On docile culture and energy
from Gombrowicz, Diaries:
"The Argentine elite resembled docile and diligent youth whose ambition was to learn from the elders as soon as possible. Ah, not to be youth! Ah, to have mature literature! Ah, to match France and England! Ah, to grow up, to grow up quickly! …
Hence the meekness of Argentine art, its correctness, its good student demeanor, its composure, were for me a testament to impotence in the face of one's own fate. I would prefer a creative gaffe, a mistake, even carelessness, but filled with energy, drunk with the poetry that the country breathed, which they passed by with their noses buried in books. I often tried to tell this or that Argentine, the same thing I, by the way, often told Poles: – Stop writing poems, paintings, talking about surrealism for a moment, consider first whether you are not bored by it, check if all this is so important to you, think whether you won't be more authentic, free, and creative by disregarding the gods you pray to. Interrupt this for a moment to reflect on your place in the world and culture and on the choice of your means and purpose. ...
I quickly left the meeting and into the Argentine night, dark and still, I went to Retiro, which you already know from Trans-Atlantic: "There the hill descends to the river and the city to the port descends and the quiet wind of the water like a song some in the midst of the plaza's trees... There were many young Sailors..." For those who might be interested, I wish to explain that I was never a homosexual, except for sporadic adventures at a very early age. …
So, I wasn't looking for erotic adventures in Retiro, but – stunned, thrown out of myself, disinherited and derailed, consumed by blind passions that my collapsing world and bankrupt fate had ignited in me – what was I looking for? Youth …
here, at Retiro, I saw, so to speak, youth in itself, independent of gender, and I experienced the blossoming of mankind in its sharpest, most radical form and – since it was stamped with hopelessness – demonic. And furthermore – down, down, down! It drew me down, to the lowest sphere, to the realm of humiliation, here youth, once already debased as youth, was subjected to a secondary humiliation, as common, proletarian youth...
I could not tell him everything. I could not reveal that place in me, shrouded by night, which I called "Retiro". I regaled Mastronardi with the work of my derailed brain which was looking for some "solutions", without mentioning the sources of my inspiration – and he did not know where in me the passion came from with which I struck at all "seniority", with which I demanded that in culture (based on the supremacy of superiority, seniority, maturity) this current, striking from below, should be revealed, which in turn makes seniority dependent on juniority, superiority on inferiority."