„We Come and Go, lightly on tiptoe…”

„We Come and Go, lightly on tiptoe…” Festival takes its title from a poem by Janusz Jęczmyk,
though in truth, these words live within us thanks to the music of Zygmunt Konieczny

and the song sung as the hymn of the “Piwnica pod Baranami.”
We create the event with all that belongs to old age in mind –
with its lights and shadows, its glories and its sorrows.

It is hard to come to terms with one of the insanities of our times — an age gone mad with admiration,

affirmation, and the idolatrous worship of youth.
Everything, it seems, must be young —

like the symbols of childishness (the buttocks) and social masks (the mug)

mocked by Gombrowicz.

The bearer of wisdom is now supposed to be adolescence — or even childhood itself.
The bearer of faith in life is meant to be the glorification of physical vigor and vitality.
A glorification that recalls those nightmarish raptures over the puppyish and calf-like
enthusiasms of adolescence — in the style of the Komsomol and the ……jugend.

“What is thundering, what is roaring so?
The sky resounds, the earth below.
Is it a storm that fiercely blows,
or a tempest coming? No!
It is youth — youth — youth (…)”
Today’s chapel is the gym.

The Manifestation of all that is “older” – botox.
Yet the Time of Dusk, the Final Stage, is a mystery,
revealing both where we are headed
and where we have come from.
For then, indeed,

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration:
the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me.”

And as for this “youth”—

is it not perhaps but a “useful idiot” in the hands of Fate?

Forty years ago, in a season of Journeys, of surrounding the Elders with care and tenderness,
we declared that severing the umbilical cord between Youth and Old Age,

between “childhood and the venerable years,”

may be one of the causes of the madness and calamities of our contemporary world.
“…But old age has one privilege: that last glimmer as it stands at the threshold of death.

That light must not be missed for in its gleam…” (1977)

Włodzimierz Staniewski