Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko

Author:Oksana Zabuzhko [Zabuzhko, Oksana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611090086
Publisher: AmazonCrossing
Published: 2011-06-06T04:00:00+00:00


—first came this poem, also unfinished—and couldn’t you finish it, see it through to the end—was it that hard?—then the dream, then—everything that came after. So knock yourself out now, dig deep, layer after layer, you pitiful, pitiful archeologine—just don’t you dare feel sorry for yourself, because nothing weakens you like self-pity). Who can tell us—poems, do they only predict or do they, God help us, construct our future for us—summoning from the teeming multitude of possibilities within it that one, which they name? And if this is really so—if we, blind maniacs, program our own lives in advance, pleased as punch at how cleverly we’ve written it all down!—and thus make our lives what they are, then this is a truly frightening gift, Lord, like a bomb in the hands of a five-year-old—and how does one pray to be released?

Who (what) writes through us?

Lord, I’m scared. I’ve never truly been scared before—not of external threats (those are nothing, there’s always a way out), I’m afraid of myself. I’m afraid to trust my own gift. I no longer believe that it is—in Your hand.

Look down upon me. Please.

In the evenings she escapes to the library—mainly so that she doesn’t stay alone in the house, where despair waits for her in the gathering twilight in order to throw a black sack over her head—but the library can’t save her: none of those more or less well-written other lives, bound in folios with worn spines, that stretch on and on, row after row, from floor to ceiling on multi-storied shelving while she accrues mileage walking up and down in search of the volume that she’s decided she must read—like in the universal cemetery (gray sky, a limitless field out to the horizon of identical gray headstones, and even though you know that behind each there is a person hiding ready to hop out the minute you call him, donning a perfectly living and full-bodied shape, the mere astronomical quantity obliterates any sense in choosing one of them: how many of them, after all, will you be able to resurrect during the course of your life, and how many of these resurrected and read entities have meant anything for you? The most you can do—and that is the maximum!—is to join their monotonous ranks with yet another not particularly noteworthy slim volume, and the “date due” slips glued on the inside covers indifferently demonstrate the absurdity of this whole enterprise: according to them, in twenty years you turn out to be the fifth person at Harvard to borrow Briefing for a Descent into Hell by Doris Lessing—a novel that is mentioned in all literary handbooks and truly deserves it—and the second to fancy the Polish edition of Milosz’s work—whereas most of those recounted lives simply gather dust, like uncollected letters in the numbered pigeon holes of the “general delivery” window at the post office)—not one of those lives has any relevance to hers, not one answers the question that she cannot seem



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