Category: prose

a surreal oil painting with a man poring over a map

Journal (A sense of direction)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

I just passed the professional certification exam required by my employer. It was my first exam since graduating, so, I won’t lie, I panicked a little because I was already out of practice, and the countdown clock in the corner of the exam application window didn’t help.

To be honest, I don’t like this type of exam where all that counts is the ability to memorise facts. I’ve never been good at this. I remember back in primary school, we had to memorise certain poems and recite them in front of the class for grades, and it was an absolute nightmare—not the recitation part but the memorization.

I learn best by gaining an understanding of the laws governing a given phenomenon, etc. In college, we had a chemical technology course where part of the curriculum was learning diagrams of chemical installations, such as oil refining, the production of nitrogen fertilisers, or certain acids. They were fairly complex, and I noticed students were divided into two groups: those who memorised a bunch of geometric shapes connected by lines, and those who learned the actual process shown in the diagram.

It’s not rocket science to guess who was better off. If someone from the first group was called to the blackboard to draw a diagram and they forgot any of the elements or confused the lines connecting them, they had no way to fix it because they had no idea what they were drawing. In contrast, if someone from the second group made a mistake while drawing, it all came down to following the process, and it quickly turned out that, for example, there was a pump missing between the tank and the furnace that heats the crude oil before it was fed to the distillation column.

And I guess it’s the same with life, where memorising the map is pointless if you don’t have a sense of direction.

an oil painting showing a busy street in a Scottish city

Journal (The power to cause harm)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Does Suella Braverman—by claiming that multiculturalism has failed—suggest that we should all subscribe to some manufactured by the likes of her image of Britishness? Because even if I tried to fit that delusion, I have a really hard time guessing what that actually is I was supposed to become since, after seventeen years here, in the UK—in Scotland, to be more precise—I’d say there’s no such thing as British, at least where I live, and if you ask any random Aberdonian on the street who they are, you’ll most likely hear Scottish. I’m pretty certain the same applies to Wales and Northern Ireland, although the situation in the latter is way more complex. Even in England, people are still likely to call themselves English first rather than British (a lot depends on how you phrase the question).

Coming from a country that went through half a century of totalitarianism, I always feel an unpleasant shiver running down my spine when I hear a politician, especially a representative of the government who controls the security services and the police, utter such bold statements. They should know better that such words have the power to cause harm, which is why I’m horrified that she says them so casually, or in fact, uses them at all.

There is a saying in my native language that overzealousness is worse than fascism, and I’m afraid it fits this situation perfectly. I will keep Braverman’s words in mind next time I watch V for Vendetta, which has been my tradition every fifth of November for quite a few years now.

an oil painting showing the temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden

Journal (Till hell freezes over)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

As I said earlier, what a disappointment it must have been to discover that someone else, that is, a woman, had suddenly appeared in the Garden of Eden. But I guess disappointment would be an understatement, to say the least. It probably looked more like a panic attack, triggering a state of emergency that has continued ever since. This required a solution, something fundamental that would safeguard the man’s position till hell freezes over—and hell it was; as once used, it quickly proved to be the best shackles and gag. And it doesn’t matter whether you call her Pandora, Eve, or Mary—no, not that one but Ms Wollstonecraft—your accusing finger says it all.

surreal oil painting with man in paradise

Journal (The only one)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski2 Comments

What a disappointment it must have been to discover that someone else had suddenly appeared, whose very existence undermined one’s uniqueness amongst the many creatures in the Garden of Eden. Imagine no longer being the only one of one’s kind—the king of utopia, the sole proprietor of the realm of plenty, ill-equipped to leave the bliss of la-la land. Imagine being a man.

oil painting with two men drinking beer in a bar

Journal (When’s the day)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Ever since I first spotted it on a billboard, I’ve always wondered if life truly was a fatal sexually transmitted disease. But cheer up. Nothing like A Bit of Fry and Laurie in “when’s the day”—I mean, Wednesday—evening, to be precise—after, started with the obligatory good morning, all day of hordeing at work to earn your fiver for a pint of bread—I mean a loaf of lager—I mean … You know what I mean. Well, except for the fact that your own bathroom light switch was just trying to electrocute you. But that would finally solve the dilemma, wouldn’t it, or at least dump it on some other poor bastard’s head? There is an endless supply of us, I can promise you that. So, cheers, my friend.

watercolour of a person writing music

Journal (Could I write music?)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

If I taught myself musical notation, would I be able to write music even though I can’t play any instruments? One might say, What a completely ridiculous idea—it’s like asking if, once you learn the alphabet, you could write Long Day’s Journey Into Night, In Search of Lost Time, or The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. But is it really? I know, I’m not a bloody Shakespeare, and I wasn’t suggesting that I would attempt to write a new Hamlet. The thing is, there are times when melodies come to my mind, and I hum them to my internal pleasure, but they are gone soon after. If only I wrote them down to be able to come back to them at a later time, who knows what they might evolve into? After all, even though I’m not even remotely close to being at the level of T. S. Eliot, I managed to write a few fairly decent poems. Of course, assuming I don’t have dysmusia.

impressionistic oil painting of a landscape with a sky full of clouds

Journal (On your own)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

There is only so much you can do on your own. You see clouds as white until someone puts a pure white shroud in front of your eyes, and only then do you realise how blind you have been all this time. So you decide to follow them, to learn from the master about the sky in fire and the earth in the grip of ice, only to learn that all you can get is discomfort sold as fear—everything else you have to do on your own.

an oil painting with two old men next to a car in front of the house

Journal (Something more to come)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

I like watching trailers for the films I have already seen. They are like old photographs in a family album—photographs of places I once visited but neglected to return to, sounds still familiar yet distant, feelings kept in the shadows since ever. I like watching trailers because they allow me to fill in the rest of the story in my own tone, especially when the film wasn’t all that good in the first place and I only remember it for the perfect moments, like diamonds in the ashes. I like watching trailers for films I don’t know because they are a promise of something more to come—unlike every day of my life.

portrait of a young woman

Journal (The women I like)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Getting on the scale has been a bit stressful lately. It’s not that I have a distorted self-image. I simply indulged in sweets (damn dried figs; they were so tasty), and with my sedentary lifestyle, it didn’t take long to see the results. And since obesity is not healthy in general and can even be fatal, given my pre-existing health problems, I try to pay attention to maintaining a healthy weight-to-height ratio.

Since I usually weigh myself after waking up and naked to ensure the accuracy of the data, I have the opportunity to take a good look at myself in the mirror, and generally, I have nothing to complain about in this matter. But this reminds me how often I encountered texts complaining about the negative impact of pop culture, and especially women’s glossy magazines, on our perception of the body, especially when it concerns women. It’s true that I’m not a reader of this type of periodical, but when I happened to pick one up on some occasion, I never found the photos of these anorexic-looking models in strange poses and unpleasant facial expressions attractive. The question is, who attracts me? I think the simplest way would be to have a look at actors, since everyone knows them, and if not, they are easy to find using an internet search engine. So here is my random list of actors I find beautiful: For each name, I add the title of the film in which they made this impression on me.

Elena Saorin in Pictures of Lily
Zoe Kazan in In Your Eyes
Franka Potente in Run Lola Run
Natalia Tena in You Instead
Jessie Buckley in Men
Kelly Macdonald in Puzzle
Aubrey Plaza in Life After Beth
Maggie Gyllenhaal in Stranger than Fiction
Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment
Cristin Milioti in Palm Springs
Natalie Morales in Language Lessons
Anaïs Demoustier in The New Girlfriend

This list could go on for a long time, so maybe I’ll end it here, because it’s probably enough to give an idea of my taste when it comes to female beauty. None of them are the Barbie type, but they are all rather slim. I don’t know if it’s biologically determined or a matter of the culture in which I grew up, but I’ve never been attracted by Rubensian shapes. Does this make me a bad person?