By Romuald Roman

It’s easy to write about yourself, but if you stray too far from familiar vicissitudes of your own life, then recreating a realistic human character is more difficult to achieve. In my youth a daredevil, and to this day a joker, I have difficulty identifying with an ideal statesman like George Washington, or serious-to-the-point-of-pain John Adams, or morally conflicted slave owner Thomas Jefferson. But Benjamin Franklin? His outsized personality, his humor, his communitarianism, his idealism, his pragmatism… Now there’s a man for all ages! In fact, I’d rather write about Franklin than write about myself!

If the German nation was created by philosophers, the English by merchants and the Italian by artists, then who created the Poles? Alas, the Polish character was created by poets, and even worse, Romantic poets. Poles are sad, sensitive, jittery, and complain about everything. We’’ve lost battles heroically, cried for our lost homeland, and put honor above wealth, all to no avail. If, instead of Juliusz Słowacki, Poles had read Franklin, their country would have been richer, happier, and more powerful. Consider Słowacki’s romanticization of death by armed horsemen in these eight memorable lines:

> Surging like a vast current of salmon or sheatfish,
> Coiling up and down like an iron serpent
> That rears now its torso, now its head,
> The armed horsemen breast the prairie grass. —
> But hold! my song’s device breaks down:
> My Muse begs a rest, having drained her cup
> Empty of sweet nectar; and so, farewell
> To you, on that steppeland rise…

Hard to drain your cup of sweet nectar and build a nation at the same time! We Poles are unlucky Franklin was born in Boston, not Warsaw. But never too late! It’s been a couple of centuries, and we have a long way to go, but who knows, perhaps, after some delay, Franklin medicine will heal the Polish soul.

One can hope, always. No matter, because writing this book was great fun. Thanks to having the complete works of Franklin in several volumes on my study shelves, I didn’t have to run around libraries or search the Internet. I read for myself page after page of what the Philadelphia doctor wrote. What enjoyment! I could choose the tastiest morsels from a big platter, because some of Franklin’s most interesting insights were buried in his political or scientific writings. When I found something like this, it was like landing a fat fish out of a pond, like finding a cep mushroom in the woods.

I never thought I would write a book about Franklin. The idea occurred to me one evening when I was lost in the pages of Poor Richard’s Almanack. “What jewels!” I thought to myself as I took delight in one aphorism after another. I am uncomplicated, simple-minded, and literaryunprofessional. For those who have read Ulysses and À la recherche du temps perdu cover-tocover, these Franklin verses must seem as simple as a child’s drawing of a deer, filled as they are with infantile rhymes and trite half-truths.

Did I mention I am simple-minded? I thought, “The Almanack is great, but English is not my native tongue. I could learn Franklin’s wisdom more quickly and more efficiently by reading the Polish edition.” Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? But despite Franklin’s significance in American and European history, no Polish edition existed. Poles don’t need the Poor Richard’s Almanack—not with inspirational poets like Juliusz Słowacki!

So at night I read Franklin rhymes to my pillow, slowly absorbing the quaint English, always thinking, “How would you say this in Polish?” Then I thought, “Maybe my children and grandchildren—after all, they have some of my genes—could also, like me, enjoy Franklin. Maybe his advice would help them in life? Maybe they would remember me, their father or grandfather, as the one who encouraged them to follow this great American’s life wisdom?” So for each of my children, Peter, Matthew, and Katia, I bought Poor Richard’s Almanack. Will it help them? They know English. Will they wise up sooner? I hope so. In many life matters my children are already smarter than me.

To my daughter Katia, my oldest, I gave three copies: a modern easy-to-read version, a lovely special edition with illustrations by Norman Rockwell, and a collector’s edition more than a hundred years old, so I put a considerable amount into her education, but what a payoff! Katia is so enterprising Franklin himself would be proud of her. I’m proud of her too. She does good work for the community, feeding thousands of Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw. So I guess my Franklin strategy has been successful in at least one life.

But what about my fellow Poles who do not read English? Well, I think the time is now. The war in Ukraine created a miracle in Poland as throughout the world: awakening a global conscience. Normally when Russia attacks a weaker neighbor, other countries only look on, wringing their hands. No one dares meddle. If on the street you see a husband slap his wife in the face, you turn the other way and pretend you didn’t see anything, right? That’s the most convenient way. Keeps you from having to confront the husband, who clearly is already angry. And big, too.

Before our eyes, the Russian thug attacked Ukraine, and witnessing their heroic defense, the world said: “Leave Ukraine alone! This is not allowed! We will not let you carry out crimes!” Foremost among those who nobly defend Ukraine is Poland. Six million Ukrainians have crossed the border into Poland, and you know what? The government did not create any refugee camps. Poles invited refugees into their homes.

Prior to this crisis, how many decades did our two nations live in discord? And now such brotherhood! Where did this come from? I don’t know. Internet and television create a global village so the suffering of others is more immediate, closer to us, as if we ourselves are being wronged. Who knows if it may now be the rule, the natural reaction of the world, that nations defend justice around the globe.

So Poland’s heart is open today. Poles have embraced compassion and humanitarianism as a society. Let us nurture this new society with simple wisdom. Yes, this is a perfect time for Poles to understand the pragmatic idealism of Benjamin Franklin.

— Translation of the preface to

**Author Bio**

Romuald Roman is a popular Polish writer whose work has never before appeared in English. He is a graduate of the Agricultural University of Krakow and Temple University in Philadelphia. He has been a naturalist in Poland’s Tatra National Park, mountain climber, teacher, skier, expert on industrial toxicity at the EPA, and a UN consultant in Poland and Romania. He has published six books in Polish, two novels and four collections of stories, and is a member of London-based Związek Pisarzy Polskich na Obczyźnie (Association of Polish Writers Abroad). Since 1984, Roman has resided in Philadelphia. Married to his wife Jolanta for 45 years, they are parents of three grown children: Katia Roman-Trzaska, Matt Roman, and Peter Roman.

The post Wisdom for Poland: Can Benjamin Franklin’s Pragmatism Transform Polish National Character? appeared first on Idil Biret Education Initiative.

An elderly Polish woman befriends a homeless bottle collector, revealing how kindness, survival, and authenticity thrive in life’s unexpected corners.

A Short Story by Romuald Roman

I sit and look at the garden and think to myself that someone else wouldn’t be able to just look at the flowers and trees minute by minute, just wondering what to do here, which weed to pull, which plant to replant, which chair to put on the table, do something…

I do nothing. I just watch. Nobody’s watching me, nobody’s trying to get me to do anything (“because you’ll get old quicker from doing nothing, Grandpa”), I just sit there, like a tree or a stone. I also think slowly, lazily. What would I do to make me happy? Eat something? Eh, no. I just ate recently. Make myself a drink? A bit early. Oh I know! I’ll call Irena.

Irena is my age. She lives in Katowice. She has always lived in Katowice. She worked there for over forty years, raised two sons, buried her husband three years ago and now lives alone. She’s not poor, so she doesn’t have to scrimp very much, but she doesn’t have much extra to spend either.

Spend on what? In your seventies, traveling gets tiresome and you become less and less curious about the world. When traveling, you can fall ill and that’s a problem. And if you’re on a distant, exotic trip, it’s a tragic shame! So why travel?

Irena doesn’t even like to drive around town. To the shop, to the post office, even to the doctor – almost everywhere. She takes her shopping bag with her and walks. If you live alone and are old, you don’t need to buy much. It’s even healthier to eat less. And it’s easier to live by having only the essentials, without getting attached to unnecessary things. That’s her philosophy.

I met Irena when she visited relatives in Warsaw after her husband’s death. They, good people, thought if they invited her to visit—by having a transition period between visiting the hospital every day watching Staszek fade away—she would forget more easily that she was now alone with years of loneliness ahead. A noble reflex on the part of these relatives, right? So she came. First for a week, then a second week, until she stayed in Warsaw for a whole month. It didn’t seem right to stay longer. Why should she? They live differently.

These relatives of Irena’s, Nina and Andrzej, have been friends of ours for forty years, from back when we all lived in Philadelphia. They returned to Poland, we didn’t. Nina has her principles, she believes a long-standing friendship is more precious than jewelry or beautiful clothes. That’s why Nina doesn’t neglect old friendships. Whenever we are in Poland, we know their house will always welcome us.

This is how I met Irena three or four years ago. She was looked lost among the Art Nouveau furniture, Italian fridges, German food processors, shiny parquet floors, carpets and huge windows through which the greenery of the garden entered the living room. Nina and Andrew live beautifully. Irena would have liked to clean but didn’t have anything to do there. The staff cleaned and dinners weren’t cooked in this house. This was not the simple life back in Katowice she was accustomed to.

It took us only a few days for Irena and me to realize we were soul mates.

We’d rather avoid the glamour of life and distant travel. We are among those who think: “it’s fine the way it is”, “as long as there’s peace and quiet”, or “what’s there to fight about?”

Nina and my wife always have something to talk about, to buy, to go somewhere. Andrew is still working, so he spends hours with his computer. Irena and I are a bit left on the side.

But slowly, without rushing, sometimes Irena helping me with the computer, or other times when I shared stories with her about the Peloponnesian War and Spinoza’s sad life, over time we noticed we see the world similarly, without big dreams and great expectations, and we both avoid revolutionary change. This is how we are.

Others, and these others in the world are the majority, still act. And us, we don’t know how to act like that, we just let life carry us. This similarity of character has meant that, when each of us has returned home, we occasionally phone each other and tell each other what has gone wrong in our lives, or, more rarely, what nice things have happened and seek confirmation that we are the normal ones and the world is crazy.

So I’m sitting in this garden, in Warsaw, at my daughter Katya’s house. My family are all over me, telling me incessantly not to make an old man of myself, that I could still do this and that and the other thing. I wonder if something really is wrong with me. I’m heartbroken. Here, where I am now, the only person who approves of me as I am is me. Everyone else is “just helping” me.

I phone Katowice.

Thank goodness Irena doesn’t try to point out how hopeless I am and laugh at my shortcomings, she just tells me about herself, that she does things she’s too ashamed to admit, and to prove it she admits to me that recently (just so I don’t tell anyone about it!) she’s been eating vegetables thrown out of the shops.

“Ooooo… This is indeed something I would never have suspected you of, Irena. If my wife caught me doing something like that, she’d throw me out of the house, divorce me and change her name.”

“I know, I know, but listen to the whole story and try to understand me. If I know you, you would have done the same thing. Because it was like this: I’m going to do my shopping for lunch, and I see near my house a young woman picking discarded bottles from a rubbish bin.”

“A beggar? Yes?”

“She didn’t look like a beggar. She was in her thirties, neither pretty nor ugly, you know, the kind of young woman you see a lot of on the street, and not dirty, not ragged or torn in any way, neatly dressed, and she was looking for these bottles.”

“Maybe a poor Ukrainian woman who didn’t have a job and out of desperation is searching through rubbish bins?”

“Not that, either. I felt sorry for her and went up to her and asked: Do you not have a job? Because if you do, maybe I can help you, I can ask around among your friends if anyone needs someone to clean their flat, or to look after an elderly person, maybe to walk their dog, I can’t promise, but maybe I can find some work for you.

“Meanwhile, the woman smiles politely at me and shakes her head and says no, that she can make a living from collecting bottles and doesn’t need another job. So I say ‘I just wanted to help. Goodbye!’ And she, too, says ‘Goodbye!’

“I walk away. I have taken a few steps and I hear someone behind me calling out: ‘Ma’am, ma’am! Please don’t be offended. I really appreciate that you thought of me. You’re a good person, but I don’t need anything, any help, I can manage.’”

“So began our acquaintance,” said Irena. “Every few days I’d see her on the street. As soon as we caught sight, she’d always be the first to greet me and smile warmly. So I’d stop and chat. Her name was Kasia. She liked dogs and cats. I was usually walking Homer, so she and the dog got to like each other (and Homer knows people, he won’t let bad people touch him). Once he licked her hand, I had no doubt that she was a good person.

“She told me that she was now looking for an old bike with a rack, so that it would be easier for her to transport glass bottles, because on her back in a rucksack they’re heavy, and yes, she’ll put it on the rack; it’ll be easier.

“I agreed with her and started looking for such a bike myself. But she found one first. No wonder, she walks so much on the streets that she reads various advertisements on poles or in shops about what people write about what they want to sell. So she bought a bike, a decent one, not old at all, and attached two bags to the sides, so that if you counted the bottles in the rucksack and the bags, there was room for more than fifty bottles altogether. Kasi updated me on her bottles every time we met. ‘Ms Irena! Look, it’s only eleven o’clock and I already have everything full – sixty-four bottles.’ I now knew how many bottles fit into her bags. Then it occurred to me. ‘Wouldn’t it be more efficient to transport the bottles on a trolley; after all, you could pull a small two-wheeled trolley with a bottle pack behind your bike. I remember back in the day, milkmen used to distribute milk bottles to our house on such trolleys. But that was a long, long time ago and not in the big cities, only in the towns. Where would such a trolley still be found today?’

“I shared this thought with Kasi and she rejoiced immensely: ‘Great idea Ms Irena! I’ll tell Antek as soon as I meet him!’

‘And who is Antek?’ I ask.

‘He’s my boyfriend. We’ve been together for six months now. Maybe you’ll meet him one day, but he doesn’t come here often, so you’ll have to wait.’

‘He collects bottles too?’

‘Yes, but not in this neighborhood, after all I said …’

‘Yes, yes, I understand, I’ll have to wait.’

“Thus I learned of Antek, the much older man with whom she lived. For how long? What do they have in common? What, or rather who, was in her life before that? I didn’t ask. You know, I don’t ask because I myself hate it when someone questions me. Why would anyone want to know another person’s secrets? Usually just for the empty satisfaction of knowing the details and being able to judge that this questioner is better than the one who gave in to the pressure of the questions.

“Am I right? Isn’t that what this is all about? That everyone wants to convince themselves that they are the better, smarter, cleverer one?”

“You’re right,” I answered her. “People invade the private lives of others with questions, but not to help.”

“Oh no! When someone questions you too much, prying and digging, wanting to know something, it’s definitely not to help.”

“Even though hundreds of kilometers lie between us and we don’t see each other, we stop talking at the same time, because each has remembered how unpleasant it is when nosy people want to pry into our lives. For me, this topic seems to have gotten under my skin more strongly, because I’m the first to add:

“‘It’s how they ask. They’ll slip in questions not because they care about you, but to gain an advantage over you by knowing details, to find something they can use.’

“‘Yes yes my dear,’ said Irena. ‘You hit the nail on the head. You better believe I didn’t ask Kasi anything. I gave her time, thinking if she wants to brag about something, she’ll tell me about it and if she doesn’t, she won’t.

“By using this technique—waiting, not asking questions, not seeming to pry—I found out this Antek of hers knows how to make things. She shared the idea of a bicycle trailer with him and he thought it was doable. Immediately he started constructing a trolley in his mind—looking for different parts for days—to surprise Kasia. Yes, and now he’s putting it all together. He’s got an old pram, various metal parts, bicycle wheels, white plastic tubing, a tabletop, all sorts of bits and pieces he’s picked up from rubbish dumps, to make a lightweight but sturdy bike trailer for transporting bottles.”

“‘He succeeded?’ I asked

“‘Indeed!’ Irena continued to tell me the story, ‘about a week later I met Kasi again. This time Kasi was riding an upgraded bicycle with a trolley attached, dozens of bottles clattering merrily behind her. Passers-by stared, but she didn’t care, because she knew the bottle business was getting better and better.’

“I interjected, ‘But you, Irena, your story has gone completely off the rails. After all, you were supposed to tell me how it came to be that you eat spoiled vegetables, and you are reporting to me on the construction of bicycle trailers.’

“’Indeed. I stand corrected. Let me pick up the thread. Some time passed and we met on Pilsudski Street near that big Carfur shop. After greeting me, Kasi hesitated a little, then asked me, as if searching for the right words so as not to offend me:

“‘Do you have a garden?’

“‘No.’

“‘A balcony?’

“‘Yes, I have a balcony, a big one.’

“’Do you grow flowers on that balcony of yours? Because, you see, if you want to try, I found some discarded ones from the shop, which nobody bought and they look worse now, but they’re in the ground – if you water them – they’ll come back to life. Look … how can you throw it away? You have to give the flowers a chance! After all, there is still life in these leaves!”

“Kasi showed me several pots in her trailer, flowers starting to wilt. ‘it’s easier for the shop staff to throw them away than to water them. I chose three pots for myself, put them in my bag and went home with flowers instead of bread, but once I had flowers in my bag, there was no room for other purchases.”

“’And you saved the flowers’ lives? And they grow? I asked her.’

“’They grow beautifully. As if they want to repay me.’

I grew impatient at Irena’s meandering.

“And the spoiled vegetables?” I insisted. “We’re closer with flowers, but you can’t eat flowers. What about the vegetables?”

“Just listen! You might guess, Kasi increased the assortment of found goods, because she could pack found things on the bike trailer. It’s easier to pull things than to carry them on your back. During her search, she also ventured into further regions of the city, where she explored the rubbish bins of large warehouses. We no longer saw as often as we used to. But well, well! let her business grow!

“That’s when, after about a week of not seeing each other, I met Kasi with her trailer fully loaded, covered with a plastic sheet pinned around the edges so you can’t see what’s inside.

“’What are you carrying there, Kasia?’ I ask. ‘Looks like you have the whole shop with you!’

“’Just so you know! I have a whole vegetable store today! But wait a minute … Wait a minute!’ So Kasi opens a piece of cloth and removes a package with six tomatoes, tests each tomato with a touch through the wrapping, smiles with satisfaction, then hands me the tomatoes and says:

“‘OK, now tell me what’s wrong with them?’

“Now I touch each tomato, one after another. When I finished I agree with her.

“’Nothing. Just beautiful, good-looking tomatoes.’

“Well, you see. And they’ve knocked them off the shop shelves! Go ahead and get them! You just have to eat them right away today, okay?”

Irene stopped talking and waited for my reaction.

“Of course you showed your gratitude to her, thanked her and …took the ‘trash’ tomatoes. And then, you ate them with relish?”

“Of course! And you wouldn’t take one?”

“I would have taken one too. After all, you can’t refuse such a gift from the heart.”

“And would you have eaten them as I did?”

“By all means. I’m inundated from all sides with appeals to protect nature, save the climate, live ecologically – should I be the one to throw away edible tomatoes? Should I turn my nose up at the fact that they were found in a dumpster? Of course I would eat them!”

“Hm …. Except you wouldn’t overlook the fact that you’re now holding another giveaway: “and waiting for you to eat, ‘still edible’ onions, ‘slightly yellowed’ leeks, ‘just a little wilted’ lettuce and aged ‘fresh’ basil that’s still fit to make pesto.”

“So, you stopped buying vegetables because you had supplies from Kasi?”

“Not quite, but for a couple of weeks I didn’t know what to do with it here anymore. After all, I couldn’t refuse her, because she treated me like a close friend, and on the other hand … after all, do you understand?”
“I understand. But you said ‘for a few weeks’. And what happened after a few weeks?”

“Kasi changed her work profile. She switched from picking vegetables to meat.”

“What?”

“Yes. She was collecting expired cold cuts to give to dogs and cats.”

“It’s a good thing it was cats and not you.”

“Very good, because out-of-date cold cuts … That, with all my sympathy for Kasi, I wouldn’t eat anymore.”

“Me neither. It shakes me up. But who are these cold cuts for?”

“For dogs and cats. Kasi and Antek, in what was a rented shed, have created an asylum for homeless dogs and cats.”

“Beautiful! Wonderful! And have they been successful? Enough of this collecting for people and animals?”

“Not only that they have succeeded, they have succeeded by opening a ‘shelter’ for animals, competing with officially operating animal hotels.”

“This one already qualifies as a fairy tale! That two homeless people would find a place in life by creating a hotel for four-legged animals out of nothing, without any funding? What a beautiful ending to the story of the accidentally met Kasi! And what do you think, Irena? How will it all turn out next? Will they succeed in the long run?”

Irena didn’t answer for a long while.

I, too, contemplated what might also happen to two brave, noble people who make their living by taking advantage of opportunities that “fell from heaven” to them.

“I think they can go on like this,” I said.

“Maybe they can even develop this animal shelter of theirs into a legitimate animal hotel?”

And already, in my mind, I had begun to follow a truly American scenario of how Kasi and Antek create a business, rent a suitable building, hire a semi-truck, arrange official permits to run an animal hotel. And on and on they go, as they create a whole network of such shelters, become rich and …”

Such was my momentum in this prediction of the story of the Polish version of the American dream that I shared it with Irena. And she:

“Now I’ll tell you something: Last year I found a small birch tree in the backyard, against the wall of the house. The tree was probably a few years old by now, but it was as small as a potted flower. But it lasted. Twisted, huddled against a brick wall, growing in rubble and stones. Constantly undernourished. Constantly in the shadows. It looked as if it were ashamed of being poor and decrepit.

“I felt sorry for the tree. dug it up gently, brought it to the balcony and put it in a large pot with extra-rich soil for flowers. I placed the pot in a sunny spot, but not so sunny that the birch would suffer from too much sun, and I watered it whenever the soil in the pot didn’t seem moist enough.

“You know what happened? In two months my birch tree was dead. Yes, it died. Everything a plant needs to thrive—sunshine, water, soil—yet leaves fell and only dry stick was left.”

“Uhmmmm … So do you think the same thing would have happened with Kasi and Antek?”

“I think so.”

“That they are not destined for great success and a life of great excess?”

“They… No! They’re like that birch tree.”

* * *

This is the end. I don’t know what happened with these people. Irena doesn’t know either, because she stopped running in to Kasia. Any scenario is possible. We can hope things improved, that their great success didn’t end in tragedy.

But they probably weren’t the best candidates for an American dream. After all, they must have had issues in the past to find themselves on the street collecting bottles. You can’t catapult such a person into another world to turn into a capitalist fortune hunter. You need to approach people gently, to try to understand, to help, but don’t impose your expectations on them.

Like… birch trees, some of us survive in cracks in the cobblestones, or huddled against a wall. Too much sun, too much water, too much love, and they wither away.

The post The Birch Tree’s Lesson: A Polish Tale of Homeless Heroes, Animal Rescue, and Life’s Simple Truths appeared first on Idil Biret Education Initiative.

By Romuald Roman

[From Zakopane Mon Amour, a Memoir coming in 2026]

Grandma Rita tells me about my father: I never called my father “dad,” not even in my thoughts. He was always “father” to me. A bad man who lived in our house and did so much harm to us that it would have been better if he didn’t exist at all, because he only made my mother cry, worried Grandma Rita, and kept us poor. He was a bad man, my father. Grandma Rita’s words left no doubt.

“You’re still a child, but you can see for yourself what kind of father you have. There’s nothing good in him, only evil. He’s different from the fathers of your friends, isn’t he? They work, bring home hard-earned money, buy toys for their children, buy dresses for their wives, save money for better apartments, maybe even for cars, but your father, what? What does he do all day? He lies in bed pretending to be sick, or even worse – he drinks alcohol. Because – and it makes me very sad to tell you this – your father is an alcoholic. Yes! An alcoholic! You just need to look in his trash bin – he drinks a bottle of wine every day. He drinks with lunch. He drinks with dinner. He can’t live without drinking. He can’t live without alcohol. Oh! Poor you, poor thing! To have such a father! And to drink so much, he needs money. Once he had money, I won’t tell you how he got it, because it’s obvious how – through human suffering or some kind of theft. God! My God! What a terrible man! But now that he has no money or gold, he sells things from the house. You can see it yourself, I don’t need to tell you; he takes down paintings from the walls, in his room, in your room – and sells them. Look at the display cabinet, there’s less and less porcelain in it because he’s sold most of the things. He sold them for vodka!”

Grandma was telling the truth. For several days, I would burst into tears whenever I remembered the morning experience of visiting my father in his room. I was looking at pictures of animals in the four-volume edition of Brehm’s Animal Life when some people came to him and asked if they could see our porcelain. He asked them to wait in the hallway, then got out of bed, put on his burgundy robe, and leaning on his cane, very politely showed them what he had to sell. Among piles of plates and saucers, dozens of glasses, colorful and blue cups, those that looked new and those that might have remembered Napoleon, there was a coffee set of – father once told me – “Vatican porcelain.” The cups were tiny, hand-painted and square in shape, and each one had a different scene from mythology painted on it. And I could, when I visited my father, bring him individual cups to his bed and ask:

“What’s in this picture?”

“Hector fighting Achilles.”

“And in this one?”

“The Trojan Horse.” “

And this poor man, chained to a rock?”

“That’s Prometheus.”

Father surely knew much more about each character, but he didn’t tell me much, just grumbled and brushed me off, muttering under his breath as if talking to me, an insistently curious youngster, was tiring him. I was standing with my nose against the glass of the display cabinet, the visitors above me, and father beside me. After a few minutes of haggling over the price, they began wrapping each cup, teapot, sugar bowl, and cream container in papers from old newspapers and carefully packing them into boxes.

And I burst into tears!

I had such an attack of crying, I screamed and howled so much, hugging the packed boxes, that the lady took out one cup and gave it to me to stop me from crying. She couldn’t bear my pain. She preferred to make the whole set incomplete rather than watch a child’s despair.

And father just watched. He didn’t back out of the sale. He needed money for vodka.

Grandma Rita was telling the truth.

She didn’t hide anything from me. She believed it was better for me to know the truth now as a child, than to wait for years until I grew up and discovered this truth myself. A child more easily gets used to the world around them, even if it’s bad, but if they grow up with this evil every day, it’s less painful than a sudden shock. That was Grandma Rita’s spiritual vaccine for children.

Once I told Grandma Rita:

“Father told me that before the war broke out, he was rich and had two cars, a Chevrolet for everyday use and an Austro-Daimler for special occasions. He showed me photos of him sitting behind the wheel. In those photos, he had a mustache. Is that true, Grandma?”

“What did he have?! He married a Jewish woman so he might have had something, but he probably drank it all away too.”

“But Grandma Lena said that Dad and she had a lot of money before the war, and that father and his previous wife jointly bought our house. So they probably pooled their money to buy it, not that she bought the house for him?” “As if! Like he would have anything of his own! He was as poor as a beggar when he came back from America! He had nothing!”

“But Grandma Lena said…”

“What did Grandma Lena say? She ‘lies like reading music notes.’ She had nothing herself when she fled from Sarajevo, so her son got nothing from her. She summoned him to return from America to save her because she fell into nervous madness after her husband was slashed with a razor by a butler. He probably had a good reason to slash him, otherwise he wouldn’t have done it! They’re all so good! So when it happened, the alarmed, obedient ‘sonny,’ instead of earning something in America, stupidly came back at her call. But he came back with nothing.”

“The butler sl-a-shed Grandma’s husband? How did he slash him? The husband who was a count?”

“What kind of count was he? Well, maybe he was, but a low-ranking one, insignificant, without money. A count – my child – is a Potocki or a Zamoyski, that I understand, that’s a count. But Dzieduszycki? What kind of count is that? When such a count dies, nothing remains except debts.”

“It’s a pity that father didn’t make a career in America.”

“That’s all we needed, for such mediocrity to make a career in America! And as an actor no less! To be an actor, you need to know English perfectly. And him! You take English lessons with Mrs. Mikulska in courses for children, right? You go to lessons every week. And, I bet, you probably already know the language better than he does, don’t you?”

“Not really, Grandma. Father reads books in English, thick ones.”

“What are you telling me?! Just because he turns the pages when you’re looking at him doesn’t mean he’s reading. He’s pretending. He’s lying to you, as with everything.”

“And about what happened during the war, is he lying too?”

“Of course! What kind of soldier was he! Young, skinny, and every bullet hit him. He spent the entire war pretending to be wounded. One lung shot through, and the other too, or maybe the same one shot through? (Hmm… That I actually believe, because his lungs wheeze disgustingly. Disgustingly.) And shrapnel hit him in the head, no wonder he has little brain left. What kind of soldier is that? Marshal Piłsudski, father’s hero, got no use out of him, only expenses for treatment.”

“So why did they give him those medals, Grandma? That blue cross that father is so proud of?”

“He probably stole it from someone wounded or dead and pinned it on himself. Don’t you know your father?” Father tells me about his life: ”What should I tell you about myself, son. You’re small, you won’t understand anything. Besides, that witch, your mother’s mother, has already turned you against me so much that whatever I tell you – you’ll only believe her.”

“Because she knows that you only love yourself and vodka, and you don’t love mom and me.”

“I love you too, but I’ve already lost both your mother and you.”

“If you loved me, you would give me that mechanical pencil with the white star that you keep in your drawer.”

“Have you gone crazy, son? That’s a genuine Mont Blanc!”

“So you won’t give it to me? Grandma Rita was right that you’re such a bad person.”

“Ah! Stop torturing me. I’m barely alive today because of this asthma. I’ll give you the pencil! Take it! Since you already know where it is in the desk drawer – take it and enjoy the pencil.”

And then I, not content with feeling victorious in the duel with my father-“monster,” needed a moment more to torment the man lying in bed who could do nothing to me, because I always managed to escape to the door. I stood safely by the half-open door and, leaving, threw in his direction:

“No matter what you give me, I still know that father is a drunk and a complete lazybones.”

Dare I admit such visits to father’s room gave me a lot of joy?

In Polish:

Babcia Rita opowiada mi ojcu

The post Poison Tongue: A Child’s Struggle for Family Truth appeared first on Idil Biret Education Initiative.

James Whipple Miller

Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish heritage, and Buddhism, an ancient Eastern philosophical tradition founded by Siddhartha Gautama, are from vastly different historical and cultural contexts. Yet, despite separation by centuries and continents, these philosophical systems reveal striking parallels in their understanding of reality, the self, and the path to human liberation. By examining these convergences and divergences, we gain deeper insight into universal philosophical concerns that transcend cultural boundaries.

Reality

Spinoza’s metaphysics centers on a revolutionary conception of substance rejecting Jewish, Calvinist and Catholic doctrines. “Being is one” is the core of Spinoza’s worldview. Nothing is separable from anything else. For Spinoza, only one substance exists—which he identifies as “God or nature”—and that’s the entire universe. Everything else, including humans, animals, and inanimate objects, are merely “modes” or expressions of the singular, all-containing, substance of being. This perspective challenges the traditional Western separation between God and creation. It has more in common with the animism or pantheism found in the pre-Abrahamic West and in many non-Abrahamic societies. In Spinoza’s view, the anthropomorphic, monotheistic God of the Abrahamic religions was dead, or at least depersonalized and absorbed into material reality.

Buddhism similarly challenges conventional dualistic thinking through its doctrine of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda). This principle posits that all phenomena arise in dependence upon multiple causes and conditions—nothing exists independently. Both Spinoza and Buddha rejected the notion of independent existence. Buddhism’s concept of emptiness (śūnyatā) further complements this view by demonstrating that nothing possesses inherent existence separate from its causal networks.

“Everything is connected” captures a metaphysical insight shared by other traditions as well. In India, Adi Shankara, a prominent philosopher of the 8th century CE, is renowned for establishing Advaita Vedanta, a school of Hindu philosophy emphasizing the non-dual nature of reality, where the individual soul (Atman) is ultimately one with the universal consciousness (Brahman). In China, Dao De Jing (attributed to Laozi, 6th century BCE) and the writings of Zhuangzi (4th century BCE) describe the Dao as the unnameable source and substance of all things. Everything flows from and returns to the Dao in an endless cycle of transformation. Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BCE) famously stated “everything flows” (panta rhei), and his river metaphor suggests that reality is a unified, everchanging process rather than a collection of separate objects. Parmenides (c. 515-450 BCE) also argued that reality is a single, unchanging, eternal whole. Shinto and other animistic religions are based on recognizing our spiritual connections; we are “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.”(1)

So Spinoza’s view that the universe “unfolds” through cause and effect relationships is hardly unique. Nor, for that matter, is the Buddhist worldview that emphasizes the interconnected nature of all phenomena. All such philosophical systems reject the notion that entities possess essential, independent properties, instead understanding reality as a complex web of inter-penetrative relationships.

The Self

Perhaps the most profound parallel between Spinoza and Buddhism lies in their radical reconceptualization of the self. Spinoza challenges the Western notion of autonomous selfhood by demonstrating that humans, like all modes of substance, are determined by external causes: “In the mind, there is no absolute or free will, but the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause, which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity.”

This view finds a striking parallel in Buddhism’s doctrine of anatta (no-self), which denies the existence of a permanent, independent self. Instead, what we experience as “self” is understood as a constantly changing process arising from interdependent causes and conditions. The article correctly identifies this parallel when noting that both Spinoza and Buddha “challenge the concept of an enduring, independent self.

” Both perspectives view the conventional sense of selfhood as a kind of illusion. Spinoza suggests “Consciousness is only a dream with one’s eyes open,” that our sense of autonomy comes merely from observing our own mental processes without recognizing their pre-determined nature. Similarly, Buddhism considers the belief in an independent self to be a fundamental delusion that causes suffering.

Ethics and Liberation

With their metaphysical foundations established, both Spinoza and Buddhism offer ethical frameworks aimed at human liberation. For Spinoza, freedom doesn’t mean uncaused action—which he considers impossible—but rather shifting from “passive” to “active” engagement with the world through understanding. Understanding is the key to freedom, and “freedom” is the ability to make conscious choices without being unthinkingly driven by impulse or emotion.

Spinoza’s path to liberation involves developing “adequate ideas” about the causes of our experiences, particularly our emotions or what he calls “affects.” By understanding the true causes of our passions, we can transform our relationship to them. This approach parallels Buddhist mindfulness practices, which involve clearly seeing the arising and passing of mental phenomena without being controlled by them.

Both traditions reject simplistic moral dualism in favor of a more nuanced understanding of beneficial and harmful states. For Spinoza, “good” refers to what increases our power of acting or “conatus,”(2) while “evil” refers to what diminishes it. Similarly, Buddhism distinguishes between wholesome (kusala) and unwholesome (akusala) states based on whether they lead toward or away from liberation. Neither system imposes morality from outside but derives ethical guidelines from an understanding of how reality functions.

The text highlights how Spinoza’s emphasis on reason resembles aspects of Buddhist practice: Instead of relying on capricious and unpredictable joys, like sensual pleasure, and fears or anger, ultimate freedom is grounded in reason. This rational approach aims at a “joyful serenity” reminiscent of the equanimity cultivated through Buddhist meditation.

Eternity

One of the most profound similarities between Spinoza and Buddhism is their shared emphasis on transcending limited perspectives. Spinoza encourages viewing reality “from the perspective of eternity,” seeing particular events as part of a larger causal network. This broader viewpoint diminishes reactive emotions by distributing “cause” across the entire web of conditions rather than focusing blame narrowly.

This approach closely resembles the Buddhist practice of developing wisdom through seeing phenomena in their true nature—as impermanent, lacking inherent existence, and arising from causes and conditions. In both cases, liberation comes from transcending narrow self-interest and reactive emotions through a more comprehensive understanding of reality.

When Spinoza’s perspective allows one to regard the passage of events with calm and composure, it echoes Buddhist equanimity (upekkhā), which arises from clearly seeing the impersonal, causal nature of phenomena. Both traditions cultivate detachment—not indifference, but as freedom from reactive patterns through understanding.

Community and Compassion

Despite their emphasis on individual liberation through understanding, neither Spinoza nor Buddhism promotes isolated self-improvement. Spinoza argues that rational individuals naturally seek community with others, as “there is nothing more useful to a man than a man.” His ethics culminates in a vision of rational cooperation where “all together should seek for themselves the common advantage of all.

” Similarly, Buddhism emphasizes the cultivation of compassion (karuṇā) and loving-kindness (mettā) alongside wisdom. The Buddha taught that liberation involves not only seeing things as they are but also developing skillful relations with others. Both traditions recognize that our interconnected nature makes community essential to human flourishing.

Divergences

Despite these remarkable parallels, important differences remain between Spinoza’s philosophy and Buddhism. Spinoza’s system is deterministic and rationalistic, emphasizing the power of intellectual understanding. While Buddhism acknowledges the importance of intellectual understanding, it places even greater emphasis on contemplative practices that directly transform consciousness through techniques like meditation.

Additionally, Spinoza’s concept of God—while radically different from Abrahamic theism—maintains some continuity with Western philosophical discourse about divinity. Buddhism, in contrast, generally avoids metaphysical speculation about ultimate entities, focusing instead on the practical path to ending suffering.

The traditions use different methodologies: Spinoza uses logic to represent his views in a geometrical, mathematical pattern, reflecting his Western philosophical heritage. Buddhism, meanwhile, developed a rich psychological analysis of mind and detailed contemplative technologies for transforming consciousness, without giving primacy to logic.

Similar Truths?

The striking parallels between Spinoza’s philosophy and Buddhism transcend vastly different historical and cultural contexts, suggesting these two systems uncovered similar truths about reality and human experience. Both challenge conventional views of self and world, replacing them with visions of interconnection, determination, and the possibility of liberation through understanding.

Spinoza wrote, “The road to these things that I have pointed out now seems very hard, but it can be found.” Similarly, the Buddha described his teachings as going against the stream of common thinking but offered a systematic path to freedom. In both cases, liberation comes not from escaping the world but from seeing it clearly—from the perspective of eternity or with the eye of wisdom.

These philosophical traditions remind us that despite cultural and historical differences, human beings across time and space have encountered similar existential questions and sometimes arrived at remarkably similar insights. The dialogue between Eastern and Western philosophy enriches both traditions and continues to offer valuable perspectives for contemporary philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality, consciousness, and human flourishing

•  “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”
  William Wordsworth (1770 –1850)
  A slumber did my spirit seal;
  I had no human fears:
  She seemed a thing that could not feel
  The touch of earthly years.
  No motion has she now, no force;
  She neither hears nor sees;
  Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
  With rocks, and stones, and trees.
• Conatus, from the Latin verb “conari” (to attempt), is also translated as “endeavor,” “striving,” or “natural tendency”. In Spinoza’s philosophy, conatus is a fundamental principle: every entity, whether mind or matter, has an innate drive to continue existing and to increase its power or perfection

The post Spinoza and Buddhism: Philosophical Paths to Liberation Across East and West appeared first on Idil Biret Education Initiative.

By James Whipple Miller

All under heaven under its sway,
A world long divided must unite;
Long united, it must divide.

話說天下大勢,
分久必合，
合久必分

So begins Romance of the Three Kingdoms, China’s greatest novel. This stoic observation—that the rise and fall of dynasties is ruled not by man, but by the inevitable swaying pendulum of fate—sets the stage for an epic tale that has shaped Asian culture as profoundly as Shakespeare’s works influenced the West.

Based on historical events from 180-280 CE, the novel chronicles the collapse of the mighty Han Dynasty and the ensuing struggle for power among three emerging kingdoms, culminating in reunification under the Western Jin. Metaphors, adages, phrases, poems, and characters from Three Kingdoms continue to permeate Chinese language, literature, and thought.

Authorship is attributed to fourteenth-century playwright Luo Guanzhong, who likely compiled the work from popular plays and storyteller tales of his time. The resulting masterpiece is monumental in scope: the standard Qing Dynasty edition spans 750,000 words across 120 chapters and 24 volumes, following hundreds of characters through intricate plots and subplots.

At its heart, Three Kingdoms explores the tension between idealistic Confucian political theory and the harsh reality that pure pragmatism often prevails in the quest for power. The novel poses timeless questions through its dramatic conflicts: Can moral purists outwit ambitious schemers? What defines true loyalty? What makes a good king? These themes remain as relevant to audiences today as they were fifteen hundred years ago when these story cycles first entered Chinese culture.

For modern readers, Ron Iverson’s excellent three-volume translation, available from Tuttle Publishing, makes this enduring classic accessible to English-speaking audiences.

The post Romance of the Three Kingdoms: How China’s Greatest Novel Shaped Asian Culture” appeared first on Idil Biret Education Initiative.

By Paweł Ciach

Note: Jacek Dobrowolski, a Warsaw philosopher, is author of the treatise “Is the will free?” As a fiction writer, underthe pseudonym “Max Wolski”, he is also author of an excellent novel with Freudian and phenomenological overtones, challenging Polishness, Catholicism and received wisdom.

Are great philosophers great writers? I hear a loud “no!” from every student who’s struggled through Kant or Hegel. So, let’s ask the question this way: Is it possible to be as talented a creative writer as you are influential as a philosopher? For the moment let’s agree that, while extremely rare, it’s plausible. But who fills the bill? Who’s a great philosopher and a great creative writer, too?

What about the mid-twentieth century French existentialists, all still widely read in French and in translation? Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus are famous for their drama, novels, and journalism, in addition to philosophy. Sartre, a novelist, playwright, journalist and general bon vivant, will have written philosophy that is a joy to read, right? So let’s dive right into Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (French: L’Être et le néant : Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique), published in 1943 at the low point of the second world war. This is one of his more familiar passages, on time

Temporality is obviously an organized structure, and these three so-called elements of time: past, present, future, must not be envisaged as a collection of ‘data’ to be added together…but as the structured moments of an original synthesis. Otherwise we shall immediately meet with this paradox: the past is no longer, the future is not yet, as for the instantaneous present, everyone knows that it is not at all: it is the limit of infinite division, like the dimensionless point. You could hardly call this paragraph beautiful, but it’s not entirely incomprehensible, either. Workman-like prose. Gets the job done. I’d give it a C+ and a ‘good effort’ (trust me, it doesn’t sing in French, either!). If not for his social prominence in French intellectual circles, and his reputation as a journalist, Sartre’s tracts on existentialism alone might not have found a publisher. Perhaps a vanity press?

Simone de Beauvoir was clearly more productive and talented than Sartre as a writer. She remained in his shadow too long, finally striking out for independence with The Second Sex, a work with greater influence on society her lover’s existentialism. But what is her writing like when she expresses philosophical ideas? This from The Ethics of Ambiguity:

Men of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition. They know themselves to be the supreme end to which all action should be subordinated, but the exigencies of action force them to treat one another as instruments or obstacles, as means. The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces. Though they are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is created only to destroy them. Each one has the incomparable taste in his mouth of his own life, and yet each feels himself more insignificant than an insect within the immense collectivity whose limits are one with the earth’s.

I’d say it’s at the same level as Sartre’s philosophical writings. They spent a lot of time at Les Deux Magots sharing and developing ideas together, no wonder their philosophical prose is alike.
Albert Camus? The Plague and The Stranger are great evocative fiction that bring absurdist ideas to life via storytelling. But look at his central philosophical text, The Myth of Sysiphus.

Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: “tomorrow,” “later on,” “when you have made your way,” “you will understand when you are old enough.” Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it’s a matter of dying. Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.

I rest my case. The most creative French Existentialist writers, when writing about philosophy, conformed to a plodding, stodgy, academic style.

How about the writing style of German philosophers? Everyone will exclaim at once: Nietzsche! Thus Spoke Zarathustra! This is an extraordinary and visionary work, and likely the most sought-after work of philosophy found in Walmart. That said, it’s a complicated interpretation of philosophy, intellectually inaccessible to an average reader, but the famous title and the famous author make it look good on the library shelf where you entertain guests after dinner. I give you the Zarathustra challenge. It’s like the Ulysses challenge. Show me someone who’s read these books to the end and can summarize the ideas without referring to Wikipedia and I’ll buy you a beer…

I’m still waiting.,,

Bertrand Russell’s prose is brilliant, witty and agile. He wrote deeply on philosophy, mathematics and logic. His talent for beautiful writing matches the best literary authors of his time, yet never was he tempted to exchange the pen of a logician and philosopher for that of a novelist or poet. A great loss, I think. I’d love to read his sonnets. I bet they’d be up there with Donne’s. And a Bertrand Russel novel? Another Fyodor Dostoyevsky! Alas, these are works of the imagination only. They do not exist

Now the moment you’ve been waiting for. If, in philosophical and literary traditions of France, Germany, or Britain, we can’t find a literary philosopher who writes with equal fluency in both literature and philosophy, how about Poland? Polish writers are undervalued in the fields of European literature and philosophy. Can a Pole combine two talents and write wonderful literature as well as wonderful philosophy?

Jacek Dobrowolski is a well-known philosopher in Poland. I wouldn’t venture to say that philosophy is important in Poland however. Not the case. Poland is not remotely comparable to France, for example, where philosophy has a long academic tradition inseparable from the education system. Sartre and de Beauvoir vied for first in the state exams for philosophy teachers, the so-called agrément. Sartre won, but some believe he cheated from his wife’s work. State-sponsored philosophy, like statesponsored cinema, creates many good works that conform to state standards, but few great ones that break the mold.

No, Poland will never compete with France in philosophy, certainly not in total philosophical output (measured in words, or ideas). France took wing from Catholicism with the existentialists, but Poland is still–but not forever?—

Catholic. Religion is important in Poland, not philosophy. Catholic priests teach ethics at school, not rationalists or ethicists. A book on philosophy that sells 500 copies is La Grande Bouffe! Poland is easily satiated with any kind of deep thought. We are not only an LGBT-free zone, we are also a philosophy-free zone…

Nonetheless, Jacek Dobrowolski appears on Warsaw radio as a philosopher, giving him a presence, at least amongst intellectuals who listen to the radio. As a philosopher he has achieved much. He is a laureate the Barbara Skarga philosophy grant, named for one of Poland’s outstanding philosophers of the 20th century.

Dobrowolski fast-paced writing spools out narrative with verve and audacity. It finally stands that only we – Mania, Yeruham, Didi, Hawa and I – are going to Kitkat, everyone else is already “too tired” and “this time” is unlikely to go to the sex party. Well, that’s cool, only it turns out, of course, that four people fit into the cab, who would have guessed, and what a bummer, just at that moment everyone had already taken their seats and I was the only one left outside, an onlooker last…. So the Moroccan cab driver will not agree to let me top up, I just think to myself, if this were Morocco, there would be no problem, somehow I would fit in, stuffed, but this is fucking Berlin, fucking Europe, so I will have to get there … mania waves me out the window from between Yeruham and Didi, bye bye, just get there fast, I’ll see you in front of the entrance! A squeal of tires and they are gone, and I’m standing alone on a street in Berlin, where it’s quickly becoming deserted, and I’m supposed to follow seemingly in their footsteps. I’m supposed to chase them!

No getting bored with Jacek Dobrowolski! His voice is audible and comprehensible in the group who follow him. As a philosopher his interests are broad. He examines modernity and postmodernity, individualism, atheism and freedom. But, most importantly, he is an independent philosopher, which is a rarity in the history of Polish philosophy, because most Polish philosophers deal solely with the history of philosophy. Original thought is rare.

Dobrowolski has philosophical books are as stylistically original as they are original in thought: The Philosophy of the Deaf, The Rise and Fall of Modern Man, The Art of Modern Man, and most recently the excellent Is the Will Free?

This last book examines questions and imaginary ideas of analytic philosophy, picking up on Adam Morton’s work on how we understand one another’s behavior in everyday life, and how mutual intelligibility affects cooperative activity. Morton is a well-regarded philosopher, but unknown in Poland, at least until Dobrowolksi “discovered” him.

Morton holds that the existence of free will is essentially a question about the ability to affect the past. If we have no influence on the past, we cannot affect the future either. Follow this further and we have no future and no other realm of existence, other what we derive from our past. This premise is the starting point of Dobrowolski the philosopher’s alter ego, i.e. Maks Wolski the fiction writer.

We believe in the existence of free will absolutely. In our minds, it is impossible to deny. Language is our expression of free will. Even if no other possible futures can be willed, humans can have the will and freedom express themselves through creativity. Every act of language creates a new reality, Heidegger would say.

An against-the-tide philosophy lecturer may not appeal to academics. After years of teaching, Dobrowolski’s contract at the philosophy department was not renewed. This turned out to be a blessing to the reading public. Jacek Dobrowolski became Maks Wolski and wrote an excellent novel, Nicuś. He’s a born writer! So sometimes it’s good to get laid-off. It’s good that there is only one past and only one future. In this view, it was inevitable that Jacek’s expulsion from academia would produce a great novelist.

New Orgy of Thoughts

Dobrowolski was not a newcomer to the literary world when he left teaching. A founder and editor of the literary magazine “New Orgy of Thoughts”, where he has also published his works. His texts appeared in literary magazines.

Maks Wolski, Dobralski the philosopher’s alter-ego, has written a traditional novel, Nicuś, with protagonists, a plot, and a denouement. One could even call it a road novel, but the journey leads nowhere. It’s available on Amazon. Maks Wolski’s gesture at a traditional plot is an important statement at a time when prose, perhaps a bit like gender, is becoming ambiguous, fluid and changeable. Austrian novelist, playwright and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) explored death, social injustice, and human misery in Austrian society. He was deeply pessimistic about Austrian culture. Wolski is equally merciless towards Polish society. Superficiality the lack of reckoning with a Nazi past are a common ground for Poland and Austria.

The December 24, 2010 NY Times book review declared Bernhard’s body of work “the most significant literary achievement since World War II.” With Maks Wolski, still early in his career, we perhaps will witness the emergence of an another powerful social critic. He’s worth watching.

Nicuś is the story of a recently deceased father who spent all of the second world war in Dachau. His war trauma and advanced age meant he almost absent from his son’s life.

Yes, it’s April, spring, and sort of summer, April, the cruelest month, Dachau was liberated in April, but it wasn’t that warm during that April liberation, because in the photos from those days the prisoners are dressed in coats and capes and whatnot, it doesn’t look like it was warm in April 1945 in Dachau, rather it was chilly, and half of the thirty-seven thousand liberated were sick with typhus. (…) And did I tell you about the events on liberation day at Dachau? It occurred just after the Americans entered. When the Americans came, some infantry battalion commanded by a captain, the first thing they saw were fresh piles of corpses and wagons on the sidings also filled with corpses and the dying. What was already a rather normal sight for the prisoners, the American soldiers were so shocked that they decided to slaughter the entire camp crew immediately, right away. And they simply peppered the Nazis with machine guns, indeed, it was a Quentin Tarantino-style ride; peppering the Nazis with heavy weapons, making chaff out of them. (…). The Americans not only smashed the Nazis themselves, but also invited the liberators to join in the fun. In a few hours, several hundred Esemans were massacred. I think of those glorious hours of revenge … did my father, who was already twenty-four years old at the time, take part in it? Did he bludgeon some Nazi? (…) I believe that Nazis do not necessarily deserve humanity … It was a beautiful and good massacre. These events were later meticulously covered up by the American military authorities; nothing here is certain ni clear. The initiator was a certain Lieutenant Jack Bushyhead. He started the shooting, gave the password. (…) Jack twisted a stogie unhurriedly, watching them without emotion, with a stone face, lights a stogie, inhaled deeply, felt the tobacco raise his blood pressure, let out a cloud of smoke, and the Germans did not pay any attention to him at all. (…) He still looked up at the sky for a moment, breathed deeply a few times to do so with a light and clear mind, sine ira et studio. And then he opened fire.

Coming from Freud’s need to search for the absence, the writer’s analysis goes deep. Maks Wolski confronts readers with all the traumas he finds within himself, in his surroundings, and in the personal historical narrative of his absent father. Family trauma, combined with a depressing feeling of lack of self-worth in a society that does not share his values, become an explosive mixture. The explosion is like a supernova, both in the field of stylistic, linguistic and formal explorations, as in the content itself. In the Dachau passage above, it is notable how Wolski demonstrates—much more graphically than T. S. Eliot ever did—that April is indeed the cruelest month. The emotionless, matter-of-fact delivery of machine gun bullets into the hearts and heads of Nazi soldiers are a symbol, perhaps, of the random slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that assail us all, completely inconsistent with cozy worldviews that may comfort us, but do not agree with the hardness of reality.

Self-therapy via an uninterrupted hand-written monologue he then transcribes into a computer, is how Maks Wolski produces his stream-of-consciousness narrative. His self-therapy acknowledges the lack of free will and heartless fate’s oversized impact in life. This allowed Wolski not only to heal the trauma but also to create important work.

Wolski is not the first Polish writer to wrestle with being Polish. The quest to understand ‘Polishness’ is the defining struggle of Polish literary Don Quixotes. An equally strong motif was present in Witold Gombrowicz’s works. He was about to receive the Nobel Prize in 1967, but in the end the award went to Beckett, who was almost as good a writer as Gombrowicz.

Because as a philosopher Dobrowolski tackles postmodernity, the personal sense of defeat and humiliation has become a philosophical experience of decline. It had to be resisted, or the windmills would have taken him and torn him apart. The nothingness in Nicuś is not only its own defeat, the process of getting even with family traumas, but it also, most and foremost, becomes the nothingness and trauma of Polishness, the neurosis of a Polish family entangled in the wartime and the Jewish past, coupled with provincial Catholicism, the recurring mantra of Marian prayers and chants, quotes from Polish baroque and Polish poetic epics. But doesn’t shutting oneself in Polishness mean the risk of shutting oneself to the world? Does anyone else in the world suffer from Polishness, apart from the Poles? Well, yes, Dobro-Wolski (the philosopher) will answer, but if free will really existed, I wouldn’t have to deal with Poland, I could deal with my relationship with Italy, which I also tackle in the novel. But parallel worlds are unknown to us, even if they exist.

Wolski managed to turn his trauma into a milieu experience, if not a generational one. This is the experience of a large part of the Polish elite in a country where philosophy is not taught, but where LGBT-free zones are designated and polling stations will be located inside churches in the next elections. Poland is a disease and Poland is a prison, it smothers you and abuses you, as Nicuś says. At the same time, the novel is excellent, engaging, intelligent and packed with self-irony, a piece of literature worthy of the attention of the best philosophers.

The post Polish Philosopher Jacek Dobrowolski’s Double Life: From Academic Philosophy to Literary Success as Maks Wolski appeared first on Idil Biret Education Initiative.

I do digital marketing for the arts and for creative people. The trained advertising expert in me says, “Create an experience telling the story of the artists, bringing the art to life.”

So when my friend wanted to create a collaborative music masterclass, we connected the dots and et voilà! We created an immersive and collaborative experience, where guests not only witness a creative experience but also get to cocreate with the artists. In the center of London, guests could “step in” and be in the midst of the Martinique creative scene. Here’s how we described to:

Step in Martinique: Live Art | Live Music | Art Exhibition

• The culture in Martinique is unique, with influences from France, Africa, India, and South America.
• The painter Paul Gauguin did significant work in residence in Martinique, where he is said to “have found his true self.”
• Our “Step in Martinique” event invites guests to experience the fusion of cultures in Martinique through our art and our music.

We held the event in Old Street Records, a cozy, intimate venue in the center of London. Guests stepped through the curtain into Martinique. They were welcomed by the amazing artwork of three photographers from Martinique: Mr. Geez, Aurelie Chantelly, and Indigochromia.

The public participated and created a song live with E.sy Kennenga, while Moera was creating a painting live, also inspired by the public. We created a song talking about what makes you feel at home when you are away from home.

It was magic!

As you can tell by the pictures, this one-night event was a true success, better than I hoped for, and there will definitely be a second edition as the most-asked question toward the end was: “When is the next one?”

This is how I want art to be “lived,” with a connection to the artists themselves. Successful promotion for artists, musicians, and creative people aims to bring the audience closer to the core of their being. This event was a successful experiment enabling artists and guests to share the creative experience together.

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From Life and Art, by Alden Mellor Heck

The second year of upper school art was trial by fire. Big budget, lots of space, big mess. I was still cleaning up from Jayne, and knew things had to change. We found out about a week-long private school art teacher’s workshop at Andover Academy, during the coldest part of January. At Andover I discovered a way of teaching art that was logical. They had a well-conceived program that methodically covered art theory and practices.

The workshop was run by three—how do I describe them?—well, egocentric males who’d gone to Cooper Union or to Pratt. All were practicing artists and self-promoting. Nonetheless they were master teachers running a program rivaling any college department, given the amount of space and materials and books they had. Andover’s art program was overwhelming.

They had a brilliant 9th through 12th curriculum. The 9th grade curriculum—required for every student at Andover—was called Visual Language and parsed the visual world. It was intellectual, appropriate for Andover students. This approach had nothing to do with a child’s skills as an artist. It was a course on how to observe, dissect, understand, and critique what you are
looking at.

The Visual Language curriculum had a whole unit on composition, presented in rational sequence, starting with the picture plane. A picture plane is the geometrical plane of a painting’s surface—the transparent plane of division between the fictive internal space inside a painting and the non-fictive or “real” space outside the frame in which the viewer exists. A picture plane contains positives and negatives, whether realistic or abstract, that move your eye around. You may have a large shape, three middle size shapes, and six small shapes, for example, that create scale variety. You have horizontals, you have verticals, you have diagonals, you have the arabesque (the line that dances). These elements, each with a different energy, can be organized in an infinite number of ways.

So we spent a day moving different shapes and lines around on a plane. We talked about the horizontal picture plane, the vertical picture plane, the square picture plane. The picture plane itself tells you: a horizontal plane is for landscapes, a vertical plane is for figures, and a square plane is for abstractions. Freshman art school material, but for entering high school students it was compelling

The picture plane was just one unit. Another unit was on color. They had a set of notebooks handmade by Josef Albers, the great color theorist. He mixed colors to his own specifications and silk-screened them. So this was not something printed where the value and the hue get skewed because of the printing process. These were actual silk-screens. They had four volumes of Albers silk-screened colors, completely explaining his color theory. The 10” x 16” silk-bound volumes were out on the table where you could look at them, touch them, and open them to gaze upon Albers’ original colors.

From the Albers books we learned about the ‘value’ of color. Our brains see value before color, but we only have a vocabulary for color. To learn how to define values, you’d get a little jar of white paint, a little jar of black paint, and create a value scale of 20 values, where every step was the same increment as the last one. You went from white on one end to black on the other, and you had to mix a value scale.

What I learned from that, which I also learned from Bob Kulicke a decade later, is that value is what creates visual structure, not color. Color is the poetry you build upon a structure of values. When you look at a full color painting, to evaluate the value of a green, for example, you need to become a black and white camera. You learn to screen out hue in order to see value. Seeing values, you perceive a structure that color alone can never create. They taught us how to observe the amount of light bouncing off the surface and hitting your retina, to see if two colors are equal or different in value. If you squint where they touch, it’s a smooth edge. Black-to-white makes a dramatic edge. Lilac-to-lavender makes a smooth edge.

Then we go into the theory of how advertisers get your attention. First, in black, white and gray-scale. Then in color. The color that gets to your optical cortex fastest turns out to be yellow-green. They’ve measured it. That’s why tennis balls are yellow green.

Then a unit on perspective, on and on. The art curriculum at Andover is largely the same today. Andover describes the curriculum on its website:

Visual Studies focuses on artistic thinking, visual vocabulary, visual literacy, and the relationship of making and thinking. Why do humans create? And how? Projects, discussions, and visits to the Addison Gallery of American Art and Peabody Institute of Archaeology focus students on their own creative work and what they perceive in the world around them. Students use a range of media (such as drawing, collage, photography, video, or clay) to expand their perceptual, conceptual, and technical skills, and develop the visual language needed to communicate their experiences and ideas.

The Andover curriculum had a lot of science. It was a rational break-down of the elements of art. This pre-dated Photoshop but predicted is visual categorization. Meanwhile, back at GFS, students were being taught, “This is magic. Oh, you just do it. Be creative! Oh, look what happened. Oh, that’s interesting. How does it make you feel? What do you want to do next?” That was the curriculum, acceptable perhaps for early grades, but not challenging enough to engage teenagers. At Andover I found a way to think about art. I saw how to create a rational and logical movement from 9th grade art through to 12th grade art. Now I knew what the components would be.

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Moeen Farrokhi

I have never told this story in its entirety to anyone—: not to my therapist, not to my closest friends, and not even to my family.

I’ve divulged bits and pieces of it to different people. When my friends back home in Iran asked me why I was leaving, I made up a thousand different reasons. When my friends here in Istanbul
asked me what happened and why I came, I would givegave them only obvious reasons. I would tell told them that I couldn’t stay any longer, that it was impossible for me to continue living
there. I said that a part of me had died, that my ambition, courage, and hope for the future had dried up. But I didn’t explain why. I couldn’t connect the single moments into a coherent
narrative. I’ve divulged bits and pieces of it to different people. Now, I want to tell this story, to you and to anyone who cares to hear.

One of those single singular moments: I am sitting at the corner of Baharestan Square, a few hundred meters from the Book House of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. On my cell phone, I have the tracking number of the book I had edited. I am telling a publisher friend that the acquaintance she introduced to me is gone, and. “now Now what?” I ask. “What should I do now? Where should I go? Which room?”

I have to find a certain lady in a certain room. They say that no one will answersee me with my long curly hair. I am wearing a formal shirt, though. I’ve tried to fix my hair. I am directed from the second floor to the third floor, from the third floor to the fourth floor, from the west side of the fourth floor to the east side of the second floor. I am lost in the corridors. I keep saying the number of the book. I say, that “I have come on behalf of the publishing house to protest against talk about the censorship of the book.”

I say, “that I want to talk to “‘Momayyez” ’ himself, .” the person who He had read the book and decided that the a scene should be removed. One character had showed the middle finger in his pocket that one character showed to another person character.in his pocket should be removed. We already had altered the middle finger to cursing in his heart. But the answer was clear: , “No way.” I got lost in the corridor of the rooms. They recommended told me to submit a written letter to the system, . which I had already donesubmitted a letter, but it remained unanswered. Eventually, we had to omit it[the curse?]the anger completely.

For two years, I was the editor of the translation desk editor of the most popular literary magazine in Iran. At the beginning of every month, my job was to select stories from many different submissions, recommend send them to translators, edit the translations, discuss every word with the translator, and finalize the text. But the final text was not really final. We had to send it to “Momayyez” and wait a few days for him to read it and return it with some notes. The person in charge was a bald man who always spoke calmly, telling us to change certain parts of the text.

We had to make the kisses and sex into just “intimacy,” replace “alcohol” with “drink,” cover up the women’s clothing a little, make the political references in the stories more obscure and incomprehensible. Soon, even the words “drink” and “intimacy” were added to the blacklist. In the stories, people drank Coca-Cola and got drunk. A man and a woman— – gays were completely out of the question— – got intimate just by talking to each other.

We fought over every single word.

Despite our efforts, deep down we knew that the removal of words was not limited to a single word or sentence; it was extensive and systematic.The removal of words was more extensive and systematic [than what?]. Deleting a word changes the a story’s dynamic, and that changes human relations. Altering human relations impacts our perceptions of life and how we think about it. What was being removed was the most significant possibility that literature offers—: the recreation of an alternative life, a way of thinking about life, the imagination of a life denied, a window into in a dim room to the open air. However, the air of freedom was not present absent, and. only tThe only breathing material air was polluted and smoky. If you did not compromise anywhere, practically no magazine would be published.

Censorship is a phenomenon that is both strange and not new. The removal that occurred deletions was were never justified, and, more importantly, it never had a serious alternative. But
if you did not compromise, practically no magazine would be published.

Let me share another story, another one of those singular moments: . You probably don’t know Nasser Taqvai, . for For me he’s one of the best directors in the history of Iran. However, 22 years have passed since his last film, and he has has several different projects that remained half finished in several different projects. A few years ago, the Cinematheque of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts held a tribute to Nasser Taqvai. They played one of his old movies, and then he himself, old and weak, came and spoke loudly and eloquently about Iranian artists.

Before that, the moderator had come and introduced him, “Everyone, clap your hands in honor of dear Nasser Taqvai, who is here with us and has fought against censorship for years.” He said. The moderator was the same bald man who censored our stories. He was a movie critic and encouraged the fight against censorship, and at the same time he censored stories of our magazine stories. If the whole Censorship is like Kafka’s stories— – judgments that come suddenly from an unknown power— – and we are too would be Sisyphus lifting pushing a stone. We writers and artists are forever striving against a force that seems determined to defeat us at every turn. Sometimes I wonder what Sisyphus was thinking the first time the stone rolled back downhill.

One morning, I woke up from disturbed dreams to a phone call from my publisher. Little did I know that this call would shape the course of my life. Up until that point, I already had wrote written two books and translated several others, but it was my third work that held particular significance. A series of interconnected stories, it delved into the lives of isolated individuals who were oblivious to of the fact that they were inexplicably linked. Craving a connection with another being to alleviate their loneliness, these characters were were mired inrestricted by their own mental shackles, unable to perceive the limitless opportunities of the world beyond.

As I committed my thoughts to paper, I was mindful that it my words would be scrutinized by the Department of Islamic Culture and Guidance. Consequently, I was acutely aware of the “red lines” that must not be crossed, such as explicitly depicting sexual acts or introducing political undertones. Rules that every writer in every authoritarian system is aware of.

One morning, I woke up from disturbed dreams to a phone call from my publisher. Little did I know that this call would shape the course of my life. When I woke up, I called The publisher,
and they told me said that the “corrections” of the of my third book had arrived. I said, “well Well, then the work will be done with the some corrections?”

“You should check for yourself, ,” they my publisher said.

It was four pages. On top of it, they wrote to the publisher that the following texts should be observed changed or deleted to issue receive permission to publish the book:

A certain page, lines 9–-11, “Hamid said…” must be deleted.

A certain page, such and such line: . this This phrase should be corrected or deleted.

So, I went down and thought, ‘Hhow am I going to fit these omissions and corrections together and survive preserve my stories at the same time?’ Pages 80– to 102 had to be deleted. Page 80 would be the third page of a one of the story stories, and page 102 would be where the female character of the story fades away.

In these meantimecrucial 22 pages, a bold woman entered the life of an isolated and shy man. The man and woman would talked to each other (seriously, all they did was just talking), and the essence of their relationship would changed.

They were walking walked together. The man was livinglived his life. The woman was livinglived her life. The woman would gowent to the man’s house, and there they didn’t know if they wanted to sleep together or not. (I had arranged this whole scene in a way that it wouldn’t come out artificially in the envelope of their course of their conversation) . and eEventually they didn’t sleep together. The woman would disappeared from the next day. The man, in the absence of the power that had animated his life, wandered around the streets in confusion to find some sense of belonging.

The following week, I returned to the Baharestan building, wandering around in confusion to find someone who cancould help me. It’s strange how memories can disintegrate from one place to the next. I remember walking from one room to another in the library building, and then feeling confused in the surrounding streets afterwards. I don’t recall what happened once I stepped in that room, but I remember every moment of being inside it. I don’t know how long I stayed, nor do I remember the exact order of our conversations., but I remember what happened there.

I stood in front of the room’s door, . which had aA table blocking blocked it so I couldn’t enter. A woman dressed in a black “chador” stood behind a computer and talked to me. I had given her the code number of my book, and she was looking half at the computer and half at me, probably reading from the “momayyezMomayyez” report. She told me to check the items and make corrections, . and I replied that they had asked me to delete 20 22 pages, but I didn’t know where how to make the changes. She pointed out that they had boundaries and had written them on the website.

I knew she wanted me to revise the book again, and I told her that I had read the website carefully and followed the red line. She responded that there were many societal events that we couldn’t write about, such as not being able to put a woman with “bad hijab” on the book cover.

Hesitantly I asked hesitantly if there was no a way to fix the problem, as if the problem was were me. She said no, and then looked at her computer and said that my writing was admirable, but I needed to rewrite it my book

The next few days were a hazy mix of slumber and consciousness. I never admitted to anyone that in those few fleeting moments, as my rage mounted, so did my shame. I was nearly certain that I had uttered those words demanding changes, . yet Yet in my recollection, I saw myself as someone who stood frozen and speechless before the door and table. I yearned to cry out, but I restrained myself. I had stifled my own voice., all by myself.

But what was even worse was that I didn’t recognize my own anger. I told myself that I should be honest with myself, that worse things had happened to many people, and that my book wasn’t worth that much anyway. In the outside world, I don’t know what was lost. Inside myself, I had lost my sense of values. When I should have been brave, I was a coward. When I should have thought of an alternative, I stopped thinking altogether.

I didn’t write anything for two years, and. I haven’t yet written a good story. In all my stories, I had tried not to reveal the core of the story and the characters’ feelings, instead focusing on the network of meanings and emotions. But now the core of my story was this: I couldn’t defend myself, ; I couldn’t console myself. Instead of brandishing my middle finger, I shifted it into curses inside my heart. My own anger had turned into silence. Meaningless dotted lines in the middle of the story. I had lost the lines and lines of feelings and meanings. I was exiled inside myself, lLike one of the helpless characters in my book who had lost their connection to the world., I was exiled inside myself,

Censorship constrains the realm of human expression, stifles creativity, and not only censors words but also thoughts. In solitary moments, when one reader seeks a point of connection, they find themselves surrounded by dots that they must connect themselves. One cannot access voices that have been silenced. I too was left alone, dead silent.

Before me was an unpredictable system that intentionally mixed signals and noise; to destabilize the stable, it must itself be unstable. It aims to confuse people—without a clear boundary, anything can become a red line. Fighting against the red line becomes futile, exhausting, and nearly impossible.

Over the years, many Iranian directors and writers have attended foreign festivals and claimed that censorship in Iran is not severe and that we can still find ways to tell our stories. Some have even praised censorship for inspiring new forms of expression unique to Iranian story-telling. In an interview, director Taqvai pointed out that censorship may have contributed to the distinctive signature of Iranian cinema.

However, many later discovered that negotiating with censorship was a dead end and were either forced into exile or left to abandon their creative work. Their careers was were left unfinished. In an interview, director Taqvai pointed that censorship has led to the discovery of new forms of expression and may have contributed to the distinctive signature of Iranian cinema, but But no one talks about those who were silenced, the stories that could not find a form of expression, and the ideas that remained unspoken. My book was one of those that was left unfinished. I could not find any other way to express myself. Eventually, I made the decision to leave the country to rediscover myself.

My book ended with the story of a young man who, after ending a relationship, desperately attempts desperately to heal by forming a new relationship. On the day of the agreement between Iran and the West on the nuclear program and the lifting of sanctions, he goes to the house of a girl to keep her company during this historic moment. They watch the news together and witness the moment of agreement. As they get physically closer, the young man realizes that he is still raging and grieving, that he is still unable to tolerate intimacy.

He leaves the house and joins the crowd in the streets who are celebrating and expressing their anger. This young man is the only character in the entire book who finds a connection to the outside world. and He understands that the path to healing is not personal but collective. The next day, he wakes up and remembers scenes from his lost relationship. He recalls his girlfriend asking him, “What’s your story?” Then he realizes that he has never told his own story and begins to narrate it.

When I left Iran for Istanbul, I never imagined that I still have unfinished business there. My plan was to observe my homeland from a distance and reinvent my storyteller identity in a new language, within a new life. But in the past five months, it became apparent that I am not done with Iran. and that cClosure would not arrive anytime soon; . I had only fled. Over these months, the unmistakable voices of Iranian women and people have grown louder, drowning out the silences. They have arisen against the red lines, and grasped that fighting on the red line with this oppressive regime is foolish, and. insteadInstead, they must fight with the whole weight of their being against oppression’s very existence. Though I am not a woman, their powerful voices resonates within me.

Every person possesses a story of humiliation, . and eEach narrative contributes to the collective voice, a of deep-seated resentment. When I watch street demonstrations in my second home, I hear my own voice amidst the slogans of arising from Iran’s streets, . a A cry that I never made, . and do not know when it emerged.

I understand now that my second home only becomes a true home when I no longer carry my anger and sorrow; . my My first home only becomes a home when I can narrate my anger and grief loud and clear. Similar to the boy in my story, I realized that the journey towards healing is never a personal one. ; it is collective.

To move forward, I must express my suffering and rage. One day, I will recount this story again, without a stumble or a pause, from beginning to end. I have no doubt that it will be a happier story, full of hope and redemption.

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By James Whipple Miller

His monastery, hidden down a back alley on a hillside, was far from the neon of downtown Seoul. Not a true monastery, really, more an ordinary house where the monk Jung-kwang and a few acolytes dwelled.

A shave-head in gray novitiate pajamas beamed a smile as he opened the door. He called into the interior, and soon the monk himself appeared to usher me in. I recognized him. I’d seen a set of photos of him in the act of painting. The sloppy, wide-open grin was unmistakable.

Another shave-head appeared, as did an aged nun, all in grey habit. The two novitiates were dispatched on an errand. The monk and the nun escorted me into a tatami room with a low table  in the center and ink brush paintings on the walls.

Jung-kwang spoke no English, but had learned Chinese in his training. Buddhism came from China to Korea centuries before before Korea had a written language. It would be a thousand years before King Sejong the Great developed hangul, in the fifteenth century, to phonetically represent the native Korean language. For a thousand years, to be a Buddhist or to be “literate” in Korea meant to be literate in classical Chinese, and for a thousand years, Korean commentaries on the sutras were written in Chinese.

My Chinese was fluent from years of study, so we established a modicum of communication. “This is Auntie” the monk said, pointing to the nun. She spoke neither English nor Chinese, so the monk translated into Korean for her.

After a few minutes the novitiates returned and opened their packages on the table: a fifth of Johnny Walker black label and a platter of braised pork ribs. Then the novitiates ran to the kitchen and brought back stainless steel bowls of rice, and plates of steamed and stir-fried vegetables.

I thought Buddhists could not drink alcohol or eat meat.”. “They can’t,” he said pointing to the acolytes, “but I can.” He poured two generous portions of Johnny Walker, then reached for a pork rib. The pork ribs! Honey, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, sesame oil, chili paste, green onions, sesame seeds sprinkled on top. This meal occurred almost five decades ago, but to this day I remember the pleasant tremor I felt as the delicate and complex flavors cascaded across my palate.

“Wow!” I gasped, wiping my mouth with the wet washcloth beside my plate. “What an unexpected and delicious pleasure! Thank you! Thank
you!” When I spoke Chinese, I was more effusively complementary than in English—different cultural expectations—but I was truly and deeply
grateful to be in that moment, with that monk, eating those pork ribs.

My partner Lew, a scholar of Korean Buddhism, had arranged a book contract with the monk, who recently had become notorious in Korea. A year earlier he was curator of the magnificent collection of Korean Buddhist art at Tong-do Monastery Museum. Then his newspaper article appeared on “Unlimited Action”, describing the form of Korean Seon Buddhism he practiced.

The philosophy of unlimited action itself elicited no controversy. Every generation or so a highly enlightened Buddhist monk appears who can move beyond behavioral restrictions of monastic practice to become a “dirty mop”. A dirty mop befriends the unenlightened and shares their habits to establish rapport, offering non-judgmental compassion. Acting without limits, this enlightened being brings glimmers of understanding and Buddhist calm to those imprisoned by desire and delusion, people who might never encounter a path to greater understanding.

That’s the social utility side of unlimited action. But the monk’s article went on to expand on further implications of this rare type of enlightenment. “Every being has Buddha-nature. When you have sex with another being, their Buddhanature is unloosed. When I have sex with a woman I touch her Buddha-nature. I’ve have sex with hundreds of women. Sex with a goat, touch her Buddha-nature. Sex with a pig, touch her Buddha nature. Nirvana!” he had written, in rhythmically ambiguous prose some construed to mean the monk had sex with goats and pigs.

So if acceptable as philosophy in the abstract, unlimited action can raise issues of social propriety. When the article appeared, powerful politicians and Korean Christian coalitions were offended. In response to the outrage, Jung-kwang was stripped of his curatorship and sent to the simple residence where he generously entertained me this evening.

“Let me explain how we will market your book. Our strategy will flow together with the Ministry of Culture and the chaebols to bring your art and your spirit around the world, creating
understanding of Korean culture and giving you unparalleled exposure in global markets.” Like I said, my Chinese tended toward flowery.

Jung-kwang laughed. “The spirit will flow of its own accord. The art will be what it is. The exposure is nothing. What is the reason to make the book?”

“Well, to bring your art into the world, and help sell your art, and make you some money!”

“But why put such energy, such heart, into this book?”
“Why? To make it a success!”
“Success? What is success?”
“Why, to achieve your desire.”
“Ah, yes.” said the monk, contemplatively.

I remember thinking, as we sipped our whiskeys, My years of classical Chinese are paying off. This monk was a free-spirit and a prolific artist. Intensely curious about this unusual man and what he thought, I drained my glass and turned the conversation back to the monk.

“Tell me, how did you become a monk?”
“My mother was a widow. I was active, in the streets, without control. I loved to draw. I was wrongly accused, but no matter, I lived in delusion and was destined for punishment anyway.”
“What do you mean, destined for punishment?”

“My intent was not good. I suffered from attachments. I loved wine, women, and song. I loved to enjoy the senses. But I had no direction. My life had no meaning. My heart was empty. I
was active, but active without pure intent. While in jail I reflected how to purify myself. When I got out I went to the Tong-do temple and learned to manage the mind. When you manage the
mind, you can act freely, because intent is pure, not selfish.”

“But you drink whiskey and eat meat! And you’re a monk!”
“Ah, Yes. Rules. We think there are rules. We think there is good and there is bad.”
“But isn’t it bad to overindulge the senses?”
“No act is good or bad in and of itself. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ exist only in our minds. We make up rules. Then we punish ourselves.”

“So, potentially, anything, any act, is OK?”
“If intent is pure, not selfish. If the act is driven by compassion.”
“Even killing someone?”
The monk laughed.
“Padmasambhava.”
“Padmasambhava?”
“Padmasambhava. Buddha’s disciple who brought the teaching to Tibet. He saw politics contradictory to liberation of the spirit. To further the purpose of all sentient beings, he performed a mystical activity killing the son of a wicked minister. His intent was pure.”

“So he killed someone?”
“His intent was pure.”

As we talked, the monk replenished the scotch, this time pouring a bountiful glass for Auntie. After lustily downing the last of her rice and vegetables, she raised her Johnny Walker and smiled happily at me. She followed the conversation with bright-eyed attention, rapt in the backand-forth as if she understood every word.

“What about you?” the monk asked. “You once were a professor of poetry? Have you left it behind?”

ehind?”
“Well, that was years ago. Those days are gone. Being serious about poetry is a luxury I no longer can afford now that I’ve set out on the sea of commerce. But I remember some.”

I thought back to the first Chinese poems I learned, so many years before, when still an undergraduate, a poem by Wang Wei familiar to every Chinese school child. I recited it for the monk.

空⼭不见⼈ Empty mountains, no one to see,
但闻⼈语响 Only echoes of speech are heard.
返景⼊深林 Late rays enter a deep grove
复照青苔上 Again, light on dark green moss!

There was a pause.
“Wang Wei was also a Chan Buddhist like me. From the 8th century,” Jung-kwang finally noted.

“Chan, Seon, Zen, all the same,” I remember saying. My speech was beginning to slur.
“Chinese, Korean, Japanese.”
“Yes, they all mean to meditate… Why do you remember this poem?”
It’s unlikely I was sober enough to describe to the monk the ‘expanded moments’
encountered in so many Tang Dynasty poems. However, I’d like to believe I told him, “I enjoy poems that capture moments shimmering between being and nothingness, impermanence and
eternity, moments slight as a faint breeze, that tie you to the universe.”
“Being present,” said Jung-kwang. “Meditation.”
In the inspiration of an altered state, speaking Chinese with a Buddhist monk, my mind switched to rhythms and images of the Tang poets I had loved. Without thinking, in clumsy
Chinese characters I wrote out a four line Tang-style short-verse poem punning on the monk’s adopted Buddhist name,

DoubleFlash” or Jung-kwang:

光光重光光 Flash flash! double flash flash!
⾃⼼来佛亮 From the heart comes the light of Buddha.
双双再双双 Pair after pair, again pair and pair
⼈物跨阴阳 Man and beast ride Yin and Yang

The monk laughed uproariously. Immediately he took out a roll of rice paper and a large brush to inscribe the poem in a beautiful
freestyle vertical calligraphy. And alongside he wrote a title: “Written after Drinking Whiskey with Monk Doubleflash.”

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