What did you see there?
– For me, writing is always about finding a new key to the current times. Trying to figure out how to seize this moment, because it is so unbalanced, crazy and elusive today. When I painted this time, I felt that what was representative of it was not modernity, skyscrapers and technologies, but this mixture of the new and the old, incompatible aesthetics and value systems. We do not have the tools to deal with this reality. We cannot predict the future. All beliefs and estimates about life may soon prove to be completely wrong. The period of transformation is an apt association, because it is the time of a complete remodeling of orders, the collapse of beliefs and the overthrow of the social scale. And the uncertainty as to whether any of our ideas are still adequate. The transformation is also the time of the magazine “Supernatural”. A time of superstitions and various witchcrafts, and this is also visible in “The Magic Wound”.
For me, the word “islands” was significant, as it appears at the beginning and is associated with the British Isles, with the specific history of emigration that ended tragically, but this specificity also has a different level. Is an island an escape?
– Yes, it is a space for dreams and achievement, but also an enclave where you can go and experience something safely.
For example, with a random man. The moment of being in a space out of time is an escape for your heroine.
– She can finally hide in an undetectable, unreachable space. It is also a place beyond growth and success, where the vectors of life are directed toward decay, nothingness, and not toward gain and proof. Love and sex end up being a form of self-destruction. But also liberation from the gray everyday life, the drudgery and the sterility of existence. The opposite of the misery of the enchanted life at Pepco – objects that are illusions. New waste triumphantly making its way through her apartment to the trash can.
The publisher describes this book as a trash novel. A collection of fragments, leftovers. Trash is important in your literary world, right?
– Trash is the new nature. Trash is important because there is Switzerland with its religion of cleanliness and order, and there is the rest of the world where trash is an objective reality. Not something marginal that we push out of sight, but something that grows, swells, covers, begins to dominate. The worlds we build are becoming increasingly ephemeral. I’m talking, for example, about those skyscrapers with a short shelf life that are being demolished and new ones are being built. I’m talking about Instagram culture, momentary staging, disposable images. These are worlds that collapse as soon as the photo is taken. Everything is designed and produced in a way that is disposable, so that you can live as many lives as possible, play as many roles as possible with as many objects and gadgets in your hands as possible.
So “Magic Wound” is about building five-minute decorations out of things that cost 5 PLN? But there’s also desperation, because you want the truth and something permanent, and you get fake magic.
– I wanted to somehow capture this still very vague feeling that life is becoming artificial, that it seems to consist of roles that we play miserably. In this book, the relationships between people, but also the dialogues, are also artificial, serial, ready-made. I deliberately use clichéd phrases and linguistic components, including in English. It seems to me that people, losing touch with themselves, with their essence, with their emotional truth, begin to reenact scenes from films of their lives and reproduce illusions. This can be seen in children and adolescents. Do you probably see it in your daughters growing up too?
They are resisting. But you can resist and you will still be drawn in and shaped by this sequence of images. I will remember a fragment from “Magic Wound,” in which you write about the poses of girls with disheveled eyelashes: “They wore short jackets, beneath which their beautiful frozen bellies, marked by extensive frostbite, were visible. They stood before them, and formed circles of women.” They come in packs of ten because it is easier to be part of a girl collective than to struggle alone with yourself.
– I think of those five-minute cosmetic medicine plans that transform all faces into one face. It’s fascinating that, in wanting to “be ourselves,” we run away from individuality. I see in this a certain unconscious escapism, seeking a sense of security in standardizing and becoming like everyone else. You eliminate what is unequal, separate, yours in you. You buy an apartment in a guarded housing complex and furnish it in a way that is similar to others. A life like this may seem more bearable, more predictable. You have finally fit the mold, but who exactly are you?
From this point of view, any attempt to create something out of the place is very difficult. Even a rebel becomes a clone of another rebel. And you still have to sell this rebellion, so you have to show it in an attractive way.
– What would a rebellion look like today?
I don’t know. Do we need to distance ourselves from this confusion of images? Go away and not show our faces? Disappear from the internet map?
– What fascinates me is that the Internet is starting to mean something more than life. If everyone is constantly recording and broadcasting everything, there is little left to experience. No one is anywhere, no one is involved in anything, everyone is looking for a chance. We are out of here. We are moving there.
I’m still thinking about something else. Virtual reality mimics real reality. How we live becomes showing how we live. Another level of illusion.
Or create reality so that it becomes a scenario that can be photographed well and go viral. Obviously we don’t want to live like that, but it’s stronger. They are currents and eddies that suck you in and make it very difficult to get out of them.
In your story, people walk past each other all the time. Parents can’t hear their children. Children can’t talk to their parents. The loneliness of the children and teenagers in this vision is terrible. As if everyone were talking somewhere nearby.
– (EN) For me, this is largely the result of the false language that is spoken now. As if it has lost its power to communicate things, all that is left are substitutes for thought, window dressing and poorly written dialogue. In difficult moments, when we do not know what to say, a tired bon mot from the series suddenly comes to the rescue. When I sit down to read a book like this, I notice what is happening around me, what we are saying, how we are saying it. I try to listen and take note. Even at the cost of entering the areas of absurdity and absurdity, but that is where the dog is buried. The vibration of strange times, distorting us more and more. And distracting us from the natural capacity to live.
And the ability to be in a relationship. And this is our basic need that we are so unable to satisfy.
– The desire for love is real, but I think it is particularly susceptible to infection by illusion. It is easy to find a person who you look good with in photos and everyone will give you lots of hearts. I think that ultimately I am writing about how we are deprived of the truth, the quality, the density of existence. How new technologies dilute our lives. They take away our powers and teach us how to survive. A conclusion that is not very revealing, but devastating to me. Even if an individual resists, this is what the crushing inertia of an entire culture looks like…
At some point you create a magical world in this story. Dead people talk to living people and suddenly they can be close to each other, hear each other.
– It’s not the afterlife, it’s not all inclusive.
Or a recycling center where everything falls and finally gets mixed together.
– There is no longer any semblance of segregation. All the garbage together. A chaos of data that no one knows where it comes from. Garbage, headlines, associations, TV series. A very strange existential condition, still undiagnosed.
I have the impression that you have changed your style a bit in “Magic Wound”. There are many brilliant images that show our reality well, but linguistically it is no longer the crazy parade of attractions that we are used to. It is much more restrained.
– I am proud of the fact that I am almost ordinary. I have found a language that is mine: poetic and vulgar, but the gravity is no longer in the experience. It is not the experiment that drives me, I am in complete control. When I wrote, I was very concerned about not lying or joking, I was “writing seriously” and for me that was at least as extravagant as using an exuberant style.
Aren’t you afraid to hear: this is no longer Masłowska, she has lost the charm of a wild child of literature?
– How could I be afraid of that? Everything I do attracts criticism, I’m familiar with that. My situation now is that I simply propose a certain vision to the public: look, this is how I recorded it. I try to create as true a picture of our reality as possible. I think I’ve already solved the like/dislike issue.
Has your skin become tough because you’ve been spit on so many times?
– And I’m still dripping. But these hates mean something completely different if you look at them. If you’re not crazy, but you’re watching.
Do you live isolated from the digital world or do you go there to find the material you need to build your literary universe?
– I have these symbolic social networks because I need them to work, but I usually invest in real life, which can end up being a bad investment. But being physical, corporeal, emotional is the priority. Relationships with yourself and with people.
It’s a luxury you can afford. Whether we like it or not, we need social media to work, to build so-called recognition.
– Sure, but admit it’s nice to be with someone who doesn’t hunt for photos and videos. It’s a completely different quality of being with someone.
Okay, now let’s take a selfie together (laughs).
– When you take pictures of yourself, you look at yourself through the eyes of others. However, this is a quest for likes. Whether you are aware of it or not, hearts appear on the horizon and something low and weak inside us rejoices.
Where did the title “Magic Wound” come from?
– A magical wound is a kind of trigger, a sudden association. I don’t know where it came from, but it seemed to me a beautiful metaphor for many things. What strikes me most is the idea that all this writing, art in general, is a magical wound. You keep digging it, festering it and not letting it grow. This image came to me when I was sitting in Switzerland, in total isolation, scratching again at all the things that my ordinary everyday life obscures and pushes into the background. Creation is in constant festering. But that’s what brings you the pain necessary to connect with other people.
What is the role of words in this process?
– I see them as my own subject. Something I sculpt. Language is the substance in which I create entities, worlds. I practice this by writing columns and essays regularly and sometimes by releasing an album. I use them to penetrate the world and indirectly arrive at prose. Language is an intimate medium. Public and very private at the same time. In this work you are dealing with yourself, it is expensive and exploitative, so it cannot be done frequently. No mind is capable of participating in this reality and diagnosing it at the pace that the market imposes today. Distance and rest are necessary.
