Unattainable Earth by Czesław Miłosz

First published:Nieobjeta ziemia, 1984 (English translation, 1986)

Edition(s) used:Unattainable Earth, translated by the author and Robert Hass. New York: Ecco Press, 1986

Genre(s): Poetry

Subgenre(s): Lyric poetry; spiritual treatise

Core issue(s): Beauty; Catholics and Catholicism; doubt; good vs. evil; life; memory

Overview

In Unattainable Earth, Czesław Miłosz’s first collection of poetry published after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1980, he sets himself a task that he acknowledges is unachievable: to create a literature that embraces a world too immense for our limited vision and insufficient language. In his preface, Miłosz notes that the Polish title for the collection means “earth too huge to be grasped,” which provides both a central thematic figure and a sense of scale for the poet’s ambition “to transcend my place and time, searching for the Real.”

In his poems, the writer not only shrugs against the limitations of consciousness and humanity’s fallen state but also struggles against the constraints of form. Rather than simply a collection of poems, Unattainable Earth is much more. It is filled with aphorisms and philosophical pronouncements as well as lyric poetry, and the book expands its formal boundaries by mortaring what Miłosz calls “Inscripts”—prose fragments and full poems by other authors, even letters he received—into the architecture of the collection.

These interpolations are wide-ranging but consistent. They include passages from the third century Corpus Hermeticum (a collection of Greek texts from a more extensive group of works containing secret wisdom known as Hermetica), as well as writings by Miłosz’s more immediate spiritual forebears, such as the philosopher Simone Weil and his cousin, the French poet and mystic Oscar V. de L. Miłosz. The inscripts, including poems by D. H. Lawrence and Walt Whitman, were initially translated by Miłosz into Polish, but remain in their original form in the English version as “an homage to tutelary spirits.”

Taken together, this anthology—or “mosaic,” as Miłosz puts it—makes up a kind of individual spiritual autobiography. Its variety of voices, both in terms of the authors incorporated into the body of the book and the numerous personas addressed and adopted by the poet, only underscores the focus of its mediation. What does it mean, the writer questions, to be an individual in the world?

On one hand, his tactic is a mode of protection and self-preservation; as Miłosz acknowledges, his efforts offer a means of countering mortality. This is achieved not through literary glory, or even certainty in an eternal reward, but through an imaginative association with others: “I invent stories, similar to my own, a lifted elbow, the combing of hair before a mirror. I multiplied myself and came to inhabit every one of them separately, thus my impermanence has no power over me.”

Even more, however, the act of connecting with others is an act of compassion, an attempt to remember and to recognize the worth of a single existence, “to embrace the poor lives of beings.” In numerous poems, Miłosz asserts the value of individuals by sketching them: a former teacher, Father Chomski; a fellow poet from his youth whose obituary he had received; numerous anonymous or scarcely recollected figures. The particularity of these lives leads to a universal recognition of the plight and the splendor of what it is to be human.

Similarly, Miłosz describes his fascination with art objects, though his response is not that of an aesthete; instead, he finds in them the pulse of past existences. “The witnesses are old things, undimmed, dense/ With the life of human hands: the intense reds/ in stained glass, stone lacework, marble heads. . . .” It is the sturdy wooden table at which he senses the touch of other fingers that captures his sympathy and leads him to recognize that he, like those before him, will pass through mortality without leaving more than a trace of the essential quality of his selfhood.

The poet acknowledges that, despite his struggles to resurrect figures both known and imagined, he fails to represent the true richness of human lives. This failure is largely due to his own insufficiencies and the inability of language to capture actuality. Miłosz continually laments that he is unable to express the always elusive quality of lives, admitting in one of his prose fragments that “every one of my efforts to say something real ended the same way, by my being driven back to the enclosure of form, as if I were a sheep straying from the flock.” Language, he says, is weak, and he regrets his inability to write with the kind of purity and detachment demanded by the pressures of suffering and history.

Yet the poet’s lament at the instability of language is voiced with a contradictory, balancing impulse: the poet’s astonishment at his own being. “What use are you? In your writings there is nothing except immense amazement.” Despite the relentlessness of mortality, the poet is able to assert his ego in the face of human tragedy and decline. He is given a space in which time loosens its power, in which language may be enough. Such an eternal instant appears in the poem, “At Dawn,” a grace note in which he is able to write, “Only this moment at dawn is real to me./ The bygone lives are like my own past life, uncertain./ I cast a spell on the city asking it to last.”

Christian Themes

Unattainable Earth is a confession of doubt and a prayer that the poet’s offering, however insufficient, may still be accepted. Despite his firm Catholic imagination, Miłosz admits to his inability to achieve an unshaken belief, a struggle that characterizes his spiritual engagement: “sometimes believing, sometimes not believing,/ With others like myself I unite in worship.” He minimizes the quality of faith within himself, claiming that “I was not a spiritual man but flesh-enraptured,/ Called to celebrate Dionysian dances.”

Miłosz links the presence of eros in his imagination with his attentive observance of the sensuous world, a quality that informs his understanding of Christian theology and biblical myth. Thus, when he turns to the story of Adam and Eve in his collection’s first section, he does not retell the account in Genesis as an investigation of innocence and sin. Instead, Eden becomes an allegory of consciousness; Miłosz, marveling at the “otherness and sameness” of his lover, wonders that “Not one, divided in two, not two, united in one:/ The second I, so that I may be conscious of myself.// And together with you eat fruits from the Tree of Knowledge/ And by twisting roads make our way through deserts.”

Even more central to his theological thought is the problem of suffering. In a poem entitled “Theodicy,” he addresses “my sweet theologians” who debate the existence of pain in a world created by a benevolent God. “A decent man cannot believe that a good God wanted such a world,” he exclaims. Because of the weight of this empathy, and despite his public position as a Catholic intellectual, Miłosz described himself as a Manichaean.

Yet above all else, Miłosz’s poetry is an effort to praise God and champion being against the powers of “the Great Spirit of Nonbeing,/ The Prince of this World.” His effort at seeking the real is itself an act of worship. The collection ends with the affirmation,

To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness.

Sources for Further Study

Best Sellers. XLVI, August, 1986, p. 192.

Christian Science Monitor. LXXVIII, July 2, 1986, p. 21.

Fiut, Aleksander. The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czesław Miłosz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. A book-length study that offers an investigation into Miłosz’s philosophy and poetry, including his efforts to respond to the “erosion of the Christian imagination.”

Library Journal. CXI, April 15, 1986, p. 84.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. May 25, 1986, p. 2.

Miłosz, Czesław. Conversations. Edited by Cynthia L. Haven. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. Collection of interviews from 1980 to 2001, including conversations about the challenges of writing poetry in what the poet calls “a largely post-religious world.”

Miłosz, Czesław. Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition. Translated by Catherine S. Leach. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968. Autobiography that introduces both the author’s life and his philosophy, displaying ways in which Miłosz’s experiences shaped and were enriched by his theological strivings.

Miłosz, Czesław, and Thomas Merton. Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czesław Miłosz. Edited by Robert Faggen. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. Correspondence between Miłosz and the Trappist monk and writer, Thomas Merton, illuminating the spiritual elements of Miłosz’s poetry and thought, including their role in his political writing.

The New York Times Book Review. XCI, July 6, 1986, p. 10.

Poetry. CXLIX, December, 1986, p. 168.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXIX, January 31, 1986, p. 62.

Washington Post Book World. XVI, August 31, 1986, p. 9.