28 August 2007
hommage a Olivier Messiaen
One of the charming peculiarities of watching the Giants play at Major Phone Company Park, picturesquely perched right on the shores of San Francisco Bay, is that the local seagulls always seem to know when the game is about to end. Late in the 8th inning they will start to circle and swoop overhead, waiting for us to stream out so they can be undisturbed as they attack whatever remnant hot dogs, kettle corn, or garlic fries have fallen on the concrete. So how do they know? Baseball, as its pastoral fans mention repeatedly, has no clock, so it can’t be that the gulls just descend the same time every day, because every game ends at a different time. And the gulls appear whether it’s a day game or a night game, so they aren’t just showing up at the same approximate time each evening, and I don’t think they’ve managed to figure out the concept of a “weekend” much less the whole “Thursdays are day games” thing. So my theory was that somehow they were hearing Take Me Out to the Ballgame at the 7th inning stretch and that was their signal. But I wasn’t sure that – here’s where, in retrospect, I have no idea what I was thinking, or, more accurately, not thinking –birds would hear music that way. So I’m watching a game the other day, and the camera shows the gulls starting to gather, and the guys in the booth wonder how the birds know, and I remember my theory, and I think – Uh, yes, duh, moron, I think birds can understand and use song as a signal. It’s so very obvious that I could barely comprehend why I had even hesitated – it was as if a sudden lightning flash had illuminated the utter deep darkness and vacancy in which I had been wandering, and I had a sudden apprehension of what it’s like to be densely stupid. And I thought, Is this what it’s like to be George W. Bush? Bird-brained would be a step up.
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4 comments:
How kind of you to not mention my part in this, but I must confess that I, the science teacher, was equally puzzled by this phenomena and actually (gulp) wondered aloud if birds have good hearing.
Working in science actually often involves those flashes where you suddenly realize how wrong your prior thinking was. I think we all walk around with a certain amount of vacancy. My guess is that George W, like many others, never senses the darkness because nothing is ever there to illuminate it, not even his supposed religious conversion. The difference is that the rest of us don't send thousands of people to die due to our stupidity.
I was going to include you, but Bigfoot told me not to, though I can't imagine what he was doing in this area -- isn't it too far south for him? Actually, I cut your part because I know how hard you work and how much you know about what you do and out of context it just sounded like one of those things that could be read as "teachers like this are the problem with our schools! How could she not know that!"
The thing about my bafflement is not that I had to shake myself out of previously accepted theories (as if, say, I suddenly had to question the miasmal theory of disease) as that I wasn't comprehending something that is completely and utterly obvious and an easily observed natural phenomenon. In either case the Bush analogy applies. I wondered if the dark wandering without any illumination ever was equivalent to being like him. There's no illumination there. The only darkness is ignorance, as Feste tells us in Twelfth Night.
Ah, you're just starting to scratch the surface, my dear Patrick, but at least you've gotten further than our Commander in Chief. Remember, Messiaen saw god and the working of the cosmos through observing birds.
There's even a wonderful form of divination called "ornithomancy." According to Wikipedia, "it is the practice of Ancient Greek augury of birds. Though mainly regarding the birds' flights and songs, any action of the bird could have been interpreted as a method of foreseeing or foretelling, or could have been interpreted as a message from the gods. These omens were considered with the utmost seriousness by Greeks and Romans alike. This form of divination became one branch of Roman national religion, which had its own priesthood and practice. One notable example occurs in the Odyssey, when thrice an eagle appears, flying to the right, with a dead dove in its talons; this augury was interpreted as the coming of Odysseus, and the death of his wife's suitors."
"Further than our Commander-in-Chief" is not much -- it's one of those "tallest midget" things.
Funny you should mention avine augury -- I was just reading a New Yorker article from last May (surprisingly current for me) about a man who smuggled art out of India -- he's supposed to drive someone to Delhi, but a bird appears and "swooped in a peculiar pattern around the house" and the man announced it was bad luck and refused to proceed. There are worse ways of deciding how to proceed -- trusting neocons would be one -- and you never know when his ravens will go swooping back to the War Father.
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