This evening, on the green-shingled roof next door, there was a battle between a hawk and a squirrel. The squirrel won (i.e., the hawk didn't carry the squirrel away in his talons). Needless to say, Dr. Spanglestein and I were glued to the window, our tails twitching in anticipation.
Two days ago I had a battle with the radiator. Just kidding, it jumped out and burned me for no real reason. Now I have a big, blistering sore on my calf. I'm hideous.
5 comments:
I basically just had a phone conversation with you an hour ago, but that was before I saw a battle and then read about the battle you saw.
I actually don't know what was being battled, but there was a lot of wing flapping from a pigeon on the eave of a porch. It was riotous and a little scary because bird wings have a tendency to look dislocated when they're being flapped about on ground.
But the whole time the pigeon was having a fight with something else (possibly another pigeon), there was a beautiful little cat on the porch just waiting for a victim. The pigeon almost flew right at him and then redirected itself to the other side of the porch which seemed to take all of its might in the way that we stay on our feet when we slip on ice. It was very dangerous and dramatic. Then the pigeon flew up to the eave and just cooed there like nothing had happened.
whoa - good battle. and, yeah, i know what you mean about pigeon wings. whenever pigeons flap like that on the sidewalk i worry that they're broken.
i gave my students an assignment this past semester (which almost all of them forgot to do, grr), to write what i called a kafka journal - to note all the bizarre, out of place things they came across in their daily travels...a bright pink stuffed rabbit in the branches of a tree, for example, was one of mine. but one of my students did write about seeing a big pile of white bird feathers on the ground somewhere. a beautiful image, i thought. yesterday, going into university hall to turn in my dissertation (huzah!) i saw a pigeon carcass on the steps. it looked like it had been there for a while. i wondered then why no one cleaned it up. but why did i wonder that? i guess i wondered if other people did or didn't find it disturbing or gross (it was about half decomposed and half ready to fly). anyway...
This dead pigeon is so many things (although the archive tries to release the animal from anthropormorphization (what the hell! is that how you spell it?)). I have a lot of pictures of dead birds next to detritus: a bannana peel and a quarter are my favorites. Are they just trash when they die? Is one only mildly grossed out by them? Because anything larger would probably become a nuissance, right? And if we are supposedly cared for by God as God cares for the sparrows, what is this total disregard for the body?
yes. at the same time...i'm also curious about my immediate desire to have it removed from sight. as if birds don't die. or things don't die. you know? i once heard some cultural anthropologist somewhere say something about how people in a disaster completely lose their shit when they can't find a way to bury their dead. it's like people just go nuts when that happens. i guess this started to happen during katrina...i think that's what he was talking about. with bodies in the water.
hmmmm. morbid much?
It's the abject...we don't want it around us. When there is shit and dead bodies on the streets, we know that things are getting really bad.
I have to admit that there is something to this in my own life. Smells and acne and stuff like that always make me think--whether it's true or not--that I better start getting my shit together.
I think that birds (or the small) should be some kind of reminder to us to pay more attention or to realize that things die (50 people in a car bombing, for instance. A single moment). It's regard.
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