birdsong1

� birds, on the other hand, like the swan and other musicians, wanting to be men

-- Plato, Republic

For winter solstice our cat Bunny left a dead sparrow on the walkway just outside the back porch, another gifted year-king frozen in the snow.

Down the ages it rages.

It is not that Nature�s way is ineffective. She is Necessity itself. But the planet is brutal.

�Unrefined,� the Flying Gypsies would say. The Flying Gypsies would inhabit the kernel of fierceness and jettison the blood-lust and vengeance.

I dumpstered the bird. I washed my hands. Then I praised the cat, petting him. He got the love and service part right. He was contributing to the household, to the greater good. The error was in execution.

Ah, well. One mustn�t expect Rome razed in a day.

That afternoon, while Bunny stalked around in the front-yard snow, the widow screeched at him until he slunk back inside. Every laugh is something else�s skin.

I hear you, little one. Make from grief a song. From the song, together we will make a third thing. Be patient, unafraid. What was taken from you will be yours again.

The Flying Gypsies would have lamb and lion together, an end to this nightmare of dyas days. But blood still fills the feline nostrils of the Sphinx. Tooth and claw rule.

The gnostics, alchemists, and sundry others saw the fundamental flaw in Nature � the savagery, blood-lust, and will-to-power that drives bio-evolution, the essential cannibalism of planetary systems and entities. This cannibalism, from inter-species and interpersonal relationships, to detente between nations, is the gnostic �evil in matter.� Others view it as merely an incomplete state, an unrefined tonic, an unfinished experiment, applicable both to human nature and the balance of Creation.

Because we are semi-conscious beings, the fundamental cannibalism of the material cosmos produces unconscious psychic horror in us, driving us to expiations of all manner, from Paleo-matriarchal blood-sacrifice to Judaic scapegoat/atonement rituals to Christ blessing, breaking, and consuming the Host. When the Christos said �This is my body,� he was not waxing metaphoric.

As men it has been our duty to suspend full relations with Nature for a few thousand years, so as to take an �objective� gander at Earth and the heavens. Some gnostic men � and even a few women -- found Earth wanting spiritually, conceiving of it as a horrible prison-planet ruled over by Demiurgic, power-crazed archons who have enslaved humanity, spirit and masculinity.

There is considerable evidence for this view. Modern humans and their collective organizations, despite five or six millenia of mass development and incremetal consciousness, are still vengeful, barbaric beings lurking beneath a veneer of �civilization.� Yet as Hermes says, �As above, so below.�

The Hubble Space Telescope, that one-eyed cosmic Wotan, reveals that violence on Earth is reflected in the universe, with interstellar collisions, explosions, mass manglings and holy black gobblings par for the country club. Death consumes galaxies as well as sparrows. As love is the fundament of the cosmos, wounding is the fundament of love.

Violence is energy, and the First Law of Thermodynamics applies. Violence cannot be abolished, only transmuted. The artifex, a lowly earth-born being, a filius of materia, does not attempt to transcend inevitable violence. He seeks to raise materia without losing the energy that violence provides. He wants to reconcile the lion and lamb of the opposites such that antagonistic, competitive charge remains, but the blood dries up and blows away in the belly of the wind.

The marriage of spirit and matter is imminent. The Groom waits at the altar. The Host surge towards the gates of heaven. The planetary egg begins to crack. But the bridal Sphinx is not yet de-clawed, and flesh presents itself on my back porch, a puzzle and gift, still.

As a boy, upon encountering a frozen bird in winter, Carl Jung decided not only to spend his lifetime questioning the paradoxes of Nature, but like any self-respecting Gnosto-alchemist, to refine and raise Nature by hyper-driving the species� collective consciousness.

Birds have an ancient tradition in myth, literature and iconography as intermediaries or messengers of divinity. Birds are numinous and liminate not because they transcend matter, but because they rise above matter while remaining corporeal beings. They are, and are not, what is beneath them.

Birds join the above and below, the profane and sacred. Their vegetal analog, and ancestor, are trees � which in terms of evolutionary biology birds once were. Birds evolved their own place of repose, nutrition, and safety. They established not merely mutualism with trees, but ancestral kinship, down to the molecular level.

Not bad for "non-sentient animals." I wonder what they�ll be next?