picture book 2: we could call it bird path

Have you ever, as you were working in the field, found some sort of companionship in the visits of a bird that is ready to overcome its shrinking nature to explore for grubs and worms in the turned earth about your feet? And have you noticed how the bird approaches you boldly and decisively but leaves you in panic and sounding its alarm call? Did you ever consider why, for this bird companion, that boldness should precede trepidation? After all, we are more familiar with narratives in which courage is achieved through the overcoming of an original timidity... protagonists fear first, and only after a series of ordeals, are they capable of sticking courage to the sticking place. Courage is experience by desensitisation; innocence appears ‘naturally’ as aversion. But the bird arrives on the handle of your garden fork in bold innocence and achieves a state of acute sensitisation only through experience. Or rather, that is how we might turn the narrative on its head (‘the reversal of terms as the terms of reversal’). 

The reality is more alien, less narratable, and ultimately, more inhuman. The bird is the corporeal locus of, amongst others, two vast, separate, and incompatible, operating systems (hunger and fear) - two superimposed inverted pyramidal drives realised within this little bird’s being. Each system binds energy to the set of behaviours necessary to the cumulative coherence of the bird’s outline. Where the first, the hunger-system, predominates, the bird is triggered to produce behaviours in accord with hunger. In the programme, or state, of hunger, the bird damps down other sets of behaviours so as to fully inhabit the hunger set. Where its being is dominated by hunger, it is relieved from the behaviours activated by, amongst other systems, the fear apparatus. 

Within each set of discrete behaviours, the bird becomes the embodiment of a single principle. But it cannot always inhabit the same system: at the threshold of its satiation, it is released from hunger and, sequentially, is immediately occupied by another programme whereupon it takes flight into the dawning of the next set of behaviours, in this case, fear. Suddenly, this bird familiar, this little companion at your feet, seems to wake as from an enchantment and, startled by your proximity, is seized by the necessity of fleeing the scene, issuing urgent alarm calls, and wholly forgetful of its preceding hunger pangs. Where hunger had damped down its wariness of you, satiation energises the excessive response of full panic. 

Perhaps of greater interest are the non-behaviours, the trances and glitches, that appear at the threshold between distinct behavioural systems - at such junctures and crossroads, are manifested our most liminal and crepuscular, our thin spaced and deranged ideas - the veritable multivalent. In such moments we do not find ourselves so much in a state of synaesthesia or of a synergistic or confluent flowing together, everything arriving all at once, but the opposite, all the systems in flight, hunger, fear, sex, rage, sleep all drained away - in such moments we disappear from ourselves and we become the glitch, gears grind, we find no purchase, we have no purpose, we enter the fugue, we are suspended. 

And so it is, right at the end here, nonplussed, and at a loss for what to say, with all our thought systems in flight, finding ourselves at the furthest point of our dispersal, we encounter a sudden and late return to tractability. It is here that we are gripped by our gripping of the door handle, one last thing: let us now consider consciousness to be less a coherent system of systems but rather more like a heaped, or tangled, midden of multiple exclusive behaviour sets overlaying each other, and running both concurrently and against each other. Our finest moments, our greatest inventions and achievements, our revelations of the sublime, are not the product of synthetic integration but the opposite. We encounter our souls in amongst the associations that are generated as malfunctions at those points where our operational drives have crashed against each other, and caused a suspension of our drives, thus suspending our driven nature as such. It is here that the world floods in.