nie ma problemu.” Literally, it all meant “no problem,” which immediately signaled to me: problem.

“We’re not going to be rich,” she said to me after she hung up. This is one of our many catch phrases, repeated after those far to frequent occasions when our financial hopes are dashed. “My student just canceled. I’m unemployed for the day.”

“Je t’aime quand meme, ma belle chomeuse,” I replied in my heavily accented French. Discussing unemployment seemed more natural in French; the word chomage, for unemployment, and chomeur/chomeuse, for an unemployed person, have an entire network of cultural connotations gained from years of experience in not working that any equivalent English word lacks. Unemployment is, of course, no stranger to Poland either, but as I haven’t come across the term yet in my “Im starting to speak Polish” book I can’t say it.

“Degage,” she said, ‘bug off,’ as she flipped over and pulled the blankets tight. She knew I was patronizing her, taking full advantage of the opportunity to gloat. For today I would be gainfully employed, and she would be the lovely housewife, a full role reversal from our normal situation, where I lounge about the apartment all day ‘doing research’ as she runs off to teach the English and French lessons which keep us from starvation. Today, however, I had one lesson of my own, a 45 minute conversation session with a 15 year Polish girl, for which I would earn 30 zlotys, and a healthy dose of self respect.

Survival and self-respect form the dynamics of language lessons not only for us but for our students. For most people in the milieu I was brought up in, the acquisition of a foreign language is a form of entertainment, a brainteaser meant to impress or waste time on par with Sudoku, or, in the case of Spanish, Chinese, or Arabic, an ambitious attempt at success and riches. Here, it is a necessity only the richest few can afford to live without. For everyone except the politicians, work, school, travel, and even entertainment require knowledge of a major world language, i.e. English or, much less often, French. Polish is alive and well but few can expect to survive on that alone, not when all the music and computer equipment is in English, all the jobs are in Ireland, and all the executives are French

Which is why, the night before, I was hired sight unseen to teach an English class for 15 dollars an hour, the only thing my employer knew about me being that I was from America, and thus a much sought-after “native speaker.” Which is why, in a country where minimum wage is around a dollar an hour, and most people can barely afford to get by, Agata, the linguistic genius that she is, can make enough for both of us with 16 hours a week of language lessons.

Yet despite these motivations, in the private English teaching business cancellations are far from rare, which is why, a few hours later, another phone call rendered us both unemployed for the day.

Which was fine, for we had other plans for the day. That evening, we were to celebrate the one year anniversary of our being together. The plan was to be chic; what actually happened was quite to the contrary…

To be continued...

'French is Trendy'

„French Is Trendy”

A large banner on the second story of the battered brick building which houses the Alliance Francaise sports this slogan. As I stared at it while waiting for my tram, I pondered the series of paradoxes in those three words.

I was waiting there, alone, in the eerily mild greenhouse-gas enhanced warm of the Polish winter, waiting for a tram, because two hours previously, Agata had received a phone call. It was the school where she teaches English lessons, asking if she could substitute for a teacher who had just called in sick. She couldn’t, but told them she had a real ‘native speaker’ handy, and so I was hired, sight unseen.

‘Native speaker,’ being, of course, a Polish word. Its used variously for any speaker of a language everyone else is trying to learn. Which means, 90 percent of the time, an Anglophone.

The French bite down on their cigarettes and fling back their scarves in fury whenever reminded of this fact. Once, it was from French that Polish borrowed all its newest and trendiest words, for luxury items such as “fotels” or aristocratic amusements such as dancing the “polonez.” Now, however, English is the lingua franca, and not enough people speak French even for the Alliance Francaise to advertise in the language its supposed to be propagating. Which is part of the joke, of course, and part of what makes the banner true. For the fact that “French is Trendy” was written in English signifies that French is not indeed a language commonly known, not something that the man on the street can understand, and thus, inherently, qualified to become trendy amongst the hip and the elite. At least, so hopes the Alliance.

Meanwhile, my tram arrived, and I was off to make 15 dollars an hour based on the sole qualification of having been born in an English-speaking country. Napoleon must be rolling in his tomb.

Owrót

00:01 10 stycznia 2007

Łódź

A revolution can be a departure or a return, an upheaval or a restoration—or many times both at once.

Take, for instance, my life, right now. Here I am, in Europe, sitting next to the love of my life, as I did for the first time, one year ago next week. Many things are the same—this laptop, my hole-ridden boxers, the sound of her breathing. Yet many things have changed. My feelings are stronger, my eyesight weaker, our future more hopeful and committed, yet still full of uncertainty and fear. We are now some 3000 kilometers away from where we were before, in Poland not France, yet the same grey smog rubs the blackened walls of old factories here as there. My life is once again my own, dedicated to leisure and leisurely learning, after six months of bootcamp-like exertion.

On the counter in front of me sits a box, found tucked away under the sink in our apartment on the 13^th floor of a housing tract called Manhattan in the center of Lodz. In it are stuffed hundreds of bills of every denominations, and a pile of coins almost too heavy to lift numbering into the thousands of zlotys. Each one bears the proud seal of the Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, the Polish Peoples Republic, and the images of famous Poles and People’s Revolutionaries. A box which seems to contain a fortune, a veritable treasure hoard stuffed amidst sponges and garbage bags, where it has most probably lain for almost 17 years, absolutely worthless. These notes bear the images of a proletarian revolution that never happened, the imaging of a system unwanted and unwieldy from its beginning whose moldy remains were put to rest 17 years ago, replaced by more potent currencies.

Meanwhile, 10000 kilometers away in the Americas, Bolivar’s old conquests declare freedom once again from imperialism, this time through ‘21^st Century Socialism,” and farther to the north another George rules Washington’s nation, this time needing more than cherry trees to satisfy the cravings in his wooden teeth.