something sharp and unwieldy

on velocity, violence, and the cosmic family

A Crow in half light

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

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The Crows looked like shadow puppets in the half light this morning. The unfolding corvid drama has become quite Shakespearean since one of our Crows decided to make an example of a Magpie by pinning him to the ground and pulling the feathers from his back. The truly wild racket that exploded out of the larger Magpie contingent brought me outdoors, from where I intervened and watched to ensure that the victim was not seriously wounded. Amazingly, not five minutes later, both parties had returned to their respective patches of nuts and seeds. Perhaps, like me, corvids reserve their grudges solely for human beings.

In the city, another day, another skyscraper. I don’t remember the last time I was there without some new monstrosity insisting itself upon the ever-thickening skyline. God forbid we slow down for a moment. On the train, I ponder how I might better support the more-than-human beings whose habitat is being so recklessly destroyed, and I briefly consider getting into politics; before my own hand rises and slaps me hard across the face, returning me to sanity. RIP the ‘What The Actual Fuck’ party, born and died on the 3.29 out of Charing Cross. Probably for the best. I’m not sure how well a manifesto speech of me screaming gutturally for an hour would have gone down, anyway.

One morning, almost two years ago now, I was driving out of the village when a sudden shift in the usual landscape forced a double-take. A copse of mostly Birch, Beech and Yew trees had suddenly vanished, leaving only sawdust-speckled stumps. I was indignant. It was March and so nesting season had already begun, and I was certain that those trees would have had protection orders on them. Cue a flurry of circuitous phone calls to the local council who, eventually, agreed to “look into it”—an action which apparently takes many months, but I was unrelenting in my insistence that someone be held accountable. There is a Horse Chestnut tree who meets my eye-line when I am sitting in bed; she who holds the Collared-Doves as they flex their wings of a morning, she who scaffolds the Magpies’ nest each Spring. Should any Bird die on the land here, it is at her feet that they are buried and, if I could, I would be buried beneath her too, so that we might one day cradle the winged-ones together. Whenever a few weeks would pass without my pestering the council, she would place a thought in my mind to contact them. I knew it was her by the way the thought landed, apropos of nothing. Like a stone dropped in water. Last week I was told that the company who felled those trees had been prosecuted. And she who holds the Magpies’ nest saw that it was good.

Whenever it was that we stopped knowing trees and Birds and the air that we share as our universal, God-given siblings, I fear that we put down something vital and we picked up something sharp and unwieldy. We began to stare at ourselves in the mirror and in so doing solidified an image of our distinctly separate selves. The deeply unhealthy relationship that modern-day humans have to nature, and indeed to themselves, sees an endless parade of bodies needlessly handed from Life to Death. “Too soon…” mutters Death, perturbed, as he lovingly takes yet another casualty from Life’s arms to cradle them in his own, like a toddler being passed from one parent to another as they are carried to bed. “Too soon,” they say in heavyhearted unison. How desperately we need an intervention. How desperately we need our cosmic parents—Life and Death, the inseparable pair without whom nothing could exist—to take the sharp objects from our hands until we have collectively learned that to harm Other is to harm Self. Within this cosmic family, our species would seem to be the only child attempting to keep one parent and erase the other—infatuated by our Mother’s youth and potential, while refusing to look our Father in the eye and plotting a future in which he no longer exists. The irony, of course, being that this Oedipal trait results in suicidal behaviour, such as frequent attempts to burn down the family home. The news reports of “fifteen dead in forest fires” and “nine hundred lives lost in the floods” without specifying that this refers exclusively to human lives, and does not begin to reflect the toll of actual lives lost. Our language reflects the belief that Life is ours alone—and that may just be the thing that kills us.

The lanes out of our village are winding, narrow and, unhelpfully, have no speed limit. This oversight sees them used as an opportunity to drive far faster than makes any logical sense, and it also seals the fate of many a wild being. On countless occasion I have taken a towel from the boot of the car so that I might scoop up a maimed Fox or Badger—always placing them at the side of the road, because not once have I found one who has survived. Occasionally, they are still warm, still limp. Life unwinding herself; Death present but yet to insist his solidity—my instinct to cradle their head, like a baby, prevails regardless. I petition the skies to please not let them have young, vulnerable cubs somewhere, before expressing my contrition to the newly dead being for the way that things are, for the unbearably long shadows that we humans cast.

The Moon is rising, here, and it’s painted the world monochrome. Things are black and white, sometimes. Somewhere, another skyscraper shoulders itself into a skyline. Somewhere, a car takes another life. We are a young species in an ancient Universe and, with no speed limit, we are accelerating at a ludicrous pace, while quietly wondering whether we can survive our own velocity. From a distance we look monstrous; up close we look like a frightened child waving a pair of scissors around in an effort to get our parents’ attention. If only we’d realise that they’ve never once looked away.

Yours in aimless flight…

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If you’re curious about living as though Life and Death really are an inseparable pair—not enemies, but beloved kin—The Deep End offers some guidance: