The Wind

Where the bee sucks

2010-04-05T13:02:00.000+01:00

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I remember summer afternoons, walking home from school through meadows choked with thousands upon thousands of wild flowers. Every blossom seemed to vibrate with humming bumble-bees: they were everywhere. We would catch them in jam jars and hold them captive for an hour to two while we argued about which of us had caught the most, the largest, the loudest. We feared them a little for their sting, of course, but knew they would attack only once (and as a last resort) in an act of suicide (unlike the hostile wasp). We never harmed them, some vague instinct in us recognizing their value, their innate sanctity even. No-one ever killed a bumble bee except by accident.

Today, the meadows of my childhood have been replaced by housing estates. But in my own garden, which cannot contain the abundance of flowers it has produced this year (poppies, primulas, poeny-roses, azaleas, lilacs, etc.,) there is an eerie silence; and there are hardly any bumble-bees.

I have always admired the humble bumble-bee, respected it. It is a gentle, industrious, endearing, fat, hairy little beast, far friendlier than the commercially-useful honey bee (It is also solitary, and so does not swarm like its cousin).

Sometimes, (like this morning) an occasional one will blunder into my bedroom through an open window and get itself caught in the lace curtains. I flatter myself it has come to visit me rather than losing its way, for many poets in antiquity were said to have been visited by bees: it was a sign of the Bestowal of Great Wisdom. Pindar was one such poet honoured in this way: they brought honey to his infant lips. Even Plato, though no poet (and seeking to exclude poets from his grim Republic) was visited by a swarm of bees at his birth. (“The Wisdom of the Bees” is also much spoken of in Celtic legend)

The bumble-bee at my window, however, had probably just got lost and needed some help. It has no brain, only a double chain of neural ganglia. But who needs a brain when you have a heart like his: so much in love with the colours, the scents the textures and the tastes of heavenly blossoms? I am reminded that the ancient Egyptians, who preserved many of the internal organs of a dead person for use in the Afterworld, discarded the human brain altogether. It was one of the few organs left on the embalming room floor. Every Pharaoh went into Paradise brainless (along with his all his Egyptian subjects). But then perhaps Paradise can only be attained by those who have renounced their calculating, chattering minds and have tuned their hearts instead to vibrate, like bees, to the colours and shapes of eternity.

My errant bumble bee is impatient to return to paradise. I wonder how he perceives my garden, his compound eyes magnifying and multiplying everything he sees. His senses must become saturated with colour. He must occasionally become drunk on what he sees and giddy with ecstatic joy. Perhaps this is the meaning of his continual murmurings.

Our word for “Paradise” comes from the Persian word for a “garden”. We (humans) find so much beauty and symbolism in flowers that we often forget that they were created solely for the insects and not for us. Without the beetles, the bees and the mayflies, our landscapes would be drab and monochrome just as they were in the era of the dinosaurs. Our ideas of paradise would also have to be radically revised.

A real-life inhabitant of paradise, a paradisiac, a hairy bundle of love, I capture my errant bee in a wine glass and release him outdoors. He makes a direct bee-line for the lilac bushes, muttering loudly to himself.

Who will sing his praises once the bumble bee has disappeared forever from our landscapes? It is slowly being killed off (I am told) by a tiny parasitic mite that burrows into its flesh. Soon, in this corner of the world, there will be no more summer meadows filled with the onomatopoeic murmurings of innumerable bees. What an incalculable loss!

© Ryszard Antolak

Cloud Appreciation Society

2010-04-05T13:01:00.000+01:00

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Clouds are endlessly fascinating. As children, we used to lie sprawled out in the long grass staring up at them for hours, relating to one another everything we saw. It was a time for imaginations to run riot. And sometimes, we really did see strange things! One particular afternoon, a huge angel with outstretched wings came bearing down on us from a crimson sky, and we ran home in fear to tell our parents.

Some years later at college, when the authorities were looking for new ideas for students’ organizations, I suggested that they start a “Cloud Appreciation Society”. I didn’t expect them to take me seriously. But they did. And to my astonishment, over thirty young freshmen arrived (with notebooks and pencils) to attend our first meeting! It was all great fun. We would drive out into the local countryside and just lie about in the meadows talking, sketching or writing about the clouds. But the secret of "Cloud Appreciation" is that it isn't really about clouds at all: it's about the cloud-gazers. We found ourselves talking endlessly about everything and everyone, until the serious types took over and Science began to rear its ugly head. There was soon talk about "making lists", and "keeping records". Profane words like “stratus" and "cumulus" were bandied about. It was then that I left. I didn’t want meteorology. I wanted the poetry, the imagination, the wildness. So I returned to the meadow and resumed my studies there alone.

But of course, I wasn't allowed to concentrate. Once again, I was made to realize that Cloud Appreciation is not really about appreciating clouds. First the lapwings started flirting with me (from a distance of course); then the grasshoppers came to see what I was doing; the skylarks played "peek-a-boo" above the long grass; the beetles walked over my notebooks trying to read what I'd written. Larger animals also began arriving to study me. A young deer once came so close that I could hear her breathing. I can still see her rounded eyes of surprise as she bounded off into the undergrowth startled by a movement of my pen. It was so difficult to concentrate! I’m sure I would have obtained my PhD in Cloud Appreciation (cum laude) from the University of "Universe-City", if only there had not been so many "distractions".

After all these years, the memory of the meadow has stayed with me while the clouds have disappeared over the horizon of age. I still remember the smell of the long grass, the flash of the buttercups, the pink streaks of foxgloves, the blood-poppies, (and those hussy little yellow poppies that look so fresh and flirty). I’ve always loved poppies, perhaps because they pine away and die the moment you pick them, and are therefore left alone by flower pickers and the commercial companies.

So what I've learned is simply this: if you go into the wilderness with the intention of studying “the wilderness”, you won't notice nearly as much as if you'd gone there to do something else. Heavy deliberation in these matters destroys all the spontaneity, kills the unique wildness, of the moment. You have to be just as wild and free and spontaneous as the things you’ve come to see. It’s like Love: holding too tightly to it is a sure way of losing it: you squeeze the (wild) life out of it. William Blake said it all so much better, of course:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

© Ryszard Antolak
(Painting: Nina Rahshenas)

The Woman

2010-04-05T13:00:00.001+01:00

For as long as I can remember, I have been holding an intimate conversation with an unknown, and perhaps non-existent, woman who haunts my thoughts. She exists partly in my imagination but is no less real for that. Her name, her description and her actions are scattered throughout the pages of my dream books, her footsteps imprinted on the Book of my Life.

It is not her beauty that has drawn me over the decades, nor any talent, (for she has none of these). It is her mere presence: so numinous that no sacrifice would be too great to win her attention.

She has always been there somewhere in the background, this woman whom I talk to in my head (at least for as long as I can remember). But I have not always recognized her. She is elusive and changeable. I have mistaken her often for others. I thought I caught glimpses of her in the faces of my mother, my sisters and the women in my life whom I loved and adored. Trusting in Her reality, I waited and prepared myself for her, certain she would reveal herself in the flesh (so many years I wasted waiting). When I met my wife I “knew” beyond all doubt she had finally arrived! I had found my pearl of great price. But the face soon faded away.

Today, I am still talking to her in my head, this woman who is closer to me than any other, relating to her every detail of my day, arguing semantics with her, pointing out a sunset. She is still here. And she is calling to me as she once did, drawing me out of my complacency, out of my shallow and incomplete understanding into those deeper levels of intimacy beyond spousal or blood relationships.

I will go wherever she leads me, of course, (how could I refuse a vocation from Beyond?). But this time I will not be deceived. In whatever form she comes, in whatever guise, with whatever face, I will know her for herself (for the hallowed presence that she is). She cannot fool me again. I have recognized her within my own self. So there is no more possibility of deception.

Dark Carousel

2009-04-05T13:02:00.001+01:00

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Sometimes the Future erupts into the Present in such a way that you cannot but take notice, even if you hardly understand what’s going on at the time. It’s almost as if you were being prepared in advance for some traumatic event in your life.

For example, one of the films which distressed me as an adolescent (and even more so also after I got married), was the musical blockbuster “Carousel”. Every time I watched it, I found myself weeping after the first fifteen minutes, something that became embarrassing, (and a great joke in my family). It puzzled me because Carousel radiates positive energy, warm sentiment and many feel-good factors that defy any inclination towards melancholia

For someone who spends many long evenings playing the piano alone, my first presumption was (naturally) that the musical score by Richard Rogers was to blame. Carousel possesses some very delicate and moving numbers: “When you walk through a storm”, “If I loved you”, “My boy Bill”, etc. Easily moved to tears by music, I presumed my emotions were being stirred by the songs. But then I finally bought myself a CD of the music and quickly realized that any emotive elements (for me at least) had to lie in the story.

Once removed from its scaffolding of infectious music, Carousel reveals a more sinister side. Based on the play “Liliom” by the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar, it is about people on the fringes of society: outcasts, low-life, carnival characters. Molnar had experienced periods of domestic violence in his relationship with his wife which had eventually contributed to his marital break-up, and it during one of these periodical “flare-ups” that he had written his most famous play.

For those who don’t know it, Carousel is the story of a handsome carnival barker, Billy Bigelow (played by Gordon McCrae) who falls in love with a sweet innocent mill-worker called Julie Jordan (Shirley Jones). Although they both love one another, the marriage is a disaster.

The tragedy of Carousel is that the hero, (Billy Bigolow in the musical, Liliom in the original play) loves his wife but cannot communicate any of those feelings to her. He is an artist without an art; and is “unable” to work because “normal” work is beneath him. Everything he touches he destroys. Not because he wants to. He has to live everything at a distance. He wastes his time gambling, flirting, and making up big (unrealizable) plans. His basic requirements are attention and excitement. Faced with the prospect of a real love (Julie’s) he discovers he does not know what to do with it. He cannot bear her devotion, because beside her, his actions are revealed for the selfish deeds they are. So he vents out all his frustrations on his wife, beating her up periodically with his fists (which is understated in the Hollywood version). Julie, however, loves him in spite of the beatings and the bullying. With a child on the way, Billy agrees to take part in a robbery to obtain money to provide for his growing family. The attempt is bungled: he falls on his own knife and is killed. (In the original play he commits suicide in order to evade his responsibilities as a father, but the story had to be softened for the American market).

Once in Heaven, Billy refuses to admit his love for Julie, and shows no regret whatsoever for his actions.

Sixteen years later (after his death), he is allowed to return to earth for a single day to do some good there. He brings with him a star he has stolen from heaven, which he intends to give to his daughter whom he has never seen. She is now 16 years old, a pretty, but unhappy child who takes after her father. She does not recognize him when he arrives to speak to her. He offers her the Heavenly Star as a gift, but she refuses and asks him to go away. (Too much like her father, she cannot accept anything good). He insists that she take it, and when she continues to refuse, he lashes out at her in his frustration and slaps her (the only way he knows to gain attention).

The girl runs away to tell her mother: she has seen a man who has hit her hard, and yet (somehow) it did not hurt. “Is it possible”, she asks her mother, “for someone to hit you hard, and for it not to hurt at all?” Julie, intuiting what has happened, tells her daughter, “Yes. It is possible for someone to beat you, and beat you, and beat you – and not hurt you at all”. Now invisible, Billy whispers to his wife: "I loved you, Julie. Know that I loved you." And Julie, (somehow), hears him. She joins her daughter and the rest of the townsfolk in singing “You’ll never walk alone”, as Billy heads towards Heaven.

As it stands, the musical Carousel can be said to condone domestic violence. It says that it’s alright to beat up your partner as long as the victim loves you and forgives you continuously.

The ending motto of the play and the film are the same: that there is a violence that doesn’t hurt the victim: that domestic violence can be interpreted as a blind form of love; and that it can be forgiven, both here on earth and also in heaven..( Billy is, after all, redeemed not by any effort of his own, but by the “tear of Love” that comes into Julie’s eye on hearing her daughter’s story.).

Once you knock on the door of your own self, the answer you receive is seldom the one you expect. When I first saw Carousel many years ago, I identified with Billy Bigolow, the flawed hero: he had the best lines I thought, the most seductive songs. But it is Julie Jordan who is the real flawed heroine, putting up with her husband’s behaviour, rationalizing his brutal actions, returning his beatings with a Christian love.

Today I know it possible to love someone who beats and abuses you. I know this because I have done it. But whether this is “right” is a different kind of question.

© Ryszard Antolak

(picture: Bita Vakili)

On the Character of Trees

2009-04-05T13:02:00.000+01:00

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Sycamore
Sit contentedly under the welcome shade of the sycamore tree. It is friendly and helpful to man. Its wood is close-grained, exuding no harsh resins: good for household furniture, for table-tops and surfaces that come in contact with your food. It is sacred to Hathor, favourite goddess of Egypt.

Silver Fir
The evergreen Silver fir is the maiden of the trees. It is sacred to the moon and the goddess Artemis. Ulysses built the Trojan Horse from Silver Fir. It burned the topmost towers of Illium.

Almond
I said to the almond tree:
“Sister, speak to me of God”.
And the almond tree blossomed.
The almond is the magician among trees. Aaron’s wand was a branch of almond. Its buds sprouted miraculously to form the menorah.

Acacia
The ark of Osirus, the ark of Noah, the Ark of the Covenant: all were all made of acacia. A hard-wood, inhabiting desert places, it is the tree of the burning bush from which Jehovah spoke the words "I am who am” to Moses. Thorny, jealous, self-sufficient like the God himself, it strangles (like the Ash) the roots of other trees that dare to grow beside it. Egyptian spears were made of this. It is the "shittim wood" of the Old Testament.

Palm
The palm tree is our relative. When God had finished creating Adam, some of the red clay remained behind. From this the creator formed the palm tree. Hence, some medieval philosophers believed it to be half-vegetable half-animal. Banished from paradise, Adam uprooted the palm tree and took it with him. He planted it in Mecca. All palm trees are descended from the pits of its original dates. According to the Qur'an, Jesus was born under this tree.

Ash
Tall and proud, the Ash is cruelest of the trees. Its shade is harmful. Its roots strangle those of other trees. Spears were made of this wood. Cruel as it is, the ash tree exudes a sweet liquid from its bark (and leaves) which the ancient Greeks called "meli" or honey. Hence comes the saying: "Out of the strong shall come forth sweetness". The Meliae (honey ash spirits) were born from the blood of Uranus after Cronos castrated him. They fed the infant Zeus with their honey in the Cretan cave of Dicte.

With purple flowers and black mitre-shaped buds, the ash is the tree of bishops. In autumn, the keys of the Kingdom hang from its branches. It is the tree of Poseidon because oars were made from ash. The druidic wand was an ash.

Elder
Both blessed and cursed, the elder is a mysterious tree. It is the first to let out leaves and last to drop them. Although a tree of wastelands (it will grow in almost any soil) its berries are nutritious and make a rich red wine. In spring the blossoms yield their own yeast under the influence of the sun and make a fine white wine. It is the tree of the crucifixion of Christ. Judas hanged himself from an elder tree. In Ireland, it was the tree of the fairies. Roads were built around them because the penalty for cutting it down was death. Any child placed in an elder cradle was sure to die. It was never used as fuel because its smoke was considered noxious.

Broom
On Mount Horeb Elijah rested under a broom asking to die and an angel touched him and brought him food. It was used for expelling evil spirits from the house, and hence to sweep the floors of homes (our word for a broom comes directly from it). It is more of a bush than a tree, but was regarded as a tree by the Celts.

Pear
Because of its white blossoms, the pear tree was sacred to the moon. The image of Hera at the Heraeum in Mycenae was made of pear-wood; and Athene had a pear sanctuary in Boeotia.

Alder
The most brotherly of trees is the Alder. It is very gregarious and allows all other plants and trees to grow around it. An inhabitant of damp watery places, its wood was used to line banks, to build water conduits and to make buckets. The city of Venice stands upon alder piles hammered into the mud of the lagoon. It was sacred to the Celtic God Bran.

Rowan
Scottish gardeners plant mountain ashes in their gardens to keep away evil spirits. (I have one in mine)

© Ryszard Antolak
(Picture: Bardia Haddadi)

Iran, King Kong and Paradise Lost

2006-10-28T19:50:00.001+01:00

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For Darius Kadivar, whose tireless efforts to persuade me to write this article finally bore fruit. With warm thanks. - RA.

In the latter years of his long successful life, Merian C. Cooper - the creator of the epic film “King Kong” - developed an inconsolable longing to return to the Zagros Mountains of Iran and live out his remaining days among the Bakhtiari nomads of the region. The idea haunted him periodically. All he needed, he used to tell his old friend Ernest Schoedsack, was to “buy horses, a few flocks of sheep”, and (because of his growing frailness) “get a couple of good Persian doctors”. But the dream with all its endless possibilities was never realized.

Cooper had first visited Iran in 1924 to film the movie “Grass”, a documentary about the Baba Ahmadi branch of the Bakhtiari tribe. Their epic journey over the mountains between Ahvaz and Isfahan every year in search of grazing has been described as “the greatest migration in modern history”. Images of tribesmen throwing themselves into the rushing Karun River (along with their livestock), and footage of them climbing the glacial face of the massive Zardeh Kuh in their bare feet, thrilled audiences all over the world. Grass became Cooper’s first commercial box office success, and on the strength of it, he was given money to complete other film projects (of which King Kong became the most famous).

In real life, Cooper was bigger than any of his movie creations. He was distinguished as a Hollywood film producer, movie innovator, explorer, war hero, adventurer, pioneer of commercial air flight and much more besides. The new biography of him by Mark Cotta Vaz is entitled “Living Dangerously” and this is a very fitting title. Because for most of his life, Merian C. Cooper lived “on the edge”, at the extremes of life: he needed to take life-threatening risks in order to feel truly alive. Life in Santa Monica and San Diego bored the pants off him and he was forever planning to escape.

In 1924, from his tent high up on the Zagros Mountains, he had written in his diary: "You risk your skin, and in the moment when life balances with death, no matter how afraid you may be, you get a touch of the animal value of existence ... wind and rain beats on your face as you brace yourself ... some man trusts you above all other men and you realize what friendship means. These are the seconds which give zest and fire to existence ... These are the moments when conscience and memory alike are drowned in the fine, physical or spiritual beauty of life..." (Vaz p6)

Cooper had experienced those heightened moments of existence before (in 1920) when as a volunteer in the Polish Air Force, he had flown dangerous missions against the invading Soviet armies. He had also experienced such moments on his journey with the Bakhtiari. He even envied one of the Bakhtiari leaders, Haidar Khan, who seemed to embody everything Cooper was looking for in life. (Some of Haidar’s qualities later found their way into the character of King Kong). But he could never find the heightened awareness he so craved anywhere else (except, perhaps in his cinematic imagination) although he longed for it until the day he died.

Cooper’s two companions during the filming of “Grass” -- both Americans -- were the boyish, excitable Ernest Schoedsack (who did most of the camera work), and the enigmatic Marguerite Harrison, who put up half of the money for the enterprise.

The three characters had met four years earlier in Poland, during the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. Cooper had been instrumental in creating the Kosciuszko Squadron: a group of young American airmen who had volunteered to help Poland in her hour of need. From their flimsy wood and canvas airplanes, they had bombed and strafed the advancing Soviet armies of Semyon Budienny, which were attempting to turn Poland into another Soviet Socialist Republic.

Shot down over the Ukraine, Cooper was captured by the Russians and dispatched to the Gulag. There, he was saved from starvation through the intervention of Marguerite Harrison (a mysterious American spy who may also have been working for the Soviets). He eventually escaped, and after crossing the northern Russian wastes with two Polish friends, found safety in neighboring Latvia. He returned to Poland a war-hero, and was decorated (along with his squadron) with the highest military honor the country is able to bestow: the Virtuti Militari.

Marguerite Harrison had put up half of the money needed to produce “Grass”, but only on the condition that she was allowed to take part in the expedition, something to which Schoedsack objected. (During the journey, he was constantly irritated by her habit of applying make-up before every filming and generally treating the expedition like a family holiday). But his objection was over-ruled, and on December 14th 1923, the three Americans arrived in Shustar by boat to start filming.

Every year, at Norooz, the Bakhtiari nomads, 50,000 men, women and children (together with half a million animals), began an epic journey over the Zagros Mountains in a search of grazing. In their path lay two great obstacles: the treacherous fast-running Karun River (half a mile wide) and the snow-clad Zardeh Kuh mountains, fifteen thousand feet high. They divided themselves into 5 separate groups, each taking a different route across the mountains. Cooper and his companions accompanied the Baba Ahmadi branch of the tribe from the start of their migration north of Ahvaz all the way to the plains of Isfahan, filming the whole journey with hand-cranked cameras supported on shaky tripods.

In the course of their journey, Cooper came to admire Haidar Khan, the tribal leader of the group. He was particularly impressed by the older man’s physical presence: very hairy, “like a gorilla”, Cooper remembered later. But in the presence of his nine-year-old son Lufta, the chief’s whole demeanor changed and he would become soft and gentle in speech and actions. The relationship between this father and son became the central focus of the film Grass.

The first obstacle for the group, the crossing the dangerous Karun River, took almost a full week. It was achieved by constructing flimsy rafts from inflated goatskins, a method Alexander the Great had used two thousand years earlier. So strong were the currents, that several tribesmen were swept away and ended up smashed against rocks. At one point, Cooper and Haidar, both stripped to the waist, raced one another across the river to the opposite bank, the older man surging ahead to win and uphold the dignity of his tribe. Cooper was exhausted by the swim, but Haidar, to Cooper’s amazement, returned time after time to help others on the other side. "Here, in danger,” Cooper observed (clearly overawed by Haidar’s natural physical powers), “[is] a man, by glory!"

Cinematically, the highpoint of the journey was the crossing of the snow-clad Zardeh Kuh, the last great barrier to the land of grass. The Bakhtiari left their tents and other belongings behind in order to travel more lightly and began their ascent of the almost sheer glacier face of the mountain. Most of them attempted the climb barefoot. They were assaulted by wind and snow. At night, they slept out under the stars. Cooper thought he was living a maddening dream. Finally, having reached the summit, they looked out before them and saw a sea of grass stretching across the horizon in a vast, tight arc of green. Cooper wrote in his diary: “Here was the prize of the gallant fight. Here was the land of plenty. Grass and life!” (Vaz 129)

The journey across the Zagros changed Cooper forever. He came to idealize the way of life of the Bakhtiari people. He was acutely conscious of the immensity of their possessions: the sky, the grass and the mountains disguised as clouds. He was also saddened (and angry) at the realization that their way of life was coming to an end; and the modern world was coming to throw this culture of a thousand years onto the dung heap of history. Something of his anger went into the final scenes of “King Kong”, when the giant gorilla, threatened by the flashing weapons of modern technology (guns and planes) makes his final, defiant stand on the topmost pinnacle of the Empire State Building.

Cooper later admitted that despite the millions of words written about the symbolism inherent in “King Kong”, the film was really just a whopping great yarn. Nevertheless, it was one that resonated with audiences all around the world who saw in it something more than mere surface gloss.

The film script for “King Kong” was written by Schoedsack’s wife, Ruth, who based the dialogue on conversations she remembered between Schoedsack and Cooper on their voyages of exploration. Her husband, (Schoedsack), did most of the camera work. Marguerite Harrison, the “unwanted woman” on the Zagros expedition, was the inspiration for the Fay Wray character. The personality of Kong himself was partly based on Paul du Chaillu's description of the death of a gorilla in his book "Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa", which Cooper had read as a 6-year-old boy. The gentle, human side of the animal’s character was modelled on Haidar, gleaned from glimpses of his relationship with Lufta (his beloved son).

Despite all his many accomplishments, however, Cooper always felt that he had left something of himself behind on the plains of Isfahan. In 1947, he began to make preparations for a re-make of “Grass”, but hastily abandoned it after learning that metal bridges now spanned the Karun River and a railroad had been built through the Zagros Mountains. The Wilderness had been brutally destroyed! There was no where else on earth to explore. Cooper, always the adventurer, turned to the only uncharted area left - the human imagination (which for him meant the cinema). He explored that exotic realm with all the creative resources at his disposal, leaving behind him a bright catalogue of marvelous and unforgettable films.

Ryszard Antolak

Reference
Vaz, Mark Cotta. Living Dangerously. The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper (Villard Books. 2005).

The Old Man and his Neighbour

2006-10-28T14:30:00.000+01:00

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There was once an old man who had nothing in the world but a few acres of land, a dutiful son, and one horse. The horse was a magnificent animal, however, and the king offered him a great sum of money for it. But the old man refused. The horse was a family member, he explained. It was not for sale.

Next morning, the old man woke up to discover that his horse had run away during the night! A neighbour rushed to comfort him. "How terrible for you!” he exclaimed. “Now you have no horse and no money. It's terrible what has happened to you!"

But the old man merely shook his head. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad”, he answered. “All I know is that my horse has gone and I have no money left. "

A few days later, the farmer's horse returned, leading six beautiful wild horses behind it. The neighbour told him they were worth a fortune. "You were right, old man! It was not such a bad thing after all that your horse ran away! Now you have seven fine horses in your field. It was a stroke of luck that your horse ran away!"

But the old man merely shook his head slowly. "I really don’t know if it’s good or bad”, he answered. "All I know is that my horse has come home with six other horses”.

The next day, the farmer's son was trying to tame one of the horses when he fell off and broke both his legs. The neighbour immediately rushed to comfort the old man. "Oh, you were right!” he lamented. “It really was a terrible thing that your horse returned with six more horses. Now your son has broken both his legs. You'll have no-one to help you in the fields. How will you survive the winter? It's terrible that your son has fallen off his horse!"

But the old man merely shook his head slowly. "I don’t know if it's good or bad”, he answered. “All I know is that my son has fallen and broken his legs. That's all"

The very next day, the King declared war on a neighbouring country. All the young men were immediately rounded up and sent to fight against the enemy. The farmer's son did not have to go, of course, because he was an invalid. When the neighbours heard the news, they went to the old man and said, "You were right, old man! It was a stroke of luck that your son fell and broke his legs. Now he won’t be killed in the war like our sons. Your son will be a comfort to you in your old age. It was lucky that your son broke legs!”

But the old man merely shook his head. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad. All I know is that my son doesn't have to fight in the war. That's all”.

But the neighbours were still unconvinced……………..

Forgotten Exiles

2006-08-11T02:59:00.000+01:00

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Turkmenistan has long been a place of compulsory exile for poets, revolutionaries and writers. Over the years, countless thousands of Poles, Russians, Germans, Chechens (and other nationalities) have been forcibly deported to this distant corner of the Soviet empire to silence their voices and suppress their activities. With the collapse of Communism and the break-up of the old Soviet Union, they are (at last) able to return to the lands of their ancestors if they wish; and most of them have done so. Only the Poles remain, abandoned by the International Community (and their own Polish Government), stranded in the most repressive and isolated of all the former Soviet Socialist republics.

Once the most far-flung, southerly region of the Russian empire, Turkmenistan still has the air of being somewhat on the periphery of the world. Its capital, Ashkhabad, is a soul-less city of Soviet concrete with a distinct feeling of impermanence about it (the result no-doubt, of the 1948 earthquake that demolished the city). There are few cars on the broad tree-lined boulevards. The ever-present dust of the great Karakum desert hangs oppressively over the city, turning the air at times into a soup of suffocating sulphur. This is a place that has long since resigned itself to the despair of barrenness, and only waits expectantly for the next chapter of its history to be meted out.

Waiting for me at the airport is Pani Irena, an elderly member of the Polish community in Ashkhabad. She was deported here in 1946, a victim of the Soviet-engineered wave of arrests that awaited many Poles who chose return to Poland after the war.

Although she has never seen me before, she picks me out from among the crowds at the arrivals gate and calls out to me (by name).
“How did you know it was me?” I ask, when I finally reach her. Her smile is broad and infectious, revealing a prominent gold tooth. “Who else could you be but you?” Her logic is unassailable. She speaks in a luxurious, old-worldly accent that is found today only among the oldest members of émigré communities. She hands me a small bouquet of wild flowers with the dewdrops still clinging to them like living pearls, and embraces me as if I were a long-lost member of her family. I am humbled and made silent by the gesture.

Security in the arrivals hall is surprisingly tight in what is, by European standards, just a small provincial airport. The boys in smart suits are eyeing me intently from the entrances, and I feel out of place among the colourful Turkoman crowds bustling around me.

“They are always suspicious of everything”, Irena explains in a low conspiratorial tone as we head for the taxi. “Nothing very much has changed here since the Soviet era.”

Her voice, I realize, is the only thing about her that is still young. She is matronly, composed of rounded forms, but comfortable and loose in her own body. Her hair, stained with an immensity of grey, is drawn up tightly on her head in a neat bun. Her unnaturally pale cheeks are veined in a watered ink. I wonder how old she can be. Seventy? Eighty? It is difficult to tell.

As we drive through the rambling assemblage of suburbs, shadows are already beginning to tug at the corners of buildings, and the sun is low over the Koppe Dag (the mountains that separate Turkmenistan from its turbulent southerly neighbour, Iran). Despite being on the edge of one of the most inhospitable deserts in the world, the city is remarkably cool and green at this hour. There are narrow irrigation channels criss-crossing the roads at regular intervals, and old established trees line the boulevards, giving welcome shade from the sun. One cannot, however, escape from the Orwellian presence of the nation's eccentric president-for-life, Turkmenbashi Saparmurat Niyazov, whose image is reproduced everywhere. “We even have a statue of him made of gold”, Irena tells me dryly. “It revolves in a full circle every 24 hours so it is always facing the sun…..He is supposed to be the light of our nation, you see!” She laughs sardonically.

There is a bitter edge to her laughter. During the Soviet era, no one was permitted to speak of the mass deportations to Turkmenistan. Even today, no one does so openly. Freedom of speech is non-existent here. There’s no right of assembly, no right of association. Every organization has to be registered with the state. The country has been slow to throw off its old Communist habits.

Once arrived at her apartment on the second floor of a modest housing block, Irena draws the curtains and (at last) begins to breathe more easily. Tomorrow, she tells me, she will introduce me to her circle. But in the meantime, I must be hungry.

She begins to take over the kitchen, as women often do, and asks me to help her chop some vegetables. I bow to her authority. We dovetail splendidly: I cut, and she prepares. The luxury of exotic cooking smells begins to infiltrate my senses and I know we are going to get along famously. Within an hour, we are eating our our “plov” (a local rice dish) by candlelight, the Turkish coffee is served, and we begin to talk.

“The first wave of political prisoners came here from Poland in the mid nineteenth century”, Irena explains. “They were revolutionaries, sentenced to hard labour for taking part in the 1863 Polish Uprising, which was bloodily put down by the Russians. They were forced to make the journey on foot. Hundreds of them perished during the building of the 700 km railway across the Karakum desert from Ashkhabad to Krasnovodsk. Later, other groups joined them, in 1903, 1921, 1935, and 1948. At one time, a tenth of the population of Ashkhabad were Poles”.

Irena knows her dates from memory. The still, deep river of her heart hoards its images and reflects them in a language that is simple, but powerfully effective, because still raw. Here is a woman whose life stands for something. For 15 years, she has devoted her energies to documenting and preserving the names and histories of the exiled. Her stories are without number. She keeps scrawled notes in faded children's jotters, hidden from prying eyes between the volumes of Russian Poetry on her bookcase. She brings them out and we go over the manuscripts together, correct references, peer myopically into maps sprawled across the living room floor

“No-one knows how many of us are left, because all archival material is considered secret. Any information we have has had to be passed by word of mouth. Hardly anyone, for example, has even heard of the mass deportations here in 1921, even though they were some of the largest. They occurred just after the Polish-Russian War when borders were established for the first time between the two countries. Poles who found themselves on the Soviet side of the border were deported to Kazakhstan, Uzbekhistan, Turkmenistan, Siberia - god knows where else. Most of their names are lost. We don’t know what happened to them”

Hours pass, talking of distant, but not-forgotten wars. Irena brings out sepia photographs, more coffee-and-cream than black-and-white, and enlarged to ridiculous proportions. We talk of the millions who lost their lives during Soviet and Tsarist eras, their names unregistered in any account book, buried without ceremony or marker in mass graves all over Russia. “If we do not remember them,” she says, “who will”?

She is a religious woman. But it is a faith expressed less in words than in the silences between them. She has nothing with which to confront the events of those years except her simple faith in a god, she says, “who betrayed them”. She uses the word “betrayed” with strong emphasis. “One day”, she adds, “God will take them into his arms and beg forgiveness for having forgotten them”. She looks directly into my eyes. “You and I will remind Him”
“What kind of God do we have who can be so... unjust,” I ask delicately?
She thinks for a moment. “You are talking about a God ‘up there’ in Heaven judging people’s actions in accordance with human concepts like Justice. That’s a naïve notion. That kind of God doesn’t exist. It’s enough for me to remember the millions who have died and been murdered to know that God exists… and is not just. It is we who must be just.”

She releases the hair from the bun on the back of her head and it fans out freely around her. The glow of a distant youth begins to emanate from her presence. She must have been beautiful in her youth.

What are her chances of repatriation to Poland? She makes a gesture of despair with her hands. “It’s possible only if a county or a district (in Poland) invites you over, offers you a place to live, and a job, and social security... before you can even think of applying. Who’s going to do that? It's hopeless. And we can’t travel anywhere else abroad because our wages are too low. She points to a photograph on the bookcase of two beautiful women with dark hair and poppy coloured lips. “My daughters. I am too old now, of course. But I would like my daughters to have a better life. We would even go to Russia if we could. But you have to show a birth certificate proving that you were born or have relatives there".

In the bloom of the candles, she looks young, even girlish, but is now visibly fading. In an effort to raise her spirits, I begin to tell her stories of my journey to Ashkhabad: exaggerated anecdotes involving lost companions, mysterious visitors and confiscated hand luggage in Istanbul. She begins to smile, and we are soon both transformed into schoolchildren, giggling and rocking against one another. I continue in the same vein for a few minutes. But when I look up, I find her fast asleep on the sofa, a cushion cradled in her arms like a child, her mouth slightly open.

I acknowledge my affection for this remarkable woman, forty years my senior. I feel a great spaciousness of soul in her, and a purity of being which I recognize but cannot convert into terms of my own reality. The varieties of love are so manifold that we do not possess the words to define all of them.

I cover her with a blanket, blow out the candles, and wander off to my room. Dawn is already in evidence. From my small window, the Persian mountains across the border hang weightless and rosy in the fresh morning light. It has been a very long day.

Ryszard Antolak
© PSA

The Young man and the Mighty Oak Tree

2006-03-05T17:34:00.000Z

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There was once a simple young man who lived on a vast, dusty plain. Beside his cottage grew a mighty oak, the only one for miles around. In winter, it protected his home from the prairie storms. In summer, it gave shade from the fierce glare of the sun. The tree was everything the man had ever wanted. It met all his needs. It was large enough to provide him with firewood from its fallen branches; and it had many strong boughs, which the man occasionally cut to make furniture. It was good and strong, noble and tall. Everyone who passed by the cottage remarked upon the beauty of the old oak, which pleased the young man, for he loved it dearly. The oak tree was his whole life, his constant companion. He liked nothing better than to sit in its shade and read a book. He was very happy with his tree.

One day, the young man decided to make a chair for his library. So he took his saw and went out to the tree. As the metal bit into the thickness of a branch, the wood snapped off as if it were brittle, shooting painful splinters into the man’s face and eyes. He was surprised and hurt. Wiping away the tears, he looked at the wood and saw it was riddled with small holes. The man knew in his heart that the wood would never serve for furniture. But he dismissed these thoughts from his mind and returned to his books.

A few weeks later, he tried again (for life presses on). He went out to his beloved tree and began to cut another branch. Just as before, the wood shattered and sprayed him with its sharp splinters. But this time, (because he was prepared) he turned his head and the splinters (sharp as kitchen knives) showered him on the back of the neck, drawing blood. Again, he looked at the wood, and once more, he saw the same pithy, brittle mass of holes and cavities.

Gradually, the man learned from his books that his precious tree was unwell. It had become diseased - infested by an insect (the prairie oak flea) that was known to cripple oak trees, but not to kill them.

As the months passed and the disease progressed, the man was conscious he was getting less and less of what he needed from his tree. Its leaves became thin and scattered, and could not provide shade from the hot glare of the sun. Storms came. But instead of sheltering the house, the oak let loose its weakened branches onto the cottage roof with a loud and angry thunder. Once, a heavy limb crashed right through into his bedroom in the midst of a storm, and the man had to spend a cold, miserable night waiting for the daylight in order to mend the hole.

But the man continued to love his tree. It was beautiful. “It is my oak, and I love it”, he said to himself. “I know it has a disease, but that’s not the fault of the tree. I chose to build my home in its shelter, and now I am committed to staying with it whatever the winds of Destiny may decide.”

And so it was. The man now decided he would live with less furniture in his house than before. He read his books sitting on an old fruit crate instead of a chair. In winter, he went about the house wearing many layers of clothes to keep himself warm. He learned to sleep lightly, always listening for any crack in the oak wood that might cause the next bough to break above his head. It was worth the sacrifice.

Until one day, a passing wagon stopped, and an old man with a face as wizened as an ancient oak tree asked him, “Why do you stay with that sick tree? It causes you so much pain, and there are so many things it can never give you?”
“I love my tree,” answered the man. “It’s the disease that I hate. The tree is beautiful and good. And it is my life.”
“But look,” said the old man in the wagon. “Its wood is rotten. Its shade is useless. Instead of sheltering you, it harms you in storms. You have no decent furniture because its wood is so pithy and brittle.”
“I have learned to separate the disease from the tree", replied the simple man. “If I didn’t do that, my heart would surely become embittered.”
“But if the disease is separate”, asked the man in the wagon, “then tell me, where is your tree without the disease? I don’t see a healthy tree standing next to a disease. All I see is a pithy, bug-eaten tree that can barely stand on its own. If your tree is such a good provider, then why do you have so little, and why is your roof patched and leaking? Why do you have no decent furniture in your house? Why are you always frightened that a branch might come crashing through your roof at any moment? Is that any way to live your life?”

The man thought for a while. He looked around at the cold and empty shack his home had become and at the miserable state of his own life. He sat down on a rotten log and began to weep. “You know” he said, “maybe you are right. No matter how much I say I love that tree, it can never give me the things I need from it. I guess you’re right. The tree and the disease are all the same thing. I don’t have a tree and a disease. I have a “diseased tree”. And the longer I stay under it, the longer I’m going to live without the shade, the shelter, and the furniture that I need. One day soon, I’m going to be conked on the head by a falling branch and that will be the end of me. Maybe I need to start looking for another tree to give me what I need...”

With tears in his eyes, the man began to pack a suitcase, and before long, he had set off to look for another place to build a home. In time, he found one, with a healthy maple tree growing nearby.

He hated the idea of building a home all over again from scratch, but he was a courageous man, and was firmly resolved to try. It was very hard. After a few brief months, however, he had built himself a brand new home, shaded in the summer, shielded from winds in winter, and safe from storms. The tree was not a noble oak of course, but it could provide him with all the wood he needed for his furniture. Bees even came to suck nectar from its blossoms. Very often, he would sit contentedly in the evenings under its extensive canopy and write letters to his friends (who also had problems with their trees). He wrote to them about his beloved oak, and about the deep peace he had found in the shade of his simple unassuming maple. The man was content.

As for the oak tree: it continued to grow in its same spot, dropping its branches during every storm, just as it had before. Just as it always would in the future.

Retold by Ryszard Antolak

February 10th

2006-02-11T06:44:00.000Z

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I am a child of Siberian exiles. Many of my ancestors are buried in the cold soil of that bleak land: all of them exiled against their will by a ruthless totalitarian state. Siberia is in my blood. Its winds blow loudly through my soul.

On this date in 1940, five members of my family, together with almost half a million other men, women and children, were forcibly taken from their homes at gunpoint, packed into cattle trains, and transported to the forced labour camps of northern Siberia and Kazakhstan. Their crime: that they were Polish citizens.

They were given no hint or warning of what was to come. The vast operation, carried out all over eastern Poland on a single night under cover of darkness and snow, had been prepared months in advance. It was first of four mass deportations of the population resulting in the incarceration on Russian soil of almost two million Polish citizens. They were taken away so no trace would ever remain of their language or their culture in the territories occupied in 1939 by the Soviet Union.

You are not likely to have heard any of this at school, or read about it in the mainstream history books. Britain, the US and the Soviet Union colluded together for almost 50 years to cover up, or obfuscate, the details of the crime. Even in (Soviet- dominated) Poland, until as recently as 1989, it was forbidden to refer to any part of this story.

All the arrests on that fateful night, February 10th 1940, followed a basic standard pattern. At four o’clock in the morning, when the whole family were asleep, a loud knock was heard at the door. Three or four soldiers entered, armed with pistols. They herded everyone (including children) into one room and put them up against the wall in their nightclothes. Meanwhile, the house was searched and an inventory made of all the family’s assets. They were then ordered to dress warmly and given fifteen minutes to gather together their belongings and prepare for what they were told was, “a long journey”.

It was snowing heavily outside. The temperature was minus 40 degrees. Two horse-driven sleighs stood waiting to transport them to the railway station. Once there, they were summarily loaded onto cattle wagons (thrust tightly in a standing position, one person next to another) like sardines. It was not uncommon for seventy people to be packed into each wagon, families with children. There was often no room to lie down, or even to sit.

In the centre of each cattle truck stood a small stove, the only source of heat. For ventilation, there was only a tiny window near the ceiling covered in masses of barbed wire. A rough hole in the floor served as a toilet. The doors of the wagon were padlocked loudly and not opened again for three days. Some of the children began to faint from lack of air and water. The men beat loudly against the doors in desperation, but to no avail. Finally, after four days, the train began its passage northwards to the frozen wastes of Siberia, a journey that was to take upwards of four weeks.

Many, however, did not survive to reach their intended destinations. The children were the first to succumb to the intense cold, the lack of air and the scarcity of food and water. Now and again, the train would stop at some abandoned station in the wilderness, and the doors unlocked to allow the passengers to dispose of their dead. The earth was frozen hard, and it was not possible to give them a proper burial. So they merely covered the bodies in a light sprinkling of snow, said a few prayers over them, and continued their journey northwards.
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The story of their exile, the miracle of their eventual release, and the desperate attempts by hundreds of thousands of them to cross Russia to freedom in Iran, is a subject too vast to outline here.

But few of those who managed to escape from Siberia ever saw their homes again. By a cruel twist of fate, their political destiny was sealed in Tehran in 1943. In November of that year, the leaders of Russia, Britain and the USA met in the Iranian capital to decide the fate of Post-war Europe. During their discussions (which were held in secret), the United States and Britain endorsed Stalin’s ethnic cleansing in eastern Poland. They decided to assign Poland to the zone of influence of the Soviet Union after the war. Poland would lose both its independence and its territorial integrity. The eastern part of the country, from which the exiles to Siberia had been originally expelled, would be incorporated wholesale into Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Polish government was not informed of the decision until years later, and felt understandably betrayed. 48,000 Polish soldiers would go on to lose their lives fighting for the freedom of (among others) the very nations whose governments had secretly betrayed them in Tehran, and later (in 1945) at Yalta.

February 10th may not mean anything to most people. But in some households such as mine, this date on the calendar can not be allowed to pass without solemn remembrance and reflection. Siberia is in our blood. Its winds blow coldly through our hearts.

© Ryszard Antolak
(picture: Nikolai Getman)

Thought of the Heart

2006-02-05T15:58:00.000Z

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For our ancestors in antiquity, the mind was often believed to reside in the heart (the center of the human organism), and not in the head. Many so-called “primitive" peoples today still believe this. So when a philosopher such as Zarathushtra entreated us to "ponder with a clear mind on the best of things", he would have been pointing to his heart, and not his head, when he said it.

To ponder something “in the heart” is very different from pondering it "in the head”. Something that is "learned by heart", for example, means the learner is totally involved in the process of learning, the heart (or sometimes the lungs) being regarded as the seat of his soul where all the senses commingle. Related to the heart, the cultivation of a "clear mind" can refer not only to a "heady", dry, intellectual, logical kind of thinking, but to a wisdom of the whole organism, symbolized by the heart which sits at the centre of the body: to that "mingling of wisdoms" (so beautifully described in the Avesta) as constituting the state of Haurvatat (immortality).

Of course, poets have long known this. A whole vocabulary of "heart thought" was developed centuries ago by the Persian poets and philosophers. Alexander’s invasion of the East all but put an end to this school of thought. But it re-surfaced in the 11th century. A philosophy of the heart continued to blossom among poets and thinkers in Persia, in the works of such philosophers as Suhrawardi, who tried to revive so many of the ancient concepts and make them acceptable to a hostile Islamic public (and for which he was duly executed by Saladin at the age of only thirty-nine). It re-surfaced also in Medieval Italy among the "Fideli d’Amore", the philosophical group to which Dante and his companions belonged. But the obsessive rationalism of the Enlightenment suppressed its development and banished it to the distant borders of poetry.

In Western Philosophy, the idea of the "thinking heart" can be found as far back as the works of Aristotle, for whom the heart was the organ of aisthesis, “dhawg” (the Persian term), or "heart-savour", which meant at root: "taking in" and "breathing in" - a gasp, that primary aesthetic response.... taking to heart, interiorizing, becoming intimate with.... so that it shows its heart and reveals its soul"
(James Hillman. The Thought of the Heart. Ascona: Eranos Foundation 1981 pp 31-32)

Later, in Sufism, Dawg was defined as "creative intuition". It meant literally "tasting", but attained the meaning of "heart-vision": direct experience of Truth beyond Reason and physical senses. Dhawg could be attained only by "taste", not solely by learning, and led to the idea of "divine intoxication".

To turn to our own time, the idea that we only think with our heads is fast becoming a quaint and antiquated concept. Today, we are beginning to re-discover the faculties of the heart known to our ancestors. Over the past ten or twelve years, images of the heart as “only a pump" have had to be radically re-examined. Research published in the American Journal of Cardiology is showing that the heart possesses its own kind of independent thought which informs the brain. It may even have its own memories. The head and the heart exchange information via the vagus nerve, a "cable” of thousands of scintillating neural filaments working in both directions. Each organ affects the other, and they work hand-in-glove.

If we banish the idea that the “mind is wholly in the head” then new doors begin to open, and new insights are revealed. Rule of the Heart (Xshathra, in ancient Persian thought) becomes defined as the coming together of all wisdoms, rational, emotional, sensual, mythological, spiritual, psychological etc. It is not at all a sentimental or overly-emotional response to experience.

If we confine our ideas of "a clear mind" merely to what is narrowly logical and rational, a wealth of meanings can be lost, leading to a rigid kind of one-dimensional thought..

“We are bereft in our culture of an adequate psychology and philosophy of the heart, and therefore also of the imagination. Our hearts cannot apprehend that they are imaginatively thinking hearts, because we have so long been told that the mind thinks and the heart feels...if we would recover the imaginal, we must first recover its organ, the heart and its philosophy"
James Hillman. (Thought of the Heart p.3)

© Ryszard Antolak
(Picture: Sara Alavi Kia)

Aphorisms 2

2006-01-29T21:03:00.000Z

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To love without covering up one’s eyes – that truly is a great art.

You can drink from a carafe if you grip its neck and press it to your lips. But if you want to drink from a spring, you have to get down on your knees and bow your head.

It is better to lose your life beneath a tattered tree you have planted, than to wander in the desert believing mirages to be your orchards.

Truth is not just knowledge, it is life itself.

No one can destroy a nation without the co-operation of that nation's citizens.

I have seen carrots and turnips cut into the most elegant patterns to place into a broth: stars and numbers, burning hearts, and crosses… Even so, the carrots and turnips remained just carrots and turnips.

Imitation of those who have introduced something concerning the overall development of mankind is not imitation, but humanity.

The spirit of a nation is like water – if you sweep it from the hills into a valley it will erupt into the sky by the measure of its debasement.

Not everything super-logical is anti-logical.

If human speech consisted merely of a certain number of words and certain combinations of expressions (as certain wise men would have us believe), there would be no difference between literature and mathematics: literature would simply be faulty mathematics!

The best healer is the one who is himself the medicine

To have a heart, one has to use it

There can be no progress without heresy.

A nation consists not just of what distinguishes it from other nations, but also of what binds it to other nations.

Love is like coal. When it is lighted, it burns; when it goes out, it leaves a dark stain.

The poet and the prostitute are alike: both sell priceless merchandise for a pittance.

He sleeps best who does not know how badly he sleeps.

There is no worse nonsense than educated nonsense

Those who profess most faith in doctors are the healthy.

The way out is through the door you came in.

The Zoroastrian Houses of Yazd

2006-01-21T22:35:00.001Z

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Sometimes old buildings possess the virtue to express far better than words the fears and uncertainties of nations or religious groups. The old Zoroastrian houses of Yazd are one such example. Civil and religious persecution have dictated the style and pattern of their unusual architecture. Memories of repression are encoded in the design of their thick adobe walls. They are voices frozen into stone.

Yazd is situated on a high, arid plateau at the interface of two mighty deserts (the Dasht-e Lut and the Dasht-e Kavir). It was once an important station on the Silk Road, famous for its fabrics and textiles (1). For many years, its splendid isolation protected it from political upheavals in the rest of Iran. After the Mongol invasions that saw the total disappearance of Zoroastrian populations from the provinces of Sistan and Khorasan, Yazd emerged unharmed, protected by its vast expanses of featureless desert. It became a haven for Zoroastrians from all over Iran. In this city of walled gardens and turquoise domes they continued to practice their religion and customs relatively undisturbed. Most of them still spoke Dari, once the official spoken language of the Sassanian court, later confined solely to the Zoroastrian populations of Yazd and Kerman (though fragmented into countless local dialects) (2). The pleasant oasis city drew many artists, poets and sufis to the safety of its walls (3)

The region’s prosperity and isolation lasted until the beginning of the eighteenth century whereupon two hundred years of political and religious turmoil ensued which decimated the population. Yazd suffered attacks from Afghans, Zands and Afshars, to name but a few. The Zoroastrian population was subjected to additional hardships. As a religious minority subject to discriminatory laws, it found it had as much to fear from its Muslim neighbours as from the foreign forces armed against it. It took extra measures to protect itself, a fact reflected in the community’s unusual domestic architecture (4).

Yazd is famous for its unique sky-line of badgirs: tall, elegant wind-towers intended to catch the slightest movement of air and direct it downward into cool underground chambers. The houses of the region have great vaulted talars that open out onto spacious courtyards containing pleasant water features and gardens. But the older houses of the Zoroastrian population are significantly different from those of their Muslim neighbours.

In 1963 when professor Mary Boyce arrived in the region to study them, she discovered gloomy, fortress-like buildings virtually devoid of any furniture or greenery. They were low and airless. No badgirs adorned their roofs. The primary consideration of the builders had been defence. The ideal solution would have been to build upwards, erecting high, tower-like houses as are found (for example) all over Scotland. But in Iran, Zoroastrians were not allowed to build their homes any higher than a man could reach (or any taller than the houses of Moslems). They could only build outwards and downwards, creating dark honey-combs of subterranean rooms with adobe walls several feet thick to withstand attack. The Zoroastrians were physically greater in stature than their Moslem neighbours (“mighty men”, as Mrs Boyce calls them) and they could well have put up a fight if they had to. But it seldom happened. The penalty for killing a Moslem was certain death: to kill a Zoroastrian meant incurring only a modest fine, usually waived by the authorities. Better, therefore, to prevent attacks in the first place

Entry to the houses was via a single door from a narrow lane just wide enough to allow a fully-laden donkey to pass. The Law stated that the door of a Zoroastrian dwelling could be secured by only a single hinge, so a series of doors had to be built (one after the other) in the interests of safety. Finally, at the end of a gloomy corridor, a narrow door - the smallest of them all - led into a bare, central courtyard or rikda.

There were no widows. Sometimes glass bottles could be seen protruding from the walls of the entrance lane. But these served as spy-holes rather than windows, defence being uppermost in the minds of these persecuted inhabitants. The only light to enter the house was through the tiny courtyard or via irregular gaps in the doors or ceilings. In some of the buildings the courtyard had been covered over completely to prevent intruders gaining access from the roof. The result was total darkness and oppressive claustrophobia. It is ironic that Zoroastrians with their sophisticated theologies of light should have been forced to live in such shadowy, enclosed buildings.

Bicameral fortresses
The oldest standard form of Zoroastrian house described by Mrs Boyce dated from the early nineteenth century. All other houses were variations on its basic design. It was known in Dari as a do-pesgami (or “two-chambered” house) on account of its two open pavilions facing each other across the rikda. These were known invariably as the pesgam-i mas and the pesgam-i vrok (the ‘great’ and the ‘small’ pesgams) (5). Both had domed roofs to help minimise solar gain and speed up the loss of heat from below.

The pesgam-i mas (or “great pesgam”) was so called not because of its size, (which was often smaller than the pesgam-i-vrok) but on account of its greater significance. It was the room set aside for religious observances and where the ritual vessels, the afrinigan, the bowls and spoons etc., were kept. It was never built facing north (the direction of evil); and was always hidden from the doorway so that no non-Zoroastrian visitor might set eyes upon it. Clay rectangular pots in which grasses were sown at major festivals were secured high up in its corners, a welcome relief from the monochrome grey of the house.

The great pesgam was considered pure (“pak”) and hence no-one in a state of ritual impurity could enter it. Its floor was of plain earth. Brick, being a man-made material, was considered unsuitable as it offended the Zoroastrians’ feeling of harmony with Nature. The age of a house could often be estimated by the height of the great pesgam’s floor. This was always higher than the floors of the rest of the house, a consequence of the fresh layer of soil that was spread upon it every year during the Farvardagan festival (the festival that welcomes back the spirits of the dead). (6)

Opposite the pesgam-i mas was the pesgam-i vrok (or “small pesgam”), a secular pavilion dominated by weaving looms with threads strung from wall to wall across the room. Zoroastrians were forbidden by law to practice any skilled trades, and hence were forced to rely upon weaving (as well as some farming and cattle-droving) to earn a living.

There were various other rooms around the periphery of the house, all of which Mrs Boyce describes meticulously in her article. What is striking about them is their emptiness: the almost complete lack of furniture, decoration or even cupboard space. In the bedroom, clothes and linens were stored in cotton bundles along the sides of the walls as if its inhabitants were ready at a moment’s notice to flee for their lives. This was often the truth, for persecution was endemic. In their haste they often buried valuables under the floors, hoping to retrieve them at a later date. This knowledge gave rise to the belief that all old Zoroastrian houses contained “buried treasure”, and ensured that they attracted the attention of potential burglars. Somewhere in the house, however, there was usually a panahgah (a concealed room) where valuables, wine - and even children - could be secreted in times of trouble.

Another room commonly found in these buildings was the ganza-yi punidun. It was nothing more than a simple stone hut. Women would pass the first few days of their menstrual periods here, segregated away from the men. But by the 1960s this architectural feature of Zoroastrian homes was already passing into memory. Mrs Boyce once asked a young Zoroastrian girl what purpose she though the structure might have served, and received the reply that it was probably “a hen-house”!

The only heated room in the whole house was the long narrow kitchen (or pokri) with its aromatic bread ovens. The weather in Yazd could be bitterly cold in winter, so the family would often congregate here in the evenings. Its fire was never allowed to go out.

Many of the laws discriminating against Zoroastrians (and other religious minorities) in Iran were still in force at the end of the nineteenth century. A Zoroastrian had to dismount from his donkey when approaching a Moslem. He was not allowed out of his house on rainy days because the water from his clothes might “contaminate” believers. He was compelled to wear distinctive garments to identify him as an outsider. He was not allowed to wear a hat or shoes, unless they were torn. Even eye-glasses were forbidden him. Subject to the notorious jaziya tax (7), he was kept firmly in poverty: a second-class citizen in his own country.

But when restrictions upon them relaxed at the beginning of the twentieth century, Zoroastrians again began to improve and upgrade their homes. The do-pesgami developed into chor-pesgami (or four-pavilioned) houses, upper stories were built, courtyards opened up and badgirs added. Water ponds and gardens began to appear to grace the inner courtyards. Life began to return to normal once again. Mrs Boyce reminds us at the end of her article that:
“Persia, with its love of gardens and flowers, was Zoroastrian before it was Muslim; and it was poverty and oppression that forced the Yazdi Zoroastrians into their small bare, fortress-like homes, without a blade of greenness to relieve the monotony. [But] as soon as pressure on them slackened, they created houses with gardens again.” - Mary Boyce, 1964

Notes
1. Marco Polo, who visited the city in 1272 called it “a noble and considerably sized city”. It was famous for Yazdi, a silken fabric embroidered with golden threads.
2. Dari differs from Farsi in possessing fewer borrowings from Arabic. Over the centuries, Dari speakers have experienced extensive political pressure to yield up the
language. Today there are less than 10,000 of them worldwide, most of them in Kerman and Yazd. Dari belongs to the N. Western Iranian language family and is related to Kurdish Gilaki and Balochi. It is not equated with the Dari spoken in Afghanistan.
3. A few of these Sufis built influential monasteries in the district. Some of them, like the monastery of Sheikh Ahmad Fahadan, can still be seen today in Yazd.
4. The Zoroastrians of Yazd distinguish between two kinds of Moslem: the najib (kind, generous) and the na-najib (the opposite of najib). They attach these names to several villages in the district and travel considerable distances to avoid contact with na-najib communities.
5. Mrs Boyce sought out the correct Dari words for many of the domestic objects she wrote about in her article. She was helped by two primary source books:
Soroushian, Jamshid. Farhang i behdinan. Tehran 1956, and
Ivanow, W. The Gabri dialect spoken by the Zoroastrians of Persia IV. RSO, xviii (1939)
6. These basic house designs are peculiar to Yazd and are not found among the Zoroastrian houses of neighbouring Kerman. If they once existed there, they probably disappeared in the 18th century after the massacre of the Zoroastrian population by Mahmood the Afghan.
7. The heavy poll tax inflicted upon most non-Moslems.

Source:

The Zoroastrian Houses of Yazd. by Mary Boyce in
Iran and Islam (In memory of Vladimir Minorsky).
Edited by Bosworth, C.E.
Edinburgh University Press. 1971
Printed in Great Britain by T. & A. Constable Ltd. Edinburgh. Scotland. UK
(ISBN 0 85224 200 X)

© Ryszard.Antolak
antolak@blueyonder.co.uk

Lament for Forugh Farrokhzad

2005-11-28T08:23:00.000Z

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[She] loved as in our age
People already do no longer; as only
The wild soul of a poet
Is still condemned to love
(Pushkin)

Ever since her tragic death in a car accident in 1967, Forugh Farrokhzad has been drawing thousands of visitors to the Zahir-al-Doleh cemetery in Tehran. They come to lay flowers, recite poetry and light candles on the grave of the poet who has become an inspiration to women, not only in Iran, but wherever women’s rights are severely curtailed. If she had survived her car crash, the poet would have celebrated her seventieth birthday this year.

Forugh Farrokhzad was one of those poets for whom Poetry (with a capital P) was not solely about the "writing" of "poems" or versification, but about living life to the full without compromise or equivocation. She once wrote:

"I believe in being a poet in every moment of my life. Being a poet means being human. I know some poets whose daily behaviour has nothing to do with their poetry. In short, they are only poets while they are writing their poetry. When they have finished writing, they turn back into greedy, indulgent, oppressive, short-sighted, miserable, and envious people. So I do not believe their poems. I prize honesty in life, and when I find these people making fists and various claims - in their poems and essays - I get disgusted, and I doubt their veracity. I think to myself, “Perhaps it is only for a plate of rice that they are screaming.”

Forugh Farrokhzad, and also Marina Tsvetaeva, (with whom she is often compared), believed one could be a poet without writing a single line of poetry. For these women, Poetry was a vocation, a way of life: a unique way of perceiving the world (and ourselves with it) as a seamless unity of being. Just as the written poem uncovers hidden connections between apparently disparate elements and unites them into a meaningful work of art; so the poet gathers up the scattered elements of his own life and makes from them a new living entity, open to infinity. He makes a poem out of the details of his life, and attempts to live it with all the heightened passion and intensity of feeling he is able withstand.

Forugh knew the consequences of dedicating her life so completely to Poetry. As a woman, it meant renouncing the traditional roles of wife and mother Iranian society required of her. On a more personal level, it meant abandoning her only child whom she loved to distraction. She made the choice in full consciousness of the consequences, writing about it with her characteristic brutal honesty:

I know a weeping child mourns
The loss of his mother,
Yet, tired and despairing
I set out on the road to Hope.
Poetry is now my love. Poetry my lover.
I leave everything behind to follow it.

Her actions, which remain as controversial today as they were during her own time, had tragic repercussions for her life as well as her sanity. As the years went by, she became increasingly haunted by the enormity of what she had done: that “sin” (as she called it) which she both detested and exalted at the same time.

I sinned a sin of pure pleasure,
In an embrace that was fiery and wild.
I sinned in the arms of one
Who was hot and avenging as iron.

In that dark and silent seclusion,
I sat dishevelled by his side.
As his passion was poured upon my lips,
and I lost the sorrow in my shattered heart…

I sinned a sin of pure pleasure,
next to a shaking, stupefied figure.
God only knows what I did
In that dark and silent seclusion!

But her poetry became enormously enriched as a result. She showed a generation of Iranian women that their lives did not have to revolve around their children or the kitchen sink. In the details of her own life, she demonstrated the possibility of extracting the utmost from every moment of existence.

It has been said that the poet’s main task is to make us aware of the breath of eternity that hangs over all that is truly alive. If this is the case, then Forugh Farrokhzad fulfilled her role as “eternity’s hostage, captive to time”. She gathered up the shattered morsels of eternity that lay within her own soul and held them up to us in “wet and trembling hands” (Pasternak)

Her poetry (like her life) veered wildly to the far-flung borders of passion, which she documented with meticulous honesty and ruthlessness of vision. Her life was tragically brief. She lit up the literary sky magnificently for a brief moment, and then went out forever. But that unique light was never forgotten. Every year on the anniversary of her death (February 14th), people gather at her graveside in their hundreds to light candles, lay flowers and mourn her passing. The sky comes down among them to lay a covering of soft snow. After so many years, Forugh Farrokhzad is still sorely missed.

I will come, I will come
I will come again
and this time my hair will smell of the soil;
and my eyes will be black
with the knowledge of the darkness;
I will come again
carrying the branches I have gathered
in the woodlands behind the wall.

I will come, I will return,
I will come again,
and the entrance will be filled once more with love;
And I will greet once more at the gate
All those who are in love
And the girl who is waiting at the gate;
I'll greet them all once more.

© Ryszard Antolak

In praise of "wobbling"

2005-11-26T15:39:00.000Z

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To wobble: verb (intrans)
"to incline to one side and then the other alternatively; to be not properly balanced; to oscillate; to go unsteadily; to be inconsistent; to rock...."

We wobble, hobble, totter, vacillate, stagger and rock from one incomplete idea to another, from one revelation to the next (and sometimes back again) until we find the truth.

I revel in that progress. Isn't it part of being human? ("If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise" - William Blake). The secret of life is being proficient at this "wobbling". To live is to "wobble", to hesitate, to try to find the balance, but never really to achieve it. This "trying" is the dance of life. Ultimate rest, true balance, is death. Everything dead has achieved its ultimate gravitas; is settled and motionless. Rest for the heart is death.

In music, I love best the irregular beat, the hesitancy, the tempo rubato, rather than the regular, hypnotic sound of the metronome which is like the dead mechanical pounding of pistons. What is dancing if not the aesthetic of wobbling motion, meaningful beyond words? And the dervish dance involves a wobbling of perception in the dancer between the sacred and profane, between heaven and earth, ecstasy and finitude.

And what of love: that sweet, fumbling, hesitant, chaotic dialectic of giving and taking? Kiss another human being on the hand (or gently on the cheek) and you turn the regular rhythm of their heart (or yours) into a truly wobbling tempo rubato of the blood. Is mystical love any different?

I am always moved by children (and young animals) taking their very first steps, uncertain on shaky legs, not knowing yet what all this tottering is about, but revelling in it. We are all like that in our adult lives.

I try to keep away from those who are unerringly consistent, those who never change their minds; those who are always right (even 90% of the time).

Our flight through Life is seldom as straight or as smooth as a blackbird's swoop; it's more like a butterfly's - inconstant, vacillating, hesitant, honest, idiotic and crooked: in a word, very human. And perhaps - who knows - this is another evolutionary gift to prevent us from being picked off too easily by those predators in the spiritual garden who would try, for their own sinister reasons, to predict our progress.

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now (it is too late)
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has - who knows as well as I? -
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the acrobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift
("Flying Crooked" by Robert Graves)

Long live the swagger and the wobbling yet!

© Ryszard Antolak

Aphorisms

2005-11-25T20:23:00.000Z

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Literature has no need of great writers, only of great writing

The Muse is the only woman who can make a man conceive.

Stupid ideas, written stupidly, are harmless. But beware of stupid ideas written with talent.

The Beautiful is that to which one cannot add or take anything away.

Lies are corrections of the Truth.

Geniuses leave no schools behind them.

Those who want to shine have to burn first

Live the biography you would write for yourself

There are writers who write and speak quietly, but whose silences are deafening.

Two idiots will never bore each another as much as two educated people.

Whether you throw a stone or a diamond into the water, the ripples are the same.

The only people who can change our maps of the world are explorers and bad printers.

The Devil never sleeps….with just anyone.

Some people’s lives are a long journey from Sodom…. all the way to Gomorrah.

Truth is always naked: no wonder people divert their eyes from it out of prudery.

Lies always sound more logical than the Truth.

Even the most beautiful legs have to end somewhere.

Those who fall madly in love were already a little mad before they fell in love.

Nothing is able to move a man more than the tears of a woman he has begun to love; and nothing irritates a man more than the tears of a woman whom he has stopped loving.

I suffer therefore I am.

There is no need to hurry: wisdom always arrives late.

Some people dedicate their entire lives to digestion.

A man has no other choice but to be a man.

Soon, no-one will ever be forgotten; everyone will become a statistic.

La La Land

2005-11-23T07:12:00.000Z

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Whatever happened to Joseph all those months ago in California, it wasn't domestic violence.

His wife had tried to explain it to him. She had told him it wasn't her fault from the start. She was just trying to get him to listen. Truth to tell, he had made her do it. “Something” had "gotten into" her: but she certainly wasn't to blame.

Today, Joseph has the consolation of knowing that his wife was right after all. Because in California, a man cannot be a victim of Domestic Violence, by definition.

California has just redefined the legal definition of Domestic Violence as, “...the infliction or threat of physical harm against...female intimate partners." The bill, which was proposed by Assembly Member Rebecca Cohn and passed this week without too much opposition by the Californian legislature, (AB 2051, for those who like to know details), defines victims of domestic violence as "battered women." And following on from this logic: - because domestic violence doesn’t happen to men (thank goodness!), any male who claims to have been beaten up by his intimate (female) partner is not entitled to any state-funded (domestic violence) services such as shelter, hotel arrangements, counselling or legal aid (and neither are his children).

But this leaves Joseph with a problem. He is (of course) relieved to learn that he has never been (and never will be) a victim of domestic violence. But what is he now to call those “incidents” that occurred during his marriage: those events that left him so traumatised? They certainly occurred at his Californian home: so technically something “domestic” happened. His bruises and scratches, bite marks, slap marks, and dislodged hair (none of which he wanted or asked for) all give testimony to the fact that some kind of "violence" also took place. But it couldn’t have been domestic violence, (at least, not against him, because he is a man). There was even blood from a knife-wound to his leg, but then again his wife assured him it wasn’t too serious.

So Joseph is still wondering what actually happened to him all those months ago, and how he could have acted differently. Should he have just taken his beatings “like a man” and not complained (and not attempted to leave the house to escape the violence)? Should he have fought back? Maybe (who knows) he should have been proud to be the recipient of the white-hot heat of a passionate woman’s love (if that’s what it was). Joseph has few answers.

But how much simpler everything would have been if he had just listened to his spouse from the beginning. There wouldn’t have been any need to sleep alone in the garage, or wander the streets in a distressed state in the small hours of the morning. What Joseph didn’t know at that time, however, (and what he knows now) was that he couldn’t possibly have been the victim of any kind of domestic violence. By definition (at least in California), a man cannot be a victim of domestic violence. The legislature of the richest and (supposedly) most enlightened community in the world has just said so (and enshrined it in law). And how can he argue with them?

Ryszard Antolak

Rebecca Cohn
(proposer of the Bill)

Artistic Resurrection

2005-11-13T15:30:00.000Z

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The older I become, the more I begin to miss old-fashioned descriptions, the kinds that are found in Tolstoy, Proust or Flaubert. I miss their arduousness, their solidity. In part, this is probably a self-defence reflex against the ubiquitous tag lines that are replacing description in our culture.

Description - communicating with words what the camera registers with an image - is becoming ever rarer in these times of computer games, news sound bites and cable TV. Today, the world is either shown or it is named. Fewer people can describe an object (or a person) than can name them. As a result, writing (literature) has become almost a rebellious act against the technological machinery of clichés and lies we are asked to accept every day. In our time, to be a descriptive writer demands not only faith in oneself, but also faith in Literature in defiance of contemporary "civilization".

Great writers deal mainly in raw material - feelings, impressions, experiences - but rarely attempt to explain them. Their method of prolonging the pre-conceptual moment before the formation of rational interpretations, frees their readers from the ideological concepts and theories that stand between them and a clear vision of Reality.

Marcel Proust, for example, presents us with a series of meticulously observed sensations and impressions in the exact order of their occurrence, uncorrected by the interruption of the intellect. In his search for “The Truth”, he portrays rather than explains. His starting point is the observer’s illusions about others, their actions seen from varying perspectives. Part of his technique is to show that all moments of a character’s life are connected and indivisible. It is only the intelligence with its passion for analysis, (for establishing artificial distinctions and diversions) that prevents us from seeing the reality clearly before us.

Proust and Flaubert also discovered that emotion and memory attach themselves mysteriously to the apparently trivial and peripheral experiences of our lives. These experiences are “trivial”, however, only to autistic Reason. For the soul, they resonate in the memory eliciting other imagined or previously experienced sensations, enabling us to enjoy one thing through the medium of another. Metaphor, the principal vehicle for transporting meaning from one frame of reference to another, becomes a catalyst for illumination and revelation. Present reality becomes enlivened and illuminated as a result.

Literature, as I understand it, is a supreme effort for human liberation and transcendence. Its function is to translate “dead facts” into a form amenable to the “soul”: i.e., the realm of meanings. What the soul attempts to do through literature (and through all great Art in general) is to reach out and embrace ordinary everyday reality in order to create from it an environment in which it can truly feel “at home”: a home in which objects are no longer opaque and sterile in their materiality, but transparent with symbolism. The world of 'hard reality' (the world of matter) remains no less real than before, but its meaning (belonging to a world which is not material) now carries more value for us as persons. Everyday reality becomes resurrected, resulting in a deeper enrichment of meaning.

For the novelist, everything can become the raw material for transformation by the imagination. This is the meaning of Artistic Resurrection: the soul delivered from the gross inertia of dead “material facts”.

© Ryszard Antolak
(Picture: Mina Mokhtarzadeh)

Seeing the light

2005-11-12T10:56:00.000Z

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One of the myths of the Zoroastrians states that all creatures were originally made from a kind of divine light called the Xvarnach, an energy that gave coherence to life and ensured its victory over Darkness. Many centuries later, the Persian philosopher Suhrawardi postulated that everything in the universe - matter, living beings, consciousness, even knowledge itself - was a form of light. Today, our scientists are at last beginning to confirm a few of Suhrawardi’s intuitions.

The importance of light for the life of our planet has been known for centuries. But the extent of its importance in regulating the various functions of the human body has only recently been realized. The less light we receive, the less our cells interact and the more the immune system becomes depressed. The body requires to be bathed in negatively charged biophotons. This is its fuel. Like plants, the human body photosynthesises light. It is made from condensed sunlight.

Not all the light that passes through the eyes is required to see objects. A large percentage of the light we receive travels to the hypothalamus, to the pituitary and to the pineal glands ie, to the centres which regulate many of the most important life processes: hormone production, reproductive functions, autonomic nervous system, stress response, emotions and metabolic functions. In winter, with shorter days, we become depressed. Less of the "feel-good" neurotransmitter, serotonin, is activated. Muscle-tone and growth decline. The body closes down as if for sleep, in other words, ceases to live an active life; becomes vegetative. Some sufferers of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) even contemplate suicide. All of us become accident prone and susceptible to illnesses.

Many mood-enhancing drugs have the major side effect that they sensitize the body to the effects of natural light. It is only now being realized that it is perhaps this “sensitizing to light” which is the significant factor in mood-enhancing medication.

It is often forgotten that light (and to a lesser extent, colour) medicine was common in the early decades of the twentieth century, and by all accounts was very successful. It was found to be most effective in the treatment of such diseases as tuberculosis and rickets. In 1903, the Nobel Prize was won by the Danish professor Niels Finsen for his work on the treatment of skin tuberculosis (lupus) by Ultra Violet light. In the very same year, Auguste Rollier opened his famous sunlight therapy TB clinic at Leysin, Switzerland. Forty years later, Doctor Emmitt Knott’s Haemo-irradiation therapy (in and around Philadelphia) was claiming successes curing peritonitis, herpes simplex, viral pneumonia, encephalitis, poliomyelitis, toxaemia and puerpal sepsis.

Seeing the danger to its profits, the powerful and fast-growing drug industry began to flex its muscles on American medical schools, helped by generous donations from the Rockerfeller and Carnegie foundations. With the advent of antibiotics after WW2 and the outlawing of several light medicine therapies in America, the whole experience of curing by light was forgotten by the 1950s and rediscovered only in the 1990s. This time, both the technology and the knowledge had increased significantly.

Today, the fastest-growing medical therapy in the western world for everything from acne to blood cancer is once again light (UV) therapy. We are curing diseases with nothing more sophisticated than the raw energy of sunlight.

© Ryszard Antolak
(Picture: Bita Vakili)

Zaduszki: Night of a thousand lights

2005-11-02T07:15:00.001Z

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Tonight, November 2nd, is the night of a thousand lights, when men and women all over Eastern Europe place candles upon the graves of the dead.

It is a truly awesome sight, with nothing to rival it anywhere in Western Europe. On this one night of the year, the darkness is lit up with innumerable shimmering lights. The graveyards are full to bursting, not with the dead, but with the living. They come carrying bread and vodka, kasha and poppy-seed cakes baked specially for the occasion to share with their ancestors in a solemn act of solidarity with the dead. In defiance of hard Reason, (following the impulses of the human heart), they acknowledge one vast community of the living and the dead: one family undivided by death.

In remote villages, candles are positioned around entrances and all doors are left open to guide and welcome the spirits home. Bonfires are lit in every cemetery and crossroads. The tradition has its roots in the ancient religion of the pre-Christian Slavs.

After they have all left, the graveyards shimmer with the lights of countless millions of coloured candles, their tongues swaying and spluttering in the chill November air. They form a continuum of light that stretches across the imagination from Heaven to earth, from the dark soil of the continent to the jewellery of stars in the night sky: one vibrant, unbroken, silent hymn of remembrance.

Zaduszki – the night of a thousand lights.

© Ryszard Antolak

So many silences to be broken

2005-10-30T09:49:00.000Z

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In our age, "heroes" are easily created for us by the media out of such ingredients as the ability to play football, innovative fashion sense or even just a few wise words disclosed by a celebrity to a briefed and waiting journalist. Such trivialisation of heroism results in the overshadowing of real stories of courage and fortitude by ordinary men and women. Their stories are too often ignored or silenced.

Above is a picture of Saudi Arabian news reporter Rania al-Baz who was beaten up by her husband and spent four days in a coma. Her father took the picture while his daughter was recovering in hospital. Rania asked that this (and other photos of her) be published: a very brave thing to do in male-dominated Saudi Arabia. (Her husband declared that Rania had "deserved" the beating, but that next time he would punnish his wife by divorcing and marrying someone else).

The fact that the Saudi authorities allowed the photographs to be freely distributed in the the media not only indicates that domestic abuse is beginning to be taken seriously, but also that male attitudes towards women may at last be beginning to change in the oil-rich Arab kingdom.

Rania: "This was my moment of dilemma. All my professional life, I had been on television, trying to get people, especially women, to talk about the day-to-day dealings of their lives. And now this has happened in my life - and I am not going to talk about it? Can I tell their stories, but not even tell my own? So I decided that whatever the price, I had to tell the truth. I wanted to be some kind of window into what is actually happening to women in my country. I had no choice but to speak out. And so I became a voice - the moment you describe what is going on in that country, you become a voice."

Rania al-Baz is a heroine. Full stop!

"It is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.
And there are so many silences to be broken"

(Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider)

© Ryszard Antolak

The Poetry of Zoroaster

2005-10-24T22:48:00.000+01:00

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(Picture: Nina Rahshenas)

Several years ago, I was fortunate to be able to attend a public recitation of the Gathas, the poems of Zoroaster, in their original Avestan language. Although I hardly understood a word, I was strangely drawn to the haunting sonority of what I was hearing, the sheer beauty of the sounds and the rhythms of this ancient text. I began to wonder whether the intense current preoccupation with the literal “meanings” of the Gathas - Zarathushtra’s philosophy, his insights into the spiritual and mental elements of the human soul – might not be blinding me to their undoubted mytho-poetic elements.

Whatever else may be said of him, Zarathushtra was certainly someone who was “inspired”, powerfully inspired: an example of a specific type of human being hard to understand from a rationalist point of view. He believed he had had a series of personal encounters with the very Source (or Sources) of Existence, and he attempted to convey the force and import of those encounters to his followers through the medium of Poetry.

It is curious that if, as some believe, Zarathushtra’s message was solely concerned with mental concepts and intellectual matters, he should have chosen to express himself entirely in poetry, and not in prose. History, of course, can provide us with many examples of philosophic treatises written in verse. Lucretius’s “On the Nature of the Universe” comes immediately to mind. But that Latin author’s work can hardly be called a prayer, or a vision, or an ecstatic utterance. Many of the Gathas, in contrast, most certainly can.

Zarathushtra was a poet in every sense of the word, and proud of the fact. He was not merely a versifier, gleeman or rhymster. As a poet, he would instinctively have known that prosaic thought is unable to bear the full weight of meaning that Poetry is so amply able to express.

Poetry is not, after all, primarily an intellectual pursuit. It speaks to the whole man, not just to the intelligence; it speaks to the heart, the emotions, the imagination, to the rational as well as the non-rational parts of us. It is also concerned with esthetic experience, with “beauty”, paradoxes, and the whole controversial area of “poetic inspiration”. Poetry is inherently multi-layered, and ambiguous in meaning. It never confines itself to a single, literal meaning .It is not to be deciphered like a hidden code. If Zarathushtra had wanted the Gathas to be a philosophical tract (or a code of Law) he would most certainly have used prose.

One of the most insidious trends besetting language today is, I believe, the passion towards finding the literal meaning of a text. In essence, this is the idea that it is possible to extract from a piece of literature a single meaning, pure and uncontaminated by other meanings: the single meaning intended by the writer. “Mind-reading” would better approximate to such an idea. Language, however, (and particularly Poetic language), is not mathematics. It is often wiser than its users, possessing a life all of its own. When using everyday language, we ourselves are often unaware much of the time that we are in the realm of poetry. It is difficult, for example, to speak for any length of time without using metaphors of one sort or another: (does the road really "go" to town or is it you who goes? Does a house really “stand” on the street etc?) Sometimes a writer himself is not fully aware himself of the depths of meaning he is imparting to a phrase he writes. The phrase merely “comes into his head” and he uses it. Only later does he wonder at the depths of his own utterance. Such is the nature of poetic inspiration, and Zarathushtra was full of it. Unfortunately, we still do not know enough about the Avestan language to be able to point out all the poetic word play in the Gathas with any confidence. Nevertheless, it is almost certainly there.

Poetry is the basis of most world religions, and Zoroastrianism is no exception. Religion and Poetry, we need to remember, have common roots, which go far back into history. Prose, on the contrary, is a symptom of man divided against himself. The Gathas of Zarathushtra were sung, chanted, recited, perhaps even danced to (who knows?). They were not the chapters of a dry thesis in prose by an absent-minded college professor). Most of them are the ecstatic emotional prayers of a mystic to his God; some are glimpses of powerful visions, one at least may be called a drama. Nyberg in his “Religions of Ancient Iran” (1938) (and after him Widengren) even portrayed Zarathushtra and his first disciples as a “group of ecstatics, and his psalms, or Gathas, [as] a liturgy of ecstasy”. Those who seek in Zarathushtra’s work a cohesive system, hard facts and defined concepts, may feel threatened by the fluidity and ambiguity which is the hallmark of classical poetic utterance. Even if Nyberg may have exaggerated his description of Zarathushtra’s followers somewhat, his point is neverthess well taken. Several medieval Persian writers attribute the origins of the dancing Mevlevi dervishes (founded by the poet and Sufi, Jalal-ud-din Rumi), to an unbroken tradition stretching all the way back in history to the era of the “ecstatic Zoroastrians”.

Zoroastrianism did not disappear from Iran with the Arab invasion. It survived, and influenced to some extent the religion of its conquerors in Iran. There was even a renaissance in the ninth and tenth centuries in the south of Fars that produced the monumental compilation of the Denkart. We know that the mystical, poetical element in Zoroastrianism influenced the development of Sufism there. Sayedd Haydar Amoli in the latter half of 14th Century, even publicly declared that: “Sufism is the essential truth…. of the religion of Zoroaster, prophet of the religion of Pure Love, whose symbol is the flame upon the fire-altar”.

Suhrawardi, of course, was the most famous Iranian philosopher who attempted to “develop” many of the surviving mystical elements of Zoroastrianism. He produced by this means a whole new “philosophy of illumination” which he hoped would be acceptable to Islam. His optimism, however, was ill founded. He was executed in Aleppo on the orders of Saladin. Nevertheless, his ideas were to find fertile ground among the wider Zoroastrian Diaspora.

"In Mughal India, the mythological aspects of Suhrawardi's writings appealed to a mystical group of Iranian and Parsi intellectuals led by one Adhar Kaywan, a Zoroastrian priest. For them, Suhrawardi, with his allusions to the doctrines of light and darkness among the ancient Persians, provided an intellectually respectable form of Zoroastrian wisdom - one that was expressed in such productions of this school as the "Dasatir" and the "Dabistan al-madhahib". A more philosophical expression of the Indian school is found in Hirawi's Persian commentary on the "Philosophy of Illumination" "

(The Philosophy of Illumination (Hikmat al-ishraq) .Suhrawardi. Translated by John Walbridge & Hossein Ziai. Brigham Young University Press.1999 p. xxiii)

So powerful was the poetic message of Zarathushtra that something similar to a bardic tradition appeared shortly after his death, with the Gathas as its central recitation. Transmitted by word of mouth from generation to generation over hundreds of years, the Gathas survived the momentous and bloody centuries that followed. Long after the literal meaning of the words had been forgotten, the power and attraction of the poetry remained to unite and draw the faithful together like a warm bright fire on a cold night.

© Ryszard Antolak

Precz z moich oczu!

2005-10-12T12:57:00.000+01:00

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Precz z moich oczu!

Order me out of your sight.......and I'll obey at once.
Order me out of your heart...... and the heart will do as you ask.
But order me out of your memory.....no, this order
Neither your memory, nor mine, is able to obey

Adam Mickiewicz 1823
transl. by Ryszard Antolak

Precz z moich oczu!... posłucham od razu,
Precz z mego serca!... i serce posłucha,
Precz z mej pamięci!... nie tego rozkazu
Moja i twoja pamięć nie posłucha.

Jak cień tym dłuższy, gdy padnie z daleka,
Tym szerzej koło żałobne roztoczy, -
Tak moja postać, im dalej ucieka,
Tym grubszym kirem twą pamięć pomroczy.

Na każdym miejscu i o każdej dobie,
Gdziem z tobą płakał, gdziem się z tobą bawił,
Wszędzie i zawsze będę ja przy tobie,
Bom wszędzie cząstkę mej duszy zostawił.

Czy zadumana w samotnej komorze
Do arfy zbliżysz nieumyślną rękę,
Przypomnisz sobie: właśnie o tej porze
Śpiewałam jemu tę samę piosenkę.

Czy grają w szachy, gdy pierwszymi ściegi
Śmiertelna złowi króla twego matnia,
Pomyślisz sobie: tak stały szeregi,
Gdy się skończyła nasza gra ostatnia.

Czy to na balu w chwilach odpoczynku
Siędziesz, nim muzyk tańce zapowiedział,
Obaczysz próżne miejsce przy kominku,
Pomyślisz sobie: on tam ze mną siedział.

Czy książkę weźmiesz, gdzie smutnym wyrokiem
Stargane ujrzysz kochanków nadzieje,
Złożywszy książkę z westchnieniem głębokiem,
Pomyślisz sobie: ach! to nasze dzieje...

A jeśli autor po zawiłej probie
Parę miłośną na ostatek złączył,
Zagasisz świecę i pomyślisz sobie:
Czemu nasz romans tak się nie zakończył?...

Wtem błyskawica nocna zamigoce:
Sucha w ogrodzie zaszeleszczy grusza
I puszczyk z jękiem w okno zalopoce...
Pomyślisz sobie, że to moja dusza.

Tak w każdym miejscu i o każdej dobie,
Gdziem z tobą płakał, gdziem się z tobą bawił,
Wszędzie i zawsze będę ja przy tobie,
Bom wszędzie cząstkę mej duszy zostawił.

(Note: Chopin used this text for one of his most haunting songs).

Exile to Siberia

2005-09-28T19:19:00.000+01:00

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The story of my banishment to the Siberian workcamps of the Soviet Union. 1940.
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The Road to the East

When I look back to those distant days, what do I see?

The summer of 1939 was one of the warmest anyone could remember. The sun shone as if it wanted to warm us, to make up for all the years ahead which were to be so difficult. Who could have thought then that thousands of Polish men, women and children would perish in the wilds of Asia; that we would be dispersed all over the cold wastes of distant Siberia? But that is exactly what happened! My whole world fell from under me like the thin ice on a river.

I had just returned home from school for the holidays, to be reunited once more with my parents, my sister and my brother. Wishing to please me, my father announced that he had been invited to a grand ball in Radziwillow, and that I could go with him. This was a wonderful surprise for me:my very first ball! It had been organized by the army officers of the region who were leaving to take up positions nearer the German border: “General manoeuvers” they called it. It was their last occasion to enjoy themselves. And so we dressed ourselves and set out on the few kilometers to the venue in Radziwillow (near Brody).

We had hardly dismounted from the carriage when two men approached us from the ballroom entrance. I knew them: they were elderly friends of my father. Taking me firmly, but gently, by the arms, they led me into the ballroom. Because I was so young and this was my first ball, and because these two gentlemen were elderly, distinguished men (one even had a small beard), I thought that the whole world would fall in upon me.

The hall was beautifully decorated. It seemed as if the whole town was saying good-bye to our Polish officers who were going away to war, a war from which very few would return. I saw various banners posted up everywhere declaring that “We will not give away even a button” and “We are strong, dedicated, ready and calm”, etc., etc.

That evening, everything seemed like out of a fairy tale. Ladies in beautiful evening gowns, and our army officers: so young and handsome. I can still see them all now, dancing like waves to the music. We all had a wonderful time. But the ball had to come to an end. Like most good things, it did not last long. It was summertime, almost at the end of the school holidays. A few days later the war began: Germany invaded Poland.

My father was immediately called up to the army. As he was boarding the troop train to depart, he received a telegram ordering him to return to his civilian work in Radziwillow, because someone had to remain behind and work.

In the first few days of the war, airplanes began bombing the main railway lines. I remember how nine airplanes flew along our section of the line one day. One of them left its formation and began to fly in the direction of our house. All of us began to run to take cover in the nearby woods. But we were noticed, and the plane began to fly after us. Although we were hidden under trees in the wood, the aircraft shot volleys of bullets at us from a machine gun. We pressed ourselves hurriedly to the sides of trees, afraid to look in case any of us had been hit! The airplane flew off into the distance a little and then returned again to make sure it had killed us all. It gave bursts from its machine gun. The bullets ploughed up the earth around us. Finally, it flew off for good. It resembled a black serpent, flying so low over the earth that the ground seemed to tremble beneath it. For a while I was afraid to look around me. Thankfully, by some miracles, none of us had been wounded!

Later, we saw the railway line had been completely destroyed. Trees stood around broken and burned, just like people with amputated limbs, legs pointing to the sky. I could hear explosions. I felt the ground rumbling. It resembled the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra! - wounded civilians, the cries of panic, the people running this way and that. Panic reigned.

An ammunition train in nearby Brody had exploded, and we all immediately let ourselves believe that the German advance had reached that town already -- only ten kilometres away. The roads were blocked with fleeing people. Those who had fled from the West to the eastern borders before the German advance now found that they had nowhere left to run to. For here, the roads ended. I remember one young woman, the wife of an elderly judge, who sat trembling like a leaf while her husband stroked her hair softly and tried to calm her down. He later told my father that he was returning to meet the German advance so that everything would be over for him, once and for all. He expected this war to be a long and terrible one that would be fought from both sides, from the West and from the East.

A platoon of Polish soldiers had taken up position in the wood next to our house. The local civilians were afraid that if the soldiers were discovered the planes would return and level the whole town to the ground. We could already hear the sound of the airplanes flying overhead. This time, thankfully, they did not see us. One of the soldiers in the platoon couldn’t stand the tension any longer and let out a shot from his rifle. He was immediately arrested and disciplined by his officers. They took away his rifle, stripped him of his belt, and told him that he would face a court-marshal. I felt very sorry for him.

The bombing continued for two weeks: the frightened people, roads full of refugees: in a word, bedlam.

Until one day, there was silence! We did not hear any noise, no exploding bombs. It was so wonderful! My father set off down the railway line to ask one of his friends who lived there whether he knew anything. When he returned shortly afterwards, he announced to us that the war was over. The Soviet armies had crossed into Eastern Poland.
“So is it true”, my mother asked him, “that there’s no Poland any more?”
My father was unable to answer, for he was caught by a spasm in his throat, and tears which we had never seen in his eyes before that day, began to flow down his cheeks. We all began to cry too. Though pale and frightened, he attempted to cheer us up a little. “At least the bombs won’t be raining down on our heads any more”, he added.

During all this time, my mother could not eat anything; she could only drink. She was the most afraid of all of us, for she had had previous experience of the Soviets. Eighteen years earlier, after the Russio-Polish war, the eastern border of Poland had been drawn by treaty some fifteen kilometers west of Bialotyn (where she lived). The villagers did not wish to remain on the soviet side of the border. So my grandfather, Ludwik Pulkiewicz and others, organized a petition objecting to the treaty, and urging the authorities to push the Polish border a little further eastwards. He was immediately arrested, but managed to escape somehow and make his way into Poland. Meanwhile, his daughter Maria (my mother) secretly continued to hand the petition around for others to sign. The Soviet authorities learned of this. One night, the soldiers came for her. A loud knock was heard, and someone shouted: “Is your middle daughter Maria there?”

The soldiers seemed in a dilemma. They did not know whether to arrest her or not. Perhaps if they didn’t arrest her, her father would return and they would have them both in custody. They argued among themselves until it was dinnertime. Then they left one of the soldiers to watch over their captive, and the rest went off into town to get something to eat. The soldier explained to my mother that he had been left to guard her. She tried to make a joke of it by saying that she must be very important indeed (but he was not really a soldier, but someone from the town whom she knew). When he went outside, my mother seized her shawl, covered her head, and quietly began to run barefoot (and in her nightdress) in the direction of the border. She had an acquaintance in Ostrog, the border town; and there she found work for herself in a hotel and was reunited with her father. So she remained in Poland and could never again return to her family. For this reason, in September 1939, my mother was more frightened than we were.

The roads were still crowded with refugees, their cars loaded with suitcases, all eager to escape the Germans. Now, from the opposite (Soviet) direction, came tanks full of soldiers. The communists were advancing from the East, the Nazis from the West; and the refugees did not know in which direction to flee, west or east. Which way should they turn?

Over the course of the next few days we did not see any soldiers from either army. Slowly, the refugees began to return home. There now began a very dangerous time indeed. As I have already mentioned earlier, we lived in Volhynia, in the east of the country, among many Ukrainians. These were people not kindly disposed towards the Poles (but not all Ukrainians were like this). They called us “Lahhy”. We felt as if we were in the lion’s mouth.

Almost immediately, two young Ukrainians moved permanently into our house without asking, and began to order us about. Our house was the property of the Lyceum of Krzemieniec, where my father was the head of the forestry estates. We felt frightened having such hostile men armed with rifles in our house. It was a difficult time for us. We lived in constant fear. Every creak of the door seemed to foretell some danger. We did not have a single peaceful day or night. Armed Ukrainian gangs had taken over control of the district. They tortured and killed, and none of us knew who would be next. We often heard the sounds of rifles discharging and we felt certain that one of us would be next.

The two young Ukrainians brought some brochures and newspapers with them, and ordered me to read them out loud. I was to read and they would listen. I could hardly bear it; so unpleasant this task was to me. Among many other things, I read that once upon a time there grew a strong tree: this represented the land of Poland. Around the tree grew poisonous grasses: these were the Polish people. The tree had already been destroyed; but the poisonous grasses still had to be torn up by the roots and burned so that no trace of them remained. I had to read such things to them every day. It was a torture for me. They threatened that they would send us to the place where the Polar bears lived, and we would shepherd the bears!

Not long afterwards, one of our permanent Ukrainian workers came to visit us. He began to talk to my mother, and began to praise (or rather imagine) what life will be like for us in the Soviet Paradise. “We will go singing to work, he explained, and return by motor, not on foot. And life at home will be so pleasant. Everyone will have large cupboards full of everything they desire. I began to think that he had lost his mind! He really believed this propaganda! At that precise moment, my seven-year-old brother rushed into the room. The Ukrainian caught him up in his arms and held him there, asking with a devilish grin on his face: “Tell me who you are now?” strongly accentuating the word “now”. At this, the little boy did not know what to say. Our mother had told him not to talk too much with such people. I froze with fright, looking at my little brother. Nevertheless, he broke his silence and answered: “I am Polish”. The Ukrainian (Mr. Bieroza) answered in a loud voice: “Oh no, you’re not! Now you are a little Bolshevik. Ha ha ha”. And he began to laugh. I looked at the man with disgust. I felt that even worse times awaited us, and I felt consumed by feelings of powerlessness.

One day, none of our employees turned up for work. Instead, they sent a fourteen-year-old boy. The boy announced that all the adult men had gone off to disarm our Polish soldiers returning from the front (and that he would join them later). When they had collected enough rifles, they would begin shooting all the Lahhs (that is, us Poles). And that is what happened. They behaved like common thugs. They began capturing soldiers returning home after the defeat. They would strip them almost naked, take away their clothes and underwear, and let some of them return home like that. After the September defeat, the soldiers returned home bedraggled, penniless. Nevertheless, the Ukrainians would go through their pockets and take away even their last cigarettes. Sometimes they would drag some of them through the streets in their underwear, prick them repeatedly with needles, and drag them through various villages until they collapsed. They did this especially to former policemen.

During this time, before the Soviet army took control of the area, terrible things happened. One Ukrainian family who lived not far away from us near the railway line (they belonged to a certain Religious sect called the Sztundry) advised my father to hide himself in their hay barn. They had heard that he was in imminent danger. While he was hiding in the barn, he overheard a conversation between some prisoners who had escaped from jail. He listened as they told one another that they already had enough rifles, and that now they would go and “deal with” the Polish settlers and Pilsudski’s former legionaries. After that they would go and settle with Woloch (that is, my father). They began to talk excitedly about how they would conduct their killings, until one of their comrades arrived on a bicycle to join them. He told them to put a stop to the killings, at least for the time being. He explained that a Russian captain from the Soviet army had been calling public meetings in several towns telling everyone to wait until the Soviet authorities arrived. Only then would the Ukrainians be able to do what they liked. Otherwise, if they acted now, “every death would be paid for by death”. As a result, the killings became fewer in the following days. It later turned out that this “Russian captain” was in fact a Polish soldier disguised as a Russian commissar. It was not long before this “captain” was arrested and executed. He saved our lives, and lost his own. But so many lives were saved because of his actions. I salute you, dear captain, because maybe I too, owe my life to you!

With the Soviet occupation, a new chapter in our lives began. At first, there was nothing to be bought in the shops of Radziwillow. If, by some miracle, we managed to find something, it was sold for a king’s ransom. The Soviet soldiers immediately snatched almost everything in the shops up.

More than once, Polish students, and other people, slept the night in our house in order to be able to cross over the border into Rumania, and so continue fighting the war. Polish soldiers who had been captured by the Russians were forced to work on the roads in their summer uniforms, even in this, the coldest winter weather. They suffered terrible frostbite and hungers. They were worked hard; and if any one of them happened to suffer frostbite to such an extent that he was unable to perform his work, then he was shot immediately. We civilians begged the Soviet officer in charge to allow us to give them something hot to eat. Surprisingly, he agreed to our request and permitted us to give the prisoners-of-war what he called “wartime rations”. “They can eat once a day,” he said.

All his lasted until the night of the 10th February 1940. On that unforgettable night, when our father just happened to be home, we heard a loud voice waking us from our sleep. “Open up!” It was the Russians: two NKVD officers with pistols, and one elderly Ukrainian who lived locally. Our hearts almost stopped! We thought our last hour had arrived. They put my father up against the wall in his underwear and pointed a pistol at him. When my father was stood up against the wall, I remember I caught a glimpse of his face. It was ashen-grey, as if his entire colour had drained away, and deeply marked with worry. Although I was only a young girl, it seemed to me then that my father had been allowed a glimpse of the terrible future that lay in store for his poor children. The rest of us were ordered to dress warmly and to take enough food to last a few days. Then they made an inventory of the contents of the house: how many rooms, what was in each one. After my father had signed the inventory, they allowed him to dress. The Russians promised that they would return all our possessions to us in the place to which we were being taken.

Remus, our family Alsatian dog, howled mournfully the whole time and I asked one of the Russians to allow me to say good-bye to him. He allowed it, but went with me to guard me. For the previous two or three days, the dog had been sensing that something was to happen.

Then we were led outside, placed onto two horse-sleighs, and driven away. It was the night of the 10th February 1940. No one saw how they took us away from our home by night, and cast us away. The sleighs moved smoothly over the thin white snow. The night was so hushed and peaceful. Only a light sprinkling of snow was falling from the sky, covering up our tracks, rubbing away all traces of us. As we were taken away, I kept looking about me the whole time as if wanting desperately to remember these sights: the places where I had been brought up and spent my childhood, and to which I was destined never to return again. I closed my eyes for a while, and not lifting my eyelids, shivered internally, not knowing where they were taking us, or what they intended to do with us.

At first, we didn’t know what was happening. Having been brought to the railway station at Radziwillow (near Brody) we saw other Polish families already there: all of them frightened and many in tears. They were mostly the families of veteran army settlers. Many, many goods wagons stood waiting, surrounded by a large number of armed Soviet soldiers. Soon, the process of loading us all on board began, a process that lasted until morning. It was a freezing February day, and yet I saw many people sitting in the snow, oblivious to all the dangers of the cold, thinking that it didn’t matter: it was the end of everything anyway.

Almost towards the end of the loading process, we noticed a group of Polish prisoners-of-war being marched (or rather hurried) to work on the railway line. When they saw us they began to shout: “Where are they taking you to, brothers?” And they began to weep, making us all start weeping too, until the soldiers came and ordered them away.

One elderly woman knelt down where the snow was deepest, raised her hands to the skies and prayed to God for revenge. Then she began to curse all the Russians vulgarly. She was immediately surrounded and arrested. Some of our men went over and pleaded with the officers to release her. They said that she had been mentally ill for a long time. The Russians believed them and released her. In truth, she was a very intelligent woman. When the Soviets had arrived to arrest her son, she had volunteered to be taken with him. She explained that she wanted to be like the mother of God and go with her son to Golgotha. She was granted that great privilege: they allowed her to be taken along with her son! This woman’s name was Mrs. Bednarska.

We were loaded into the goods wagons like sardines, one next to another in a standing position, families with children. In the centre of the wagon stood a stove. There was also a small barred window. A hole in the floor served as our toilet, which we concealed with a bedcover for modesty’s sake. The doors were locked and padlocked, and were not opened again for three days. Some of the children soon began to faint for lack of water. The men would beat against the doors with their hands and feet in desperation, but to no avail. We were soundly locked up! But why for so long? Nevertheless, we still had some hope that the longer we stood at the station the more chance there was that someone would get to know about our fate: the world would learn what was happening to us and wouldn’t allow the Russians to take us by force. Oh God, how we hoped and prayed…in vain!

After three days the doors were opened and the soldiers shouted: “Everyone out for a walk! So we went out for ten minutes or so into the fresh air under the glare of pointed rifles, and were then herded back into the wagons again. They padlocked the doors so loudly this time that it sounded like the door of a charnel house had shut behind us. Soldiers with rifles stood by every door. We could hear the noise of people in other wagons. Maybe the Russians would not have time to expel us. Maybe other countries would get news of what was happening and put a stop to this rape. The train buffers shuddered. There was a sound of steam. The engine whistled, and slowly the train began to move: in the direction of the East.

Everyone in the wagon began to shout out, and although the wheels made a loud noise on the rails, the wailing and crying of the people was much louder. The whole goods train was lamenting. A great cry of injustice went out to God: “Out of the depths do we cry to you O Lord!” It was a heart-rending cry: this last moan. The hair on the head can grow white from hearing such a desperate cry. And then there came a song, one that has often imparted spirit to this tortured nation like no other. From inside the sealed wagons there burst a mighty song: the National Anthem: “Poland has not yet passed away while we are still alive”! It burst out of us spontaneously. Totally exhausted, we were standing crowded together like sardines, singing through our tears. The engine whistled again. The melody of our national anthem ran out over the deserted fields, lost itself and disappeared in the emptiness of the open landscape.

At first, I did not know what to think: the wailing, the incessant noise from the wheels of the wagons, the intense darkness, the sound of breathing from people whose faces I had never set eyes on before. I shrugged my shoulders, willing myself to wake up from this nightmare -- because surely it had to be a bad dream! But no! I was awake and this dream was real, overpowering with the weeping voices of so many people packed together.

Day after day, night after night, the train blundered its way along the railway line. Sometimes it would stop at some remote, unnamed station before setting off again. Presently, we were transferred to Russian wagons (i.e., Pullmans), which traveled on the much wider Russian railway gauge.

We were told to fill one pail of water for every wagon (and there were 74 people in our wagon!), and then we were on the move again. The little children were given positions on two ledges (two bunks) and the rest of us had to remain standing, moving from time to time from the window to the stove, and back again, for a change. We crossed the Russian frontier during the night at Szepetowka.

The rest of the journey continued under frightening conditions. The feeling of physical exhaustion overshadowed all other senses. The sorrow caused by our helplessness was unbearable. Why had fate chosen us for this ordeal? With insufficient water, air or rest, everyone in the carriage began to feel unwell. There was a small unbarred window in the Russian Pullman carriages, high up from the floor. From time to time, one of us would let down a container on a string to gather some snow, which we melted over the stove to augment our water rations. But this situation was not allowed to continue for long. The soldiers who traveled with us, one almost to every wagon, strongly forbade us even this luxury. Anyway, there were so many people in the wagon that we would have to be melting snow continually to satisfy everyone’s thirst.

The train rocked from side to side so relentlessly that the children lying on the bunks would fall on top of those of us who were standing. I could never have dreamt that a train was capable of rocking so abruptly. It seemed to have been done deliberately.

When it stopped, occasionally, (usually at a goods station), we were sometimes able to speak to the Russians outside through the window. At other times, when the train was moving slowly, the Russian civilians who saw us seemed to sympathize with us. Those of us who could speak Russian began to shout out of the window to them, giving them the information that we had been taken from such-and-such a place by force and were suffering an injustice. But how could they help us? This was not the first time they had seen such scenes. They merely shook their heads from side to side and pointed to their eyes and ears. They were showing us that they were not supposed to see or hear anything. This was not the first time such things had happened in Russia.

More stations came and went: Kiev, Oriel, and Smolensk. We would look out on this hostile land as we traveled further on and on. No one had a map. Eventually the train came to a definite halt. The soldiers jumped down from their posts, opened the doors and shouted: “Everyone outside for a walk!” Those of us who still had some strength disembarked to take the air, helping down others who were weaker than they were. We tried to move our legs a little, as if checking if they were still functional. They were functional, and we were still alive, but for how much longer? A shout was heard that the breather was over and we were to return immediately to our wagons. Shortly afterwards, we heard another cry. This time, two people from each wagon were to get out. We did not know who was to go, or for what reason. Soon the rumour went round that they were to bring soup and coal to the wagon. The two volunteers were escorted away under rifles and returned presently with the soup and coal. Water and coal were priceless commodities for us. There were no takers for the soup. It was a thin dull color and no one wanted to eat it.

Further and further we traveled eastwards. I asked one of the soldiers where they were taking us.
The train knows where it is going,” he replied.

One night there was a loud cry from our wagon, and we did not know what had happened. Some of the men began to wave their hats out of the window and shout: “A doctor. A doctor!” Voices in the other wagons began to take up the call. Soon the whole train was shouting for a doctor. Our guards, however, out of spite, pretended not to hear. Whenever we lowered a small container out of the window to gather snow for water, they would see it immediately. But when we shouted for a doctor, they did not hear us! After an hour or so, someone calling herself a nurse was allowed into the wagon. A short time later there was a sound of gentle whimpering, as if from a sick bird, and we felt sorry for whomever it was who was complaining of their fate. We learned later that a little boy had been born in our wagon! The mother did not even have a bed to lie on, and there was hardly enough space for her on the floor. So we all had to squeeze together even more tightly. The little boy was given the name Christopher, after the patron saint of travelers.

Several times we passed other trains like ours heading in the same direction. It was very hard to bear, knowing that others had been condemned to the same fate as us, just as many others have in the course of our long history. We would meet these other transported Poles when the train slowed down at a station, for instance. We would shout out to one another: “Where are you from? When did they take you?” When we were being arrested we did not fully understand what was happening. When one saw all the other trains full of forcibly transported people, we felt so powerless. “So many people!” What a terrible thing was happening to us all! And how many others had already died in their hearts! Nevertheless, in spite of this, there were certain individuals among us, strong wonderful individuals, who infected us with their courage. For if a person has even an iota of hope that things will turn out well, then it becomes easier for him to endure.

At last, we felt that we were drawing nearer to our intended destination. The frosts became more severe (it was February 1940). The children who slept by turns on the bunks found that their hair became frozen to the sides of the wagon, and they could not get up in the mornings. We were still traveling ever further. The second week began, and still we did not know where we were. Dark clouds hung gloomily over the forests. The sky became darker with every day that passed, and more frightening. All around us there were only forests and more forests without end. We had been traveling through these forests for three days now without seeing a single soul, a station, a settlement or even a road. And still we traveled on.

After about four weeks, the train came to a halt. We thought that they would shout “Everyone out for a walk” again. But this time there was only silence. Then the doors opened as if by themselves. Our guards had disappeared and we had not even noticed when they had gone. The train had reached the end of the line. Here the railway line ended. We had arrived in the Archangielsk region, Lalsk area (Khrystoforov, 16th station on the line). We wanted to get out, but there was so much snow, that we gave up. It was also so bitterly cold. So we stayed where we were and waited to see what would happen next.

One courageous individual did get out. He saw some people standing on the opposite side of the line. These people began to come out of their huts carrying what looked like bundles of clothes. We understood that this place was our intended destination. A few sleighs arrived, and they loaded us into them in small groups, and took us to our barracks.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Chapter Two

SIBERIA

The first group of us was packed into a small barracks building, basically a log cabin standing by the railway line. The next group (of about seventy people) was accommodated in a larger barracks that stood alongside it. The rest of the people were driven three or four miles deeper into the woods.

The barracks house was fairly small, perhaps only 5 metres by 5 metres. In the centre was a stone stove whose permanent inhabitants were large, red cockroaches with white underbellies. Around this stove, we settled down to sleep on the floor, all thirty-seven of us. The walls were constructed of tree trunks, placed one upon the other. The gap between each log was plugged with moss, in which millions of fleas lived and bred. They were like a plague. They crawled out in their thousands, and even flew around. They gave off a very specific flea-like odour. They would bite us mercilessly. It was like living in an ants nest.

The first thing we did was light the stove, because the cold was so intense that trees were cracking open outside. We had brought a few things with us from Poland. Spreading out the clothes we had with us onto the floor, we lay down to sleep, one next to another. At least we had the luxury of being able to lie down. In the railway wagon we had been forced to stand continuously for four weeks.

Early next morning, the men among us set about constructing a set of three-tiered bunks so as to better make use of the small space. Meanwhile, the women melted snow and made something to eat. When we had finally more or less arranged things in the barracks, we were very tired. We crawled across the bunks on our bellies to find a space to sleep. We were packed tight like herrings in a barrel. At least we each had space to ourselves. Covering ourselves with whatever we had - blankets, coats - we fell asleep.

During the night, someone with a torch entered and began shining a light into our eyes, demanding, from each of us in turn, our first and second names. They were checking to see if we were all there, to see that no one had run away. After this checking, we let out a sigh of relief! But it was only short-lived, because soon voices were ordering us to get up and go (immediately) to the railway line as quickly as we could. A train had arrived waiting to be loaded with wood. What else could we do but get up and obey?

Quickly! they shouted.
Oh, it was so cold and dark outside! The wind wailed unremittingly. We were forced to load newly cut, heavy tree-trunks, which were destined to become railway sleepers, onto the carriages.

When we had finished our work, we were utterly exhausted. Sleepy and sore all over, we returned to out new, communal home only half-alive. We were hungry, cold and tired. After a few hours rest, we heard the familiar cry of Get to work! This time, the railway line needed to be cleared of snow.

The very next day, several of the children in our barracks, died. We carried their lifeless bodies by sleigh a little distance into the forest. The earth was too frozen to be dug, so we just buried them in the soft snow.

After overworking myself that first day, I spent the following days longing for Sunday. The days seemed to drag on doubly long; and Sunday (or Day-off as it was called) seemed to pass so quickly with the flicker of an eyelid. This lack of proportion between ones longing and the reality seemed to be just one more injustice we had to endure. Yet the days did pass, faster even than I could imagine. I would return each evening from my ten hours of hard labour and collapse on the bunk, falling asleep immediately. The man with the torch would always awaken me in the night, however: every single night without fail. We always had to counted and checked. It seemed that things could get no worse. Not long afterwards, our ten-hour workday was prolonged to twelve hours, with no day off in the week at all! The extra day's work was to be our contribution to the Soviet fatherland!

I would often say to others that a life such as this was unbearable: that no one could survive it. The Russians would always reply in the same way: they would say, You will get used to it. And if you dont get used to it, you’ll perish. And that was exactly how it was! With every day that passed, our numbers became fewer. Many of the elderly died; but the children died in the greatest numbers. We would take them, our dearest friends and acquaintances, into the forest by sleigh and bury them in the snow at night. Some of us pulled the sleigh while others pushed. Someone would hold a paraffin lamp, while the others dug a hole. The wind and the snow wailed unbearably as we sang: Serdeczna Matko opiekunko ludzi. Niech Cie placz sierot do litosci wzbudzi. Wygnancy do Ciebie wolamy. It was a singing mixed with much bitterness and weeping. Every word of the hymn imprinted itself in our minds. Then we would leave our loved ones behind in the forests, leave them there alone. In the next few days, or sometimes even the next day, we would return with the next victims of this Soviet paradise.

One particular evening, a Russian from the nearby settlement of Khrystoforov came to visit out barracks. His name was Baranowskij. He sat down with us and began to tell us of the time when he first arrived here, twelve years earlier. He tried to lift our spirits as much as he could, and gave us good advice. He told us the story of how he, and many others like him, had been taken from their homes and dumped here in the Siberian taiga. From what he told us, we learned that these Russians had had a much worse time of it than we had. When they arrived, there was nothing here at all for them but bare snow. The children and the old folk among them were the first tom die, but the stronger ones managed to build themselves a shelter so as to have some hope of surviving until the spring. A few people did survive until spring: and later, somehow, they learned how to cope. The Russian gentleman promised to return next day. But the camp commandant learned of his visit, and forbade him to come again. The commandant’s name was Tokmakov. His second in command was a certain Voronin. They were heartless individuals.

Everyone over the age of fourteen was required to work. Younger children were sent to a Russian school to be indoctrinated into the Soviet faith. I began by working on the railway line as a railway worker. They formed a few of us into a Polish women’s brigade. At first, all we did was clear the line of snow all day long. Later we were given the job of renewing bolts in the railway line. We would hammer them into place with a giant hammer called a pereszywka. Whatever it was we did, we had to fill out a daily norm, otherwise our ration of bread would be cut. Later we were put to building a new railway line into the forest. It was very heavy work, and it continued every day.

For almost nine months of the year it was as dark as night; for three months we had continuous day without night. Sometimes we would see the Aurora Borealis in the sky! We would come home from work so exhausted that our legs could hardly carry us. We did not have the luxury of rest, because we then had to walk three kilometers to the next settlement and stand in a queue in order to get something to eat. Many times we returned empty-handed because there was no food left for us. Then, we would all lie down on our bunks (onto which it was necessary to crawl on our bellies) and go to sleep hungry, and exhausted. But there were too many impediments to sleep. The fleas crawled over us like ants and bit us. And then there was always the roll call every single night without exception: to make sure that no one had escaped. Escape would have been madness! No one could survive the wastes of the Taiga in all that snow and without any food.

The worst things we had to endure were the hunger, the cold, and the exhaustion. When you went outside the barracks you found it difficult to breathe. Often the cold was so severe that your eyelids would glue themselves together with frost. Whenever someone shouted to you: Hey! Your cheeks! or Hey! Your nose is completely white! we had to scoop up handfuls of snow and rub them into the frozen part of our body until the color returned.

No one was allowed to arrive late for work, or else he was immediately sent to court. The Russians did not call this crime being late but, progoly. One of our number (Pan Rosa) and another Ukrainian was once arrested for being late. Six NKVD officers marched them off as if they were real criminals. For the first progol, the authorities would deduct 25% of our wages for the fatherland. For a second such offense, they deducted 50%. If it happened a fourth time, you were sent straight to the labour camps.

It is laughable to call these wages. We were hardly paid anything at all. We often did not have enough to buy the half-baked bread that was on offer. If we had not had things to sell, or rather barter, (a watch, a skirt, maybe a shirt) then things would have been even worse for us. Conditions were bad enough as they were. In the beginning they did not want to pay us anything i.e., pay us what we were owed; they were only prepared to give us an advance (a few rubles every ten days). This situation lasted for some time. Some of the families among us had not been allowed to take many personal belongings with them from Poland when they were arrested. These people fared the worse. We had to help one another as best we could in order to survive until the next day at least. And when tomorrow came, what then? We placed such great hopes in this tomorrow.

Sometimes when biscuits, or something else, arrived at the cooperative store, the NKVD, the teachers and the doctors (if you can call them doctors) were always allowed in first and the doors closed behind them. They would take what they wanted first, and only after they had finished, would they let us in. What a rush, a squeezing and a pushing would then ensue. It was possible to walk over the shoulders of the crowd!

Each of us workers was given a work card with which we could obtain 700 grams of bread every day (if we had the money to buy the bread, of course). Children and the elderly could obtain 300 grams. The bread was only half-baked in order that it would weigh more on the scales. We could also buy a portion of soup (called stalowoj). The soup was little more than water into which some powdered peas had been added and boiled in a large cauldron. For breakfast it was always oats, almost all of it still in their husks, served on a shallow plate.

My seven-year-old brother never used to want to eat in Poland: he had to be forced to it. In the Soviet paradise, he quickly changed. My poor mother wanted to give my father (as an adult) and me (who was working, and also almost grown-up) a little more of the oats for breakfast. At this, my brother would sit with tears falling into his plate. Why are you crying? my mother would ask him.
Because daddy and Hela have more than me, he replied. He did not realize that we had to work hard almost all day long i.e., ten hours, and then walk the three kilometres for the soup or the bread.

We were regularly forced to listen to propaganda lectures. Basically, the NKVD officers came and escorted us to these meetings. And what interesting things did we hear there? Always the same things every time: the names of those people who had fulfilled their work norms (because this was a rare occurrence), the names of those who hadnt; that we had to get used to life here; that we should attend dances; that Citizen Stalin wanted to create a better life for us....... and so on without end.

Among us, the talk was only of hunger, death, and of our terror and helplessness. The cold chilled us, took away our breath, and entered deeply into the marrow of our bones.

When Christmas arrived, we shared out our bread with everyone around. We wished each other a speedy return home, and a speedy reunification with our loved ones. We believed that these wishes, made on this most holy day of the year, had to be granted! Meanwhile, around us, the trees cracked open with the severe frost; the temperature reached 50 degrees below zero, and deep snow covered everything. Snowdrifts formed around our cabins, which the wind had blown there during the storms. The trees stood silently, like house brooms. Soft powdery snow fell into the air from the branches. Snowy streamers and lustreless icicles hung down from them. The wind was always wailing and moaning like a hyena. We all felt united as one, all of us who had been sentenced to that little cabin. We had been brought together by the same fate, united under a single roof and a single sleeping area. We were strangers and loved ones. Whether we understood one another or not, we nevertheless sought support from each another, even if at the same time we also felt like keeping our distance, or even hated the sight of one another. Then, there began to unfold before the eyes of my soul the image of the broad landscape of my home in Poland. Here and there I saw glimpses of woodland hiding a mirrored slab of pond or lake. Behind them were large orchards overladen in spring with thick bunches of apples or cherries. A dome-shaped willow in the middle of the village. A large house covered in red roof tiles, hidden almost completely in the trees. Variegated garlands of woodland stretching to the crests of hills. Everything shone and smiled. Above them all was a blue sky, transparent as glass. This whole picture flowed before my eyes, and then slowly dissolved itself in mist. Oh, how much I longed to see it again just one more time!

Every day, we had to go to work very early. Every day was exactly the same as the one before it. Work, seven days a week; 800 grams of half-baked bread, the cold, useless hands, backs sore from work. Would there ever be an end to all this suffering?

In winter we would dig channels in the snow so that the melting snow would not flood the railway line when spring arrived. These channels were dug very deep and narrow so that from the bottom you could only just catch glimpses of the sky. The snow, which we dug and tossed out, would come falling back onto our heads (because the channels were so deep and narrow). So many times I felt as if I was digging my own grave! I would become all wet from the snow and from my own tears. If anyone stood still for any length of time he would freeze. Mostly, all of us held onto the slender hope that something sometime would change for the better. Physical exhaustion extinguishes all other feelings and emotions. Perhaps it was this physical exhaustion, which saved me from despair. So many times, I would catch myself crying, unable to control myself. It was not the pain that was unbearable, but the feeling of impotence, and my sorrow at our destiny: that Fate had singled us out for this!

I would emerge from these channels in the snow to have an hours break for dinner. Our so-called pagruzczyki (men who loaded the wagons with wood) would light a fire, and we would sit around it and bite into our pieces of bread, if we had any with us). The bread would be frozen stiff, in spite of the fact that we kept then inside our fufajki (padded jackets). We impaled the pieces of bread onto twigs and warmed them over the fire. Then it was back to work again.

All this lasted for two years. But in reality, it flowed into the whole remainder of my life. All my life I have had before my eyes those dejected, frightened, pathetic faces. They have followed me even here, into the present.

Many of my friends - or rather my young colleagues in misfortune - died in Siberia. There was nothing to treat them with: no medicines, not even an aspirin. We would go to a doctor only for what was called a sprawka, a doctor’s note of exemption from work. This was granted only if one had a high temperature. If one was weakened by working (as we were) so that we could hardly walk straight but wandered around as if we were drunk and had to hold one another up, then no exemption was granted.

At night we were almost eaten alive by fleas. Sometimes it was our turn to eat them! Cockroaches (hideous they were: red with white undersides) sometimes fell into the large cooking pots of soup, which we ate. For this soup we had to stand in line for several hours in freezing weather!

In front of our settlement stood a little wooden box. It looked like one of those booths, which soldiers on guard duty use. The most frequent occupant of this box was a brave, elderly woman called Pani Bednarska, the very same woman who had volunteered to follow her son into Siberia. She was always saying something or other against the Soviet authorities; and as a punishment she was regularly locked up in this cold, damp, narrow box. We would often see her thrusting her clenched fists out at them from the window. She would be released after a few hours. A few days later it would happen again, and she would find herself back in the box once more.

I worked as a laborer on the railway line (zelaznodaroznik), doing everything that the men did. I would hammer nails with a great hammer; remove heavy old rivets; tighten screws, renew portions of the railway line. I carried a so-called demokrat (this was a heavy instrument that was placed under the line and jacked-up so that the tracks could be raised. We would spread some sand under some of the sleepers, and so on. Having worked my hours, I would go home, only to return to work again a few hours later.

In summer I worked on the pereszynki: that is, measuring the width of the track. Using a kind of claw, which held the rails tightly, we would measure their width. Sometimes it was necessary to move one of them further or nearer to each other. One of the people who worked alongside me was a Russian called Paszka. We were allowed to sit down and rest now and again for a few minutes. This was called ‘zakurka’. Paszka would make a kind of smoking pipe out of a rolled-up sheet of newspaper; and many times he would share it with me, saying: Yelena, would you like a smoke? Of course I would try it. It was his own tobacco, but he was very hospitable and he would laugh loudly at me. His wife also worked in our brigade. She had a strange habit of saying the word liszak after almost every word. They were both desperately poor. They lived in an enormous communal barracks along with many other people. They called these places ‘obszczezycie’. They ate the stalowoj (soup), never cooking anything themselves because they never had anything to cook. Thats how they lived. In the Taiga, they knew no other life.

My father, however, was a pagrozczyk: he loaded logs onto railway wagons. He would work all day. He would load up one train and another would immediately arrive to be loaded. The logs were newly felled, raw, and very heavy. His shoulders became so badly bruised that the flesh would hang from his bones. Finally they had to dismiss him from this work and attached him instead to my brigade. But he could not fulfill his norm even here. So they gave him the job of looking after the horses. All night he would have to watch over these horses. In winter he drove with the bread from the bakery to the shop. If anyone had horses in his care, he answered for them with his life. If any injury happened to a horse, even if was just an accident, the man in charge of it was immediately taken to court: because the horse was the property of the state. On the other hand, if a man was killed at work, no one even investigated the circumstances of the death. My father was a little happier working with the horses than before.

After a while, we had bartered away almost all the things we had brought with us, for food or money. Now we were working twelve hours a day instead of nine; and not six, but seven days a week: all day, every day. The extra day we worked was supposed to be for the fatherland. People were dying like flies. There wasnt even any milk to be had.

Most of the young men, as well as the elderly ones, soon began to suffer from what we called chicken blindness (they became blind as soon as daylight faded in the evenings). One day, a stray dog wandered into our settlement. We looked at it as if it was the seventh wonder of the world, because it was the first dog we had ever seen here. Immediately, the men threw themselves upon it like lions. I thought they wanted to stroke the dog. I dont know how to describe what happened next. They caught the dog, killed it and made a drum out of its skin. The meat was distributed to those who suffered from the chicken blindness. The liver, they ate raw. It cured them! My mother asked one of them, Pan Zeman, what the meat was like. I dont know, he answered, I swallowed it the way a cat swallows a mouse.

There were certain individuals among us who, realizing that we were almost at breaking point, in danger of falling into despair, immediately sprang into action. We all needed something to lift our spirits, to give us some life. As a result, many of them suddenly became fortunetellers: they read our futures by various means. Strange to tell, everyones reading came out the same: in a short time we were to leave this place by sea! How could we doubt it? There had to be something to it, we told ourselves, when everyone was getting the same outcome. We also held sances: and the results were very similar. There was some kind of change imminent. We began to receive letters from home in which a mysterious Auntie Fran and Auntie Engie (whom no-one had ever heard of) who had at last moved themselves! These statements were followed in the letters by lines of dots. In these dots we placed all of our hopes! Those of us who had almost been at breaking point began to feel better. I also had a Tartar girlfriend from the next settlement. When I visited her secretly, she would also communicate to me in sign language things, which I understood perfectly.

The superior on the railway line was called Nikolaj Nikolajevicz. Well advanced in years, he could remember Russia in better times. Often, when we were working together, we would talk freely (because I was the only one in my brigade who spoke Russian fluently). I would often complain to him that in Russia there wasnt this and there wasnt that. He would always reply in the same way, smiling: Yelena Aleksandrovna (thats how I was known) we too once had these things in Russia.

Every single day we worked ourselves to the edge of starvation. The wind wailed mercilessly. At night we were eaten alive by bedbugs. It seemed as if every day was exactly the same as the one before. Yet every day was a new struggle with death to survive at least until tomorrow. Because tomorrow something might change. We had hope. The Russians, on the other hand, had lost all hope of anything better in the future. Over the years they had come to terms with their fate. But to live like that - living only to survive - is no life at all. The secret of human life is not just to live, but also to have something to live for.

There were also Russian soldiers among us who had fought in Finland. Many of them had caught frostbite there, and had had to have their toes amputated. For some transgression of the law, they had been sent to Siberia as a punishment. The deep snows and the terrible cold meant that they found it difficult to walk. They could not keep their balance and kept falling over. It was hard for them to get around. We were sorry for them, thinking what they had been through. They suffered physically and psychologically; and they had no one to complain to. They did not trust their own people; and they regarded us Poles as their enemies. They had fought for their country, had lost their health for their Motherland: and this was how they had been rewarded.

Our dziesiatnik (work-leader) on the railway line was a poor, goodhearted, native Siberian called Czaszczyn. He had been born in Siberia. I called him my commander, and he loved to be called by this name. His wife had a two-year old child whose bones were so badly deformed, that it could not sit up properly. The poor child would just lie in bed without moving, pale and malnourished. Indeed, we hardly saw any children at all in Siberia. After a time, the little child died, and the wife of my commander came to visit us at night, frightened lest the NKVD spotted her. I remember her whispering something to my mother. I later learned that she had come to beg us for some holy water to sprinkle over the coffin. Because her child had died without being baptized. The childs poor Russian mother was secretly asking us to help her child when it was dead, because she had been unable to help it in life.

One day, we were replacing portions of the track and were moving the rails to the left and to the right with our crowbars. Our commander began to shout out: One, two, lift it through, and we have it too. One two give it here etc. I found this funny at first. But after a while I became sick of it, of hearing it over and over again. So I began to impersonate his voice. Everyone laughed. They loved my impersonation so much that alas, to the end of my stay in Siberia, they made me be the one to shout out One two lift it through....

Various superiors and foremen would visit us on the trains that came for the wood. Sometimes they would even walk the eighteen versts from the station at Sosolowka. They were eager to talk to us Poles working on the railway line. Our commander always wanted to introduce me to them in the best possible light. They would tell him not to trust me because I was a Polish woman. They said they knew of incidents when Russians had fallen in love with Polish women, (and believed that they were loved in return). It had ended with a knife in the back!

Now and again, in the summertime, we would see a sailor walking along the railway line. He would walk the twenty kilometers or so from Susolowka station in his white sailor's hat. He was probably visiting some family members in Khrystoforow. He liked talking to us Poles! He came many times. He was also very handsome! He would even visit us in our barracks. We would often wonder why he was allowed to visit us, and everyone else was forbidden. So sometimes, the thought would cross our mind that perhaps he had been sent to us on purpose by the authorities. We enjoyed his company nevertheless. One time he came and said: Yelena Aleksandrovna! In a very short time you will all be leaving here, you know
Where to?, I asked him. Home, to Poland?
No. Not home immediately to Poland, he answered. But one day, when you return, Ill come and visit you there. You wouldnt throw me out if I did that, would you?

The sailor departed, and shortly afterwards, we gained our freedom. The sailor's name was Lonia. Thats all I know about him. To this day I still wonder who this Lonia was. I remember him with fondness.

All of us bore our fate as well as we could. One of us, however, (Pan Langner), was forever complaining. “My good lady”, he would say, “a man can't live like this when he’s starving, when he’s sleepy.... “and so on and so forth it was always the same: “My good lady”.... It was even worse when we celebrated some religious feast day like Christmas or Easter. Then he would tell us how the feast was celebrated in his house at home; how much there was to eat, and what he ate, how each dish was prepared, all in the minutest detail. He would describe one course after another, and how each course tasted. He had a phrase he used often at these times: it had eighteen flavours. Each of us, in turn, would then describe other delicious dishes we had tasted. We spent our time in this way. For a short while we were transported away from our miserable existences and traveled away home. All of us wished that we could return back home as quickly as we could!

Whenever we wanted to say prayers together, at the May festival or whenever, the camp commandant always got to know of it immediately. He would shout at us in the most vulgar fashion and threaten to throw us into prison. I remember when my seven-year-old brother once gathered together a group of his little friends, made themselves a red-and-white flag from some rags, and went marching along the railway line: playing like little boys do. Voronin, our military policeman, came rushing out immediately, chasing the frightened boys away. My father was summoned to the komendatura and told that if anything like that happened again he would deal with the children in a wholly different way.

Soon, we were sick of everything. By some miracle, news reached us that the Germans had declared war on Russia. This news raised our spirits considerably. Suddenly it seemed to us that even the dog had not died in vain: because the sick among us had been able to eat his meat and feel better; while we younger, healthier ones had had a drum made from its hide (which Pan Rosa drummed upon every day). Up until this time, the Soviets had continually tried to persuade us to organize diversions for ourselves: to begin to accept life in the Soviet Union. We never took their advice. Now, when we knew well that the Russians had problems with Germany, we began to arrange dances and pretended to enjoy ourselves just to spite them. When the commandant asked us what all this meant, we would explain to him that suddenly everything made sense to us, and that we were beginning to get used to life in the Soviet Paradise. If a person possesses even the smallest crumb of hope, he is able to find enormous energy to survive.

A short time afterwards I fell ill with pleurisy. We had nothing to treat it with. Through my acquaintance with a young doctor, I was sent to hospital in a nearby Russian settlement. A few months earlier she had bought a nightdress from me, which she used as an evening gown. Through her I was given access to the hospital. The lady doctor told me that there were no medicines to be had in the hospital, but that once a week I would at least receive a soup made with milk. This meant a lot! They treated my high temperature with quinine, but from where they obtained this quinine I have no idea. My kind doctor could not keep me there for very long, however. I was soon dismissed from the hospital and told to report once a week for an examination. Every day I began to feel worse. I had difficulty walking and could not sleep at all. I was suffocating. I could not breathe lying down, only in a sitting position....

One woman who lived in our barracks had banki (cupping instruments). After she came back from working every evening, she would position the banki on my chest. Only then, when I felt the little cups clawing at my flesh, was I able to breathe easier and feel better. Next day, and the day after, I would wait on my neighbour to come home tired after work to attend to me. She would see to me immediately, without complaining in the slightest.

All this lasted several weeks. When I sat ill in the barracks, I would always have before my eyes all those I had known, those young girls fresh as flowers, who had died here in Siberia and who could have still been living: those whom we had driven into the forest on sleighs and buried in the snow by night. The wind blew terribly. The dark and the snow of the endless Taiga. All we had was one lantern. Several of us had wanted to sing: Dear Holy Mother, protector of peoples, let the weeping of orphaned exiles wake you to mercy. We sang out the song, but the wind blew away our words. Once again we felt like lost orphans.

Soon there was no remedy for my illness. It had become worse. Pani Bednarska, the old woman who had volunteered to go to Russia with her son, also fell ill. She had a daughter in Warsaw who was a doctor. This daughter tried everything she could to aid her mother. She crossed from the German into the Russian sector of Poland, and by some miracle, managed to get hold of a Russian passport and all the necessary papers allowing her to work as a doctor wherever she wished in Russia. She immediately bought a ticket to Archangielsk, got into a train, and arrived at the door of our camp to treat her mother! It was a wonderful thing to do; but alas, she arrived too late. Her mother had died seven days earlier and was already buried. Poor Dr Wanda had gone through all the bureaucratic procedures to get here, and had not been able to see her mother! She wrote on her mother's grave: I am longing, Lord, for my own country.

Dr Wanda had managed to bring some medicines with her, and began to treat everyone in the camp. Soviet women also came to her. She helped everyone she could. She even cured me! The NKVD was unhappy with this state of affairs, however. They confiscated her passport. She was condemned to work in the camp on the same terms as us. She lost her freedom! She too, had to do hard physical labour. She was a newcomer, however, and still had some strength and psychological resistance; and somehow she survived. Because some of us did not even feel angry after a while. Anger is bad. But sometimes it has the function of giving one some strength. When one loses hope in what one has been waiting for, longing for with ones whole soul, and if that hope finally betrays us, then I think that hatred still gives us a little something to live for. People who have no hope, or even hatred, no longer respond to anything and they collapse into a vacuum.

Summer arrived full of mosquitoes, bedbugs, cockroaches and hunger. What was worse was that now there was no night. We had become so sick of winter; but summer was also hard because there was no darkness. In our barracks there was hardly room to move, it was suffocating; we were unable to sleep because the bedbugs ate us alive. Some people did not sleep for weeks at a time. They were forced to walk about, their heads wrapped in handkerchiefs, waving tree branches about in the air to scare off the mosquitoes. Going to work without having slept was totally exhausting.

Until one day we felt something new in the air. The commandant came, as usual, to chase us to the political meeting. We always went to these meetings against our will. On this particular evening, however, we walked the 3 km to the venue happily for some reason. When we entered the hall, we saw that the commissars had friendly expressions on their faces! This was very strange! They all stood up and informed us that....... we were free! They stretched out their hands to congratulate us!

We were struck dumb for a time. But not for long. Suddenly we all began to embrace one another, and to cry with joy! Someone started to sing the Polish National anthem (Poland has not disappeared while we are still living...). Every one of us, with one voice, joined in, sobbing the whole time. What happened next in that hall would be impossible to describe. In short, we could not get it into our half-sick minds that what we were hearing was the truth. For almost two years we had had it drummed into our heads that they (the Russians) had liberated us; that our Polish rule had ended for good. They had called us leeches living off the working class, that if we didnt perish here we would grow used to this life in the Soviet Paradise. As the night began to draw to a close, we were still walking around as if intoxicated, unable to believe the news. Perhaps it was a trick, we thought.

Next day we were issued with documents (udostwierenja), which permitted us to travel anywhere we wished in Russia, with the exception of Moscow. The local authorities tried to persuade us to stay and continue to work in Siberia. They had been paying us a little more money lately. But we wanted to get away from there with all of our might. Where to? We had no earthly idea. It was not easy to travel anywhere without a worker’s permit that would have allowed us to get bread or something to eat. People who had no money were unable to leave. Some families were unfortunate in this respect. We were paid everything that was owed to us, and we set off on the third day after our release. Doctor Wanda and her brother left the day before us.

The railway station had been built only for goods trains hauling timber. No one had ever seen a passenger train on this line. So we embarked on one of those primitive wagons, or rather platforms, sat down beside the timber, and waited. We waited all night, but no engine arrived to move the wood. In the morning, to our relief, an engine finally did arrive to take the wagons and us with them. We were moving!

We were so happy! Not for long, unfortunately. The locomotive took us only two or three kilometres up the line, and then stopped in the middle of the forest. We were freezing. The locomotive unhinged itself from our wagon. The staff on the engine got out and said to us: You have to all get off! You can't travel any further. This is a goods train and passengers are not allowed to travel on it. If you dont get off these wagons you will be put up against a wall and shot, because this is wartime; and in times like these they shoot you for what you are doing. The locomotive unfastened itself from us and set off without us to the station at Sosolowka, about 18 Russian miles away.

People had been traveling on these goods wagons to court and back for twenty years or more. Even big fish from Moscow or the NKVD traveled this way. Yet these railway workers had decided that we couldnt travel! We were frightened, but we didnt care any more. We had no intention of returning to our barracks. Consulting together, we decided that if we were to be shot, then so be it; but we were staying where we were in the wagons. We waited in the quiet of the forest to see what happened next.

Not far away from us stood a railway box in which Lizka, a friend of mine, worked. Lizka was a Russian signal-woman. There was a telephone in her box. (We had often used this railway box during our lunch breaks wheb we were working nearby. There was a stove inside on which we would often place our frozen pieces of bread to thaw them out). I went over to Lizka and asked her whether she knew why the locomotive had abandoned us. She didnt know. After about an hour, the telephone rang to tell Lizka that a locomotive had set out from Sosolowka to pick up our wagons with the timber. I quickly ran back to tell my parents and my comrades-in-misfortune that a train was on its way. I said my good-byes to Lizka. Then we all sat down on the wagon and waited to see what would transpire.

The locomotive arrived, attached itself to the wagons, and let out a shrill whistle. We were moving again! We were frightened, however, that there would be unpleasantness when we reached the railway station. When we arrived, before the train had even stopped moving, we saw that the crew of our locomotive was different; and we saw the members of the original crew were being escorted away under arrest by the authorities.

We bought tickets to Kotlas. I can even remember how much they cost -- 120 rubles. Boarding the passenger train, we set off. I looked around me at those places for the last time, and life began to flow into me once more.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Chapter Three

THE ROAD TO FREEDOM

When we disembarked from the train at Kotlas, we were confronted by a large number of Polish families already waiting there, from the other camps. We held out our arms to one another and greeted each other as fellow countrymen. We began to embrace, weeping with the joy that we had been counted among the chosen ones.

Representatives from our group went to speak to the town elders: to tell them our story. By some miracle, they responded by arranging a train for us, free, at no cost! This railway station, we learned, was a “gathering point” (as they called it) for refugees. A very large number had gathered there. Many of them were Soviet citizens: refugees from Stalingrad.

Every so often, the train would stop at a station, and we would run out to get some hot water to drink before the train started again.

We were traveling with many people who had been released from the penal colonies. These were individuals traveling alone, dressed only in a single prison shirt. They had rags wrapped around their feet instead of shoes. Each of them held a “kotelok” firmly in his hands. This was just an empty tin can with a piece of wire attached to the top so that it resembled a little pail. It was their only possession. People like us, with families from the labor camps, had at least a few bundles of clothes or blankets with which to cover ourselves. These ex-prisoners had nothing: no money, not even a single blanket. All they had was lice! The weather was cold and these poor souls did not have a single article of clothing with which to cover themselves at night.

Once, the train stopped for a longer time than usual, (it was in Chelyabinsk, I remember); so we took some of our possessions to the marketplace to see if we could exchange them for food. The Russians who lived on collective farms had no decent clothes to wear, so we gave them some of our clothing in exchange for vegetables. Only rarely was it possible to buy anything for money. So you can imagine how our poor, almost-naked fellow-countrymen from the penal colonies fared! We tried to help them as much as we could.

We had often noticed that if someone managed to run into the station dining rooms early, before the train had even stopped moving, they could sometimes buy something to eat at the window. I tried this on one occasion, But by the time I got there, and took my place in the queue with the hope of buying something (anything, a piece of bread even) the window closed and they said: “Nietu!” There was nothing left. So I began to run back empty-handed. There were trains setting off, one after another, in every direction. My train had been standing at platform 5. Although all the trains were traveling slowly, it was still very dangerous to run under the wagons; but somehow I managed to do it. When I returned to the platform, however, there was no sign of my train anywhere! I went around asking everyone; but no one knew anything. In fact they would not even tell me in which direction the train had gone, because it was forbidden. In wartime such information was secret! My train had been heading south, roughly, so I jumped onto the first moving train headed in that direction, and traveled onwards, my heart beating fast. Maybe I would catch up with them, I thought! But, My God, the train could be going anywhere. I could not think of anything else to do.

I traveled on until we came to an unnamed station, where I jumped out. I looked around, but there was no sign of our train there either. Again, no one would give me any information. It was then that I began to become afraid. I wondered what I would do, all alone, in this foreign, hostile country. Just then, I saw a column of Soviet soldiers marching by. Each of them was carrying loaves of bread in his arms. I must have been staring desperately at those loaves of bread because one of the soldiers (the last one in the column) - I don’t know why - shouted out to me: “Catch!” and threw me a loaf of fresh bread. Then he marched away out of the station, without even looking back behind him. I don’t remember if I even thanked him, but my spirits rose tremendously.

I approached the railway line and waited for a miracle! Maybe some goods train would arrive, I thought, so I could jump onto it and travel onwards in my search for my family. I stood there waiting and listening for a very long time. At length I heard something approaching: a passenger train. I thought to myself: good enough! Jumping onboard, I began looking for an empty space in which to stand, still holding my precious loaf of bread tightly in my hands. The passengers in the train all looked like beggars. I began to listen to them and realized that they were talking in Polish!! I went into the adjoining carriage and finally understood that…Good Godthis was my train! My train had caught up with me!

I was so happy to have found my family, who were all in tears. They had presumed that I was lost, like so many others, never found again in that country. My parents were happy to see me; but what was just as important was that now we had a loaf of bread to keep us alive for a little while longer. So we all felt a little lighter at heart as we traveled on southward, happy to be getting ever further from the cold place of our exile.

There was an outbreak of lice on the train. We were bitten so badly that we could hardly bear it. There was nowhere to wash, and nothing to wash with. The washrooms were blocked up so badly that everything was spilling out of them down the stairs: dirt, stench and misery.

Sometimes, for several days at a time, we had no food whatsoever. In one place where we stopped, some of the men in our group went to see the town elders. They begged them to give us something to eat, anything. They explained to the officials that that we had just been released from the Siberian camps and the penal colonies. We were starving. Our children were dying every day and we had to throw their dead bodies out onto station platforms whose names we did not even know. They asked the officials to imagine the anguish of a mother who saw her second child dying from malnutrition or some other disease. The person in charge took our papers and soon afterwards returned with some bread for us to share with everyone on the train. This only happened to us once, anywhere.

We were ill, exhausted and felt we could travel no further. At one of the stations, we met the director of a collective farm from Saratov. He was happy to learn that Poles were on the train because he needed help on his farms; all the soviet men had been drafted into the army and there was no one to work the land. He tried to persuade us to spend the winter working for him. When spring arrived, we could continue our journey, he said. We considered his proposition. We really had no other alternative. The leaders of our group did not think it was wise to travel on into Asia right away. They explained that too many refugees would be flooding into the warm countries. Epidemics were likely to break out, which might finish us off. It was better to wait.

So together with several other families, we left the train, were loaded up onto a truck, and driven to the collective farm. We spent that first night in a little shack by the side of the road. The next morning, some girls arrived with oxen to take our group of four families to one settlement, and the other group of four families to another settlement several kilometers further away.

The oxen took us to a village called Merlino-Voskresienka, in the Saratov region near the River Volga. We were put up with some Russian families. We all lived together communally. It was wonderful not to be troubled by lice! The families received us heartily, because it was easier to find kindling for the fire if a large number of people lived together. Finding something to burn in the stove was a real problem in this area. There was no wood to be found anywhere; and the winters were severe, though not as severe as in Kotlas.

We lived in a little house together with a young Soviet girl who operated the combine harvester. She drove the combine harvester in winter and attended to the cows in the summer. She was an orphan and had a younger, ten-year old brother. Her name was Katia, and her brother's name was Miniok. The house comprised just one room, which was reached via an open sewer and a pile of manure, propped up against a small larch tree. In the middle of the room stood a stove. Katia and her brother Miniok slept on top of this stove. We, however, slept on the floor. We spread out some straw, and some spare garments we still had with us, and covered ourselves with our coats (those of us who still had them!)

There was no fuel for the stove, and so we had nothing to cook with. We would have to go out into the fields and wade waist-deep through the snow to look for stalks of wormwood that sometimes emerged here and there from under the snow. We wore ourselves out looking for this wormwood to bring home. It was hardly possible to warm oneself adequately because the stalks burned too quickly. If, by some miracle, we managed to cook a potato on the fire, it left the bitter taste of wormwood in our mouths.

Miniok had only one coat that he wore every single day, and in which he slept. All day every day, he would sit by the stove with my younger sister and brother, telling them stories. Most of all, he liked to tell the story of Dr. Doolittle: how he talked to the animals. He probably only knew this one story. Maybe he had heard it when he was young from his mother. But his mother had been dead for several years.

That winter left its mark on us. The worst thing was that there was nothing to burn in the stove. There was little to eat either. We ate the bran from the wheat, and stole sugar beets from under the snow. Back home in Poland we wouldn’t even feed such things to the pigs.

Every night, sometime after midnight, the Russian women would come and knock on our window. We would be waiting, dressed and ready with ropes and pickaxes. We would go out far into the fields where the giant haystacks stood, the property of the collective farm. The wind moaned cruelly, and the wolves wailed from below in the valley. We would have to go out to the haystacks, bring some of them down, and tie them into bundles, (by touch almost, because we could hardly see them) and hope we weren’t caught. Sometimes we lost our way because the earth and the sky were the same color. If we managed to bring home some hay, then next day we were able to warm ourselves a little by the stove and cook something hot.

Our wages were five pounds of wheat for a whole weeks work. We made a kind of primitive hand mill with a stone. Turning it this way and that, we were able to grind some of the wheat into rough flour. There was too little of it. But what else could we do? Yet all around us, there were thousands and thousands of acres of wheat, sunflowers and sugar beet hidden under the snow. They could have allowed us to take these because they were only rotting anyway. There was no one to harvest them: all the able men had been sent to defend the fatherland. While here, people were starving.

Soon there was a call-up of young women to the army, and Katya received her summons to go and help dig trenches with the soldiers at the front. Her young brother had to remain behind alone while she went off. We looked after him.

There was a kitchen on the solkhoz where they made a soup called “sh-ch-i” for the tractor drivers. One day I went to this kitchen to get some drinking water for the workers picking potatoes in the fields. The cook started up a conversation with me, and among other things, she asked me whether I would like to work with her in the kitchen. Of course, I said yes immediately! We all had to sleep together on the floor of one room near the kitchen: the cook, her husband, their two children and me. The cook and her husband were very kind to me. They shared everything with me, even the floor of the room they slept in. I don’t even remember their names!

Among others on the collective farm, were two young brothers whose family name was Chowanski. Their mother had been sent to prison for the reason that the boys’ grandmother happened to live in America. She would send her grandsons letters written in Polish. The boys were unable to read any Polish. So they brought me a pile of these letters and begged me to read them. Oh how overjoyed they were to hear that their grandmother in America loved them! Even though America was far away, they knew that they had someone who thought about them, the poor orphans.

In winter we, the Poles, were allowed to gather sunflowers from under the snow. There were thousands and thousands of hectares of them. We were allowed to gather as much as we wished. The problem was how to bring them back home. After work, it was usually possible to ask for the use of the oxen (when they were not being used), and take them to transport the many bundles of sunflower plants. But it was dark. The sunflower fields were situated very far away. We were tired; and so were the oxen. Nevertheless, my mother and I used to go out and tie up the sunflowers into large bundles and load them onto a sleigh. We tied the ropes around the bundles so that they wouldn’t fall off, and set off back home. The sky was the same color as the earth: greyish-white. How were we to navigate our way back home? Not surprisingly, we lost our way. It was dark. The wind wailed and blew hail into our faces, pricking us like needles. My mother and I would find ourselves wading through snow up to our waists, hardly able to pull our legs out of the snow. After a while the hail began to come down heavier. The sleigh would fall over onto one side and then the other, and almost overturned completely many times. We traveled on regardless, not knowing where we were going. We blundered onwards, snow falling onto our heads. But what else could we do? We could have been going round in circles for all we knew. I began to jump up like a horse, but would slip and fall into snowdrifts. At one point I was even crawling on all fours. It all ended well, however. We saw a small light in the distance! It was our house. The oxen knew the way, and had led us back to the safety of the village. What a joy! We now had something to burn in the stove. And we had the sunflowers to eat!

Soon after this, my father fell terribly ill and no one knew what was wrong with him. He had a very high temperature and his tongue began to crack open all over. I was worried that it might fall apart altogether! For days he just lay on the ground, and I was worried that if he died there would be no wood to make a coffin for him. A certain elderly doctor came out to examine him, but he explained that he was unable to help because he had no medicines. The best he could do was to send him to a hospital a long way away. There, he would at least have a bed to lie on, and would be given tea with sugar! We agreed.

Two weeks later, two officers arrived at the collective to see us: Polish officers from the army of General Anders. They were dressed in uniforms with the Polish eagles proudly displayed on their fur-lined hats. They said they were taking us to Tatishchevo, into the care of the Polish Army. We had two days to prepare ourselves. You can imagine the joy we felt at seeing Polish soldiers again after such a long time; and to know that the army was reorganizing! I phoned my father in hospital from the solkhoz office and asked him what we should do. He answered that we should definitely go with the officers, and that he would go too. I dont want to be left behind, he added.

We gathered together all our earthly goods, the few miserable rags we possessed, and took the oxcart to the railway station at Ekatirynowka. Once at the station, the officers began to inquire about arranging a wagon for us. The soviet authorities gave them no assistance, however. So we spread out our belongings onto the concrete of the station and waited. Even though it was winter, we had to spend the night there. Next morning the officers busied themselves phoning everywhere they could. Yet the soviets always said there was nothing they could do. So we continued to wait on the platform.

There was nothing to eat. We were not working, and so were not entitled to any bread. Suddenly we saw my father approaching! He was walking as if he was drunk, poor man! The hospital had not wanted to release him, so he had released himself, and walked here in his condition, the twenty Russian versts or so, through the snow. On reaching us, he immediately fell down on the cold concrete earth and slept.

On the third day there was still no news of transport. I went to the kitchens and explained to them how things stood: that we were sitting here in a cold station, we had people who were ill; that surely the Soviet Union cared about its citizens! I begged them for something to eat, or at least something for the young children and the sick. It wasnt pleasant for them to hear all this, but it proved effective. They came up with over a dozen portions of soup for us. Now, we felt a little better.

On the sixth day of our stay, the officers found a little hut on one of the goods wagons and quickly packed my father, and us with him, onto it. We were on the move at last. We were not sure that we were traveling in the direction of our army in Tatishchev, however. The railway officials did not know that we were aboard the train, because we had boarded secretly. At least we were moving. Every time the train stopped, we would open the doors to see if it was our station, because we did not want to miss it.

After a long time, we stopped at some unnamed station, and saw some soldiers approaching uswith blankets! Our Polish soldiers. They had been waiting for us at the station and had been searching every wagon until they found us. They wrapped us all in the warm blankets, sat us on a waiting sleigh, and we set off!

Presently we arrived at the camp: an enormous barracks building with three-tiered bunks filled with civilians. How beautifully we were received! They dressed us from head to foot in new clothes. They fed us. They even had medical personnel on hand: in a word, this was heaven! We were given as much food as we could eat, and a place to sleep. Most important of all, we felt happy to be among our own, Polish soldiers.

After about two weeks there, we were informed that we were leaving Tatishchevo for Asiatic Russia. The army would be traveling with us. They loaded us up, several families at a time, onto some railway carriages and made us comfortable. There was an army kitchen on board that served delicious meals. In a word, they treated us like a mother treats her children.

We were traveling onwards, further and further away from that Hellish place of Siberia. One morning, however, we woke up with surprise to find that we were stationary. The train and the army wagons were nowhere to be seen. We were alone on the railway line. No one had told us anything, and to this day I do not know why our carriage had been disconnected from the train. A Russian railway worker had probably unhinged our wagon by mistake. The army train had left us behind, and we were stuck on a side track!

This was a desperate situation that we now found ourselves in. What could we do? What? Some of the elders of our group found a piece of chalk and used it to write the name of some Russian town on the side of our wagon. It worked! The railway workers read the sign, attached our wagons to another goods engine, and we found to our joy that we were traveling again. But what a difference there was now! This time we had nothing to eat. We could not ask anyone for directions because we were at war. We desperately wanted to reach some Polish army centre. The men in our group intended to enlist in the Polish army. When we reached these centres, however, we found they were invariably full up, and we had to travel further onwards.

The train stopped somewhere on the Russian steppes. There wasnt even a station there. It was the middle of nowhere. The train stopped, and waited. On both sides of the track stretched barren uninterrupted plains as far as the eye could see. We asked the engine driver if he would be stopping here for long. Oh yes! He answered. About four hours.

Some Mongolian men entered our wagon and asked whether anyone had tea or soap to barter. My mother had a piece of soap she had been holding on to as if it were a precious heirloom. Soap was impossible to obtain anywhere. She exchanged the soap for a few carrots, with which we were immensely pleased. We disembarked from the train, and went off to pick some greenery and a few thick stems of plants that lay around. We lit a fire on the edge of the railway track, and hung our tins on some sticks (which we had in the carriage with us) and boiled the carrots sliced up in some water. As soon as the water began to boil however, the train began to move away quietly without giving any signal. I started to run towards it carrying the tin on the stick with me. People in the wagon stretched out their arms to me, and somehow they managed to pull me into the wagon. Even today I can still remember the taste of those uncooked carrots in the water. It was such a luxury.

We had now been traveling for three months in the wagon. We were hungry, and we were finding that there was no room for us in any of the army centers we found along the way. In one particular place, we stopped for the night and were given a pail of soup for every wagon. That was in Samarkand. The Polish authorities there had learned that we were on the train; and at the behest of a Polish Community Organization, they had stopped the train and were able to give us something to eat. I can still remember the name of the officer-in-charge of the operation. His name was Szymczyk. This was the only place we got something to eat.

We had been traveling a very long time now, and still we were on the move. It seems to me that after this, we didnt stop anywhere else for four days. For four days we did not have a single thing to eat. Finally, somewhere in Uzbekistan, the train stopped and an Uzbek came on board with a water melon, hoping to exchange it for something. We no longer had anything to trade with. We only had money. We must have looked very miserable and desperate because he agreed to sell us the melon for a ruble! Divided up into five portions, it was the first meal we had had in over five days.

A few days later we arrived in Tashkent, where we learned of a Polish camp that was not yet full. We got off the train at a station called Guzar. When the train left us, we sat down at the station to discuss how we should proceed, terribly exhausted, dirty, and beggarly. We picked a few individuals from our company to go to the camp and ask whether they would receive us into the Polish army.

The refugee camp consisted of a few miserable mud-huts, filled with Polish nationals. There were people lying outside on the streets and under fences as well as indoors. Everywhere we saw dying people, most of them suffering from typhus, cholera and bloody dysentery. These were people who had come directly from Siberia. Here in Uzbekistan they had immediately contracted various diseases from which they were dying like flies. From morning to night, squads of soldiers dug large communal graves, but they could not keep up with the number of corpses to be buried. The dead bodies were thrown one on top of the other without coffins or any kind of wrappings; and they covered them with lime.

There was also an army reception camp nearby which was receiving volunteers into the army. No one here was yet in uniform, however. Children who had been orphaned were sent to the Childrens Home where our Polish children were brought up to be communist citizens. My sister and I were accepted into the junior cadet school. My little brother was handed over to the orphanage.

We lived ten cadets to a tent. Sometimes when it rained, we found ourselves swimming in our hammocks. The worst thing of all was when we had to share something out between the ten of us, because it was difficult to make all the portions exact. We would look with hungry eyes at those who were dividing up the food, and it led to many quarrels. Once a day we would go with our tin cans to get some barley soup. Sometimes an ill person would give us his portion of soup.

My father enlisted in the army in Guzar (Uzbekistan) but one of his fellow soldiers fell ill with scarlet fever and hence his whole tent was quarantined.

Soon, we began to hear rumors that the cadets were to be sent to India. We had only been in the camp for a few weeks when we received the orders to leave! We were to travel with the army volunteers (the pestki). If any one of us fell ill with any disease, or collapsed with exhaustion, her comrades would have to hold her upright on parade so that no one would know that she was ill; otherwise they would leave us behind in Russia!

At long last we arrived at Krasnovodsk, the port on the Caspian Sea, the last place we passed through in the Soviet Union. The whole group of us was packed onto two Soviet ships, and we left the Soviet Paradise behind us forever. A band played the national anthem. We were sailing bound for Persia.

I am unable to describe the scenes that followed because even today, when I think back to that moment, the joy of that event flows through me again! The voyage across the Caspian Sea to Iran lasted for six and a half hours. We docked at the port of Pahlevi.

There, on the very shores of freedom, people among us started to die. Some of them died from sheer euphoria, others from overeating. Everyone knew the dangers, but starving people often have little willpower.

Our whole cadet school was bathed and given new clothes. Some of the younger girls had to have their heads shaved. Every shred of our old clothes was taken from us and burned. Our commandant led us into one of the tents and exclaimed: And now my girls, take a blanket and go and get some bread! She was the only commandant born in France. In the provisions tent, one soldier threw us a can of condensed milk, while another threw oranges. We were given a whole blanket full of very tasty fresh bread. I thought that this was to last us for the whole week, but our instructors assured us that we would receive the same amount of bread again the next day. Try as we might, we could not bring ourselves to believe them. Just as they had promised, however, the next day they gave us more bread, and we ate from the Polish army kitchen on Persian soil. I walked about in a stupor unable to take everything in. It was as if I had seen bread for the first time in my life! Today, I am an old woman and still, for me, bread comes first before anything else!

In this way we fled out of the house of bondage. Persia took us, sickly, beggarly people to itself with all its heart! In Teheran I managed to trace my mother and brother; they were in Camp No. 1. Our father had had to remain behind in the Soviet Union, with the other sick soldiers in Guzar.

* * * * * * * * * *

Chapter Four.

FURTHER TRAVELS

As I mentioned earlier, my father had signed my sister and me over to the junior cadet school in Guzar, Uzbekistan. Oh God, how fortunate we felt to have left the Soviet paradise!

After a month, we were sent to the first transit camp in Tehran. There were 107 of us cadets and six instructors. The Persian population received us lovingly. We were given a large hall carpeted with Persian rugs, on which we slept all together as a group with our teaching staff. We were so happy to have left the Soviet Union that we seemed to be breathing in the whole of Persia with every breath we took.

The camp compound was situated not far from Tehran. Solely women and children populated it; the men had all been sent to join the Polish forces in Iraq. We lived for almost a year in this camp. After that the authorities decided to send all the civilian population to India. My mother, who was being sent with them, managed to get my younger sister out of the cadet school and my brother out of the orphanage. I remained where I was for the time being. After a month I suddenly changed my mind and begin to make efforts to follow them to India. My father was still with the army in the Soviet Union (Guzar) quarantined and unable to leave because someone in his tent had contracted an infectious disease. So I decided to follow my mother to India, because I was her eldest daughter and she might need me. Things did not go according to plan, however.

My journey to rejoin then was a hurried one. It was through mountainous country by train. Every mountain seemed to have a tunnel going through it. Finally I arrived at Ahvaz on the Persian Gulf, where I discovered that my mother had already left. I heard that there was another ship leaving to sail that very day, and I was packed onto it. I dont remember much about the journey, or how long it took. Eventually I reached the port of Karachi in India where I was reunited with my mother.

We lived all together in a transit camp situated on a wild plain, not far from an Indian town. At night we would hear the wailings of jackals or hyenas. I was always frightened that a hyena would come into my tent and drag me away by the legs. During the day we saw large lizards resembling crocodiles, which were also frightening when they approached our tents. The food we received was very meager.

After some three weeks, we were driven to the port and packed onto another ship bound for East Africa. The ship was very small and bobbed up and down on the waves like the shell of a nut. I was seasick a lot of the time and just lay on deck unable to eat anything. The only food I was able to keep down was onions, which an elderly Indian member of staff would bring me.

Somehow I survived the voyage and arrived at the port of Dar-Es-salaam in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Once again we were put to sleep one next to the other like sardines in a tin, on the floor of a large hall. The lights were kept on all night long. We received quinine against malaria.

After three weeks, we were all loaded up (ten people to a jeep) and the whole convoy traveled through the burning sun to an Italian convent at Tosamaganga, where we spent the night. Sometime in the middle of the night we were woken by the nuns and led into the chapel. The singing of the choir was so beautiful that I was transported to heaven. I wanted to remain there for ever! But it was wartime. The nuns were not allowed to take any new postulates. So next morning we were off again.

Finally we reached our intended destination of Ifundi. We were given a hut built of mud with a thatched roof. The place was called camp A. There was no glass in the windows. There were only heavy wooden shutters kept open during the day with a pole, and lowered at night. There was no furniture: only our beds, if you could call them that. This was our famous intended destination.

For a very long time we had no news of what had happened to my father. We wrote to the war Office giving all his details, but with no results. Finally I wrote to the religious authorities. I received a reply informing me that my father had died in Kermine Uzbekistan. He had been buried in a communal pit together with other soldiers. My mother took the news very badly. We had traveled through Hell, and here at the very end of the journey he had not made it. Yet we were lucky that at least some of us had survived. Some families lost several members. I remember one woman in Tehran. She was sitting by a wall in Camp No 1 beating her head against the stone and lamenting to God: why had He taken all her family from her; why had He not taken her too? (It reminded me of the Arab in Slowackis poem whose family had died and he was returning without his wife and children). This was the lament of more than one family.

Instructors were assigned to us and we began our studies. We had to make up for lost time. Students who wanted to study in the High school had to travel to another camp called Kitugali. They would return to us only for the holidays. We had a hospital, several doctors, a public school and a small altar where Father Krawczyk celebrated mass. We had a Polish YMCA community Center. Also a radio to which we listened every day for news of the war fronts where our soldiers were fighting.

One time, we staged a small theatrical performance. It was a sketch that featured Hitler walking about painting fences. One woman with her child passed by the dictator and began to malign him and his work. Some very talented individuals wrote it. The English officer in charge of the camp, as well regional governor with his staff, were present at the performance. Everyone seemed to enjoy the show. The English colonial governor stood up, however, and ordered an immediate end to the performance. Hitler, he said, was a genius, and we had no right to malign him. It was the year 1944. We were not pleased with his behavior.

Life in the camp was very monotonous. The local people would drum and chant every night. Lions would approach our settlement. Sometimes some Tanzanian would knock loudly on the door asking if we wished to buy any kalanga (ground nuts) from him. We learned to talk a little Swahili. Sometimes they would ask us about our country and would be amazed to hear that is was populated solely by white people. So who does all the work? they asked us!

In time we set up a scouting organization, and we had meetings and bonfires etc. I also belonged to this movement and had 150 scouts under my supervision. Very often we would be visited by various delegations, even ministers from London or from the Nairobi consulate. They would inspect our scouts, take photographs etc. Once we were even honored with the presence of father (professor) Wargowski, who enjoyed his visit immensely and sent me a letter from Nairobi thanking me profusely for his visit.

Dr Brzozowska, together with other members of the medical staff, organized a nursing course that I attended. After a time, there was an appeal from the Polish government for nurses to care for the wounded Polish soldiers in Scotland. I answered the call. I expected that after the war, I would eventually return to Poland and, as eldest daughter, I would look after my family. So together with a few other nurses, I left our camp at Ifundi for Britain. We traveled through the jungle by army trucks. A young boy with an artificial leg was traveling with us to Nairobi. Two days into the journey and the truck broke down. As we were pushing the truck in the dark with the help of some local tribesmen, a beautiful limousine driven by an English woman overtook us. We thought that perhaps she would give us some advice or even stop to help us. Instead, she was very angry and shouted: “Why are these Poles always wandering about here and there where theyre not wanted”? And she sped off in a cloud of English pride.

Eventually another truck arrived and came to our aid. We were finally able to reach Arusha, and then Mombassa. We spent only one night in some shack, and in the morning we were quickly packed into a Red Cross ship bound for England. There were 73 of us on the ship, accompanied by a doctor.

While we were on the ship we heard the news of the Warsaw Uprising, and everyone became sad. The captain, a very merry soul, invited us to tea and wanted to cheer us up after hearing the news that the Uprising had failed. We explained to him that none of us were in the mood to enjoy ourselves because people had lost their lives and that there had been some promise that the uprising would succeed. But the captain could not understand why we were so unhappy.

We sailed across the Red Sea, passed through the Suez Canal and arrived at Port Said (Egypt). We were given uniforms, rested for ten days, and then traveled on in a large convoy to Great Britain. On arrival, we showed our documents to the authorities at the port of Liverpool. A representative was waiting there to take us to Scotland. This representative was Lieutenant Stanczyk from the Polish Hospital at Taymouth Castle in Aberfeldy.

I worked one month in this hospital before moving to a convalescent home for Polish war invalids in Forfar. There were many soldiers who had lost their legs and arms and eyes on the Italian front: Monte Cassino, Ankona, etc. It was distressing for us to see so many young men who had sacrificed so much. And for what? Our own allies had betrayed us. So many of our soldiers were lying in graves in the place of English dead. I remember the time George 6th visited our soldiers, praising their bravery, saying that the British would never forget what the Poles had done for them. Shortly afterwards, however, they sold us out at Yalta. Living in this country for so long, we still remember all this. But what can we do?

I managed to bring my mother, sister and brother to Scotland from Africa several years later. My mother died many years later in Scotland. I still live here in Scotland. In Aberfeldy I met a Polish soldier who had lost his leg, and he became my husband (he is no longer alive). I was unable to return home to Poland because my home is now in the Ukraine. My grandfather, Ludwik Pulkiewicz, was murdered in my village of Androszowka, (near Szumsk, Luck) in 1943. I only learned of this after making various searches in 1996.

I could tell much about the many countries through which I traveled and in which I lived: Persia, Africa (Tanzania), India, Pakistan, Egypt…At present I am living here in Scotland, and I am old now. I live with my children and am good for nothing.

During all those years of wandering from camp to camp, one thought above all dominated my mind: to return again to my own country. Our soldiers fought all over the world…surely there must be some justice in the world! But there seems to be none. The war finished and we had to remain in a foreign country, unable to return to our homes. We were left to bitterness and sorrow. Sometimes, talking to my Scottish neighbors the question is asked of me: Why dont you return home? What can I say in reply? They are unable to understand.

Yet we must carry all this in our memory.

Because we can never forget.

* * * * * * * * * *

Helena Woloch Antolak

Grangemouth Scotland

1998

Compiled and translated from the original Polish text

by Ryszard Antolak

antolak@blueyonder.co.uk

© Ryszard Antolak

Why we stay

2005-09-25T10:53:00.000+01:00

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Spouses who continue to stay with their violent partners are often (later) asked the question: “Why did you put up with it for so long? Why didn’t you leave sooner?” Each and every attempt at explanation always sounds unconvincing. The human heart is capable of living with dissonant contradictions: this is its great strength as well as its weakness.

In many cases, they do not leave out of choice, but out of necessity - forced out by the need to protect children, or out of sheer exhaustion and shattered nerves. No longer able to function adequately in their everyday lives (or at work), thrown out onto the street in the middle of the night once too often, they take the small bag of essentials they have always had hidden somewhere in the house for such an emergency (containing passport, diplomas, underwear, photos etc.,), and head for the airport or bus station. It is seldom a rational or considered decision to leave.

Why do we stay so long? I run the risk of inviting all kinds of criticism if I say we stay because we are still “in love” with our partners. It is (inexplicably) possible to love someone who beats your head repeatedly against a wall, who bites and scratches you, pulls you hair, throws knives at you, empties trash cans over you, pushes you down stairs and pounds you repeatedly on the face with fists. The heart is large enough to contain such contradictions and many, many more.

Behind the violence, you are still able to perceive the person you first fell in love with, (that revelation unique to you alone) and even though it cannot save you, your task becomes to hold onto that hallowed image for dear life. There is no one to talk to, no one you can tell. In the ensuing tension between opposites, a whole continent opens up (as large as Africa) where you must pitch your tent. In this landscape, you learn to tread carefully, as if on eggshells, in order not to provoke your loved one to anger. You manage to live on crumbs of affection given to you whenever your partner is in the mood (which is never predictable). Your first thought on waking up (or returning home from work) is always: what kind of mood is he (or she) going to be in? For a time, you live under the illusion that your partner’s behaviour is wholly your fault (because that is what you have been repeatedly told). You hope against hope that something will change. But it never does.

And then, if you ever learn to stop blaming yourself, you enter a period of feeling sorry for your partner (because surely he or she must be ill) and hence further feelings of responsibility are generated. In the process, you find a hidden strength, or even a scrap of dignity in the fact that you didn’t retaliate in kind. Had you done so, you would have fallen into that same downward spiral of deceit and self-loathing as your partner, and never been able to regain self-respect.

What many of us realize in the end is that loving someone (anyone) is far more important than receiving love. And this realization is often enough to keep us there for as long as we are able.

Of breasts and men

2005-09-11T22:57:00.000+01:00

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I really don't know why breasts are so endlessly fascinating to us men. They just are.

The only boy in a large family of girls, breasts were everywhere. They never held any novelty value for me. Yet my reaction even today when I see a pair of women's breasts is akin to a kind of hypnosis: they draw all my attention immediately, and nothing else at that moment becomes remotely important except their various qualities and attributes. They are endlesly fascinating. And I'm not alone in this. I'm sure every man can understand Menelaus' reaction at the end of the Iliad when, instead of slaying Helen for causing the Trojan war, he drops his sword at the sight of her naked, scented breasts. Beauty (with a capital B) is Power. And breasts do possess a strange power over men.

I have no sympathy for a (female) friend who can refer to her own breasts as "ornaments" (ornaments!?)," tools" (I have visions of a hardware store!!!) , or "an annoyance and occasional source of concern"! (Ok I can understand this last description, but only from the medical angle). But please...I''m glad men (at least) are able to appreciate these sources of endless riches and wonder: dare I say it....these "mythical" organs for what they really are.

Do I really need to defend female breasts? OK. .......At the very outset, however, I have a confession to make: I was breast-fed for two years (which is fairly uncommon now) but was normal where I came from, and may explain something about me. (My aunt was breast-fed for a full five years!).

The breast is expressive of a woman's femininity, her softness (in all senses of that word) her vulnerability. It also comforts and warms. Possessing very few muscles, it is defenceless and "innocent". It invites one to hold it. It is our earliest source of wealth, and hence (for men at least) possession of a (woman's) breast is possession of the whole universe. A baby doesn't need anything else in the entire world (and a grown man still has this same feeling). It is the ultimate cornucopia. And a baby has access to TWO of them!

The breast is a baby's first plaything, its first pillow. It is also its first source of nutrition.When I use phrases such as "the milk of human kindness" I always think of breast-milk (and used to think everyone else did too, until I realized to my embarrassment that I was the only one in a vast literature class of hundreds who had this mental image). One of the most moving medieval woodcuts I know is an image of two elderly, bearded philosophers suckling at the breasts of a young, crowned woman who represents Sophia (the Highest Wisdom). I don't need to mention that this alchemical image has no sexual overtones (much like the image at the end of Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath") ......Metaphors of lands full of "milk and honey" are descriptions of paradise.

And then of course, the obvious. Men are more visually-orientated than women. For them, the breast is a sexual trigger producing a rise in blood-pressure, a surge of adrenaline (including other hormones), and more evident male physical reactions. I'd better stop now while I'm ahead, (or rather "abreast") of this topic, or I'll end up babbling.

In an effort to calm down, I'll mention that last summer I took my wife to Shakespeare's hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon where we did the tourist circuit. One of the objects in the museum there which intrigued us both was a pair of objects labelled "nipple-protectors". They were made of heavy coarse metal. Having argued (loudly) together for some time over the purpose of these unpleasant-looking implements, the museum curator came over and explained their function to us. They were used by mothers in days gone by to dissuade their children from suckling at their mother's breasts! Instead of a warm nipple, the child got a mouthfull of cold metal (and thereby learned his first harsh lesson in life)!....... The ultimate betrayal, I thought! Extremely practical, thought my wife.

We could not even agree to disagree.

© Ryszard Antolak

That Longing

2005-09-04T16:59:00.000+01:00

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Psychiatrists tell us that subconsciously we expect sex to provide a mystical unity, the spouse a divinity, the home a heaven. There is a homesickness in us which most of us feel but cannot articulate fully. We are homesick for something that cannot exist in our ordinary everyday material reality.

But just because this ideal place of our longing cannot exist (here and now) does not mean that it has no value. The most important part of any cup, drinking vessel, is not the material that it''s made from (however beautiful and precious) but the empty space (the nothing) in the centre waiting to be filled. Our longing is that emptiness which only the infinite can fill. Oscar Wilde said something similar, but in a personal sense:

"One''s real life is often,
The life one does not lead" (Oscar Wilde)

Franz Kafka described the poetic process in terms not of cup and empty space, but of calling Reality into existence, inviting it to be present by using the "right words", the poetic fiat. I am quite fond of this description of his for the creative (and religious) process:

"It is entirely conceivable that life''s splendour forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by the right name, it will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not create, but summons"
(F. Kafka. Diaries)

The search for our "true" home, for our lost mystical unity, is as old as recorded history. It has often been visualized as an epic journey because man has always seen himself as a wayfarer, always setting forth, responding to the invitation of further horizons. It is a journey of self-discovery to the East (but not to the physical East), from where the source of all light (the sun, illumination) rises. It is a search for the lost part of ourselves, that part which makes us complete and infinite.

© Ryszard Antolak
Painting: Wiesława Kwiatkowska

A beautiful heart

2005-09-03T21:03:00.000+01:00

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One day a young man was standing in the middle of his town proclaiming that he had the most beautiful heart in the whole valley. A large crowd gathered around him and they all admired his heart for it was perfect. No flaw or mark could be seen in it. Yes, they all agreed, it was truly the most beautiful heart they had ever seen. The young man became proud at this and continued to boast loudly about the beauty of his young heart.

Suddenly, an old man appeared from the crowd and said to him, "Your heart is very fine, but it is not nearly as beautiful as mine. Come and see". The crowd and the young man came over to look at the old man's heart. They saw it was beating strongly, but was full of scars. It had places in it where pieces had been removed and other pieces put in that didn't quite fit right; and there were several jagged edges protruding. In fact, in some places there were deep gouges where whole portions were missing. The people stared -- how can he say his heart is more beautiful, they thought?

The young man looked at the old man's heart and saw its state, and laughed out loud. "You must be joking," he said. "Compare your heart with mine. Mine is perfect and yours is just a mass of scars and tears."

"Yes," said the old man, "yours is clean and perfect-looking, but I would never exchange mine for yours. You see, every scar I have represents a person to whom I have given my love. I tear out a piece of my heart every time and give it to them; and often they give me a piece of their heart which fits into the empty place in my heart. But because the pieces aren't exact, I have some rough edges, which I cherish, because they remind me of the love we shared.

Sometimes I have given pieces of my heart away and the other person hasn't returned a piece of his heart to me. These are the empty gouges -- giving love is taking a chance. Although these gouges are painful, they stay open, reminding me of the love I have for these people, and someday I hope they may return and fill the space I have waiting for them. So now, do you see what true beauty is?"

The young man stood listening with tears running down his cheeks. He walked up to the old man, reached into his young and flawless heart, and ripped a piece of it out. With trembling hands he offered it to the old man who took the offering and placed it into his heart. Then he took a piece from his old scarred heart and placed it in the wound of the young man's heart. It fitted, but not perfectly, as there were some jagged edges. The young man now looked at his heart, which was no longer perfect, but was more beautiful than ever because now love from the old man's heart flowed freely into his.

Then they embraced each other tightly; and walked away side-by-side into the distance.

Art of the storyteller

2005-08-27T22:32:00.000+01:00

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Children love to be told stories over and over again, as much for the music of the words as for the story itself.

Story telling is truly a great art. Yet it is very different from reading prose. Linked to breathing, to the heartbeat, to pure audible form, the human voice is capable of reaching wells of emotion that elude mere words on a page.

The personality of a storyteller is an integral part of any story he tells. In the hands of a master storyteller, listeners can easily become drunk on the rhythms of his voice or lose themselves in the vowels and pauses in his sentences. They are able to anticipate what is to come through his enthusiasm, sadness or heroic manner in which he tells episodes of his story. The contours of his voice become the landscape of the listeners’ experience, akin to the soundtrack of a great film. Which is why listening to a story is very different from reading prose.

Under literacy, the sense of sight wholly dominates; and sight has a natural bias towards detachment, creating the detached observer. It allows one to stand back and see details against a background. Literate peoples experience sound as if it were visible. They listen to music.

Sound has the opposite bias: it surrounds and it involves. You step into it as into an environment. Non-literates live in acoustic space. They do not listen to music as we do: they merge with it.

We can learn a lot from the non-literate societies about what speech must have once been like before our society became literate. In oral societies, perception (cognition) is immediately followed by emotion. Every idea is not just a state of knowing but a tendency towards movement. In Homer, warriors weep, beat their chests, tear out their hair; and when Homeric poetry was sung in the Athenian marketplace, the listeners joined in the expression of these emotions. Hearing an account meant experiencing it. The speaker's voice, his pauses, his rhythms, his bodily movements were all part of the meaning.

Today many people are able to read a story without any outward shows of emotion, or signs of bodily movement. This is a fairly recent phenomenon. When Augustine mentioned that his hero Ambrose could read a book without moving his lips, the act was rare enough in his time (two thousand years ago) to merit mention. Today, people who have had throat surgery are often advised not to read for several months after their operation, because small movement of the larynx can still be detected during so-called "silent reading". Literacy has not completely lost its ancient links to the spoken word.

The language of our distant ancestors was fresh, their consciousnesses innocent and unfocussed, so that every utterance must have had tremendous power, with a resonance that swelled and rocked them to their foundations. Sentences must have been like incantations, spells. Perhaps they were even chanted or sung. And every statement must also have been interpreted on several levels simultaneously, because there was (as yet) no abrupt separation of individual from community, community from environment, Man from God. What was meaningful on one level was meaningful on all the other levels as well.

I'm not entirely convinced that they told stories in the sense that we mean that word today. I think that “story lines” (plots) are a consequence of literacy (from the eye following a line of print). The "stories" of aural peoples are generated largely by associations of meanings (circles of meaning) and actions. They rarely have an identifiable “beginning, middle and an end” (climax).

If I go to a concert, I cannot sit and just listen quietly. My head begins to move and my hands and fingers begin to dance to the rhythm. What I am experiencing is something of what our ancestors felt when they listened to the music and voices of the world about them with innocent ears and marvellously resonant imaginations.

© Ryszard Antolak

Ancestral soil

2005-08-21T18:27:00.000+01:00

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Ancestral soil – I don’t mean “the fatherland”, the nation-state, the racial or linguistic group to which a person belongs. I mean the dirt and soil at your feet composed of the pulverised bones of your ancestors.

Our forebears (those who supported themselves by agriculture) had an intimate and spiritual relationship with the land around them, which many of us have lost. They lived in the settled communities, rarely straying from their villages. Houses and farmsteads were passed down from father to son; generations of the same family came to be buried in the same earth, dissolving and becoming a part of it. Agriculture was therefore a sacred activity (a sacrament) because when you tilled the soil, you were literally stirring the bones of your ancestors. Even in death, they were seen to perform their duties for the welfare of the community.

Is it any wonder therefore, that ancestor worship was so widespread in the ancient world? The dead were responsible for the quality and fertility of the soil upon which the entire community relied; the annual crops were perceived to grow from their dissolved remains. How many of us today can pick up a handful of soil, run it between our fingers and know for certain we touching the ashes of our grandparents and their grandparents?

In earlier times, it was inconceivable that land could be bought or sold. The land belonged to no one. The only claim anyone could have to it was by virtue of the fact that one’s ancestors were buried in it (i.e., they were part of the soil).

We know from records of the colonisation of places such as Iceland and Scotland that the idea of ownership of land was seen in exactly this way: through the process of burial. St Columba, therefore, could not take possession of the sacred isle of Iona until his disciple Odran had “volunteered” to be buried in its soil (which is why St Odran is such an important figure on the island). If you travel the roads to other sacred places in the UK (like Stonehenge and Avebury), barrows announce for all to see that those living on these sites claimed those territories through generations of buried ancestors, emphasized by the large number of burial mounds.

A strong mystical connection exists between the soul and soil that fashioned it. The pull is strong. Soil and soul are ultimately of the same substance. Even today, most of people would prefer to be buried alongside their families and loved ones than among strangers. Some exiles are known to keep a small handful of their nation’s soil hidden somewhere among their belongings.

If you are ever fortunate enough to be able to return to your ancestral soil, you break out into a sweat. You know you are in physical contact with the grandmothers and great grandmothers who struggled to bring you into existence. It is as if the earthen womb recognizes the worth of each of her children and demands an account. What have you done with your life? What did you do with the body I loaned you, the emotions I breathed into you, the abilities I impressed on you? Did you squander them, or use them wisely?

We move around so much these days that our emotional bonds to a particular soil are all but severed. Our last links to it are played out in our relationships with our gardens, which are images of paradise. Those of us who are fortunate to possess a garden are able to experience a little of that lost relationship with the earth which our forefathers once possessed. Through it, we become involved once more in the rhythms of the year, the turn of the seasons (once celebrated by the great religious festivals) and the cycles of growth and decay. It teaches us how to nurture and protect the young and the delicate.

In view of this, perhaps we can better understand the feelings of those more settled communities towards their ancestral lands. I thinking in particular of the peoples of Eastern Europe (as well as those in Chechnya and Afghanistan) who, when taking up arms against their invaders, sought to defend not so much a political nation-state or piece of prime “Real Estate” as the blood and bones of their relatives and ancestors stretching into the past beyond all hope of memory.

© Ryszard Antolak
Painting: Sahar Esmaeelpur

The God of small things

2005-08-18T17:06:00.000+01:00

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“She loved him so much,
she concealed his name
in many different phrases,
the inner meanings of which
were known only to her.

When she said,
“The wax is softening near the fire”,
she meant, “My love is wanting me”.
Or if she said, “Look, the moon is up”,
or “The willow has new leaves...”
it was Joseph’s touch she was meaning”
- Rumi

Anything can remind a lover of the presence (or absence) of his beloved. The meanest object or sound can become precious, - and even "holy" - by virtue of a pure heart and an Active Imagination.

A lover calls his beloved by many endearing little names. Quite often, the more diminutive and childish (and silly) the names he calls her, the more hopelessly, madly, and unashamedly in love with her he is.

Why should this not be the same with our names for God? Most of our adjectives for the Deity derive from the language of the Law Courts: they are to do with kings, judges, rulers, lords and distant impersonal masters. Sometimes he is a father. But what a difference it would it make if we used the words of intimacy instead: the language not only of the lover, but also of the familiar and familial, of the delicate and the vulnerable.

Religious symbolism (fish, lamb, vine, oak, bull, dove, sun, bread, wine, fire....) has already moved a little in this direction. But perhaps there is need to go further. If we call God “great”, are we not depriving him of the ability to be small? Small, after all, is beautiful. Small is familiar and endearing. Small can be intimate and “close as your jugular vein”.

Can we ever really presume to know who (in his heart) is truly “Christian” and who is "Pagan"; who is the true ''Moslem'', and who is the ”Infidel''. Is it the one who calls out, "O Great Apollo!", or the one who cries out, “Allah is great"; the one who calls out, “my little one” or the one who whispers, “My baby?”

“My son, the exterior of religious law is often hidden idolatry,
while the reality of infidelity is a manifest gnosis."

- (Al-Hallaj)

© Ryszard Antolak

The Evil Empire

2005-08-18T14:24:00.000+01:00

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Jonathon Jones betrays his own complexes and neuroses towards the Persians in his extremely biased article "The Evil Empire" published in The Guardian (Sept 8 2005). His image of the Persians is the one created for him by the Greeks, their old enemies. So when confronted by first-hand evidence of their culture in a lavish exhibition at the British Museum, he becomes confused (as well as overwhelmed) and falls back upon old cliches (and even some puerile newer ones from the film "Star Wars").

Where does he think the notion of human freedom (so championed by the Athenians Greeks) came from in the first place if not from Persian Zoroastrianism? I will not even begin to go into the influence upon the Greeks of Persian Astronomy, Science, philosophy and Fine Art (or else I will be here all night). The Persians have had a bad press throughout History because they were the military opponents of the Greeks (and later, the Romans). And Ancient Greece, in particular, still continues to be a kind of Golden Calf for many classicists.

But when the great schools of classical learning in the Greek/Roman Byzantine empire were suppressed forever (by royal decree) in the early Christian era, where did the professors and teachers go to continue their teachings? To Persia of course, where they were graciously received. Enough said.

The First Muse

2005-08-15T22:21:00.000+01:00

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When I recall all the scattered fragments of that initial encounter, I never should have asked her to play for me. The first Muse is the cruellest, ripping at our complacency, slashing at our innocence, setting our desires upon impossible horizons.

She was a schoolgirl with unbound hair, eleven years old, (and I not much younger). But she smiled so sweetly and led me by the hand through corridors echoing to the sounds of hundreds of children.

When we reached the silence of the music room, she opened up the polished wing of the grand piano that was the colour of chestnuts, and asked me politely to sit down by the window. There was a reverential silence as she positioned herself comfortably at the keyboard. Then she reached out exploratory hands to the keys, and let loose the music.

I did not know anything so beautiful could exist in the world! The music swept into my soul, illuminating the darknesses never before discernable to consciousness. The path to my innermost being had been divined with such simplicity and ease that I could have cried out in all my newfound weakness. I was never the same again.

When she had finished, the piano of smouldering chestnut still spoke of her playing. I wanted to remember everything just as it was at that moment: the quality of the light, the textures of the room, her unbound hair stained with an intensity of blackness, the shapes of her hands that could open up at times to swallow a third of the keyboard. But above all, I wanted to remember that feeling of being buoyed up in a boundless sea of love.

For a while, we stood holding the piano between us, the only barrier between our two souls. I would have liked to have been received into deeper areas of friendship but before I had gathered up the courage to say, “Please play something else for me”, she had disappeared back along the corridor leaving only the halo of her presence behind.

I returned home that evening seduced to the innermost core of my being, my innocence shattered.

Since that afternoon, I have pursued the music that she played with all the ruthlessness of a seasoned hunter. I lay traps for it, practicing Chopin Etudes until my fingers became numb.I squandered my youth stalking it. My school friends went out to enjoy themselves while I remained behind relentlessly pounding away on my humble upright piano late into the night.

Today, I can play these pieces well enough. I have acquired the technical skill necessary. But there is still some indefinable element missing, something which she (the first Muse) possessed in abundance. In my frustration, I play the pieces over and over again in vain hoping to capture that elusive something I know will never possess.

From all this I have learned that there are things in life that we can never attain, and yet must strive for constantly. The goal is always on the horizon. The yearning, the despair, the infatuation, (the process of giving up and then starting again a hundred thousand times) is part of the whole process: perhaps it is the very essence of Love itself.

The first Muse rouses us to Life. But once roused, there is no peace for us ever again, and no rest. Rest - for the heart - is Death.

© Ryszard Antolak
painting: Saeed Siadat

Rumblings of Protest

2005-08-12T22:45:00.000+01:00

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Always the same with a new class: argumentative, resistant, over-intellectual. These students brought up on cable-TV and video games have no need for poetry they tell me. It''s all nonsense: wordgames, hot air.

What good is Poetry? Why do we need poets? It''s not real. Poetry''s useless etc. .. I try to talk to them about the soul-sickness in them, the dissatisfaction with themselves and the world around them. The running after diversions, drugs, drink, sex...anything to divert attention away from that aching emptiness in them that they won''t admit. They are homesick for a home they have no knowledge of or even image of what it might be like. They feel trapped, because (to paraphrase Rumi), they are "noble birds of the air who have had their wings clipped by an old woman and have been brought up among chickens". They''re not living their own lives. Somewhere "out there" lies a real, fuller, broader life which seems to have escaped them, but which they know exists somewhere. Poetry is a signpost to that place. But it is not "out there" at all.

How to put them in touch with that real living world they secretly long for, the world which cannot be found in history and which is not remembered precisely because it is not yet dead, not yet passed away. How to get them to admit they have all but bankrupted their capacity to be wonderstruck, to be bewildered and enchanted by the world around them. Which is why we never needed poets more than we do today.

© Ryszard Antolak
Picture: Aydin Aghdashloo

Yama

2005-08-10T15:13:00.000+01:00

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Pathanjali, in his Aphorisms of Yoga, places Yama (moral duty) as the first of the eight steps of yoga.

Defined as rejection of all lying, covetousness, violence, incontinence and theft, yama is seen as the foundation upon which all other disciplines of ecstasy are built. Before the practice of yogic postures (asanas) and breathing exercises (pranayamas) now so fashionable in the West can even begin, one must cutivate yama: rejection of violence, greed and deception. It is the soil out of which the other seven disciplines of yoga emerge.

Yet, for most people in the West today who still possess a religious predilection, yama, (morality) is seen as the goal of religious life, its highest expression. Beyond it, they believe, there is nothing higher. Even those trendy youngsters who assiduously practice the asanas, and have an inkling of their religious significance, perceive all other practices in yoga as aids leading towards the final goal of yama.

But for Pathanjali, yama comes FIRST!

My Precious

2005-08-08T17:09:00.000+01:00

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I found it in my bedroom, in the space between the piano and the wall: dusty and mildewed, but still legible. It was one of my lost notebooks dating from Spring 2002, the time we journeyed to East Africa in search of, well……. ourselves I suppose. I had refused to take a camera with me, trusting my memories and observations solely to a few A5 notebooks, my most intimate companions on the trip. It had been one of my more successful hare-brained ideas, though derided at the time by my companion, whose heavy baggage of photographic equipment I was, nevertheless, compelled to carry throughout the course of our journey.

I have to confess that I have always disliked keyboards. The movements required of the fingers are too abrupt, too staccato for my liking. I much prefer loops and ovals, lines and squiggles, paper and ink. I love the feel of the pen, the smell of the paper, the handwriting changing with every turn of thought and every colouring of mood like music. Just looking through the entries in “my precious” I can instantly discern what the complexion of my mind had been on every page from the size, the orientation, the tidiness (or not) of the ink handwriting. I have been told by calligraphers that despite modern technology (nibs of gold, iridium, stainless steel etc., etc.) the most perfect writing implement remains to this day the one used by the medieval monks to produce their illuminated Psalters: the humble goose quill, its point fashioned to perfection with a pen-knife. Nothing has yet surpassed it.

But as for the word “nib”: who on earth coined such a pathetic word for the business end of an ink pen? He should be taken out and summarily shot (or stabbed with a stylus like J.C – metaphorically of course). What a pathetic word for such an important and momentous implement, one that has changed the course of human history and civilization more than any battle, or royal decree!

© Ryszard Antolak

The Iranian Soldier-Bear of Monte Cassino

2005-08-06T15:09:00.000+01:00

After the Battle of Monte Cassino, one of the fiercest and bloodiest conflicts of the Second World War, many accounts emerged of the bravery and heroism of the soldiers. But perhaps the strangest story of all was of an Iranian brown bear who served alongside the allied soldiers in the worst heat of the battle. Despite the incessant bombardment and constant gunfire, the bear carried vital supplies of ammunition and food to his fellow-soldiers fighting on the mountainside. Many observers who witnessed his remarkable actions doubted the reality of what they were seeing. But the story was no legend

At the time of his death in 1964, he was the most famous bear in the world, visited by countless celebrities and adored by the international press. Books and articles were written about him, statues and plaques commemorated his actions. To the men of the 22^nd Transport Company (Artillery Supply) however, he was merely “Voytek” a remarkable fellow soldier, and their beloved comrade.

He was born in the mountains of Hamadan, in one of the many caves to be found in that dusty mountainous area. At the age of eight weeks his mother was killed by a group of hunters, but he was rescued by a young Iranian boy who thrust him into a hempen sack and set off with him homeward along a narrow dusty path.

Iran at that time was going through one of the unhappier periods of her history. Occupied by the Russians and the British, her relations with the soldiers of those two countries were understandably tense and strained. In April 1942, however, Iran opened its arms to receive hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens (men, women and children) who had been released from the Soviet labour camps of Siberia and Kazakhstan. Having arrived at the port of Pahlevi (now Bandar-e Anzali), they were suffering from various diseases, including malnutrition, and had to be rested in the vast tented city hastily built for them on the shores of the Caspian. When they were well enough to travel, however, they were taken to more substantial military and civilian resettlement camps all over Iran.

Most of the civilians (women and children) were destined to remain as guests of Iran for up to three years. But the able-bodied men were almost immediately sent westwards to join the Polish forces in Lebanon. A long stream of covered trucks left Anzali daily carrying the future soldiers along the narrow twisted roads via Qazvin, Hamadan and Kermanshah to the borders of Iraq and beyond.

It was on one of the narrow mountain roads somewhere between Hamadan and Kangavar, that the trucks were brought to an abrupt halt by the sight of a small Iranian boy carrying a bulky sack. He looked tired and hungry, so the men offered him a billy-can of meat. And as he ate, they gasped in astonishment as the sack beside him began to move and the head of a honey-coloured bear cub emerged sleepily into the sunlight.

Although none of the men could understand Farsi, the boy was able to indicate by his actions that he had found the bear cub whimpering outside one of the caves, its mother having been shot by a hunter. The orphaned cub was in poor condition and it was almost certain he would not survive the day. One of the men, therefore, offered to buy the orphaned cub for a few toumans. Someone else fumbled for a bar of chocolate and a tin of corned beef to give him. Another took from his pocket an army penknife that opened up like a flower. The boy smiled, pocketed the offerings and disappeared forever from their lives.

A feeding bottle had to be hastily improvised from an empty bottle of vodka into which a handkerchief had been stuffed to serve as a teat. They filled it with condensed milk, diluted it with a little water, and gave it to the little bear to drink. When he had finished it, he crept up close to one of the soldiers for warmth and fell asleep on his chest. The soldier’s name was Piotr (Peter) and he became forever afterward, the bear’s closest and most enduring friend.

The cub clung desperately to his substitute mother all through the tortured journey across Persia, Iraq and Jordan, along vast distances that seemed to loose heart and succumb to the despair of barrenness. Sometimes the man would lock the bear in the warmth of his greatcoat so that it became part of him. In the evenings, as he sat with the other men around the fire telling tales late into the night, the bear cub would be rocked to sleep in the sound of his immense laughter. In time, the orphan lost himself in the lives of these strangers and entangled himself completely in the rhythms and cadences of their speech. From that time onwards he became wholly theirs: body, will and soul.

In this way, Voytek the Iranian brown bear from Hamadan entered the lives of the soldiers of the Second Polish Army Corps, transforming all their destinies.

In the months that followed, he won over the hearts of all who met him. The soldiers, who had all endured the horrors and hardships of Siberia, needed something in their lives to love, and the presence of Voytek was a wonderful tonic for their morale. Despite his brute strength, which grew day by day, he was always an amiable and a gentle giant. The soldiers treated him from the start as one of their own company and never as a pet. They shared their food with him, allowed him to sleep in their tents at night and included him in all their activities. If the unit was ordered to march out, he would march with them on two legs like a soldier. When they were being transported to some distant location, he would ride in the front seat of the jeeps (or transport wagons) to the great amazement of passers-by. More than anything, however, he loved to wrestle with the soldiers, taking on three or four of them at a time. Sometimes he was even gracious enough to allow them the courtesy of winning. Over the next few years, he shared all their fortunes, and went with them wherever they were posted throughout the Middle East. He grew to be almost six feet tall and weighed 500 pounds.

In early 1944, the men of Voytek’s unit were ordered embark for Italy to join the Allied advance on Rome. The British authorities gave strict instructions that no animals were to accompany them. The Poles therefore enrolled Voytek into the army as a rank-and-file member of their company and duly waved the relevant papers in front of the British officers on the dockside at Alexandria. Faced with such impeccable credentials, the British shrugged their shoulders and waved the bear aboard. In this way, Voytek the Iranian bear became an enlisted soldier in the 22nd Transport Division (Artillery Supply) of the Polish 2^nd Army Corps.

Monte Cassino was the strategic key to the allied advance on Rome. Three bloody attempts by the British, Americans, Indians, French and New Zealanders to dislodge the enemy from the famous hill-top monastery had failed. In April 1944, the Polish forces were sent in. It was one of the bloodiest battles of the war. Much of the fighting was at close quarters. The shelling, which continued night and day without interval, scarred and cratered the landscape until it resembled the pock-marked surface of the moon.

During the most crucial phase of the battle, when pockets of men were cut off on the mountainside desperately in need of supplies, Voytek, who all this time had been watching his comrades frantically loading heavy boxes of ammunition, came over to the trucks, stood on his hind legs in front of the supervising officer and stretched out his paws toward him. It was as if he was saying: “I can do this. Let me help you”. The officer handed the animal the heavy box and watched in wonder as Voytek loaded it effortlessly onto the truck. Backwards and forwards he continued, time and time again, carrying heavy shells, artillery boxes and food sacks from truck to truck, from one waiting man to another, effortlessly. The deafening noise of the explosions and gunfire did not seem to worry him. Each artillery box held four 23 lbs live shells; some even weighed more than a hundred. He never dropped a single one. And still he went on repeatedly, all day and every day until the monastery was finally taken. One of the soldiers happened to sketch a picture of Voytek carrying a large artillery shell in his arms, and this image became the symbol of the 22^nd artillery transport, worn proudly on the sleeves of their uniforms ever afterwards and emblazoned on all the unit’s vehicles.

Now famous, he completed his tour of duty in Italy and when the war was over, he sailed the Polish Army to exile in Scotland. Here, once again, he found himself a celebrity. In Glasgow, people lined the streets in their thousands to catch sight of the famous soldier-bear marching upright in step with his comrades.

Voytek’s last days, however, were steeped in sadness. In 1947, the Polish army in Scotland was demobilized and a home had to be found for him to live out his retirement.

Although he was world-famous, the bear of Monte Cassino was forced to spent his last years behind bars in Edinburgh’s Zoological gardens. Artists came to sketch him and sculptors to make statues of him. Sometimes his old army friends arrived to visit him, leaping over the barriers to wrestle and play with him in the bear enclosure (to the utter horror of all the visitors and zoo officials). But he did not take well to captivity, and as the years passed, he increasingly preferred to stay indoors, refusing to meet anyone.

I was lucky enough to see him just before his death in 1963. He was sitting at the back of his large enclosure, silent and immobile. It was said that he was sulking, angry at being abandoned by those he had loved. Others said he was merely showing the symptoms of old age. None of the shouts from his assembled visitors seemed to catch his attention. But when I called out to him in Polish, something seemed to stir in him at last, and he turned his head towards me as if in recognition.

He died in Edinburgh at the age of 22 on 15^th November 1963. A plaque was erected in his memory by the zoo authorities. Statues of him were placed in the Imperial War Museum in London and in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. But although he had entered the pages of military history, the Iranian soldier-bear of Monte Cassino would have preferred to remain in the company of the soldiers with whom he had shared five years of war and countless memories of devoted companionship.

What Remains

2005-08-02T16:08:00.000+01:00

So what am I to do with all these feelings: embers that still glow, the fire-fly thoughts that flash?

This chrysalis I''m left with, swaddled in a hard transparent shell. I breathe on it and look! its veins begin to fill, its flesh softens, the shell splits open to reveal the wings, still folded, of a creature promised to the sky.

And all her photos, e-mails saved on disk, the burning letters, locks of hair? Destroy them? Give them back? - it can''t be done. Confine them to a safe? - they''ll burn a hole through ten foot steel!

Wild Thoughts

2005-08-02T16:06:00.000+01:00

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On days like this when thoughts grow troublesome and loud, I take the wildest ones and let them run around outside. I turn them loose in meadows by the river's edge and watch them chase the dogs or hunt the crazy butterflies, sniff at the base of trees or bark at passersby, (while leaving me alone in peace).

Wild thoughts need to be outside. It's bad for them to be indoors. Deprived of light and air, they grow anaemic, ghostly, like the skeletons of spiders that you find in empty rooms.

My room is littered with the skeletons of long-dead thoughts: ambitions I once entertained and thoughts I never should have held. They stare at me from photographs or spill out like confetti from the books I read, love-letters that I find.

I need a broom to sweep the dead away. I need to let the sunlight in, put flowers in windows, fill this house again with poetry and colour from a late, but welcome, Spring.

© Ryszard Antolak

The Maiden's Tower

2005-08-01T18:20:00.000+01:00

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“At the beginning of the 1st millennium BC, there was raised an 8-storied towered temple (Maiden’s Tower) devoted to seven gods, grandiose for those day….[possessing]seven sacred levels, [and] wall-recessed altars with seven-coloured fires burning in honour of the pantheon of gods of Ahura Mazda or Mithra”.- Professor Davud Akhundov.

The former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan possesses no shortage of ancient Persian monuments. None, however, is as enigmatic as the Kyz Galasy (or “Maiden’s Tower”), the oldest and most famous building in the country’s capital, Baku.

Legend and mystery surround this ancient structure. No-one knows how old it is, or who built it, or why it was constructed. Estimates for its age vary from eight hundred to two thousand six hundred years. A defensive structure, a lighthouse, a Zoroastrian temple, an observatory, a dakhma (place for disposing of the dead)? The experts cannot seem to make up their minds.

Folk memory in Baku speaks of a “fiery maiden” who delivered the city from a desperate siege in the distant past. The oldest legend, however, (almost certainly pre-Islamic) tells of a mighty ruler who developed an incestuous love for his own daughter. So great was his desire that he promised to give the girl whatever she wished if she would marry him. Although she feared his advances, the young maiden did not dare to disobey her royal father, so she asked him to build her a tower on the edge of the sea, greater than any that had ever been built. The king readily agreed, and construction began immediately. To play for time, the daughter visited the structure regularly and suggested improvements and additions. Finally, when the tower was finished, and it was impossible to build it any higher or any more strongly, she climbed up to its topmost pinnacle and threw herself into the sea, her virginity still intact.

Nothing about this ancient edifice is really known for certain, except its physical characteristics. The “Maiden’s Tower” is a massive stone cylindrical building almost 30 metres high and 17 metres in diameter. It sits anchored to a rock on the edge of the Caspian Sea in the Ichari Shahar, or ancient quarter of Baku. The great quantity of stone needed to construct it would have been sufficient to build a defensive wall around the whole of the ancient city. Its walls, five metre thick, contain seven spiral staircases leading to seven floors. Each floor has curious recesses set into its walls. Nine narrow windows face outwards towards the Caspian Sea and could not, therefore, have been used for defence.

The most curious and puzzling aspect of the tower, however, is the strange trapezoidal projection that points away eastwards towards the rising sun. From the air, it gives the whole building the appearance of a colossal key, or a gigantic tadpole stranded forever on the Caspian shoreline. When the tower first came under serious scientific scrutiny early last century, the Soviet scientists who examined it could find no function for this anomalous projection. It was not a breakwater, or a stabilising buttress, and it was no use for defensive purposes.

For many years, the Gyz Galasy was presumed to date from the 12th Century AD, mostly on the evidence of an Arabic inscription set high in the wall which reads: “The vault of Masud ibn Davud”. Not long ago, however, the Azeri historian Sara Ashurbeyli convincingly demonstrated that this inscription was merely a piece of broken tombstone used to repair the tower during the Middle Ages. Since then, speculation has grown concerning the real age and function of the building.

Within the last two decades, the Maiden’s Tower has begun to reveal some of its secrets. Recent evidence suggests that the structure predates the advent of Islam by many centuries, and is far older than anyone had hitherto imagined

For thousands of years the Absheron peninsula - upon which Baku stands - was a holy land sacred to those who revered fire as a living symbol of divinity. Pilgrims travelled from far afield in order to worship there. Scores of shrines and temples once covered its windy promontory, lighting up the skies with innumerable natural fires; for Baku sits on one of the largest oilfields in the Middle East. The earth here is saturated with black naphtha and natural gas. In ancient times it would have oozed up under the feet of its inhabitants. At times it would have irrupted spontaneously out of vents in the earth and ignited to create spectacular fountains of perpetual fire: a marvellous sight for anyone approaching Baku by sea!

For most of its history, Azerbaijan - or Odlar Yourdu, “The Land of Fire” - lay within the cultural influence of Persia. And it is to Persia with its Zoroastrian past that most historians look when attempting to decipher the function of the Maiden’s Tower.

Some Iranian historians, like Bastani Parisi, believe it to have been a temple to the goddess Anahita, the virgin deity presiding over waters and fertility. She was the “fiery maiden” of the legends. A deep well within the tower, cut twenty feet into the rock, still yields water today. The tower could have been built to announce and celebrate the well’s holy presence.

Far more colourful is the interpretation of Professor Davud Akhundov, an expert on the architecture of Caucasian Albania, and a native of Baku. He dates the tower back all the way to the 6th century BC. For him it was a magnificent towered sanctuary dedicated to the seven Zoroastrian “archangels” or Amesha Spentas. Each floor of the tower - he maintains - was once dedicated to a particular hypostasis of Ahura Mazda. Each possessed its own altar and its own uniquely-coloured holy fire. The fires were fed by currents of natural gas conducted to the altars via a 30 cms-wide pottery pipe, which can still be seen today by visitors to the tower. The gas kept the seven fires on the altars perpetually alight “in honour of the pantheon of Gods of Ahura Mazda”.

If the building was indeed a Zoroastrian temple, however, it is unlike any that we know. Gas-fed altars of the sort described by Dr. Akhundov are certainly known to have existed. But the little that we know of early Zoroastrian agiaries suggests that they were invariably rectangular in plan, and not circular. In addition, a more conventional fire altar (called by Akhundov “the temple of fire in the water”) has recently been discovered at the foot of the Maiden’s Tower near the water’s edge. If this smaller structure was the real temple, then what could have been the function of the tower behind it?

Other historians attempt to distance themselves from Dr. Akhunov’s evident romanticism, but their own interpretations are no less colourful. V. Aleksperov and Gala Akhmadov believe the Tower to have been a Zoroastrian observatory, with each of its nine windows angled to a particular heavenly body. The ancient Persians, after all, were famous for their knowledge of Astrology.

A more sober explanation is given M. Nabiyev who sees the structure as a mausoleum. Zoroastrian burial customs required that corpses be exposed on circular, well-shaped, stone structures called Dakhmas (or “Towers of Silence”). To bury bodies in the ground dishonoured the earth, which was sacred to Zoroastrians. The proponents of this theory explain the Tower’s curious tail-like projection as an “astadan”: a place where the bones of priests and important Zoroastrians were kept for posterity, the bones of lesser mortals being gathered into the dakhma’s central “well”.

No-one, it must be admitted, really knows anything for certain about the Gyz Galasy. The only sure facts are that it is a building of very great antiquity, constructed either by the indigenous Albanian peoples, or by priests of the Zoroastrians faith. In the 12th century AD it was repaired and incorporated into the city walls as part of Baku’s defences. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it became a lighthouse. Its light was finally extinguished in 1858; and the tower was opened to the public in 1964 as a museum.

Today, this most famous landmark in Baku draws thousand upon thousands of visitors. Many of them come from Iran, tourists hard on the trail of their nation’s cultural history. In the year 2000 when a mighty earthquake rocked the centre of Baku, the Maiden’s Tower emerged untouched, her head raised proudly above the rubble of more modern buildings that had succumbed.

This remarkable monument it seems, is likely to remain standing on its rock for many more centuries to come, igniting the passions and lighting up the imaginations of all who gaze upon it.

© Ryszard Antolak

The Precious Stone

2005-08-01T16:19:00.000+01:00

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One day, a wise old woman was out walking in the wilds when she happened to find a precious stone lying in a mountain stream. She was overjoyed at her find, picked it up immediately and placed it safely in her knapsack.

On her way home, she met a young traveller who had been wandering for some time, tired and hungry. The wise old woman opened her bag to share her food with him. But the young man saw the precious jewel in the woman’s knapsack and begged her to give it to him. To his great delight, the old woman did so without a moment’s hesitation.

The young traveller left, rejoicing at his good fortune. He knew the stone was immensely valuable and would provide him with financial security for the rest of his life. All his dreams would be fulfilled!

But a few days later he came back and returned the stone to the old woman.
"I''ve been thinking," he said, "I know how valuable the stone is, but I give it back to you in the hope that you can give me something even more valuable.”
“And what is that?” asked the old woman .
“Give me the thing within you that enabled you to give me the stone. That is what I really want."

© Ryszard Antolak

The Image of Helen

2005-07-31T17:24:00.000+01:00

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I''ve just watched the film "Troy". The Gods were absent from the story. And Helen was an unsympathetic character. I was diasappointed. But perhaps I was missing something important.

I remembered references in old texts to Helen (over whom the heroes fought at Troy) not being a real woman at all but an "eidolon", an image of the Goddess Artemis. Homer confirms this and also calls her a "phantom" (eidolon).

This may explain Helen''s enigmatic character. She is the most inscrutable, possibly the most plastic and inhuman of the women in Greek mythology. We never really gain a glimpse into her character, what she really felt and thought (if she thought at all).

She is the image (as Homer calls her) of Beauty and, as such, reperesents the potent power of images over reality. In the Greek legends she seems to have no self-will at all; she goes where she is taken and is adored by everyone. The heroes fought over her for ten years but none of them, though they tried, ever accused her of duplicity. When Menelaus finally regained her for the Greeks (and city of Troy burned around him), he raises his bloody sword to kill her (as punnishment for the ten year Trojan War). Her only reaction is to unclasp her tunic and let it fall, revealing her feminine, perfumed breasts. Immediately, Menelaus puts down his sword and all resistance to her falls away. She is adored and feted once again.

An image cannot be destroyed, it can only be forgotten. The image of beauty and perfection is so alluring, so enchanting, that it is impossible to live without it, even while it destroys the lover.

Today, Helen has won over the heroes. The image is multiplied in every magazine and newspaper, in every television set and billboarding. Today, life without this dangerous Helen is unthinkable. More than ever we are living in an Hellenistic world.

© Ryszard Antolak

The Morrigan

2005-07-28T18:53:00.000+01:00

The ravens descended on us this morning at first light. Sudden, precise and without warning, they unleashed their concerted attack with ruthless efficiency. I was still in my bed, but hearing the shrieks and panic among my nesting blackbirds, I guessed immediately what was happening and rushed out into the garden as fast as I could. Dressed only in my pyjamas, I clapped and shoo-ed and waved long clothes-poles at them, but they only jeered at me from the top of the old apple tree before making off, triumphantly with long deliberate wing flaps, into the distant woods.

I was too late: they had done their bloody business. Both nests were completely cleaned out. One of the naked chicks lay on the ground below the nest box I had constructed just months earlier. His neck was broken, and one tiny leg was pathetically raised in a futile gesture of defensiveness. I wrapped him in a red-coloured cloth and buried him solemnly in the corner of the garden beside others of his kind. His parents, shocked and still complaining bitterly, examined their nests two or three times flying in and out, confused. I felt for them. They sat for a time on the garden shed together (all four of them, each pair a little apart from the other), allowing the reality of what had happened to fully sink in. Then they disappeared into the low undergrowth to mourn their loss. They did not return all day.

I hate the ravens with a mighty passion. In early Celtic poetry, ravens were believed to be in the service of the Underworld; and anyone who has ever seen them arriving to devour a carcase will understand something of the reason for this belief. They arrive as if by some unseen signal, gliding effortlessly to the place of the kill. Their presence seems almost inevitable: a force of Nature; messengers from Hades arriving to claim a new subject for their dim domain. The mere presence of blood was once thought to attract them and it was commonly believed that they knew in advance where any battle was about to take place:
“The raven knows the place, but not the time.”
The eagle knows the time, but not the place"

The personification of the raven that devoured the bodies of the fallen warriors on the fields of battle was Morrigan (pronounced Mo-reg-ghan), the Irish goddess of war and Queen of demons. In an eighth century Ulster tale she is described as arriving on the battlefield before the warriors in the shape of a giant raven and shrieking with joy at the thought of the inevitable carnage. I know that shriek well. Together with her two hideous sisters, Badb (scald crow) and Nemain (panic), she was said to inhabit a dim cave in Connacht from where she often let loose a flock of pestilential birds to wither the land with their breath, or a herd of boars to trample down the crops.

In addition to her usual form as a bloody raven, however, the Morrigan could with equal ease transform herself into a beautiful maiden or an ugly one-eyed hag. An old Celtic tale tells how she once fell in love with the Ulster hero CuChulainn. She appeared to him as a young noblewoman, offering herself to him along with all her cattle and riches. But CuChulainn had no time for her and spurned her in a rather vulgar manner. Angry and revengeful, the Morrigan plagued him for the rest of’ his life .It was she and her two sisters, in the form of three old crones, who tricked him into eating dog-meat hence bringing about his death. (Dog-meat was “geis” for CuChulain, a prohibited thing; his own name derived from the word for dog, and therefore consumption of that animal meant for him his certain death).

Morrigan entered the Arthurian legends as Morgan le Fay, the sorceress and arch-enemy of Arthur. After a lifetime of plotting and scheming to bring about his downfall, it is she, as Goddess of Death who finally claims his bleeding body on the battlefield of Camlann and carries it in triumph to the other world of Avalon. In a sense, she is the end that awaits all heroes and villains (and all of us, too); the embodiment of dissipation , death and decline into old age.

I hate all ravens with a burning passion.

© Ryszard Antolak

Artistic Unconsciousness

2005-07-28T10:14:00.000+01:00

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Many of my friends who are (Jungian) psychologists have told me over and over again that the goal of human development is simply consciousness. And that the more consciousness we have, the better.

I have never agreed with them. Consciousness is a wonderful human quality, one I wouldn''t want to be without. But I don''t want to be conscious all the time: that would be like being in a straight-jacket. I want periods of unconsciousness. I want periods of sleep, periods of stupidity, of forgetfulness, times when I can lay consciousness aside or, perhaps, even go beyond it.

I am a pianist in my spare time. Every pianist knows that in order to play Chopin properly you cannot be conscious all the time of where you are placing your fingers. If you were, it would be impossible to play with any passion or depth (or even speed). When I am learning to play a new piece I rely upon consciousness to tell me where to put my fingers, but once I know (and can remember) I leave that consciousness behind and launch off into other spheres. It is only then that any real creative (or re-creative) Art begins: once I have taken that intuitive jump into the abyss. I have to trust that my fingers can play on their own (and they do!!, something which always amazes me).

In the same way, I don''t have time to be conscious all the time of digesting my food, circulating my blood, secreting hormones, keeping my temperature steady etc, etc. I have other things to do with my time. I leave all that to the "internal robots" within me.

I want to be able use consciousness as a tool, not to be imprisoned by it

© Ryszard Antolak

Poetry of Light

2005-07-27T21:56:00.000+01:00

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Light is probably the greatest metaphor and symbol that we have. Our religions in particular, are saturated with the poetry of light symbolism.

We need only think of the images of the divine light in Zoroastrianism (which significantly influenced all three Abrahamic religions): the sacred fires, the so-called ‘fire-temples’, the aureoles, the Mountain of the Dawns, the Peak of Judgement, the Auroral fires, the Chinvat Bridge - the symbolism can easily become heady, the imagery intoxicating. Reason begins to lose its foothold here. But to remove such poetic elements at the heart of any philosophy or religion is to rip out its heart and corrupt its truth. For religions, as well as philosophies, live and breathe by the quality of their poetry: by their ability to set hearts alight and not just heads. Sometimes it can be more instructive to follow the images of thought to where they lead us, rather than rush immediately to dissect with the intellect.

So many traditions bear witness to the experience of the divine light that it is impossible to indicate even a tiny representative sample here. It is the fire of the Burning Bush seen by Moses; the pillar of fire before the Israelites in the desert. It is the Kibriya. It is the tongues of fire revealed to the apostles of Christ at Pentecost; and the light of the Transfiguration glimpsed by them on Mount Tabor. The Manicheans, blinded by its beauty, looked in disgust at the material world that had become dark and dead for them in contrast. Rumi wrote eloquently in praise of it, but at first he was terrified of its illumination:
“I lost my world, my fame, my mind
The sun appeared and all the shadows ran
I ran after them but vanished as I ran
Light ran after me and hunted me down”
The Islamic philosopher who borrowed more elements from Zoroastrianism than any other was probably Suhrawardi. For him the universe was an infinite sea of lights: nothing existed that was not light.

All truly great symbols overflow the boundaries of meaning and invade the world of the senses. Light (perhaps the greatest religious symbol of them all) is no exception. Many of the early Christian saints such as Gregory Nazianzen, Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus, Macarius of Egypt, Andrew of Crete, John Damascene, Symeon the New Theologian, Euthymius Zigabenus, etc., all spoke of the Divine Light as if they had seen it with their bodily eyes. For if the intensity of the light is in some way a ‘measure’ of ‘wholeness’ (holiness) some argued, then surely it should be experienced by the ‘whole (or holy) man’ and be perceptible to the physical senses as well as to the intelligence. “I had often [bodily] seen the light”, wrote Symeon the New Theologian in the eleventh century in defence of this position - and we have to believe him. But the dispute as to whether the light could in fact be seen with the bodily eyes split the Christian Orthodox Church in the Middle Ages. Gregory Palamas (the Byzantine ‘apostle of light’) healed the rift in the fourteenth century with a series of compromises, but he still remained tantalizingly ambiguous on the subject:
“The light has sometimes also been seen by the eyes of the body,
but not with their created and sensory power; for they see it
after having been transformed by the spirit…”

Yet the basic intuition of a synchronism between the spiritual and the sensual light continued to be felt and expressed. Writers like Rumi and Ibn Arabi conceived of the spiritual and the sensual as ‘conspiring together’ in some mysterious and irrational fashion. And Suhrawardi, when defining his fifteen varieties of spiritual light, seemed often to be describing what are known today as ‘photisms’: intense flashes before the eyes sometimes experienced by people who practice meditation. Varying in intensity from pinpoints to large areas of bright and coloured lights, these photisms have been experienced by far too many people for them to be easily dismissed. Individuals as varied as Ibn al-Arabi and Emanuel Swedenborg have investigated them, (the latter thinker believing them to be internal ‘signs of approval’).

Images of the afterworld, of Heaven, are primarily places of intense light. Christianity and Islam derived their ideas of heaven from Zoroastrianism which itself looked forward to a gradual “enlightenment”, and not to a sudden entry into the domain of uncreated light. That progress towards enlightenment (Frashkart) was bound up with an ‘incandescence of the inward layers of beings’ - a process by which the world would slowly begin to lose its opacity, without ever losing its concreteness, somewhat in the way that a person with a face and a name becomes discernible to the mind from a mass of physical details. This light from within would gradually reveal a universe that was at once familiar and yet intensely personal, imbued with meaning and beckoning with wonder like the atmosphere of a fairy tale.

The light would also reveal and expose the inner condition of every individual soul: and that revelation could be painfully shocking. The tension between what the individual could have become, and what he had (in fact) become during the course of his life, would constitute (in part) his personal ‘reward’ or ‘punishment’ (there is no “Last Judgement” as such in Zoroastriansm). He would see ‘in a new light’ his own child-soul which he had nurtured (or maltreated) in the course of his life coming to greet him (in person) on the Chinvat Bridge, the ‘bridge of destiny”.

Is the divine light then purely intellectual; is it spiritual, physical, psychological; or all four? In the end, the real nature of this light defies all attempts to grasp its full significance, because you cannot demonstrate that which is itself the cause of all demonstration.

© Ryszard Antolak

Thirst

2005-07-26T07:23:00.000+01:00

There was once a Persian mystic (I forget his name) who lowered his bucket into a well to pull up water to drink. He hauled up his bucket and found it was filled with gold. So he emptied it, lowered the bucket again and drew it up. This time it was filled with silver. He emptied it. “I know you’re full of treasures,” he said, “but for God’s sake, just give me some water to drink. I’m thirsty!” He lowered the bucket again, and brought up water, and he drank.

This is how the Word should be – without ornament.

Meetings with myself

2005-07-25T13:52:00.000+01:00

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Lately, I have taken to wandering the woods in all weathers, a shrouded and unrecognizable figure clutching a walking-stick, my head concealed in a thick padded hood. No-one sees me: everyone is snug and warm at home. The rain lashes at my back, the wind shoves me from the path. But once I reach the shelter of the deep woods I am counted among the trees who recognize me as their own: one who does not grow parallel to the earth like four-legged beasts but stands up tall (as they do) reaching for the sky. I draw back my hood, breathe in the cinnamon of pines and feel instantly at home. We are old friends, they and I.

Following no path, I walk aimlessly, searching the wet bushes and bright puddles for fragments of a lost self. I find them in the twisted limbs of particular trees, in the fevers of red and green lichens on dry-stane dykes, in the brilliant carpet of bluebells that flash in the forest on either side.

As we mature, the world of our senses becomes increasingly invaded by the intellect. Everything we do becomes mixed with intellection. Sense experience loses its immediacy and its innocence. Even biological acts become clouded by social models, by self-consciousness. So our meetings with nature become all the more rewarding: because there is no profit and loss between us, only a pure immediacy.

Going for a walk (or a holiday) alone is not always a retreat into a private, lonely world. It is not a flight from reality. On the contrary, it can be a journey into the very heart of things, the greatest journey it is possible to make. We can rediscover that we are not separate, self-contained units, but that we grow out of everything and that this “everything” caused us to be. We are not placed into the world like an object among other objects, solely obeying Newton''s laws of physics. Rather, we are born out of our environment so everything “out there” is also a part of me “in here”. We are meeting elements of ourselves with which we are unacquainted, entering into the real, immediate world of the greater Self.

Painting: Bardia Haddadi
© Ryszard Antolak

I hug therefore I am

2005-07-19T06:17:00.000+01:00

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I have always been drawn to those who are dangerous in some way, those who love too passionately, who think (and act) too radically, whose imaginations are easily heated to incandescence, who warn me from start of their intensity of emotion.

I should not complain, therefore, when I get burned and lose everything. We need to experience the “Grand Passions” and live life at white-hot heat to feel we are truly alive. Any Love worthy of the name should utterly destroy us so we can be reassembled again in a totally new way. We need to be incinerated by love to become fully human. I am alive, therefore I bleed and hurt. I am human therefore I weep.

But what I value more than the “grand passions” is a subtler form of Love which, in its tenderness and vulnerability, is paradoxically stronger than passion. I hesitate to call it “tenderness” because that word has other implications, but I have no other term large and clean enough to describe it. Physical consummation is no more than a crude metaphor for this love. It is expressed in the gentle touch of hands, in a heartfelt hug, even sometimes in something as simple as a button sewn on to a lover’s shirt. It flows from weaknesses, from those parts in us that are most vulnerable and undefended, those places of least resistance which, I suppose, we have to call the “soul”.

Threatened with imminent death, the men and women trapped in the World Trade Centre on 9/11 did not spend their precious last moments in an orgy of self-gratification: frantic sex in back corridors. They sent simple phone messages to their closest ones telling them how much they were loved and valued. From what we know, friends and strangers alike hugged one another, held one another tenderly, loved one another chastely and then jumped to their deaths from the windows, their hands clasped together in loving tenderness, their only response to abject fear.

I hug, therefore I am.

Milosz wrote: “Perhaps the only things that are worthwhile [in Poetry, in Art, in Life] are those which preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with imminent death”.

I think he was probably right.

© Ryszard Antolak

In praise of Cursing

2005-07-18T23:06:00.000+01:00

Sticks and stones can break my bones
But names will never hurt me

It isn’t true, of course. Words can hurt as much as stones, and cut more cleanly and directly than any knife. Words are real: they have force and power. The function of language is not just to convey information, it has interactional and relationship functions as well. One of these is as a weapon of personal destruction. To ritually curse someone is to do him real damage, sometimes seriously affecting his health.

In Celtic societies, one of the functions of a bard (poet) was to go before the body of the army and ritually curse the advancing enemy. (I suppose the Media performs this function today: softening up the image of the opponent). Before any physical fighting could begin, opposing bards held cursing contests on the field of. Battle. Prizes were even given. There was a real art to this cursing, one which has been lost over the centuries. Robert Graves mentions that the curse from an Irish Ollave (a kind of superior Bard) was real enough to induce blisters on the skin of his victims.

In Anglo-Saxon cultures, curses (and foul language) were mostly sexual in nature, perhaps reflecting the fear that rape or physical violation held for members of these societies. But in Eastern Europe they tended to be medical: diseases were “called down” or “wished upon” the bodies of victims. Cholera was a common curse, one which is still in use today.

Strangely, however, in antiquity the Greek word for “accursed” (anathema) originally meant something holy, or consecrated. Gifts to gods were described as anathemata i.e., objects (or people) intended for the gods, for sacrifice, and hence not for everyday use. Even in the Gospel of Luke, it still possessed this meaning. Only much later did the word “accursed” acquire the meaning it has today.

But words have power not only to hurt, but also to caress. A year before he died of consumption in Paris, the composer Fryderyk Chopin wrote to his friend Grzymala: “I have never in my life cursed anyone. But things now are so unbearable, that it seems to me that I might feel better if I could bring myself to curse Lukrezia”.

By “Lukrezia”. he was referring, of course, to his ex-mistress of nine years (George Sand) whose memory still obsessed and tortured him with bitterness. He would have liked to have let off steam by cursing her but his upbringing forbade him. And it was while reading Chopin’s letters that I began to realize for the first time the potential benefits cursing can have.

I have to put up my hand and admit that, like Chopin, I have never been able to curse anyone: a fact which infuriates those with whom I quarrel. They tell me that my ineptitude is a provocation that makes them curse all the more violently and vociferously.

In the Siberia Gulag (at least during the war) inmates regularly cursed one another, (their family, mother, family) as a term of great endearment. It was done with love (and often with tears in their eyes): a human safety valve. It served as an antidote to the bitterness and desperation of the inmates’ hopeless predicament.

The older I become the more I believe I have missed out on something here. I feel I could benefit from the therapeutic benefits of the occasional, well-aimed curse. But like Chopin, I’m afraid I’m too old now to change.

Trees I have loved (and lost)

2005-07-17T22:20:00.000+01:00

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Ancient and mysterious even to botanists, the baobab exudes not only antiquity but also nobility. It would never be seen dead among the sausage trees and acacias that grow on the African savannah. It prefers the rarified atmosphere of mountain slopes and places that have exclusive views of prime real estate. It is undemonstrative, long-lived and ponderous with a vegetable wisdom derived from its millennia of experiences. A mature tree can remember back to the first stirrings of human civilization (if it wanted to remember, that is).

Like a tree pulled up out of the earth and planted upside-down, the baobab has so few leaves to sustain it that it seems scarcely alive. If the sequoia of California lords over other trees on account of its great height, the baobab proclaims its superiority by means of its girth. For this tree is not so much interested in producing branches and leaves as in producing trunk. It rejoices in wood. It is the thick, silent, hard man of the Tanzanian hills.

To anyone approaching it, the baobab seems more mineral than vegetable. You are confronted by a massive wall (branchless, twigless, smooth and mossless), like the rampart of a castle holding within it some fabled and promised treasure. Our hands are irresistibly drawn to its stony surface as we feel along it for an hour or so searching for a concealed entrance. But the heart of this living monument is too well guarded. We give up and return to the landrover.

Perhaps he has no heart, we wonder. Or perhaps he’s just afraid of intimacy, afraid to open up: is content to live his life alone behind the impenetrable defences he has built up around himself. I know many others with the same attitude. The world is a dangerous place; never give your heart; sit tight and turn your attentions inwards. Make wood.

© Ryszard Antolak

Faces and Haloes

2005-06-24T18:34:00.000+01:00

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I was sitting in a restaurant yesterday watching a young mother interacting with her new-born baby. They were smiling at one another and gazing into each others eyes in a way people seldom do. Mutual gazing and smiling between mother and child is very common. Two people never gaze into one another''s eyes with such intensity again until they come to fall in love.

Mother and child spend a lot of time gazing into each other''s faces. The face is where we are most individual, most personal. We look through the face to the soul, to the imaginal, qualitative world.

It got me thinking.......

Most of us are able to experience a human being in one of two ways: as an object (a collection of tissues, chemical processes and electrical impulses) or as a person (an indivisible whole with a face and a name). Once an object is perceived as a person, a mysterious new dimension opens up: we recognize something that exists on a higher level than mere sensory perception. We respond to the infinite within the finite. To recognize a person when all we have before us is a mass of physical characteristics - hair, teeth, tissues - is to perceive that object qualitatively, i.e., to see it in a new light (the light which early Persian Philosophers called the "xvarnah").

We take for granted our remarkable ability to perceive persons: we hardly give it a second thought. Its sheer wonder becomes clear only once we experience someone who possesses no such intuition: the classic autistic person. Broadly speaking, the severely autistic individual can be described as being trapped in a world of physical matter and strict reasoning. He finds it difficult to communicate, to imagine or to deal with other people socially. Although good at learning complex rules, he is nevertheless incapable of reacting sympathetically to others because he can never imagine what anyone else is thinking: he has no concept of mind. The whole interior (infinite) world of the person as person is unknown to him. His relationships are directed chiefly towards objects: which is how he perceives other people -- as objects.

Science knows little of the person. The person (the uniqueness of the person) cannot be expressed in concepts at all. It evades all rational definitions because all the properties by which it could be characterized can be met with in other individuals. Personality can be grasped only by direct intuition. Similarly, a face - the symbol of the person - differs from all other faces in very minute details, barely describable in words. Yet to other human beings, the recognition of these features as a unique person goes far beyond what science can explain.

Once the internal world of another individual is revealed, by virtue of our recognition of him as a person (an object open to infinity), the whole world of human relations suddenly becomes possible: co-operation, intimacy, compassion, understanding, love..... civilization.

When we fall in love with another human being, we are seeing that individual as more than just a person. For a time, the image we have of him or her is complete (because illuminated strongly by the Light), whole, and hence (whole-ly) holy. That atmosphere of wonder and colour that suddenly surrounds the object of our attentions (when coincidences abound, when the world suddenly becomes saturated with meaning and everything in creation revolves around this single human being), is a quality of the xvarnah. We are loving someone who does not (yet) exist.

The halo (the aureole, the nimbus) is one of the great abiding icons of religious art. This is the light which in Zarathushtrian as well as in Christian and Buddhist iconography, is to be found glowing about the heads of great kings, priests or holy men. Each of us has set at least one halo ablaze in the course of our lives. When we fall in love, it is as if we have lit up the beloved''s halo. Perceiving their dimension of transcendence, we recognize the divine in them. For what is a halo but a human being lit up with the light of great love, value, or destiny? A lover does not love the physical body of his beloved at all, but the ideal image of her, the angel to whom she corresponds. Of course he does love her body also, but for the sake of her person: because it belongs to her and manifests her reality. That physical body can be old as a grandmother, sick, diseased, (barely recognizable as a human being), punctured by tubes and plugged into monitors, but still loved and adored for the person within it.

© Ryszard Antolak

Terrorism in Perspective

2005-06-24T18:25:00.000+01:00

The verbal build-up for some kind of action against Iran is well underway. The wires are already buzzing. The US government has repeated its pledge to “get all those who are terrorists and all those who harbour them". And Iran seems to be the next in line.

1) Here is the FBI''s own definition of terrorism:
"Terrorism is the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."

So what the US government proposes to do in Iran, if it effects regime change (or just invades without a UN resolution) is commit an act (or acts) of terrorism.

2) If the USA government was really serious about its pledge to "get all those who are terrorists and all those who harbour them", then it''s curious that it hasn''t acted in its own back yard yet. Orlando Bosch admits to bombing a civilian Cuban airlines flight, killing 73 innocent people, yet he lives perfectly free in the US - which refuses to extradite him to Cuba or any other country. The US is also harboring the terrorist Emannuel Constant, who slaughtered 4,000 innocent Haitians, and refuses to extradite him to Haiti for trial.

So the USA is, by its own definition, a state which harbours terrorists.

3) The U.S. government itself has broken international law and the Geneva Convention many times with its use of force and violence against persons and property, to intimidate and coerce governments, civilian populations, and many segments thereof, in furtherance of political, social and especially economic objectives.

So is the USA a terrorist state, (one which also harbours terrorists) or does the FBI''s own definition of terrorism apply only to countries other than the US and its client states/allies?

© Ryszard Antolak

Watering the fruit trees

2005-04-20T07:13:00.000+01:00

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Every newspaper I pick up today seems to have something in it about Freedom: freedom of choice, freedom for Iraqis, freedom of religion, freedom to roam.....Yet, for me, the extent to which any individual can be "free" (whatever that might mean: freedom from?.....freedom to..?.) is vastly exaggerated. And anyway, I would never wish for complete freedom.

Even though we feel ourselves to be masters of ourselves, in control of our own destinies, close examination teaches us otherwise. Anyone who has ever practiced meditation for even a short time realizes just how little control he really has over his thoughts. Images and thoughts just seem to form and bloom without any conscious intervention. It is extremely difficult (for example) to hold a single image or intention for more than a minute or two. Our thoughts are not felt to be our own, they seem to possess a life of their own. Most of them (other than those heavily deliberated) reflect the background of our inner desires and feelings. (Desires and passions are the engines of our inner lives, operating fairly independently of our conscious selves). But Man is neither a free agent nor a puppet, for both views presuppose a separation of the individual from his environment.

In Homer, the whole concept of freedom is very heavily circumscribed. In short, human beings cannot be blamed or praised for their actions because the origins of these actions lie with the gods. Whenever their lives were set in motion, stirred to life by emotion, desire, reflection, anger, the Homeric hero knew that a god was at work in him. No-one, not even old Priam, accuses Helen of guilt. "To me,” he says, "you are not the cause, only the gods can be causes.”

Homeric heroes were simply not responsible for their actions. It was the gods who led them on to disaster, ruin, death, wealth: humans were merely swept up in the great movement of Life, a life greater than themselves. The actions of human beings were considered mediocre. Greatness, grief, ( in a word, life,) only really happened when the gods entered into a man. As Sophocles put it : "Mortal life can have nothing grandiose about it except through divine infatuation." With every heightening intensity of his life, the Homeric hero came within the domain of one god or another (with that god''s alliances and feuds with other gods). Life took place simultaneously on two planes, the plane of the gods and the plane of men.

In addition, Homer did not distinguish between the evil of the mind and the evil of the deed. The guilty party could be as much a victim as the assumed victim. So the Homeric hero lived freed from the monsters of shame, revenge, guilt and depression because although possessed periodically by these emotions, he did not associate their cause as coming from within himself. Guilt however, could take on a life of its own, become almost palpable, binding and loosing and moving ever onwards.

The idea that man is a totally free agent, able make real choices in the world, filtered into the West mainly from Zoroastrian philosophy. At its most basic, our freedom (such of it as exists) was believed to lie almost entirely in the choice of which emotional currents to follow; which images and appetites to cultivate in our minds; which thoughts to react to, which to let go. That was where the "battle" for individual freedom was really fought, in the heart.

“ …Water the fruit trees and don’t water the thorns.
Be generous to what matures the spirit and the divine luminous Reason-light. Don’t honour what causes dysentery and knotted-up tumors”.

It may seem like common sense, but we all know that human beings are perfectly adapted for deceiving themselves. It is remarkable how easily we all find credible ‘reasons’ for watering those thorny lusts and greeds of our secret internal lives.

Text: Ryszard Antolak
Painting: Gita Norouzian

The Almond Tree

2004-11-30T18:03:00.000Z

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"I said to the almond tree:
"Sister, speak to me of God"
And the almond tree blossomed.

Angelos Sikelianos.

Poetry in Time of War

2004-11-26T13:31:00.000Z

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"Poetry is irrelevant in times of war. It becomes valuable only after the killing has stopped". I heard this on my radio this morning as I was having breakfast. The words were from a leading Oxford academic being interviewed about the bombing in Iraq. For a moment I nodded my head in agreement with him without really thinking. Yes, I said to myself, a real wasteland is far more terrible than any of the descriptions of the imaginary wastelands within a poet's soul to which we've become accustomed to hearing over past 50 years or so.....

But then I suddenly put down my coffee. I remembered stories of the one and a half million Poles carted off to Siberia by the Soviets in cattle trucks in Feb 1940. They had recited excerpts from Mickiewicz's "Pan Tadeusz" (their unofficial national epic) during the journey to their freezing deaths. I remembered how Jews and Christians alike had recited passages from the Psalms (and even the Song of Solomon) as they were forced to dig their own mass graves before execution. I remembered how, more recently, Iranian friends had told me of informal "Rumi-thons" they had heard performed among political prisoners in Turkish and Iranian prisons. Perhaps, I thought, war-time was the ultimate test of real poetry, separating it from verse which merely posed as poetry (elegant words, clever verbal craftsmanship). Perhaps real poetry was that which acted as an antidote to feelings of mortality and despair.

The Nobel prize-winner, Czeslaw Milosz once wrote: "Probably the only things are worthwhile [in poetry, in art] which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with imminent death". I think this is a good test of genuine poetry, and I wish it wasn't, (because I dislike Milosz as a man, and wish I didn't have to use his definition). It is certainly better than Graves's though (poetry is verse which causes the hair on the back of the neck to stand up etc), which seems frivolous somehow in comparison.

Rumi wrote:
"In the driest, whitest stretch
of pain's infinite desert,
I lost my sanity
and found this rose"

Perhaps this verse applies equally to the finding of genuine life-enhancing
poetry in the time of terror, or total war.

Dark Poetry of Bush, Blair & Frederico Garcia Lorca

2004-11-26T09:57:00.000Z

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I listened to the British Prime Minister Tony Blair yesterday on television. Public opinion in Europe is heavily against his policy in Iraq, so he needed to win back the doubters. He was asking us all to remember the thoughts we had as the planes smashed into the World Trade Centre on September 11. So I cast my mind back for a few moments to those frantic pictureswe had seen on the screen some years earlier. What I discovered was something unexpected: a shameful and guilty memory of which I'd been totally unaware.

Let me explain. In the days prior to September 11, I had been reading the works of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. His book of poetry, "Poet in New York", had been a violent response to the New York he encountered while a student at Columbia University in 1929 and 1930. Lorca was passionate in his dislike for the city: its brutality, loneliness, poverty, inequalities and insane pride had all disturbed him. Abandoning his usual lyrical style, Lorca's reaction was a series of experimental poems expressing, in no uncertain terms, his tortured feelings of dislocation from his beloved Andalusia, and his hatred of the city in which he now found himself:

"I denounce everyone....,
the half who can't be redeemed,
who lift their mountains of cement
where hearts beatinside forgotten animals;
and where all of us will fall
in the last feast of pneumatic drills.
I spit in all your faces...
I denounce the conspiracyof those deserted offices
that radiate no ecstasy,that erase the plans of the forest...."

In part, the poet's bitterness and hostility were due to his own sense of loneliness and distance from his family in Spain. So in truth, the city he railed against could easily have been any large metropolis in North America, not just New York. Lorca was especially incensed by what he saw as the "loss of soul" this heartless city had engendered in its population, and its worship ofprofit and greed. Lorca was nothing if not passionate! His reaction was violent, his images - those of destruction and apocalyptic revenge. Nothing could satisfy his mind but an image of the destruction of New York, that symbol (he believed) of all that was wrong with the modern world:

"..scream in front of the domes!
scream as if all the nights converged!
scream with such a heart-rending voice
that the cities tremble like little girls
and knock down the prisons of oil and music.
Because we demand our daily bread
alder in bloom, and perennially-harvested tenderness.
Because we demand that earth's will be done,
that its fruits be offered to everyone..."
(Call from the Tower of the Chrysler Building)

These were the kinds of poems I was reading in the days prior to September 11. As I watched the planes penetrating the World Trade Centre a day later, I confess that for a moment (a spit-second), something ran in me like intoxication. I was feeling exhilarated. Inexplicably, it seemed as if some great weight had been removed from my neck, relieving me, freeing me! In that brief moment, I felt that the World Trade Centre had been destroyed because of its pride, its arrogance and its usury. It was a modern-day Tower of Babel (two towers even, surpassing the original!) destroyed by the hand of God! I was complicit in its destruction. Was I excited? I confess: I think I was! A line from Lorca even echoed in my mind (I may even have whispered it):
"Oh savage, shameless, North America!"

The whole experience lasted only a moment (a millisecond even); though it seems longer in retrospect. I quickly came to my senses: became conscious of the reality - the twisted metal, the carnage, couples jumping from windows (hands clasped together in a confused amalgam of love and fear). What had I done! I felt ashamed and uneasy with myself. For a little while, I tried to rationalize my feelings: I tried to blame the poetry of Lorca for seducing me with its images and lyrics, (because I had never been to New York; it was a mythical city for me).

But it was not the poetry; it was not Lorca. It was something in me (perhaps something in all of us) that rejoices when great catastrophes occur: some demonic, inhuman joy takes possession of us then turning us into a tangle of primitive, mindless, nerve reactions. When Fire, Deluge, Death strike on so grand a scale we feel ourselves to be demons too, working alongside them, toiling to relieve the earth of its houses and its populations, its cities and its technologies, seeking to restore the earth once more to its original, pristine purity; erasing all trace for ever of man and his works. I suspect that even the gentle Basho may have had somesuch similar thought when he wrote:
"When the house is burned down
You own a better viewOf the rising moon"

So now, when George W. Bush speaks of a war against Terrorism, I know he is talking about me: a war against the wild, scarred, mountainous, barren areas of my soul that cannot be bombed by "daisy-cutter bombs" or infiltrated with coalition Special Forces. It is a war I can only declare on myself. I know that the war against terrorism begins exactly here at home (in the heart) and not in some distant country about which we know nothing but stories and poetry. But I suspect that the rhetoric to continue the killing in Iraq is a similar, persuasive kind of Dark Poetry that appeals to a wide swathe of the American mid-west.

© Ryszard Antolak