Marta Zelwan
TRANS. BY Victoria Miluch
Dreaming
SINGULAR POINTS
In a house separated into two parts, I was drawn to the one more deeply hidden: so deeply hidden that I immediately forgot about it. A little closer to reality, in a waiting room, four people sat at a square table: three men and one woman. I was drawing mandalas with a pencil on graph paper when a very strange, very old woman came up to us and said something nonsensical. On her way out she shoved open the swinging door, and four similarly singular women sitting up in the gallery expressed their approval enthusiastically. Then it turned out that I was in need of a doppelgänger—and at times it grew closer, other times it drew away, we were walking down a dark street, we could hear music, someone was playing the piano, someone was looking out a window. Later someone wrote about it in The Psychology of Four, or maybe in the I-Ching of Jesus, in books that no one has ever seen in the waking world.
We sit down at the square table. I’m drawing mandalas on graph paper. F is speaking. We’re talking about the Indian yogi Naropa, who trekked across the Himalayas and saw signs in the sky. As though they were flying by. Corporeally. It was interpreted as a blessing from other worlds. In Tibet, this was considered a great act of grace. There haven’t been many experiences involving this energy, involving the physical sign of this energy, hence perhaps the tendency to fall to one’s knees in prayer when encountering such phenomena. It’s extraordinarily meaningful. The source. Returning to an experience like this can save a person. If a person could fully understand this state of absolute grace, they could return to relative reality with something completely different. Is five minutes of grace enough to last an entire lifetime? Or maybe it could last for a whole life? No, calculating this in terms of time won’t get us anywhere. Five minutes can alter both realities, the absolute and the relative, and both can disappear into a third thing, something that does not yet exist.
In the same way, mathematical functions describing phenomena have their limits. For example, a denominator can be any number except zero. Or take swinging: the swing arrives at a certain point and won’t go any higher. Or the Doppler effect: you’re standing at a station and a train goes whistling past. You hear a high pitch, and when the train passes, the pitch lowers. As the train moves, the sound wave compresses, the intervals shorten, there’s a higher frequency. When the train is moving away from you, it’s the other way around, you add velocity to distance. First there’s a monotonic increase in sound. It could increase more—but suddenly, at this exact point, called the singular point, in this moment of greatest saturation, the process reverses itself, black emerges from white. And then the reverse. And if you add in quantum nonlocality, there’s no telling where we’ll end up. Not here, certainly; far, far away. It is in this manner that we move from one world to the next.
ON TV
I had a great shock, and it did something to me. That’s why I turn on the TV. In Malaysia, not too long ago, a monitor lizard was born, a human’s brother. Shamans beat their drums to welcome him. The monitor lizard is named Andy, and he is an emissary of the gods as well as a part of the human species. Musicians play just for him. The whole village comes. They kill an animal as an offering, and the monitor lizard observes all this as though he were a human, as though he were figuring something out.
On the island of Sulawesi there lives a girl and her little crocodile sister. The girl is leaving for university, so the little crocodile is in tears. She lives in an underground cell. Her claws are ornamented with colorful beads. Everyone watches while she eats. She devours a dozen eggs with her mouth wide open, but not all of them at once. They stroke her. They stroke the whole length of her as she lays stretched out as long as she can. It’s a strange story, but a true one.
A hermit lives in Poland’s mountains. He remains silent to better hear the voice of God, because God tends to speak within a person, rather than externally. We must dispose of the bad within us—once again I fail to find the place I’m always searching for in the world, a place that is no longer truly the world, but a wastebasket. The hermit sings hymns, tends to his garden: fruits are virtues. He has joyous, crazy eyes. He says: it is not supposed to be the way I want it. What is mine is not mine. What I consider to be good is the opposite in the eyes of God. He says that awe overcomes a person.
BACKGROUND SICKNESS
There was once a family that was constantly getting evicted from their building and denied visas—nobody wanted them because they were poor, strange, and sick, each in their own way.
The husband was a depressed Russian historian, and when Communism started to fall, he started suffering from back pain. Moreover, he was obliged to carry his wife around in his arms—she was a dancer who had never learned to walk. Their son, a toddler, had the background sickness. You could see it in his white eyes, glassy and glowing. With eyes like that, he couldn’t see himself on any background, he couldn’t fit himself into any background, he couldn’t see anything at all except an indistinct background—a distant, flickering work of art. If he walked toward that background, he always slipped and fell—and if he ever imagined himself walking anywhere else, he immediately got lost within himself.
There was a cure, but it was worse than the sickness itself. The doctor who knew it was old as the world itself. She had broken her foot recently, and now the only place she could walk was along the seashore. The foot deteriorated steadily. It grew thinner and paler, and then something started happening to the other one. It was difficult to walk straight, to avoid falling on people—the woman admitted she could no longer avoid any person in her path.
She said that when it comes to sickness, the trick was to consider them against a wider background. You must begin by notifying people who have long been unconscious or absent. Forewarn them that only original documents matter now, since copies turned out to be at odds with our idea of humanity. Remind them that only a thin, vertical line divides sickness from health, and neither one is a pure state, and the relationship between them gets decided by the background—which can become a living being, like a ghost—and can sometimes do all our thinking for us.
What’s unfathomable should be left unfathomed. We’ll find our medicine in that which won’t let itself be fathomed, no matter how much we want it. Rejoice, said the woman, when you shudder. Before I could collect myself, she disappeared deep inside the dream, and a small, naked child ran past me, a little boy. He dragged a white sheet behind him. He wanted to fly out of the frozen window into the cold, but I caught him and quickly shut him in the cellar, where it was warmer.
Marta Zelwan is a Polish writer based in Warsaw. She has published nine books, including collections of poetry, prose, and essays. Two of her books have been nominated for the Nike Award, Poland’s most prestigious literary award, and she has won the Iskry Press Prize, the Literature Foundation Prize, the Stanisław Pietak Prize, and the Edward Stachura Prize, as well as the Culture Foundation Prize. Her most recent book is Graffiti, a collection of poetry.
Victoria Miluch is a fiction writer and translator. Her stories have appeared in such publications as Passages North, The Southeast Review, and The Adroit Journal, and her translations can be found in Asymptote and the Denver Quarterly. She currently lives in Poland, translating Polish literature on a Fulbright fellowship.