ZAGAJEWSKI
399
weren't looking for radical transformations, and life's unfailing instinct
for self-preservation had triumphed in their plain persistence, their
tedious battle for survival, the battle to make sure that there was coal in
the winter and a poppy-seed cake for Easter. My flights of fancy
inevitably contained a touch of scorn for anyone leading a merely nor–
mal life: you can scarcely get off the ground without some contempt for
ordinary pedestrians! As if a sense of superiority were the essential, high–
octane fuel for the imagination's spaceship! I could easily have become
the ideal detonator for some demagogue or other. In the gray Poland
plundered by the Soviet utopia there was no shortage of cunning petty
demons on the Party payroll out searching for young souls with ballistic
tendencies, souls who dreamed of greatness and despised the trifling
daily round of worries and pursuits. Imagination's explosions do ulti–
mately lead to the truth, but its flights come perilously close to the walls
of utopia; I've encountered more than one unusually promising young
man whose nuptial flight culminated in a grotesque touchdown in the
cafeteria of the regional committee of the omnipresent Party.
I
LOST TWO HOMELANDS,
but I sought a third: a space for the imagination,
a domain that held room for artistic needs that were still not entirely clear
to me. I lost a real city, but I sought a city of the imagination. I picked
poetry as my province relatively late, later than many others do.
IT
MIGHT SEEM
as if the inner thermostat of an entire city-Krakow,
beautiful, bewitching Krakow!-had stopped working. It cheered the
great violinists, David Oistrakh or Yehudi Menuhin, if they happened to
visit the local philharmonic, but it was also happy to celebrate someone
along the lines of Fidel Castro, who created what was perhaps the most
perfect system of police surveillance in human history. Not to mention
the petty tributes that the higher functionaries, raised to power by the
Party machine, managed to coax now and then from the local popula–
tion. The city didn't shrink from carefully staged May Day parades, a
sneering caricature of spontaneous demonstrations. Nor did it forgo the
pseudo-elections in which you tossed into an urn a single card prepared
in advance and bearing the names of the lucky candidates: the most
primitive robot could have replaced the human hand and mind entirely
in performing such a fundamentally mindless function.
