Category: Yo Ivanhoe

The tree outside the window wobbled and tossed off light, little sparks like Instamatic flashbulbs in the moonlight. Was it a wagon or a wheelbarrow that so much depended on? Either way, nothing depends on them now.

I watched a dog creeping through the backyard shadows, stunned to still be doing God’s work early in the 21st century. He paused and listened to what he did not know was a train, a nice rhythm, the night murmuring at some safe distance. Big moving water, perhaps, where another race of dogs lived with its secrets.

The first plodding steps into September, moving resolutely into the black teeth. Soon enough the house will be smelling like a wet blanket baking, winter heat limbering up in the floorboards. And out there somewhere, sprawled behind me in the vacuum of another long night completing its free fall, are the remains of the blankest summer I can ever recall: three months on my back in the dead grass, staring up into the confused canopy of a condemned elm that obliterated the stars. A summer without a soundtrack, without a scrapbook, without a single snapshot or picture postcard to remember it by.

The wading pool in the park across the street has been drained, and the days will be marked now by nothing but the dull racket of jumping jacks and shoulder pads and the insolent gaggle of high school students shuffling along the sidewalks on their way to Taco Bell.

The cicadas are almost done; death, I suppose, the Arizona they fly off to for the winter. They burn down entire villages every autumn and flee to angel dusks. Soon enough the shuddering ghost-crying of geese evacuating across the moon and disappearing into the clouds.

It was on a night like this, somewhere across the world, that I watched as a shirtless man leaned back and coughed fire into the fog. He would swish his canteen of gasoline and nudge with his boot the tin cup at his feet. “It costs money!” he shouted. “Don’t just look!”

“How long can a man possibly breathe fire?” a bored Frenchman asked his date. “There must be other things as well. It is the same thing every night.”

“Perhaps that is what gives it the power it has,” the woman said. “The fact that there is nothing more, that this is all he has: just the fire, just the instant, repeated again and again. The poor man is clearly dying. Give him ten francs.”

A Statement From Louisiana Senator Mary L. Landrieu

Before The Merciful Intervention Of Medical Professionals:

And, Miraculously, After:

Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better, which cannot, unfortunately, be said of this world.

Give something away. Some thing, or some part of yourself.

Take a moment and try seriously to imagine yourself in the soggy or non-existent shoes of those forsaken people in Louisiana and Mississippi.

I’ll bet you’re unable to do it.

I sure can’t.

We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

–Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

 

I broke my brain. I’m not shitting you. It was joggled around in some giant, anonymous pair of hands and tossed end-over-end, without hope or desperation, down a scarred velvet table in a dark and nearly empty casino.

Have you ever felt like a moth that has been pinned to a post and is being swarmed by thousands of vague and terrifying lights? Has it ever seemed like you’ve been locked inside an old bank safe that has a rusty and long forgotten combination and then been flung into the Mississippi River on a moonless night?

For many days now I have had a lost thought rolling around like a marble greased with gore in the back of my skull.

You realize, of course, that I’m not kidding. I’m one of those guys who doesn’t tell the jokes unless I mean them.

It’s not sleep that I occasionally, and increasingly rarely, find in the long hours after midnight, but something more…I don’t know, really, sleepish, is I guess the best I can do in describing it. Utter sleeplessness that lapses from time to time into weird, yet oddly merciful little spells of sleepishness.

This is what I am.

And I have decided that I want to take the idea of talking birds much further than anyone has ever taken it before, to explore the language of birds in the history of literature, music, and art, to get to the bottom of this queer and preoccupying business once and for all.

I realize that I have, from time to time, gotten carried away with similar such quixotic pursuits. There was the time, for instance, when I was determined to make this…blog a portal for all manner of exhaustive scholarship regarding Calvin Coolidge, the thirtieth President of the United States. I honestly thought that I could –that I would– become the world’s most preeminent Coolidge scholar.

Little did I realize at the time, however, that Coolidge was such a thoroughly boring character.

I have some reason to feel optimistic that my parrot project will be much more fruitful. No particular reason, really, but some reason, and that, at this point, is something.

I have spent the last week or so assembling some preliminary notes on my exhaustive cultural study of parrotology, and will in all likelihood continue to work away at this long and ongoing project in this space. At the moment, at least, I am taking as my models for this compendium Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and Isaac Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature.

For now I would ask your patience and beg your pardon for the disorderly nature of these notes and ruminations. What you have here is a both a crude document and a portrait of one man alone in the wee hours, fumbling his way into a vast and, in all likelihood, inexhaustible project. I would welcome any assistance or suggestions that might point me in potentially fruitful new directions.

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and err greatly. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complicated than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

— Henry Beston, The Outermost House. 1928

 

Psittalinguistics: the science of talking parrots.

A parrot, it has been alleged, was responsible for planting many of the more heinous perversions in the head of one of the most depraved of the Caesars, Tiberius, this after the bird had had read aloud to him (by a sociopathic dwarf tutor in the Caesar’s employ) from an early and particularly pernicious primer in lechery. (See: A. Towson Dandridge, The Psychology of the Tyrants of Antiquity, Stanhope and Adelman, Manchester. 1949.)

We also learn, in Dr. Renata Steenblom’s Unnatural Nature (University of Winnipeg, 1963), of a parrot which was allegedly capable of divining –and divulging at inopportune moments– the innermost secrets of its mistress, including sexual fantasies of a shockingly explicit nature. The bird was notorious for regaling unsuspecting visitors with a tortuous impression of the poor woman’s whinnying orgasm.

According to Fr. Xavier Empson’s Curiosities of Catholicism and Marvels of Mariolotry (Eternal Image Press, Skokie, Illinois. 1957), there was, once upon a time, a parrot belonging to a tavern owner in a small village in Italy, and this bird was renowned for its ability to recite the Rosary (in Latin) in its entirety. One day, Empson recounts, the bird solemnly proclaimed, "It is the will of God, and I am but His humble servant," and promptly fell over dead.

From the pages of the children’s magazine, Highlights, we learn of an unassuming insurance adjustor and confirmed bachelor in Dallas, Texas who purchased a blue-fronted parrot which, upon being installed in the man’s home, was discovered to have committed a number of Johnny Cash songs to memory. The bird was capable of singing these songs in their entirety, and in a passable impersonation of the country legend’s voice.

The annals of parrotology are full of similar wonders, from the ancient world to the modern. In a little known short story by the Russian writer, Gogol, a bird is called upon to testify in a court of law as a material witness to its master’s infidelity.

There is an obscure novel, Lucifer’s Bird, by a Depression-era Georgia writer by the name of Ernest Winter, which featured a talking parrot that was believed to be possessed by Satan. The bird’s sinister commands and insinuations lead a God-fearing local deacon to engage in acts of depravity that shake a small southern town to its core. William Faulkner reportedly attempted a screenplay of this novel for Charles Laughton, but there is apparently no surviving evidence of this aborted project.

In the days before teleprompters one often heard stories of Catskill comedians in their dottage who resorted to being fed their lines by parrots, which were perched on stage in full view of the audience. One such bird was said to be such a quick-witted master of improvisation that in time it became an actual and valued partner to the comedian. Before it eventually passed away from advanced years (the bird survived the old comedian by more than a decade), the parrot had established itself as a successful solo act –if something of a novelty– in its own right.

The legendary blues musician Skip James is another performer who was alleged to have used a parrot as a prompt, often, some accounts allege, after James had become so inebriated that he could no longer remember the words to his songs.

There was a minor dust-up in academia in the 1950s when a man named J. Richard Stevens published portions of his doctoral dissertation in a then reputable scholarly journal. Stevens’ thesis, which was immediately and loudly discredited, was that a number of Emily Dickinson’s poems had been almost literal transcriptions of the utterances of her beloved parrot, Desdemona.

In the early days of television, talking birds were often used to provide voiceover narration for advertisements, largely in an attempt to cut costs and circumvent union restrictions. The practice apparently continues –albeit somewhat clandestinely– to this day, most prominently in the dubbing of low-budget films from Asia.

The debate over animal cognition: Dr. Irene Pepperberg’s famous gray parrot, Alex. Dr Pepperberg’s pioneering studies with Alex proved conclusively that the prevailing and disparaging notion of a "bird brain," is grounded in ignorance. Many birds –parrots most particularly– have very large brains indeed, and possess a cognitive sophistication that is as wondrous as it is little understood. Dr. Pepperberg’s work with Alex is almost as important and influential as the better known work on animal communication and referential speech that has been conducted on the great apes.

The Yellow Naped parrot, the most virtuosic and versatile of the Amazonian talking parrots, can often master an impressive vocabulary of upwards of eight hundred words, and is also capable of singing, dancing, whistling, and doing uncanny impersonations of animals and household appliances.

Double Yellow Head parrots have long been recognized as accomplished opera singers, with extraordinary range. They are among the more excitable and motor-mouthed of talking birds. (See: Robert T. Nicolai, Caruso in a Cage: The Incredible True Story of Sergei, the World’s Most Famous Singing Parrot, Bristol House, 1983.)

Budgerigars have been known to have vocabularies in excess of one thousand words. One such parrot, Victor, purportedly demonstrated that birds are capable of engaging in actual conversation, and was alleged to be an influential teacher and mentor to many other birds. Victor, according to its owner, presided over a de facto academy for talking birds, and a lexicon of the parrot’s impressive vocabulary, along with an archive of its recordings, can be found here.

N’Kisi, a New York parrot with an almost 600-word vocabulary and psychic abilities, is purportedly capable of reading the thoughts of visitors.

See also: Bruce Thomas Boehner’s Parrot Culture: Our 2500 Year Fascination With The World’s Most Talkative Bird.

More audio recordings of talking birds.

There have been innumerable documented cases of talking parrots thwarting robberies.

Other literary examples:

Eudora Welty’s The Shoe Bird

Flaubert’s "Un Coeur Simple." (See also: Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot)

Somewhere in the works of Balzac (and I have thus far been unable to find the source of this story, although I maintain a clear memory of it nonetheless) there is a parrot that recites "The Lord’s Prayer."

There is also, of course, the foul-mouthed parrot in Errol Stanley Garner’s, The Case of the Perjured Parrot.

More recently: Joe Coomer’s The Loop, which features a home invasion by an elderly parrot given to cryptic utterances.

In the seventh century, Shui Shi Tu Jing published the Book of Hydraulic Elegancies. Indeed, one continually finds descriptions of such technological wonders as mechanical flying doves, dancing apes, and talking parrots in the literatures of Islamic nations, India, China, and Greece. In fourteenth century Florence, it was none other than Filippo Brunelleschi who designed a mechanical stage to bring Paradise to life.

–Oliver Grau, "History of Telepresence: Automata, Illusion, and Rejecting the Body."

 

This defect or imperfection that stands in the way of man’s communicating with animals, why isn’t it as much our fault as theirs? For we don’t understand them any more than they understand us.

—Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebond"

 

Yet the animals are not incapable of being taught also in our way. Blackbirds, ravens, magpies, and parrots we teach to speak; and that facility with which we see them rendering their voice and breath so supple and manageable for us, to form and constrain it to a certain number of letters and syllables, testifies that they have an inward power of reason which makes them so teachable and determined to learn.

—Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebond"

 

This story of the magpie, for which we have Plutarch himself as sponsor, is strange. She was in a barber’s shop in Rome, and did wonders in imitating with her voice all that she heard. One day it happened that certain trumpeters stopped and blew a long time in front of this shop. After that and all the next day here was this magpie pensive, mute, and melancholy, at which everyone marveled, and thought that the sound of the trumpets had stunned and deafened her, and that her voice had been snuffed out together with her hearing. But they found in the end that it was a profound study and a withdrawal within herself, while her mind was practicing and preparing her voice to represent the sound of these trumpets; so that the first voice she used was that one, expressing perfectly their runs, pitches, and variations; and for this new acquirement she abandoned and scorned all she had learned to say before.

—Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebond"

 

 

An old Danish shipowner sat and thought of his young days and of how he had, when he was sixteen years old, spent a night in a brothel in Singapore. He had come in there with the sailors of his father’s ship, and he had sat and talked with an old Chinese woman. When she heard that he was a native of a distant country she brought out an old parrot, that belonged to her. Long, long ago, she told him, the parrot had been given to her by a high-born English lover of her youth. The boy thought that the bird must then be a hundred years old. It could say various sentences in the languages of the world, picked up in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the house. But one phrase the old China-woman’s lover had taught it before he sent it to her, and that she did not understand, neither had any visitor ever been able to tell her what it meant. So now for many years she had given up asking. But if the boy came from far away perhaps it was his language, and he could interpret the phrase to her.

The boy had been deeply, strangely moved at the suggestion. When he looked at the parrot, and thought that he might hear Danish from that terrible beak, he very nearly ran out of the house. He stayed on only to do the old Chinese woman a service. But when she made the parrot speak its sentence, it turned out to be classic Greek. The bird spoke its words very slowly, and the boy knew enough Greek to recognize it; it was a verse from Sappho:

 

The moon has sunk and the Pleiads,

And midnight is gone,

And the hours are passing, passing,

And I lie alone.

The old woman, when he translated the lines to her, smacked her lips and rolled her small slanting eyes. She asked him to say it again, and nodded her head.

—Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

Pay attention.

Let it be.

Say exactly what you think, and what you mean.

Stop pretending it’s so damn hard to be human.

Show your teeth to God.

Do what you can.

Every time you notice the stars –and I hope you’ll notice them often– I want you to think of me alone in this cage in the darkness, pounding away at my cuttlebone.

Relax, it’s just like dancing.

The truth, by whomever it is spoken, is from the Holy Spirit.

I can but wonder whence I get the lasting sense of so much warmth and light.

Yum, yum.

Lucky, lucky man.

Thank you.

Bless you.

Sweet dreams.

I apologize for that last entry. I apparently wrote [sic] it during the empirical blackout in which I have been lost the last several days.

I confess that it makes absolutely no sense to me, and although it is not uncommon for things that show up here to make no sense to me in the cold light of day, very seldom do I literally have no memory of having even written the words in question.

At some point in the early hours of the morning this entry —this, these words– was typed, I discovered that I was clutching a crumpled ATM receipt in my fist on which was scrawled this quote from Hippocrates: “If the matters which are purged be such as should be purged, the evacuation is beneficial, and easily borne; but, if otherwise, with difficulty.” Turning this scrap of paper over in my hand I found another sentence, also attributed to Hippocrates: “A woman does not become ambidexterous.”

I was seated in a green chair. I had a pen in my right hand (I almost always have a pen in my right hand; I’m like Bob Dole in that way, I guess, although I believe Dole grips his pen in his left hand, and for entirely different reasons). Charley Patton was moaning softly from the stereo in the background. I had no recollection of consulting Hippocrates, and couldn’t imagine owning a book of any sort that would contain the words which were jotted on that receipt. I looked around the room where I was seated, hoping that I would find the source of these quotes. I moved a great number of things around, in fact, but did not find what I was looking for. I wandered into the next room and investigated the various piles of books that were heaped all over the place there. Still no Hippocrates.

Blessedly, I suppose, my mind in the wee hours (okay, fine, my mind in general) is like that of a severely cross-wired lab rat, and I eventually found myself back in the green chair, slumped in my habitual stupor. From the stereo Arthur Rubinstein, I believe, was playing Chopin’s Nocturnes; I realized that I was now thinking about something that I have spent a great deal of time thinking about over the years. And that is this: How much control, I wonder, does a parrot’s owner have over the bird’s command of the language, such as it is; or, specifically, the words and sentences it learns to speak?

From that launching point I wondered –presuming one has real control over such things– what words or phrases I would choose to teach a parrot. It seems like this would be an important question. You’re presumably going to have to live with these words for as long as you own the parrot.

Given this assumption, I’d think you’d want to teach the bird to say something wise, beautiful, or consoling. But what? Parrots, I’d think, are more likely to be aphorists rather than storytellers, so you’d probably want to choose something short and sweet.

People’s first instinct –which is almost always a tragic one– is to teach a bird to say something funny or profane. They want to make an insult comedian out of the parrot rather than a philosopher or a poet, but I imagine the severely limited wiseacre routine would get old in a hurry.

I can’t imagine living with a bird that cursed me or shrieked my name all day long.

I recall once visiting a couple of my acquaintance that had taught their parrot to do a terse and terrible John Wayne impression. “Howdy pilgrim!” the bird would drawl over and over, until I wanted desperately to run the damn thing through with a knitting needle.

I also have some dim memory from my childhood of a parrot that had learned to say, “You bet your sweet bippy!” I think you’ll agree that it would be unacceptable to have such a bird in your home.

I thought for a long time about what words I would teach my parrot (even though, I should probably admit, I would never, under any circumstances, actually wish to own a parrot, or a bird of any kind). I’m still thinking about it, in fact, and when and if I manage to narrow it down I’ll let you know what I’ve come up with. In the meantime, feel free to send me your own suggestions.

Knock, knock.

Who’s there?

Me.

Me who?

Whom?

I don’t get it.

We have a winner!

The world is a complex fatigue.

—Hayden Carruth, “August First”

Whatever asks, heart kneels and offers to bear.

—Jane Hirshfield, “What the Heart Wants”

Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them

Did not board ship with grief among their maps? —

Till it seemed men never go anywhere, they only leave

Wherever they are, when the dying begins.

—Mary Oliver, “No Voyage”

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.

—John Ashbery, “The New Spirit”

Earth, give me back your pure gifts,

the towers of silence which rose

from the solemnity of their roots.

I want to go back to being what I have not been,

and learn to go back from such deeps

that amongst all natural things

I could live or not live; it does not matter

to be one stone more, the dark stone,

the pure stone which the river bears away.

—Pablo Neruda, “Oh Earth Wait For Me”

Fold your wings, my soul,

those wings you had spread wide

to soar to the terrestrial peaks

where the light is most ardent:

it is for you simply to wait

the descent of the Fire –supposing it to be willing

to take possession of you.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn to the Universe

How many nights must it take

one such as me to learn

that we aren’t, after all, made

from the bird which flies out of its ashes,

that for a man,

as he goes up in flames, his one work

is

to open himself, to be

the flames?

—Galway Kinnell, “Another Night in the Ruins”

It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.

—E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden.

–T.S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton“

It is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice.

—Elias Canetti, Notes From Hampstead

Broken world:

How is it that I came to find myself in the courtyard of an unfamiliar apartment building, seated on a bench in front of a poor excuse for a fountain, stammering and watching people –all of whom seemed to be afflicted with some sort of mental or physical infirmity– shuffle away into the shadows?

Where is Beyond the Shadow of a Doubt?

Find it for me on a map.

Show it to me.

Take me there.

Don’t bore me.

Please don’t bore me.

Keep me moving.

Keep moving me.

Make me work.

I am wanting.

I want.

I want something.

I want, I believe, something more.

I frankly don’t understand anymore how people make things out of words. It sometimes takes me days to build a single word, any word at all, even when I have elaborate plans and dictionaries and Scrabble letters scattered all over the tabletop in front of me.

I’ll make what I think is good progress, I’ll have something that almost resembles a word in the dictionary, but the instant I carefully remove the tip of the pen from the paper a mysterious breeze will materialize and blow the whole thing down. Quite often it will simply –not so simply– carry the letters away. I’ve seen them float off through the windows and evaporate into thin air. Sometimes they drift up to the ceiling and just disappear.

Other times my clumsy attempts at words combust of their own accord, and dissipate in the air around me like smoke. I once labored for days, working around the clock, to construct what I thought was a serviceable sentence –“When the old man arrived in San Pedro he was thirsty and in need of a shave”– only to collapse from exhaustion. I was then startled from a deep stupor at some point in the middle of the night by the smell of smoke, and discovered a pile of smoldering ash where I had left my sentence lying on the table earlier in the evening.

It has taken me more than two weeks of the most difficult labor to reconstruct from memory an approximate version of that original sentence, and even now I have little faith that those words, that any of these words, will survive another night.

I received this message –or these messages– from my old friend Ruckert today, scrawled in his almost microscopic handwriting across the back of several subscription cards for a magazine called Country Living:

Late last night, as I was in the basement digging around for a book on the Black Hole of Calcutta, I stumbled across a photograph of the two of us (taken, if I’m not mistaken, by a now famous actor), from god knows when, but certainly long, long ago, before you assumed your current identity (such as it is) as a transparent imposter in polite society and stopped returning my phone calls.

In the photo we are standing on the tin roof of a trail shelter somewhere in the Green Mountains of Vermont, with the sun collapsing in the sky behind us. We look like two men on top of the world.

How could we have possibly known at the time that shortly thereafter we would both commence the very long, steep climb back down?

I’m not even sure, in fact, that I could properly call the journey of these last many years a “climb.” I’m not even sure that I could properly call it a “journey.”

To say that we fell off the top of the world would not, perhaps, be too much of an exaggeration.

For all I know, you may have an entirely different and far more cheering perspective on the years since that photo was taken, but if so, poor fool, I can assure you that you are sadly mistaken.

At night now I sit out on the porch in the darkness and listen to the chirping chorus of banjos from the surrounding woods.

Surely, you think, those can’t possibly be banjos I’m hearing.

Go ahead and think whatever you want. I’m pretty sure I know a chorus of banjos when I hear one.

What in god’s name, I wonder, made me think I wanted to live in the country?

Often, in the hours after midnight, I see lanterns moving through those woods, and I imagine that some locals –in all likelihood the feral characters I routinely encounter at the Casey’s store in town, buying giant jugs of Mountain Dew and cases of generic Sudafed– are hauling bodies back there to bury.

This is, I’m sure you’d admit, a most comforting thought for an entirely friendless man in his middle years, living alone in the absolute middle of fucking nowhere, to entertain as he makes one more futile attempt to find his way into sleep.

Come on out and pay me a visit sometime. You can help me stalk and kill that donkey (I think it’s a donkey) that’s been lurking around my property and nosing at my windows in the night. (Be sure and bring your camera.) We’ll build the biggest bonfire you’ve ever seen. Honest to god, there isn’t one thing left here that I wouldn’t burn.

It’ll be just like old times.

Happy trails, sucker.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

—George Orwell, “Reflections on Ghandi”

Poems are hard to read

Pictures are hard to see

Music is hard to hear

And people are hard to love

But whether from brute need

Or divine energy

At last mind eye and ear

And the great sloth heart will move.

—William Meredith, “A Major Work”

Do not die out, fire. Enter my dreams, love. Be young forever, seasons of the Earth.

—Czeslaw Milosz, “Unattainable Earth”

That last one standing is him.

He is not expecting rain.

And even if it does rain

He’ll be good and god damned

If he’s going to lay down

With the rest of the cows.

He needs to go to town.

From the scrap of his

Own damaged heart he

Is building a new,

Flawed (but healthy) part,

And wiring it with

A fierce, desperate

Desire for goodness.