Belgian Waffle in Belgium

While I wait for my boat to come in, I walk about in Antwerp, see sights and eat a waffle. I see that Antwerp is not Kraków owing to many small particulars, and yet, European cities are European cities in ways that American cities will never be—ancience, stone quotient, narrowness of streets—while at the same time, cities are cities in much the same way, and in the future, they will be almost indistinguishable. Their architecture and history are and will be preserved largely in the service of global commerce, especially tourism, with the shops offering more or less the same international brands. The local souvenir shops will vend almost identical T-shirts and key-chains, loving the place with stereotypical graphics and fonts. Better than Disney, but not history. I do not lament this homogenization, this hollowing out, this salting and drying; some preservation is better than no preservation, and modern preservation will be as good as preservation has been. We can at best cherish the past, even only its husks; we cannot live in it. It’s not a bad walk-through, though.

Hmmm, waffle.

Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal & Rubens Statue
 

OLV or Cathedral of Our Lady
 

Grote Markt/Great Market

Stadhuis/Town Hall

Street View from the Grote Markt

Not in Poland Anymore

Nineteen hours aboard a Sinbad bus and three countries later—Germany, Holland, Belgium—I’m in Antwerp, where I will pass customs on Tuesday afternoon and board the Julius S for passage home, first to Liverpool, then on to Chester, Pa., that is, Philadelphia—close enough. We leave on Wednesday the 12^th and expect to arrive back in the states on the 26^th of June.

Germany, Holland, and Belgium, while not a completely different world—there are no completely different worlds here on earth—are pretty distinguishable europes, wealthy and sleek, with smooth highways, the lines bright white and freshly painted and the church steeples protestant and severe. The early morning derelicts of late-night revels have darker complexions than those in Poland, even the tanned Poles. Lacking a recent empire, Poland’s hardship cases are mostly home-grown. My last memory of the Planty from this trip will be an early Saturday morning bum urinating spectacularly while he walked, his water arcing golden in the rare sunshine like a few flings of new groszy. The rough, the ragged, the unfinished, the ruined can surprise you.

I was ready to leave, though, not because I’ve tired of Kraków or Poland, though I have tired of the rain and drizzle these last two weeks. No, rather, it was just time to go, time to reflect, regroup, and reconceive in light of all the information I’ve gathered on this reconnaissance. Imagine a next step. While not a great leap forward—linguistically—I have moved ahead and with this realization, however cliché: Poles are just like everybody else I’ve ever met, live essentially the same life; but they live it in an old country and in Polish, no small achievement, two features that continue to fascinate and to elude me.

Lufthansa

My foray draws to an undistinguished close. We’re at T-minus 10—days, give or take. There is too much to do to make much of an accounting just now. The mother of my children, best friend, and byłą żoną, (“was wife”) has shown up at my rooms and requires some attention. I walk her about. In the process of my revisiting tourist mainstays with her, she, more curious, or at least differently curious, pushes lines of inquiry and social interaction—dining, drinking coffee, thrift shop visitation just for fun, and farmer’s market questing in search of asparagus and strawberries—that make me wonder if the only Poland I might realistically enter at some point in the distant future exists behind the walls of a monastery, one in which the brothers have taken a vow of silence. Thankfully, there are a number to choose from.

The only indication that colloquial Polish has taken any root in my unconscious—where it must reside to make real progress—emerged on my melancholy flights back, cholera, “home.” Flying Lufthansa, when interacting with the flight attendants, I should have been able to use, or even default to, my not very good German, but my natural instinct—since Germany is a foreign country—was to use a foreign language, but the foreign language that came out was my not very good Polish. (The flight attendants, of course, speak much better English than I do anything else.) Even when I tried, consciously, to recall my German, bad Polish blocked most of my efforts. I managed a decent German sentence or two with my seatmate, a Tamil whose German was perfect and whose English was commendable. It can be done it seems. But maybe you have to be a woman.

Mr Cogito Advises

Back in Kraków. En route to Jesse’s funeral, I passed my hours flipping around in Zbigniew Herbert, from Elegy on the Departure and Epilogue to a Storm to Mr Cogito, who, reflecting on suffering, advises that “All attempts to avert/the so-called cup of bitterness—/by mental effort/… let you down.”  So, “drink [the] extract of bitter herbs/but not to the dregs/be careful to leave/a few gulps for the future”. A poet who suffered no shortage of horror, emotional distress, and physical pain, his alter ego, Mr Cogito’s voice is hardly a balm. “You have to consent,” he says, “gently bow your head/not wring your hands/ use suffering mildly with moderation.” Practically, “accept it/but at the same time/isolate it in yourself/and if it is possible/make from the stuff of suffering/a thing or a person/play/with it/of course/play/…with silly tricks/a wan/smile.” I think the operative notion here is “if possible.” We won’t be playing anytime soon. But already we smile wanly. (279)

Tough as his counsel reads, I do prefer it to the social conventions and the moist politesse of communal grieving—grieving from which there is no escape and for which no satisfactory language has been invented. Not even music. Not even silence. As bad as the worst in opening my mouth at all, I trust that the roar of grief in their ears engulfed any words I managed to utter and that only one’s simple presence will be remembered.

Such heartbreak always makes us wonder what we’re doing, why we are here. If home is nowhere other than that place where brothers gather to eat and drink, watch the Bucs and Penguin hockey, and mourn the loss of sons and nephews, what am I doing in Poland? Well, I suppose, we have to gather from somewhere.

Jesse

When I posted yesterday’s photo, I did not realize that the storm was gathering for my family, a beloved brother and his wife, my parents, and their grandson, Jesse and his sister. Jesse took his own life yesterday, a lovely young man, talented, intelligent, in the throes apparently of being and coming out in a world still uncomfortable with, even hostile at times, to its own variety. He could not have chosen better parents, and his friendships seemed to abound. There was no shortage of love. It is the hardest of realities, that sometimes all the love in this imperfect world isn’t enough. Let the tears fall like rain. 

Almost Summer in the City

Storm over Mariacki

Birds of the Planty: Lesson One, The Pigeon

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