Wanders through .....Warsaw.

2009-09-29T06:09:00.000-07:00

WARSAW TALKING

Are you the traveller travelling through me?

To begin with take heed for I am surely far different from what you suppose;

Do you suppose you will find in me the downtrodden city?

Do you think perhaps you will begin to hate me?

Do you think our meeting will shed blood before its end?

Do you think me grey and ugly?

Do you see no further than this façade, this awkward misshapen structure of me?

Do you suppose yourself spacing on hallowed ground toward a murdered city?

Have you no thought O wanderer that it may all be Maya, iluzjon?

2009-09-29T05:04:00.000-07:00

It is a great art to saunter.

Henry David Thoreau

THE WANDER BEYOND: A SHORT WORD ON THE STRAVAIG

As a Scottish teacher of English in Warsaw, one of the first words I teach to my students (in fact possibly the only word since vocabulary is something of a self-taught enterprise), whether their level be elementary or proficiency, is the word ‘stravaig’. Likewise, when embarking upon a foreign country and a foreign language (all too aware of how much the lexicon of a language can reveal through its descriptions of movement), one of the first words I learn is/are the word(s) for ‘walk’ (which incidentally, in Polish, is ‘spacer’, pronounced spatzer) and its offshoots.

Although used in the same vain as the word ‘walk’ the stravaig is never simply a walk. The stravaig, a Scottish sculpting of the old English word ‘extravaig’ (from the Latin ‘extra’ and ‘vagari’ meaning to wander outside or beyond and from where we have the modern day 'extravagant'), denotes not only the physical activity of travelling outwards but also a cerebral one of removing the cranial corset imposed on us by traditional linear thinking. The stravaig indulges all that a restrictedly linear foot (and mind) might does not - it welcomes tangents, deviations, digressions, detours, divagations; it wanders down alleyways, cuts laterally across parks and fields, and railyards, gets beyond the pathetically limited ‘city’ that consists of a couple of blocks and three or four points of reference. The stravaig is open to the asides, the arounds and the abouts of city and country. There is a curiosity in the stravaiger that welcomes the city as a conglomeration of monstrosities (as well as a forest of ideas). However, it is not all about the city. The stravaiger’s territory is not so limited. In wandering outwards, and indulging the vagaries of an animated body, everything comes into play during the stravaig. And in out-wandering (in ‘planetting’) the stravaiger becomes an inexorable function of the Earth itself.

At the school in the district of Imielin one evening, in a moment of reciprocal word-swapping, it comes as no surprise that the Polish word for playing truant is ‘wagary’ (pronounced va-garry).

THE FLUID OSCILLATION OF INNER & OUTER AND THE MELDING AND WELDING OF MIND & WORLD

With the simple act of walking, of wandering (purposelessly) without any particular aim in mind, the sauntering stravaiger enters into an area of pendulous oscillation. Of left and right, up and down, of waves of walking, and undulations. It is this rhythm, (regular bodily motion synchronises space and time allowing each to be experienced in terms of the other), and the resulting fusion of space, time and animated body, that allows and fosters a cognitive waywardness (the tonus of the muscles affecting the tonus of the mind) which then percolates the mind into the landscape one is walking through. Walking becomes an emblem of wholeness, comprehending both the person’s conscious steps and pauses and the path beneath his rising and falling feet. Thus, one is integrated into the environment, one becomes it, entering into an area referred to by Robert Louis Stevenson, wanderer par excellence, as ‘the parish of the infinite’.

Jeffrey C. Robinson, from his book The Walk, speaks of the walk as,

an occasion of limited vulnerability…The world flows past my body […] the walk implies a mixture or an alternation of committed responses and disinterested reflection, or the world on a walk engenders the mental polarity of critical thinking all the way to wonderment.

In mentioning the flow of world and our relationship to it, John Bliebtreu, neurologist and animal behaviourist, would go one further than Robinson, and perhaps reconnect with Stevenson’s ‘parish’ by saying in The Parable of the Beast that the world does not just flow past my porous body:

Electrically and chemically the world moves right through us as though we were made of mist.

Harry Martinson, Swedish vagrant, seafarer and poet, in his Aimless Travels, conceives of the world in a similar way:

In what unheard of intimacy of exchange does man live on earth! And how the earth breathes through him!

And so it is, like this, that on the stravaig, man is worlded.

Martinson, no stranger to stravaiging, was a man more at home out of doors with a roof of stars and a bed of grass. A man who had spent many years as a stoker on several ships, and as a vagabond on the back roads of his native Sweden, he writes in his autobiographical book The Road:

It is for the serenity it gives that he continues to stride alongside it, while the visible road passes through his expectant body, not like a string of promises with a gap between each, but like an endless belt of promise that runs through him all his life. The road becomes a flood of promises that streams in through the eyes and out through his heels, a flow of promise that is an end in itself: in itself a fulfilment. The only condition that it shall be so is that he should walk on and on.

Again, we have the flow, the waltz of earth and man breathing in unison, the world moving right through us.

During the process of making vodka (an activity of no small significance here in Poland) the grain is softened first by steeping it in water before brewing. A process of melting occurs, giving way to the process of malting. It is this softening of the grain, this malting (from the Greek meldein ‘to melt, make liquid’), that refines the vodka.

The process of walking (a process of waking), of setting in motion the body and the mind, is not dissimilar to the process involved in the rectification and refinement of vodka, the word ‘vodka’ (little water) being the diminutive of the word ‘woda’ (water).

To get at thinking, a process of walking out the impurities of thought is first required. To become a thinker (that can go beyond and does not rely upon mere post-factum ‘thinked thoughts’) one must first become a stillmaster, and discard appropriately the ‘heads’ and the ‘tails’ of impure compounds. To become this 'stillmaster' one can either move or remain still. Though by remaining still one limits the spontaneity that a walk and ‘being on the move’ might engender. The power of sudden cometary intrusions to excite the mind, to whisk it up, is all but gone when we’re not walking. This is not a million miles away from Erich Fromm in Fear of Freedom:

In our culture, however, education too often results in the elimination of spontaneity and in the substitution of original psychic acts by superimposed feelings, thoughts and wishes. (By original I do not mean, let me repeat, that an idea has not been thought before by someone else, but that it originates in the individual, that it is the result of his own activity and in this sense is his thought).

In getting to the source of our thoughts (realising them for ourselves, involving ourselves in the process, and understanding them) we learn, on a walk, how to think for ourselves. Wandering and wondering are not so removed from each other. An implication of this is that when we don’t walk we forego this opportunity to think for ourselves, and we 'learn' how to accept willy-nilly the ideas of others as set in stone, and to use them as a template for our subsequent ‘thoughts’.

A man, who has been a keen advocate of a ‘pure pathology of mind and body’, and of a 'moving zazen', of an extravaging life that seeks amongst other things to get to the root of real thinking, is the thinker traveller Kenneth White. For White, sitting passively on a small black cushion just doesn’t do it. ‘Meditation isn’t mummification’, White writes in his poem In the Sea and Pine Country, ‘it’s quick movement that enlightens the mind […] that is the perfect zazen.’ This combination of movement and thinking was to erupt in White’s writings from very early on. They were inextricably bound together. His own wanders through Glasgow, Munich, and Paris (amongst others) in the fifties and sixties is early evidence of the connection White attributed to walking and writing. There was a movement, a momentum in both, that could yield to a refined understanding of the cosmos that went beyond the mere human context. These were the relationships, ‘communication between man and cosmos’, of an Incandescent Limbo:

I am a survivor of a great catastrophe and I am trying to re-establish contact. I walk and I write for the same reasons. To make the right movements and to renew lost relationships.

When a traveller asked Wordsworth’s butler to show him her master’s study, she answered, ‘here is his library, but his study is out of doors.’ Likewise, White was to express, in En Toute Candeur, reiterating a Nietzschean lament at modern man’s (in)capacity for rhythm,

It's better to take a man for a stroll along the seashore on a windy day than for him to learn versification.

A follower of Aristotelian peripateticism (walking-talking-teaching-learning) it was through walking, through ‘la dérive’ (literally unembanked) of the drift, probably the closest you can get to the stravaig at least in linguistic terms if not in practical terms, that the American thinker and stravaiger Henry Bugbee came into direct contact with things, and things (via his now unencapsulated self) came into direct contact with him. For Bugbee the walk was, in the spirit of Heidegger’s ‘Gelassenheit’, a return to the things in themselves.

From his journal An Inward Morning, here is an entry, dated Friday August 7th:

During my years of graduate study before the war I studied philosophy in the classroom and at a desk, but my philosophy took shape mainly on foot. It was truly peripatetic, engendered not merely while walking, but through walking that was essentially a meditation of the place[…] I weighed everything by the measure of the silent presence of things, clarified in the racing clouds, clarified by the cry of hawks, solidified in the presence of rocks, spelled syllable by syllable by waters of manifold voice, and consolidated in the act of taking steps, each step a meditation steeped in reality.

With the derive (leaving the banks of ideology and certain ways of thinking as opposed to a simple errancy) we are already in a more demanding space. Bugbee was aware, like Aristotle and Thoreau, that the textbook and the walled classroom could only take you so far, and that before we could even begin to appreciate the whole we should need, as Harry Martinson says, again in his Aimless Travels, ‘…many years of patient teaching in a thousand open-air classrooms’.

It is then that I stress to my students the importance of ‘wagary’, that a little truancy once in a while never hurt anyone. Indeed, to quote Thoreau from Walden, a man well acquainted with the stravaig:

To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation! - why, if I had taken a wander down the harbor I should have known more about it.

As a ‘meditative walker’ (stravaiger) Thoreau would often indulge in day-long walks to the back of beyond around his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. For him, this was the saunter, a word that in his practice of it, takes on a similar meaning to the stravaig. And a word whose archaeology fascinated him.

Etymologically, theories abound as to the whereabouts of its birthplace. Thoreau himself explored the etymology of ‘saunter’ which he believed was derived from the French ‘Sainte-Terre’ (Holy Land) or from ‘sans terre’ (without land). However, Thoreau (perhaps in a moment of puritanism) tended towards the former stating that true walking was not a directionless wandering of the countryside, but a crusade ‘to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the infidels’. Although he admitted that his own walks brought him back to home and hearth at the end of the day, the walking to which he aspired demanded that the walker leave his life behind in the ‘spirit of undying adventure, never to return’. The ‘walker errant’ is in a category by himself, ‘a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People’. But many of Thoreau’s townsmen were too tied to society and daily life to walk in the proper spirit. Walking lead naturally to the fields and woods and away from the village, that scene of much busy-ness. Entertaining the village via some dubious etymologies as to the place of the ‘road’ and ‘vile’ behaviours, Thoreau expanded on the need to venture forth into new territory, free from the frank of man. It was here that we perhaps had the answer to our ‘saunter’ - in this venturing forth, in the sense of escaping conventions, the village and established roads. In subscribing to the ‘Sainte-Terre’ origin of ‘saunter’, Thoreau, albeit inadvertently, had stumbled upon, with his ‘spirit of undying adventure’, a more plausible origin for the word. That of adventure. From the old French ‘s'aventurer’.

Nevertheless, 's'aventurer' is only one likely birthplace for ‘saunter’. If we look at ‘sans terre’ as a state of landlessness, perhaps implying vagrancy (as belonging to no country or flag), it could be interpreted as a state of ‘groundlessness’, a state that surely the transcendental Thoreau was familiar with, as that of non-attachment, of spontaneous compassion, of a non-desirous will to shape the world as we moved. The saunterer, as venturer, as extra-vagrant, threw off the gravity of manufactured life, whilst welcoming the levity of the naturally creating life.

Whatever the origins, there is something of a connection between Thoreau’s ontic saunter and the stravaig. It is the daring venture of Heidegger’s being, the open road of Whitman’s song and Martinson’s endless walk, the untented Kosmos of Robert Louis Stevenson’s abode, and the moving meditations of White’s open world.

‘Man is an adventurer and he must never give up the adventure’, writes D.H. Lawrence in his essay Books. With a little extra poetic license we could perhaps rephrase this as, ‘man is a stravaiger and he must never give up the stravaig’.

2009-09-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

THE DAY IN A LIFE - IN THE PLANE OF IMMANENCE

We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE and nothing else... A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.

Gilles Deleuze

They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold, and I deem them mad for thinking my days have a price.

Khalil Gibran

After three years wandering (and wondering) through Warsaw, and 15 months of periodic blogging, it's time to move on and indulge what Deleuze referred to as our 'sacred right of migration'. Warsaw has opened my eyes perhaps more than any of the other dozen or so cities I have lived (and wandered) in. This is no doubt due to the sheer incongruity of Warsaw's spaces, its buildings, the abundance of wildlife living in the city or just passing through, the primordial on the periphery, the great forests out of which Warsaw springs. Warsaw is, in spite of the new economic model it labours under, a peaceful city which is completely at odds with the Paris', Londons, and New Yorks of this world. Warsaw has thus refreshed and revitalised, and re-established lost connections. Granted, in the spirit of Ghibran, I have forsaken the conventions of 'making a living' in the hope that I might actually do it, and thus freed up time (or, perhaps more accurately, not clotted it up in a state of manic busy-ness) to explore the territory, get out and about. Perhaps emphatically, my great stravaiging companion of the past 3 years, Berenika (the bringer of victory), who for the past 18 months has studied the correlations of play behaviour in infant rats with exploratory behaviour in adults, has intimated that at heart I am in fact a rat. This comparison, like Warsaw itself, has pleased me no end!

'Exploring the overgrowth' in Pole Mokotowskie.

2009-09-15T06:47:00.000-07:00

SPECIES OF SPACE

Every city has its own particular, even peculiar, brand of space.

Warsaw is no exception, and is particularly endowed with peculiarity, and a variety of species.

Take Plac Pilsudskiego for example with its eulogy to emptiness framed on all sides by low rise techtonics in a variety of styles. Space has never been so unanimous. The whole square (and it is a square) is in some ways a grand epitaph to the destruction that was levelled here. The square is its own building so to speak… 2 dimensions not three, more space than stone. It is an epitah with no name.

Another great example of the peculiarly spacious city of Warsaw is its underground system. When I first used the metro (though this will come as no surprise with those of you familiar with Glasgow’s ‘clockwork orange’) I was aghast at the volume of space within these cavernous subterrene halls. Ok, so it’s only one line, but look at that space. It’s all the more amplified, especially as you get further out from Centrum, by Warsaw’s uncongested feel. You’d never get this in any other European capital.

Another unmissable Varsovian landmark, and perhaps Warsaw's piece de resistance, it took me a while to realise the beauty of the Palace of Culture was not the building per se but the space (the 77 hectares) that surrounded it. Like a volcano abruptly rising out of an ocean, the Palace of Culture erupts space like no other.

The Centrum district of Warsaw, of which the above picture represents one half, is divided into two by the punishingly long decumanus maximus of Aleje Jerozolimskie. Bisected into north centre (Srodmiescie Polnoc, above picture) where Centrum proper is located, and south centre (Srodmiescie Poludnie), where the vast basin square of Plac Konstitucji lies, the centre of Warsaw is an eye-opening event for anyone with even the most partial of sight.

Within these two halves Centrum in fact embodies most vigorously an ethos of architecture and town planning that defines the whole city. This ethos of course is the absolute incongruity of juxtapositional elements. While Srodmiescie Poludnie points to the past with its various Secessionist and Socrealist stone relics and varying degrees of spaces, its northern counterpoint, with the dominating Palace of Culture and Science and the awkward Modernist shapes of cuboids, bubbles and pillars, points emphatically to the future.

Where Srodmiescie Poludnie (with perhaps the exception of the oversized Plac Konstitucji) retains the human element in its survivor tenements and manageable streets, Srodmiescie Polnoc (annihilated during WWII) goes exorbitant, and waylays the human in the most terrifying fashion.

Srodmiescie Polnoc (between Marszalkowska and Nowy Swiat) following WWII. In the centre of the picture you can make out the tall skeletal frame of the Prudential building which was painstakingly restored to its former glory.

The problem with Srodmiescie Polnoc, specifically the area between Marszalkowska and Nowy Swiat and Jerozolimskie and Swietokrzyska, is that it is, with its ignominious high rise tower blocks overseeing everything, as much residential as it is anything else. As such, there exists a neglected suburban scheme-feel about the area. In some of the passages behind the cuboid Galeria Centrum on Marszalkowska there is a complete absence of any spatial fluency, (imagine a labyrinth with fifty metre high walls). This might have been all well and good for the sixties when most of these things were thrown up, but now they are out of place and out of time.

What there is in terms of space in this area might be termed as ‘the bleeding effect’ where space drips from one area to the next, where it coagulates and clots due to the contiguity of structures, causing bottlenecks of people and cars, and where perma-dark passages only ever see the light of day during the sun’s more zenithal summery moments. What few fin de siecle buildings exist have their aesthetics levelled in one fell swoop by their propinquity to devastatingly horrid modernist bloks.

This discontinuity and fragmentation of architectural style and of space, of light and gravity and of urban geography, invests Warsaw’s centre with a certain peculiar quality that confers a subliminal sense of panic on the quotidian citizen. In terms of architecture and town planning, Centrum is, in other words, cosmetic surgery gone wrong. It is a precinct of horror, a tragedy on the city stage for all to see. It is perhaps for this reason that the whole area is a shopping centre, advertising openly welcomed. Indeed, the panic invested in the pedestrian means that he or she will at some point wish to conceal themselves from it, most probably in one of the many retail outlets here.

The Marszalkowska Monoliths - Virtual Tombstones for the Annihilated Area.

Maybe by turning the centre into a shopping mall and by accessorizing the faded facades of sixties modernism with multi-coloured ads, Centrum will take on a newer feel, more ‘twenty-first century’, more approachable than ever before, offering people the opportunity to come inside, explore this new world, and avoid such spatial angst.

'Sciana Wschodnia' (the Eastern Wall) at the beginning of the 1970s. In the 1960s, a complex of residential and office buildings went up on the eastern side of Marszalkowska Street between Jerozolimskie and Swietokrzyska. The 'Pasaz Srodmiejskie' with their Central Department stores and the Relax Cinema became one of the most popular places in Warsaw. The above picture reveals a certain idyllic quality with few cars and even a parasol-ed mezzanine in CDT (then one of Poland's largest department stores) on the left. Today, however, the city has not evolved, yet traffic is tenfold, detroying any sense of 'city life' that might once have been. Now, on the contrary, this area is a seething, writhing mess of pollution and chaos.

Looking at the newly built Centrum area in 1965. Again, notice the lack of traffic.

2009, almost half a century later. The same facade, except this time every surface screams.

The above are only a few of Warsaw's many species. Many others exist: the miniaturised Nowy Swiat, Plac Trzech Krzyzy, Stare Miasto (the old town), the great suburban dormitory of Ursynow. To document them is a thesis in itself. Better to wander perhaps, see them first, feel them in all their pervasive (in some cases 'perverse') sense of space.

2009-09-09T02:43:00.000-07:00

A COUPLE OF REMARKS ON THE DEEPER REALITY OF THE SLUZEW WALL

The essence of life is not a feeling of being, of existence, but a feeling of participation in a flowing onward, necessarily expressed in terms of time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space.

E. Minkowski (Vers Une Cosmologie)

1. Decay is the flowering of time: it extends into us a sense of width, a wide sense of duration; it is life and death all rolled into one; it is culture, not clutter.

Within a 'simultaneous society' where time has effectively been 'flattened' by speed (projected onto the flat screen of modernity) and denied its duration, man loses his sense of self as a historical being. Decay allows us not just to see and feel time, to touch it even and smell it, but since we ourselves are depleted by similar processes, we contend a solidarity with it.

Decay is not the despair of Ozymandias. On the contrary, decay is a thing of reassuring beauty - it recognises us within the unstoppable flow of the kosmos.

It allows us to participate in time, to move through it; it accords us what the psychiatrist Eugene Minkowski (a man who began his medical studies in Warsaw no less) referred to as 'lived time'.

Decay, in its embrace of death, gives us life.

2. It is somewhat ironic that here, on the Sluzew Wall, decay is symbolic as nature's way of keeping the human species in check, reminding us not only of change and movement and the ephemeral nature of all things (one day a piece is there the next it's gone) but of our powerlessness to resist its force. In the lexicon of graffiti writers these 'pieces' we see on the walls are variously known as 'tags' or 'bombs' or 'burners'. They are a sort of primal marking of territory, a 'territorial signal' to others. When another writer decides to muscle in on this territory it is a matter of course to over-write (in street argot, to 'cap') the extant pieces with his own tag. In this way, he promotes his own super-iority and assumes ownership of the original piece.

Decay then, (as the act of de-composing), is nature's way of capping (and owning) man.

Graffiti is not just about scrawling on walls, though I am sure there are many who think no more of it than just that. Graffiti goes much deeper. It tackles the very bones of existence: creation, destruction, ebb and flow - the endless rhythms of renewal. We would do well to give graffiti a little more credit for involving us so overtly and freely (when was the last time you saw a painting in a gallery 'decompose'?) in this great process. It is no surprise that every metropolis has some. I have yet to visit a city that doesn't. That in itself must tell us something.

Details of a piece. (taken over the period of two years)

2009-08-29T09:34:00.001-07:00

THE SIMPLE BEAUTY OF THE SILVER BIRCH

Birch trees have a special sacred significance in this part of the world. They are I suppose to northern Europe (and Russia) what bamboo is to south-east Asia. Next door, Finland and Belorus have it as their national tree. For the Siberian tribes of Russia the birch tree is the forest girl: slender, smooth, prone to the occasional weeping; she improves the soil. Poland doesn’t appear to have a national tree but if she did it would probably be the silver birch (Betula pendula).

As a pioneer species, one of the most important functions which birch trees fulfil is that of improving the soil. They are deep-rooted, and their roots draw up nutrients into their branches and leaves, which the trees use for their growth. Some of these nutrients are returned to the surface of the soil each year when the leaves fall in the autumn, thereby becoming available for other organisms in the forest community. An indication of the scale and significance of this nutrient cycling can be drawn from the estimate that birch trees will produce between 3 and 4 tonnes of leaf litter per hectare per year.

All around Warsaw there are great (and small) swathes of birches. In Wierzbno (ironically, the place of the Willow) there is a small unassuming birch entranceway to a block of flats which is made all the more special by its almost perfunctory status. Next door, down at the Russian cemetery, there is a line of birches which runs all the way from Raclawicka Avenue to the southern edge of Pole Mokotowskie, over a kilomtre in length. The latter 370m tail of this, through the allotment garden complex, has been accorded protected status as an ‘aleja zabytkowa’ due to its eco-historico nature.

These trees, whether birch or other, irrespective of their individual age, manage to give Warsaw a sense of deeper time, connecting and rooting the city with a profound and primeval past from which modern Warsaw has emerged. Forests still play a huge part in the city accounting for 14% (7,260 hectares) of the surface area. Most notable of these are Las Bielanski, Rezerwat Morysin and Natolinski, and the Mazowiecki National Park. This 14% doesn’t include the periphery forests of Kampinos or Chojnowski, the respective northern and southern lungs, which are located on the city’s immediate outskirts.

Many foreigners speak of the pretty Polish girls. They are world renowned for their radiant and healthy beauty. But there is another Polish girl who is the silver birch and who is just as elegant, just as beautiful, just as healthy. There is also the added bonus that for 4 months of the year, she is almost completely naked.

A Silver Birch Grove in Powsin's Park Kultury.

(Top: A line of 20 silver birches in the Kashubian town of Swarzewo between Puck and Wladyslowowo)

2009-08-29T04:09:00.000-07:00

THE ALLOTMENTS OF WARSAW

Aleja Brzozowa (Alley of Birches) in the allotment gardens at the southern end of Pole Mokotowskie.

Despite having lived in this area for almost three years and wandered it through and through, I discovered this sanctuary only a few weeks ago secreted in between the Russian Cemetery Park and Pole Mokotowskie.

The allotments (Ogrodki dzialkowe) of Warsaw have a long and colourful history, and are one of the city’s more redeeming features. Almost 5% (1,700 hectares) of Warsaw's city surface is given over to allotments. The first ‘dzialki’ were set up before the war when the Polish Socialist Party put forwards an initiative to form ‘special workers’ oases of peace’. Where the likes of London gradually lost hers to property developers (inner city London was covered with them following WWII) Warsaw has retained hers most emphatically, governed by an allotment cooperative to protect and conserve them.

The district of Mokotow is particularly blessed with these green areas which teem with all manner of life be it animal, vegetable or mineral. During the Communist era, and as part of a remit to have people ‘grow their own’, most of the ‘dzialki’ were allocated to professional groups such as teachers, railway workers or miners. An allotment ‘parcel’ was a symbol of a certain status. More importantly, it was a gurantee of a regular food supply since buying certain foods at stores was not always possible. In effect, it was a form of collective and responsible living which is still vigorously continued to this day.

Sadly, most allotment gardens are closed to the public. However, there are certain gardens which have public throughways like this one. Personally, I have never found it a problem to gain entry to these places. With a little patience and a well-aimed smile (and some very bad Polish), you can be surprised at what you can gain access to!

2009-08-25T06:56:00.000-07:00

UNDER THE CHESTNUT TREE

Here in Mokotow, I am surrounded by chestnut trees. Just down the road along the long eastern edge of the avenues of Andrzej Boboli and Woloska there are more than a hundred mature horse chestnuts all standing to attention. The sight (and smell) is quite overpowering at any time of year but particularly in April when their candelabra gently explode outwards.

Down the main thoroughfare of Raclawicka, itself a haven for some glorious oaks, there’s even a couple of red chestnuts dotted about. But it’s the horse chestnut at the end of my skwer that garners my special affection. I salute it every morning as I bask under it like a house fly in the summer sun. It is a fine old beast of a tree, a sage if ever there was one, ideally situated next to a lime, with a bench and the trzepak underneath. The shade it casts in summer is marvellously refreshing.

In summer, on sun-filled mornings like today, the light appears to cascade through its splayed hand-like leaves making the leaves themselves appear almost translucent. The dance of light and shade within is quite a painting. Indeed, if anything were to convince me to take up a palette and brush it would be this - sitting under the chestnut tree.

Lazing in Lazienki, under the chestnuts.

'In Praise of Shade - Under the Chestnut and Lime'.

2009-04-23T05:07:00.001-07:00

WANDERING THROUGH WARSAW

A group of Tibetan monks taking a stroll through Ogrod Saski one fine day in April.

2008-06-30T08:54:00.000-07:00

ALL GO IN WLOCHY

What guides poetic thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization…

Hannah Arendt

Warsaw, whilst being a city full of ‘development’, is also a city full of decay. It’s what makes it such a poetic place. Even in the city’s centre the wild places and abandoned spaces often contrast unsympathetically with the vanguard of skyscrapers in their fashioned glass and steel sprouting up here and there.

Beginning in the southernmost tip of the borough of Wlochy, Fort Zbarz, located on the border with Mokotow, is a great starting point for wildness and wetness and a study of decay. Fort Zbarz was part of a line of defences built in the early part of the 19th century which consisted of two circles of forts surrounding the city of Warsaw. Fort Zbarz, long since abandoned by humans, is part of the outer circle.

The fort itself has been partially swallowed by the water of its moat creating the image of a terraquaeous city half above half beneath the surface. The paths themselves, signs that not everyone has forgotten of such places, are difficult to follow since they too have been swallowed up by growth. This is the thing with decay. One man’s decay is another man’s growth. As things fall off (de-cadere) and separate from each other, they coalesce and unite with other things. Decay, thus, is not all ‘de-cay’; it is growth too. There are few things quite so majestic as nature retaking its territory.

Midst the reeds and red bricks, a plane flies overhead reminding us that the airport is next door. Terminal 2’s new glass and steel building is not five hundred metres from here, the runway a little less than a kilometre. Whether it’s the fort’s active undergrowth or the airport’s active runway, it’s all go in Wlochy.

2008-06-29T04:53:00.000-07:00

KILIMANJARO & MNEMOSYNE

Poles try to downplay the significance of the Palace of Culture. Most are either indifferent towards it or hate it altogether. Few have feelings towards it that might mimic a member of their family. Whatever the case, there is no denying the sheer monstrousness of the building itself. Not in half a century since it was built has anything in the city come close to it. Even Liebeskind's effort going on next door, Zloty 44, soon to be the tallest residential block in Europe, will be something of an embarrassment compared to the PKiN. You've got to hand it to Stalin's architects (in this case Lev Rudnev) for mimicking the iron man's own monstrousness, and getting his thanks (and Rudnev the Stalin Prize in 1949) in the process.

However much disdain and gingerbread vocabulary the modernists throw at it there's still no denying fifty years on the Palace of Culture's structural integrity, and its ability to stand alone without cohorts. Where Liebeskind's building will require the help of nearby skyscrapers to form a range of peaks, the Palace of Culture is a Kilimanjaro and a shining mountain in its own right. Factors have conspired to give the Palace a stage that it deserves (700 square metres of space surrounding it) that is as much a part of the building as the very blocks of the building themselves. Like Rudnev's Moscow State University, the building upon which it was modelled, the Palace of Culture has plazas on all four sides allowing its full form and dimension to be appreciated from the necessary distances. One can only hope that this 25 hectare stage, already primed for construction, remains sufficiently low-built as to continue to allow the Palace its spell.

As a teacher whose classroom has an unmolested view of this beast I find myself drifting off at the most inconvenient of times. In a spellbound state I have often drawn the comparison between the Palace of Culture and the Mother of the Muses, Mnemosyne, for both their abilities to render one blissfully lost in thought. Like the Greek word 'mnemon' itself (to be 'mindful') the Palace has both held my attention in my physical wanders throughout the city, and bestowed upon the vagaries of my mind a phantastic daydream quality. Occasionally, in the misty months of January and February, the Palace herself will become 'lost in thought'. It's as if, in her own narcissistic way, she has waylaid herself with her own beauty, and her mind, that pinnacle of inspiration, for a moment, wanders off into the clouds.

Beauty should be painted with her head lost in the clouds wrote Cesare Ripa in Iconologia, for there is nothing more difficult to describe than beauty.

2008-06-28T22:13:00.000-07:00

EROTIC ROCKS

Warsaw is full of erratic boulders (Glaz Narzutowy), or 'erotic rocks' as my Slavic companion calls them. At the Geological Institute opposite Rakowiecka Prison (quite a contrast in itself) at the entrance on Wisniowa Street there is the largest (30 ton) erratic boulder in Warsaw. The picture below is the red granitoid of Piaseczno, the largest in Mazuria, the Glaz Mazur. The district of Mokotow seems particularly endowed with these wandering rocks. There are boulders in Lazienki Park, a stone circle at the entrance to the Biblioteka Naradowa, and a variety of rocks at the Museum of the Earth, and, in the small Park Malskowich off Pulawska (opposite Park Dreszera), there are 9 more. In fact, wherever you go in Warsaw, even in the front of shopping malls, you're never far away from an erotic rock. On the other side of the river, a whole street is lined with them, Ulica Traczy in Wygoda in Rembertow, a sort of alley of honour, each one a tombstone for the fallen officers during the war. With these boulders all over Warsaw and beyond comes an element of ‘deep time’ (a term coined by the Scottish Geologist James Hutton) that slips into the consciousness of the passer-by, albeit subliminally. There is movement too in those boulders despite their static appearance. It is a sad reality of over-developed cities in Northern Europe that these boulders have invariably been removed due to the successive layering of society and to make way for a four-lane bypass or another Starbucks, and never been relocated. They have simply vanished under the rationale that there is no ‘point’ to them and they take up space. That there may indeed be no ‘point’ to them is an astute observation, yet it is the body of the boulder that matters. Their massive one-piece size alone is enough to get the mind turning. In Glasgow’s Buchanan Street, there used to be a sculpture, honed from the bone of an erratic boulder, by the name of ‘The Spirit of Kentigern’ (the patron Saint of Glasgow). It came as no surprise that it was locally known for its misshapen features as ‘The Blob’. One morning they came with a truck and lifting gear and hauled it off. Of course, when people complained (the blob apparently had its admirers) the City Council promised its removal was only temporary in order to repave the street. That was five years ago, and there is still no sign of it.

At times I feel like an erratic boulder - Poland is the eleventh country I have lived and worked in during the past 13 years. Gilles Deleuze, a man who wrote widely on the nomadic spirit of man, spoke of man’s ‘sacred right of migration’, his duty almost, to go out and explore the world. I had always found ‘holidays’ somewhat limiting in the temporary perspectives they offered. TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) provided the opportunity I was looking for, to move and reside simultaeneously, errancy and residency, to really travel (and travail) a country. Here in Poland, when I watch the storks, themselves great migrators, seemingly lazing about spending whole days nest-bound doing nothing in particular, it is easy to miss the mass of internal work that is going on. The eating, the resting, the thinking, the slow build-up of energy, the storing of such, in anticipation of the next move. Erratic boulders (or teflers) are no different. Living inter-glacially, it is only a matter of time before the wandering begins again.

2008-06-27T13:35:00.000-07:00

SPACER ARKITEKTURA

This blog is really just an excuse to get all cosmic. In fact, that's what city stravaiging is all about: attuning into the greater picture, getting a feel for time and space, tapping in to the life and death of the metropolis. The city, if you let it, can faciltate the experience of being rooted in the continuum of space and time. Architecture is a great starting point. But there are other ways too: birds, plants, trees, people even. You just have to open yourself up to it, and like a well-tuned wireless, refine the senses to receive their 'frequencies'. The weakening of the experience of time, the commodification of space, the growing desensitization of self through technology (and an economic model predicated on profit and competition), has devastating mental effects. People now speak in a terrifying chorus of not 'having' enough time, and of 'making' a living. They see life as a paper mache mask; they treat space as something to be occupied, to be measured and bought by the square metre. Time, well, time is money, is it not?

The human untied from time and space is the human disintegrated from the 'kosmos' of the beautiful whole. Lend your self to architecture - the patina of time, of wear and tear, of weathering and decay, will help you, perhaps. As will its textures and contours, its enlivening of space. Wander through the city with an aletheic gaze. Look, touch, taste and feel. Do not rely on the eyes. Be haptic! Listen too. You may hear something of that harmonising force which includes you.

This is one of several 'kopulaki' (copulating domes) in Ulica Ustrzycka just to the west of Zwirki i Wigury in Jadwisin. Built and designed in the sixities by architect Andrzej Iwanicki, a loophole in building regulations was exploited which denied space to constructions which exceeded a certain height. The result was this low level housing, mammary style, which allowed more ground space to be exploited by the architect. Several still exist intact from their initial design; others have mutated. Out of the planned 70, only ten were actually built, but what a ten!

Secreted behind the facade of Ulica Moliera 6, this wonderful structure at Ulica Kozia 9 is indicative of the hidden gems available to the curious stravaiger. Poking your head in through gateways, through tunnelled entrances, past grand portals, is a trait I picked up in Paris and Naples, two very different cities whose real flesh lies hidden and concealed intra muros.

The 'mouth' building on Browarna Street in Powisle is another idiosyncratic structure that has been earmarked for demolition. It has acted as an outlet for the university since the sixties.

Another building in the throes of 'remodification' this one on Pulawska is probably considered an eyesore by most if it is considered at all. A wonderful structure whose tabled base frees up the facade in true Corbusien fashion allowing for full windowed walls on both sides. The result is an airy and spatious building, the back end of which looks over the Warsaw escarpment with views further beyond to the river and the east side.

'Marvellous' insofar as it makes the mind marvel at how on earth it managed to get built. This is the Centrum Zdrowia (Health Centre) in Miedzylesie. It doesn't look too bad in fact framed against a clear blue spring sky. It is a building of magnitude, not imagination.

Another block, this time of a more solid and durable nature. Continuing along the north-south route linking Mokotow and Zoliborz, this photograph taken from Elektoralna Street, is of one of the solid arcaded cornerstone bloks of Jana Pawla II. This area was the heart of the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto, and it was completely destroyed in 1944. The rebuilding program of the 50s was a massive undertaking with many comparing Warsaw at this time to a huge building site. The new throughfare with its sturdy neo-renaissance buildings (which can also be seen on Andersa Street, below) was constructed from 1953-1959.

The relatively short street of General Anders just to the west of the New Town is framed beautifully by the arcaded blocks you see here. The street itself, a little like the building, is not one of your usual streets; there is something curious about its multi-pathed system. In the autumn and winter months, on a cold clear morning, when the sun beats a path straight through, the buildings and the street are illuminated in all their glory. Like the blocks on Jana Pawla II these too were built in the craze of apartment block construction that swept through Warsaw in the fifties.

This corner blok on Niepodleglosci and Dabrowskiego in Mokotow was recently restored both inside and out. Designed by President Stefan Starzynski, who has a plaque dedicated to him on the opposite corner, this stretch of Aleje Niepodleglosci (between Pole Mokotowskie and Wierzbno metro stations) is a grand boulevard cum expressway which was built in parallel to 'Europe's last great street' that of Karl Marx Allee (formerly Stalinallee) in Berlin. Though Niepodleglosci's socialist architecture does not possess much of the finesse of its German counterpart, its buildings, though perhaps the avenue width, does maintain a similar dimension.

This pre-war villa at 101 Madalinskiego street in Mokotow in its strict geometric form and austere blank gable wall is almost completely Loosian in design. The two guardian oak and chestnut (the only sign of 'ornamentation') frame the north facade beautifully. The house mirrors itself on the other side, and has remained unoccupied for some time now, though its garden is evidently taken good care of. Through much meditation upon the structure I have come to know it as the 'Logic House' (so-called after the house Ludwig Wittgenstein, a close friend of Adolf Loos, designed for his sister in Vienna). The building even drew a poem from my innards, one which was superiorly inferior to the poetry of the building itself.

This 'balcony building' residence 18a Karowa Street just off Krakowskie Przedmiescie is wonderfully different from the standard block. From a head-on angle you could be forgiven for being a little puzzled. Indeed, it's only when viewed from the side that you can see a kitchen window part of the flat below. Thus, the balcony for one, is the niche kitchen for another. It is a rather odd design, reflecting the building's experimental nature.

A 1950s squat block in Stare Rembertow. Not to be confused with the practice of 'squatting', that is 'occupying a building without legal title', the squat block (here, a sort of sideways high rise) is particularly common in Warsaw and a more humane variation of housing solutions.

A squat block in Nowolipki, formerly part of the Jewish Ghetto. Nowolipki is a wonderful area in the city centre and was the site of Warsaw's first 'garden city', a residential area full of tree-filled courtyards which would be built upon the ashes of many of the Jews who died here.

Located on Aleja Niepodleglosci between Raclawicka and Wierzbno metros, this is a huge structure some 500 metres square. With its castellated roof and its 'zuckerbackerstil' (wedding-cake style) it has something of a regal feel to it. When the soft summer light hits it as in this photograph, it reminds me of Jordan's Nabbatean Treasury in Petra, which also glows pink in the late afternoon light. Both structures, in their perfect portrayals of solid stonework and expert craftsmanship, represent the true art of building. Where Petra's 'Treasury' was not so much a building as a relief and a facade, this treasury has a network of spacious apartments and verdant courtyards to its interior. In its size, not so much tall as wide and thick, it mimics the colossal Socialist Realism of other grand housing projects: the Stalinist 'magistrale' of MDM in Plac Konstitucji, Nowa Huta in Krakow, Independence Avenue in Minsk and that of Karl Marx Allee in Berlin. This particular structure is one of my all time Warsaw favourites. Its placement here in the middle of Mokotow at the southern end of the city represents for me the end of the city proper and the beginning of the endless city suburbs.

This building and its predicament is a good example of Warsaw town planning. All around Chalubinskiego Street are WWII survivors nursed back to their former health. The three storey townhouses at the rear with their red mansard roofs give something of a Parisian quality to this area. And yet, in the midst of it all, a towering goliath, completely out of place. It is a curious building for its sort of Babushka (telescopic) principle which can be better discerned close up. I have always thought there a certain pyramidal quality to it, not least because of the colour. But don't take my word for it. As I say, this part of Chalubinskiego was painstakingly restored after the war. There are some fine buildings here, and predicaments like this will certainly help to keep the senses open.

The economics department headquarters building in Aleje Niepodleglosci. The peaked cap of a roof is supposed to signify the prow of a ship. The greatest thing about this building is perhaps the solar sightlines that remain open to it as envisaged in this crepuscular showdown.

No blog on Warsaw would be complete without several pictures (one is not enough) of the 42 storey goliath that was Stalin's parthian shot (so to speak) to the people of Warsaw. When the light hits it so it is truly the paragon of a beast. But you will have to be quick with these autumnal dusks, for soon, between the sun and the palace will rise the tallest residential complex in Europe, Zloty 44, designed by Daniel Liebeskind, slashing its shadow like a Stanley knife across this the north face of the Palace of Culture.

Built in 2003 in Warsaw's historic area of Plac Piludskiego and Saski Gardens Norman Foster's Metropolitan building is a real Zen-like structure. The three symbols of Zen, the square, the triangle and the circle, are melded seamlessly to produce a building of staggering virtuosity. Goethe was once told by a poet friend of his that architecture was like music that had frozen. It is no coincidence that Foster's block stands next to Warsaw's Opera.

At its most basic level, the Metropolitan is what you might call a three-part office block. On the most obvious level it is an office building, the first triple A class in Warsaw; next, it is a public square which is incorporated into the structure which can just be seen from the circular frame eking out at the top; lastly, it is a commercial building housing cafes and shops at its base. The building, in spite of its futuristic design and use of materials, blends well into an area replete with historic structures. Here, the height factor is played down to the wide factor. Circling round as a tripartite building, this is a real island of a building as perhaps reflected in the image beneath. Incidentally, in this picture, as well as the Opera House and the Old Town, you can see the hidden gem documented above as a standalone block behind a row of tenements.

Aerial view of Saski Gardens, Monument to the Unknown Soldier, Plac Piludskiego, Foster's Metropolitan, the Opera House, and the Old Town.

The title picture to this blog is of the famous Za Zelazna Brama Estate in the city centre. The square in front used to be a thriving black market place during WWII, occupying an oculus within the encircling Jewish Ghetto. These buildings, originally conceived as Corbusier like 'Unites d'Habitation' by students of the great man himself, consisted of a fleet of 19 which were built in the 1960s to house an ever-growing city population. The title itself 'behind the iron gate' derived from a cartouche in the nearby Saski Gardens which no longer exists. The idealistic vision of wide-rises to adequately house all facets of the individual has always been a questionable concept. Here, it was more a question of economics and demographics, and of time. Initially built to optimise incoming sunlight which, it was thought, would relieve the tension of such 'factory living', the buildings have since suffered greatly because of this. Heat, humidity, extreme cold and the general effects of weathering have all taken their toll. To add insult to injury, the space between the buildings is constantly under attack from property developers and the like. From being initially lauded as a sort of Manhattan complex of high living standards, the buildings now are viewed as something of a blight on Warsaw's central cityscape.

I call this one 'the building of a thousand eyes' for the most obvious reason. It stands on the corner of Koszykowa and Mokotowska, and though in need of a paint-job is a thoroughly unique structure with its shadowed ground level and maze-pattern balconies. Its facade too has been 'freed' to allow all those eyes (eye and window in Polish, oko and okno, are practically the same word). Its colour also, a sort of high frequency corn yellow, brings a little vibrancy to an otherwise tenebrous corner of Srodmiescie Poludnie.

The spacey French Embassy on the corner of Ulica Piekna and Ulica John Lennona.

Building on Ulica Czerniakowska

This is the entrance foyer to the arthouse cinema Kino Iluzjon in the wonderfully serene square of Antoni Slonimskiego. The main auditorium, replete with fleabitten curtain and some several hundred seats (that have all but lost their zest for life), is a splendid space with carved reliefs of Warsaw's mermaid maiden Syrenka etched into the high walls. At present in 2009, this location is closed and the building's fate is in the balance. It may, or may not, be renovated. During the two years of our great relationship I feasted on films such as Blood Simple, The Passenger, The Wages of Fear, Tom Horn, Manhattan, Chinatown, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Fahrenheit 451, Angel Heart and many many more. I've always thought that a healthy relationship with any city has to involve a picture house like this one. Warsaw, with places like Kino Luna, Kino Wisla, Kino Muranow and Kino Femina is a city that has not yet kowtowed to the soul-less profit-hungry multiplex. It is a city of fleabitten velvet curtains, dodgy seats and grainy, lovingly washed prints!

Recently restored in 2008 the Hera building, with its guardian hickory, stands on the corner of Gagarina and Belwederska at the southern end of Lazienki Park.

Although Warsaw was home to a stock exchange since 1817, in 1945, because of political changes after World War II, it could not be recreated. It only started operating again in April 1991, after the reintroduction of the free-market economy. From 1991 until 2000 the stock exchange was situated in this building pictured on the corner of Jerozolimskie and Nowy Swiat. It was previously used as the headquarters of the Central Planning Committee of the Polish Communist Party (PZPR). The reason for using this building was two-fold: the first was the symbolic value attached to the building, and the second was the fact that no other building in Warsaw was as well connected with telecommunications.

This is the atrium of the former Communist Headquarters Building, now very much the caldera of capitalism from which all eruptions effuse.

2008-06-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

OF CLOCKS AND CLOUDS

All clouds are clocks, even the most cloudy of clouds. Karl Popper

Living on the European plain (as opposed to the crusty lips of the Mediterranean or the thin skullbone of Scotland's west coast) brings a whole new landscape to the skies. Cloud formations like these ones become something of a metamorphic map that chart within a larger sense of 'world'. It might surprise you the sheer variety of cloudscapes that awaits you just outside your window. To be sure, it's hard to beat the 'flex and flux' of Scotland's west coast, but here, over Warsaw, there is another breed of cloud that invests the imagination with an equivalent sense of wonder.

(Top) Some wonderfully mesmeric Stratocumulus undulatus.
(Above) Some strips of Cirrus fibratus in the lower half with what looks like the beginning of a wave cloud above it.
(Below) Above the elm tree, Cirrus vertebratus swimming across the ocean of air.

In Polish the names for the months of the year do not derive from the names of benevolent dictators nor of mystical sungods, but quite simply from the earth and the elements that appear at these times of the year. December is 'grudzien' from 'gruda' meaning hardened ground; April is 'kwiecien' meaning flowers; July is 'lipiec' from 'lipa' the lime tree; 'listopad', November, is 'falling leaves'.

As much as I think these names more becoming of an earth (and not a dictator) that feeds us I still feel there should have been one name, in amongst those twelve, directed upwards at the sky. One of the summer months, particularly July and August whose thunderstorms are infamous, would have been particularly apt for the title 'big cloud moving', or a phrase to that effect.

From Most Poniatowskiego, Stratocumulus stratiformis perlucidus.

Dawn over Mokotow.

John Ruskin, a man whose word-paintings of cloud-filled days occupy large swathes of his journals, speaks freely of clouds in his epic Modern Painters, especially in the chapter Of the Open Sky:

It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of all creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more, for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.

A great shelf cloud, with some satellite Cumulus beneath, passing over Warsaw.

'Over Mazovia'. Some Altocumulus radiatus.

CLOUDS

Clouds

they hang in the air

like whole countries

there before me

an unwritten atlas of the skies

Stratus - Cirrus - Cumulus

continents floating

on oceans of air

What with the rise in temperature, moisture and relative humidity, July is a wonderful month for these great Cumulus congestus. It is the month above all, and these are the clouds, that make Warsaw as green as it is. July is the month (not so much of the lime tree as 'Lipiec' would suggest but) of the storm and of great raucous displays of thunder and lightning, and downpours that make a monsoon look tame.

Subtle cirrus, the high-flying cloud - the music of the air.

Some silky Cirrus feathering the sky.

An arching 'rainbow' cloud.

Altostratus haze with a small lenticular cloud in the foreground.

Some wispy 'pannus' beneath a brooding Cumulonimbus.

(Below) Some crepuscular 'celestographs' of fading Altocumulus.

Frozen explosion.

Cloud and crow.

Bone cloud.

Archipelago cloud.

Magpie sky.

Crepuscular rays.

Then, what do you love, you extraordinary stranger?
I love clouds... drifting clouds... there.... over there...
marvellous clouds.

Charles Baudelaire.

2008-06-21T06:31:00.000-07:00

THE BIRD CITY

Even when the bird is walking, one senses it has wings.

Antoine-Marin Lemierre

As city stravaiging goes, some cities are better than others. Better in the sense that they may accommodate our bipedal tendencies more freely, and better too in terms of offering us a world that goes beyond mere city logistics. Warsaw, with its great canyon roads, and its strict jaywalking laws (blisters from the Stalinist and communist eras) could perhaps be a little kinder on the stravaiger’s legs, though in terms of getting beyond the metropolitan machine, in offering us a world by way of its birdlife, nature and space, it excels beyond the norm. Warsaw is, in many aspects and contrary to popular belief, an organic city bustling with the sort of life that one tends to ignore when talking of metropolitan centres.

Everybody knows that Warsaw was almost completely annihilated during World War II. The city was a battlefield for half a decade and suffered losses, both human and other, on a grand scale. It was, ironically, in this destruction, and the destroyed buildings, the cracks and crannies which in some places lay for years, that the proliferation of the city birds that we see today first found their footing.

Not unlike the re-colonisation of London’s east-end by black redstarts who found the rubbled habitat particularly alluring, the synanthropy (the ability to exploit anthropogenic breeding sites) of jackdaws and other birds to Warsaw was similarly effected by the devastation of World War II. This was further compounded by the ever-changing landscape of the Polish countryside. Destroyed buildings provided jackdaws and crows with ideal nesting places at a time when suitably old trees on the edge of forests were disappearing (jackdaws normally nest in older trees and do not like to delve too deep into forests). Other cities in Poland like Wroclaw, Poznan and Lublin also experienced similar changes in their avian populations at this time with their successful urbanisation and breeding continuing well into the latter half of the twentieth century. Reconstruction of these cities, however, was to have a marked effect, on the birds. An effect that was not all for the worse and which still continues today. Populations, due to newly evolved architectural technologies that do not accommodate our feathered friends (co-habiting birds are increasingly viewed as a nuisance), have been on the decline since the early 1980s. Yet, somewhat ironically, the architecture that gets Warsaw much of its flak, namely the gargantuan grey blocks of Stalinist Socialist Realism built in the 50s, are buildings whose wealth of niches and nooks, spandrels and overhangs, provided first class accommodation (and still do) for the resident wings of Warsaw. We could perhaps say that functionalism as an architectural policy extended, albeit unintentionally, beyond the realm of humans.

During the reconstruction of Warsaw, a resuscitative process which is still going on today, it wasn’t just the city’s buildings that were restored, rebuilt and refashioned but also its parks and open spaces. Like Glasgow (my own native city), Warsaw possesses, as one of the greenest cities in Europe, a side to its face which provides a jarring contrast with the great grey city of billboards and bombs. Here, midst the great green spaces of Royal Lazienki and Wilanow, the ever-present plaques and memorials honouring ‘the glory of the dead’ and reminding us without pause of the tribulations of war are conspicuously absent. Cleansed of candle and cruciform, shrine and billboard, there appears in Warsaw’s parks, fields, and forests a city freed from epitaph, and a city unchained from the destructive and stifling subtext that so often underwrites it. The centre of Warsaw is a city of great gardens such as Ogrod Saski and Ogrod Krasinskich; it is a city of wondrous tree-filled cemeteries, of the great Cmentarz Powazkowski and Cmentarz Brodnowski. It is a city with a proximity to the primeval, to the untopiarised ‘puszcza’ of Kampinos and Bielany, to the many 'rezerwat' that perforate the city. It is a city that whether looked at on map or from a plane is rather more green than grey.

The humble house sparrow, the most numerous of Warsaw's birds with an estimated 160,000 pairs, a far cry from British cities' much depleted populations.

Birds have taken to Warsaw not just as a side-effect of the destruction that levelled it, nor indeed for the abundance of the city’s trees, but also for the largest untamed stretch of water in Europe and Poland’s major river, the Vistula. The Wisla (Vistula), which cuts a dash across the length of the country from the Beskidy Mountains in the south to the Bay of Gdansk in the north, is a major flyway for migratory birds to and from Africa and a constant source of food and shelter for many others. Its Varsovian banks haven’t suffered (at least not yet) the ignominy of waterfront ‘regenerations’ that many other European cities have seen. Consequently, the Vistula’s banks are riddled with sand and growth, wet and wildness, with the land rising naturally from the water’s edge up into the city. In the middle of the river there are sandbars and spits, nesting and resting places for the consummate travellers, the common tern, the gulls, ducks and swans. Along the way, there are little colonies of black-headed gulls who have taken to the archipelago of sand bars that lie just above the fast flowing river.

Deviating from the Vistula just south of the centre through the sinewy Kanal Wilanowka towards the wonderful grounds of the Royal Palace of Wilanow (the former hunting grounds of Warsaw's nobility) and its lake, Jezioro Wilanowskie, there are sieges of herons, the odd pair of garganeys, and a wealth of lesser and middle-spotted woodpeckers that can inspire wonder in the most jaded of eyes. Another of the royal grounds, and even more centrally located, Royal Lazienki, is no stranger to the cackling cry and determined drums of the elusive green woodpecker. The woodpecker is one such family among many that has successfully adapted to the urban environment of Warsaw.

Royal Lazienki, in the heart of the city, is also a haven for red squirrels, thousands of rooks, hooded crows, jackdaws, tits, sparrows (both tree and house), nuthatches, jays and magpies, as well as many other birds and animals. Other less common birds that have been spotted over recent years include golden orioles, waxwings, and wheatears.

The abundance of corvids (especially the ambling jackdaws) and sparrows was the first thing to hit me when I arrived in Warsaw in the middle of autumn. The city is teeming with them and their sounds. They saunter the pavements and grass verges as if they own the place. Indeed, they do. They were here well before the city chased them away and its destruction brought them back again. As pilots of the sky these birds are magnificent. And yet as walkers, whether pigeons or jackdaws, they also excel. There is a curiosity amongst them, a sense of sharing space, that engenders amongst passers-by, albeit subconsciously, a sense of real community that goes above and beyond the often laboured mono-species relations of humans. There is, if you will, an inter-species communication going on, fostered by the calm relaxedness that birds show (and vice versa) when near to people. The pavements belong as much to the bird as they do to the human.

Kawka

It is perhaps true to say that most people, Warsaw or not, are unaware of how many species of bird they share their city with. In Warsaw alone 247 species of bird have been noted in the past 15 years including 139 breeding species. These include various species of owls, birds of prey (six species have been observed including sparrow-hawks, buzzards, and peregrine falcons, one pair of which was nesting on the Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw’s enormous landmark skyscraper). Even white-tailed eagles in search of food and warmth are now regular visitors to the city, taking advantage of resources here that are not available or that are in lesser supply in rural landscapes.

Urbanisation, however, typically results in a minority of species dominating the fauna, and it is here that the Corvidae family, sparrows, and finches have taken over. Their capacity to habituate to humans has been a key attribute of their synanthropy. This habituation however is not born simply out of love. There is in Warsaw a huge number of bird tables and feeders placed in back greens and in parks, hanging from balconies and dangling from bushes. Though perhaps unaware of the quantity of different species that shares the city with them, the people of Warsaw are evidently aware of the fact that they do share it. There is a spread of bird houses that would rival even that of the human houses of the great suburban dormitory of Ursynow. Their architecture, propped carefully against many tree trunks, assumes a compassionate aesthetic that Socialist Realism in its often blank austerity could never achieve. Feeders, in the shape of empty water bottles and disembowelled canisters, hang from almost every tree and bush. Bird tables are constantly refreshed with a small variety of offerings. Little tin pots of water balancing birds upon their rims are placed in back greens and at the sides of pavements. Trees are belted with bread buckets requesting residents to deposit their unwanted bread. Benches too abound for those humans interested in participating in the spectacle of the bird city. This provision of food and shelter has managed to offset some of the avian evictions that have been caused by the sheerness of modern apartment blocks, and subsequently lessened the rapidity of the decline of the city’s bird population.

Maybe, through the immensity of its historical loss, the people of Warsaw have held close the sanctity of life, which is demonstrated not only in their sense of community for each other but through a compassion for the non-human life that inhabits the city.

This profusion of bird, plant and animal life, which instils the city with an aliveness (that goes beyond mere liveliness), has added a mystical aura to Warsaw, an aura that is considerably less melancholic than the city that has hitherto been covered in concrete, and storied with death.

2008-06-21T02:22:00.000-07:00

VARSAVIANA

I've said it before and I'll say it again, for the utter avian activity that comes alive in the city at this time of the year, you could dedicate a whole blog to these last two weeks in March. Just as a matter of curiosity I thought I would note down the various species of bird that have appeared in the back green (the communal back garden for over 300 human residents) over the past couple of weeks. This of course includes my 'avi-flat-mates', the sparrows under my windowsill, the jackdaws up in the eaves, and the two pigeons nesting in the now defunct chimney flue on the eastern gable of the building.

Most of the 19 bird species listed here are resident in the skwer, but there are a few who erratically pay the skwer a visit from time to time just to see what's going on. So, here they are. The order I have ascribed to them is the order in which they appear in my brain:

1. House sparrow (Passer domesticus)
2. Tree sparrow (Passer montanus)
3. Jackdaw (Corvus monedula)
4. Pigeon (Columba livia)
5. Magpie (Pica pica)
6. Great tit (Parus major)
7. Blue tit (Parus caeruleus)
8. Hooded Crow (Corvus corone cornix)
9. Collared dove (Streptopelia dectaocto)
10. Lesser-spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos minor)
11. Treecreeper (Certhia familiaris)
12. Jay (Garrulus glandarius)
13. Black-headed gull (Larus ridibundus)
14. Starling (Sturnus vulgaris)
15. Fieldfare (Turdus pilaris)
16. Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs)
17. Rook (Corvus frugilegus)
18. Wood pigeon (Columba palumbus)
19. Greenfinch (Carduelis chloris)

The last 8 birds listed muscle into the skwer at irregular intervals, with some becoming more residential depending on the time of year. It has to be remembered that this skwer represents but a fraction of Warsaw's aviana as a whole, (as does the particular time of year) but what better time and place to start than spring at your front door?

2008-06-20T08:32:00.000-07:00

Z MOJEGO OKNA

Brooms & the Blue Man

The blue man, as I call him, (the man in the blue jacket and blue cap), is the keeper of the courtyard here. He is the skwer's main man. He not only looks after the greenery (and yellowery) outside, but maintains a constant vigil on the squat blocks themselves cleaning their interiors every so often and organising repairs. The man nearest us is the 'broom man'. It is mid-October and the leaves are falling, and so brooms (here, sans stick) are in great demand. Those infernal leaf blowing machines (yes, the ones that wake you up at 6.30am) are not quite all the rage yet, though they are in evidence. The other guy appears to be a hanger-on, a rail bird, with nothing better to do, along for the ride.

The heart of Kryzstof Kieslowski’s Dekalog in which ten stories are centred in and around Warsaw high-rises was partly influenced by Jozef Robakowski’s ongoing film Z Mojego Okna (From My Window) in which Robakowski, over the course of 21 years from 1978-99, filmed his mostly concreted Lodz 'courtyard' and all its residents.

These vitrinal vignettes on life (below Robakowski's 9th floor flat), from a high-rise which formed part of a complex affectionately known as the Manhattan of Lodz, convinced him that the courtyard had lost all its meaning. He would narrate his videos with a grave dispassionate commentary that amplified his detachment from that which he saw below. At times, he would even sound suicidal from his denunciations of the actions of his fellow blockers.

This is the problem with living nine floors up. The earth below and all its activity seem distant, meaningless, devoid of character any more. The higher you go the less 'courtyard-y' the courtyard becomes and the more the depth charge of mind is likely to go off. The courtyard metamorphoses into something like a well, or a pit, where sounds and smells no longer reach all the way up or down but dissipate into the ether somewhere in between. In losing this sense of sound, and effectively of feeling, one loses a sense of touch with the ground not just physically but metaphysically.

Four floors up however, the earth not only retains its element (with the surrounding blocks harbouring our sense of attachment to it), but the space and all within is positively enhanced by a not wholly horizontal perspective (that is neither wholly vertical) and which literally high-lights the whole courtyard. Granted, the position of one's vantage point is of some import. We also cannot ignore, in the case of Robakowski’s 9th floor prospect, the nature of the courtyard (or lack of it) and the impact of the presence of cars (which does more to court pessimism than instil a sense of wonder).

The following pictures represent just a few 'z mojego okna' onto a carless and tree-filled courtyard in Old Mokotow.

As a footnote to this, and by way of elucidating the title, I find it more than just a little curious that in Polish the word for eye (oko) and the word for window (okno) are almost identical.

The little side-square, a sort of overflow for the main skwer, accomodates the bulletin board and the many downed maple leaves from the nearby trees (and the odd bicycle too). In front of this, as if I weren't fortunate enough, there is a Thoreauvian garden (below) where the old man and his wife tend their plots with flower and vegetable throughout the year.

The beginning of a new year, and some wonderful weather. You won't be able to see the sparrowhawk that has just settled on a branch of one of the trees in the school yard beyond. All manner of wildlife reveals itself in Warsaw whenever the temperature drops and the ground remains snowbound.

The Plum tree in April attracts the attention of some children.

The first week of May brings colour to the courtyard that would make a rainbow jealous.

June sees the Elm (and almost everything else) in full flower.

And December sees it naked.

2008-06-20T03:31:00.000-07:00

THE RIDDLE OF THE ROOK

2008-06-19T08:26:00.000-07:00

THE BONNIE BANKS OF WARSAW

Warsaw’s lively strait, the Vistula, is fringed on either side, though more remarkably on its unregulated east side, by wild growth. There hasn’t been (or at least only sporadically) the concretisation of its banks that most European capital cities have already seen in the form of waterfront ‘regenerations’. Looking eastwards across the river towards Praga, the land rises naturally from the water’s edge up to the city. There are no grand harbour developments, no colourful yachting marinas, no extreme watersports clubs, just a growth of wild life that stretches the city from country to country, and forest to forest, as if Warsaw weren’t there.

(Top) Looking north to the city from Siekierki Bridge. Taken on June 24th, 2008.

(Bottom) Taken from the plane, at the beginning of May, on the approach to Okecie Airport, this photo shows, quite remarkably, the River Vistula in all her untamed glory. The diamond-shaped island to the bottom centre of the picture is, together with its smaller satellites above it, known as the Swiderskie Islands on account of the River Swider that runs into the Vistula on its east side. On the west (left) side of the Vistula towards the bottom left-hand corner is the small village of Gassy. On a warm spring day, with fields and trees in full blossom, the cycle down here from Warsaw along the quiet back roads is redolent of cycling through the south of France. Once upon a time there was a ferry service connecting Gassy with the larger town Karczew (seen here in the bottom right of the photo), but it appears to have been disbanded. Otwock, to the north-east of Karczew, is just out of view.

From the epicentre of the city, on a wet day in June, looking east across the Vistula towards Praga, with the copper-topped horns of St. Florian's (Kosciol sw. Floriana) poking out from the bush.

2008-06-19T06:42:00.000-07:00

It’s interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls.

Bohumil Hrabal

CEMETERY STRAVAIG

This morning, on the way to Powazki, I made a little detour via the Antykwariat bookshop in Ulica Wilcza (the Street of the Wolves). There, in amongst the leaning towers of books, I found a couple of tattered paperbacks, a few zloty apiece. One of them was the 1955 edition of The Nature of Living Things by the American natural scientists C.B. Worth and R.K. Enders, and the other was Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (Piesn O Sobie). On the back and inside covers of the Worth and Enders book, they assured me that it was ‘specifically written for the general reader’ with ‘easy-to-understand answers to questions about plants and animals and their relation to the universe’ (there were no such assurances in Whitman). From the first chapter, simply titled Life and the Universe, I had already surmised that the ‘general reader’ of the 1950s was appreciably more rounded (and well-sighted) than the general reader of today. The chapter (in very small print) opened:

LIFE CANNOT be defined precisely. Living things are familiar objects, but they may depend for their life on important dead components […] Life seems wedded to dead things.

Whitman, from Song of Myself, also speaks of life and its curious relation to dead things:

the smallest sprout shows there is really no death[…] all goes onward and outward […] to die is different from what any one supposed […] [Death] is form, union, plan - it is eternal life - it is Happiness.

When wandering round cemeteries, especially one like Powazki, one learns as Whitman says that ‘all goes onward and outward’. In other words, everything, in effect, stravaigs. These places are not singularly solemn cities of the dead, nor of the silent. To define them as such is to lose sight of the necropolis as a whole, and the ebb and flow of life that exists within it.

On the right-hand side of the great portico of Powazki, there is etched in the stone wall a small quote in Polish by the late Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski. It translates roughly as:

When the memories of people burn out, the stones will continue talking.

On the left-hand side of the gate drawing attention away from this is a huge twelve-foot Roman centurion, relieved from the stone, standing guard. His enormous sword whose hilt forms an equally enormous crucifix has a serpent writhing at its foot. The inscription above the gate’s entrance reads ‘Brama sw. Honoraty’ (the gate of St. Honorat). On each flank of the entrance are candle and plastic flower vendors spilling gaudy colour all over the pavement.

It is perhaps curious to note that St. Honorat (aka St. Germanus of Auxerre), having achieved saintly status for his many miracles, was mentor to St. Patrick, and had, allegedly, taken him to Britain in the fourth century AD to spare him the heresies of the wandering monk Pelagius (who had caused the church great consternation by denying original sin and by advocating free will without divine intervention). St. Honorat, with a group of priests that included St. Patrick, travelled throughout Britain convincing people to turn to God, and expelling the false priests of Pelagius who had become known as snakes.

Powazki Cemetery (pronounced Paw-Vomski) is the oldest and most famous cemetery in Warsaw, dating from the late 1700s. At the last count there were over a million bodies inhumed here (the dead in any given city almost always outnumber the living). Powazki is thus one of the largest necropolises in Europe if not the world. But it’s not the quantity of Powazki that excites, it’s the quality.

During the third partition of Poland (1795-1918) which saw the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth divided amongst Russia, Prussia and Austria, Powazki was the only place where monuments of any ‘creative’ merit could be erected. It is here in the depths of this ‘city of the dead’ where artists gave their works to posterity. As such, the site, which contains several cemeteries of varying religious inclinations, is something of a skansen of sculpture, and architecture, and of a quiet, outspoken patriotism. Powazki is the Pere Lachaise of Warsaw, and like Abney Park Cemetery in north London, it is also something of an arboretum with trees of all species, shapes, and sizes.

Through the front gate, the site peels away into the distance, and its tree-lined alleyways send the eye into infinity. Not far from the main gate are the catacombs and the Aleja Zasłużonych (Avenue of the Meritorious), one of the more ‘upmarket’ quarters of the cemetery. It is here where such notables (the deserved dead) like Leopold Staff, Wladyslaw Reymont, Zwirko and Wigura, and the Polish tenor and actor Jan Kiepura are buried. The opulence of some tombs is both attractive and repulsive.

It is early July, ‘lipiec’ in Polish: ‘the month of the lime tree’. There is growth all around. Some graves are completely shrouded with weeds and wild flowers. The sky in places is almost completely blotted out due to tree cover. There is a sort of shredded sunlight percolating through the canopy, painting the ground with a crooked chess set of light and shade.

The whole place, this cool quiet morning, is like a photograph, an enormous painting in light. On my way to Plot 23 (one of the cemetery’s most sought-after plots) I sweep through the tree-lined alleyways like Swist, the Slavic God of the Wind.

I glance at names as I go, at digits and dates, at tombs and trees. Some of the tombs are big enough to hold a mass in. I pass by the plot of Zbigniew Herbert, the popular Polish poet and essayist. His black marbled tomb simply reads ‘poeta’.

Weaving through makeshift trails between rows and plots I come across what I initially think is the grave of Joseph Conrad. The dates and the chiselled bearded facial relief, and of course the name of Jozef Korzeniowski (Conrad’s birth name) seem all present and correct. But it’s not Conrad, for Conrad is interred in Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury being the town where Conrad lived out the latter part of his life. This plot here is the grave of the Krakovian dramatic director of the same name.

As I walk and weave some more, the beguiling song of a wood warbler (‘swistunka’, named after the god of the wind) lights up the air.

From fifty metres out I catch sight of the tomb of Krzysztof Kieslowski. I recognise the hands, squared in typical filmic pose. Kieslowski died at the age of fifty-four having given to cinema, amongst others, his epic Dekalog (ten short stories made for TV based on the ten commandments, filmed in and around Warsaw), La Double Vie de Veronique (a meditation on the nature of free will, subtly underscored by the haunting music of his long time friend and colleague Zbigniew Preisner), and the Three Colours Trilogy loosely based on the political ideals of the French Republic, liberté - egalité - fraternité.

It comes from a deep-rooted conviction that if there is anything worthwhile doing for the sake of culture, then it is touching on subject matters and situations which link people, and not those that divide people. There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. If culture is capable of anything, then it is finding that which unites us all. [Krzysztof Kieslowski]

Standing here looking around, at the tombs and epitaphs galore, I get to thinking that in a world of constant competition (there is no avoiding crass ‘catch-up capitalism’ in Warsaw) death is the one cultural certainty which truly unites everybody. As such, death, as this great coherer, concocts a paradox that, in a world where we struggle to grow together, our decay and death is the only way to do it. Surrounded by the many birch-branch crosses honouring the glory of the fallen, it isn’t difficult to lose it a little in a Warsaw cemetery, to allow the cynic within to get the better of you. But it’s not for long. I spot a jay (or rather it spots me) sitting on the chipped wing of an angel a couple of rows down, shaded by the languid leaves and the broad curving crown of an old Spanish Chestnut.

On Kieslowski’s tomb, there are some flowers, but no epitaph. On the front corner of the black marbled surface someone has placed a small gold coin. It is twenty Hong Kong cents. Next to Kieslowski is someone called Roman Aftanazy (Historyk Kultury), and the epitaph in Greek letters, ‘panta rhei’.

Cemeteries are curious places. There is something placid about them, something natural invested within them, something human within (not least the bodies that are buried there), that conveys amidst the apparent stillness an overwhelming feeling of the ineluctable flux of nature. Of course, not all cemeteries are so readily blessed as Warsaw’s Powazki. As a woodland necropolis it has far more to offer than most in terms of flux. Like Glasgow’s Central Necropolis or Paris’ Pere Lachaise, Powazki (one of Warsaw’s virtual lungs with Brodnowski on the other side of the river) is also a virtual landscape in the city where, due to its sheer size, you can get away from the metropolis and its din of unknowing, and spend an afternoon strolling the car-free avenues of a more silent and serene city. Unlike Glasgow’s Central Necropolis however, Powazki has a great many trees, most over a hundred years old. It is this aspect that paints Powazki, quite literally, in a whole different light.

Cemeteries in summer are particularly curious. They lend a certain overarching beauty to the stravaiger therein. I suppose the same might be said of cemeteries in any season for the changes they bring to the land and tombscape, but I’m not sure if the summer (and maybe the spring) isn’t privileged. As the cyclical period of ‘life’ the season of summer has a communicative effect with a cemetery and its space. There is a profusion of growth (as summer) joining in with decay (as the weathered cemetery and exhausted corpses). Within this larger context there is a sense of the microcosm of the quiet graveyard, of a more rounded whole of inextricable parts, of growth upwards and decay downwards, everything silently moving. A whole which, by its very nature and through its simple concealment in the belly of the city, is magnificently beautiful.

Indeed, in summer, the cemetery becomes not so much a sleeping place (as its etymology might suggest) but a land of activity: of spiders buildings webs, of birds nursing young, of plants overgrowing. It is to this reality that the word ‘necropolis’ as ‘city of the dead’ would perhaps be more readily applicable to the concrete jungle outside.

Consequently, though it may seem trite to say it, cemeteries like this are amongst the liveliest and most fascinating places in all the city. It is not because one is surrounded by the dead (to which one feels correspondingly ‘alive’ - this would only concur with a small-minded view of life), but because one is surrounded by a totality of life (that of life and non-life), and great varieties of it. As Kenneth White, writer, wanderer, poet and fellow necrostravaiger, says in his narrative waybook Across the Territories,

As every transcendental traveller knows, the most interesting places in any town are the library, the station and the cemetery. If you don’t know that you may as well stay at home and watch television.

A dead tree, with two treecreepers crawling its length foraging for food, stands skeletal in front of me. Aside it stands a two-metre high statue of a soldier in full uniform holding a flower.

There is an old ecosophical saying that says that in a dead tree there is more life than in a living one. The same could be said of humans if they didn’t insist in marbling themselves off when buried. Not content with living as long as they can, they seek now to die as long as they can too. Even in death, by virtue of air-tight coffins and marbled tombs, people want to live forever. Humans have become non-biodegradable, plastic-coated, non-recyclable. Abridged from the greater earth they are part of, there is something of a prolonged decomposition at work in modern-day graveyards.

An extended putrefaction is something the tree does not readily go in for. For a start, it doesn’t have the money. In the US alone, death is a $25 billion industry. In Poland too (a country slipping deeper into America’s pocket), following my visit to the enormous Brodnowski Cemetery on the fanatical ‘Day of the Dead’ (1st November) death has cornered a substantial market too. Not content with opulent coffins and tombs, a cyclical market has developed with tens of thousands of candles in plastic holders filling the air with a putrid almost toxic smell and smoke. Plastic flowers carpet the cemetery.

Memorials for the Warsaw Uprising and Katyn and the late Pope John Paul II are a flower and candle-sellers’ bread and butter. Huge great metal bins lining the alleys are filled with mangled plastic containers, and plastic flowers that have withered. Death is well and truly alive here. On days like these (of which throughout the Polish calendar there are several) with torrents of people coming and going (depositing their non-biodegradables), it almost verges on the taphophilic. For this tree however, dead in front of me, teeming with life, death is no industry at all. Dying is as simple as living.

I move down deeper into the cemetery, passing snails in mid-path, down to the edge it shares with the Jewish cemetery. We are now in the darkest (most lightest) depths of Powazki in plot 347. There is a large wall separating the two cemeteries which makes it virtually impossible to see into it. We are (and I am reluctant to say this) at what is arguably the quietest corner of the city of Warsaw. It is the city’s biggest secret. Another blackbird pierces the air, before silence again. Not in any of the public parks can you get this glorious sense of isolation, of uninterrupted nature within such a serene citified sylvan setting. It really is something special.

With a helping hand from the headstone of the dearly departed Zygmunt Muczynski I scale the wall in a single bound and I can see that the Jewish Cemetery is even wilder than this one. Tombs lie scattered all over the place, most having toppled or fallen against each other, now propping each other up precariously. Flecks of sunlight are dashed against them having infiltrated the thick canopy of tree cover overhead. Ludwik Zamenhof, doctor and creator of Esperanto, is in there somewhere.

At this point in the stravaig I decide to embark upon an old Slavic tradition. Sitting on the tomb of Jerzy Nowacki beneath the frilled canopy of a stag-horn sumach I take out my sandwiches and lunch upon the grave of the dead. In the past, and in some areas still continued, it was considered fitting within Slavic circles to eat with the dead, to keep them company, and indulge them in a little conversation, albeit slightly one-sided. It is a tradition that at its core seeks to impart the thought that death is not the end. It is also simply a tradition of eating, drinking and being merry for one day we will, like Jerzy and all his co-tenants, surely die.

I carry on skirting the perimeter before delving back into the centre. Some tombs I pass are completely shrouded with fern and overgrown with wild daisies. It’s as if the dead had been planted, and are now sprouting flowers. The botanist Carl Linnaeus in his Västergötland Journey often mused on the subject of death:

When I dig the soil of churchyards, I take the parts which have constituted and been transformed by human beings into human beings; if I take them to my kitchen garden and put plants in them, from this I get cabbage heads instead of human heads, but if I boil these /cabbage/ heads and give them to people, they are transformed once again in to people’s heads or to other parts etc. thus we come to eat up our dead, and in so doing we prosper.

In Powazki, admittedly, we are a little lucky in having such growth and spread of life. Warsaw is a city of some forty cemeteries, including three of the largest in Europe. Most are so well-tended that any sign of wildness or ‘out-of-controlness’ is soon expunged by its caretakers. In fact, some cemeteries in Poland are so well-tended that some of the tombs and decorated mausolea look quite inhabitable.

It is not unusual in Poland for schools or scout groups to be awarded a cemetery to look after, particularly those graves of families who have breathed their last or have moved away. Cemeteries are national monuments, and on certain days throughout the year they are bustling with families and friends of the dearly departed. The glow from candles on a day of remembrance (of which there are several in Poland) could power a small reactor. On the gate of the cemetery in Zakopane in the Tatry mountains there is a small wooden plaque which reads - ‘a nation is its people and its graves’. So, here in Powazki, overgrown, is hardly typical of a Polish cemetery. This is further reinforced as I jump onto the 180 bus outside to go a mile up the road past the Tatar and Muslim cemeteries to New Powazki, formerly Warsaw Military Cemetery. It is pristine.

Gone are the small weathered benches, sitting skeletal before the tombs. Gone is the beautiful decay of headless angels and fingerless Christs. None of the residents here are pushing up the daisies, nor the ferns. Everything has been manicured and graphed. There are no more earthen paths leading off the cobbles. One is afraid to stand on the grass lest it incurs some kind of penalty. But still, all this tidiness aside, New Powazki has much to offer. It is here in plot A29 that the roving Pole Ryszard Kapuscinski was buried recently. I’m pretty sure though he would have been more at home pushing up daisies in old Powazki.

Kapuscinski, a roving reporter famous for his ‘involvement’ in twenty-seven revolutions and coups all over the world had died earlier this year in Warsaw after a serious illness. He had been likened to a modern day Herodotus for his capacity to storytell with such authority (and perhaps a good deal more truth). In fact, Herodotus and his Histories (which Kapuscinski succinctly re-translated as Investigations) had accompanied him on his adventures ever since starting out as Poland’s only foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency in 1964. Then, he was responsible for fifty countries over the next ten years (at about the same time he was also secret agent for the Polish Communist intelligence service). As someone who had grown up with war, and who had been deeply affected by it (Kapuscinski was born in Pinsk, now Belarus, in 1932), he was rarely to leave its penumbra. Throughout his life he was forever within range of ‘the machinery of death’. He could boast to having been sentenced to death not just once but four times, to having reported on 27 revolutions (as well as making several of his own); to having travelled the world, observed and documented its earth-shattering events; he might even tell you that he had evolved from having grown up wearing bark for shoes to getting into the bark itself and entering the ‘silva rerum’ (the forest of things as he liked to call it) of the planet. ‘To capture the world’, he used to say, ‘you have to penetrate it as completely as possible’.

In his writings, the roving Pole was ever-present (he used to claim that his tales would be authenticated not by any witnesses or satellites but by ‘its being lived’). This was not to say that he wrote for himself (rather he wrote for ‘people everywhere still young enough to be curious about the world’), but that his presence within his journalistic tracts was as essential to the story as everything else. His plurality of vision saw through the most opaque of shapes. It was here that Kapuscinski seamlessly wove from the geopolitical to the geopoetic much of the background of the situation he was caught up in. A poet more than anything Kapuscinski firmly believed that it wasn’t the spectacle that was important but the story which surrounded and gave birth to it. He had a greater commitment than simply reporting for a newspaper. If Kenneth White could coin the term transcendental travelogue for the waybooks he wrote, then Kapuscinski would have been deserving of the title of transcendent correspondent for the obstacles he surmounted and the tales he wove around them.

Lying in ‘Professorial Alley’ in New Powazki, Kapuscinski is accompanied by such notables as the journalist (recently killed in Iraq) Waldemar Milewicz, Jacek Kaczmarski (the poet/singer who beat the heady drums of the solidarity movement), and the philosophy professor Stefan Amsterdamski, one of the founders of Towarzystwo Kursow Naukowych (‘the flying university’). To my surprise, Kapuscinski does not yet have a tomb or epitaph, just a heap of earth and grass (perhaps more fitting for a man of the earth). All there is is a little wooden cross with his name on it signing him off with the dates March 4, 1932 - January 23, 2007.

As a possible epitaph, here is one I read which summed up the open-ness of Kapuscinski to the world out there, and his capacity to penetrate it. Indeed, the world out there for Kapuscinski soon became the world in there too, for it passed right through him as he passed through it.

A good writer. He had a whole lot on his mind, but he always kept his eyes and ears open. And his skin, too. Nobody could drop half-dead of malaria in a trackless waste like that Kapuscinski guy.

From plot A29, as I walk in the general direction of the entrance, I pass by some gargantuan stone figures lurching towards something, rifles and flags in hand. Their faces are a mixture of fear and pride. The date 1944 is emblazoned across the headstone. Out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of a small green woodpecker on the neat grassy verge before me. It sees me and flaps upwards to an overhanging branch. As it goes to work on the rotting wood I squeeze the binoculars up to my eyes and watch it claw-hammering away for the next how many minutes. It seems oblivious to my presence, indeed oblivious to anything else other than what might be crawling beneath that piece of gently rotting bark. It is perfectly concentrated with the task in beak. It has me completely absorbed until I too am completely oblivious to everything around me, though in this oblivion there is also a complete consciousness, a complete awareness of the essences surrounding. Just like the woodpecker who feels you coming it’s as if I can feel the woodpecker. As if to bring me back down to earth (though I would argue that I had never left it), the woodpecker lets out a piercing laughing yaffle which illuminates the graveyard before flapping off through the trees.

2008-06-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

MOVEMENT IS EVERYTHING!

2008-06-18T18:04:00.000-07:00

THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY

It is one of the great joys of walking and getting to know a city when, one day out on a wander, a ‘new’ space makes an impromptu connection with an ‘old’ space, and we see a familiar setting from a not so familiar angle. There is a fleeting vision of something whole; the cognition of a connection. Escorting this is a feeling of continuity and fluency, not of time (since we are, in accordance with the moment, extemporaneous), but of space. Within this 'being-in-space' there is a feeling of what is best described as an 'ineluctable inextricability' (that governs all things and non-things).

The territory of thought, much like that of land, needs to be mapped, needs to be ‘thought out’, and the best way to do this is to move right through it.

When wandering open-mindedly (released from any pressing details of 'life'), we cannot help but be provoked by the universe.

Reality may well be subjective in the words of Kierkegaard, but it is also an activity. You need to work at it, travel it, travail it. Thus, the event of 'Warsaw' itself becomes an activity. Left to its own devices Warsaw, as any other place, is merely a dictionarily defined 'city' - on the move, however, it shapeshifts with one's consciousness. Thus, when I'm in Glasgow I am glasgow; when I'm in Warsaw I am warsaw. The map is not the territory - I am.

2008-06-18T06:12:00.000-07:00

REZERWAT LESNY MORYSIN

At just 7km from the city centre, the forest reserve at Morysin is a wonderful sanctuary in bucolic surrounds. Enveloped by the sounds of nature, it’s hard to believe you’re this close to the busy-ness of Warsaw. This is the beauty of Warsaw, indeed of any city worth its salt, that it incorporates the country within it and not just on its fringes.

It’s April 10th and I have found a dirt track across a field (the aptly named Trojpolowa ’between the fields’ ). It leads down to Kanal Sobieskiego which borders the west side of the forested reserve. I haven’t seen a soul since coming off the warehoused Zawodzie opposite Siekierki Power Plant. The rush of the water across a small dam fills the area with sound. On one side of the canal sits a freshly ploughed open field, on the other stand the tall still bare trees of the reserve. Just then, I see a flutter of blue, a flash of inflorescence, skiting across the water from the bank I‘m standing over. I am momentarily bemused before I realise it’s a kingfisher! I watch it fly along and across the canal, some 100 or so metres, until it sets down on some unadorned branches at the confluence of the Kanal Wilanowka which borders the west side of the reserve. There’s another bird hidden in there amongst the web of branches. Fortunately, there is little leaf cover. I can make out a large reddish brown breast. It’s another kingfisher. The first one, the male, does a quick dance from branch to branch before mounting it for a few delicate seconds. Then, it’s off back down the kanal, right past my eyes in a slow shout of blue and green, away into the distance. The female hasn’t moved. It sits there for another fifteen minutes before spotting something in the water and going for it. It perches now on one of the more outward branches giving me a perfect look at its delicate multicoloured coat and its perfectly pointed mandible. What a beauty! It recalls the sheer purity of the starling’s oily ‘skin’ I had my eyes on last week in Lazienki. Beauty is something philosophers have struggled over for ages. I find it inextricably connected with birds, for their movement, their work, their agility, their tiny muscles all coordinating perfectly, their synchronicity with the seasons, their rather rapid and unadorned coupling, their insinuation into it all. Their beauty is not just an externality, it is there inside too. They have a grace of space that most humans have long lost contact with. A grace that is in itself a beauty. They work this earth, this air, the waters, enthusiastically. It is this, this communion with nature, this inextricable binding with it, that is the real passion, that is a truly erotic religion.

Skirting the Kanal Sobieskiego, serenaded by the birdsong of warblers and tits, I pass some dead trees whose fallen bodies are slowly being assimilated by the forest moss and fungus. As I train the binoculars on a small willow warbler seated on a low branch I am aware that something else has just moved into the field of view. At first I think it a dog which will soon be followed by its irresponsible owner, but as I drop the bins to take stock I see that it’s a fox, thin, auburn, with that wild, pointed face, eyes steadied and staring. For a moment our gazes interlock, then it darts to one side and is quickly lost in the undergrowth.

I continue skirting the path past some ’dzialki’ (allotments) until I am directly opposite the Wilanow Palace grounds. Nearby, on a little prow of land jutting out into Jezioro Wilanowska, a green woodpecker (whose yaffle I had heard a minute or so previous) flies over my head and lands on the short grass about ten metres in front of me. A fine entanglement of twigs and branches conceals me for the moment, but I can see it perfectly. It’s a male (it has a red stripe under its eye). Its beautiful pear green coat blends well with the grass, but it’s that sharp red crown that stands out, and those eyes. Then, just to the left of it I spot the female. Again, it’s a clamber-on clamber-off affair of some rapidity. When it’s done, they continue to work the ground together quite the thing. Like the kingfisher, the green woodpecker (as well as that wonderful laughing yaffle) has exuberant colours. It’s yellow-circled beady eye is all aware. As it forages, its head twists upwards as its eye quickly scans its surrounds. The pair of them work the ground quite contentedly.

2008-06-17T23:41:00.000-07:00

THE RUSSIAN CEMETERY

The main shaft of the arrow shaped Russian Cemetery just off Zwirki i Wigury is a wonder of 'framed space'. Looking east here, there are two files of cedar trees and two sets of Socrealist monuments to the fallen which, their own greatness notwithstanding, imbue the walker with a corresponding splendour of space. Behind the phalanxes of cedars there are the graves of the known dead. Though there are perhaps only a few hundred of these, there are nonethless 15000 soldiers buried here. Coalescing with the cemetery are the pine groves and allotments which surround the graveyard. The whole complex, with its trees, red squirrels and birds (a great corvid community, especially from November to March when hundreds of Siberian rooks nest here), and its surprising quietness all year round remains as one of Warsaw's great meditative spaces. Long may the cracked paving stones live!

2008-06-17T18:12:00.000-07:00

BRODNOWSKI CEMETERY

Brodnowski Cemetery on the east side of the Vistula is actually bigger than Powazki though not as old. It has significantly fewer trees too. What it does have is an original 19th century wooden church (St. Vincent de Paul), and some enormous monuments to Katyn and other WWII graves. The ritualistic Day of the Dead on 1st November is quite a squeeze. So much so that last year when I made the trip I thought I might be staying longer than I had intended!

2008-06-17T15:30:00.000-07:00

WINTER STUDY SEARCHING

Winter study searching

for inspiration -

Japanese verse,

White

Whitman

Martinson

Nothing -

And then outside,

On the elm tree,

A gathering of waxwings.

2008-06-17T13:21:00.000-07:00

THE TREE IS THE BUILDING, THE BUILDING IS THE TREE.

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. Greek Proverb

Out on an afternoon walk 'through the skwers' of Stary Mokotow one cannot help but notice the sheer abundance of foliage. The squat blocks and their courtyards are brimming with life, and colour. On a grass verge, a child chases two hooded crows while mother looks on. The crows, looking a little bit miffed, hop away nonchalantly until, having had enough, they low-fly across the street to another quieter, childless verge.

It's late afternoon, mid-October. We're entering the months of the long shadows. And casting them far and wide are the trees that occupy every courtyard, skwer and place. Through living in and wandering many cities the world over, I have come to see architecture not as the Japanese post-war Metabolist movement saw it as 'biomimicry' (which was heavily reliant on technological advancement), but firstly as simple 'block and brick architecture' whose 'bio' comes in the form of the plantlife invested in the spaces between buildings. This was the principle of that much maligned architect Le Corbusier whose five point plan of building 'materials' began with the tree, followed swiftly by sky and space, then lastly (and perhaps least) cement and steel.

What makes these Mokotovian squat blocks such fine examples of 'architecture' and of master building, are the interstitial spaces of back greens and how they have been 'built'. These 'skwers' are no inadvertent spandrels, unwittingly sprung forth as 'leftover space'; rather, they are the result of people, like former President Stefan Starzysnki, who invested the city with a vigorous tree planting program in the nineteen thirties. The street trees of Warsaw owe a great deal to Starzynski who inspired many who came after him to take up this mantle. Consequently, in Moktotow, an area of the city which Starzynski had a hand in, not least in the creation of Aleje Niepodleglosci, there are grand boulevards like Aleje Zwirki i Wigury and its 1200 linden; Woloska and Boboli with their centurion rows of chestnuts; even 'lesser' streets shine forth like Asfaltowa, Opoczynska, Kielecka, and Lowicka with their respective oaks, maples and elms, ash, wingnuts and sumachs. The list of Varsovian streets filled with trees is endless. Some have even garnered special status accordingly; next door in Nowe Wlochy, the luscious limes of new Italy in Ulica Rybnicka and Chroscickiego are streets designated as monuments to nature. Even in the very epicentre of the city, an area fraught with the repetitive chaos of building, demolition and re-building, there are trees which have been protected, and others which have recently been planted. Wherever I wander I see evidence of care and attention to trees; newly planted trees on grass verges, in parks, in squares; tree surgeons hard at work with their perennial tend of wandering trees.

Not only do these trees add fragrance, flower and fruit at various times of the year, but they bring colour, shadow and shape. They bring 'time' to the table of the city. Language, like the odd garden fence, is wound around them. Months of the year are named after them. They re-mind us of life outwith the human. And they brighten up what is perhaps a dull piece of concrete. There is nothing so tragic, and architecturally void, as a treeless housing estate, or worse still, a treeless city. But then, it has always been much easier to cut a tree down, than to build around it. What was it Khalil Gibran said? 'Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, we fell them down and turn them into paper, that we may record our emptiness.'

Tree Sky Space (Cement & Steel) - A School in Ulica Wiktorska.

From an article entitled To Beautify Warsaw in the New York Times dated December 3rd 1922 mention is given to the scarcity of trees before the re-establishment of the Polish State, and the 'upward of 19000 trees' lining the streets and squares 'now'. It mentions a few of the species being planted as 'maple, chestnut, linden, ash and pine', and finishes by saying 'The Department of Parks is not only interested in adding to the attractiveness of Warsaw, a city of almost a million inhabtants[...] but also in providing open spaces for the rapidly growing population.'

The 2008 population (arboration?) of Warsaw in terms of its trees far exceeds the 19000 of 1922. When I think of cities I often place a greater importance on 'tree population' and 'bird population' than I do human. Indeed, if one were to concoct an equation that sought to find some kind of balance in terms of a sustainable city and urban biodiversity, one would probably see the bird and the tree outnumber the people by a significant factor. For myself, this scenario rings true with my experiences of Warsaw, but then, into that mix must be added how you yourself negotiate that city, what paths you choose, and how indeed you take them (by car, metro, bicycle or foot), and of course how much time you have to 'live the city' and not simply in it. The architecture of one's own life can have a marked effect on how one perceives the architecture of the city.

2008-06-16T18:25:00.000-07:00

THE WISLA'S TONGUE

In the midst of the Vistula is a sandbar. At times, it resembles a tongue, at others a long serpentine tail. It is a haven for all manner of bird life. Indeed, it is not the only sandbar or spit along the Varsovian Vistula's length. This, however, is the most central, wedged as it is between the old town and the zoo. It is obviously such a watermark of the city that cartographers have etched its ineffable outline onto maps. Occasionally, during periods of heavy rain, it will disappear from view altogether, but it's never far away from the surface. Whether as a gathering place for gregarious gulls or a contemplative spot for corvids, this little sandbar is a home from home for many of the wings of Warsaw.

2008-06-16T06:27:00.000-07:00

WARSZAWA ELEKTRONICA

If I have included a link on the front page to Synopsis Elektronica, a web log devoted to (particularly) German experimental electronic music of the seventies and eighties, it’s because the winter that Warsaw is currently embedded in is particularly befitting of such austere, synthesized sounds (and because the view from my kitchen window bears an uncanny resemblance to Michael Hoenig's album cover above) . Whether Tangerine Dream’s Ricochet or Manuel Gottsching’s E2 E4 or indeed Michael Hoenig’s Departure from a Northern Wasteland, there is something of an electronic intonation to Warsaw’s voice. Even the name - Warsaw (Warszawa) - carries an austere and perverse charge that echoes long after it is voiced.

It needn’t be the neon streaking through the night, or the great experimental spaces invading the city, and all this architectural counterpoint, that renders Warsaw so 'synthesized'. It is perhaps, more, the synthesis of two states of mind, the capital and the communal (the young and the old, the past and the present), that brings Warszawa Elektronica to the fore.

In a Warsaw winter, everything is pared to the bone. Though 2 decades deep in Capitalism the city has not yet relented to the full furore of 'the spectacle'. Austerity is still a visible factor. Xmas begins in the middle of December and ends on the epiphany of 6th January. The city's many birds and trees, in this testing time of year, lend another quality of hardship to the scene. Insofar as this is concerned, and in terms of its natural patrimony, Warsaw is a compassionate city.

There is a super-reality when knee-deep in a Warsaw winter. It comes as no surprise then to discover that Edgar Froese, the founder of Tangerine Dream, the most definitive electronic band ever, had studied under Salvador Dali in Berlin. Later, in 1984, Tangerine Dream would come to Poland for a series of concerts, later releasing the album 'Poland' including a title 'Warsaw in the Sun'. They were one of the few foreign bands allowed to perform under the Communist regime (since the band was wholly instrumental, sound itself could not be seen as subversive).

Back in Berlin in the seventies, David Bowie had recorded the deeply atmospheric and synthesized Warszawa for his experimental album Low. Warsaw was also the name initially adopted by the English band that was to become Joy Division. Like Joy Division (the name referring to a camp of Jewish women used to service the sexual needs of Nazi officers during WWII), Warsaw has had a death in the family and is now embracing a new order, a new economic model under which this old elektronic world will gradually be annihilated. There is a new Joy Division servicing Warsaw, all the more evident in the run-up to Xmas and in the relatively new phenomenon known as 'the January sales'.

Nevertheless, I still find the old world, the ever-retro properties of Warsaw’s Communist city frontage (its album cover?) ever-alluring. It has aged well against the progressive mode of modern tack. And its taste has deepened accordingly. Yet, this view is not shared by everyone. For many, this Communist aspect to Warsaw represents the demonic side of the city. As such, some would rather erase it completely. I'm talking principally of the city's vast architectural wealth of Socialist Realism, of which the tumultuous Palace of Culture and Science is but a single structure amongst many.

Nevertheless, this heritage (architectural and other), no matter how disagreeably people look upon it, is both healthy and necessary for Varsovians in order to come to terms with what 'Warsaw' really is. Look at it as a form of architectural adversity if need be, but do not pretend it never existed. This would simply be falling into the same totalitarian trap as before. A city without a visible past is a city living from hand to mouth. Warsaw would then be condemned to reconstruct itself ad infinitum. And for a city whose motto boasts 'contemnit procellas' (it defies the storms), this would be highly irregular.

However, in the era of the ever-effervescent Capitalist model, perhaps Warsaw will follow the same fate as vinyl, and be melted down and rebuilt as a compact disc. In the short term, the sound will sound the same, maybe even better, but in the process of replacement and 'improvement', the gritty synthesis of Warszawa Elektronica (and Warsaw's own idios syn-krasis) will be lost, and come ten, twenty, thirty years, they'll have to re-build Warsaw again, and again... and again.

Looking north (from my kitchen window) to the city's centre. The beacon of the Palace of Culture and Science is just visible in the centre of the picture. [January 2nd, 2009]

2008-06-15T23:51:00.000-07:00

ON THE CORNER

On the corner of Kaweczynska and Otwocka

Sitting on the steps of the Basilica

the rattle of trams

the rustle of trees

pigeons and people

coming and going.

2008-06-15T18:30:00.000-07:00

IN THE COMPANY OF CROWS

If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be wise enough to be crows.

Henry Ward Beecher

Looking towards BUW, Warsaw University, from Most Slasko-Dabrowski.

A rook's silhouette on a branch in Park Skaryszewski.

A curious hooded crow by Lazienki Palace.

Crow and Jay in Lazienki Park.

Hooded crow in the Russian Cemetery.

Out for a stroll on the riverside.

2008-06-15T12:12:00.000-07:00

HANGING ROUND THE MIDDENS

The middens (excuse my Glaswegian) are a great place to find birds. The sparrow and pigeon community where I live seem well versed with the timetable of certain residents' weekly disposals. Tits and gulls too. And of course, crows and magpies. Many middens are housed in sealed sheds, inaccesible to bird (or man) without the key; there are some, however, that are open, so to speak, to the public. Impromptu wheelie bins, like here on Ulica Brzozowa (Birch Street) at the back of the Old Town, can provide invaluable twitching time for the avid city birder. Watching a couple of crows go to work on a half-open wheelie bin can be quite a sight to say nothing of the vacuuming capacity of a platoon of pigeons or sparrows.

Taken in mid-October by my Slavic companion Berenika (the bringer of victory) Mioduszewska, this photograph shows the excellence of an agile magpie's newly coated wingtips.

2008-06-14T18:07:00.000-07:00

MORNING SCENE

Back green

Great elm

Spray of snow -

People passing

Jackdaws laughing

Observant crow.

2008-06-14T07:03:00.000-07:00

AEROPOLIS - THE HIGH-RISE CITY

Odi et amo.

The satirical poet Juvenal provides a vivid and unflattering, but not altogether impartial, picture of life in a Roman apartment block:

We live in a city supported mostly by slender props, which is how the bailiff patches cracks in old walls, telling the residents to sleep peacefully under roofs ready to fall down around them.

By the mid 4th century, there were 46,600 apartment blocks known as ‘insulae’ (islands), and only 1,790 ‘domus’ (villas) in Rome. Their heights, as well as their numbers, were something of a cause for concern; they continued rising higher and higher, even in spite of Trajan’s height restrictions of seven storeys.

At times, and places, wandering through Warsaw, I get to thinking of 4th century Rome.

This stepped residential block is part of the Goclaw housing complex on the north side of the Kanal Goclawski.

Apartment blocks are a visible part of any city. Warsaw's high and wide-rises however form an integral part of housing both in the centre and around it. Whole areas, like the southern suburban dormitory of Ursynow consist of nothing but them. Many were built in response to housing shortages in the 60s and 70s. This particular wide-rise was one of several in Zoliborz standing proudly off Krasinskiego Street near the river.

This colourful beauty is part of a complex between the main arterial roads of Ostrobramska and Grochowska. These areas are really 'spruced up' by all those trees and grassy areas. The proliferation of birds, notably pigeons, jackdaws, tits and sparrows aids this architecure immensely. When we talk of 'bionic architecure', this is where it all starts. These spaces in between buildings are as much a part of the building as the roof or the walls. In his list of the five most important elements in building Corbusier would reply: 'Sky, space, trees, steel and cement, in that order, and that hierarchy.'

This block in Ulica Prusa stands opposite the snazzy Sheraton and together form one of Warsaw's many enduring tectonic stand-offs.

2008-06-13T23:12:00.000-07:00

IN PRAISE OF POWAZKI

Here, I am not all death.

There is more life in me than you could ever imagine.

There is a wildness travelling my bones.

A Slavic wind, a world wind, dances through my trees.

Perched atop my speaking stones

Crows and jays and blackbirds sing

There is a wildness travelling my bones

A world wind dancing through my trees here

I am not all death.

2008-06-11T23:52:00.000-07:00

HERONS AND BEAVERS

On Warsaw's east side, between bridges Most Slasko-Dabrowski and Most Swietokrzyski, is Port Praski. Though very much lying in a state of disuse, the lack of human commotion belies a wealth of animal and bird activity. Though I have never seen them, there are reputed to be beavers in them there waters. From the bridge on Wybrzeze Szczecinskie it is possible to have a good look at the entrance to the port that in the past was used as a graving dock for ships. If you want to get closer, and with a little added chutzpa, you can enter the docks from Jana Zamoyskiego street, but watch out for the 'parky'! He's got a little booth there where he sits. If you're lucky he'll be taking a wander himself and you can slip past unnoticed. But be quick, for plans are afoot to develop the whole area with 10 storey residential blocks.

Next door to Port Praski, wholly separate from the dock, is a little marsh where you can see a pair of grey herons who live and regularly feed here. They also, on occasion, fly across the main road to the river and are not an uncommon sight, along with the odd cormorant, on the few stoney islets when the river is low.

2008-06-11T05:07:00.000-07:00

BEAUTIFUL FREAK

In terms of 'psychogeography' Warsaw is a minefield. There are instances of city evolution that, in their extreme movement and mutation, boggle the mind. I can think of several instances where the built environment, due its outlandish construction, its strange contiguity with the other, has blown the mind to pieces and engendered a sort of nirvana.

It is this metaphysical minefield, this 'mind stepping on a mine', that makes Warsaw such a wonder to wander through. There are epiphanies to be had within this marvellous abomination of a metropolis.

One such epiphany, of how beautifully abominable the city of Warsaw can be, is at the terminus of tram number 16 beneath the spaghetti junction of Modlinska, Torunska and Jagiellonska in Zeran. Here, there is a church strapped between slipways and flyways of surrounding communicating motorways (a bit like Zygmunt Berling further down in Saska Kepa). Indeed, the church is so hemmed in that one wonders, when looking at it from the terminus, how on earth one gets to it without 'froggering' one's life to the capricious onslaught of traffic.

It's a scenario best appreciated cartographically (although google earth makes a sterling job with its aerial view). For me, the expression here is several. Firstly, there is the expression of a city being 'cobbled together' with no apparent regard for the human who must necessarily negotiate and inhabit it. Secondly, there is the obvious symbolism of a church refusing to budge, and the obstinacy of 'religion' not to change with the times. Thirdly, there is the voice, or absence of it, of the citizens themselves, abandoning (for they have no time for such dubious pursuits as psycho-geography) their city to the caprices of politicians and beauraucrats.

Here, the church's location is not the only expression of these ideas. If you turn ninety degrees to the north you will see another, a hotel in the shadow of the Zeran power plant, and whose picture of unblessed geography I have attached below.

Pod Grotem indeed!

Take the tram ride, see for yourself, this beautiful abomination, your city.

2008-06-09T23:05:00.000-07:00

ROYAL LAZIENKI PARK is a wonderful place at all times of the year, but autumn is particularly resplendent. Not only are you swallowed into a kaleidoscope of colour, into the engoldened Polish autumn, but the wildlife within (becoming a little less wild with each passing season) are a little more, how shall we say, ‘friendly’.

Tits and nuthatches regularly perch on the fingertips of seeded pedestrians. Crows and jays will actually come within a few feet of you to snap up that carelessly thrown almond. Red squirrels, the cheekiest of the lot, will run up your jeans as if you were a tree.

About the only animal that doesn’t get too close is the ever-suspicious magpie. But then you’ve got to love that in-built disdain and distrust for the human species. I admire the magpie for never getting too close. Those Siberian rooks too, always with one eye on you, are the first to flee should you mosey in on their patch. History has told them too much about humans, too much that they can’t afford to ignore. The tits and squirrels are much more trusting, but then they’re much more agile too.

As the trees go skeletal, and the leaves make a carpet of the park, there is real opportunity for close encounters, encounters that go far beyond watching birds through binoculars, and go some way to fostering a quality of being in the world that transcends the all too often human.

A young jay looking for another almond.

A late autumn morning in Lazienki, like a midsummer’s day in Powazki, is something of a Varsovian gem not to be missed.

By mid to late November, the first snows usually fall in Warsaw. Here, a nuthatch and a great tit go to work on some sunflower seeds.

For a country popularised for its 'ginger' heritage my native Scotland is sadly absent of any 'ginger' squirrels. They have been driven out by the more adaptable (yet infinitely less tufty-eared) grey squirrel. You can imagine my joy then when I realised Warsaw's parks were full of these 'little gingers'. They really are the cutest most curious animals, and they really do treat your jeans like trees. The other day this little guy even tried to nibble my camera lens.

All creatures great and small: an adult male (note the red nape ) great spotted woodpecker above, and a great tit below. The colourful cannondale attracts a great deal of attention, most of it non-human. In spring and summer, wasps, bees and butterflies find it particularly alluring.

A roe buck enjoying some late winter grazing in the north end of Lazienki.

On a cold day in December these peacocks will take your hand off if you're holding anything that vaguely resembles food. As I placated this fiery one with a few flung bread crumbs a red squirrel tried to make off with my gloves which I had laid on the bench aside me. In winter, Sunday is really the only day these guys can be guaranteed a feed, and maybe Saturday too. By mid-week, when the park is empty of feeding human hands any food is quickly pounced upon. Whether jays or rooks (even the magpies are getting closer), squirrels or peacocks, it gets to the point on a real bitingly cold Friday morning as you prepare to sprinkle the ground with a little bread and cheese that you almost fear for your life as birds and animals throw a cordon round you. With scenes almost reminiscent of Hitchcock, one can perhaps understand how bare nature's larder has become, and just how cold it can get even here in the centre of the city, and just how far these animals will go to get a little food into their stomachs.

January, 2009, this jay, belly-deep in fresh snow, is looking for the slice of snickers I threw it. I've seen jays here, so eager for a bite in these snowbound days, perch on the fingertips of one of the old-timers who regularly feeds them. You can see the Siberian rook behind is much more cautious of human activity. And don't worry, it didn't take long before the jay was tucking into a tasty mix of nougat, caramel and milk chocolate.

This little guy got some snickers too. I mean, how could you refuse such a face!

Perfectly camouflaged (save perhaps for its little red skullcap) it's easy to see why the green woodpecker spend's most of its time in the short grass than on the trunks of trees. There are at least two pairs which inhabit Lazienki, one at its north end and the other at its southern end. With their unmistakeable yaffle cry they really are beautiful birds.

2008-06-09T07:39:00.000-07:00

THE METAPHYSICAL CITY

December one morning

The frozen city

Cast in sunshine

Escapes herself -

2008-06-08T23:44:00.000-07:00

AND THE WHOLE EARTH IS LIKE A POEM...

The empty pond of Pole Mokotowskie.

Słońce

All colours come from the sun. And it does not have
Any particular colour, for it contains them all.
And the whole earth is like a poem
While the sun above represents the artist.

Whoever wants to paint the variegated world
Let him never look straight up at the sun
Or he will lose the memory of things he has seen
Only burning tears will stay in his eyes.

Let him kneel down, lower his face to the grass,
And look at light reflected by the ground.
There he will find everything we have lost:
The stars and the roses, the dusks and the dawns.

Czesław Miłosz (Warsaw, 1943)

The pine grove of the Russian Cemetery.

A silver birch grove on the north-west edge of Las Kabacki.

2008-06-07T23:39:00.000-07:00

RIVER

Though the mercury, this past week, has dropped to minus twenty, it hasn’t felt that cold. Perhaps because there haven't been any clouds or wind, and there has been lots of sun, or perhaps simply because we native Glaswegians, unlike the gentle Pole or effeminate Englishman, are as hard as nails, and know what real cold, the stuff that's wrapped in gale-force winds and horizontal rain, (both alien concepts in the landlocked and planed Warsaw), is.

Today, the river was super-frozen, almost arctic. Its ice-slabbed surface was all fractured and broken up highlighting the ebb and flow of ice and the process of freezing and melting that has taken place during the last week. To see such a powerful river as the Vistula frozen from end to end is a sight that is quite indescribable.

In the midst of these shimmering shards of ice were a group of black-headed gulls gathered round a small ice hole. Further over, was a large gathering (some dozen or so) of hooded crows exploring the small mountains and valleys of their new territory. (In Polish, these floes are known as 'kra', which seemed quite appropriate for the vociferous crows).

From the top of Most Poniatowskiego the Vistula’s surface was mottled with meltpools which had re-frozen. Dimpled and scarred, the river now had something of a lunar quality to it.

As the sun lowered in the sky, the trees and buildings cast their shadows across the ice. 5 mute swans flew over my head. If ever there was a bird that could make languid look so graceful it would be the swan. They cleared the bridge by only a few metres. Their wings slowly whipped the air beneath them. I might’ve touched them had I stretched out my hand.

Crows and Kra

Fresh and vital, the frozen River Vistula from Most Poniatowskiego.

2008-06-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

WALLED IN IN WARSAW - THE SLUZEW WALL REVISITED

I try to get down to the Sluzew wall twice a year - once in the winter and once in the summer. That way you get a real feel for the new stuff that’s been ‘posted’, and for the old stuff that has already begun to decay. In winter, the two kilometre stretch of pavement in front of this calli-graffitied wall is deserted. In summer, conversely, there’s always a couple of artists working away, making the most of the light. Whatever the season, the Sluzew wall is a wonderful open-air gallery which, at any given time, displays many different styles, and more colour than a bucketful of fruit!

When the graffiti artist Banksy mentioned in Wall and Piece that graffiti was ‘one of the more honest art forms available,’ he wasn’t far wrong. When art becomes a byword for profiteering or the ego, when we diminish the potential for 'an art of 5 kopeks', the game is up. Graffiti as an art form has no such pretensions. This is why places like the Sluzew wall in Warsaw hold a special place in the city’s psyche.

When I walk along the wall’s length aside Warsaw's main north-south expressway I can’t help but think of the thousands of cars and their drivers/passengers that zoom by it every day. And it’s then that I usually think of a short passage in Thoreau’s Walden (not wholly inappropriate since Thoreau himself reckoned that the name of the pond came from ‘walled in’ as it was by the two tracks of the Fitchburg railway and the stone walls that supported them).

Here, Thoreau remarks on the people in the train who pass by the pond every day:

The cars never pause to look at it; yet I fancy that the engineers and firemen and brakemen, and those passengers who have a season ticket and see it often, are better men for the sight.

And so it is with the Sluzew wall; for many, at such speed, the whole sight must pass by as nothing but a blur of colour, yet I fancy that even this flash of colour, as they head south into Warsaw’s grey high-rise suburb, illumes inside just a smattering of wonder and curiosity.

DETAILS OF THE SLUZEW WALL, ULICA PULAWSKA 17.12.2008

July 2009

September 2009

2008-06-07T05:13:00.000-07:00

THE BUILDING IN THE PLASTIC MASK

In the futuristic noir Blade Runner, the advertising that floats through the air on a lightsign-airship tells us of a new life awaiting in the off-world colonies, and the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure. A fluorescent coca-cola bottle drips its electronic tonic down the side of a skyscraper. Atari is still going strong. The city with its incessant rain and skating light is a riot of urban planning and marketing. Ridley Scott, the director, before turning to filmmaking had already cut his teeth in the competitive world of commercial advertising.

Already in Warsaw, there are video ad-screens on the metro and in the stations, whole buildings stand in the wings curtained off by advertising, even the handle straps in the buses have ads dangling from them. In certain parts of the world, hubcaps of vehicles now display messages; people have sold their bodies (and minds) to advertisers as 'live mobile billboards'.

It's not just Warsaw's architectural patrimony that is suffering here. When you look at the 400 metre tenemented stretch of Aleja Jerozolimskie (between the Marriot and the Novotel) and see 60% of it covered with ads (buildings whose skeletal shells were painstakingly restored after WWII), you really start wondering.

On an architectural 'spacer'' organised by the Festival for Science, our guide referred to certain structures in Centrum whose whole raison d'etre was now simply to display adverts across their towering torsos.

The following pictures show an almost panoptic view of Plac Konstitucji in Srodmiescie Poludnie one Sunday afternoon in late September 2008. Plac Konstitucji as site of the MDM (Marszalkowska Housing Project) in the early fifties is of great historical and architectural significance, not just to Warsaw but to the whole of Europe (if not the world). Buildings in this area have recently been cleaned and restored to their original states.

The east facade of Plac Konstitucji is, surprisingly, sans masque, though you can rest assured this won't be for long. The telecom providers who operate out of the arcades beneath will soon have it looking like a satsuma again.

The first yellow building nearest us is Kamienica Khonow built in 1935 by architects Maksymilian Goldberg and Hipolit Rutkowski. The one next to it at No. 58 Marszalkowska, covered, dates back to 1875. Aside that is another pre-war building. In fact, this stretch of Marszalkowska, between 56-62, contains the longest unbroken stretch of pre-war tenements of the whole street.

I can perhaps understand the rationale behind much of this advertising, that is, that the money raised from it goes towards the restoration work of many of the city's dilapidated treasures. Nevertheless, as you can see here, in this one square, where buildings have been restored they are quickly covered up. So the question remains, and it's an important one, is this restoration work nothing but a con and simply a prelude for the pernicious sub-culture of modern day capitalists?

2008-06-06T23:40:00.000-07:00

WAXWINGS OVER WARSAW

With some eighty or so flats looking onto this back green there are roughly 200 inhabitants that can lay claim to a small piece of this skwer. Yet it is not the human occupants that represent the greatest movement within the square. Sure, the people come and go, most, on average, just once a day, but it’s the birds that bring the real animation to the skwer. This is most evident in those bare-boned days of late autumn, winter, and very early spring when the follicles of trees extend nakedly into the air. Visibility is greatly increased, not just of the city rising up in the background, but of the birds flying and perching in the foreground.

There are the Siberian rooks scouting about from November to March, many to be seen lock-jawed with walnuts or hazelnuts. There are the fieldfares who occasionally group up and crash the scene, invariably demobbed by the magpies or jackdaws; then, there are the three resident magpies which I have almost been tempted to name; there are the sparrows and tits in the shrubbery, and the odd vagrant pigeon flirting on the rooftops. The rooftops are a wonderful world for the birds. The chimneys upon them are mere stepping stones for the primadonna magpies who hop balletically up before flicking their tail feathers to any lesser agile beings that might be watching. From here the magpie surveys its surroundings before hopping and skipping along the roof to its edge and performing the most graceful dive since Greg Louganis.

The single aerial extending some fifteen feet above the roof is pretty much reserved for the collared dove when he shows his face. From here he echoes his ‘coo’ across the skwer.

The eaves of the roofs belong to the jackdaws; the ventilation grills, all 48 of them in this U-shaped skwer, to the tits who seem quite remarkably to insinuate themselves between their tiny grill holes.

Very occasionally, infrequent visitors (hooded crows, spotted woodpeckers, jays and tree creepers) will pass through, and give the place a once over. They seem however to prefer the un-hemmed grass verges and trees of nearby cemeteries and parks. On top of all this, and as if an elegy to the previous year, come the Bohemian waxwings, down from Scandinavia, who, for the past three Warsaw winters I have presided over the skwer, have never failed to show. In fact, you could almost set your clock by them. I remember their first appearance in the winter of 2006 as being roughly a week after Poland’s Independence day (November 11th), or a couple of days after 'Hydro-Max' day (when the communal heating in the block is turned up from its tepid setting to full-blast). In 2007, they were a day late! This year (2008), however, they made up for it, by arriving a day early.

The dapper little waxwings (jemioluszki) lightly coat the top of the great skeletal elm like an organic wig. Today, they arrived in three separate squadrons. To the right of the skwer as I lean out the window I can see several collected atop the Xmas tree conifer. They seem to be tree-hopping gathering what nourishment they can along the way. With their little Mohawks waving in the wind the great elm bristles once again. Atop the elm's tendrils, the waxwings' constant yet subtle shrills light up the whole skwer. The jackdaws have fallen silent. For some several minutes the waxwings remain perched atop the elm. Today, it is a real spectacle, with some two hundred all vying for that top twig. After some ten minutes of shuffling and shrilling, and as if to live up their name, they all flash towards the same orb of mistletoe (jemiola) for its berries in the bottom left of the tree.

Once teeming with the parasitical plant, the great elm now has only a few bunches left (since it was tended last year). At that precise moment, a jackdaw lets out a yelp, and within that same second a cloud of 'mistletoers' are spraying aerosol across the rooftops into the dreary mist of November. For a moment, as I snap a picture, this darkened phalanx of wings in full flight looks like a signature of the sky. Like a cluster of starlings they dance chemicalised across the sky in tight unison. These little guys are just one of the heavens’ many live contrails, vibrant organic clouds, which shrink into the distance, before eventually becoming nameless.

2008-06-06T18:36:00.000-07:00

WARSAW IN THE SUN

In the 12th century text Hikmat al-Ishraq (Theosophy of Oriental Light) the Iranian philosopher Suhrawardi lays out a conception of existence in terms of light. He declares all reality to be nothing other than light, which varies only in degrees of intensity.

At a recent exhibition of the American surrealist painter and photographer Man Ray at the Palace of Culture and Science there was a quote on the wall from the Man himself:

You've got to watch the light; it's the light that creates.

As a codicile to this Man Ray was also noted, in one of his essays, to have said:

To create is divine; to reproduce is human.

Auto-Portret, Plac Pilsudskiego.

2008-06-06T18:07:00.000-07:00

BIRD BY BIRD

Pajaro a Pajaro conoci la tierra. Pablo Neruda

D’esprit du monde, c’est nous, des que nous savons nous mouvoir. Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The other Saturday as I cycled home from work through the eastern end of Pole Mokotowskie I was startled by the sound of the sky above me. It was 5pm on the last day of November and already it was dark, though not black enough for me to be completely blind to what was going on above.

I stopped where the main road of Niepodleglosci divides the eastern end from the western end of the park.

It took several seconds for my eyes to adjust to the almost black evening sky, but then I saw them, the scattered shoal of black wings and bodies against the dark dark blue. The whole field of my vision became full with this image of jackdaws and rooks winging across the sky. I realised there had to be hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands. It was hard to tell. Their sounds alone were enough to drown out the expressway traffic along the main thoroughfare of Aleje Niepodleglosci, (Independence Avenue). Up there, was another independence avenue, a wind tunnel over Warsaw rendering the sky spoken. Such was the sight (and sound) that I was genuinely surprised that the cars did not stop and their drivers get out to see what the kerfuffle was all about, but of course they were oblivious to it all sealed away behind their wind-screens and combustible engines.

When I arrived in Warsaw two years ago I barely knew what a bird was. I can recall walking along Marszalkowska towards the centre at about the same twilight time and hearing this tchaking raucous above me. I was literally awestruck by the great flying carpet of black wings heading towards the beacon of the Palace of Culture. As I stood there mesmerised wondering if this was some kind of avian invasion I realised by other people’s casual indifference that it was perhaps not an uncommon affair. How can you not attend to such an event I thought. Even two years on, especially two years on, the event is even more mesmerising. What little I've learned of corvids along the way has further fuelled my curiosity. And I still think, how can people not attend to this event?

In fact, these crepuscular fly-bys are relatively new over Warsaw, and have only been witnessed like this for the past ten years. Before that the skies above the city were sadly absent of such seething shoals of jackdaws, and crows. Various speculations have been made as to the reason, but none are as of yet conclusive.

As I stood frozen to the spot, my bicycle's blue titanium frame now betwixt my legs, my whole soul saluted these birds, commended their energy, their sacred right of migration, and of movement. At times I have even convinced myself, whether through flight of imagination or of movement, that I am part-bird. These birds have taught me much about motion, about 'the why of movement', and of the world. In these cold winter mornings when I jog down through the Russian cemetery (my pockets full of seed and breadcrumbs) I become the roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) who starts the day running not in some vain enterprise to entertain passers-by (though my hirsute Scottish legs have been known to raise an eye) but to jump-start his central heating system, oxygenate his blood supply and prepare himself for a day of action. I am fearful of cars, of ‘automobiles’ that seek not only to usurp my own auto-mobility but to gradually destroy the air I breathe, and the space I move through.

I envy these birds that their space has not been so congested by traffic. I envy them for their purity of being, for their lack of progress, for their hesitation of the human. I envy their wild erratic flight patterns, their ability to home, as a verb, and not as noun. I envy them for their wings that carry them up on the thermals, that allow them to soar and sweep, and call out, and provoke the odd thought in my collapsible body. In my own wanderings, of mind, and of leg, I am part bird.

I travail as much as I travel, and when you watch the bird, when it becomes so ingrained into you, you see this work, this travail, this travelling as one and the same thing. These wind tunnels over Warsaw are a high-way of a wholly different sort, ones of which most are blissfully unaware. These thousands of jackdaws and rooks home into their patches in Pole Mokotowskie, in the pine trees of the Russian Cemetery, over the river into Park Skaryszewski, like shoals of fish swimming chemically through the sea. The sky of course is another kind of sea, an ocean whose movements for the most part we are fortunately privy to. Never before, in all my various migrations, had the sky taken on such meaning, such movement. On the Great European Plain, Warsaw stands as an elemental crossroads of land and of weather, of river, cloud and bird. Whether it be those travelling north to south, or east to west, Warsaw gets it all at some point. Just don’t take your eyes off the skies. It is such that Warsaw becomes the world without even moving.

2008-06-05T12:50:00.000-07:00

THE BOOKSHOP WINDOW

I walk past this bookshop window almost every day. It does two things to me. In fact three. Firstly, it inspires me, like standing on the top of a mountain inspires me, with all those live minds hidden behind those hard and soft binds. From Augustine’s Civitas Dei to Ibn Arabi’s Bezels of Wisdom to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself the bookshop window is a constantly changing surface affecting the psyche. Naturally, being Warsaw, most of the titles are in Polish, though I have found a couple of bilingual editions here and there. However much it frustrates not being able to read these books, (and here's the second point), I take quiet solace in simply being able to see them bound in that communist cloth that clothes and smells so well. I rejoice in the fact that I can still see a bookshop window so full of uncelebritized names (the third point), so full of obscure (yet enlightening titles) by people called Korzbyski, Witkacy, Potocki, Ingarden. Indeed, every morning at 11am, the window dressage is an event in itself. Slowly, as if with the seasons, the gist of the window changes so that a springtime of phenomenal fleet-of-foot leads through a summer of northern european art to an autumn of reflection and questioning and a winter of cold, wide thinking. Slowly, the year passes philosophically as perhaps it should, whilst I continue to marvel and wonder at what on earth some of those titles behold behind that finely woven communist cloth.

2008-06-05T08:22:00.000-07:00

AT PEACE IN THE PINE GROVES

Death is the side of life that is averted from us, unillumined by us.
R.M. Rilke

Irony doesn’t stop at death. This grey-beaked Siberian beauty was found beneath its roost, at peace in the pine groves around the Russian cemetery. This place, particulary in winter, is a real precinct of life and death, space and silence, and what Heidegger might have termed the ‘whole draft of the Open’.

In the wandering morning, in the groves around the Russian Cemetery, the incandescence of being wells up from its depths, within the widest orbit of the sphere of beings.

2008-06-05T05:04:00.000-07:00

METROPOEIA

I am inclined to see Warsaw, if we’re talking orthography, much like the Polish language itself. Difficult to spell. Even more difficult to pronounce. When I say that the Polish language is the most difficult I have encountered, more difficult than Mandarin, Hungarian, or Arabic, I kid you not. Its orthography alone is enough to drive you up the wall. Think Gaelic fused with Swahili and you’re almost there. It is a devious concoction of letters and symbols, hooks and accents, stress and silence. At times when confronted with clusters of consonants half a mile long one wonders if Poles have ever heard of vowels. Polish words seem to suffer from the same lack of ‘town-planning’ that the city does. It is, if you will excuse my forthrightness, a mess. Take one of my students’ names, Martyna Skrzypczynska, for example, or the inimitable Square of the Three Crosses in Warsaw, Plac Trzech Krzyzy. Or words like WŁĄCZAĆ (to include) or PRZYCISZYĆ (to supress) which my all too clever spellchecker insists in changing to ‘sissy’ (probably because that’s what it thinks of me).

This is not an uncommon event in Polish, encountering words whose orthography is so oblique that you simply do not know where to start. The city itself is a little like this.

To respond to this (and to compensate for Martyna's almost completely disemvowelled surname), there is a definite ‘logopoeia’ going on here, that is, a dance of the intellect among words.

The Scots ‘philosopher’ Ivor Cutler once remarked on vowels that they were the lubrication that stopped consonants from sticking together like boiled sweeties in a paper bag. The prospect of a bag of sticky humbugs is not a wholly unpleasant one though.

I suppose, as a native English speaker, it’s a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. Just look at the ‘ough’ combo in English and all the myriad ways of pronouncing it. The ‘szcz’ combination in Polish has but one sound.

When I wander through Warsaw there is always something of an orthographic complexity to the city that bowls me over. But the city it would appear, from travelling through its great spaces, is full of vowels. The syntax of the city, if not its orthography, continues to call forth the attention, and choreograph the intellect into some wild primal dance. There's something uniquely special about the city that I just can't put my finger on. It's as if as I wander its various ways I am looking at the covers of a thousand books whose names are unpronounceably fascinating. There is no linearity any longer, no centre. I have been released into the realm of 'metropoeia'.

2008-06-05T03:11:00.000-07:00

WHO FEEDS THE FEEDERS?

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Walden, Henry David Thoreau

The ‘with’ is not just a mode of being-in-the-world, but our transcendental condition.

From the Existence of Communism to the Community of Existence.
Jean-Luc Nancy

Many animals are opportunists. Others, arguably the more intelligent of the species, are more devious. The bird and squirrel boxes of the Russian cemetery's pine and birch groves are a fine place to observe some quality opportunism. I have found adult hooded crows wedged into slats no larger than a letterbox for the sake of a few breadcrumbs, and daring Siberian rooks momentarily embottled in a five-litre water cannister (designed for tits and sparrows) for a measly few seeds. To be sure, most bird tables, or squirrel boxes, will have some kind of in-built security to prevent such bolshie burglary, but you can rest assured it won't be good enough to stop these bestia non grata for long. They will always find a way to squeeze in. The real problem is getting out and, whilst in the box, leaving itself vulnerable to attack. This pigeon (beaneath) wasn't so daft as to keep his head inside the slat for long. He had one eye on me all the time.

As to who fills the feeders, I have only ever seen the more mature Varsovian do this, or, at the other end of the age spectrum, say, a child accompanied by its parents. Those in between 10-60 seem conspicuously absent.

Is it possible that, at these north and south poles of life, one tends to feel ‘life’ not just as a side-effect of one’s self-encapsulated ego, but as part of a wider belonging?

In other words, within these vital polar regions, privy, perforce, to the aurora vitae of life, does one enter into the truth of being individual, as indivisible from all things? Does the dawning (or in most cases the 'dusking') recognition that we share our city with these birds and animals render ourselves, at last, compassionate? Does the simple act of scattering a few breadcrumbs, a few nuts, allow us to partake in this winter as if it were really a winter? Might we begin to comprehend the nature of primal living, and how we have become sedated by choice and comfort, by capital and petition?

Does the 'with' of it all exact and re-enact our presence, all of a sudden, out-with the narrow human context which had hitherto consumed it? And if so, should not also the question be asked - do we really have to wait until we're about to die to realise that we have not fully lived?

The Seeker of Truth. (Be curious, be agile, but get your head stuck in too deep and you might never get it out).

Something tells me this great picture wasn't taken in Warsaw!

2008-06-05T01:55:00.000-07:00

LAS BIELANSKI: THE BRAIN OF BIELANY

The history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man.

Warsaw is a city of small forests. There are some dozen 'rezerwat' and 'lasek' within the city's relatively compact limits. Warsaw is a city surrounded by forests too. On the city's periphery, covering Warsaw on all four sides, are the larger 'las' of Kabaty and Mlociny, and National and Landscape Parks of Kampinos and Mazovia.

One such forest, both a 'rezerwat' (protected area) and 'lasek' (small forest) is a fragmentary remnant of the great primeval forest of Mazovia, Las Bielanski. Lying on the west bank of the Vistula at the northern perimeter of Warsaw, a mere ten minutes by metro from the centre of Warsaw (you try doing that in London), Las Bielanski is a wondrous forest of old and young growth trees. It is here, unlike any park or topiarised woodland, that you can get a sense of the symbiotic cycles of life and death that an unmanaged forest is made up of. Comprising some 152 hectares, and bounded in by three hulking expressways you're never very far from 'civilisation', yet within these forest boundaries there is an unmistakeable sense of the primordial. This is a place where time sings. The forest itself is but a meandering echo of the great forest that once covered all of Europe.

Woodpeckers tear away on the rotting bark of dying trees, deer make their home here, wild lynx and moose have even strayed down from the much larger Kampinos several kilometres to the north-west. In a clearing at the forest’s eastern edge, perched on the escarpment overlooking the river (and expressway), is the site of the 17th century Cameldolite Monastery, now part of the University grounds here. It was the Cameldolites who gave Bielany her name both here and in Krakow, 'bielany' referring to their white robes.

As far as trees are concerned, Las Bielanski is full of oak, alder, ash, pine, birch and lime. There are hazel and hornbeam, rowan, juniper and buckthorn. Fossil leaves and pollen show that the oaks, the oldest of the lot, have been here for at least a million years, but have come and gone in the warm interglacial periods. The Scots pine, with its eco-plasticity and its high adaptability, is also dominant here, especially fond of the sandy subsoil that so much of this area is made of. There are parts of the forest, with the extreme old age of some of the trees, whether pine, oak or other, and with a forest floor strewn with hollowed out trunks, that resemble the age old Bialowieza Puszcza (primeval forest) on the Polish Belarusian border. The forest, though more visibly full of death than life, especially in the midst of winter, is in-visibly replete with activity.

What makes the likes of Las Bielanski different from ‘normal’ forests is its untended nature. It is left to its own devices, its own world lives and breathes, regulates itself without too much human interference. It is of its own mind so to speak. It is perhaps incomparable to the great and pristine puszcza of Bialowieza. Nevertheless, here, in the depths of Las Bielanski, there is a similar intelligence at work.

When I look at the canopy of a forest in winter each tree appears like a neuron extending and feeling into space. Their structure and 'behaviour' are almost identical, albeit on a different scale. Together, these trees, as the forest, form a cortex (the word 'cortex' comes from the Latin meaning 'bark'). And, as anyone reading this should be able to tell you, if you connect enough cortices together, you've got yourself a real living brain.

The Brain of Bielany.

2008-06-04T23:02:00.000-07:00

A WARSAW WINTER ROOST: The Groves & Graves of the Soviet Military Cemetery.

For its space, its wildlife, and its silence there are few places (in any city) that could rival the sheer serenity of Mokotow's Soviet Military Cemetery. It is true that, especially over the last few months of jogging through the cemetery every morning, I have developed a special bond with the place.

Winter is particularly alluring when the whole complex, save for a few stray couples and a few feeding hands, remains more or less depopulated. You might be forgiven for thinking the cemetery to be in state of suspended animation, and sitting the winter out as patiently and quietly as possible. Yet, such hibernation could not be further from the truth. The activity is all the more pronounced: squirrels are squirreling away, tits and sparrows are gathering and eating anything they can get their tiny claws and beaks on, and the resident hooded crows strut about like they own the place. In December there is an influx of waxwings and fieldfares from the north who make the most of the buckthorn, rowan and mistletoe berries which, thanks to the cemetery being almost surrounded by shrub-filled allotments, exist in prodigious quantities. This is to say nothing of the thousands of Siberian rooks who make the groves around the graves their home for the several months over winter. Before going to roost in the late afternoon, the rooks have a tendency to congregate in the vacant field between the groves and the new 'luxury apartment' complex currently being thrown up to the east of the cemetery towards Woloska. At times, such is their number, the grass in patches looks as if its black. Some birds will take to the treetops earlier than others, normally at around 3.30pm with the rest following as the light fades. For the hour between 3 and 4, their wheeling through the sky and their raucous squawking is something special in Warsaw's city scene. Indeed, if it weren't for the scaffolding and the cranes opposite and the lights of the already completed apartments I might think myself in full country.

It is this, the adrenalin of nature, whether the trill of a hundred waxwings atop the tendrils of a silver birch or a great community of rooks and jackdaws celebrating in the twilight (and the lack of man who has, to his own detriment, gradually removed himself from these proceedings) that renders the cemetery such a peaceful place.

This is survival. Super-life and super-living. At its rawest.

Below is a quick 25 second video clip of the birds going to roost. It was taken at around 4pm on Saturday 3rd January, 2009. Though effectively a 'video' I much prefer the term 'audio'.

2008-06-04T12:56:00.000-07:00

PUBLIC SCULPTURE

You walk through a great city grown old in civilisation, one of those containing the most important archives of universal life, and your eyes are drawn upwards, above, to the stars; for in the public squares, at the corners of crossroads, motionless characters, taller than those who pass by at their feet, relate to you in a silent language high legends of glory, of war, of knowledge, of suffering… Were you the most carefree of men, the unhappiest or the meanest, a beggar or a banker, the stone phantom seizes you for a few instants, in the name of the past, to think of things which are not of this world. This is the divine role of sculpture.

Charles Baudelaire

Insinuated into the flesh of a city are marks of its past in the form of statues, ornaments and sculptures. The following examples of 'carvings' in Warsaw represents only a fraction of the total. I have maintained a purely subjective perspective here, and presented only those sculptures which, let's say, tickle my fancy. After a year or two wandering through the Polish capital one becomes a little jaded with all the crosses and candles, and the monuments to the fallen. So, when you come across a statue or an ornament that goes in the other direction, there is cause for pause. That's not to say that all the following are wholly 'pacific' in nature. Warsaw without a little war wouldn't be quite the same; but I have tried to tone it down a little.

No Polish city would ever be complete without a few Jesuses jumping about. This one 'pod lipa' on the road to Kampinos is actually not too bad. It makes a pleasant change to see him standing, and not hanging. There are more than just a few JCs dotted around Warsaw that in their gorey bloodletting would make Tobe Hooper look tame.

I know what you're thinking. But a naked and ferocious Nike aside Aleja Solidarnosci dares anyone to say they're not.

The mosaic on the wall on Egipska Street in Saska Kepa, illustrating Copernicus' heliocentric view of the solar system, was inaugurated in 1973 as part of a 500 year celebration of the astronomer's birth.

One of Warsaw's more powerful sculptures, this one in Praga beside Port Praski, commemorates the Russian losses in WWII.

Though perhaps not as 'public' as some others the sculpted epitaph of filmaker Krzystof Kieslowski lies in Powazki Cemetery amongst a wide variety of other such sculptures. Cemeteries are of course amongst the finest places for architecture and sculpture, not to mention ornithology and biology, and silence and space. And Powazki, with its age old trees and deep winding alleys is a labyrinthine complex par excellence.

This sculpture of Warsaw's enduring symbol, Syrenka, is to be found somewhere in the Zelazna Brama Estate. Sadly, however, the statue has suffered from neglect over the years and the birdbath that makes up its tail is broken and waterless. It is by far, out of the half dozen or so Syrenas to be found across the city, the most evocative, the most poetic (the most difficult to find). Surrounded by shrubbery and sparrows it would have once made a lovely bathing spot for the birds. Now, it is filled with empty beer cans and broken bottles. Indeed, I wonder how many of the residents of this estate realise it is actually there.

A bizarre sculpture of Stefan Starzynski opposite the Town Hall at Ratusz Arsenal.

This sculpture, found in the grounds of Palace Krolikarnia in Park Arkadia in Mokotow, is called 'The Soul Escaping the Body' (sandstone, 1918) by Xavery Dunikowski (1875-1964). It is thought that it was made for his friend and patron Antoine Cierplikowski (1884-1976) a rather eccentric and wealthy art lover (and hairdresser) who was known to sleep in a crystal coffin and who had presumably ordered it (well in advance) for his own tomb.

A statue of Jan Matejko on Pulawska with his alter ego 'stanczyk' the cour jester who features in several of his paintings. Matejko is perhaps better known for his monumental canvases like 'Bitwa pod Grunwaldem' (Battle of Grunwald) and 'Kosciuszko pod Raclawicami' (Kosciuszko at the Battle of Raclawice) which lie in the National Museums of Warsaw and Krakow respectively. As an artist Matejko wasn't interested in presenting factual events as they were but in re-presenting these events as a historical-philosophical synthesis. He considered history as a function of the present and the future. Thus, his paintings are not historical illustrations but powerful expressions of the psyche and his own attitude to the world.

Taras Shevchenko, the Ukrainian painter and poet, in the late afternoon light by Goworka Street in Stary Mokotow.

Stone reliefs and general ornamentation are few and far between in a city that was ruled by the Communist credo that 'all ornamentation is a crime'. Most of the reliefs (if they are to be found at all) are, like this maritime archway, to be found in the Old Town. I suppose the situation makes the discovery all the more potent, and the relief and ornament all the more wonderful.

This great stone stork is at the entrance to Ulica Piwna on the edge of Plac Zamkowy. It really is a beauty. Just along the road a bit is the pigeon sculpture featured in the top right of this blog. Again, a cracker that has sometimes (believe it or not) been mistaken for a huddle of real live birds!

This sculpture stands outside the College of Technology in the serene western end of Ulica Narbutta in Stary Mokotow. I have absolutely no idea what it is meant to be, but that doesn't stop me from admiring it. Answers on a postcard please.

Berling the Birdwatcher!

This statue of Zygmunt Berling is found surrounded by slipways and off-ramps at the eastern end of Most Lazienkowski (dedicated to Berling) in Saska Kepa. A strange looking statue if only for the fact that his legs have been cut off at the knee. Berling, although retired from active duty in 1939 due to 'ethic problems', was arrested with many other Polish officers by the Soviets, (though escaped the fate of most by agreeing to cooperate with the Russians). Due to rocky relations between the Polish government in exile in London and Stalin, Berling became eventual Commander of The Polish Corps in the East appointed by Stalin himself. He was later to come to the aid of the Polish resistance through his autonomous actions (which later saw him dismissed and transferred to the War Academy in Moscow) when he gave orders whilst waiting with his army in Praga to engage the German army across the Vistula. Though more symbolic than efficacious, it was the sort of ethical dilemma that had seen Berling retire in '39. The statue's positioning is thus deliberate marking the point where Berling's army initially grouped. However, now, with the onslaught of motorways and flyways, there is little opportunity for people to see it. A repositioning might benefit from a greater knowledge of Berling and his dilemma.

Praga's 'four sleepers' monument at the junction of Targowa and Solidarnosci signifying Polish Russian relations. This, officially called 'The Brotherhood in Arms', was one of the first post-WWII monument erected in 1945. It stands opposite Mary Magdalene Russian Orthodox Church originally built in 1867-9. And yes, it was questioned as to which direction that grenade should be launched.

A socialist realist statue to the fallen in Wawer's Ulica 27 Grudnia.

A war monument in Marysin Wawerski's WWII Officer Cemetery, a wonderful spot, thanks to its proliferation of Scots red pine, for woodpeckers and other birds.

Ulica Wilcza.

The National Museum courtyard is full of weird and wonderful sculptures like this one.

This bronze beauty is located in the Wyspianski room of the National Museum. It is called Swist i Poswist (the pagan gods of the wind in Slavonic mythology), and is by Slawomir Celinski.

The 'Armia Krajowa' monument opposite the Senate (out of view) and a rather nice apartment block at the far end. The 'evil eye of Sauron' (the clocktower of the Palace of Culture) can be seen peaking out over the city in the far left corner.

Monument to the fallen, Pole Mokotowskie.

The Polish Poet Cyprian Norwid in Lazienki Park.

The stainless steel giraffe in Park Praski, thanks to its porous design, is now riddled with sparrow and starling nests. Most of the birds are to be found in the belly of the beast itself, out of reach of any human marauders; there are however a few in the upper back-left thigh. In terms of bird-house architecture and the relatively cramped conditions of existing bird boxes, this steel marvel is like the Burj al-Arab of the bird-house world. The giraffe of Praski Park, whether intended or not, and despite its unsightly nature, is 'organic sculpture' at its best.

This spooky eyeless sculpture on Wybrzeze Koscziuszkowskie reminds me of Proust. Not because of any facial similarity but because of something he once said: The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. I might add to this (in a world that is growing increasingly ocularcentric) that it's not always about the eyes. This is something sculpture is particularly good at: touch and texture.

2008-06-04T12:28:00.000-07:00

TO THE WHITE BONE

Let each body become a dancer and each mind become a bird.
Friedrich Nietzsche 'Morgenröthe'

1.

Here,
In the depths of this winter
Oblivion is no obvious path
But it is the path you shall follow
Skinned
Disembowelled
To the white bone.

These past few days
Crystalline
Empty
Are present within me yet
Wandering through snow covered cemeteries
Gathering death
And itinerant wings
My brain smouldering
From the powder burns of a reality
shot straight through.

With all this space, this silence, the starvation of it all
Sometimes it’s hard to believe
When they tell me
this is a city of people.

2.

Early one morning
Naked
Across a carpet of ice
I dance in the sunlight
Of the Russian cemetery -

2008-06-04T05:05:00.000-07:00

PARAGON & PAROXYSM

This is Warsaw in a nutshell: palaces and bloks; great gardens and spare ground; gothic churches and, well, high-rise tower blocks; past and future, all rolled up in pratically the same space. The more I wander the city the more incongruous she becomes. When recently, in one of my classes, I remarked at how 'ugly' Warsaw was (I said it with a smile), this was immediately misunderstood as somehow negative. When I call Warsaw 'ugly' it is as a compliment, for within this 'spiritual unsympatheticness' I see a raw and savage beauty, one that cares not for your feelings, for your humanity, or your attention. It is an unwitting beauty, inadvertent, ex-apted. I might refer to Warsaw as a flashing example of the seemingly anthropo-ex-centred city, where spatiality and town planning have carried on outwith the human mandate of dimension, form and colour. But of course, the lack of any political cohesion takes shape firstly in the city. The 'polis' embodies the politics. Here, we have history in all its brutal glory where the spaces themselves are buildings of their own sort. Vanquished architecture. Paragon and paroxysm. In a city called Warsaw.

A high-rise apartment block and St. Florian's Church in Praga.

2008-06-03T13:56:00.000-07:00

WANDER ROUND MY BALCONY

Even smaller than Xavier de Maistre’s ‘bedroom’ is my flat’s balconette which adjoins the east-facing chamber that acts as my bedroom. Though a mere 2 feet by four feet in size, this balconette is a worthy spatial promontory that has seen much action. Most of this has been from the pigeons that frequent it, usually in the winter mornings between 9 and 10 when I lay out a sprinkling of sunflower seeds. In summer too, its bars are a fine sunbathing spot for the basking Musca domestica.

As well as offering a blistering aspect of a Warsaw dawn, the balconette is also something of a miniscule observatory from where I gaze at the night sky. For these reasons and for its capacity to oxygenate and allow me to step out from the inside, this tiny mouth of a balcony is the most valuable space in the whole apartment. I reckon the pigeons and the flies might go along with that too.

2008-06-03T13:06:00.000-07:00

THE FIFTEEN PER CENT

The following photographs document some of Warsaw's great survivors following WWII. These are my own particular favourites, buildings that I had earmarked not on account of their fortuity in surviving but more out of respect for their exterior personality. Accounts maintain that just over 85% of the city was reduced to rubble during the war. Well, this is the fifteen per cent that wasn't.

This building's stonework just screams solidity. It was built between 1931-33 and designed by the team of Marcin Weinfeld,and Stefan Bryla, and it stands at 9 Plac Powstania Warszawskiego (formerly Plac Napoleona). It is known as the Prudential Building after its first tenants, the Prudential Insurance Company. At the time it was built in the early thirties, it was Warsaw's tallest building and first real skyscraper. With the main corpus of the building, its arcaded base and funneled top two floors, the Prudential remains an example of the majesty of pre-war Polish engineering. It was badly damaged during the war when the Germans took umbrage at the Kilinski Battalion of the Home Army's hanging the Polish flag from its 16th floor. After several attempts, one of their Thor missiles eventually struck the shoulder of the building. Indeed, the Germans didn't stop there and continued shelling the Prudential for many days, (the building was an excellent outlook tower for the Polish Army). Yet, such was the strength of the internal steel structure that they could not bring it down. Despite being utterly gutted, the Prudential defiantly remained standing. The building was fully restored shortly after the war and has recently undergone extensive refurbishment to prepare it once again as one of the city's most prominent hotels. Below, is an image of the building in its skeletal state at the end of the war.

The Prudential Building in 1945.

This building, kamienica Próchnickich, at the corner of Koszykowa and Emilii Plater is redolent of the architectural variety of this section of Warsaw's centre. It was built in 1913-14 and designed by architect Marian Kontkiewicz. It has, despite losing its cupola, its top floor and a few stone entablatures in the sixties, remained more or less unchanged. It is with its soft curved exterior slightly reminiscent of Antoni Gaudi's Casa Mila. The surrounding streets of Lwowska, Wilcza, Wspolna and Hoza all have pre-war survivors of some significant architectural note. Their courtyards too (if you can get into them) often reveal secret buildings. This area of Srodmiescie Poludnie is undoubtedly the closest you will get, the variety of styles notwithstanding, to any sort of architectural and spatial cohesion in Warsaw.

Ulica Lwowska

This building with its red virginia creeper stands on the corner of Chalubinskiego and Koszykowa and was designed by Romuald Gutt and built between 1927-28. It is with its white bricked facade quite a sight and perhaps the converse of what the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright had once said about ugly buildings: doctors can bury their mistakes, architects can only advise their clients to plant vines.

Next to the Cepelek building at No.2 Chalubinskiego (which you can see on the corner) is this tesselated beauty at No.4. Chalubinskiego street which fuses Niepodleglosci with Jana Pawla II is one of Warsaw's few streets with almost as many pre-war buildings as post-war. The Architect was Rudolf Swierczynski and it was built after the completion of No.2 between 1929-31.

Kamienica Rackmana, at No. 47 Aleja Jerozolimskie, was built in 1906-7 in the secessionist style. The Hotel Polonia standing adjacent was built a few years later between 1909-13.

After years of living and wandering Warsaw it's not unusual to find buildings right in the centre that had up until now managed to escape you. The Synagogue (built between 1898-1902) is one such building located as it is between the wide-rises of Za Zelazna Brama Estate. You can probably see one poking its head up at the back. The building suffered considerable damage during WWII and was initially restored in 1950, with later renovations in the seventies. Stumbling upon hidden buildings (this area has all the seeming of one gigantic courtyard) is one of the joys of wanders through Warsaw.

Built between 1928-31, and designed by Rudolf Swierczynski.

The building we are looking at on the left was built in 1909-1910. From the outside, it has not changed at all since that time. It was the one time hangout of the Polish actress Pola Negri when the bottom floors were dedicated to a dance hall and theatre.

Designed by architect Lucjan Korngold, this building at 18 Marszalkowska was built in 1935-6. Its geo-vitreous facade, and sunken balconies, are a wonder of engineering and craftsmanship.

Both buildings here, built between 1910-13, survived the bombs and incendiaries of WWII. The one on the left in its geometry (and with a little imagination) reminds me of New York's Flatiron building though on a much smaller scale. With its fluted pilasters and figurehead frontage it's a real ship of a building.

Plac Uni Lubelskiej (this and the following two pictures), from where Marszalkowska begins its long journey across the city, is relatively untouched since it was first constructed. Here, as well as this pink castellated beauty, you can still see the two neoclassical toll booths that once marked the limits of the city.

Designed by A. Daniszewski and built in 1911-12, this late Victorian beauty lost some of its ornamentation during restoration work.

My slavic stravaiging companion this afternoon remarked at how thoughtful 'they' were to have used a sheath that copies the facade of the building beneath it. Maybe this is the future of 'restoration' work. Simply print the clean facade on a building stocking and slip it on. Who knows, maybe if we didn't have Daniel and friend stalking the walls we might not be able to tell the difference. This building, incidentally, dates back to 1899, designed by Stefan Szyller. Let's hope the quantum curtain is a prelude to some serious restoration work. It would be a tragedy for the city to lose one of its most elegant and oldest buildings.

Opposite 007 and like something out of Ghostbusters, this eagle-topped beauty would be even more beautiful if it weren't for all those cars and that supervising high-rise right next to it. Built between 1912-17 by Jan Heurich, it was called 'House under the Eagles' (Dom pod Orlami).

2008-06-03T01:33:00.000-07:00

THE GREAT OAK OF NATOLIN (Dąb Mieszko)

The tree bears its thousand years as one large majestic moment. Rabindranath Tagore

The Dab Mieszko (Mieszko Oak), despite what the sign says, is nearer 620 years old according to a recent dendrological study and not a 1000. Nevertheless, 620 is still a ripe old age, oak or otherwise. Mieszko, incidentally, was the first duke of the Polans, and lived from 935-992. The Mieszko Oak stands, helped by an arboreal crutch, in the southern suburb of Natolin on the eastern edge of the great suburb of Ursynow and on the western rim of Natolin Forest.

It’s difficult to grasp the expanse of time that this tree has crossed to be here today. At its birth the grand duke Jagiello (or Jogaila) of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was most probably conducting a pact with Poland (1386) in which he agreed to accept the Roman Catholic faith, marry the Polish queen, become king of Poland, and unite Poland and Lithuania under a single ruler. Jan Dlugosz, the Chronicler of Poland was yet to be born, and Mikolaj Kopernik , the man who 'stopped the sun and set the earth in motion', was still an interstellar twinkle in his grandfather's eye.

The Mieszko Oak has already lived the equivalent of 10 human lifetimes, Jagiello's and Kopernik's included, and shows little sign of stopping. It has no doubt supported myriad life forms over that period, sustained and housed millions of existences, whether moss or lichen, insect or bird. It has withstood fierce weather and all manner of bacterial onslaught. It has also, as the plaque states, survived the wily ways of the most ferocious beasts of them all, the rampant property developer and the blundering building bureaucrat. That the oak has survived thus far is testament to the fact that not all things get signed away into oblivion and fall under the steamroller of progress.

Part of the reason why its difficult to grasp this tree’s longevity is, our own myopia notwithstanding, the context in which the Mieszko Oak finds itself. A few metres behind it lies the fence of a gated community, its homes and cars in full view. With this as a backdrop any chance of an temporary return to medieval times is sadly out of the question. Nevertheless, as the snapshot below shows, at the tree’s front, is a foreground (Rezerwat Natolinski) more conducive perhaps to a little time travel and a little ‘spacing out’ of the mind.

Natolin Reserve and Palace grounds, once part of the Royal Wilanów estate (Wilanow Palace and grounds are about 3km to the north-east), was originally a zoological garden belonging to King Jan III Sobieski (in the late 1600s). The estate was developed by King August II Mocny (Augustus II the Strong, Sobieski's successor) in the earlier half of the 1700s as a farm. The Palace was then built by Prince August Czartoryski in the 1780s, and the building thereafter served as a residence for different owners drawn from the Polish aristocracy who successively redesigned and developed the palace with the help of Italian and Polish artists and craftsmen.

Following heavy damage during the Second World war, the entire Natolin estate became state property, and from 1946 onwards was closed to the public, becoming the weekend residence of the President of the Republic. The restoration of the Palace and associated buildings was largely completed in the 1990s. The park now houses the College of Europe and the Natolin European Centre, and is now a nature reserve (rezerwat) accorded the appropriate protective status.

Like Warsaw’s many erratic boulders the city's aged trees bring a little ‘deep time’ to the urban table. Where the boulders might bring ‘death’ in the form of their inanimacy the trees most assuredly bring ‘life’ in its fullest and most resplendent sense.

The great oak of Natolin in the midst of Winter.

2008-06-02T12:44:00.000-07:00

GOING ALL CITY

The Sluzew Wall (this one and top)

Bert & Ernie by the Vistula.

Sinatra and compadre in Ulica Wilcza

Bacall on a Wall (Ulica Szkolna)

Never had I seen so much stencil art than when I wandered round Warsaw. Much of it has political connotations decrying the actions of people like George W. Bush and neighbouring Belorus leader Lukaschenko. Others are more symbolic, like a green Al Pacino asking you to say hello to his leetel fren (at the north western exit of Ogrod Saski), or a tennis ball telling me 'the world is round' (in a close off Nowy Swiat). Street stencil art can be readily found all over Warsaw, sometimes in the most curious of places. Particularly good for such wallfront revolutions is the wall outside the Academy of Fine Arts off Karakowskie Przedmiescie. For its quickness and instant messaging, whether political or poetic, the stencil is a voice like no other.

Kino Iluzjon

'Respect women or the bitch gets it!'.

This piece of stencil street art was discovered in Ulica Prozna in the area of the city centre that is referred to as Srodmiescie Poludnie, an area that formed a significant part of the Jewish Ghetto during WWII.

Adverts are not restricted to billboards. This one is for Poland's militant Catholic Radio station 'radio maryja', headed by the controversial 'Father Director' Tadeusz Rydzyk.

Varsovians vent their concern for their Belarusian neighbours and for the despotic dicatator Alexander Lukashenko.

This stencilled primate bears an uncanny resemblance to the visog of 'Father Director' Tadeusz Rydzyk.

Shopping done. Time for that smoke.

The Polish counterpart of the English language acronym FTP (the one that isn't File Transfer Protocol) HWDP (chuj w dupę policji meaning literally 'fuck the police in the ass') is the de facto form of 'aggressive graffiti' in Poland. This one has been written on the lock-ups at the back of the Police station (that looks like an apartment block) on Ulica Tyniecka.

2008-06-02T04:17:00.000-07:00

THE HOODED HALF OF MARCH

By March 15th most of the Siberian rooks have bolted back to Siberia. Of course, there are always one or two stragglers, a couple of rooks that perhaps decided Warsaw ain’t that bad, that maybe they can make a go of it here, escape that long tortuous trip back to the frozen expanse. The rest of the city’s corvid population, the hooded crows, the jackdaws, the magpies, jays and others will probably be glad to see the back of them. The rooks took over whole areas in their thousands: the Russian Cemetery, Pole Mokotowskie, the grounds of the Department of Life Sciences, Park Skaryszewski as well as other tree-filled areas.

The hooded crows (Corvus cornix, in Polish, Wrona Siwa) seem particularly animated after the rooks departure. They can be seen all over kraa-ing their little hooded heads off. This is the time for building nests, for preparing for spring. Up until now, the hooded crows had taken a back seat to the rather vociferous rook, but now they can seen swooping and swerving across the streets and skwers, their beaks full of tinder. In one of the tall elm trees on Ulica Lowicka two middle-aged hooded (more of a mask really at this age) crows have decided to do a loft conversion on the mistletoe orb in the crown of the tree. I can see their progress pretty well from my fourth floor window. Throughout the past week, together with another pair of crows and the pair of magpies, they have cleared the whole skwer of its oragnic litter.

In Scotland, where the hooded crow resides mostly on the coast, I had always thought it a mystical bird compared to the more common carrion crow. Unlike the latter, the hooded crow was rarely to be seen in the city, and it seemed an altogether more elegant and graceful mover. Here, in Warsaw, where there is no shortage of hoodies, it’s perhaps easy to get used to them. Yet, just because they are more numerous does not reduce the grace with which they move, whether on foot or by wing. They have a dignity, a shared compassion as it were, to their strides and wingbeats that exudes a confidence, and a trust, that enriches space.

As the great elm outside sprouts its red buds, and great heaped clouds travel across the sky, the hooded crow is definitely the mover of the moment.

2008-06-01T13:29:00.000-07:00

A JAPANESE DREAM

This is the beauty of cycling, the sudden cometary intrusions en route, like this, possibly the most pleasantly placed police station ever, the cop shop at Reguly, like cycling into a Van Gogh oil painting.

The cop shop at Reguly is to be found not a stone’s throw from Reguly train station on the mainline to Milanowek in the Gmina of Michalowice. This is yet another bucolic corner of Warsaw’s periphery, about 10km south-west of the centre. Just next to the police station is the wonderful Aleje Topolowa (pictured below), and a 400 metre tunnel of mature poplars. All this lends Warsaw a certain provincial aspect not without its own charm. Van Gogh might have referred to this setting as ‘Dreams of Japan’ when in 1888, having debunked to Arles from Paris, he painted a similar scene, Field with Flowers near Arles, and wrote to his brother Theo:

A little town surrounded by a field of yellow and purple flowers – you know, it’s just like a Japanese dream.

2008-06-01T13:05:00.000-07:00

OF FRONTS AND FONTS

Whether fascia boards or fonts, hand-painted advertisements or glass-case extensions like the one below at Cepelia, there's something undeniably special about Warsaw's neon semiotics be they of a drugstore or drapery, hairdresser or grocer. As David Crowley remarks in an essay Life after Dark incorporated into Ilona Karwinska's retrospective Warszawa Polski Neon: 'The value in these bright symbols lies in their capacity to cast a distinctly local light on the tidal wave of global advertising which has washed over the city.' Moreover, and as these photos show, the ubiquitous helvetica seems happily absent, and, it needn't be 'after dark' to appreciate this old-world beauty.

The Varsovian hairdresser shop front is always particularly endearing. In this part of Stary Mokotow, this one is on Ludwika Narbutta Street, there are several fryzjers all vying for the most aesthetic shop frontage. Walking though this part of Warsaw, one soon realises that the sombre subdued tones and the absence of any garish in-your-face industrial colour, endows the surface of the city (if not also that which lies beneath it) with a wonderfully earthy quality. The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky noted that the spiritual growth of man began with the study of colour. One could do a lot worse than wandering around the streets of Stary Mokotow.

Sunlit 'owoce' (fruit) and 'warzywa' (vegetables) on the corner of Kielecka and Rakowiecka at the end of a cold March day.

Silk - Wool - Cotton (Jedwab, Welna, Bawelna). A drapers shop on the corner of Pulawska and Antoniego Malczewskiego.

In a city of slowly dissapearing neon this is my absolute favourite, mostly because of the deep blue colour (which the camera does not do justice here) and the white double underscore. Technically of course, this is not neon, since neon is of an unmistakeably bright orange colour. All other colours, this one included, are created using a mercury vapour discharge which excites a phosphor via fluorescence. The 'apteka' signs had one design all over Warsaw, and there can still be seen a great many like this one with small variations.

A florists in Kolo.

A jeweller's in Ulica Dabrowskiego in Stary Mokotow.

2008-06-01T06:02:00.000-07:00

A NEW YORK VIEW

There are very few views like this in Warsaw. Indeed, this is one of the very few framed views of the Palace of Culture and Science in the whole of Warsaw. Cycling down this street (Ulica Pankiewicza) a few times a week to go to work I often have the impression that this is what central New York is like, full of strangled views, light and darkness, interstitial moments.

If New York is, as Le Corbusier once called it, a catastrophic hedgehog, then Warsaw is something of an alopecic vole. But, it is this patchiness, this uneven-ness across Warsaw’s board, that renders it so fascinating a place to explore. There is no grid, there is little apparent planning to speak of, but there are moments like this one that contrast wildly with the great spaces like at this street's exit when one is flushed onto Aleje Jerozolimskie into an wide open area befitting of an ocean.

2008-06-01T05:05:00.000-07:00

SMIECIE GORA

The 'mountain' in question is of the rubbish variety and is located on the northern edge of Bemowo forest and the western edge of Bemowo airfield. It’s not often you get an open air chance to gain such a privileged aspect of Warsaw, so I naturally jump at the opportunity, even if it means suffering a complete olfactory breakdown along the way.

From the top tier of the tip.

To be honest, I wouldn’t exactly recommend the trip to the tip since the smell (which seems to cling to you even once you are long gone) is the most vile I have ever had to inhale. I never imagined a smell could ever make me sick but this one almost did. It's real primal stuff.

The tip itself is a pyramid structure which stands some fifty metres high and will probably go a few more before they decide to cap it off. As you go round and up, the tall pine and spruce trees opposite start to give way to the sky and the city beyond. It’s quite a sensation, this virtual enlightenment, climbing your way, so to speak, out of a forest.

A Parallax View

2008-06-01T04:40:00.000-07:00

DZIEN WAGAROWICZ (The Day of the Wanderer)

The first day of spring is marked by many diverse events in many cities across the world. In Naples, on the waterfront, people protest against the Mafia; in New York, the city's park rangers organise a salt-marsh hike; couples dance in the streets of Paris, and in India they celebrate Nowruz, the most vibrant festival of colours.

In Warsaw however, they've got it better than all the others. They dog school. March 21st, or the nearest school day to it, is known as 'dzien wagarowicz' , loosely translated as 'the day of the wanderer'. Children, the ones that are worth their salt, take this perennial opportunity to skip off classes and wander through the city. Most however, fearful of the wrath of parent and teacher, simply wander in spirit, daydreaming themselves out of a classroom window into the clouds above.

I believe it the responsibility of every teacher to encourage a little 'wagary' once in a while, a little rebelling against the system, what the physicist and teacher Richard Feynman might have referred to as 'engaging an active irresponsibility'. Here, with 'wagarowicz' we have a classic example of exactly that. Education, (ex-ducere), is thus led outwards, where it should be, into the field, beneath the clouds.

As a boy I was regularly detained after school for wearing the wrong footwear and 'dogging it' and spending whole days, wonderful days, in the subterrene confines of The Premier Billiard Hall in Sauchiehall Street. These are the days I remember the most, along with the other outings (this time arranged by the school) to the fields, and to the river where we ran cross-country through quagmires of knee-deep mud, and where I coxed a four man boat on those cold winter afternoons, eventually, though not wholly deliberately, coaxing it, much to the consternation of my crew, into the bank of the river itself.

Later, at university, I could recall my psychology teacher telling me how worried he was that I had attended all his classes, and that maybe there were better things to do.

Words and a walled classroom can only take you so far. The Swedish vagrant and seafarer, Harry Martinson, reminds us in his Aimless Travels that teaching will take place in a 'thousand open-air classrooms' when 'the world breathes through you'. It is then that I stress to my students the importance of ‘wagary’, that a little truancy once in a while never hurt anyone. To quote Thoreau from Walden, a man well acquainted with the stravaig:

To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation! - why, if I had taken a wander down the harbor I should have known more about it.

Life is not mathematics. Nor is it a text book. It is, rather, an immutable truth, which is best 'learned' out of doors.

2008-06-01T00:26:00.000-07:00

INTERZONE

There are two great railyards in Warsaw where straps of tracks enter and exit. The first is at Pelcowizna on the east side of the river (from Warszawa Praga to Warszawa Zeran); the second is here on the west side of the city starting at Warszawa Wola moving westwards past Wlochy to Warszawa Golabki.

No matter which country you find yourself in railway lines have always presented something of a poetry-in-action. Railway lines in Poland are particularly special. They seem to be the last bastion of neglect in a world consumed by progress. Almost a relic, Polish railways utter a throaty gargling across the land betraying their histories of tumultuous change. There are few countries in the world whose railways have conveyed so much emotion, so much feeling.

Railway lines in Poland are not privy to the same rules and regulations as other countries, or if they are they are not heeded. Not surprisingly then (since there is less traffic upon them), it is ‘less illegal’ in Poland to cross a railway at a non-defined point than it is to cross a road. Partly due to the decay of bridge and sub-way infrastructure, crossing the tracks is a regular affair for many. I have seen mothers pushing prams across them, men carrying their fishing equipment across them, a cluster of nuns traversing them holding hymn and hem. I have even seen foxes cross them ignoring the few pipey animal tunnels that have been placed here and there for them.

These railway tracks, occupying this interzone between Nowe Wlochy and Jelonki Poludnie further north, represent a section of the city that is too often barricaded from view or exploration, or which at least is only visible from the interior of the moving train itself. Railway areas however represent wonderful places for natural processes to eke out their work without too much human interference. And here in Warsaw, thanks in part to the ‘lack of development’ that seeks to demarcate everything from everything else, there is an opportunity to explore these areas of growth and decay, to court yards of ‘expanding and contracting culture’.

Summer is the best time to explore the railways. There’s lots of light and lots of movement (though not too much from trains). And it’s a great time to get lost in the undergrowth world of flowers and insects.

In the summer months the tracks are concealed by the growing grass and yellow wheat. There is colour everywhere. None of that peach puff pastel or green chartreuse. Here it’s all earthy and elemental. The sleepers sprout all manner of thistles, pincushions and sweet angelika, and redstarts, wheatears and wagtails dart in and out from the undercarriages of stationary trains. Jackdaws too have taken over the roofs of the two large train houses. The dark ochre orange of oxidization takes over the rails and goes to work on anything at all resembling steel. Whether it be rust, plant or insect, there is a fascinating amount of life to be had at the railway yard.

It is also deadly silent. It is the private life of a public space. It rarely gets busy here. Polish timetables of trains have not yet reached the rapacious regularity of western ones. No cars, few people, no dogs. But plenty of life. And it’s not just here. Warsaw is replete with such zones, sparkling pearls of quiet motion, and it’s only by walking (or cycling) the city thoroughly, all over, that you will come to discover them. The more you travel the city, the more you work its paths, and wander about aimlessly (undistracted by agenda), the more capable you become of stringing these pearls together and forming a city-wide necklace, one of clarity which sees the city for what it actually is - a self-organising and autopoetic entity of vast proportions. It’s in situations like this that one realises that the city is very much alive, and evolving. That this is the real city, the highest expression of collective living, where plant, insect, bird and bacteria co-exist with human and machine.

An attentive wheatear gives me the once over.

2008-05-26T07:53:00.000-07:00

THE EMERALD CITY ?

An early morning shot (with the silhouette of St. Florian's Cathedral in the background), taken by Berenika Mioduszewska as she makes her way to the Bird Asylum to help out.

I have always harboured a great deal of ambivalence regarding the existing conditions of most zoos. No matter how spacious and airy and well-fed the animals, they are always in state of captivity. To see animals like this gorilla with such melancholic demeanour makes me think that zoos are perhaps counter-productive. It's a complex matter, to be sure, but one that needs constant attention. Warsaw Zoo has tried over the years to offer animals more open spaces, paddocks for roaming about in, for the panthers, leopards, oryx and the like. But when I see those wonderful birds, the owls and the hawks, the eagles and the kestrels, the great ravens and macaws, who can barely manage a wingbeat due to the size of their cages, I find myself in a quandry once more, and asking myself, what is the purpose of zoos other than to deny these wonderful creatures their very nature? Do they really work? I mean, we still succeed in wiping out species by the dozen every day. Are they simply there to entertain us? Invariably, and yet I keep going back, I come away from the zoo a sadder, more melancholic, more pensive creature myself.

A pair of Golden Macaws.

The southern end of Praski Park near Warsaw Zoo. The bear enclosure is not more than a few paces from the busy Aleje Solidarnosci. Naturally, there is a small moat between bears and pavement, but sometimes I reckon that if these guys were not so domesticated they might clear that gap in a swift and desperate leap. Praga would then have a few extra bears running around its streets.

A couple of hooded crows preening a llama.

The Oryx enclosure.