Crow Heiroglyphs

The following images I photographed and edited this morning. I found myself delighted that these flying breatheren were curious about me and my silly technology as I am about them. I wanted these images to be used somehow creatively by my friend Shams Abdul Jami, who also goes by the name "Wounded Crow." I think the images may be part of a song.

I thought of naming this piece "Crowlingo" but became afraid it would have meanings that might expose me to the shadows of my own ignorance, ethnicity and racism.

Still elsewhere there are crows, black-birds circling round Wallace Stephens' poems to blackbirds. The world is as immense as the golden upthrust beauty of black crows painted on a shimmering Japanese ornamental screen, dulled and subtly undertoned by the weight of imperfection, the birds fly off in all directions and for that moment all senses are lost.

A friend who worked with me, analyzed my dreams and desires in the early 1990's referred to the poems of Ted Hughes: sometimes one must take flight and fly above the valley of one's own darkness. I was enamoured of dark paintings, everything was about the amplitude of darkness that showed just the narrowest sliver of light.

Now I think of these crows as making heiroglyphs against the background of blue sky or green field in morning sunlight. The sun is a heiroglyph as well, absorbed within the folds of these feathers.

W. G. Sebald writes "As soon as I began to write, time began to move quicker, and picked up with an alarming rapidity." To see the world as heiroglyph is to induce the world to write into consciousness a symbol, and the "Truth" (with a capital "T") of symbols that invites us to our real dwelling in this universe. Time picks up tempo because it is intensified through the writing split and line of consciousness: the black of the crow's body against the background of space and emptiness.

Werner Herzog stated (in an interview with Henry Rollins) that what we truly long for is the truth, not facts. Facts and information (and the explosion of information in this information age) merely create norms... truth seeks one toward transforming one's very heart. (Herzog did not say this precisely, I am losely interpreting him here, but I think he would not mind too much.)

Ted Hughes:

Crow Blacker Than Ever

When God, disgusted with man, Turned towards heaven, And man, disgusted with God, Turned towards Eve, Things looked like falling apart.
But Crow CrowCrow nailed them together, Nailing heaven and earth together-
So man cried, but with God's voice. And God bled, but with man's blood.
Then heaven and earth creaked at the jointWhich became gangrenous and stank-A horror beyond redemption.
The agony did not diminish.
Man could not be man nor God God.
The agony
Grew.
Crow
Grinned
Crying: "This is my Creation,"
Flying the black flag of himself.