Incredible how time sneaks by and I make excuses not to blog, like this is some chore or activity I might actually get paid for. Oh foolish reflexes…

It’s snowing outside (or at least it was when I was originally writing this), thick flakes filling the air like it’s the middle of winter, although the newscasters on N24 are adamant that this is only an Herbststurm. They call it a hurricaine too, and touted it for three days running on the morning news, which I can’t really say I agree with, but headlines are headlines, you gotta keep people watching the ads.

Last I checked, we were just barely coming back from Greece, or maybe bouncing down to Heidelberg and the Weinstrasse, and later Prague and Czesky Krumlov with my parents. Apparently a whole season came and went. Time now for serious work again. And Russian novels; as the first flakes came down yesterday we ritually went to visit St. Georges bookshop and I picked up a copy of “Anna Karenina.” Did I say work? I meant hot toddies and books thick enough to chew on.

And so before disappearing back into silence, I must recommend a recent new discovery, the pair of Soviet science fiction writers responsible for Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”, Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky. They’re the most famous Russians of the genre, yet not well known in English-speaking circles, or not as well as the far more widely published (and Polish) Lem.

Forget about that “Stalker” reference; they wrote it, and the book it’s based on, “Roadside Picnic”, but in fact they are closer to Philip Dick or a sci-fi Chandler. Their writing is smart and funny, dark and noir-ish, their jaundiced view of human nature and institutions reflected through characters’ helpless and corrupt responses to alien or fantastic events rather than simply our own decaying urban environments.

A page about them is here, with several English translations of their work available for download. “Roadside Picnic” is one of them, I highly recommend it to anyone with any taste at all for noir or sci-fi. If anybody in Berlin has a copy of the seemingly out-of-print “Monday Starts on Saturday”, can I borrow it?

We’re back from two weeks in Poland, Hungary, and Romania, of which more, including pictures, later. But first a bit about Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, or Witkacy, a Polish artist who dominated that portion of our trip.

The son of an impossibly stern 19th century artist and critic with Nietzschean ideas of modern education, Witkacy was allowed complete freedom as a child — with the single caveat that he grow up to be a groundbreaking artist. So, you know, no pressure. He turned out as a mischevious, creative, self-doubting wreck, but entirely unique.

His paintings, once he matured, lay somewhere between Chagall and the German Expressionists, a riot of color, and cartoonish, nightmarish absurd compositions. His main love was theater, in which he wrote from what he called a “Theory of Pure Form.” He essentially believed that the best art offers a kind of internal geometry that resonates with the reader/viewer/listener in a non-rational way. The actual content of a work is irrelevant, he believed; only the underlying form itself would trigger this “metaphysical feeling,” a state more important than a simple emotional or intellectual response to the work.

In effect, he saw art as a drug. Rational and emotional responses were traps. He spent his entire life looking for transcendence of one type or another, found it himself in a series of drugs, and saw art as the only path that didn’t bring with it a hangover and self-recrimination. If he could have been religious, he might have been happier.

This metaphysical response was theoretically possible in realistic writing, he thought, and he had nothing but praise for the old Greeks; but modern post-Enlightenment realism in the theater had dulled audiences senses, so that all they knew how to experience was an emotional or intellectual reaction. The only way to let audiences find the Form was to use the grotesque, the perverse, the absurd. And he did; his plays are in a sense similar to the later absurdists, irrational, confusing, sometimes hilarious, full of nonsense philosophy and gunfire and reanimated corpses.

None of this brought him money to live, unfortunately. Depressed, he started a one-man portait-painting firm. Several types were on offer: good, realistic ones for which he charged the highest prices, and then others done under the influence of a variety of drugs, which were brilliantly distorted. He published his “Rules” of the firm, with detailed explanations of the types, and strictures such as “Any sort of criticism on the part of the customer is absolutely ruled out. … Given the incredible difficulty of the profession, the firm’s nerves must be spared.” But he hated it, and saw his role as an artist diminishing. When the Nazis invaded in 1939 he fled to the east, and then killed himself on hearing that the Soviets were invading from that direction.

Dead, he offered an appropriately Witkacy-esque sequel. Rediscovered by avant-garde directors in the 50s, his plays were re-performed. As Polish national sentiment rose in opposition to Soviet control, the Communist government ultimately hailed him as a national hero. In 1988, the government finally decided to exhume his body and rebury him as a symbol of national pride; they “found” his body and buried it with honors in Zakopane, the mountain town where he’d mostly lived. An expert consulted looked at X-rays of the corpse and realized it couldn’t be Witkacy, who had lost teeth; the government tried to cover this up and went through with the ceremony, but the information leaked out, turning the whole event into a farce worthy of one of the playwrights own works.

…even in Berlin.

…O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I though well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Most everyone is familiar with how the Afghans kicked the Soviets out after years of bitter battle. I was less familiar with an earlier version of roughly the same story, almost 150 years earlier, when the British first decided to invade in order to put their own ruler on the throne, and forestall a largely theoretical alliance between the Tsar and Afghanistan on India’s borders.

The British army had little trouble sweeping over the initial Afghan resistance. It installed itself in Kabul, with an occupying authority, a local government propped up by British troops, and all the comforts of home (or Indian home) such as port, cigars, and imported prostitutes. A year or two passed in relative comfort, until the locals started rioting. They surrounded one of the top Briton’s homes, sent someone in to show him a “safe” way out, who then led he and his brother to their deaths in the crowd. Sporadic reisistance spread, until there was an actual Afghan army on the march, led by the former ruler’s son.

The British, under a wholly incompetent general, and unwilling to be pushed into actual discomfort, offered to withdraw. A negotiation proposal came from the young Prince: a secret agreement would be signed, allowing the Brits to stay for 8 months, and giving the prince a share in government, at the expense of other Afghan leaders. The top British official accepted, went to sign, was kidnapped and killed.

Forced out, the rest of the British force, and their huge accompanying crowd of servants, wifes, etc, (16,500 people in total) took march across the passes on Christmas Day, 1841. Afghan patriots harried them all the way back, killing most of them. A single soldier, an army surgeon made it back, charging on horseback to a fort on the Indian side of the border.

The incident, according to the ridiculously nostalgiac history of the Victorian Empire that I’m reading, is still remembered with glory. From the book, in an author’s footnote:

As for the retreat from Kabul, though largely forgotten in Britain, it is vividly remembered in Afghanistan: when in 1960 I followed the army’s route from Kabul to Jalalabad with an Afghan companion, we found many people ready to point out the sites of the tragedy, and recall family exploits. I asked one patriarch what would happen now, if a foreign army invaded the country. “The same,” he hissed between the last of his teeth.

But no worries, Afghanistan is wholly peaceful now. Everybody loves us. Nothing to see there.

A real loss to journalism and politics. There isn’t anyone in the US who can take her place, whose tongue is as sharp, but whose satire is made even more poignant by her real understanding of, and even sympathy for, the blemishes of democracy.