Love as the Highest Form of Possession

azulejo_fot-dagmara_smolna.jpg, default, Azulejo, photo: Dagmara Smolna , Love as the Highest Form of Possession

There is no contradiction between 'being' and 'having', since love, which constitutes the highest possible intensification of being, is at the same time the highest – and the only satisfactory – form of possession.

Jacek Podsiadło

Is poetry able

I’m reading a letter found among my papers, from January 28, 1984

Handwritten with angular letters so long ago.

'I took part in a French language contest.

7 people from our class participated. We were expecting

to write it and then go home. Imagine our surprise and anger when they asked us

to go obediently to class.' I can imagine them.

Surprised, angry. Offended princesses

in old-fashioned outfits. Fake denim, pleated skirts,

tights, striped T-shirts, the plumper one in a pinafore even.

I can see clearly. Somewhat painfully clearly.

Lips unfamiliar with lipstick, handkerchiefs in their pockets.

They’re walking to the math classroom, endlessly down the stairs.

(Jacek Podsiadło, Collected Poems, vol. 2, Warsaw, 1998)

[Trans. AP]

In the early 1980s, that is, in the distant past, when academics still viewed Plato and Hannah Arendt as authors of philosophical thought rather than just as producers of erudite slogans for scholarly publications, the psychologists Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and Eugene Rochber-Halton published a book containing an analysis of three hundred conversations they conducted in American homes on the topic of objects inside these homes. The conclusions were startling. Families living in the houses classified as emotionally warm would mention how absolutely irreplaceable certain items were. In the emotionally cold houses, in turn, questions about special items were often considered objectionable. Let us talk about people, not some random knick-knacks! On closer inspection, however, such assertive anti-materialists would turn out to maintain the fewest social contacts. Possession, then, was by no means at odds with humanist values. Quite the opposite – the love of things and attachment to other people went hand in hand.

On a personal level, this is probably somewhat obvious. Even if we can trace their pedigree back to the market, objects can enter our souls. One need only view them from a certain angle. There’s clearly a difference between purchasing ceramic tales that make us think of Portuguese azulejo, which we admired together on our trip to Porto, and a fashionable interior as if out of a magazine, designed by a hired architect according to the current canon of Swedishness. Moreover, it’s no coincidence that we meticulously remove price tags from the presents we gift to those close to us. The number, after all, is cold and anonymous, while objects are warm and individual. Their textures, smells, as well as the memories or ideas associated with them form natural bonds with the particles of the human soul. Prices, then, are their natural antagonists.

What’s more difficult, however, is to combine possession with human affection at the level of cultural diagnosis. After all, post Erich Fromm, the hippie movement, and punk rock, every decent human being simply must agree that whoever wishes truly to be cannot have, and if they do have then maybe they are, but only to a very limited, shrunken extent. One’s indignation at greedy materialism constitutes a form of cultural initiation, the First World’s favourite intellectual rite. Sitting over a glass of craft beer in the middle of the night, a well-educated European must be able to name at least three cardinal sins of capitalism, making up an ambitious mini-essay to elaborate on each of them. 'We’ve exchanged spiritual needs for sensual pleasures, shopping malls are now temples of consumption; commodity fetishism makes us obsess over pieces of matter with brand logos slapped on them.' And then, their conscience clear, they can order another hazy IPA.

The issue is, however, that contrary to the popular opinion, capitalism is not at all about things. A love of things one already possesses, if not translated into a desire for continued shopping, actually harms the capitalist system. Whoever drives a Romet to work and has used the same cellphone for the past 20 years is probably either a hard-core conservative or a hipster, and at the same time about as subversive as the Centennial Light bulb, which has been lit up on and off since 1901 in several locations in California. As the British philosopher Terry Eagleton writes, 'capitalism, for all its crass materialism, is secretly allergic to matter. No individual object can fulfil its voracious appetite, as it hunts its way restlessly from one to the other, dissolving each of them to nothing in doomed pursuit of its ultimate desire. For all its love affair with matter, in the shape of Tuscan villas and double brandies, capitalist society harbours a secret hatred of the stuff. It is a culture shot through with fantasy, idealist to its core, powered by a disembodied will which dreams of pounding Nature to pieces. It makes an idol out of matter, but cannot stomach the resistance it offers to its grandiose schemes'. We mostly focus on the surface level of the problem: materialism, vulgar hedonism, outrageous inequalities, the excesses of a tiny percentage of rich guys. Meanwhile, even the billionaires, throwing orgies on their million-dollar yachts, are in fact nothing more than the system’s useful idiots, a temporary medium for a process which, at the end of the day, goes far beyond the human realm. If capitalism was all about the human being and matter, we would have long been satisfied with one of the items provided to us by the free market. Capitalism’s true passion, however, is for pure will, for infinity – in other words, undiluted metaphysics.

Jacek Podsiadło’s poem interests me in this context as a description of a moment of tenderness (a word that Podsiadło would already write with a capital letter as early as twenty years prior to Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize and guides to positive egoism). It’s the moment between 'I can imagine' and 'I can see clearly' when the action slows down and the princesses walking to a math classroom become submerged in a dreamlike light falling from nowhere in particular. Without such moments of stillness and hallucinogenic intensity, there is no poetry. As Podsiadło explains elsewhere, 'time executes sentence after sentence / on flowers, on resolutions / on opera arias. Suddenly the guillotine’s sharp admonition / descends on us, suddenly. / A gust of reminiscence sweeps us off, or a shock / wave of Tenderness.'

One may, of course, list countless examples of poetic still frames. 'It’s like the table at our student parties when I would suddenly stop being there and would see us all talking, laughing, as if we were changed already into those who had lived long ago' (Czesław Miłosz, trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass). 'Return in thought to the concert where music flared' (Adam Zagajewski). Viewing the Vistula River valley from a bank side under Annopol, Edward Stachura referred to such experiences as 'all the brightness'. Wisława Szymborska devoted one of her poems to Isadora Duncan’s dance pose and her stillness, as if torn from the stream of time. The beginning of Andrzej Stasiuk’s Dukla, too, constitutes a magnificent poem on the nature of the world emerging from such moments.

What is tenderness? In her Nobel lecture, Tokarczuk dubbed it 'the most modest form of love'. 'Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time', 'It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our self.' Let’s phrase it like this: tenderness, the key ingredient of poetry – which, I believe, fits here better than the novel, to which Tokarczuk refers – constitutes a form of possession, a possession more intense and real than that which we can come into by purchasing goods or services. There is no contradiction between 'being' and 'having', since love, which constitutes the highest possible intensification of being, is at the same time the highest – and the only satisfactory – form of possession. An original Japanese cast-iron pot for brewing green tea is certainly something, but it’s only thanks to tenderness (Tokarczuk again) that 'the teapot starts to talk', filling up the buzzing silence. Royalty rights to a music piece can help one become an expat and buy them a piece of an artificial island in Dubai, but the real owner of the piece is the one who cries, makes love, or speeds along a country road to the music. In the world of economics and newspapers, Elon Musk already possesses everything with the exception of Twitter. The truth is, however, that he can only really possess that which, at any point of his life, he has come to love.

Put briefly, then, the reason why capital is evil isn’t the fact that it encourages us to possess things. After all, things aren’t harmful by definition. It’s not even due to its secret fantasies of eternity. The desire for everything is an anthropological constant. Most traditional religious and philosophical systems view the human being as a mixture of worldliness and eternity, a mortal body and an immortal soul. The fraud of capital and all the indirectly related forms of degeneration – the pure madness of disparities, the dumps of toxic waste, the wars over resources – result from capitalism’s promise of solving the problem of eternity with a never-ending flow of novelties and amusements. From children’s collectible cards through the recursive loops of electronic games to new, breakthrough seasons of TV series. Let’s finally do justice to Fromm – To Have or to Be? is both a false dichotomy and a very good book. To quote the philosopher, 'ours is the greatest social experiment ever made to solve the question whether pleasure (as a passive affect in contrast to the active affect, well-being and joy) can be a satisfactory answer to the problem of human experience.'

The promise of capital is to produce and then sell us for a bargain price pieces of eternity, which is why for two hundred years it’s been hiring and firing, searching the skies and digging across ocean floors, seeking resources which it claims it requires to continue the project. Common sense prompts us to notice that something isn’t right: for two hundred years we’ve been getting wealthier and wealthier, and yet for fifty of them we’ve been criticising consumerism. In this context, poetic tenderness teaches us an alternative way of coming into the possession of reality, a transition from looped algorithms and idiotic refrains supplied to us by machines to the point where 'a chestnut opens with a crack over our heads'.

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

Language English

olga tokarczuk

jacek podsiadło

20th century polish poetry