Icons and mead
Tonight I dreamt that I walked in Ząbki, sometime in 1990s (when the town tissue was not yet devastated by an extensive pathological construction), trying to find the painter of icons. I have become aware that he lives in the neighbourhood from reading an advertisement section in some old local newspaper. I walked into an unpaved street, and asked some local people whether they know about the painter living nearby. Some person showed me the way to a place that was a separated building, with different people living in different parts of it. Somehow simultaneously, this place consisted of many different little separated wooden houses, located at the same territory, jointly fenced off from outside by a larger wooden wall.
The person who guided me there has pressed a buzzer at the wooden wall, and left me alone to talk with someone who will respond to it. A woman voice responded though an intercom. I told her that I would like to visit the painter (I specified his name and surname). She was a bit astonished ‒ apparently a situation of someone asking about this has not happened since a long time ‒ and, after a pause, she confirmed that this painter lives here. However ‒ she said ‒ he is no longer painting, for last twenty years. Since the government has canceled some form of pension he was receiving, he had to drop painting, and, in order to survive, he started to produce mead. This process is so costly, regarding the time and effort put into it, that there is not only no more time left for painting, but actually no more vital energy to do anything else. It was clear from the story told by this woman that she is the only person who keeps caring about this painter, and he probably would not survive without her help. The production of mead was carried by two of them, but the income obtained from it was sufficient only for the survival. She said that their daily diet consists mostly of raw potatoes, which are neither boiled nor fried, in order to save costs on gas and electricity. She said that she is sorry to disappoint me, but the advertisement I’ve read was from more than twenty years ago, when he was still painting.
All of that was told by her to me while talking through intercom, without me actually entering this place. She then asked me: «Are you rich? You have to be. His icons are expensive.» This statement, despite somewhat distrustful coldness of the surfacial layer of tone, contained a mixture of intense undertones: a sound of a despair and permanent hunger of a person who eats only cold potatoes while producing mead, combined with an uttermost proud of someone, who devoted her life to take care of a lost and forgotten genius.
Later in that dream I met Ania Cieślewska, and we had a conversation about the last unfinished book of Stanisław Zapaśnik. This book was taking into account six different universal philosophical systems of thinking (with their epistemology, ontology, logic, ethics, corresponding social structures, as well as the subjective phenomenological experience of someone living according to them) in a parallel way, achieving a balanced framework of quasi-equivalent translations between them. I was reading fragments of it, and I was shocked by the strength and directness of insights contained there. In particular, there was a short statement that meant, essentially: the task of resolving the infinite complexity of the inner relationships composing into the wholeness of the universe (by bringing it into a balance) can be achieved by an individual only through achieving the same within his home (with its direct social neighbourhood representing the properties of an effective truncation at a boundary), which is a finitely compactified epistemic model of the universe, ontically, ethically, and logically isomorphic to it.
I slowly walked though the empty streets of Ząbki, quite shocked by the spiritual profoundness of this insight, as well as the whole book, its unfinished state, and the deeply sad feeling that I will not have a chance to talk about it with its author.
19.I.2023, Brzeźno