Postcard from Poland
I went to Poland, I made work, and then I returned to Berlin.
As always, it was a spiritual pilgrimage. Never the same lessons, never the same prints. I listened to Lola Young’s song Messy on repeat, dancing between print runs. Morning to night, I sat on the cement floor to re-arrange the alphabet, building a new series of works.
I was surprised by how absolute devastation and absolute contentment straddle the same horse. Has it always been like this? Land of the living, land of the dead—it is the same damned land.
Took a flixbus to the city of Zamość. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Zamość was central to the trade route between Eastern Europe and the Islamic world. Much of the exchange was driven by Muslim, Armenian, and Jewish merchants. Many came from Turkey or from the more recent Spanish expulsion. Today, the city is entirely Polish, commercialized beyond recognition.
One of the only testaments to the town’s mutli-ethnic past is the synagogue—built in full Renaissance style between 1610 and 1618. (The Armenian church had been burned to the ground by Poles in the 19th century).
The yeshiva and the mikveh, adjoined to the shul, are now private Polish property. The buildings are in total ruin, stuffed with firewood and inhabited by hundreds of blackbirds who nib putrid berries that cling to red, drooling vines.
I wanted to see the the synagogue, which functionined in perpetuity for three hundred and sixty years. I called the number pasted to the door as the rain drizzled down the ridges of my coat.
The man who answered the phone was going Chrismas shopping with his wife and no, he couldn’t possibly turn around and open the door for us, and no, there was no one else with a key except for him and he has a bunch of synagogues that he has to open all the time and can’t we understand how inconvenient it is for him and why couldn’t we just come back sometime in April when it’s tourist season and no, no, he won’t be able to return to Zamość before 16:00h and if we come back in the Spring then maybe, just maybe, he will open the door. Monday or Tuesday.
Here I was, running after the past only to be bismark’d with the present and its cubes of capital. American Christmas music on full-blast in the old market square.
Clip-clop the horse of depravity.
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
R E A D I N G S
Clearing by Maureen McLane
Non Omnis Moriar by Zuzanna Ginczanka (trans. from the Polish by Nancy Kassel and Anita Safran)
New Year’s: A Handmade Greeting Card by Zuzanna Ginczanka (trans. from the Polish by Alex Braslavsky)
Interview with Robin Coste Lewis on the publication of her new book, Archive of Desire
H A P P E N I N G S, E T C.
On December 21st, from 6-9pm, at Café Plume, in celebration of Midwinter Day, poet Lotta Thießen and I will be reading excerpts from Bernadette Mayer’s epic poem. On the longest night of the year, Lotta and I will share our work alongside beloved passages from Mayer’s “Midwinter’s Day.” You are warmly invited to bring a favorite excerpt of Bernadette Mayer’s work or a Mayer-inspired poem of your own, as we read and share together. We will also have copies of selected passages available to read collectively. I will light candles to mark the final night of Hanukkah, and you are welcome to bring a small offering for the altar—a gesture to summon the light.
