(On the Language of Birds)
Form is desire. Mimicry is carnival. Birdsong is wordplay.
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“Last night with the new voice I had a simple, wonderful little dream. In a grey room wearing a white dress, I wrote the words PATH and GUIDE, but I spelled the word “guide” as GUTH. When I woke up I didn’t know why I spelled “guide” that way although the word felt familiar. Google translate reminded me that GUTH means VOICE in Gaelic.”
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When I told a poet friend of mine that I wanted to talk like a bird, she decreed: “You will sink into an even deeper solitude. We don’t know what birds care about.” Birds care about the same things we care about, things we daily forget.
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”I dreamed with you last night. You were walking towards me, and you said: ’I have transcended the words, all the ones that had to be pronounced have been already drawn. Now I devote myself to outline sounds to fly away.’”
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Listening to the birds around the block I realize that many of them speak in parallel verse, repeating the same phrase over and over, in the manner of old liturgical chants.
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“A few days ago my girlfriend had a nightmare. I did not talk to her but played one of your bird voices.”
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For a bird, its own voice is bogged down with the same anxiety of survival we hear in ourselves. For us the voice of a bird, concrete as it is, doesn’t lead to a limitation. It passes through us without being delayed by the need to decipher it. It calls for a detachment that promises nothing more than its own literalness. The birds don't need to hear a bird's voice as much as we do.
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Birds have good pipes but poor memory. Our own tragedy seems to be the exact opposite. Few of us have a voice that will do justice to what’s worth remembering. Birds sing their songs to make themselves present. When a bird sings, he is saying: ”Here I am.” Speaking like a bird implies inhabiting our own voice.
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“I felt that I needed to hear this bird. Listening to the sound, it’s like I’ transparent.”
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You can say “pass me the salt” in human language, but to say that you are in love you better say it like a bird.
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Poet Michael McClure insists that one should not say “bird” but “goldfinch” or “swallow.” We name the world to absent ourselves from it. There are just a handful of words that actually mean what they name. No matter how convincingly I say “alpiste” or “birdseed,” a bird won’t come unless my hand is full. The first thing I realized when I decided to talk like a bird is that birdsong became an act of making. Language is also an act of making, but even if we were to manifest the impossibility of total silence, we won't come undone.
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“You can speak bird. And when you speak Heaven answers. You are reluctant to speak for birds. I believe because of this they may say anything to you at any time.”
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Nothing comes from nothing. For a bird to be a sign you have to be a nest.
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“This week I was surprised by a heart attack, a big scare. When I received your bird message, I was in the emergency room. At that moment, you sounded like a bird speaking directly to my heart, setting a rhythm, like a conductor who waves its wings.”
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In Italy, a woman I know touched a swallow, just by chance. She put her hand on a balustrade and felt a soft scared tremor underneath.
I sent her my swallow voice.
She played it at her balcony and the swallow replied. So I, too, touched a swallow.
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“That bird sound applies to my life quite perfectly right now. The nickname for Owl in Thai is Big Eyes, Big Eyes is Ta-Toh. The woman I just started seeing in SF is half Thai, her family nickname is Ta-Toh...”
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The Italians have a word for “man who imitates the cant of birds”: chioccolatore. It comes from chioccolare: to trill, or to warble. What is it with names, that make you feel exactly as when you are wearing someone else’s shoes?
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“Last night I dreamed of being inside a nebula made only of sounds and endless colors. I saw you smiling with your hat and jacket, I asked you where we were, you pointed to the spherical horizon, I turned around and you were gone, in your place a concert of bird voices.”
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When you understand that the voice of a bird is a reasonable expectation, you learn the laughter of the madman.
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“Two nights ago I dreamt I had a bucket full of your birdsong. I spilled it out and scrubbed the floor with it.”
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There is a particular kind of person with a particular kind of mind whose knee-jerk reaction is to ask “What kind of bird is that?,” as if naming the bird could account for the experience of seeing it, an experience that teases our longing for a promise that no one ever really made. For a thing to have a voice we just have to accept it’s presence. The dreamlike quality of a bird’s visitation accounts for its reality as a sign. We can’t really paraphrase a bird, but we understand it at a deep level. What the bird writes is the memory of the present moment, so it becomes a hieroglyph for heightened state it produced. If there is anything to the “healing power” of an image, it has to do with its capacity to put us in that place of stupefaction, which is a place of silence or laughter.
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“I dreamed that you showed me some birds, perched on the telephone wires, and you said: They do not remember, because there is nothing to remember. They take the sound, as it is, expresses it and then forget it. In that way, they align themselves with the patterns of nature. Using words is a dissociated metaphor. You said all this without words.”
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If we translate The Conference of the Birds, a Persian poem from the 12th Century, into its original language, not Farsi, but birdsong, its true form becomes evident. In the poem, the birds of the world decide to request an audience with the king of birds, the Simorgh. When the hoopoe tells them that to reach the palace of the Simorgh they will have to cross seven valleys, the birds try to resist, presenting their excuses one by one. No matter their pretexts, the hoopoe’s response is always the same: “Op!”, “Op!”, “Op!” (Three short notes that spell the letter “S” in Morse code, “S” being the closest letter to the infinite). For the structure of the poem, this implies a rhythmic base. The flourishes in the birds’ voices are punctuated by this austere call. That reflects the contents of the poem. Life is repeated in the permutations of its simple rules. Oracles account for the rules of the world in the lineaments of their own forms. With time, we learn that to be witnesses of the life of forms consists of accepting their presence so that all the questions can receive the same answer: “It is what it is.” In other words: “Op!” “Op!” “Op!”
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“What will you do if someone starts offering you little pieces of bread?”
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You can fool the birds, but not the wind.
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“The poetic language of the birds in its most esoteric sense is very much an experience of reality, as the birds are always speaking to us and to everything else that lives.
Now that I am directly working with birds, your poetic life of the language of the birds informs my dealings with them.
It is amusing to me in the best way that I am thinking about a person in a city making bird calls while I am standing in a forest with a bird in front of me.”
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All sparrows look alike. The hunger of one feeds the other.
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“When I play your bird voices all these birds come and listen. Then they go: ‘uhh, this is nonsense!’ and fly away.”
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White dots in the finch’s wings, white seeds in the hand. Contemplation is closely linked to language. Our instinct is to lend a garment to the void. The void is not necessarily an abyss, just an edge in which we intuit the tremors of our own fall. To regain balance, we speak. This is the eerie laughter of the verge, like a dove, cooing where the heart becomes a train.
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“That bird voice you sent me sounded a little like scratching, as if by speaking like a bird you were writing.”
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One of the most remarkable things about talking like a bird is that when you do it on the street, no one notices it. They hear it, of course, but as they don’t find anything unusual about it, they simply accept it as part of the landscape. You can use people’s disposition to overlook what they feel is familiar to them and hide your voice in plain sight. I would do my bird voices while walking behind someone, and no matter how close I get or how loud I talk, they never turn around. They just keep walking.
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“After listening to your bird voice, it is as if I have a refreshed capacity to create boundaries to restore and protect this valuable facet of my life: the imaginary.”
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If my bird voice comes from memory, whose memory is that?
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“My first experience of receiving the bird song with no instruction in the usual sense, was that it came from sheer faith - and to recognize that was simply stunning. It wasn’t just a moment in time that’s now past, but is always present when I'm present, and time seems to have a way of collapsing.”
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I would like to think that when I speak bird there is no distance between the experience of my voice and the material fact of making the sounds. Quite often, by not hitting the sound right, I say something I didn’t mean. This is not like wanting to say “ask” in Chinese (问 = wèn) and saying “kiss” instead (吻 = wěn), but like wanting to draw a circle and end up drawing an egg.
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Right when I was talking like a dove, a friend from Brazil wrote to say that he had discovered a nest of doves on his porch. When I sent him my recording he replied: “My migraine has just dissipated.”
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Whenever you speak bird, and a bird responds, you feel yourself pushing a membrane that pushes you back. The point is not to perfectly mimic a mating call – after all, I am married – but to extend my voice into the evocation of a bird’s disposition.
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“After talking to you, I see the language differently. And that’s why I had to apologize, because as soon as I knew it was you and not birds in the recordings, then I realized I was wrong for most of our conversation. I did not notice the difference between the imitation of a bird and the bird itself, I did not even know that they could be imitated with such accuracy as to confuse the senses. So, speaking like a bird is a form of expression, as is art, poetry, or literature. I would have understood it from the beginning if I had known from the beginning that it was really you and not the recording of a bird, although then, I suppose it had not been “so much fun.” Notice that when you told me I was speechless because it was a possibility I had not even contemplated. And I accept imitating a bird as a bird, just as I accept Plato’s theory of ideas. It is the maximum that we can get, to be imitators of perfection, but we will never reach perfection in itself, we can only try to reach it. It is what Jesus represents, for example. For a Buddhist, however, it is possible to achieve that perfection, because a Buddhist is not an imitator of Jesus, he is a potential Buddha, a seed without sprouting, but in any case, I doubt very much whether that seed will germinate. When you use written language to speak like a bird, now I understand it too. It’s like talking through koans. Above the stream, its nature is to flow, and as the stream, I stagnate, because then I would rot. If you can talk to a bird, this is a metaphor that transcends the metaphor itself. And I did not realize it until you told me it was you in the recordings.”
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Under the rain, balancing an umbrella and a pile of books, I came across a homeless man that I usually support. I fumbled with my load patting my pockets, knowing that Instead of the dollar bill I tend to keep apart for him, I only had my goldfinch voice. There are moments when you can peek at a whole world through a hole in a saltine cracker. So I saw myself giving this man my bird voice, and I saw every homeless man in town chirping and warbling. For two seconds I was certain that this way, they would get enough money to fly south during winter.
But then again, I have no right to tell others how to run their business. I snapped out of my vision and, quite embarrassed, confessed to the man that I had nothing to give him.
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A bird’s freedom has nothing to do with its wings. Birds don’t seem to be bothered by a need to distinguish what they do from what they are supposed to do.
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“I saw you last night in a dream, but I was awakened by the bustle of some birds that ended up being the noise of the brakes of a bus.”
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A sparrow’s voice is like the taste of water.
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“Sometimes your voice arrives as a wind strong enough to carry off the heavy things.”
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When you speak bird, you tell the other a secret that he only understands if he is paying attention, not in the way we are taught to pay attention in school but in the way a sunflower pays attention.
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Perhaps knowledge is what we feel when a sparrow takes a crumb of bread from our hand.
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“The bird voice was a little enlightenment alarm. Some people don’t want to wake up because everyone they care about is still in the dream.”
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The voice the the bird speaks to the point where the mind becomes daylight. The anonymity of a “species” won’t account for an experience we can only understand one bird at a time.
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“Listening to this shook a long unthought of experience loose, when a bird fell down the chimney several years ago. The thing is, I never heard that bird’s voice. There is no song in fear. Maybe I heard for a moment that bird’s voice in yours, once it was safely away from us and its long night in the fireplace.”
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A woman wanted to learn the language of the birds and I told her to look for words that have the same soul as her name. She told me she didn't know her name. If that were true, she would be a bird.
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I managed to engage a sparrow long enough for him to consider what I was saying. He did not answer me out loud but instead opened and closed his mouth to the rhythm of my voice, mouthing my words. The sound of an ambulance broke the spell.
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“Your bird voices this weekend. I’ve listened over and over to the owl, and I feel peace each time I do. I listened to your chirps yesterday after a particular awful day at the hospital, and your bird voice transformed most of the despairing rage into tears.”
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Birdsong and dreams are artifacts that would transmit poetic knowledge without leaving any intellectual sediment and could, at times, incite some kind of action. This is not like shooting an arrow and hitting the target, but rather like playing the violin waiting for someone on the other side of the wall to start dancing.
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“The combination of illusions in your message is numinous. I understand what your bird voice is saying, but only while the recording plays; it defies translation the moment your bird voice stops speaking.”
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The form that soothes our anxiety transfers us onto another reality. Then, maybe, we are turned into augurs. Oracles must poetize life, not delimit it with answers.
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“That bright voice becomes so muffled at the end. For a moment in the deep muffling is a heartbeat, as if we are suddenly listening to your bird voice from inside your chest.”
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A walk through the park makes you aware of the fact that the beauty of flowers, in all their delicate intricacy, is there to sustain life. I wonder if birdsong is art, but the birds don’t care. Nightingales have been used and abused in countless poems, and they still sing.
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“You ask a bird to express your mind?”
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Most thought comes out of fear, like antlers. Poets are always trying to put into words something they see but that is not quite “here.” Isn’t that what the future is? We want to pluck a form out of thin air.
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“The bird tells me something about short sequences of things with a lot of space in between. I have pain in my body that seems to be constant, but isn’t really if I tune in to it directly. Then there is no actual continuity of anything.”
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A friend is convinced that if the shadow of a cloud gets stuck, let’s say that in a fire hydrant, or in a tree, the cloud will not be able to continue on its way. Someone will have to come to free the shadow of the cloud so that it can continue floating. It is possible that he is right. I have stepped on the shadow of a sparrow countless times, and it still flies away.
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“Your bird calls alert me that I am in the forest sometimes. In the world of omens, sensations arrive quickly. You feel it or you don’t. I can get a call from you that will make me ask for the check and leave the person right there at the bar. Or I can get one and feel like closing my eyes.”
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What is tangible in our voice? The shape of letters? We can only speak of a ‘language of the birds’ from our condition of speakers, that is, from our symbolic reality. A stone can fly off the hand to be a bird, or it can serve as the foundation for a house.
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“I walked out back and heard chirping in the pitch dark, too much night still for little birds. But a black ball of feathers with a white breast landed not three feet away and spoke in a voice full of stars, a voice I would swear was yours. And I knew I had awoken to a better dream than I had slept with.”
— Enrique Enriquez, New York, 2018-2020.
NOTE: Poet Charles Bernstein wrote, “In Western poetry, birdsong has been a foundational metaphor for poetry, especially the nightingale’s song. The earliest homophonic poetry would be the mimicry of birdsong in human language."
Corresponds to the vowels in the words oíōnos / sono io. Oíōnos is a Greek word for bird. Sono io is Italian for “It’s me.” The “oi, oo, oo, oi” of the bird is the “Here I am” of the author.
O I O O and O O I O spell L and F in morse code. By turning the F upside down, and overlapping it with the L, we assemble a window for the bird to fly out.
O I O O and O O I O spell L and F in morse code. By turning the F upside down, and overlapping it with the L, we assemble a window for the bird to fly out.