"A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto"

I have been, noncommittaly, reading some work by Milosz, but doing so only in English. Today I read a piece of his in Polish, and simultaneously the translation into English. I found the translation to be pretty inadequate so I re-translated it, obviously with much help from the skeleton of the original translation. Here it is:

Bees build a casing over a red liver
Ants build a casing over a black bone
The tearing begins, the stomping of linen
The breaking of glass begins, of tress, iron, nickel, silver and foam
Gypsum, iron sheets, violin strings, trumpets, leaves, balls and crystals.
Poof! The phosphorous fire from yellow walls
Consumes human and animal hairs.

Bees build a casing over the honeycomb lung
Ants build a casing over the white bone
Torn is the paper, rubber, canvass, skin and flax
Fiber, fabrics, cellulose, hair, snakeskin, wire
In flames, the ceiling falls, then the wall and fiery heat engulfs the foundation.
All that is left is, sandy and trampled down, with one leafless tree,
The earth.

Slowly, boring a tunnel, moves the guardian mole
With a small red lantern strapped to his forehead
He touches the buried bodies, counts, and digs on
Distinguishing human ashes by their luminous vapor,
Each one's remnants a different hue of the spectrum.
Bees build a casing over a red trace,
Ants build a casing over the place left behind by my body.

I fear; so deeply do I fear the guardian mole
His swollen eyelids like a Patriarch
Who frequently sat among the glimmer of candles
Reading the great book of the species

What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament
Waiting for two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus?
My broken body will deliver me to his sight
And he will count me among the helpers of death:
The uncircumcised.

Czeslaw Milosz

My book arrived today. "To Begin Where I am" by Czeslaw Milosz. It came used with an inscription.
"Dear Professor Carol Lambert, Every time I'll go to the office of International Affairs, I'll remember you; when people complement my English, I know deep inside that your courses brought my English skills on a higher level. But now, it's time to thank you for all your help, and wish you a very happy, wonderful time on your retirement. To you and your family My best wishes, Anna Mostowa."

Here is the most amazing excerpt from the book:

SPACE
Imagination, always spatial, points north, south, east and west of some central, privileged place, which is probably a village from one's childhood or native region. As long as a writer lives in his country, the privileged place, by centrifugally enlarging itself, becomes more or less identified with his country as a whole. Exile displaces that center or rather creates two centers. Imagination relates everything in one's surroundings to "over there"-- in my case, somewhere on the European continent. It even continues to designate the four cardinal points, as if I still stood there. At the same time the north, south, east and west are determined by the place in which I write these words.
Imagination tending towards the distant region of one's childhood is typical of literature of nostalgia (a distance in space often serves as a disguise for a Proustian distance in time.) Although quite common, literature of nostalgia is only one among many modes of coping with the estrangement from one's native land. The new point which orients space in respect to iteslf cannot be eliminated, i.e. one cannot abstract from one's physical presence in a definite spot on the Earth. That is why a curious phenomenon appears: the two centers and the two spaces arranged around themselves interfere with each other or--and this is a happy solution--coalesce.

opening paragraph

"Our indulgence in fantasy disconnects us from the anchor of the banal.
Our indulgence in the banal disconnects us from the pull of fantasy."

Just an opening paragraph to a statement I'm writing. It's similar to the essay below, but really stretches further to encompass a more broad body of work.
___
The body of work is the study of the relationships of individuals to time- in its trinity of the present, banal moment and the illusions of the past and the future. It observes and, at times, attempts to elicit, the constant teetering between the three states of awareness.

It explores four general concepts:

1. The role of fantasy as a mode of disconnecting from the present moment.
2. The use of sensuality to heighten and/or elongate the experience of the banal.
3. The breakdown of fantasy when prefabricated expectation or hope is confronted with the arrival of the new present.

4. Human response to entropy and the ephemeral: attempts at preservation.

___

"The internet serves as more than a medium for the exchange of facts, it is also one for the sharing of these fantasies, creating what I call, with some hesitation, a very rough draft of a universal consciousness- of our thinking, of our memories and of our longing."

Jiří Černický

But I wanted them whole, including the roots- no rarity should ever be destroyed. So I asked him to use my cerulean hair brush to comb out his hair during the rest of my stay in Berlin. Six months later I received the brush with the last strands of hair.
- Cernicky
Jiri, in his art and writing, is a perfect example of sweet, sincere, unadulterated communication. He makes intensely personal work so accessible and interesting. Besides that, his website is one of the most enjoyable I've come across in a hell of a long time. His work spans so many different discussions, from ideas of memory and sentimentality, to, for those of your more politically inclined, extensive social commentary. Most of his artistic endeavors are accompanied by really fantastic stories.

He writes:
Once I had a quarrel with my girlfriend. She was sad and had a pretty bad bout of depression. I wanted to make it up to her and please her. I tried by decorating the hood of a limousine, rented from a company that loans out such fancy cars for weddings, with her glorious little body.
"...it becomes obvious that Černický is an original exponent of the contemporary Czech art scene. He is the winner of the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize and the Soros Prize. As regards art disciplines, Černický expresses himself with a broad spectrum of media, from classic painting through objects to videos. When not globetrotting, he can be reached in Prague." -Kontakt

homes

Last December, while looking for gifts I came across PREFAB, a book on modular housing. I was immediately smitten. I am always surprised by how much time people spend on their personal look and how little effort they put into the functionality and appearance of their homes, and more so, how strong of a hold traditional rules have on the way we arrange our living space. I've always seen a home as the place to be entirely selfish and indulgent. Now a new book, Spacecraft has been released and it looks fantastic.

"But not all of the buildings and installations are eligible for living in them. It's a broad range featured in this book: "We looked for outstanding international projects that are engaged in informal and unconventional ways of crafting space - found beyond architecture's beaten track. The book features on the one hand flexible, fleeting structures that only exist for a limited time such as artistic spatial interventions that live from their performative quality or mobile living units roaming freely beyond the paved routes of conventional architecture. On the other hand, Spacecraft focuses on spaces that are used temporarily. Whether vacation homes, urban hideouts, art pavillions or studios, all of the included work is distinguished by an challenging and poetic approach to spatial design."

comming soon

Jana Sterbak

I've been doing a little work on Czech art and literature. I'll be posting some information this weekend. I know it's been something like a month now since an update. I promise it will be exciting.

finalized essay

La Persistencia de la Memoria
The experience of time is one of transience, impermanence, and entropy- these are integral aspects of life regardless of culture and historical context. The sharp shifts in my life, the highlight of which was immigration, revealed this to me at a very early age.
Because of this, I have developed a particular interest in fantasy (defined as any mental incarnation which exists outside of the present moment) and its ability to create longing, therefore serving as a strong impetus for action. However, the yearning towards a potential future horizon lends itself to pursuit, while the experience of longing for the past does not. The past is a particularly fertile, yet confusing breeding-ground for fantasy and longing- one that relentlessly calls for an impossible act: the return.
Instead of indulging in that fantasy, I respond by dissecting the experience, studying the preservation of memory through the relification (the creation of relics) of objects and places, as well as the preventative preservation of relationships through communication, particularly the sharing of experiences and objects. I am simultaneously interested in the examination of memory itself and the extent of its ability to create fantastical, romanticized illusions.
In the study of my own longing, I have begun to disassemble objects of personal historical and sentimental value and to investigate my experience doing so. I try to note both the suffering and the moment of disconnect during the destruction process and observe the point at which the object becomes exclusively memory and is therefore subject to the process of romanticizing.
Simultaneously, I have, In my past installations, attempted to recreate these mental abstractions in a physical space, not to test the strength of my memory but to actualize these fantasies, permitting me to contrast them to the experience of the present moment; what I call the banal.
My third, concurrent pursuit has been the simplistic act of illustrating horizons and mountain ranges, imagery closely linked with the ever-present but inaccessible or, at least, the not readily accessible, creating metaphors for the experience of longing.
Finally, I am interested in electronic mediums as an extension of mental space for storing experiences (through video, audio and photography) and the role of current technology such as YouTube and Picasaweb in allowing a more immediate and multisensory experience of others' memories and, therefore, a more expansive understanding of subjective history and longing. Because, while the moment exists as an objective thing, our experience of it does not, and neither is our capturing of it through memory (or the extension of memory: the previously mentioned technology). That is what piqued my interest in collecting videos of sincere joy, communal singing..etc from the internet; because they allow me, in spite of barriers of distance or, perhaps, even language, as close to experiencing others' past as possible and give me the opportunity to observe, among other things, the types of scenarios chosen to be remembered.
The internet serves as more than a medium for the exchange of facts, it is also one for the sharing of these fantasies, creating what I call, with some hesitation, a very rough draft of a universal consciousness- of our thinking, of our memories and of our longing.