The Land of Ulro [Paperback]

There are particular paths in the field of intellectual history that are so famous, after years of study, anyone is likely to expect certain names to appear in a certain order. For those familiar with the work of William Blake, Czeslaw Milosz's title THE LAND OF ULRO suggests an explanation of a particular vision in some obscure prophetic and poetic work. A scholarly approach would include an index in which all the pages mentioning Ulro could be identified and checked sequentially or by particular topics to clarify how Ulro is understood in this book. But actually, Czeslaw Milosz is a poet, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, who summed up the twentieth century in a book called ROAD-SIDE DOG (1998) by remembering a slow trip by two-horse wagon. "And always we were barked at by a dog, assiduous in its duty. That was the beginning of the century; this is its end." (NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS (1931-2001), p. 645).

Rather than being an intellectual history, this is more like a memoir of intellectual roots that was written in Polish (ZIEMIA ULRO) in 1977, and a Preface in English by Czeslaw Milosz dated 1984 apologizes for "too many allusions to poets and critics unavailable in English translation." (p. vi). The translator Louis Iribarne provides notes on pages 277-287 for many of the names in the text, and seems particularly knowledgeable about Witold Gombrowicz (1904-69) on pages 277-278 and characters from his novel FERDYDURKE Professor Pimko and Miss Youthful on page 279. The poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) has a ballad "The Romantic" on pages 97-99, translated into English by W. H. Auden. Considered "The first in Polish literature to bear the title of a *wieszcz*--a vatic bard endowed with the properties of a charismatic national leader" (p. 282) Mickiewicz is also explained with reference to his major works, including a play in which "its poet-hero Gustav [is] reborn as the rebel Konrad." (p. 283). People who have already read FERDYDURKE as a comic romp on the Polish pride in Polish poets might approach THE LAND OF ULRO as a more serious contemplation of the same theme by someone who deserves the respect that comedy lacks.

Gombrowicz and Czeslaw Milosz were both educated in law before achieving fame as authors who spent much of their lives in the West. THE LAND OF ULRO attempts to explain how the study of literature is so much like a dog chasing its own tale that legal studies seem closer to reality. The ultimate state of our culture is suggested by the reflection in this book on seeing a photograph of Albert Einstein on the wall of a restaurant.

"I stared up at the face, recalling how moved, how humbly respectful I had been, when many years ago I had made his acquaintance at Princeton. To me he was not only a scientist; he had stepped quite suddenly from the pages of ARS MAGNA and LES ARCANES." (p. 226).

That observation is from the end of section 35 of this book. Section 31 begins with the observation, "In 1924 a small book by Oscar Milosz was published in Paris under the Latin title ARS MAGNA. It consisted of five chapters or, as he called them, `metaphysical poems,' the first of which was written in 1916. LES ARCANES, written in 1926 and published in 1927, is both a sequel to and an expanded version of the first book." (p. 187). "Both make fiercely difficult reading, exasperating . . ." (p. 188). Section 16 began with the identification of "my distant cousin, Oscar Wladyslaw Milosz, who wrote under the name of O. V. de L. Milosz." (p. 61). Skipping over section 34, I noticed a mention of Milton that I had long expected to find during the book's many references to William Blake:

"The rebellion of the angels, which begot the power of evil, was, in effect, a catastrophe affecting the whole of creation, even if it did not produce another, equally powerful extreme opposed to good. The first catastrophe is closely related to the second, the sin of our parents. In Dante's DIVINE COMEDY the earth's center is occupied by the fallen (literally, headlong from heaven) angel, Satan. Milton's PARADISE LOST treats the rebellion of angels as a cosmic catastrophe. William Blake, though poetically indebted to Milton, `corrects' him by exonerating Satan, because, said Blake, he rebelled against a false God, the autocratic Jehovah. For Blake, as I have said, the catastrophe occurred with the breakup of the unity of the human-divine family." (pp. 214-215).

Section 26 begins with, "To speak of Swedenborg is to violate a Polish taboo that prohibits writers from taking a serious interest in religion." (p. 135). For one thing, his books were in Latin. "But a reading public of enlightened, philosophically minded ladies and salon wits, either ignorant of Latin or deficient in it, now had to be addressed in the new international language of French." (p. 141). Near the end of section 26, summarizing his visionary style, "The tension between Swedenborg's pedestrian style, stripped of poetic fancy, and the substance of his message conceals a richness difficult to name, before which we stand as before Escher's geometric drawings exploiting the paradoxes of three-dimensional space. Despite the cloying repetitiveness and manifold tautologies, Swedenborg makes profitable reading, even if one is in no way moved to become a Swedenborgian." (p. 147). Section 28 reveals, "Blake was born in 1757--the year of the Last Judgment, according to Swedenborg--and the significance of his birth date was not lost on him." (p. 158). Blake's THE BOOK OF THEL (1789) is like:

He who has never tasted bitterness
Will never taste sweetness in heaven. (p. 163).

Blake's great poem "Milton" is quoted on pages 172-174, compared to a Swedenborgian maxim, and quoted again on pages 179-180, without specifically mentioning the poet Milton, except as Northrup Frye binds "when Blake and Milton elaborate theories of history" (FEARFUL SYMMETRY, p. 195) (Milosz, p. 182).

I'm afraid that intellectuals I would admire are marginalized in America, and this book shows that European civilization as an attempt to make progress the fulfillment of everything religion tried to promise is the road to a spurious infinity that has rarely been explained adequately to be understood by people who expect a concise punch line when they are set up for a joke. I admire Gombrowicz for the manner in which his ability to picture real monstrosities rubs off on this book.

I was looking for information about a chapter of Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky about Jesus that was deleted by a censor when the book was first printed and never restored, so the chapter is now lost forever. I wanted to find something about the chapter in The Land of Ulro by Czeslaw Milosz, but I could not. I have been doing a lot of reading on Bakhtin recently, which considers Dostoevsky the leading artist for modern interaction with religious ideas, but The Land of Ulro has a blend of obscure intellectual strands that differ from the others while remaining aware of the crippled nature of attempts to get a utopia up and running so far. I don't think we are out of the woods yet, and trying to picture Jesus with our set of trees with limbs that only reach so far when spectacular growth is needed to pay back any money that has already been spent is not just comic.