In Sopot
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More Thoughts from Sopot
I’m in the church again. I didn’t know it, but they’re having a mass now. There are about twenty people here, including a man in the confession booth behind me. There’s no altar boy, but an old man is wearing the little white outfit and ringing all the bells. The church is much more well-light; the light is bouncing off the white walls, but it’s still not very bright. I am the only one sitting right now, and I feel a bit conspicuous, but not too much. They sing in unison, but not everyone joins in. Some are standing right behind me — a weird feeling. The priest initiates a song then steps away from the mic, still singing. The priest holds the host, hand under to catch crumbs (?), says a prayer, then a thin, cheap sounding bell is rung. He goes to the gold box, gets out a cup, then passes out the host. About three people go for the host. He puts the cup back, the bell is rung. He wipes the crumbs into the goblet, mixes in some wine, drinks it, wipes the goblet out with a white cloth. He folds the cloth lengthwise, lays it over the goblet, places a lid-like thing over it and the altar man takes it away. Then he sings a prayer — a chant in two tones. Everyone stands to sing. I can’t see what happens. When they sit, the priest is gone. After a few moments, the lights are dimmed. A few remain, but most file out quietly. A man in jeans is now taking the sound system down. It’s like a concert in reverse: The lights go down at the end and the roadies waste no time breaking down everything.
The ritual and hierarchy [are] amazing. I can’t see why people subject themselves to it. Out of love? Fear? K wants her beliefs to be based on love, but I don’t know if it’s possible.
So now a little about the past couple of days. Wednesday night the Volunteers (And then There Were Three . . . ) played at a local bar. I missed most of it. I was looking for a bite to eat. When I got there I began talking to Julie L. She said the following: “I felt like you were completely overshadowed.”
Skipping Class
I’m in the main church here in Sopot, skipping the first language lesson of the day. I needed some time alone, I decided. Who knows what PC administration might say.
This church is really quite small and relative modern. The walls are white with bricks along the edges serving as a border. It makes the whole thing look a bit like Lego blocks. The church yesterday in Gda sk was enormous. With its thin pillars and high, arched ceiling, it was the epitome of Gothic architecture. The entire interior was white, a creamy, Liquid Paper kind of dirty white. There was an enormous organ which J. S. Bach supposedly loved, an altar made in the fifteenth century that was at least twenty feet tall, and a huge crucifix with Mary and Peter (?) Standing at the base of the cross, with a skull at the bottom (Golgotha, I guess). There was another crucifix with a strikingly lifelike face which had an intriguing legend attached: The unknown artist hung a man on a cross and watched as he died to obtain an accurate likeness.
Around the walls of this church in Sopot are representations of the stations of the cross. I don’t know what they are, but they are all very similar: Christ on the way to Golgotha carrying the cross through a dark and empty landscape encountering several people along the way. Christ is always painted with a tired and somewhat painfully confused visage, almost childlike in some pictures.
People filter into the church to pray. Some even carry bags with the fruits of their morning shopping. It’s as if they are just dropping in on their way home. It’s rather strange. Are they offering their own prayers, or the Bisquick prayers they’re taught as children? I cannot understand the prewritten, memorized prayer. How can that mean anything? I remember the woman in Wraclaw who glanced at her watched as she muttered her prayer. It’s just another part of the ritual and repetition meant to keep people from thinking on their own.
At the top of the phallic arch over the alter is the eagle/chicken national symbol of Poland. A nice combination of religion and nationalism.
As I look around, I notice the arches on the side of the church have a particularly noticeable penile shape, complete with a tapered tip. I wonder why that is. The WCG of old could explain it, but I’m not sure it’s attributable to Satan’s evil influence . . .
Language School
We had our first language classes today and it’s good for a couple of reasons. It was good to learn a little more Polish. But more importantly, it taught me a lot about what it’s like to be a student. As I struggled to think of something to say to Sue, I thought of how all my students must feel. It’s not an effective teaching method. Even simple things that I say so often came with great difficulty. I must find more effective teaching methods which are also more comfortable for students.
I’m finding that I’m falling into that strange apathy I felt in K. Dolny. I am alone at times, and I don’t want to be with anyone. Still, I don’t want to do anything that might assure me of being alone.
It seems that I am always taking the initiative to talk to people. Few people have sought me out of the group to talk. As we walked through Sopot today I didn’t really talk to much of anyone. And after the reception I wandered around, not really feeling like I’m part of the group. I don’t mind in a way.
Waiting in Krakow
Location: Krakow Glowny Train Station Waiting Room
I’ve about an hour until I leave for Sopot on a horrific six hour train ride. I’m in the waiting area, sitting beside the first woman I’ve ever heard say kurwa. She turned toward me as she laughed – many teeth were missing and the few that remained were any and all colors except white. Two police officers are winding through the crowd – no, three – asking questions I don’t understand. They’ve said nothing to me, and I am a little grateful. Two tired bums sit with blank expressions. They probably haven’t shaved or bathed in weeks. A drunk just bumped into me and he apologized with glazed eyes. An old man sits across from me, his hands folding in his lap and gazing quietly with almost childlike eyes. A group of gypsies sit together, looking at photographs. Some people read, some eat, and we all wait.
Waiting is not something I will miss when I return to America.
EKG Forest
I am now sitting at my desk which is now in front of the bedroom okno looking occasionally at the school. I borrowed a chair from Roy so that now I am reasonably comfortable as I write. It was snowing heavily until a few moments ago, but now it’s not falling at all.
I can see the hay fields to the left of the school, the fields from which I’ve taken so many pictures. The hay triangles/pyramids are slightly visible, and the forest is a hazy band of darkness on the hill-top horizon. The doubled glass in the window makes everything sway and bend as in an amusement park mirror. The half-built house beside the school shrinks and grows as I move my head just a slight amount. The tips of the trees form a jagged border resembling an EKG chart. What it’s graphing, I’ve no idea. The clouds are whizzing by, and I can hear the wind that carries them whistling around the corners of the apartment building. There is a small patch of clear; I can see the baby blue sky through it as if it’s a floating window. The clouds around it, illuminated, form a white border in the grey. And I hear an unseen jet above the grey ceiling.
I like being in this room. I spend so much time in the big room that it becomes a bit stifling, I think. I guess now I’ll be spending much more time in here. I think any change can be good, and this one is very much so.
Crucifix
There are crucifixes in each and every classroom at my school. Separation of church and state is not a goal of the Polish democracy. So every day I teach with a little statue of a man nailed to a tree hanging right above my head. “It gives some people comfort,” says Danuta, my counterpart English teacher. I suppose that’s possible.
Early in the first semester the director told me to come down to the new English classroom to tell him where I wanted the bulletin boards. (The boards were actually sheets of styrofoam attached to the wall. Economical.) He drilled the holes, put up the styrofoam, then drilled the hole for the crucifix. I wondered how he would respond if I said, “I don’t want that in my classroom.” No doubt he would be confused, and maybe (probably?) a bit upset with my irreverence. Of course I said nothing. “When in Poland . . . ”
It’s got me to thinking about the whole religious symbolism in Christianity. The cross is a sacred symbol because it represents Christ’s death to millions of Christians around the world. It is a simple character, almost reminiscent of minimalism in its barest form. Most people wear crosses because it is an outward expression of their inner convictions. Yet I wonder: If Jesus had slipped in the shower and bonked his head, would we be wearing Soap-On-A-Rope? Would giant bath-size Dial bars replace steeples at churches? Would we make bathing motions every time we enter a church? It would shed new light on what Pilate said: “Okay, I wash my hands of the whole issue!”
Anyone seen Monty Python’s Life of Brian? Remember the scene where they’re trying to decide what symbol they’ll use to indicate that they are followers of Brian? “The shoe! The shoe!” I suppose that scene prefigures my own speculations. Yet both point out how virtually arbitrary religious symbols are. If Christ were to be put to death today, I suppose twenty-first century Christians would use the electric chair or a hangman’s noose as the primary symbol.
The crucifixes are just one indication of how strong Catholicism is in Poland. For many, to be Polish is to be Catholic. They are virtually synonymous. In fact, next to every crucifix is a relief in plastic of the national symbol of Poland. Religion and nationalism, hand in hand, as they so often are.
Lipnica Wielka, Lipnica Mala
I didn’t look at the destination sign closely this afternoon so it took me three hours to get from Jabłonka to Lipnica Wielka because the bus I got on went to Lipnica Ma a. And of course as I was walking through the fields toward Lipnica the sun set. And the sky was cloudy, so I turned around and went back to the road. I was afraid I would get lost in the forest which had appeared before me so very suddenly.
I walked for a while and suddenly a babcia stopped me and asked, “Skad jestes?” I thought for a moment and pointed toward the end of the village and muttered, “Tam.” And she asked me again. I was angry and tired, and though I understood her words, I didn’t understand what she meant. I tried again: “Jestem z Ameryki.” She shook her head. “Skad jestes›?” she asked again. “Gdzie?” I asked. “Hej!” she confirmed, rephrasing it, “Gdzie byłes› ?” I told her everything: “Mieszkam w Lipnicy Wielkiej. Byłem tam,” pointing again. I apologized, “Musze isc,” and left.
I tried for an hour to get a ride via autostop, but no one did. They would all turn on their lights to see who I was, then drive on without slowing. I laughed as I wondered why they didn’t stop. “Myslysz, ze ja bede mowic, ‘Daj mi twój maly fiat?'” I yelled at them.
Finally one guy stopped. He asked me where I was going. He muttered something about “sto” something. “Bedzie dobry,” I sighed and started to get in. He yelled something and drove off, only to pull into a drive sto meters away. What I want to know is if he was only going 100 meters, why the hell did he pull over in the first place?
Another car pulled out of a drive behind me, drove about fifty meters and began slowing as it approached me. “Finally,” I thought., but the car passed me and pulled into another driveway, about seventy-five meters away from where it began. “Lazy jerk,” I thought.
Finally someone gave me a ride. I walked the final kilometer to the main road from Jabłonka where I quickly caught a ride all the way back to dom naucy–oh, to my apartment.
Stupid day . . .
Thoughts on Alcohol
This afternoon I saw the man who has a mustache and red beret entering the gmina. He is short with a fierce look of arrogance in his eyes. He often struts, and more often he staggers. I seldom see him sober and I never see him without a cigarette. At the store he strutted in and threw down some money and said gruffly, “Daj mi Popularnie,” the cheapest brand of cigarettes at about 1.20 z a pack or about $0.44.
It got me to thinking about drunkenness and alcoholism in general. It seems that for a long time we either turned a blind eye to the problem or we laughed at it (as illustrated by the character Otis on The Andy Griffith Show). In America it is often hidden away, shuffled to the slums or closed behind suburban doors. But here, it is out in the open. People click their tongues and shake their heads, but they’ve become desensitized, I think. And since many of the women who click their tongues go home to alcoholic husbands, it’s hard [to imagine that they] feel much more than disgust. They are codependent in the original sense of the word, and when they see a man staggering down the street, they see him in their own pain, and the only reaction that seems logical is revulsion.
Grandmother’s Day
I had a rather successful lesson with IB today. I wrote the lyrics for “Come On Come On” and cut the song into strips. I left blanks for a few words, so first they had to put the song in the proper order, then fill in the missing words. The whole thing took up the full class period, and everyone got involved and stayed busy.
The lessons with IA went well, too. The first lesson we worked on the animal crossword puzzle. I gave them the complete list, let them study it and ask questions, then took the lists back up and gave them the puzzles. The second lesson was simple: I had everyone write a letter to Maw-Maw. It was Grandmothers’ Day Tuesday and I thought it would make a nice surprise for Maw-Maw–and keep the kids busy during the last lesson of the semester.
An interesting romance has sprung up between Anna P. in IB (the one I always call on, hoping to boost her confidence) . . . and Zbeszek. I saw them walking hand in hand yesterday. I hope that his apathy doesn’t rub off onto her . . .
The weather has warmed considerably this week. Snow is melting and the ice on the road has turned to black slush. I walk about without a hat or gloves and nothing turns numb. There was a beautiful full moon last night, but the standard clouds have returned and it is as dark as a moonless night now. But the starts don’t provide any surrogate light. It seems unlikely that this warmth will last, and in a way I don’t even want it to. The black snow and the dirty slush serve as a prelude to the inevitably muddy spring that is on the way. Spring will bring many good things, but they will arrive in a muddy package.
I wonder what this is doing for the frozen creek? Obviously some of the ice is melting, but is it becoming unsafe? Kids have been skating and playing on it for weeks now, and until I saw how thick it is, I did feel a little anxious each time I saw them. I guess there’s nothing I can do unless I see something happen. I don’t worry about it.
I wonder if the ice will audibly pop when it thaws. I’ve always read about the gunshot noise rivers make; would a small stream do such a thing? If so I doubt it would be loud enough for me to hear unless I happened to be close to it. Perhaps I will be by some stroke of luck.
Halina (IA) did not come to school the entire three weeks between the two breaks. I wonder if she’ll come back at all. I should go up to the Haven and see what’s going on there. Perhaps she’ll be back after winter break.
She was always a bit confusing. In some ways she seemed very eager to learn. But often she was incredibly apathetic about everything. I think part of it was due to a lack of confidence. But her English seemed rather good. Or at least she’d become very good at faking understanding. I think she might actually ahve been bored in class. I know that she felt a bit out of place because of the age difference between her and the rest of the class.