Deeper Down

 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, cartographical and metaphysical concepts as we go. This swooping of the crow is not dissimilar from 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 encompasses politics as much as physics, economics as much as biology, psychology as much as meteorology: it recurs at all scales and locations.” (Bennett 2010 pp.118)

We can see that these motions now extend further beyond our eyes and the Crow, these movements align with deep time and historical moments, that of “flood and fire, of plethora and exhaustion, of vertical growth and sudden fall, of accumulation and drought, in which history (…) rises and descends” (Serres 2018 pp.85)

Jane Bennett comments on Serres theory, describing it as “one vortical process, though it can be parsed theoretically into stages: first a “fall” or conative impulse of matter-energy, then an aleatory swerve that produces crash encounters between protein bits, then a stage of confused turbulence, then a concealment or crystallisation of matter into bodies, then a decay, decline, and dissemination of the form. And finally: a new fall, a fresh swerve, a different configuration of turbulent forces, another set of formations, a different rate of sequence and decline.” (Bennett 2010 pp.119) Our lives are happening, living and dying is happening, 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 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 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 climate nihilism, their dark colour and lore all tied up with a warning of tomorrow the death will come. The Crow, the Crow and the Holy Crow. Or rather, The Creature, The Myth and the Symbolic Crow. One whole heap of a Crowly Trinity.