Informant38

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My ex-girlfriend who happens to be my neighbor, and her son, both think I'm nuts. Among the many valid and invalid reasons for this is the time I made the mistake of telling him that birds talk to me. When I said that, I was convinced of the rightness of it, not the factual rightness but the, holiness I guess, the alignment of that with the beauty and truth of the world. well it wasn't too long afterwards that I realized it was just more proof of my isolation and disconnectedness. Trying to explain what I meant was useless, to minds raised and kept on cartoon level animal spirits. It became a kind of Rubicon. A place I left behind the obedient servant, the good soldier I was half-beaten into becoming.
I woke up this morning thinking about the first time it was driven home to me. I was in Graton, down by the swamp there, my toyota had broken down, I was filled with despair and frustration. didn't know how to fix what I didn't know was wrong with it. I remember saying to myself out loud, "well I'll just kill myself, fuck this shit." and from fairly close by in the bushes came this bird sound that had all the emotional accuracy of any human communication and it was sad, loving, compassionate, and most importantly it had the kind of dependency that is a component of love between equals. the helplessness of women loving men, the bewildered helplessness of men loving women. but not sexual and it's taken more words to describe than there was message there. but it was undeniable. and of course that made me even more frustrated. because then I had to think about all that. and it also meant I couldn't just bail.
so that was the first time in this particular flow. I seem to recall being in a house on Main Street in Salinas with Famous Bob. This would have been in 67 or 68. and we were talking about this and that, I mentioned I'd eaten morning glory seeds some time before, hadn't liked it, and how it had felt , the goofiness of that and his sincerity. and then there was this crescendo. this mounting intensifying symphony of bird song, this is in Salinas right? the pesticide capital of Central California, and this bird choir right outside in the trees, this choir, which is too small a word just lifts and makes it almost impossible to talk . I remember that real clearly. so there was stuff then. probably all along. but I can't get at too much before the Big Disjuncture whenever that was.
so before I disappear into one of the holes of modern living, I wanted to clarify some of what I meant when I said that to my ex-girlfriend's son. there is an obviously limited range of expression available, just technically. only so many notes and combinations. and maybe something about the actual emotional makeup of birds themselves. which puts this right up against the monsters of science who insist without any reason that birds of course have no emotions, and the monsters of religion who insist of course that birds have no souls, and so on. I'm just working with what I can't ignore. and that's what redeems it for me. at that moment in Graton I didn't want it. Wanted to be alone in the world so I could leave. But no.
I have no name for, no idea of, what it is that drives all this. Though I think it's pretty obvious it's bigger and more wonderful than some kind of predator/prey zoology. I just wanted to emphatically state, that I didn't come to the conclusion that birds talk to me because I wanted to see that, far from it, it was the opposite exactly. it has been a comfort at times, and a great burden most of the time, because no message comes through that I can understand that would lead me. just comments mostly. yes. no. oh no. that's right. watch out. uh-oh. like that. except for blue jays. who always seem to be disgusted.