Białowieża

Little new to report on the process of my BecomingP, though what there is to report does encourage me even in my summer lassitude. A cousin, David, one of the provocateurs of the family’s reconnection to the old country, has closed on an apartment in Kraków, within walking distance of the market square, the rynek. Sweet, słodki. He has offered quarters therein if my recess request is approved. A meeting on that request, slightly, bureaucratically delayed, as bureaucracies are wont to do, will take place Monday, the 13^th. It will then be submitted to the Dean.

A colleague has returned from a trip to Poland, bearing gifts: soup mix, a refrigerator magnet, and photos, hundreds of photos. I peruse the ones particularly of Białowieża Puszcza, the considerable remains of the primeval forest that once covered most of northern Europe. Białowieża, (biały “white” and wieża “tower”) refers to a hunting lodge, legendarily built and apparently painted white, by Władysław Jagiełło in the early 15^th century, the first Polish king (he was Lithuanian) of the Jagiełło dynasty. Puszcza means “forest primeval” and echoes pustka, pustelna, pustelnik, pustkowie, pustoszyć, pusty, pustynia, words for “solitude,” “hermitage,” “hermit,” “desert/wilderness,” “devastate/lay waste,” “empty/hollow,” and “waste.” These images appeal particularly, sublimely and subliminally, to a Borowicz (bór “forest” and owicz “son of”). Poles are the people of the fields, of the pola or pol, but before the fields were the ancient oaks, five hundred years old and more, the deep woods, the fens, the swamps, and their denizens. Vestiges of those ancient beings reside still in these photos, though concealed, “see, there!” and recall our origins, all of our origins, and our youths.

 (Photos courtesy of Maggie Kubak)

Miłosz has a few lines in “Rivers Grow Small” that conjure our change of perception of our past owing to aging, but of the changelessness and universality of our initial perception.

The forest near the village of Halina once was for me primeval,

smelling of the last but recently killed bear,

though a ploughed field was visible through the pines. (198)

We all lived in Eden once—and Poland still has one, an original.