Author: Maciej Modzelewski

Sometimes hope is just not enough.

Do as the Romans do

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Being a native speaker is certainly very convenient, but it often makes you also blind to the idiosyncrasies of your language. After all, you absorb it with your mother’s milk (is that why they call it a mother tongue?), so you think nothing of it. To give an example, I never noticed that one of the constructs in my native Polish violated logic—well, even if it doesn’t inherently do so, a negative concord definitely does seem counterintuitive to formal logical systems—until I started learning English. But learning the latter is not without its own challenges, one of the biggest being articles—something completely alien to me, since they don’t exist in Polish. They simply make no sense to me. I could say, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’, but I don’t think that proverb is the most fitting here.

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A simple recipe

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The frail constitution of conscience,
the assumed brevity of spirit,
and the calculated immodesty of mind,
all curtained with a green palette—
courtesy of a linden bathed in sunlight—
is a simple recipe for disaster
or a poem.

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A day

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I wake up early in the morning—usually around six, unless I can’t sleep at all; though recently that happens on rare occasions—and prepare some flatbread dough to bake, then do a pinch of yoga for my ageing spine, and finally sit by the window to read, which I try to do for at least an hour, but there is only so much my temporal lobe and Broca’s area can muster. Once I retire from the reading spot, it’s time to write a line or two before I fill my belly and start another nine-to-five as a proud member of the remote task force. Lunchtime starts with a second yoga session, then comes light aliment and a few pages to peruse over before returning to work. The evening chore that some call dinner marks the arrival of crepuscule with all the fun I’ve been dying to indulge in but am too spent to pursue. And then it’s time to find comfort in the arms of Hypnos, who may one day introduce me to his brother—if I’m lucky.

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To redeem us

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[…] the point of disagreement is not that I like his body better than he likes mine, but that he likes my mind less than I like his.
Lytton Strachey, from a letter to Leonard Woolf

I don’t believe in unicorns
and beautiful boys entering the picture mid-spring
to redeem love—
or whatever that spree in meadowland is called—
only to turn yet another string of random labels
that our days need to progress
from one misstep to the next.
Besides, I’m not well-adjusted—I wish I were,
or perhaps not; maybe it’s better the way I am—
unlike all the pre-highbrows walking down Charing Cross Road
on rainy Sundays; I’m still struggling with the difference
between pleasing you and joining your tribe.

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The ignoble writing implement

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Why does the word ‘computer’
not have the noble ring of a ‘fountain pen’?
Even a ‘typewriter’ sounds better
than the name of the Difference Engine’s progeny,
though I could always say that I wrote this verse
on my PC (yuck!) or a desktop.

I wonder if the poet had the same problem
when quills had gone out of use.

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The crumpled butt

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In the mornings I sit by the window and read—partially to draw inspiration but mainly to kill time between dates on my future tombstone—but at the same time observe the little world outside, and today I noticed a rather baffling scene. A car stopped by the kerb, and after some erratic movement inside, a middle-aged woman emerged out of it, smoking. She walked aimlessly around the vehicle, her entire focus on the cigarette, but once she finished smoking, she returned to the car and went on her merry way, leaving the crumpled cigarette butt behind. How peculiar.

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Simple life

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Charles Travelyan and his wife live in the country. They rise at six.
While Charles is shaving, his wife reads Ibsen aloud to him,
and while she’s doing her hair, he reads Bernard Shaw aloud to her.
They work till twelve, when they have a light vegetarian lunch;
they then walk over ploughed fields till six, when they have a light
vegetarian dinner. After dinner Charles Travelyan reads aloud
for an hour and a half, and at eight they go to bed.
This is supposed to be the simple life, but my private view is
that Charles Travelyan’s one object in doing it is to save money,
as he’s the heir to forty thousand pounds a year.*

And, as then, so now, there is nothing like simple life
with a six million pounds sterling price tag—in today’s currency—
to while away the time in the country.

*Adapted from a letter by Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf, dated June 13th, 1905, as found in The Letters of Lytton Strachey, edited by Paul Levy.

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The mismatched

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He’s most a runner who has won the race.
The Category, Lytton Strachey

It’s supposed to be May, yet with two degrees outside
and fifteen in my study, it feels like December. But who cares
about mismatched months when the years are also mixed up—
for now I’m stuck in nineteen-oh-five, mostly because it’s hard to be a person
when you’re reduced to a book of letters with a somewhat blurry picture
that was never intended for a cover.

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Haggis

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I have always wondered what haggis tastes like
because, despite living in Scotland for two decades,
I’ve never actually had the opportunity to try it,
and not for lack of desire, but due to dietary restrictions,
which would also apply to more foreign delicacies
like Yorkshire pudding (some Scots will appreciate the jest),
in toad in the hole in particular. Perhaps I’ll order it
for my last supper.

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