1480

So tonight, after eight months and two renewals, I’ve finished Długosz’s Annals. Even this abridgement at times felt interminable, five hundred and fifteen years of one thing after another, actually, the same damn things over and over, occasionally all at the same time, medieval things, mostly fighting, everywhere and between everyone, a thousand truces and never any peace, dynastic intrigue, religious and cultural bigotry resulting in copious bloodshed, every conceivable permutation of the Seven Deadly Sins, the plague, heresy, a dozen Władysławs at least, with an equal number of Bolesławs, and even more Casimirs, and to finish, Jan Długosz himself, a bit actor in his own chronicle, which ends in 1480 on his death bed:  

Though lying in bed, gravely ill, yet am I no little pleased that, after protracted, uninterrupted labour, much thought and deliberation, extensive travel and journeying in search of the chronicles of our own and other lands and in so doing subjecting myself to censure, abuse and rebuff, I have come to the end of this work, which all others have neglected. Gladly would I continue it for the honour of God and the benefit of my Fatherland, but Fate is preventing me, for I strongly suspect that the Cruel Sisters are even now drawing their threads. I have, by the Grace of God, reached an age that not all attain, having lived for sixty-five years. My afternoon being over and I having reached the actual evening and term of life, when I am to enter the kingdom of Eternal Light and enjoy everlasting life with all the saints, I confess, what I admitted long ago, that not absolutely everything I have written has accorded with the truth. Some of the things I have described have been trivial and ephemeral, though amusing, thing[s] that I have taken from the writings of others either on my own initiative or at the suggestion of others, things that I have found in minor works or in other people’s maps, or matters of hearsay, taking as worthy of belief what I have merely been told to be true. I beg those who are better endowed by Minerva and have ready tongues to correct my errors and misconceptions. Should they find what they read, even the whole, confused or amateurish, may they undertake the editing of it, and may they forgive my language and incompetence. With such a wealth and variety of topics, only an angel could explain and verify it all. It is not a gospel or a canonical letter I have been writing, as the holy apostles did, but, as an intellectual exercise, I have described things that are variable and ephemeral. I accept responsibility for verifying them or for failing to do so, should that be what I have done.

….I beg all who read or will read this Chronicle to kneel and say for me, first and last of sinners, one Paternoster and one Hail Mary, so that Our Lord Jesus Christ, son of the Immaculate Virgin, through all his torments borne with strange love for me, for him and every mortal, may deign to free me of eternal and temporal torment and lead me to see His Blessed Trinity, whose is the honour and the glory, now and for ever. Amen. (p. 601)

This I can do and have done, in Polish.

1414

On this date last year, I had just arrived in Poland, slipping down through a winter fog into the damp snowy cold of Małopolska, “Little Poland,” the capital of which is Kraków. A year later I miss everything about Poland—except the damp cold. But since so many of the good things about Poland in winter are a response to the damp cold, a quiet resistance to it, an occasional defiance of it—vodka, tea, grzaniec (“hot, spiced wine”), a peppery barszcz, conversation with family or boon companions in pubs and cafés and cukiernie (“sweet shops”), and szarlotka—perhaps I miss the damp cold, too. The slush on cobbly pavements. The snow falling clumpily from trees. The smell of wet cement, a little salty, a little savory. The typical cold in Minnesota is not the same, but drier, edgier, and its polar vortexicality, not in the least to be preferred. The chill cold dripping down one’s neck on Karmeliczka Street, while hardly pleasant, doesn’t begin to compare for discomfort with the rolling, bitter, avalanche of subzero temperatures and subarctic windchills. BRRR. At the moment, I remember my arrival in winter Poland warmly.

I have been reading Długosz desultorily, intermittently, since coming home and yesterday arrived at the year 1414, exactly 600 years ago. Sometimes such coincidences seem more than coincidental. But I have to say, little noteworthy appears to have happened in 1414. Yes, the plague abated somewhat, but the Teutonic Knights were up to their old bedevilment. While King Władysław defeated them spectacularly at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, he neglected to push his advantage, failing to take their fortress at Małbork and leaving them a stronghold for continuing mischief; the Order appears to be winning the “peace,” duping the King, taking advantage of his diplomatic good nature, and “using gold and bribery as arguments rather than justice” in international forums of arbitration. Władysław concludes a truce “for winter is approaching and dysentery rife among his troops.” He’s still angry with his kinsman and ally, the Grand-duke of Lithuania. Heresy visits Czechoslovakia in the person of Jan Hus. Same old, same old, and without much encouraging to say to readers 600 years hence.

But having now read Jan Długosz himself, and not just read of him, his long and unflinching account of hardship and misfortune in the middle ages, with rare visions of peace and goodness, I have a new appreciation for his name, accomplishment, and the resting place of his bones in the crypt as Na Skałce. 

Uninstructed Ducks

Reading still and underlining often in Długosz, Miłosz, and Herbert, though not so much in Długosz—it’s a library book. What I make of them, and what they make of me—in the direction of Polishness—remains to be seen, but every now and then you come upon a passage that bursts off the page like laughter, a tiny firework, the memory of a wet, moustachy smooch from a rascal aunt long dead. And you want to share it for what it is and make nothing more of it, complete in itself.

Once, a very long time ago, walking down the street in a Polish village, I grew thoughtful at the sight of ducks splashing about in a miserable puddle. I was struck because nearby there was a lovely stream flowing through an alder wood. “Why don’t they go over to the stream?” I asked an old peasant sitting on a bench in front of his hut. He answered: “Bah, if only they knew!”             Miłosz, To Begin Where I Am, p. 245

Birds of the Planty, Lesson Three: the Rook

Rooks, gawrony, nest high in the trees, socially, in clusters, tree-top neighborhoods, “rookeries,” and in Kraków they would drop to the Planty singly and pace, rather warily of humans, in search of food, mostly worms and grubs. Whenever I would approach, however quietly and unobtrusively, or lift my camera in their direction after sitting relatively motionlessly on a park bench, they would lift-off on long, deliberate black wing, not in haste or fear, but with a certain dignity, as if intruded upon, far enough away to render my limited zoom pretty useless. So repeatedly unsuccessful was I in trying to image them digitally, that when I came upon a trio cast in bronze at an art gallery, I thought I might have to settle for that, an image of an image, an image of a brazen image. (How that sculptor worked so fast I cannot imagine.)

But as you can see, they are a not unhandsome bird, a little beaky perhaps, with iconic possibilities. Like their cousin, the magpie, they appear in contemporary Polish poetry, in this case along with their other cousin, the crow, known in Europe as the “carrion crow.”

Crows, rooks gather


Of an evening in the stubble.


The dark company moves


Slowly toward the forest. From the west

Float violet clouds.


Crows, rooks preen


smoothe their Indian feathers.

(Zagajewski, 61, my free, inexpert translation)

The rook and the carrion crow are not native to the United States, though, like the magpie, the carrion crow has a close relative in the North American crow. At any rate, the Corvidae family—crows, rooks, ravens, magpies, jays, jackdaws—among the most intelligent of bird, and even animal species generally, strikes a familial note with me, and not merely for their self-consciousness and tool use. The czarnowron, the “black crow,” or carrion crow, appears on the Borowicz family coat of arms. And while I’m not convinced that my origins are particularly aristocratic—perhaps we’re magpies and jackdaws to the more elite branches of the family—I’m not averse to granting some resemblance. And I’m partial to that blue.

Birds of the Planty, Lesson Two: the Magpie

Long and away from the Planty, the greenspace surrounding the center of Kraków, I’m reminded that I remain quite incompletely Polish and, more recently, even lax in my efforts to become so. Reminders of failure and guilt abound in life, but I have grown coarse and insensitive to them over time. Having little use for guilt from my early teens and accustomed to failure thereafter, I don’t respond much to these emotional spurs, these negative drivers. Rather, one rediscovers the occasion within oneself, often prompted by some outside messenger, some seemingly chance sign from the universe that draws us back to the quest—even when you’re not looking for one particularly.

So last week, I was driving out to Seattle with my byłą żoną to deliver a car to our son—my dear boy—when across our path in the high plains of Montana swung a bird that I had first seen on the Planty. I called out “Sroka!” Magpie.

A handsome bird, sleek in black and white with wing highlights in cobalt, and a long tail that plies the air like a gondolier’s oar, it inhabits Europe and Asia and western North America, but not Pennsylvania or Minnesota, my first and current homes. Its sharp markings strike me as aristocratic, priestly, a priest with a sense of style, of elegance, but understated, though he screeches. I think if I were an aristocrat or a priest, I would adopt the magpie as my totem bird.

Curiously, the magpie appears in the poetry of both Miłosz and Herbert, but when you consider how visually striking is the bird, how bright its white against black wing, against the background green and blue of lawn and sky in flight, it’s not that surprising that it generates a poem. In “Magpiety,” Miłosz asks “Magpiety?/What is magpiety? I shall never achieve/A magpie heart, a hairy nostril over the beak, a flight/That always renews just when coming down.” (156) I own that nostril, but of the heart and flight, it remains to be seen.

Herbert’s sroka, “Pica Pica L.,”—the Latin name—is a villain. There is no question about the nature of universal magpiety:

its song alone

a rattler’s song

betrays

the true nature

of a baby killer

Herbert invokes the Polish priest-poet, Jan Twardowski (1916-2006), to exorcise and kill that feathered demon. But the name, Jan Twardowski, is also the name of the medieval magician/academic (a.k.a. Faust) who bargained his soul to the devil, so the doubleness of appearances, the paradox of being both bad and potentially good, redeemable, keeps the 

question open indefinitely. In the magpie’s soul, there is black and white, but also cobalt blue. 

Until then

I cut off today my Polish moustaches. I’ve been considering it since I returned. They did their work, inspired my look and framed my mouth with Old Polishness, but they do not appear to have improved my language skills particularly, that is to say, magically. And nonverbal communication can only go so far, even to the point of miscommunication, misrepresentation. Last Saturday at the Minnesota State Fair, wearing my moustaches and my Kraków T-shirt, I heard someone from the crowd call out dzień dobry, to which I responded, dzień dobry, but could take it spontaneously no farther, alas, szkoda. (A Polish graduate student in Horticulture.) I have yet, it seems, to have genuinely earned those silver stripes. I feel no less Polish now in their detachment, nor any less committed to the enterprise. Rather, I’ll proceed in my natural-born disguise, the baby-faced Amerykaninem. Until then.

Blue Moon

As a respite from the annual carnage in Długosz’s Roczniki, I turned to Zbigniew Herbert’s collected prose. He wrote informedly and well about the classics, French cathedral architecture, painting and painters, especially of the Renaissance—Piero della Francesca. But for some reason—an ethnic catastrophist streak among Poles?—he recounts a tale of the Inquisition, of Inquisitors getting their just deserts, martyrdom: “Though it is difficult to feel sympathy for an institution called the Inquisition, one has to respect the courage of people who enter unarmed a place known as a hotbed of heresy, in a de facto state of war…. When the door breaks down under the blows of axes, the friars kneel on the floor and begin to sing Salve Regina. The slaughter is full of fury and cruelty. Sources tell us that the broken skull of Guillaume Arnaud was used as a drinking cup by his murderer.” (122) I much prefer to live in an age when the bleached bones of our enemies are not considered suitable for stemware.

On a lighter note, and one having nothing vaguely to do with Polish sensibility, or do I repeat myself, I am happy to report under this August blue moon, the fourth full moon of a season, that Dino’s boat, the Lua, lost on the 17^th of June, drifted a hundred something miles almost due east, been recovered, towed to the west coast of Ireland by “a realy [sic] nice gentleman,” and secured in a shipyard for repairs. He hopes to sail her home to the Azores next summer. May God bless the realy nice.