Anthro-Animal (updated)

In the mind and pen of man, crows are constantly found to be burdening the weight of pestilence, flying the threat of death, or acting as a trickster; and this association placed them in ominous steed for the modern and postmodern era wherein images or references of Crow and corvid subspecies feature in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, O’Casey and Dickens. They also appear in the artwork of Picasso, Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin; as well as ample modern-day renditions. Layers of myth, superstition and lore have muddied the mottled feathers of crow, loaded him with debris and detritus, the trace and mark of man all over his image. 

In modern literature, Crow is often portrayed as self-centred, arrogant, and male. Through time, this fictional Crow has dipped and swerved, changed direction and doubled back, depending on what tongue was speaking, when these things were uttered and in what context they were ascribed. However, if there is one thing that has held steady to the identity of Fictional-Crow, it is that he is made up of a congealing of the misconceptions, exaggerations, and inaccuracies picked from the corpse of sensorial evidence of Creature-Crow. Everything that Fictional-Crow is, comes from human tongues.

(It is bad luck to kill a crow)

In Boria Sax’s book, Crow (2017), the front cover image is a rendition of our mysterious bird. The illustration is passably realistic; however, it is off. Stare at it and you begin to see that it is an amalgam, a collage of photos, textures and layers of crow-ness. Not the real thing. Therefore, this crow comes ‘alive’ in our minds, and - of course - speaks in a deep male voice, when he says-

‘On asking questions of why Crows gather together in parks, “every answer will tell something about the crowds but a lot more about the speaker.” (pp.163 emphasis added)’

Of course, we know Creature-Crow cares not - observe her haphazard strut - she will keep caw-ing and hark-ing and pervading your back garden whether you are fearful or disapproving of these things or not, however, Fictional-Crow is so steeped in his own mythos, imbued with traits, idiosyncrasies and trope ticks –

- feasting on bloody fiction -

- twitching and uncomfortably ill-as-ease with his own bristling and fluctuating identity and other-selves that he has become a shapeshifter. To twitch, to blink, to flip a page is to see Fiction-Crow changed again. We have put too much onto him, for he is in constant flux. Forever changing, tricking and deceiving. This mingling ambiguity makes crow even more complicit in this duplicity, our Freudian double, doppelganger, uncanny bird, appearing again. Weird, eerie liminal beast, with all the power of a million ambiguous birds behind him. In some of the darkest days of his life, Ted Hughes wrote of this crow, the universal Fiction-Crow, and as if harking back to the dark ages, this is the most bloody, black and barbarous rendition of Crow in poetic form we have seen in modern times. Here Fiction-Crow sees himself as greater than god, having the hubris to bind god and man together, and lord himself over the achievement.

 

“When God, disgusted with man,

Turned towards heaven.

And man, disgusted with God,

Turned towards Eve,

Things looked like falling apart.

 

But Crow . . Crow

Crow nailed them together,

 

(…)

 

The agony

Grew.

Crow

Grinned” (Hughes 1970)

 

This invention of this Crow-Character, inspired primarily from myth and religion, took on the form of the grief, pain, accusations and mourning Hughes was living through. The grief from the death of Sylvia Plath and the accusations of Hughes being responsible for her suicide turned Crow into a bird of dark, glossy black cruelty, persistent fame-instilled insuperability, gory, spotted, stained and high above as he is seen “flying the black flag of himself” (Hughes 1970); purposefully muddy as to whether this is a reflection or inflection of the writer himself.