From Diary Without Vowels

ALEKSANDER WAT

Translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles

Why do I write poems?

I was no more than two years old, but I remember it as if it were today. No doubt the experience I'm going to describe took on its lasting shape much later, in the period of childhood when consciousness not only perceives things but has become accustomed to registering them, when one has learned to retain impressions. In addition, I'm reading it from my child's memory in the words I use today, but nevertheless I will try, with these alien, indirect, and distant words, to convey an elemental experience as faithfully and simply as I can.

I know from my siblings that at the time my passion was collecting pencils and drawing clumsy shapes. I imagine I'd been given colored pencils, but I don't remember color; on the contrary, I can still see the dark leaden grayness of the marks today.

My hoarding pencils and making drawings doubtless extended for a longer period, not without difficulties, uncertainties, and fears. But in my memory it is as if everything were concentrated into one moment.

Astonishment that two things put together made a third, new, and different thing, and immediately after that, that I made that thing and could make it as I wished, when I wished: that astonishment was so intense and unique that I feel it as the first astonishment of my life, and also one of my most intense emotions. I know it couldn't have been the first, it was prefaced by at least two other universal human astonishments, but no one remembers them, at least not consciously. I mean the famous shock of birth, when we go out into the alien cold world from a warm, dark, safe, and nourishing shelter. The second astonishment: when from a mosaic of patches and lines (which we can't imagine), from their chaos, emerges the first defined and constantly repeated shapes we can give names, though we don't yet know the use of speech. That is the first human language, a visual or simply an ophthalmic language, and we at times recover the remote and weak echoes of that astonishment in our later lives, whenever human language shakes us, in poetry. But our conscious memory doesn't preserve that second astonishment either, we can only infer it from the signs of poetry or perhaps from dreams and delusions. As some maintain. So let us agree to call the reaction to my scribbling my first astonishment, although it is at least third in a sequence.

It was, I repeat, so strong and intense that without reflection or hesitation I place it with another astonishment of forty years later.

That was in Alma-Ata in May 1944. We were then living in a settlement in the dunes, eighty kilometres from the capital, on the Ili River, the name of which had made the newspapers quite recently. Ola was in the hospital with typhus, I was on my last legs, emaciated by a new succession of prisons and a week of serious typhus. But there was nothing to eat at home. I had to go to the bazaar in Alma-Ata to sell two blankets that had arrived from Iran by the miraculous grace of fate. So although the doctor had forbidden me to exert myself I went by Polish "samovar" train that was probably deported to Mongolia in 1940. I left at one o'clock at night (it only ran at night, so people wouldn't miss any work), with that" samovar" crowded with folks selling things, with invalids and women from the kolkhoz farms on the way. I got to Alma-Ata at six in the morning, stopped by friends' to eat something, the same people we just found again in Paris, and, clutching two dark blue blankets in my outstretched arms, I stood in the tolkuchka.

I knew that vast square well. I had lived nearby, across the railroad tracks, after my first amnesty release in January 1942, with a night watchman who agreed to take me without registration and rent me a cot for twenty-five rubles a month: the sack was so narrow my arms hung down on both sides. He was a tall, sturdy, straight-backed man, still fairly young, although he gave the impression he was an old man, maybe because of his wrinkled face, with its grey stubble and deeply carved lines.

It was here [in 1944] Ola and Andrzej came to me, both alive, in spite of my fears. They arrived on the day when the watchman's little son, who had died in the night of scarlet fever, was lying on the table, two steps from my cot.

In January 1942, there were a few weeks when I would cross that square diagonally on my way back from an elegant hotel, the House of Soviets, where the Polish Delegation was housed, and where my food was so implacable then that I would suppress sharp pangs of hunger for hours.

But much more than mouths I was afraid of eyes. They were something other than everything I already knew and trusted. They were themselves and always something more than that, that's what made them challenging. Something that evaded me and at the same time pulled me somewhere and penetrated into the flesh of what was my "I," I felt something in me being disturbed, determined, and established, something remaining in me like a sting (naturally that comparison is today's).

I was afraid of every human face, even my mother's, especially my mother's. I have to explain here that as far back as my memory reaches I never loved my mother, and that flaw, that irredeemable sin is always with me, it hit me one night in my cell in Zamarstynów, when I saw terror and poverty as an expiation for my hidden fault, for my curse. Not my mother's curse-my mother loved all her children fanatically and tirelessly.

And here when I first saw or recognized in my drawing a human face-it was probably an awkward square with two or three openings and a horizontal stripe-I understood right away or maybe only sensed that all my fear of the human face had vanished, that all at once I had freed myself of my fear of the human face. It simply fell from me. And now on the contrary, I liked to meet looks, liked to observe the folds, wrinkles, narrowing’s, widening, distortions, the relaxing and flexing of muscles, lines, sight, everything constituting mimicry, the joins and rifts, the many-handed play of peace and anxiety, and the unmistakable signs of all the emotions I already knew well.

But the fear, liberated from the world outside of me, turned against me. Obsessively drawing faces, unable to tear myself away from the activity, until my ears rang and I felt dizzy, I suffered an acute fear of myself: it's me making human faces, and always, whenever I want to, I can make them. Now I felt threatened from within.

The third stage probably started many months later, although-I repeat-it seems to me that it all happened in immediate succession.

I now discovered the resemblance of my faces first to the cottage where we lived that year, in Mala Czarna near Warsaw, and then to the little house where I was driven in autumn by one of our employees, whose father rented an allotment garden in Mokotow. Brought up in rented apartments, amid apartment buildings, I then found myself in the countryside for the first time, and the contrast was so strong that I never managed to resolve the antagonism between man and nature, and I live with that fundamental antagonism, never reconciled.

From that time onward I drew only houses. They were no different from my faces, except for the mouth, which I drew upright. And instead of blackened hair I put a roof on. Insofar as all my scrawls gave me a full sense of recompense, with the roof it was different. I couldn't make it work, I saw how blundering it was, how crooked and ugly, and for the first time, I angrily and bitterly came up against the divide between a vision of my intention and its execution.

I wasn't able to draw the layer of snow on the roof or anything else of the winter landscape, but it would be obvious that it was winter, with a chattering frost, and in my little house heat was radiating from the tile stoves. I was warm and cozy in those little house-faces of mine. They bore the same relation to the many-storeyed apartment buildings where I myself lived, as children like me bore to grown-ups, and I had no wish to grow up, I was happy to make do with little houses with two windows and one door.

And so I was warm and cozy, friendly and safe when I drew my lines, and this time I didn't go on until I was in a state of exhaustion. At that time I came to like human faces, they gave me the same sense of warmth and security, pleasantness and kindness. I came to like women's faces in particular, I liked to watch them laugh or be sad, their glittering teeth, full lips moving, their movable tongues when they were chatting with me or eating. I was at peace, and I no longer woke up at night.

At that time I also learned to add two chimneys on the roof, with billowing smoke as a clear, visible sign that it was freezing outside and warm inside the house.

A good many years passed. I'd long given up drawing houses and faces, or maybe I did draw them but differently, imitating adults' drawings. Once I was walking down Danilowiczowska Street with my older brother, at the time of the 1905 Revolution. My brother pointed out to me a building with barred windows-a prison. I already knew what that was. Right after we got home I started drawing faces again, with thin bars across the wide-open eyes and mouths. That phase probably passed quickly and then everything took its normal course. But I know for sure that that is why I started writing poems many years later-though by inclination and ability I was a mathematician and I still write them to this day, despite the fact that as many claim, poetry is a secretion of youth and suited to a tender age. "He's so old, isn't he ashamed to write poems?"