How is a decent, still reading, slightly conservative (but not too much) working intellectual supposed to watch a remake, a farce (vulgar – vulgaris means in Latin just ordinary, common, everyday, known) of the Broadcast of the High Chamber’s Proceedings?
How can they not lose touch with the most vital, elementary, ludic layer of national culture (we remember well how this problem tormented Wyspiański a hundred and twenty years ago), and at the same time, not go into internal exile (risky today, they might not let you back in)?
How not to lose faith (of the fathers) in revealed truths: in the revitalization, modernization, and leapfrogging democratization of our beloved Ithaca? And such a question will often plague us, in an era of rapidly growing popularity of machines capable of emitting any archetypal content from any empty heads into the first best scenography.
Note that both elements of scenography (including, for example, the carafe in front of the Marshal) and inner emptiness are copyrighted, please do not tinker amateurishly with the trans-mission of proceedings and events.
Try to maintain a lively contact with contemporary language, occasionally read something on the side, as much as you can “keep up to date” (but really, without exaggeration).
The most suitable role for the working intelligence in the current spectacle is the well-known, graceful role of Dzidek, to whom the enticing subject, like Polonia Restituta (must have been some Miss), appealed directly: Dzidek, do not leave the conduit!
And if that doesn’t help, you can always remind yourself of other deeply symbolic curiosities of the national spectacle for intellectual relief.
Take, for instance, the one from a Kraków theater eighty years ago. Supposedly every smallest detail from those plays was incredibly important. Supposedly those working on that play tried very hard to push elements as common, vulgar in the 1944 realities, into Wyspiański’s Homeric drama.
Treat what they’re staging today lightly, casually, like placing a plastic replica of a wind turbine (made in Siemens) and a few tweed hearts between a wagon wheel and a wooden cannon dummy. It won’t distort the drama.
And we, like those gathered around young Tadeusz Kantor back then, are primarily to experience. Following the performance is secondary.
Perhaps we’ll see that what Kantor dreamed of decades ago has finally come true. The entire class has died. The entire political class. And the show cannot stop. So, an outrageously avant-garde play is announced, illegible, unpredictable, full of tension, screaming, senseless display of excess energy. Are we now, on the eve of 2024, able to muster enough energy together for at least a partial resurrection? Wyspiański would be genuinely surprised at how bizarre stories weave through intellectual heads in the audience of the national stage.
