I sometimes dream, quite often, that I have been persuaded to go on a sea voyage. I never know who convinced me to do this, or why I agreed. After the momentary excitement of going out to sea, the stupidity and irreversibility of this decision reaches me and I freeze with horror. At other times, very rarely, I dream of a rough, full sea, hissing, foaming and shimmering with intense colours; one that does not frighten but, I don't know, uplifts. And still at other times, while I am awake, I am haunted by a vision of dark, cold and flat water coming up high and engulfing the land. It falls into this water and the road I am on disappears under it. Great, great horror.

I have the beginning of the Tale of the Heart (very early working title), a good few minutes now, but still no singing. Radek Rak’s text resists me. It is speaking to me in different ways, but I still do not quite know what it is saying and with what voice. Anyway, it has just changed a bit. It was changed by the Author, after some of my questions and requests. As generally as I can say about it, my questions concerned the structure of the story. This is a delicate matter, because it is a fairy tale, and a fairy tales do not necessarily lend to being read as a strictly coherent and logical story. Logic is not lacking here, but there is also a mystery and there are some rifts in the cohesion. Perhaps they are the result of some centuries-old omissions and abbreviations, once understood – but today, no longer so. But I rather think that the fairy-tale-like mystery functions on a different principle – as the workings of a momentary, deep-seated intuition that expresses itself in a sudden and unexpected turn of the plot, an event in the story or a character’s decision that cannot be explained. In any case, the story is about Jakób Szela, a rebellious peasant, who engages in various contacts and conspiracies with the supernatural world and pursues a certain agenda. Partly it is a depiction of Jakub Szela, who did live in the 19th century, and the legends about him are still alive in the region of former Galicia. A character that is difficult to assess unequivocally, whose life and actions constitute an interesting episode in the history of class tensions in the territory that is now Poland. A bit of a serial rapist and killer and a bit of a Robin Hood. At the same time, in the libretto, he is depicted as a man tormented by passions and forces far beyond his, and perhaps anyone’s, cognitive abilities. Additionally, his identity is fluid; at one point Jakób transforms into Wiktoryn. As if by a decree, he actually gets different rights for one day. Any rights. But the transformation goes deeper than that. His heart turns to stone; the victim turns into a torturer; the peasant – turns into a master. But neither the peasant is entirely good, nor the master – entirely evil. As I am reading and passing on the content, I try to bear in mind the good of the work, which needs to present its content in at least some degree of clarity, but also not to overdo it and throw away this mystery, which may work independently of my interpretative, perhaps completely unnecessary, or in any case very possibly misguided efforts and intuitions. 

All I can say about the music so far is that it probably reveals a difference in the nature of the instrumental ensemble components: lively and simple (if not primitive) against cool, raw and to some extent driven by certain strict material calculations.

Leśmian’s Gorilla is taking me longer than I expected. It is also primitive, bot not necessarily simple. I wade through this poem, turning back again and again. But I push on, with a sense of purpose before me. With effort, but nevertheless quite lightly overall.

And on top of that, I am watching the emergence of the theatre work Bull by Szczepan Twardoch. The bull is trashing around and panting. And I add a little bit to it.

A side note: it seems that the time-space dimensions of the world allow for assuming that everything that is, or at any rate, that can be, occurs (somewhere, sooner or later) in all possible varieties, shapes and sizes (and all and any other categories). In other words, everything is natural. Of course, this is not a new thought, nor is it mine; I am merely simplifying it here, I do not know why.