Introduction (Updated)

 

A space between two roads, a hemmed in space, a sacred place.

A ‘magic circle’ if you please.

This space is alive with liminality and animality, constantly touched on and scavenged by birds, yet humans almost never enter the space. Human traces, however, are rife, bin bags, discarded masks, plastic bottles etc. I began to see Crow here on my daily walk in and out the city, they would fly past me with items in their mouths, swoop and veer in the air above and they could always be seen hopping around in the grassy area itself.

Recently, this area of grass was scalped by man – the turf removed and sent somewhere else – a turf translocation, transposing of top-soil. This was a great event for all the birds in the near vicinity of course, a great many worms and critters were consumed that day, but Crow lorded over all activity; seen fighting off pigeons and even seagulls to protect their domain, their space, sacred site, magic circle – birthplace of the Crowly Trinity.  

 

 

This is where we shall witness Crow, this is where we will investigate and explore her, him, them.

Once we have discovered this Crowly Trinity, Whole-Crow, as a Crow swoops and swerves in the wind, so will we; first we shall tumble Down, the fall, the failings, the symptoms of humankind, and secondly we shall flip and switch; heading Up witnessing and noting all sorts of sensorial, cawtographical and metaphysical concepts as we go.

This swooping of the crow is gleefully mimicked, in the writing of Michel Serres, as he “suggests that the process of collaboration and contestation between bodies is not random or unstructured, but confirms to the strange logic of vortices, spirals, and eddies, and this logic (…) recurs at all scales and locations.” (Bennett 2010 pp.118)

These swooping, vying, turbulent modes of movement between bodies, objects, subjects, animals, humans and non, extend further beyond our eyes and the Crow, these movements align with deep time and historical moments as all lives, all existences, are happening, living and dying, revealing and withdrawing, in this form, not a circle, as “there are only vortices (…) spirals that shift, that erode.” (Serres 2018 pp.85), but rather a looping, swooping, one which collapses and disintegrates at the same rate in which it is built, like a bird instinctively swerving, swooping, falling and flying.

Therefore, are our lives, all lives, not already intrinsically caught up with, tethered to, the icon of the bird? Why not then, the Crow? Crows appear in murders, as holes in our sight, burning blind spots - as if warning of an incoming migraine - they caw and hark their interrupting cries, they alight our superstitious, instructive, antecedent brain, they speak of our doom and nihilism, their dark colour and lore all tied up with a warning of tomorrow the death will come.

 

We must now meet The Crow, the Crow and the Holy Crow. Or rather, The Creature, The Mythical and the Symbolic Crow. One whole heap of a Crowly Trinity.