A workshop on poetry with Monika Herceg was the beginning of building such houses, several different ones, sketched by our intuition. Yesterday, Krzysztof Czyżewski talked about houses with an empty room inside – such houses were the tradition in the Suwałki region. Space is telling its tale again, a house and its construction lasts forever, houses are built and are filled in with new worlds all over again. Their protective and healing function is falling apart when we think of Ukraine or Belarus, they have to be invented again, the space has to be reoriented in a different way. It also concerns the issue of emigration, and the 20 th century life paths of Czesław Miłosz and his intellectual generation. A house loses its sensuality, it needs a new language and a new story. It is here that we can find help in poetry, which is the craft of mindful sensitivity, and which perforates silence thus protecting life. This is how we can think of Czesław Miłosz, who in the 1940s found words to write about the Holocaust and the destruction of the Jewish world. From what Irena Grudzińska-Gross said, we make the image of the emigré-poet whose unusual energy and wisdom made it possible for him to reply to the heroism of Romanticism with redeeming pragmatism. Miłosz builds an alternative kind of patriotism, he is on the side of people, civilians and leads us towards critical memory which is the foundation of a good community. Memory, with its different dimensions and the tension between the experience and the narratives of history, was the main topic of the first film presentation in the Krasnogruda Dilemma Summer School. We were watching Nana Janelidze image, Lisa, go on, with our minds filled with the thoughts drawn from the discussions and lectures that had taken place during the day. This road movie is the flow of testimonies, diary entries and the recollections from the war in Abkhazia and as such it refers to the memory which is full of contradictions and for which the common experience is the experience of the world, the homeland and individual houses falling apart. In the film by Janelidze, the neighbouring river, arbitrarily divided by the borderline, does not become the stream of reconciliation or the purifying bridge, but instead and for a brief moment, it stops with the characters between each of the riverbanks, then it is let free forcefully and the water is flowing on and on indecisively.
tekst: Piotr Szroeder
