II 4th July 1994
The areas surrounding the Manor or barren remains of the old main yard are not suitable for new farm buildings, because they are not directly accessible from the cobble-stone road. I sited the new buildings away from them, across the road, next to brick-arched storage bunkers, covered by earth and partly sunk into the ground, which gave identity and a measure of privacy. The extensive field stretching behind them offers adequate space for new buildings, leaving the rest of the field unencumbered. A line of elms along a deep ditch, runs at the bottom, with another low-lying field extending to a river which is our boundary. The genius loci imposes itself; and placing the buildings along the line of the old street is the beginning of rebuilding of the village, which disappeared slowly after the war and totally after the presidency of Mr Gierek who gave the farmers subsidies, which enabled them to build new homes in the middle of their own fields. It is a pity that the village is gone, albeit for a worthwhile reason; in the west in France, Italy or Germany, it still remains where farmers take to their fields on wheels, retaining their ancient homes as a social centre. This aspect of Polish countryside has now become more like Swiss mountain-side tradition with individual houses creeping along willy-nilly, looking for their own free space. It was of course inevitable, but to try to recreate the village now the best one can hope for is to ask new farmers to make their homes here - as we are doing - and to attract commercial units to begin remaking of a social centre for the community spread out in the countryside.
Finding water is the essential first step which depends on finding a right place to sink a well. Bearing this in mind, we engaged a geodesic engineer, a gipsy lady diviner and a villager with a divining rod, a gaggle who after some heated arguments compromised and pinpointed the position with a certainty and conviction which was worth admiring, and fully justified, when in the afternoon the engineer found at the depth of five-and-half meters a clear stream flowing under a rock-like formation. The water was well protected from seepages above and plentiful. In this part of Europe, small towns have mains water but seldom sewage, while villages have neither and farmers depend on individual wells for water and on shambo pits, a kind of cesspool cleared periodically for the latter. The well proved good, one of the best in the locality and we were able to offer help to others in times of drought.
To fence an area and construct a building was the next task. We met members of a small Buddhist community near- by, who offered, at low price, when funds were short, to build a garage cum-workshop and store: 30 metres long, with two gates which were tall enough for tractors to pass. While digging a service pit they discovered human remains, a skeleton with a bullet hole in the temple. The bones had to be laid out, under police supervision, because they were judged to be post war and the possibility of some crime existed. In the village, many tried to remember people who went missing and recall ancient enmities, but nothing was ever discovered in our Corleone enigma, of a young man, buried in a shallow grave, found by the Buddhists, in the no manʼs land behind the cold storage cellars. This land holds many mysteries with many meanings, stories, plots of life, of greed, of hate, jealousy, revenge and of war. We are told that along our road lay buried four German soldiers, killed during the retreat in 1944 - this is not our Parsons Green SW6, which as an old jousting green has itself a few myths, but none as impulsive as those in this land, which chose to reveal them to us so early.
Before the end of the spring, with help from the village, our first barley was sown on a small field, adjacent to the old orchard and while it was nearly two months too late for the crop, it nonetheless produced our first harvest of eleven tons of grain, which we sold locally. It was like the beginning of a fairytale.
To accept that human evolution and biological evolution are two phases of a single process is to put an optimistic view on the future of man, by observing his timeless improvement. About 35,000 years ago Homo sapiens - as we know him today - asserted his spiritual awareness in a hopeful mutation, which we recognise in the discoveries of ancient tombs, artwork and vivid cave paintings. The sub-human who came down from the tree to learn the use of his hands, or the early warrior-hunter who settled around the fields of corn and formed an early social group, or the trader who began commerce between these and opened the road for the city, priest, king, empire, republic and modern world - all made the steps in their human evolution. Significant mutations happen suddenly when the need has matured in nature, or when concepts developed gradually, come ready to be integrated by the power of imagination in a group. One is tempted to ask whether the 21st Century, just around the corner, will not bode the time for next, sudden spiritual change, as a result of the maturity of human awareness, and because of the apocalyptic dangers, which man faces today.
We have always known that descending from his animal roots, early man retained a natural propensity for violence, but it seems that science of human behaviour, also tells us now that he - even as his animal ancestors - inherits a natural propensity for justice, which is his guide, a hopeful and lovable trait, as natural as the struggle. We are told that even a monkey when unfairly unrewarded for the same task as performed by another, stops cooperating - let alone a man who is born with a conscience and a sense of justice. There seems to exist in life both mutual struggle and mutual aid, perhaps in equal amounts, but in the main, our nature until now, drew more heavily on the side of violence, calling it always human nature. The irrevocable past remains a guide, but hopefully the future is a matter of choice - there is this other side to human nature - and perhaps a new spiritual order can now grow naturally from the roots of human evo- lution. It obviously needs the care for the values acquired in community, through which people harvested a legacy of thoughts and feelings of past generations. For if a group of kids today were reared by apes, on the bosom of nature, they would find themselves without these roots, and who knows how long it would take them to attain even a most savage culture, humbly began by man with his crops - not inherited in his genes, like the colour of eyes - which seems to me to need preservation with ʻtender-loving-careʼ and building, rather than ruthless competing.
From a practical point of view: we are surrounded today by unlimited riches which make all possible: a new dream of hope can perhaps open leaving behind forever the ugly ʻFour Horsemen of the Apocalypseʼ.
