As of today, I have decided to stop writing poetry. To tell the truth, I’ve been planning to do this for quite some time now. And no, I am not aping Rimbaud, whose level, by the way, I am not even remotely close to. I simply feel like a fraud with a fig leaf of a quote from Apology, where Socrates said that “not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them.” And even if I manage to write something decent from time to time, most of my literary output is mediocre at best. It’s true that I had my moment when I was still writing in Polish and a series of my poems were published in one of the most important literary magazines in Poland, but this is ancient history now.
I stopped writing in Polish, and what’s more, I even stopped reading in my mother tongue. It was not a whim but a conscious decision to motivate myself to dive deeper into the language and culture of my new homeland instead of closing myself in a ghetto like many of my compatriots in emigration. By the way, I still feel a tinge of embarrassment when I remember the sight of satellite dishes mounted on kitchen walls near the wide open windows in the apartments of Polish emigrants to receive Polish TV because mounting satellite dishes on the outer walls of skyscrapers was prohibited for security reasons. If anything, it was the end of a bloody November, and believe me, that’s not fun on the Scottish coast. I can’t even imagine how cold it must have been in those apartments.
So, instead of waiting for another divine inspiration, I decided to start writing a journal, partly because my attempts at writing novels had failed since they were always nothing but a flash in the pan—I’m working on that—and also because of a lack of ideas for interesting stories. A journal definitely sorts the latter problem out—my life is my story. Moreover, the masterpiece of my favourite writer, Witold Gombrowicz, is his diary, which, by the way, I have in the original and in English translation, and I regularly return to both. So why not follow my master’s example, even if my chances of writing anything worth publishing are rather slim?
hidden pilcrow 