Jerzy Sosnowski_A Body in the Raspberries_part 3

A BODY IN THE RASPBERRIES – part 3

I didn’t make it back home that day. Górczewski-Grabiec, even though obviously suffering from heart disease, finally decided that I could be trusted, so he talked me into joining him in the Sailor bar in Ostróda and, what happened after that, I can’t recall exactly. Luckily I did have enough wits about me not to get into my car afterwards and the next day I woke on his sofa, fully dressed and, I must confess, in his arms. No, no, he was also fully dressed and, though I can’t be certain, I think that he had kept sobbing and falling asleep throughout the night and near dawn he had sobbed and slept simultaneously.

Fortunately, I had forgotten to switch off my recording device and, as it has a capacity of four gigabytes and is voice activated, I was able to play back most of our conversation, if it can be called that. I blushed intensely and shuffled my feet from time to time in acute embarrassment; really, I have no idea why I told him about my crush on my primary school PE teacher and I think I should have shut up instead of reciting to him the pornographic poetry I had written in secondary school. That would have lasted a lot shorter had I not fallen asleep in the middle of my recital and had I not insisted, upon being woken from my slumber, on continuing encouraged by his cries of „That’s pretty good!“ I had thought he had meant that my poetry was pretty good but, having listened to the whole recording, I now knew that he had in fact been referring to his anecdote about the meeting with Robert Wilson. The less said about that, the better. Having filtered out this, and other trash, including many unarticulated pronouncements and an unsuccessful, though not for lack of trying, attempt at a joint rendition of a Balkan pop song, I managed to piece together the following story of what had happened in 1986, as told by my witness:

„Balladina” was supposed to be the first play staged by the L4 student theatre. It was being directed by Szamilski, who had also cast himself as Kirkor. The core of the group was made up of two couples: initially Marta Pszczelińska had dated Górczewski, while his fiancée-to-be Gosia had been going out with Tomasz Mryk, now a professor of physics. During rehearsals there was a bit of a reshuffle, meaning that Marta started going out with Myrk while Górczewski, none too eagerly, turned to Gosia – and he seemed to imply strongly that the director had not only arranged the whole swap but fed the flames on purpose, as if he wanted the actors to hate each other, or quite the contrary, as if he wanted the memories of old and current liaisons to create strong bonds within the group. The girls were locked in strong rivalry between themselves and Szamilski entertained the idea that they would be switching parts during the run of the play. Either way, the issue of who was to play Alina during the opening night was to be decided by a draw.

The original play, written by Słowacki, had been shorn, though, from what I gathered, not as radically, as the director tented to edit the texts he worked on later in his career. Górczewski claimed that there were simply not enough actors to play all the parts; the roles of Goplana, Skierka and Chochlik, Filon and Wawel the historian were simply axed. In this way, Szamilski had argued loftily, “Balladina” became credible as a tragedy about political struggle, about grabbing power without undue concern about principles. All this was really relevant to first year students who had been shocked by the imposition of martial. The show was supposed to be brutal, loud and dangerous, which was why Szamilski had insisted that the knife, which they had brought at a prop sale at the National Theatre, was properly sharpened. But, careful here, it was the blade was to be sharp, not the tip. “We are performing in a cramped space” – he had explained. “A piece of tin, too blunt to open a letter with would be too much like bowing to convention. We, on the other hand, are supposed to break with convention, the audience has to be uncertain as to what exactly is going on, what is real and what isn’t”. The cramped space where the premiere was taking place was the student club “Teoretyk” situated on Kwiatowa Street, and they were forced to pay a symbolic, although painful price: one of them had to become a member of the pro-regime Polish Student Association (Polish abbreviation: ZSP), otherwise they wouldn’t be allowed to rent the hall. After a long and stormy discussion, which almost resulted in the break-up of the company, Szamilski himself decided to bite the bullet. They all greeted his decision with relief.  Later on though, there was a weird situation with posters for the play: someone was always scribbling the letters ZSP on them, which by 1986 was a bit of an embarrassment so somebody from the company would use tip-ex (worth its weight in gold in those days, as Górczewski pointed out) to blot them out; soon the hidden perpetrator would write ZSP on the white blot all over again. I didn’t really understand these emotions well. Mryk appeared to be the one most put out by all of this and he kept grumbling about dishonour and collaboration with the authorities. Mryk was playing von Kostryn, he had the deepest voice of them all and, as he seemed the most conscientious of them all, the director made him the prop master: he was in charge of ensuring that no one would have to search frantically backstage for the crown, the knife or the raspberry jugs.

The play began on time, Górczewski was standing in the middle of the stage, in the role of Grabiec who had been turned into a willow tree, with his arms and fingers outstretched and he heard Mryk and Szamilski talking about something back stage, which was distracting him.  And that’s why, he explained, although at the last moment he noticed that the tip of the knife looked different than it did in rehearsal, it was too late for him to react. Pszczelińska stabbed with full force, the knife went in deep. Gośka probably died instantly. Marta, having waited in vein for her reply for a moment or two, started screaming wildly, there was a commotion, Szamilski and Mryk ran onto the stage and the rest of the cast after them. Who was standing next to Szamilski? Why, it was Mryk himself. So, the director’s words “It’s not your fault”, which were the last thing on Porąbany’s tape, were aimed at the actor playing von Kostryn.

– It all came apart during the investigation – moaned Górczewski. – I was the only one who tried to cooperate with them. The others became very principled all of a sudden, Mryk was going on about collaboration once again while Szamilski was spreading around the theory that the whole thing had been set up by the secret police in order to cast a shadow on the student movement. Moron.  Yeah, right, I can just see his production of „Balladina” becoming the downfall of the communist regime. I suspect he was just trying to cover his tracks a bit, having signed up to the ZSP. In the end it was me who ended up being called a snitch, because I answered the detectives’ questions as best I could. To me it was obvious that the only person who could have had the opportunity to block the knife blade and to sharpen it was the prop master. The rest of us had nothing to do with the gadgets, we simply took what he was handing us. We all had terrible stage fright, especially Marta. She wanted to be a star as far back as that. So did Gosia – he added quietly.

Even though Górczewski had stuck by his story, Tomasz Mryk had been able to account for his every moment since the time when, two hours before the start of the show, they had all met back stage and had been playing with the knife. It had been fully functional then and folded just like it should. It was never determined what implement had been used to sharpen the knife, while the nail used to block the folding mechanism was a standard issue one, which could have been bought in any hardware store. So, the investigation stalled. It was soon discontinued and the whole thing was put down to an accident and (as Górczewski kept on insisting, none too convincingly) all evidence to the contrary was destroyed.

Before I left Ostróda, I became aware that, to my, thinking about the culprit had turned into some kind of obsession. He had a large notebook at home in which he scrupulously recorded all the events in professor Mryk‘s career and, just as I was leaving, insisted that I listened to an excerpt of a radio show in which the physicist had taken part.

– Juss lissen to this – he was fighting the alcohol. – Why, thisss the worss of a murderer.

RADIO 3 JOURNALIST:

Professor, please correct me if I’m wrong but it appears from what you are saying that physics questions the very existence of… I don’t know how to say it, the soul? Our conscience? The ego? Various philosophical and religious systems have different names for it, Buddhism talks about the atman, isn’t that so? And there is this strange and mysterious book in the Talmud tradition, the Book of Zohar, or Radiance, translated into Polish by Ireneusz Kania, and there it talks about, well, radiance, a ray of light which illuminates the darkness of this world; this ray signifies wisdom, we could even say that it means „awareness“. In any case, modern psychology seems to be moving away from such a purely behavioural approach, which views human beings merely as a complex of certain behaviours or actions and pays no attention to our emotions and feelings. So, how does all this look from the point of view of a physicist?

PROFESOR MRYK:

I can see that you really want me to talk about things I would classify as metaphysical. It’s all a question of which language you choose to discuss these issues and I feel it is necessary to note that we, and especially you, as someone obviously more into the humanities than into science, are a prisoner to the choices you have made in that respect. It could be argued that you make flawed logical assumptions based on the vocabulary you are familiar with. To put it simply: the science of physics, or at least the kind of physics that I deal with, sees everything that surrounds us in terms of energy: organizing and disorganizing energy. On the one hand there is chaos, which we call entropy; on the other we have information, which boils down to taming the chaos in some manner. And in this segment of the time-space continuum which we are privy to empirically, we can see how information is dispersed by entropy and we are allowed to assume that if entropy prevails, it will all end on the lowest energy level. Then we will just be left with slight differences, which carry with them the possibility of information and these differences are the building blocks of information. So, from this perspective, there is nothing unusual in all these aspects of existence, including the thing you insist on calling „awareness“, which is nothing more than atoms and particles forming clusters as a result of a momentary surge in local energy, clusters which remain stable for as long as they are able to procure energy from the environment that surrounds them and when that fails, they disintegrate and entropy prevails there, because, as the law of thermodynamics tells us, generally speaking entropy, the total sum of entropy of the entire universe, is on the rise, chaos prevails, and all we can hope for is to curtail it’s progress here and there, to achieve the illusion of control from time to time. So, there is no death, or there is death but viewed only as total stillness, a definitive fall in the energy levels of the whole system and therefore there is also no issue of awareness, only local phenomena, which mean nothing in the grand scheme of things and in the history of the universe from the Big Bang to it’s total annihilation due to lack of energy at a point some billions of years away.

RADIO 3 JOURNALIST:

So, religion and psychology have been lying to us all this time? Or let’s put it differently, so as not to be too abrupt: have religion and psychology been wrong all this time…

PROFESOR MRYK:

Why such dramatic words as “lie” or “wrong”? Once again you are falling into the linguistic trap. Language itself and it’s constructs, such as religions, to use the most obvious example, are fascinating, from the point of view of a scientist like me, machines for the local curtailment of entropy, which feed on the difference in energy levels. Let me give you an example. Let’s say we have an actor, who has memorised the whole of Homer’s Iliad, for example. What does that mean, exactly? It means that by drawing the energy from his environment he has forced the particles in his brain to form a certain structure, which we subjectively perceive as „remembering the text of the „Iliad“.  Let’s assume for now, that someone kills the actor. This really signifies that he has severed the particles in his brain from their source of energy, the particles become dispersed, disorganized and the information disappears. But his body now starts to decompose and that means that in this dead organism other living organisms start to form and thrive. Life, what we call life, takes on a diffrerent shape, other particles form different clusters and the energy accumulated in the body of the actor, but not the information, serves as a source of energy for bacteria and other living organisms, but lets not go into that, because that’s a bit drastic. The existence of these creatures becomes possible, because some order is introduced once again or, to be more specific: their existence is equated with order. I am of course speaking in very broad terms here, the only precise language when discussing such things is mathematics, but, just to summarise, I am defending my thesis, that religion, psychology and all the rest are just machines of sorts which produce information and introduce some kind of order, which, nonetheless, from the point of view of the entire universe, means nothing, nothing at all. Just as the death of an individual means nothing, the only thing that counts is the overall encroachment of entropy, of chaos, or as someone close to the arts or the humanities would say, cruel chaos, but let’s be clear, this encroachment, this forward march of entropy is the only progress we can be certain of, there’s no stopping it.

– Did you hear that? He’s a monster – wailed Górczewski. – A monster. In all but fact, he admitted on air to having murdered an actor. That is, „let’s be perfectly clear about this“, an actress.

[END OF PART THREE]