Andy and I have travelled to Krakow to meet our daughter, Madeline, who has been working outside of Lviv. She has been doing humanitarian aid work for a small local NGO that is providing food, power and medical supplies to the eastern part of Ukraine that has been destroyed — and then re-destroyed — by Russian missile strikes. I gather her fiercely in my arms, but no encompassing hug, no comforting words can erase the reality of war that she is living. And that reality, despite my over-active imagination, I cannot truly comprehend as I have only read about it. What she speaks about in her time with the Ukrainian guys she works with is their laughter, their teasing, their attempts to understand her feminism against their more traditional gender roles — how they meet the logistical challenges of moving truckloads of donated items across war-torn spaces.
We are reconnecting with her as we wander around the beautiful city of Krakow. I learn more specifically about the cycles of the portioning of Poland and the vast and violent re-drawings of empire that this land bears witness to. We enter the Wawel Cathedral and, amidst the relics of saints and royals, we find the Crypt of National Poets. And there on the wall is a poem, shared with me many years ago in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by my Athenian colleague Lisa Haney, and returned to when the horrors of history and the moment well up in me: Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski.
Try to praise the mutilated world
In reading that poem again — in marble, on the wall of this crypt, next to my weary daughter — I feel how the layers of unliveable history shape us. Zagajewski connects the daily acts of praise of living with the web of struggle and loss that we inherit.
You must praise the mutilated world
This is a call, a demand that in spite of the mutilation we should find beauty and coherence. The horror must be included in the blessing. I don’t know how. And I want to turn away. And I know we are all called to learn, to seek understanding where there is grief, to see the scars of the past on the earth.
Praise the mutilated world
I remember first reading this poem in the aftermath of 9/11 and thinking — briefly, self-indulgently — that I had an understanding of living in war. Such an American indulgence! My understanding has become more layered as I contingently watch what happens in Ukraine. As a citizen of London, I am learning all the time how the aftermath of war has shaped and shifted time and place, how it reframes our lives today. The poem reflects how deeply and desperately the mind holds the everyday miracle of living in equilibrium with injustice and violence. The poem connects me to past reckonings with history’s wrath — and gives me the breath of the light of living.
Solstice is a celebration of the necessity of the darkening days with the shift towards more light in our daily cycle. This poem meets that primal movement with the historical movement between times of peace and times of struggle. Zagajewski catches the experience of using our imagination as a way into other stories (the eternal role of the creative arts), other histories. Isn’t this in part why we wander through old buildings, tapestried halls? And it is not really the moments of triumph we seek, but a map of how to negotiate the exiles, the griefs — the blasts into the work of living.
In The New Republic, the poet Robert Pinsky wrote in 1993 that Mr. Zagajewski’s poems, in a collection titled Canvas, were “about the presence of the past in ordinary life: history not as chronicle of the dead, or an anima to be illuminated by some doctrine, but as an immense, sometimes subtle force inhering in what people see and feel every day — and in the ways we see and feel.”
More on Zagajewski can be found in this New York Times obituary from March 2021.
