I am writing to you today from a train bound for Krakow from Wroclaw. Krakow, it turns out, is actually pronounced “crack-off” while Wroclaw does not sound like the first two syllables of Rock Lobster but instead is pronounced something like “vrotz-love.” So if you love your vrotz, you’re gonna love Wroclaw! Why the Poles spell things so weird is anybody’s guess. Anyway, at the bottom of this page is actual video footage of when the people of Wroclaw broke the world's record for the number of guitarists simultaneously playing Hey Joe. No joke!
I’ve done two talks in Poland so far. The first was in Opole University. Unfortunately the fliers were not delivered to the organizers until the day after the talk, so pretty much nobody but the people who set up the talk even knew it was happening. Even so it was a fun small group discussion. At the end of the talk I improvised a theory as to why the original Japanese Godzilla represents the Buddhist view of nature while the lousy American remake in 1998 represented the American view. This theory also explains why the American Godzilla sucked pachycephalosaurus ass. Remind me and I’ll tell you about it one of these days.
The following day I did a book signing at the Narlanda bookstore in Wroclaw. My appearance there had gotten a nice write-up in the entertainment section of the city’s largest newspaper, right below an article about an upcoming concert by Bobby McFarren. Subsequently the turn-out was far better. The place was pretty much packed.
It’s interesting trying to answer questions that are relayed to you through an interpreter. Sometimes the kind of questions I get asked in English are very difficult for me to make much sense out of. I could tell my long suffering Polish translator Kasia was having trouble with some of them. One guy seemed to want to know about predictions of future Buddhas. I did the best I could with that one. I couldn’t tell if he was one of the followers of one of the many supposed future Buddhas working the spiritual scene or if maybe he was trying to connect the approach I advocate with what he’d heard from those guys. I don’t think he liked it much when I compared waiting for the next Buddha to trying to figure out which contemporary sugar-pop band was going to be the next Beatles.
One of my hosts asked me for my one-sentence summary of my feelings about Poland. But I couldn’t give him anything. There are lots of funny things nobody ever tells you about a foreign country. Like how the Polish language sounds exactly like what you get if you tape record someone speaking English and then play the tape backwards. I keep wanting to record people’s voices and then replay them in reverse to check for Satanic messages. Also no one ever tells you that Wi-Fi is pronounced "whiffy" all across Europe.
The people I stayed with in Wroclaw had a 6 month old kitten named Bazilla. Or, anyway, that’s what I named him. His name was actually Bazili. He enjoyed attacking my hands at every opportunity. Unlike the cat I wrote about in Zen Wrapped in Karma, fortunately, he wasn’t actually trying to draw blood.
So far in Europe I have eaten more cheese than any human should ever eat. It’s difficult sometimes to find vegetarian food here that’s not loaded up with the stuff. And while I do like cheese quite a lot, I have had quite too much of a lot of it and shall be endeavoring heretofore to avoid cheese wherever possible. Unless it’s really delicious cheese, of course.
So far Poland kind of looks to me like picture postcards of Poland. Lots of medieval castles and archaic buildings. Rolling hills with ancient barns on top under endless gray skies. They tell me it’s not always this gloomy, and maybe it’s that Icelandic ash cloud still messing up the weather. But it’s been raining the entire time I’ve been here. This my first visit to a former Iron Curtain nation. My family went to Czechoslovakia back somewhere around 1974 when it was still a communist country. But this is the first time I’ve been to Eastern Europe since the fall of communism.
I’ve spent ten hours of my stay so far on trains. So I feel like much of my impression of the country is actually my impression of its railway system, which appears little changed since the days of the Cold War. The toilets are best left undescribed. Kasia told me to avoid the one with vomit all over the floor and instead use the one with no light and a heater stuck on scorch. You had to sort of take aim carefully and then close the door and hope for the best. I could see a lot of others before me had failed.
We’re now stopping at Trzebenia. I have no idea how you pronounce that.
Anyway, in some ways non-communist Poland resembles communist China, which I visited a few times while I was living in Japan. There are McDonaldses and KFC’s wherever you go. There are massive department stores full of consumer goods. There are froofy grocery stores that sell expensive imported foods. Not so different from anywhere else in Europe.
But I get a sense that people here are still adjusting to all this. It’s been 20 years since Solidarity and the fall of the Soviet empire, which means there are people in college who weren’t even born yet when the change happened. But most of the population still remembers.
As far as Buddhism is concerned, from my little perusal of the bookshops I’ve been in, it seems to be pretty much the same as the rest of the Western world. The store I spoke at last night had everything Osho ever wrote, a few Ken Wilber books, plus some Zen stuff by Taizen Maezumi and a few Polish authors whose names I did not recognize. Those were on the very bottom shelf.
Tibetan Buddhism is strong, like it is all over the West. Perhaps that’s the form of Buddhism that most appeals to people steeped in the Christian worldview. I’ve been told that Philip Kapleau established some centers here. Kwan Um is represented as well. There are posters all over town announcing talks by some chubby Eastern European Zen Master in a nice set of robes. Sometimes you even see a poster for me, with a view down the hole of an outhouse where a monster is crawling up out of the muck to bite your butt. But there aren’t too many of those.
... It’s now a day after I began this piece and I’m writing from a Buddhist center in Krakow. I had just gathered up my stuff to go and take a shower when, at that very nanosecond, two Polish workman guys appeared out of nowhere, went straight for the shower and started taking it apart. So here I am writing this.
They put me up here for the night. It’s on the fourth floor of a building they told me is 200 years old. It looks and feels to be about 500. The fourth floor in Europe, by the way, is what we in the US call the fifth floor. No elevators, but I need the exercise so that’s fine.
There is a wood burning cooking stove in the kitchen. And not one of those rustic, artsy-fartsy ones either. More like something a bunch of Polish peasants cooked their kielbasas on in 1571. This place is the home of seven local Buddhist groups of various denominations. There’s a Tibetan room for the folks from Karmakamtzang and then there’s a Zen room dominated mostly be Kwan Um inspired decorations, but apparently used by a number of other groups.
Oh! The workman guys left, just as mysteriously as they came. I’m gonna go get a shower before they come back!
... (twenty minutes later) I cannot figure out the showers here. They’re all hand held and the bathtubs are really deep like in Japan. I’m not sure if I’m meant to kneel down and spray myself or if I’m meant to take a bath and use the hand held shower to rinse off. In any case, I was unable to make the hand held shower here work at all. I couldn’t find any sort of button thingy or pull-up push-down thingy or knob or anything of that nature that would make it work. So I washed my hair by craning my neck such that it was under the faucet. Maybe I should’ve asked the workman guys before they left. Or maybe that’s what they were fixing. Only Jesus knows and he’s not telling me.
I have gone full circle at this point in my life. From touring with punkrock bands and sleeping on people’s floors is squats where nothing works, I am now touring behind punkzen books and sleeping on the floors of Buddhist centers where nothing works. Or at least I can’t figure out how anything works, which is the same in the end. I guarantee you the Dalai Lama does not travel like this. Are you sure Thich Nhat Hanh started out this way?
You probably think I’m complaining, but I’m not. It’s really fun doing this and I wouldn’t give it up for anything. I went out last night with some students from the local university to a place called the Sacred Cow where they play loud Indian-inspired dance rock and make coffee with caramel in it. Got an interview and a book signing today and then another long trip through the Polish countryside to the next town. This is the life!
