I write this out of grief and hope. I write this cu ca cow I write this in the language of the slime mold, there is a manifesto or is this the wrong word. Is there a dada for the female for the creature for the floral? Can I find it? To search, cu cu cow, what can I break? What bird rests heavy upon my heart (why it is the quail of course)→
In strange things I reside
The juncos gather in my yard. The abyss is so much deeper this year. Have I drawn too close to human considerations?
But these are the signs for which people have learned to watch.
It is because I’ve stopped paying minute attention. Even as I sit can hear the seagulls crying at the park but I do not know what species they are. Is this part of the manifesto?
Dogs will bark. Frogs will leave the area. The sky will fill with strange lights
Once, I studied birds but I’ve always been shit birder. Do not mistake the one for the other. On the one hand, I care too much about what each particular creature is doing and on the other I do not care enough about lists. The American robins are wild after the snow melts–I’m missing my Bewick’s wrens. I know they are around because sometimes I hear them but I’ve not received my post-Christmas visit yet?
Cracks and holes in my body, this refugia of fire
I’m not sure how to write about the wren hunt this year–given that in past I’ve been so deeply engaged in thinking birds (thinking Callipepla quail) that it’s been a natural outpouring.
Sentences must contain nonsense to exist
This year I’m thinking law and I’m thinking climate change. And it feels as though I’m no longer situated as comfortably amidst the other creatures whose worlds I share.
You’re the only/Person who’s not here
The specters that haunt me are legion. In the juncos outside my window, the grey squirrel peering in at me, the crows a few rooftops down and the elegant quail, so far in time and space they are barely an outline in my mind but are so solid in my heart, like a dollop of pain.
Crystal Frost, Cruelty
This winter’s gentle snow. What word do you have for the hush that comes over a city when it snows? If our weather is to become increasingly violent, will that hush be an endangered species of sound?
Is it the same/For you?
I don’t mean to get so dreary. Honestly, celebrate, the sun is out the air is cool the juncos are gathering and the wren hunt is about to begin.
The wren, the wren, the King of All Birds, St. Stephen’s Night got caught in the furze.
Or→King Night, caught the furze, Stephen’s All. Birds Chid-it, Chid-it. Wren Wren.
Your wren poles are tinder the coins are on fire, the wren hunt is become the wren hunting you.
Maybe it’s only in our injuries… that the future can take root
Do you see? Law school hasn’t cured me. I am untamed by the logic of the legal mind.
a wolf in the woods/on the night of the bodies
It just stripped the quail out of my thoughts. They are still in my chest. I feel them as grief. I miss what I was when I stood in the field and the lightening arced towards the enormous mesquite and the rain soaked me. I hunted quail with my eyes and my ears, not with my gun. I save that for
I proclaim the opposition of all cosmic faculties to this gonorrhea of a putrid sun issued from the factories of philosophical thought,
It’s time for me and you to hold all of this together in action–in our own broken works and battered footfalls. To hold the creatures and other organisms that are our true brothers and sisters, our great aunties the Hexactinellid sponges and our ancient grandmother, an ascidian perhaps? Our anthropocentric world acts to sever our families from us, but in our earliest moments we know there is only these families. Some of us can hold this understanding into adulthood but believe me we pay a price. The constructs within which we exist, are a web of razors designed to ensure we are stripped of our connections to other species. Just try talking about the importance of a tunicate species– throw a little tunicate idea of “self,” of consciousness or of something radical like that (we do not have the tools to prove or disprove) and you will feel the touch of the blade.
Why doesn’t anyone say anything. Why the great silence?
Dada was for the disruption of the world in WWI–it was a human (white male) based movement and it succumbed to time and internecine strife. But I’ve been looking to Dada lately, because of my specters (a specter is haunting Europe), because of the failure of language, because the wren hunt survives in my mind while the accumulation of Western philosophical thought is like dust to me. Or like a lens that allows me to see incomplete details narrowly. (Like the elephant and the blind men).
I am speaking to you of a mortal solitude
What is the female, the nonwhite, the queer, the nonhuman, Dada? Does it already exist? Is there a way to capture this Dada, and create the new world in the ashes of our old? It isn’t that word DADA which matters, but it is this***
Quotes are from:
Ali Smith, Alexandra Pizarnik, Ana Božičević, Timothy Morton, Tristan Tzara, Rachel Cusk
Featured Image Credit: By Alan Vernon (Flickr: Bewick’s wren (Thryomanes bewickii)) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
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