Nonfiction from Roman Cherevko

Original Photo: Julian Hochgesang

The Pigeons Are Gone

I didn’t notice when the feathered creatures disappeared, but something was wrong. I started analyzing my insomnia, looking for that small detail that could have changed my entire sleep-wake cycle. And here it was. No cooing from the kitchen hood as the birds perched on the rooftop vent, hijacking the air shaft’s acoustics to help their biped neighbors better hear the morning concerts. No wing-flapping or claw-scratching on my bedroom’s exterior windowsill that worked better than any alarm clock.

I went outside, walked around a little. They are gone.

I read it as a portent. An ominous sign any way you look at it. If pigeons are flying rats as people call them, then the rats have left and the ship is going under. If they are akin to doves, and many languages and cultures make no distinction between them, then there is no hope for peace and salvation.

Noah’s dove never came back. This time the deluge has no end in sight. Or, if there are any survivors out there, on a piece of land miraculously untouched, the message from the Ark has never reached them. Perhaps, there is no Ark after all. There is no place for it among all the corvettes, frigates, and aircraft carriers prowling the seas. Captain Nemo, too, would, have no chance of escaping the onshore injustice as his Nautilus would be hunted down by nuclear submarines.

Arka nie istnieje i nigdy nie przybędzie, the Ark does not exist and will never arrive, is a phrase repeated as a mantra in O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization, a 1985 Polish dystopian film. A group survive an atomic war, but their shelter is about to crumble, exposing them to the nuclear fallout. The mysterious Ark that was promised to them turns out to be a myth, an invention. The director, Piotr Szulkin, admitted that the movie’s pessimism reflected the sentiment of the Polish society after the 1981-1983 martial law, a society that had lost hope in the face of domestic unfreedom and persecution as well as the global atmosphere of the Cold War.

It is curious how melting ice can have two opposite meanings. Ancestral memory suggests that when a winter—or an ice age—ends, everything springs back to life, tensions are released, communications warm up, and pathways between neighbors become walkable again. Climate science warns us that excessive melting of Arctic ice can drown entire cities and regions. Incidentally, the turbulent period in Polish 17th-century history known as the Deluge, graphically described by Henryk Sienkiewicz in the eponymous 1886 epic novel, was brought about by the empires of the north.

Aleister Crowley, a 20th-century mystic, placed no reliance on virgin or pigeon and proclaimed the new aeon of Horus, a hawk-headed god of war and vengeance. It is, however, hard to see how war and vengeance are new. If anything, it’s a return to the primitive axiology where force and strength are valued above everything else. What is new is their scale, their fatality, and their destructiveness. And yet prophecies of con gurus can come true. Or maybe they become self-fulfilling exactly because people believe con gurus.

I meditate on the vessel known as the peristerium, the Eucharistic dove, which represents the Holy Spirit. It holds consecrated hosts, which represent the Body of Christ. The body is contained within the spirit, an inversion of the stereotype of the spirit being imprisoned within the body. Perhaps the key is in inverting traditional roles, putting doves above hawks, subordinating force to mind.

Meanwhile, I am back in my bedroom—I almost wrote ‘in my cage.’ It’s hawks, hawks all around, with no doves or pigeons in sight.
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Roman Cherevko is a writer, translator, and culture critic. He lives in Ukraine.