DEAD END ROADS or WHEN ONE ROAD ENDS, ANOTHER BEGINS

I wrote this article for my blog:

Since arriving in Poland a year ago, I’ve thought about how to express the many aspects of this huge move. I ditched my entire life in Australia to come to Europe. Coming to Poland wasn’t part  of that plan but it ended up being the only practical place to be for a while.

I am still waiting for my temporary residency Visa to come though so I cannot travel outside Poland, and this has been the case since my Schengen Visa expired last year. So living here with all the advantages of being in the centre of Europe with so many awesome places on the doorstep hasn’t been realised. 

My work as an English teacher, despite usually working 7 days a week, still isn’t enough to prevent me from delving into my Australian savings to stay alive. It’s better than a year ago of course, but still  very unsettling as time goes by. New teaching ventures and promising leads have recently proven fruitless.

And what about Poland? What’s it like? 

The truth is I’m not 100% sure. When you don’t speak Polish, it’s very hard to see into the culture, to get a feel for what people think. If you can’t understand the conversations people have, the dialogues you hear - if you can’t hold a conversation with people from different parts of society, then you’re largely in the dark about how Poles think.

Of course working with Poles has helped - as the ones I work with (teach) can speak English, to varying degrees. So I get as much information as I can from them about Poland and it’s culture, but it’s an incomplete picture. This language barrier which leads to a knowledge barrier also results in feelings of isolation, which can be unnerving. I often liken it to walking around inside a glass bubble which lets sounds in, but doesn’t let my own sounds (voice) out. Everything is endurable when Aurora is here, but when she’s away, the  world closes in, shuts down and I live inside my own mind.

Poles are generally reserved. Many don’t appear to be happy from the outside. Life has been hard in Poland and it is still caught midway between the east and west, in many ways. This creates a general level of conservatism. All of my clients however, are the most wonderful people, all of them, which leads me to think my impressions of what I observe in the Poles is possible because I can’t speak to most of them. Of course my clients I can speak to, and I can get to know them.

Lockdown is Life

Living in lockdown for most people was pretty challenging but for me, life before and after lockdown has been identical to living in lockdown. There are no differences, except occasionally being able to go out for a coffee or a meal now. All days are spent inside, at home, teaching clients and doing lesson preparation from sometimes 6am through to 9:30pm. Lessons aren’t usually continuous but spread out throughout the day with an hour or more break between them which makes going out impossible anyway.

I’ve had a few people make suggestions to me. “Why don’t you go out and get involved in something, take up a sport or something?” etc. This kind of suggestion comes from someone who has never lived in a non-English speaking country. It’s just impossible. It is even challenging just to go to the shops to buy something, anything, as either the shop assistants don’t speak English or they refuse to do so. Even the immigration office - no English spoken there, “we are under no obligation to speak English here”, Aurora was told. So nearly  everything I need to do which requires making a phone call, meeting a courier at the door, arranging something, going shopping etc, requires me to ask Aurora to go with me. It’s quite demeaning and my independence and self-confidence has taken a battering.

Here’s another one: “Why don’t you just learn Polish?” Polish is one of the most difficult languages to learn, every Polish person tells me this. I have a client who is a 13 year  old girl and she told me her English exams were easier than her Polish exams. I would only begin the long journey of learning Polish if I knew I was going to stay here - and maybe I already have that knowledge but I don’t want to accept it. 

Now that it’s summer and the weather is warm, all I think about is Australia and the freedom of the outdoors - the nature I miss terribly. I miss friends too, just having another human to talk to, an Ozzie to share a laugh with, drink a beer with, be crazy with. Thing is I have nothing to go back to in Australia, no car, no house, no job. Everything was sold, donated or thrown away. And with the amount I earn teaching here in Poland, that actually means you may as well forget about travelling anyway. I earn around 30zL per hour for teaching when I work for the English school, which is 90% of my work. 30zL is about 6.7 Euros or 7.66USD. So after some time living in Poland and exhausting savings, there is no option other than to stay here - the ultimate trap.

It was my choice to throw everything away and come here for a new life. I know that too well. The biggest and most difficult challenge of my life and I chose to take it on at age 60. Great idea Mike.

And What About Art?

My photography since being in Poland has been almost exclusively with Aurora. The art scene in Poznan is non-existent. There are no models who will work TFP with me except a few, and in those I haven’t seen anything much I can connect with, share ideas with or create something of value with, aside from Aurora. Their aesthetic is not what models in other countries have developed. The language barrier is there too of course, communicating with models is difficult and communication is probably the single most important thing when I work in an invested way with someone.

So my creative mind as far as meaningful projects go has been stifled under the daily necessities of living and through feeling as if I don’t live in the type of place where my mind can roam free and explore ideas.

So, thinking about all this now leads  my mind to a huge body of unfinished work which was started with  Lauren Michelle years ago in Australia. This work occupied years of my creative input and investment and needs to be shown the light of day, for no reason other than I devoted so much of my life to it and I believe it to be substantial work as an artist.

With all that, here’s an image which represents many things to me and my journey. The model is @helvethet - a good friend of Aurora’s. It was created by physically sandwiching two medium format negatives together and sliding them around until I saw some kind of meaningful thing. I then took a snapshot of the sandwich by holding it up to the sky, with my DSLR. Not much editing and this is the result.