From 1955 to 1958 Polish director Andrzej Wajda fiilmed and presented a series of three movies, all based on contemporary Polish books, concerning the rise of the WWII resistance movement under Nazi occupation: A Generation, Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds… The fatalism of the primary characters, particularly during the second film, stoked the smouldering coals in my heart… A ragtag collection of people crawled through the ruins of Warsaw and the sewers underneath fighting a loser’s battle… Rifles and pistols, scavanged mortars and moonshine, dark humour and bitterness flung from every paneless window and doorless frame at German tanks slowly edging their way into the city… The children who had been absorbed by the Home Army, the women who ran messages through the city’s sewer system and the beaten and worn men in homemade uniforms and cub-scout merit badges knew they would be killed and yet they continued to defend the ruins… Their lives had been narrowed and honed into one solitary existence and had, for better or worse, found their entire purpose…

By the third movie the war was ending– Germany surrenders and the Red Army has yet to claim Poland as its own… Suddenly the soldiers have lost their clearly defined purpose just as they’ve lost their clearly defined enemy… Factionalization occurs but in the political struggle between left and right wing ideologies everything has become grey, people lose their focus and their identities… The world has opened up and a million different paths spread out across the horizon– people collapse unable to take a step…

Sitting in the grey area, paralyzed by too many choices… We sat discussing Sisyphus and wondered whether he was happy or miserable struggling with the boulder… I latched on the the purpose he’d been given, the complete submission of your existence to one goal… People travel to far-flung places to dedicate their life to monoastic life, David Bowie dedicated himself entirely to being David Bowie– so clear and so defined and so complete…

Meanwhile the world carries on while you practice your koan or compose your next alien opera– a gray world of war and corruption, death and guilt and avenues of capitalizing or fighting against… Most seem paralyzed unable to take a step in any direction…

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