On Birds, and the trust we put in them.

Having been in a less than light mood lately, I have started to re-read parts of the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Not because in good goth fashion he holds my dire souls twixt the measures of his verses’ pincered grip, but because when one is in existential dread it is always good to realise the melodrama of ones actions, thus to negate them into self mockery and therefore good humour. After all, when one feels whiney and wallowing, what better to do than to root out someone who is even more versed and mired in the melancholic mood that permeates the occasional week?

Well, one can crawl into the embrace of one’s lovely boyfriend and watch sappy movies until the mood improves, but my lovely boyfriend is far away from me at the moment and this option was therefore not open for me, and watching sappy movies alone in a mood like that is a recipe for disaster only eclipsed by the horror of country music while in the presence of a warm bath and razor blades.

Mood thus through literature abated, I started thinking about a theme touched upon in EAP and other works of writing and mythology, specifically, the bird that perches in a book-lined study atop a bust of some Greek personage, intoning that single word of anguish to a grief-ridden narrator. And even more specifically still, about the mental state of someone who would put the wellbeing of his mind and soul into the uncaring talons and opinions of a feathered and beaked opponent.

Not that he is in bad company, this nameless narrator shouting at the blackened shadow above his study’s entrance.
Odin, the managing director god of the Norse pantheon was aided by two ravens who embodied thought and memory and who traversed the earth each day as his eyes and ears, reporting back to him each night.
The earlier versions of the Cinderella tales have the ghost of the protagonist’s mother personified by a small bird denouncing the stepsisters and stepmother as treacherous creatures set on bending the world to their desires.
Athena, goddess of wisdom, was accompanied by an owl, symbol of contemplation and dread calm.

In many tales, birds are, if not the harbingers of step sisterly betrayal, at least messengers for a world beyond our own, to be reached only through the medium of air. Obvious symbolism, air being the element of the mind, where fire and water belong to heart and soul, and earth to the material body. Thus, air, being the mind and the reason within it, would obviously bring forth those that judge or guide without heart, weightless retainers to a force above our own ability to deal with it.

Such a shame that the more factual nature of birds never factors into the approximating of divinity. Because birds are, well, vicious and stupid, to say the least.
If I was to put my mental and emotional state in the talons, beaks, paws or otherwise of any non-antropomorph being, I would certainly never pick the one species of animal that does little else but peck disheartenedly at the occasional dropped French frie in some godforsaken square in almost all big cities or makes it a habit to pound itself to death at any and all available pane of glass.

Granted, dropped French fries and panes of glass were not overabundantly represented in the classical worlds, but I find it hard to believe the birds have only gotten stupid in the years since the inventions of these things. After all, would evolution alone not have delivered us birds of remarkable intelligence and eloquence, if they have divine beings and motherly guides to start out from?

In the specific case of the studiously ensconced narrator the decision is easily understandable. He laments the loss of his love, is in a grey and dark mood, and having found an advisor that only answers with one word and one word alone starts asking questions where that one word promises only the worst of outcomes, giving him the chance to beat himself to death on the cliffs of his overpowering grief. Something I am sure we have all at some point in time have desired doing, after all, humanity is no stranger to wallowing in a bit of self pity.

But Noah had no need of such mood-enforcing exercises when he loosened not one but three birds from his famous boating experiment to find a good place to land. Sure, he had little at his disposal to be fair, but logic dictates that if there is enough of a landmass nearby to allow olive branches to be beakily plucked from it then surely mere time or a better, human, lookout would have proven to be as effective as the birds.
That said, it is almost astoundingly likely that the man was just getting tired of having build an ark with all his might and heart and faith and now watching it being crapped continuously on by anything with a metabolism and had just decided to get rid of anything he could not easily reach to kick, and considered it sheer luck that one of them happened to come back with digestible resources. The likelihood that an excellent recipe for dove smothered in olive oil has been invented at the spot.

Why? Why birds? Ok, easily answered, the link to air-symbolism is easily put down. But still, why? Birds are evil, annoying creatures with small brains in little heads that hold no more truth in their evil sodden souls than a drunk beggar railing at leather coats on the streets of Amsterdam holds the wisdom of the world in her bottle.
I just don’t get it, really, but perhaps this is because I have somewhat of an aversion to birds, but all I can think of thinking about Athena’s owl is the drycleaning costs of having something only able to poop processed mouse on ones’ shoulder.
Which, I think, is a bit of a shame.

For now, I will continue my avian ruminations, perhaps to be taken up at another stage.
Stripes at 11101, three birds in hand, one in bush,

Kevin.

For the turnout of this little blog I have relied heavily on the assumption that all my readers few of you as there are, are familiar with a specific work of poetry. This work or the one word that lies at it’s centre has not been named explicitly. For all those who request further information, please let me know.