I sat at my computer hiding from preparations for Friday. This time I have a boring paper I'll be giving in German and it's still waiting to be absorbed like a foreign body,painful enough as it's one of those that make even the speaker fall asleep, plus there's an irritating LOT of things of every description that must be packed into my rucksack for the weekend at the parent's place. It's still true that I like the beginnings of the ends, but Thursday evenings are just too much for me. So. Pu-erh, dark chocolate and let's pretend I'm capable of extending the night hours and can literally take my time.
And with this dark chocolate and a teaspot of pu-erh I come back to yesterday's concert of Bregovič. The genious Goran in his white suite, with a choir of probably the most powerful voices of the Balkans, the brass section (with 'brass' meaning 'frivolous' in this case) and the singers from Serbia, including the wonderful, a bit childlike voice mostly known from the "Ederlezi" song – God/Goran (same difference) knows what her name is.
It felt good, very good. I recalled getting to know a year and a half ago Bregovič's "7/8 & 11/8", "La Nuit" and the rest of "Ederlezi". Back then it was hypnotizing, an energy I hadn't known before; some kind of East-European sorrow and haughtiness, bitter-sweet mixture, so different from the Klezmer melodies, so much deeper and lower. I remember it came to me when I was reading "Żelary" by Květa Legátová and slowly falling for her austere and simple stories about the people of mountains, stories that together with Goran's music gave me so strong experiences that I began to think and write in their terms. And never before or after that did writing give me so much pleasure. Nor as good results. Never.
And then it felt good because the tuba, the drums and the tones going down and down, as if I was sliding my index finger on the map of Europe, down to the Southern-East, farther and farther, made me realize that this is the land really near my country. It's not only Andrzej Stasiuk and the Eastern ethno fashion that has been developing in big cities, it's surely something more, this magic negligence and ubiquitous peasantry that determine our kinship with the nations of the East, the West left aside with a considerable lower percentage of blood shares.
Yes, I know all those heaven and earth signs with Gombrowicz in the front indicating that we're actually in the goddamn Between. But perhaps it's the East that concentrates all our complexes, our ignorance and the ever-trouble-making, and that is why we are constantly carried in this direction, maybe it pinches us so much that it has to be always on the surface layer. And all goods we draw from the West is garbage, empty coke bottles and faded plastic bags, which we decorate our blocks of flats with, our slums of all sorts. And while doing this, we're demonstrating how much we really need all those Englands with Frances and Belgiums. This is how Stasiuk described it, when he wrote about the Balkans, but it's easy to see in Poland, in these colorful signboards looking grotesque in the peasant Warszawa, an exaggerated shrine of shit, mess and one big Anyhow. Some of us try to pose, though, with a quite convincing effect, but let's be honest: we build dirty streets on purpose and only feign some enclaves where, spruced up for the time being, we can sit for a while without getting dirty with our daily dirt that we've got used to anyway.
I might be wrong but this is how I sense it, when to Goran's "one, two, three", the whole Sala Kongresowa yells: DO ATAKUUU! Funny, by the way, to hear a Bosnian talking to us in broken English, to what we response in our Polish way, in a building that was once a great gift for Poland from Mother Russia in her Iron Outfit. Still, everyone's happy.
It's not to say that I'd love to pin to my lapel the Polish parochiality, our phobias, oh, so varied, together with the conviction of our exceptionality and wear it like a brooch till I die. On the contrary, throughout 90 percent of the day I'm a straight occidentalist and if I had a chance to follow the roads that Andrzej Stasiuk travels, I'd probably be too frightened to go farther already at the first border crossing.
I just want to confess some kind of irrational and quite perverse pleasure I derive from the Balkan rhythms, the movies by Kusturica and Legátová's or Stasiuk's language invariably weighing down to the Southern-East. Or "Gadjo Dilo" by Gatlif. I guess I'm a lap-dog that would love to spend the whole day in some nice and clean hidden place from which it could observe the Gypsy, Bosnian and Slovakian mongrels.
And late in the night it would feel too much of the sorrow and yearning to fall sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment