At Nightmare’s Edge, Lifelike Dolls

Originally published in Rabbit Hole Magazine.

Picture Credit: Reborn dolls

I want to stroke Alma’s silky wisp of hair, put ointment on her peeling ankles, kiss the place where a drop of blood has dried on her teeny heel. I keep scrolling. Eloisa stares at me with vacant green eyes, her fists delightfully wrinkled but eerily glossy. I keep scrolling. Red-eyed and deathly pale, Isadora makes my heart stop. Beneath her button nose, the minuscule mouth dribbles blood, sports fangs.

Adopted, the caption reads. Painted and designed by an 11-year-old – under her mother’s supervision – Vampire Isadora was sold at a discount.

At reborns.com, anyone can become a happy parent. With the help of a dropdown menu, you can narrow down the 657 lifelike dolls by price ($100-$5000), ethnicity, gender, eye material (glass, acrylic, polyglass). Select “boo boo,” and the faces scrunch into pouts. Choose “realborn,” and the vampires, chimpanzees, and waxy misproportioned monstrosities all blessedly disappear – replaced by something which, in its own way, is even eerier: dolls made from 3D-printed babies. (Where do the models for the dolls come from? Bountiful Babies, the top supplier of 3D-printed doll parts, is suing dollmaker Stephanie Ortiz for libel over alleged ties to the Kingston Clan, of polygamy and child marriage fame.)

Reborns.com lies deep in the uncanny valley: that terrifying twilight zone whose residents appear almost-but-not-quite human. Is this website a Toys“R”Us or a slave market? Are these dolls babies or playthings, dead or alive? Unable to settle on a characterization, my mind churns; my stomach churns with it.

Picture Credit: teadrinker

Not everyone feels that way, though. The community of hyperrealistic doll enthusiasts has been steadily growing since 1989, when Joyce Moreno created the first “reborn” doll. The original process of “reborning” involved stripping store-bought dolls of their paint to give them a more lifelike makeover. These days, most artists use unpainted, purpose-built doll kits instead, but the name has stuck.

There are now tens of thousands reborn artists and collectors worldwide. They chat on specialized forums and buy the dolls on eBay, Etsy, Facebook, even walmart.com.

Rather than being put off by ambiguity, the reborn community appears to thrive on it. A reborn “mother” might find her baby at a convention, displayed next to bags of disembodied, unpainted doll parts. She won’t mind knowing that the womb this doll came from was the oven which helped set the paints.

Picture Credit: Donna Lee Originals

Or perhaps she had her baby shipped by mail from an online “nursery.” In this case, she might post a carefully choreographed unboxing video on YouTube. Like a mother at a baby shower, she’ll coo over the accessories that come with the purchase: the cardigans, onesies, itty-bitty shoes. Then comes the birth certificate, and finally: the doll itself. Tradition dictates that the feet are unwrapped first, precious toes squeezed while the head and torso remain swaddled in a blanket. Unboxing complete, the new mom might cradle and rock the doll like a real baby, even change its diapers – only to plonk it unceremoniously to the ground, the neck lolling back as if snapped.


Who are the people who collect these dolls? Why do they do it? And with a lifeless baby in the house, how do they sleep at night?

Most (though by no means all) reborn collectors are American or European women. Reborns are mostly white, so many of their collectors (who often refer to dolls of other races as “ethnic”) probably are too. About half have real children. Beyond that, every collector’s story is different.

Shane Pointon’s reborn was modelled on his stillborn son. The father, who burst into tears when receiving the doll from his wife, delights in combing its hair and choosing its outfits. This is the sort of story you’ll find in the tabloids, but Pointon is hardly your typical collector; one reborn artist reports serving a single bereaved customer over seven years. In the minority of cases in which a reborn is based on photos of a real baby, the tragedy prompting the rebirth is usually only this: the prototype had gone on to become an adult, sometimes, the very adult requesting the reborn: more than one son has gifted his mother a reborn version of his baby self.

Many, perhaps most, collectors see themselves as just that: collectors of world-class masterpieces. The artistry really is spectacular; Vermeer would be put to shame by the 30 layers of paint a reborn artist might use to mimic skin over veins. Small touches complete the illusion: individually rooted hairs, heartbeat and voice modules, baby scents.

Some display the dolls in cribs; others arrange their vinyl babies in glass cases. Kellie Eldred prefers to think of the dolls as “huggable works of art.” She cradles her masterpieces to decompress at the end of a long day at work; nothing soothes your nerves quite like the sensation of holding a pellet-weighted doll.

Though literal loss of an infant is uncommon, other losses abound: childlessness, infertility, miscarriage. Lucenda Plancarte, who has stage four endometriosis, picks up her reborns on her sad days, the ones when she can’t help asking “Why am I not a mom today?” I half-expect Plancarte to dissolve into tears on screen as she says this. “Okay, you’re gonna get through this,” she chirps instead. Like so many reborn moms, she has pulled off the trick: dreaming on the verge of her nightmare, finding comfort in a memento of her loss.


“When you go out and push a pram, everybody looks…You feel seen when you’ve got a baby. I can walk down the street now and nobody looks at you, nobody talks to you.”

Christine was the one who cut her grandson Harry’s umbilical cord. She was his primary caretaker for 2.5 years, while his mother battled from cancer. Then the mother recovered, snatched Harry, and immigrated from the UK to New Zealand.

It’s time to take out the stroller; Christine has had Harry reborn.

For 2.5 years, Christine had a purpose, an identity. And just like that, it was snatched away. For other mothers (birth or not), the transition is less abrupt, but who’s to say it shouldn’t hurt too?

I think back to the sons who reborn themselves for their mothers. I’m your baby – the best gift you can have. I first saw it as infantile egoism. Now, I sense a tenderness beneath the strangeness: he understands his mother’s loss. For years, she had tethered herself to his development; nobody checked whether she was dizzied by its speed. He doesn’t see himself as a baby, but a part of her always will. He is finally old enough to understand this.

The next moment, I’m spooked again. What will Harry think when his grandmother shows him his doppelgänger? If you can replace me with a doll, did you ever really love me?

Reborners have a penchant for bluntness. The doll, unlike a real child, won’t grow up, won’t do drugs, won’t move to New Zealand, won’t die of leukemia. This is all said explicitly. “Let’s be honest, children are cutest when they’re newborns. We all want them to stay that way.”

Reborns “don’t give you any trouble,” collector Lachelle Moore sums up. “There’s no college tuition, no dirty diapers…Just the good part of motherhood.” To hear this as a onetime child is to feel, literally, objectified. It’s to become nothing more than the trigger for the secretion of maternal instincts. Whatever happened to loving a child’s interior? To watching and helping a baby become her own person? Is none of that part of what makes motherhood worthwhile?

Reborning shines a blinding light on parenting’s dark side. Our parents did want to hold on to us forever; a part of them did, anyway. And still, they let go. That is love.


When Christine brought “Harry” back home, her husband couldn’t hide his revulsion. “It’s like something out of the mortuary!” he protests. The quiver of Christine’s lip is barely perceptible, but it stings more than the sharpest accusationFor all the sympathy I have come to feel for these collectors, I remain repelled by the reborns themselves. Why must the dolls look so alive – and hence so dead? Why can’t their owners play with ragdolls instead?

Picture Credit: michelle a

It’s tempting to say: to better inhabit their fantasy. But despite all the talk of “adoption,” for all the diapers and doll-strollers, it would be a mistake to accuse reborn collectors of delusion – and not just because they themselves deny that the dolls are real babies.

Do you believe in a movie’s fiction when you watch it? What if you’re engrossed in a gripping scene? These collectors embrace their dolls in a similar way.

When Lucenda Plancarte sits with her dolls, she is also sitting with her infertility. What Shane Pointon, the grieving father, takes out of the wrapping paper is a fantasy child and the reality of his son’s death. When Christine puts her newborn in a stroller, she imagines he is Harry even as she learns to accept that he isn’t.

The very feature of reborns which repels me – their residence at the edge of the uncanny valley – is what allows their owners to move through their grief. The doll is an infant one moment, and just a doll the next; the owner can escape her grief for an instant, then be brought right back.

More than their mindboggling realism, this is what makes reborns art to me. Like the most beautiful tragic play, they connect their audiences to their sealed-off feelings, offer solace, so that, fortified, they can return to reality.


After hours of polishing this article, I look in the mirror and see…a doll. A physical mechanism which will one day fail me; a bone-sack which can kill each dream through infertility, illness, death.

What if I’m wrong? What if the illusion lies in finding these babies creepy, not cute? What if I, not the collectors, am the escapist?

If something out of a mortuary looks cute, then something cute can end up in the mortuary. I can’t bear to face this conclusion – the staggering fragility of babies – so I deny reborns their cuteness.

The uncanny valley exists because our brains abhor ambiguity. We want an impassable boundary between fact and fiction, the human and the inhuman, the living and the dead. Of course, no such boundary exists; we are all sliding towards the uncanniest of valleys: death.

There is no place to dream but at the nightmare’s edge.

Axiology, Transphobia, Spouse Selection: Poland’s Sex Ed Curriculum

In my last post, I sounded the alarm about a bill threatening Polish sexual education. Today, I’ll show you just how bad the current curriculum is.

What follows are curriculum fragments interspersed with my own memories from (Polish) Catholic middle school. The italicized paragraphs are my translations of the curriculum for “Preparation for Life in the Family ” put out by the Polish Ministry of Education in 2016 and recommended for 10 to 15-year-olds.


The student will refer to the right to life from conception to natural death.

“This is going to be difficult to watch,” the teacher apologizes. “But it’s important to know the truth. Unborn babies are murdered every day.”

The Silent Scream, she explains, shows footage of a fetus recoiling in terror at an impending abortion. It’s incontrovertible proof that the unborn child feels fear and pain, that it doesn’t want to die any more than we do.

I brace myself. She pops the tape in the VCR, and I see dark, indecipherable pixels an almost blank screen. The program’s host tries to point out the fetus’s body parts, but I can’t really see anything. I squint my eyes. I wait for the action. It’s only when my classmates erupt into tears that I know that the fault is mine, not the tape’s.

Afterwards, we go around the room sharing reasons why abortion is morally wrong.

Ever the budding philosopher, I up the ante. “It’s even worse than murdering an adult. After all, the adult has already had a chance to enjoy life, but the fetus has all of that ahead.”

The girl in black at the back of the room who is last to go has remained one of my dearest friends. At the time, her words run a confused jolt through me: “I think we should be allowed to give arguments for both sides. Just on principle.”


It’s worth covering the dangers connected with masturbation, e.g. pornophilia, sex addiction.

This is the one time the word “masturbation” occurs in the curriculum.


The student knows the differences between contraception and natural family planning.

Abortion was murder; contraception was playing at God. Besides, it didn’t work, and could turn to murder: one educational video claimed that when a condom got stuck inside the woman, the baby would be suffocated on birth by a “condom hood.”


In accordance with personalistic anthropology, humanistic psychology, pedagogy and developmental psychology, as well as familiology and axiology, and also the rules of the Polish language, [the teacher will] (…) highlight the value of marriage, distinguishing it from other relationships – in the legal, physical, psychological, spiritual, and social aspect.

Imagine taking that lesson as the child of single, divorced or unmarried parents!


And that physical aspect distinguishing marriage from other relationships?

The student can list biomedical, psychological, social and moral arguments for sexual initiation within marriage.

In another “educational” video, a leery boy is pestering his girlfriend. “Come on, babe, show me that you love me.” “I want to wait till marriage – that’s how much I love you.”

The guy was so antipathic that I assumed that anyone who wanted sex before marriage was practically a rapist. At the same time, a part of me was confused: was it always the man who was pestering? Did other girls not have unruly bodies like mine?

I made it to college thinking that waiting till marriage was the norm.


The child will know how to express gratitude to family members and what for. (…) He’ll learn to give Father’s, Mother’s, Grandparents’ Day wishes.

This one’s a mixed bag. On the one hand, I’m all in favor of teaching people how to be nice to each other. On the other, I’d appreciate an acknowledgement that some parents might not deserve thanks. Surely reading “honor your mother and your father” in their catechism is insult enough for abused children!


The school’s functions include (…) strengthening the process of identifying with one’s own sex. (…) It’s worth covering disorders of identification with one’s sex, such as transgender, transsexuality.

This new addition to the curriculum is appallingly harmful to trans kids – but not just them. I remember how once it was actually easier to be a tomboy in Poland than in the US. Now, I anticipate teacher-backed bullying at the slightest signs of gender nonconformity.


The student characterizes concepts connected with sexuality: masculinity, femininity, complementarity, love, value, marriage, parenthood, responsibility.

The glaring omission in “complementarity” is the only way in which homosexuality occurs in the curriculum.

I remember looking “gay” up in the dictionary. A classmate had asked me if I was gay, since I never talked about my crushes. (How could I talk about them if they gave me such evil feelings?) I remember hearing about gay parades as some exotically terrible event, where people talked about sex in public and dressed in revealing and bizarre ways. It never occurred to me that any of it might have something to do with love.


The teacher should cover the typology of relationships: e.g. monogamy, serial monogamy.

There is nothing past the period.


It’s not all doom and gloom; let’s end with a few more positive nuggets.

The school’s functions include (…) demonstrating the unity between sexual activity, love, and responsibility; discusses problems connected with sexual objectification.

That’s a beautiful, if quixotic, idealism: it’s not just that there should be a relationship between love and sex, but that there already is one.


The student knows the criteria of spouse selection, the motives for entering into marriage, and the factors determining the longevity and success of marital and familial relationships.

Now that lesson I’d like to attend myself.


In the end, Poland’s “family values” offer an escape hatch out of sexual miseducation: attendance in Preparation for Life in the Family requires parental permission.

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Sex Ed Threatened in Poland

Poland, 2004. “Puberty,” I read in my middle-school biology textbook, “is a time of overwhelming and confusing sexual desires. To manage the impulses of this perilous life-stage, we recommend filling your schedule with as many extracurriculars as possible. That way, you’ll fall asleep as soon as your head touches the pillow, safe from temptation.”1

The textbook was mistaken; no number of extracurriculars was enough. Facedown on my bed in the dead of night, I was never too exhausted to feel my body. The more forbidden it was, the louder the call, and so I let myself believe my body’s fiction: that this was only pleasure, that what felt so good couldn’t be so wrong. That in the privacy of my bedroom, I could do whatever I pleased; no one would ever know, so no one would get hurt.  Against the evidence of every past experience, my body urged that this road was heading somewhere beautiful, towards bliss greater even than what I felt now.

I loved this imaginary world while it lasted, and so I stretched out the act until I could no longer hold it, until the final contraction brought me back to the real world, until with that final gasp I would realize: I had sinned again.

My body made promises it never kept; orgasm always meant shame.


Come Sunday, I’d page through the booklets preparing for confession. “Am I pure in thoughts, desires, acts?” Even the thought of dirty thoughts beckoned with a tempting finger.

I’d take a deep breath and resolve to confess my sins. Like any good Catholic, I believed that that if you honestly show contrition, confess to a sin, and do penance, all will be forgiven. Just reach out your hand, and receive the keys to heaven. Don’t, and hell beckons.

My dirty mind was too shameful to admit; my hand only ever reached in one direction.  Each week, I chose hell over confession. Each week, I desecrated the Holy Wafer with my sinner’s tongue.


When I lost my religion, I kept the shame. I couldn’t even bring myself to admit to masturbating on an anonymous survey.

The first person to help me unravel a few of the threads binding arousal to shame was my high school sex-ed teacher. She was funny, assertive, beloved by the students – and claimed the deadly sin which kept me up at night was perfectly normal.

Until I met this teacher, school and religion had been systematically garbling and undermining my body’s beautiful messages. I hope future generations of Poles won’t have to undergo such brainwashing.

Unhappily, things seem to be going in precisely the wrong direction.


In the proposed Polish “Stop Pedophilia” bill, “anyone who promotes or approves the undertaking by a minor of sexual intercourse or other sexual activity” would face a penalty of up to two years of jailtime. If the bill passes, the only teacher who ever eased my terror at my evil habit would risk imprisonment.

The petition proposing the bill is signed by 263 000 people and backed by the Polish Pro-Life Foundation. It was first put before the Polish parliament in October 2019 and sent to committee for further work this April.


What sort of people would support such regressive legislation? I turn to Google for answers. On sites promoting the bill,2 I read that in Germany, preschool-aged children are encouraged to regularly masturbate. (Parents are instructed not to intervene.) By the time they are teenagers, students are habituated to group anal sex. Poland is beginning to follow suit.

And who is behind this madness? Western corporations who want to addict future generations of Poles to sex, enslaving them to their own desires.

Oh, and don’t forget the pedophiles, who invented “progressive” sexual education in the first place. Take the legendary Kinsey: he apparently instructed pedophiles in rape, telling them how to measure children’s sexual responses using a stopwatch. Later, in Berlin, Helmut Kentler, who promoted the idea of “sexual diversity,” gave known pedophiles custody over orphans. Supported by Berlin authorities, the experiment went on from the 60s until 2003.3


51% of Polish voters recently re-elected the right-wing incumbent, whose party, in addition to being vehemently homophobic, supported the bill. How can so many people be so wrong?

Well, maybe their own sex ed was just as bad as mine. And that includes the progressive teachers. Remember how I said that my high-school teacher normalized masturbation? It wasn’t that simple.

Eyes glinting with mischievous amusement, she informed us that a student from another class had come to her to confess.

 “I masturbated,” he whispered. “How bad is that?”

“How many times?” she asked.

“Once.”

“My mind filled with dirty possibilities,” she confided in us. “Once per day? Once per hour? Half hour?”

Once, period.

We laugh – and that’s the end of the story. No Q&A, no further explanation.

I went away from that class understanding that to masturbate once was okay. Beyond that, I had no clue. Apparently, there was a number past which depravity lay. And were the rules different for girls? Weren’t boys supposed to have a higher sex drive? If there was a boy in the other class who masturbated only once, was something fundamentally wrong with me?

I ached to ask her, but knew I couldn’t – not without being turned into a hilarious anecdote for the other class.

How did my teacher exhibit such a profound failure of empathy? How did she not entertain the possibility that this class contained teenagers just as confused as that boy?

Possibly, she was reacting to the same taboo that the Stop Pedophilia bill is trying to pass into law. Perhaps she formulated her lesson entirely in humorous implicatures for the sake of plausible deniability. But my money’s on a different explanation: despite evidence to the contrary, she had simply assumed that all of us students were already little liberals. After all, good = liberal, and surely we were good.

For the conservative, the sex-ed teacher is a depraved pedophile in the pocket of Big Sex, who is absolutely not a member of your parish.  For the liberal, the conservative is a deprived bigot who, in collusion with pedophile priests, drinks the blood of women and sexual minorities and who is most certainly not a member of your sex-ed class. Stereotypes hurt everyone.

When a nun taught me sex ed, masturbation was cause for shame. When a liberal did, I was simply taught another type of shame: at having been ashamed in the first place.

No one wants to carry double shame. Perhaps the rise of political polarization has something to do with this fact.


The video opens with ominous, belligerent music. With his heavily lined face, cropped hair, and deep scowl, the leader of this prayer circle is not someone I’d care to meet in a dark alleyway.

“We’re here to pray. To pray in the intention of sexually used children. To pray in the intention of depraved children. Children who are depraved in order to be sexually used. But we’re also praying for the depravers. It’s a horrible thing, to damage the psyche and the life of children.”

So it is.

[1] Paraphrase based on memory.
[2] I don’t want to link to them, but they’re in the top five search results for “stop pedofilii.” The video mentioned in the last paragraph is on one of these.
[3] This last part is absolutely true!…


In Part II, I talk about how bad Poland’s current sex ed curriculum is.

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An Angel Against Her Will: Zuzanna Ginczanka’s “Non Omnis Moriar”

Zuzanna Ginczanka.jpg
Zuzanna Ginczanka

Zuzanna Ginczanka (born in 1917 as Zuzanna Gincburg) wrote her first poems at the age of 4. By 14, she had found her mature voice. At 19, she was a rising star in Warsaw’s avant garde.

At 27, she was murdered by the Nazis.


Two years before her death, she narrowly escaped capture by the German police, or “Schupo.” She processed her experience in this remarkable poem.1

Non omnis moriar – my noble estate,
My fields of tablecloth and expansive sheets,
My steadfast wardrobe bastions, still replete
With pastel-colored dresses will outlive me yet.
I left no successor to inherit these
Jewish things. May your hand then reach,
Mrs. Chomin of Lvov, brave wife of a snitch,
A Volksdeutcher’s2 mother, for them if you please.
May they serve you and yours. For why should it be
Outsiders? Neighbors, you – that’s more than empty name.
I still remember you, and when the Schupo came,
You remembered me. Reminded them of me.
May friends of mine sit down and raise their jugs
To drink away my death, toast the things they’ll own:
The platters and candles, tapestries and rugs.
May they drink all night, and at the break of dawn
May they search for gold and for precious stone
In mattresses, couches, and duvets in turn.
Their work will go so fast, it will almost burn,
While billowed horsehair, seagrass, eiderdown,
And clouds from gutted pillows will drift gently
Down to their arms. And then my blood will cling
To fiber and to fluff and form the wings
Turning those in seventh heaven into angels.


 It’s one thing for Horace, who lived to 56, to claim “non omnis moriar” (“not all of me will die”)-another for a 25-year-old Jew hiding in Nazi hell. The poetry Horace left behind offered comfort; Ginczanka’s material possessions are only a threat. If Mrs. Chomin hadn’t hoped to pillage Ginczanka’s “Jewish things” after her death, if jealousy towards her neighbor’s relative wealth hadn’t turned to spite, Ginczanka wouldn’t have needed solace in the first place.

I’m haunted by those pastel-colored dresses. I wonder if Ginczanka remembered, when writing that line, how she had used the image of the dress in “Virginity.” In this poem, we, women,

in cubes of peach-tinted wallpaper,
as hermetically sealed
as a steel thermos,
ensnared to our necks in dresses,
carry out
civilized
conversations.

The dresses symbolize her innocence and youth, but also the curse of her notorious beauty. Before the war, this meant unwanted male attention and female jealousy. Now, she carried the burden of an unforgettable face, the utter impossibility of passing for an “Aryan.”

Nothing is as worthy of jealousy as it seems; jealousy itself, morphed to malice, ensures that.


The Winged Victory of Samothrace
The Winged Victory of Samothrace. (Source.)

Knowing that doesn’t stop the jealousy. Even I feel it: jealousy for Ginczanka’s talent, beauty, heroism. Even for her martyrdom.

I want to be a hero too. Instead, I’m beset by uncertainty, flitting from one pursuit to the next, always wondering whether I could make a bigger difference, devote myself to something more important. Ginczanka had no such choice; hiding away from the Nazis, all she could do was the thing she loved most: write – and that was enough to turn her into an angel.

The bitter sarcasm of her poetry brings me to my senses: I, and only I, am the enviable one.


More than half of the population of Ginczanka’s hometown of Równe (now Rivne, Ukraine) was Jewish. Still, Christmas was the holiday for which her grandmother would decorate the family storefront. Each year, she would dress up her beautiful granddaughter, attach wings to her, and place the angel behind the glass display. Local children would stand on the other side of the glass, rooted in place by the spell of Zuzanna’s beauty.3

And so her childhood prefigured her death: transformed into an angel against her will, locked inside a small room on the other side of reality, hoping for invisibility behind a glass wall.

Did she return to this memory when writing “Non Omnis Moriar”? Was she using her blood as a final act of defiance, sticking her wings onto her tormentors? “Here, you be the angel, see how much you like it!”


Słowacki, by James Hopwood
Juliusz Słowacki

Ginczanka’s poem includes several references to Juliusz Słowacki’s “My Last Will.” One of Poland’s great Romantic bards, Słowacki wrote at a time when Poland was absent from world maps, partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The poet, who suffered from tuberculosis, “leaves no successor,” so he bequeaths his writing to the Polish people. He hopes it will inspire them to keep the flame of Polish culture alive and to, if necessary, fight and perish for the sake of independence “like stones cast by God onto the barricade.”

It’s a powerful and bittersweet thing to see Ginczanka claiming this Romantic lineage. Though she had called Poland her home for almost her entire life and inhabited the Polish language as comfortably as anyone, she may have never held a Polish passport.4

Fleeing pogroms, her parents had brought her to Poland during the first few years of her life. At home, she spoke Russian, but inspired by the rich poetic culture of inter-war Poland, she chose Polish as her written language. In “Non Omnis Moriar,” she is, like Słowacki, taking it upon herself to pass on the torch of Polish culture; the republic is, once again, erased from the map. But she’s doing something else too: sketching a new map, a map of a country that would claim her as its own. A country of culture, of compassion, of tolerance.


When Ginczanka asks “For why should it be outsiders?” she’s surely paraphrasing something Mrs. Chomin would have said. Of course, for the snitch it is the Jews who are outsiders – but Ginczanka willfully misunderstands her neighbor. If Poland is the only place she ever called home, how could she be an outsider?

A better Christian than Mrs. Chomin, she models loving your neighbor like yourself. A better Pole, she knows the country’s literary canon by heart (I doubt there’s space in her hideaway for volumes of Słowacki!).

Of course, none of that makes any difference.


The image of the angel is also borrowed from Słowacki, who closes his poem by prophesying that that the force of his poetry will turn “bread eaters” – complacent Poles unfazed by the country’s partition – into angels.

Ginczanka’s angels are much more enigmatic. Her death turns her snitches into what passes for angels in the topsy-turvy world of Nazi-occupied territories: obedient subjects. Appealing to Mrs. Chomin’s withered conscience, Ginczanka reminds her that it is her own blood that makes this illusory honor possible.

If Mrs. Chomin is an angel, she is an angel of death.


The righting of the topsy-turvy world came too late for Ginczanka. But just as she prophesied, her poem lived on.

In 1948, Zofja Chomin was sentenced to four years in prison for collaborating with the Nazis. The evidence? Among others, “Non Omnis Moriar” – one of the only poems ever used as testimony in court.


Ginczanka’s early poem, “Grammar,” features an unforgettable simile:

And pronouns are as confidential as flowers
as the minuscule, minuscule roomlets
in which you live in secret evasion.

The “roomlets” hold a pair of lovers, hidden in the anonymity of “you” and “me,” but they’re also the shelter Ginczanka would find in language – the only place that would hold her.

“Non Omnis Moriar” is a tour de force of poetic control. Ginczanka twists Mrs. Chomin’s words “why should it be outsiders?” for her own purpose and returns the wings which her oppressors forced on her.

It is, of course, control only on paper – the only type of control she knew in her short life. The plot is made by the powerful; all she can do is choose the words in which she tells her story. The words make a difference, yes – but by then all of her is dead.

In the “Grammar” of Ginczanka, a woman and a Jew, there are no verbs.


[1] All translations are mine.
[2] The Volksdeutche were subjects of Nazi-occupied territories who claimed (or were pressured to claim) German heritage and received special treatment as a result.
[3] Anecdote taken from Izolda Kiec’s biography Ginczanka. Nie Upilnuje mnie nikt.
[4] Izolda Kiec cites an acquaintance of Ginczanka’s on this point, but also expresses some scepticism, since Ginczanka’s own mother did posses a Polish passport.


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My Lungs Are Full: It’s Wonderful

Pandemic Advice from a 1976 Polish poem

Since March, I’ve been reading and re-reading a 50-year-old Polish poem. Written by Edward Stachura — a troubled bard recovering from a painful divorce — it appears as the final track of “Birthday,” his 1976 album.¹ Here’s my translation.

Song for the Quarantined

It’s wonderful:
My lungs are full!
I have two hands,
I have two feet!

Loaf on! There’s bread
And cheese to spread,
For drinking — rain.

The night descends,
With it, a chill;
I have two hands,
I’ll hug myself.

I’ll hide myself
And nestle in
My bristled fur.

Daybreak is far,
Can’t see a thing;
I have two feet;
We’ll make it there.

There’s barking mutts!
There’s flying mists!
Keep sleeping, miss!

My lungs are full:
It’s wonderful!

I don’t think I need to explain why this poem in particular has been on my mind over the past few months.² Instead, let me tell you about my shifting interpretations, and how they led me to a kind of hope. Perhaps you might find your way there too.


First, a confession. In Polish, the poem’s title is more like “Song for the Infected (with a contagious disease).” I’ve taken some liberties with the translation so that I could dedicate it to all of us, including those locked down not by a diagnosis, but only its possibility.

It’s a hopeless title to translate, anyway. “Zapowietrzony” — “infected” — literally means “aired up” or “over-aired.” The word has its roots in the old-fashioned belief that infectious diseases spread through bad air, or miasmic vapors.

Just the song for us, potential victims of an airborne pulmonary disease.


Edward Stachura

The first time I read the poem, I thought it was an exuberant song, a pared down hymn to asceticism. Stachura finds joy in the (seemingly) smallest things: air, bread, a healthy body, the sound of words. He may be cut off from his fellow humans, but he reframes his loneliness as an opportunity for self-reliance.

If this version of Stachura were alive today, he might say: it’s wonderful: our lungs are full! How sweet the air tastes when you don’t have a pulmonary infection… or a policeman kneeling on your neck! How wonderful to bake your own bread, to taste all the pleasures of solitude! How grand, at the end of a Zoom call, to still have two hands for hugging yourself!³

Can you read this with a straight face? I don’t think I can, and I’m not sure Stachura could, either. The poem has a knife-edge quality: one foot in grateful exuberance, the other in irony. “Thanks for the air,” it says, forever hovering between “thanks for everything” and “thanks for nothing.”


The second time through, I listen to Stachura sing — or whimper — his poem, and the positive interpretation evaporates. All joy abandons me at “I have two hands,/I’ll hug myself.” Has there ever been a sadder couplet? These are the words of the tantrum-throwing child who thinks he can make it without his parents.

Between the verses, a chilling refrain: “Yoohoo!” It sounds like a wolf howling, choosing solitude to mask his loneliness.

In the song immediately preceding “Song of the Quarantined” in the album, air “sticks, bonelike,” in Stachura’s throat. This Polish idiom suggests that air is an annoyance or irritation; after his painful divorce, the poet doesn’t want to go on living. 

Howl it angstily enough, and “My lungs are full/it’s wonderful” will communicate the same thing.


“Quarantine Jungle.” Oil on canvas, 16″x12″

For the first few months of the pandemic, my own moods swung between gratitude and despair as wildly as my poetic interpretations. One day, I’d go on a baking spree. I’d make art. I’d feel almost a moral obligation to be happy; after all, I was young and healthy and could work from home. The next day, I’d read every news article I could get my hands on. I’d watch the death count rise and the minutes trickle away in a haze of dread. I’d feel almost a moral obligation to be unhappy. After all, people were dying, the economy was collapsing. I had no right to be the one untouched by this.


A person swinging between emotional extremes is an unhappy sight. Not necessarily so for a poem. It’s as if “Song for the Quarantined” can hold anything, emotionally. It taught me to do so too.

The lesson began with this couplet:

I have two feet;
We’ll make it there.

Who is this unexpected “we”? This isn’t the first time I’ve tripped over a Stachura pronoun. In “Time Passes and Kills Wounds,” he addresses a couple of “unknown friends,” would-be suicides, urging them to delay their act. The poem ends with the heart-wrenching

For it would be such a,
such a, such a loss –
to lose us!

The “unknown friends” vanish into thin air. Stachura has invented them. He is the one who must be dissuaded from suicide. They are simply conduits for his self-talk, arm extensions so that he may better hug himself. So too in “Song for the Quarantined” — we’ll make it there because how else do you cheer yourself on, if not through a division of the self? It’s a song for the quarantined, not of him.

Or maybe not. The friends may be unknown, but they do exist. Stachura offers his poems up to all the abandoned, all the would-be suicides. To those readers, finding an “us” at the end of a poem really can make the difference between life and death. Stachura leans on them, but he’s only able to do so because he knows they can lean on him.


During the pandemic, I turned to almost-praying for solace. Loving-kindness meditation isn’t addressed at a higher power, so it’s not quite prayer — but it’s close enough. I simply sit down and think about various people: “May you be free from suffering. May you be happy.” I do this not so that God or the universe might hear my wishes, but that I might hear them myself. As long as I can access the part of myself which aches for others’ well-being, I will be okay. Then, I can help you be okay too.

Shutterstock photo by Cynthia Kidwell.

We all need something greater than ourselves to take refuge in, to nestle in. “Greater” doesn’t need to mean “grandiose.” It can be as simple as the set of all people — united by shared suffering, fear, loneliness. Or merely — by humanity.

Like any “lone wolf,” Stachura howls to establish a new pack: a pack of the lonely. Which, right now, is just about all of us.

That’s why we dance over Zoom, sing from our balconies, write poems.


We. That single word anchors the otherwise desperate poem in hope. The second anchor comes in the final couplet: “My lungs are full:/ it’s wonderful,” symmetric bookend to the opening “It’s wonderful:/ my lungs are full.”

The reversal might be driven by poetic structure, but to me, it represents a powerful transformation.

The first lines move from wonder to full lungs. It must be wonderful, I can’t allow myself dark thoughts — so let me find something, anything, to attach my wonder to. I must be happy, so let me list 200 wholesome activities I can engage in during lockdown.

This sort of inference is inherently unstable. It can tip into irony at the slightest breeze: it must be “wonderful,” so let me add every small personal sorrow to the global grief of a pandemic.

“My lungs are full: it’s wonderful.” The wonder follows the air. Hope follows realism. Exuberance flows from neutrality. When Stachura inhales, he doesn’t assume it will be a miracle, doesn’t compare himself to those who can’t breathe. He simply experiences it; the miracle follows.


The third time through, the poem is exuberant. Some of the most profound moments of my life have been moments of simply breathing the air. During a ten-day meditation retreat, the ground beneath my feet felt as profound as a bike ride through Dutch tulip fields. During walks around the block in lockdown, the twitch of a rabbit’s nose or the flutter of a sparrow’s wing can be all the bliss I need. 

If the pandemic helps us access such moments — power to us. But such experiences can be faked. No one but me can tell whether I’m really astonished by a rabbit, whether it’s my wonder that comes first or my full lungs. And if I fake it, I’m doing myself a horrible disservice, substituted the outward trappings of joy for the real thing.


At the suggestion of a meditation teacher, I have added another clause to my loving-kindness mantra: “may I rest in not knowing.” Only if I rest in my uncertainty, risk the air not being enough, can I discover its glorious neutrality.

Since the start of the lockdown, I’ve been baking bread, gardening, organizing a Zoom poetry night. After an evening of poetry, we extend our arms, then hug ourselves. It’s wonderful.

It might not sound like it, but wolves do howl for joy.


Daybreak is far, who knows how far. How do we stop swinging from chirpy optimism to unfounded despair? Stachura’s verse suggests a way towards honest hope.

Daybreak is far,
Can’t see a thing;
I have two feet;
We’ll make it there.

Look squarely at the darkness. Admit how little you know. Then, turn to what you have, to what is, for the moment, still up to you. As long as there are feet. As long as there is air.

Tragically, we won’t all make it there. The hope which is truly honest would cut the verse down:

Daybreak is far,
Can’t see a thing;
I have two feet;
We

Darkness, two feet, and an “us.” Maybe only the possibility of an “us.” I have that much hope. It is, for the moment, enough.

 — 

[1] Since Stachura was a poet who put great care into the lyrics of his songs, I think it’s fair to call these lyrics “poems.”

[2] I drafted most of this essay before the murder of George Floyd. Of course, that tragedy gives the poem another chilling dimension.

[3] Should I, or Stachura, have said “arms?” We Poles can be cavalier about appendages; our word for soccer literally means “legball.”