Postcard from Skoda

with Stanislaus I. Skoda
Another Missive from…

This is Skoda. While the news reaches me in the hinterlands of Eastern Europe that presidents are being impeached and bombs are falling, here I am finding that the dark peasants of Jerzy Kozinski’s STEPS are alive and kicking. Somehow, I am staying the winter in the small POlish town of Hajnufka, near the border of Belarussia, and next to the last preserved grouping of old growth Forest left in Europe, the now National Park of Bialowieza. Long a hunting preserve of the Czars, it now is home to the last European Bison.

I have been bit by a dog. If anyone has ever been bit by a dog, the realizaztion and old buried fear of PREY breaches our thoughts on human mastery. The beasts owners offered no apology, the drunken louts. The man could barley stand and the wife sloppily kissed my cheeks calling me a good “Polish Ham” I still haven’t figured out what that meant.

My research on the crazed polish artist Witkiewicz continues. I have rented a small chatja, or cottage, which has the name ‘The Old Mans cabin’, named after an old man who used to live in it. There is a rag on the wall hanging from a nail, and it trembles at odd times, when there is no wind and no trucks passing by on the road. The nail is rusted and old, and brings to mind a story I was told by a pyschologist I was talking to in a bar in Kracov. This fella told me about a boy whose foot was nailed to a board in the woods by his fellow school mates. Maybe the trembling of the rag is the reverberations of foot pain. Who knows?!

For the sake of it, I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to verify the possibility of a Witkiewiczian Creation. In his novel, Insatiablity, Witkiewicz tells of a mysterious pill, the Murti-Bing pill, apparently a diabolical pharmecutical which manges to dispell doubts and questions from the minds of artists and intellectuals to make the transtition to Conquered as the country is invaded. While Witkiewicz was deep into Narcotics and hallucigens ranging from Cocaine to Peyote(his paintings bear an intricate labling system, ssetting down whether he painted straight, or on coffee, or cigarettes, or cocaine or vodka..) after looking up journals from his time(1920-1930′s) and examining various alchemical texts at St. Charles University in Praha and at the University of Kracov, nothing comes close to what Witkiewicz was describing with his Murti-Bing pills. So, face it, yes, he made the thing up. Any fool could tell that on first reading, but frankly, I was too intrigued by the possibility of its possibilty. Too much time on slow moving trains and vodak, I reckon. So no dice fellows, find yourself a new drug. Lucky for me, they still sell absinth over here, and it doesn’t cost a……