Shawn and I had a recent discussion about capital punishment that spilled over from an online forum we both participate in. The conversation continued over IM, and Shawn posted it on his blog.

In the spirit of eavesdropping, here’s a passage I read yesterday in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana that seems relevant. We find our hero, Mr. Wormold, vacuum-cleaner salesman and reluctant MI6 spy, engaged in a game of checkers with Captain Segura, a Havana police boss who has been looking into Wormold’s affairs. Wormold took the MI6 job to pay for his daughter Milly’s expensive hobbies. His reports are fiction, based on Shakespeare and vacuum cleaner parts. London thinks they’re true. Harm has befallen a person who doesn’t know Wormold listed him as a contact. Segura is in love with Milly:

‘There are unimportant pieces in any game,’ said Captain Segura. ‘Like this one here. I take it and you don’t mind losing it. Dr Hasselbacher is, of course, very good at crosswords.’
‘What have crosswords to do with it?’
‘A man like that makes a good cryptographer. Somebody once showed me a cable of yours with its interpretation, or rather they let me discover it. Perhaps they thought I would run you out of Cuba.’ He laughed. ‘Milly’s father. They little knew.’
‘What was it about?’
‘You claimed to have recruited Engineer Cifuentes. Of course that was absurd. I know him well. Perhaps they shot at him to make the cable sound more convincing. Perhaps they wrote it because they wanted to get rid of you. Or perhaps they are more credulous than I am.’
‘What an extraordinary story.’ He moved a piece. ‘How are you so certain that Cifuentes is not my agent?’
‘By the way you play checkers, Mr Wormold, and because I interrogated Cifuentes.’
‘Did you torture him?’
Captain Segura laughed. ‘No. He doesn’t belong to the torturable class.’
‘I didn’t know there were class-distinctions in torture.’
‘Dear Mr Wormold, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement.’
‘There’s torture and torture. When they broke up Dr Hasselbacher’s laboratory they were torturing … ?’
‘One can never tell what amateurs may do. The police had no concern in that. Dr Hasselbacher does not belong to the torturable class.’
‘Who does?’
‘The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with émigrés from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal. You see, I was right to make that king, and now I shall huff you for the last time.’
‘You always win, don’t you? That’s an interesting theory of yours.’
‘One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don’t recognize class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. So too of course did Hitler and shocked the world. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons, or in the prisons of Lisbon and Caracas, but Hitler was too promiscuous. It was rather as though in your country a chauffeur had slept with a peeress.’
‘We’re not shocked by that any longer.’
‘It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.’

There’s a digression about Segura’s fondness for Milly, and Wormold’s new staff. These extra employees are working for MI6. Wormold says that Lopez, formerly his sole employee, wasn’t reliable. Then:

‘Ah, Lopez. Another of your agents.’ Captain Segura laughed. ‘Or so it was reported to me.’
‘Yes. He supplies me with secret information about the police-department.’
‘Be careful, Mr Wormold. He is one of the torturable.’ They both laughed, drinking daiquiries. It is easy to laugh at the idea of torture on a sunny day.

Forgive me for yet another post about religion. I’m preaching largely to myself here, and I hope I’m not alienating my limited readership with sermonizing. But these seem to be the thoughts that preoccupy me.

The irony of this preoccupation is that I haven’t been as involved in my church this year as I have in the past. This has been a hard thing for me. I miss the fellowship and unity of being part of a group of people that are united for a cause. It’s so comfortable to be in a group where beliefs and expectations are defined, where the common good is described, and action assigned. These are good people, who are full of faith and labor to make the world a better place. They do much good. They’re not perfect, and I don’t expect them to be. I’ve grown distant because I can’t in good conscience endorse the orthodoxy or fully follow those my church recognizes as authorities. I’m coming to different conclusions on questions that my church believes are fundamental, and I’m left with the option of silently disagreeing, or becoming separate. It’s been one of my key struggles of the year.

But today is Christmas, and I wanted to get a dose of gospel. I love the core of Jesus’ teachings, and I looked forward to reflecting on those teachings with extended family. We’re in New Hampshire this year, the first time Heather and I have been with family for Christmas is several years. I really love Heather’s family. Her parents are the kindest, most accepting in-laws I could hope for. They’ve really become a second set of parents for me. I especially enjoy the walks I get to take with her dad (usually to avoid a shopping trip, to our mutual relief). It also means we got to see our niece and nephew open presents. Play-Doh was the hit of the day.

Last year, Heather and I were in London. I recorded some Christmas thoughts shortly after our trip:

We think America is secular, and parts are leaning that way, but we’ve got nothing on Europe. There was shockingly little talk about Christ and Christmas in the UK. All talk of Christmas centered on it being a dissatisfying commercial exercise that only held value for kids. This bit of an article I read in the Guardian sums it up pretty well:

“How has a festival of goodwill and generosity come to evoke such different emotions? It’s partly that we have such high expectations. Instead of focusing on Christmas as a children’s festival, in which those with little buying power can be made very happy by being given objects they could not acquire for themselves, we seem to expect that magical quality to be carried on into adulthood. We fail to draw a distinction between the ecstatic excitement that children can feel, and the much more limited response that is possible once we have grown up and started to buy for ourselves.”

References to Christmas as a time of worship were scarce. In fact, the sole media reference I caught that suggested that Christmas was a time to celebrate the birth of Christ was absolutely comical. It was on BBC 2, late on Dec 23. I caught 5 minutes of it, and it went like this: A presenter travels to Bethlehem, and expresses forced exasperation at being in the place where Jesus was born. Supposedly overcome by emotion, he turns to the camera and breaks into an all too operatic version of Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is.” Ack.

It was kind of bringing me down. I’m no religious purist. I like the gift giving and receiving parts of Christmas. I do get overwhelmed with the commerce, but a little of it is fun. I like the songs, I like the decorations, I like the food. But I also like to try and find at least one quiet moment to reflect on spiritual things. This year, I was finding that hard to come by.

We went to an LDS service the week before Christmas. It was flat. We were reminded that Mormons don’t worship Mary, and treated to some standard carols. But other than the songs, it was the same old same old. We went to a performance of Handel’s Messiah, which is usually a way for me to get centered Christmas-wise, and it was beautiful, but didn’t quite take off for me like it usually does. I was getting depressed.

Then on Christmas Eve, we went to midnight mass at the Church of England. I like midnight mass for a couple reasons: First, because it’s nice to actually go to church on Christmas. In some ways, I’m sad that Mormons only do that once every seven years. Second, I like the buildings, and I like the incense, and I like the pageantry. I see how these things could get in the way of worship, but at Christmas, it adds to the feeling of celebration for me. But this mass also reminded me that I wasn’t going to find Christ easily this year. My only other European Christmas mass experiences were on my mission in Poland, when every catholic church would be packed. People were forced to stand, and crowds spilled out into the streets. The church we were at had plenty of room. The priest (or would he be a vicar?) acknowledged the “many visitors,” and admitted that he himself was visiting. I don’t always get a lot out of the sermons at midnight mass, sometimes because they don’t feel directed to me, sometimes because my head is elsewhere. But this one really struck me. I’m going to try to paraphrase the gist of it:

The priest said that he hears all through the holiday season that Christmas is for kids. He said this isn’t hard to understand. Even the story of Christ’s birth is filled with the stuff of fairy tales: A virgin and an evil king, travelling wise men and signs in the sky, etc. He acknowledged that in the modern world, full of war and strife, the suggestion that one child’s birth could usher in peace does seem to be a joke. But then he stressed how significant it can be for each of us to be childlike in that way. It means remaining open to the possibility that God can and will descend and live among us, that we share in our nature the possibility to create a better world. It was one of the better calls to abandon cynicism that I’d heard in a long time.

As we walked home afterwards, I found myself thinking of this Christmas song:

I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play
And mild and sweet the words repeat,
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

I thought how as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had roll’d along th’ unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bow’d my head:
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong, and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men.”

‘Til ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

Those thoughts seem even more relevant this year. If you trust Fox News, there’s a War on Christmas this year. This is a holiday that long ago lost most of its sanctity, and I’m as much a part of the problem as I am a solution. While I criticize the commericalism, I indulge in it and I enjoy it. While I turn up my nose at those who I believe are too dogmatic, I become less compassionate and I ingore the beam in my eye. The most glaring evidence of this “war” seems to be over the blandly PC expression “happy holidays.” I don’t think that people need to be offended by the expression “Merry Christmas.” I believe that when most people say this, it’s not code for, “I assume you believe what I believe.” I think it is far more likely to mean, “This is part of me, and I’m opening it to you.” The times in my life when I’ve been invited—even as a spectator—into someone else’s religious practice, I feel like a welcome guest, not a victim. But then again, I grew up in the majority of such things. The war rhetoric makes me sad, because I think it creates more animosity and tension, and allows the kind of misunderstanding that lets things like “Happy Holidays” become an issue. I read that some church groups were so pleased about the success they had in getting news of this “war” out, that next year, they’re planning on a boycott on gifting between adults, with the many saved to go to charities to help the poor. This is actually an action I can get behind. But I’m saddened by the story for two reasons: First, I fear that much of the money will go to ideoligical groups that put their own dogma ahead of the true needs of the poor. Christianity is noble, but Christians manage to consistently make a mess of it. Second, the motivation for this boycott isn’t to help the poor, but to flex economic muscle, to prove that like-minded religionists are a bloc that wields considerable power. The boycott will collaterally benefit the poor, but the poor will remain pawns for the powerful who want to push their orthodoxy with muscle and not truth.

Even the song I mentioned last year is back in my orbit. Last week, President Bush cited the same song in a speech about staying the course in Iraq. This is a course that he can neither define nor articulate, a course that has taken a serpentine path through proximate causes, shifting rationales, and a bloody stumble towards the laudable but soft goal of democracy. Last year I remembered that song as a call to hope. This year, I heard it as a determination that our country is righteous. The inferrence is a particularly offensive kind of blasphemy to me. It seems to suggest that rightousness lies with a nation, and not with the truth.

Today, as I sat in church with my wife and in-laws, I was struck by the focus on the miraculous and the regal in the beautiful songs that were sung. Kings, angels, celestial signs, the expectation of a leader that would crush the enemies of the faithful—this is the stuff of most Christmas carols. But at the center of the fanfare, there was nothing more than a baby. For all the legend that surrounds his birth, I can’t help but think that when Jesus was born, it was a moment of hope and love like that when any child is born. At the center of Christmas lies not an avenger, but a symbol of hope. One of the central tenets of Christianity holds that the Jews were waiting for a king that they didn’t recognize, because he was all too common. It reminded me of a statement I recently came across in the writings of Jim Wallis, a progressive evangelical preacher: “We are the ones we are waiting for.” So this year’s strike against cynicism, a blow that I hope will crack my own heart, is the simple reminder of the possibility that we can change and that we can make the world a better place. We’re not going to do this by following the stars, but by putting our hands and hearts to work here on earth.

Born on August 13, adopted on October 28. This is Scotch, our new puppy. He’s a snuggly little guy. We’re working on housebreaking, and he gets a lot of attention when we walk him around the neighborhood.

Here are some video clips of his floppy gait, and his vicious attack on a piece of fabric. The sweater in the second video doubled as his Halloween costume (Bill Cosby).

Shawn posted some thoughts last week that are related to some things that I’ve been thinking about lately. For me, the starting point was an essay Bill McKibben contributed to the August issue of Harper’s with the subtitle “How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong.” He makes a provocative argument. There’s a greater percentage of Americans who self-identify as Christians than Israelis who self-identify as Jewish. And yet, what most Americans seem to think of as “Christian” isn’t at all connected to the things that Jesus taught in the New Testament. McKibben:

“Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.”

McKibben is himself a Christian, and he’s not trying to out-pious other believers. “Are Americans hypocrites?” he asks. “Of course they are. But most people (me, for instance) are hypocrites.” His point is that the word so many of us use to describe ourselves—Christian—has little to do with the teachings of Jesus.

This idea that the mainstream (or orthodoxy) has Jesus wrong isn’t a new idea. In addition to the well-known religious reformers who spawned orthodoxies of their own (Martin Luther and Joseph Smith, for example), there have been countless relatively personal struggles with the same disconnect. I’ve been reading about Tolstoy’s personal struggle with Christianity. He was born an aristocratic Orthodox Christian, but by the time he was a young man, he’d developed a strong dislike for the church and abandoned it completely. He wrote War and Peace, he wrote Anna Karenina, he achieved widespread fame and success, but by middle age was unfulfilled and even suicidal. Tolstoy scholar F.A. Flowers III writes that by 1879, Tolstoy refused to go hunting, “because he feared he would turn his gun on himself.”

Tolstoy began a search of Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity to fill the void and find a solution to what he called “the problem of life.” He finally decided that the answer could be found in the teachings of Jesus, but only if those teachings were stripped of orthodoxy and dogma. “Never, since the time of Arius, has a single dogma arisen from other cause than the desire to contradict and opposing dogma,” he wrote. He saw the Old and New Testaments as irreconcilable, and man’s attempts to find continuity in religious history an exercise in hubris. He believed that the teachings of Jesus could stand alone, without the annotation of man:

“The reconcilement of all the revelations can be infinitely varied, but the explanation of the teaching of one person, and one looked upon as a God, should, on the contrary, not give rise to any difference of sect. It is impossible there should be conflicting ways of interpreting the teaching of a God come down to earth. If God had so come down to reveal unfailing truth to men, at least He would have revealed it in such a way that all might understand; if, then, this has not been done, that is because it was not God who came; or if, indeed, the truths of God are such that God himself cannot make them plain to mankind, how can men do so?”

But the act of getting to the kernel of truth in Jesus’ teachings, Tolstoy observed, only led to further sectarian disagreement and the creation of new orthodoxies that were Christian in name, but something else in practice. Yet all this contention had failed to explain the core power of the Jesus “problem” as Tolstoy put it:

“Eighteen hundred years ago a poor wanderer appeared on earth who taught certain things. He was flogged and executed. And since then, although many and many just men have suffered for the belief, millions of people, wise and foolish, learned and ignorant, cannot shake off the conviction that this man, alone among men, was God. Here is a strange phenomenon; how is it to be explained? The Churches explain it by saying that this man, Jesus, was really God, by which everything is explained. But if this man is not God, how are we to explain why this mere man, in particular, has been acknowledged as God?”

Part of Tolstoy’s approach to the question was to write The Gospel in Brief. To get at the kernel, Tolstoy wrote his own condensed version of the four gospels, based on his study of the original Greek, and not subsequent translations. He stripped out the proofs—any mention of genealogy that established Jesus’ historicity, and any mention of miracles that testified of his divinity. What was left was what the gospels say that Jesus said, and what they say that he did. As a historical record, Tolstoy recognizes the limitations of the New Testament:

“The reader must never forget that Jesus himself never wrote a book, as did, for instance, Plato, Philo, or Marcus Aurelius; that He, moreover, did not, as Socrates did, transmit His teaching to informed and literate men, but spoke to a crowd of illiterate men; and that only a long time after His death men began to write down what they had heard from Him.”

The resulting book is a wonderful account that humanizes Christian morality. For example: The KJV bible translates Matthew 12:8 (which deals with Sabbath observance) like this:

“For the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath day.”

Tolstoy reads it like this:

“Man is more important than the sabbath.”

Throughout Tolstoy’s translation, Jesus’ teachings are redirected to lift men, not orthodoxy. “The house of God is not the temple in Jerusalem,” Tolstoy translates Jesus’ citation of Isaiah 56:7, “but the whole world of God’s people.”

I find much greater inspiration in Tolstoy’s humanistic approach than the cosmic and metaphysical promises that most churches offer. That’s not to say that the miraculous promises aren’t enticing. Tolstoy’s gospel contains no resurrection, and having been raised with the promise of life after death, the finality of the words “It is finished!” are not particularly comforting. But Tolstoy’s gospel, like McKibben’s essay, both serve as reminders that true Christianity means acting to end suffering and love others now, and not to put orthodoxy ahead of compassion.

This morning, while reading Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan I came across a succinct and unexpected summary of the kind of Christianity that Tolstoy and McKibben advocate. Vonnegut wasn’t describing Christianity at all, but rather a fictional faith created by a guy who was caught in a space-time loop that left him circulating the cosmos on a circuit that gave him access to the future, but prevented him from ever existing in one place (or moment) for too long. This character, Winston Niles Rumfoord, trains an army on Mars and sends them on a doomed mission to invade earth so that he can provoke mankind’s sympathy and create a peaceful world with a new religion—”The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent”:

“‘The flag of that church will be blue and gold,’ said Rumfoord. ‘These words will be written on that flag in gold letters on a blue field: Take Care of the People, and God Almighty Will Take Care of Himself.

“‘The two chief teachings of this religion are these.’ said Rumfoord: ‘Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and luck is not the hand of God.’”

A believing person may take offense at the idea that God doesn’t need us, or is indifferent to us, but Rumfoord and Tolstoy and McKibben are all latching onto the most important (and elusive) part of Jesus’ teaching. I’ll let Tolstoy sum it up:

“And Jesus said: ‘… There is one temple of God; that is, the hearts of men when they love each other.’

“And [the disciples] asked him: ‘When shall there be such a temple?’ And Jesus said to them: ‘That will not be soon. People will yet long be deceived in the name of my teaching, and wars and rebellions will be the result. And there will be great lawlessness, and little love. But when the true teaching shall spread among all men, then will be the end of evil and temptations.’”

DAY 1: SFO TO PRAGUE, OR I’VE BEEN TO DACHAU, I’VE SEEN ALL THAT

My friend Nate Grover is a talented writer. He’s finishing his MFA in Creative Writing at USF, and in spite of some weird modest “but it’s not ready!” thing he has about his work, the few stories I’ve persuaded him to let me read are very good.

This Summer, Nate spent a month in Prague studying with Czech Writer of note Arnost Lustig, or “Lusty” as his students call him. I’ve not read the works of Mr. Lustig, but he’s a holocaust survivor and classic European libertine. Nate said he had two cell phones on him at all times (one for each mistress).

Blessed with my long break, Nate and I conspired to meet up in Prague and take a little trip into Poland. So a couple days after my trip to Hawaii, I boarded a British Airways flight to Prague via Heathrow. Luckily, this was before the strike, and so my trip was smooth.

The flight itself was uneventful. I was packed in with a group of Spanish students returning from some educational program abroad. One of them was sitting next to me, but between watching a BBC-produced film about two brothers growing up on the mean streets of East London (Bullet Boy) and my transatlantic sensory deprivation sleep routine (eyeshades, iPod on shuffle all, shoes off, under blanket, headphones used to immobilize head by wedging into seatback) we didn’t talk much. Which meant I was doing a pretty good job sleeping. We finally spoke halfway through the flight back by the restroom, when she confessed that she was concerned because I hadn’t moved in hours. I said I was comfortable. She looked at me like I was crazy and tried to explain something about vitamins. A vacated lavatory saved me.

I had a few hours to kill in Heathrow. First, I decided this: I’d like to see W.H. Smith take over airport bookstores everywhere. I get a little flight-phobic about reading material. I usually travel with several books, because I fear being stuck with nothing to read (or nothing that I want to read) like most people fear STDs. I take precautions. I was packing Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree, the latest issues of Harper’s and the New Yorker, and I’ve come to trust BA’s in-flight entertainment options. But at the San Francisco airport, I started wondering whether it was enough. I stopped into the bookstore in the international terminal, just to see if I could find something that I could carry as a Friedman-back up. Maybe a novel, I was thinking. There was nothing. Nothing. Nothing other than the usual spate of bestsellers and motivational chicken slop for the middle manager. If I had been robbed blind on the road, and knew that my plane was going down on a desert island, the best option would have been Bill Clinton’s autobiography. And this was San Francisco, which (I say with local pride) has one of the highest per capita book sale rates of any city in America. We’re a city of readers. But you wouldn’t know it from our airport.

In Heathrow, I wandered into W.H. Smith. I was in the homestretch, and was feeling good about my stash of things to read, but since I wasn’t hungry, and wasn’t really in the market for a tailored shirt from Pink, I decided to see how it stacked up against SFO. No contest. I couldn’t buy anything, because I knew I couldn’t stop. But let’s just say that I could have turned that desert island scenario into a nice little trip. In the middle of the shop, on the left hand side as you enter, are several shelves of classics, and if you’re looking for a book, it would be a great place to start. Things that have been on my “I should really read list” that I almost bought (and that were on those shelves): Tolstoy’s Anna Karennina, Orwell’s 1984, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and (not on the classics shelf, but also on my list) Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan. God save the British.

My departure gate wasn’t posted on the board yet, so I found a bench in the middle of the airport, and settled in for a nap. As airport benches go, Heathrow’s are quite comfortable, and I was soon sleeping peacefully. But my slumber was interrupted by a volleyball to the chest. It turns out that some of the Spaniards were killing time with a little indoor match. In the middle of a crowded airport. One of them bounded over and said with proud colloquial insight, “Sorry, dude!” I groggily forgot my manners, and said, “It’s not cool. You should really find someplace else to do that.” He picked up his ball and ran back to his friend with a look on his face that said, “Next time the ball goes in that guy’s yard, it’s staying there.” Sorry Spanish friend, for being your ugly American moment. But still, take the game outside next time.

My gate was announced, and I got into the queue (since this was London, after all) right behind a pack of fellow Americans who were moving at the speed of business. It was a foreshadowing moment. They were traveling together, and using all the corporate speak about teams and projects and conference calls that makes me feel like I’d need linguistic training if I ever found myself facing a real job. One of them, who had been to Prague once back in 1991, took it upon himself to set some sightseeing agenda.

Alpha Male: “You’ve got to check out the St. George Bridge.”
Beta Male: “Yeah, I hear that’s great. Did you know that Budweiser was invented there?”
Alpha Female: “Oh, we have to order one!”
Alpha Male: “There’s also this amazing cemetery where they buried Jews during the war.”
Alpha Female: “I went to Dachau when I was in Germany, so I’ve seen all that.”

Nate met me at the airport, and I checked into the Dlouha Hostel in Josefov, the Jewish quarter of the old town. It was a wonderfully functional place, austere but clean, and with some great views of city rooftops.

I was higher on Prague that I was tired from jetlag, and we walked through old town, past the astronomical clock (pausing to watch it chime with the crowd) and up Vaclavske Namesti to the statue of Good King Wenceslas and back again.

Nate was kind enough to indulge my geeky sense of humor, even when it involved telling him about a Steven Pinker lecture I made Heather watch on Hawaiian PBS during Summer vacation pt. 1. Pinker was making a point about the infinite possible combinations of words in the English language. Guinness claims that the Faulkner actually wrote the longest sentence, a 1300 word monster in Absalom, Absalom! that begins “They both bore it as though in deliberate flagellant exaltation of physical misery transmogrified into the spirits’ travail of the two young men …” Pinker points out how easily he could claim the record simply by submitting, “Faulkner wrote, ‘They both bore …” Which would stand until someone submitted, “Pinker said that Faulkner wrote, ‘They both bore …” He goes on milking this joke, and by the time he gets to “Who cares that Pinker said that Faulkner wrote …” I was on the floor laughing and Heather was making a mental note of things to use against me later to prove her tolerance of my twisted moods. Anyway, I passed it on to Nate, whose nerd-quotient approaches mine, and I thank him for laughing, making me feel not a stranger on a foreign shore.

(Bonus geek out: I couldn’t remember the exact Faulkner reference, and in Googling it, I learned that a sentence that uses all 26 letters of the English alphabet is called a pangram, the most common example of which is “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”)

DAY 2: CURIO AND KNIHA, OR I’M IN LOVE, I’M NEPERLIVA

I took advantage of the free hostel breakfast (corn flakes and yogurt) and found my way to an English bookstore where I picked up Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, Ivan Klima’s novel about a TV cameraman’s life and the Velvet Revolution. I met Nate for lunch, and I did as the locals do with a hearty serving of goulash, and Nate ate the biggest sausage I’ve ever seen. This is only newsworthy because Nate is taking a Summer break from being vegetarian, and he’s off the wagon like the backside of a pioneer child on a bumpy stretch of road.

After lunch, we hit the Strahov Monastery on castle hill. They had these great curio cabinets that Nate couldn’t get enough of, and two beautiful libraries. Since I’d paid the extra 50 crowns to take pictures, I did my best to get my money’s worth:

That night, we ate in the neighborhood restaurant by Nate’s dorm with his roommate, and hit one more bookstore (The Globe). I’d been to The Globe seven years earlier on my first trip to Prague, when it was a happening ex-pat hub. It’s since moved to another part of town, and the bookstore is smaller than it once was, though the café is larger. Still, the City Lights posters and prominently displayed Good Vibrations Guide to Sex reminded me of home.

I’m going to try to talk less about bookstores now.

DAY 3: KUTNA HORA HURRY TO KLIMA, OR TO LIVE IS TO META-FICT

The next morning I was up early, and phoned Heather to let her know I was alive. Kindly, she was pleased to know this. After rounding up some of Nate’s writer-friends (Christy and Jason) we took a bus to Kutna Hora, which was the jumping off point for Sedlec, home of an ossuary chapel, decorated with the bones of various plague victims. Not to seem too jaded, but I’d seen one before, in Poland. Inch for inch, the Polish version in Czermna has more bones (and the bonus of a nun who will open the crypt for you), but Sedlec wins for artistic flair, including a coat of arms, complete with raven plucking out the eye of a dead Turk, and a chandelier that utilizes every bone in the human body at least once (or so I’m told—our “is that an ulna, or tibia?” conversation confused us in a hurry). The creepiest effect, to me, was the cherubs perched among the bones.

We decided to take the train back from Sedlec, but a series of delays left us stranded at the station for much longer than we’d anticipated. We were a little concerned, because Ivan Klima (who I was reading for the occasion) was doing a reading back in Prague that night. This was one of the big events of the writing program I was crashing, and Nate and his friends were anxious to get back. We killed time with some snacks. In his continuing meat binge, Nate braved a train station hot dog. It was kind of hot, so the woman in the kiosk wrapped it up in an old train ticket. He consumed it under an advertisement that (I think) captured his mood perfectly.

At the train station, for third time that day, we ran into a Gen X British global vagabond (currently residing in Iceland, but he’d spent some time in Soquel, and was happy to know that Nate and I were from the Bay Area). Gen X was traveling with his sweet, 70-something English mum. We finally settled onto the train together. It was one of the old school open-wagon communist variety, with alternating benches that faced each other like booths at a fast food restaurant. A few minutes into the ride, one of our cabin mates started making a lot of noise. He was shirtless, with an ample gut that made the top button of his pants a useless add on. He was sporting the classic curly Euro-mullet and a gap toothed grin, bearing a striking resemblance to Yugoslav filmmaker of note Emir Kusturica.

Emir was excitedly blabbering to Gen X in Czech, something like this:

“[Czech Czech Czech} MANCHESTER! [Czech Czech] NOTTINGHAM! ARSENAL! [Czech Czech Czech Czech Czech] REAL MADRID!”

Gen X picked up on the team names, and deduced that Emir was on about football, which we interpreted to mean soccer. Gen X nodded politely, and after a few minutes of bonding, Emir offered him a sip of beer from a large Dixie cup that was filled to the rim. It was amazing, really. Emir was so drunk he could barely stand, and yet—on a moving train no less—not one drop was spilling from the cup. If the Czechs have an equivalent of stupid human tricks, he should sign up.

Gen X, with undying politeness and an utter disregard for sanitation, took a sip of the beer and passed it back. We thought that Emir was done, but a moment later, he rose up from behind the seat that I was facing, with a lookabout grin that kids often get in moments of adult attention that broadcasts, “Hey, look at me! I’m doing something cute, and I know it! Look! Look!” He then offered us the cup. Being Americans, unbound but custom and as yet not properly guilty for running the world, we declined. Emir sank back out of view. As the train was pulling into the station, Emir tossed the now empty cup from the window, disembarked, and threw up all over the platform.

But we were late for the Klima reading, which we joined already in progress. Klima is probably the second best known living Czech novelist, after Milan Kundera. Like so many Central European writers of his generation, he’s witnessed massive cultural upheavals, wars, oppression, and somehow managed to wake from the nightmare with experiences that provide a profound insight into the human experience. Unfortunately, English is not his native tongue, and he was having some trouble sounding out the words in the translation he was reading from. I’ve got more to say about Klima, and experiential motivation in art, but I’m going to save that for another post.

DAY 4: CRASHING THE PARTY, OR HOW WE MISSED THE MUSEUM OF MINIATURES

The hot water at my hostel ended this morning. It was kind of karmic, actually, because the hot water at Nate’s dorm had cut out a few days before I arrived, and I was a bit too cavalier about it. My endless digs at his manhood when he’d complain about the cold water finally came around.

I spent the morning at a gallery on the old town square that was showing a retrospective of Czech photography. I particularly enjoyed:

The Jiri David portraits that make two symmetrical selves of his subjects:

The pre-war documentary selections marked by the lasting influence of communism. Scrubbed free of happiness, they focused on scenes of rural poverty and hardships of capitalist labor. Whether the happy photos were destroyed by the Statni Bezpecnost, or simply forgotten after all these years is unknown.

And the treasure trove of WWII-era documentary images, from Nazi troops invading Prague, to German women, hair cut and faces smeared with tar, forced to work repaving city streets:

My favorite from this collection was titled “Berlin’s First Bookseller, 1945.” In it, an oldish guy sits on two benches, arranged in an L. Maybe two dozen books are stacked alongside him. Across the street is the bombed out shell of the city. His legs are casually crossed, and he’s reading like it’s been a slow morning.

This was an unbearably hot day in Prague. One of the shopkeepers I spoke to claimed it was the hottest day in 200 years. Not only was the sun beating down from above, but stones of the sidewalks turned to brick ovens, radiating back up in a cruel kind of heat-stereo. That night, at a party for Nate’s writing program, one of his classmates (Aurora) and her friend Sarah (also a tag-along traveler like myself) told me all about the wonderful public pool just across the road from where they were flat-sitting just out of the city center. Delirious with the heat, it sounded like an aquatic paradise. Sarah and Aurora and I hatched a scheme to get Nate there that involved a fictional museum of miniatures (something we knew he’d go for). The plan was to get him there, tell him that he had to wear a bathing suit to enter (security precaution), and lure him to the edge of the pool and push him in. Such were the fantasies of my Summer-stewed brain. We never made it to the pool.

But this night was really all about the writer kids, which meant that Sarah and I were left to entertain each other. This was to my great fortune, since she was very interesting (in a vagabond state pre-grad school and post-artist’s residence in Vermont). Between fake discussions about structure and character (to mask our identity as party crashers) Sarah was kind enough to regale me with tales of Mexico, a country that I know only from coastal vacations, but that I hope to traverse sometime soon. Not only had Sarah been to the fabled city of las mumias, but she was able to give me insight into the local cocktail of choice, Mezcal y Squirt, which is commonly enjoyed from a goat’s bladder on a sling. Now I don’t know the first thing about drinking, but if I was to start, I think that might be the place.

That last image is of an advertisement that we interpreted thus:

10:00 pm: Pay 250 crowns.
10:05 pm: Play a laser game.
10:30 pm: Have a drink for free.
10:35 pm: Surf the internet …
3:00 am: … and surf and surf.
6:00 am: Stagger on home.

That night, we crashed back at the Dlouha, and we were treated to a fantastic lightning storm that finally cleared the crushing humidity. While tidying the memory card after a failed attempt to get a picture of an actual bolt from the blue (black, actually—it was night) I inadvertently erased the best pic, of Nate silhouetted at the window by the red sky. You’ll have to settle for this one:

DAY 5: FUN IN AN EXISTENTIAL SPACE, OR THERE’S A WEEVIL UNDER YOUR WHAT?

This was to be our last day in Prague, and due to the crotch in a pair of cords that had fought the good fight, Nate and I popped into H&M to get him some new britches for the next leg of our journey. I’ll spare the details, but let’s just say that one of the choices he had was purple pants. PURPLE. A missed opportunity, to be sure.

On the metro, riding back to Nate’s dorm, he called my attention to an object on the left shoulder of a sixty-something woman seated by the door. “Is that decorative, or alive?” he asked. We watched it. It moved. “It” was a weevil of some kind, about the size of my thumb. “Um, s dovolením,” I said, and pointed at the hitchhiker, then made a brushing motion at my own shoulder. The woman pulled at her sleeve and looked down. The weevil crawled toward her neck, out of her eyeline. A British woman sitting next to her now noticed, and decided to help. “Oh, you’ve got a bug on you!” she exclaimed, and quickly flicked the thing in a beeline (weevil-line?) straight into the bag on the woman’s lap.

Having not yet seen the weevil, the woman with the bag seemed confused, as we kept pointing to the bag and saying, “It’s in your bag! IT’S IN YOUR BAG!” as if by sheer repetition of this one phrase, she’d catch on to the English language. She figured out that there was something in her bag that was pretty frightening to tourists, and so she opened it up to reveal a turtle, comfortable nestled in a custom open-top wooden box lined with Styrofoam. The weevil was nowhere to be seen, she lifted the turtle out of its box with one hand, revealing the weevil. I fished a candy wrapper from my pocket, and tried to scoop the weevil out, all the while being emasculated by the British woman who kept shouting, “JUST USE YOUR FINGERS, IT’S NOT GOING TO BITE YOU!” Sure lady. Hey, I have an idea: YOU use YOUR fingers to grab foreign insects from a stranger’s bag in a subway 6,000 miles from home. Sheesh. Meanwhile, the woman with the bag turned to her turtle, and said something like, “See all the fuss going on here?”

Weevil safely chased out the door at the next stop, we met up with some of Nate’s friends for a picnic up on the castle hill.

Vickie was wonderfully witty and full of pop-culture references, including a well placed mention of this Bonnie Tyler gem that burrowed into my auditory cortex and haunted me for the rest of the trip. Thanks, Vick.

Being the literary masterminds that these kids were, Jason scored a MadLibs book that materialized whenever the conversation lulled. To help you capture the mood, I’ve created this little Javascript game for you to play along. Just click on the photo of Kelis, another pop disaster that I got stuck in my head this trip:

That afternoon we hit the Kafka museum. It was of the “existential space” variety, which means a bunch of video installations, moody lighting, and a piped in soundtrack like you might play on Halloween to spook out trick-or-treaters. But first, we seized an opportunity to take this truly juvenile photo:

Here are some images from the museum, interspersed with some of my favorite quotes from the walls:

Whatever you do, it is always wrong.

The Messisah will only arrive when
we no longer need him.

The office is not a stupid institution,
it is rooted more in the fantastic than
the stupid.

Then we packed, ate a couple of questionable train-station sausages, and settled in for an overnight ride to Kraków.

As we rode across Bohemia and into Silesia, we were treated to another great electrical storm. Every flash of lightning would reveal a farmer’s field, or a distant clump of buildings out on the horizon, and we fell asleep to the sweet smell of wet earth and ozone.

DAY 6: CITY OF KINGS, SHRINE OF A QUEEN, OR THAT POPE THAT JUST WAS

We rolled into Kraków tired and hungry while the city was still waking up. We checked into the freshly painted Kadetus hostel on Zwierzyniecka St., a word that simply refused to roll trippingly off my rusty Polish tongue. We showered and dumped the bags, then wandered back to the old town, looking for a nalesniki (crepe) place we’d seen earlier on our way to the hostel from the train station. We were having a hard time finding it, or anyplace to have breakfast before 9 am on a Sunday, and it was making us a little cranky, when in the middle of the square, a cheery, “Hello fellas,” made us forget our stomachs for a minute. Our friend Dustin was in Kraków for the Summer studying Polish, and we’d sent an email before leaving Prague in hopes of catching up with us. Dustin replied with an early morning rendezvous point, but we missed the email. Turns out, we just happened by it. A lovely Polish coincidence, indeed.

Breakfast was nalesniki and strawberry pierogi with cream and sugar, then we made our way up to Wawel castle, the seat of Polish kings for hundreds of years. I’d been talking up the famous hussar armor, which I incorrectly remembered being in the castle’s armory. It’s not. It’s either in Gdansk, or maybe in the national museum in Warsaw. If someone sees it, pleases let me know. The ticket proved to be worthwhile nonetheless, since we were able to ogle the Polish coronation sword, and some clever 18th and19th Century contraptions that combined the grace of a sword with the shock and awe of a derringer (tucked into the handle). I made a mental note of this combination, in the unlikely future event of essential swordplay.

That afternoon, we hopped a train to Czestochowa, site of Poland’s most important Catholic shrine. As we approached the sanctuary, we were reminded that this was sacred ground, and were admonished to “behave as a pilgrim!” I’d left my black hat and brass buckled shoes back in the States, plus I wasn’t really comfortable trying to buy Manhattan for beads, so I chose to just try and be respectful instead.

The main event in Czestochowa is this:

She’s an icon from the East, artist unknown, that is commonly known as “the Black Madonna.” She’s got a legend that I’ve heard goes like this:

Back in the 17th century, the Poles were at perpetual war with the Swedes. In a particular battle at the monastery of Jasna Góra in Czestochowa, she was brought out on the ramparts as a standard to inspire the Poles. Here’s where things get metaphysical: In one telling, the monastery was lifted up into a cloud, out of reach of the Swedes, who were reamed by the Poles. At least that’s how I remember the story, but you can never be sure with the Poles. They’re as proud of the battles they lost as they are of the ones they lost. It’s also possible that it was just a well-placed fogbank that created the illusion, but who knows. In the course of the battle, the painting was damaged (the source of the two scars on Mary’s cheek). Rumor has it that these slowly expand each year, and that when they reach her heart, it will begin the rapture. But I think that the guy who told me that also said that the next Pope was going to be a black man from America, and that didn’t pan out. For her service in this miracle, she was later crowned queen of Poland. She’s about the only Catholic who ranks higher in the Polish heaven than John Paul II:

After stopping for lunch at a pizzeria (where the kind waiter explained every menu item, and served us a rather unique bruschetta with stewed mushrooms), we climbed the hill to the monastery, and joined the throngs of faithful trying to get a look at the painting.

The sanctuary was packed with some great faces. The look of septuagenarian Poles engrossed in prayer is pretty powerful, but I felt that snapping pics would be not be pilgrim-like, so I was left with what I shot from the hip:

At one point in the mass, everyone knelt, including the three of us, a moment late. Dustin noted that it must be something in the Mormon imprint that leaves us ready to assimilate into a mass religious ritual when confronted with it. That and I was still trying to behave like a pilgrim, and they were kneeling, so it seemed like the respectful thing to do.

On the ride back to Kraków, we shared a train compartment with a kind retired factory manager from Katowice. It gave Dustin and I a chance to practice some Polish. It takes some time to get used to the grammatical inconsistencies that simply don’t translate. For instance, this friendly guy several times mentioned “That Pope that just was,” referring to John Paul II. You could use the same grammatical construction to talk about something you just had, like “that pizza we just had.” Even though he was saying it right (it is his language, after all) it still struck me as absurd every time he said it.

After a conversation about the weather (our friend’s cure for the oppressive heat: strip to your underwear, soak your feet in cold water, and drink beer, not vodka), things got political. Our new friend had to know: “So how’s it living over in the states with the terrorists? You guys have it pretty bad, right? Is it safe to go out on the streets?” I got similar questions from a couple cab drivers that made me wonder what the press is saying. It was like they thought we were living in Tel Aviv, which I can only imagine is like what he described, based entirely in what I’m reading in the press here. Such is globalism.

I took the opportunity to ask him what Poles thought of Bush and Americans. Turns out, he liked the guy so much, that he said he’d have voted for him if they’d let him. I said that we were curious, because we hear a lot about how unpopular Bush is in Europe these days, and he broke it down for us like this:

“See, that’s the Germans. They don’t like Bush, but we all know that the Germans can’t be trusted. The French don’t like him either, but what are the French? They’re scared. They’re no soldiers. They were the first to throw their hands up in World War II”—this point emphasized by our friend waving his arms above his head in mock surrender—”Now the Italians, at first they seemed to be okay, but they’re no soldiers either. They backed out as soon as things got bad. Not the Poles. When there’s a fight, Pole will go. The die, but they go.”

“They die, but they go.” It could be the new national slogan.

Still, he saved the worst for the Russians: “They’re a dark, filthy people who are illiterate and don’t understand the concept of money.” To that summation, he added an aesthetic critique of the uniforms they wore in WWII, which had something to with the distasteful state of repair in which they kept their boots.

It was also a chance for me to get an update on Silesia. For the most part, it seemed like life in Poland was better than it was 10 years ago. There was construction everywhere. Krawów had new street signs, and flowers planted in the once neglected public gardens. Most telling, every third woman seemed to be pregnant—something far less common 10 years ago, and as strong a barometer of optimism. But it sounds like poor Silesia is missing out on the boom. This was Poland’s rust belt, one of the most polluted places in the world. I lived there for seven months in 1993-94, and once I got caught in the rain, and the next morning in the shower, my hair came out in handfuls. I bought a hat. I haven’t spent any time there since 1998, but our friend said that because Poland is now a member of the EU, they can’t afford to make the factories clean enough to meet EU standards, and massive unemployment remains in this corner of the country. Soon enough, the train stopped in Katowice, and after much handshaking and future well wishing, our friend hopped off the train and we were back to the tourist-infused boom of Kraów.

Dustin guided us to a tasty Georgian café for dinner, where we had some kind of lavash burrito hybrid. The dinner was interrupted at one point when a drunk and aggressive older Polish woman made a grab at my plate. On reflex, I swept my arm around, knocking her off balance, and our eyes locked. It wasn’t a particularly good feeling. It was too full moment to adequately balance the moral consequences of her hunger and drunkenness, my easy affluence, the instinct to protect myself, and the higher calling of helping a person in need. The only Polish phrase that came to mind was, “spadaj,” a less than polite way of asking someone to get lost. I knew it wasn’t the right word, but I didn’t know what was. She finally broke the silence:

“Are you Polish?” she asked.

“No,” I said in Polish.

“Stupid Germans,” she muttered, and staggered towards the noise of the square.

DAY 7: DEATH TO NUMBNESS, OR HOW WE ENDED UP AT THE KINO

The next morning, Nate and I took another field trip from Kraków to Auschwitz. This marked my sixth return to the camp—once for myself, five times to take someone else for the first time.

I don’t know what I can say about Auschwitz that hasn’t already been said. It’s a sad and powerful place. I’m glad the museum is there. I agree with the Simon Wiesenthal center that graces the lobby of the entry building: “Information is a defense.” Even though I now know very well what will face me when I step out into the yard, I still physically feel a wave of sadness when I see it for the first time. It’s a place that a more superstitious soul might describe as haunted. I think I’ve been too many times. I kept trying to see it through Nate’s eyes instead of mine, but that just made me anticipate the exhibits that he’d find most disturbing. It was like a morbid play that I’d seen performed too many times. I didn’t even take many pictures this time. I’ve already got too many. We skipped the Birkenau camp, because Nate was starting to feel numb from all the death. He said it, but I felt it too.

In the continuing trail of new wealth that follows sites of tourist interest in the new Poland, the taxi driver who took us from the train station to the camp had a flat screen TV in his cab. I distinctly remember my shock 10 years ago, when the Polish government issued new currency (including coins, the old ones having long lost their value) and I came across the first Coke machine in 18 months. I stood in the Warsaw train station and stared at it, stunned that I could forget that Coke machines existed. And now, barely a decade later, TVs in taxis.

The other change is the introduction of a new consumer-sales culture. Customer service didn’t exist 10 years ago. The information desk at the train station was where you went when you needed to be insulted and berated for your lack of ability to read the posted schedule, not where you took legitimate travel questions. Those you saved for people waiting for trains. But now, in Kraków, there was a sign behind the info desk that said something to the effect that the train station’s mission was to provide a positive customer service experience and fulfill every need of the client blah blah. I can’t imagine the meeting where they unveiled that one. But apparently it caught hold, and as it often does, customer service morphs into aggressive sales. Our taxi ride back to the train station was offered by one Jan Gut, whose card advertised “LANGUAGE ENGLISH” and “MINI VAN 6 + 1.” He has an email address, but he explained to us that if we want to contact him by email, it may take a minute to respond, since his son in the statse checks his email, then prints and faxes the messages to him. We also saw all his family photos, and got a long and confusing menu of services Mr. Gut can offer visitors to Auschwitz. It seemed to include run of his garden and sauna, but his pidgin English-Polish was more confusing that it would have been if he’d just stuck to one language of the other. I’m not sure if a sauna was where I would want to go after Auschwitz, but in the new Poland, you’ve got the option.

We returned to Kraków, and after lunch at the Bar Mleczny Dworzanin (bigos and golabki) then met up with Dustin and spent the afternoon browsing (and then buying) at a gallery of Polish posters. I picked up some replicas of Soviet work posters (for Heather’s office) and movie posters for Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing and Big Animal, and absurdist film about a Polish villager whose calm existence is upset by the inheritance of a camel. We then went back to the square, where we watched some Polish breakdancers (not these specific Polish breakdancers, but kids with skills, nonetheless) and where Dustin ordered some fantastic ice cream concoction described as the “spaghetti of the elves.”

We also took some time to photograph the pigeons. There are more of them in the market square of Kraków than any other one place that I’ve ever been. Here are some of the best:

After another pierogi dinner at a nice little café tucked into a winding side street, we parted ways with Dustin, and then Nate and I went to the movies. All the walking was taking a toll. By this point I had a foot that wasn’t tolerating a shoe (you can see it here, but it’s graphic—not for the squeamish) so we stared going to the movies. Tonight’s feature was My Summer of Love, a British film by Polish expat Pawel Pawlikowski, about two girl who meet and have a Summer fling under the judging watch of one girl’s older criminal turned born again Christian brother. Paddy Considine, who I’ve liked since 24 Hour Party People played the brother. I quite liked the film—full of idealistic characters whose fantasies run out of steam by the end of the story. We saw it in a small theatre, a single room that also housed a bar and the projector (which noisily chattered away). At one point in the film, the brother’s prayer group starts speaking in tongues, and Pawlikowski chose to use Polish for gibberish. Between listening to the English, reading the Polish subtitles, and my brain fatigued from switching languages all day, it was absolutely confusing.

DAY 8: WARSAW, A REAL CITY, OR HOW TO LEARN NEW AND UNEXPECTED POLISH WORDS

Either my memory is fuzzy or the rail system in Poland is better than it used to be. The trains look about the same, but I remember the Kraków to Warsaw trip taking three to four hours. Now it’s just over two. We opted to get our first decent night’s sleep in a week and leave for Warsaw late the next morning, which also afforded Nate a chance to do some souvenir shopping and get a haircut at the train station. The barber had a cousin in Montana, but she’d never been. “I only know it from that Robert Redford movie where he talks to horses,” she said. We were also the second set of Americans in a month that thought a train station haircut was photo-worthy. She had a good laugh about that:

Nate’s souvenir binge left him with more cargo than his existing bags could carry, but a lady at one of the newspaper kiosks helped us out by selling us a Polish lady’s magazine that came with a free cheap vinyl suitcase. On the ride to Warsaw, we read an article about why Polish women have sex and got depressed. The reasons were all things like “because I like the status is gives me with my girlfriends” and “because it’s easier than the fight I have to have with my man when I say no.” Better than the magazine was the lunch we ate in the dining car. I had a bean soup called fasolka po Bretonsku that I’d all but forgotten about. Again, the power-lunchers with their laptops reminded me that this was not the same country I lived in 10 years ago.

I got kind of giddy as we neared Warsaw and I started to recognize the landmarks. The tracks skirt the edge of the neighborhood there where I lived for 5 months in 1994-95. I lived in more picturesque places, but Warsaw always held a special place in my heart. Nate observed that it’s a “real city,” and it’s true. There isn’t much that’s old. It was completely reborn after the war, so if you’re looking for a cobblestoned Euroland of make believe, this isn’t it. But it’s got the energy of two million people, and a vibrancy befitting the capital of a country of romantics.

We checked into our hostel near the university, and after a walk to the old town, and ate yet another pierogi dinner. Bellies full and feet raw, we once again found our way to the movies. The best option at the theatre nearest our hostel was Inside Deep Throat, a documentary about the quintessential blue movie of the 1970s that single handedly created porn chic. (By the way, “quintessential” is really not the right word, but I just could bear the potential homonymic pun of the more accurate “seminal.”) The film was okay. It didn’t really let me in on anything more than what I already knew about the film from film history books (that I wanted to know, anyway). But I did pick up some Polish slang that I never had cause to use as a Mormon missionary. For example, where Americans “spank the monkey,” Poles “break the horse.” I learned some PG-rated phrases as well. Like the Poles don’t think of American presidents as sitting “in the Oval Office,” but rather “on the presidential armchair.”

It was pretty late after the movie, but I was still suffering from severe nostalgia. So I left Nate at the hostel and took a cab across town to Ochota, my old neighborhood, for a midnight walk.

Maybe it was because it was dark, or abandoned, but this was a close as I came to revisiting the city I knew 10 years ago. It’s a nice hood—close to the center, but with a pace dialed in right between urban and residential. It’s probably no coincidence that my neighborhood in San Francisco moves at roughly the same speed. But this is where I first fell in love with it. It had changed, to be sure. There were clothing stores where my grocer used to be, and the street signs were all new. But the old monument to the Battle of Warsaw was as grey as ever, and locked down for the night, the old market stalls looked the same. The movie theatre where new posters marked the passing weeks was still open, but had fallen from first run to video store status. There’s nothing notable about this neighborhood, except that it was mine. It was the right landscape for my memories.

DAY 9: NEW CITY RISING, OR WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

After the best shower either of us had in over a week (bless Warsaw for its warm water and adequate pressure), we crossed the bridge to the Praga side if the city and took a stroll through the Russian bazaar. Staged around the upper ring of a decommissioned soccer stadium and sprawling out the gates and down to the street. It was—and is a place where just about everything is for sale, though most of the goods are traveling East to West (hence the “Russian” bazaar). Although there seems to be more north and south than there used to be, too. Warsaw was (and still is) not a particularly diverse city, but there were quite a few Africans at the bazaar. Every 20 yards a group of Africans and Poles (or maybe Ukranians) would be arguing. The main African complaint seemed to be, “You’re cheating me!” and the principle Polish response was, “You should be grateful to be making any money at all!”

In addition to the cheap stockings, miscellaneous appliance parts, and fishing tackle were more ominous items. We got a hard sell from one guy who had everything from Polish commando knives to switchblades to bona fide machetes. And that was just what was on display. There were a lot of guys brushing against us offering spyritus (liquor), papierosy (cigarettes), and black market CDs and DVDs. Can’t wait for the official War of the Worlds release? They already had it in Warsaw. Most of this is just foreign travel fun. It makes for the kind of story that can be dressed up to sound dangerous, when it’s really just a day at the market. The only thing guys that truly made me nervous were the ones who would ask, “Boys, what are you looking for? What can I get you?” That’s when my imagination got the best of me.

We then headed back across the city to the relatively new museum of the Warsaw uprising. It’s about a year old, and is in the style of the new “experience” museums that are as much about ambience as artifacts, a draw for tourists more than a resource for scholarship. Poles are proud of the uprising, and rightly so. On a signal from the Russians, the underground Home Army started a series of acts of sabotage and attacks on German positions in the city to open the gate for liberation. But the Russians stopped on the Praga side of the river and waited. They knew that they couldn’t turn Poland into a Soviet satellite state unless it was weakened, so they let the Germans cripple the capitol. For 63 days, the resistance fighters in Warsaw used guerilla tactics to keep the Nazis at bay. By the time the city stopped kicking, 85% of it lay in a moonscape of ruins. We were at the museum just two days after the 61st anniversary of the start of the uprising, and every other street corner in the city was decorated with flowers remembering some key standoff with the Germans.

The museum is a great entrée to this piece of history for an outsider, but at least one Polish woman who looked old enough to remember the war was underwhelmed. As we were checking our bags, she started complaining to an attendant that the videos in the museum were in English, not Polish. “But the video playing right now is in Polish,” the attendant said, pointing at a monitor above his head. “Inside, it’s all English!” the woman retorted. They were both right. The videos inside were subtitled in English, and the Polish soundtrack was on headphones attached to the wall. Apparently this concept of museum design hasn’t totally caught on yet.

We headed back to the old town for yet another batch of pierogi. This classic Polish dish is experiencing a renaissance in Warsaw, where every third restaurant is advertising them, even the fancy places on the square. The word “pierogeria” has entered the lexicon, and they’re branching out from the classic cheese and potato or cabbage and mushroom varieties. We ate seven varieties in all during the trip. Here’s the roundup:

Strawberry with cream and sugar
Ruskie (potato and cheese)
Ham and Camembert
The El Pierogo (Tex-mexish tomato and spicy meat)
Chocolate (for dessert)
Spinach
Cheese and pineapple

The last two were baked, not boiled, with garlic and cranberry sauce, respectively.

Nate observed that Kraków and Prague both had successful market square “gimicks.” In Prague, it’s the parade of saints every hour in the astronomical clock. In Kraków, it’s the bugler who repeats a song that was supposedly played during yet another war with the Swedes, cutting off mid-note where the original bugler was said to have been killed. Warsaw has no such gimmick (although the whole old town was rebuilt from rubble after the war to pre-war specs, unlike most of the city). The city added a new mermaid statue last year (she’s the symbol of Warsaw, for reasons I don’t remember) but it lacks theatricality. We were thinking that they need some legend that involves the square and a pierogi maker. Let me know if you have any ideas, and I’ll try to pass them on to the municipal government.

That night, we saw Batman Begins, both of us for the second time. We saw it in the American-style multiplex in the Palace of Culture and Science. The Palace was an unwanted gift from Stalin, and matches a number of similar towers in Moscow. Ten years ago, it was a dusty office complex slipping towards neglect. Most Varsovians never liked it, and along with the usual chat about tearing it down, I now here there’s a plan to bury it in other skyscrapers. It’s a solution that’s still too expensive for the newly capitalist city, but I counted seven skyscrapers in the city center starting the process. The building was a locus of Soviet occupation, and now it’s a locus of the new global order. Where the lobby used to be all hard flat surfaces, now it’s red carpet and movie posters. There’s a scene in Batman where two ladies who accompany Bruce Wayne to a posh restaurant get scolded for splashing about in a fountain. “Forgive them, they’re European,” Wayne explains. And finally, the audience laughed like they were in on the joke.

DAY 10: BACK ON THE PLANE, OR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SEATING

Early the next morning, our trip wrapped up. We boarded our flight from Warsaw after deftly decoding their random security screening (every other person), and I ended my trip on a accidentally poetic note: Sitting next to me was a guy from the Bay Area who was in Warsaw researching a documentary film about the origins of the Polish joke. When we got up to change planes in London, Nate elbowed me and pointed out that the guy in the seat behind me was a Mormon missionary. Heather asked later, but I failed to notice who was in the row in front of me. At least it wasn’t just the bulkhead.

The last two weeks of silence here have been the result of a busy work schedule and behind-the-scenes work on a long post about my summer trip to Europe. I can’t imagine posting it right now. It’s going to go on the shelf for a few days.

Last night I was up late paying the bills. It’s a monthly ritual for me, and as usual, I was watching TV while I balanced my checkbook. I’m fortunate enough to have the means to pay my bills, so it’s actually a kind of fulfilling task. A few clicks on the web, and it’s done for the month, and I’m pleased to see that the number at the bottom of the column is black, not red.

I’ve been following the hurricane Katrina stories like most of you have, I’m sure. From time to time at work, I catch a headline on the web, or read a quick article. But to be brutally honest, for most of yesterday I was more preoccupied with the demise of one of my favorite bookstores than the plight of the people in New Orleans. I’m ashamed to admit being so self-centered, but it’s true. But last night, as I sat in my comfortable apartment, counting my money with a belly full of Chinese food, I really stopped and saw the faces and heard the voices of the people who are suffering in the New Orleans, and my heart was pricked.

Maybe I’m moved in part because the last time an American city was destroyed like this, it was San Francisco, my adopted home and a place I love dearly. As I was writing this, I recalled this telegram, sent to George Hearst in Paris from his business manager after the 1906 quake and fire. Even though it happened 68 years before I was born, let alone moved here, I can’t imagine the loss of my city.

You probably don’t need this blog to understand that this is a disaster, but I’m not sure the scope can be overstated. New Orleans is a city of half a million people, and it’s gone. On cable news last night, I caught interviews with the police chief of Miami (who has some hurricane experience himself) and the former chief of New Orleans. They both acknowledged the importance of gaining and maintaining early control of certain infrastructure in the wake of a storm like Katrina. They also admitted that the opportunity to do so was past, and that for now, the possibility of order in the city is essentially lost. People are shooting at rescue helicopters and hospitals. Cops who have lost everything themselves are choosing to turn in their badges and walk away rather than risk their lives trying to put down the anarchy.

People are being failed by the government. Last night, I saw the dead and the dying in the convention center. There are tens of thousands of people holed up there. They went there because their leaders told them to. They’ve been without food and water for 4 days. The center is literally filling with human waste and bodies. Elderly people are dying in their wheelchairs, then push against the wall and obscured with a blanket. Babies are starving. I saw a hysterical woman pleading for milk for her infant. The child, hair matted with sweat, flopped like a rag doll in her arms as shifted him to her shoulder. “He’s not waking up like he used to,” she said. “He’s not waking up.” Cameramen are reporting piles of human waste on the floors, and there have been reports of gun fights and rapes [i]inside[/i] the superdome and convention center shelters. Ted Koppel was grilling the head of FEMA on Nightline. The FEMA-head claimed that they weren’t aware of the conditions of people in the shelters until yesterday. A Koppel asked, “How can you say that? Don’t you watch TV? We’ve been reporting this for days.” I’m not particularly sympathetic to the FEMA-head’s explanation that they needed to “experience the truth themselves.” He also claimed that after the hurricane they thought the worst was over, and that no one was prepared for the flooding from Lake Pontchartrain. Before the storm, I was only following the story with the most casual of attention and even I was aware of the feared scenario of the levies breaking. There’s been a complete and total failure of leadership here, and once the immediate work of rescue and relocation is underway, there needs to be a reckoning.

As I’ve been thinking about the situation, and thinking of what I can do, I’ve started thinking of this as both a short-term crisis and proof of the need for long-term planning. I got an email from a friend this morning who decided to do what she could with her address book to encourage people to pitch in. I’m not delusional about the size of my readership here, but putting out the call is the least I can do. Even if one or two more people pitch in, it will be more than I could do alone. Here are some suggestions for action:

Personal

Send money. Whatever you can spare. Most of us feel far away, but a few mouse clicks can bring us closer. I think that the Red Cross is probably the best place to contribute. They’ll be at the center of whatever relief effort happens. My friend also sent links to donate via Amazon.com and the LDS Church, and a government guide for non-monetary ways to help, including blood donation. Be generous, and be swift. I have a birthday coming up soon, and I expect that some of you will start asking me soon for gift ideas. Don’t buy me anything. Give the money to the Red Cross.

Look for other ways to help. Listen to people’s needs, and be creative with what you have. I was moved to tears when I heard that Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich opened his state’s schools to kids affected by the storm. I can only imagine the kind of hope that little bit of order can provide some families. There are countless smaller stories of people in Houston and other nearby communities taking people into their homes, and showing up to volunteer at shelters. I know a guy who lives in Houston, and he went to the Astrodome to volunteer. Here’s part of the account he posted online:

I noticed one lady in particular walking up a long ramp, dragging a large duffel bag. I offered to help her, and she just about broke down in tears as she told me that she was unable to contact her nephew. I guess she raised her nephew like a son, and the nephew lives in Houston. I asked her if she knew his phone number, but she said when she called information, she was told that it was a private number. She didn’t have his address, and all she knew was that the nephew worked at a Hampton Inn as a security guard. I took her to my car and drove her to the Hampton Inn just down the block. The manager refused to divulge any information to this poor lady, so I brought her to my apartment to research the nephew’s contact information on the Internet. As luck would have it, we found his number right away. We called, he answered, and there was much rejoicing. When the lady and the nephew reunited in the parking lot of the grocery store at the end of the street many tears were shed.

Watch for opportunities to help, and don’t talk yourself out of seizing them. Act now. Almost all of us can afford to go without some everyday luxury. Choose to make a small personal sacrifice and use the resources you save to help alleviate the suffering of others.

Plan and prepare. One of the lessons of this storm is that life and civilization are fragile. We need to shore up the levies in our own lives. Manage your own resources well. Get out of debt as quickly as you can. Put money in savings. Buy insurance. Keep emergency food and water on hand. Once you’ve got your own house in order, then you can serve your community. A while back, Heather and I were roped into spending most of our September Friday nights doing Neighborhood Emergency Response Training with the SFFD. I’d been thinking of this as a hassle, but I’m now galvanized. As I rode my Vespa across the city this morning, I saw a lot of faces that could have been the people I saw on the news last night. Preparedness isn’t just about self-preservation. It’s also about standing ready to help others.

Talk to other people. Tell them what you’re doing. Encourage them to help. Keep us all accountable for our actions and our inaction. The idea isn’t to brag, but to make other people see that action is possible, and to prick their conscience.

Political

At the risk of poor timing, I can’t help but think that the choices we’ve made in our leaders have contributed to this mess. This is the end game of conservative government. You don’t like gun control? Then remember that you’ve helped arm the angry mobs. You don’t like big government? Then don’t expect Louisiana to have the resources to upgrade the levies that could have averted the worst of this disaster. Support the war in Iraq? Then you approve an overextension of the military now so desperately needed at home. Think that the poor are responsible to better their own circumstances? Then the babies dying at the convention center are on your conscience. If their parents earned a living wage, then maybe more of them would have had the resources to respond to the evacuation orders when they had a chance to get out. Even if you write off the report by an MIT climatologist about global warming causing more hurricanes, you have to look at the failures of leadership here. We might not have created this storm, but we elected the leaders that seem so incapable of preparing for and responding to this catastrophe. These are the stakes of not supporting a government that takes care of its subjects.

Private

How we respond to a crisis like this is only symptomatic of the state of our moral compass. It’s almost impossible not to feel compassion when faced with this kind of suffering. But what happens to that compassion when the storm is over? Do we turn our focus back onto ourselves? Do we put our needs above others? Do we rationalize our way out of doing our part to build better families and communities? There will come a time for soul searching, and each of us should be brutally honest about the choices we make and the beliefs we hold and whether they are going to lead to the family, community, and nation that we want to build.

Twelve years ago this October, my passport was stamped for the first time. I was barely a week past my 19th birthday, and I was traveling as a ambassador of a very American Jesus to the world’s second most Catholic country, to a place emerging from the shadow of Soviet oppression, and still thrashing after a bitter century of fighting for existence, independence and identity.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was armed with a rudimentary knowledge of the language, a near ignorance of cultures besides my own, and a mythology that made my mission part of a global Christian Manifest Destiny. I was coming to terms with what would be an unparalleled period of belief in my young life. I lived in Poland for almost 2 years. Though I’ve only returned a few times since, like Chopin, a piece of my heart remains interred there.

Enter The Captive Mind. I became aware of Czeslaw Milosz not long after that first stamp, but other than thumbing through books of his poetry, I’d never read any of his works. Finally, last month, in advance of a trip to Kraków and Warsaw, I picked up this best known of his works.

Milosz wrote it in the early 1950s, shortly after emigrating from Poland to France. It’s a collection of essays concerning the difficulties of intellectual life in a totalitarian system. It’s a warning of the dark sides of Soviet communism (which were somewhat underestimated by many intellectuals of the day) and an account of the difficulty of maintaining your soul and independence in the face of a system that demands conformity. But The Captive Mind shouldn’t be mistaken for a history lesson. As Milosz points out in the introduction, he didn’t escape pressures to conform by defecting, and I don’t think we’ve escaped it with time and the victory of democracy, either:

“The decision to refuse all complicity with the tyranny of the East—is this enough to satisfy one’s conscience? I do not think so. I have won my freedom; but let me not forget that I stand in daily risk of losing it once more. For in the West also one experiences the pressure to conform—to conform, that is, with a system that is the opposite of the one I have escaped from. The difference is that in the West one may resist such pressure without being held guilty of a mortal sin.”

To be sure, I recognize the advantages of capitalism, democracy, and freedom. But I also feel the pressures to conform. Though the influences of church, family, society, need and want are less overt than the heavy hand of a totalitarian regime that isolates its critics in a gulag, they are no less real. In truth, these internal pressures to conform can be more vexing, because they are so intangible. It’s hard to stand up against an ethereal oppressor, and it’s easy to seem egocentric when the struggle with conformity is so personal. Democracy is a freedom of choice, but it’s not freedom from pressure to uphold the status quo.

Milosz writes about the fictional Mongolian philosopher Murti-Bing, the creation of Polish writer Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. Murti-Bing created a pill that, when ingested, freed the soul of metaphysical angst, leaving contentment with the existing order of things. In Witkiewicz’s novel Insatiability, an Eastern Army, unified by the Murti-Bing treatment, goes to war with the West. The forces of Murti-Bing win, and the conquered are left with no choice but to swallow the pills and embody the ideals of the East through “socially useful” works. But the deeply embedded culture of the West makes complete self-deception impossible, and the vanquished Westerners become Schizophrenics. Milosz:

“Today, Witkiewicz’s vision is being fulfilled in the minutest detail throughout a large part of the European continent. Perhaps sunlight, the smell of earth, little everyday pleasures, and the forgetfulness that work brings can somewhat ease the tensions created by this process of fulfillment. But beneath the activity and the bustle of daily life is the constant awareness of an irrevocable choice to me made. One must either die (physically or spiritually), or else one must be reborn according to a prescribed method, namely, the taking of Murti-Bing pills.”

Witkiewicz’s novel became prophetic when Soviet forces invaded Poland. He responded by cutting his wrists.

Totalitarian Murti-Bing means one pill cures all. Democratic Murti-Bing means you get your choice of pills that claim to cure all. But democracy doesn’t free you of the pressure to conform. It just turns the man at the pulpit into a cacophonous crowd.

Still, Milosz believed that the democracies of the West were where hope for the future should lie. That’s not to say that our systems are perfect. Milosz’s disgust at American hubris is no less relevant today than it was 50 years ago:

“The man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are. Their resultant lack of imagination is appalling. Because they were born and raised in a given social order and in a given system of values, they believe that any other order must be ‘unnatural,’ and that it cannot last because it is incompatible with human nature. But even they may one day know fire, hunger and the sword. In all probability this is what will occur; for it is hard to believe that when one half of the world is living through terrible disasters, the other half can continue a nineteenth-century mode of life, learning about the distress of its distant fellowmen only from movies and newspapers. Recent examples teach us that this cannot be. An inhabitant of Warsaw or Budapest once looked at newsreels of bombed Spain or burning Shanghai, but in the end he learned how these and other catastrophes appear in actuality. He read gloomy tales of the N.K.V.D., until one day he found he himself had to deal with it. If something exists in one place, it will exist everywhere. This is the conclusion he draws from his observations, and so he has no particular faith in the momentary prosperity of America.”

What Milosz says the man of the East is looking for—and I think that many of us in the modern West can say the same—is not merely “freedom from something,” but rather “freedom for something“:

“More than the West imagines, the intellectuals of the East look to the west for something. Nor do they seek it in propaganda. The something they look for is a great new writer, a new social philosophy, an artistic movement, a scientific discovery, new principles of painting or music. They rarely find this something. The people of the East have already become accustomed to thinking of art and society on an organizational and mass scale. The only forms of culture in the West which attain such a scale are movies, best sellers, and illustrated magazines. No thinking person in the West takes most of these means of mass recreation seriously; whereas, in the East, where everything has a mass character, they take on the dignity of being the sole representatives of the ‘decadent culture of the West.’”

I’m not saying that the West has failed to create new somethings since the end of the Cold War, but rather than create from or for somethings, we’ve been particularly busy creating means to somethings—tools and systems. We created the internet, which brings both the poems of the person I’m talking about and pornography across the same wires. It’s the biggest communication revolution since the printing press. An undeniably democratic medium. But what does it stand for? What do you want it to stand for?

Which brings me to the idea of Ketman. Milosz first encountered the idea in a book by the French diplomat and racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau, and is described as a Persian method of denying ones true thoughts and feelings in support of the more “correct” system of Islam:

“The people of the Mussulman East believe that ‘He who is in possession of truth must not expose his person, his relatives or his reputation to the blindness, the folly, the perversity of those whom is has pleased God to place and maintain in error.’ One must, therefore, keep silent about one’s true convictions if possible.

“‘Nevertheless,’ says Gobineau, ‘there are many occasions where silence no longer suffices, when it may pass as an avowal. Then one must not hesitate. Not only must one deny one’s true opinion, but one is commanded to resort to all true ruses in order to deceive one’s adversary. One makes all the protestations of faith that can please him, one performs all the rites one realizes to be the most vain, one falsifies one’s own books, one exhausts all possible means of deceit. Thus one acquires the multiple satisfactions and merits of having placed oneself and one’s relatives under cover, of not having exposed a venerable faith to the horrible contact of the infidel, and finally of having, in cheating the latter and confirming him in his error, imposed on him the shame and spiritual misery that he deserves.”

Ketman can apply to much more that Islam. I confess to my own personal Ketman. Treating my work as important, when I know that I do it more for my own benefit than for others—that’s Ketman. Making and keeping religious promises with an imperfect institution with hopes for my perfection—that’s Ketman. Ignoring my own inexperience and ignorance to go on a mission to Poland at 19—that’s Ketman. It sounds a lot like hypocrisy, but it’s better thought of as a shield around what we value most.

Milosz, with firm but gentle humanity, explained why we engage in Ketman, then refused to take shelter in it himself. He knew the dangerous hubris that resulted from a steady diet of Ketman:

“The civilization that calls itself Christian was built on the blood of the innocent. To be nobly indignant at those who are trying today to create another civilization by similar means is to take a somewhat pharisaic attitude. The records of crime will remain for many years, hidden in some place that is remote and secure; then, a scholar of the future, reaching through dust and cobwebs for the old files, will consider the murders committed as insignificant misdeeds compared with the task accomplished. More probably, however, no such files will exist; for, keeping step with progress, the emperors of today have drawn conclusions from this simple truth: whatever does not exist on paper, does not exist at all.”

This is the admission of a devout but honest Catholic. These are the observations of a man, having witnessed the darkest scenes of the 20th Century, recognizes the importance of rising above the darkness:

“The war years taught me that a man should not take a pen in his hands merely to communicate to others his own despair and defeat. This is too cheap a commodity; it takes too little effort to produce it for a man to pride himself on having done so.”

And to witness and create honestly—to deny Ketman—is his challenge to us:

“Eyes that have seen should not be shut; hands that have touched should not forget when they take up a pen.”

Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
John Wayne’s America, by Garry Willis
Either/Or, by Søren Kierkegaard
The Gospel According to the Son, by Norman Mailer
The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James
The Trial, by Franz Kafka
The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker
The Captive Mind, by Czeslaw Milosz
Pastoralia, by George Saunders

I’m taking requests.