Loneliness, more or less.

I'm writing this while staying away from home (during June and early July) for work on the EURO, but before I went the park crows had been making sure that I didn't forget them. They'd spot me parking up outside the house and fly over, landing opposite, to call for food. Or they would, like this one, eye me in the garden. I wonder what they'll make of my absence.

It's interesting to realise that you are part of a more-than-human project of world-making. I am an element in the lives of these birds, who both observe me and impact me. They witness my movements and dictate them.

I could, of course, fail to notice, refuse to pay attention. That's the thing, isn't it? By refusing to pay attention to the world, we refuse to be shaped by it and then, presumably, become misfits, anomalies. Academic Harry Wels stresses the need for noticing: "Radical empathy through the art of noticing is based on a wise and kind curiosity and constant alertness on what might be overlooked to the detriment of striving for a radical empathy." Earlier in the same text, he writes:

The essentialist mind-body binary, as well as the culture-nature divide which is in sync with, and paralleling the mind-body binary, were both discarded [in most southern African ontologies] for embracing inclusivity as enchanted webs of significance, inspired by San cosmologies and tracking practices. Empathy is no longer restricted to humans, but stretches as far as the senses and the mind can carry it, into enchanted and spirited landscapes full of shared sentience, sensuality and multiple meanings and ambiguities (cf. Myburgh, 2013; Latour, 2017).

I find that inspiring. And that leads me to an act of poetic empathy.... this is CC's friend's wonderful poem inspired by a photograph of a crow.

Crow

Karen Dennison

Both witchfinder and witch, crow is cloaked

in night and shadow, ghosts of oil slicks.

Crow’s black lets sunlight dance and drum

on her feathers, let’s heat spirit the breeze.

Crow rattles danger, soothes herself with caws

of chants and spells. Steampunk crow

grips a fallen bough with mechanical claws

the colour of storm clouds. Crow looms

against the sky, plague-doctor beak stuffed

with herbs that smell sweet. Crow unwraps

her capes of wings, fans the air with pointed

hands, sweeps high. Crow harvests voices lifted

by wind, learns each human’s shape. At day’s close,

a coven gathers. The many roost as one.