Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
One summer’s morning I was standing in the kitchen, trying to make breakfast while being harassed by a fly. There’s a type of fly that appears in the summer whose buzz emits a sound, a frequency, which has the power to instantly send my nervous system into a state of fierce, rigid tension. It was one of these flies which was harassing me on that morning (I know “harassing” implies malicious intent, but, really, who can say). Its persistence had pushed me firmly in the direction of rage so, after levelling some (frankly devastating) insults at the fly, I picked up an oven glove and swiped it quickly, violently through the air in the fly’s direction—and, to my horror, I hit it. The fly dropped, like a piece of gravel, to the kitchen floor. “No, no, no, no, no…” I repeated, as though my monosyllabic mantra might somehow undo what I’d done. Flies are able to process extraordinary amounts of visual information in a fraction of the time that we humans can. While we see a swatting oven glove moving as one fluid arc, the fly perceives it with such temporal precision that every subtle shift within the arc is visible, a bit like a zoetrope spinning slowly enough to see each individual image. It must have had its back turned. On my knees, with my head a couple of inches above the victim of my outburst, I saw that it was still alive. After managing to gently nudge them onto a piece of kitchen paper, I took the fly outdoors with the mind that sun and fresh air might help it to recover. I spent the next half hour coaxing the fly back to health, with a few drops of water on a teaspoon and half a raisin. When, eventually, the fly took to the air, I felt absolved.