Believe it or not, but two days ago, instead of being stuck in front of the TV, I went for a wander around the streets. When you don’t have any work to do, sitting at home all the time can make you crazy. I’m sure many of you are well aware of this. So I went aimlessly into town.
In the market square I met a guy who was obviously looking for someone. Even though it was still completely light, he was shining a candle. When I asked him who he was looking for, he replied briefly that he was ‘looking for a man’. I was surprised because there were a lot of different people around. ‘I am Marcel.
What is the name of the man you are looking for?’ – I asked, not very sure if I was phrasing the question correctly. While he was answering me rather curiously, a car drove up to us and two guys in white coats hurriedly got out. After a moment, I was surprised a second time, as they took my interlocutor away without any explanation. I started to protest, but they – splashing filthy words from between their teeth – threatened that they could ‘take me to the crazy’ too.
It was only then that I realised that the stranger was dressed in a coat, from under which protruded a completely washed-out pyjamas.
I’m a bit interested in art, and I know how many artists who are considered great today were once considered crazy. Let’s take Vincent Van Gogh, for example, who ended up in an insane asylum only because he cut off a piece of his ear after an argument with Paul Gauguen. He did it because a lady asked him to do so…. Camille Claudel, a pupil of Auguste Rodin, spent half her life in an ‘asylum’ because her family didn’t like the fact that she couldn’t see the world outside her sculptures. Antonio Gaudi may have missed out, but, imagine, it is only in the last dozen years or so that he has been regarded not as a stranger but as the most brilliant modern architect, which is all the more important because Gaudi has been dead for almost seventy years.
So maybe this stranger was also one of those misunderstood people? I mean he wouldn’t say of himself that he belonged to the people, he wouldn’t say that he was one of the people. This stranger was just explaining this to me. He was not looking for someone, he was just looking for a ‘person’. And a human being – according to him – is someone unique, alone and free. Someone without a name, who is himself, that is, who is master of himself, who lives his own life, and yet who can live without ideology – or so he told me.
I don’t know much about philosophy, and I don’t know much about politics at all, so I didn’t understand everything. I’m ashamed to say, but I didn’t know what an ‘ideology’ was? I had always heard about this or that ideology; never about what the ideology itself is. After the incident, I went to a friend of mine to enlighten me on this. He is an intellectual, you know, a bespectacled man with constantly black eyes from sleepless nights reading piles of books. Kacper, for that is my friend’s name, gave me a definition from which I understood nothing. Therefore – as tourists with little knowledge of the native language do – I asked him to repeat it again, slowly and clearly. Kacper smiled good-naturedly and began to explain to me.
- ‘A man,’ he said, imitating my way of speaking, ‘is the kind of animal that can use tools. Even the first man thrown down to Earth, when he could not yet say me or be, would grab a stick and beat with it anything that moved and could be eaten.
And if he was afraid to do so, he hurled stones at it. It is no different today, when mankind spends as much on constructing new tools for battle as it would take to fill all its empty stomachs with food. As you may know my dear Marcel – he was already speaking in his own voice – language is also a tool. It is the greatest, most complex tool that man has constructed. Unfortunately, this tool can also be used as a weapon. Such a weapon made of language is called an ideology.
Now I get it! A human being – as the stranger tried to tell me – is someone who does not fight against other human beings; someone who never takes sides in a fight. Delighted by the clarity of my own thoughts, I told Kacper my adventure with the madman. It made him laugh hard, I have no idea why. When I asked him about it, he wanted to give me a book to read about some Greek philosopher who lived, like some kind of ptarmactyl, before our era. - Don’t make fun of me,’ I told him. – I won’t understand anything from such a book.
I hate theory. Give me something with action that takes place in the present day. Something about a normal person, not some bearded wise guy. And for the book to be thin, because I don’t like thick ones. – Kacper did some digging in his bookcase and gave me a small yellow book. - ‘There was a film,’ he said, ‘Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’. Maybe you’ve seen it? – I shrugged my shoulders and he said – It was written by an Englishman, Alain Sillitoe. It’s a story about an honest man.
When I started reading this book I was sure a friend had fooled me into a bottle, because its hero is a thief. But I didn’t break and kept reading. The protagonist is sent to a reformatory for thieving as a juvenile. The boss there tells him: ‘If you play fair with us, we will repay you with the same’. And further: ‘We require honest, diligent work and good sportsmanship,’ he still said. – If you meet these two conditions, you can be sure that we, for our part, will do our duty and send you from here back among the people as a decent human being.’ Kacper was not making fun of me at all! They, quite simply, would only make an honest man out of a thief. To this end, they suggested that he practise long-distance running. He didn’t want to run at first, but then agreed. He started to cooperate, as they say.
But further on, something in the story didn’t feel right. The protagonist did not want to be an ‘exemplary citizen’ at all. He ran not to become an honest man, but because when he ran, he felt free. These were the thoughts going through his head: ‘I am a man, I think, I have my secrets, I have a life going on inside me that he – the director of the reformatory – has no idea about, that he will never know about, because he is stupid. (…) He is stupid, and I am not, because I can see through people like him, and he cannot see through people like me. (…) When he talks to me, and I look into that corporal mouth of his, I know that I am alive and he is dead. (…) It is possible for a man to become a corpse when he takes power over others into his hands.’
My word to you, at times I thought this boy was a real nutter, because he would like to put people against a wall and execute them. Heroes who volunteer to go to war he would lock up in prison for attempted suicide. The strangest thing, however, is that he considered himself to be a man of integrity, as if there were different integrity and not just one, as is commonly known. Anyway, read for yourself: ‘…I have come to the conclusion that what the director extols does not at all apply to a man who was born and brought up in such conditions as I was. People like the director will never understand that I am honest, have always been honest and will always be honest. It sounds strange. But it’s true, because I know what integrity means in my terms, and the director only knows his own idea of integrity. I think my honesty is the only true honesty in the world, and he thinks the same about his. That’s why guys like me are locked up in this dirty big house, behind walls and wires, in the middle of nowhere. But if the whip were in my hand, I wouldn’t bother building such houses to house policemen, directors, posh whores, grifters, officers and members of parliament. No. I’d put them up against a wall and smash them down, as they would have done to the likes of us long ago if, it is understood, they had a concept of real honesty…’
At first I didn’t drip any of this. It wasn’t until somewhere in the middle of the book that it began to dawn on me why Kacper had given me this particular book. Well, this boy was fighting a war, but he wasn’t doing it with an ideology. He did not take sides. He himself was a party in this war.
Who was he fighting? With them. Yes, with them. With the people. With those who considered themselves to be some kind of ‘we’.
For example, with a policeman or the director of a reformatory, each of whom threatened him on behalf of some of them. Interestingly, he was not the one who instigated this war. He didn’t even know when it broke out. He only found out he was fighting it in the middle of it. It is a war that society is waging against a man who does not want to be part of society; a war of the morality of the crowd against the inner honesty of the man; a war of the freedom that the community allows against the freedom that the individual man feels within himself.
In practice, it looks like this: a man comes into the world and people, as soon as he grows up a little, want to remake him in their fashion. First, they are kindness, at school. Then, when he rebels, he goes to an insane asylum or, as in this book, to a reformatory, to the army, to prison…
And if all that didn’t break him, then in the electric chair. Yes, it’s a war no joke. They are armed to the teeth, with many ideologies. They have schools, police, military, law, politics, religion, and they can have a family too, yes, a family, although it’s not mentioned in the book. The hero of the book, on the other hand, had nothing. Nothing but his reason, his own reason.
An ideology for another ideology – this is how I theorise it – is only an apparent enemy. When two ideologies clash, both grow stronger. So all ideologies are allies despite the fact that they are apparently fighting each other. Their real enemies are people who do not recognise any ideology. They, when they fight, do not support the ideology, but undermine the foundations of the whole system. They are internal enemies, alone, which is why they are difficult to detect. And when the supporters of an ideology detect such a person they try to destroy him at all costs.
Why fight such a war? Is it possible to win in it? Can one man defeat a whole crowd of people? Is it not better to surrender at once? Probably yes, if one had the choice.
But here’s the thing: one doesn’t have a choice. It’s just that most don’t know which side they’re on, and they don’t even know there’s a war going on. After all, they don’t write about it on the front pages of newspapers, as is the case with normal wars. Only some people happen to find out about it. But then they no longer have a choice anyway. The sides have been set, the rules too. The mother faces the daughter. The son facing the father. The teacher opposite the student. The policeman opposite the poor man. The boss opposite the subordinate. Everyone is fighting against each other. The world is a battlefield.
As you know I don’t know about philosophy, psychology and such…. I can’t explain it intelligently. Perhaps there is some force, some fear drive or safety instinct. What I do know, however, is that most people can sell themselves so long as they don’t differentiate themselves from others. They put on suits of restraint, duty, fidelity to principles and shake their pants for fear of being wrong, of someone pointing the finger at them. They tell themselves that they do not live alone. Life is serious, they say. – The rest is childishness or madness. About truths, they say, about God, and still about beauty, about goodness. For these their noblest ideas they have cursed nature. They have denied sensual love. But this he adds from himself, because the hero of the story does not yet have such things in his head.
I will not write how the story ends; whether the hero wins or loses. It depends, by the way, from which side you look at it. A defeat can be a victory, can’t it? Even if they lock someone up in a reformatory or a lunatic asylum, it can be a stroke of luck for them.
I wouldn’t say that about Camille Claudel, however. This amazing woman sculptor, unable to create, spent thirty years in a hospital for lunatics. Anne Delbee has written a wonderful book about her. I have it on my shelf – if I may boast. It stands alongside Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Letters to My Brother’, Paul Gauguin’s ‘Noa Noa’ and Somerset Mougham’s novel ‘The Moon and the Sixpence’, which is precisely about Gauguin. I mean it’s not quite about him, but I don’t want to explain that now.
There is a passage in it that I associated with all these events and musings.
‘Conscience is in the individual the guardian of the laws that society has established for its own protection. It is a policeman, placed in our hearts to guard the observance of these laws. It is a spy embedded in the central fortress of our ‘self’. The desire for approval is so strong in man, his fear of criticism so strong, that he has himself introduced an enemy within his own walls. This enemy guards him, ever vigilant in the interests of his master, ready to crush any half-formed desire of the individual to break out of the herd; to force him to put the good of the whole above his own. This is the strongest bond linking the individual to the whole. And the individual, by surrendering to a good he has deemed more important than his own, makes himself the slave of his caretaker. He seats him in a place of honour. And then, like a courtier cloaking himself before the royal staff, which falls on his shoulders, he boasts of the sensitivity of his conscience. He finds no words harsh enough for one who does not recognise the authority of conscience. For as a member of society he is acutely aware that he is powerless against it.’
I do not know where those who do not belong to society, such as this long-distance runner, come from. They are not powerless. True, they don’t have the weapons, the ideology, with which to fight others, the people. You can lock them up, take away their freedom of action, but you cannot take away their freedom of thought. This madman-philosopher, for example, after our brief conversation, they certainly locked him in a room without handles, but they could not take away his thoughts. ‘A person is someone who thinks independently’ – at the time he explained this to me I didn’t understand him.
The next day, after reading the book, I went to see my friend again. - Now I understand everything – I started confidently. – The only freedom anyone has is the freedom of thought!
- You are wrong. No one has such freedom,’ said Kacper, and it was as if someone had punched me in the gut with his fist. – You see, Marcel, everyone learns a language as a child. And with language comes a certain way of thinking. Thoughts, though not identical to words, are shaped by the mother tongue. And no language is neutral. Language does not reflect reality like a mirror, but rather imitates it, just as a map does. It exaggerates some elements of reality, ignores others, generalises. It also organises and even, to a certain extent, creates images of reality itself. In order to know all these influences in detail, one would have to know theoretically and practically a multitude of completely different languages, which, as far as I know, no one has yet managed to do.
- No freedom? – I concluded resignedly, unable to recover.
- At least nobody has learnt about freedom of thought, if there is such a thing,’ Kacper corrected me matter-of-factly. – Language, as I told you last time, is a tool, and every tool, while giving us some possibilities, at the same time takes away others, limits us.
- But it is possible to construct a universal tool. Can’t it be done with language?
- Perhaps one day, if people, just as they are busy today building ever more perfect machines, would get on with perfecting language…. – my friend finished his sentence with a smile.
- And how to do that? – I followed this thought like a hungry hunter after game. – Let’s say, how to express these ambiguities of the words ‘man’ and ‘people’?
Kacper got up from his chair and started walking back and forth across the room, as is his habit. - I understand,’ he replied after walking for a while. – A person once as someone special and once as one of many. And vice versa. People as a grey crowd, or a few individuals.
- Yes – I nodded rather than said, waiting in suspense.
- Of course, what is not implicit in the words can always be explicated.
- What do you mean? – I let him know who he was talking to.
- Perhaps we simply do not have enough words. In that case, they need to be created. The easiest way would be to form the plural from ‘man’, as a unity, and the singular from ‘people’, as a plurality. From ‘man’, let us say: ‘manki’, ‘mank’, and from ‘people’: ‘ludź’. [here is a play on words that I can’t translate, sorry]
- It sounds a bit strange – I couldn’t hide my disappointment.
- Or from ‘czleka’: ‘czlowiecy’, which in variation would sound: ‘of men’, “to men”, “with men”, “about men”- without paying any attention to me my friend linguised – and, on the other hand, “lud” as “lud”, the feminine gender is: ‘luda, ludka, lu…’. [as above]
- It’s all nice – I bumped into his newly-created word – only who will understand me when I start talking like that?
- That’s the whole problem – he paused, clearly annoyed that I interrupted him when he was inspired. – These words should be in use and have a fixed meaning, because meaning is the most important thing in language! – he finished smugly to remind me that he had to stoop to my level because I was a layman and he was an expert.
I will not attempt to continue our conversation. I could easily have got something wrong as we kept adding new words. We set about improving the Polish language. It got to the point where both my interlocutor and I were parched. As we didn’t want to waste any time brewing tea, my friend took a flask of the beverage from the bar. The conversation slowly turned into a heated discussion. I declared that it could not go on like this. I decided to create a new state ruled by human beings, not by humans. I called it Mankind. On the spur of the moment, I came up with a battle slogan, which, despite the late hour, I practised out loud: Members of all countries unite! For this was the term I used to describe the activists for human independence.
Kacper began to argue with me that this was not possible. - People live to make people better! – he protested. – Everyone, without exception, lives to make things better! And that’s why you have to respect every human being…. Because after all, we don’t know what he is, why he was born and what else he can do. Man! That’s wonderful! – he said pathetically, which I did not expect from him. – It sounds proud: a man! A man must be respected! Not to pity him… Not humiliate him with this pity… He must be respected! Let us drink to the honour of man!
Finally reconciled, we sang in chorus:
Brunettes, blondes
I want to kiss you all
I want to kiss you all!
I got home late because I had so many new words in my head that I got on the wrong bus line. When I realised my fatal distraction, I decided to find out where I would get on that bus. Unfortunately, I inadvertently addressed the female passenger sitting next to me as ‘human’, which she clearly did not like. I got off the bus at the first opportunity and cursed the madman under my breath, because it was he who started it all. I firmly resolved to myself never to talk to strangers who, in their pyjamas under their coat, with a candle in their hand, are looking for no one they know. I also hurled some heavy insults at Kacper, despite our friendship, because it was he, after all, who had made water out of my brain with his uncontrollable wordiness. Imagine, the smug bastard wanted to lend me another, as he said, similar book: some Lawrence ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ of some sort. Of course, I declined, because I am not so stupid as not to be able to tell the difference between an erotica and an ordinary novel.
A man is a man, and men are men – I foolishly consoled myself by walking home. Although I don’t deny, everyone would like to see themselves and others unequivocally. Do you remember that Akira Kurosawa film with three protagonists and three versions of one story? No one put it better. Everyone wants to see themselves as the hero, the ruthless bastard or his helpless victim, and others as friends or enemies. Yes, we all want clarity. But life is ambiguous. Bloody ambiguous! Therefore, I give my head for it, there are no omniscient people. Probably my friend is wrong about more than one thing too. And even if there is no freedom of thought, can’t freedom exist somewhere beyond matter and beyond thought? For all I know, perhaps there is some freedom of consciousness that even death cannot take away from us? I once read the Japanese Death Poems, so I know something about that. How wonderful is painting, sculpture, architecture…. In them this eternal consciousness is able to create without the mediation of the intellect. That’s probably why great artists are considered madmen – they can do without language. Kacper would be of a different opinion, but let him…!
When I returned there was still Somerset’s book on the table: a biography of the painter, quasi Paul Gauguin. I thought I’d do a bit of reading before I got drowsy. By chance, I opened it to a page where the author wrote down this thought: ‘Each of us is alone in the world. Locked, as it were, in a fortress, he can only communicate with his fellows by means of signs, and signs have no common value, their meaning is unclear and doubtful. We strive earnestly to communicate the treasures of our heart to others, but they do not know how to receive them; so we walk alone side by side, but not together, unable to know other people and not known by them. We are like people living in a foreign country whose language they speak so poorly that, although they have beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to self-taught banalities. Their brains are swirling with a whirlpool of thoughts, and they only know how to say that the gardener’s aunt’s umbrella is in the house.’
I’m feeling cruelly dry right now, my head is throbbing, but despite this I have no regrets. I may not have grown in knowledge, as if the opposite were true, but I think I am wiser. Therefore, I have a request to all of you who care about me. Don’t ask me questions, don’t require me to know, and don’t think I understand any of this. I don’t even have a clue why I’m writing all this. All I know is that you are incapable of fulfilling my request, and yet this meagre knowledge is already beyond my strength. The only thing that keeps me alive – and I feel so bad today that I don’t even want to live – is the hope that there is a man somewhere, the one person who can share my philosophical madness, and that I will find him before the people in white coats find me and take me to a house without handles.