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.