The Language of the Birds

1
A man saw a bird and found him beautiful. The bird had a song inside him, and
feathers. Sometimes the man felt like the bird and sometimes the man felt like a
stone--solid, inevitable--but mostly he felt like a bird, or that there was a bird in-
side him, or that something inside him was like a bird fluttering. This went on for a
long time.
2
A man saw a bird and wanted to paint it. The problem, if there was one, was simply
a problem with the questions. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how,
because hows are easy--series of sequence, one foot after the other--but existen-
tially why bother, what does it solve?

And just because you want to paint a bird, do actually paint a bird, it doesn't mean
you've accomplished anything. Who gets to measure the distance between expe-
rience and its representation? Who controls the lines of inquiry? We do. Anyone
can.

Blackbird , he says. So be it, indexed and normative. But it isn't a bird, it's a man in
a bird suit, blue shoulders instead of feathers, because he isn't looking at a bird,
real bird, as he paints, he is looking at his heart, which is impossible.

Unless his heart is a metaphor for his head, as everything is a metaphor for itself,
so that looking at the paint is like looking at a bird that isn't there, with a song in its
throat that you don't want to hear but you paint anyway.

The hand is a voice that can sing what the voice will not, and the hand wants to do
something useful. Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a
poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart.
3
They looked at the animals. They looked at the walls of the cave. This is earlier,
these are different men. They painted in torchlight: red mostly, sometimes black--
mammoth, lion, horse, bear--things on a wall, in profile or superimposed, dy-
namic and alert.

They weren't animals but they looked like animals, enough like animals to make it
confusing, meant something but the meaning was slippery: it wasn't there but it re-
mained, looked like the thing but wasn't the thing--was a second things, following a
second set of rules--and it was too late: their power over it was no longer abso-
lute.

What is alive and what isn't and what should we do about it? Theories: about the
nature of the thing. And of the soul. Because people die. The fear: that nothing sur-
vives. The greater fear: that something does.

The night sky is vast and wide.

The huddled closer, shoulder to shoulder, painted themselves in herds, all to-
gether and apart from the rest. They looked at the sky, and at the mud, and at their
hands in the mud, and their dead friends in the mud. This went on for a long time.
4
To be a bird, or a flock of birds doing something together, one or many, starling or
murmuration. To be a man on a hill, or all the men on all the hills, or half a man shivering in the flock of himself. These are some choices.

The night sky is vast and wide.

A man had two birds in his head--not in his throat, not in his chest--and the birds
would sing all day never stopping. The man though to himself, One of these birds is
not my bird. The birds agreed.