"Objeżdżamy Europę. Objeżdżamy mapę". Dziennik okrętowy Mirona Białoszewskiego
“Touring Europe. Touring the map”. Miron Białoszewski’s logbook

Summary/Abstract: This article analyses the literary record of poet’s perception of the world during a voyage along the coasts of Europe, described in Miron Białoszewski’s posthumous book Obmapywanie Europy – along with a discussion of the work’s origins. Of special interest is, apparently, the role of the sense of sight in ‘domesticating’ the vessel, ‘spying on’ its passenger’s behaviours, and creating a map of Europe, transposed as it is into the matter of language. The sight appears not to be the ‘most noble’ of the senses at all. While absorbing anything spotted, without much selection or filtering, it shows a ‘loutish’, greedy facet. Conceived as ‘consumption by brute force’, seeing can be read in terms of a metaphor within which Białoszewski has contained an anthropological project of his own creative activity.

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