It should be emphasised that despite the individualism, the pantheon of great figures, the Polish Himalayanism of the socalled golden period also upheld the team model for a very long time. However, this was not just about social issues. Also, the climbing experience, whose inexpressibility was stressed and considered the foundation of mountaineering, was treated as something very intimate that should not be eulogised. Attitudes seen as “Romantic” and “sentimental” were openly contested, with Ferdynand Goetel’s ironic prewar text Wycieczka – jak się o niej nie pisze [Mountain Excursion – How One Shouldn’t Write about It] serving as a benchmark in this regard:
Summit! The view, the feeling. I use to know mountaineers who, having eaten, did not enjoy the sensation – but I have not known any who enjoyed it despite not having eaten. […] Then of all these conditions, at the time I fulfilled just one – I ate. It isn’t strange that today I can remember nothing of the moments I experienced at the summit. (1976: 107).
Consequently, for a very long time, the identity of the mountaineer was more or less consciously characterised by its cultural function. And just as alpinism, regardless of the criteria adopted (sport, art, science), has always been “something more,” so too has the alpinist been recognised in a broad context as a being mediting between extremes and worlds; as a result, his symbolic humanity is stretched between the semidivine and animal realms, sometimes he appears to be a supernatural man, a hero, at other times a monster fallen into atavism, stripped of what is human (Pacukiewicz 2012: 271–272).
The mediation between oppositions [4] is clearly visible in mountaineering narratives, which allows Agata Rejowska-Pasek to speak of a “fractured discourse of Polish mountaineering.” This fracture runs between six pairs of oppositions: spiritual – rational, path – summit, happiness – skill, nature mysticism – parameterisation, myth – history, community – individualism (Rejowska-Pasek 2016: 175–181). According to the author, it is responsible for both the shape of the “traditional ‘mythology’ of mountaineering” and the process of “ ‘disenchanting the world’ of mountaineers” (2016: 15). Arguably, this is because, in both its “modern” and “postmodern” variants, this discourse makes use of a very distinctive and firmly established (at least in Western European culture) symbolism; a point I will return to in my consideration of myth.
[4] Confirmation of this tendency in thinking about mountaineering can be found in two titles of texts published in a single issue of the Gliwice magazine Bularz in 1991: Cwaniacy czy frajerzy? [Sly Dogs or Muggins?] by Andrzej Wilczkowski and Apes or Ballerinas? by Tom Patey. The above juxtapositions perfectly specify the two main lines of mountaineering discourse: altruism (social) vs. egoism (individualism) and biology vs. art.