WITOLD GOMBROWICZ
Museums and books as cemeteries
PREFACE
Lilia
responded the other day to a beautiful black/white photo from Venice which I
had put on Facebook of her (age 18) feeding pigeons in San Marco when we had
left Sofia in April of 1968, “I remember being happy to leave Bulgaria but the
black and white photograph makes me seem like I am dead…”
-SEVEN-
Yale University
Press by reprinting in a beautiful fat paperback an up-dated complete edition
of the Diaries of WITOLD GOMBROWICZ has done a singular important, essential
and remarkable job. GOMBROWICZ in his
diaries contradicts, stands athwart the constant infantilizing of the
world. The Diaries remind us what it is
to think, beholding to no power other than the power contained in one human
individual brain, a brain that does not forget, that owes nothing to any cause
or any party or faction or group. Free
of the temptation of nostalgia in knowing that no time is better than any other
time, Gombrowicz is as is said, his own man, “We are not, I said, the direct
heirs of past greatness or insignificance, intelligence or stupidity, virtue or
sin and each person is responsible only for himself. Each is himself.”
No one reading
this blog is likely to be unfamiliar with WG’s writings… FERDURKE, PORNOGRAFIA…the plays THE MARRIAGE,
OPERETTA… and so much more. I have long
been taken with WG’s idea that when I talk to you and you talk to me I begin to
talk to the imagine that I have of you just as you begin to talk to the image I
have of you and gradually it is those two images, those two inventions are
talking and if one is able to step back one enjoys the comedy…
Here I think is a
perfect example from 1953 while he is living in Argentina of what I go to
Gombrowicz for:
I do not believe,
therefore, that death is man’s real problem or that an art that is entirely
permeated by it is completely authentic.
Our real issue is growing old, that aspect of death that we experience
daily. Perhaps not even growing old but
the fact that it is so completely, so terribly cut off from beauty. Our gradual dying does not disturb us, it is rather
that the beauty of life becomes inaccessible to us. At the cemetery I spotted a young boy walking
among the graves like a being from another world, mysteriously and abundantly blooming
while we looked like paupers. It struck
me, however, that I did not feel our helplessness as something categorically
inevitable.
And I liked this
feeling in myself at once. I hang onto
those thoughts and feeling that I like.
I am incapable of feeling or thinking anything that would compete
annihilate me. So that even here I
followed this line of thinking which, because it derived from me, created
hope. Was it really impossible to bind
old age to life and youth? That
artificiality, to which I am becoming more and more accustomed in man, that idee fixe, which grows so gradually and
so reluctantly in me, the thought that the terrifying concreteness of our form
is not the only possibility, makes the world supple. If at one time I had believed that everything
had already been said, today I am surrounded by endless combinations of ideas
and forms and everything around me becomes fertile (Here I would like to note
that I searched for a half hour for the sentence which will appear below
because , as always, I am trying to formulate a problem without knowing whether
a solution is possible and I did not really think the issue through at the
cemetery.)
According to me,
youth at the core of its spirit does not like its own beauty and defends itself
against it, and that distrust of its own beauty is more beautiful than beauty
itself and contains the only possibility of overcoming of the distance that
kills.”
-NINE-
I have been transferring
my little pencil markings from my battered hardcover editions of Gombrowicz’s
DIARY to this new edition to which have been added pages and the parts that were slashed in an now
mistaken effort to not give offense to the communist bosses in Poland.
-TWELVE-
Are Museums
cemeteries? The more I think about this
it becomes obvious beyond argument. I
was thinking of the Metropolitan in New York City, The National Gallery in London, add any of the
other big one… those large warehouses…
But then there are
The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum and
probably near you too some variety of a museum devoted to “modern” art. Also near you if you live in a large city is
the Medical Examiner’s Office or the Coroner’s office… truth to say I see
little real difference between these guys with their refrigerated shelving and
the frigid rooms people hurry through at MOMA for instance in New York .
Recently at the
Stein show in New York and one walks through rooms of Picasso and Matisse… and
then on to the part of the museum with the 19th century art that
seems not to be “impressionist”
One wishes to
lives another two hundred years and to discover that people then decide that Impressionism
was just another peculiar episode in the history of art, a history… and just
that word: history…
The large
international art museums, the Met, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre
seem to be always moving the paintings about:
paintings are not fixed to certain walls… of course in the Louvre due to
the size of certain paintings this is not the case but still even there
paintings move and then there are the constant temporary shows which seem
always unnecessary in this age of easy travel.
Why shouldn’t people be required to just go to museums to see works of
art rather than having museums mount these shows and show is the exact word…
like Broadway show, like the times for showing the movie…
Of course we will
hear of what a wonderful benefit it is to everyone to gather for a short period
of time many works by a certain artist… or even more curious a curator will
decided to stage an idea or a theme… and then gather from many collections…
Jacques Rigaut---
the discover of Lord Patchogue--- when he came to the US in the 1920 announced that he was a museum and preceded
to reveal the treasures that he carried in his pockets, stored for safe keeping
in match boxes… thus he established the pathetic uselessness of museums… these vast overcoats if only they knew---
rooms instead of pockets stuffed with art…
All museums seem
like supermarkets… but does one really have to go on?
The only movable
show I can approve of is when the Met
puts up its Baroque Christmas tree, for that season, there midst looted medieval
altar pieces… though I am going to the Met then to visit the memory of going
there with my children…
-FIFTEEN-
Picture
and word books about obscure places are always interesting, at least to
me. I have never exhausted the Salton
Sea, Tombstone, Patchogue, NY, northern Wisconsin and from Nebraska University
Press comes LIKE NO OTHER PLACE The Sandhills of Nebraska by David A.
Owen. Like many narratives of such
places, there is the accident of arriving, the meeting with people and then the
staying or the coming back… a modest book of a modest place--- twenty thousand
square miles out there somewhere in Nebraska but then everything is somewhere
out there when living in Manhattan, NYC.
The acknowledgments
go on for two pages which seems a little much for a book of 145 pages and when
I looked at the photographs… mostly pleasant snap shots of people met but who one can imagine are now aging and some
might be dead and others have the book put away somewhere not wanting to be
reminded or if reminded… that was when…
but the pictures of the emptiness of the land, a land devoid of
people and even of animals, black and
white, not posed, not shaped by some academic theory, modest, not done on
glossy paper: clouds and land with the absence
of trees. I would have been happy with
just that as Owen goes astray when he takes camera inside and shows us details
and in all those acknowledgements no a mention of Wright Morris who discovered
and showed us all what he found inside in Nebraska. But the last words from David A. Owen, “Once you
are in Ellsworth, you are almost immediately out of it and back
into the bush…”
Of course all places are like no other place.
