Crows
Crows are everywhere. We all see them. They fly alone over forested mountain tops and crowd city parks. They amplify farmers' fields with their cawing and pick suburban roadways clean. Poets need them when they need something nihilistic and the inclusion is never questioned. Like all corvids crows are brilliant, coolly negotiating what they need from the world. They're carrion eaters, corpse eaters, and we mark them for this, and any association with witchcraft they may have seems silly until we see one, alone on a fence post, shifting its eyes for a seed to poach or a nest to rob. We've so long made them monsters that we loathe them, and their seeming detachment from the grim way they go about their lives is something devilish to us, evil even. The truth, however, is different. Crows are like all living things. We've assigned human meaning to them but their true nature remains out of touch. They're no more demonic than the metaphors that make them so, but simply creatures on the earth who've earned a niche and fill it admirably. It's true, though, that crows can teach us something of wickedness, if not the condition outright then certainly the traits and acts by which we define it. All you have to do is find an owl roost deep in the forest, a great-horned's, and listen as first one then another crow finds it. You'll hear the cries rise to a pitch as bird after bird rushes in, and if you don't understand crows any better you'll recognize the fear filling the valley. It's your own, and everyone's whom you know, man and animal. Most people don't know this about crows, the fear, and none of us can come to terms with evil. We feel the hatred and see the violence by which we describe it, but evil itself stays beyond our collective horizon, remaining with the clutch of questions - such as defining god or love - that every individual must revisit within themselves over and again. For evil, though, and even hatred and violence, any understanding must begin with its source, fear, and crows are the best if most unlikely place to find it.
My father is a hunter, not a shooter. His profoundest pleasure in hunting comes from taking in all the nature he can while pursuing game, in his case ruffed grouse. Squeezing a trigger is certainly part of it, but the consummation is nothing without the rest. He never shoots trap and considers game farms - where birds are released from cages - little different than a skeet course. During his life, though, there is one exception. Crows, which normally possess a potent intellect and the caution to attend it, lose themselves in the presence of owls. Hawks stir them as well, but when one spots an owl roosted in daylight the call goes out and the mobs arrive, exchanging their usual cool-headedness for bloodlust. For the human part, teenage boys have their own susceptibility to bloodlust. They exercise it in many ways, and one of these involves securing a great-horned owl decoy to a fence post then hiding themselves nearby. Crows show up by the dozens.
There's few stories my father has told with a timbre of regret but this was one of them. No one, obviously, eats crows, and the only reason to shoot them is to kill them. Once while in high school he and a friend took a mounted great-horned out to a cut corn field, fixing it to a cedar post. Taking their shotguns and several boxes of shells they then hid in the brushline and waited. Owls, especially great-horned's, do eat crows, being one of the few species that targets them. While crows roost at night the silent owls - able to see a black bird in the black night - pick them off their perches. Crows know this, and come for them when they can, always when the table is reversed and an owl is itself caught in daylight. His friend had done this before. In the gray of the fall day a passing crow veered down from its overhead flight and circled the decoy. It landed on a fence post a few down from the stuffed owl and looked over. The friend signaled my father to wait. A caw went out in the valley, then another. Two more crows came seemingly from nowhere and added to the noise. Soon the area in front of them was alive with black birds, perching and flying, circling and cawing, and all of them threatening in the worst way the placid killer on the post.
His friend shot first. A bird dropped dead, and my father, who knew crows to be among the most cautious creatures around, expected the frenzy to vanish as fast as it had arrived. Nothing happened. The dead bird lay with its fingery wing feathers wagging in the breeze, but the horde above didn't notice. More, rather, came in, intensifying the bustle. My father shot now, too, and bird after bird fell until a couple dozen lay among the buzzed corn stalks. Nothing - not the gun blasts nor the commotion in the brush nor their dead and dying companions around them - kept the crows off that owl. An errant shot finally knocked the decoy off its perch and the crows were tipped off. They circled for a moment then seeped back into the valley hardwood. My father and his friend picked up their shells and the damaged decoy, leaving the crows where they lay. He told me this not out of pride but caution. I was entering adolescence myself and his primary aim was re-iteration, that animals shouldn't be killed that aren't put to some form of human use. He'd killed those birds for the sake of killing them and the shame he felt didn't need to be stated. His second aim was natural history. The crows had lost their fear, he said. In the presence of an owl - their only regular predator - they'd lost all caution and banded together in collective passion. To my knowledge my father has nearly always been right regarding the natural world. On this, though, he was only half right. The crows had certainly lost their caution, but this in no way means they'd lost their fear. Fear, in fact, and the hatred it engenders, were fully present that day.
We cloak fear. I can't speak for other animals, but as humans we bury it unknowingly with every trait we can, from bravery and honor to violence and hatred, often mingling several at once in a desperate, subconscious effort to inter our fear, specifically that of death. In death we embark, leaving the known for the unknown, and no matter how curious we may be or how much someone may suffer on earth, very few people look forward to dying. In life we're familiar, and as fervently as many of us may believe in a detailed afterlife, everyone at some level understands death for what it is, a transition into the unfamiliar. There's no sign of any kind to indicate what transpires, and the high plausibility that our lives and souls and identities may be snuffed out looms ominously. This, in turn, instills fear, that of utter unfamiliarity and possible annihilation, an emotion that itself breeds hatred. We don't understand much of the violence we do to one another, but in the search often turn away from its primary source, this primitive fear.
Isolated incidents, of course, have more easily traced causes. Murders and savage beatings, even torture, can stem from jealousy to greed to the whole range of human capacity. Likewise, the grander violence - that of sweeping wars and deliberate, calculated slaughter - often has readily seen secular causes as the impetus, such as power, intolerance, or a thirst for resources. Given the horrors we perform on one another, though, none of these do in full, particularly when it comes to warfare and the rape, killing, and cultural desolation it leaves behind. We possess a rationality too acute to be gulled into butchering ourselves for gold or oil alone, or even an argument over scripture. What we often call evil, then, must mostly pulse from the irrational, or at least our fear of it, and this fear and this irrationality find their base elements in two places, death and god.
Death, of course, the act, is rational. We know we die. The heart stops and the brain shuts down and everything we've built our lives toward ceases. God, however, is the concept we've fashioned for what comes next, which is entirely irrational. By creating god, both the word and the notion, we've manufactured a symbolic landscape we can travel to whenever the need to chart the unknown arises. Religions, mysticism, and spirituality of every kind – including atheism – live in this landscape, and it goes great lengths to allay our fears of death and an ungoverned universe. A flaw, however, exists, and it's obvious. As comforting as it may be and as much stability as it provides most of us know at least on a liminal level that this arrangement of symbols is just that, symbolic. Life and death - both their meaning and longevity - can't be known rationally, a knowledge that lodges itself in our psyche and throbs. Even if we don't realize it, we fear, and like all fears this one needs release.
When people, then, make war on one another, they're at least in part making war on god, or the out-of-reach answers to what our lives mean and what happens when we die. During our daily lives we're scarcely if ever aware of the incremental frustration this anxiety causes. We most often exorcise it, moreover, in the landscape of symbol, the place of religion and philosophy, ritual and spirituality, but it's worked out in other ways too. Generations may pass in a given culture before this comes to be, but it touches every corner of the world. War erupts, and whatever earthly reasons we have for throwing ourselves into it we also lunge into the irrational with all the ferocity, violence, and hatred we assign to evil in an effort to purge our implacable fears of death and the afterlife. We rip each other apart in order to get at the silence that absorbs our inquiries, and no matter how we dress it in symbol and myth, that silence - maddening, stifling, and brutish - is god, or everything we'll never understand.
A soldier, a German on World War II's Eastern Front, wrote in a letter shortly before being killed: All connections are broken. Where is Man? Anger roars through all the cracks in the earth.
He was trying to understand evil. The violence and hatred he saw and committed himself were unfathomable, shattering the bonds holding the best parts of humanity together. Goodness was gone, replaced by horror and decay. Everyone feels this. War is unquestionably irrational, though at least part of it can be explained. We fear and despise the silence of death and the silence of god, and not being able to get at what's invisible turn our anger and violence, our evil, onto ourselves, an entity we can see. Crows aren't human, but they'll teach you this. The fear of death and the possible ephemerality of our own souls isn't the province of man alone. Spend some time in the woods. Any season or habitat will do. I've heard them several times, the crows, from Connecticut to Pennsylvania, Vermont and Colorado, right up to Alaska. If you're close the sound will drown out the valley. Move closer. The fear will be familiar. In that disjunctive, irrational cawing, in the violent gathering of multitudes, you'll feel the universal anxiety - the fear of death - bleeding off, as if in that owl, hunched tight against an oak, the crows have trapped god itself out in broad daylight. They haven't, but it's a threat they can see, and they go at it like their hatred will rid the world of death and mystery. At grim, irrational times, we do the same to one another.
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