Vertical Divider

Umrungen von Gefahr
​(postcards from Amsterdam and Leiden)*


I.

I came to the Netherlands from Poland, or I used to come, because I am confused in counting how many times I actually travelled back and forth between Kraków and Amsterdam. But never by train. Let me explain why.
In 1987, when I was 15 years old, I saw the comedy Kingsajz by Juliusz Machulski, in which the allegory of Szuflandia (the Drawerland), a country located in an abandoned library catalogue hidden deep in the underground of the Quaternary Research Institute, left no doubt that he was actually speaking of Poland. The gnomes, living under a tiny dictator and suffering a constant shortage of supplies (in spite of such limited appetites as theirs), presented an unmistakably Polish, Romantic mentality, conspiring against the tyrant and nurturing lofty dreams of freedom. Tiny conspirators, Adaś and Olo, strive to discover the Formula, enabling them to access the Kingsajz, the world of the fully grown.
The allegory of two scales, that of the gnomes and that of the fully grown people, translated the sensation of eternal minority nurtured by the Poles in relation to the higher, greater, more serious reality of “the West” (“Zachód”). It is westwards that the heroes try to flee, even if they remain utterly caught in the minor dimension. In the final scene, the train that should transport them to freedom becomes a mere toy speeding on a closed circuit of miniature rails across the lawn in front of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. I have often meditated on it on the problem of our "queen-sized-ness", nurturing a sensation of being minor in the global intellectual and academic context and trying to break the Kingsajz formula just as hard as Machulski's gnomes did. Later on, when I actually saw myself working in the West, I could believe to have managed to achieve it, yet still, I used to shiver any time I looked through the window, fearing to discover that I was travelling on a toy train or aircraft, taking me to a cardboard Amsterdam Centraal station or a delusive Schiphol.
It was for freedom that the gnomes were fighting; that was at least what they believed and said. In the genial interpretation of Jacek Chmielnik as Olo, the inflection given to the word brought through the limits of the comedy to assume, for a fraction of a second, all the past and present aspirations of a nation. The way Olo pronounced the word “freedom” was giving the gist of its sublime concept in the Polish culture.
On the other hand, as soon as I landed on the polder where the Haarlemmermeer (Haarlem's Lake) had once been, it was easy to see the difference; it was also resumed in Goethe's Faust:

Ja, diesem Sinne bin ich ganz ergeben,
Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluß:
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben,
Der täglich sie erobern muß.
Und so verbringt, umrungen von Gefahr,
Hier Kindheit, Mann und Greis sein tüchtig Jahr.
Solch ein Gewimmel möcht' ich sehn,
Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn. (1)

Certainly, the untimely discovery costed doctor Faust his soul, but at the same time there was a clear difference between the situation of the Dutch and the way how the tiny conspirators lived umrungen von Gefahr. It crossed my head that in fact the Dutch concept of freedom must come as close to the notion of comfort as it does to safety; as far as I was able to interpret it, it appeared to me epitomized as a peculiar antique chair carefully preserved in the Rijksmuseum together with a cushion padding the seat. Olo has his freedom always in front of him as a sublime target; the Dutch freedom, located at the rear, is always a means leading to further acquisitions; it permits to sit down comfortably, thinking what to do next. Machulski's heroic gnomes cannot go beyond the point of achieving their freedom; they prove unable to inhabit it as fully grown men. For them, freedom cannot be translated into commodity. Olo cannot construe himself as someone in possession of it; he cannot imagine freedom as a space to put his furniture in, making it cosy. Perhaps this is what utterly transforms his train into a miniature, taking him back to the uncomfortable and penurious Drawerland.
Freedom as a means of further acquisitions leads to work and creation, makes work and creation viable. Once again, the best illustration of this truth is contained not in a self-definition, but in an alien glance, that of King Crimson's lyricist Richard Palmer-James musing on Rembrandt's masterpiece, The Night Watch:

So many years we suffered here
Our country racked with Spanish wars
Now comes a chance to find ourselves
And quiet reigns behind our doors
We think about posterity again

...

And so the pride of little men
The burghers good and true
Still living through the painter's hand
Request you all to understand. (2)


II.

One of the basic distinctions I had to learn as a child in Poland was the opposition “to have or to be” (“mieć czy być”), which in the decade of 1980 was regarded as defining the intelligentsia as a class that “chose to be”. Probably this stoic subterfuge safeguarded its survival and integrity against the material shortage. Yet later on, during my studies at an artistic high school, it clashed against the dawning consciousness that the entire history of art is in fact a constant testimony of the survival through “having”, a perennial victory of the pride of those other “little men” who chose to have. Nonetheless truly do I wonder how this instinct of unstoppable acquisition, alien to the stoic philosophy in vogue at the time, came to me; perhaps due to the fact that my social extraction had so little to do with intelligentsia. I could not hope to “be” as the members of this social group “were” – in their sublime essence, independently of any material possession. Thus I started to accumulate very early. As a child, I was already gathering books of any sort, even if I had no such knowledge as required to peruse them (in 2014, at the time of my travel to Island, I was amazed to discover a critical edition of the Poetic Edda, yellowed with age, that I must have bought at a ridiculous price when I was still at the primary school; even now, in any of my travels I buy books written in languages I can hardly decipher, with unshakable faith that the mere possession will secretly transform me, and one day their meaning will become clear to me). Someone might say that I constantly try to have what I am not, and I carry on my back what I cannot reasonably hope to become. 
This is how I managed to gather, across several decades of my life, a Multilingual Library that made me enormously proud. At the moment of my immigration, it was a major worry how to bring my books to Holland, especially if I did not have any permanent place to stay. Even more that that, another, quite unexpected problem aroused. In Leiden, I found an abundant supply of free books, left in a network of special bookshelves distributed strategically throughout the city. The inhabitants used to leave there any literature they did not want any more; there was also such a shelf in the University library, where I could often get a bagful of Arabic books. As I lived right on the opposite side of the Singel channel, very close to the university and in a neighbourhood inhabited by a hereditary intellectual class that had enormous quantities of books to spare, I could gather, as a scavenger, a completely new section for my Multilingual Library. On the other hand, the treasures I was carrying on my back throughout the world somehow suffered a sudden devaluation, leaving me in a state of considerable perplexity. 


III.

In the Netherlands, I had no such a social privilege I managed to get in Poland, where I was a titular full professor, with a domination signed by the President of the Republic; it was an often repeated joke, probably many decades old, that such people used to put announcements in the press, offering their libraries cheaply for sale. I became, nonetheless, even more attached to my own one, perhaps because it seemed to be the only form of stability in a country that went adrift. As an immigrant, I had to learn how to live a precarious life, applying for research grants, constantly umrungen von Gefahr, constantly uncertain if I would have a place to keep my books for the year to come. And yet Holland gave me such an uncanny sense of safety as I never experienced before. 
 

(1) J. W. von Goethe, Werke, Kommentare und Register. Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden, Band 3, Dramen I, München 1989, p. 348.
(2) R. Palmer-Jones, The Night Watch, lyrics of the song included in King Crimson's album Starless and Bible Black (1974); source: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/k/king+crimson/the+night+watch_20078633.html
* Here I give a new development to a fragment of the text published as “Kingsajz, or the Worldliness (postcards from Amsterdam and Bissau)”, Spain – India – Russia. Centres, Borderlands and Peripheries of Civilisations. Anniversary Book Dedicated to Professor Jan Kieniewicz on His 80th Birthday, Jan Stanisław Ciechanowski, Cristina González Caizán (eds.), Warsaw, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Sub Lupa, 2018, p. 505-517. 

Amsterdam

Leiden

De Haag

Utrecht