I've been baking bread with rye sourdough for some time now. Contrary to popular belief, it's neither a great art nor a philosophy. You just need to autistically stick to certain basic, unchanging principles, which I’m good at, and the bread turns out well. You can also play with modifying nuances, proportions, additions, etc., which I enjoy moderately, and then the bread doesn’t always turn out well, at least not right away, but you can develop your own working models. My working bread is rye-spelt (in a 3:2 ratio), with the addition of honey and olive oil (and of course water and salt). At the center of the process is the sourdough. A special matter. A mixture of flour and water that starts to spoil and can be maintained at this initial stage of decay by endlessly reducing it and adding fresh portions of the substances it consists of (flour and water). You can also think of it a little differently: it’s a mixture of water and flour that comes to life. It becomes an organism that must eat and drink and excrete, consuming only what it consists of, and the product of its metabolism is itself. In any case, an important phenomenon for bread baking is the rising of the sourdough. After adding fresh ingredients, consuming itself, the sourdough swells – it fills with void. If you catch it at the peak of this growth and kill it by sudden heating (just before the point of complete burning), you have bread. It once seemed incomprehensible to me how people came to such practices and all their inventions. But the longer I live, the less it surprises me. I see that life is full of nonsensical, meaningless situations, from which nothing usually results, sometimes a disaster, and sometimes something constructive. Surely, once upon a time, some grain remains rotted on a stone in the rain, and the next day the sun came out. And surely one of our ancestors was hungry and/or thoughtless enough to try to eat these rotten, sun-baked remnants. And it must have happened thousands of times before someone additionally figured out how it happened and how to repeat it. Fortunately, we have plenty of time.

Recently, an interesting story happened to me with the sourdough. It stopped rising. It didn’t seem dead, it looked and smelled as usual, it just didn’t respond to feeding. I was about to throw it away, but I didn’t; I get attached to living organisms. I gave it some time, fed it regularly, and mentally encouraged it to live. And finally, it revived. It regained its vigor. And then I found out that during this crisis, its offspring – a part of the sourdough that I had once given to someone – had died, forgotten in a warm room and completely rotted. The irrational part of my mind, which I rarely let speak but sometimes listen to, thinks the sourdough was in mourning.

And now I am temporarily engaged in orchestrating three songs to the words of Leśmian (from the Couplets cycle). It’s not entirely simple, but still easier than writing itself and can function as a kind of relaxing break. I have three songs to orchestrate: Goryl, Niewidzialni, and Dookoła klombu. The biggest challenge: rhythm. I allowed myself some figures in the piano part that don’t work in the orchestra, such as:

So I’m simplifying a bit. But I also want to leave the soloist’s part unchanged, so I have to be creative. Thanks to the available sheet music editing tools today, it’s a pleasant and quick task.

And soon I unexpectedly return to the Arctic waters.