David Havird

Obeying the Call of Luminous Things: Writing in Paris with Czeslaw Milosz by David Havird
July 27, 2025 Havird David

Obeying the Call of Luminous Things: Writing in Paris with Czeslaw Milosz

 

(A summary of this essay was presented in a seminar led by Cynthia Haven at the 2024 Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers annual conference at The Catholic University of America.)

 

In an interview with Cynthia Haven in 2000, Milosz observes, “It seems to me every poet after death goes through a purgatory, so to say,” where his or her achievement endures the fire of critical “revision.” Twenty years after his death in 2004, how do “we” see Milosz, and how, with new readers in mind, might we be interceding? The publication in early 2025 of Poet in the New World: Poems, 1946-1953, much of which was previously unavailable in English, speaks to his endurance—as do such notable prior intercessions as the addition in 2011 of some 50 pages of “Last Poems,” translated by Anthony Milosz, to the 2006 Selected Poems; the 2012 production of The Age of Czeslaw Milosz, a documentary film by Juozas Javaitis in Lithuanian with English subtitles; and the publication of Andrzej Franaszek’s monumental Milosz: A Biography as edited and translated by Aleksandra and Michael Parker (2017), Cynthia Haven’s less expansive Czeslaw Milosz: A California Life (2021), and Eva Hoffman’s sometimes personal essay, On Czeslaw Milosz, in Princeton’s Writers on Writers series (2023). I address that dual question as a longtime fan (since reading “It Was Winter,” his at-once disturbing and redemptive poem about migration west, from Old World to New, in The New Republic in 1982), an aspiring poet, and a professor of English who built a basic course in creative writing, with fieldwork in Paris, on a thesis derived from Milosz’s introduction to his 1996 “international anthology of poetry,” A Book of Luminous Things.

 

My title alludes, first of all, to a late poem, “Capri” in Facing the River (1995). There Milosz considers his vocation, his calling: “Early we receive a call”—“the immense call of the Particular”—“and only late do we discover how obedient we were.” It alludes as well, of course, to the title of A Book of Luminous Things, an anthology that reflects his artistic principles as they relate to the Particular—thus my substitution of “luminous things” for “the Particular.” The second half of my title concerns, as I’ve implied, that general education course in creative writing for incoming first-year students at Centenary College of Louisiana during five successive Augusts (2014-2018) in Paris. By using that anthology’s “luminous things” along with several of Milosz’s own poems as models, notably “Bypassing Rue Descartes,” which was our “poem of arrival,” we came to be writing in Paris with Czeslaw Milosz. Nevertheless, this essay is far more about Milosz’s obedience to the call than the students’.

 

By the way, I am following Milosz in using “luminous things” sometimes to denote the poems, sometimes to evoke their subject matter. Thus Milosz conceived of his anthology: “As the title suggests,” he explains in a 1997 interview with Robert Faggen, “this is a book about things seen by various poets,” and he proceeds, as he also does in his introduction, to compare the poems and their stance to “Dutch still lifes and their luminous grasp of things.”

 

And here, also in passing, I observe that a late poem, “Realism” (1995), written around the time when Milosz was compiling A Book of Luminous Things and set in a gallery of Dutch paintings, begins with this assertion: “We are not so badly off, if we can / Admire Dutch painting.” As the poem unfolds amid still lifes, landscapes, and genre paintings, the poet is able imaginatively to “enter those landscapes / Under a cloudy sky from which a ray / Shoots out, and in the middle of dark plains / A spot of brightness glows”; and at the end of the poem, “Amid . . . ruffles, collets, and silk shirts,” he “rais[es] [his] voice / To join” those figures thus clothed “in their choral singing,” finding himself to be “Already one of them, who vanished long ago”—already “here eternally” like them, glorified by art. Some fifty years earlier, Milosz, who declared that “as a poet I owe as much to paintings as to literature,” named the French Impressionists Manet and Degas as his “favorite painters.” But as Franaszek reports, a visit to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum in 1971 appears to have changed his mind. Now it was the 17th-century Dutch painters who likely produced “the best art (to hell with the Impressionists, the beginnings of the plague!)” (Impressionism depicts a “world deprived of clear-cut outlines,” which Milosz deplores in his introduction to that anthology. The plague is abstract art.) Cézanne, however, remains a paragon. As the course in Paris evolved, “Realism” became the subject of a brief seminar in the Tuileries, following our exploration of the Louvre.

 

In the introduction to A Book of Luminous Things, Milosz argues that “Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot—if it is good poetry—look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting. . . . By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.” In his own poems such things as often as not—or, as may be likely, more often than not—are remembered things, people too. The feature, then, that more than any other draws me to Milosz’s poetry and holds my attention is the role of memory—“my Muse, Mnemosyne,” he writes in “Magpiety”—its embrace of particular things, as opposed to “so-called ‘idées générales’” (which include Marxism’s “beautiful idea” of historical necessity), and in tandem the play of imagination, aroused as it often is by sensuous reality. Seamus Heaney, it appears, anticipated my response twenty years ago: “much of his staying power as a poet will continue to reside in . . . his refusal to underprize the thickness of the actual and the sovereign value that can inhere in what we choose to remember”—or rather, what we happen to remember and choose, if we are artists, to commemorate. Examples that come immediately to mind of poems about such chosen things are “Encounter” and “Blacksmith Shop,” both of which you would expect to find in A Book of Luminous Things had Milosz included, in this “book of enchantments,” poems of his own.

 

In his introduction to that anthology Milosz quotes Cézanne to the effect that time consists of fleeting moments that consist themselves of images; it is incumbent on the artist to capture those “things-moments,” as Milosz proceeds to describe them. Thus they, the things of the moment, become “eternal,” while time itself “is valorized,” the “shape and color” of each constituent passing thing worth noting. “Encounter,” a very early poem (1936), richly captures a long-ago moment from childhood. Set amid “frozen fields” in early morning twilight, the scene is unfrozen—enlivened—by color, motion, and the sound of movement: a bird, specifically a redwing, taking flight, a hare “streak[ing]” across the farm road, the pebbles “rustl[ing],” and the hand of someone pointing, directing the boy’s attention—sensations that image a moment in time. “Encounter” well illustrates that artistic principle which Milosz shares as a poet with Cézanne. Both the imagery’s vitality and the “wonder” expressed by the poet as to where the fleeting sensations and their agents have gone—these also imply the erotic value that Milosz ascribes to things. I mean erotic in the sense of relating to Eros, which is for Freud “the preserver of all things,” the “life instinct” to which “affirmation, as a substitute for uniting, belongs” (I am quoting Freud from Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920] and his 1925 paper “Negation”). In a 1982 interview Milosz responds to a question about himself as “an erotic poet” by acknowledging “a very erotic attitude towards reality, towards simple things,” an attitude that includes, despite its relish of the sensuous, the view that “everything is . . . probably eternal.” “Encounter” evinces this fundamentally erotic attitude, concluding as it does with an apostrophe to “my love” and a “melancholy reflection” (as conveyed by “wonder”) on the dispensation now, in place and time or beyond, of the poem’s things of the moment:

 

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

 

I observe, again in passing, that Milosz restates, in an elaborate way, this question in an apostrophe to Cézanne on “Page 15” of “The Separate Notebooks.” There he remembers Gabriela (who was a first cousin of his mother’s—she is also the subject of his 1963 “Elegy for N. N.”) as first seen, a “teenager,” by his three-year-old self:

 

I want to know where it goes, that moment of enchantment,
to what heaven above, to the bottom of what abyss,
to what gardens growing beyond space and time.
I want to know where the house of an instant of seeing is,
when it’s liberated from the eye, in itself forever,
the one you pursued day after day
circling a tree with your easels.

 

Wherever that “house” is, there is Paulina’s “room,” as seen in “Throughout Our Lands” (1961), Milosz’s “first major poem written in exile,” as Haven points out—in the “new and unfamiliar terrain” of California, where he “was trying to locate himself in the prism of his poems”:

 

. . . a geranium, the chill of a dirt floor,
a hard bed with three pillows,
an iron crucifix and images of the saints,
decorated with palms and paper roses.

 

Though dead, Paulina “is,” Milosz asserts: “And, I am somehow convinced, not just in my consciousness.” There, as he imagines,

 

Above her rough Lithuanian peasant face
hovers a spindle of hummingbirds, and her flat calloused feet
are sprinkled by sapphire water in which dolphins
with their backs arching
frolic.

 

Paulina glorified . . . There too, rebuilt (thanks to apokatastasis, the doctrine of “reverse movement” in which Milosz announces his belief in “Bells in Winter”), is “the shelter of an apartment house / That was considered safe but toppled down,” amid whose “slabs of walls” (in the fourth of Milosz’s “Six Lectures in Verse”) is Miss Jadwiga, “A little hunchback, librarian by profession, / Who perished” during the Warsaw Uprising, according to Franaszek, in 1944:

 

The little skeleton of Miss Jadwiga, the spot
Where her heart was pulsating. This only
I set against necessity, law, theory.

 

Against, in other words, modernity’s “great metaphysical operation . . . to invest history with meaning” (“Essay in Which the Author Confesses . . .”), the poet sets—spots—this singular human being as she is in death, mere bones, and life, a beating heart amid the “knocking” that was “heard for many days.” For Milosz, another “name” for “History” is “Annihilation” (“Why”).

 

“Blacksmith Shop” (1991), written fifty-five years after “Encounter,” is perhaps the simpler poem—and maybe the better model for students who are learning, in a basic creative writing course, to notice things. It also makes a statement about the poet’s calling, a concept to which, of course, my title alludes. As for the things in the poem, they belong to Milosz’s memory of early childhood in rural Lithuania, specifically, according to Franaszek, the family’s farm in Szetejnie: the bellows, the fire, the glowing iron, the “bucket of water,” which represent the four classical elements (air, fire, earth, and water) and thereby imply that the blacksmith shop is itself a microcosm of the natural world refashioned by the work of hands. With senses aroused, seeing (among other things “the blazing of the fire” due to those bellows), hearing (the “blowing,” the red-hot “piece of iron” hammered on the anvil—“bent into a horseshoe”—the “sizzle” when it goes into the bucket), and feeling (the “gusts of heat”), the poet remembers himself as a barefoot boy at the “entrance,” “dirt floor” (a tactile image) beneath his feet: a liminal figure, “I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: / To glorify things just because they are.” Perhaps the scene, for the poet in memory as well as for a 21st-century student who may not know what a blacksmith does—perhaps the scene, which radiates light, is all the more luminous thanks to that word “black,” which denotes the so-called “black metal” forged by the smith, but also connotes the sootiness (due to the coal that no doubt fuels the fire) and dustiness of the workspace. The poem itself becomes an even more luminous thing thanks to the last line, which reveals the poet’s motive: “to glorify,” which is to exalt in a worshipful way—as though to surround with a halo, like Paulina’s “spindle of hummingbirds,” thereby conveying “‘The Metaphysical Sense of the Wondrousness of Being,’” to quote a phrase from a 1990 essay. (A note on this essay, “Against Incomprehensible Poetry,” in To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays identifies it as the first version of the introduction to A Book of Luminous Things.)

 

“Capri,” an even later poem, in which Milosz assesses his obedience to that “call,” makes us also recipients of a call and complicates the nature of those things by presenting them as innately luminous: “disguises of the lost Reality,” which is to say, God. The poem takes its title from its occasion: a “festivity of incessant renewal” on Capri, in which “a rejoicing and banqueting humanity invites” the 80-year-old poet “to take part.” The occasion has sent the poet back in memory to his first communion, at the Dominican Church of Sts. Philip and James in Wilno, when he was eight—or rather to the cocoa that followed it, “served by zealous Catholic ladies.” At the end of the poem Milosz refers for the first time, in a general way, to “bread and wine,” which, however, he equates with “our flesh and blood” instead of Christ’s; the cocoa, evoking satiny warmth and bitter sweetness, remains a more vivid image, radiant while not precisely luminous, for reader and poet, who wishes that he could shine light on those ladies. (No such wish attaches to the priest.) They “existed, after all, and if I returned there now, identical but with another consciousness, I would look intensely at their faces, trying to prevent their fading away.” So, too, would he look at certain childhood things, among them “carriages and rumps of horses illuminated by lightning or by the pulsating flow of distant artillery,” a memory that dates from 1915. His failure to have looked with sufficient intentionality prompts him to reflect, “Early we receive a call” (perhaps from the “Most High”—see “Report,” which immediately follows “Capri” in Facing the River), “yet it remains incomprehensible, and only late do we discover how obedient we were.” It appears that as early as 1915, when he was four, he had received a call, if not yet understood, to glorify by first staring and staring. No doubt he has in mind Jesus’ parable in Matthew 20: as he similarly affirms in “Late Ripeness,” an even later poem (2000), “I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard, / as are all men and women . . . whether they are aware of it or not.” Late in “Capri,” with reference to his fellow revelers, Milosz writes of their fear, and his, of a “sign that the unavoidable”—death—“is close: a tumor in the breast, blood in the urine, high blood pressure”; and he mordantly concludes, “Then they know for certain that all of us are called, and each of us meditates on the extravagance of having a separate fate.” Perhaps he is recalling Paul’s analogy, in 1 Corinthians 12, between variously God-gifted people and parts of the body, specifically Christ’s, in whose mystical body his first communion (if not the cocoa) has united him with other communicants, living and dead. (Paul has only just instructed the church, in 1 Corinthians 11, on the ritual observance of the Lord’s Supper.) Anyway, the poet implies that the call, received wherever from, reveals one as a singular manifestation of the Particular, whose sensuous nature masks divinity. Or so I read the concluding lines:

 

If I accomplished anything, it was only when I, a pious boy, chased after the disguises of the lost Reality.

 

After the real presence of divinity in our flesh and blood which are at the same time bread and wine,

 

Hearing the immense call of the Particular, despite the earthly law that sentences memory to extinction.

 

For Milosz, as I now see, but did not know when teaching that course of mine in Paris, obeying the “call of the Particular” became a sacramental enterprise. My aim for the students, who were hearing the call, was more down-to-earth: “Through the close reading of short poems and literary nonfiction by established authors and through the composition and group critique of work of their own, students will discover and put into practice basic techniques of creative writing that draws its subject from the sensations of home and the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch of Paris”—whether these things conveyed a luminous divinity or not. To put the matter another way, the aim was not to confirm the students’ enrollment in the “communion of saints,” as in the Apostles’ Creed, but rather to enlist them, if belatedly, in that “wandering crew” (which includes Milosz) whose poems he is reading in a late poem, “Report” (1995), while compiling his anthology.

 

I should acknowledge, by the way, the presence of a colleague, whose principal interest was literary history—we team-taught Writing Paris / Writing Home; its goals were ours. Also I should explain that the course belonged to a program of courses in one of which each incoming first-year student enrolled. Centenary in Paris, which included orientation, ran for three weeks in August: two weeks on campus, one (the second week) in Paris. The courses were staffed by faculty from the three academic divisions: Humanities, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences. Related to each division was a challenge to consider: living a meaningful life (Humanities), creating a sustainable world (Natural Sciences), expanding your circle (Social Sciences). “A culminating portfolio,” as our formal, Catalogue description of Writing Paris / Writing Home concluded, “will represent each student’s tentative articulation of ‘the meaningful life.’”

 

The description appearing on the syllabus, which I now quote from while paraphrasing, elaborated by relating Milosz’s thesis, in his introduction to A Book of Luminous Things, to the challenge of living a meaningful life. There Milosz observes a “deprivation” afflicting contemporary life and attributes it to “science and technology,” which “pollutes not only the natural environment but also the human imagination.” “For this course,” the description continues, “we understand ‘science and technology’ as consisting of” . . . and here our list includes a number of now-redundant items in whose place, ten years later, we could specify the smart phone, with its camera, Web access, and plethora of apps, “whose thoughtless, habitual use can turn human beings into multitasking automatons that are able only through training and focused acts of will ‘to look at things of this earth.’” The description concludes with an echo from earlier in this essay: Milosz’s thesis that the production of art that “deals with the singular, not the general”—that is to say realistic art—cannot but find the “things of this earth” to be “colorful, variegated, and exciting”; art of the Particular “is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.” Well, there is more, which refers to models in addition to “the realistic lyrics in A Book of Luminous Things,” but I’ll stop here.

 

Now, retracing in my mind our way on foot from Luxembourg (the Métro stop) on past the Panthéon to Saint-Étienne-du-Mont for a seminar on our poem of arrival, I reflect on Robert Faggen’s astute observation in his 1997 interview with Milosz: “This whole anthology seems to me to be like another poem, in that you have allowed all of these voices to speak through you. It seems a continuation of your poetic tapestries of the late 1970s”; and Milosz enthusiastically assents: “what you say is precisely what I had in mind.” The “Polish edition,” he adds, may read even more like a polyphonic poem of his, since there he translated “most of the poems” himself. Having thought more systematically than before about the source for me of Milosz’s “staying power” and its relation to the artistic values expressed in the introduction to A Book of Luminous Things and represented by the poems chosen, I understand that we were writing with Milosz to a greater extent than was apparent, and not simply, for instance, with Arthur Waley’s Po Chü-i, Milosz’s “favorite realist.”

 

“Bypassing Rue Descartes,” whose first three lines in italics served as the epigraph to our syllabus, was the subject of a “seminar” on the steps of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont in Place de l’Abbé Basset, where the Owen Wilson character, Gil, in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011), which we screened before departure, is met by the antique Peugeot that transports him to the Paris of the twenties. We are ourselves “barbarians,” I’d say, “just come” from Louisiana, like Milosz from Lithuania when he was not much older than you, “to the capital of the world.” Now, the aim of the course was not, admittedly, to usher our students into the abstract “universal” (though global citizenship for its students is a mission of the college)—quite the opposite: to alert their senses to the sensuous activity of the city,

 

Rustling with throaty laughter in the dark,
Baking long breads and pouring wine into clay pitchers,
Buying fish, lemons, and garlic at street markets . . .

 

which contrasts with the inanimate stone of its “monuments representing nobody knows whom,” evoking, that is, such abstractions as “honor and shame and greatness and glory.” (This said, we would that very day draw the students’ attention the statue of Montaigne on rue des Écoles.) Ten years later, I still remember—though the phrasing is likely more mine than the students’—such things as “snails curled in garlicky butter, which have, though chewed and chewed, no taste of their own”; “the smell of piss in the Métro, which stings your eyes in the stairwells”; in Notre Dame “the crown of thorns encased in a chapel behind the altar, suspended as though in blood-red wine”; “the gargoyle with piercing eyes and mouth like a stepmother’s, open to scald”; “a piano playing, not enough notes heard to follow the tune, on the bridge, at the opposite end”such images as figured in their writing.

 

We’d have come to that spot, after a little circuit through Hemingway’s neighborhood, by way, in fact, of rue Descartes—and afterwards “descended,” as does Milosz, “toward the Seine,” we for lunch with Notre Dame in view. I’d tell the students about Milosz’s first trip to Paris in May 1931 when he was not yet 21, right after his second year at the university in Wilno—the ill-fated summer adventure of attempting, with two fellow “Vagabonds” (members, that is, of a club so named) to travel the waterways by canoe from a lake in Germany to Paris. Now I know that Milosz, in the poem, is recalling his second visit to Paris some 3-4 years later (1935) when he lived no distance at all from where we’d be reading the poem: briefly, according to Franaszek, at a pension on rue Valette before settling at a hotel around the corner on rue Laplace. To descend from there to the Seine he would not have avoided rue Descartes on purpose but merely passed by it, turning left from Laplace onto Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. It is right there, at Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, that Descartes begins, running south toward Place de la Contrescarpe, where the opening pages of A Moveable Feast are set. Of course the intentionality implied by “bypassing” wittily establishes the poet’s negative or skeptical stance regarding “cogito, ergo sum,” at least as understood by a general reader if not a professor of philosophy: that thinking, whereby you make your home among “beautiful, universal ideas” instead of things—things seen, heard, tasted, smelled, and felt—which arouse a physical reaction, verifies your existence.

 

What are—or were in 1935—these “beautiful, universal ideas”? We have as a handout the poem as presented in The Washington Post in 1999 by Robert Hass, who writes, “He’s thinking, I’m sure, about the Marxism or rather the Stalinism, of Parisian intellectuals in the 1930s”—a reasonable interpretation since “customs of our homes,” which adherents of those ideas would like to “abolish,” evince a hierarchical social order: “The clapping for servants, barefooted girls hurry in.” Milosz, when invited in a 1994 interview to comment on this poem in which “you describe Paris as a city where many espoused what you called ‘beautiful ideas’—ideals both naïve and cruel,” reflexively refers to his “two phases” in Paris during the fifties—thereby implying that when he wrote the poem in 1980, he was seeing his year in Paris, 1935, as through the lens of his experience first, in 1950, as “an attaché of the Polish embassy” whom the communist literati embraced, and one year later as a refugee who had broken “with the Polish communist regime” and whom such “French intellectuals” as “Jean-Paul Sartre and his crowd” shunned, “completely in love” as they were “with communism and Stalin. . . . The French felt that their so-called ‘ideés générales’ were valid for the whole planet.” All the same, the poem’s reference to the “many from Jassy and Koloshvar”—these two cities in particular—who would “[s]oon enough . . . be killed because they wanted to abolish the customs of their homes,” is puzzling, given that the customs there are likely to have been Jewish ones, the many who wanted them abolished Nazis. (The 1941 Jassy pogrom killed maybe 14,000 Jews. In Koloshvar the 16,000 Jews already confined to a ghetto saw deportation in 1944 to Auschwitz.)

 

As I’ve implied, things sensed, as opposed to ideas thought, are local, whether present in actuality or in memory, and our reaction to them, having its basis in our physical experience (abetted perhaps by cultural traditions), may not be logical. So appears to have been Milosz’s reaction to the water snake: impulsively physical. Again beside the Seine after a long absence from Paris (during which “empires have fallen . . . And the abolished customs are restored to their small fame”), the poet remembers “How, one day, walking on a forest path along a stream, / I pushed a rock down onto a water snake coiled in the grass.” In our handout Hass cites Milosz’s note, which “associates” the water snake with the sun. After reading the poem at the Library of Congress in 1997, Milosz had more to say, observing in a humorous tone that killing the water snake was not an “ecological crime.” He was born in Lithuania, he explained, which was the last country in Europe to “adopt” Christianity. Many “pagan beliefs” prevailed: “I was taught in childhood that to harm a water snake was a heavy sin against the sun,” that luminous god. The local custom, which evolved from a savage people’s life amid the “reeling wheel of the seasons,” of venerating a water snake (“coiled” as this one is) as an incarnation of the solar year, is one such custom of his home that Milosz, “just come to the capital of the world,” would have been “[a]shamed to remember.” Now, confessing himself to be “the breaker of a taboo,” he affirms his provincial identity. He is, or so he feels, thanks to his “heavy sins” and the “just punishment” that “reache[d]” him, as a refugee in Paris and later the American West, from the vestigially pagan Lithuania of his childhood.

 

Had I been giving that seminar on the steps of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont in August 2024, I might have related the poem’s culminating example of a local way of seeing that withstands a missionary ideology to the “Apache Christ” that was the subject of a feature by the Associated Press in late July. The story from Mescalero, New Mexico, by Deepa Bharath, concerns a Native American congregation’s reaction to the surreptitious removal by a priest, with the bishop’s authorization, of an icon from the St. Joseph Apache Mission church in June. As Bharath describes it, the eight-foot-tall icon, painted by a Franciscan friar in 1989, “depicts Christ as a Mescalero medicine man.” Removed along with the icon was “a smaller painting depicting a sacred Indigenous dancer. Also taken were ceramic chalices and baskets given by the Pueblo community for use during the Eucharist.” A member of the mission’s parish council understood the removal as an effort by the priest, with the bishop’s approval, “‘to cleanse them of their ‘pagan’ ways.’” She “never imagined she would have to choose between being Apache and being Catholic.” However, earlier in June the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, as Bharath notes, “overwhelmingly approved a pastoral framework for Indigenous ministry” that describes as “false” the choice to be either Native or Catholic and assured Indigenous Catholics “that you do not have to be one or the other. You are both.” The story does end hopefully.

 

Reading that story about the Apache Christ with this essay in mind, I remembered Milosz’s characterization, as Haven reports, of Lithuanians as “the ‘Indians’ of Europe, latecomers to Christianity, the last on the continent, after they had been conquered and forcibly converted by Teutonic Knights in the fourteenth century.” I also remembered the Native American “Medicine Man” in his 1962 poem “I Sleep a Lot” with whom the poet pleads:

 

. . . When you start to dance
you visit remote pueblos in your sleep
and even lands you have never seen.
Put on, I beg you, charms made of feathers,
now it’s time to help one of your own . . .

 

This poet in California, a would-be healer, is unable to heal himself—by sleeping a lot and reading Aquinas (not to mention the recent The Death of God)—of a homesickness that is both terrestrial and cosmic. “When it hurts,” Milosz continues, with a reference to rivers in Lithuania (the one that runs beside the blacksmith shop, where items await repair, and the one that “rolls its waters past . . . the church” where he took his first communion)—

 

When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers.
I remember those crosses with chiseled suns and moons
and wizards, how they worked during an outbreak of typhus.
Send your second soul beyond the mountains, beyond time.
Tell me what you saw, I will wait.

 

This depiction of Christian Lithuania with its enduring vestiges of paganism returned me, of course, to the water snake. I can’t help wondering if among those “beautiful, universal ideas” in “Bypassing Rue Descartes” there isn’t Roman Catholicism, which finds it necessary even in 2024 to reassure locals of its commitment to “authentic inculturation,” as symbolized in “I Sleep a Lot” by those “chiseled suns and moons” on crosses. There in Place de l’Abbé Basset I might observe with a grin that for young barbarians like them at a college whose mission is to prepare them as “global citizens” for meaningful lives, the tension between a cosmopolitan aspiration and an unsentimental respect for “diversity,” the local color of its “richly complex forms,” may be a challenge-in-the-making, one worth pondering.

 

You will have noticed that in Milosz’s poems remembered things (as well as “information” in prose) provide a “sense of locality.” In fact, they serve as “a remedy against homelessness,” a universal “threat,” he says in a 1980 interview. As he observes elsewhere (in the essay “Happiness”), “In a world dominated by technology and mass mobility, most of us are first- or second-generation immigrants from the country to big cities” (and not necessarily houseless because of some calamity or other). “Now I am homeless,” he announces in The Captive Mind, written during his first year of political asylum in France (1951). (How Milosz, an erstwhile diplomat in Washington, DC, came to be a refugee in Paris while his pregnant wife with their small son remained behind is a complicated story.) Milosz appears to have been congenitally alert to physical sensations and remarkably able to recall them: “Enchantment at a very young age is a sacrament, an experience whose memory acts upon us through our life,” he writes at eighty (in Milosz’s ABC’s); “my ecstatic praises of existence can be explained by that early gift I received through my five senses.” Presently, thanks to a fellow Polish refugee, Stanislaw Vincenz (who figures in Franaszek’s biography as an archetypal Wise Old Man), the intentional pursuit of sensory enchantments became self-therapy. Vincenz “made him experience the world by touching it with foot and hand, tasting things, humbly taking in its limitless forms, and so prised him away from human madness,” suicidal urges. His “goal” for Milosz, as Franaszek explains, was “to make him realise that being in one’s homeland did not necessitate being physically present within borders of a country, and that history is not constituted from an assembly of iron rules, but springs from individuals’ memories.”

 

Able eventually to immigrate, Milosz comes to accept as home (in “It Was Winter,” written in the Berkeley Hills in 1964) a “valley” where,

 

After eight dry months, rain fell
And the mountains, straw-colored, turned green for a while.
In the canyons where gray laurels
Graft their stony roots to granite,
Streams must have filled the dried-up creek beds.

 

If the California landscape sometimes hurts the eye, as Milosz observes in a 1980 interview, it also can enrapture it, if not enchant; and in either case the Far West throws into vivid relief the Old World

 

. . . where you sit under a café awning
On a marble piazza, watching the crowd,
Or play the flute at a window over a narrow street
While children’s sandals clatter in the vaulted entryway.

 

Hardly has this “country where thunder beneath the rippled skin of the earth . . . nullified us”—us migrants, who include a remnant of the Donner Party—than erotic, restorative things, “the hems of invisible silk vestments,” which are felt to skim, “pass over,” the poet where he’s lying beside a spring, and “lanterns in the magnolias,” enchant the poet’s imagination, things whose likely source is the Japanese fairy tales read to him in early childhood by his paternal grandmother in Latvia: “my house is huge,” Milosz concludes. Thirty years later, mere months before he died, and almost ninety years since hearing those tales read, Milosz reflects: “I remember kimonos . . . Japan had a special place in my imagination.”

 

The eventual discovery that “my house is huge” was, metaphorically, the aim of our course in Paris. Meanwhile, there were our young barbarians, who had no sooner moved from home to campus than flown to Paris—already some of them were missing their dog, a golden retriever, or younger sister, whose first day of high school it was; or else their girlfriend, newly enrolled at another college, wasn’t texting back—already they were homesick. I might, as I now see, have found a way to somehow say, not without empathy, “This very course could be your cure: obey the call of luminous things.”

 

 

 

A Note on Sources

 

Quotations from Milosz’s poetry come from his New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 (Ecco, 2001). Other books by Milosz that supply quotations are A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry (Harvest / Harcourt, 1996); Milosz’s ABC’s (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001); and To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays, edited and with an introduction by Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). Unless otherwise indicated, Andrej Franaszek’s Milosz: A Biography (Belknap, 2017) is the source of biographical information. Franaszek is also the source for Milosz’s statement about the “special place” of Japan in his “imagination”; he does not, however, relate it to “It Was Winter.” Quotations from interviews come from Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations, edited by Cynthia L. Haven (U of Mississippi P, 2006), which arranges the interviews in chronological order. The quotation from Seamus Heaney comes from his 2004 Guardian essay, “In Gratitude for All the Gifts,” as reprinted in Haven, An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz (Swallow / Ohio UP, 2011). The quotations from Haven about “Throughout Our Lands” and regarding Milosz’s view of “Lithuanians as the ‘Indians’ of Europe” come from her biography Czeslaw Milosz: A California Life (Heyday, 2021). Quotations from Sigmund Freud come from The Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay (Norton, 1989).

David Havird is the author most recently of Weathering (2020), which includes prose memoir as well as poetry. Find new poems of his in recent issues of the Asheville Poetry ReviewBirmingham Poetry ReviewLiterary ImaginationLiterary MattersLowestoft Chronicle, and Raritan. He retired from the classroom in 2020 after 30 years at Centenary College of Louisiana.