LIMOUSINE FOR FREEEADING 14. HELLPURGATORYHEAVEN

LIMOUSINE FOR FREEEADING 14

HELLPURGATORYHEAVEN

I visited at the beginning of my trip the Royal Museum in Sanok having three main expositions, the meaning, history, interpretation of which mixed with each other and in themselves three concepts, spheres, levels that determine the DIMENSION of man. Thus Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. In other words, the three gates of APOCALYPSE.

On the first floor there was an exhibition of the millennium’s Polish military cross-section which somehow, except for the original BUNKER, didn’t excite me, let’s say. Being raised in Bialystok, I had scored countless trips to the ‘representative’ Museum of the Polish Army on KILLiński Street and knew all the exhibits ‘by heart’. So before I entered the floors of the shuffled HELL AND HEAVEN, I had a private look from the collection of miscellaneous art. I happened to run into a group of cheerful elderly ladies with a ‘guardian’ in this darkened purgatory, not necessarily pleased with the experience they were having, not shying away from commenting it was some ‘gray storm and gloom’ this art. We agreed together to a couple of different, colorful examples, including some of the prehistoric one from the mammoth remains fished out in the San river.

APOCALYPSE WISŁA
Vistula - Polish main river

I approached the man assigned to this exhibition and we started talking. Why such a number of these icons, in such a large format, in several hundred years old, etc.? And he was terribly pleased that I was interested, and also proud of this exhibition, explained it was after Operation Vistula, after the war, after Catholicism was forced to take over the properties and temples of Orthodoxy and Greek Catholicism. After World War II and Poland’s new borders, Stalin decided to exchange the population in a multi-dimensional interpretation, so to speak. On April 28, 1947, Operation Group “Vistula” began the brutal deportation of Ukrainians from the area of southeastern Poland and Poles from Volhynia and eastern Galicia. Within three months, more than 140,000 Ukrainians were forcibly relocated to the Western and Northern Territories. The idea for the action originated at the General Staff of the Polish Communist Army.

The Communists decided that all those who had any Ukrainian roots must be forcibly deported, including Lemkos and mixed families, with the classification for deportation determined not by nationality, but by the ethnicity of the relatives. On this occasion, it was also decided to get rid of Polish families that were “reactionary” for the Communists. The resettlement of Poles was an undisclosed part of this operation, which was accompanied by a huge propaganda machine telling the population that the consequences were “benevolent.” The dimension of the “Vistula” operation is ambiguous in terms of Polish-Ukrainian antagonism because its greatest resistance came from the anti-Polish UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which murdered Poles in Volhynia (Wołyń) and Eastern Galicia with enormous cruelty. On the other hand, in the displaced lands, it aroused the greatest sympathy, because, as it was widely assumed, thanks to this action the UPA was going to be finally got rid of. And to force the Ukrainian population to assimilate into Polish culture and nationality.

The non-recognition of the existence of the Greek Catholic Church in the People’s Republic of Poland seems interesting. In the Soviet Union, this church was outlawed, so along the lines, many of its priests were repressed. Besides, the vassalized Poland drew many of the patterns of the “Vistula” action, of course, from Stalin’s deportations to Siberia or Kazakhstan. Anyway, in general, the transplantation of the Soviet regime’s state of mind was carried out on many levels of extermination of human distinctiveness: cultural, linguistic, moral or religious. Everything to force Soviet subordination / atheistic, party slavery.

One views these icons differently in isolation from historical facts. The artistic or aesthetic value alone appeals differently to a person than the simultaneously doped actual emotional load of marked, certain suffering, venom and hatred, which feelings and emotions, in my opinion, artificially induced to fuel and nurture ethno-national antagonism, so that, making it easier for the communist government to rule subordinate countries, and by the way “ate” human, tolerant impulses. Satanic dialectics with no way out, forcing resignation and transplanting resentment and loathing of faith and the Church. Irrespective of which one? What was supposed to be more repulsive? Hell with an image of Heaven, under the pretext of Purgatory. The Communist regime’s Gordian knot binding and degrading humanity.

APOCALYPSE BEKSIŃSKI

The term Apocalypse is most often used to describe, like dressing wounds, visions of darkness and dystopia. Someone might say that for lack of a better term or for lack of lac sealing the mouth of horror and plagues. Zdzislaw Beksinski, a Polish painter, photographer and sculptor working in his hometown of Sanok, was undoubtedly one of the most original, recognized and globally recognized artists of modern, post-war Poland, and perhaps of the 20th century. Just inside the entrance to his exhibition stands a sculpture entitled ‘Hamlet’ on the left.

I never looked specifically at his art. I knew her. She was too obviously hellish for me. I conceived of her as depressing. Who wants to add such bricks in his difficult life. What is it supposed to explain. Torn out pieces of faces, skeletons, death, a lot of suffering, darkness, crosses in the DESERT of various arrangements. As a youngster, I used to listen to his son Thomas’ “CD Evening” broadcast on Sundays at 9 pm on Public Radio Channel Two, due to the rarity and availability of whole records. It was possible to record. I remember, for example, that he liked the trash-metal group Testament. He committed suicide in 1999. At the exhibition I was mainly interested in the collection of photos of Zdzislaw’s wife. It’s extraordinary how to share a life with such visions with a loving wife. Where heaven where hell. What makes them different in such a juxtaposition.

I think man’s greatest darkness, something that paralyzes you, is sin and fear / pushing away responsibility for its/their actions. A record coded in the blood reflected in the soul. In the development of this is even worse, because there is a temptation and then a kind of getting used to the fact that someone else will suffer for you. This is HORROR. Some kind of satanic inversion, ceding guilt, opening the field of justification for committing sin, constituting its existence. An attempt to take man away from hu/man. Some kind of re-transformation of the world’s Christian vision, when Christ is only needed to suffer. The most degrading vision of a weak, atrophied man, and perhaps already, given the load of all the definitions of him, perhaps there is no longer a hu/man there in such a case. What right does anyone have to heap someone’s guilt? There is no true freedom without the fullness of humanity. This is the construction that applies. A HUMAN BEING IS ALSO, OR PERHAPS ABOVE ALL, RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS HU/MAN SINS.

In anthropology and also in philosophy combined with the theme of sin / original sin, the curse of Cain is the most common. When man / interpreting the world / puts himself in the position of God justifying someone’s supposedly unfree existence – someone who was “forced” / by ‘consequence of history’ to commit the sin. As if his existence was “divinely” planned, taking away from him “in advance” the freedom to decide to commit this very sin. This is such quite unusual paradox. The stick has two ends. You want to hit God, to attribute evil intent to him, but in that case there is HELL at the end. It’s HORROR. Such a wishy-washy approach, a pseudo-psychological search / justification of the subject, in such a view immediately opens the gates of hell, as an inevitable future. This is HORROR. Instead of pushing determinism away, you graft it on. From Heaven’s origin or from Hell. Or maybe God gives the action field to Satan to organize hell for just such people. For those who get rid of the human in themselves, do not take responsibility for their actions and want others similar to themselves to justify it. Maybe this is where it starts.

APOCALYPSE ZYNDRANOWA

In the process of transformation, unification/assimilation and displacement of certain characteristic elements in favor of so-called urban culture, the vast majority of folk cultures in Poland and other European countries have been destroyed, annihilated, reduced to so-called folk ‘song and dance’ ensembles, representations of culture in a condensed, sometimes very artificial form, and Lemkos are a very glaring example of this. Outside of annual meetings, rallies of 2-3 thousand people, culture functions only in the form of open-air / museum.

This open-air museum Zyndranova is at the end of Poland, just before the border. It’s a strange feeling, coming to watch a forgotten culture hidden somewhere near the border. I got rid of my Polish cash, because what was the point of keeping it, and it turned out that there was no terminal there to pay by card for entry. Well, and as a result, I could not see the inside of the houses. What an irony, a passing away culture without less and less entries.

The Lemkos, an East Slavic people, which seems to be one of the more interesting attempts at national identification, didn’t have a crystallized, coherent national consciousness before World War II. Some considered themselves Ukrainians, some Russians. After the deportations, those who found themselves in Ukraine chose Ukrainianness. Some became Poles, Russian sympathies faded. Some Lemkos recognized that they were an organic community, belonging neither to the Ukrainian nation, nor to the Polish nation, nor to the Slovak nation. Some embraced the American-created concept of a Carpathian nation, intended to include the Lemkos of Poland and Slovakia, the Ruthenians/Ukrainians of Transcarpathia, and the Ruthenians/Ukrainians of Croatian Baca and Serbian Vojvodina. Whether other existing strong national forms didn’t meet their expectations, whether the ambition to have their own distinctiveness, sovereignty and their own identity, language and rituals seemed strong enough to distinguish them, seems to have been of little importance once the entire culture became history.

As history vividly shows, empires fall, countries dissolve and tie back together, popular / cultures blend. Nationalistic tendencies appear and go away, then reappear again. Poland lost its state after the partitions between Russia, Prussia and Austria in XVIIIc. for 123 years, and thanks many stubborn factors, some collective perseverance and often a martyr’s struggle, its statehood was regained. It often seems that such a process of taking over, absorbing other cultures is meant to serve something other than such a culture. Nowadays, the stewardship and manipulation of the emigrant/immigrant forces is meant to cause unrest and destabilize the state, rather than trying to help them regain stability of their own, as is precisely the case with Ukraine, where it seems highly likely that it’s not Ukrainians who are about themselves today, but other nationalities, oligarchies and corporations to which almost half of Ukrainian land already belongs. Celebrating the independence of the Ukrainian state in Poland also seems to be a similar modern paradox or even an oxymoron, while a proxy war is going on in Ukraine.