I wandered in Vilnius in search of Czeslaw Milosz. Through his poems I had come to know Vilnius’ ghost, Wilno, as Milosz’s muse, the beloved city of his Lithuanian homeland, where he had begun to write and publish and to encounter and understand himself as poet. Milosz wrote to, for, and about Wilno for decades, so I arrived naively anticipating to see his devotion reflected back from the city. I expected, on my long walks to nowhere in particular, to stumble upon streets and plaques bearing his name, to see him embedded in the architecture in iron and brass. I expected everyone to know his name and, accordingly, to recognize my pilgrimage as ordinary, another visitor in a series of many acolytes come to retrace the steps of the exiled poet.

I knew my Polish would be useless here, but the familiar architectures of this urban landscape made me reach for it instinctively. Every smell and sight willed me to speak in the language of my family’s cities and villages, which were largely linguistically Polish no matter where they lay on the map. To opt for English felt like a betrayal, but of course I knew I was not in Poland. I wasn’t even in the realm of intelligibility among other Slavic languages, save for the moments I passed by recently resettled speakers of Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian, mostly drowned out by the noise of Vilnius around us: a refurbished Soviet-era streetcar rattling over a cracked road; sledgehammers breaking up the cracked road to lay a new one; endless sounds of renovation, restoration, demolition, expansion, virtually indistinguishable from those of any other city.

Over the twelve days I spent in Vilnius, I didn’t speak or write very much at all. I walked and listened and looked for a man to whom the city had become indifferent—perhaps had always been indifferent. Most afternoons I followed the steps of a walking tour put together by the Vilnius tourism website, which promised to reveal the locations of Milosz’s former haunts, interspersed with places that feature in a random assortment of his poems, essays, and novels. Here is an apartment he lived in while enrolled in school. Here is the school he attended in adolescence. Here is the former office and press where he printed pamphlets full of his early writing, now a restaurant called Grey full of gray furniture. Here is where the two rivers meet—find either of them in any one of his books. Besides the tourist’s guide, I used the 1968 poem “City Without a Name” as a supplement to my wandering. [1] Or perhaps it was the reverse: I read the city in my wandering as a gloss for the poem, in which Milosz attempts in twelve distinct sections to enter Vilnius as a means of puzzling out the mystery of his devotions—to the place and to the poem.

Though I had read the poem before, “City Without a Name” sounded entirely different in this city. I read it daily, as if it were itself a city within the city—sharp angles smoothed by time, arranged in irregular blocks and stacked with all the same odd inventiveness of a multiplied urban landscape. Though I cherish my days in Vilnius, there has been no more gratifying experience for me than walking around the poem. Or, it is through reentering the poem that I can reenter Vilnius, my memory of the city’s brick, my fixation on stepping exactly where Milosz stepped. To fill the exact container of his body—the city.

To continue writing of the place he left in 1940 and would not see again for over fifty years—this is the intensity of the poet’s devotion. Meanwhile, in those years, Milosz’s Wilno was coming apart and being remade, not least in language, as Vilnius. This is no city without a name; it is one of many names. It was also in language that its citizens remade themselves within the shifting borders of Lithuania and the changing names of what would become its capital. My walks through Vilnius testified to the success of generations of Lithuanian linguistic resistance, which finally ousted the city of the languages of its various occupiers.

As he reached for poetry, though he thought of it as his calling, Milosz still found a way to doubt its purpose and efficacy, and especially questioned why poetry would ordain him—Czeslaw Milosz—to enact its mysteries. With an exile’s suspicion towards the permanence of place, he wrote of Wilno longingly and often, accessing it only by revisiting and revising his memories, changing his mind, taking in new information and showing its historic precedents, and repeating old information anew. “City Without a Name” shows the poet in this mode of exploration and inquiry. The poem’s structure makes clear the process by which Milosz asks a question, attempts to answer, and must finally content himself with a reinvented question—a gesture that rejects certainty, transparency, and completion.

As I read I wander around in Milosz’s memory, imperfect and layered, but so full of his selfhood. The architect of “City Without a Name” is in every particle, every word. The poem is forged in the sounds and images of every city that Milosz himself had read, and in so doing, walked. Most prominent among these is T.S. Eliot’s post-catastrophic London. It was not until after he left Vilnius that Milosz read and translated The Waste Land. In the underground spaces of 1940s Warsaw, witnessing daily every scale of state violence, Milosz encountered and reconstituted, in Polish, Eliot’s polyvocal testimony of London’s devastation after World War I. Traces of The Waste Land are all over “City Without a Name.” Milosz conjures a handful of images that appear throughout Eliot’s tour of the “Unreal City.” [2]

From my own first walk through The Waste Land I remember noticing images that I knew I had encountered in Milosz. “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante” with her “wicked pack of cards” jumps out early in Eliot’s poem, affixing itself to my reading of Milosz’s own “fortune-teller hawking: ‘Your destiny, your planets.’” [3] [4] Rivers, named and unnamed, feature prominently in the landscapes of both poems, such as the Wilia in Vilnius and the Thames in London. Deeper still into my reading of The Waste Land I caught the woman who “drew her long black hair out tight” not unlike the two women in Vilnius, Anna and Dora Drużyno: “at night they unravel their spinster tresses of gray hair.” [5] [6]

Soon, every return to Eliot’s text was a mission to ransack his London towards a greater vision of Milosz’s Vilnius. This happened even in the smallest parcels. I remember early in my readings of “City Without a Name,” which stuck me in questioning the lack of a definite article in the line, “The valets had already brought in Theban candelabra.” [7] Not the Theban candelabra, as I kept wanting to fill in the additional monosyllable. I stumbled the same in Eliot: “Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra”—not the sevenbranched candelabra. [8] I tripped over the same stones in both cities, made the same motions over shared text, music, and image in both poems.

What the two pieces share most is the quality of movement. These poems are grand tours, exposing their respective cities to the reader. But it is in the way that each poet embodies and enacts the tour—the exposure of city and thereby of self—that distinguishes the poems from each other. Earlier I had mentioned that, in the case of “City Without a Name,” Milosz’s body and city are one and the same container. This is made clear in the poem itself; Milosz enters his memory from his present moment in Death Valley, California, not so far from where he had come to make his exilic home in Berkeley.

In Death Valley salt gleams from a dried-up lake bed.

Defend, defend yourself, says the tick-tock of the blood.

From the futility of solid rock, no wisdom. [9]

From Death Valley, he moves through his mind in order to move through the city, constructing it spatially, temporally, and emotionally. The penultimate section brings us to some of Milosz’s earliest childhood memories, (re)told in the second person to his child self. Here instead we receive explicitly some names of the early books he read: “stories of King Otto and Melusine,” presented as objects for purchase off a stand in the midst of a busy festival market. [10] A confession of a boyhood spent reading, playing with, and possessing literature, bestowed upon him by the city, stored for decades in his body in his mind.

The Waste Land is also in constant motion, but the text’s movement through space and time is much more difficult to track—not because of its polyvocality or anonymity but because of its specific refusal of the poet’s embodiment. Eliot’s poem also journeys the streets of London, peopled with its “undone” survivors, who sigh and stare at their own feet as they shuffle across London Bridge. [11] Where Milosz opts for abstraction to extend beyond his I, Eliot entirely erases himself, denying the reader any guide through the terrible urban landscape that teems with the disorienting mess of death.

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water… [12]

Though Eliot’s Waste Land is palpable throughout “City Without a Name,” these two men do not come to face each other in Milosz’s poem. Rather, Milosz faces himself—and by extension, his city—as built, in part, with the materials of Eliot’s poem. No effort is made to distinguish the self from the place; in fact, Milosz uses the terrain of the poem—and so the architecture of the city—to name his desires (“For I love the light too, perhaps the light only.”), question his purpose (“What evil in me, what pity has made me deserve this offering?”), and even attempt to identify his own self:

From nails, mucous membrane,

Lungs, liver, bowels, and spleen

Whose house is made? Mine.

So what else is new?

I am not my own friend.

Time cuts me in two.

Monuments covered with snow,

Accept my gift. I wandered;

And where, I don't know. [13]

A house is made in flesh. A city is made, in some part, of houses and monuments. How might these lines reveal, then, that the city could be made in flesh? As the self struggles with its own multiplicity, facing the materiality of the body and the city, it resigns itself to wandering. Because he is able to identify his own body, its organs and proteins, and because he is able to engage with the city around him, Milosz can admit to the limit of his knowledge. Where to go? Where to take the split selves? This is a poem that uses the body as the locus from which to look inward and outward, and so, it is a profoundly personal poem. Even as it makes massive strides across time and space, and engages gestures of the epic in order to accomplish the humble task of asking the most truthful question, the poem centers the poet—his memories, insecurities, failures—his self.

This is a stark departure from Eliot’s condemnation of the poet’s self-exposure. As delineated in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot believed impersonality to be a requirement of interesting, complex, perhaps even convincing poetry. [14] There is, for Eliot, an inadequacy inherent to the individual (and to individual expression) that should never find its place in the poem; personal emotion precludes “technical excellence” and must be excised towards a greater aesthetic goal. This is a tall demand; even in The Waste Land as it has been published and republished for over a century there are traces of Eliot withholding, attempting to rein in personality. Among the bodies—dead and alive—and the voices—dead and alive—one passage in particular takes the shape of Eliot:

‘My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart

Under my feet. After the event

He wept. He promised a ‘new start.’

I made no comment. What should I resent?’

‘On Margate Sands.

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.

The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

My people humble people who expect

Nothing.’ [15]

Though set in the distancing punctuation of quotation and composed in the third person, the speech of this unnamed interlocuter references the nervous breakdown that would lead Eliot to draft The Waste Land. He does not boldly claim himself or take up space in himself, the way that Milosz plants his body in his memories and reminds his reader, repeatedly, that those memories and their attendant desires are always of the body. To be clear, this is not my call for Eliot to have written a confession or sentimental poem, with an imposing personal I dominating his verse. (Milosz himself does not accomplish either of those modes in “City Without a Name,” in spite of his present and central I.) But Eliot claims that “very few know when there is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet,” and so, to that end: “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done.” [16]

Are we to assume, then, that the heart in the sand at Margate belongs solely to the poem? That the emotion communicated in the failure to connect anything with anything is disembodied from Eliot’s person, arising organically from the text? Whether Eliot achieved surrender in writing is another issue, but here, body parts—Eliot’s own—are sublimated into emotion. For another example: In both poems, fingernails might be capable of holding a universe of testimony. Where one man puzzles over his own nails, observes and experiences them in all their familiarity, and admits to their inadequacy to answer his inquiry, the other reveals them as contained image, separate from a more profound declaration of failure.

It is because “City Without a Name” is so personal that, when I read it, I feel that I can access not just Vilnius but Milosz’s nameless city, filtered through his embodied experiences while living and wandering in and out of urban space. This, too, includes his reading—which, in the case of Eliot, did not take place in Vilnius but in Warsaw. His reading of Eliot still shows through the memories of Vilnius, because The Waste Land is bound to his body rather than to the place or time of the event of his reading. In this way, Milosz enacts Édouard Glissant’s concept of errantry; he carries the Anglophone, U.S.-born Eliot along with him to California, by way of Warsaw, to better understand Vilnius. No linguistic boundaries or state borders can sever Milosz’s engagements with literature from his body; and in the act of writing “City Without a Name,” kinetic as it is, Milosz refuses the forced distance of exile between one territory and another. In that refusal, he leaves it open, like a map, for other readers to enter and explore.

Errantry is rhizomatic movement that shirks a fixed conception of identity that is rooted to land, favoring Relation. Of Relation, Glissant states:

Relation to the earth is too immediate or too plundering to be linked with any preoccupation with identity—this claim to or consciousness of a lineage inscribed in a territory. Identity will be achieved when communities attempt to legitimate their right to possession of a territory through myth or the revealed word. [17]

Milosz does not use the space of “City Without a Name” to lay claim to the territory of Wilno, though it does invoke a territory (unnamed though it may be) for which he longs. What to do, then, about his condition of the poet in exile, who reaches towards a distant homeland that contains one self, from a site in which another self now lives and writes? Milosz’s opening questions in “City Without a Name” appear to name the problem of the exile absent from his duty to honor his city.

Who will honor the city without a name
If so many are dead and others pan gold
Or sell arms in faraway countries?

What shepherd's horn swathed in the bark of birch
Will sound in the Ponary Hills the memory of the absent—
Vagabonds, Pathfinders, brethren of a dissolved lodge? [18]

These are questions that request one answer—one word or story. In lieu of discovering a solution, Milosz repeatedly pulls up his own roots, culminating in the twelfth and final section. Unlike exile, errantry stubbornly asserts that identity cannot be satisfactorily accessed through roots planted (or ripped, either) from territorialized land. Where exile is preoccupied with land lost or denied, and so a self lost or denied, errantry posits that identity can and must be fully explored in Relation, which rejects state logics that would draw borders—geopolitical, linguistic, ethnic—around the perimeter of a standardized sense of self, bound to the culture and/or language that is assumed to be bound to land. In “City Without a Name”, memories and their attendant places, institutions, and other territory-bound sites are pulled out of time and placed in the present to determine how the self has not only endured but transformed, creeping along the rhizome and touching all that it has found is in Relation with itself.

We can return to the seventh section to trace Milosz’s experience of leaving Europe and arriving as an exile in the United States. The rhyming tercets here are abstracted from time and place, placing sonic emphasis on the way in which multiple losses are stacked—losses of the self, of identity, of sense, of home.

Oh yes, I wanted to be me.

I toasted mirrors weepily

And learned my own stupidity.

From nails, mucous membrane,

Lungs, liver, bowels, and spleen

Whose house is made? Mine.

So what else is new?

I am not my own friend.

Time cuts me in two. [19]

As much as this passage shows what is lost in the process of exile, it shows how it gives rise to new desires, too: “Oh yes, I wanted to be me.” This is not only an extension of the embodied self, in want for a self. Here is where Milosz begins to shed root identity, though he is not yet arrived at Relation identity. Nevertheless, he begins to posit that his self can no longer be contained singularly; in an effort to access any self, Milosz must reach for knowledges that go beyond what is inscribed in land claimed by the nation state. To reach those knowledges, however, he must surrender rootedness in the form of attachment to the sanctity of the nation-state:

When I got rid of grieving

And the glory I was seeking,

Which I had no business doing,

I was carried by dragons

Over countries, bays, and mountains,

By fate, or by what happens. [20]

This section opens on an emptying-out. Resigned to his losses, Milosz steps into magic and myth (in the Polish text, griffins join the dragons to carry him). And he identifies his new desire to be himself. Is the desire for self-identity the same as a desire for individuality? When I read this section through the lens of Glissant, I think not:

The thought of errantry is not apolitical nor is it inconsistent with the will to identity, which is, after all, nothing other than the search for a freedom within particular surroundings. … [I]n the poetics of Relation, one who is errant (who is no longer traveler, discovered, or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this—and knows that is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides. [21]

To return to the moment at which Milosz loosens his grip on root identity, it is important to note that he does not emotionally or intellectually distance himself from his “situation of origin.” [22] Instead, he chooses to move rhizomatically through time and space to increase his self-knowledge—ending, finally, on a self-knowledge that depends on a refusal of one way of being, speaking, or knowing. Per Glissant: “The thought of errantry is a poetics, which always infers that at some moment it is told. The tale of errantry is the tale of Relation.” [23]

Milosz was stateless until 1970; he wrote “City Without a Name” in 1968. Residing in California, writing in Polish of a place no-longer (Wilno) and not-yet (the Vilnius that I would encounter), he composed a poem that desires to understand its (and his) desires. The opening “Who…?” and “What..?” are reconciled in the final “Why…?”, showing that what the poem wants is not a designee to steward the land.

Why should that city, defenseless and pure as the wedding necklace of a forgotten tribe, keep offering itself to me? [24]

This why-question gives shape to the prior eleven sections of the poem, and that shape is what Glissant calls “the open circle of our relayed aesthetics, our unflagging politics.” [25] Over the course of the poem, Milosz collects and reveals his multiple attempts to resolve his initial inquiries. In doing so, he plots his knowledges in a reverse-chronological and geographical order that is largely undisciplined by epistemological borders. Milosz’s findings are governed by the senses, which themselves are unboundaried among a variety of intellectual associations to other literatures that had come to haunt Milosz within and beyond the city. For this reason, the poem is the form best suited to hold this exploration, which blends and hybridizes sensory, anecdotal, literary, and political commentary.

By the time we reach the twelfth and final section, Milosz’s priorities have shifted. Instead of worrying over memorializing territory from his position as an exile, he rises to the occasion of errantry, asking questions that cannot be answered singularly and moving through spacetime unencumbered by borders and history.

And what do I know now, when I turn into Arsenal Street and open my eyes once more on a useless end of the world?

I was running, as the silks rustled, through room after room without stopping, for I believed in the existence of a last door.

But the shape of lips and an apple and a flower pinned to a dress were all that one was permitted to know and take away.

The Earth, neither compassionate nor evil, neither beautiful nor atrocious, persisted, innocent, open to pain and desire.

And the gift was useless, if, later on, in the flarings of distant nights, there was not less bitterness but more. [26]

These final lines are an exercise in surrender. What the body carries within it as memory is the unterritorialized city, which can never be named so long as it is carried within the self. This is the end of a will to solve or resolve a problem; the body’s knowledges rush in. Or, as Glissant writes, “The thrust of the world and its desire no longer embolden you onward in a fever of discovery: they multiply you all around.” [27] Multiplied Milosz—multiplied cities—multiplied desire.

The poem ends on one final episode of pleasure. Milosz: “In the immobile light I move my lips and perhaps I am even glad not to find the desired word.” [28] Glissant: “The landscape of your word is the world’s landscape. But its frontier is open.” [29] The word—which may be, but is not necessarily, a name—permits the multiplicity of the world. And in the absence of the word, the body can do the same, for they make each other.

The text of “City Without a Name” opened Vilnius to me. On my first Milosz walk, jetlagged and lost, I visited the shallow stairs that had been gifted posthumously to Milosz in 2011—a hundredth birthday present. The stairs were dressed with shiny etchings of lines from “Nigdy od ciebie, miasto” in Polish and Lithuanian. [30] As far as monuments go, the stairs were boring and offered me nothing of Milosz. I walked up and down those steps, over and over again. They were difficult to read, coated in sand and gravel from a sizable construction site immediately next to them. Two workers sat on a ledge and watched me repeatedly hike the incline. I couldn’t tell what they were building; it looked to me like a project intended only to stoke the dust from an ugly pit, making endless mess over the quiet intersection of what used to be ulica Bakszta and ulica Safianiki (now Bokšto gatvė and Šimaitės gatvė).

It took a few passes for me to notice Milosz’s autograph, a matte silver on the face of an irregularly sized brick. It looked to me like a headstone; had I not seen his signature before, I wouldn’t have so immediately registered the scribble as his or as anyone’s name at all. I photographed it with my phone: M … ł … reaching towards a handsome diagonal of sun, permitted to filter through the ineffectual fences and tarps that turn their backs on the entire scene, just out of frame. I didn’t go back to his stairs for the rest of my trip, for I had found my desired word—his name.

Months after my visit, it was through reading Eliot that I became fully aware of how Milosz treats the body, self, and city as connected entities, co-creating one another. Now, returning to Eliot through my reading of Milosz, I see the profound impact that Eliot had not only on the images and music of “City Without a Name” but on Milosz’s values around how and why history is made and arranged. Eliot was right to argue that literature is one of the most powerful vehicles through which to do and make history. When I encounter his claim that “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past,” it is clear to me that Milosz engages his own learning and reading in the same way. [31] “City Without a Name” shows that the exhumation of memory necessitates a cataloguing of one’s reading—but, to Eliot’s likely disapproval, this poem stands firmly in the ground that literary tradition, as it is experienced in the midst of war or migration or childhood or everyday domestic life, is stored and remade by the self. And the embodied self—the personal self—is best equipped to contain and express it.

Why should this poem keep offering itself to me? My memories of Vilnius are remade each time I read “City Without a Name.” Even if I never return to that city, I will always enter anew through Milosz’s poem. In reading I wander the architectures of his language, which itself has been lifted from Eliot and so many others. In the poem I am invited to wander a city stitched of the steps and streets that, for me, bear Milosz’s name without question. I walk him to find my city—to find my poem. I wander until I am myself.




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