Utopia

Utopia

Island where all becomes clear.

Solid ground beneath your feet.

The only roads are those that offer access.

Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.

The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.

The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.

If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.

On the right a cave where Meaning lies.

On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.

IF there is any poem by Wislawa that Ive come to love, it is her poem Utopia. This ex- communist Polish poet speaks to my heart as I am an ex-communist myself.  I couldn’t confirm but I deduced through secondary sources that she wrote this poem sometime after 1960. That was the period during which the scourge of Communism/ Marxism was spreading throughout Europe like wild-fire. She had probably realised due to the Polish Government’s attempts to censor her poem; that the communist/ Marxist/ Socialistic ideology and their governance machinery was inherently fascist.
Like Islam is presented today by ideologues cum ‘intellectuals’ and fanatics as the answer to all human problems and the perfect solution; Communism was presented by leftist ideolouges, intellectuals, etc as the panacea to all human problems.

Wisława Szymborska-Włodek  (2 July 1923 – 1 February 2012) was a Polish poet, essayist, and translator. She was the recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Szymborska was born in Prowent. She died 1 February 2012 at home in Kraków (a Polish City) from natural causes, aged 88.

Poland under the guidance of the leaders of the Soviet was heading towards the said ‘Utopia’; atleast they told their citizens that they were. An utopic world would be one with perfect knowledge
(Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds )
as well as equal prosperity. That the committees i.e. the Politburos of the world even thought that they through ‘collective action’ and ‘scientific committees’ could attain perfect knowledge was and continues to be laughable in itself. The part about shared prosperity turned out to be a farce in real life with hundreds of instances of mass starvation, rampant shortages and general statism. It was in this world that the poem  ‘Utopia’ was written by Wislawa Symborska.

The poet refers to the Utopic world as an Island. One wherin ‘ all becomes clear’ i.e. one with perfect knowledge. It may be wrong to read too much into a translated version of a poem but I find it extremely interesting that the poet has used the line ‘The only roads are those that offer access’. This is because every Tom, Dick and Harry in communist countries would offer a foreigner or a member of the elite access to the Politburo i.e. the uber elite in exchange for a large consideration. The poet then uses symbolism –‘ Tree of Valid Supposition ‘ and ‘Tree of Understanding’ to describe the intelligentsia in such an utopia who held beliefs about armed proletarian revolution which they could lead from their armchairs ; Dialectical Materialism in their eyes was true (A valid Supposition ) giving way to the Tree of Understanding which grew in the springs of ‘Now I get it’ . The communists used Marx’s fuzzy concept of Dialectical Materialism (The spring) to analyse everything from Human behavior to animal behavior (Tree of Understanding).

 The poet uses – ‘Valley of Obviously ‘, ‘If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.’ to again describe the said Utopia of perfect knowledge wherein all doubts are dispelled instantly. She is probably referring to Communist attempts to dispel all doubters through the dialectical red armies. The poet goes on describe the Island by personifying Meaning and Deep Conviction as caves on the Island ; she then goes on to say "For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,". People for all their demands of security  –financial and physical are too adventurous to remain in such a boring place where there is no purpose to life. She ends with the words ‘As if all you can do here is leave| and plunge, never to return, into the depths.|| Into unfathomable life. ‘The last lines capture the essence of the poem quite clearly.

The poet uses poetic devices like Personification by capitalizing words like ‘Tree, Understanding , Supposition, etc. She uses symbolism in a very elegant way – ‘On the right a cave where Meaning lies.
On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction .’ 

One wonders if she is writing about a Utopic world or a Dystopic world. Events in the 1980s proved that the latter was indeed true. The horrors of the Communist regimes in Asia and Europe came to be known by the rest of the world and the true face of the dystopic ,despotic regimes of Eastern Europe and Eurasia horrified the world by the scale of deprivation, large scale murder and oppressiveness.