08.24.04| ravens, crows, blackbirds "And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, Through all aspects of my emotional life, crows factor as archetypes, diving and flying throughout landscapes of memory. As creatures of extreme, I often find them yelling their names from the roofs of libraries, or perching on the edge of the horizon, preening in the low afternoon sun, lost in a casual, self-abosrbed meditation. Sometimes they wander into my recollection, establishing scenes as vignettes, moments recorded with minimal action yet heavy with shadows and personal symbols. For instance, as a college sophomore late one winter, while walking across campus, I stumbled upon a dead crow, frozen in a heavy snowdrift, a large ink stain in the middle of a mound of fresh snow. The death itself did not shock me, it acted instead as an epiphany, as a sudden realization in the middle of the night, an episode of unexpected awareness which wakes you from a light sleep. Or a second instance, mid-fall in a mid-western city. Clustered among heavy wild oaks, the antebellum buildings burned a dark blue in the overcast day. Audible from blocks away, a large flock of laughing birds motioned through the trees, scattering and regrouping, resting eventually outside my window, wild greek chorus, until another lifting of shadows, and they motioned to a new location. For almost an hour their tidal chatter sounded across the city, echoing. I could tell you that on this particular night my reading was consumed by a translation of Japanese court writing, sense of irony to embellish this introduction— and how, at the moment when I paused with my finger closed inside the pages, the descent of dark-winged angels began, twenty-four or more black crows settling into the branches outside my flat’s sun room. As a result the memory sparked these terse poems and ink drawings, a spontaneous combustion of words and sketches. Or I could say how the book fell from my hand, wings spread, landing open and exposed to the paragraph from the Pillow Book of Shei Shonogan: “in autumn the evenings, when the glittering sun sinks close to the edge of the hills and the crows fly back to their nests in threes and fours and twos...” — but then the entire scene is a fiction. An exaggeration of events for a sense of drama, a re-staging of the past to re-emphasize my point. A sleight of hand trick with words, embellishing truth to add interest, a conjuration adding another layer to the text. Here then are three preliminary sketches for a new project of words and feathers— a collection of verse accompanied by drawings. |
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