Those Birdsongs Are Not What You Were Told
“I would like to suggest something you are overlooking about birdsongs. They are not what you think. It does not actually matter deeply what they are to the birds, though you love to argue about this. For your people, they are a door. And that door leads beyond your minds into something you have no language about. Yet.
I am not sure if any humans like you have any idea what these songs are, because they are more than all of your technology and records. If you had any idea about what they were, you would be bored by war or wild science-fiction because birds are better. In fact, they are better than space-travel, and more useful. It appears that many humans are busy attending to small devices that remake their minds in the images of the functions of tools. This makes them immune to birds.
[Redacted] the songs are not a single method. Their proper reception cannot be stipulated. One powerful [redacted] overlooked by humans is to feel yourself becoming the purpose and emission of song you are hearing. This speed and depth of communication is a different order than those familiar to humans (other than small children). Many small children know or discover how, generally, to accomplish this act, and this is an aspect of how they manage to acquire human language.
How does one become (the purpose and emission of) the song one is hearing? It sounds abstract. Poetic. Yet it can be sought and a way will arise. I will suggest something.
First, you must imagine, in a way, that you are making it. You are the bird who must make this now, inside. That these sounds are emitted by your soul the way movement is accomplished when dancing. If your inwardness begins to feel as if it is emitting what it is hearing, that is the beginning. The feeling is a movement inside that coincides with the sounds you are hearing, and after a time, you feel they are coming not from the bird as much as from both of you together. Continue deepening this. Breathe naturally. Then you will feel ‘the pulses’, and they will change you in waves. You will fly inside. And more I will not say.
If you are ever seen among human beings again, It will be wonderful to know what you think about birds. Or trees. Or anything else. These songs are not merely mating signals. They are doors that, for you, lead into terrain unknown to your people. You do not have a word for a metatechnology, but these songs are that, and the intelligences they encode are functionally older than time. Follow them to their sources. There, you will taste something like intelligence.
I hope you will bring some back.”
— he hears the birds singing
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and the origins of our species.
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