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Communication without words

Writer's picture: CroneCrone

On the front page, again, a Driveway crow watching me as I feed the birds in the garden. He or she cawed, the melodious caw, not the shouty one (crows have many voices) and did the tail spreading thing they do. I did as ordered.


This blackbird is the bravest of the two females and two or three males I regularly see. She will eat close to me but I have to stay very, very, very still. Here, she's considering, I think, the birds in next door's sycamore and looking a little anxious.



The pigeon simply wants me to leave.



So much for the birdies; what is the earth saying, without words? As I write, the wildfires are ongoing in Los Angeles - that novel, The Deluge, has a section on a huge LA destroying wildfire set in 2032 or something: real life is even worse. Erik Jampa Andersson has written a thoughtful piece about this. Me... well, today I was listening to Ferris Jabr's Becoming Earth, in which the Oregon-based journalist describes how life has made the conditions for life better on this planet... well, until we started fucking it up. There's a section about the mammoth steppes and how the mega-herbivores kept the world cooler by ensuring that the grasslands continued. He writes of the co-evolution of mega-herbivores and grass, and the extinction of these huge, slow-breeding creatures when faced with spear-wielding hominids. Their decline led to a change in climate which made existence harder for them. The earth has been dealing with the ways we have torn apart webs, simplified ecosystems, homogenised habitats and so on for tens of thousands of years. Now the resistance has become deadly.


Back to communication without words, I read this today in the novel Solar Storms by Linda Hogan - very good, about Native Americans:


Jere and Dora-Rouge talked all the next day. From what little I understood of the language, they talked about the time when everything was still alive. That’s what they remembered and missed. It was what all the old people longed for again, the time when people could merge with a cloud and help it rain, could become trees, one with bark, root, and leaf. People were more silent in those days. They listened. They heard.


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maplekey4
17 janv.

I read the piece by Andersson and how she refers to Haraway's 'staying with the trouble' etc. Yes, a good article and reminder.

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