idleness and augury no. 2
[No. 1]
Each day at breakfast, I hear mourning doves but see only starlings. I never imagine the right bird when I hear one. There are sounds and there are bodies. There are words and things. For instance, I know the word nightjar but not the bird it means. The word is dark glass and sky. The bird is something else—a whippoorwill? Another word. My small ignorances feel like an unwitting practice of detachment.
At a fiction reading last night, an author says the word bobolink. I can’t picture it. The story isn’t very good but it is filled with birds. They make good portents. Observing their movements was a form of fortune-telling in antiquity, though even then it was mocked as foolishness. Cicero: “What, then, is the nature of an art which makes prophets out of birds that wander aimlessly about — now here, now there — and makes the action or inaction of men depend upon the song or flight of birds?”
The world is full of inputs and noise. Some of these are birds. My brain, dazed each morning, stirs slowly to them, picks out a low coo beneath the clamor of the City. I’d like to think of it as something more, something depended upon. But it’s a foolish thought. Nightjar, bobolink, mourning dove—a foolish augury, fumbling around with words. Foolish to think a dove could be mourning rather than just seeking a mate. Foolish, at least, until the falcon snatches it, and dares you not to give meaning to all things suddenly gone.
ben tapeworm