Remembering Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)

Much has changed

Sometimes I think of Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004). (Pronounced: Chef-wash Mee-yosh). I drew his likeness, displayed here.

Milosz was one of my favorite poets of the twentieth century. An east European Cold War exile, he wrote with a Christian worldview and a naked awareness of the inhumanity of Statism. His poet’s imagination and his old Catholic commitments were deepened by disappointment. That sounds paradoxical, or maybe just sadly impossible (i.e., impossibly sad). Yet, for this sensitive soul, the cruel antinomies of evergreen Christian hope and grungy gray Communist threats led him to the garden. Some Christians are called to the foot of the cross, others to the upper room. Czeslaw Milosz lived in the nexus of night and daybreak where saviors can be mistaken for gardeners, where weeping women bundle with each other in the chilly air, walking briskly, with a basket of ointments for the dead Christ. Milosz lingered there. The old man exulted in the empty tomb while weeping to see the daylight. There were others like him. I knew them. They had survived the horrors of World War Two to be locked away in the Cold War (so soon forgotten). So, Milosz wrote poetry in the Garden, just when the Gardener was recognized.

I heard of his passing when my family and I were in Aberdeen, Scotland. We were on High Street. I was sitting at an outside café, having coffee, reading the Times, when I saw his obituary. The briny smell of the North Sea is as real now as then.

I served in Naval Intelligence (the now repurposed and renamed Naval Security Group) in the Cold War. I met many refugees from Communist countries, all with unique yet similar stories. They are mostly gone now. They lived long enough to witness the Iron Curtain crumble, and not quite long enough to watch the eager young socialists trying to rebuild it. Those who advocate Socialism should read his stark poetry, and prose about exile from his home of Poland (and Lithuania). Milosz taught at Stanford. Like so many Communist exiles, he, and my professors at the Defence Language Institute in Monterey, sought and found refuge in Gov. Reagan’s, then, staunch anti-Communist State of California. Much has changed. But their presence in this world remains a witness to the Gardener who is there, moving amidst the graves, recognizable to the hopeful and the disappointed.

Some Lines from Czesław Miłosz

“The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.”
― Czesław Miłosz, The Issa Valley

“There is the warm, human presence of a God who took on flesh in order to experience our hunger and our pain, so we would not be doomed to strain our eyes upward but could be nourished by words spoken by lips like our own. And the God-man is not one of us in our moments of pride and glory but one of us in misfortune, in slavery, and in the fear of death. The hour when he agreed to accept suffering conquers time; centuries of change and passing civilizations are insignificant and short-lived, and no wasteland of cement, glass, and metal will make man different from those men Christ addressed in Galilee. He still has the right to proclaim: ‘I am love.’” On Catholicism, 1984.