WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.730 align:middle line:90% "The Language of the Birds." 00:00:03.730 --> 00:00:05.290 align:middle line:90% One. 00:00:05.290 --> 00:00:09.280 align:middle line:84% A man saw a bird and found him beautiful. 00:00:09.280 --> 00:00:12.820 align:middle line:84% The bird had a song inside him, and feathers. 00:00:12.820 --> 00:00:17.800 align:middle line:84% Sometimes the man felt like the bird and sometimes the man 00:00:17.800 --> 00:00:19.210 align:middle line:90% felt like a stone-- 00:00:19.210 --> 00:00:23.170 align:middle line:84% solid, inevitable-- but mostly he felt like a bird, 00:00:23.170 --> 00:00:27.250 align:middle line:84% or that there was a bird inside him. 00:00:27.250 --> 00:00:31.280 align:middle line:90% This went on for a long time. 00:00:31.280 --> 00:00:32.000 align:middle line:90% Two. 00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:34.490 align:middle line:84% A man saw a bird and wanted to paint it. 00:00:34.490 --> 00:00:38.690 align:middle line:84% The problem, if there was one, it 00:00:38.690 --> 00:00:41.060 align:middle line:84% was simply a problem with the question. 00:00:41.060 --> 00:00:43.910 align:middle line:90% Why paint a bird? 00:00:43.910 --> 00:00:45.140 align:middle line:90% Why do anything at all? 00:00:45.140 --> 00:00:49.340 align:middle line:84% Not how, because hows are easy-- series or sequence, 00:00:49.340 --> 00:00:52.310 align:middle line:84% one foot after the other-- but existentially 00:00:52.310 --> 00:00:56.390 align:middle line:90% why bother, what does it solve? 00:00:56.390 --> 00:00:58.610 align:middle line:84% And just because you want to paint 00:00:58.610 --> 00:01:01.280 align:middle line:84% a bird, do actually paint a bird, 00:01:01.280 --> 00:01:05.060 align:middle line:84% it doesn't mean you've accomplished anything. 00:01:05.060 --> 00:01:09.200 align:middle line:84% Who gets to measure the distance between experience 00:01:09.200 --> 00:01:11.570 align:middle line:90% and its representation? 00:01:11.570 --> 00:01:14.900 align:middle line:84% Who controls the lines of inquiry? 00:01:14.900 --> 00:01:16.040 align:middle line:90% We do. 00:01:16.040 --> 00:01:17.930 align:middle line:90% Anyone can. 00:01:17.930 --> 00:01:19.730 align:middle line:90% Blackbird, he says. 00:01:19.730 --> 00:01:23.240 align:middle line:90% So be it, indexed and normative. 00:01:23.240 --> 00:01:28.460 align:middle line:84% But it isn't a bird, it's a man in a bird suit, blue shoulders 00:01:28.460 --> 00:01:31.130 align:middle line:84% instead of feathers, because he isn't looking 00:01:31.130 --> 00:01:34.910 align:middle line:84% at a bird, real bird, as he paints, 00:01:34.910 --> 00:01:40.040 align:middle line:84% he is looking at his heart, which is impossible. 00:01:40.040 --> 00:01:44.330 align:middle line:84% Unless his heart is a metaphor for his heart, 00:01:44.330 --> 00:01:47.310 align:middle line:84% as everything is a metaphor for itself, 00:01:47.310 --> 00:01:50.510 align:middle line:84% so that looking at the paint is like looking 00:01:50.510 --> 00:01:54.830 align:middle line:84% at a bird that isn't there, with a song in its throat 00:01:54.830 --> 00:02:00.230 align:middle line:84% that you don't want to hear but you paint anyway. 00:02:00.230 --> 00:02:04.190 align:middle line:84% The hand is a voice that can sing what the voice will not, 00:02:04.190 --> 00:02:08.970 align:middle line:84% and the hand wants to do something useful. 00:02:08.970 --> 00:02:15.480 align:middle line:84% Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, 00:02:15.480 --> 00:02:22.230 align:middle line:84% I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart, 00:02:22.230 --> 00:02:24.720 align:middle line:90% says the heart. 00:02:24.720 --> 00:02:25.220 align:middle line:90% Three. 00:02:25.220 --> 00:02:28.610 align:middle line:90% 00:02:28.610 --> 00:02:31.040 align:middle line:90% They looked at the animals. 00:02:31.040 --> 00:02:33.480 align:middle line:84% They looked at the walls of the cave. 00:02:33.480 --> 00:02:36.320 align:middle line:84% This is earlier, these are different men. 00:02:36.320 --> 00:02:41.570 align:middle line:84% They painted in torchlight-- red mostly, sometimes black-- 00:02:41.570 --> 00:02:45.080 align:middle line:90% mammoth, lion, horse, bear-- 00:02:45.080 --> 00:02:50.510 align:middle line:84% things on a wall, in profile or superimposed, dynamic 00:02:50.510 --> 00:02:53.060 align:middle line:90% and alert. 00:02:53.060 --> 00:02:56.270 align:middle line:84% They weren't animals but they looked 00:02:56.270 --> 00:03:00.200 align:middle line:84% like animals, enough like animals to make it confusing, 00:03:00.200 --> 00:03:03.710 align:middle line:84% meant something but the meaning was slippery. 00:03:03.710 --> 00:03:07.730 align:middle line:84% It wasn't there but it remained, looked like the thing 00:03:07.730 --> 00:03:10.610 align:middle line:84% but wasn't the thing-- was a second thing, 00:03:10.610 --> 00:03:12.980 align:middle line:84% following a second set of rules-- 00:03:12.980 --> 00:03:14.900 align:middle line:90% and it was too late. 00:03:14.900 --> 00:03:18.500 align:middle line:84% Their power over it was no longer absolute. 00:03:18.500 --> 00:03:21.780 align:middle line:90% 00:03:21.780 --> 00:03:28.220 align:middle line:84% What is alive, and what isn't, and what should we do about it? 00:03:28.220 --> 00:03:31.730 align:middle line:84% Theories-- about the nature of the thing. 00:03:31.730 --> 00:03:34.760 align:middle line:90% 00:03:34.760 --> 00:03:37.500 align:middle line:90% And of the soul. 00:03:37.500 --> 00:03:39.860 align:middle line:90% Because people die. 00:03:39.860 --> 00:03:42.870 align:middle line:84% The fear-- that nothing survives. 00:03:42.870 --> 00:03:45.520 align:middle line:90% 00:03:45.520 --> 00:03:49.510 align:middle line:84% The greater fear-- that something does. 00:03:49.510 --> 00:03:55.750 align:middle line:84% They huddled closer, shoulder to shoulder, 00:03:55.750 --> 00:03:59.080 align:middle line:84% painted themselves in herds, all together and apart 00:03:59.080 --> 00:04:00.130 align:middle line:90% from the rest. 00:04:00.130 --> 00:04:02.770 align:middle line:84% They looked at the sky, and at the mud, 00:04:02.770 --> 00:04:06.310 align:middle line:84% and at their hands in the mud, and at their dead friends 00:04:06.310 --> 00:04:08.320 align:middle line:90% in the mud. 00:04:08.320 --> 00:04:09.820 align:middle line:90% This went on for a long time. 00:04:09.820 --> 00:04:12.520 align:middle line:90% 00:04:12.520 --> 00:04:14.230 align:middle line:90% Four. 00:04:14.230 --> 00:04:17.410 align:middle line:84% To be a bird, or a flock of birds 00:04:17.410 --> 00:04:24.680 align:middle line:84% doing something together, one or many, starling or murmuration. 00:04:24.680 --> 00:04:31.310 align:middle line:84% To be a man on a hill, or all the men on all the hills, 00:04:31.310 --> 00:04:36.830 align:middle line:84% or half a man shivering in the flock of himself. 00:04:36.830 --> 00:04:40.040 align:middle line:90% These are some choices. 00:04:40.040 --> 00:04:43.355 align:middle line:90% The night sky is vast and wide. 00:04:43.355 --> 00:04:47.340 align:middle line:90% 00:04:47.340 --> 00:04:52.380 align:middle line:84% A man had two birds in his head-- not in his throat, 00:04:52.380 --> 00:04:53.910 align:middle line:90% not in his chest-- 00:04:53.910 --> 00:04:58.600 align:middle line:84% and the birds would sing all day never stopping. 00:04:58.600 --> 00:05:05.290 align:middle line:84% The man thought to himself, one of these birds is not my bird. 00:05:05.290 --> 00:05:07.320 align:middle line:90% The birds agreed. 00:05:07.320 --> 00:05:08.000 align:middle line:90%