Creature-Crow - Pest Control & Parasites (updated)

 

 

Pest Control

 

 

Are crows pests? As city birds they are somehow different from pigeons and seagulls, they appear more aloof, literally, always high above, almost never seen down at your feet.

 

Once, whilst leaving my home for my walk into the city, I was met with a pest control van parked on the curb. Firstly, ‘pest control’ is a strange phrase, but one which is to be expected from us anthros. The word stems from the Latin "pestis" meaning a “deadly contagious disease; a curse or a bane”, and surely the irony of this epistemological definition when paired with the word 'control' cannot be lost in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

(Plague dominance, disease wrangling, nuisance supremacy: Corvid-19).

 

Moreover, to be cursed with pests appeals greatly to Mythic-Crow - who we will meet shortly - as this implies some wrongdoing on the cursed party. As if, for example’s sake only, we are the provoker of such pests in the first place. (Surely you don’t mean me?)

 

 

 

“Eliminate LDT: Pest, Bird and Environmental Operations”.

 

As if to give the whole undertaking a more civilised feel, the subtle Americanisation of ‘exterminate’ has been toned down here to a quaint ‘eliminate’ which sounds much more professional and polite than its potential counterpart. However, what is more fascinating is the distinctions in the terms listed: first pest, then bird, then environmental operations. What is it exactly that separates these first two categories? Pest and bird; many people would argue they are one and the same, but surely without humans to pester the pests would cease to be as such, or at least named, denoted, domineered, in this way. Furthermore, the singling out of ‘birds’ makes it ambiguous as to why these birds are being eliminated – perhaps there are government pigeon-spies among us that need to be taken down? Eliminate LTD describe their efforts in the elimination of rats and insects but stop short with the eradication (a halfway point between exterminate and eliminate perhaps?) of birds and opt instead for the bird-proofing of homes and technology – not a dead pigeon in sight.

 

Why the distinction? Because we are human, and this human compulsion is hard to resist.

 

It seems that in the working definition of the term as something which is to be eliminated (‘exterminate’ will now forever haunt and flap around this term): ‘bird’ is not synonymous with ‘pest’. However, they are still pests in the soft-core affiliation of the word; your next-door neighbour might be a pest, but where eradicating humans is a jail sentence, exterminating rats and insects is a respectable vocation. Therefore, to circle back to the opening question, it seems that crow can be a pest but, at least in the city, has not quite risen to the level of a parasite.

 

 

 

(It is bad luck to kill a crow)

 

Tell that to the farmer.

 

(always taking, never giving).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parasites

To attempt to further tease out the relationship Crow has to the concept or potential of the parasite, we can find that in the writing of Michel Serres’ - translated from French - this term develops a double meaning. Where parasite is a term that can be used to describe something that feeds off, lives inside and eats with, or at the table of, another, can also mean something else in another tongue; in French parasite can come to mean a break in a message, static or disconnection (Serres 2007). Within this definition we can sneak our first glimpse of Creature-Crow and deem them a definitive, double-down parasite. As carrion feeders, crows primarily feed off others, picking and pecking around in the grassy space, moreover- the interrupting Caw of the Parasite can be heard in the city or the country, perched in a tree or a lamppost, squawking from the houses opposite. Therefore, within another tongue, with a translation - Crow becomes Parasite.

 

However, what of man himself?

 

For to “dress in leather and adorn ourselves with feathers” is to “live within the animals (we) devoured.” (Serres 2007 pp.10). Therefore, for man, “everything and everyone around him is a hospitable space”. (Serres 2007 pp.24)

 

"We parasite each other and live amidst parasites. Which is more or less a way of saying that they constitute our environment.” (Serres 2007 pp.10)

 

Within this parasitic nature of man we have uncovered, we come to understand the system we are tethered within. For Serres, we are the ‘country rat’: we cringe at the complicated, we do not “understand that chance, risk, anxiety and even disorder can consolidate a system. (We trust) only simple, rough, casual relations; (…) that disorder always destroys order.” Therefore, how many of these country rats - how many of us - have “built such homogenous, cruel systems upon the horror of disorder and noise” (Serres 2007 pp.14) this disruption that exists underneath, down deeper and down, our reality? We have built our stagnated lives atop this turbulence, this parasitic environment, we deny these ideas of flux, change, chance.

Man, lives as the parasite does, he eats at another’s table, so to speak. He interrupts the messages of nature, adorns himself with another’s skin, fur, coat. But Crow - Crow interrupts this system with her cry.

 

 

Hear it out, literally.

 

The Caw of the Crow is the disruption that will destroy the order of man's disruption - one which he has built his systems upon. A Caw of Ecological Awakening. Breaking apart the murder of our epoch, dismembering it.

 

Everything feeds off or from, interrupts and disrupts, another. The chain. Everything follows, as Derrida shall be seen to say. You are in front, or you are behind, you are feeding, then chasing, chasing the rats, chasing the crows off your field. The crows who bring the disorder, the unanticipated anticipation of the start, the shock, the jolt, the jump up and flapping and fleeing.

 

Parasites are in us, of us, are us, they take control, they incur static, breaks in messages, break-down of communication to the subconscious brain but also body, they interrupt, incur violations and render creatures vulnerable, render our frameworks useless, bringing the new, bringing the other.

 

Imagine the inane looping of this cycle; a parasite on the land of man, the parasitic shot of the parasite’s gun rendering the parasite no more. The parasites on the parasite crawl off. Man strings up the parasite as a warning to others. Another cycle: A parasite frequents the field of a parasite, the parasite cages, traps the parasite and his parasites, to lure other parasites to come and repeat the first cycle. This goes on and on, down and down, until something happens, someone decides to flip out over this sequence … but we are getting ahead of ourselves.