Pigeons: Sadness Sculpted Of Living Flesh

Perhaps We Have Something Tragic In Common

Pigeons used to annoy me. They seem dirty. They’re greasy-looking wings make a weird squeaking sound when they fly. That sound is called a ‘wing whistle’ and it’s supposed to warn other pigeons when danger is near. But to me, it sounds like filthy fingernails scraping the chalkboard of the air.

I thought I didn’t like them because they’re always underfoot and because they crap on buildings.

But then I read something about them and it made me realize why I hated pigeons: Guilt. Deep-seated guilt. You see, pigeons hang around us because we made them. 10,000 years ago we began domesticating them. We used them to carry messages. We lived with them. We loved them. And they loved us.

And then, after millennia, we invented the telegram and we ghosted them. Just a hundred years ago we bailed on a relationship so deep it had become genetic. We moved on. But they didn’t. They, like dogs, need to be around us. And so they hang around our cities, living in our filth, cooing to us, reciting love poems in Pigeon that we don’t bother to hear.

As I began to wonder about pigeons, I recognized the sadness of the situation. It was surprising in its familiarity. What if the Gods of old — the Greek pantheon — What if they domesticated us a long time ago?

What if it was the Gods who lifted us from our wild state, causing the Great Cognitive leap that took place when we went from beasts to humans who could write and draw on cave walls? After all, nobody can explain why humans suddenly became thinkers after so many years. Perhaps these Gods sparked our minds and moved us beyond grunts and into poetry. Perhaps they communicated through us, as we communicated through pigeons.

And then they tired of us. Or they found something else to do. Or a better way to communicate. And, just like our pigeons, linger in a state of living obsolescence. We populate the Earth and congregate in churches and offer up prayers like the cooing of our feathered friends. We long for the presence of our domesticators. And when they notice us, if they notice us at all, it is simply to curl their lip and ask, “Why do they squeak like that?”