Selections from the letters of Bruno Schulz

[Bleak&Icy]

There was a time when I put everything I had into letter writing, then my only creative outlet. It's a shame we can't carry on our correspondence retroactively. Nowadays I can't write like that any more, and in retrospect that time--not very remote--seems rich and full and blossoming compared to the grayness and fragmentation of the present. You have the type of handwriting I like. I've had good experiences with people who write like that.

You overrate the advantages of my situation in Drohobycz. What I miss even here is quiet, my own quiet of the Muse, of a pendulum slowed down to its own calm gravitational rhythm, marking a clean path undeformed by any alien pull. That silence--substantive, positive, full--is almost creative itself. The things that I sense want to be uttered through me occur above a certain threshold of quiet; they take shape in a medium brought to perfect equilibrium. Even the peace I experience here, though more nearly perfect than in that happier period, is no longer enough for the demands of an ever more delicate, more exquisite "vision." I find it harder and harder to believe in this vision. Yet those very matters demand a blind faith, demand to be taken on credit. Only when they are won over by this kind of faith do they barely consent to materialize, to assume a certain degree of existence.

What you say about our artificially prolonged childhood--our immaturity--takes me a little aback. After all, the kind of art I care about is precisely a regression, childhood revisited. If it were possible to reverse development, to attain the state of childhood again, to have its abundance and limitlessness once more, that "age of genius," those "messianic times" promised and sworn to us by all mythologies, would come to pass. My ideal goal is to "mature" into childhood. That would be genuine maturity for you.

-- To Andrzej Plesniewicz, 4 March, 1936

[matt cardin]

Quote Originally Posted by Bleak&Icy

I can't stand people laying claim to my time. They make the scrap they touched nauseating to me. I am incapable of sharing time, of feeding on somebody's leftovers. (These are the kind of words jealous lovers use.) When I am obliged to prepare a lecture for the next day or buy supplies in the lumberyard, I lose the whole afternoon and evening; I forfeit the rest with a grand gesture. All or nothing, that's my maxim. And since every school day gets profaned in this way, I live in proud abstinence and--do not write.

Without going into too much detail, I would just like to say that what Schulz describes here also describes my own inner/outer condition, attitude, and experience with uncanny precision. I mean truly stunning, oh my God, get-the-hell-out-of-my-head accuracy, right down to his description of some of the specific circumstances that inflame his sense of temporal violation and result in that creative paralysis. For me a day or an afternoon when a known obligation is staring at me from the next morning is a bleak and heavy thing, suffused with a sense of vague discomfort or dread. Oddly, I've always been this way, from childhood, although I remember originally experiencing the phenomenon in reverse. That is, as a child I didn't consciously feel worse when I knew scheduled things were hanging over me, but I very consciously felt better when they weren't. Afternoons when, so far as I knew, I had the next day entirely to myself were palpably delicious. Sometime during late adolescence, and finally coming to full bloom in my twenties, this mutated into its complementary opposite: the conscious experience of low-grade dreadfulness, desperation, and deep violation that has accompanied the endless schedulings of my temporally tyrannized adult life. I've grown a thousand percent better at managing this over the past decade or two -- but at great cost to my relationship with my daemon muse, who only speaks into the empty spaces that aren't occupied by clock time or external obligation.

Thank you indeed for posting these excerpts.