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John von Sturmerwas invited to the festival as a visual artist. He spent the whole festival ?visualising? Biziel Hospital in the gastroenterology and surgery wards.
There were things I saw and there were things I didn?t see. There were things I did and things I didn?t do. I never saw a cat; I never stroked one or looked it in the eye. As for drawings, they existed a-plenty. But actual cats, real, furry, purring, claws bared or retracted, back arched, sliding past your leg or seeking your lap, nothing. As if the domestic creature, the domestic creature par excellence, did not exist. But then I saw one, at night, wild, on the loose, a black cat fleeting swifter than swift across the road. Szubin. Sensed rather than saw for it was dart, motion, escape. The merest glimpse. As for dogs I saw dogs, not too many, out on the streets with their owners, Mostowa, on the bridge over the Brda. Where ducks swam. I never rode in a tram or on a train though both beckoned. I never got to Torun or Poznan. We skirted round both. I did get to stand on the banks of the Wisla, my shoes caked with mud from a newly plowed paddock. In the distance there were deer; to myself I called them ?chevreuils? because that?s what they reminded me of, creatures I?d seen flushed out by beaters in the Foret de Fountainbleau or the woods round Vaux-le-Vicomte where I?d spent Christmas many years back, in 1967. |
