You could tell that they had been craving this national communion for decades.
The Polish word osoby has a much different feeling than its English equivalent, “people.” It’s more of a collective than a collection. So tough to explain.
[Midnight Mass, 1966. Still outside in the field, but somewhat formalized with a portable podium and altar, and a microphone and speakers hooked up to a diesel generator. Archbishop Wojtyła no longer addresses only God, speaking instead to the thousands assembled before him. “Nie bój si. Nie lkajcie si!” But Nowa Huta is long past the point of fear, now that the community has hired a professional architect to draft blueprints for an illegal church. “It is real now that it is on paper,” says a man in the crowd.
“No,” the Archbishop counters, “it is real when you gather out here in the cold. You are the rock on which Peter built his church.”
“Peter’s rock is a political machine, and it is going to crush their skulls,” the man says, blowing cigarette smoke into the sky. This mass is being hijacked by people who would later become members of the Solidarnomovement. They were hoping to give each other the best Christmas present ever—a revolution.
Now we were parked in the middle of Tyniecka Street, surrounded by osoby gathered to see the house where Karol once hid from the Nazis.
Witaj Królowo nieba i Matko litoci
Witaj nadziejo nasza, w smutku i z´ałoci
You typically heard this chant when your babcia died. Your family would go hoarse repeating it, to keep the sobs at bay. Swallow. You heard this when sadness and emphysema took your dziadek, when they told you, in every possible grammatical way, so there would be no confusion. Exhale.
But I never heard this hymn when my mother died. As a matter of fact, I didn’t hear a fucking thing in the days and weeks and years that followed.
It sounded as if Radio Maryja had turned its mics to the window to broadcast the sound of mourners spilling into the streets in greater numbers, shuffling, roaming aimlessly. Refrains dropped off and resumed again out of nowhere. The sound of thirty-eight million people destined to get lost in each other’s grief.
The announcer didn’t dare play any recorded music. Who could presume to choose the right soundtrack for a night like this?
“Turn here,” I told the driver. We were in Kraków, but still nowhere near the gallery. The meter was running up a fortune, and with this one deft move, I knew we could bypass St Stanislaus, St Michael, St Florian, St Francis of Assisi, the Papal Stone of the Blonia Commons, and anywhere else troublemakers were likely to gather that night.
“That will be worse,” he said, glancing at me in a rearview mirror choked with plastic rosaries. “You’re telling me we’ll be able to get within a kilometre of St Mary’s Basilica?”
He had a point. It’s national lore that when young Karol finished a work day at the quarry mines, he would stop by St Mary’s to soak up the stained glass. It’s no secret he was a Queen of Poland junkie.
“Just do something,” I said. “We can’t go straight.”
“Why not, Mr GPS?” The driver was miffed, and popped the clutch on purpose, jerking us both forward.
“Because that’s where the Solvay chemical factory was,” I said. Where Karol had bottled poison as a young man. Kraków is crows, but it’s also nostalgia. We were navigating through a landmine of sacred sites.
“Give me a better reason.”
“Because you’re not getting a fucking grosz from me if you go straight.”
“Then I’ll take you right to the police station.”
It was 8:45. If my gallery audience hadn’t dispersed into the slipstream of mourners, they would still be waiting for me to set London ablaze. Frustration was making me peel my lips with my teeth.
It wasn’t the taxi driver that was getting to me. It was the noise. You could hear that this death was going to change things permanently.
Medically speaking, subjective tinnitus makes no sense.
Researchers give these sufferers of phantom crickets and whistles a sample sound to listen to, a gauge to measure the buzz that’s slowly driving them zwariowane. Here lies the contradiction: patients focusing on the sample can often hear it below five decibels, rendering their internal hummingbirds and cicadas undetectable, but when focussing on the tinnitus and ignoring the sample, the same osoby claim insect symphonies of seventy decibels—as loud as a vacuum cleaner.
Do you see what I mean? Tinnitus is impossible to measure.
It may sound strange, but even with this din, there was still too much silence in my life. Missing speech. To this day, it kills me not to know all that my mother screamed from the fire. “Tell him.” Maybe she’s behind every inferno I plan, a wraith wrapped in a bed sheet, a spook in a shawl of embers. Invisible and mute, with a swatch of duct tape over her mouth. It’s almost as if I’m waiting for her to make an appearance and to shout a little louder this time. What did she want to tell me? I’m a child in Lourdes, with my sister, waiting for Mother Mary to materialize in a rainbow blur and take us by surprise. But most of all, I need to know if we’re alone in this world. I need to know if the apparition can ever happen or if it’s just a stupid dream.
And I need to know if the sister—Dorota, I mean—is for real.
Do we really need relationships if they end up causing us agony? It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they’re merely conversations with fellow travellers carried on for far too long.
[Nowa Huta, 1983. Karol Wojtyła is speaking in the middle of a field, where he did so for over a decade. But the middle of the field is now Kociół Arka Pana, a big ship of a church with a cross for a mast, built exactly according to blueprint. The Lord’s Ark, like the Elephant House, is shaped like a flying saucer but is an ocean-going vessel, with a four-metre metal Jesus figurehead arching his giant chest forward into the waves. The church is packed, and 250,000 more believers wait outside for a glimpse of Karol. Little has changed, except that he’s now Pope and has just unknowingly kissed a man dying of AIDS, giving him a personal sacrament. HIV now courses through Poland, but the general public won’t know this for years. And even when they find out, nobody will get tested or administer the tests. Nobody sees the pinpricks that old shopkeepers poke into condoms to give sperm a chance in a cruel world out to get them. The cameras, however, catch the Pope’s every hand gesture as he consecrates the first church in the City without God. Peter is pulverizing the Communists, one construction site at a time. Karol is definitely more useful to the Solidarity movement as Pope than as Karol.]
It was 9:15, and I was furious that London—that heathen, roiling, plague-filled heap of lumber—was spared the dignities of fire. One of the greatest in history, according to the effusive museum paintings usually done in flourishes of yellow, crimson, and hell.
The driver, I realized, had no intention of getting me to the gallery. He had been making a sacred-site pilgrimage this entire time, praying for gridlock and bilking me through the nose.
I paid the ridiculous fare, got out of the cab, and froze in the glow of the intersection. The traffic was wedged in the vertices of a cross made of thousands of candles stretching from sidewalk to sidewalk ... to sidewalk to sidewalk. I knew it was only one of hundreds that were guttering throughout Kraków at that precise moment, drawing devotees of the Virgin Mary closer, like flies.
Everybody wants to see a vision of their Mother.
It was too much.
Tinnitus, it turns out, isn’t always imaginary. Pulsatile tinnitus occurs when increased blood flow to the ear causes audible—and verifiable— spasms and clicks.
Sometimes we just want to hear these sounds, whether they’re real or not.
Clang, clang.
YOUTUBE
The Amphitheatre of Pompeii, 1971.
Slow zoom in from the highest rung of stone seating to the centre of the circular arena. From far away, we see four figures hunched in front of giant speakers. Dust hangs in the blinding sunlight, cutting a mid-air shad
e unevenly. As the camera gets closer, we see that the four figures are playing to technicians tweaking knobs on a network of soundboards.
A horizontal tracking shot across equipment cases:
PINK FLOYD, LONDON
Pan to a sleepy Mount Vesuvius in the background. Pink Floyd has travelled to the oldest surviving Roman amphitheatre to perform for an audience of their own roadies.
In the name of art? Hardly.
“Chapter 24,” from their album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, is the first song on the set list, although it never made it onto the officially released film. Don’t ask me how I found it.
The narrator chatters: “On August 24, in the year 79 CE, Vesuvius spewed pumice and ash for a solid day, burying the city under a twenty-metre blanket. This was the day after Vulcanalia, festival for the Roman god of fire.”
Roger Waters chugs through bass notes that echo on the slate slabs of the amphitheatre. Close-up stock footage of lava bubbling and boiling, while Nick Mason hits the cymbals, synching up to the imagery far too precisely. The microphone catches wind and adds a new layer of fuzz to the distortion.
The lyrics echo the words of the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, supposedly describing the steps involved in performing a divination:
Six in the third place means
The image of the Turning Point
Six at the top means
Misfortune from within and without.
At Pompeii, however, on instruments that shatter in sunbursts of every colour, we see a different interpretation. It’s obvious that the Floyd are singing about the stages of a developing flame. The band hasn’t even played the first bridge of the song yet, and we see pangs of the first three: red becoming visible (525°C), cherry dull (800°C), and cherry clear (1,000°C).
Rick Wright is fucking the Farfisa organ, and we can tell by the kryptic look on his face that he’s leaning into chords entirely new to him. Professional recording is the best time to improvise, because you can always rewind the tape if you forget the finger steps.
Cross-fade to footage of stone gargoyles found at the Pompeii ruins. The facial grimaces are perfectly preserved. Whose faces?
Orange deep (1,100°C) and orange clear (1,200°C), the fourth and fifth stages. A cloud passes, and the drum kit shines. The hotter it gets, the shorter the Celsius increments.
The city was uncovered nearly 1,700 years after the eruption, when archaeologists found curious pockets in the solidified ash. They twigged on the human shapes of these holes, injected them with plaster, and made casts of Pompeiani frozen in their last moments of life. Coiled bodies in situ, fear etched into furrowed foreheads.
Nick Mason breaks a drumstick and expertly replaces it before the next cymbal crash.
At five kilometres away from the volcano, magma didn’t get the Pompeiians and neither did fire. Wisps of pyroclast are harmless, but when they snowball into an avalanche, there’s nowhere to run. Ash is a nightmare.
Six in the third place means
The image of the Turning Point
Six at the top means
Misfortune from within and without
Bright white (1,400°C) is the sixth stage.
Dolly shot of the camera circling the band. They seem to be getting tired in the heat, maybe sick of playing to a phantom crowd. They slog on with the song, but now it looks automatic. Roger Waters’ face is an oily pizza. Any bursts of energy are probably just retakes carefully spliced together. Two guys, probably bored sound engineers, sit together under an umbrella drinking cans of San Pellegrino soda.
Archaeologists were surprised to unearth erotic frescoes at Pompeii. The video clips are littered with black censor bars, but they outline must-see body parts rather exquisitely:
A woman sprawled on a pile of crêpe fabric, with a centurion diligently eating out her cunt.
A bearded man with wolverine legs fucking a goat. The animal is in full revolt.
A woman doing the “reverse cowgirl” over another woman’s hand. There’s a Mona Lisa thing going on, because we can see traces of her face, beneath the fresco, where she was once facing her fisting partner.
A mural of Priapus and his giant cock were not found until 1998, after a heavy rainfall washed away the mud that was covering it.
The sun wanes, and “Chapter 24” is nearing its finish, but this raging 1,400°C is by no means the end. A technician turns on a light rig and floods the band with 1,500°C dazzling white: the seventh stage of fire. Pink Floyd have had a good week. The Book of Changes agrees:
On the seventh day comes return
It furthers one to have somewhere to go.
David Gilmour plays a plangent guitar note and hits the whammy bar to make it cry. Why does he have to ruin everything? He doesn’t even belong in this song.
Nobody ever mentions Herculaneum, the narrator complains, the other city that Vesuvius destroyed.
Zoom in on a piece of tourist graffiti:
SODOM AND GOMORRAH, YOU HAD IT COMING
Cut to the opening bars of “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.”
FOOTBALL
After the closing night of my London show at Człowiek Obcy (we rescheduled the vernissage fire), I came home on the tramwaj and looked forward to a relaxing night of vegging. Is that the expression? “Vegging”? I’ve always wondered what you thought of my English.
My rest was postponed, however, when I got distracted by a pile of junk in front of my building. Garbage piles never last long in Nowa Huta.
There’s a belief that runs through the neighbourhood, learned under Communism, that everything can be salvaged. To the seasoned scavenger, a busted baby carriage isn’t trash. It’s a set of wheels that can be refitted on a shopping buggy, a mash of metal to turn into curtain rods along with fabric to hang on them. It’s a display case of merchandise with a sign that says, “Steal me.”
I saw too much good stuff to pass up: T-shirts that were mouldy but in fun styles, a beheaded oscillating fan that looked a lot like mine, and a television tube, intact but separated from its smashed casing. I was visualizing how I could paint the tube orange and use it in my next maquette to give San Francisco a ghoulish glow from a hole cut in the Mission District. But I lost that train of thought completely when I saw The Final Cut.
This Pink Floyd album was arguably a Roger Waters solo project with the odd contribution by other band members. How could it not be their greatest album?
Then a few of my books hit the pile.
I looked up to see Pan Laskiewicz, that twitchy mongrel, chucking my shit over the balcony. I raced into the building, taking the stairs two at a time, and trying desperately to remember what I knew about criminal law and bodily assault.
When I reached my apartment, a set of keys were in the lock, and the door was open.
I saw his back first, and got a tiger-like instinct to jump him from behind and core his brain like an apple. In his hand, I saw a white-rimmed black triangle that refracted into the colour spectrum: my mint LP copy of Dark Side of the Moon. But I was crunching loudly toward him over my ransacked stuff, and he heard me, ruining my surprise attack.
“Aha!” he said, his face alive with glee. “You have come a little too late to assist with your own eviction. I have been given this most wonderful task.”
Pan Laskiewicz showed me the official eksmisji prawna, apparently signed by my enemy, the . It had to be a forgery; in Nowa Huta, bureaucracy was as slow as melasa.
“Get the fuck out of my house,” I told him, “before I throw you over the railing.”
“Oh, the homosexual is getting angry! I considered taking the stairs to move your stuff out, but this is much more fun. No nail polish today, my pedał?”
With that, he dropped the album over the balcony and sealed the deal.
Nobody messes with my Dutch pressings.
I dragged him back into the apartment by his arm hair and kneed him in the chest. He was winded for a few seconds, but sprang right back. He was pretty r
ipped for a guy in his fifties and tried to choke. Me. Against. The. Ironing. Board. Built. Into. The. Wall. Until I broke free and successfully jammed one of his fingers into the mechanism, then closed the ironing board.
A clean slice, and he lost it. Not the finger, but almost.
His index finger ripening blue and nasty, Pan Laskiewicz opened his maw and sank his yellowed tusks into my face, snorting through his whiskers. A wild djik—I had always known his true identity.
The apartment was coffee breath and pain for a spell. I lost a few seconds to dimness, almost blacking out. Then I staggered over to the mirror so I could see my wound, but there was no mirror, just a nail in the wall.
“You’re going down, piece of shit,” I told him.
“Is this making you excited? Do you want to suck my cock?” He mimed unzipping his pants and stroking himself.
Then I kicked his nose.
Heard the bone snap, the crunch of cartilage.
“No,” he said.
He dropped to the ground to cradle the new sinkhole in his face. I crouched beside him. Half of his nose, it seemed, had disappeared into him. He fondled bits of broken bone like a rosary, rocking back and forth. It was too much for me to take, especially with a bite gash in my face. I could hardly breathe.
“Pan Laskiewicz, I’m so sorry.”
“All I wanted,” he cried and blew bubbles in blood, “was to see you fuck my wife.” He looked up at me pleadingly with eyes quickly swelling black. “Was that such a ridiculous [he had a hard time saying it] demand?”
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