crows
The sound of birds draws my eye to the window and I lift the shade. Three crows are engaged in what appears a life and death struggle, one or two more circle overhead and swoop down. It looks now that one maybe the victim of a group attack and I wonder if I am witnessing bird murder or gang rape but then positions switch and a raven on the sidelines pulls with his beak at the wing of one seeming to go in for the kill. An intervention? Are they fighting or fucking? Now they are resting two combatants laying side by side, beaks open as if catching breath and one standing above the two like a warden. They remain this way a moment then suddenly as if in one motion the three take to the sky, followed by the others and are gone.
What have I just witnessed?
I lack adequate knowledge of the life of crows (or is it ravens? — they were so large) or possess too limited powers of observation to discern whether they were in pursuit of life or death. Knowing this can I resist the impulse to make a meaning of their so appearing before me? Is there a purpose served in the bird world if one of them dies like that, at the beaks of the others. Were they thinning out the flock? Or having a lovers quarrel? I know I cannot understand what I saw in these terms. Yet it remains that I was doing the looking and they did not even know I was there.
“These are singular journeys” an old friend recently said.
and I sketch some equations: singular = cellular or singular/cellular
(I can only do this twice before advertising intervenes)
thus the impossibility of a private person.
