Bruno Schulz
From Wikiquote
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.
Contents |
[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 understood the divine anger of holy men.
- Sometimes he placed two chairs back to back, and, supporting himself with his hands on the backrests, swung his legs back and forth, his radiant eyes searching our faces for expressions of admiration and encouragement. He had, it seemed, become entirely reconciled with God.
- Only today do I understand the lonely heroism with which he single-handedly gave 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 the hoppers of which the bran of the empty hours was poured, to burst into bloom in its mechanism with all the colours and aromas of oriental spices. But we, having grown accustomed to that metaphysical prestidigitator’s magnificent jugglery, were inclined to misapprehend the value of his sovereign magic, which delivered us from the lethargy of our empty days and nights.
- ‘Were I, casting aside respect before the Creator, to seek to 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 contact with that unusual man, all things retreated, 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 shall 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 rose up, in the midst of which Adela danced a dance of destruction, looking like a furious maenad enveloped in the whirling of her thyrsus.
- Mother held no influence over [my father], although to Adela he bestowed great reverence and attention. When she swept the parlour it was a great and important ceremony to him, one that he never neglected to bear witness to, following Adela’s every movement with a mixture of fear and a shudder of delight. He ascribed some deeper, symbolic meaning to her every action, and when the girl pushed a long-handled brush across the floor, with youthful and bold thrusts, it was almost beyond his endurance.
- Adela’s outstretched slipper shook slightly and shone like a snake’s tongue.
- ;‘Sadly, Adela,’ said Father, ‘you never could comprehend matters of a higher order. Always and everywhere you have thwarted my actions with your outbursts of mindless animosity. But today, encased in armour, I mock the tickling by which you once drove one helpless to despair.’
[edit] Books
- Ah, in writing down these stories of mine, arranging these tales about my father in the used up margin of its text, do I not yield to the secret hope that they will imperceptibly take root someday between the yellowed pages of that most magnificent, crumbling book, and fall into the great rustle of its pages, which will enfold them?
- I simply call it the Book, without qualifications or epithets, and in this abstinence and restraint there is a helpless sigh, silent capitulation in the face of the immeasurableness of the transcendent, for no word, no allusion can glisten, scent the air, or drift with that shudder of terror, any inkling of that thing without a name, the very first taste of which on the tip of the tongue surpasses our capacity for rapture. For what can the pathos of adjectives or the haughtiness of epithets avail in the face of that measureless thing, that magnificence beyond reckoning?
- For ordinary books are like meteors. Each has its own moment, that instant when it flies shrieking into the air, like a phoenix, all of its pages ablaze. And for that one moment we love them, although they are already mere ash by then. And sometimes, late at night, we wander in bitter resignation through their congealed pages, insisting with their wooden clatter, like a rosary, on their dead formulae.
- 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 have we lived under the terror of the matchless perfection of the Demiurge,’ said my father. ‘Too long has the perfection of his handiwork paralysed our own creativity. We have no desire to compete with him. Our ambition is not 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; in a word, we crave Demiurgy.’
- ‘The Demiurgus [my father said] 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, lacquered colour, straw and sawdust? — It is’ he said with a pained smile ‘our love for Matter itself, for its downiness and porousness, its unique, mystical consistency. The Demiurgus, that great master and artist, hides it away, vanishes it under life’s make-believe. We, to the contrary, love its abrasiveness, its unruliness and rag doll ungainliness. Behind each gesture, behind each movement, we like to see its exertion, its inertia, 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, and those lamentable Nibelungs. Here are those great incubators of stories, those storyteller factories, the misty kilns of fables and fairytales. Now that great and sad mechanism of spring may be comprehended at last. Ah, it grows on stories. How many events, how much history, how many fates! Everything we have ever read, all the stories we have ever heard, and all those stories that have loomed in our dreams since childhood — never heard — here and nowhere else is their abode and their homeland. Where else could writers derive their conceits, where would they take the courage of their inventiveness if they did not sense behind them these reserves, these assets, these hundredfold repeated narratives that the Underworld is reverberating with?
[edit] Time
- Everyone knows that in the course of ordinary, normal years, whimsical time sometimes gives birth to other years — odd years, degenerate years, somewhere in which, an aberrant thirteenth month sprouts up, like a little sixth finger on a hand.
- And then there is all this highly improper manipulation of time. These indecent dealings, sneaking into its mechanism at the back, riskily tiptoeing around its precarious secrets! Sometimes one feels like banging on the table and shouting at the top of one’s voice: ‘Enough of this! Keep your hands off time! Time is untouchable — it is forbidden to provoke time! Space is for man — in space you can go where you please. You can turn somersaults, fall head over heels, leap from star to star. But for the love of God, leave time alone!’
- Has the reader heard anything about the parallel strands of time, in double track time? Yes, such branch turnings of time do exist, a little illegal, to be sure, and problematic, but when one carries such contraband as ourselves — such supernumerary, unclassifiable events — one cannot be too particular. And so at some point in my story we shall attempt to take such a branch turning — a siding — and shunt this illegal history into it.
[edit] Living things
- August’s unkempt and harridan luxuriance expanded into silent hollows of enormous burdocks, holding sway with their flaps of shaggy, leafy tin plate, straggling tongues of fleshy green. There, those distended rag dolls of burdocks abounded, like expansively settled hags half devoured by their own crazy skirts.
- Ah, life — young and frail 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, how it hesitates — filled with aversion and discouragement! — to accept the venture proposed to it.
- And one of those plants, yellow and full of milky juice in pale stems, now puffed up only with air, discharged only air from its empty shoots, only fluff in the form of feathery, milky balls, strewn by the breeze and quietly pervading the azure silence.
- For it was a man! It was a man on a chain, whom I had by incomprehensible means, in a simplifying, metaphorical, comprehensive elision, taken for a dog. Please don’t misunderstand me. A dog it was, to be sure, but in human form. The quality of the canine is an internal quality, and it can manifest itself just as well in human as in animal shape.
- I understood then why animals have horns. That incomprehensibility, which could not be contained within their life, was a wild and obsessive caprice, ill-judged and blind obstinacy — some idée fixe, grown beyond the borders of their being, high over their heads, suddenly raised up into the light and solidified into palpable and hard matter. There it assumed a wild, incalculable and unbelievable shape, twisted into a fantastic arabesque — invisible to their eyes but dreadful nonetheless — into the unfamiliar numeral under whose menace they lived.
- But even further from the light there were cats. Their perfection was alarming. Wrapped up in the precision and meticulousness of their bodies, they knew neither deviation nor error. They sank for a moment into the depths of themselves, to the bottom of their being, then they froze in their soft fur, grew menacingly and ceremonially serious, and their eyes grew as round as moons, soaking up the view into their fiery craters. But a moment later, cast out to the edge, to the surface, they yawned in their nihility, disappointed and without illusions.
[edit] The seasons
- Thus begin all springs, from those enormous and astounding horoscopes, beyond the scale of a mere season of the year, and in each of them — be it nevermore said, let me say it here — there is everything: endless processions and manifestations, revolutions and barricades — and through all of them, at a certain moment, the hot wind of remembrance blows, that boundlessness of sadness and intoxication searching in vain for the adequate in reality.
- Spring’s horoscope is so measureless! Who can take amiss its intense scrutiny, reading it in any one of a hundred ways, contriving blindly and syllabising in all directions, lucky when anything at all can be deciphered among the misleading chatter of the birds? It reads that text forwards and backwards, losing the meaning and starting at the beginning again, in all of its versions, its thousand alternatives, its trills and its twitters. For spring’s text is full of meaning in its implications and insinuations, ellipses dotted without letters in empty blueness — and, in the vacant gaps between the syllables, the birds capriciously insert their own guesses and suppositions.
- In July my father went to take the waters, and he left me with my mother and older brother, at the mercy of the summer days, glowing white and stunning. We browsed, stupefied by the light, through that great book of the holiday, in which every page was aglow with splendour, and had, deep inside, a sickly sweet pulp of golden pears.
- Autumn, autumn, the Alexandrine epoch of the year, gathering into its enormous libraries all the sterile wisdom of the three hundred and sixty-five days of the solar cycle. Oh, those aged mornings, 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 ladders in his slipped-down dressing gown, sampling the preserves of all ages and cultures!
- Along came the yellow and thoroughly boring days of winter. A torn and tattered, too-short mantle of snow covered the ruddy earth. It was too meagre for the many roofs, and so they stood out black or rust coloured, shingled and thatched arks concealing the smoke-blackened expanses of the attics inside them — charred black cathedrals bristling with ribs of rafters, purlins and joists — the dark lungs of the winter gales. Each new dawn uncovered new vent pipes and chimney stacks, sprung up in the night, blown out by the nocturnal gale — the black pipes of the Devil’s organs. The chimney sweeps could not drive away the crows that perched in the evenings like living black leaves on the branches of the trees by the church; they rose up again, flapping, finally to cling once more, each to its own place on its own branch; but at daybreak they took to the air in great flocks — clouds of soot, flakes of undulating and fantastic lampblack, smearing the dull-yellow streaks of the dawn with their twinkling cawing.
[edit] The heavens
- The moon was still high. The transformations of the sky were unending — the metamorphoses of its multifarious vaults in ever more masterfully described configurations. The sky that night opened up its bewitching internal mechanism like a silver astrolabe, and exhibited the gilded mathematics of its constantly turning cogs and wheels.
- And through those two or three pulses of darkness, through that red eclipse of the blood pounding in my head, the great corvette of Guiana sailed straight over the sky, all of its sails thundering. Heftily dragged along amid thrown out lines and shouts from the tugboats, it glided with bulging, rumbling sails through a commotion of seagulls and the red splendour of the sea. Then an enormous, tangled rigging of ropes, ladders and poles appeared and spread widely over the whole sky, and a multifarious, many storeyed spectacle of lofty sails, spars and braces clamoured, their unbolted canvas booming in the heights, where tiny nimble Negro boys could be seen for a moment in the gaps, and were then swamped by that linen labyrinth, lost amid the signs and figures of a fantastic tropical sky.
- Sometimes a whole bright day passes in explosions of the sun, accumulations of clouds hanging luminously and chromatically at the fringes, their redness breaking off at every edge. People go about stupefied by the light, their closed eyes exploding inside with rockets, Roman candles and powder-kegs. Later, toward evening, that hurricane fire of light softens; the horizon has grown rotund, beautiful and 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 rouleaus of golden medals, or peals of bells combining in rosy litanies.
[edit] Journeys
- The landscape turned its yellowed pages over like an old romance, ever more pale and delicate, as if they must end in some great, scattered emptiness. In that scattered nothingness, in that yellow nirvana, we might perhaps have pulled in beyond time and reality, and remained forever in that landscape, in those warm, sterile draughts, a motionless diligence on great wheels, imprisoned amid the clouds on the parchment of the sky, an old illustration, a forgotten woodcut in an antiquated, crumbling romance — when the coachman, with the last of his strength, jerked the reins, pulled the landau out of the sweet lethargy of those winds, and steered into a forest.
- It was a long journey. Barely one or two passengers travelled on that forgotten branch line, where the train ran only once a week. Never had I seen carriages of such archaic style, spacious as rooms, dark, and full of nooks, withdrawn from the other lines long ago. Those corridors deviating at different angles and those empty, labyrinthine and cold compartments had something oddly forlorn about them, something almost ghastly. I made my way from carriage to carriage in search of some snug corner. It was windy everywhere — cold draughts cut a path through those interiors, penetrating the whole train from end to end. People sat here and there on the floor with their bundles, not daring to occupy the vacant and excessively high seats. Those bulging cedar seats were as cold as ice anyway, and sticky with age. No passengers boarded at the empty stations. Without a whistle, without a puff, the train went slowly and, as it seemed, pensively on its way.
