The Black Bird Enigma

Before I left for Gerona, my shoes were of primary concern. Which to pack, which to leave behind in Barcelona? What would be safe, what would be comfortable? I regretted what I’d chosen upon arrival. (Such a silly fixation; ultimately I was better off sweating in boots on those cobblestones than I would have been rolling my ankle in flip flops.)

I went up to the roof of the hostel and forgot my feet. Immediately I sat and started to write. I cannot get enough of Mediterranean balconies and terraces, nor gothic bell towers dominating charming plaster horizons.

This time, the tower was accompanied by a cloud of black birds. I became fixated on them, their swooping and darting, their seeming disappearance before re-apparition in a burst of feather and screech.

For a week I’d been noticing an inordinate number of bird silhouette tattoos on Barcelona’s women; immediately I felt these birds overhead to be the inspiration. I am making this bond up. Who knows what each bird meant to each woman? But in my mind we were all linked, me and bird tattoo ladies, in this recognition of this enigma overhead.

What were they, swallows? I have no idea; I so lack the vocabulary to describe nature. I loved their punctuation of the burning blue slate sky, their sudden elusiveness when I tried to capture them with my camera. They forced me to be in the moment because there was no way to satisfyingly record them. The more I thought about them, the more I stared and tried to take pictures and wished for a clear metaphor or symbolic understanding of why I was drawn to them, the more mysterious they seemed. Why were there so many? What were they doing, circling and hovering like that?

More and more I noticed them, like clouds of electrons or harbingers of... what? There was nothing to say about them, nothing but this buoying joy I started to feel every time I saw them. My black birds, my enigma.

They are patternlessness with shifting form and shape, like a jazz improvisation. They are dance, grace, kinetic ebb and flow. They mean nothing, they are the great turning wheel of the natural world set whirling in miniature through the sky. They are primal, simple, functional beyond my understanding; beyond deliberation, they are thoughtless instinct manifested in multitudes.

Paradoxically they’ve acquired symbolism for me now, for their very lack of symbolic clarity. They are my personal reminders that life makes no sense; means nothing, says nothing until one stares and speaks or writes to lend it meaning. There is nothing to figure out, nothing to unlock; the locks are in our minds and all we have to do is free ourselves from the expectation that we have more control and understanding than we do.