Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
Last week, a coach the size of a London double-decker bus somehow managed to find itself stuck at the top of our lane. The driver claimed he’d broken down, but on being pressed admitted that he was stuck and could see no way of driving through the narrow roads of the village. Not much happens in our village, and so a small crowd of onlookers slowly amassed as the poor driver became steadily more distressed. At one point, he could be overheard on the phone saying, earnestly, “I’ll die here! It’s a tiny village with tiny houses and no water! I’m going to die here!”—a fear quelled shortly after, when a villager brought him a bottle of iced water from their fridge. While some of the onlookers worked hard on the mental gymnastics required for them to find a way to blame this man’s lack of directionality on immigrants, others took to action and had every car parked in the vicinity moved, so that the driver (who did not die in our tiny, allegedly waterless village) could perform a 300 point turn, and make his bid for freedom. I suppose we all have our version of narrow lanes, times when unfamiliar terrain sees the walls of the world close in on us. Funnily enough, the first panic attack I ever had was in a Propositional Logic class in college. The linear causality that we were being taught, the kind which surgically slices up the world into clean-edged binaries of “If X then Y, X therefore Y”, had felt like a spiritual assault. Like I was watching a poem, out in the wild, grazing in dappled light, suddenly snared, caged and forced to live out their existence behind the parallel lines of literalism. None of the circular, spiralling, shifting and relational patterns found in nature, grief and a real lived experience belonged in that room, and so it became devoid of air. I failed that class, choosing instead to sit on the grass outdoors, wondering why it is that beauty seems to demand a witness, as though it wants us to engage with it… If X then Y me that.