I have been neglecting this blog lately, so I ought to show you what I've been up to. This is the opening to a novella about birds, entitled ETHICS, that I wrote a little over a year ago. The first part is about a songbird, the second part is about the cuckoo that has parasitized the songbird's nest, and the third part is a stripped down version of what I imagine the Ethics would have been like if Spinoza had been a bird (sorry).
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Streaking
over the earth, the songbird lifts itself up slightly and then,
folding its wings, drops into a shallow swoop toward cover as a flash
of lightning bursts and gutters, and then, virtually in the same
moment, a thunderclap swats the bird to the ground. The bird's skull
fractures, with a crack that sets its jaw awry, and the pain and
shock of crashing is doubled and redoubled with the searing, sugary
torture of the split bone. The blasted bird lies turned onto its
side, stunned in the tall grass, still dry, though whipped by the
wind, which has begun to stink.
Suffering
is playing all around the bird like that stinking wind. Suddenly,
she sees the fire. The dream is in the light, the gold and scarlet
color, the almost inaudible sound it makes, the impossibly nimble
dance it's doing in place, and in the way it swells, as if the bird
were hurtling up to meet it and only it, unmoored among all the other
fixed things the bird can see. The noise of the fire is like the
song of an unfamiliar type of familiar animal. There's a humming,
like a swarm of bees. There's snapping like twigs, rustling like dry
leaves, but then none of these familiar noises are ever produced at
once by the same thing, not in any organized way. The fire thing
must have its own organization, which is the reason it sings in the
way it does, using the most unusual things as voices. The coloring
is strange because the noises have no associations whatever with
bright things, like sparkling water running; but then the ocean also
sparkles and roars. Incandescent gold sparkled into ruby and sullen
bloody scarlet, lacings of symmetrically tongued crimsons and
carmines, luminously tawny and sun-glazed sand. The fire looms over
her now like a tree growing out of nothing, the stinking, coiling
brilliance in front of her seems to want to poison and devour her
senses like a swarm of vicious insects, but it is mysteriously
contained in itself, even as it fights to hatch itself out of its own
shape. The songbird stares in awe at the coilings of towering
scarlet monster rearing itself out of nothing, no roots, nothing but
grass and the level ground, taking in its writhing shapelessness, its
struggles within its bottomless shape, as if it were a huge poisoned
animal convulsing and sick, vomiting itself. The fire, set by
lightning, dancing out of its irregular footprint and throwing itself
impetuously up, up. Now it channels itself along its length to
heighten this leaf, standing bolt upright out of its spiny, whirling
mass, and now that leaf shrinks back down and becomes a spine while
the fire, which seems to be both the whole thing and a sort of
darting shootingness inside it, transfers its upward groping into
another limb adjacent to the first.
Horrorstruck,
she stares at the beaded lashings sliding along the dry stalks of the
grass only inches away from her. She struggles, her skull flaring
and crackling with every movement, her head heavy and ungainly,
pulling her down to strike it again against the ground and causing
the flames already lining the crevice to pop. She watches helplessly
as a feeble sticklike arm of the fire effortlessly encircles her.
She is trapped inside the fire. She screams. Stares. Screams.
Stares. She cannot balance, get her wings out to fly. Then a chance
contraction concentrates her will into the effort to rise to her
feet. Just then, a lazy flirt of wind dashes a scrap of flame
directly onto her, and she catches fire, the flames sucking greedily
at her neck and face. Her right eye puckers, charring. The bird
flails wildly, battering herself against the ground, all her muscles
spasming. She falls on her right side and feels the cool of damp mud
through the heat.
The
pain is so total that it almost forces her out of herself somehow.
Her right side is slathered with mud. The right side of her face and
neck are smoking, but the flames are extinguished. Staggering, she
turns to look toward the fire with her one seeing eye, and sees that
there is a brownish hollow space inside it, returning her gaze like
an unexpected eye.
"This
is Reason" it says.
