Author: Maciej Modzelewski

Sometimes hope is just not enough.
an oil painting showing a lonely withered tree on a desert dune in the heat of the sun

Journal (History as a zero-sum game)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Two seemingly unrelated articles in the Guardian caught my attention this morning. One described the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict; the other was news about Australia rejecting a proposal to recognise Aboriginal people in the constitution, and I thought about them as I passed the pro-Palestine demonstration in the city centre this afternoon.

First of all, what Hamas is doing is pure evil, another example of a weaponized religion in action, just like in the case of ISIS. But saying that, based on what I read in the first of the aforementioned articles, it seems like Israel, out of its own political calculations, contributed to the growth of Hamas as a way of undermining support for the Palestine Liberation Organisation under the leadership of Yasser Arafat. It’s obviously not the same as what Americans did for the Afghan mujahidin, but it’s hard not to notice some parallels. But what is more important is the way Israel handles the situation in the region and how it treats Palestinians. If Israeli and foreign human rights groups started using the word apartheid, that says a lot. One could imagine that a nation that survived the Holocaust would know better.

And here comes the news about the referendum in Australia. Of course, the situation is different because, even though it has a practical dimension—to improve the living situation of Aboriginal people—the fight is more in the symbolic realm; it’s about Aussies’ honour and acknowledgment of Indigenous Australians in the country’s constitution. There are no border disputes, no living memory of a country that existed prior to the current state of affairs, and no religious fanaticism used as a weapon. And still, the referendum ended in failure, just like the previous one in 1999.

There is a saying that history is written by victors, but the problem with it is that it implies history as a zero-sum game. And even if this is the reality, I would like to think that we are still able to shift that paradigm and finally move to a non-zero-sum game that allows everyone to win.

oil painting showing a lonely man in a bar

Journal (No such thing as a free drink)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Falling in love is like a shot on the house in a dubious establishment—free and intoxicating but not without its unpleasant consequences the next morning. The barman is a professional who knows what he is doing, as there is no such thing as a free drink—it’s a trap to make you crave some more, where every next jigger costs you double. At the end, you wake up in a dodgy apartment, laying on the floor in your own spew, or worse—on the street. The irony is that you despise it and promise yourself never again, only to end up in the same bar the very next evening, asking for another round. Lucky few who have never fallen victim to this addiction.

oil painting showing a young beautiful woman passing a middle-aged man with a shopping cart in a grocery aisle without paying attention to him

Journal (Already a ghost)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

It’s been three years since I’ve been alone—longer if you consider the period in which my marriage fell apart—and I think I’ve got used to being on my own; I don’t need anybody in my solitary life anymore. At least that’s the mantra I kept telling myself every morning after waking up and every evening before going to bed. But today I met a woman who proved that I’ve been wrong all this time. Well, met is perhaps an overstatement, as she passed me in the grocery aisle as if I were nothing but a mere shadow on the floor, which isn’t much of a surprise considering she looked about half my age and was stunningly beautiful. I must have looked absolutely ridiculous, stopping at the sight of her as if I had turned into a pillar of salt, assuming, of course, that she even noticed me. Even more amazing was that she spoke my native language to the couples she met further down the aisle.

I have no idea who she was, and I’m sure I’ll never see her again. And even if so, what could I offer her? I’m a nobody—a bitter middle-aged man, ridiculously shy and awkward in social situations—who used to write poetry and now just pretends to have something to say in his journal until he gives it up, like everything else in his life. No wonder I’m not afraid of death—I’m already a ghost.

an oil painting showing a battle in the city

Journal (A year without war)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

I tried to find out if there has ever been a year without war in human history, but I could not find any reliable source that answered this question conclusively. However, based on various interactive maps, timelines, and articles, I am inclined to say that there were none. With regret, I have to say that we are not a peace-loving species—more like bloodthirsty monsters. And what worries me the most is that, with time, the situation might only get worse as our global population grows, while at the same time resources become depleted and climate change of our own making makes more and more places barely habitable. Add to that all the madmen in power who try to impose their delusional vision of history or morality, and you have a deadly cocktail ready to blow.

an oil painting showing a man in his luxurious villa dreaming of immortality

Journal (Forever)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

How long is forever? Wait, did I just wake up to ask this question, or did the question wake me up? All I know is that every time I open my eyes unexpectedly in the middle of the night, the time stretches on forever, although I’m not sure if this time it actually was about time. Anyway, I remember when I was a little boy, like a member of some primitive tribe whose numeral system was limited to one and many, “now” was the only tangible idea that I could understand. So “forever” was anything other than this instant. But I guess that’s something common for all children. With time, we all overcome this little shortcoming and forever move to a more abstract conceptual realm, unless, of course, we use it in some metaphorical way, as when we complain about having to wait forever for a loved one to call. There are also those who fetishize “forever” with their wet dreams about everlasting life, but they should be careful what they wish for; they just might get it. That would be nothing but the hell of paradise all over again.

an oil painting showing a fox walking in the middle of a city and turning its head to look back at the viewer

Journal (A little gem found in the ashes)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

There are films I watch for a single scene only, but to appreciate that scene, you have to see the whole film. Like the one in Marianna Palka’s Motherhood, also known as Egg, where conceptual artist Tina asks Karen, her friend since art school, who is now eight months pregnant and came with her husband to visit her, just as the guests were about to leave her apartment, to send her a picture of Elliot when he is born, thus reviling the gender of the expected child to the father. It may sound unremarkable, but it’s not. That single scene in an otherwise mediocre film is like a little gem found in the ashes, as beautiful as unexpected. And it’s the same in life, with those rare moments we encounter in the currents of everyday mundanity. We tend to forget them quickly, but eventually learn to treasure them and cling to them like a lifebuoy.

It reminds me of the words of George Falconer, the protagonist in A Single Man played masterfully by Colin Firth, who says in the dénouement: “A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp. And the world seems so fresh, as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realise that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.”

And the most important part is that these moments are derivatives of our perception, not expenditures. We don’t have to travel thousands of miles or spend a substantial amount of money. All that is required is a slight shift in optics, perhaps some fine-tuning of the soul. And then even exchanging a glance from a distance with a fox in the middle of the city during an evening stroll takes on a transcendental dimension.

an oil painting showing ancient Athenians debating in the agora

Journal (The doorway to wisdom)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Knowledge of languages is the doorway to wisdom, as Doctor Mirabilis once said, so over the many years of my school education, I learned, or rather, tried to learn, Russian, German, French, Italian, Latin, and ancient Greek. In the end, I only managed to scrape a smidgen of English, and even this was only after I moved to Scotland as an adult. On the other hand, one could repeat after Anne Dreydel that there’s no point in speaking many languages if you have nothing interesting to say in any of them. And for that, you need something more than just repetition of random facts approved by some Ministry of Education official, which, as Michel de Montaigne rightly noted, only stuffs the memory and leaves the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

Since there is no way, for obvious reasons, of joining the bunch following Socrates, the second best I could do was study philosophy at the university, which was my plan if I hadn’t failed my matriculation examination—the maths part, to be precise (my literary essay turned out to be one of the best of the year, so I clearly placed emphasis on the wrong part of my education). I passed it two years later, after leaving the army, but it was too late to pursue the original plan. I had to put on the braces of adulthood and get a job, which was a lesson of a sort. But I never really forgot about it, and from time to time, I tried to study philosophy on my own. The problem was that the books I read either bored me immensely or were too difficult to understand, so at some point, I just gave up.

A few years after coming to Scotland, when I finally managed to achieve a level of English that allowed me to read newspaper articles and technical texts at work with relative ease, I reached for a novel, but it was a total fiasco. And then, by sheer chance, I came across The Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno. It was an e-book, so reading it on one of those fancy e-readers with a built-in dictionary that lets you see the definition of a word if you highlight it turned out to be a delight. Following that one, I started searching for more using the phrase “philosophical essays.” Soon after, I also managed to find a few second-hand bookshops with shelves dedicated to philosophy. With every book I read, my appetite increased.

But then, at one point, I reached a limit. It was soon after I finished reading The Essential Plato, with an introduction by Alain de Botton. I bought Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. I tried to read it. I really did, but it was just too much. I gave up after about eighty pages. The next failure was Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives, although this time I persevered and made it two-thirds of the way through the book before giving up. So, now I know my limits and that I’m not going to be a philosopher or a philosophy scholar. But I can still enjoy a book of essays by A. C. Grayling, or the aforementioned Alain de Botton, or even Michel de Montaigne, although Charles Cotton’s seventeenth-century English is not easy to read, probably even for a native speaker.

an oil painting depicting a modern Japanese couple drinking tea at a table

Journal (The itchy scar)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

It’s puzzling how easily “I do” becomes past imperfect tense, and despite all the anger, regret, or whatever other feeling prevails, you have to let it go. And you do. Eventually. After all, it is not without reason that they say time heals wounds. But the itchy scar will remain for life. And like the good grammarian you are, you will continue to look for syntactic sugar to alleviate the bitterness of that new cup of tea you have managed to brew, hoping that someone will be tempted to join you at five with a platter of madeleines and one day help you scratch that itch.

an oil painting showing a group of people playing a board game

Journal (A gracious AI or an obnoxious human)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

I’ve never been into games. I find them dreary, but they also require interaction with other people, and that’s a challenging endeavour for me. For most of my life, I stayed on the sidelines, observing others running like lab rats in a maze, which proved convenient when I started working for newspapers. That’s probably why I became a journalist in the first place, as it embraced this habit of mine, allowing me to make a living out of it while at the same time feigning involvement in the affairs of others, at least up to the final punctuation mark, so I could for a little while convince myself that the detachment from the real world that I have always felt is nothing but my imagination. However, one may ask oneself what is more desirable: indifferent reliability or compassionate inadequacy (knowing people, they would aim for compassionate reliability—what a greedy creature human is). But it turns out that if you sugarcoat the former with an impression of sympathy, we are more than happy to embrace it, like the Diplomacy board game players, who were happier to lose to gracious AI than obnoxious human players (see What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World? by Virginia Heffernan in Wired magazine).