The Street Of Crocodiles Read Free Page A

belief. His artistry is a unique sacral practice in which myths are accompanied by worship, ritual, and verbal ceremony. Schulz digs down, delving for the taproots, the seeds of our conceptions and imaginings, for, in his words, “the spawning bed of history.” He says: “Just beyond our words... roar the dark and incommensurable elements. . . . Thus is accomplished within us a complete regression, a retreat to the interior, the return journey to the roots.” The meddling with language, with semantics, in these depths, in order to give form to the inexpressible—that is the goal of Schulz's poetic search for definitions. Reading Rainer Maria Rilke, Schulz's most beloved poet, was for him a constant comfort, a source of moral support in his creative struggles. “The existence of his book,” he wrote in a letter, “is a pledge that the tangled, mute masses of things unformulated within us may yet emerge to the surface miraculously distilled.”
    When Schulz's popularity as a writer threatened his privacy and solitude, his creative work began to slacken, and more and more frequently he fell into barren and agonizing states of depression. He spoke and wrote to his friends many times of the blessings of seclusion, seeing it as absolutely essential for his art, although at the same time he was painfully aware of his isolation. In reply to a letter, he wrote to one of his acquaintances: “You overrate the benefits of my Drogobych existence. What I lack here too, even here, is silence, my own musical silence, the tranquil pendulum subject only to its own gravitation, having a clear line of movement, not troubled by any foreign influence. This substantial silence— positive, full—is itself almost art. Those matters that wish, so I believe, to express themselves through me operate above a certain point of silence; they take form in an environment brought to perfect equilibrium.” Elsewhere, speaking of The Street of Crocodiles, he confesses: “In a way these ”stories' are true; they represent my style of living, my particular lot. The dominant feature of that lot is a profound solitude, a withdrawal from the cares of daily life. Solitude is the catalyst that brings reality to fermentation, to the precipitating out of figures and colors." 
    Schulz's solitude was complex and many-sided, not merely the mode of life of an introvert who eschewed the clamor of the world. Both the small provincial town detached from the main currents of life and the writer's strange sense of identification with the Jewish community condemned him to some degree to isolation. That isolation was all the greater when, in view of his striking singularity, which the inhabitants of Drogobych saw as pathological deviation, he was cut off even from his fellow townspeople. His Jewishness too was problematic. In the eyes of those about him it was evident and undeniable, and yet he did not at all feel himself to be a full-fledged citizen of the ghetto. His ties with his own genealogy, marginal in the present, mainly had to do with prehistory, with the mythic ancestors in the mythic Bible of his own devising.
    JERZY FlCOWSKI
August
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    In July my father went to take the waters and left me, with my mother and elder brother, a prey to the blinding white heat of the summer days. Dizzy with light, we dipped into that enormous book of holidays, its pages blazing with sunshine and scented with the sweet melting pulp of golden pears.
    On those luminous mornings Adela returned from the market, like Pomona emerging from the flames of day, spilling from her basket the colorful beauty of the sun— the shiny pink cherries full of juice under their transparent skins, the mysterious black morellos that smelled so much better than they tasted; apricots in whose golden pulp lay the core of long afternoons. And next to that pure poetry of fruit, she unloaded sides of meat with their keyboard of ribs swollen with energy and strength, and seaweeds of vegetables like dead