WANDERING THROUGH WARSAW
A group of Tibetan monks taking a stroll through Ogrod Saski one fine day in April.
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You rush unchecked in the beating gallop
Chased by the wind of your history and your future fame!
You rush and you take us, to the surprise of Europe,
Towering and strained capital, Warsaw!
Julian Tuwim
It has always struck me as enjoyably peculiar the orthographic similarity between the words ‘wonder’ and ‘wander’. Peculiar because despite their completely distinct etymological roots it might be said that they are still in fact nodes of the same plant.
In both cases, it is movement that is the stem from which both words diffuse. With wonder, in its capacity to marvel and wind out the possibilities thrown before it, it is a turning of the mind; with wander, in its power to gather ground, a turning of the foot.
The following blog, then, in its 3 years of stravaigs between Octobers 2006-9, presents something not just of a wandering of Warsaw, but of a wondering of this thing we call 'the city'. In the inimitable words of the cinematographer and traveller Wim Wenders:
Adventure, space and time.
My writing is a combination of three elements: the first is travel, not travel like a tourist but travel as exploration; the second is literature; the third is reflection.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Wandering from the strangled lanes and the tall thin houses of the city’s old town to the vast inglorious squares, runway avenues and wide-rises of the Socialist Realist Srodmiescie, and still further, to the open green spaces of Powazki Necropolis and Pole Mokotowskie, Skaryszewski and Lazienki Parks, Warsaw’s species of space are almost as varied as the life that inhabits them. From the perceived inhumanity of a discordant Centrum (and the ultra Palace of Culture) to the verdant ‘skwers’ of squat-block courtyards and the quiet compositions of Stary Mokotow and Saska Kepa, there is in Warsaw, from one quarter to another, and like no other European city, an ever-changing and pervasive sense of space.
To the avid wanderer, this often conspicuous melding of space is one of the city’s greatest attributes, for, in upsetting our normal rhythms of spatial interaction, the city brings the space itself to the fore.
In wandering the city (in ‘spacing’ it and engaging its space) the poems I have placed here effectively begin at this fundamental level. From here, they radiate outwards and encompass all aspects of the city, and whatever else, however distant, that may lie out there.
Today our goal is movement
in tranquillity
a certain fluency, agility
A revolution in being -
A whole geography of space
Lies before me
A quantum atlas everchanging
evershifting
Continents opening
Continents closing
Worlds in flux
metamorphosing
All ways
Uncharted.
Seeing itself is a movement.
August Macke
This is no Warsaw
Of candle and cross.
This is a Warsaw
of seeing not saw,
of bird not war.
This is a Warsaw like never before.
One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow. Wallace Stevens
Eleven rooks in the tree
Jedenaście gawronów na drzewie -
Two jackdaws on the aerial
Dwie kawki na antenie -
Three hooded crows on the roof
Trzy wrony na dachu -
One raven… in the brain
Jeden kruk… w mózgu.
In the widest daylight
in certain parts of the city
the human element
completely disappears
there is only a vague sensation of man
a few cracked tyre tracks in the earth
the sound perhaps of an airplane overhead -
This city
is the solitary city
the silent city
where all the flurry of talk has dissolved
into the air
into the earth
where the denizens
are dispersed
subterranean,
into iron and steel,
behind brick walls,
insinuated
into the integument of the city.
The city, rid of its self,
has become something else.
It is still the city
only not bigger not louder,
but quieter,
more alive.
Gradually,
the empty waste ground,
the weeds growing through the window,
the suddenly silent street,
in broad daylight,
smash the mind to pieces -
The pine trees seem to listen. F. Nietzsche
They stand like judges
silently
in the sandy needled earth
crackled bark, fractured limbs,
stretching their grotesque red necks
listening intently
surrounded by smell
quietly epic.
Dry -
That burnt dry -
Nothing left but pine needles…
..and sand…
and that aquiline light
percolating through
the pine trees.
…all these paths and tracts, interzonal,
Archived in the undergrowth,
Fugitive from the life that exhibits itself,
Draw the mindbody in
Draw the mindbody out,
Piece together a new city
By parallax, extract,
A city of space, that hides, accidental,
from all the standards hitherto published,
From purpose, profit, aversion
Harbouring petals of the unseen mover,
the flows overlapping,
enlarging,
Evolving
like flowers on a great chestnut
all these paths and tracts
The tree within a single leaf
drawing poetry in the earth.
Pure time existence. Henri Bergson
On skwer Malkowskich
opposite Park Dreszera
9 wandering rocks
the resident errants of Mokotow
Bledne Skalny (erratic boulders)
erratic once
static now
concentrating energies
in a moment of repose
before the wandering begins again -
Meditate upon space as the highest reality. The Upanishads
It’s not often you find a hill in Warsaw
sure, there are high rises
more views than people
but a hill
technically a 'tell'
a weathered womb
with aerated views
across the land -
and that tellurian feeling
almost umbilical
attached to the whole of the earth.
This wide smile of a lake
a sliver of the Vistula
lipping away with the willows
shelters the gulls above
an old man digging in the mud
a heron stood silently waiting.
Today
Courtyarding
Srodmiescie (Downtown)
Hoza Wspolna Wilcza Lwowska
A sort of spelunking
Potholing from the sides
Into the heart of an architect
The belly of a building -
Once in the cavern
The sounds feather downwards
From all sides
A whirlpool of voices
Of fridges closing
Tables being laid
Secrets being shared -
The soul of the structure
Is courtyard shaped
The innards of this palace
A cavernous shaft
Up there on the rooftop
It’s another world.
Arriving at the end of the line
so tempted to keep going
I exit into Kabaty
the form-filled fringe of Warsaw
the precipice of city
cutting sharply into country.
Yet form in Kabaty is singularly suffering.
There are no pinnacles, no peaks,
no crags.
Simply blocks and cubes of
pulseless planes,
unfertilised space.
At the city limit,
the sharp teeth of humanity
stare at the brink of a world
from pastel-coloured blocks.
Red here
yellow there
green over there.
Blocks, ‘spiritually unsympathetic’,
(Kandinsky’s words not mine),
separated by canyons
of non-colour.
Blocks sometimes compounded,
fenced in,
by peach perimeters -
Buildings too far
buildings too near,
it is a riot of colour and non-colour,
a great spatial battle
of sound and echo.
When talking of the motion of colour
Kandinsky tells us, yellow -
There is madness here in Kabaty.
To try and displace the concrete grey
so profuse
in Warsaw,
the Kabaty colourists,
with their greens and reds,
blacks and whites,
have inadvertently uncovered grey
again.
(Delacroix sought to express rest
and the immobility of grey
through a mixture of green and red)
In The Language of Form and Colour
Kandinsky notes:
Kabaty and Kandinsky
mull on the last
a seething spatial drama
a motionless discord
both cold and dark.
Here in summer
all this heat
all this growth
makes me yearn for winter
for death and streets
quiet and free, that are cold
and speak with an easy tongue
and whisper to me
the beauty of oblivion -
The few forts that remain
blissfully untouched by human hands
Zbarz Pilsudskiego Szczesliwice
conjure up
portals of emptiness
surrounded by chaos -
Invisible eyes one can seep into
off the beaten track
away from the storm -
The rustle of reeds
on the verge of the moat;
the flooded caverns
filled with echo
bring something of a timelessness to these ferruginous forts -
And yet, time is all that grows here,
the nectar of space
reaches out, brushes against your leg,
wild, overgrown, wet -
A Series of Stravaigs thru the Polish Capital.
Avian architrave
You rush unchecked in the beating gallop
Chased by the wind of your history and your future fame!
You rush and you take us, to the surprise of Europe,
Towering and strained capital, Warsaw!
Julian Tuwim
Pre-amble
It has always struck me as enjoyably peculiar the orthographic similarity between the words ‘wonder’ and ‘wander’. Peculiar because despite their completely distinct etymological roots it might be said that they are still in fact nodes of the same plant.
In both cases, it is movement that is the stem from which both words diffuse. With wonder, in its capacity to marvel and wind out the possibilities thrown before it, it is a turning of the mind; with wander, in its power to gather ground, a turning of the foot.
The following blog, then, in its 3 years of stravaigs between Octobers 2006-9, presents something not just of a wandering of Warsaw, but of a wondering of this thing we call 'the city'. In the inimitable words of the cinematographer and traveller Wim Wenders:
Adventure, space and time.
ARCHIVE
PLEASE LEAVE BREAD FOR THE BIRDS
My writing is a combination of three elements: the first is travel, not travel like a tourist but travel as exploration; the second is literature; the third is reflection.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
spacers
Wandering from the strangled lanes and the tall thin houses of the city’s old town to the vast inglorious squares, runway avenues and wide-rises of the Socialist Realist Srodmiescie, and still further, to the open green spaces of Powazki Necropolis and Pole Mokotowskie, Skaryszewski and Lazienki Parks, Warsaw’s species of space are almost as varied as the life that inhabits them. From the perceived inhumanity of a discordant Centrum (and the ultra Palace of Culture) to the verdant ‘skwers’ of squat-block courtyards and the quiet compositions of Stary Mokotow and Saska Kepa, there is in Warsaw, from one quarter to another, and like no other European city, an ever-changing and pervasive sense of space.
To the avid wanderer, this often conspicuous melding of space is one of the city’s greatest attributes, for, in upsetting our normal rhythms of spatial interaction, the city brings the space itself to the fore.
In wandering the city (in ‘spacing’ it and engaging its space) the poems I have placed here effectively begin at this fundamental level. From here, they radiate outwards and encompass all aspects of the city, and whatever else, however distant, that may lie out there.
TODAY OUR GOAL IS MOVEMENT
Today our goal is movement
in tranquillity
a certain fluency, agility
A revolution in being -
RESPECT WOMEN OR THE BITCH GETS IT!
THE POSSIBILITY OF SPACE
A whole geography of space
Lies before me
A quantum atlas everchanging
evershifting
Continents opening
Continents closing
Worlds in flux
metamorphosing
All ways
Uncharted.
This is no Warsaw
Seeing itself is a movement.
August Macke
This is no Warsaw
Of candle and cross.
This is a Warsaw
of seeing not saw,
of bird not war.
This is a Warsaw like never before.
Looking onto ulica Goszczynskiego one white wintry morning
One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow. Wallace Stevens
Eleven rooks in the tree
Jedenaście gawronów na drzewie -
Two jackdaws on the aerial
Dwie kawki na antenie -
Three hooded crows on the roof
Trzy wrony na dachu -
One raven… in the brain
Jeden kruk… w mózgu.
In broad daylight
In the widest daylight
in certain parts of the city
the human element
completely disappears
there is only a vague sensation of man
a few cracked tyre tracks in the earth
the sound perhaps of an airplane overhead -
This city
is the solitary city
the silent city
where all the flurry of talk has dissolved
into the air
into the earth
where the denizens
are dispersed
subterranean,
into iron and steel,
behind brick walls,
insinuated
into the integument of the city.
The city, rid of its self,
has become something else.
It is still the city
only not bigger not louder,
but quieter,
more alive.
Gradually,
the empty waste ground,
the weeds growing through the window,
the suddenly silent street,
in broad daylight,
smash the mind to pieces -
The Pine Trees of Kampinos
The pine trees seem to listen. F. Nietzsche
They stand like judges
silently
in the sandy needled earth
crackled bark, fractured limbs,
stretching their grotesque red necks
listening intently
surrounded by smell
quietly epic.
The Mazowiecki Mindscape Park
Dry -
That burnt dry -
Nothing left but pine needles…
..and sand…
and that aquiline light
percolating through
the pine trees.
Extract from the song of space
…all these paths and tracts, interzonal,
Archived in the undergrowth,
Fugitive from the life that exhibits itself,
Draw the mindbody in
Draw the mindbody out,
Piece together a new city
By parallax, extract,
A city of space, that hides, accidental,
from all the standards hitherto published,
From purpose, profit, aversion
Harbouring petals of the unseen mover,
the flows overlapping,
enlarging,
Evolving
like flowers on a great chestnut
all these paths and tracts
The tree within a single leaf
drawing poetry in the earth.
A moment of repose
Pure time existence. Henri Bergson
On skwer Malkowskich
opposite Park Dreszera
9 wandering rocks
the resident errants of Mokotow
Bledne Skalny (erratic boulders)
erratic once
static now
concentrating energies
in a moment of repose
before the wandering begins again -
Atop the tell kopiec powstania warszawskiego
Meditate upon space as the highest reality. The Upanishads
It’s not often you find a hill in Warsaw
sure, there are high rises
more views than people
but a hill
technically a 'tell'
a weathered womb
with aerated views
across the land -
and that tellurian feeling
almost umbilical
attached to the whole of the earth.
by jezioro kamionkowskie in june
This wide smile of a lake
a sliver of the Vistula
lipping away with the willows
shelters the gulls above
an old man digging in the mud
a heron stood silently waiting.
warsaw intra muros
Today
Courtyarding
Srodmiescie (Downtown)
Hoza Wspolna Wilcza Lwowska
A sort of spelunking
Potholing from the sides
Into the heart of an architect
The belly of a building -
Once in the cavern
The sounds feather downwards
From all sides
A whirlpool of voices
Of fridges closing
Tables being laid
Secrets being shared -
The soul of the structure
Is courtyard shaped
The innards of this palace
A cavernous shaft
Up there on the rooftop
It’s another world.
the heart of an architect
KANDINSKY IN KABATY
The spirit, like the body, can be strengthened and developed by frequent exercise[…] for this reason it is necessary for the artist to know the starting point for the exercise of his spirit. The starting point is the study of colour and its effects on men. Wassily Kandinsky
Arriving at the end of the line
so tempted to keep going
I exit into Kabaty
the form-filled fringe of Warsaw
the precipice of city
cutting sharply into country.
Yet form in Kabaty is singularly suffering.
There are no pinnacles, no peaks,
no crags.
Simply blocks and cubes of
pulseless planes,
unfertilised space.
At the city limit,
the sharp teeth of humanity
stare at the brink of a world
from pastel-coloured blocks.
Red here
yellow there
green over there.
Blocks, ‘spiritually unsympathetic’,
(Kandinsky’s words not mine),
separated by canyons
of non-colour.
Blocks sometimes compounded,
fenced in,
by peach perimeters -
Buildings too far
buildings too near,
it is a riot of colour and non-colour,
a great spatial battle
of sound and echo.
When talking of the motion of colour
Kandinsky tells us, yellow -
can never have profound meaning […]
may be paralleled in human nature with madness,
not with melancholy or hypochondriacal mania,
but rather with violent raving lunacy.
There is madness here in Kabaty.
To try and displace the concrete grey
so profuse
in Warsaw,
the Kabaty colourists,
with their greens and reds,
blacks and whites,
have inadvertently uncovered grey
again.
(Delacroix sought to express rest
and the immobility of grey
through a mixture of green and red)
In The Language of Form and Colour
Kandinsky notes:
Two great divisions of colour occur to the mind at the outset:
Into warm and cold, and into light and dark.
To each colour there are therefore four shades of appeal -
Warm and light or warm and dark,
or cold and light or cold and dark.
Kabaty and Kandinsky
mull on the last
a seething spatial drama
a motionless discord
both cold and dark.
In a Warsaw Winter
Here in summer
all this heat
all this growth
makes me yearn for winter
for death and streets
quiet and free, that are cold
and speak with an easy tongue
and whisper to me
the beauty of oblivion -
fort zbarz
fortress warsaw
The few forts that remain
blissfully untouched by human hands
Zbarz Pilsudskiego Szczesliwice
conjure up
portals of emptiness
surrounded by chaos -
Invisible eyes one can seep into
off the beaten track
away from the storm -
The rustle of reeds
on the verge of the moat;
the flooded caverns
filled with echo
bring something of a timelessness to these ferruginous forts -
And yet, time is all that grows here,
the nectar of space
reaches out, brushes against your leg,
wild, overgrown, wet -