The artist Marek Zulawski, translation & Polish-British culture

Hi,

Today, an excerpt from my father's autobiography about his local high street, Kilburn High Road in London. It takes place in 1983, possibly 1984.

---

The only choice is between eternal existence and eternal death

An album by Kilburn & The High Roads from 1983

Grocery shopping with Magda. Kilburn High Road is hot and crowded. Women with trolleys full of groceries, children of every size and colour… Also elderly men with little baskets and scruffy Irish louts, drunk since morning. Some might be unemployed, but the shops are packed to the brim, spilling cheap goods onto the pavements. Sales and bargains. At cost price. 

There’s too much of everything. TVs, VCRs, turntables, radios, tomatoes, celery, T-shirts, summer clothes, swimming costumes, shoes, booties, women’s and men’s footwear, motorcycles, cars — a consumer paradise.

Which means the torment of choice. It’s hard to choose anything from such a mass of options. To buy a stupid tube of toothpaste, you’d have to hire an expert, because they all advertise themselves as the most amazing. And let’s not even start on washing machines. How can you tell the best one? In the sweltering heat, sweaty people peer at a wide range of big laundry powder boxes, reading the small print about their miraculous biological advantages. 

Heaven on Earth.

I’m carrying two bags. For balance. Magda keeps trying to take one from me, to ease my burden. So I explain to her how balance is the only principle that definitely governs the universe. The rest are less certain.

Balance, meaning symmetry. Weight distributed symmetrically guarantees you physical and aesthetic balance. The same goes for painting, sculpture, architecture and poetry, as well as sports, politics and theology.

Magda probably doesn’t hear me because the crowd keeps separating us, and when we enter the shops, new problems arise. The stalls are straining under the weight of all the fruit, vegetables, socks, towels, underwear and slippers. 

Across the street, a choir of Anabaptists are singing hymns. Nearby, an African preacher black as coal is bringing Christianity back to the heedless white European crowds. No one stops to listen to him. He speaks of eternal punishment for our sins. He threatens demonic torment. Terror flashes in his eyes.

Every theologian struggles to justify Hell. How can it be reconciled with the concept of all-encompassing Goodness and Grace? Simply put: if God is merciful, then Hell cannot exist. It’s either/or.

Even that wise Jesuit optimist Teilhard de Chardin admitted he couldn’t solve this problem. How could he?

I used to think Hell was the inevitable consequence of the symmetry principle that governs the Universe. Right side and left side, day and night, darkness and light, cold and hot, evil and good, love and hate, and so on, and so on. So, if eternal happiness in the form of Heaven exists, then eternal misery in the form of Hell should also exist. For purely aesthetic reasons. For symmetry.

But my theory didn’t take into account the nature of God. If God is the embodiment of goodness, then He could never condemn anyone to eternal torment in Hell. So if there is no Hell, then by the principle of symmetry, there can be no Heaven either. The only choice is between eternal existence and eternal death. No small matter.

Magda stops in front of a shop bursting with goods spilling onto the street and contemplatively examines a dress that looks like a nightgown. So to finish my thought, I stop just behind her and say into her ear: 

“And which of these two becomes our fate depends on whether we believe in Eternal Life, whether we have an unwavering hope of attaining it, and whether we desire it with all our hearts. Essentially: Faith, Hope, and Love.”

“You’re repeating yourself,” says Magda. “I already read that in one of your books. Should I get the white one or the beige one?”

“I prefer the white,” I reply. “And as for my eschatological theories, you’re clearly not reading them seriously. You haven’t noticed that they’re evolving. Back then, I was trying to justify the existence of Hell, assuming Heaven exists. Today I know that neither Hell nor Heaven exists. Therefore, the Last Judgment — although it's splendid as an artistic vision — is left a redundant concept. Man judges himself and determines his own fate, not because he wants to — he might prefer shifting that responsibility to God — but because he must. He’s programmed that way.

“You could get the beige one — it’s a neutral colour — it’ll look good on you. In these small matters, man has some degree of free will. You can choose a white dress or a beige one. It won’t make much difference in your life… But in matters of great importance, especially ultimate matters, free will practically doesn’t exist. A ball set in motion must roll, a die must bounce. That’s their nature. A person’s actions, and therefore their fate, also depends on their nature — meaning their character and preferences.

“I know, you'll tell me I’ve already said this a hundred times. Sorry...”

Some cool dudes on Kilburn High Road in 1988, via flashbak.com

If you'd like to see some more photos of Kilburn, here is a great selection from 1988.

---

Instead of an exhibition

I recently posted about the Stanisław Wyspiański exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. In an effort to balance this out with something a bit more contemporary and radically different, I'd like to point your attention towards a Polish band called Siksa that is playing in Camden Town later this month.

Siksa is a duo made up of a bassist and a vocalist. They do make music, but it's more like a theatre performance, and extremely confrontational.

Here's a clip of them performing in Germany in what looks like a submarine. Most of the performance is in English, although I'm not sure that helps the audience much:

If you can stomach it, I highly recommend you watch their contribution to Hot16challenge2, a viral video challenge for charity which famously had President of Poland Andrzej Duda rapping about fog or something.

And I do really mean 'stomach it'. Here's that link again...

---

That's all for this week. Many thanks for reading. If you want to support the newsletter, please forward it to a friend or donate here.

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / TranslatePolishMemoirs.com / Other stuff

👉 Help fund the translation of Studium do autoportretu via Paypal 👈

Sent this by someone else?

Subscribe