the days and weeks and years that followed.
It sounded as if Radio Maryja had turned its mics to the window to broadcast the sound of mourners spilling into the streets in greater numbers, shuffling, roaming aimlessly. Refrains dropped off and resumed again out of nowhere. The sound of thirty-eight million people destined to get lost in each other’s grief.
The announcer didn’t dare play any recorded music. Who could presume to choose the right soundtrack for a night like this?
“Turn here,” I told the driver. We were in Kraków, but still nowhere near the gallery. The meter was running up a fortune, and with this one deft move, I knew we could bypass St Stanislaus, St Michael, St Florian, St Francis of Assisi, the Papal Stone of the Blonia Commons, and anywhere else troublemakers were likely to gather that night.
“That will be worse,” he said, glancing at me in a rearview mirror choked with plastic rosaries. “You’re telling me we’ll be able to get within a kilometre of St Mary’s Basilica?”
He had a point. It’s national lore that when young Karol finished a work day at the quarry mines, he would stop by St Mary’s to soak up the stained glass. It’s no secret he was a Queen of Poland junkie.
“Just do something,” I said. “We can’t go straight.”
“Why not, Mr GPS?” The driver was miffed, and popped the clutch on purpose, jerking us both forward.
“Because that’s where the Solvay chemical factory was,” I said. Where Karol had bottled poison as a young man. Kraków is crows, but it’s also nostalgia. We were navigating through a landmine of sacred sites.
“Give me a better reason.”
“Because you’re not getting a fucking grosz from me if you go straight.”
“Then I’ll take you right to the police station.”
It was 8:45. If my gallery audience hadn’t dispersed into the slipstream of mourners, they would still be waiting for me to set London ablaze. Frustration was making me peel my lips with my teeth.
It wasn’t the taxi driver that was getting to me. It was the noise. You could hear that this death was going to change things permanently.
Medically speaking, subjective tinnitus makes no sense.
Researchers give these sufferers of phantom crickets and whistles a sample sound to listen to, a gauge to measure the buzz that’s slowly driving them zwariowane . Here lies the contradiction: patients focusing on the sample can often hear it below five decibels, rendering their internal hummingbirds and cicadas undetectable, but when focussing on the tinnitus and ignoring the sample, the same osoby claim insect symphonies of seventy decibels—as loud as a vacuum cleaner.
Do you see what I mean? Tinnitus is impossible to measure.
It may sound strange, but even with this din, there was still too much silence in my life. Missing speech. To this day, it kills me not to know all that my mother screamed from the fire. “Tell him.” Maybe she’s behind every inferno I plan, a wraith wrapped in a bed sheet, a spook in a shawl of embers. Invisible and mute, with a swatch of duct tape over her mouth. It’s almost as if I’m waiting for her to make an appearance and to shout a little louder this time. What did she want to tell me? I’m a child in Lourdes, with my sister, waiting for Mother Mary to materialize in a rainbow blur and take us by surprise. But most of all, I need to know if we’re alone in this world. I need to know if the apparition can ever happen or if it’s just a stupid dream.
And I need to know if the sister—Dorota, I mean—is for real.
Do we really need relationships if they end up causing us agony? It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they’re merely conversations with fellow travellers carried on for far too long.
[Nowa Huta, 1983. Karol Wojtyła is speaking in the middle of a field, where he did so for over a decade. But the middle of the field is now Kociół Arka Pana, a big ship of a church with a cross for a mast, built exactly
It sounded as if Radio Maryja had turned its mics to the window to broadcast the sound of mourners spilling into the streets in greater numbers, shuffling, roaming aimlessly. Refrains dropped off and resumed again out of nowhere. The sound of thirty-eight million people destined to get lost in each other’s grief.
The announcer didn’t dare play any recorded music. Who could presume to choose the right soundtrack for a night like this?
“Turn here,” I told the driver. We were in Kraków, but still nowhere near the gallery. The meter was running up a fortune, and with this one deft move, I knew we could bypass St Stanislaus, St Michael, St Florian, St Francis of Assisi, the Papal Stone of the Blonia Commons, and anywhere else troublemakers were likely to gather that night.
“That will be worse,” he said, glancing at me in a rearview mirror choked with plastic rosaries. “You’re telling me we’ll be able to get within a kilometre of St Mary’s Basilica?”
He had a point. It’s national lore that when young Karol finished a work day at the quarry mines, he would stop by St Mary’s to soak up the stained glass. It’s no secret he was a Queen of Poland junkie.
“Just do something,” I said. “We can’t go straight.”
“Why not, Mr GPS?” The driver was miffed, and popped the clutch on purpose, jerking us both forward.
“Because that’s where the Solvay chemical factory was,” I said. Where Karol had bottled poison as a young man. Kraków is crows, but it’s also nostalgia. We were navigating through a landmine of sacred sites.
“Give me a better reason.”
“Because you’re not getting a fucking grosz from me if you go straight.”
“Then I’ll take you right to the police station.”
It was 8:45. If my gallery audience hadn’t dispersed into the slipstream of mourners, they would still be waiting for me to set London ablaze. Frustration was making me peel my lips with my teeth.
It wasn’t the taxi driver that was getting to me. It was the noise. You could hear that this death was going to change things permanently.
Medically speaking, subjective tinnitus makes no sense.
Researchers give these sufferers of phantom crickets and whistles a sample sound to listen to, a gauge to measure the buzz that’s slowly driving them zwariowane . Here lies the contradiction: patients focusing on the sample can often hear it below five decibels, rendering their internal hummingbirds and cicadas undetectable, but when focussing on the tinnitus and ignoring the sample, the same osoby claim insect symphonies of seventy decibels—as loud as a vacuum cleaner.
Do you see what I mean? Tinnitus is impossible to measure.
It may sound strange, but even with this din, there was still too much silence in my life. Missing speech. To this day, it kills me not to know all that my mother screamed from the fire. “Tell him.” Maybe she’s behind every inferno I plan, a wraith wrapped in a bed sheet, a spook in a shawl of embers. Invisible and mute, with a swatch of duct tape over her mouth. It’s almost as if I’m waiting for her to make an appearance and to shout a little louder this time. What did she want to tell me? I’m a child in Lourdes, with my sister, waiting for Mother Mary to materialize in a rainbow blur and take us by surprise. But most of all, I need to know if we’re alone in this world. I need to know if the apparition can ever happen or if it’s just a stupid dream.
And I need to know if the sister—Dorota, I mean—is for real.
Do we really need relationships if they end up causing us agony? It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they’re merely conversations with fellow travellers carried on for far too long.
[Nowa Huta, 1983. Karol Wojtyła is speaking in the middle of a field, where he did so for over a decade. But the middle of the field is now Kociół Arka Pana, a big ship of a church with a cross for a mast, built exactly
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