Curious, but any feelings of lineage or of ephemeral connections with the past which might arise in me were usually evoked by one of three curiously disparate phenomena: one, narrow, olden streets with miniature houses: two, certain unreal types of human beings, generally dreamers or fanatics; three, photographs of Tibet, of the Tibetan landscape particularly. I could be disoriented in a jiffy, and was then marvelously at home, one with the world and with myself. Only in such rare moments did I know or pretend to understand myself. My connections were, so to speak, with man and not with men. Only when I was shunted back to the grand trunk line did I become aware of my real rhythm, my real being. Individuality expressed itself for me as a life with roots. Efflorescence meant culture—in short, the world of cyclical development. In my eyes the great figures were always identified with the trunk of the tree, not with the boughs and leaves. And the great figures were capable of losing their identity easily: they were all variations of the one man, Adam Cadmus, or whatever he be called. My lineage stemmed from him, not from my ancestors. When I became aware I was super-conscious; I could make the leap back at one bound.
Stanley, like all chauvinists, traced his arboreal descent only to the beginnings of the Polish nation, that’s to say, to the Pripet marshes. There he lay bogged, like a weasel. His antennae reached only to the frontiers which were limitrophe to Poland. He never became an American, in the true sense. For him America was merely a condition or state of trance which permitted him to transmit his Polish genes to his heredity. Any differentiations from the norm, that is, from the Polish type, were to be attributed to the rigors of adjustment and adaptation. Whatever was American in him was merely an alloy which would be dissolved in the generation that was to spring from his loins.
Preoccupations of this sort Stanley never divulged overtly, but they were there and they manifested themselves in the form of insinuations. The emphasis he gave to a word or phrase always provided the clue to his real feelings. He was thoroughly antipathetic to the new world in which he found himself. He made only enough effort to keep alive. He went through the motions, as we say, nothing more. Though his experience of life was purely negative it was none the less potent. It was a matter of charging the battery: his children would make the necessary connections with life. Through them the racial energy of the Poles, their dreams, their longings, their aspirations, would be revived. Stanley was content to inhabit an in-between world.
All this admitted, it was nevertheless a luxury for me to bathe in the effluvium of the Polish spirit. Polonesia, I called it. An inland sea, like the Caspian, surrounded by the steppes. Over the troubled, stagnant waters, over treacherous shoals and invisible sources, flew huge migratory birds, heralds of past and future—of a Polish past and future. All that surrounded this sea was inimical and poisonous. From the language alone came the much needed sustenance.
What are the riches of English, I used to say to myself, compared to the melodious verdure of this Babel? When a Pole employs his native tongue he speaks not only to his friend but to his compatriots everywhere in the world. To the ear of a foreigner like myself, who was privileged to assist at these sacred performances, the speeches of my Polish friends seemed like interminable monologues addressed to the innumerable ghosts of the Diaspora within and without. Every Pole regards himself as the secret custodian of the fabulous repositories of the race; with his death some secret part of the accumulated intangibles, unfathomable to aliens, dies with him. But in the language nothing is lost: so long as one Pole is left to articulate, Poland will live.
When he spoke Polish he was another man, Stanley. Even when he spoke to one as insignificant as his wife Sophie. He might have been talking of milk and crackers, but to my ears it sounded as if we were back in the Age of Chivalry. Nothing is better suited to describe the modulations, dissonances and distillations of this language than the word alchemy. Like a strong dissolvent, the Polish language converts the image, concept, symbol or metaphor into a mysterious transparent liquid of camphorous odor which, by its mellifluous resonances, suggests the perpetual alternation and interchange of idea and impulse. Issuing like a hot geyser from the crater of the human mouth, Polish music—for it is hardly a language—consumes everything with which it conies into contact, intoxicating the brain with the pungent, acrid fumes of its metallic source. A man employing this medium is no longer a mere man—he has appropriated the powers of a sorcerer. The Book of Demonology could only have been written in this language. To say that this is a quality of the Slavs explains nothing. To be a Slav does not mean to be a Pole. The Pole is unique and untouchable; he is the prime mover, the original impetus personified, and his realm is the dread realm of doom. For him the sun was extinguished long ago. For him all horizons are limited and circumscribed. He is the desperado of the race, self-accursed and self-acquitted.
Make the world over? He would rather drag it down to the bottomless pit.
Reflections of this order always rose to the surface when I would leave the house to stretch my legs. A short distance from Stanley’s home lay a world akin in many respects to the one I had known as a child. Through it ran a canal black as ink whose stagnant waters stank like ten thousand dead horses. But all about the canal were winding lanes, eddying streets, still paved with cobblestones, the worn sidewalks flanked by diminutive shanties cluttered with shutters dislocated from their hinges, creating the impression, from a distance, of being enormous Hebrew letters. Furniture, bric-a-brac, utensils, implements and materials of all kinds littered the streets. The fringe of the societal world.
Each time I approached the confines of this Lilliputian world I changed back to a boy of ten. My senses became more acute, my memory more alive, my hunger more sharp. I could hold conversation with the self which I once was and with the self I had become. Who I was that walked and sniffed and explored, I knew not. An interlocutory I, doubtless. An I suborned by a superior court of justice … In this supraliminal arena Stanley always figured tenderly. He was the invisible comrade to whom I imparted those larval thoughts which elude speech. Immigrant, orphan, derelict—of these three ingredients he was composed. We understood one another because we were complete opposites. What he envied I gave him regally; what I craved he fed me from his carrion beak. We swam like Siamese fish on the glaucous surface of the lake of childhood. We knew not out Protector. We rejoiced in our imagined freedom.
What intrigued me as a child, what intrigues me to this day, is the glory and the wonder of eclosion. There are balmy days in childhood when, perhaps because of the great retardation of time, one steps outdoors into a world which is dozing. It is not the world of humans, nor is it the world of nature which is drowsing—it is the inanimate world of stones, minerals, objects. The inanimate world in bud … With the slow-motion eyes of childhood one watches breathlessly as this latent realm of life slowly reveals its pulse-beat. One becomes aware of the existence of those invisible rays which emanate perpetually from the most remote parts of the cosmos and which radiate from the microcosm as well as from the macrocosm. As above, so below. In the twinkle of an eye one is divorced from the illusory world of material reality; with every step one places himself anew at the carrefour of these concentric radiations which are the true substance of an all-encompassing and all-pervading reality. Death has no meaning. All is change, vibration, creation and re-creation. The song of the world, registered in every particle of that specious substance called matter, issues forth in a ineffable harmony which filters through the angelic being lying dormant in the shell of the physical creature called man. Once the angel assumes dominion, the physical being flowers. Throughout all realms a quiet, persistent blossoming takes place.
Why is it that angels, whom we foolishly associate with the vast interstellar spaces, love everything which is mignon?
As soon as I reach the banks of the canal, where my world in miniature lies waiting, the angel takes over. I no longer scrutinize the world—the world is inside me. I see it as clearly with eyes closed as with eyes wide open. Enchantment, not sorcelry. Surrender, and the bliss which accompanies surrender. What was dilapidation, decay, sordidness, is transmuted. The microscopic eye of the angel sees the infinite parts which compose the divine whole; the telescopic eye of the angel sees nothing but totality, which is perfect. In the wake of the angel there are only universes to behold—size means nothing.
When man, with his pitiful sense of relativity,
