Conferring With Blackbirds

Sounds of Silence, Ignorance, Fear, Voting Mythic, & Mulling Jazz

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“Perhaps when we die our names are taken
from us by a divine magnet and are free
to flutter here and there within the bodies
of birds. I’ll be a simple crow
who can reach the top of Antelope Butte.”—Jim Harrison

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I didn’t know at the time, but when I was a little kid, the creek water I was drinking in the woods turned out to be mostly septic drainage. To me, the water looked clean, and the flavor fine. I was inventing my reality. We slowly learn as we grow older, looks can be deceiving. Closer examination begins to matter. Misdirection can be a glorious swerve, but losing trust in ourselves is never alright.

These days, I think a fair amount about the passing of time—mid-life, near-life, tomorrows, yesterdays, today, and all-of-a-suddens. Some of my thoughts include:
1) Details become as complex as geological time. What do I mean? The more you know, the less you know.
2) Saying something will be “easy” is a top ten joke.
3) Most things are not what we think. At least one creation story declares we live on the back of a turtle. Poet Gary Snyder wrote, “I pledge allegiance to the soil of Turtle Island.” Our world a turtle? Why not. If I tell you finding the color blue is difficult, I’m not lying. I’ve spent the last thirty years searching for cyan, but that’s a post for another day.

Let’s confer with blackbirds.

I was wade fishing one of my favorite spring-fed creeks of the Driftless when a Raven landed atop a tall Cottonwood. I thought what brings you to me now? Attentive, all I heard was a creaky CAW. Then another variation, CA-CAW. Next, a pebble showed up in my palm. Well, not really, but I wouldn’t have been surprised. I watched two monarch butterflies flutter in the air dapping up some common milkweed. More importantly, a hatch of decent-sized caddis flies had begun, and I cast to some rising brown trout. I forgot about the bird for the moment. I focused on water. On space, not time. My mind silent, but of course, silence comes in ten thousand variations—the way the water flows, rising brown trout, my daughter grinning, my wife watching sea otters, facts in a story I might write equal to its fiction. One may think: is this too much silence, too much hope? Maybe, but I’m not alone in these things; they’re creation in action, they’re the world’s refrain:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful¹…

I was lured in by creation stories a long time ago, or maybe they discovered me? Either way, I’m convinced everything has a beginning; I’m not so convinced everything has an ending.

And there’s this:

When you speak to a Raven, or an Angel, or a Spirit, they pass along what you say. So that your noises or thoughts become a sort of braille: well-felt and tangible rosaries of the wild, beads of earthly elements—fire, water, earth, and air—echoes of a forgotten language.

W.S. Merwin wrote about this, about lost and long ago language in his poetry, “A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back … they know that such things are no longer believed”² Exactly. Secrets older than words. A long time passing.

Often we think of unique pre-historical, archetypal myths, start to trust them, want to believe them, but are told, “Oh, never you mind such things.” At least I know I’ve had such thoughts as long as I have lived. I’ve often wondered, What have we done with our silence? Wondered, how is it that what we believed in for hundreds of years is suddenly of no use? If I pursue these ideas, am I being too creative? Too independent, too much this, too much that…I can recall teachers, friends, co-workers, others saying: “nonesuch nonsense never you mind.”³ Turns out teachers and leaders prefer conformity and control. Prefer people to be seen not heard, to follow the leader. Wouldn’t you know it, this is essentially the role of public education these days. George Orwell wrote in 1984, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” With this rejection of evidence, “the party” can do as they please. These days, in my state, this is obvious—for instance, our rising cancer rates and soil erosion mean nothing. Our libraries are being “cleansed.” Our population picked over. We are told we feed the world. Reminded we are doing valuable work; the “Lord’s work,” we are the brightest and the smartest. We are loyal, we eat our beef and our chicken, and most importantly, we’ve learned to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears.

Where do I go from here, you might wonder? Fortunately, there are places to go. I want to make a roundabout prayer for Iowa.

Maybe I’m a dreamer, or maybe I’m crazy, or maybe I’m just mixing up two John Lennon songs, but I believe creation myths are necessary for explaining the living. Fox steals the sun, Clouds bathe the soul, Raven finds polluted water and unleashes a fortnight of bright red dawns, the way the moon winks tin at night. At this point, I’m no longer just talking about Ravens—but prophets, tricksters, creators. Heroes with a thousand faces⁴—independent journalists, small presses, folk musicians, populist political candidates, public land trusts, believers in land ethics, instigators of civil disobedience. Anyone who still accepts what they see and what they hear.

Let me offer a quick reminder of the once-grand region between two rivers we now call Iowa. A smooth blend of ecoregions: tallgrass prairie, oak savanna, healthy meandering streams and rivers, vast wetlands, diverse wildlife and natural habitat sustained by seasons, wildfires, floods.

If we listen and recall what once was—before our curvy streams were straightened, the wetlands drained, the Oaks cut, the prairie yanked and unrooted, the possibilities are astounding. Iowa hasn’t always been corn and beans and mushy animal waste turning things into cancer and erosion. Hasn’t always been field after subsidized field of eerie silence, where no insects move. A place where our young people flee for their lives from. At the rate we’re going there will be two options: ignorance, or fear.

Most of us know Zeno’s paradox. How Achilles can never catch the tortoise because the distance to be travelled is constantly halved and halved on into infinity. Our brains have limits of comprehension. We are only as good as the questions we can ask and the observations we can make. Quantum physics is essentially the mergence of philosophy and magic realism. Afterall, this high science has proudly produced …

ta-dum,

the uncertainty principle!

Where does this leave me as I confer with blackbirds? Well, uncertainty.

I was thinking the other day that we never catch up with our past. No matter how much we slow down. The CA-CAWs I hear might be my mind inside out. “A Crow is impatient,” explained Barry Lopez, “a Raven, they take time, can wait out dew on their wings in the morning.” I feel like this brings me back to silence. Watching, listening, believing. When walking and wading in creeks, I feel most alive, and where I come the closest to the uncertainty principle.

What do I want most? To love and to care for others, to experience joy. Where people are confident enough to create and make mistakes. I want to live in a place where I know kids can swim in water that is safe to swim in. Where chemicals don’t contaminate the soil. Where hospital cancer wards aren’t overlooking football fields, which are sponsored by the very Big Ag corporations which are causing the kids to have cancer in the first place. (This is a straight-up hat tip to an event where I heard Chris Jones speaking.)

I appreciate the world is uncertain. When I was little, what I thought was clean water wasn’t. But I was fine, and that’s the point: I was free and able to develop my mind with what I saw, what I heard, what I thought. We need to let the world create, not be controlled by greed or a ruling “class” telling us how and what to be. Not control our language, tell us what rules to follow.

Somehow, someway, believe beyond yourself. Beyond facts, beyond sounds, beyond senses, into stillness and the fullness of silence. Converse with Blackbirds. Fortunately, fluency is not required in any of this.

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What’s the writing tip in this column? I think it’s this quote from Thelonius Monk, “The loudest noise in the world is silence.” Good writing shows up when we aren’t trying to write, like humming when we don’t even know we’re humming. Respect quietude. I return to the poem at the beginning, “I’ll be a simple crow who can reach the top of Antelope Butte.”

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In the spirit of this substack, I’d encourage you to contribute and spread the word of Chris Jones’s campaign for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture in the state of Iowa. Vote for him in the Democratic party primary and then again in the State Election this November. This elected position is definitely not just for farmers. It’s a public office for a reason. To quote Woody Guthrie, “this land was made for you and me.”

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As much mirage as fact, I am part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative Roundup a group of authors examing the in’s and out’s of Iowa.

1. Cecil Frances Alexander

2. parts from “Losing a Language”

3. I mean the variations: are you on drugs, drunk, stoned, dreaming, crazy, …. the possiblities of thinking different somehow come across to most as dangerous most of the time.

4. Joseph Campbell