Some Thoughts On Two Common Crows
A few days ago, I took an afternoon constitutional (aka a walk) with no fixed destination, like the ones we might have taken but this time by myself, and noticed a murder of crows.
It was snowing. Given my compulsive need to not waste a rare weather event, I thought the snow would be nice mise en scène for a stroll, like in a samurai manga about a ronin; but nope, it was wet and windy and miserable, like in a ronin reality about a beggar.* Yet there were the crows, basking in the cold, almost mocking my softness. But maybe that was just me. Somehow I assumed crows shun foul (get it?) weather. It sure didn’t look it. Crow don’t care. There might have been 50 of them, randomly(?) distributed on some exposed rocks by the water. Then one of them flew a short distance and landed on a large rock. A second or two or three later, another one landed on the same rock. In the popular consciousness, there’s some endearing but muddy belief about crows mating for life, isn’t there? So I watched them for a while to see if there was any evidence that they were ‘togethers.’ Specifically, to see if they would fly off simultaneously.
No fighting over food or territory. No exerting dominance. No harassment of any kind. Although no signs of affection either. Or cooperation. No interaction of any kind. Even so, they sure seemed full of “pairiness.” I looked around at the other crows. Some of them also looked paired. Or so it appeared until the bunches would shift and old “couples” separated and new ones formed. Then I remembered Poisson distribution Poisson Clumping. A term I still might not know about if you hadn’t told me. Then I remembered confirmation bias. Something else we might have discussed at one time.
Without the courtesy of a warning to its real or imagined partner, one of the two crows on the large rock flew away. Quickly. And for what felt like a corroborating amount of time, the second one did not follow. Observation debunked, right? If the story ended there, yes, but soon after the remaining bird suddenly took to the air in order to follow the other and even caught up to it. Confirmed? Well… almost at the same time, a third crow, I’m not sure where it came from, swooped by and caught up to the pair and you wouldn’t have known who’s who. Or whose is whose.
Just telling you about my day because, supposedly, I don’t tell anyone anything.
* For some reason it is a revelation every time it happens: walking in snow is a lot like walking in rain.
Jae-Ho
Susan Sontag, on Roland Barthes and his propensity for essay writing:
“It was not a question of knowledge…but of alertness, a fastidious transcription of what could be thought about something, once it swam into the stream of attention.”
Writing stuff down in words. Who knew?
I use to think writing, more so than speaking because of writing’s relative immutability, was a question of knowledge. I’ve looked ignorant enough times in writing that I had no need for it and writing certainly had no need for me. No, it was enough to verbally converse (that is, quickly exchange and adapt ideas) with a friend, possibly over some eggs.
But then there is that second part of the Sontag quote. Just transcribing something from the stream of attention allows for more branches of thought, simply because the original trunk is persistent so that it can be revisited and branched. Writing allows me to be less linear in my thinking. I find thinking quietly and speaking tends to be relatively sequential, which is useful for communicating but not as useful for exploring.
For example, this one response has probably seen about three iterations that barely resemble each other.