The
common pigeon, gołąb, pronounced not
unlike “GO-wamp,” has a privileged place here in Kraków. I’ve yet to figure out
completely why. At my house in St. Paul, they roost loosely and noisily in my
brackets, making themselves all too cozy amidst the anti-pigeon measures. They
befoul my air conditioner, chimney, and sidewalk. I don’t encourage them and
sometimes disrupt their comfort with a tennis ball.
Here,
pigeons receive nurture. The obwarczanek
ladies routinely gorge them on old product and from the crumbs and seeds they
brush out of the box. (Waste of mek,
if you ask me.) And I’m well aware that some people raise them, “their birds,”
as a hobby, for racing and homing and who knows what else. Manuals about their
care have been written for this audience, no doubt, but I have never seen one
in a U.S. bookstore—and I’ve been to a few—nestled away in some obscure,
inaccessible corner shelf next to the Historical
Essays of Henry Adams. But in Kraków, The
Atlas of Pigeons finds a conspicuous place in the main street bookshop
window, next to the trendy Cultivate
Grapes and one window over from the complete Miłosz.
 |
| Atlas of Pigeonry |
And they
figure sympathetically in Polish poetry. In Zagajewski’s “Exploding Man,” the
explosion enveloping the man is just a flock of pigeons at their feeding,
prompted to fly off by fear, which in my experience on the Rynek, approaches in
the form of three year old boys. But they fly off as “skrzydlatach przyjaciół człowieka” (“winged friends of [the] man”).
 |
| An Implosion of Pigeons |
Speculating
here, but I wonder if this is relevant…Today was Pentacost Sunday, and First
Holy Communion at Kościół Święta
Floriana, and during the sermon on the Holy Spirit, I definitely caught the
word gołąb, but probably gołąbnica, the diminutive of gołąb, meaning “dove.” In English, the relation
between pigeons and doves (they are essentially the same bird family) is
linguistically obscured. In Polish, while there may be a size distinction,
you’re definitely in the Paraclete family, the emblem of the Holy Spirit, the Emissary of God. That is, pigeons here approach the
sacred, which may account for this weird photographic association I have had in
my head for at least a month now.
 |
| Red-eyed Saints |
 |
| Peter and Paul's Gate |
