[Reader-list] reader-list Digest, Vol 64, Issue 26

Tue Nov 4 17:16:11 IST 2008

"narrow-mindedHe had always attacked the pettiness of his compatriots; he defended 
the visionary homeland his dreams, pluralistic and tolerant, but at 
the same of ..........,

These words hold true for many citizens today, when they respond and react to the posts, immediately such are labelled as left, right and communal.?

 Concern at social ills are articulated, efforts are made to raise the awareness in all about the pettyness of a few, rule of laws when flouted, the governance in society does not remain fair and just as this leads to favours to few individuals or group of such,  of castes and faiths in democratic life, the ones who feel cheated then have grouse against the system of governance as the system is not all inclusive and favouring parts, segments of individuals may be, because of the faith, caste etc. Criticism at such favoured actions if directed , are often seen with tinted glasses of green, saffron and never in clear vision for the entire society.?

From: rajendra bhat <raja_starkglass at yahoo.com>

... you have not bothered to reply as to why you were not civilised at 
martand temple parading and photographed in nude, but the same culture 
was absent at mosque, say at hajarathbal.?

Nudity does not affect any of us as we are all products of nude coitus, 
of parents, but in civil society every civil act has a place, dining 
hall for dinner, coitus in bedroom, so if your culture is not to be 
civil, but only cultured, then have your culture same in all the places 
of worship.!

Lot more love.

>> From: inder salim <indersalim at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Thinking Through Figures on Internal
>> Displacement from Kashmir
>> To: reader-list at sarai.net
>> Date: Sunday, November 2, 2008, 4:14 PM
>>
>>
>> well, dear pawan
>> how a North indian ( like you) can join Raj's Jai Mahrashtra slogan,
>> it is beyond my comprehension.
>>
>> why mosque comes to your mind as and when you talk about Temple. how
>> is your subconscious working, you might find an answer.
>>
>> how my nidity hits you below the belt, i dont understand. Hindu
>> gods were always confortable with that. it is necessary, to say
>> Female, as and when we say Male, Nudity is not always happening
>> against the factor called ' garment' . it has some innocene involved
>> int it, for example when we were born. there is no reference of any
>> past which has nudity as part of mosque culture. so wherefrom this
>> question?
>>
>> well, i have my own understanding of violence, and i believe our
>> intolerance towards the other is the core reason.
>>
>> we all are victims at one point or the other, but how to join
>> mobocracy is beyond my understanding of discourses on any subject.
>>
>> i am talking to you becasue you are in discourse on the List,
>>
>> and the moment you will throw stones on others, you will become a
>> petty instrument of those who work from above and motivate the 
workers
>> to act, the paid or unintelligent activits.
>>
>> you need to know that you are using words, like we, which are 
ambigous
>> most of times, and so there is always scope for humour, wit, and
>> profoundity at the same time.
>>
>> lot of love
>> and regards
>> is
>>
>> p.s. if you are still angry with me, please wrtie back to me outside
>> the list, i will be happy to respond back, we can spare others from
>> all this
>>
>> On Sun, Nov 2,2008 at 12:39 PM, Pawan Durani 
<pawan.durani at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > IInder,
>> >
>> > till date i have not got a reply ohn when you would get yourslef
>> > photographed in the Mosque premesis like you got one done in 
Martand
>> Temple.
>> >
>> > Pawan
>> >
>> >

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 05:45:00 -0800 (PST)
From: Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Kashmiri Pandits demand ‘internally
    displaced persons’ status
To: reader-list at sarai.net, Aman Sethi <aman.am at gmail..com>
Message-ID: <755035.69140.qm at web57202.mail.re3.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Dear Aman 

I hope your 'suggestion' was just a 'needle'. One more added to the many that populate this List. 

Such one-liner 'needles' meant to only provoke and not contribute anything useful carry their own consequences of responses they get. Once that happens, there is a lot of whining all around.

Certainly your 'suggestion' could not have been a serious one. If it was intended to be so, it was 'moronic' indeed. Seriously moronic.

KPs believe that the erstwhile Princely State of J&K duly became a part of India through the Instrument of Accession. You may or may not agree with that position but that is what KPs believe.

With 'that position' of the KPs it would be quite moronic for anyone to suggest that they should simultaneously demand implementation of the UN Resolution on 'Kashmir' which contradicts the position held by KPs. 

You might see the implementation of the UN Resolution on 'Kashmir' as un unfinished agenda. You might (if you do) see it as 'A Cause'  or even see it as 'The Cause' in Kashmir. That does not mean that no other 'cause' linked with 'Kashmir' can be spoken about unless simultaneously what you see as "A Cause" or "The Cause" in 'Kashmir' is not spoken about.

Instead of the 'moronic' suggestion, you could have if you wanted to and felt strongly about, questioned the validity of KPs seeking recognition as IDPs. Or, if you think that KPs are IDPs, perhaps even suggested what would be proper manner and fora in which to seek recognition as IDPs.

Since you mentioned it, I hope you know that the UN Resolution on 'Kashmir' is generally evaluated as giving only 2 options; 'Join India' or 'Join Pakistan'. There is no 'Third Option'. (Generally so evaluated).

You might want to ponder over what has changed since 1947 that led Kofi Annan to doubt whether the UN Resolution on 'Kashmir' can be implemented. It has been reported that the Resolutions do not fall under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter and so the UN has no 'enforcement' mandate. 

You might also like to think over what it was that led Musharraff to float his 'thinking out of the box' proposals while in fact disregarding but not acknowledging the discarding of the UN Resolution on 'Kashmir'.

Think. Unless, you want to come up with yet another "moronic' suggestion, in which case you do not need to do much thinking.

Kshmendra 

--- On Sun, 11/2/08, Aman Sethi <aman.am at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Aman Sethi <aman.am at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Kashmiri Pandits demand ‘internally displaced persons’ status
To: reader-list at sarai.net
Date: Sunday, November 2, 2008, 3:42 AM

Perhaps you should insist that India carry out the UN mandated
plebiscite as well.
a.

On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 6:10 AM, Aditya Raj Kaul <kauladityaraj at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Kashmiri Pandits demand 'internally displaced persons' status By
Indo-Asian
> News Service
<http://www.freshnews.in/author/indo-asian-news-service/> on
> Friday, October 31, 2008
>
>  Kashmiri Pandits held a silent sit in protest outside the United Nations
> High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office here Friday, demanding that
> the community, which fled the Kashmir
> Valley<http://www.freshnews.in/tag/kashmir-valley>during the peak of
> militancy 20 years ago, be declared as internally
> displaced persons (IDPs).
>
> The community represented by Kashmiri youth organisations in the capital
> like Roots in Kashmir, Internally Displaced Youth Front, All India Kashmir
> Samaj, Panun Kashmir and others, along with elderly members of the
community
> in Delhi, presented a five-page memorandum of their demands to Nayona Bose
> of the UNHCR to be forwarded to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who is
on
> a two-day visit to India.
>
> "We welcome the UN secretary on his visit to India. As a community
we,
> therefore, appeal to him to help us - declare the Kashmiri Hindu community
> as IDPs," Lalit Ambardar, 35, a qualified engineer who was one of the
> 100-odd protestors, told IANS.
>
> "The Human Rights Working Group on Minorities in Geneva had
recognised
> Kashmiri Hindus formally as a 'reverse minority'. So the use of
the
> insulting term of 'migrants' for us - a forcibly exiled community
- should
> be removed from all records and communications relating to us
henceforth,"
> Ambardar chorused the protestor's demand.
>
> Many others protestors were angry about the state to which Kashmiri Hindus
> have been reduced since insurgency in the Kashmir Valley in 1989-90, when
> more that 400,000 Kashmiri Pandits fled their homes to escape persecution.
>
> "Historically, Kashmiri Pandits were known to be intellectuals, but
now we
> are rotting away - we are a national waste - we have no political
> representation, have no geographic ethnicity that we can claim as our
own!"
> fumed Raj Raina, 37.
>
> Raina was unable to get a government job owing to his 'migrant'
status. He
> is now self-employed and runs a small printing press.
>
> "When I was forced to leave my home in the Valley,
> militants<http://www.freshnews.in/tag/militants>threatened us time
and
> again - merge with us (with political and religious
> views), perish or vanish," Raina recapitulated memories of the
insurgency.
>
> Amongst those present from the community were varsity
> students<http://www.freshnews.in/tag/students>,
> who also held that the current situation was sordid.
>
> "Calling us migrants implies that we had a choice in the matter, when
we
> were actually forced to flee," said Aditya Raj Kaul, a 22-year-old
student
> activist from Delhi University.
>
> "We have demanded in the memorandum that the UN direct the Indian
government
> to ensure adequate protection to the residual Kashmiri Hindu population
> living in the Valley. Also that Kashmiri Hindus be restored political and
> economic rights, giving them equal status rather than second-class
> citizenship in their native land," Kaul informed.
>
> Link -
>
http://www.freshnews.in/kashmiri-pandits-demand-internally-displaced-persons-status-93431
> _________________________________________
> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
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_________________________________________
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Critiques & Collaborations
To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in
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To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list 
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------------------------------

MessaDEFANGED.41730>
----- Original Message ----
From: "reader-list-request at sarai.net" <reader-list-request at sarai.net>
To: reader-list at sarai.net
Sent: Monday, 3 November, 2008 7:35:08 PM
Subject: reader-list Digest, Vol 64, Issue 26

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Today's Topics:

  1. Fwd:  reader-list Digest, Vol 64, Issue 13 (samhoodx at aol.com)
  2. Re: Kashmiri Pandits demand ‘internally displaced
      persons’ status (Kshmendra Kaul)
  3. Fwd:  reader-list Digest, Vol 64, Issue 13 (samhoodx at aol.com)
  4. I can't write a memoir of Czeslaw Milosz (Vivek Narayanan)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 08:38:49 -0500
From: samhoodx at aol.com
Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd:  reader-list Digest, Vol 64, Issue 13
To: reader-list at sarai.net
Message-ID: <8CB0BD0A2E2C8A2-CB0-3CE5 at mblk-d13.sysops.aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

hi. you seem to have missed inder's response, just as dhatri did. so i 
am forwarding inder's response below the quoted part of your message. 
he says there is no tradition of nudity in islamic art, while hindu 
deities did not have any problem with nudity.. that is correct. as you 
know, there is much nudity (and many varieties of intercourse, i might 
add) in hindu temple art, the most famous of which is khajuraho. there 
are many more examples of very high artistic sophistication, such as 
konark. apart from the philosophical content of its sanskrit texts, 
temple art and architecture are probably the most sophisticated 
elements in its corpus. however, nudity in temple art may or may not 
mean the same thing as inder's - or anyone else's - performed nudity in 
a temple today. it would be good to have a discussion on what it may or 
may not mean, and why.

sam

-----Original Message-----ge: 3
Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 08:45:08 -0500
From: samhoodx at aol.com
Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd:  reader-list Digest, Vol 64, Issue 13
To: reader-list at sarai.net
Message-ID: <8CB0BD185327F9A-CB0-3D45 at mblk-d13.sysops.aol.com>

correction:

the sentence " however, nudity in temple art may or may not mean the 
same thing as inder's - or anyone else's - performed nudity in a temple 
today" should read:

"however, inder's - or anyone else's - performed nudity in a temple 
today may or may not mean the same thing as nudity in temple art ."

sam

- -----Original Message-----
From: samhoodx at aol.com
To: reader-list at sarai.net
Sent: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 8:38 am
Subject: Fwd: [Reader-list] reader-list Digest, Vol 64, Issue 13

hi. you seem to have missed inder's response, just as dhatri did. so i
am forwarding inder's response below the quoted part of your message.
he says there is no tradition of nudity in islamic art, while hindu
deities did not have any problem with nudity. that is correct. as you
know, there is much nudity (and many varieties of intercourse, i might
add) in hindu temple art, the most famous of which is khajuraho. there
are many more examples of very high artistic sophistication, such as
konark. apart from the philosophical content of its sanskrit texts,
temple art and architecture are probably the most sophisticated
elements in its corpus. however, nudity in temple art may or may not
mean the same thing as inder's - or anyone else's - performed nudity in
a temple today. it would be good to have a discussion on what it may or
may not mean, and why..

sam

- -----Original Message-----

From: rajendra bhat <raja_starkglass at yahoo.com>

... you have not bothered to reply as to why you were not civilised at
martand temple parading and photographed in nude, but the same culture
was absent at mosque, say at hajarathbal.?

Nudity does not affect any of us as we are all products of nude coitus,
of parents, but in civil society every civil act has a place, dining
hall for dinner, coitus in bedroom, so if your culture is not to be
civil, but only cultured, then have your culture same in all the places
of worship.!

Lot more love.

>> From: inder salim <indersalim at gmail.com>

>> Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Thinking Through Figures on Internal

>> Displacement from Kashmir

>> To: reader-list at sarai.net

>> Date: Sunday, November 2, 2008, 4:14 PM

>>

>>

>> well, dear pawan

>> how a North indian ( like you) can join Raj's Jai Mahrashtra slogan,

>> it is beyond my comprehension.

>>

>> why mosque comes to your mind as and when you talk about Temple. how

>> is your subconscious working, you might find an answer.

>>

>> how my nidity hits you below the belt, i dont understand. Hindu

>> gods were always confortable with that. it is necessary, to say

>> Female, as and when we say Male, Nudity is not always happening

>> against the factor called ' garment' . it has some innocene involved

>> int it, for example when we were born. there is no reference of any

>> past which has nudity as part of mosque culture. so wherefrom this

>> question?

>>

>> well, i have my own understanding of violence, and i believe our

>> intolerance towards the other is the core reason.

>>

>> we all are victims at one point or the other, but how to join

>> mobocracy is beyond my understanding of discourses on any subject.

>>

>> i am talking to you becasue you are in discourse on the List,

>>

>> and the moment you will throw stones on others, you will become a

>> petty instrument of those who work from above and motivate the
workers

>> to act, the paid or unintelligent activits.

>>

>> you need to know that you are using words, like we, which are
ambigous

>> most of times, and so there is always scope for humour, wit, and

>> profoundity at the same time.

>>

>> lot of love

>> and regards

>> is

>>

>> p.s. if you are still angry with me, please wrtie back to me outside

>> the list, i will be happy to respond back, we can spare others from

>> all this

>>

>> On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 12:39 PM, Pawan Durani
<pawan.durani at gmail.com>

>> wrote:

>> > IInder,

>> >

>> > till date i have not got a reply ohn when you would get yourslef

>> > photographed in the Mosque premesis like you got one done in
Martand

>> Temple.

>> >

>> > Pawan

>> >

>> >

- ------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:34:29 +0530
From: Vivek Narayanan <vivek at sarai.net>
Subject: [Reader-list] I can't write a memoir of Czeslaw Milosz
To: sarai list <reader-list at sarai..net>
Message-ID: <490F04ED.2040909 at sarai.net>

I know well that poetry is outlawed in quite a few republics, maybe for 
good reason; I know that it renders some people speechless, others 
angry, and still others contemptuous;

but still I wanted to throw this beautiful "non-memoir" (of Czeslaw 
Milosz, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century) down and see 
if anyone had anything to say.

", narrow-mindedHe had always attacked the pettiness of his compatriots; he defended 
the visionary homeland his dreams, pluralistic and tolerant, but at 
the same of ness, nationalism, stupidity. He had a 
religious mind but he also believedtime he castigated the vices of the existing society: he hated 
anti-Semitism in liberal, democratic principles 
and tried to teach his contemporaries the implications of this complex 
creed."

Is it indeed possible to love your land deeply but despise the stupidity 
of nationalism, to conduct an intense lifelong search for the invisible 
while avoiding doctrinarian religion? Milosz, like many others, believed 
it was not only possible, but necessary.

Vivek

(from The Threepenny Review: 
http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/zagajewski_f08.html )

*I Can't Write a Memoir of Czeslaw Milosz*

Adam Zagajewski

I can't write a memoir of Czeslaw Milosz. For some reason it seems 
impossible to me though I had almost no trouble when I wrote about the 
late Zbigniew Herbert, for example (but, on the other hand, I wouldn't 
envisage writing this kind of essay about Joseph Brodsky either, someone 
I knew well). Why is it so? Was Herbert more of a "unified person"? Not 
really. All three of them, Milosz, Herbert, Brodsky—so different as 
poets and human beings—enjoyed, or suffered, the complexity of a life 
divided between the utmost seriousness of their work and the relative 
jocularity of what the other people perceived as their socially visible 
personalities. All three enjoyed joking, being with other people, 
dominating the conversation, laughing (Milosz's laugh was the loudest, 
the most majestic), as if needing a respite from the gravity of their 
vocation.

And yet, again, some time ago I was able to write a few pages about 
Herbert's life. Was it because I met him briefly when I was almost a 
child, when he visited my high school in Silesia? Because his personal 
predicament, his illness, stamped him with a drama which was so gripping 
in its ferocity and made him differ even more from the music of his 
noble poetry than was the case with other poets and artists (who, none 
of them, are ever identical with their work)? Because I had the feeling 
that, as we were born in the same city of Lvov, some twenty years apart 
and only two hundred yards away from each other, I had a special claim 
on his fate, the way veterans from two different wars but from the same 
regiment may feel close, almost like members of the same tribe, the same 
family?

I had read Milosz for many years before I met him in person. In the late 
Sixties and in the Seventies I didn't believe I'd ever meet him. He was 
then for me a legend, a unicorn, somebody living on a different planet; 
California was but a beautiful name to me. He belonged to a chapter of 
the history of Polish literature that seemed to be, seen from the 
landscape of my youth, as remote as the Middle Ages. He was a part of 
the last generation that had been born into the world of the 
impoverished gentry (impoverished but still very much defining 
themselves as gentry): he grew up in a small manor house in the 
Lithuanian countryside where woods, streams, and water snakes were as 
evident as streetcars and apartment houses in the modest, industrial 
city of my childhood. His Poland was so totally different from mine—it 
had its wings spread to the East. When he was born in 1911 he was a 
subject of the Russian Tsar; everything Russian, including the language 
which he knew so well, was familiar to him (though, as his readers well 
know, he was also very critical of many things Russian). I was born into 
a Poland that had changed its shape; like a sleeper who turns from one 
side to another, my country spread its arms toward the West—of course 
only physically, because politically it was incorporated into the 
Eastern bloc.

I grew up in a post-German city; almost everything in the world of my 
childhood looked and smelled German.. Cabbage seemed to be German, trees 
and walls recalled Bismarck, blackbirds sang with a Teutonic accent. My 
primary school could have belonged in any of Berlin's middle-class 
suburbs—its Prussian bricks were dark red like the lips of Wagnerian 
singers. The first radio in our apartment (a radio I worshipped—it 
received signals from an invisible realm, it had music, it brought 
strange sounds from different continents) was German and probably still 
nostalgic about Adolph Hitler's endless speeches. The first foreign 
language I had begun to learn (unwillingly), because of my grandfather, 
himself a Germanist, was German, too. For Milosz, who was a polyglot, 
learning German never existed as a possibility, especially after World 
War II, and German poetry never played a major role in the vast universe 
of his reading.

There were no manor houses and water snakes in my childhood. Coal mines 
and chimneys played the part of woods and meadows. Aristocratic families 
were squatting in the smallest apartments, surviving on minimal wages. 
(My family, I hasten to make it clear, was not aristocratic at all.) I 
was supposed to be a lucky inhabitant of a classless society in which 
falcons and sparrows were condemned to mandatory friendship. Classless 
society: practically, it meant that everybody was very poor, with the 
exception of Party dignitaries and a few cunning merchants who were able 
to outwit the Party but whose sleep was rather nervous; the wealth they 
accumulated could have been taken away from them in one day, no solid 
law protected them. The language we spoke was a plebeian Polish, hard, 
ugly, filled with typical Communist acronyms, abbrevations, and clichés, 
punctuated with giggles, swear-words, and ironies—a language of slaves, 
good only for basic communication in a kind of a Boolean algebra of 
resentment. In the mid-Seventies I venerated a performance of Adam 
Mickiewicz's Dziady (Forefathers) staged at the Teatr Stary in Krakow; 
it was directed by Konrad Swinarski, who before long died tragically in 
an airplane accident in Syria. Soon afterwards I was told that Milosz, 
who had been offered the recording of the piece, commented sourly: "I 
can't stand the way these actors speak the Polish language." He found 
their pronunciation barbaric. These barbarians were my peers, my 
contemporaries: I knew many of them from rather benign military training 
sessions at the university. When they played the rebels from the 
Mickiewicz generation they sounded to me like my friends; I was 
transported back to turn-of-the-century Vilna, I was one of them. They 
spoke my language, a language that didn't have the sweet music of 
Russian nor the elegance of French.

Also in the Seventies, one of my friends, a painter, Leszek Sobocki, 
traveled regularly to the United States (his mother was living in Los 
Angeles then). He was a part of a vague constellation of young artists 
and poets who were critical of the Communist system, though they hadn't 
known any other from personal experience, and who tried, being faithful 
to a more or less realistic aesthetic, to create art that would matter 
socially and politically. I belonged to the same archipelago. Sobocki, 
on one of his trips to L.A.., mailed to Berkeley a package which 
contained excerpts from poetry and fiction produced by us, as well as 
reproductions of the paintings and prints made by him and his friends. 
After a while, a long letter written in response by Milosz arrived; it 
couldn't have been more devastating. Milosz basically dismissed the 
whole business of socially critical art, reducing our efforts to the 
well-meaning but aesthetically uninteresting and totally predictable 
reactions of inexperienced youngsters. He extolled "metaphysical 
distance," quoting Aleksander Wat's sentence on the necessity of 
fighting against Communism on metaphysical grounds. Which meant going to 
the very foundations of somebody's convictions. The letter was a cold 
shower for us, for me. Was Milosz right? I was of two minds even then... 
He gave me pause. Now I think he was mostly right, though there must 
have been also a bit of jealousy in his judgment, jealousy of the 
directness of our action; an intellectual in exile is often 
"metaphysical" by necessity— for him it's not a matter of free choice 
since he has lost access to the unmediated spectacle of life in his own 
country. A much younger Milosz, the Milosz of the great poems written 
under the Nazi occupation or right after it, was after all somebody who 
didn't disdain directness at all.

And yet against all odds I fell in love with Milosz's poetry; its 
melodies seemed at times ancient, but its intellectual content couldn't 
have been more modern, more attractive, more complex, more intoxicating. 
I say I fell in love with it, which is true—still, first I had to find 
Milosz's poems, which was very difficult indeed. My parents had a 
significant library (where, it's true, fiction dwarfed poetry) but there 
was nothing by Milosz on the shelves. His name was erased from all the 
textbooks. My high school literature teacher never mentioned the name of 
Czeslaw Milosz. In an encyclopedia there was an entry under Milosz, but 
it was devoted to "Milosz Obrenovic," a brave Serbian prince, not to the 
author of Native Realm. Since 1951, the year of his defection, Milosz 
had been an outcast, a non-person. If his name did appear somewhere in 
print, it was frequently accompanied by the official Byzantine formula 
"an enemy of the People's Republic of Poland.." Poor republic, having 
such a potent enemy!

In order to be able to read his poems and his prose, I needed a special 
permit from the dean of my college, and even once I got it—which wasn't 
easy—I was not allowed to check these books out; I could only study them 
in one of the reading rooms in the Jagellonian Library, my Krakow alma 
mater's crown jewel. Each day I had to say good-night to a pile of 
books: they had to stay on the shelf while I walked home. I was assigned 
to the Professors' Reading Room, which in my eyes, the eyes of a young 
graduate student, added to the importance of the occasion. And there I 
sat for hours, discovering the writings of the enemy of our republic. 
Sweet hours! And they were made even sweeter by the conspiratorial 
conditions under which I approached Milosz's poetry.

The richness of this work was overwhelming; I wasn't able right away to 
grasp the whole extent of the poet's achievement. I was swallowing lines 
of his poems like somebody given only a short moment in a magical 
orchard, a trespasser avidly reaching out for cherries, pears, peaches. 
I didn't have enough time and leisure—nor maturity, I'm afraid—to 
discern the different layers within his work, to understand the 
meandering of his thought, to define the stages of Milosz's complicated 
poetic evolution. I read for enchantment, not for any critical insights. 
I remember walking home after these sessions in the library and 
repeating lines from his poems—I was inebriated with them. Had I been a 
driver then, the police could have arrested me for driving in a state of 
drunkenness. But as I was only a chaotic walker, nobody could stop me; 
even a totalitarian state was not able to control my daydreams, my 
poetic fascinations, the pattern of my walking.

What was it that attracted me to Milosz's poetry? Precisely everything 
that was different from my own experience, my own situation, from my 
"people's republic" language. I fell in love with the freedom with which 
Milosz both respected and defied the rules of poetic modernism. He was 
saying more than the poets I had known before—I mean he didn't keep a 
strict diet of purist metaphors: he was willing to tell the reader more 
than was accepted among contemporary poets. The reader knew that Milosz 
believed in something and hated something else, knew what Milosz's 
Weltanschauung was, and yet many of his poems were violent quarrels of 
the poet with himself, not at all easy to decipher—he was never 
doctrinaire, he never quite agreed with himself. I was also struck by a 
constant, energetic quest for the invisible in his poetry, a quest that 
arose amidst the most concrete, sensual images, not in an ascetic 
monastery chapel. In his oeuvre, ecstatic tones mixed with sober 
reflection; there was no easy way to classify this poetry—it burst 
taxonomies. It was not "nature poetry," it was not a "poetic meditation 
on History," neither was it "autobiographical lyric"—it was all of 
those. The ambition of this poet knew no limits; he tried to drink in 
the cosmos.

After so much intimacy gained from the contact with his work, the shock 
of meeting him in person was still considerable. And the contrast 
between the immense, complicated territory of his powerful work and the 
gentleman I finally met (a seventy-year-old "smiling public man") was 
sizeable, too. How can a single person embody all the nuances and 
contradictions of a vast opus? I don't want to say that I was 
disappointed with Milosz's human incarnation. Not at all; I admired him, 
I loved him, every moment spent with him was fascinating. He was a kind 
friend; he wrote a most generous preface to Tremor, my first collection 
of poems in the United States; he showed interest in my life and work; 
and much later, in Krakow, we became almost neighbors, and I saw him 
often. And yet I know that for him I always remained a younger friend, 
not somebody he would confide in the way, I imagine, some from his 
generation might have enjoyed—or endured.

I met him for the first time in June 1983, in Paris, in the spacious 
apartment of Leonor Fini and Konstanty Jelenski near Place des 
Victoires. I was then somebody who had recently left Poland and who had 
no idea how long his Parisian emigration would last. Konstanty Jelenski 
was an exile like Milosz, a brilliant critic and a great admirer of 
Milosz's poetry. The Milosz I met then was an elder statesman—old and 
yet strangely young and handsome, serene, witty, radiating an energy 
which made him the center of every social event; wild and tame at the 
same time, rescued by the renown of the Stockholm accolade from the 
trials of his Berkeley solitude.

In January 1986 I read with him and some other famous poets during the 
PEN conference in New York, in the Cooper Union Hall, where a huge and 
enthusiastic audience that consisted mostly, it seemed, of very young 
poets greeted the readers—what a wonderful audience it was! After that I 
saw him now and then in Paris, in California, in New York, in 
Indianapolis... In Houston, where I taught creative writing, I 
introduced his reading.

Later, in Krakow, I'd visit him many times in his apartment in 
Boguslawski Street, where he eventually settled down with Carol. I saw 
him walking—more and more slowly—in the Krakow Old Town, where almost 
everybody recognized him and looked at him with awe. Given the slow pace 
of his walks, the awe had enough time to be richly deployed. He was like 
Goethe in Weimar, though his apartment was so much more modest than the 
house in Frauenplan—but the centrality of his position in the small 
world of Krakow and Poland was never questioned. This in itself was an 
enormous achievement for an exile who had returned to his country after 
so many decades of absence. His intellectual authority was overwhelming. 
In the restaurants he spoke very loudly because he was hard of hearing, 
so loudly that it was a bit embarrassing for his friends—not much 
privacy in these conversations. And yet he was never diminished by his 
great old age. His memory was invincible, his laughter irresistible, his 
mind alert.

In 2002 and 2003 he was enthusiastically received by American poets, 
very young ones and also the well-known ones, during summer conferences 
I organized with Edward Hirsch in Krakow; Milosz refused to participate 
in panels because he couldn't hear what the others said, but agreed to 
meet students from Houston. He gave several Q & A's, answering endless 
questions, embarking on long, unforgettable soliloquies (someone would 
always help him by repeating the question near his better ear). And he 
read with the other poets: I'll always remember him at a reading in the 
beautifully restored Krakow reform synagogue, a yarmulka on his regal 
head—old David speaking to his nation, feeble and yet so strong, solemn 
but also visibly savoring with a courteous, contented smile the din of 
the ovation that went on and on.

There was something absolutely splendid in the way he stood up to the 
challenges of his last years. He never withdrew into the comfort of a 
well-deserved retirement. With those he loved or liked, he was tender, 
magnanimous, charming; he received many friends and many strangers, 
young or old admirers of his work, poets and critics, but when he spoke 
in public he retained the tone of an angry prophet. He had always 
attacked the pettiness of his compatriots; he defended the visionary 
homeland of his dreams, pluralistic and tolerant, but at the same time 
he castigated the vices of the existing society: he hated anti-Semitism, 
narrow-mindedness, nationalism, stupidity. He had a religious mind but 
he also believed in liberal, democratic principles and tried to teach 
his contemporaries the implications of this complex creed.

I witnessed his deep sadness after Carol died; by then he knew he would 
face the end of his life in an empty apartment whose every corner bore 
traces of Carol's tender hand and imagination. Even then, after he 
returned from his last trip to California, where he bade her goodbye, he 
was able to write the beautiful elegy for Carol, "Orpheus and Eurydice." 
His gift for transforming life's sorrows into poetry was intact, but he 
was tired and, it seems to me, maybe even a bit ashamed of always 
succeeding in being a magician against all odds, all catastrophes, all 
deaths. "What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people?" he 
asked in the mid-Forties. What's the use of magic that doesn't assuage 
despair? There was always his religious hope, his faith, sometimes 
dreams brought him signals of divine presence, but—we know it from the 
poems—despair was also one of his frequent visitors. His laughter still 
triumphed over the baseness of biology, but the last years made him frail.

This great life had its secrets: how many times had Milosz told us in 
his poems that he was an "evil person"? His friends never believed it, 
though I think he wanted us maybe not to accept it as true it but at 
least to consider it more seriously. Friends are usually too 
well-meaning, too polite, too well-bred. They always tell you "you'll be 
fine," "you exaggerate"; they want to cheer you up—that's their 
business. Which is probably the last thing someone coping with the grave 
images at life's end wants to hear. The poet who decided early on that 
poetry was about communicating with other people, not about lofty 
hermeticism and language games, was dying in the silence of his solitary 
days and nights. One of the last humans who spoke to him in his hours of 
agony was an uneducated woman who took care of his small household, a 
wonderful person with a great heart. I like to think of it: in the vast 
polyphony of the almost hundred years of his dramatic existence, the 
ultimate sound he heard was an unschooled voice of goodness. Perhaps in 
this soothing voice he found something like an arch between his early 
idyllic childhood in the Lithuanian countryside and his closing moments; 
and in between there remained, bracketed out for once, the rage of 
modern history, the loneliness of his long exile, the violence of his 
struggles, of his thought, his imagination, his rebellions.

I can't write a memoir of Milosz: so much was hidden in his life. 
Besides, he was an ecstatic poet and an ecstatic person. We'll never 
really know people like that. They hide their great moments of elation; 
they never share with others the short joys of their sudden discoveries, 
and the sadness when the vision fades. They thrive in solitude. With 
their friends they are usually correct, measured, just like everybody 
else. They are like a ship we sometimes see in a peaceful port: a huge 
immobile mass of metal covered by spots of rust, a few sailors lazily 
sunbathing on the deck, a blue shirt drying on a rope. One wouldn't 
guess that this ship was once struggling with the hurricane, barely 
surviving the onslaught of big waves, singing an iron song... No, I 
didn't know him enough. I have to return to his poems, to his essays.

Adam Zagajewski, who divides his year between Krakow and Chicago, is the 
author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Without End 
and A Defense of Ardor.

- ------------------------------

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