Came across a dying crow on the path last week. Wanted to help, but wasn't sure what to do - felt like it wasn't my place to enter their world. Painful to see something that should be responding with fight or flight, but instead is simply struggling to right itself, and then regarding me with detachment. Me, whose compassion has no place on this path, whose concern can only appear as curious gawking.
I was reminded that I used to sing Put A Straw Under Baby (Eno, TTMBS, (1974)) to my kids when they were infants. What started as the one song eventually became the entire album. And then, as it was ineffective at lulling, the entire on album on repeated play. A lullaby of caring for a child. But a weird, disharmonic lullaby. Filled with forbidding imagery.
Eno has said the lyrics in the song is a mix of jumbled misundestandings of nursery rhymes and Catholic School memories from his childhood. Weighted Catholic imagery mixed with a childhood awe toward magic: transformation and transcendentalism.
An invective to caring for a child, but, like my own parenting, a misfire. Life being a series of impulses leveraged against decades of confusing and ominous experiences. A losing struggle to survive against a world that quantifies and exploits: I retreat to the orchard and become a crow, survival necessitating a dropping of the straw of agency, responsibility.
Sixteen years later, I watch the consequence: my own children now quantified and exploited by the world (as it does). The Pharm Life pill charts are from an experiment on the social behavior of crows; the pills collating - not communicating. The crow, trapped in the world of the orchard, cut off and dead.
The resolution oddly satisfying: a quirky misinterpretation of scripture blessing a sense of family into our everyday experience. And yet not satisfying at the same time: it is home, and it is love, but it also feels somehow erroneous.
Came across a dying crow on the path last week. Wanted to help, but wasn't sure what to do - felt like it wasn't my place to enter their world. Painful to see something that should be responding with fight or flight, but instead is simply struggling to right itself, and then regarding me with detachment. Me, whose compassion has no place on this path, whose concern can only appear as curious gawking.
ReplyDeleteI was reminded that I used to sing Put A Straw Under Baby (Eno, TTMBS, (1974)) to my kids when they were infants. What started as the one song eventually became the entire album. And then, as it was ineffective at lulling, the entire on album on repeated play. A lullaby of caring for a child. But a weird, disharmonic lullaby. Filled with forbidding imagery.
Eno has said the lyrics in the song is a mix of jumbled misundestandings of nursery rhymes and Catholic School memories from his childhood. Weighted Catholic imagery mixed with a childhood awe toward magic: transformation and transcendentalism.
An invective to caring for a child, but, like my own parenting, a misfire. Life being a series of impulses leveraged against decades of confusing and ominous experiences. A losing struggle to survive against a world that quantifies and exploits: I retreat to the orchard and become a crow, survival necessitating a dropping of the straw of agency, responsibility.
Sixteen years later, I watch the consequence: my own children now quantified and exploited by the world (as it does). The Pharm Life pill charts are from an experiment on the social behavior of crows; the pills collating - not communicating. The crow, trapped in the world of the orchard, cut off and dead.
The resolution oddly satisfying: a quirky misinterpretation of scripture blessing a sense of family into our everyday experience. And yet not satisfying at the same time: it is home, and it is love, but it also feels somehow erroneous.