Bruno Schulz
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Bruno Schulz (1892-07-12 – 1942-11-19) was a Polish writer and artist, considered by some to be the greatest prose stylist of the modern Polish language.
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[edit] His father
- I have never seen the Old Testament prophets, but at the sight of that man floored by divine anger, widely straddling his enormous porcelain urinal and shielded by the tornado of his arms, a cloud of desperate contortions, over which his voice rose still higher, alien and hard, I came to understand the divine anger of holy men.
- He would occasionally place two chairs back-to-back; then, supporting himself with his hands on the backrests, he swung his legs back and forth, his radiant eyes searching our faces for looks of admiration and encouragement. He seemed to have become entirely reconciled with God.
- Only today do I understand the lonely heroism with which he gave single-handed battle against the boundless element of boredom numbing the town. Bereft of all support, without acknowledgement on our part, that astonishing man defended the lost cause of poetry. He was a wonderful mill, into whose hoppers the bran of the empty hours was poured, bursting into bloom in its mechanism with all the colours and aromas of oriental spices.
- “Were I to cast aside respect before the Creator, to make a jest in criticism of creation, then I should demand, ‘Less content, and more form!’ Oh, how that loss of content would unburden the world! More modesty in purposes, more restraint in claims, gentlemen demiurges, and the world would be more exquisite!” cried my father as his hands were laying bare Paulina’s white calf from the fetters of her stocking.
- It is worth noting how, in coming into contact with that unusual man, all things withdrew, as it were, to the root of their being, rebuilt their phenomenon down to the metaphysical core. They returned to their primordial idea, only to betray it at that point and lurch into those dubious, daring and equivocal regions that I will here succinctly call, The Regions of the Great Heresy.
[edit] Adela (the domestic servant)
- Adela returned on luminous mornings, like Pomona from the fire of the enkindled day, tipping from her basket the colourful beauty of the sun.
- An infernal storm-cloud of feathers, wings and screeches flew up, in the midst of which, Adela, looking like a furious mænad, half-obscured by the spinning of her thyrsus, danced a dance of destruction.
- Mother held no influence over [my father]. Upon Adela, however, he bestowed great reverence and attention. When she swept the parlour, it was a great and important ceremony to him, which he never neglected to witness, following Adela’s every movement with a mixture of fear and a shudder of delight. He ascribed to her every action some deeper, symbolic meaning; when the girl pushed a long-handled brush across the floor, with youthful, bold thrusts, it was almost beyond his endurance; tears streamed from his eyes then, his face was choked up with silent laughter, his body shook with a pleasurable spasm of orgasm.
- Adela’s outstretched slipper shook slightly and shone like a snake’s tongue.
- ">“Sadly, Adela,” said Father, “you have never been able to comprehend matters of a higher order. Always and everywhere, you have thwarted my actions with your outbursts of mindless animosity. But today, clad in armour, I mock your tickling, by which you once drove one helpless to despair.”
[edit] Books
- Ah! And in writing down these stories of mine, arranging these tales of my father in the used up margin of its text, do I not yield to the secret hope that, someday, they will strike root imperceptibly between the faded leaves of that most magnificent, scattering book? that they will fall into the great rustle of its pages, which will enfold them?
- I simply call it The Book, with no qualifications or epithets; and in this abstinence and restraint there is a helpless sigh, silent capitulation to the immeasurableness of the transcendent; for no word, no allusion could glisten, scent the air, or rain down in such a shudder of terror, with any inkling of that unnameable thing, the very first taste of which, on the tip of the tongue, exceeds the capacity of our rapture.
- For ordinary books are like meteors. They each have their moment, that instant when they fly, shrieking, into the air, like a phoenix, all their pages ablaze. For that one moment, that single instant, we love them; although they are mere ashes by then. Sometimes, late at night, we wander in bitter resignation through their congealed pages, whilst they go on insisting, with their wooden clattering, like a rosary, on their dead formulæ.
- Have you ever noticed that flocks of swallows fly past between the lines of certain books? whole verses of trembling, pointed swallows? The flights of those birds must be interpreted...
[edit] Creativity
- “Too long,” said my father, “have we lived under the terror of the matchless perfection of the Demiurge. Too long has the perfection of his handiwork paralysed our own creativity. We do not wish to compete with him. We have no ambition to rival him. We merely want to be creators in our own, lower sphere. We crave creativity for ourselves. We crave the joy of creation. We crave, in a word, Demiurgy.”
- “Demiurgus [said my father] was enamoured of refined, perfect, and sophisticated materials; we give precedence to junk; we are simply enrapt by it, entranced by the cheapness, the paltriness, the tawdriness of the material. Do you understand,” my father asked, “the profound meaning of that weakness, that passion for gaudy tissue-paper, papier-mâché, coloured lacquer, straw and sawdust? It is,” he said with a pained smile, “our love for matter as such, its downiness and porousness, its unique, mystical consistency. Demiurgus, that great master and artist, hides it away, causes it to disappear behind life’s make-believe. We, to the contrary, love its abrasiveness, its unruliness, its rag doll ungainliness. Behind every gesture, each movement, we like to see its exertion, its torpor, its sweet ursinality.”
- We are at the very bottom, at the dark foundations. We are with the Mothers. Here are those endless infernos, those hopeless Ossianic expanses, those lamentable Nibelungs. Here are those great incubators of stories, those storyteller factories, misty kilns of fables and fairytales.
[edit] Time
- Everybody knows that in the course of ordinary, normal years, whimsical time will occasionally bring forth from its womb other years—odd years, degenerate years, somewhere in which, like a little sixth finger upon a hand, there sprouts up a spurious thirteenth month.
- And then there is all this highly improper manipulation of time, these indecent dealings, sneaking into its mechanism at the back, dangerously tampering with its precarious secrets. Sometimes, one wants to bang on the table and shout at the top of one’s voice, “Enough of this! Keep your hands off time! Time is untouchable! It is not permissible to aggravate time! Space is for man; in space you may go where you please; you may turn somersaults, fall head over heels, leap from star to star... But for the love of God, leave time alone!”
- Has our reader ever heard about the parallel strands of time, in two-track time? Yes, such branch stretches of time do exist, a little illegal, to be sure, and problematic; but when one carries such contraband as ours, such supernumerary, unclassifiable events, one cannot be too particular. And so, at some point in our story, we will attempt to take such a branch turning, a siding, and shunt this illegal history into it.
[edit] Living things
- On those shoulders of the garden, August’s unkempt and harridan luxuriance had expanded into silent hollows of enormous burdocks, holding sway with their flaps of shaggy, leafy tin plate, straggling tongues of fleshy green. Those distended rag dolls of burdocks bulged there like peasant women, sitting around half-devoured by their crazy skirts.
- Ah, life!—young and fragile life, sent forth from the dependable darkness, from the snug warmth of the maternal womb, into a great and unfamiliar, illuminated world! How it flinches and draws back, filled with aversion and discouragement! How it hesitates to accept the venture proposed to it!
- And one of those plants, yellow and full of milky juice in pale stems, now puffed up with air, discharged only air from its empty shoots, only fluff in the form of feathery, milky balls, strewn by the breeze and softly pervading the azure silence.
- For how great is the force of credulity! how powerful the suggestion of terror! Such incomprehension! But this was a man! A chained-up man, whom I, by incomprehensible means, in a simplifying, metaphorical and comprehensive elision, had taken for a dog.
- I came to understand why animals have horns. It was the incomprehensibility that would not be contained within their lives, a wild and obsessive caprice, ill-judged and blind obstinacy. Some idée fixe, having grown beyond the borders of their being and high above their heads, brought suddenly into the light, had solidified into palpable, hard matter. There, it had assumed a wild, incalculable and incredible shape, twisted into a fantastical arabesque, invisible to their eyes, and dreadful; into the unknown numeral under whose menace they lived. I grasped why those animals were disposed to ill-judged and wild panic, to startled frenzy. Herded into their mania, they could not extricate themselves from the knot of those horns; and so, lowering their heads, they looked out sadly and wildly from between them, as if trying to find a pathway through their branches.
- But even further from the light were the cats. Their perfection was alarming; wrapped up in the precision and meticulousness of their bodies, they knew neither deviation nor error. For a moment, they sank far into themselves, to the bottom of their being; they froze in their soft fur and grew menacingly and ceremoniously serious; their eyes grew as round as moons, soaking up the vista into their fiery craters.
[edit] The seasons
- All springs begin in this way, from those enormous and astounding horoscopes, each one beyond the scale of a single season of the year. And in each one—be it nevermore said, let me say it here—there is everything: endless processions and demonstrations, revolutions and barricades. Through them all at a certain moment the hot wind of remembrance blows, that boundlessness of sadness and intoxication, searching in vain for its counterpart in reality.
- In July, my father left to take the waters; he left me with my mother and older brother, at the mercy of the summer days, glowing white and stunning. Stupefied by the light, we leafed through the great book of the holiday, in which every page was ablaze with splendour, its sickly sweet pulp, deep within, made from golden pears.
- Autumn! Autumn! The Alexandrine epoch of the year, gathering all the sterile wisdom of the three hundred and sixty-five days of the solar cycle into its enormous libraries. Oh, those aged mornings, as yellow as parchment, sweet with wisdom, like late evenings! those cunningly smiling mornings, like shrewd palimpsests, many-layered, like old, yellowed books. Oh, the autumnal day, that old jester-librarian, clambering up his ladders in a slipped-down dressing gown, sampling the preserves of all ages and cultures!
- Yellow, filled with boredom, the winter days were here. A threadbare and patchy, too-short mantle of snow was spread over the reddened earth. It was too meagre for so many roofs, which stood out black or rust coloured, shingled roofs like arks and thatched cottages, concealing within them the smoke-blackened expanses of attics—charred black cathedrals bristling with ribs of rafters, purlins and joists—dark lungs of the winter gales. Each dawn uncovered new vent pipes and chimney stacks, sprung up in the night, blown out by the nocturnal gale—black pipes of the Devil’s organs.
[edit] The heavens
- The moon was still high; the transformations of the sky, the metamorphoses of its multitudinous vaults in ever more masterfully described configurations, were unending. The sky that night had opened up its bewitching internal mechanism, like a silver astrolabe, was exhibiting in endless cycles the gilded mathematics of its cogs and wheels.
- Sometimes, a whole bright day passes in explosions of the sun, in accumulations of clouds encircled by redness, luminously and chromatically at their edges, breaking off at every edge. People go about stupefied by the light, their eyes closed, inwardly exploding with rockets, Roman candles, and powder-kegs. But later, toward evening, that hurricane-fire of light softens. The horizon grows rotund and beautiful, full of azure, like a glass ball in a garden with its miniature and illuminated panorama of the world, in a happily ordered composition, above which the clouds, its conclusive toppings, are arranged, unfolding in a long row like rouleaux of golden medals, or the peals of bells, combining in rosy litanies.
