Plumbbob

My favorite tool is a tool I rarely ever have the opportunity to use. Because it's beautiful, it sits on my desk, rather than being jostled about in my bag or buried with the ugly tools that fill my toolbox. I feel safe leaving it there because the chance to use it would be an event, and I could hardly forget to take it with me. Calling it a tool seems strange, since you have to let it go for it to work. I suppose its the equivalent of a sailor's compass. Both are indicators of great cosmic forces, and the operator only need to watch and reckon.

Mine is a cone of polished brass with a black screw-on tip, of steel, I'm guessing, which resembles a tiny warhead. While writing e-mails I pick it up to feel it's weight and admire it's Brancusi-like finish. I imagine removing it from it's velvet-lined mahogany box, deftly attaching it's string, lifting it up for the congregation to see, mumbling an incantation and nodding while I climb the Sacred Ladder. When suspended from a roof-beam or some fixed point, it dances and spins a little in ever smaller circles until it comes to rest, pointing to the center of the earth. It does look missile or bullet-like and might serve, in a pinch, as some kind improvised weapon, but it's destiny is at the end of a piece of string, a gravity kite. I've seen ugly ones, which baffles me, because, honestly, a rock on a string will do just as well most of the time, so if you've made the effort to give it form, how can you accept anything less than a little sculpture.

They were supposedly in use in Ancient Egypt, pointing opposite the Pyramids, and I'm guessing the Egyptians held them in equally high esteem. They take their name from the Latin word for lead, plumbum. I haven't seen what one used for the Dome of St. Peter's would have looked like, but I'm sure it was well proportioned, and maybe as a nod to Peter's former occupation, shaped like one of those little lead weights for fishing line.

I don't know if the name was just pulled out of a hat or had some symbolic significance, but in 1957, the U.S. conducted a series of nuclear tests in the Nevada desert, dubbed Operation Plumbbob. I think at least one bomb was suspended plumbbob-like from a large balloon for detonation, but I think the name was chosen as a reference to measuring or determining. Like any good series of Cold-War era experiments, there were plenty of explosions, blimps, and pigs in asbestos suits. Plumb those mysteries. Knowledge of that event colors my feelings about my plumbbob, sign-post to the Center of the Earth, adding a wee bit of menace to it's shape.

Handwritten Manuscript Page From "Chemical X"

Kissing Circles

The Kiss Precise
by Frederick Soddy

For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
'Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.
To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.
If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.

Excerpts From A Polish Travelogue

Words and Photographs by C. Joshua Borowicz

Monday, July 14—People have been asking me am I excited to vacate, to go back to Poland. Yes, but not to the point of losing sleep in anticipation. I don’t anticipate because, as the blackest of pessimists, I would only anticipate trouble, troubles so dire and serially persistent—missing my flight, arrest for forged documents, carjacking and Polish highway robbery at the hands of the mafia (Russian bastards!), and plane crash on the return flight—that they would convince me to turn back, not start, never travel again. (Fortunately, so far, I have not the courage of those irrational convictions.) So, I don’t anticipate and let come what comes. Trouble has seemed much less troublesome as a reality than a fantasy. People manage real terror on a daily basis.

As it happened, my flight to Chicago offered no trouble at all. Checked in well in advance, such that they placed me on an earlier flight to the Windy City, stand-by, giving me plenty of time to switch terminals in O’Hare and make my connection. Hot summer day, beautiful sky, clouds below like the light froth of lovely weather, the head of ambrosial summer. As we approached O’Hare, a model of Chicago lined up along the lake shore, smoggily, with a life-size street map spread out below. Descended through evanescent cumulus as resistless as sleep. I was reading the July Harper’s and came upon this line in Gass on Henry James, “Travel has its pleasures but not their descriptions.” Anyone who has read James’s Little Tour of France can no doubt attest. Yet, in this little tour of Poland, I bend the bow of The Master in full foreknowledge of gassy futility.



The Warsawa pulled up to the gate and applied its ear to the gangway. I recorded two photos of its glossy whiteness.(1) Our pilot appeared at the boarding desk with a retinue and a bouquet of flowers, not nestled into the crook of his elbow, like a beauty queen, but grasped at the stem end like a nightstick or a flashlight, blooms to the floor. He wore, in addition to a broad smile and gray eminence, a red silky sash reading “Retired.” Not quite yet, I thought. What was the opposite of “maiden voyage”? I couldn’t remember, “terminal,” “swan song”? I was sure pilots had a term, “valedictory,” “farewell”? When we pulled away from the gate, the Warsawa passed under an arch formed by two fire trucks issuing salvos from their water cannon in his honor. My preferred way of seeing emergency vehicles in action.

A fine late afternoon for flying, the sun bright; sleek tubular jets nosing deliberately about for take-off, a pod of judicious whales, aluminum skins agleam. Throttling up we breached faultlessly into the aery ocean and banked over a tideless, steel-blue Lake Michigan, nicked occasionally and only occasionally by a sailboat here and way over there. More quilted earth over terra Michigan. Our Great Circle rout would overfly Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Greenland. One had visited those places on maps, and now (again) their airspace, but the likelihood of touching down on that austere there was, God willing, slight.

Tuesday, July 15—Flight generally, and this particular flight, repeatedly, has blessed my pedestrian mind with Olympian views. The gibbous moon risen over Lake Huron. Clouds shifting across the undersphere, amber herds of woolly mammoth. Solitary Canadian roads fork and score the relief map of taiga. Holes in the cloud cover drop into depths, like those entrances to vast limestone caverns in Mexico that young extremists base jump into. Arctic and Antarctic icescapes, glacial cataracts, mistbergs. As if all worldly forms have spectral patterns in this Platonic manufactory. And painted, like the original Greek. A band of indigo marks some atmospheric horizon, from which with imperceptible suddenness, emerges, or succeeds, that deep blue for which this planet is so rightly esteemed in the solar system, though moonlit tonight, not sunlit. More and only words for such imagery, mostly futile.



The rosy fingers of Tuesday’s dawn smoothed the cotton batting of LOT’s worn mattress cover. Our venerable pilot brought Warsawa home to Warsawa for his last time, a gorgeous descent along the Wisla, the fields and domiciles of his fellow Poles laid out in neat strips and in suburban developments, not unlike an Old World Monopoly board.(2) Perhaps, as if he could not bear to cease his Olympian life, or perhaps it is a tradition among retiring pilots to make one final pass upon the airport and the city, we pulled out of our initial approach—we had almost touched down—winged about, away from the Palace of Culture and Science, in a long leisurely arc and repeated our reconnaissance of the Wisla. In spite of this scenic delay, we landed on time, to a twittering applause, his last, it would appear, at the controls. A second water cannonade greeted our arrival.

The taxi ride to my hotel on Constitution Place revealed a national capital down at heel, a little rundown, gray, grotesque, as the poem prefers, the grass in the public spaces at least a month overgrown, the graffiti common. I, too, prefer my cities imtouristperfect, but they take some getting used to. Checked into my hotel, the MDM, a completely satisfactory accommodation; took the small, slow elevator six floors up to my room on the seventh floor, room 524; and conned a map of the city. Commenced my walkabout almost immediately, first toward the Palace of Culture and Science, that epitome of Soviet grayness and grotesqueness, a central landmark but little more. Not even a skeleton but something of a carapace of a creature that never really thrived here, the lower floors are occupied by pubs and clubs, restaurants, and movie theaters—the people’s true culture. Bums slept on its masonry benches, the groundskeepers derelict, and a wheel-chair bound double-amputee relieved himself behind a tree in mid-afternoon with an indifferent audience of traffic, other transients, Socialist Realist heroes—and me.(3-5)

Excerpts From A Polish Travelogue Part II

Wednesday, July 16—Up at 7:00 a.m. and showered hotly. Made my way down to a full complimentary breakfast on the unnumbered second floor: bacon, eggs, kielbasa, sausage, cereal, cold cuts, fruit, pickled things, bread, butter, cheese, juice, coffee, tea, cake—a rather hearty spread, which sustained me over those days in Warsaw. While avoiding the Polish specialties and typicalities—the cold cuts and pickled things—I partook of the bacon, bread (ciabatta rolls), butter, juice, and even fruit (yes fruit, I ate fruit! it’s not bad, kinda sweet) multiple times and finished with a cube of cake and tea, all the while watching the cars on Marszalkowska take the corner and careen to work. To work. Work to what end? To no important end. Perhaps only to make vacations meaningful.



Walked to the National Museum of Art in Warsaw in the morning, arriving at nine, an hour too early, so I perambulated its environs. Of initial note, the building itself, fenced all around with high black bars, the museum had all the charm of a medium security penitentiary. To keep viewers out or the art in, I couldn’t determine. A military museum of 20th-century weapons of war was parked at one end, vintage tanks, helicopters, half-tracks, fighters, with assorted ordnance lying about—shells as big (or as small) as me. The green at the rear of the museum was calf-deep and weedy. At ten o’clock, I was the first patron. There was no line.(13-15)

In A Defense of Ardor, Adam Zagajewski wrote of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert that he “wandered through [museums] with his sketchbook, not for thirty minutes or an hour, like ordinary, distracted tourists, but for half a day, a whole day.” Neither a poet nor a painter and extenuatedly Polish, I aspire only to a status one or two echelons above that of an ordinary, distracted tourist. I spent half a day at the National Museum and make the following observations but no sketches.

Franciszeck Zmurcko’s The Sinner’s Past (1895): a big canvas, the goatish face of a sinner contemplates seven young beauties revealing six breasts and what appear to be four erect nipples. I identify with that sorry old Epicure and recount my own loves and lusts (seven), though current research indicates we fall in the quartile of least turpitude—that is, measured by number of partners.

Jozef Simmler’s The Death of Barbara Radziwill (1860): the last of the Jagiellonian kings on the Polish throne, Sigismund Augustus (1520-1572) contemplates the expiration of his pallid beauty, Barbara Radziwill, at the age of 31. To us, it looks sadly romantic—and not that it wasn’t—but Sig married again, and philandered for both natural reasons and reasons of state, heirs, you know. Convenient excuse.

Jan Matejko’s Karol Polewska (?), Skarga’s Sermon (1864), The Battle of Grunwald (1878), Self-Portrait (1892): Matejko was liberal, republican Poland’s chief visual propagandist, incredibly prolific and accomplished, though of course, during his lifetime, Poland had ceased to exist as a political entity. He rendered Polish history with magnificent panache and profusion and considerably less historical accuracy. My historical mind does not overly object to his republican myth-making; rather, one could use his paintings and discuss their historical errors to teach better history. I like Matejko. He looks like my brother, James.

Henryk Siemiradzki’s The Christian Dirce (1897): The collection guide explains the subject matter as follows: “In the times of the Emperor Nero (1st century AD), Roman women professing the Christian faith were sentenced to a martyr’s death, tied to bulls which were killed by gladiators during gladiatorial combats.” In this large canvas, we view the result, a dead, spear-perforated black bull spouting blood from his nostrils: a mostly naked martyr, fine white flesh, blond, without a drop of blood or physical injury to be seen. She has been strapped to a bull and dragged through gladiatorial combat and shows in death all the trauma of a nap. The absolutely powerful and absolutely corrupt Nero, obese, wrapped in paisley and wigged with laurel, looks on appreciatively with attendants. A pig in a blanket. To the far left, a sadly stoic looking figure, probably the wise, school masterish, and completely ineffectual Seneca. Sex, power, violence, corruption, and irony, this picture has it all. Stylistically—classical academicism or academic classicism—it’s about a century late. Not much impressionism to be seen in the National Museum.

One cannot view paintings without being amazed by the time, the work, the skill, the attention to detail required to produce a single frame of visual information and emotional effect before the age of photography. I moved from the Polish gallery to the European collection.

Luca Giordano’s The Communion of the Apostles (1659): a scene with Christ distributing communion to nine of his apostles, five of whom are bald, four of the five in his inner circle.

Gaspare Traversi’s Job Ridiculed by His Wife (1752): a naked Job, thankfully prior to the afflictions by boils and leprosy, endures his wife’s reproaches. I realize that as I tour this museum, I am attracted by images of old men suffering, old and purportedly wise men. I turn fifty this autumn.

Simon Vouet’s Ill-Matched Couple: An Allegory of Vanitas (early 17th century): a young beauty repels the touch of a white-haired suitor (but he does have abundant white hair) by pointing to a skull on the table.

Balthasar Denner’s Old Man with Sand Glass (early 18th century): well wrought hands, pink lids and rheumy eyes; Cornelius Bisschop’s Portrait of a Scholar in His Study, a fine image for a man who would visit the University of Warsaw, briefly, after his tour of the museum.

Warsaw National contains an unusual number, to my eye, of Martydom(s) of St. Sebastian. How many times must a saint absorb such slings and arrows? In one altar triptych, an Adoration of the Child, stepfather Joseph looks both dazed and bored, and the face of his stepson, strangely mature, though fatuous; baby Jesus looks like Lou Dobbs. There is a female portrait of the Czapski family, a Polish noble family I encountered in Zagajewski’s book, though the displaced gentleman Czapski who fascinated Zagajewski had himself made a career in art after his disennoblement. A higher nobility.

If a castle is any evidence, the royal are different from you and me. Not biologically, of course. Blue blood is no redder or bluer than ours, the red-blooded commons. Socially, and perhaps economically, the privileges would seem obvious, but I’m thinking more culturally, or even cognitively. The extreme elite, occupying built environments like these, these massive architectural confections, these infinitely appointed apartments, these constant sensory assaults of class consciousness, these carefully and minutely crafted hierarchies, condition their minds to images of both fantastic splendor and fantastic order. Not sure which of the two is more dangerous to us—the quite happily less splendid and the more or less disorganized. The gilt, no doubt, bedazzles; the sugary reliefs and moldings, tempt; the iteration of pattern and motif pleasurably benumb; the enamels, the marbles shine, the draperies hang in routines of seriousness so unrelenting as to seem ubiquitous, careless. Too much, entirely too much. A nice place for the likes of us to visit once in a long while, like Disneyland, but a ridiculous place for anyone to try and live in. How it must warp a mind or require the strongest of tonics. Beauty to choke on, to wallow in. Little wonder royals are so effed up.

And there are paintings because the walls require them. Acres of landscape, multitudes of portraits and portrait busts, libraries of visual history, roomsful of still life, complete bibles of Christian parable, and here, at the end of the day, completely out of place, Rembrandt van Rijn’s pensive Scholar at the Pulpit (1641).

Had trouble sleeping. May have gotten four hours.

Excerpts From A Polish Travelogue Part III

Wednesday, July 23—It started well with a sausage McMuffin from McDonald’s and a Polish doughnut, a perfect bilateral breakfast. Then, rain. I didn’t record exactly when the rains began, but for the rest of our stay, they plagued us, dampened our clothes and spirits, and altered our schedule. Unlike the Poles, who, according to Anna, are made of sugar and melt even in light showers, we Americans absorbed our share of precipitation undaunted, but flooding in the south prevented us from going to the Zakopane and hiking Mt. Giewont. Of the repeats I would have like to execute, climbing Giewont would have been paramount, but some things are not to be. Today was Auschwitz, a dreary day—much like the day of my first visit to Oswiecim—suitable for black and white film stock.

On the way to Auschwitz, however, we made a stop at a small castle, an unrestored ruin of a country stronghold of the bishops of Krakow. A side-trip new to me, the Zamek Lipowiec offered lovely views and a memorable highlight. While not the Zakopane, the castle elevated us and took our breath away. High on a hill surrounded by a wood, the castle’s approach has a decidedly fairy-tale look, and yet altogether natural. I love the forest landscape in the Old World, how clean it is kept, the brush cleared and the trees pruned for kindling, so that visibility extends to a distance—one can see wicked witches and predatory beasts half a mile off. Walls so thick of rough-hewn stone and brick, you’d think that these were not so much rooms constructed as caves, hollows, or pockets of air structurally permitted by the orderly piling up of masonry. These were forts, prisons, redoubts, refuges, not royal villas; a modern basement provides more amenities, but has much less atmosphere. And we climbed up into that, atmosphere, spiraling tightly into oxygen debt, the abounding silence of life far below, the Wisla flowing, autos trundling, cemeteries resting in peace, and falcons, below us, diving into the tree-tops below them. With only the sound of the wind. Mounting a castle tower or a mountain is the medieval equivalent of flight.(128-150)

Auschwitz, again, failed to move me, though Birkenau succeeded as before in evoking something of a sense of melancholy and a little of mystery. I do not know why this most awful of places weighs so little upon my psyche. Perhaps, as Arendt has argued, the banality of this particular evil, affects our memory of it. Perhaps it requires reenactors, Nazis recruited from the White Supremacy movement. Perhaps we should be sorted at the entrance, separated from our families, some sent immediately to the gas chambers, others to work. Perhaps our material goods should be confiscated, pilfered. Perhaps we should be physically abused. Perhaps we should be made to fear, not to reflect. Movies do a better job of recreating the horror; the static site itself preserves only the banality, a banality not without occasional pathos or arresting imagery, but nothing like the place it should be, the sickening blow it should deliver. Perhaps my soul has been deadened, and I refuse to feel the way people—even good people—want me to feel. I did appreciate the prison photographs of the seized and the murdered, which I had not seen before. They personalized the horror, and their eyes communicate all the individuality of response to their plight, from boredom and despair, to impending hysteria. The cafeteria was quite good, and shouldn’t be there at all.(151-155)



Steady rain shortened our stay at Birkenau, a more open camp site, and compelled us to our cars and a return to Krakow. We mistook a turn and traveled most of the way back behind a truck loaded with poultry, encountered a traffic jam of the sort that makes me curse Chicago, dropped Anna off, and succeeded, at Erin’s direction, in finding our way back to the hostel. We dined at Restaurcja Nostalgia, I the potato placki. I defeated Alex again in chess, pretty much by accident. We know the proper movements of the pieces, but nothing of strategy—armies that clash in the night.

Excerpts From A Polish Travelogue Part IV

Thursday, July 24—Rain was forecast for the day, so we decided to stay in Krakow and as much as possible indoors, opting for a tour of Wawel Hill, the royal compound, taking in the cathedral and the royal apartments. Having reported previously on Wawel, I will only gloss a few of its newly distinctive moments.

Rain fell steadily and at times, heavily, which packed the cathedral with candy Poles. Not easy to move about. Like St. Adalbert’s, the cathedral dates to the early 1000s, and by its completion some 700 hundred years later, exhibited the gamut of architectural styles, inside and out. I rather like agglutinative aesthetics, but I don’t particularly enjoy the challenge of explaining them.

A few tombs of interest on the main floor, Kazimierz the Great, Stefan Batory, and the silver reliquary supposed to house the remains of St. Stanislaw—not likely—of whose butchery you will read shortly. What Italians could do with marble in the Renaissance astonishes! Orangey though, with the complexion of pepperoni. Equally perplexing is how and why, exactly, marble? We, I (again), did not descend into the crypt for more tombs—surcharge.

Repeated my tour, as well, of the royal apartments. Nothing new to report, and my comments regarding the Royal Castle in Warsaw could be inserted here. One ceiling was impressively beamed with larch, a second ornately paneled with deeply recessed boxes, a third, the most famous, populated with carved heads that stare down upon us with the same vulgarity as we gaze up at them. A bust of Caracalla wears the look of a school bully. Otherwise, simply fabulous, again. We descended into the caves below the castle, the dragon Krak’s lair, where I unsuccessfully attempted photography. Too dark, I think. The folktale goes that Krak, like most dragons, made himself a pest by eating the locals. Enter king, beautiful daughter, inventive farm boy who induces Krak to devour a Trojan sheep stuffed with sulphur. Boom. Next thing you know, a thriving Krakow.

More interesting, though not drier, was our walking tour of Kazimierz, the former Jewish district of Krakow. My old haunt, having lived for two weeks there in 2004 on Miodowa, a main street. Visited the Old Synagogue and the New Jewish Cemetery, an almost random assortment of stones and memorials, a charnel junk drawer. I feel more fully the tragedy of the Holocaust here than at Auschwitz, for not only were the Nazis intent on murdering a people, the Jews, their purpose was to erase an entire culture as well, the wonder of which culture that is so evident in restored Kazimierz.



Christianity, Roman Catholicism, likewise abounds in Kazimierz, with its coincident charms, coincident with the names and color schemes of my growing up. There is the Church of St. Catherine, in which St. Rita has prominent billing, the names of my grandmother and mother, respectively. No one seems to be able to take a clear picture of the statue of St. Rita, the Patroness of Difficult and Impossible Cases. My efforts blurred, and the post-card I received from a very kind Protectress of the Card Table Display of the Holy Bric-a-Brac is similarly unfocused. The church Boze Cialo (Bozhay Ciao-wo), or Corpus Christi, I love for its blacks and its gold, and its black and gold—the Steeler Church. It’s of the 1340s and the 1970s. Not far away, though not in Kazimierz proper, is the Norbertanek cloister, my father’s patron saint. And finally, the Paulite Church “On the Rock,” which impressed itself in my memory on this trip for two reasons. First, we happened upon a pool into which a finger of the dismembered St. Stanislaw is reputed to have been thrown. Stashek was killed and quartered in 1079 in a power struggle with Boleslaw the Bold, a struggle in which holy men generally lose but become saints in the process: vide Thomas Becket and Thomas More—two of my favorite old movies. Remember Peter O’Toole’s (Henry II) wonderful line, “He’s read books, you know. It’s amazing.” And second, in the crypt of the Church “On the Rock” lie interred a number of Poland’s cultural heroes, including now Czeslaw Milosz, who died during my second visit to Poland and who lived, I found out recently, not far from David. Owing in part to Milosz, and Szymborska and Zagajewski, I’m reciting more poetry now than ever, and certainly more poetry than prayer.

To find my home in one sentence, concise,
as if hammered in metal.
Not to enchant anybody,
not to make a name for oneself in posterity.
An unnamed need for rhythm, for order, for form.
Which three words are opposed
To chaos and nothingness.

Or words to that effect. This tangle of associations makes Kazimierz my favorite quarter of Krakow.(156-162)

Excerpts From A Polish Travelogue Part V

Saturday, July 26—Our last full day in Poland, and finally a clear one, Alex and I hiked the Zwierzyniec to the Kosciusko Mound, stopping en route at the Norbertanek cloister. Fine views of Wawel, of the Wisla, of the Mound itself, and of Krakow from the Mound. Judgy, a little acrophobic, soldiered on and up like a trooper, and given that our second objective for the day was to climb the Mariacki bell-tower, we accomplished great things, took wide views, before returning to headquarters for a final game of chess, which he began famously by taking a rook advantage. I persevered and salvaged a draw, before retiring to try and catch some sleep for the overnight drive to Warsaw. I rested but did not succeed in sleeping, a familiar story. We bade farewell to Krakow at about 11 o’clock that night.(170-191)

Sunday, July 27—Arrived unremarkably and too early to Warsaw, fiveish, sixish, for an 11 o’clock flight. The second most difficult leg of my journey was finding my way back into the parking ramp, which took me an hour—no airport employees around to direct me. So we spent some time laying around in the terminal, getting a few minutes. Loaded up on the Gdanska for the daylight flight home.