A turning here as the evil that men do mounts higher and higher, a turning, a detour to the narrow goat path up the mountain, the hard winding road to the summit. Milosz says Martin Luther who, when asked what he would do if the end of the world were tomorrow, answered that he would plant apple trees. Publius Ovidius, a poet, turns to the poetry of mankind. Turns to the arts of mankind. Turns to the best in mankind. An attempt to rise above daily concerns to engage with what Suzanne Cesaire calls the “Mahvelous.”
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On the New York Review of Books blog, Tony Judt writes about his experience reading Czeslaw Milosz's critique of intellectuals who are afraid to think for themselves:
For Milosz, “the man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.” This is doubtless so and explains the continuing skepticism of the East European in the face of Western innocence. But there is nothing innocent about Western (and Eastern) commentators’ voluntary servitude before the new pan-orthodoxy. Many of them, Ketman-like, know better but prefer not to raise their heads above the parapet. In this sense at least, they have something truly in common with the intellectuals of the Communist age. One hundred years after his birth, fifty-seven years after the publication of his seminal essay, Milosz’s indictment of the servile intellectual rings truer than ever: “his chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself.”
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http://sibila.com.br/english/a-conversation-with-czeslaw-milosz/3718
Daniel Bourne: In The Captive Mind you wrote: “The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless. Probably only those works are worthwhile which can preserve their validity even for a man threatened with instant death.” How did the lyric poetry and love songs you wrote during the Warsaw occupation meet these criteria?
Czeslaw Milosz: My quotation doesn’t mean, I hope, that I would like to see only topical peotry in such situations. I highly value poems that are strong enough to survive even when they are completely detached from the surrounding reality in poetic subject and tone. A very strong poem, a lyrical poem, draws its strength from its perfection and can withstand such a reality. Here I can quote from Simone Weil, who said that the highest test of a work would be to place it in the cell of a man confined to many years of solitary confinement; if the work were indeed of enduring value it would not lose its power of perfection over the years in that lonely cell. I might add, too, that a lyric poem can be a defiance thrown to the world of inhumanity. I wrote a long cycle of poems, entitled “The World,” which was such a defiance.
Jurek Polanski: Facing an occupation by the country of Goethe, Schiller, Heine and Beethoven–when Europe seemed to be committing cultural suicide–were there any convictions that you arrived at in order to sustain life and poetry, to uphold art rather than abandon it?
Milosz: If I’m not mistaken, in one of my books I quote Martin Luther who, when asked what he would do if the end of the world were tomorrow, answered that he would plant apple trees.
DB: That is, performing an act that is not necessarily logical but still necessary for survival?
Milosz: Yes, of course. I wrote under a kind of compulsion during the occupation.
DB: Do you have the sense that you might have taken on the burden of the writers who died during the war? The sense that as a survivor you’re somehow their voice, too?
Milosz: In a way. Of course, when the war began I was 28, and most of the new-generation poets were 18 or 19. So the bulk of poetry written by many of the younger poets at that time was considerably different from mine. They saw my poetry only as a kind of foreboding, a forecast of the catastrophe of Nazism. But that view was narrowing. My poetry and the poetry of my generation dealt with the general catastrophic situation of makind in this century, of which a series of revolutions, including the Nazi revolution, were the last part. As to the responsibility–of course. There is in my poetry a feeling of death and a feeling of someone who has survived.
DB: You are often described as being a member of the avant-garde in pre-World War II Polish literature. Since then, of course, you’ve become a very prominent figure concerned with literature and society. Was there a point when you saw yourself change from being principally involved with aesthetics and literary concerns to being more preoccupied with the world-at-large?
Milosz: As if the avant-garde was just the opposite of serious poetry!
DB: I didn’t mean it that way.
Milosz: Well, the term avant-garde is used in the history of Polish literature to delineate certain movements of the ’20s and ’30s. First of all, from a purely metrical point of view, Polish poetry at that time was undergoing transformations in versification equivalent to those being attempted by English and American poets of that period–Ezra Pound, Stephen Spender, William Carlos Williams. Concerns with the “world-at-large,” as you say, actually appeared very early in my poetry. In 1933, I and a colleague of mine, Zbigniew Folejewski (who is now a professor in Canada), published an anthology of socially-committed poetry, but in so doing we behaved very fanatically because we excluded all poems with traditional rhymes and quatrains–even if they were good.
JP: In your poem “Dedication,” you wrote: “That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,/That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,/In this and only this I find salvation.”
Milosz: I consider myself, to a large extent, to have been saved by poetry. At one time, I was too much under the influence of philosophy, and I noticed that that was very detrimental to my internal equilibrium. I had to go back to poetry to save myself from philosophy. To this day I still believe that in poetry there is much more wisdom. For example, in the work of the American poet better known than all others taken together, Walt Whitman.
JP: I was thinking of Pound.
Milosz: No, unfortunately I am in disagreement with all the intelectual trappings of Ezra Pound. I feel that he is an example of a badly digested fascination with history.
DB: But what about his poetry, his poetic sensitivity?
Milosz: His contribution is serious as far as his impulsiveness, his ability for embracing a lot of humanist yet diverse feelings. In those respects I suppose that Pound can be considered an heir to the finest classical desire.
JP: In Prywatne Obowiaki, you mentioned such disparate writers as Oscar Milosz, Robinson Jeffers, and Cavafy as examples of bezinteresownosc.
Milosz: Yes, in the sense that each was writing against the currents of his day. Bezinteresownosc, or disinterestedness, is in this sense writing without seeking any public acclaim. Cavafy turned to the past and the Hellenic world during the final decade of the nineteenth century, a time when poetry was largely experimental. I have some theories as to why this earlier world suited him. Oscar Milosz, for his part, was in conflict with his contemporaries too; he was extremely critical of the French poetry of his time. Maybe the only French poet of his time whom he respected was Paul Val�ry. So instead he opted for European poetry of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, directly stemming from Goethe, Heine, and so on. Milosz, I might add, has been an important influence on me, as a poet and writer and also as an initiant into the polemics of twentieth-century poetry. Robinson Jeffers also presented a lonely figure, turning against experimentation and the influence of French symbolism upon American poetry. Taking this literary stand and an equally unpopular political one during World War II (when he was basically anti-war and opposed to American involvement in the war) mean a diminishing of popularity for Jeffers.
DB: In your poem “To Robinson Jeffers,” you wrote:
And yet you did not know what I know. The earth teaches
More than does the nakedness of elements. No one with
impunity
gives to himself the eyes of a god. So brave, in a void,…
…
Better to carve suns and moons on the joints of crosses
as was done in my district. To birches and firs
give feminine names. To implore protection
against mute and treacherous might
than to proclaim, as you did, an inhuman thing.
Are you criticizing all Western writers who attempt a poetry of ferociousness, while not having lived through the horror of the Polish and East European holocaust?
Milosz: No. The conflict here is between an individual focus and a certain collective societal aura so typical of the part of Europe from which I come. As my late friend Witold Gombrowicz maintained, the notion of the individual is underdeveloped in my part of Europe, while there is such an aura around the individual in the West. This is a conflict and, as far as Jeffers is concerned, viewing mankind and nature with the eyes of a god is maybe presumptuous.
JP: A number of East European writers, among them Solzhenitsyn, have accused Western writers of frivolity or lack of depth. And Witold Gombrowicz, in 1953, in his Dzienniki, noted of you: “Where he makes the effort to be different from Western writers, he is most important to me. I sense in him the same which stirs within me: reluctance and disregard mixed with better helplessness.” What is your response to that, and what is your relationship to Western writers?
Milosz: My attitude toward Western writers is different than that of Russian writers. Being a Pole, I have the feeling of belonging to the West and quarrelling with it at the same time. I imagine that Western literature holds for me a great source of reflection. I mentioned Walt Whitman; it would be very hard for me to name a poet with whom I feel a greater affinity. It is also my suspicion that the Russian bard Mayakovsky was strongly influenced by Whitman, by what is good in Whitman. Maybe I have a certain image of hope in and affirmation of the world, for which I look to Western poets but rarely find. I am much more optimistic as a poet, in spite of the tragic elements in my poetry, than many contemporary American poets.
Yes. In our two plots in a Community Garden in downtown San Francisco we have planted recycled discarded Christmas trees. Other trees only through metaphor.
Have you planted any trees yet?